[Renee Montagne:] Good morning, today the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducts Lynyrd Skynyrd, the creators of Freebird. Today is Monday March 13 and this is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. The Hall of Fame also welcomes Blondie, Black Sabbath, The Sex Pistols and Jazz Trumpeter Miles Davis. I'm Renee Montagne.
[Steve Inskeep:] And I'm Steve Inskeep. In this hour we'll report on the aftermath of South Dakota's ban on abortion. Some abortion opponents are skeptical. We'll also report on a tax against American's in Mexico. Today President Bush delivers the first of several speeches defending the War in Iraq. And we'll have analysis this hour from NPR's Cokie Roberts. This day is the birthday of Cokie's mom, Lindy Boggs, member of Congress, Ambassador to the Vatican, long time resident of the French Quarter is 90. The News is next.
[Renee Montagne:] This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
[Steve Inskeep:] And I'm Steve Inskeep.
[President George W. Bush:] This month will mark the three-year anniversary of the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, which liberated Iraq from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.
[Steve Inskeep:] President Bush says he will mark that anniversary with a series of speeches starting today. The president knows that news reports surrounding next weekend's anniversary may paint a grimmer picture than his administration once did. Joining us as she does every Monday is NPR News analyst Cokie Roberts. Cokie, good morning. COKIE ROBERTS reporting Good morning Steve. How has the political calculation changed for the president since the early days of the war?
[Roberts:] Well you know it's hard to remember now, but the invasion was originally considered politically helpful to the president. In fact critics said he was just doing it for political reasons, if you might recall. And even at the time, some of the presidents defenders said no that's wrong, and they warned that the could all go bad, and said the president was willing to invade anyway because it was the right thing to do. Well now according to the polls, American's do think it has all gone wrong, and the president acknowledge that in his radio address on Saturday. And apparently according to the strategist, it is Iraq that is driving American's to say that they think that the country is off on the wrong track, rather than going in the right direction. And that's, that is something that makes it very tough, not only for the president, but for members of his own party. And so that's one of the reasons he's going to be out this week with speeches, supporting the policies, starting today at George Washington University, here in Washington, and also giving broader warnings about isolationism in the country, particularly on the heels of the upset over the ports deal with the Dubai Company.
[Steve Inskeep:] And this president, whose administration for a long time famously acknowledged no mistakes, says that he's going to speak this week about fixing things that went wrong in Iraq. How likely is he to be able to succeed in persuading the public to look at the war differently?
[Roberts:] Well it's going to be hard, particularly when the pictures continue to show, the bombs going off, and people getting wounded or killed. And also Steve, you've also got the 2008 presidential campaign underway. One possible democratic candidate, Delaware Senator, Joseph Biden, said over the weekend that he was a supporter of the war, but if he had to vote on the war now, he'd vote against it, because it's a disaster. And that if things don't get better politically in Iraq over the summer, American troops should come out, after the summer. You're going to have a drumbeat like that, and then other Democrats, just keeping up their criticism of the president. Another possible presidential contender, Russ Feingold, saying that the president illegally approved of domestic surveillance-and he is introducing a censure resolution against the president. Now other senators have said that's ridiculous, mainly republicans, but Democrats appear to be cringing at that as well. But you're going to have just this constant drumbeat, because of the campaign ahead, and it's going to be tough for the president to shout above it.
[Steve Inskeep:] We should mention that Republicans are also maneuvering towards 2008.
[Roberts:] Indeed, and they met over the weekend with southern Republicans, in Memphis, Tennessee. And by the way there was a straw poll, which surprisingly, was run by, won by Tennessee Senator, Bill Frist, who-the homeboy. But one of the interesting things that happened at that event, was that-watching John McCain, the senator from Arizona, absolutely wrapping himself firmly around President Bush. He does not want to be seen as, not a party player, the way he was in the 2000 election. This is something we're just going to be seeing more and more of Steve, the Democrats who are already trying to change the process once again for the nomination for 2008, the campaign is upon us.
[Steve Inskeep:] Okay, thanks very much. That's NPR News analyst Cokie Roberts.

[Steve Inskeep:] Next, we're going to talk about an uneasy alliance in the fight over gun control. The gun industry makes weapons. The National Rifle Association is a leading voice for gun rights. They share common interests, of course, but it's emerging that they may not always have the same opinions about fighting the change in gun laws. Paul Barrett of Bloomberg Businessweek has been talking with gun makers. What is it you think has been overlooked about the whatever you want to call it the gun lobby, the gun industry, gun rights advocates, what did you discover?
[Paul Barrett:] It's becoming almost conventional wisdom that the reason the NRA goes to such extremes is that it is driven by the gun industry. And in fact, that understanding is just incorrect. If anything, it is the NRA that sets the terms of the debate and the gun industry basically obediently follows along.
[Steve Inskeep:] What are some things that the National Rifle Association has said in recent months that have caused people in the gun industry who talked to you to cringe?
[Paul Barrett:] Well, the most specific thing has been the series of performances by Wayne LaPierre, the CEO and longtime head of the NRA, who has taken the group to what I would describe as a new extreme in terms of its pugnacious stance in the wake of the Newtown Elementary School massacre. And I think many people in the gun industry, given a choice, would not take the conspiratorial sort of paranoid approach that LaPierre specializes in. That said, they are doing nothing to try to deter him for two reasons. One, they're afraid of the consumer boycotts that the NRA can organize if it chooses. And two, the NRA's hype actually does benefit the gun industry.
[Steve Inskeep:] Is that a real possibility, that the NRA could organize a boycott of Smith & Wesson or some other brand of firearm?
[Paul Barrett:] It's not just a real possibility; it's something that has happened in the past. In 2000, which really was the last time before the current round of debate that we had a live gun control debate at the national level. Smith and Wesson actually tried to step up and arrive at a truce with the Clinton administration and with government officials around the country who were suing the gun industry. And Smith & Wesson agreed to settle those lawsuits and to comply with an unprecedented level of regulation. The result of that was that the NRA, other gun rights groups, encouraged gun buyers to boycott Smith & Wesson. In the space of six to eight months, the company almost went out of business. Plants were shut down, production lines were closed, and ultimately, the company changed ownership, reneged on the settlement and was accepted back into the fold. This is not a theoretical possibility. This is what happens when you cross the NRA.
[Steve Inskeep:] Are there specific reforms if we want to call them that that gun manufacturers would sign on to if the NRA was not in the way of them doing so?
[Paul Barrett:] It's more question of whether they would object. One of the main proposals pending before Congress, and in fact, the White House has identified this as its top priority, is to make the background check system comprehensive, so that it would be legally required for all gun transactions to go through some type of computerized background check.
[Steve Inskeep:] Mm-hmm.
[Paul Barrett:] In fact, the gun industry is basically agnostic on that point. It's not that they're going to stand up and cheer in favor of it, but almost their entire stock and trade is already done through the licensed background check system. So the gun industry would just basically stand by and say very little if it were purely up to them. But they're not going to stand up and get into a fight with Wayne LaPierre in public.
[Steve Inskeep:] Paul Barrett of Bloomberg Businessweek, thanks very much.
[Paul Barrett:] My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
[Steve Inskeep:] This is NPR News.

[Scott Simon:] President Obama made a personal statement in a TV interview this week. He didn't call for any new laws or initiatives. But many Americans seem to hear his statement as a truly significant moment in American history. Novelist and screenwriter Armistead Maupin joins us. Mr. Maupin is best known for his breakthrough "Tales of the City" series. He joins us from member station KQED in San Francisco. Thanks so much for being with us.
[Armistead Maupin:] Oh, it's a pleasure, Scott.
[Scott Simon:] How do you feel about what the president said?
[Armistead Maupin:] It was something I felt in my heart. A lot of pundits have been kind of analyzing, oh, what does it mean and why did he do it. But as a gay man who's been an activist for almost 40 years now, it was an extraordinarily moving thing to hear an unequivocal statement to the effect that gay love was the equal to opposite sex and attraction. Gay people are used to hearing something, you know, especially from Democrats, some little nod towards I'm with you folks but usually in some private dinner, never publically, never without equivocation like this. And so it was a big moment, whatever the reasons for it, it was a big, big moment.
[Scott Simon:] What do you think it changes?
[Armistead Maupin:] Well, we talk about bullying a lot in this country as if it's something that's generated in schoolyards, but in fact it's generated in churches and by politicians, by parents even, who don't even consider the fact that their own children might be gay. So, when something like this comes from the top, from the very top, it's going to filter down. It can't help but filter down.
[Scott Simon:] You grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, right?
[Armistead Maupin:] I did.
[Scott Simon:] And North Carolina has undoubtedly, you know, the 31st state this week to constitutionally ban same-sex marriage.
[Armistead Maupin:] Absolutely, yeah.
[Scott Simon:] Now, the president says that while he supports gay marriage, he leaves to local states to make their own decisions. Is that enough for you? Would you press him and people in Congress for federal laws?
[Armistead Maupin:] I will eventually. At the moment, I simply want to celebrate what he's done. That battle was very personal to me because I have relatives in North Carolina. I have a brother a few years younger than I am who is an avowed Rush Limbaugh conservative Republican. And everything I've posted about Amendment One, prior to and after, has been met with stony silence on Facebook. That's how we communicate with each other these days. And I'm aware that he thinks it's part of his party platform to deny full equality to gay and lesbian people. And yet, the same brother whom I know to be a kind-hearted man actually attended my own wedding to Christopher Turner. He congratulated us, he toasted us, but somehow he's not made the connect yet between what knows personally to be true and the political agenda of his party. We're seeing the shift happen, and it's not happening because of politicians; it's happening because Americans themselves are being exposed to their own members of their family and their friends. And they realize they cannot keep up this barbarism much longer. It's funny, I still I was at the dentist yesterday and the hygienist came in and I heard myself making the choices to whether or not I would say my partner, which is now acceptable, or whether I would say my husband, which still throws people when I say it. And I went for husband, because I do wherever I go. Because it's important that people know that we feel that way about each other. We called each other husbands long before we were married, by the way, because we knew we had arrived to that point where we were committed to each other from life and we wanted to assert that to each other. And it really does help to have the leader of the free world say that he approves of that. It helps a lot.
[Scott Simon:] Novelist and screenwriter Armistead Maupin speaking from KQED in San Francisco. Thanks so much.
[Armistead Maupin:] My pleasure, Scott.

[Steve Inskeep:] President Bush famously said he could see into the soul of the man who runs Russia. Not long afterward, U.S. relations with Russia grew worse. But more recently, the two countries appear to have grown closer and today, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is meeting her Russian counterpart in Geneva. NPR's Michele Kelemen is traveling with the secretary.
[Michele Kelemen:] The Obama administration has been trading letters and calls with the Kremlin, and a State Department official says the atmosphere is clearly improving. What Clinton hopes to do is to translate the friendlier words into real cooperation on Afghanistan, Iran and missile defense. But she also had to reassure newer members of NATO and would-be members from the former Soviet Union that the Obama administration isn't bending too far.
[Secretary Hillary Clinton:] I reiterated again today in our meetings with Ukraine and Georgia the United States' firm commitment to each of those nations moving toward NATO membership, and our equally strong commitment to work with them, along with NATO, to make clear that they should not be the subject of Russian intimidation or aggression.
[Michele Kelemen:] She said the U.S. will never recognize a Russian sphere of influence, or recognize the breakaway regions in Georgia that Moscow supports. But she also called for realism in dealing with Russia. That's a thought that was echoed by NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who said Russia could do more to help facilitate NATO supply routes into Afghanistan.
[Secretary General Jaap De Hoop Scheffer:] Afghanistan is a case in point, where I think NATO and Russia can better work together. The fight against terrorism is another one. The fight against narcotics is another one. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is another one. Russia is an important player. Russia is a global player. And that means that not talking to them is not an option.
[Michele Kelemen:] NATO foreign ministers did agree to revive high-level talks with Russia, which were suspended after Russia invaded Georgia last year. Scheffer says the NATO Russia Council will have a foreign ministers-level meeting soon. As for U.S. overtures to Russia, a State Department official said that the Obama administration will be more proactive on arms control talks. The U.S. also seems to be slowing the pace of work on missile defense, another thorny issue that has strained relations with Moscow in recent years. But Secretary of State Clinton isn't backing off from that issue entirely.
[Secretary Hillary Clinton:] Our discussion about missile defense is aimed at determining its feasibility economically, technologically, and we will continue to explore it with our allies. And we've made the case to Russia time and again that Europe has a right to defend itself from the new threats of the 21st century.
[Michele Kelemen:] She says the threat is emanating from Iran, and she plans to raise concerns with Russia Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov about Moscow's discussions with Tehran about selling the Iranians longer-range missiles. The U.S. also wants to see Russia do more to help rein in Iran's nuclear program. While she's been talking tough on Iran, Clinton also announced yesterday that she expects Iran will be invited to a high-level conference on Afghanistan that she proposed for later this month. The Netherlands has been asked to host the meeting, which would include countries that are contributing troops to Afghanistan, neighbors and donors. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Brussels.

[Sarah Mccammon:] We're going to turn now to domestic politics because more than 10 days after 17 people were killed by a gunman in Parkland, Fla., the debate over whether and how to strengthen the nation's gun laws continues. President Trump has proposed arming teachers. Florida Governor Rick Scott suggests raising the age at which someone can buy an assault-style weapon from 18 up to 21. So after another horrific shooting, is there an actual groundswell for action? With us to discuss this more is NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Hello, Mara.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Hi, Sarah.
[Sarah Mccammon:] So, Mara, Congress is back in session tomorrow after a week-long recess. Where does the gun debate stand today?
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Republicans clearly want to be seen as doing something, but there's still no policy consensus on what to do. But on the Sunday shows today, there was no clamoring by congressional Republicans for anything specific. Some were willing to support a ban on some types of mass-casualty, assault-style weapons others weren't. Some favored a higher age limit for buying long guns others didn't. And that suggests we might be following the same path we've seen after other mass shootings support for gun control spikes. A lot of talk about it. But in the end, no action by Congress, and then interest fades.
[Sarah Mccammon:] On that note, one prominent Republican voice on gun laws is Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey. On NBC's "Meet The Press" today, he said President Trump will be essential if any new gun laws are to pass.
[Pat Toomey:] The president's expression of support for strengthening our background check system is very constructive. The president can play a huge and, in fact, probably decisive role in this. So I intend to give this another shot.
[Sarah Mccammon:] Mara, what does President Trump want from gun legislation?
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] What he said is he wants to be very strong. There's a bill in the House that tweaks the background checks system. It would be much weaker than Pat Toomey's bill, which would have made background checks universal. He's also said he wants the ATF to ban bump stocks, although the ATF says it doesn't have the authority to do so and that Congress would need to pass a law. Of course, today, on television, the NRA spokeswoman, Dana Loesch, said the NRA doesn't back a bump stock ban. And of course, that was supposed to be the legislative solution after the last mass shooting, the one in Las Vegas. But the main thing that the president has been talking about is arming some teachers. That's a proposal the NRA has backed, but it hasn't gone through the policy process, hasn't been vetted there's no legislation in Congress, and the White House spokesman said the president won't necessarily propose any legislation. We already saw the good guy with a gun that sheriff's deputy in Florida not able or willing to stop the bad guy with a gun. So there's still a lot of questions about how arming some teachers would work and even what role the federal government would play since K-12 education is a state responsibility. So we still need to see if the president is willing to use his political capital for something specific.
[Sarah Mccammon:] One thing that's been different since the shooting in Parkland is we've seen these students become practically household names overnight because of their activism for gun control. We saw that incredibly emotional and powerful town hall last week. And we've seen major corporations backing away from the NRA. Is any of this a sign that we have indeed reached a political tipping point in the gun debate?
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] I don't know. I don't think you can see tipping points until they already have happened. Usually, you see them in the rearview mirror. But we're waiting to find out a couple of things. Number one, will the Florida families who have been galvanized by this will they be happy with just minor tweaks from the Florida legislature or will they really insist on some kind of ban on certain types of mass-casualty assault weapons? And then, if nothing happens, will they become another source of energy for Democrats in the fall? Corporate America, on the other hand, doesn't take sides in political battles for any other reason other than their bottom line. So if corporate America does think the NRA has overstepped its hand and this kind of movement to sever ties with them continues, then I think something is really changing.
[Sarah Mccammon:] That's national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Thanks, Mara.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Thank you.

[Ira Flatow:] What comes to mind when you think of the Wild West? Of course, dusty cowboys, miners, saloons, six guns. How about astronomy? Because back in the 1890s, the mathematician and astronomer Percival Lowell sent a scout out West, away from the city lights of the East Coast, to find the perfect spot for a new observatory. His scout started down in Tombstone, Arizona, slowly working his way up the state, and he eventually made it to Flagstaff, then just a little outpost of around 800 people, selecting a mesa above the town as the ideal place for the new Lowell Observatory. And in the years since, they have made some remarkable discoveries at Lowell, like the Planet X, aka Pluto, and other observations that eventually led to development of the Big Bang Theory and the idea that the universe is expanding. And they're still busy discovering stuff today, still hunting for planets, but not ones in our Solar System new exoplanets. And they're studying our sun and other stars like it and planning for a flyby of Pluto. So there's a lot to talk about, a lot of stuff going on here at the Lowell. And here to talk about it is Jeffrey Hall, astronomer and director of the Lowell Observatory here in Flagstaff. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] Good afternoon, Ira. Pleasure to be here.
[Ira Flatow:] Thank you for that tour you gave me last night.
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] That was fun.
[Ira Flatow:] I didn't realize how hands-on it is to work that telescope.
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] It is. It's a 106-year-old telescope at this point, manually operated. It's open every night for people who come to Lowell for observing, and our staff just slew it around manually.
[Ira Flatow:] It's true. And it has a frying pan on...
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] That's right, one of the finderscopes, they couldn't figure out what to use for a cap, so why not the director's wife's frying pan?
[Ira Flatow:] High-tech, truly high-tech stuff. Tell us let's talk about Lowell himself. Why was he so anxious to get the telescope built?
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] Well, Lowell was a mathematician by training, astronomer by passion, and he had become very interested in what he thought was evidence of intelligent life on Mars, the so-called canals. And in 1894, there was a particularly favorable opposition, or a geometric alignment of Earth and Mars that made it favorable for observing. So he was pretty anxious to get away from the humid, cloudy East, and out here to the dry, barren West to found a new observatory and make those observations.
[Ira Flatow:] And so he chose Flagstaff because?
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] Well, after a long tour through the Arizona territory, it was probably some combination of, fortunately, clear skies when his scout, Mr. Douglass, was here, good treatment by the locals and willingness to give the observatory a site of land upon what was called Site 11, and where we still are 117 years later, just about a mile from here.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. Let's talk about Pluto being discovered here at Lowell. Tell us the story behind that.
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] Well, Percival Lowell was convinced there was Planet X out beyond Neptune, which he believed was the because of irregularities in the motions of Uranus and Neptune. It turns out that wasn't the case. But, in fact, when the Pluto search was resumed in earnest quite some time after Lowell's death, in fact it was found, fortuitously, fairly close to where he predicted it would be in 1930.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow. And one of the things he was involved with while he was alive was the observations of so-called spiral nebulae galaxies, right?
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] Well, yes. And, you know, we're certainly most famous for the discovery of Pluto, but, really, the much more profound astronomical discovery is just that. Back in 1912, we had only the most rudimentary idea of what might be beyond our Solar System and the structure of the universe, the idea that spiral nebulae might be other well, they picturesquely called them island universes, perhaps systems of spinning stars out beyond our own galaxy. But it was speculation. Lowell directed one of the observatory's astronomers, Vesto Slipher, to make observations of these, using that telescope you looked through last night with a spectrograph attached to it. And he found that the spectral lines in these spiral nebulae were all redshifted, and these were the first cosmological redshifts. At the time, they didn't know what they were looking at, but they were the first observations that ultimately led to the idea that the universe is expanding. It's one of the fundamental observations of the 20th century.
[Ira Flatow:] And that's what Edwin Hubble ran with, right...
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] Mm-hmm.
[Ira Flatow:] ...to talk about the redshift and expansion of universe.
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] Right. Then developed into the expanding universe cosmology.
[Ira Flatow:] So this is this Edwin Hubble is one of the founders of this theory. How many times did he come up to Lowell to take a look?
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] Slipher's work was picked up by the folks over in California.
[Ira Flatow:] They never came here.
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] Not that I know of.
[Ira Flatow:] And still credited with that incredible discovery about the using the data that came from here.
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] Well, as with many discoveries like this, it's a lengthy process with we still see this today. You have discoveries where knowledge is an incremental process, and it often takes a team or a group of people to eventually come to the right answer.
[Ira Flatow:] If you'd like to ask a question, our microphones are open here in the hall. Don't be afraid to step up and ask. And would you say that that was probably the most famous use of the telescope, in the long-term, with these observations?
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] The Clark Telescope has been used for a number of things. Today, it's for public viewing. It was not, in fact, the telescope used to discover Pluto. That's a different one, more optimized for wide-field surveys. But certainly, with the Clark, that's pretty fundamental.
[Ira Flatow:] Did they have any idea at the time, when they were talking about when Lowell was talking about the spiral nebula, we our place in the galaxy was?
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] No. The development of the understanding of our the structure of our galaxy, the structure of the universe is within pretty much the last century.
[Ira Flatow:] Hmm. And one of the projects the observatory is involved in today is the New Horizons spacecraft. What's that about?
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] Well, that is an unmanned NASA spacecraft on its way to Pluto. It was launched in 2006. And one of the main criteria for this mission is the folks who launched it really didn't want to be dead by the time it got to Pluto. So...
[Ira Flatow:] I hate it when that happens. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] Yeah, I do to. So the idea is you build a very small, very light spacecraft and put it on the biggest rocket we've got and really fling it out there. So they launched it in 2006. Thirteen months later, they used the old gravitational slingshot past Jupiter, and now it is on its way to a 2015 rendezvous with Pluto. And if we can find a suitable object, they will continue on to try to get a close up image of one of the enigmatic Kuiper belt objects that populates the far reaches of the solar system.
[Ira Flatow:] And so your observatory is involved in that?
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] One of our astronomers, Will Grundy, is a member of the New Horizons science team. And like any of these missions, it's a large consortium of scientists from multiple institutions.
[Ira Flatow:] But Pluto is still very special here.
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] Oh, we love Pluto.
[Ira Flatow:] Is there any chance you get to do some research with Pluto?
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] Well, I think it's singularly appropriate. And, you know, what Will if you ask Will: What are we going to find when we get to Pluto? What I've heard him say is: We don't know, but it's guaranteed to surprise us. And in that regard, it's just like the other unmanned missions. Think back to the Pioneer and the Voyager era. When we got our first close-up look at the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus, they're weird. All of them are pathological, in one way or another. So I'm sure that when we get there, we'll find something pretty interesting.
[Ira Flatow:] Speaking of pathological, let's go to the audience. No, no, no. Sorry about that. Yes. First question here.
[Unidentified Woman:] I wanted to ask about the dark skies, because I know Flagstaff is a dark-sky city. And I know that from some point outside of town, you can see the light pollution from Phoenix and other big cities. And what part has Lowell had in keeping the skies of Flagstaff dark?
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] We've had about a 50-year role in that, going back that far when there was first some indications that brightly lit advertising might be put in place in Flagstaff. And this started an effort, really, to work with the city and the citizens, not at them, to come up with a solution that provides safe and sensible lighting for people on the ground while preserving the beauty of the night sky not only for astronomers but even from in Flagstaff. We were looking last night. Just standing outside the Clark Telescope, you can look up one mile from downtown Flagstaff, and there's the Milky Way galaxy in all of its splendor. That's a good thing to have in the middle of a reasonably sized city. Chris Luginbuhl at the United States Naval Observatory has done some quantitative work on this, and I think the answer he got is that the skies in Flagstaff are about 30 percent darker than they would be in the absence of an ordinance. Other communities around Arizona have picked up the torch as it were, although that might be a lousy analogy. And, you know, it's really a statewide effort, because astronomy is a huge industry in Arizona, $250 million a year pumped into the state economy and growing as new opportunities come in. So preservation of the quality of our skies, both for science, as well as for public enjoyment, is quite important. And Flagstaff has been an international leader in this regard.
[Ira Flatow:] Well, what did the ordinance say? You're not allowed to what, or...
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] There's a couple of components to it. It basically limits the lumens per acre. And then there are zones, lighting zones, where it's a little more strict in the areas closest to the observatories, and then gradually relaxes as you get a little further away.
[Ira Flatow:] Well, it certainly seems to be working...
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] It's working well. Yeah.
[Ira Flatow:] ...in this city. Let's go to this gentleman here. Yes.
[Unidentified Man:] So you're talking about detecting exoplanets and the search for exoplanets. And I know it's it has to do with detecting the dimming of stars. And I was wondering if you could talk more about the process that goes into finding an exoplanet.
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] Sure. We have an astronomer on our staff who's involved with the Kepler mission, which is out there staring at a region of sky in the constellation Cygnus, searching for planets. But finding exoplanets is a fairly recent development, because they're very hard to see, and they're small, faint. They tend to be washed out by the brilliant star next to them. So only recently have we developed the instrumentation that can find them. There's a couple of ways you can look for them. You can look for mini eclipses. If you happen to have a star where the planet passes in front of the star, you get a very small dip, sort of like a solar eclipse, except it's not like the moon over the sun. It's just a little blip. That's kind of what Kepler is doing. They're looking for brightness variations in stars to detect the existence of planets. You can also do a little bit of it's almost like the redshift work. You can look at spectral lines from the star altering or going back and forth a little bit as the planet tugs the star back and forth. And then, one way that's very difficult to do is just try to take a picture and image it directly. We have astronomers at Lowell who have been involved with teams employing all three of those techniques. What we're finding you know, in some ways, Ira, we're almost on a cusp very similar to where I think Slipher might have been in 1912. We had an idea that there were things out there, spiral nebulae, but we didn't know what they were, and we hadn't detected many of them because but now, as we start to look for planets, they're everywhere. We're up to about 700 of them, wherever we look, and we're starting to get the picture of a galaxy that's just brimming with worlds. Now, by and large, if you're really looking to get away from it all and do an exoplanet vacation, say... ...the ones we found so far are horrible, you know, gas giant-sized, very close to their parent stars, 2,200-degree atmospheres. Ew. You can't think about it. But missions like Kepler now have the ability and the precision to detect ever-smaller planets that are more Earthlike, and the real Holy Grail is a planet in habitable zone around a sun-like star. This is a planet where water can exist in all three of its phases and, potentially, a source for life as we know it.
[Ira Flatow:] This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR. I'm Ira Flatow here in Flagstaff, talking about the Lowell Observatory. And you guys also do research on the sun. Well, isn't it?
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] Yeah. I do.
[Ira Flatow:] And what do you want to know about the sun? What are you thinking about?
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] Well, we want to know if it's going to destroy us no, no. I came to Lowell involved in a project designed to do long-term monitoring of the solar activity cycle and similar activity cycles in stars like the sun, the idea being the sun influences terrestrial climate. We know it does weird things. The cycle seems to turn off or go into very quiescent periods from time to time. What effect might that have on terrestrial climate? The problem is, first of all, you know, Ivo points out that a million year is chump change. We're astronomers, OK? Ten million years is chump change for us. And by the time by that point, I'm going to be thoroughly sick of this project. So instead of observing one star for 10 million years, we observe a whole bunch of the most solar-like stars we can. Now, imagine looking out at this audience, imagine understanding the human race by observing one person. You know, you'd have a very myopic view. We use other suns as proxies for our own to understand how the sun might have varied over hundreds to thousands, millions of years.
[Ira Flatow:] A question oh, there's a familiar face. Go ahead.
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] Hi, Brian.
[Brian:] Hi, Jeff. Can you share with us about the capacity of the new Discovery telescope and when it's going to be working and...
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] Brian, I would love to share that with you.
[Ira Flatow:] We did not set this up for today.
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] No. This yes.
[Ira Flatow:] I didn't. I don't know if these guys were...
[Brian:] And I honestly don't know about it.
[Ira Flatow:] Tell us this new telescope, or what it's about.
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] I just got back from that telescope, where I was giving some folks a tour. Astronomers do what they do by collecting light. You know, we can't go out and dig in the ground, and we can't put a star in a beaker and poke it. We collect light, and so we need light buckets. Lowell's currently largest telescope has a mirror of 1.8 meters aperture. That's about six feet across. Not too bad, but small by today's standards. The Discovery Channel telescope is a 4.3-meter primary mirror, about 14 feet across, state-of-the-art instrumentation. Why is it called what it is? Mr. John Hendricks is the founder and CEO of Discovery Communications, contributed through his own foundation and Discovery $60 million towards the capital cost of the telescope, jumpstarted the project back in 2003. In return for naming rights and what Discovery wants to do is not tell us what to look at, but use what we look at to use in their broadcasts. So we and our partners will use this fabulous this new facility to observe things we just can't do right now. You know, we have public tours every day at Lowell and often, people will ask: Now, how far can you see with your telescope? And really, it's more how faint can you see, like this Kuiper belt objects. Celestially speaking, they're right on our doorstep, but they're small, and many of them are not very reflective, so they're exquisitely faint and...
[Ira Flatow:] Will you be able to see that with the...
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] Right, right. We can do imaging and, even more difficult, spectroscopic studies, where you spread the light out, of very faint objects. And you go out there and stand out there I think if Percival Lowell is standing there you remember the Clark Telescope Dome last night?
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. Yeah.
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] And all around the perimeter are these tires, the 1954 Ford pick-up tires that rotate the dome. You go out to the Discovery Channel Telescope. In the dome, at 90-degree intervals, are these huge motors, and underneath the motors are these really high-tech tires. No, they're very high-tech, and they butt up against this immense steel ring and turn the dome. In aspect, they look very similar to the old things. I think if Lowell were standing out there, he'd be pretty happy.
[Ira Flatow:] Well, thank you. Thank you very much for coming by and telling us about that.
[Dr. Jeffrey Hall:] My pleasure.
[Ira Flatow:] Jeffrey Hall is an astronomer and director of the Lowell Observatory here in Flagstaff. I'd like to thank Northern Arizona University, W.L. Gore & Associates, and the city of Flagstaff, Flagstaff Cultural Partners for making our visit possible. I want to thank, also, John Stark and all the folks at KNAU for making us feel at home here today.

[Melissa Block:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
[Robert Siegel:] I'm Robert Siegel. And it's time now for All Tech Considered. Today, Facebook announced its own email service. The company's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, says it is meant to help Facebook users connect more easily with their friends. As NPR's Laura Sydell reports, it's also considered a competitive move against Google's gmail service.
[Laura Sydell:] The new Facebook system is about a lot more than email, says Zuckerberg.
[Mr. Mark Zuckerberg:] It's a convergent system that kind of handles messages seamlessly across all the different ways that you want to communicate.
[Laura Sydell:] Zuckerberg says email is just one more way that Facebook users can communicate with their friends on the social network. And if you have a conversation with your best friend that spans across several communication forums on Facebook, you will be able to view it all in one place.
[Mr. Mark Zuckerberg:] All your IMs, messages, emails, SMSs go into that, and you have one history, and you can kind of go through it forever, right. And that's going to be really cool because five years from now, you're going to just have this full, rich history of all of the communication that you have with each of your friends and the people around you.
[Laura Sydell:] Unlike other email systems, Zuckerberg says this one will have the advantage of knowing your friends list from Facebook, and putting those emails into a separate box. Finn Brunton, a researcher at NYU studying social networks, says this is part of a move by Facebook to become the backbone of all interpersonal communication on the Web.
[Mr. Finn Brunton:] It becomes, basically, the dashboard for your life. It becomes like, something through which you can manage almost every aspect of your experience from, you know, setting up dates and arranging events to, yeah, to doing mail and all those other things.
[Laura Sydell:] Brunton says by introducing email, Facebook is also putting itself in direct competition with Google's central place on the Internet, with its gmail service and search engine.
[Mr. Finn Brunton:] And which Facebook becomes a kind of deep utility in the sense that Google has already become.
[Laura Sydell:] When asked if he was setting up Facebook to compete with Google's gmail system, Zuckerberg said he was trying to advance how people communicate online.
[Mr. Mark Zuckerberg:] This simpler kind of messaging is going to be how a lot more people will shift a lot of their communication, and we'll see how that happens over time. But if we build a good product that people want to use, then people will use it.
[Laura Sydell:] Of course, with more than half a billion users, Facebook will have a distinct advantage over every other email system from Google to Yahoo to AOL. Laura Sydell, NPR News, San Francisco.

[Renee Montagne:] The community of Ridgecrest, Calif., is getting a clearer view of the damage caused by last night's 7.1 magnitude earthquake. There are reports of power outages, fires and some injuries in the area about 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles. Sharon McNary of member station KPCC is in Ridgecrest and joins us now. Good morning.
[Sharon Mcnary, Byline:] Good morning.
[Renee Montagne:] And you just arrived a few hours ago. Tell us what you're seeing.
[Sharon Mcnary, Byline:] You know, I've been driving through town. I've been seeing lots and lots of chairs in front of houses, even some tents with mattresses inside them that people drug out of the house to give us a sense of greater safety. You don't see a lot of external damage to houses just from what I've seen driving around. But at the fire station, of course, all the fire engines and vehicles have been pulled out of the fire station. And it was a good thing because there's still a lot of aftershocks. I was sitting in my car during a sizable one. And when I first rolled into Ridgecrest, I stopped at a gas station, and the pumps were almost all occupied with people filling up their gas tanks, possibly for a long drive to another place to stay or just to keep their vehicles filled up while they run around doing post-emergency chores, which, you know, there's going to be a lot of them. But inside a convenience store at a gas station, the typical thing you see bottles everywhere. You could smell the wine just wafting out the front door. And the earthquake actually knocked a toilet off its bolts. So that was unusable for customers.
[Renee Montagne:] Well, you know, people in Ridgecrest and all the surrounding area must be on edge because of that 6.4 magnitude earthquake on the Fourth of July. But how is this stronger quake affecting the people you've been talking to? This is a one-two punch for them.
[Sharon Mcnary, Byline:] Well, it's almost like a two-one punch because the bigger one followed what they thought was the big one.
[Renee Montagne:] Right, right.
[Sharon Mcnary, Byline:] I spoke to one woman named Shawny French. She and her daughter slept outside in their front lawn in a tent overnight. They'd lost power for a couple of hours after the July Fourth earthquake. And that was a 6.4. But last night, the 7.1, their power went off briefly, and then it came back quickly. It also restored her Internet, which was actually the only good news she's had. I asked her what she needed, and here's what she said.
[Shawny French:] I need it to stop. I need it to stop. I'm too old for this.
[Renee Montagne:] Whoa. Yeah. Having been in earthquakes, you do want it to stop after about a bunch of post-earthquakes, little tremors. So what there about emergency services? What's been set up so far?
[Sharon Mcnary, Byline:] Well, in a situation like a 7.1 earthquake, we'll see assistance coming from all over the state, maybe even beyond. There are specialized units, like the urban search and rescue team. I went inside the trailer that the Los Angeles Fire Department brought out, and they have tools for freeing people from cars, from buildings. They can cut through steel with an oxygen torch or through concrete with heavy saws. So far, though, none of that has been needed. The housing stock here dates from World War II and after, so it's got pretty good building standards. So it's this city's been less vulnerable to earthquake damage than what you might find in an older city.
[Renee Montagne:] That's Sharon McNary of KPCC talking to us from Ridgecrest, Calif., which is near the epicenter of last night's big quake. Thanks very much.
[Sharon Mcnary, Byline:] You bet.

[Madeleine Brand:] Back now with DAY TO DAY. I'm Madeleine Brand. Forbes Magazine is out once again with its rankings of the world's richest people, and this year's wealthiest person in the world will come as no surprise. It's Microsoft founder Bill Gates. But this time, a lot of other people have joined him on the list of billionaires. Bob Moon joins us from the Marketplace News Bureau in New York, and Bob, who's in and who's out? Back now with DAY TO DAY. I'm Madeleine Brand. Forbes Magazine is out once again with its rankings of the world's richest people, and this year's wealthiest person in the world will come as no surprise. It's Microsoft founder Bill Gates. But this time, a lot of other people have joined him on the list of billionaires. Bob Moon joins us from the Marketplace News Bureau in New York, and Bob, who's in and who's out?
[Bob Moon Reporting:] Hey, Madeleine. Well, as you mentioned, the richest software tycoon, Mr. Gates, tops the list, and his position would appear to be pretty firm. He personifies the old adage, the rich get richer. His net worth grew from 46.5 billion to $50 billion, a billion here, a billion there; pretty soon, it adds up, you know. No. 2 on the list is Warren Buffett, the Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. That's the company that owns a collection of businesses, including GEICO Insurance, Fruit of the Loom, Dairy Queen, among many others. Hey, Madeleine. Well, as you mentioned, the richest software tycoon, Mr. Gates, tops the list, and his position would appear to be pretty firm. He personifies the old adage, the rich get richer. His net worth grew from 46.5 billion to $50 billion, a billion here, a billion there; pretty soon, it adds up, you know. No. 2 on the list is Warren Buffett, the Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. That's the company that owns a collection of businesses, including GEICO Insurance, Fruit of the Loom, Dairy Queen, among many others. All in all, Forbes figures the number of billionaires around the globe grew by about 102 people over the past year, and that means there are now a record 793 billionaires with a combined wealth of $2.6 trillion. Now, the Top 10 did change a bit. Oracle's Larry Ellison and Wal-Mart chairman Robson Walton are no longer among the elite of the elite. All in all, Forbes figures the number of billionaires around the globe grew by about 102 people over the past year, and that means there are now a record 793 billionaires with a combined wealth of $2.6 trillion. Now, the Top 10 did change a bit. Oracle's Larry Ellison and Wal-Mart chairman Robson Walton are no longer among the elite of the elite.
[Madeleine Brand:] And any surprises among those who have fallen off this list? And any surprises among those who have fallen off this list?
[Moon:] Well, maybe not a surprise, but Martha Stewart, who had made her debut on the list last year, is now no longer on the list at all. You can apparently blame her conviction for lying about that stock trade. Her net worth fell in the past year from $1 billion to about half that, and since they've been having a bit of a feud over who was to blame for the lackluster ratings of Stewart's version of The Apprentice, we might note here that Donald Trump is still very much on the list. He's worth a cool $2.6 billion, according to the magazine. Well, maybe not a surprise, but Martha Stewart, who had made her debut on the list last year, is now no longer on the list at all. You can apparently blame her conviction for lying about that stock trade. Her net worth fell in the past year from $1 billion to about half that, and since they've been having a bit of a feud over who was to blame for the lackluster ratings of Stewart's version of The Apprentice, we might note here that Donald Trump is still very much on the list. He's worth a cool $2.6 billion, according to the magazine.
[Madeleine Brand:] Well, the stock market hasn't been performing so well recently. Has that affected the rankings this year? Well, the stock market hasn't been performing so well recently. Has that affected the rankings this year?
[Moon:] Well, indeed, it has. It has hurt some of the wealthiest shareholders, if you will, with the stock market gaining just about 1 percent over the past year. Take, for example, Robson Walton of the Wal-Mart Empire; he fell all the way from 10th to 19th on the list. A number of other members of the Walton family also slid down the list, and that's no surprise, when you consider the fact that stock in Wal-Mart lost about 10 percent of its value over the past year. Well, indeed, it has. It has hurt some of the wealthiest shareholders, if you will, with the stock market gaining just about 1 percent over the past year. Take, for example, Robson Walton of the Wal-Mart Empire; he fell all the way from 10th to 19th on the list. A number of other members of the Walton family also slid down the list, and that's no surprise, when you consider the fact that stock in Wal-Mart lost about 10 percent of its value over the past year. Some of the big gainers were in Russia. Russia's stock market jumped 108 percent between February 2005 and February 2006, and that's where a lot of those billionaires were added to the list. Some of the big gainers were in Russia. Russia's stock market jumped 108 percent between February 2005 and February 2006, and that's where a lot of those billionaires were added to the list. Today in the Marketplace newsroom we're watching a new promise from China to crack down on product piracy. Today in the Marketplace newsroom we're watching a new promise from China to crack down on product piracy.
[Madeleine Brand:] Thank you, Bob Moon of public radio's daily business show, Marketplace, and Marketplace is produced by American Public Media. Thank you, Bob Moon of public radio's daily business show, Marketplace, and Marketplace is produced by American Public Media.

[Neal Conan:] Playwrightfilmmaker Neil Labute has been called a misogynist, a misanthrope, and a cynic. Other descriptions include the angriest white man, a spoil sport, even a downer. But for somebody to get that kind of a name calling and still be around is a testament to some other qualities. He's been described as a genius, the dark star of the American theater, or as one critic described him, a virtuoso about writing about sick puppies. If you've seen one of his plays or movies, such as In the Company of Men or The Shape of Things, they can be difficult to watch, but almost as difficult to turn away from. The Studio Theater in Washington, D.C., is showcasing his latest play, "Fat Pig", along with a couple of his other works. He's our guest today. If you have questions for Neil Labute about his work, give us a call, 800-989-8255, that's 800-989-TALK. The email address is talk@npr.org. And Neil Labute joins us now from a studio at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Thanks so much for being with us today.
[Mr. Neil Labute:] Hi, Neal, how are you?
[Neal Conan:] I'm well. With a title like "Fat Pig", it doesn't take a lot of imagination to get the gist of the kind of brutal honesty you're trying to get at in that play.
[Mr. Neil Labute:] No, it sort of gets to the heart of the matter right there. It was one of those titles that sort of came to me before the play, and it just seemed like such a, a right fit for the idea that came immediately after. I just thought it, you know, not, not as an attention-grabber, although it kind of...
[Neal Conan:] It does that, yeah.
[Mr. Neil Labute:] It can't help but do that, supposedly, since it's had, you know, time playing in New York, and now playing in Washington, and, and overseas, as well. But I think beyond that, it's a term that you know gets hurled at people. You know, I deal with the imagination. I make stories up. These people didn't come from my childhood, or I didn't see it happening in an office. I made it up. But I know that people have heard that thrown at them and the idea, you know, was a pretty potent one to take and then, and make a story built around that.
[Neal Conan:] But to listen to a clip, this is an excerpt from the opening scene of the play. In fact, the, the character named Helen is in a restaurant at the beginning of the play eating some pizza, and a young man, we'll learn his name is Tom, walks in.
[Helen:] [in play] I thought you meant me before.
[Tom:] [in play] I'm sorry?
[Helen:] [in play] Uh, when you said that. Pretty big, I thought you were saying that to me. About me.
[Tom:] [in play] Oh, no, God, no. I wouldn't, you did?
[Helen:] [in play] For a second.
[Tom:] [in play] No, that, that would be rude. Still, I mean, why would I do that? Besides, I'm not a...
[Helen:] [in play] You'd be surprised. People say all kinds of things, here.
[Tom:] [in play] In this place?
[Helen:] [in play] No, not just here, this restaurant, or anything. I mean, in this city.
[Tom:] [in play] Hm.
[Neal Conan:] An excerpt from Neil Labute's play, "Fat Pig", that from the New York performance. And, really, the rest of the play almost goes on like that for quite a while, the Helen character seeming to trip up the Tom character, who makes all these verbal gaffes.
[Mr. Neil Labute:] Well, I think it is a, it's a play that people can look at that title and think it's, you know, going to be one thing, and I, I think it does turn out to be something else. It ends up being as much a study in weakness as anything, and particularly, the weakness of this man who falls in love with someone, and then doesn't have the, whatever you want to call it, the backbone I guess is the thing we tend to throw around, the spine to live up to those convictions. He has a private life and a public life, and he can't marry them in the end, and, and so that's what was fascinating in that play. As I wrote it, I had to shift from it being about one thing into seeing that it really was about how, how weak someone can be in the face of, you know, it's easy to say we would do this or do that, or be strong or save someone, and in the end when you have to actually do it, it's a much trickier bargain.
[Neal Conan:] Yeah, and these are not exactly bosom buddies who he is trying to stay along with. I mean, these are the people he hangs out with, but he doesn't particularly like them, the people who sort of rein him back into the mainstream, who exploit his weakness.
[Mr. Neil Labute:] Yeah, no, that's, I think, the funny thing about, about life, how we often align ourselves with people whom we don't necessarily, as you say, even like. And yet, we live with them, because it's, it's just that much easier to go under the radar, you know, to not create a problem. And I think this is a character who doesn't like the, to get into conflict. And probably myself, I can see myself, you know, in that character, it's that somebody who much prefers, you know, a very even keeled person to deal with. And I think of myself as that. But the flaw of that is that you can also be a procrastinator or, or someone who, you know, creates a great deal more strife by just continually dodging the, you know, the, the anguish that you think that would come with an actual fight.
[Neal Conan:] I think, I sure saw some of myself in that character, and I think, in fact, a lot of other people did too. Is that what makes us cringe, and at the same time, is that what makes it work?
[Mr. Neil Labute:] Well, I suppose there's a bit of that on both sides, that you recognize the behavior. I think that the piece, not unlike, like something I think that's out there right now in movie theaters for people, Brokeback Mountain. People go to a movie like that and they see the unrequited love in that rather than just the specifics of, here's two, you know, sheepherders from the 1960's, I don't have any identification with that, and yet I understand the idea of falling in love with someone and not be able to be with them. And that's what I think that any number of people in any number of situations can look at a piece like "Fat Pig" and say, that's me, in the general sense. And I think that's the best quality that theater or literature or the cinema can have, is that something very specific can speak to a general audience because of the nature of what the themes are.
[Neal Conan:] If you'd like to join our conversation with Neal Labute, 800-989-8255, or you can send us email, talk@npr.org. Let's start with Carrie. Carrie's calling us from, is that Golden Hill, California?
[Carrie:] Yep. Golden Hill, that's part of San Diego.
[Neal Conan:] Okay, go ahead please.
[Carrie:] Um, well I just wanted to say that I finally saw In the Company of Men, after my friend said, no, no, no! You have to see it, but you're going to freak out! And I freaked out, because I loved it. I really thought it was amazing. My question is that, you know, you create these characters that are, many of which are unfortunately fairly, are fairly true to life. I mean, you didn't make these people, but unfortunately they remind us of others. Why do you think people have such a reaction towards you in general?
[Mr. Neil Labute:] I think that, yeah, a lot of what people see is, in a character they see, you know, something that, as you say, something that rings true to them, and yet they don't really want it to be true. They understand the behavior and go I've seen that sort of person'. I've been accused of a lot of things, but no one has really looked at the work and said that it's, they might say it's far-fetched, but they don't say it's science fiction. They don't say those people just don't exist on our planet. And so for me, it's really I think to them, I'm always looking for something that's unique; a different approach to a love story or a different approach to the workplace, that kind of thing. That's my job to spin a new tale, you know, or take an old tale and spin it in a new way. But I think that some of the techniques that I use, where I, I try not to be too judgmental with characters or stories, and the one that you mentioned, In the Company of Men, is a good example of a story that doesn't end the way we've traditionally been brought up to believe stories end. That the bad guy, as it were, doesn't get his just reward for being bad; at least not in the, you know, 90 minutes that we watch him. So I think that kind of thing is unsettling to people. How I often wrap up, or choose not to wrap up a story, that's I think people will allow a lot to happen during the course of a movie or a play or a book. But in the end, they want to be satisfied that all those, the strings have been tied so that they can put that back on the shelf or leave the cinema and not have to deal with it. But often I kind of leave this unwrapped package in their lap and say okay, this is your mess now. I just brought up the questions, now you figure it out.
[Neal Conan:] For those who don't understand the charges of misogyny involving the movie In the Company of Men, we'll play a clip from the film. It's about two, ruthless corporate climbers who play a terrible trick on a lonely secretary, who's also deaf, by romancing her and then dumping her simultaneously.
[Mr. Aaron Eckhart:] [As Chad] And suddenly she's got two men. She's calling her mom, she's wearing makeup again, and on we play, and on and on, and then one day, out goes the rug, and us pulling it hard. And Jill, she just comes tumbling after. Whoa. An hour later we're on a flight back to civilization like nothing ever happened.
[Neal Conan:] Like nothing ever happened. Boy is that cruel.
[Mr. Neil Labute:] That is, you know, that probably is some of the cruelest writing that I've done. I've done some stuff that I would think of as brutal and tough and also, you know, surprisingly tender. I mean, tender for me anyway. But that character in particular, Chad, played by Aaron Eckhart, someone I've worked with a number of times, I think he was probably the more, most outright cruel person because he's so aware of what he's doing and has the ruthlessness to go through with it. Then he, in the first 10 minutes of the film, he tells us what he's going to do, and I think, again, story-wise, we're used to things happening: he'll fall in love with the girl, he'll get into a car accident and have an epiphany, something, you know, there'll be some story change, but he tells you in the first few moments, this is what I'm going to do. And then he proceeds to do it. And you kind of stand back and go, oh my gosh! I hate to believe that somebody could be that, you know, awful.
[Neal Conan:] Yeah. Yeah. Carrie, thanks very much for the call.
[Carrie:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Let's go to Carley. Carley calling from Philadelphia.
[Carley:] Hi.
[Neal Conan:] Hi.
[Carley:] I have a question, Mr. Labute. I'm currently playing Cammie in a production of The Distance From Here in Philadelphia.
[Mr. Neil Labute:] Oh! Congratulations.
[Carley:] And I would like to know whether you, yourself, happen to be a misanthrope.
[Neal Conan:] Hmm. You don't just hate women, you hate everybody.
[Mr. Neil Labute:] Yeah, I'm an American. I'm an equal opportunity hater.
[Carley:] I'm asking, really asking.
[Mr. Neil Labute:] You're really asking?
[Carley:] Yes.
[Mr. Neil Labute:] Okay, so I have to be really serious then.
[Carley:] I was just trying to call you a name.
[Neal Conan:] No, no, no...
[Mr. Neil Labute:] See that's easy enough.
[Neal Conan:] ...that's my job.
[Mr. Neil Labute:] Yeah. No, I, you know, how could I answer that any way but no, um, unless I was honest. And God forbid that should happen. No, of course I don't see myself as someone who hates people. I think that's the essential tag for a misanthrope. I find myself much more positive, much more hopeful a person than I think a lot of what people see on the page. It's just I'm always looking, I'm looking for a fight on paper, you know? My job is to create conflict; conflict is drama. So I'm looking to walk into a perfectly nice family or business arrangement and mess it up. And, often in the same way that the actors will tell you, I mean, you probably know this, being an actor, you hear all the time an actor who has suddenly taken a part as a villain, they say, well it's so fun to play a villain, they get all the good lines. Well, they're also fun to write. You get to write all those good lines. And so, I wouldn't shy away from the fact that I've created a great deal of conflict on the page and left things unresolved and it seems as if there's a cynical or, you know, I would certainly say I'm a skeptical person. I think it's very hard in this society today to take the time to be caring, to worry about other people. And, you know, relationships take work. And that's not just, you know, love relationships, but work and friends, and you have to, you know, give of yourself. And I think people do a lot of just getting by. And, I think that's a pretty real and cruel thing that people do, is they just slide by with enough effort to make it into the next day. So I just tend to chronicle that, and not put a, you know, a spin on it that says that we're, we should be better or we will, or, you know, there's a chance around the corner that we'll be better. I kind of call them as I see them, and yet I, at the end of the day, I feel like a person who always hopes that things are going to work out for people or for myself, but with a completely clear-eyed view that things often just don't.
[Neal Conan:] Taking notes there, Carley?
[Carley:] Yeah. I mean, in the production of The Distance from Here, people, you know, often, are just, like they feel, the audience feels walloped. They just feel like they've been sucker-punched.
[Mr. Neil Labute:] Well, then my work here is done.
[Carley:] And the producer said that his goal in producing the play is that people will come to see it and then they'll go home and hug their kids.
[Mr. Neil Labute:] That's not such a bad thing. I mean, that's, then my job is well done. Because it...
[Carley:] Yeah.
[Mr. Neil Labute:] ...I certainly think that, you know, that you do look at a, at that particular play, I mean that play is much closer to me in a lot of ways than other things I've written. Because, it's more the way I grew up. Certainly not exactly that way, but I grew up around the kind of people in The Distance from Here far more than the kind of white collar, urban living characters that I've written a great deal about. So that, those kids who are parentless or at least fatherless and, you know, kind of moving just from day to day through a sort of very lower middle class America, a very marginalized, almost invisible population, it's very hard to be positive, or to feel, you know, that anybody does care about you. And so, you know, charting that world doesn't mean that I hate them, although if I'm honest, as I said in the preface, they're the kind of people that I probably would sit far away from at McDonalds. And yet I feel some affinity for them because I saw that hopelessness even back in school, where they just, you know, they weren't thinking about what college are they going to go to, they were thinking about what crap job am I going to get so I can get an okay car, and, you know, make it through the week.
[Neal Conan:] Carley, break a leg!
[Carley:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Okay. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News. And let's see if we get another caller on the line. This is Don, Don's also calling from Philadelphia.
[Don:] Hi gentlemen. Neil, you know, you mention honesty several times and I'm a writer myself and I enjoy unveiling the nastier side of characters with a fair amount of honesty. My question to you is, what kind of price have you paid for that honesty, among the people that surround you meaning, how many times do people say, gee, he's writing about me, or he's stealing a piece of me to put in there, and it's a piece I'd rather not have shown to the world?
[Mr. Neil Labute:] Well, it's funny that you ask that, because I think there's almost, almost no one would be my answer to that. Because I'm not someone who does pull a great deal from my life, even though I say that, say The Distance from Here, I know those kind of people, having grown up around them, I don't tell, you know, specific stories blanketed in some kind of fiction. I've changed the names, for instance. I haven't really written a coming of age story that was really my story, or, I didn't go through, you know, I didn't pull off the In the Company of Men gag, or have somebody, you know, use me as an art project, that kind of thing. I tend not to pull from the headlines or pull from my own life. I really do rely a great deal on imagination. I think what people experience is just that, the sense of, once I've created this story I'm trying to get to the truth of the matter there.
[Neal Conan:] Did you ever work in an office? We just have a few seconds left.
[Mr. Neil Labute:] I did in fact work in an office.
[Neal Conan:] And was David Mammoth your boss?
[Mr. Neil Labute:] You know, one would wish. I mean, there's a guy who could teach anyone a lesson or two.
[Neal Conan:] The Office just seems such a compelling vision of the American office.
[Mr. Neil Labute:] I go back to it often in my writing because I find it's such a life-sucking place where, you know, you have to conform to a certain, you know, set of rules and ideals that often, I think, take away that individual spirit in a person. And so it, it's really interesting when a person work in that environment how they have to try and switch gears back to being a caring person at home. I think it's a really difficult mix.
[Neal Conan:] Neil Labure. First of all, to Don, thank you very much for the call, appreciate it.
[Don:] You're welcome.
[Neal Conan:] And Neil Labute, thank you so much for joining us today. We appreciate you for taking the time.
[Mr. Neil Labute:] Pleasure. Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Neil Labute is a playwright, a filmmaker, and a director. He's also a prose writer. His work includes In the Company of Men and The Shape of Things. The Studio Theater in Washington is showcasing his play, "Fat Pig", as well as two others of his works. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan, in Washington.

[Robert Siegel:] This week brought a change of mission for the U.S. military in Iraq, but that's not the only thing that's changing. After nearly seven and a half years of war, the U.S. Army has transformed how it fights, how it trains, and how it educates its leaders even the equipment it uses. NPR's Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman reports on how the Iraq War shaped America's largest military service.
[Tom Bowman:] General Ray Odierno, a bald, hulking man, trained at West Point to fight the Soviets. Then in the spring of 2003, he swept into Iraq with his troops and tanks. After Iraq's regular army crumbled, a new enemy resorted to hit-and-run tactics. But Odierno didn't see it as an insurgency.
[General Ray Odierno:] This is not guerrilla warfare. It is not close to guerrilla warfare because it's not coordinated, it's not organized, and it's not led.
[Tom Bowman:] But it was a guerrilla war. It caught the Army flatfooted. Odierno was later faulted by the Army for using heavy-handed tactics, like arresting thousands of young Iraqi men tactics that made the insurgency worse. Lieutenant Colonel JOHN NAGL [Ret., United States Army]: This was a man who did not have a great appreciation for counterinsurgency and guerrilla warfare. John Nagl served in Iraq as an Army officer, and is now a defense analyst. Lt. Col. NAGL: General Odierno has shown that people can learn, that he has learned. He has led our Army in learning how to conduct this kind of war. And the lessons he's learned, I think, are of great relevance to the whole nation, going forward. Just this week, General Odierno stepped down as commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq. In many ways, he personified the Army: big and lumbering. But Iraq taught Odierno and the Army that fighting an insurgency means protecting civilians, not breaking down their doors; training local forces, not doing the job for them. Troops, not tanks.
[Mr. Andrew Krepinevich:] I think Iraq has changed the Army in just about every way possible.
[Tom Bowman:] Andrew Krepinevich wrote "The Army in Vietnam," about how the Army failed to understand the insurgency there. He thinks the jury's still out on Iraq.
[Mr. Andrew Krepinevich:] Looking back on it, it took us far too long to adapt the Army to fight that kind of war successfully. If we win, it will be by the skin of our teeth. And if we lose, we'll rue the fact that we really weren't prepared.
[Tom Bowman:] So now, the Army is still learning the lessons of Iraq. At West Point, cadets are studying languages like Arabic and Pashto. At Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Army majors study the history and cultures of the places they may find themselves fighting. Brigadier General Sean MacFarland is in charge of education at Leavenworth. He says the days are gone when an instructor would just lecture from an Army manual. Now officers break into groups and work on scenarios straight from the battlefield, like how to negotiate with tribal leaders. Brigadier General SEAN MacFARLAND [United States Army]: They can get results in almost real time, of the decisions that they're making. So because of Iraq, the Army is changing the way it fights. It's also fielding new weapons and equipment on the battlefield. John Nagl, the former Army officer, says insurgents forced this change. They resorted to crude roadside bombs or improvised explosive devices. Those bombs caused up to 70 percent of U.S. casualties in Iraq. Lt. Col. NAGL: Improvised explosive devices are going to be a part of every future battle we fight, and we've got to be ready for them. To get ready, the Army has spent billions of dollars on electronic jamming devices that can stop bombs from detonating; on massive armored vehicles that protect soldiers from the blast. Some argue the change has gone too far, that the Army is focusing too much on fighting guerrillas. They complain that the soldiers have lost their edge in classic combat: artillery and tank warfare. The Army's top officer, General George Casey, told NPR last year that his soldiers must also be ready for a large-scale war.
[General George Casey:] Now, the guidance that I gave the Army last summer was: focus on major conventional training so that you rekindle some of the skills that you've lost.
[Tom Bowman:] The Army also lost talent. Multiple combat tours led to an exodus of captains and sergeants. Again, Andrew Krepenevich
[Mr. Andrew Krepinevich:] And a lot of them say: Look, I've done my patriotic duty. I've sacrificed for the country, my family has sacrificed, and I just can't see myself doing this anymore.
[General Peter Chiarelli:] We've asked the same base of people to go back time and time again, and that has put stress on the force. There's no doubt about it.
[Tom Bowman:] That's General Peter Chiarelli, the Army's number two officer.
[General Peter Chiarelli:] We have a large population and a growing population, quite frankly that have suffered the hidden wounds of this war.
[Tom Bowman:] Thousands suffer from post-traumatic stress or traumatic brain injury. The Army is also seeing an alarming increase in suicides. Getting troops time off from combat will help. The goal? Two years at home for every year in a combat zone. Chiarelli says the Army hopes to reach that goal of two years at home by the end of 2011, around the time when all American troops are supposed to be out of Iraq. Tom Bowman, NPR News, Washington.

[Scott Simon:] Times of crisis and consternation are also times when political landscapes are rearranged. The Republican presidential field seems to get more crowded. Is the Democratic field already filled by one? Here, in the first month of 2015, to talk about 2016 is NPR's Ron Elving. Ron, thanks so much for being with us.
[Ron Elving, Byline:] Good to be with you, Scott.
[Scott Simon:] We literally can't get to everyone, but let's begin with Mitt Romney. He memorably said last year I'm going to quote "no, no, no, no, no, no" to the idea of running again. What may have changed his mind?
[Ron Elving, Byline:] Romney changed his mind about 2016 because of 2014. And he hopes that will help other Republicans forget about 2012. You know, Romney's been crisscrossing the country for other Republican candidates all this past year, and it felt pretty good to him. Those candidates did very well in November. And Romney looks around, and he sees no great alternatives to Jeb Bush. And he's just not convinced that Jeb Bush can win the nomination and sell the country on another president named Bush. Of course, his own problem is selling other Republicans on another dance with a guy named Romney.
[Scott Simon:] Rand Paul is jetting around everywhere. How does he take advantage of the national network of support, particularly money that his father Ron Paul built up, while departing from his father on some national security issues? His father essentially blamed the policies of the French government for the murders in Paris.
[Ron Elving, Byline:] That's right. Rand Paul inherits a tremendous base from his father Ron Paul, but also that ceiling that you're referring to, which is largely foreign policy. Ron Paul always had great buzz. He really did. And he had some fundraising and disappointing vote totals. His persona was never enough to really attract people. And Rand Paul brings a kind of youthful freshness to libertarianism that his father never did.
[Scott Simon:] Jeb Bush resigned from more corporate boards recently than most of us have chopping boards in our kitchen. Is there a chance he won't run for president now?
[Ron Elving, Byline:] Not anymore. He's cleared his decks. As you mentioned, he's gotten a lot of financial stuff out of the way, old emails from his time in public office. The fundraising operations he's created are a clear sign, also, the team he's assembling, the social media presence. Four years ago, he said he had family issues that kept him from running. And now perhaps he feels he's resolved those. But whether he has or not, he is running.
[Scott Simon:] A question I wouldn't have projected even a few weeks ago is there any more room for Chris Christie? And should he have stayed home and watched that Cowboys-Lions game?
[Ron Elving, Byline:] [Laughter] You're referring to the much-viewed man-hug with Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones big YouTube story. What was the last big story about Chris Christie that actually helped him? You can say that he did a good job running the Republican Governors Association last year, and he did. But last year in New Jersey was largely tale of woe for Chris Christie. And the bridge closure blow up is still not entirely resolved and behind him. The New Jersey economy has trailed the national recovery. There was a poll out this week by Fairleigh Dickinson University saying only one New Jerseyan in five thinks that the Chris Christie years have been good for the average citizen there.
[Scott Simon:] If Hillary Clinton is a prohibitive favorite on the Democratic side, why are they practically lined up on the Republican side to run against her?
[Ron Elving, Byline:] Because Republicans believe that Hillary Clinton will be an exceptionally vulnerable candidate, even as safe as she is in her own party. She's going to have to answer for every dollar the Clintons have ever raised, earned or spent because all the opposition research the Republican Party can mount is going to be focused on her. There's already a team working in Little Rock, Arkansas. But look, Elizabeth Warren seems to have finally convinced most of the media she means it when she says she's really not running, and no other big-name Democrat has really shown much of an inclination to challenge the Clinton machine. And right now, the Clintons are locking up some of the operatives who beat them in 2008, so Hillary's candidacy looks inevitable, and her nomination looks highly probable.
[Scott Simon:] NPR's Ron Elving. Thanks so much
[Ron Elving, Byline:] Thank you, Scott.

[Guy Raz:] You have just over 24 hours to submit your original short story in Round Six of our Three-Minute Fiction writing contest here on Weekends on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Our judge, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, says each story has to include one character who tells a joke and one who cries.
[Bob Mondello:] [Reading] I remember when I first saw you, I said. So beautiful. I sat like the most shameless voyeur and watched you eat a bowl of soup for 10 minutes trying my best to think of the line that might get your attention, even make you laugh. Do you remember? Yes, she admitted, voice lacking the flavor of nostalgia, I do. She flipped the lid of the suitcase, zipped it all the way around and tugged it twice to make sure it was tightly closed, looked at me then and showed the briefest crinkle of her brow. And then, I said she broke in waiter, what's this fly doing in my soup? And the waiter said I began, she finished the backstroke. We both laughed as we'd laughed then at the familiar thing that was once new and meaningful, beautiful in its infancy but now gnarled and gray. She picked up the suitcase. I didn't offer to help.
[Susan Stamberg:] [Reading] Did I ever tell you the one about the rope that went in the bar, he asked. I had heard it countless times, but I smiled and nodded noncommittally. He took my gesture as a reason to continue. See, the rope goes in and the bartender tells him to scram. He don't serve their kind. So the rope goes out, puts a loop in himself and unravels his end and goes back in the bar. Bartender says, ain't you the rope I just told to get out? And the rope says, I'm afraid not. The unlit cigarette dangled from his lips shaking and almost falling as the old man laughed and struggled to find his breath. I smiled until the spasms went on longer than I liked, and I looked over at him.
[Mike Pesca:] [Reading] Vince sat on dad's bed and talked to him as if he could hear everything. Dad hadn't uttered a word in days. The nurse would come in and turn him and the party would resume upon her departure. Cat poured the wine. Always the wild woman, she was more gentle this evening. We were all trying to one-up the other with our stories. Vin, the consummate prankster, decided to tell a joke. Hey, I have one: What is dad's favorite drink? But we never got to hear the answer to Vin's joke. Out of nowhere, we heard a gentle murmur: Becks. Not believing our ears, Vin said, what? Again, dad breathed: Becks.
[Guy Raz:] Excerpts from the stories by Lamar Jones of Wilmington, Delaware, Benjamin Tosh of Wasilla, Alaska and Isabelle Hart in Naples, Florida. Thanks to our readers, NPR's Bob Mondello, Susan Stamberg and Mike Pesca. And now, it's your turn. To submit your story, go to our website at npr.orgthreeminutefiction, all spelled out, no spaces.

[Rachel Martin:] It has been a long, long campaign 574 days of stump speeches, rallies, sound bites, debates and vitriol. As we push to the finish line, let's take a moment to rewind the tape and remember some of the moments that brought us to this place.
[Ted Cruz:] I am honored to stand with each and every one...
[Carly Fiorina:] I'm Carly Fiorina, and I'm running for president.
[Marco Rubio:] First generation of Americans to inherit a country worse off than the one left for their parents.
[Jeb Bush:] In any language, my message will be an optimistic one.
[Donald Trump:] We will make America great again. God bless you and good night.
[Bernie Sanders:] Establishment politics is just not good enough. We need bold changes. We need a political revolution.
[Hillary Clinton:] I want to be a president who takes care of the big problems and the problems that are affecting the people.
[Donald Trump:] They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists.
[Hillary Clinton:] I made a mistake using a private email.
[Donald Trump:] That's for sure.
[Hillary Clinton:] And if I had to do it over again, I would obviously do it different.
[Donald Trump:] And I'm telling you, November 8, we better be careful because that election's going to be rigged.
[Hillary Clinton:] Therefore, it's imperative that the bureau explain this issue in question, whatever it is, without any delay.

[Steve Inskeep:] This week brought new revelations about a cyber attack on Premera Blue Cross. The health insurance company based outside Seattle says hackers may have compromised 11 million customer accounts. Attacks like that are prompting some companies to buy cyber insurance, and that business is growing quickly, as we learn from reporter Kaomi Goetz.
[Kaomi Goetz, Byline:] Steve Hawkins strokes the hair of his four-year-old English Labrador.
[Steve Hawkins:] Sammy, Sammy. Good girl, good girl. Who's my good girl?
[Kaomi Goetz, Byline:] Sammy is more than a pet. She's trained to sniff out bedbugs for Hawkins' exterminator business called 5 Star Environments in Manhattan. It's one way to get an edge against competitors who don't use dogs. Another is being able to assure clients their information is safe. Hawkins learned the importance of data protection two years ago. That's when hackers got into his computer and stole his customers' credit card information. He immediately beefed up his firewalls to prevent it from happening again, but still, he worries.
[Steve Hawkins:] A lot of what's going on in the news makes you think about the smaller companies like myself protecting myself.
[Kaomi Goetz, Byline:] One way to do that is having cyber insurance. Like most companies, Hawkins already has general liability coverage for things like workers comp and property liability, but it doesn't cover hacker attacks. Cyber insurance pays for privacy attorneys to sift through state and federal data breach laws. There also might be regulatory fines and costs for setting up call centers, credit monitoring and help with PR. But bundling that risk into a monthly premium isn't an exact science. John Farley is vice president of insurance brokerage HUB International. He says underwriters are used to large swaths of data.
[John Farley:] It's much different in cyber because in cyber, there's really not a lot of claims data out there. It's relatively new, and it's not readily shared.
[Kaomi Goetz, Byline:] He says putting a price on loss of reputation, like the recent hack on Sony Pictures, is harder to quantify. Yet, that isn't stopping insurers from writing policies or companies from buying them. Insurance industry researcher Advisen says the number of premiums paid for cyber insurance was $2.1 billion last year. That's up from 1.8 billion in 2013. Farley says cyber insurance is booming.
[John Farley:] If you went back 10 years ago and asked the insurance buyer the risk manager at corporation, you know, what keeps you up at night? They might answer that question and say, you know, being involved in a mass tort or a big product recall where they're getting sued. Those concerns are still very valid today. But if you ask that same question what keeps you up at night? cyber rescue is always at the top.
[Kaomi Goetz, Byline:] But because they are so new, cyber policies can be tricky. Ed Stroz is a former FBI agent who founded cyber security firm Stroz Friedberg in Manhattan. He says companies have to be realistic.
[Ed Stroz:] You have to look at the terms of the policy, the kind of insurance products that are out there and how well that aligns with the kind of coverage your client seeks to get.
[Kaomi Goetz, Byline:] If companies aren't careful, their cyber insurance policy might surprise them when they need it most. Retailer Target suffered a massive data breach in late 2013. About 100 million customer accounts were compromised. That shook investor and customer confidence. The cost of breach reached $148 million by the second quarter, but its cyber insurance policy paid out only 38 million. One reason payouts sometimes fall short is an insurer might decide the company was negligent on security, even for something as simple as failing to regularly change security passwords.
[Steve Hawkins:] Come on. Yeah, that's my girl. Give me a kiss.
[Kaomi Goetz, Byline:] Steve Hawkins knows cyber insurance isn't a hundred percent guarantee, but he's willing to do whatever he can.
[Steve Hawkins:] Listen, we're a small company, but we are a target. There's no question.
[Kaomi Goetz, Byline:] And he's trying to educate other small business owners to the risk because he knows hackers are always one step ahead. For NPR News, I'm Kaomi Goetz in New York.

[Madeleine Brand:] If the Padilla decision is good news for the Bush administration, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is a far more mixed picture. The political fallout continues to be damaging for the president. He's trying to fix that and this Sunday will visit the Gulf Coast again. Every Friday we turn to NPR senior correspondent and regular DAY TO DAY contributor Juan Williams to discuss the week's major political news. Hi, Juan.
[Juan Williams Reporting:] Hello, Madeleine.
[Madeleine Brand:] Well, big news today. FEMA Director Michael Brown essentially relieved of his duties overseeing the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. So this is a surprise, isn't it, for this White House, which is known for its loyalty?
[Williams:] Well, it is, but you know what? There was so much pressure and so much political pressure coming from Republicans as well as Democrats-Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House, has already said that the president-and I'm quoting here-"recognized what I've been saying for more than a week, that the federal response to this disaster must be managed by a capable leader." So this is a way of pushing Michael Brown aside without firing him, and I think that's how the loyalty plays into it. Brown was able to tell reporters that, really, he's being made a scapegoat by the press and not by the president.
[Madeleine Brand:] And let's talk about the president's job approval ratings. Where are they right now?
[Williams:] Well, there's the Pew poll out that shows that his job approval rating is now at the lowest it's been in his entire tenure as president of the United States, 40 percent, Madeleine. In fact, there's a Zogby poll that puts it at about 41 percent, so it's in the same area. And with regard to the hurricane, 67 percent of Americans say that this administration, the Bush administration, has done a bad job of handling it, responding to it, being quick about helping people who are suffering.
[Madeleine Brand:] And, Juan, what are people telling you there on Capitol Hill in Washington maybe off the record about what the president needs to do to boost his image?
[Williams:] Well, the foremost thing that I'm hearing-and, boy, there's a lot of back-room chatter, especially from the Republicans, who are afraid to take the president on directly-is that he needs to have a major address to the nation about what has taken place and about the federal government's lack of response, poor response-however you want to put it. In addition, they're talking about maybe that the president should appoint someone like a Rudy Giuliani, a Colin Powell, someone with a tremendous amount of personal appeal and reputation, as a czar of recovery-put someone in that position who could handle long-term relief efforts, reconstruction, so that you would have a sense of this administration coming to grips with a major catastrophe on the national scene. Whatever is done, though, they feel the president has a need to make up for the flyover when he was first made aware of the extent of the damage. Remember, at one point he said, `Brown, you're doing a great job,'with regard to Michael Brown-that the president now needs to go back and say that maybe he didn't understand the gravity of the situation.
[Madeleine Brand:] And he does have an ambitious domestic agenda being eclipsed at the moment by this hurricane, but he does have this agenda. How does his declining popularity affect his ability to pull that off?
[Williams:] Well, you know, it starts with Iraq, Madeleine, and what you have here is a situation where people already have declining support for the administration's handling of the war in Iraq. And so what you see is that people are saying, `Well, it was the leadership that really signified the president's ability after 911.'And so the president will talk about 911 and play on that leadership notion. But in this case you don't see the leadership, and I think that lots of people are now going to question, again: Where's the leadership on the hurricane? Where's the leadership in Iraq? When it comes to Social Security and the kind of social safety net in the country, again, the hurricane and the tremendous need for disaster relief aid makes it more doubtful that the president will be able to proceed in any changes in Social Security. The same thing with tax reform-how are you going to change the tax system or even put in place greater tax benefits for the affluent at a time when the nation's budget is being directly strained by the need to help out those in need?
[Madeleine Brand:] And let's talk about the Democrats for a minute. They have been criticized in the past of not having a cohesive message. It does seem to have changed now in the wake of this hurricane.
[Williams:] Very much. I think that's one of the big stories of this week. I don't know if it's been told outside of Washington, Madeleine. But what you saw, of course, after 911 was Democrats afraid to criticize the president or lack of response in terms of helping with disaster relief up in New York and Virginia, the Pentagon. But now, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, you see that the Democrats are not worried about being called unpatriotic. Instead they are focusing on this leadership angle, lack of leadership, lack of efficient government response. So you get things like John Edwards, the Democrats' vice presidential nominee with John Kerry in 2004, saying, `This is evidence of two Americas and that the poor, the minorities in the country are not being tended to by this administration.'You get Howard Dean saying that, `This administration really didn't do anything until they understood they had a political problem on their hands as opposed to understanding the tremendous need to help people.'
[Madeleine Brand:] NPR senior correspondent Juan Williams joins us every Friday on DAY TO DAY to discuss the week's major political news. And thank you, Juan.
[Williams:] You're welcome, Madeleine.

[Steve Inskeep:] The European efforts come at a time when some of their economies are already slowing down. The unemployment rate is already over nine percent in the town of Bochum. It's in the rural valley, a famous home of German industry, and in that town, workers heard this week that their situation is likely to get worse. NPR's Tom Gjelten reports.
[Tom Gjelten:] Among the people in Bochum who feel hard times coming is Horst Roman who has an upscale used car business on the edge of town. The Mercedes, Volkswagens and Audis he has for sale are all sparkling clean, but his showroom this day is utterly deserted. Horst sits in his darkened office smoking a cigarette. He hasn't even turned the light on. He's been here since 7 a.m. waiting anxiously for customers to come in.
[Horst Roman:] [German spoken]
[Tom Gjelten:] Totally dead. Totally quiet. Pointing to his telephone, he says it hasn't rung all morning. Horst Roman has a theory for why the people of Bochum are no longer buying his cars. They've lost their nerve to buy, he says.
[Horst Roman:] [German spoken]
[Tom Gjelten:] They are all broken, he says. I get the feeling it's like they've all been hit by a hammer. They're all afraid. Nobody dares to take a risk at all. The largest employer in Bochum is Opel, the European car company owned by General Motors. The Opel factory here employs 5,000 workers, and it's by the factory's output that people in Bochum measure their economic situation. The factory is now open turning out inexpensive Opel cars for sale in Russia, Poland and China as well as Germany. But at the end of last month, Opel shut down production here for two weeks, and this week the workers learned that the factory will close temporarily again next month. This is what makes Bochum workers like Franz Yosef Droos nervous, he's been with Opel for 33 years.
[Franz Yosef Droos:] [Through Translator] In all these years, we've never had a production stand still like this. We've had problems with sales, we've had strikes. And what's happening now with them cutting production so much, this has never happened in all this time.
[Tom Gjelten:] This day the company has rolled out its newest car model, the Insignia. It's on exhibit in the factory parking lot here in Bochum for the workers to see. Franz Yosef Droos, along with dozens of other Opel workers, stops to check out the model after finishing his factory shift. He and the other Opel workers pouring over the Insignia don't see it so much as a nice new car but as a product that could revive their company and help save their jobs.
[Franz Yosef Droos:] [Through Translator] This is our flagship. Really we should promote this car better. It's the sign of hope for the Opel company.
[Tom Gjelten:] This may be a bit of a wishful thinking. The Opel company's overall sales in Europe are down 14 percent since last September. Opel executives in Bochum declined to be interviewed for this story, but one company official speaking on background said, I'm afraid it will get still worse. Managers say production in 2009 will be unchanged at best. It's not just in Germany that people are buying fewer cars. Also in the United States, in Spain, in Poland, and in Russia, there's now a global problem. Ferdinand Dudenhoffer is a professor of automotive economics at the University of Duisburg in Germany.
[Ferdinand Dudenhoffer:] People are very reluctant to consume high price products like cars. That means in 2009, we see big problems in the German car industry. We think that they have to reduce jobs.
[Tom Gjelten:] This week the German government predicted economic growth for next year to be 0.2 percent at best. And that estimate was prepared before the financial crisis hit.
[Ferdinand Dudenhoffer:] It looks worse because nobody expected that this financial crisis would hurt the markets and the people so strong as it did in the last three or four weeks. The car market will deteriorate in the next months even stronger as we thought a few months ago.
[Tom Gjelten:] Bochum and other towns in the Ruhr Valley have been through hard times before. The coal and steel industries that were once the backbone of this region have mostly disappeared. The Opel factory at its peak once employed 20,000 workers, four times the current total. Some small companies have established themselves here in recent years and see themselves as part of the Bochum community, but a global recession would affect everyone, small and big companies alike. And Bochum and thousands of other towns in Germany, in Europe and across the globe are bound to pay the price. Tom Gjelten, NPR News, Bochum, Germany.

[Farai Chideya:] From NPR News, this is NEWS & NOTES. I'm Farai Chideya. President Bush is making a new effort to turn renters into homeowners. He'll seek $35 billion for the Department of Housing and Urban Development's 2008 fiscal year budget. That's nearly $2 billion more than his spending plan this fiscal year. And the White House also notes that families of color are closing the homeownership gap with whites. But some economists aren't painting such a rosy picture. They say more middle class families are being shut out. So how's the market really faring? We speak with two experts from opposite coasts. We've got Christian Weller, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress. He joins us from the studios at the center in Washington D.C. And also with us, Azeem Ali, he's a foreclosure specialist with Pacific Coast Capital. He joins us by phone from Los Angeles. And good to have you back on the program. Welcome to you both. And Christian, let me start with you. What is the housing market looking like nationally? Is this a boom time? A slump time?
[Mr. Christian Weller:] Well, I think you when we look at the housing markets, it's important to understand what it was and what it wasn't. It's clearly a boom time it was a boom time at least through early 2006 in terms of house prices. The flipside of that is it made it harder for people to move into homeownership. If you look at the aggregate data for the United States, in particular from 2004 to 2005, homeownership rate actually dropped. And it dropped the most for African-Americans who still had the most to catch up relative to whites, for instance. The same time the flips the other flipside of this is also that those people who managed to move into their own homes had to borrow more money, had to take out more exotic mortgages options only, adjust rate mortgages that left them ultimately more vulnerable. And that is particular concentrated among African-American homeowners. So it really was a double-edged sword. Those who basically could sit in their homes, watch the value appreciate, that didn't have to take out more loans, I think they made out nicely. But I think a vast group of people, A, couldn't move into homeownership because of higher prices, and B, if they were moving into homeownership, had to borrow more money than in the past.
[Farai Chideya:] And Christian, you've also done some research on America's spending and saving habits, and you talk about the high rates of debt in general. Tell us just briefly about that.
[Mr. Christian Weller:] Well let me give you a number a little bit on the homeownership rate on the homeownership vulnerability, because that's directly related to link and that's the most important reason why people borrow. If you look at the data, about 49 percent of homeowners have one measure of vulnerability: high debt payments, high levels of variable interest rate debt, a very high leverage, they own very little of ground homes or they own very little outside of their homes. That's for the 49 percent in 2004. As for the entire population for African-Americans it was 72 percent of home African-American homeowners with at least one of those measures of vulnerability. Now it's directly linked to the run-up in consumer debt. And overall you see that the run-up at consumer debt truly was much more explained in the last few years by a fairly weak labor market, very weak job growth, especially in manufacturing, where especially African-American men are disproportionally concentrated. And at the same time basically flat wage growth. And on top of that, you see rapid price increases for things like housing, health care, education and energy. And against that backdrop, people took out massive amounts of debt. Their debt payments have risen to the highest level on record. And clearly, I think that has left the middle class, whether they're homeowners or not, much more vulnerable to any economic shocks at this point.
[Farai Chideya:] Azeem, you deal really with people. You deal with numbers, of course, because you're in the foreclosure business, but you really deal with people who are having trouble. We had you on before to really talk about how you deal with people who are in crisis. What are you seeing now in your business?
[Mr. Azeem Ali:] Well the biggest thing that I'm seeing is a lot of the individuals who have bought in the last three years, two years, where the housing market has been on such a drastic increase. They just like Mr. Weller said, they're really getting into a lot of different types of loans to make the cost of money, i.e. interest rate, more favorable for them on the entering into the market. So what you're seeing is they're not looking at the overall price of the home. So a home is half a million dollars. They're not looking at that per se. They're looking at their monthly affordability. And a lot of mortgage brokers are presenting to them different, like Mr. Weller said, exotic ways to bring that cost down reverse amortization loans, interest-only loans, teaser loans. So when they see that they could pay $2,000 or $2,500 a month, that becomes their focus point and they're getting involved in those loans not knowing the dynamic of that loan and how they go up or how they aggregate overtime. And then, once it goes up or once it changes form, unbeknownst to them, because they didn't read their contract thoroughly and their broker didn't really represent it correctly, they're starting to go belly up. And unfortunately, it always comes down to education for me. I'm a huge proponent of education at the point when you're getting into a loan.
[Farai Chideya:] Now what are you seeing in Los Angeles? This is one of the cities where housing prices really has shot up. I know a lot of African-American families are moving out to the desert towns like Lancaster because they can't afford to live in L.A. anymore. Are you seeing a lot of foreclosures? Are you seeing it's kind of a split screen because on the one hand one person's disaster could be another person's opportunity to own. What about that part of the picture?
[Mr. Azeem Ali:] You hit the nail right on the head. I mean there's a lot of activity going on. There's a lot of quick turnover on properties, unfortunately, because you are noticing, especially in the entry level the Lancasters, the Palmdales those areas that are very favorable to entry level homeowners because of the price. You're noticing that individuals are getting involved in those areas. But unfortunately, Palmdale and Lancaster have this extremely high foreclosure rate. And what's happening is you're right. You're noticing, though individuals get involved, getting into the home, and then no more than a year later it's turning over. And someone else is walking in and getting a great deal now. Now at this point it's still the prices are still holding pretty steady, but you're noticing that the banks are starting to their appetite for holding these properties is not really great. They don't want to hold these properties,so they're just counting these properties and getting them into the second homeowner's hands.
[Farai Chideya:] Christian, this directly relates to some new census figures that said that 2.1 million vacant homes are for sale at the end of 2006, up from 1.56 million a year before. So what should that vacancy tell us about how the market is doing?
[Mr. Christian Weller:] Well the market is definitely slumping and there we see weaknesses. And the fear is here, really, we're entering a vicious cycle that, as more homes are on sale, more homeowners who need to sell will cut their prices. Which also means ultimately, because many people are so highly leveraged, they have such high outstanding mortgages, they will ultimately go into foreclosure because they can't repay their mortgages with a lower sale price. And that ultimately has a ripple effect. Goldman Sachs just warned yesterday about this ripple effect, which can be very serious. That ripple effect is that the banks will ultimately see mounting losses and they will just simply stop lending to particular segments in the market. And it's often called a credit crunch. And the big fear is that that will particular hurt those homeowners, those communities that are often have hard times getting access to the formal credit markets. We're talking largely minorities but also small business owners here. And I think that's the big worry here that as we have an oversupply, a large supply of homes on the market, we get these ripple effects to the default rates that ultimately lead to less lending and that ultimately bring down, slow down the economy, particular in certain communities.
[Farai Chideya:] Azeem and Christian, I'm going to ask you the same question. Is the American dream working? On some level, the home, whether it has a white picket fence or not, whether it's a condo or a co-op or a detached home, that's the American dream. Is it in jeopardy, Azeem?
[Mr. Azeem Ali:] Well, I'm going to go back to my soapbox once again. I think that the gap that needs to be closed is in education. I mean, financial education is probably one of the biggest problems when it comes to individuals obtaining and keeping not just obtaining but keeping that American dream, because you can obtain it. But keeping it is a different thing. And once the banks and the loan brokers start to become more responsible in that area, then the homeowners will have a problem with retaining that American dream. There's still, and I advise on this all the time, there's still a lot of very creative ways to get into a home affordably and have it work for you. But you have to be educated. You have to be educated on the whole cycle.
[Farai Chideya:] And Christian, I'll pose the same question to you. But also, whose responsibility is it to make sure that Americans can own homes? Is it government's responsibility? Azeem seems to hint that some lenders should be more forthright in the terms they put out. Whose responsibility is it to ensure that people can safely and intelligently make a purchase?
[Mr. Christian Weller:] I cannot agree more. I think the chance of holding on to the American dream has declined. Clearly, people are leveraged; they have too much debt. It's harder for them to it's easy for them to get into a home but harder to hold on to that. But then I think making the American dream work is a shared responsibility between everybody. Yes, individuals should become better educated of the loan products and what they mean. But I think lenders have to become more responsible, because it's their own interest. Ultimately, they pay the price through higher default rates. And I think policy makers need to step in, and that requires reducing, eliminating practices that are clearly either illegal or onerous. But also the other parties, we've got to get beyond just simply looking at housing as a stand-alone issue. Say, okay, why are people borrowing so much money. It's not because the house prices alone are so much higher. It's also because income hasn't grown. And so I think you've got to see the full picture, and I think public policy is really demanded here to come up with creative public policy solutions, to make sure that people have actually income to payback the loans that they have taken on.
[Farai Chideya:] All right, well we're going to have to leave it there. But I hope we can catch up with you gentlemen again soon, because these issues of housing are not going anywhere. Christian Weller, Azeem Ali, thank you so much.
[Mr. Azeem Ali:] Thank you.
[Mr. Christian Weller:] Thank you very much.
[Farai Chideya:] Christian Weller is a senior economist at the Center for American Progress in Washington D.C. He joined us from the studios at the Center. And Azeem Ali is a foreclosure specialist of Pacific Coast Capital. He joined us by phone from Los Angeles. And just ahead, are U.S. automakers on their knees? Plus a Southern journalist helped solve civil rights murders.

[There Is A Baseball Team That Can Provide Some Guidance To All Those Cash-strapped Clubs:] the Arizona Diamondbacks. In the Phoenix area, job creation is way down. Foreclosures are rampant. Yet the Diamondbacks still have plenty of folks signing up for season tickets. Derrick Hall has been the team's president since 2006, and he has a pretty simple plan. Keep player salaries low, and treat fans to an affordable, enjoyable experience. For some teams, that's pretty radical thinking. I asked Hall about why the game is more susceptible to an economic downturn now than in years past.
[Mr. Derrick Hall:] With our TV deals now, so many of our games, if not all of them, are on television. So if you're giving somebody the option of staying at home with a brand new, beautiful, hi-def TV flat screen and have a real good seat in the house right behind the pitcher or the catcher, yeah, it sometimes does compete with you. But it's important for all of us to have those TV deals so that we can paint the picture, show how exciting it is in person, and invite people to come out to the ballpark.
[Robert Smith:] And these days, people are probably paying for that TV on credit and are a little bit worried about their finances. Is that keeping them from the ballparks?
[Mr. Derrick Hall:] You know, I think in some markets, it will. In ours, I don't think so. We're actually in the lowest per-capita income of all the 30 markets, believe it or not. But you know, our season-ticket renewal rate was around 83 percent, which is a very good number, especially when you compare it to some of the other cities and teams that were in the 50s and 60s. So we're just going to have to get real creative, make sure that we have affordable options, and that we do a lot in the form of group sales and group discounts.
[Robert Smith:] Do you come out and say, we know times are hard, and we're there for you? Is that...
[Mr. Derrick Hall:] Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. There's no sugar-coating here. We know times are tough. We certainly don't want you to get a hit in the wallet when you come to our ballpark. You can even bring your own food, is one of the messages that we've sent. You know, we created a new section this year, which is all you can eat. And you know, for $25, you know, a person can have a great seat on the suite level and can have all the food that he or she could eat. So yeah, we do recognize it. We communicate that with our fans, and we're trying to help them get through this and still receive entertainment.
[Robert Smith:] All you can eat, huh? You have no idea how much Cracker Jack I can put away.
[Mr. Derrick Hall:] It's all yours.
[Robert Smith:] Well, have you heard from fans, season-ticket holders who have had their homes foreclosed or worried about being able to pay for tickets this year?
[Mr. Derrick Hall:] Very little, to be honest. We had a few that would call us and say, look, I can't afford my season tickets anymore, and it breaks my heart because I've been in the same seat since day one, where we've then gotten back to them and said, look, what if we can help find you a partner or two and let you split the season up? And they were thrilled, and we've been able to help them. It's just going the extra mile. You know, we have certain acronyms that we live by. One fan at a time. We don't leave a voicemail, phone call or e-mail unanswered. When you talk about fan experience, you're talking about affordability, cleanliness, safety, family-friendly entertainment, and that's really what we have.
[Robert Smith:] I know the club wasn't always in great shape. After you won the World Series in 2001, the next year, the team almost collapsed under the financial strain of paying all those great players.
[Mr. Derrick Hall:] Correct.
[Robert Smith:] So what did you have to change?
[Mr. Derrick Hall:] Well, we had to change quite a bit. The financial situation that we were in, in fact, it's remarkable that we're still alive. We lost $353 million in our first seven years. That was because of the amount of money that we were paying our superstars. And the way that we were doing that was really backloading those contracts and deferring their payments through later years, even past their playing days. You know, there's payment schedules for the next, say, five years for a player that hasn't been with us since, say, 2003. So there was a price to pay for that championship. I wouldn't trade it in for anything, but that's just it put us in a very tight situation. But then again, we're operating the way we think we should. We're being fiscally responsible, and we think this the model that other teams are going to follow suit on, as well.
[Robert Smith:] Not to embarrass you, but you are the youngest CEO of any of the baseball clubs. You're 40 years old, right?
[Mr. Derrick Hall:] Yes. Correct.
[Robert Smith:] And some people have said you'd make a great commissioner for Major League Baseball some day. Is that a job that interests you?
[Mr. Derrick Hall:] That's you did embarrass me, yeah. I think anybody that works in this game and that loves this game would be honored to even be mentioned as a possible candidate one day. I've certainly got my eyes set on the job here and the task at hand. I love this franchise. I love our fans and our employees. We've built a great culture, and you know, if I'm ever called upon for another duty to help out Major League Baseball, the way I feel about this sport and what it's done for me and my family, I would certainly listen. But I have no intention of going anywhere but to and from my office for the next several years.
[Robert Smith:] Derrick Hall is the CEO of the Arizona Diamondbacks. He's joined us from the studios of member station KJZZ in Tempe, Arizona. Mr. Hall, thanks a lot.
[Mr. Derrick Hall:] Thank you. It was a pleasure being here.

[Audie Cornish:] And for more of the week's politics, our regular Friday commentators are here: columnists E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and the Brookings Institution, and David Brooks of the New York Times. Good to see you guys.
[E.j. Dionne:] Good to be here.
[David Brooks:] Good to see you.
[Audie Cornish:] So obviously a huge part of Secretary Napolitano's legacy will be border security. It's a major sticking point in the ongoing debate over overhauling the nation's immigration laws. And this week, House Republican leaders had their meeting to come up with an alternate strategy, right, to the Senate bill. What of the news that came out of that meeting impressed you? What's the strategy here that you see? I'll let you go first, David.
[David Brooks:] Well, it's always interesting to watch a major political party commit suicide. So I think that's sort of what we saw. What the Republicans are doing, they're going to break it into a bunch of pieces. They're going in a different direction than the Senate, different than anything the White House will be acceptable to. They're going to try to have beef up the things they like, like border security, and probably ignore the things they don't like, like path to citizenship. But without the comprehensive bill, there's no chance of getting anything. So we're pretty much likely to get nothing.
[Audie Cornish:] All right. Political suicide. E.J., what does that leave you to say on this?
[Dionne:] I agree with David. I think that when you look at what the House Republicans are saying, they're not making arguments for voting no; they're making excuses for obstruction. And I think it was one of the most impressive things this week was to see Chuck Schumer and John McCain stand together and say, come on, Republicans in the House, you can't stay here. I still think there's going to be pressure on them to act but I think this was a two-part obstruction play this week. The other remarkable thing that happened was the passing of a farm bill without food stamps in it, without any of the nutrition programs. That's never happened since 1973. This is not only inconsistent on principle; it's not small government. They voted $195 billion over 10 years for agribusiness and farmers and zero for working families on food stamps. So they're not being true to fiscal sort of fiscal care. And they are really throwing over a lot of working people.
[Audie Cornish:] Now, I was going to ask you about this separately. I mean, the thing is the food stamp program doesn't need this particular piece of legislation to continue, right? I mean, it's just the idea that these two things were married together for a very long time. David, what do you see in that, in them being split apart?
[David Brooks:] Yeah. Well, I'm hoping to defend the House Republicans but you guys got to give me something to work with here. So they're really not helping. It started with a good impulse. The impulse is, as you said, there was this unholy marriage between the SNAP, the food stamp program, and the ag subsidies.
[Audie Cornish:] With the idea being you could draw bipartisan support.
[David Brooks:] Exactly. And get it passed year after year. And that's pretty much what happened. And the House Republicans, a huge percentage of which are freshmen and sophomores, come in and they want to really change Washington. And so that's a good impulse. Here's an unholy alliance; let's look at this. Let's look at all these ag subsidies that are bloated and in many ways wasteful. Let's look at the incredible ramp-up in the food stamp program. Let's look at it. And so there was a good impulse there to break it apart. The problem was instead of actually doing something populist and breaking it apart and reducing the ag subsidies, they caved in to their interests and kept the ag subsidies while not even funding, so far, the food stamp program. So they look like they're helping their interests rich corporate farmers while ignoring poor people who do rely on food stamps. So it's the worst marriage of bad instinct, bad institutional respect, bad politics.
[Audie Cornish:] All right. Time to bash the other house. Let's go to the Senate side. There's a vote set for next Tuesday to end Republican filibusters on several of President Obama's more controversial nominees. Now, if Democrats don't get the 60 votes that they need on each of these nominees, they say they're ready to change the rules of the Senate to make it impossible to filibuster a nomination. This is the so-called nuclear option, which I feel like I hear about every three to four months. Why should we be concerned or pay attention this time?
[Dionne:] Because something has happened over the years, and particularly during the Obama administration, where, to begin with, the filibuster used to be used sparingly. Now it's used on everything, which is not in the Constitution. The Constitution doesn't require supermajorities for routine stuff. But on appointments it's particularly scandalous. I was reading the Lincoln book earlier this year and it really struck me that Lincoln would set up a nomination in the morning and the Senate would often confirm it on the same day. Obama has been blocked over and over again. More than one-fourth the cabinet department positions that require Senate confirmation remain vacant. Now, let's assume that Obama's been a little slower in making appointments. There has clearly been abuse of this process and I think it's past time to just say enough of this and to have a majority vote on confirmations.
[Audie Cornish:] But the argument has always been if you change the rules now, you know, it's going to look different to you when you're in the minority. David?
[David Brooks:] This is an example of pure opportunism. Like all process issues, nobody actually has substantive beliefs. They just do what's right for them at that moment. And so whatever party's in the majority, they always want to do the nuclear option. Republicans did it. The Democrats were furiously opposed. Now the Democrats are furiously in favor, Republicans furiously opposed. The principled position is the Senate is different than the House. We have a republic, not a democracy. We're not a majoritarian institution. We need to protect minority rights and the filibuster is a precious institution that protects minorities so majorities can't run roughshod over them. If we get rid of the filibuster, if we exercise the nuclear option, the Senate will be just another version of the House. The minority will have no power and we'll be more polarized.
[Dionne:] Maybe the filibuster was...
[Audie Cornish:] Do either of you get the sense, though, it is more likely this time around, that this threat to change the rules is real?
[Dionne:] Yes, I think it is real, and I disagree with David on principle. I think the Senate should operate, as it always has in our history most of the time, as a majority institution. And I'm willing to live with the consequences of that.
[Audie Cornish:] What happened to the teacup and the cooling and the taking of the time? That's not...
[Dionne:] Well, Congress has more cooling and taking time than we can count. So I'm not worried about that. I am worried about routinizing something that was never supposed to be routinized. It's not precious anymore, David.
[David Brooks:] I'm for cooling. We have got a lot of stupid ideas running around in this country. We need some cooling.
[Audie Cornish:] All right, we'll have to leave it there. David Brooks of the New York Times, E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post and the Brookings Institution, thank you guys so much.
[Dionne:] Thank you.
[David Brooks:] Thank you.

[Renee Montagne:] Protecting local culture-For a few years now, that's been the subject of debate at UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. UNESCO recently adopted a cultural convention, a treaty that would protect a country's indigenous movies, music, television and the like. Most of UNESCO's members support it. Only the United States and Israel voted against it. And some in Hollywood fear it could mean losing business overseas. NPR's Elizabeth Blair reports.
[Elizabeth Blair Reporting:] Take a look at a few of the recent top-grossing films in countries around the world. Often they're produced by an American company. In Canada, it's "King Kong," "Narnia" and "Harry Potter." In Russia, "Aeon Flux," "Just Like Heaven" and "Cry Wolf." Hollywood Studios often count on foreign markets more than they do on the domestic box office. One example: Warner Bros. epic "Troy."
[Unidentified Man #1:] Do you know what you've done? Do you know how many years our father worked for peace?
[Unidentified Man #2:] I love her.
[Unidentified Man #1:] Agh!
[Blair:] "Troy" made about $135 million at the box office here. Overseas, it did much better, more than $350 million. So when UNESCO approved the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions in October, Hollywood winced.
[Mr. Dan Glickman:] That treaty basically took a shot at the United States, as far as I was concerned.
[Blair:] Dan Glickman is head of the Motion Picture Association of America, the trade group that represents Hollywood Studios and other film companies. He says his members are all for cultural diversity, but they don't want countries to use the UNESCO treaty to limit the number of American movies allowed on their screens.
[Mr. Dan Glickman:] ...we want to make sure is is that culture, the protecting of culture, doesn't become an actual trade barrier to keep our products out. And our studios, I think, would be very worried if they thought that countries were going to keep our products out just to protect their own indigenous film industry.
[Blair:] The UNESCO debate over the cultural treaty, which is sponsored by France and Canada, has been emotional, says Louise Oliver, the US ambassador to UNESCO. In the end, she could not support it because, she says, the language was too vague.
[Ambassador Louise Oliver:] The convention states that cultural goods and services have a dual nature, economic and culture. Well, who decides whether it's economic, and who decides whether it's culture? No definition in that. We wanted clarity as to the relationship of this legally binding document with other international obligations. So we tried over and over again to get the phrase consistent with international obligations, and that was rejected over and over again.
[Blair:] Just how the treaty would be used if it's ratified is unclear. What is clear is that UNESCO officials have different views on the treaty's intent. Timothy Craddock, the United Kingdom's ambassador to UNESCO, insists the cultural convention is largely symbolic and not about trade at all.
[Ambassador Timothy Craddock:] This convention is simply promoting the capacity of particularly the poorest countries, which are the ones where the threat's the greatest, to promote their own culture and to help countries promote their own creative industries in a way that's set down in law for the first time.
[Blair:] In other words, it codifies on an international level a belief that culture is not only about economics but also national identity. But culture and commerce are intertwined, and there's concern in the US over how a country might use the UNESCO treaty to its advantage. An editorial in The Wall Street Journal said China could use it to close newspapers and pull international satellite TV off the air. Other countries might introduce screen quotas, already in place in countries such as Argentina and Korea.
[Mr. Jonathan Kim:] We didn't have that much money. We didn't have-few stars. We really didn't have an industry. But the thing is, we were able to keep the Korean movies because of the quota.
[Blair:] Jonathan Kim, a film producer in Korea who supports the UNESCO treaty, says in the 1970s and '80s, American movies were much more popular than anything made in Korea. But a government-imposed quota requiring theaters to show Korean movies 146 days per year kept the small industry alive, he says. Eventually, the acting and production quality of the films improved. In 1999, for the first time, a Korean movie surpassed an American one at the box office there. "Titanic" was sunk, by a film called "Shiri," the name of a small fish.
[Unidentified Man #3:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Unidentified Man #4:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Unidentified Man #5:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Group Of Men:] [Foreign language spoken in unison]
[Blair:] "Shiri" is a romantic thriller centered around the tensions between the north and south. Other films in this new wave touch on feelings about modern Korean culture and self-identity in the face of political division. And this is the crux of the matter for many of the supporters of the UNESCO treaty. Filmmakers want to tell their own stories to their own people in ways that are as popular as a story like "Titanic" is to Americans. Today Korean films have more than 50 percent of the Korean market. The US wants Korea to end the screen quota, especially now that their films are competitive. But Jonathan Kim says Korean filmmakers aren't ready to give it up.
[Mr. Jonathan Kim:] It's like saying, `Oh, there's no more accidents at the intersection. Let's get rid of the lights.'That's how we feel, because we do not know how long this will last. We could go back to 1980s if we don't do things right.
[Mr. Steve Solot:] They would rather resort to possibly out-of-date mechanisms to protect their industries.
[Blair:] Steve Solot heads up the Motion Picture Association's Latin American office in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Protectionist measures, he says, are not the best ways to stimulate and sustain local film industries. Through training and production coordination, his office has helped launch a number of successful films: "City of God," from Brazil, "The Crime of Padre Amaro" from Mexico. Solot says international partnerships are becoming more common, a trend brought on by market forces.
[Mr. Steve Solot:] Entertainment product must be... [unintelligible]. It must be diversified. And more and more local content is needed to offer the consumer everywhere around the world diversified product. No consumer in any country can subsist only on American Hollywood fare.
[Blair:] On that, both sides of the culture vs. commerce debate seem to agree. The UNESCO treaty is going through the ratification process. Thirty countries need to sign it before it can go into effect. Elizabeth Blair, NPR News.

[Melissa Block:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
[Guy Raz:] And I'm Guy Raz. Time for your letters. And we'll start with our coverage of the WikiLeaks release of a quarter of a million confidential cables, written by U.S officials around the world.
[Melissa Block:] We spoke to Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, about the paper's decision to publish some of the leaked documents. And that interview prompted some critical email. Anne Kaufman, of Los Angeles, writes: The tone of your coverage has been somewhere between titillation and a shrug.
[Guy Raz:] And Alex Licht of North Liberty, Iowa, writes: Who knows what type of danger may come from this? Many of the leaders and nations represented have fragile peace agreements with the U.S. and other nations. I feel that the media, including NPR's, extensive coverage of this material only legitimizes it.
[Melissa Block:] On to more mundane matters. We reported last week on the proclamation that April 11, 1954, was the most boring day in modern history.
[Mr. William Tunstall Pedoe:] Typically, lots of famous people are born, famous people die, all sorts of things happen on any typical day. And this particular day was extremely notable for having almost nothing happen.
[Melissa Block:] That's William Tunstall Pedoe, who ran the computer program that led to this conclusion.
[Guy Raz:] Well, we knew that some of you would disagree. Cheryl Lindstrom of Edwards, Colorado, writes that while her husband can't remember the precise events of that day, he did turn 2. We're pretty sure there was cake, and a rousing rendition of "Happy Birthday."
[Melissa Block:] Take that, William Tunstall Pedoe. And Marilyn Hirschhorn, of Cincinnati, writes this: Marilyn and Joseph Hirschhorn were married on Sunday, April 11th, 1954, at 12:30 p.m. in Nashville, Tennessee. It was an important day for us -not earthshaking, but it has lasted 56 years.
[Guy Raz:] Well, there you go.
[Melissa Block:] Earthshaking or not, please keep your letters coming. You can send them to us at npr.org. Just click on "contact us," at the bottom of the page.

[Ari Shapiro:] This week's Mueller testimony brought the same words over and over again, like an echo collusion, obstruction and, also, read the report. People received the special counsel's testimony very differently depending on who was listening.
[Elijah Cummings:] It is a moment which people will be talking about 3-, 400, 500 years from now.
[Unidentified Person:] It is definitely time to move on.
[Kevin Mccarthy:] This should be the end of the chapter of this book that we put America through.
[President Donald Trump:] Well, we had a very good day today.
[Jerry Nadler:] Mueller made clear that the president is not exonerated.
[Bret Baier:] ...Halting and slow and painful.
[Eric Swalwell:] If you showed up expecting a Broadway show, sure, you may have been disappointed.
[Ari Shapiro:] Reaction to special counsel Robert Mueller's testimony there from lawmakers, cable news analysts and of course the president. Another word that hung over Wednesday's hearings impeachment. And that issue still divides the Democrats.
[Nancy Pelosi:] No, I'm not trying to run out the clock. We will proceed when we have what we need to proceed not one day sooner.
[Ari Shapiro:] House Speaker Nancy Pelosi there. NPR's impeachment tracker says the number of Democrats supporting impeachment has just crossed over into triple digits. And this is where we will begin our weekly political roundup. Our guests this Friday are Kristen Soltis Anderson of the Washington Examiner and Jason Johnson, politics editor at The Root. Welcome to both of you.
[Kristen Soltis Anderson:] Thrilled to be here.
[Jason Johnson:] Glad to be here.
[Ari Shapiro:] So the Democrats began the week expecting that Mueller's testimony would be a turning point in the conversation about Russian election interference and the president's possible involvement in it. Kristen, do you think the Democrats overpromised? Did Mueller underdeliver? What?
[Kristen Soltis Anderson:] I think they overpromised because Mueller was very clear about what he was going to deliver, which was, read the report. When he came out and gave his press conference shortly after the report's release to try to clarify what he had felt was some of perhaps the misreporting or misunderstanding of what the report had said, he was very clear I said what I meant; I meant what I said.
[Ari Shapiro:] And I don't want to talk about it before Congress.
[Kristen Soltis Anderson:] And I don't want to talk about it before Congress. But if I'm going to, I'm just going to say, I would refer you to the report. So nobody should be surprised by the performance that Mueller gave because he was very clear well in advance that this was exactly how he was going to handle it.
[Ari Shapiro:] Jason, what do you think these two hearings did for the Democratic push for accountability?
[Jason Johnson:] Well, I don't think they really did much of anything. There's nobody in America who was convinced by these Mueller hearings because if you either read this report, you already know that the president engaged in impeachable offenses, and if you haven't read the report, then you're going by what's on television, and you're driven by whatever your political ideology is. So I don't think it changed anything. What I did think was interesting from the sort of pure strategic standpoint is it was like watching this really, really bad game of charades with the Democrats saying what sounds like, second syllable, trying to get Robert Mueller to say impeachment.
[Ari Shapiro:] [Laughter].
[Jason Johnson:] He was never going to do that. That is the responsibility of the Democrats in Congress, and he's made that clear. He's given them tons of recommendations. So nothing changed. Both sides are just as set in as they were beforehand.
[Ari Shapiro:] Well, far from putting the issue to rest this week, there has been more impeachment talk since Mueller testified than ever. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been asked about it repeatedly. Kristen, do you think Democrats risk being overly defined by this debate?
[Kristen Soltis Anderson:] I think every time another Democrat comes out and says that they would like Nancy Pelosi to begin impeachment proceedings, Republicans are the ones that are celebrating because this, in public opinion poll after poll after poll, shows that there are large majorities of Democrats that would like their elected officials to begin this process, but independents are much closer to Republicans on this question. They're focused on other issues. They would like Congress to be tackling other problems. They may not like the behavior that Trump engaged in that is detailed in the report but don't believe that impeachment is the way forward. And so this puts Pelosi in a very tough position.
[Ari Shapiro:] Jason, I think Kristen is pointing out an important divide here, where the base that might decide the 2020 Democratic primary really supports impeachment, but the independents who helped Democrats win back the House in 2018 don't. So what do they do?
[Jason Johnson:] Impeachment is more popular amongst all voters now than it was before the Nixon impeachment. You can pat your head and rub your tummy. I don't think the Democrats put any risk. Impeachment is actually more popular now when the Affordable Care Act got passed, and that cost the Democrats 30-something seats. So I don't think that the Democrats are in any danger whatsoever if they go through with impeachment. Even for the Democrats who are in the seats that Trump won in 2020, I don't think that there's anybody in those districts who's going to decide, I will not vote for my representative again because they voted to have Donald Trump impeached.
[Ari Shapiro:] So do you think...
[Jason Johnson:] What this really boils down to is it's a responsibility; it's whether or not the Democratic Party wants to take on the responsibly for oversight or they want to play politics.
[Ari Shapiro:] A lot of negative things have been said about Nancy Pelosi, but most people agree that she's pretty good at political calculus. Do you think her political calculus is just wrong here?
[Jason Johnson:] Yeah, I do. I think her political calculus is wrong. I think she's what would have been a smarter decision for her to make is, from the very beginning, say, hey, look when my caucus comes to me and wants to do this, we can. She's been throwing water on it from the very beginning. She's been trying to have this sort of chilling effect because she believes somehow, some shape, way or form, that there has to be this magical number of consensus in order to get this done. There's a reason that you have an actual trial. I think this is a mistake on her behalf because, at the end of the day, you are dragged over the line by your base. The Republicans understand that their base will drag them over the line. The Democrats seem to think that they want to keep running for a middle and an independent who are eventually not going to be the decision-makers in 2020, anyway.
[Ari Shapiro:] I want to move onto one topic that was central to the Mueller hearings, which was Russian election interference. And Mueller said that did not stop with 2016.
[Robert Mueller:] They're doing it as we sit here, and they expect to do it during the next campaign.
[Ari Shapiro:] Hours after Mueller finished testifying, Republicans blocked legislation that would have provided standards for reporting interference and given states millions of dollars to protect voting systems. Here is what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, said about that bill.
[Mitch Mcconnell:] It's just a highly partisan bill from the same folks who spent two years hyping up a conspiracy theory about President Trump and Russia and who continue to ignore this administration's progress at correcting the Obama administration's failures on this subject in the 2018 election.
[Ari Shapiro:] In response to that, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer tweeted that McConnell is, quote, "standing in the way of common sense action." So Kristen, why do you think Republicans are blocking this?
[Kristen Soltis Anderson:] If you take a look at the vote in the House on the bill that was sent to the Senate as a factual matter, it was a very party-line vote. So this is the sort of issue that I think is going to require a bill that starts off with bipartisan support, and what Democrats have put on the table just wasn't something Republicans thought was appropriately tackling the issue.
[Ari Shapiro:] But do you understand why? I mean, Republicans say Congress has already done enough. Congress, objectively speaking, hasn't really done very much.
[Kristen Soltis Anderson:] I think one of the bills that's being talked about in the Senate which is being put forward and, I believe, is in the works by Senator Lankford, a Republican of Oklahoma, and Senator Amy Klobuchar this is a bill that would look to give, I think, some funding but would also, I think, change the way that the federal government supports states and localities. That's the bill that I think you're more likely to see come out of the Senate, if something emerges.
[Ari Shapiro:] Jason, in our last 30 seconds, I'm going to give you the final word on this.
[Jason Johnson:] Mitch McConnell doesn't want to do anything about election protection because he knows the only way Donald Trump gets elected is by supporting suppressing minority votes and making sure the voting systems can easily be corrupted. Everybody knows that. It's not complicated. This is not about patriotism. It's not about partisanship. It's about the future of this country, and Mitch McConnell doesn't care.
[Ari Shapiro:] That is Jason Johnson, politics editor at The Root. Thank you for joining us.
[Jason Johnson:] Thank you.
[Ari Shapiro:] And Kristen Soltis Anderson of the Washington Examiner, have a great weekend.
[Kristen Soltis Anderson:] You, too.
[Jason Johnson:] I will.

[Neal Conan:] I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Cain issues a pre-allegation denial then decides to reassess. Barney bows out after 30 years. And the DNC unloads on Mitt. It's Wednesday and time for a...
[Newt Gingrich:] Less disgusting...
[Neal Conan:] Edition of the Political Junkie.
[President Ronald Reagan:] There you go again.
[Vice President Walter Mondale:] When I hear your new ideas, I'm reminded of that ad: Where's the beef?
[Senator Barry Goldwater:] Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
[Senator Lloyd Bentsen:] Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy.
[President Richard Nixon:] You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore.
[Sarah Palin:] Lipstick.
[Governor Rick Perry:] Oops.
[President George Bush:] But I'm the decider.
[Neal Conan:] Every Wednesday, we wrap up the week in politics. Ken Rudin is on the road today and out of pocket. Guest political junkie Mara Liasson joins us. As the Cain campaign reels from an adultery allegation, polls show Gingrich narrowly ahead of Romney, and the GOP frontrunners start to sting each other as Iowa approaches. Perry tries to recover lost ground on immigration. The president airs his first ad and hits the road to Scranton. The recall petition gathers steam in Wisconsin. And two senior Democrats decide to retire from the House: Charlie Gonzalez of Texas and Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who will join us in a few minutes. Later in the program, commentator Ted Koppel on the latest crisis in Iran. But first, NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson joins us here in Studio 3A. And Mara, as always, thanks for pinch-hitting.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] It's nice to be here, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] And is this the end for Herman Cain?
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Well, I think it's close to the end. I don't think he had much of a future anyway. But you see conservatives turning against him. They were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt when the topic was the sexual harassment allegations. Now we're talking about an allegation of a 13-year affair. And a lot of the conservatives that I've talked to and read on the Web say it's not even so much the allegations, it's how he's handled it and how inept the campaign has been. And if you can't run your own campaign, how are you going to run for president against President Obama or be the president? So I think Cain's chances of being the nominee were already slim to none, and now I just think it's a matter of time.
[Neal Conan:] The allegations, Ginger White, a woman, came forward this week claiming that she and Herman Cain had a 13-year very casual affair. Here she's talking with Fox 5 Atlanta.
[Ginger White:] He made it very intriguing. It was fun. It was something that took me away from my sort of humdrum life at the time. And it was exciting.
[Neal Conan:] Speaking with CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Monday, this even before that interview aired, Herman Cain said after earlier allegations of sexual misconduct, he says this one is also false.
[Herman Cain:] My wife's reaction was very similar to mine: Here we go again.
[Neal Conan:] And today in a campaign appearance, he says, well, he's still reassessing his campaign, but he's a victim of character assassination. Yeah?
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] You know, it's funny, when you're reassessing your campaign, that's not a good place to be. And apparently Ginger White has a record, which she shared with these local news organizations, of many text messages and cell phone calls to his phone. And one of the initial ways that his campaign explained this was that this shouldn't be an issue because it was a private matter not very satisfying. I really think that, you know, Cain at this point is a sideshow because we have yet another anti-Romney candidate.
[Neal Conan:] Well, and that is Newt Gingrich, who's taken the lead. And it's interesting. Some places have done one of those snap polls that if Cain is out of the race, then what happens. And it shows nearly all of his support going to Newt Gingrich.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] That is what we've seen all along. Various anti-Romneys rise and fall, and when they fall, their support does not go to Romney; it goes to the next one in line, who's auditioning for the job of being the anti-Romney. You saw it with Bachmann and Perry and Cain and now Gingrich. Some polls show that Romney is the second choice of many Republican voters, but so far, they haven't gone there. He's held steady in the low 20s, mid-20s sometimes, which is enough to win against a crowded field of conservatives. But if Newt can consolidate the conservative anti-Romney vote, he has a theoretical shot at the nomination. But he doesn't have any kind of an organization the way Romney does, doesn't have the money, and he is vulnerable when Romney decides to start attacking him.
[Neal Conan:] Well, Mitt Romney yesterday labeled Gingrich as a D.C. insider on this interview on Fox News.
[Mitt Romney:] I wouldn't be in this race if I didn't think I had unique background and vision for America and the capacity to actually replace President Obama. I think to get President Obama out of office, you're going to have to bring something to the race that's different than what he brings. He's a lifelong politician. I think you have to have the credibility of understanding how the economy works, and I do.
[Neal Conan:] And thus far, Mitt Romney has very largely tried to stay above the fray, attacking President Obama. Here at least he's beginning to focus in on what seems to be his first serious rival.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] He has to. The interesting thing about this career politician charge, he tried it against Rick Perry, Newt is so unusual. His career has been so kind of strange that you can't really call him a lifelong politician. He's not a blow-dried, safe, scripted guy. As a matter of fact, John Burnett, who's our correspondent in Austin, did a really interesting piece early on when Rick Perry and Mitt Romney appeared before the same audience in Texas. It was a VFW convention. And at that point, Romney was attacking Rick Perry, who was his rival du jour, as a lifelong politician.
[And He Interviewed Some Of The People In The Crowd, And They Said:] I don't want someone who's a lifelong politician. And John said, oh, you mean Rick Perry? No, no, that other guy, Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney just looks like a lifelong politician. He's been trying to be a politician his most of his adult life.
[Neal Conan:] His father, of course, was a lifetime politician.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Lifetime politician. He's been running for many, many, many years for many, many different offices. He hasn't succeeded yet. So I don't think that's a very fruitful line against Newt. However, there are many more attack lines to choose from when it comes to Newt Gingrich.
[Neal Conan:] And I should mention, of course Mitt Romney's father who also ran the Ford Motor Company. So he did other things, as well. But in an interview with CNN on Monday, Newt Gingrich says he thinks Romney could be President Obama, that he's a wonderful person, closer personal friend but had this to say on why he might be the better candidate.
[Newt Gingrich:] I mean, if you run to the left of Teddy Kennedy, it's a little trickier than trying to run to the right of Newt Gingrich.
[Neal Conan:] And that getting to the flip-flop issue in a roundabout way.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Yes, that's Mitt Romney's great vulnerability, and that has been something he hasn't been able to dispel, this idea that he says what voters want to hear at the moment, that he changes his views, that he has no core. Yesterday, in probably one of the longest television interviews, national television interviews he's ever given on Fox News, he Mitt made a Romney made a big deal of the fact that he hadn't changed on health care. And he kind of used it as a badge of honor. He said: If I really was one of these flip-floppers, I would have disowned my healthcare plan, which is so interesting because he was reading the stage directions because his campaign made a decision not to flip-flop on health care so as not to contribute to his authenticity problem that he flip-flops on everything.
[Neal Conan:] Nevertheless, he was asked a series of questions about his position on immigration vis-a-vis Newt Gingrich's position, for which he got a lot of flak a couple of weeks ago. This is Mitt Romney on Fox News yesterday.
[Mitt Romney:] My view is that those people that are here illegally today should have the opportunity to register and to have their status identified, and those individuals should get in line with everyone else that's in line legally. They should not be placed ahead of the line: They should instead go at the back of the line, and they should not be allowed to stay in this country and be given permanent residency or citizenship merely because they've come here illegally.
[Unidentified Man #1:] But isn't that what Gingrich is saying? Isn't he saying short of citizenship...?
[Mitt Romney:] I can't tell you what Speaker Gingrich is saying.
[Unidentified Man #1:] But yet you call...
[Mitt Romney:] No, what if he's going to do what I believe he said he was going to do for those people who would be allowed to stay permanently and become citizens, that would be providing for them a form of amnesty.
[Neal Conan:] Mara, let me make this perfectly clear: I don't get what he said.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] It's impossible to know what he says. This is one of the most interesting debates in the Republican Party right now because the Republicans have a long-term general-election problem, which is you can't be perceived as the anti-Hispanic party and win national elections because Hispanics are the fastest growing bloc in the electorate. Newt Gingrich, who has talked about this for a long time, is pointing a direction for Republicans to resolve their Hispanic, their immigration problem. He's talked often about a middle ground between amnesty and deportation. He wants to figure out something, some middle ground. And he's come up with this plan where you would become a legal resident but not a citizen. I suppose you'd be able to do everything short of vote, meaning vote for Democrats because that's one of the reasons why Republicans don't want to legalize make citizens out of all these Hispanic immigrants. Newt Mitt Romney said also further on in that interview, he said he was asked would they go to the back of the line in the United States, or would they have to go home? He said no, they would have to go home and apply for legalization or citizenship. Now that is an incredible statement. So in effect he is talking about deportation, which not only is incredible impracticable, impractical, it's also a red flag for Democrats, who were jumping up and down today because they're looking forward to painting Romney as someone who favors the mass deportation of 11 million illegal Hispanic immigrants. This is something that even putting Marco Rubio on the ticket might not be enough for Mitt Romney, if he is the nominee, to solve.
[Neal Conan:] In the meantime, of course Democrats, well, they're running their own campaigns, as well. This is an ad from the DNC that focuses on, apparently, the fellow they think is the most likely Republican nominee.
[Unidentified Man #2:] From the creator of I'm running for office for Pete's sake comes the story of two men trapped in one body: Mitt versus Mitt.
[Mitt Romney:] I will preserve and protect a woman's right to choose. The right next step is to see Roe v. Wade overturned.
[Unidentified Man #2:] Two Mitts willing to say anything.
[Neal Conan:] And it goes on, but Mitt Romney in response says, well, clearly they think I'm the most dangerous person: Bring it on.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Yes, bring it on, they think I'm going to be the nominee. They're obsessed with me. Interestingly enough, the abortion question is one where he readily admits he changed his mind. That is the one so-called flip-flop that he does admit to. What's interesting about this is that until now and you start to see this real debate between Gingrich and Romney, where they are starting to attack each other Romney has had more or less of a free pass from the other Republican candidates. There hasn't been a concerted negative assault on Romney, even though he's been the putative frontrunner all along. So it's been left to the Democrats and to these outside groups or the DNC, who made this kind of ad, which is very unusual. I can't think of another election when the incumbent has started to attack the person he thinks is going to be his opponent this early. But the Democrats have to do this. They feel they need to soften him up now because this is the period of time where they have a bit of an advantage. They have a lot of money, and they can use it. They're not going to have a financial advantage over the Republicans once the Republicans have a nominee.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking with guest political junkie Mara Liasson. In a few moments, Democratic Congressman Barney Frank will join us. He's just announced plans to retire. If you'd like to talk with Congressman Frank about his time in Congress or how Congress has changed during that time, give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan. It's Wednesday, and guest Political Junkie Mara Liasson joins us, NPR national political correspondent. Ken Rudin will be back next week. So will his ScuttleButton puzzle and his regular Political Junkie column. Both are posted at npr.orgjunkie. If you'd like to talk with Congressman Barney Frank about his 30 years in Congress, nearly, and how Congress has changed over that time, give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. As mentioned, Congressman Frank announced plans to retire at the end of this term, and he joins us now from his office here in Washington. Congressman, thanks very much for taking time to be with us. Nice to have you back on TALK OF THE NATION.
[Representative Barney Frank:] I appreciate this opportunity.
[Neal Conan:] And once you've left office, you're freed from the shackles, you'll be able to finally be free to tell us what you actually think.
[Representative Barney Frank:] Well, I'm working on that. I'm kind of shy in some ways. But I'm trying to get up the courage to do that.
[Neal Conan:] Why now?
[Representative Barney Frank:] Well, I'm 71 years old. I'll be a few months short of my 73rd birthday when this term expires. I started working fulltime in politics in October of 1967, when I volunteered in the mayoral campaign of Kevin White. In what will then be 45 years at the end of next year, I've had six months off. I've enjoyed it enormously. It is a great honor and a great privilege to be able to participate, and I'm a great fan...
[Neal Conan:] And we've lost contact briefly with Congressman Frank in his office on Capitol hill. We're going to reestablish that in just a minute and get back to him and...
[Unidentified Man:] Yeah, I'm here, what happened?
[Neal Conan:] And let's see if we can get somebody other than the engineer up there. Mara Liasson, in the meantime, getting him back momentarily? Congressman, are you with us?
[Representative Barney Frank:] I am.
[Neal Conan:] I apologize for the problem.
[Representative Barney Frank:] I don't know at what point I disappeared.
[Neal Conan:] Well, you were talking about being will be 73 and started in '67 in the campaign for Mayor White.
[Representative Barney Frank:] Yes, and since then, as I said, it will have been 45 years in which I've had a chance to be a participant in something I care deeply about, democracy. I think intellectually and morally and in every other way, it's a great thing. But I'm getting kind of tired, and...
[Neal Conan:] And maybe we'll get him on the phone as opposed to trying to use the device we're using. In the meantime, Mara, we should note that another senior Democrat retired. This is Charlie Gonzalez, Democrat of Texas.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] You know, these retirements, while they're not a flood, are considered to be a sign that Democrats are not so confident about getting the 25 pick-ups in the House they'd need to retake the majority. These are people who would be committee chairmen if the Democrats were in the majority again, and if you don't think you're going to become a chairman next time, maybe if you're of a certain age, why not retire?
[Neal Conan:] Okay, Congressman Frank is back with us, and I do apologize.
[Representative Barney Frank:] Let me respond to Mara's comment there because it does not apply at all in my case. I had four years as a chairman. It was a great thing. Frankly, as I contemplated not having to work so hard at the age of 73, the prospect of being chairman again was a very mixed blessing. In my case, as I was saying before we lost contact again, I would like to do some other things. I've always had an interest in writing. I want to be a public policy advocate. I have a great respect for written words, and I would like to join in that intellectual conversation from which I've been not as much of a participant as I would like. I think in some ways, given the nature of our politics today, I can be a more effective advocate for many of my public policy views than if I'm seen as someone inside the system. Some people can do the kind of job I have and also write. I'm too easily distracted by the blank page, or I suppose I should say the blank screen. So I was planning to retire. Then the Republicans took over the House. I had decided last year to retire at the end of this term, and then the Republicans took over the House, and I felt some obligation to stay here and to not be a lame duck because that loosens you, lessens your influence. And so I could fight for protection in the financial reform bill and for making sure the military spending reductions are part of the deficit reduction. But then I got a new district from the Massachusetts legislature, which has [unintelligible] new people. I was disappointed by it, but if I were to run for re-election, I would not be able to spend my time doing the things I wanted to do on financial reform and fighting for military spending reductions. I would be busy campaigning as if I were running for the first time. I think I would have won, but the relevance there is simply that I would have spent the last this next year in a campaign instead of in the kind of advocacy, and given that choice, I thought it didn't make sense.
[Neal Conan:] Mara?
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] You know, Congressman Frank, given that the considerations of a Democratic majority or not in 2012 don't apply to you, what do you think about the Democrats' chances next time?
[Representative Barney Frank:] I don't know. Oddly enough, it depends somebody said it really depends on Angela Merkel. The American economy is now for the second time on an upward swing which is threatened by problems in Europe. If you go back to the last quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2010, we were moving out of the slump in a good way, and unemployment was dropping, and then the Greek crisis hit, and that the world is so interconnected now that bad news anywhere is bad news everywhere. We are again ready to move. There was a prediction, we had a good quarter, there was a prediction of over three percent growth next year. That's now been downgraded because of the fears about Europe. So it really depends. I mean, if the economy is on the upswing next year and I think people are voting often not only on the action level but on the trend and how it's going, if the economy were in fact swinging upwards and unemployment was dropping, then I think you would have a good Democratic year because the Republicans benefitted in 2010 from a lack of familiarity on the part of the voters with what they stood for. I think we are still blamed for a lot of things, but I think the Republicans are in some ways less popular. So if you were to combine the perception by the American public of the Republicans' extremism, which is an accurate perception, which an upswing in the economy, then I think we have a good chance. But nobody can know for sure what's going to happen in Europe, and if the economy in fact were to start either stall or go downward, then it would be very bad news for us.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] So you're saying the Democrats' and President Obama's fate is really tied to the economy, over which, given that events in Europe are really driving this, they don't have a whole lot of control.
[Representative Barney Frank:] Absolutely correct.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] What do you think what would you like to see the president doing that he hasn't been doing enough of or he hasn't done yet?
[Representative Barney Frank:] Well, he's been doing most things I agree with. The one change I would make is this: I think we should be pushing harder for reductions in America's role, self-appointed, as the world's military guarantor of stability and security. Harry Truman did a great thing when he intervened to protect Germany and Italy and Austria and France from Stalin. Stalin's dead. His successors have not materialized. They don't continue. And those countries, which were devastated after World War II, are now quite prosperous and strong. We continue to be spending billions and billions of dollars protecting Western Europe from non-existent threats. We're still ready to fight a Cold War with the now non-existent Soviet Union. I believe we should be getting out of Afghanistan, where especially now that bin Laden is dead, we do ourselves more harm than good, and substantially reduce our worldwide military commitment. I want us to be the strongest military power in the world for a variety of reasons. We can do that a lot more cheaply than we now are. And that means that you could then do deficit reduction while still having money to help improve the quality of life in America, not to deprive older people of a decent cost-of-living increase. And that has two important reasons. I think people like myself, liberals, face a problem today that the public has lost confidence in the government's ability to produce good results. And we're in a vicious cycle: The more the people are skeptical of the government, the fewer resources are available, and the fewer resources are available, the less we produce and the more people are angry. The one way out of that cycle is to say, you know, we've played a very important role as the worldwide defender of almost everybody against almost everything, but still be the strongest nation in the world and protect those vulnerable areas like Taiwan or Israel or South Korea. But let's pull back from this worldwide commitment we have. Let's accept the fact that it's not our national moral duty to solve every problem everywhere, especially when they're not often easily solved by American military personnel. And so I would put back and I was, for instance, disappointed when the president announced he was sending 2,500 Marines to Australia. They perform absolutely no political function military function. They're there to reassure people in Australia, and I think it would be cheaper to send them Xanax than to send them 2,500 Marines.
[Neal Conan:] Let's get some callers in on the conversation. Paul's on the line. Paul's calling us from Haley in Idaho.
[Paul:] Yes, how what a pleasure, Mr. Frank. If you take two weeks and fish the Wood River in Idaho, and you wander right, looking back, what would you write about? Would you do your memoirs?
[Representative Barney Frank:] Well, there are a couple of things. One, I have a particular perspective: My political career and the movement for gay rights, as it was called originally, serendipitously were about the same age. You know, the Stonewall riots were in '69, and gay rights began right around that shortly after. And I was elected to the Massachusetts legislature in '72. We made enormous progress in protecting gay, lesbian, bisexual and now transgender people against discrimination, and I would like to chronicle that, partly because I think there are lessons in there about how you do it, what's the effective way to do that. I'd like to write a book about what I think liberalism should look like today, how you combine a respect for the wealth-producing aspects of the private sector with an understanding of the need for a vigorous public sector that improves the quality of life and provides a framework for that. And the third book, I guess, would be something very important in our lives and not well understood, and that's the business of legislating. If you go to the law schools, they would teach you a lot about how judges judge, but they won't teach you much about how legislators legislate. And I know the process in which I'm been engaged for 40 years of legislating isn't very neat, and it's often easy to follow, but it's not totally random. There are things you can learn from of it. So those are the three books I'd probably like to work on. In what order, I don't know.
[Neal Conan:] Paul, thanks very much.
[Paul:] Thank you very much.
[Neal Conan:] Here's a tweet from Mark. Congressman Frank, young voter here frustrated by partisan bickering and a do-nothing Congress. Has it always been this way?
[Representative Barney Frank:] Well, in the first place, I differ with his notion about partisan bickering. When we debate whether or not we should raise taxes on people who are making more than $300,000 a year, I don't think that's bickering. I think that he's picked up an unfortunate tendency to denigrate a legitimate debate. We're not arguing about who gets the parking spot or who gets the early lunch hour. We're talking about some of the most fundamental issues. I bicker if that's the way you want to call it with the Republicans who wanted to keep gay people out of the military. I bicker with them about whether we should address environmental issues like climate change. Having said that, I would say that the partisan differences are deeper and are being carried to too much of an extreme by some more today than previously. And the reason is and I will make what sounds, I suppose, like a partisan explanation it was the election in 2010 of a lot of people in the Republican Party who were very much on the right, who do not share what's been an American consensus view that there's a positive role to be played by government. So no, there are sharper differences, but that's, you know, people have said to me, well, why can't you work things out with the Republicans, and my answer to my friends has been: Exactly on what issues do you think Michele Bachmann and I can compromise? At some point, differences become so sharp that in a democracy the legitimate approach is to debate them, tee them up for the electorate and let them decide.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking with Congressman Barney Frank, who earlier announced plans to retire at the end of this session of Congress. Guest Political Junkie Mara Liasson is with us. Ken Rudin is back next week. I said earlier George Romney was president of the Ford Motor Company. Wrong, George Romney was in fact president of the American Motor Company. I'll be tortured by memories of my Rambler. Sorry for that mistake. And thanks to all of you who called to point out the error. I'm Neal Conan. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And let's see if we go next to this is John. John with us from Saint Louis.
[John:] Hi. Representative Frank, I had a question since the housing crisis that came out of 200 2007 and beyond, what are some of the things that could be done differently to prevent the failures that were experienced with Fannie and Freddie?
[Representative Barney Frank:] Well, the failures of Fannie and Freddie predate 2007. What happened was Fannie and Freddie were being pushed by the political leadership to some extent to buy mortgages that have been granted to people who shouldn't have gotten them. Now, I was in the minority in the House until from 1995 to 2006. During that period, in the early part of those years, I did not see the problem. By the later part, I and some others did try to ban subprime loans that shouldn't be given. But frankly, Tom DeLay, who was then Republican majority leader, he said, no, we're not going to interfere with the free market, that the Wall Street Journal said don't interfere with the free market and not want to interrupt the flow of these. The Republicans then had a fight among themselves between the House Republicans, the Senate Republicans and the president I guess they could say among and as to how to pass a bill to restrain Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I was in the minority at that time, so I wasn't a major player. What happened in 2007 was that the Democrats took over, and in that very year, in the first months, as you would read if you saw Henry Paulson, Bush's secretary of the Treasury's book, I worked with him, and we passed the bill that made reforms in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Unfortunately, by the time the Senate got to passing it the next year, it was too late, and they had to be taken over. But Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as far as what has to be done to prevent the recurrence, we've already done that. In 2008, acting under legislation that was passed only when the Democrats took over in 2007 and 2008, Bush's secretary of the Treasury put Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into a conservatorship. Since that time, they have not made a significant number of bad loans. According to the administrator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, under the federal housing finance administration, who's not a friend of Obama's Obama's tried to fire him a couple of times this man reported to us, Mr. DeMarco, that since these two entities were put in a conservatorship as a result of, frankly, Democratic-passed legislation, they have not incurred any losses, that the activity they have engaged in since 2008 has in fact been profitable. The problem was by the time we got around to that a lot of bad stuff had already happened.
[Neal Conan:] As you know, Newt Gingrich has proposed that you be sent to jail for your role in this.
[Representative Barney Frank:] Well, Mr. Gingrich apparently is unhappy because he was being paid through 2006 by Fannie Mae and by Freddie Mac I don't know, a certain number of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it was when they went into conservatorship that that was cut off. So maybe he's angry because they cut that off. I know there's been Republican line that somehow I and other Democrats are responsible for these issues. What they try to get people to forget is that from 1995 to 2006, which were the years when the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac problems developed and when the bad practices were engaged in, they were in control. Now, I acknowledge I was late in seeing this, but it didn't make any difference by the time I did say it in 2004 and '05, that we had to rein them in. Nobody paid attention to me. I was in the minority. This was Mr. Gingrich's until 1998, and his Republican successors who ran this. So yes, it is true, Mr. Gingrich, who got well over a million dollars from Freddie Mac to lobby the Congress for them, I believe, and it created a favorable climate so they could keep doing what they were doing, is trying to blame me. In fact, I was in the minority until 2007. In 2007, as I said, I acted to try to change things.
[Neal Conan:] Mr. Gingrich says among he may have done many things act as a historian, I think, but lobby was not among them.
[Representative Barney Frank:] Yeah. He was clearly the highest paid historian in American history. And I think Mr. Gingrich may have done a lot to the humanities because there's been this question about, well, if I major in history or literature, will I be able to make a living? And if Mr. Gingrich is to be believed, on which I will reserve comment, he was paid a million-six in a very short period of time for being a historian. So that may encourage more people to become history majors.
[Neal Conan:] Congressman Frank, as always a shrinking violet. We thank you very much for your time.
[Representative Barney Frank:] You're welcome. Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] And, Mara Liasson, again, thanks for pinch-hitting for Ken Rudin.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Glad to be here.

[Michel Martin:] Now to Russia. While the U.S., the U.K. and France say their joint airstrikes were justified, the action is being seen quite differently in Russia. Russia is, of course, an ally of Syria. Joining us now from Moscow is independent journalist Charles Maynes. Charles, thank you so much for joining us.
[Charles Maynes:] Good to be with you.
[Michel Martin:] Just what exactly have Russian officials been saying about the airstrikes?
[Charles Maynes:] Well, you know, from President Putin on down to his foreign minister, to his foreign envoy, Russia's been arguing that this attack violates international law. President Putin issued a statement very early this morning on Saturday saying that calling it an act of aggression against a sovereign state. He said, once again, this is a case where the U.S. has destabilized the Middle East, very much in line with Iraq and that, you know, these charges against Assad using chemical weapons were merely a pretext to attack. The Russian argument it's really focused on the timing of these attacks, just as this international team of the OPCW, as the previous segment noted, is on the ground investigating these charges of chemical weapons used. And just remember that Russia says that, you know, the Bashar al-Assad's government gave up these weapons, these chemical weapons, back in 2013 when he when Putin brokered a deal with the Obama administration. So that, you know, any remaining stocks, Russia says, are either in the hands of terrorists or pro-Russia backed rebels. Or, as they say here, it's just fakery to serve Western aims to depose Assad.
[Michel Martin:] Has this affected the relationship between Washington and Moscow, and, more specifically, between President Trump and President Putin?
[Charles Maynes:] Well, you know, the relationship between President Trump and President Putin or Russia and the U.S. has been on such a rollercoaster ride over since Trump took office. I mean, we had first this incredible excitement here over Trump's election win. That then turned all this dismay over the gulf between what candidate Trump said he wanted, which was better relations, and what the realities of Trump presidency abroad, which has been more sanctions, not less. You know, but still, Moscow also kind of gave Trump a pass. I mean, they blamed the problems on hawks in Congress or the so-called deep state that won't let Trump, you know, be Trump. You know, and it seemed occasionally to pay off. You had this moment where Trump extended the idea of a summit meeting with Vladimir Putin, something that the Russian government was very eager for. You know, but then we have Syria. And Trump has really, you know, singled out Putin, saying that he personally bears responsibility for Bashar al-Assad's use of chemical weapons. You know, the president is kind of known for bending over backwards to not say anything negative about Putin, and suddenly, this is a real shift. So although it's, I suppose, important to point out that he hasn't exactly given him one of his famous Twitter nicknames yet. But maybe that's coming.
[Michel Martin:] Before we let you go, Charles, was there any danger that U.S. and Russian forces would find themselves facing each other in these airstrikes? And is that something to be concerned about going forward?
[Charles Maynes:] Well, it was, and it still is, I think. Russian media in particular has been ratcheting up this idea of, you know, full-on panic that World War III was just, you know, minutes away, perhaps telling people how to stockpile water, survive a nuclear apocalypse. You know, and yet still we here are all here. And so I think part of the reason for that is Russia's defense ministry came out today. They said they confirmed that the U.S. airstrikes avoided hitting Russian bases in Syria. There are no Russian casualties, which is important. And the fact was that the Russian air defenses, which they said they might deploy, actually hadn't been deployed. So for all this, you know, bluster that we hear out of Moscow, Russia really kind of sat this one out. The defense ministry also said today that they were considering helping Damascus beef up its air defenses, including giving them Russia's much-vaunted this S-300 surface-to-air missile systems. And that's certainly worrisome. But there is one good sign that you've got also a hint here in Moscow of some kind of back-channel diplomacy. We heard from the U.S. ambassador, Jon Huntsman, who said that, in fact, the U.S. had informed Russia in advance of its of its moves to avoid Russian casualties with that specific purpose. So there is this, you know, sign that perhaps, despite all this heated rhetoric, at least on both sides kind of acknowledged that there's it's important keep this from spinning out of control.
[Michel Martin:] That is independent journalist Charles Maynes joining us from Moscow. Charles, thank you.
[Charles Maynes:] Thank you.

[Neal Conan:] As oil continues to spew into the Gulf of Mexico from a deepwater well, the Obama administration today proposed changes to the federal agency that oversees offshore drilling. In an announcement today, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar pushed to split the Minerals Management Services into two agencies. One to enforce safety rules and inspect oil rigs, the other to handle leases and collect the billions of dollars in royalties from oil companies.
[Secretary Kenneth Salazar:] I believe the job of ensuring energy companies follow the law and protect the safety of their workers and the environment should be independent from MMS'leasing, revenue collection and permitting functions. We will approach this restructuring responsibly and thoughtfully. And we will ensure the American people that they have a strong and independent organization holding energy companies accountable and in compliance with the law of the land.
[Neal Conan:] Critics complained the dual mission of the current agency creates a conflict of interest, that MMS, as a result, is too cozy with the oil companies it regulates. Some have described the agency as a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity. Also, today, Congress began hearings into the cause of the explosion that killed 11 men and the massive oil leak that followed. Officials from BP, Transocean and Halliburton testified before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. So who regulates what, how might that change, what did we learn today? Joining us here in Studio 3A is NPR's Brian Naylor, who's been following all this. Brian, nice to have you on the program.
[Brian Naylor:] Thanks, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] And we learned at least one thing today about what happened before the deadly explosion. The blowout preventer that was supposed to help protect against an oil spill had been modified.
[Brian Naylor:] Well, right. And what you heard today were there were three company executives testifying before two Senate committees, the chairman of BP BP which owns the well, Transocean, which was drilling for the oil, and Halliburton, a subcontractor which was in charge of sealing the well and in injecting a kind of a cement into the well to secure it. And what you saw today was the spectacle of these three gentlemen sitting shoulder to shoulder, all pointing the fingers at one another. BP said that its hands were clean, as it were, in this. That it was Transocean's job to see oversee the drilling function. Transocean said, well, we did what we were supposed to do and it was Halliburton that was supposed to seal this well properly and they didnt do it. And Halliburton then turned around and pointed the finger back at BP, said, well, it's your well, it's your responsibility.
[Neal Conan:] And tomorrow, we're going to hear from the manufacturer of the BOP valve, the blow out preventer valve, saying presumably somebody else's fault.
[Brian Naylor:] Well, right. And it's unclear who they'll pass the buck to. But there's a lot of that going on right now on Capitol Hill.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking with NPR correspondent Brian Naylor about the hearings today up on Capitol Hill and about the regulatory agency that's responsible for overseeing offshore drilling. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And Brian, there's going to be a lot more on these hearings later today on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. But I want to focus on this proposal to divide MMS. As I understand it, United States is one of the few places in the world that's involved in oil production where both the environment and safety are in the same agency as operations.
[Brian Naylor:] Yeah. And this is something that critics have been decrying for some time now, that there's an inherent conflict of interest. You have the same agency that's in charge of collecting revenue which $13 billion last year, which is the second largest amount of incoming revenue stream, second only to the what the IRS collects in our taxes. So you have this agency that collects all this revenue, that works with the oil companies to identify and develop new drilling sites. And this agency is also in charge of policing the regulating how the drilling is conducting is being conducted, overseeing the environmental aspects of it and overseeing the workers' safety aspects of it. So, clearly, this is an agency that had a lot on its hands. And many said too much on its hands, too much for it to manage.
[Neal Conan:] Critics said that, in effect, they let the oil companies pretty much manage themselves. You saw a lot of memos saying, well, all the big experts work for the oil companies, they know better than we do.
[Brian Naylor:] Well, that's right. And they let them develop their own environmental impact statements, if you will, which is the case with BP in the Gulf. They've consistently downplayed the effects of a possible spill. I've got a page from an environmental impact statement. When they first decided to allow drilling in this portion of the Gulf, they said oil spills resulting from a proposed action are not expected to damage significantly any wetlands along the Gulf Coast. I think there are a lot of people down there who would beg to differ with that assessment today.
[Neal Conan:] By splitting these two parts, what is that going to take? Is that legislation? Or is it just an executive order?
[Brian Naylor:] It's a little bit unclear. Secretary Salazar said that there is a legislative package that's being developed to send to Capitol Hill. He's going to try to do some things himself. He can clearly reallocate some resources and some personnel. But it seems as though Congress is going to have to weigh in. One of the things that Salazar has suggested, and many on the Hill have suggested this in the past, the director of the Minerals Management Service right now is just simply appointed. Its not he or she is not congressionally confirmed. And so, that would be a change. They would go through the confirmation process.
[Neal Conan:] Thats what Congress gets in return for this.
[Brian Naylor:] Right. Right.
[Neal Conan:] This lack of management, there was a scandal not just a few years ago with MMS.
[Brian Naylor:] Yeah. In 2008 in the Denver office, it was found that there were employees who were taking drugs, buying marijuana, sleeping literally with some of the people that they were regulating. It was...
[Neal Conan:] From the oil business.
[Brian Naylor:] From the oil business, yeah. It was called a culture of I'm trying to find the quote here in all of my papers. But clearly there was a lot of the inspector general looked into this and found a very deplorable situation. Several of those people were fired but others remain. And it just sort of points to the overly cozy relationship between this agency and those its supposed to regulate.
[Neal Conan:] And nevertheless, nothing changes until after a disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which is being compared more and more to the Exxon Valdez situation, the tanker that wracked in Alaska and caused untold damage there. And it is a reminder that the kind of blame game that we're seeing in Washington today these executives all pointing figures at each other, this is all going to be hashed out in court. Eventually, probably at the Supreme Court, and it could be a decade or so before this is all settled.
[Brian Naylor:] Yeah, there's going to be a lot of suing and countersuing going on. I think that's one thing that's clear. Although, the executive from BP today made clear that they intend to pay every legitimate claim.
[Neal Conan:] Legitimate.
[Brian Naylor:] Well, and that's going to be determine down the road exactly what's legitimate and what's not, obviously. But they're making the case that they're no matter the they're not looking at bottom line. We'll see. Well see. But I'm sure that whatever BP pays out, they're going to it would be fair to assume they're going to try to recover some of that from some of their subcontractors, as well.
[Neal Conan:] Brian Naylor, thanks very much for being with us today.
[Brian Naylor:] Thank you, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] NPR correspondent Brian Naylor talking to us about MMS. And what now may be two federal agencies if the proposal from the secretary of the interior is accepted by Congress and the president.

[Renee Montagne:] The upheaval in Libya has sent foreigners racing for the exit. More than 17,000 people have crossed Libya's western border and entered Tunisia in the last few days, according to Tunisian authorities. Most are men who were working in Libya. NPR's Tom Gjelten has been at the border, talking to some of those who fled.
[Tom Gjelten:] They arrive at the Libyan border packed so tightly in cars that they're hanging out the windows, luggage stacked high on the roof. Or they come by bus. For all, it's been a harrowing ride. Levant Gulalda is from Turkey. He was working in Tripoli as a civil engineer for a Turkish construction company.
[Mr. Levant Gulalda:] There was some fighting today.
[Tom Gjelten:] Between here and Tripoli?
[Mr. Levant Gulalda:] From Tripoli, 50 kilometers.
[Tom Gjelten:] There was some fighting.
[Mr. Levant Gulalda:] Yes. I heard some gunfire. Very bad situation. Road was closed. We went another way.
[Tom Gjelten:] The town he describes, 30 miles west of Tripoli, is Zawiya, where fierce clashes have been reported. Gulalda and others say Tripoli itself appears, for now, to be firmly under the control of forces loyal to Libyan ruler Moammar Gadhafi at least during the day. At night is another story. Then, no one dares venture outside. Once the refugees from Libya reach Tunisia, they have to figure out where to go next. Most are herded onto Tunisian buses waiting in the parking lot. Some go to the nearest airport. People with nowhere else to go are being housed in a refugee camp a few miles from the border established by the Tunisian military, where they receive food and shelter. About three dozen big tents have been set up so far. More are going up by the hour, including a dining facility.
[Unidentified Man:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Tom Gjelten:] The Tunisia military have set up a mess tent here for these men who have just arrived from Libya. They are giving out their midday meals right now. Each man gets a plate with what looks like saffron rice, chicken, a kind of a potato-carrot mixture, an orange piece of bread, and a big bottle of water. Actually, it looks like a good meal. About 300 people have arrived in the camp by midday. About 20 of them needed medical attention.
[Dr. Ashish Bekir:] Our station is a battalion aid station, composed by one physician and four nurse. And we can receive five patients on bed.
[Tom Gjelten:] Tunisian Army Dr. Ashish Bekir says one woman arrived with fairly severe injuries from traumatic blows.
[Dr. Ashish Bekir:] On the neck, on the arm, and on the leg.
[Tom Gjelten:] From what?
[Dr. Ashish Bekir:] From traumatism, of aggression.
[Tom Gjelten:] She was beaten.
[Dr. Ashish Bekir:] Aggression.
[Tom Gjelten:] Was it Libyan police?
[Dr. Ashish Bekir:] No, not police. She has been aggressed by civilian.
[Tom Gjelten:] That woman's experience remains the prevailing story from Libya: abuse at the hands of pro-Gadhafi elements. Several people told me it's because the Gadhafi forces know they're finished in Libya and are lashing out. They insist Gadhafi cannot last indefinitely, but they are careful to stress the difficulty of confronting a regime that is still very well-armed. Tom Gjelten, NPR News, near the Libya-Tunisia border.

[Renee Montagne:] The Confederate battle flag is on the defensive more than at any time since the Civil War ended. That flag appeared in photos held by a young white man identified as the gunman who last week shot to death nine black churchgoers in Charleston.
[David Greene:] The governor of South Carolina now says the Confederate flag should come down from in front of that state's capitol. There's talk of removing it from state license plates and taking it away from its prominent place on the state flag of Mississippi.
[Renee Montagne:] Major retailers are also pulling products with images of the flag. But some stores are still carrying Confederate-themed merchandise. NPR's Hansi Lo Wang talked to people about its symbolism at one such shop in Charleston.
[Hansi Lo Wang, Byline:] If you're in the market for a new Confederate battle flag, bumper sticker or shot glass, there's a store less than a mile from Emanuel AME church in the heart of Charleston's tourist district.
[Roger Mitchell:] Right here is the license plates. And then we have some magnets this all here yeah, down there, hats, which are over here. The flag is right up here.
[Hansi Lo Wang, Byline:] Roger Mitchell is the assistant manager here at the Five and Dime General Store. This is where you can find plenty of Confederate flag thimbles lining a shelf above Aunt Jemima salt shakers made in China. Mary Cole also works here and says most of the people who buy this stuff are tourists.
[Mary Cole:] I think it's just kind of, like, a novelty. Like, they're in the South. That's part of the South's history, so they just it's kind of just a cool novelty item.
[Hansi Lo Wang, Byline:] This week, Wal-Mart, Amazon and other national retailers announced they will no longer sell Confederate-themed merchandise. And lawmakers in South Carolina are debating whether to take the Confederate flag down from in front of the statehouse. But here at the Five and Dime, Cole and Mitchell say Confederate souvenirs are still selling. Bill Greer of Hueytown, Ala., though, is not interested in any of it, even though he's proud of his Southern roots.
[Bill Greer:] I like deer hunting. I'm a Southern redneck, too [LAUGHTER].
[Hansi Lo Wang, Byline:] Greer says he doesn't have a problem with stores selling Confederate merchandise.
[Bill Greer:] That's just the way people at one time lived, but that doesn't mean I want to live that way. People one time lived in caves, but I don't want to go back and live in a cave.
[Hansi Lo Wang, Byline:] But across the street from the Five and Dime, Dolph Kilby wears the red, white and blue symbol of Southern history with pride. Kilby rips off the Confederate flag patch... From his black baseball cap and shows it to me. He's a student at North Carolina's Catawba College, and to him, the flag doesn't represent racism.
[Dolph Kilby:] You have people like white trash that have given it that name. But to me, it's about a symbol of heritage of where we come from in the South, where money used to flow.
[Hansi Lo Wang, Byline:] Kilby says the renewed debate over the Confederate flag has left him feeling conflicted. But he doesn't think removing the flag from the South Carolina Statehouse grounds is the right way to move forward from the church shooting.
[Dolph Kilby:] I don't think it's a flag problem. I don't think we should take it down.
[Hansi Lo Wang, Byline:] But Kilby says he understands the other side.
[Dolph Kilby:] Where it's like, yeah, as long as it's flying, there will be racial tension in the air.
[Hansi Lo Wang, Byline:] Down the street from Emanuel AME Church, the Confederate flag is nowhere to be found amongst this crowd of protesters.
[Unidentified Man #1:] How everyone doing out here?
[Hansi Lo Wang, Byline:] But it's a topic that's present in many conversations for demonstrators like Keenan Bell of Summerville, S.C.
[Keenan Bell:] It needs to come down because of what it represents. You know, a lot of blacks have died behind that very same flag. I think it's time to go period time to go.
[Hansi Lo Wang, Byline:] For Kalaani Reynolds of North Charleston, S.C., the timing of all this talk about removing the Confederate flag is suspicious.
[Kalaani Reynolds:] Now all of a sudden, everybody's screaming tear the flag down. It's a pacifier because the world is watching, but it does not fool us.
[Hansi Lo Wang, Byline:] Reynolds says she doesn't expect the debate about the flag in South Carolina's state capital to truly address the issue of race in the state.
[Kalaani Reynolds:] I've seen no changes at all not yet. That flag is nothing. That flag is nothing.
[Hansi Lo Wang, Byline:] Real change, Reynolds says, will take more effort than moving a piece of cloth. Hansi Lo Wang, NPR News, Charleston, S.C.

[Liane Hansen:] When drugs are sold on the street, communities live in fear. There tends to be violent crime, property values deteriorate, businesses leave town. There's an effort under way to get rid of some of the worst open-air drug markets in the country. As Amy Costello reports from New York, the approach, which is more carrot than stick, is succeeding in some places.
[Amy Costello:] Sell cocaine to someone on a street corner, and there's a very good chance you won't end up in prison.
[P:] Right now in America, the risk of going to prison for a single cocaine transaction is 1 in 15,000.
[Amy Costello:] That's David Kennedy, director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Kennedy himself has devoted much of his career to trying to push drug dealers out of neighborhoods. His latest target is the two-block stretch along Terrace Avenue in Hempstead, Long Island. Hempstead's police chief, Joseph Wing, says Terrace Avenue became a magnet for buyers from around the region, mainly because of its location next to two major thoroughfares.
[Liane Hansen:] It became notorious, it was well-known, buyers knew that they come there and get in and get out and leave relatively safely.
[Amy Costello:] Chief Wing sits in front of grainy, silent surveillance tape filmed by his undercover agents. You see a man or a woman approach a car. They thrust small, white packets of crack cocaine through the open window. It happens over and over again, often in broad daylight. The surveillance tape then moves inside a Terrace Avenue public-housing complex.
[Liane Hansen:] A subject just opened the apartment door, and that's the crack cocaine that he just purchased from inside the apartment.
[Amy Costello:] Nassau County District Attorney Kathleen Rice says she and her predecessors had tried to stop this open-air drug market using all the usual tactics: surveillance, the occasional raid, arresting dealers. What we were doing really wasn't having any effect at all. Rice says arrested dealers were quickly replaced by new ones. Those who got out of prison made their way back to the same spot on Terrace Avenue and began dealing again. Addicts remained on the street. So Rice teamed up with Professor Kennedy to see if they could eliminate Hempstead's drug market. Law enforcement officials identified more than a dozen dealers on Terrace Avenue. They trailed them, using the video surveillance, to capture the suspects red-handed. Then earlier this year, officials delivered letters to the suspects ordering them to show up at a town hall meeting or face prison. Rice was there. It was quite an amazing night because the 13 individuals who came, they were very hardened when they walked in the door because they were very skeptical I don't believe that when I show up, you're not going to put handcuffs on me and take me away. During the meeting, suspects watched their own images on surveillance tape. Each dealer now realized that the seemingly remote 1-in- 15,000 chance of going to prison no long applied to them. Professor Kennedy says at that moment, each suspect realized his or her number was up.
[P:] Now we can say to them the next time we know you've sold drugs, the chance that you're going to go to jail is one in one. We've got you now. We're going to tell you ahead of time. The deterrent value of that turns out to be spectacular.
[Amy Costello:] More than 300 members of the community were there, too. They got to voice their frustrations at the dealers. Despite years of mistrust between residents and cops, tonight they showed dealers that they were now a united front and that drug crimes would no longer be tolerated. Then Rice gave the suspects a choice. They could commit to turning their lives around. She offered them fast-track access to a range of social services, everything from job training to drug rehab. Otherwise, they'd face prison. All but one of them took Rice up on her offer. It's a windy day, a few weeks after Rice offered the dealers their second chance. The once-notorious block along Terrace Avenue is dead quiet, save for a piece of scrap metal blowing across the street. Ever since the town hall meeting, a couple of cop cars have been parked round-the-clock at the infamous corner of Terrace and Badel. Other police cars cruise up and down the street. Captain Corey Pegues is a New York City police officer and a member of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives. He is not part of Rice's initiative, but he is a longtime Hempstead resident. Before you would see dope fiends and crackheads all over this place. Now look at this. Ironically, we're driving down the street, and you see kids walking down the street, playing tag with each other. Even so, Pegues wonders how long this will last. Once the funding is over, what's going to happen? What's going to be here to sustain it? After all the, you know, lights and cameras go off and everybody's gone, are we going to go back to the old days? Not necessarily. Professor Kennedy has shown in places from High Point, North Carolina, to Providence, Rhode Island, that drug markets do not necessarily return once police patrols subside. William Sherman Mason, pastor of New Hope Baptist Church in High Point, North Carolina, has seen it himself. After Kennedy's program was under way in his town, Mason said dealers began selling on his church property. Frustrated, Mason went out and stared at the suspects. They stared back. He was a little frightened. Then he saw that his neighbor was standing on her porch, too, staring at the dealers.
[R:] Not long after, I noticed that yet another neighbor had come out, and she also was standing on her porch, and she wagged her finger at him, and she says, I see you, I see you.
[Amy Costello:] Mason suspected he and his neighbors each felt emboldened by one another. He went inside and called the police. He thinks his neighbors did, too. The cops arrived within minutes. Police in Hempstead are hoping that this kind of partnership between cops and residents will be as effective in their community. For NPR News, I'm Amy Costello in New York.

[Debbie Elliott:] Every day about 120,000 day laborers seek work. It's estimated about 34 of them are in the country illegally. The National Day Laborers Organizing Network represents many of these workers, but they now have another labor group on their sideCIO. Recently, the labor federation reached an agreement with the day laborers group to work together. Among other things, the AFLCIO pledged to advance the rights of day laborers and to fight legislation that seeks to criminalize immigrants. We asked Linda Chavez-Thompson, executive vice president of the AFLCIO, to explain why her organization entered into this new arrangement.
[Ms. Linda Chavez-thompson:] We believe that any time any group of workers is treated less-than, if they are pulled down as far as wages and working conditions and health and safety issues, it brings down all workers.
[Debbie Elliott:] How will that play out in practice? If I go into a day laborers center, am I going to see a big AFLCIO banner?
[Ms. Linda Chavez-thompson:] No, I don't think so. What this working relationship is to find ways where we can mobilize to protect these workers. It's the same thing that happened at the turn of the century with the Irish, the Italians, the other immigrants that have come into this country. By predominance, the day laborers are undocumented immigrants and any time they are treated less, all workers suffer the consequences.
[Debbie Elliott:] Now, am I to understand correctly, you're not going to be in these labor centers trying to sign up new union members.
[Ms. Linda Chavez-thompson:] No. Eventually if they do join the union, great. But that is not the intent. It is more about talking about worker centers and of course the protection of the undocumented immigrant as well.
[Debbie Elliott:] Now, the protection of these centers, you know, in some places these centers have come under protest, say, by groups like the Minutemen, or even local communities have voted to try to force them out. Will the AFLCIO step in in these instances? I mean, what do you mean by protect? Is it money? Is it people? Is it legal aid?
[Ms. Linda Chavez-thompson:] What we want to try to do is to work together with state and local enforcement regarding the rights of and the protections of these workers, including their wages. Immigrants, whether they're documented or not, still have rights under the law.
[Debbie Elliott:] But there are also federal laws that say these people are not supposed to be here working. When you're talking about an undocumented worker, how do you navigate that line?
[Ms. Linda Chavez-thompson:] Well, employers are the ones that are coming to these workers. I would assume that the employer is trying to get cheap labor, but we're trying to protect the workers and I think that's the goal that we have in this agreement.
[Debbie Elliott:] You know, the nation is divided on the whole issue of what should be done about workers who are here illegally. What have you been hearing from the rank and file members of your union about this new agreement that you have?
[Ms. Linda Chavez-thompson:] When we went into this agreement, we consulted with the president and the executive officers of the building trade, so this was not something that the AFLCIO walked into without consulting these unions. And so it is about the workers. It is about what we can do to help protect them as workers. And as I said before, if they happen to come into the union, great. But for right now, let's just protect their rights.
[Debbie Elliott:] You know, don't some rank and file union members look at workers in a day laborer center and think, you know, these are the people that might fill my job should I go on strike, you know. What do you tell union members about how working with this organization and working with some undocumented workers might actually help them? How do you make that case?
[Ms. Linda Chavez-thompson:] Part of it is education. Any union member who hopes to get better wages has to realize that the more of the work force that is out there that can be manipulated by employers, all workers suffer. I think by having this relationship, we can almost assure ourselves that these workers are going to work with us not to be the strike breakers. And I think we've even had some incidents where the employers tried to go to them and have them break strikes, and these workers refused to do that, even long before our agreement with them. I think it's a win-win situation for both sides.
[Debbie Elliott:] Ms. Chavez-Thompson, the November election is the first national election since six members of the AFLCIO split off, but I understand you've decided to team up during this campaign year with Change to Win, the breakaway group that had formed. What's the joint strategy for the election?
[Ms. Linda Chavez-thompson:] The Change to Win unions and ourselves signed an agreement and what basically we are saying is we're going to work together. This is the largest program that the AFLCIO has ever had. They have priority states. We have priority states. So we're all going to be working together, and our local unions are just as enthusiastic about making this program work as we have been with any other political year.
[Debbie Elliott:] Linda Chavez-Thompson is the executive vice president of the AFLCIO. Thanks for speaking with us.
[Ms. Linda Chavez-thompson:] Thank you.

[Noel King:] The very last male northern white rhinoceros died in Kenya last year, so now conservationists are trying to use the financial markets to save other species of rhinoceros. Stacey Vanek Smith and Cardiff Garcia of the Indicator podcast from Planet Money have the story.
[Stacey Vanek Smith, Byline:] The problem with current efforts to save and protect the rhinos is that all this takes a lot of coordination constant vigilance, day and night. Oliver is the head of conservation finance and enterprise at the Zoological Society of London.
[Oliver Withers:] Poaching that is actually quite a difficult thing to budget for.
[Cardiff Garcia, Byline:] The other problem, says Oliver, is that the current system does not tend to focus on long-term goals. Everyone is just kind of scrambling to make it from day to day, so it makes it hard to plan and to get ahead.
[Stacey Vanek Smith, Byline:] The result fewer and fewer rhinos in the world. And Oliver is a finance and economics guy, and he says the plight of the rhinos just really strikes him as a very classic economic problem.
[Oliver Withers:] The way to look at it is, imagine you're in the mythical Economics 101 widget factory. You make widgets. You know, in this case, we're making rhinos.
[Stacey Vanek Smith, Byline:] And this is where the rhino bond comes in.
[Cardiff Garcia, Byline:] The conservationists put together a plan laying out what they would need to guarantee that fewer rhinos got poached and more baby rhinos got born. Altogether, it's about $50 million. That's what they would need.
[Stacey Vanek Smith, Byline:] Here's how it works. Investors will buy a five-year bond $50 million worth altogether. At the end of five years, these investors will get their money back with a little extra.
[Cardiff Garcia, Byline:] And the bond succeeds if the number of rhinos in the five parks reaches a certain threshold.
[Stacey Vanek Smith, Byline:] Now, if the number of rhinos does not meet the bond's promise, investors lose money. But if the number of black rhinos does meet the bond's promise, investors can feel like they really made a difference. And they'll get their money back, plus a bit extra a profit for the risk they took.
[Cardiff Garcia, Byline:] Oliver and his team are looking to governments and foundations for the money to back this bond.
[Stacey Vanek Smith, Byline:] It does seem a little strange that, like, the public sector would be potentially paying investors.
[Oliver Withers:] The reality is is that we've seen that money be invested into biodiversity. We haven't achieved the results we expected. If we use some of that to pay investors for taking on that risk, the public's actually better off.
[Cardiff Garcia, Byline:] Oliver says that to this point, governments and foundations have been donating money with no guarantee of results. And the results, frankly, have not been great. Under this new model, the bond model, wealthy investors take all the risk. They buy the bonds and hope that the rhinos proliferate. They put up the $50 million.
[Stacey Vanek Smith, Byline:] If the rhino numbers do meet expectations, then and only then will the governments and taxpayers pay out. They will pay back the investors who bought the bonds. Still, Oliver says, governments have been skeptical of this and slow to sign on.
[Cardiff Garcia, Byline:] Investors, though, they've been jumping at the idea. Glen Jeffries is with Conservation Capital. He's the finance manager for the rhino impact bond. He says that interest from private investors has been overwhelming. And that's good news, he says, because investors will want to see where their money has gone. They're going to want to track how it's used, and that is going to bring rigor and accountability to conservation spending.
[Stacey Vanek Smith, Byline:] Still, ecosystems are incredibly complicated. Focusing on one animal could end up being problematic, create unexpected issues, put pressure on other species. Stacey Vanek Smith.
[Cardiff Garcia, Byline:] Cardiff Garcia, NPR News.

[Debbie Elliott:] Coming up, music for every taste. But first, a taste more and more children cannot tolerate. The number of kids reporting peanut allergies is soaring. An estimated one in every 125 children is now allergic to peanuts. Experts don't know exactly why the numbers are going up, but whatever the cause, schools must decide how to protect students who can have severe allergic reactions. Karen Brown of member station WFCR in Amherst has our report.
[Karen Brown:] At Norris Elementary School in South Hampton, Massachusetts, 11 students this year are allergic to peanuts and tree nuts. One of them is so allergic, administrators say she could go into anaphylactic shock and possibly die just by touching a table bearing traces of peanut butter. So principal Bill Collins felt there was only one solution.
[Mr. Bill Collins:] We've said that no nut or nut by-products should come into our school.
[Karen Brown:] The peanut ban starts here in the cafeteria, where school lunches are prepared without nuts or nut oil, and no student is allowed to bring peanut butter sandwiches from home. It also means no nuts for class parties, and even cleaning supplies are screened for nut ingredients. Principal Collins admits the policy was unpopular when it was introduced last year. In fact, the school board hired two police officers to be on hand at a meeting where 400 parents showed up to oppose the ban.
[Mr. Bill Collins:] They were saying, why does everyone else have to change their ways for these students? Couldn't these students go some place else? Couldn't we separate these students somehow? And we really can't.
[Karen Brown:] An estimated 600,000 school-age children in this country have peanut allergies. And many administrators consider a severe allergy a disability they are legally required to accommodate. so more and more schools are banning nuts. But one group you might expect to be happy about this is not.
[Ms. Anne Munoz-furlong:] When a school makes a declaration about being peanut-free, they need to be able to live up to that. And over and over again we see they're using that term very loosely.
[Karen Brown:] Anne Munoz-Furlong runs the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network, a national advocacy group. She says since peanut bans are virtually impossible to enforce, they give only the illusion of safety.
[Ms. Munoz-furlong:] If a child says I have a peanut allergy, and I'm I feel like having a reaction, my concern is that the staff would say that's impossible, we are a peanut-free facility. And I don't want a delay in getting help for that child.
[Karen Brown:] What the allergy network wants is for schools to take smaller, more targeted steps to keep students safe. For instance, train every teacher, substitute and bus driver in using EpiPens, which are small medical devices that can slow down an allergic reaction until an ambulance arrives. And Munoz-Furlong wants schools to scout field trip locations ahead of time.
[Ms. Munoz-furlong:] One school had a field trip to a museum. One of the exhibits that are children are going to had crushed nuts as one of the manipulatives that the children would be going be working and playing in, and they made another plan so that the children with food allergy would not be exposed or have a reaction.
[Karen Brown:] But some safety measures create extra work at a time when many schools are scaling back on staff, including school nurses. And there are other costs. The South Hampton School District had to replace peanut butter with more expensive ingredients and hire more lunch monitors. Even parents of allergic children don't agree on how far schools should go. Miriam Burke of Western Massachusetts has a son in second grade who is severely allergic to peanuts.
[Ms. Miriam Burke:] We want him to be a normal kid and to have a normal kid experience. I don't want him to feel like he has to be protected more than he really needs to be.
[Karen Brown:] Burke has never asked her elementary school to institute a peanut ban. But the school did agree to designate a nut-free table in the cafeteria. The school also sent letters to all families in the boy's class, asking them not to send any peanut products for snacks or class parties. But, Burke says, parents still do send in the occasional PB and J.
[Ms. Miriam Burke:] I like to think that, you know, that we look out for each other's children, so I have to presume that it's just that they didn't understand, you know, what it could mean for that child.
[Karen Brown:] Massachusetts is among a handful of states with school allergy guidelines. They were created after three children died in three years from reactions to food. Pending federal legislation would create standard guidelines across the country. Banning peanuts is not among those recommendations. For NPR News, I'm Karen Brown.

[Renee Montagne:] And Donald Trump tweeted yesterday that he'll announce his vice presidential pick tomorrow. Hillary Clinton has been secretive about her possible choice of running mate. But today, one name rumored to be on her short list is getting something of an audition. Here's NPR's Tamara Keith.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Virginia Senator Tim Kaine will campaign with Hillary Clinton this afternoon at a community college in northern Virginia. Online odds-makers put Kaine at the top of Clinton's short list. Here's NBC's Chuck Todd asking him about it.
[Chuck Todd:] All right. A lot of people are writing about you right now in American politics. And there it seems to be a theme...
[Tim Kaine:] Don't believe the hype. Well... Don't believe the hype.
[Chuck Todd:] All right.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] There are denials, and there are dodges. And in recent weeks, there have been so many of them. In the quadrennial parlor game that is VP speculation, this is the season of asking possible candidates if they're being vetted by the campaign, whether they've filled out a survey or shared financial information with those putting together files on all of the potential veeps. On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow asked Massachusetts senator and progressive hero Elizabeth Warren about whether she was being considered.
[Rachel Maddow:] Has Hillary Clinton talked to you about the prospect of being her running mate? Have you...
[Elizabeth Warren:] Nope.
[Rachel Maddow:] ...Been vetted? Have you no, no conversations?
[Elizabeth Warren:] No.
[Rachel Maddow:] Am I supposed to ask it more broadly? Has...
[Elizabeth Warren:] [Laughter].
[Rachel Maddow:] Have her people talked to your people?
[Elizabeth Warren:] [Laughter] I don't think so. You know...
[Rachel Maddow:] OK.
[Elizabeth Warren:] ...Look, I know there's been a lot of speculation about this. But the truth is I love the work I do.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Ah, the old I-love-my-job answer. That's what Labor Secretary Tom Perez went with when Montgomery Community Media asked him to address the speculation.
[Thomas Perez:] I just put my head down and do my job, you know. Those sorts of rumors aren't part of what I'm doing.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Perez has been a dedicated Clinton campaign surrogate. And many think he could be up for the VP slot. In fact, all the people most hotly discussed have been out campaigning for Clinton. Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown's non-answer didn't go so well when Martha Raddatz on ABC's "This Week" asked him three times if he had been contacted or vetted by the campaign.
[Sherrod Brown:] I'm not going to speculate.
[Martha Raddatz:] I'm not asking you to speculate.
[Sherrod Brown:] Talk to the Clinton campaign.
[Martha Raddatz:] Have you been contacted?
[Sherrod Brown:] I understand. I you've heard my answer. That's what you're going to get. And talk to the Secretary Clinton campaign.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack had essentially the same answer for Peter Alexander on MSNBC.
[Peter Alexander:] So let me ask you point blank. Are you being vetted right now by the campaign?
[Tom Vilsack:] Listen, those questions should obviously be directed to the campaign.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] The Clinton campaign declined to comment for this story. The campaign seems to be doing its best not to contribute to the veep stakes chatter. Last week, Clinton spent a full day at her Washington, D.C., home meeting with aides and lawyers who were leading the selection process. We know this not because the campaign made an announcement, but because TV crews staked out the house all day. Tamara Keith, NPR News.

[Ira Flatow:] You're listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. Up next, that famous JFK moon speech.
[President John F. Kennedy:] I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.
[Ira Flatow:] No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space, and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. It was 50 years ago this week that President Kennedy presented to Congress an ambitious plan, really a challenge he wanted to land a man safely on the moon and bring him back before the end of the decade, and you know the rest, as they say, is history. But much of that history isn't too well-known, like for example the way that NASA and CBS collaborated to televise the first landing, or that Kennedy had doubts about the plan and that far from being a Cold War showdown, he was willing to collaborate with the Russians on the project. Much of this hidden history can now be found in two books on Apollo, and their authors are here with me now. John Logsdon is author of "John F. Kennedy and the Race to The Moon." He is professor emeritus of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. He also founded the Space Policy Institute there, and he joins us from our NPR Studios in Washington. Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY, John.
[Professor John Logsdon:] Good afternoon, Ira.
[Ira Flatow:] You're welcome. Nicholas de Monchaux is the author of "Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo." He's the assistant professor of architecture and urban design at the University of California, Berkeley. He joins us from our studio there. Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. de Monchaux.
[Professor Nicholas De Monchaux:] Very happy to be with you.
[Ira Flatow:] And just to fill our listeners in, when we first talked to Dr. de Monchaux a few months ago, he was talking to us about the design of the spacesuit. A good part of that book is how Playtex had designed the spacesuit that landed the astronauts on the moon. Your books are filled with so much interesting detail that was left out about the space race. I want to get right into it. John Logsdon, for people who are not, or may not remember the history, or may be a little too young to remember, give us an idea what was going on in the world when Kennedy delivered that speech.
[Professor John Logsdon:] Well, Kennedy had come into office not having thought very much about the space program and wanted to defer a decision on what the United States would do. But then on April the 12th, '61, Yuri Gagarin was launched by the Soviet Union, first human to go into orbit, and the world reaction was uniformly positive. And I think it really convinced Kennedy that the United States, by default, could not allow the Soviet Union to do everything spectacular in space, and then a few days later, the United States sent Cuban rebels onto the shores of the Bay of Pigs, then didn't provide them air support. And Kennedy and his new administration looked kind of weak before the world while the Soviet Union looked strong. I think that reinforced Kennedy's decision to move forward. So it was in the context of Cold War confrontation, competition, that Kennedy said the United States had to find a way to get back and in fact win a space race.
[Ira Flatow:] So he had that idea in his mind, or did he ask his advisors to come up with something for him?
[Professor John Logsdon:] Well, I think he had the very broad idea that we had to do something to put us in a leading position in space, but on April the 20th he wrote a memo to Lyndon Johnson that said: Find me a space program which promises dramatic results, in which we could win very clear set of requirements: space, dramatic, win.
[Ira Flatow:] And he gave that to Johnson to find.
[Professor John Logsdon:] He asked Johnson to conduct a review or organize a review, and over the next two weeks the vice president did do that, brought in NASA, brought in the Department of Defense, brought in Werner von Braun, almost as an individual brought in some businessmen and some leaders in the Senate and finally came to the conclusion that the moon was indeed the first target that the United States had at least a good chance of reaching before the Soviet Union.
[Ira Flatow:] Nicholas, would you agree with that assessment in general?
[Professor Nicholas De Monchaux:] I would. I think it's Dr. Logsdon's work is great on this subject, I think. But I would take you to 1961, where if you opened a newspaper, you might actually be likely to see a picture of John F. Kennedy himself in a spacesuit, not literally wearing one but drawn in a spacesuit, as he often was, by both cartoonists like Herblock and artists like Richard Hamilton. And that kind of flattening of the whole space race around Kennedy was a really is a really kind of important illustration of how Kennedy's own individual persona, as a kind of heroic figure with this mastery of media that he had, was immediately, as soon as the space race was entered into, kind of conflated with the heroic figure of the astronaut himself. So I think the story, as you're telling it today, which is both, of course, an epic global story but also a very personal story about Kennedy, is a really interesting way to understand this history.
[Ira Flatow:] I also understand from reading both of your books they're both excellent books is that this was almost from the beginning going to be the first giant television event, was it not?
[Professor John Logsdon:] Well, Kennedy...
[Ira Flatow:] Go ahead, John, you can go first.
[Professor John Logsdon:] Okay. I mean Kennedy got very much involved in a critical decision, which was to televise the first U.S. launch, the suborbital flight of Alan Shepard, which eventually happened on May the 5th, to televise it live despite a number of his advisors saying it's too risky; right after the Bay of Pigs we certainly don't want another disaster, and particularly one where there's a good chance an astronaut could lose his life on live television. Kennedy took the advice of a few people who said why postpone a success and made the decision that that mission and everything that followed would be on live television.
[Ira Flatow:] Nicholas?
[Professor Nicholas De Monchaux:] Oh, I would point out that amongst those advisors that Johnson assembled was actually Frank Stanton, the head of CBS, and there was very close to the surface in the whole planning process the notion of this as a media event, and that was something that the United States could do very well that the Soviet Union couldn't do because the Soviets never, in their entire space history, announced successes until after they were sure that they had happened. They were allergic to any notion of live coverage and transparency. So Kennedy did very much set the tone of the American space race as a public media event, as well as a technological effort.
[Professor John Logsdon:] Well, after all, the point of Apollo was to demonstrate American technological and organizational competence, and the best way to demonstrate it is to let everybody see it.
[Ira Flatow:] And you go to great lengths in your book, Nicholas, to point out that it was that because Frank Stanton was an advisor, that CBS was sort of chosen. You say a growing complicity between NASA's press office and CBS, that CBS was sort of chosen as the network, and Walter Cronkite, to convey the joys of the space race.
[Professor Nicholas De Monchaux:] Well, I wouldn't necessarily say that CBS was anointed but rather it found itself anointed much, very broadly by the American people at the time as the central voice of news coverage. CBS certainly spent more money than anyone else on its television coverage. It was dissatisfied with many of the visuals offered up by NASA in the planning process for the lunar broadcast, which took as long and was as expensive as various components of the space program. And so it rehired many of the companies that had provided simulators and visual effects actually to train the astronauts for NASA to in turn produce visual effects and simulations for its own audience for the TV broadcast. And I think the audience share for CBS during the Apollo Program hovered between 45 and 50 percent of American households. So it was very much the voice of Cronkite was the voice of the space program.
[Ira Flatow:] But CBS was also brought in post-Kennedy, in the Johnson administration, during which most of the space effort happened, to actually help the image of Lyndon Johnson. Did not CBS help design the desk that Lyndon Johnson...
[Professor Nicholas De Monchaux:] Well, Frank Stanton personally helped design Lyndon Johnson's White House desk to make him more telegenic. Johnson was very insecure about his own image, especially relative to the Kennedys. So he felt like he needed every piece of help he could get.
[Ira Flatow:] And you also point out that the set that CBS used was referred to as the HAL-1,000.
[Professor Nicholas De Monchaux:] Yeah, well, it was even the HAL-10,000.
[Ira Flatow:] Ten thousand, I'm sorry, I left a zero off.
[Professor Nicholas De Monchaux:] No worries. It was, it was well that's the set is a beautiful object, and it's not often seen in many of the retrospective footage we see. But it was designed by Douglas Turnbull, who did all the visual effects for Kubrick's "2001," and so that's why it had this name. And it had it was a kind of revolutionary piece of technology. It had many of the components that we associate with TV broadcast today: clip banks, green screens, overlaid displays that were as completely unusual then as they are ubiquitous now, especially because excuse me Bob Whistler, who was the producer of the CBS broadcasts, actually went on to become the co-founder, with Ted Turner, of CNN, in which many of these techniques that were developed for these unprecedented, you know, 31-hour, 48-hour broadcasts where then combined to make much of the contemporary media landscape.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm. 1-800-989-8255 is our number. John, do you think that Kennedy knew what was actually involved technically in going to the moon when he made that speech?
[Professor John Logsdon:] No, very few people did to start out with. I mean, the plan at that time was to build a rocket even bigger than the Saturn V that was eventually chosen and just to fly off to the surface of the moon. The whole notion of rendezvous either in Earth orbit or in lunar orbit wasn't under consideration. Reading the documents, listening to the tapes, I have the feeling that Kennedy didn't have much of a sense of technology, that he was not a technologically sophisticated individual. I mean, he visited the Cape six days before he was killed and was briefed on the Apollo arrangements and saw the Saturn I launcher. And NASA number three person at that time, Bob Simmon, says maybe for the first time he had a good sense of what he had approved. So I think for him this was a political, I don't think terribly visionary action, with not a good sense of the underpinning technology.
[Ira Flatow:] Hmm. Talking to John Logsdon, author of "John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon," and Nicholas de Monchaux, author of "Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo." Did the president think you know, there was this giant race with the Soviets, and you talk about in your book that at one point he actually approached Nikita Khrushchev and asked him if they wanted to collaborate.
[Professor John Logsdon:] Well, he approached him twice.
[Ira Flatow:] Twice.
[Professor John Logsdon:] I mean, for the first thing, we didn't know what the Soviet Union was doing. It turns out that they didn't have a lunar program while Kennedy was alive, and we were racing only ourselves. But we didn't know that. Kennedy came into the White House having thought of space as maybe an area of cooperation to reduce tensions. In his inaugural address he said to the Soviet Union, let us explore the stars together. Gagarin and the decision to compete put that aside but not very long. Ten days later, after announcing the lunar landing decision, he met Khrushchev in Vienna, their only face-to-face meeting, and at both lunches suggested, why don't we do this together? And Khrushchev said no. It's too close to our military technology, our military secrets. We don't want to do it. And then, two months before he was killed, Kennedy came back to this idea in the most public possible setting, the General Assembly of the United Nations, proposed a joint expedition to the moon. Ted Sorensen says Kennedy, all through this, would have rather cooperated than competed. But competition turned out to be the option that was more politically relevant and viable.
[Ira Flatow:] This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. I'm Ira Flatow talking with John Logsdon and Nicholas de Monchaux. 50 years later, what do you think the legacy, I'll ask both of you, John, first of the Apollo program is and the race to the moon?
[Professor John Logsdon:] Well, I think the legacy of images, of the fact that we've done it, did it, is something that is part of the American patrimony, something that we continue to point at when we want to be proud about country. It did have a strong positive influence on the American image around the world. It gave rise to a clich� if we can go to the moon, why can't we, that I think is basically empty of meaning. I think Apollo and the circumstances that made it possible were unique and not a model for other large-scale enterprises. And I think it had a rather unfortunate effect on the long-term U.S. space program by casting the program as a race. Once you won that race, as we did with Apollo 11, then there was no answer to what next. And I think we've been kind of drifting for 40 years since.
[Ira Flatow:] And Nicholas?
[Professor Nicholas De Monchaux:] Well, I one of the things that I tried to do in my book is make sure to cast the story of Apollo not so much as a kind of ascendant technological narrative, that's very clear, but rather as very much a product of the culture and a kind of soft landscape of its time. I would say that the as we look back on it, we should also be very careful not to see it simply as a kind of vast national achievement. That's certainly what all the various media outlets were telling us at the time. But also very much a kind of illustration of the intense forces that were crushing in on American culture and on the leaders like Kennedy, who were trying to make decisions about how to negotiate this unusual, outlandish landscape of the 1960s in which we could all die tomorrow by nuclear attack and which we didn't know which way it was up. And so it was an attempt to make sense of that era and to give a kind of feature to a public face, to something that was enormously complicated and enormously subtle. And I think we should, in many ways, also be very grateful that we don't live in a time that was quite so confusing. Our own time is, of course, very confusing as well but not quite in such apocalyptic terms.
[Ira Flatow:] John, what would the equivalent 2012 dollars be in...
[Professor John Logsdon:] Well, I know the 2010 dollars for Apollo.
[Ira Flatow:] Okay. Give us...
[Professor John Logsdon:] That's $151 billion in 2010 equivalents. Just by comparison, the shuttle has cost us almost 209. The shuttle has cost us more than Apollo did.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow. That puts it in perspective a bit more, I think.
[Professor Nicholas De Monchaux:] But the Apollo program was only you know, from its conception to the moment when we landed on the moon, it would be as if we had decided with none of the technology to land on the moon in, you know, 2001 and had done so three years ago. It was an enormously -that's why I say it was this kind of diamond of an achievement that was compressed by the temporal and political forces at the time, whereas the shuttle program is a kind of decades-long, very different kind of venture.
[Professor John Logsdon:] Yeah, that's fair enough. I mean, maybe the better comparison is something like the Manhattan Project, which cost, same measure of dollars, $28 billion, or the Panama Canal, which was eight billion, compared to Apollo's 151.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow. All right. We're going to take a short break and take your we're going to take your questions and phone calls. Our number: 1-800-989-8255. Talking with John Logsdon, author of "John F. Kennedy and The Race to the Moon," and Nicholas de Monchaux, who's author of "Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo." As I say, our number: 1-800-989-8255. And tweet us, @scifri, S-C-I-F-R-I. Leave a conversation or join a conversation. Start one on Facebook at sciencefriday Facebookscifri. And also on our website at sciencefriday.com. We'll be back after this short break, talking about the legacy of John F. Kennedy's speech 50 years ago this week. Stay with us.
[President Kennedy:] We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard.
[Ira Flatow:] That's President Kennedy speaking at Rice University, September of 1962. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. We're talking about the another speech the president gave a year before to Congress, in 1961, talking about the need to the challenge of going to the moon before the decade was out. My guests, John Logsdon, author of "John F. Kennedy and The Race to the Moon," and Nicholas de Monchaux, author of "Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo." John, did the president waiver any time in his thinking or have second thoughts after he made that first speech or the second one?
[Professor John Logsdon:] Oh, I think so. He was not a space visionary. He wasn't committed to space. He kept saying, is it really worth the money? This is a lot of money, got to make sure that we're not wasting it. And then there was a lot of criticism in 1963, and Kennedy took a fair amount of that criticism to heart. The Kennedy Library on Wednesday, on the anniversary of the speech, released a recording of the meeting between NASA administrator Jim Webb and the president. And the excerpts from that meeting sound like Kennedy was wavering. I think they're taken a bit out of context. He was worried about maintaining political support for the program when neither the United States or the Soviet Union was doing much in space for a couple of years. And he was worried about it becoming a vulnerability as he campaigned for reelection in 1964.
[Ira Flatow:] Did President Johnson, who took over I mean, he could have said, well, this was JFK's thing, not mine. But he did...
[Professor John Logsdon:] Well, he did say I'm sorry.
[Ira Flatow:] Go ahead.
[Professor John Logsdon:] He did say it was JFK's thing. And because it was, we're going to go forward. It became a memorial to a fallen president.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. I was going to say, that could have given him an opportunity if he didn't want to go, to say it was JFK's, but he took it and ran with it.
[Professor John Logsdon:] Well, after all, it was...
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah.
[Professor John Logsdon:] ...Lyndon Johnson that recommended the program to Kennedy in the first place.
[Ira Flatow:] And the space center is in Houston, let's not forget.
[Professor John Logsdon:] By accident. Well, not by accident, but not because of Lyndon Johnson.
[Ira Flatow:] No?
[Professor John Logsdon:] It was a Texas congressman named Albert Thomas who controlled NASA's appropriations, who was the immediate cause. He told Jim Webb, he told John Kennedy, if you want the money you're asking for it to get Apollo started, the installation for that program had better be in my district in Houston.
[Ira Flatow:] And your reaction to all this, Nicholas?
[Professor Nicholas De Monchaux:] Well, you know, I think that it's really Kennedy is such an interesting figure and in some ways a bit like the space program. He's the heroic quality he's been given by history helps -sometimes blinds us to the kind of wonderful pragmatism that was actually in operation. I mean, Kennedy was someone who's whether it was an image like the monk, Thich Quang Duc, being setting himself on fire in June 1962 in Vietnam, or protesters being attacked by police dogs in Birmingham in May 1963 he was someone who felt buffeted by the television images of the time and who felt always responding to these particular singular images. And so the space program was really an attempt to push back and sort of control the narrative through at a truly global scale. You know, Harold Macmillan, the prime minister of Great Britain, wrote in his diary after meeting Kennedy for the first time that he really didn't think much of him as a kind of big strategic thinker, but that he thought he was the best person he had ever met making decisions under pressure. And so I think what's so interesting about the decision to go to the moon, which we have with the lens of history we see as this grand, heroic, kind of thoughtful decision, was actually something made only in a few weeks, in April of 1961, and only under enormous pressure after the launch of Gagarin and the Bay of Pigs and the larger political climate of the time, as Professor Logsdon points out. So you know, in some ways, it was a really good decision, but it was really astonishing...
[Ira Flatow:] Are we ready? I'm sorry. Go ahead.
[Professor Nicholas De Monchaux:] No, it was a great decision, but it was a decision made under pressure, not necessarily with a sense of history.
[Ira Flatow:] All right. I want to thank you gentlemen for taking time to be with us today.
[Professor John Logsdon:] We enjoyed it.
[Ira Flatow:] Fascinating books, really fascinating books on his 50th anniversary. John Logsdon, author of "John F. Kennedy and The Race to the Moon." He's professor emeritus of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, and also he founded the Space Policy Institute there. Nicholas de Monchaux, author of "Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo." And he is assistant professor of architecture and urban design at the University of California at Berkeley. Thank you both for joining us today.
[Professor Nicholas De Monchaux:] Thank you.
[Professor John Logsdon:] Our pleasure.

[Scott Simon:] Even those who live and work a good distance away from that badly damaged Fukushima plant are still concerned about the radiation exposure. Even those who live and work a good distance away from that badly damaged Fukushima plant are still concerned about the radiation exposure. Reporter Doualy Xaykaothao has spent time with a family in a small town in northern Japan. She has this report. Reporter Doualy Xaykaothao has spent time with a family in a small town in northern Japan. She has this report.
[Doualy Xaykaothao:] Meet Oliver, the Holland Family's Shetland sheepdog. He's the family's early warning system. When the Magnitude 9.0 quake hit, Oliver's barks signaled danger was imminent Meet Oliver, the Holland Family's Shetland sheepdog. He's the family's early warning system. When the Magnitude 9.0 quake hit, Oliver's barks signaled danger was imminent
[Sophie Holland:] I have another pretty dress. Look, look. I have another pretty dress. Look, look.
[Doualy Xaykaothao:] Stephen and Junko Holland's little girl, Sophie. Stephen and Junko Holland's little girl, Sophie.
[Sophie Holland:] Well, little Sophie, bless her heart, she's only three years and three months old. So, she doesn't quite she doesn't understand what's going on. Well, little Sophie, bless her heart, she's only three years and three months old. So, she doesn't quite she doesn't understand what's going on. Earthquake is not so scary right now; nuclear is quite scary for us, I mean, for everyone. Earthquake is not so scary right now; nuclear is quite scary for us, I mean, for everyone.
[Doualy Xaykaothao:] Earthquakes you can feel, even see, but radiation, that's invisible. Officially, radiation levels in Aizuwakamatsu, where the Hollands live, are low. But Stephen Holland, who grew up in Britain and who's lived in Japan for 21 years, is worried what will happen if the Japanese government expands the evacuation zone. Earthquakes you can feel, even see, but radiation, that's invisible. Officially, radiation levels in Aizuwakamatsu, where the Hollands live, are low. But Stephen Holland, who grew up in Britain and who's lived in Japan for 21 years, is worried what will happen if the Japanese government expands the evacuation zone.
[Sophie Holland:] If those instructions come through, then, so everyone's going to be evacuating, and there will be just traffic jams everywhere. The dilemma is do we stay or do we go. If those instructions come through, then, so everyone's going to be evacuating, and there will be just traffic jams everywhere. The dilemma is do we stay or do we go.
[Doualy Xaykaothao:] Junko Holland says she also doesn't want to leave her family, her neighbors, her community. Junko Holland says she also doesn't want to leave her family, her neighbors, her community.
[Sophie Holland:] Yeah, that's quite difficult. Right now, I don't feel like leave here immediately, because we are still 100 kilometers from nuclear place. But if government said you have to leave, I think, yeah, I'm going to decide to leave here. Yeah, that's quite difficult. Right now, I don't feel like leave here immediately, because we are still 100 kilometers from nuclear place. But if government said you have to leave, I think, yeah, I'm going to decide to leave here.
[Doualy Xaykaothao:] In the meantime, they check radiation levels daily and follow the news while working to keep their language school going. In the meantime, they check radiation levels daily and follow the news while working to keep their language school going.
[Sophie Holland:] What we're trying to do is we're trying to get back to normality, so we're trying to carry on our school of English and run it as if this event had never happened. And I think a lot of people here in this community, in Aizu, are also trying to carry on working as normal. What we're trying to do is we're trying to get back to normality, so we're trying to carry on our school of English and run it as if this event had never happened. And I think a lot of people here in this community, in Aizu, are also trying to carry on working as normal.
[Doualy Xaykaothao:] So, for the last few days, they've been getting Sophie up every morning to go to school. So, for the last few days, they've been getting Sophie up every morning to go to school.
[Sophie Holland:] Sophie, do you want me to take you? Sophie, do you want me to take you?
[Doualy Xaykaothao:] When Sophie is off to class, Stephen and Junko prepare for the arrival of teachers and students to their own school, the Windmill English Centre. Junko manages the school. When Sophie is off to class, Stephen and Junko prepare for the arrival of teachers and students to their own school, the Windmill English Centre. Junko manages the school.
[Sophie Holland:] First, we talk about, oh, how are you doing, and we worry this and stuff. But in the class, I think they just focus to study English, and I think it's actually good for us to forget about our worry and do different things. First, we talk about, oh, how are you doing, and we worry this and stuff. But in the class, I think they just focus to study English, and I think it's actually good for us to forget about our worry and do different things.
[Doualy Xaykaothao:] Maeko Kato is one of the teachers. She too is trying to get back into her routine, but she has a friend, Emi Narita, who remains missing. Maeko Kato is one of the teachers. She too is trying to get back into her routine, but she has a friend, Emi Narita, who remains missing.
[Maeko Kato:] I got to know her when I was in college in Sendai. And I've been trying to contact her, contacting my friends in Sendai, but I still haven't heard anything from her yet or from her family yet. I got to know her when I was in college in Sendai. And I've been trying to contact her, contacting my friends in Sendai, but I still haven't heard anything from her yet or from her family yet.
[Doualy Xaykaothao:] Where was she staying? Where was she staying?
[Maeko Kato:] Some part of Ishinomaki. Some part of Ishinomaki.
[Doualy Xaykaothao:] Ishinomaki is a seaside town on Japan's northeastern coast. Much of it was destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami. Earlier this week, an 80-year- old grandmother and her teenage grandson were rescued there after nine days crushed underneath their home. Ishinomaki is also where the body of Taylor Anderson, an American teacher, was found the same day. Ishinomaki is a seaside town on Japan's northeastern coast. Much of it was destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami. Earlier this week, an 80-year- old grandmother and her teenage grandson were rescued there after nine days crushed underneath their home. Ishinomaki is also where the body of Taylor Anderson, an American teacher, was found the same day. Again, Maeko Kato speaking about her college friend. Again, Maeko Kato speaking about her college friend.
[Maeko Kato:] I don't want to imagine. I don't want to think that. Sorry, I want to believe that she is still alive. I feel very sorry for lots of people who died. I don't want to imagine. I don't want to think that. Sorry, I want to believe that she is still alive. I feel very sorry for lots of people who died.
[Doualy Xaykaothao:] But you're coming to work, and you're trying to get back to normal. But you're coming to work, and you're trying to get back to normal.
[Maeko Kato:] Yeah, I'm trying, I'm trying. Yeah, I'm trying, I'm trying.
[Doualy Xaykaothao:] Maeko and the rest of the staff at the Hollands' school say they know things are not normal, that life is in limbo, but they've got kids eager to learn English, kids with hope for a better tomorrow. Maeko and the rest of the staff at the Hollands' school say they know things are not normal, that life is in limbo, but they've got kids eager to learn English, kids with hope for a better tomorrow. Doualy Xaykaothao, NPR News, Aizuwakamatsu, Japan. Doualy Xaykaothao, NPR News, Aizuwakamatsu, Japan.

[Ira Flatow:] Coming up later in the hour, your summer science activities. We want you to call in and tell us what you did on your summer vacation. And a new high-resolution camera goes into orbit that'll probably make your Google, Google Earth and Google Map look a lot better. But first, hold on. Got him? I think. No! Missed it, got away, you know. Flies, it's almost impossible to swat them sometimes, and new research may explain why flies are so hard to whack and swat. Super high-speed videos show that as a swatter fly swatter comes into view, the fly stops what it's doing, and begins to reposition its body. It's a sort of a little ballet moving its legs so that it's poised to take off in the opposite direction of the incoming swatter. And here's the most amazing part, the fruit fly can pull off this escape moving in hundredths of milliseconds, a hundred milliseconds to do all of that. How could an organism with a brain the size of a poppy seed think so fast? Well, here to talk about it is Michael Dickinson, he's a professor bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology. He published his research in the journal Current Biology this week. Welcome to Science Friday.
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] Thanks Ira, welcome.
[Ira Flatow:] You're welcome. I want to let our listeners know that they can actually see this video we have that you've helped us provide some of the video with on sciencefriday.com under our video pick of the week. They can watch these flies they sort of do a ballet there, don't they?
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] Yeah, it's quite elegant footwork. And as you said, especially giving that it takes place so quickly which is why of course that no one is able to see this before because our eyes are way too sluggish to observe these motions.
[Ira Flatow:] So give us a little thumbnail of what the fly does.
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] Well, the first thing the fly does when it sees the looming swatter is to stop what it's doing Flies are quite active creatures, most people probably. If you watch a fly on say, a coffee table, you'll see that they're rubbing their little legs together to groom themselves, they're actually quite clean creatures. But the first thing they'll do when they see the swatters is to stop moving. And then their brain is able to calculate the direction from which the swatter is coming, and they'll move their legs and body in a new position so that when they push off with their legs they'll jump away from the swatter. Right before they push off, they actually raise their wings very carefully so that when they jump they can coordinate that jump with their first downstroke of flight.
[Ira Flatow:] So they're actually watching the swatter is in motion while all of this is happening.
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] That's right.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow.
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] And flies have a visual system that is well-designed to do this, they have the fastest visual system known of any organism. Their eyes don't see, by the way, a hundred fly swatters coming at them. They form a single image of the world just as our eyes do. They just happen to use many lenses to do it. And their resolution is very poor. The fruit flies we work with have the equivalent of about a 25 by 25 pixel camera. But that camera is very, very fast, about 10 times faster than the human visual system.
[Ira Flatow:] How are you able to able to capture the quick movements that you say happen faster than the blink of an eye?
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] Well, there are sort of two parts to it. One is the the fly wrangling part. In order to capture a literally hundreds of video sequences, we had to and this was mostly done by a very talented graduate student in my lab named Gwyneth Card. She was able to lure flies one by one onto the top of a little platform. And once they settle down on the platform, we would release our automated fly swatter which would fall down at the fly at the same time we are capturing the fly's motions with the high speed video.
[Ira Flatow:] How high speed we are talking about?
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] For these images, for this study, we use 5,400 frames per second. And in other, another little trick is that we can't use bright lights during the filming process because that would basically blind the flies. They're very visual creatures so all of this all of these experiments were actually done under infrared lighting that neither the flies nor we can see but the camera can. So it's a sort of night vision,
[Ira Flatow:] Wow. And if you moved the swatter around, does the fly know it's moving around?
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] Yes. So if the swatter is coming from a different direction, the fly's brain is able to determine that and adjust its leg posture accordingly.
[Ira Flatow:] And what's the size of the brain of this fly that it can do these things and coordinate all these actions?
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] Well the brain is rather small, now they're of course they're different species of flies, and the brain will scale accordingly. But the fly has about 300,000 neurons in its brain, and that's almost exactly 300,000 times fewer than our brain.
[Ira Flatow:] Now what makes the fly able to react so quickly?
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] Well a lot of it has a lot to do with the visual processing. As I said, the fly's visual system is really specialized for rapidly analyzing the visual world, and they need very fast visual systems because they fly, and as the flying animals move for the world the world sort of runs across their retina very quickly.
[Ira Flatow:] Hmm. So if you brought a fly to a movie, for example, it would see the flickering of the movie like to see each one of the frames?
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] That's right. A typical movie is displayed at 24 images per second, which are sluggish. A human visual system will just perceive as a smeared portion, that's why it looks like a moving picture whereas the fly would more likely perceive it as a sideshow.
[Ira Flatow:] Now your lab also looks at the flight of flies, and the aerodynamics are actually pretty complicated.
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] Oh absolutely. It's very, very sophisticated. That's mostly what my laboratory does is study the flight behavior. We spent a lot of time studying how the little tiny wings which flap back and forth more than up and down, how that back and forth motion is able to generate enough aerodynamic lift to keep the little guys in the air.
[Ira Flatow:] Are they different than, let's say how bees fly?
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] Actually, they turn out to be quite similar to bees and in both cases the wings sweeps through the air, flips over so that during one stroke the bottom part of the wing is actually facing up, and sweeps back, rotates, sweeps, rotates. And sort of a sculling motion, and they're actually they generate a little tiny vortical structure called a leading edge vortex, like a little tiny tornado on top of their wings. And that structure is really the means by which they can generate sufficient lift to stay in the air.
[Ira Flatow:] Now you actually built a fly-flight simulator, did you not?
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] That's right. So, this is a simulator for the flies, we actually tether the flies to it a very tiny tungsten pin. And we have sensors that can detect how the fly's wings are moving so we can basically tell the intention of the fly, whether it's trying to go straight, turn left, turn right. And we can surround the fly with a complicated visual display that changes depending upon what the fly does. So it basically enables the fly to play a video game, and by manipulating the rules of that video game, we can learn how the fly's brain is processing information as it flies.
[Ira Flatow:] So it's flying through sort of a virtual landscape that you create for, without actually moving.
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] That's right. It's moving its wings. It's generating aerodynamic forces, but it's fixed in space.
[Ira Flatow:] And so I understand you also built a robotic fly, is that right? Is that something we can get at Radio Shack yet?
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] Not anytime soon, but there are many laboratories around the world that are trying to build a flapping robots on the actual spacial scale of an insect. And they're using of course, research on real insects for inspiration.
[Ira Flatow:] And so what is the robotic fly do? It mimics the wing motion of a real fly?
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] Well, the robotic fly that we actually make the most use of in our laboratory is actually not a small thing, it's a giant thing. It has about a meter wing span, and it flaps in three metric tons of mineral oil. And it is a so-called dynamically scaled fly. So, just like an engineer at Boeing can study an aircraft by shrinking it down and putting in it a fast wind tunnel, we take a little tiny fruit fly, scale it up and let it flap in mineral oil.
[Ira Flatow:] What would you like to know about the fly that you don't know yet?
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] What wouldn't I like to know? There's so many mysteries related to how flies are able to make their way through the world. I'd certainly like to know a lot more about how their brain works. I'd certainly like to know a lot more about just how they're put together. I mean, these animals are basically, topologically, spheres. They don't have bones as we do of course. Their entire body is really one continuous surface that sort of operates almost like fancy origami, and we're just beginning to understand how that works.
[Ira Flatow:] And finally, the 64 dollar question. Now that you've done all of these research and spent all these money, what is the best way to swat a fly?
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] Well, the purpose of the research was really not to make it easier to swat flies, but the results would suggest that one key thing is to know that the fly is going to move away from your swatter, so you basically want to to lead your strike. You don't want to strike where you see the fly, you want to anticipate where the fly is going to move, and it's always going to try to move away from the direction of your swatter.
[Ira Flatow:] So, if you aim a little head a little ahead of the fly, you anticipate it's got to go in that direction. It's got to see your swatter coming from the rear, and does it turns itself to look at the swatter? Or does it could it be pointed away from the swatter and be OK?
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] It doesn't need to turn and look because in most flies have a rather panoramic view of the world and not entirely 360 degrees, but quite close. So, they can pretty much see the swatter no matter from which direction it's coming.
[Ira Flatow:] So, the bigger the swatter, I would think that would be helpful also.
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] Depending on the swatter, although, sometimes smaller swatters are better because you can flick them more quickly.
[Ira Flatow:] And so what's the next thing you're going to be doing in your research?
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] Well, we've got lots of, lots of work ahead but with respect to this take-off behavior, we'd really like to understand what circuits and that the flies tiny brain are actually responsible for turning this visual signal, the image of the swatter into a set of a very specific motor commands to the legs. So, we hope to be doing actual imaging of the fly's brain while the fly is performing this behavior, and even using electrodes to record the activity of neurons in the fly's brain.
[Ira Flatow:] You can actually you think you could actually see an image coming from the brain?
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] Well, we can make use of the fact that we study Drosophila Melangaster, which is a genetic model organism, and it's actually possible to genetically engineer a fly, such that the neurons in the fly's brain make a little, little proteins that would basically glow when those neurons become active.
[Ira Flatow:] Well, all I can think of Vincent Price at this point. So, I want to thank you for taking time to be with us.
[Mr. Michael Dickinson:] Sure.
[Ira Flatow:] Good luck. Michael Dickinson is the Zarem Professor of Bioengineering at Caltech and he's publish his research on flies in a journal Current Biology this week, and this offense to those folks who love that movie The Fly, one of my best. We're going to take a short break and come back and switch gears, and talk about what you did on your summer vacation. I mean, did you do anything Sciency or whatever, you'd like to share with us? Took a hike some place, maybe you built a robot, maybe have a fly simulator in your garage that you built this year. So, you won't have to write any essays for us about what you did but share with us, 1-800-989-8255. What kind of sciency thing that I do in my summer vacation. Stay with us, we'll be right back after this short break. I'm Ira Flatow, this is Talk of the Nation Science Friday from NPR News.

[Rachel Martin:] It has been a long, strange trip for the GOP. But with a win in Indiana, Donald Trump is now solidly on his way into the Republican nomination.
[Steve Inskeep:] He won a decisive victory in the Hoosier State yesterday, almost 18 percentage points over his nearest competitor, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. The results were hardly in when Cruz pulled out of the race.
[Rachel Martin:] Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders won a close contest with Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side in Indiana. Here to talk through what happened yesterday are our regular guests, Republican pollster Jim Hobart and Democratic pollster Margie Omero. Welcome back to the show.
[Margie Omero:] Good morning.
[Jim Hobart:] Thanks for having me.
[Rachel Martin:] All right. Both of you, why don't we start off by having each of you sum up what happened yesterday in one sentence. That is your challenge. Margie?
[Margie Omero:] It's a little bit of a surprise that Sanders won Indiana. We shouldn't be surprised Trump won. But we should be deeply, deeply disturbed.
[Rachel Martin:] Jim?
[Jim Hobart:] Everything's coming up Kasich, right? No, I think that the it's clear that the big question on the Republican side is what's next? What's next both for Donald Trump as a candidate does he shift to a general election? And then what's next for Republicans who are going to be on the ballot this fall? Do they start to move away for Trump, or do they start to embrace him?
[Rachel Martin:] All right, we're going to talk about all of that in a few minutes. But first, NPR's national political correspondent, Mara Liasson, on what happened in Indiana and what happens now.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] For the past 11 months, Donald Trump has blindsided the GOP establishment. Last night, he finally crushed it. Ted Cruz had called Indiana a do-or-die state. And last night, he told his distraught supporters that from the beginning, he'd promised to stay in as long as there was a viable path to victory.
[Ted Cruz:] Tonight, I'm sorry to say...
[Unidentified Cruz Supporters:] [Yelling] No.
[Ted Cruz:] ...It appears that path has been foreclosed.
[Unidentified Woman #1:] No.
[Ted Cruz:] Together, we left it all on the field in Indiana. We gave it everything we've got. But the voters chose another path.
[Unidentified Cruz Supporters:] [Yelling] No.
[Ted Cruz:] And so, with a heavy heart but with boundless optimism for the long-term future of our nation, we are suspending of our campaign...
[Unidentified Cruz Supporters:] [Yelling] No.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Cruz notably did not endorse or even congratulate Trump. Trump, on the other hand, was magnanimous. Just hours after he'd called Ted Cruz desperate, unhinged, and of course, Lyin'Ted, he was singing a different tune.
[Donald Trump:] Just so you understand, Ted Cruz, I don't know if he likes me or if he doesn't like me. But he is one hell of a competitor. He is a tough, smart guy. And he has got an amazing future. He has got an amazing future. So I want to congratulate Ted.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Then Trump turned his attention to his likely rival in November.
[Donald Trump:] We're going after Hillary Clinton. She will not... ...She will not be a great president. She will not be a good president. She will be a poor president. She doesn't understand trade. Her husband signed, perhaps in the history of the world, the single worst trade deal ever done. It's called NAFTA. And I was witness to the carnage.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Trump's big win in Indiana pulled the rug out from under the Stop-Trump movement. The chairman of the Republican Party, Reince Priebus tweeted that it was time for the GOP to unite. Around a third of Republican voters have told pollsters they will never vote for Trump. Mike DuHaime, top strategist for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, one of Donald Trump's earliest establishment supporters, predicts that will change.
[Mike Duhaime:] I think one of the great unifying factors for the Republican Party will be Hillary Clinton herself. She is not a popular figure among the Republican Party faithful. And that will bring people together. But certainly, the Republican Party has rallied against the Clintons and used them as a rallying cry for 25 years now. So that will not go away easily, regardless of who the Republican opponent is.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] But there are plenty of Never Trumpers who won't budge. Jonah Goldberg is the senior editor of the National Review.
[Jonah Goldberg:] I'll never vote for Hillary Clinton, and I'll never vote for Donald Trump. The question for people like me though is, how do I talk about this? How do I talk about the campaign? How do I criticize the candidates if I really don't want Hillary Clinton to be president and I really don't want Donald Trump to be president? And I certainly don't want him speaking for me as the leader of the Republican Party and the sort of titular head of the conservative movement. And this is a real dilemma. No one has got a great answer.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] There has been talk among Republicans about running a third-party candidate to give conservatives like Goldberg a reason to turn out and vote for down-ballot Senate and House candidates. But that idea doesn't seem to be going anywhere, so that leaves the party with Donald Trump. Even though he still needs about 200 more delegates, the man the party establishment didn't take seriously 11 months ago has now completed his hostile takeover of the GOP.
[Rachel Martin:] And we are back with our pollsters here in studio, Republican pollster Jim Hobart, Democratic pollster Margie Omero. Jim, this is not exactly where the Republican establishment thought they were going to be 9, 10 months ago. What happened to that Stop-Trump movement?
[Jim Hobart:] It didn't work. He wasn't stopped. A lot of people would say that it got started too late, that it should have started last fall or perhaps even last summer. And now the Republican Party has to deal with him as their nominee. And it is certainly as you say, it's not where they thought they would be. It's not where they hoped it would be. It flies in the face of the vast majority, was written in the Republican autopsy after 2012. But it's where the party is. And they have to do the best they can in this situation.
[Steve Inskeep:] Were Republicans defeated by that old saying, you can't stop something with nothing? And in the end, Republicans by that I mean of course, Republican leaders who were opposed to Donald Trump they didn't have anything else. They didn't have anybody else they could put forward that got people excited.
[Margie Omero:] Well, the other right. You're exactly right because Republican establishment folks don't particularly like Senator Cruz either. I mean, certainly we saw that with former Speaker Boehner and his comments last week showing, you know, I think that he didn't really like wasn't very fond of Cruz, I think is fair to say how to characterize his comments. And so the fact that Cruz was the second-place finisher in so many states made it harder for the Never-Trump movement to say, well, we have this alternative because the other alternatives that people liked were actually losing by a lot in a lot of states.
[Rachel Martin:] But why did that happen? People point to that Republican field and say, this is the most qualified field we have seen in a generation or so.
[Jim Hobart:] I think that for whatever reason, almost every candidate approached the race once Trump became this dominant figure, as as long as I can get one on one with him, then things will be good for me. You look at someone like Ted Cruz, who was embracing Donald Trump for months, I mean, saying he was a great guy; he's great for the party. And then the last day he's running for the election, he has to start calling him a pathological liar and a serial philanderer.
[Steve Inskeep:] OK. Let's throw out a couple of theories from the Democratic Party's perspective. One is, I suppose, wow, this is great. This controversial candidate has been nominated by the opposing party. And we're going to have an easy election. But there are other ways to look at this. What do you think, Margie?
[Margie Omero:] I think he is just too toxic, too corrosive to have in our political bloodstream, even if he is the most beatable candidate considering that's what the polls show, that Clinton and Sanders beat him by a lot in general election matchups. He's so overwhelmingly unpopular. All those things are true. I just don't want to listen to him until November. The language that he uses is too corrosive.
[Steve Inskeep:] But let me ask you both, is he really that beatable? Because of course the argument of Trump supporters is he'll shake things up. He's a different candidate. He's going to cause people to think again about the Republican Party.
[Jim Hobart:] He's the most unpopular major party nominee of all time. If he is able to change that somehow, more power to him. I think his biggest issue is he can't seem to help himself. On a day like yesterday, where he knew he was going to be the nominee in terms of all the public polls that he looks at, he still couldn't help himself from saying that Ted Cruz's dad was a part of the conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy.
[Steve Inskeep:] Oh, part of his vamping up a National Enquirer story...
[Jim Hobart:] Right.
[Steve Inskeep:] ...That nobody believes. Go on.
[Margie Omero:] Not just that, he's dangerously unqualified. If you go back to The Washington Post transcript from their interview with him, he can't put together a coherent sentence on any of the major issues of the day. When cornered, he just moves to some sort of social, tweet-like, erratic behavior rather than actually engaging on policy issues, in addition to the hateful, racist and sexist language that he uses on a regular basis.
[Rachel Martin:] But none of that, obviously, seems to stick. And he is, especially on issues like free trade, which flies in the face of Republican values, this is an issue that has really real railed gotten a lot of support from people who are also supporting Bernie Sanders. And there is this cross-section that he seems to be speaking to. Margie, do you think he has any chance of bringing those people into his camp?
[Margie Omero:] Sanders voters?
[Rachel Martin:] Yes.
[Margie Omero:] No. I wince at that comparison of Sanders voters and Trump voters. You know, they have one thing in common. They like to talk about their own polling. I think that's really where the similarities end because Sanders doesn't use that kind of corrosive language. He sees a role for government. Trump doesn't. It's just I think that the crossover there is very limited. Most Sanders voters say they would vote for Clinton if she was the nominee.
[Steve Inskeep:] Jim Hobart, in a few seconds, if you're a Republican, does tribalism really take over at this point? Trump is your nominee. You're going to vote for him. You're going to try to save the Senate. If you love Trump, that's great. If you hate Trump, you're still going to do that because you think he's better than Hillary Clinton.
[Jim Hobart:] I think that a lot of it depends on where you're running. If you're a candidate in a swing state, that's going to be up to the candidate themselves, in terms of if they want to embrace of move away from him. For other candidates and for the officeholders and saver seats, I think you're going to see them come around to Trump.
[Margie Omero:] There are already Senate candidates who are being attacked because of their support for Trump.
[Rachel Martin:] We'll have to leave it there. Margie Omero, Democratic pollster, Republican pollster Jim Hobart, thanks so much for talking with us you two.
[Margie Omero:] Thank you.
[Jim Hobart:] Thanks.

[Ailsa Chang:] There's more bad news for Boeing. The company is back on the defensive after admitting over the weekend that a safety sensor on its troubled 737 Max planes didn't work as intended. And anger is intensifying because Boeing didn't tell airlines about that until after the first of its planes crashed last October. All of that is ratcheting up pressure on Boeing as it tries to get its grounded 737 Max planes back in the air. We're joined now by NPR's Russell Lewis, who's been following this part of the story. Hey, Russell.
[Russell Lewis, Byline:] Hi there.
[Ailsa Chang:] So what do we know about this sensor and why it didn't work properly?
[Russell Lewis, Byline:] Well, this is called the angle of attack disagree alert. This plane has two angle of attack sensors, one on each side of the nose. And they're designed to tell the flight crew how the plane is flying relative to airflow over the wing. If the angle of attack gets too high, the plane's wing can stop flying and enter an aerodynamic stall. But the 737 Max had this new flight control system that we've heard about called MCAS. It would force the nose of the plane down in certain circumstances. And this is what is appeared to have happened in the two crashes of the 737 Max. And we should remember that those accidents have killed a total of 346 people. And here's what's new that in 2017, Boeing learned a few months after the jets began flying, that the sensor would only work if airlines had purchased an optional safety alert.
[Ailsa Chang:] And do we know why Boeing chose not to inform the airlines right away that the sensor wasn't working properly?
[Russell Lewis, Byline:] Well, this is not a good look for Boeing. I mean, the manufacturer, as we have been reporting, is subject to several congressional investigations, whistleblower complaints and lawsuits that are filed by family members of those killed in the crashes. So clearly Boeing is being careful in what's being said publicly. We really don't know why it took almost a year for Boeing to tell the airlines about it. But we also have learned that Boeing didn't tell the Federal Aviation Administration about the nonworking sensor until this past November, after that first crash. And at the time, the FAA deemed it, quote what they're saying is low-risk and that it would be updated by a software upgrade at some point in the future.
[Ailsa Chang:] And what's been the reaction today from all the airlines after this latest news?
[Russell Lewis, Byline:] Well, I think anger is probably an understatement.
[Ailsa Chang:] Yeah.
[Russell Lewis, Byline:] The airlines, Boeing and the FAA had been working through various issues since the 737 Max was grounded back in March. Things were sounding like they were all in lockstep, working together. But we've continued to see revelations and developments like this one. Earlier today, I spoke to Dennis Tajer. He's the pilots union representative for American Airlines who also flies the 737 Max. And he's very disturbed.
[Dennis Tajer:] It shatters the eggshell of the trust that we had built. We were hoping that that would be broadened and bolstered and strengthened as these positive interactions with Boeing happened. But news like this to say that we're dismayed would be a complement to it. We're just floored by this.
[Russell Lewis, Byline:] That said, Tajer, Ailsa, says that he remains optimistic that they can iron out these problems and hopefully at some point get that jet flying again. But you know, he says these continued revelations certainly do not build a lot of confidence.
[Ailsa Chang:] Yeah. How critical is this sensor to making this plane operate properly?
[Russell Lewis, Byline:] Well, I think that's an interesting question because, I mean, certainly for decades, planes have flown just fine without an angle of attack disagree alert. And Boeing is quick to point out that it's really not an integral safety component of the 737 Max either. But it is a tool that helps pilots understand what's happening to their jets, especially in an emergency situation just 'cause it gives you more data, which really points to sort of a bigger, philosophical issue the high automation and computerization of these planes. Clint Balog teaches at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. He's both a pilot and an engineer. And he says there's a problem in aviation right now with what he terms data saturation.
[Clint Balog:] We can provide a flight crew with so much data and information that we can cognitively overload them and provide them with so much information that it actually reduces safety.
[Russell Lewis, Byline:] And all of this is the backdrop as Boeing works to get its grounded jets back in the air.
[Ailsa Chang:] That's NPR's Russell Lewis. Thanks so much, Russell.
[Russell Lewis, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Rachel Martin:] Now that President Trump is back in the U.S., he confronts an unpleasant reality the investigation of Russia's participation in Trump's election has now reached the West Wing of the White House. Here's NPR's Tamara Keith.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] It was inevitable that special counsel Robert Mueller's team would want to speak with aides currently working in the Trump White House. After all, some, like top adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, communications director Hope Hicks and policy adviser Stephen Miller were key players in the campaign as well. Their outside lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. White House special counsel Ty Cobb, the lawyer brought in to handle the Mueller investigation and the various congressional inquiries, wouldn't go into details of who or even how many aides will ultimately face questioning.
[Ty Cobb:] I sort of have a blood oath with Mueller that I don't get into that. I mean, it complicates his job, and it sort of defeats the confidence that people here have in me to, you know, protect them. So, you know, I can't talk about the who, what and where stuff.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] But Cobb is talking about when.
[Ty Cobb:] The interviews ideally will be completed by Thanksgiving or shortly thereafter.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Mueller's team has reportedly already spoken to former administration officials Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus. Thus far, under Ty Cobb's guidance, the White House posture has been full cooperation.
[Ty Cobb:] I think it's been highly professionally done, and I think they've moved, you know, with an alacrity that they're proud of and that the American people can be proud of.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] But that is paired with frequent comments by the president and his allies meant to undermine the investigation, calling it a witch hunt or suggesting the real scandal involves Democrats. Regardless of public expressions, when White House aides must hire outside lawyers and sit for interviews with federal investigators, it's intense, says Lanny Davis.
[Lanny Davis:] No matter how you try to put it out of your mind, it's like a cloud or mist that never goes away.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Davis is a lawyer who served in the Clinton White House for two years handling the response to Ken Starr's independent counsel investigation. And he says he's spoken with members of the Trump administration who were looking for advice.
[Lanny Davis:] If everything were good and nobody had done anything or met with the Russians or talked about meetings with the Russians or emailed about meetings with the Russians if everything were good, it would still be stressful.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Davis remembers in the Clinton White House, everyone was so afraid of getting into the investigative crosshairs that many stopped taking notes altogether. He used 3-by-5 note cards that as a practice he'd throw out at the end of the day. He imagines aides in the Trump White House are experiencing similar highs and lows.
[Lanny Davis:] You're so thrilled to be there, and when you walk down the driveway early in the morning and you see the house lit up and you think, gosh, Abraham Lincoln walked down these very same stones, you say I'm so lucky to be here. And then you walk into your office and you turn the lights on and you suddenly see some 3-by-5 cards from notes that you took the day before and you think, oh, my God. I didn't throw those away last night. Now what do I do?
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] For his part, current White House special counsel Ty Cobb, who projects a permanently unruffled attitude, insists aides in the Trump administration are sanguine about the whole thing.
[Ty Cobb:] I don't think there's, you know, much angst here.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] As for how much longer the special counsel's microscope will stay on the president and his administration, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders says things are nearing the conclusion. Cobb, on the other hand, says the timeline is up to Robert Mueller. Tamara Keith, NPR News, Washington.

[Tony Cox:] From NPR News, this is NEWS & NOTES. I'm Tony Cox in for Farai Chideya. Imagine you were among those members in Congress invited to find a new way forward in Iraq. For months you debate strategy with nine of the most accomplished figures in American politics, including a former Supreme Court justice, past secretaries of state and defense, and a former White House chief of staff. That's exactly what power broker Vernon Jordan did after he joined the Iraq Study Group. Jordan once headed the National Urban League and has advised American presidents for more than 40 years. His career began as a civil rights lawyer and even survived an assassination attempt in 1980. But in an interview yesterday, Vernon Jordan told NPR's Farai Chideya that nothing could have prepared him for the gravity of this, his latest assignment.
[Mr. Vernon Jordan:] Because it's about war and it's about young people dying, and it's about sectarian violence; and it's about families losing their loved ones. And this is a difficult war, and it's a deteriorating, grave circumstance. And so that was a difficult part of it. Now there's another there's a positive aspect of it. We are five Democrats and five Republicans, all of whom checked our partisanship at the door.
[Farai Chideya:] All 79 recommendations that you made are unanimous, but can you take us inside the room. Did you ever reach a point where you thought, okay, there's no way we're going to reach consensus; although we're a bipartisan group, it's just too tough for us to reach a compromise on what we say.
[Mr. Vernon Jordan:] I never, never doubted it that we could reach the consensus that we reached because we all went into that room, having checked our partisanship, believing in each other, believing that we could, through working together, come to a consensus, and we did.
[Farai Chideya:] Who were you in that room? Let me ask, were you someone who played a role of bringing people together who were of different like minds? Were you someone who cooled hot tempers? Who it seems to me in a way that you guys were like a sequestered grand jury.
[Mr. Vernon Jordan:] I'll tell you this, Farai, that this is the first time that I've served on this kind of commission and I've been privileged to serve on many -where there were no heated arguments and nobody jumping up screaming and nobody's stomping out of the room. That did not happen, and maybe it's because we are old, but that did not happened; nobody cursed anybody out. And I've seen that before, and there were no written dissent or threaten of written dissent. We had a common purpose and we accomplished it together.
[Farai Chideya:] So given that you had 79 recommendations, which one really has your heart? Which one of the recommendations do you feel is the most important?
[Mr. Vernon Jordan:] Well, there are three primary recommendations and I think they are of equal importance. The first dealing with a responsible transition of American troops from combat troops to support troops. The second issue is the national reconciliation on the part of the Iraqi government to meet milestones and to do some things that they must do that they have already set for themselves. We are holding them accountable, as we should. And thirdly, the diplomatic offensive. Those three things go hand in hand, and we think that they're all important and of equal importance.
[Farai Chideya:] You have been an adviser to so many presidents, but one of them is not President George W. Bush who, according to many people who spend a lot of time covering him, is a person who keeps a very tight council with very few people. So what was your relationship and the study group's relationship with the president?
[Mr. Vernon Jordan:] I must say this. I am not an adviser to this president. I do know him and we are friends. I was much closer to his father. And better friends with his father. But this president has given this Iraq Study Group an unusual amount of time and attention. I think if you total up the hours it's probably close to three and a half to four hours. We met with him actually three times, including yesterday morning at 7:00 in the morning; that would never would have happened in a Reagan or Clinton administration, a 7 o'clock meeting. But it did happen, and so I think he understands his responsibility. He understands our responsibility, and he was very open yesterday to what we had to say. And he rightly said I want to read this and I want to come back to you.
[Farai Chideya:] At the same time, though, when he was making remarks with Prime Minister Blair of the U.K. it did not seem as if he was in complete agreement with what you were saying. Do you have any concerns he's not going to listen to your recommendations?
[Mr. Vernon Jordan:] Well, I hope he's going to listen and I hope he's going to be responsive. I am not privy to what happened in the press conference with Prime Minister Blair and President Bush. I was practicing law a bit this morning, and so I've not caught up to that and so I'm not informed about what happened in that press conference.
[Farai Chideya:] Let me kind of put this in the framework of the United States. You've got Iraq, which is a nation that is ethnically and religiously divided by different factions, but the United States has been divided by race, class, and religion. And in reading your autobiography I was struck again by the fact that you were shot by a white supremacist who almost took your life. What lessons can we learn from our own divisions in the United States, past and present, that could be applied to how we think of Iraq?
[Mr. Vernon Jordan:] When you've got a problem, you have to deal with it. And you have to talk to everybody, all of these people who are railing against us, talking to Iran and Syria. You know, it reminds me of being in the South in the 1960s. We talked to the sheriffs and the police chiefs who were beating us, who were arresting us, who were harassing us and who were shooting us. We talked to them and they were not our friends. But we had to talk to them to make them understand what it is that we were about. And there was a negotiation that took place, sometimes successfully, but sometimes not so successful. But nothing happens if you don't talk.
[Farai Chideya:] It reminds me of that Frederick Douglass quote, power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will.
[Mr. Vernon Jordan:] That's a very accurate quote from a great man.
[Farai Chideya:] Of course, you know. But here's a thing. The insurgents right now have a certain amount of power, you know, they are disrupting the nation. What can we demand and what kind of leverage does the United States have to make demands on these insurgents?
[Mr. Vernon Jordan:] Well, we've set forth three things that we want to do. We are recommending keep in mind that the Iraq Study Group has no statutory authority, we have no executive powers, and we have no enforcement responsibilities. We are a group of private citizens funded by the United States Congress to think about this matter. We did, and we've given our recommendations to the president who is its commander in chief. And it is now up to the president and to this Congress to find a way forward for this country. And I hope that's going to happen. I also want to say to you that this town has been strife with polarization and hostility in our politics. I hope that this administration and the Congress can take a page out of the Iraq Study Group's process, and that page is civility.
[Farai Chideya:] Now one more thing on the recommendations, specifically. You don't advocate an increase in U.S. troops but that's because we don't have them, at least that's what we heard as the report was being debriefed. Now Congressman Charlie Rangel has advocated a draft; that would be one way of increasing troops. If we did have a draft, or if there was some incentives for people to enlist in larger numbers, would the commission have recommended an increase in Iraq rather than a drawdown?
[Mr. Vernon Jordan:] Well, we did not because we actually believe that, as we said in our primary one of our primary recommendations, that the we need a transition in our troops. Years ago, I served in 1966 on the National Advisory Commission on Selective Service. That was all about the draft. Actually, Charlie Rangel was the first general counsel to that commission. It's where I first met Charlie Rangel. And I am sympathetic to his view about national service that would also include the draft. But that has fallen on deaf ears both in the Congress and in the administration. But I think that is one way to equalize who protects us and defends us.
[Farai Chideya:] Finally, this is a question that's unrelated to your work on the Iraq Study Group. People are putting together their exploratory committees for president and one person who is exploring his exploratory committee is Senator Barack Obama.
[Mr. Vernon Jordan:] Well, I'm not going to talk to you about politics.
[Farai Chideya:] Can I ask you this question and then you can just say I don't want to answer it?
[Mr. Vernon Jordan:] OK.
[Farai Chideya:] Do you envision a time in your life when one of the major parties will nominate a black person for president and that person will win and take office?
[Mr. Vernon Jordan:] Well, I believe that can happen. I'm now 70 years old, so I'm one year beyond my promised time, according to scripture. So I don't know that I'll be here, but I think it can happen, and I think it will happen, and I hope so.
[Farai Chideya:] Mr. Vernon Jordan, thank you so much.
[Mr. Vernon Jordan:] Thank you so much.
[Tony Cox:] That was NPR's Farai Chideya talking with Vernon Jordan, who once headed the National Urban League. He is one of 10 members of the Iraq Study Group, which released its recommendations Wednesday. Coming up, our Roundtable reacts to our talk with Vernon Jordan. And respect your elders. Remember that warning? Well, it's back. We'll tell you where in a moment.

[Steve Inskeep:] Years ago, a politician told me a rule of his craft politicians work with their rivals where they can, even if they disagree on everything else. You'd be forgiven for thinking some American politicians totally forgot that rule. But in diplomacy, the U.S. and China remembered it. For all of their differences, the two governments reached agreements as President Obama visits Beijing. In a moment, we'll hear about a trade deal. We start with another agreement that goes into effect tomorrow. Chinese tourists and businesspeople can more easily visit the U.S. They can receive multiple-entry visas valid for up to 10 years. NPR's Frank Langfitt reports from Shanghai.
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] The first impression most Chinese have with the American government comes when they apply for a visa. For years, they dreaded the process.
[Mei Zhang:] It was humiliating.
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] Mei Zhang runs Bishan, a tour company in Beijing that caters to wealthy Chinese.
[Mei Zhang:] If anyone's experienced a Beijing cold winter you stood out there in the street for three hours waiting to get into the embassy.
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] Then, often Chinese had to convince a visa officer they weren't secretly planning to emigrate to America. By all accounts, the wait time is much shorter now. Zhang says, sparing Chinese from having to reapply for new visa each year will make travel even easier.
[Mei Zhang:] This has removed a major obstacle. You can go back to America again, again.
[Ryan Becker:] China is our number one overseas market.
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] Ryan Becker works for Visit California, a nonprofit industry group that markets the state. He says Chinese spent nearly $2 billion in California last year more than tourists from any other country.
[Ryan Becker:] We're very excited about the changes. It's the kind of smart policy that we think makes sense on many different levels.
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] Becker says Chinese visits to California were already expected to double by 2017. He says the visa extension will just mean more tourists and more spending. Frank Langfitt, NPR News, Shanghai.

[Steve Inskeep:] This week on MORNING EDITION, we've been talking about what the American military can do in Iraq, and what the war is doing to the American military. Today we'll look at the toll the war is taking on equipment the helicopters, Humvees, tanks. Repairs are not cheap. The military calls this the reset cost, and Robert Gates said it would be a top priority in his confirmation hearing for secretary of defense.
[Deborah Amos:] To find out more, we turn to Andrew Krepinevich; he heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. Krepinevich says the Army's equipment is taking a beating damage by enemy fire, the elements, and almost constant use.
[Mr. Andrew Krepinevich:] As anyone who commutes will know, if you plan on commuting 10 miles each way a day and all of a sudden you're commuting 40 and 50 and 60 miles each way, your car is going to wear out a lot more quickly. Well, the Army had planned to use this equipment in a peacetime basis. Now that it's at war, it's using it much more intensively. And not only that, you get some modifications to the equipment that also cause problems. So, you know, we see these Hummers on our highways. They have similar vehicles to that over in Iraq. But what they've had to do to provide better protection to the soldiers are to put armor plates on the sides of these Hummers, these Humvees. Well, imagine putting armor plates on the side of your car. You know, what does that do to your tires? What does that do to your transmission? What does that do to your gas mileage? And what you see is this equipment wearing out at an accelerated rate.
[Deborah Amos:] So is there a dollar figure, now, on the reset costs?
[Mr. Andrew Krepinevich:] Yes there is. The Army has requested, and the Congress has approved $17 billion for this fiscal year. So it's the year that begins the first of October through the end of next September. And the Army said that will enable us, for these units that have come back from Iraq whose equipment has been partly destroyed certainly a lot of it's worn out to begin to refit those units. It will enable us to make sure that those units that came back, that are about to go back to Iraq again, that we make sure they have a full complement of equipment.
[Deborah Amos:] How can you know all of your reset costs when you don't know when the Army is going to leave Iraq? Aren't these rolling costs that come over time?
[Mr. Andrew Krepinevich:] Well, that's why the Army says, you know, we cannot put this in our budget. We have to look at exactly what is going on in these military operations, the intensity in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. And so it submits these reset costs as they become known. On the other hand, the Army also does estimates. And so, for example, the Army will tell you, we anticipate that if there is no significant change in the level of operations, in the intensity of operations, that next year our costs will be about $13 billion. So they can give you a ballpark number.
[Deborah Amos:] Why can't it be more specific? They've been there for three years, they're beginning to see the patterns of how this equipment is wearing down -and they know about helicopters, tanks, Hummers so why is this figure so murky?
[Mr. Andrew Krepinevich:] Well, I think if you just went back just go back two years, for example. Let's look at 2004 2004, in Iraq, started out relatively peacefully, then we had the uprisings in the spring. Since then, things have gotten progressively worse. So for the Army, say in the beginning of 2004 to be able to accurately predict what kind of fighting it was going to be doing in 2006 is very difficult. And the same thing applies in Afghanistan. Two years ago, the sense was the Taliban was defeated and now we find that we're engaged in a number of hostile operations with the Taliban forces in Afghanistan. So you can project, but as people in the Pentagon are fond of saying, the enemy gets a vote in this, too.
[Deborah Amos:] Is there a moment where the secretary of defense has to start making some tough calls? For example, will some of the Army's modernization programs have to be scrapped to pay for all of this as we go forward?
[Mr. Andrew Krepinevich:] Well, that's an interesting question. When you talk about resetting the force, do you really want to reset it to the kind of army that existed on the eve of the Second Gulf War? That army was optimized and oriented to fight conventional forces, and yet now we find ourselves fighting irregular forces terrorists, guerrillas, militias and so on. And so, the question becomes, let's take a look at the Army modernization program. What is in there? And how much of that is really going to help us deal with the kinds of challenges that we confront right now? And a potential bill payer, if sacrifices have to be made, may be the Army's future combat system. It is the Army's crown jewel, in terms of their modernization effort, but a lot of people myself included are concerned that this new system may be primarily oriented towards fighting another Republican Guard somewhere, another enemy tank force. And so the question is, this future combat system program which is projected to cost $150 billion over its lifespan is that really something the Army absolutely needs or is this a program that perhaps should be modified to free up funding to be able to do some of the things the Army needs to be able to do right now in terms of things like resetting?
[Deborah Amos:] Let's talk about the future: 2006, we're talking about $17 billion. Do reset costs get the U.S. military closer to their goal?
[Mr. Andrew Krepinevich:] Well, that's a critical question. You know, one of the sobering aspects of this war has been the continued projections of progress just around the corner. And of course, the continued frustration, the sense that Iraq is a more violent place today than it was in 2005, and it was more violent in 2005 than in 2004. And so, at the end of the day, I think a lot of people want an answer to the question of is this more good money after bad? And do we have a plan? Is it a plan that's likely to produce results? How can we measure results? Because obviously, the patience of the American people is not infinite, and the resources that we have are not infinite.
[Deborah Amos:] That was Andrew Krepinevich, who heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. During our conversation, he made one other point about the Pentagon's so-called reset costs.
[Mr. Andrew Krepinevich:] People wear out, too. But of course, people can break in a number of different ways emotionally, mentally, combat stress but in a volunteer force, they can also refuse to re-enlist, and leave the service. And so, the Army is quite rightly concerned about the readiness and the ability to refit and reset the people as well as the equipment.
[Deborah Amos:] As of yesterday, at least 2,906 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the war in Iraq. The military says more than 22,000 service members have been wounded.
[Steve Inskeep:] And Deb, our conversations continue tomorrow when we'll talk to a former Army chief of staff who says the mission in Iraq is draining the Army's ability to fight elsewhere.
[Unidentified Man:] [Former Army Official]: If you take the combat units and take them apart and put them into advisory detachments, there's no reserve to do anything else.
[Steve Inskeep:] You're not ready for another war.
[Unidentified Man:] You're not ready to go to Korea or whatever, who knows where, the Antarctic or someplace.

[Eric Westervelt:] Greeks vote tomorrow in a referendum that's been interpreted as a verdict on austerity, as well as the country's place in the eurozone. The question itself is based on a bailout deal with eurozone lenders that's no longer even on the table. In a massive rally Friday night, the Greek prime minister urged Greeks to vote no. It's expected to be a close vote. But as Joanna Kakissis reports from Athens, many Greeks are making their choices with trepidation.
[Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras:] [Speaking Greek].
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras told a cheering crowd of supporters last night that voting o'hi, the Greek word for no, was about dignity. O'hi was the word that Greeks had chanted when they resisted Italian fascists in 1940.
[Maria Bairaktari:] There is no alternative, either no or nothing.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] That's Maria Bairaktari, who is at the no rally. She's 45 and can't find a job. And she says the European Union and the eurozone have not helped her. She wants out.
[Maria Bairaktari:] At this moment, we are not ready to leave European Union and euro currency. Hopefully soon we'll be powerful again and return to drachma. That will be ideal for us.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] The drachma was Greece's currency before the euro. Konstantinos Kotitsas says it would be a disaster for Greece to revert to the drachma.
[Konstantinos Kotitsas:] [Through interpreter] I've been thinking about voting yes on the referendum. I'm afraid we're going to get kicked out of the euro unless we vote yes.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] I meet Kotitsas in his apartment in a modest suburb, where he lives with his 12-year-old daughter, Androniki. She imagines terrible things happening in Greece if it leaves the eurozone.
[Konstantinos Kotitsas:] [Through interpreter] I'm scared that we're going to go bankrupt, that there will be war and that we will go hungry because we have no money.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] Kotitsas is struggling. The construction company he founded with his father and brother Dimitris is barely breaking even. Dimitris Kotitsas now drives a taxi to support his wife and two young children.
[Konstantinos Kotitsas:] [Through interpreter] My brother and I are already doomed with the way things are. But we can't doom the kids. We have to make sure they grow up in a healthy country and have good prospects. They don't have that now.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] Konstantinos's daughter Androniki wants to be a civil engineer when she grows up. But he worries that if Greece cannot pay back its debts, the economy will never improve. Konstantinos brings up a friend, who, after months of searching, finally found a part-time job.
[K. Kotitsas:] [Through interpreter] And when I asked her how much they were going to pay her, she told me that for working six hours a day, six days a week, she would get 190 euros a month.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] That's only about $200. These are labor abuses, says Euclid Tsakalotos, the alternate foreign minister who leads the Greek government team that was negotiating with eurozone and International Monetary Fund lenders. The Greeks, he says, want a deal that's fair to workers and pensioners, but the eurozone dismissed their proposals as amateurish.
[Euclid Tsakalotos:] We did come with very serious proposals. It's just that the other side were never willing to accept proposals on a different logic than theirs.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] This impasse led to the prime minister calling the referendum, which Tsakalotos describes as part of the negotiating process.
[Unidentified Man:] [Speaking Greek].
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] It's unclear to the Kotitsas brothers if that process will ever start again and when Greek banks, closed all week, will reopen. European leaders are urging Greeks to vote yes, but the brothers decided to vote no. Like many Greeks, they worry what either choice will bring. For NPR News, I'm Joanna Kakissis in Athens.

[Melissa Block:] The Iraqi city of Ramadi is now completely in the control of militant fighters from the self-declared Islamic State. The city fell over the weekend despite a heavy bombing campaign by the U.S.-led coalition. Iraqi government forces were killed or fled. Tim Arango, the New York Times Baghdad Bureau chief says seizing control of Ramadi is a big win for ISIS.
[Tim Arango:] Especially at a time when the Americans are constantly saying they're on the defensive and getting weaker. You know, it's a huge symbolic victory for them and, I would imagine, would, you know, help with recruitment.
[Melissa Block:] And Arango says Shiite militiamen are now mobilizing to retake Ramadi, the provincial capital of Anbar Province.
[Tim Arango:] Well, today we saw thousands of Shiite militiamen streaming towards Anbar getting ready for what comes next in the coming days in terms of offensive on Ramadi. Inside Ramadi itself where ISIS has been consolidating control, we've heard that they've been going around looking for, you know, security forces, people who had been loyal to the government, asking them to come and repent at the mosque, and in other cases we've heard of executions as well. So it's another grim day in Anbar.
[Melissa Block:] Let's talk about those Shiite militias that you say are gathering, getting ready to try to retake Ramadi from the Islamic State militants. Are they in a position to do that? Are they armed? Do they have backing to try to retake the city?
[Tim Arango:] They're certainly seen as a very, very capable force. They've been the main force that has pushed back the Islamic State from other areas of Iraq, such as around Tikrit. They're very well armed, partly by the Iranian government. And they also have the manpower. Iraq is a you know, is a Shia-dominated country, and a lot of these militia units were formed last summer when the Shiite clerics put out a call to arms, so they certainly have the manpower, and they certainly have the morale and the motivation.
[Melissa Block:] You mentioned that these militias are armed by the Iranian government. Are they under the control of Iranian commanders? Whom do they answer to?
[Tim Arango:] Right now there's been a great effort by the prime minister to show that he's in control. And it's an interesting situation because in an individual case like with Anbar, they didn't rush to Anbar until the prime minister ordered them to, but in effect, they are the most powerful ones, anyway are Iranian essentially Iranian-directed.
[Melissa Block:] Let's talk a bit about sectarian fears of what might happen next in Ramadi. We should remind people this is an overwhelmingly Sunni area. You have thousands of Shiite militiamen going in to try to retake control. Is there great concern that this will be yet another sectarian bloodbath in Iraq?
[Tim Arango:] Well, there's certainly great concern, particularly on part of the American officials because in recent weeks and months they've advised the prime minister not to send them. However, it's important to note that things had gotten so bad in Anbar that it was Anbar officials, actually, including the Anbar official council, over the weekend that voted to ask for the militias to come and save them. So there is some legitimacy to them being there, but those concerns about sectarian violence and revenge killings there are those concerns are always there.
[Melissa Block:] Tim, what does all this say about the strategy of U.S. airstrikes to try to support Iraqi government forces on the ground and how effective those have been or ineffective?
[Tim Arango:] Yeah. Well, it clearly raises questions about the U.S. strategy. In that, it clearly shows that the combination of American air power and the Iraqi security forces, at least in Anbar, was not enough. And that's why the militias are being called in. When we saw the operation in Tikrit several weeks ago at first it was just the militias and Iraqi security forces. That didn't work until the American airstrikes came in, so I think going forward, the big question is, to what scale will the American airstrikes continue with the militias on the ground? And my understanding is the Americans said they will continue to support it as long as the militias are, you know, answering to the prime minister. But there also needs to be coordination because the Americans are very worried about, you know, friendly fire incidents. So they need to know where these militias are, so they don't bomb then.
[Melissa Block:] Tim Arango, Baghdad Bureau chief of The New York Times. Tim, thanks so much.
[Tim Arango:] Thank you very much, Melissa.

[Guy Raz:] Just hours ago, Michael Phelps finished his last race as a competitive swimmer. It was the men's 4x100 meter medley relay. Phelps was one of four swimmers racing for team USA, which was heavily favored to win the gold. A quick word now. If you're waiting to watch the results on prime time tonight, you may want to turn the volume down because we're going to NPR's Howard Berkes now in London who was at that race this evening. Howard, unbelievable. The U.S. team took the gold. Michael Phelps' 18th career gold medal. Tell us about the race.
[Howard Berkes, Byline:] Well, it was an amazing race. You had Matthew Grevers start out in the backstroke on world record pace. Then the United States had lost its lead in the breaststroke. Michael Phelps came in with the butterfly, regained the lead. And then Adrian Nathan in the freestyle leg just blew them out of the water, finished a body length ahead, a clear no-question gold medal. For a race, you know, that the United States team has won every Olympics it's ever competed in in this event, great way to cap Michael Phelps' career.
[Guy Raz:] We know that his mother was in the stands cheering him on. What was it like? What was the atmosphere like inside the building during that race?
[Howard Berkes, Byline:] Oh, the place was just rocking. The noise was deafening. And, you know, there were some Americans there for sure, but people from all the countries that were there to see the other swimmers were also cheering. I think everybody wanted to see Michael Phelps go out with something memorable. They were there to see it. There was a lot of excitement at being a witness to history.
[Guy Raz:] He is leaving swimming now with a total of 22 Olympic medals, 18 gold medals. Incredible. What's next for him?
[Howard Berkes, Byline:] Well, by the way, those aren't just swimming records. Those are records for any Olympic athlete ever. He is the most decorated Olympic athlete ever to compete in the Olympics, and there's no one anywhere near close who's competing today. These are records that are likely to stand for a long time. And all we've heard so far about what his plans are next, he said that he's definitely getting out of the pool. He's not going to swim in any kind of competitive races at all. He says what he wants to do is travel, which is what, you know, a lot of us want to do when we retire. He's only 27. It's not a full retirement, but he said he wants to travel. He wants to see the world. He wants to see the world, I think, other than from a hotel that he's staying in to get into a pool, you know, the next day. And that's what he's that's all he's said so far about what he plans to do.
[Guy Raz:] Howard, another piece of history made today with Oscar Pistorius, a double amputee running in an Olympic race. Tell us about that one.
[Howard Berkes, Byline:] That was also an amazing sight. Eighty thousand people in the stadium on their feet roaring and cheering when his name was announced. He ran in a early heat of the 400 meters and he qualified. And he runs on these carbon fiber legs called blades, and it's a really otherworldly kind of sight. He's an amazing athlete. There's some controversy about whether he should be competing in the Olympics, but he did meet the qualifying time. And he ran, you know, he ran faster today than almost half the field that ran. So he'll be in the semifinals tomorrow. It would be a surprise if he made it into the finals, but he did he's already made history. He's very happy about it, and people are very excited to see this barrier broken at the Olympics.
[Guy Raz:] That's NPR's Howard Berkes reporting on the Olympics for us from London. Howard, thanks.
[Howard Berkes, Byline:] You're welcome, Guy.

[Steve Inskeep:] It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
[David Greene:] And I'm David Greene. Good morning. College students have been heading back to school, and so has President Obama. For the last two weeks, the president has been visiting campuses in swing states around the country. He's been urging students to register and vote. His campaign says it is also working to win the votes of young people who are not in school. Here's NPR's Scott Horsley.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] It's a brand new semester on college campuses, and that means a brand new class of potential voters. Rebecca Hinch attended an Obama rally this week near the University of Virginia.
[Rebecca Hinch:] All of my friends are here. So the majority of people at least I know are here for Obama. So I think it's definitely, he's a young people's person.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Four years ago, Mr. Obama won more than two-thirds of the youth vote, and he still enjoys a sizeable lead over Mitt Romney and his iPod-loving running mate Paul Ryan. Still, a survey this summer by Circle, a Tufts-University center that studies young people and politics, found nearly four in 10 voters under the age of 30 are disappointed with Mr. Obama. For some, the change he promised has not come quickly enough.
[Patrick Morgan:] Well, four years is a long time for me.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Patrick Morgan of Falls Church, Virginia is 18 years old. That means he was just 14 when the Obama presidency began.
[Patrick Morgan:] I wouldn't say I'm disappointed. It didn't live up to my hopes. But it didn't fall below my expectations. I think there's some things that I wish could've been done that haven't, closing of Guantanamo Bay and wish there could've been a lot more done with immigration and solved that.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] At another campus rally in Iowa this week, Mr. Obama warned his political opponents will try to capitalize on youthful disillusionment.
[President Barack Obama:] They're counting on young people sitting this one out. They say, well, you know? Obama's, you know, he's greyer now. He's not as new and as fresh as he was in 2008, so young people aren't going to turn out the same way.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] The president sounds as if he's joking, but his concern is genuine. Republicans are highlighting the high unemployment rate among young people: 13-and-a-half percent for those between 20 and 25. What's more, many young people now take for granted changes that seem dramatic to their parents on gay rights, for example.
[President Barack Obama:] We don't need to rewrite our Constitution to somehow say that people who love each other and aren't bothering anybody else, that somehow they cannot get married.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Young people may applaud the president's newfound endorsement of same-sex marriage. But to those like Rebecca Hinch, Mr. Obama's personal evolution seems less like breaking ground than catching up.
[Rebecca Hinch:] I mean, I have a lot of gay friends at UVA, so I just think it's dumb that we're still arguing over it, honestly, and that it's such a big issue. It should be, like, you know, not a big deal. That's my personal thing.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Each year, Beloit College prepares a kind of field guide to update professors on how incoming freshmen see the world. This year's guide notes that for young people just entering college, Bill Clinton is an elder statesman. Richard Nixon has always been dead, and the secretary of state has almost always been a woman.
[Olivia Brown:] It's been most of my life like that. And looking back at how it used to be, I think that shows that it would be, like, progress that our country's going through, being able to have so much diversity in our government.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] But for UVA sophomore Olivia Brown, that kind of diversity, even the first African-American president, is something she's more or less grown accustomed to. So Mr. Obama takes pains to remind young people of other changes that have come in the last four years, including the health care overhaul, the end of the war in Iraq and big investments in green energy. The president acknowledges there's still a lot of unfinished work to do. As he did in 2008, he flatters young people about their role in making it happen.
[President Barack Obama:] I'm asking you to believe, not in my ability to bring about the changes you want to see. I'm asking you to believe in your abilities. I'm asking you to believe in what you can accomplish.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] That message works for Olivia Brown.
[Olivia Brown:] I know a lot of people are probably didn't get all the change that they wanted. But I don't think that kind of change can come in just four years. And I'm really excited to be able to spend my first vote on voting for him.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Some 15 million Americans have turned 18 and become eligible to vote since Mr. Obama's first election four years ago. He hopes a lot of them feel the same way. Scott Horsley, NPR News, the White House.

[Steve Inskeep:] And let's talk now about a man who served his country out of uniform for generations. J. Edgar Hoover created the Federal Bureau of Investigation as we know it today. In his lifetime, he built up an image as a hero. His career went from the end of World War I to the 1970s. Since death in 1972, many have reevaluated Hoover as a menace. Now, Hoover is the subject of a movie in which he is played by Leonardo DiCaprio, in a film directed by Clint Eastwood. Kenneth Turan has a review.
[Kenneth Turan:] "J. Edgar" is a brooding melodrama with strong political overtones that examines the public and private life of a man with a phenomenal will to power, a man who headed the omnipotent Federal Bureau of Investigation for 48 years. Though in theory, he served eight presidents, in practice, J. Edgar Hoover served only himself. Hoover did champion scientific crime-fighting in general, and the use of fingerprints in particular. Here, he faces off against a dubious state police official in the aftermath of the kidnapping of Charles Lindberg's infant son.
[Leonardo Dicaprio:] [as J. Edgar Hoover] Where's the ransom note?
[Dermot Mulroney:] [as Colonel Schwartzkopf] Of course.
[Leonardo Dicaprio:] [as J. Edgar Hoover] You are touching that with your bare hands, as well.
[Dermot Mulroney:] [as Colonel Schwartzkopf] We checked. They are none of those finger imprints that you fancy so valuable, Mr. Hoover.
[Leonardo Dicaprio:] [as J. Edgar Hoover] Please hand it over, Mr. Schwarzkopf.
[Dermot Mulroney:] [as Colonel Schwartzkopf]. That's Colonel Schwartzkopf.
[Kenneth Turan:] But we see much more of Hoover's dark, pathological side, of his mania for collecting incriminating evidence on people like Martin Luther King, Jr. He even taped President John F. Kennedy in a compromising position and used the transcript to get what he wanted from Kennedy's brother, Robert.
[Jeffrey Donovan:] [as Robert Kennedy] Please leave the transcripts here with me.
[Leonardo Dicaprio:] [as J. Edgar Hoover] Yes, sir. Oh, and feel free and share them with your brother. Oh, and let him know that I have a copy of my own for safekeeping.
[Kenneth Turan:] "J. Edgar" also deals with Hoover's unacknowledged private life, his lifelong personal attachment to Clyde Tolson, his closest colleague at the FBI. "J. Edgar" theorizes that the men had strong feelings for each other that were never acted on, a situation that gives Hoover's story unexpected poignance. We must never forget our history, Hoover was fond of saying. We must never lower our guard. The FBI director was concerned about Communists, but this film insists it's not reds we need to worry about, but people very much like J. Edgar Hoover himself.
[Steve Inskeep:] Kenneth Turan reviews movies for MORNING EDITION and the Los Angeles Times.

[Robert Siegel:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
[Michele Norris:] And I'm Michele Norris. A young bluegrass musician from New England heads south in search of his musician father, who abandoned him long ago. That's the premise of Gregory Spatz's novel, Fiddler's Dream. Alan Cheuse has a review.
[Alan Cheuse Reporting:] When a gifted writer finds the language to combine a love of music and a knowledge of music, something just clicks. The story follows a young musician, Jesse Allison, who leaves Vermont for Nashville hoping to achieve a double dream, find his long-lost father and make music with bluegrass legend Bill Monroe. And almost immediately you find yourself riding along with him and swaying along with him to the music he makes. The first night on the road, Jesse pitches his tent at a campsite and takes out his mandolin. He loves the feeling of the neck between his left thumb and palm, Spatz writes. How it makes his own throat ache and feel pressed out like being full and hungry at the same time. And he loves the curve of the scroll too. The dully varnished, curly maple upswelling like a horse's neck, like a found unfolding, the wood swooping and beveled, going down from the scroll into the belly. In Nashville, Jesse bunks in the house of a family friend, violinmaker Jenny Fried. Jesse becomes enamored of a fiddle she's refurbished. And even before he takes off for south of Memphis and his father's new address, you know that he and that instrument are going to make beautiful music together. You hear it in Spatz's prose every time Jesse begins to play, by himself or in jam sessions with some of Nashville's finest. And this novel about finding one's vocation and finding reconciliation, it too jams right along to its minor key but satisfying conclusion.
[Michele Norris:] The book is Fiddler's Dream by Gregory Spatz. Our reviewer, Alan Cheuse, teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

[Melissa Block:] And we're going to leave Michele on the convention floor there and go back in time a bit. Earlier today, Michele spoke with Washington D.C. lawyer Eric Holder. He was co-chair of Obama's vice-presidential selection committee. Holder said that 26 candidates were considered and the final group of six or seven was vetted by a team, including lawyers and accountant and a doctor. In the end, the committee decided that Joseph Biden brought the whole package of experience, policy beliefs and ability. Here's Michele's interview with Eric Holder.
[Michele Norris:] Joe Biden's name was always, you know, within the possibilities when people talked about the short list that the Obama campaign might be looking at, but it was widely assumed that he was perhaps at the back of the pack. Was his role in the situation in Georgia a game-changer, his decision to get on a plane and go and get on the ground and take a look at the situation there?
[Eric Holder:] No, it really wasn't, and that was actually, I think, one of the surprises that we had, at least that I had. At one of our first meetings in Chicago, Senator Obama discussed people who he thought were going to be finalists and potentially the vice president. Senator Biden was among those people. There was a chemistry between them. He said he liked Joe Biden and liked the interaction they'd had on the campaign trail. And so, he was always among that relatively small group of people throughout the process, and the Georgia trip really wasn't a factor.
[Michele Norris:] Joe Biden, Senator Biden, does have obvious vulnerabilities though. His penchant to speak sometimes without filters. There are charges of plagiarism that go back several years. There are women who still are have a lingering anger at Senator Biden over his handling of the Anita Hill hearings. How is the campaign prepared to deal with these issues? Because the Republicans will go after him on this.
[Eric Holder:] Right, and these are all issues that we talked about with people in Congress and with the various constituent groups. Women, for instance, talked about, you know, you have to look at the totality of Joe Biden's experience and talked about, you know, his role in passing the Violence Against Women Act. His ability to speak and speak directly, sometimes using maybe more words than people would like, is in some in many ways, we think a strength. We think that's something that will connect him to the American people. This is a guy who comes from Scranton, from modest roots.
[Michele Norris:] No worries, though, that he'll go off-script?
[Eric Holder:] No, I think that one of the things you also have to understand is that you look at the way in which he conducted his presidential campaign this time, there was a degree of discipline that you saw there in the way in which he answered questions. I mean, that famous line that he had in describing, you know, Rudy Giuliani, coming up with sentences a noun, a verb and 911. Brian Williams asked him about his ability to restrict his verbal output, and he simply said yes, you know? But I want to make clear that we don't want to restrict him. We want Joe Biden to be Joe Biden. The ability to connect with working-class people will only come if we let him be himself, and so we're not worried about that.
[Michele Norris:] Now, I've talked with voters, even people who are Democratic voters, even people who are very happy about the choice, but they scratch their heads a bit and they say but this campaign is all about change. Joe Biden doesn't necessarily reflect change. This is someone who's been in the Senate for decades.
[Eric Holder:] Yeah, been in the senate for decades, but not necessary a Washington. This is a guy who, as a result of a very, you know, unfortunate and compelling, you know, accident that took his wife and his young daughter away from him, has gone home every night. You know, every night that he's in D.C., he gets on the Amtrak Acela or the other one, the Metroliner, and goes home and sleeps in his bed in Delaware. But he's also seen as a person who has the ability to reach across the aisle. He's one of those few senators, I think, though he is a senior senator, who is seen as somebody who can move things in D.C. So I think he'll be fine in that regard.
[Michele Norris:] He can be tough. He knows how to throw an elbow when he has to. Is that part of his role, and will we see that this evening?
[Eric Holder:] No question about that. He has known John McCain probably longer than anybody in this campaign, and I think that he'll talk about why he thinks John McCain would not make a good president, why Senator Obama would be a much better president. You know, he's not a person who's shy and retiring. He knows how to throw elbows, as you said, and I bet we'll see, you know, some of that tonight and throughout the campaign.
[Michele Norris:] Eric Holder, thank you very much for speaking with us.
[Eric Holder:] Thanks for having me.
[Melissa Block:] Eric Holder co-chaired the vice-presidential selection committee. He was speaking with our co-host, Michele Norris.

[Jacki Lyden:] Another financial calamity came to light this week, one that left investors with $50 billion worth of nothing. It's the biggest Ponzi scheme fraud in financial history. The man behind it, Wall Street money manager Bernard Madoff. He's a former chairman of the NASDAQ Stock Exchange, and he was arrested Thursday after confessing that his investment fund was, to use his words, one big lie. His clients woke up yesterday morning to massive losses hedgefunds, big universities, social climbers from Park Avenue to Palm Beach, and at least one former model. That's Barbara Flood. She's a stylist and designer in Manhattan, and she won't say exactly how much she's lost. The problem, she says, isn't just the money.
[Ms. Barbara Flood:] The thing for me about Madoff is the shock of people who knew him, and they were so friendly with him, as I was, could turn around and do something like this. I'm still quite stunned about the whole thing.
[Jacki Lyden:] About what seems like a betrayal.
[Ms. Barbara Flood:] Absolutely. I mean, I dress a lot of people, and I style for people, and his wife was one of the people who I worked with and his brother's wife, also. So I knew them. I knew them very well. And my uncle brought me to see him, and I didn't have the kind of money that people had to invest, and my uncle said, I think you should be with this man because this man never loses, you know, any money. So I said, OK. And we started slowly and sure enough, he didn't lose any money, I thought, up until a few days ago, when I came home to three phone calls, you know, from my lawyer, from my accountant, from somebody in Palm Beach.
[Jacki Lyden:] Investing with him was prestigious, wasn't it? I mean, didn't one have to be invited?
[Ms. Barbara Flood:] Yes. Why? I don't know. But it was the best thing in New York City was to try to get into Bernie Madoff. And to make enough money that you could get to go into Bernie Madoff because he only took people, this was not me because he did it as a friend, but he only took people that had a million dollars. And everybody wanted to be there because nobody thought that they would ever lose any money.
[Jacki Lyden:] What did your statements show? How did it work? Did you make money all along?
[Ms. Barbara Flood:] You made money all along. The statement was a series of stocks that went up or down. And so, there were about 50 stocks, and you'd get a statement once a month. You could never talk directly to Bernie Madoff. He was not available, even to friends I mean even to me, he was not available. And you'd get a statement, and you couldn't read the statement. And nobody could understand what the statement said. But after trying to figure out apples and oranges, you know, my accountant would say, well, the thing is, he's always making money. And always making money sounded very good to all of us, especially at a time when you're trying to grow your little puske, you know. I was trying to grow my modeling money into something better, so when I finished modeling and started to do other things, it would really help. On paper, I grew it. Now, I'm not sure. But if I asked for $10,000 or $15,000, I would get it within three days, you know. So did he actually invest in stocks? Could he possibly have done this on his own without that entire staff knowing about it? These are all questions that I'm sure all of us are asking today. And will we ever get an answer? I don't know.
[Jacki Lyden:] Is everyone phoning everyone else? Are you phoning other friends?
[Ms. Barbara Flood:] Yes. I mean, we're phoning other friends, and I have some other relatives through that same family connection who put a little bit of money in. But they, in fact, put money in, and they lost everything. Nobody, even though we thought it was strange, nobody ever really sat down and said, wait a minute, this doesn't make any sense until now. The bottom question is, will any of us ever see our money again?
[Jacki Lyden:] Barbara Flood is one of the thousands of victims who've lost money in the Bernard Madoff investment scandal, and she joins us from New York. Thank you very much for being with us, Barbara.
[Ms. Barbara Flood:] Oh, thank you so much, Jacki.

[Farai Chideya:] Author Caille Millner may be only 27, but she's an old 27. Her memoir recently hit bookshelves. "The Golden Road: Notes On My Gentrification" follows Millner on a journey of self-discovery from her California home to Harvard to South Africa and back again. Hey, Caille, how you doing?
[Ms. Caille Millner:] I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.
[Farai Chideya:] Well, I'm really delighted to talk to you about this because I went to Harvard, too. I am class of '90, and I'm sure that you're a decade or more after me. But there's definitely a kind of culture shock of moving through all these different racial and cultural worlds. I guess, let me start with this. When was the first time that you realized that you were different in any way from the people who were around you?
[Ms. Caille Millner:] I think it was when my parents moved out of our neighborhood, our original neighborhood. I'd grown up in sort of a lower middle-class Latino neighborhood, and we moved to an affluent neighborhood and all of a sudden everything changed. So we moved to this affluent neighborhood and I started going to public school there. And some of the people who were there were bussed in from my old neighborhood. And all of a sudden, they were like, well, you know, you're not one of us anymore. First of all, you're black. Second of all, you know, you have money. So, you know, don't act as if you can still kind of participate in our culture.
[Farai Chideya:] You also aspired to the Ivy League and you got in. How was Harvard the real place, the real school different from what you had dreamed or expected or fantasized about?
[Ms. Caille Millner:] Well, I thought a couple of things when I was going to Harvard. I thought, first of all, it was going to be a good school and that I'd have a good learning experience, which I did. The other thing I had hoped for was that I was going to find, you know, a quote, unquote, "black community." Right? I'd never lived with one and I really wanted to have that experience, whatever that means. So I got there and there was a black community of sorts, but pretty much they were all students who had the same experience I had growing up for the most part. Very few of them were working class or, you know, had grown up in urban areas or anything like that. And we all kind of hung together, but I found out pretty quickly that that wasn't a good enough reason to build a community -just because we were black.
[Farai Chideya:] How did you find Harvard dealt with the issue of race and mixing? You know, you would like to think that certainly there would be something more than oil and water, but I found a lot of oil and water.
[Ms. Caille Millner:] Absolutely. I think they don't want to talk about it all. And to some extent, I don't blame them because it's such a minefield. But there's definitely the feeling that, oh, you know, all of you kids can just be with whoever you want to be with. And so the people who have wealth and power, who've always had wealth and power, they congregate together. And the people who, you know, like me, are looking for this community, they try to stay there. And the rest of us are kind of left to float and to get punished for floating, and that's how it is.
[Farai Chideya:] Another place that you both did and didn't fit in was in South Africa. And you were among the colored community and you probably looked like some of the people in the colored community. I use that term because that's what they themselves use. How did you find yourself situated in South Africa?
[Ms. Caille Millner:] On one hand, I would say it was really refreshing because I didn't have to interact with the whole American racial psychosis. Now I got to see how other people's racial psychosis worked. So it was kind of interesting. [unintelligible]. But the colored community is sort of fascinating, and I don't share anything with them. They have a different religion, most of them follow Islam; we don't speak the same language, they speak Afrikaans, you know. So there was there's really no markers except for skin color, which works fine until I open my mouth. So I was able to kind of watch them, and they have it troubled me. They had most of them, not all of them but most of them have a sort of a deep contempt for the black South African population.
[Farai Chideya:] Tell us about your experience in Orania.
[Ms. Caille Millner:] So Orania is a separatist community for white Afrikaaners in South Africa. And I was doing some freelance work for Newsweek's international edition at the time. And my boss said, oh, why don't you go Orania and write a story? What I found there and they don't want to participate in South Africa the way it is now because they feel that whites can't get a fair shake there because of affirmative action. And basically, what I found was people who wanted to separate themselves based on, not just race, but definitely culture because they didn't like the sort of the British South African population either. In fact, they probably like to meet them less than anyone else. So they said, you know what? If you grew up Afrikaans, if you speak Afrikaans, you're welcome here. If not, you were not. And that brought me back to all the things that I had been dealing with about this idea that, you know, cultural authenticity means everything. And it just really brought me back to the idea of how dangerous that is. And it really brought all of these back home to me and that was when I said, you know what? I've got to go home. I've got to deal with whatever is going on back in America. I've got to stay here and fight it out.
[Farai Chideya:] What does fighting it out mean to you?
[Ms. Caille Millner:] I would say sort of living this idea in action, right? Living this idea that you don't have to be culturally authentic in action. So, for me, it just means living my life with no apologies basically. So, you know, for me it would be something like, you know, I'm here among the editorial board of the Chronicle. I'm doing yoga. I'm, you know, flying trapeze. I'm basically running a lot...
[Farai Chideya:] Flying trapeze?
[Ms. Caille Millner:] Yeah. It's fabulous.
[Farai Chideya:] That's awesome.
[Ms. Caille Millner:] Yeah. It's great. It hurts your knees, though, you've got to be careful. So, yeah, for me it's about living in action and just showing people and showing myself everyday, of course, that, you know, you don't have to be in a certain way.
[Farai Chideya:] Well, on that note, a perfect note. Caille, thanks a lot.
[Ms. Caille Millner:] Thank you.
[Farai Chideya:] Caille Millner is the author of "The Golden Road: Notes on My Gentrification." She sits on the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle.

[Robert Siegel:] A celebrated author of science fiction has died. Richard Matheson was 87. He may be best remembered for writing some of the most disturbing episodes of "The Twilight Zone" and "Star Trek." That includes this one, in which an evil duplicate of Captain Kirk wreaks havoc aboard the Starship Enterprise. As NPR's Neda Ulaby reports, Matheson left behind reams of darkly, engrossing science fiction and much of it was made into movies.
[Neda Ulaby, Byline:] How many authors could claim one of their novels was made into not one, not two but three different movies about a man inheriting a post-apocalyptic wasteland? Starting with "The Last Man On Earth" in 1964. "I Am Legend" was originally published in 1954. It's probably partly responsible for today's wave of shows about mutant zombies. John Adams edited an anthology about end of the world scenarios. It's called "Wasteland." I interviewed him for a story six years ago when "I Am Legend's" most recent adaptation came out.
[John Adams:] The whole world's become vampires and there's the one guy left and it doesn't look good.
[Neda Ulaby, Byline:] In the original book, "The Last Man Standing," fortifies his little house against former friends of neighbors. They come out at night thirsting for his blood. The first film adaptation feels closest to the novel, but it's not close enough for Adams.
[John Adams:] Richard Matheson wrote the screenplay for that movie, but then they made so many changes that he made them take his name off of it.
[Neda Ulaby, Byline:] "The Last Man On Earth" stars Vincent Price in what Adams calls a unforgivably hammy performance. The remake from 1971 pitted Charlton Heston against the ghoulish survivors. "The Omega Man" is notable now for a then-daring interracial romance and an amazing opening sequence that might be the template for half the world's video games. Heston cruises a deserted downtown Los Angeles in a red Ford Galaxy convertible, picking off mutants with a gun.
[Akiva Goldsman:] My first exposure to the story was "Omega Man."
[Neda Ulaby, Byline:] Akiva Goldsman wrote and produced the third adaptation of "I Am Legend," a blockbuster starring Will Smith. But you did not need to be science fiction nerd to be influenced by the work of Richard Matheson. You just needed to turn on the television. Matheson wrote more than a dozen "Twilight Zone" episodes. One of the most famous starred William Shatner as an unstable airplane passenger convinced he's seen someone or something on the wing. That was an era when people watched for science fiction stars like Richard Matheson or Harlan Ellison on the credits. Novelist Michael Koryta told NPR in 2002 that Matheson's gift was selling skeptic readers on implausible stories. He grounded you in reality, then slowly slipped in the surreal.
[Michael Koryta:] All of the sudden, as strange as the events become, there's a part of you that says maybe, just maybe this could happen and maybe it could happen to me.
[Neda Ulaby, Byline:] That was the goal exactly, said Richard Matheson in an interview with the Archive of American Television in 2002.
[Richard Matheson:] My ambition was to change the thinking of the world and I realize that's a little heavy.
[Neda Ulaby, Byline:] Richard Matheson hoped his scariest stories about worlds gone terribly wrong might equip his readers for reality. Neda Ulaby, NPR News.

[Audie Cornish:] The U.S. has temporarily shuttered diplomatic posts across the Middle East and Africa, in response to a fear of an imminent al-Qaida attack. We now know that fear began with intercepted communications between the head of al-Qaida and the leader of its branch in Yemen, called al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. AQAP is one of the terror network's most active and most effective affiliates. The group played a role in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting rampage. It also claimed responsibility for attempting to blow up an airliner over Detroit a month later, and for the attempted Times Square bombing in 2010. For more on AQAP, we're joined by Gregory Johnsen. He's author of "The Last Refuge: Yemen, Al-Qaida and America's War in Arabia." Welcome to the program.
[Gregory Johnsen:] Thanks so much for having me.
[Audie Cornish:] So let's go back to the beginning. How did AQAP as we know it form?
[Gregory Johnsen:] Right, so this is a group that really has its roots in a prison break in Yemen that took place in February 2006. And this is when 23 al-Qaida prisoners tunneled out of their cell into a neighboring mosque, and they sort of dusted themselves off, said their morning prayers, and then they walked out the front door to freedom. And among those escapees was the head what would turn in to be the head of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, Nasir al-Wuyashi.
[Audie Cornish:] And tell us a little bit more about him and some of the other more remarkable characters in the group.
[Gregory Johnsen:] So Nasir al-Wuyashi is someone who left Yemen in the late 1990s and he headed to Afghanistan to join al-Qaida there. So he went into the training camps that al-Qaida had established there in Afghanistan. And Osama bin Laden sort of brought him under his wing. And for the next four years, Nasir al-Wuyashi essentially served as the aide-de-camp to Osama bin Laden. They were separated in the battle of Tora Bora in 2001. And Nasir al-Wuyashi made his way south and then into Iran, where he was arrested and eventually sent back to Yemen in 2003, where he spent the next couple of years in prison before breaking out, as we said, in 2006.
[Audie Cornish:] They're also known for their bomb making capabilities. Tell us kind of what we've seen from them and who are the figures within AQAP who are kind of responsible for this reputation.
[Gregory Johnsen:] Right, so the main bomb maker that Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula has is a Saudi national by the name of Ibrahim al-Asiri. He was a chemistry student. But at one point he was so fed up with the images that he saw out of Iraq from the U.S. forces fighting against the resistance there, that he dropped out of college and tried to make his way to Iraq. But before he could actually cross the border from Saudi Arabia into Iraq, he was arrested by Saudi forces. And, in fact, he told his younger brother that that was the first time being in Saudi prison that he realized that Saudi Arabia was in the pay of what he called the crusaders. He was let out of prison in late 2005. And in 2006, he made his way across the border into Yemen and he's been constructing bombs ever since. So we know that he was responsible for the Christmas Day underwear bomb. He was responsible for a pair of cartridge bombs in 2010. But the thing that's really important about Ibrahim al-Asiri is that this is an individual who goes to school on his past failures. And one of the very worrying things is that each time he builds a bomb it seems to be better than the last. And despite all the millions and millions that the U.S. has put into airline security since September 11th, 2001, he's still making bombs that quite possibly could evade that security.
[Audie Cornish:] You wrote today that the United States is fighting the al-Qaida that was instead of the al-Qaida that is. What did you mean by that?
[Gregory Johnsen:] Yeah, absolutely. I think that in Yemen the U.S. is essentially using the same sort of playbook that they used in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And the U.S. had a fair degree of success with that. But in Yemen it's a little bit different. So al-Qaida in Afghanistan was a group of Arabs in a non-Arab country. Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula is primarily a group of Yemenis in Yemen. This means that they're tied to society in a way that the group in Afghanistan wasn't. They have tribal and clan ties. They're often intermarried to different tribes. And they have identities that allow them to travel around the countryside in a way that wasn't always possible in Afghanistan. So tracking these individuals in determining which Yemeni is a member of al-Qaida, and which Yemeni is just somebody who has a beard, carries a gun and talks about Islamic law, that's a very difficult thing to do from several thousand feet up in the air.
[Audie Cornish:] Gregory Johnsen, thank you so much for speaking with us.
[Gregory Johnsen:] Thanks for taking the time.
[Audie Cornish:] Gregory Johnsen, he's the author of the book "The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaida and America's War in Arabia."
[Melissa Block:] This is NPR.

[Alex Chadwick:] Today we are revisiting someone in San Francisco. A woman with a signature laugh... ...and a cat. She's Alicia Rose Parlette, 24, working as a Copy Editor at the San Francisco Chronicle and she has cancer. How long have you had that cat?
[Ms. Alicia Rose Parlette:] It's my roommate's cat, and he's four.
[Alex Chadwick:] Oh.
[Ms. Alicia Rose Parlette:] Yeah.
[Alex Chadwick:] How are you adjusting to living with a cat?
[Ms. Alicia Rose Parlette:] It was kind of hard at first. I think he hated me but it's better now.
[Alex Chadwick:] We first met Alicia last summer. She'd been diagnosed a few months earlier with Alveolar Soft Part Sarcoma. That's difficult to treat, and fortunately very rare, cancer. It had started in her hip and then moved on to her lungs. With the encouragement of Editors at the Chronicle she began to write about her experience and so far the paper has published sixteen of these highly personal accounts. Here's Alicia reading from her very first piece, published last June.
[Ms. Alicia Rose Parlette:] If I get through this, this story will help me remember the important moments along the way and in the worst of all circumstances, if I go through this life changing ordeal and my body just wears out and I die, I will die a writer, the one thing I've always wanted to be.
[Alex Chadwick:] Now it's ten months later, I'm back in San Francisco; Alicia has invited me to her apartment. She still has that laugh, but there have been many many complications. She's had a lot of pain and difficulty with the medications that are supposed to ease it. Worst of all, doctors told her they'd found evidence of the cancer in her brain. Something that for Alicia was too horrible to imagine.
[Ms. Alicia Rose Parlette:] I think I thought, and I still think of my brain as the most sacred part of my body. I mean maybe except for my heart. Your brain is where your personality is and the cancer had invaded that and that was very frightening.
[Alex Chadwick:] Alicia underwent a kind of targeted radiation treatment and it was successful. And overall her therapy seems to be holding the cancer at bay.
[Ms. Alicia Rose Parlette:] The spots on my lungs are pretty much unchanged and it looks like my hip tumor, it's still growing but it's growing at a slower rate than it was before which was kind of the whole point of this treatment. So, in that regard things are going better than I thought that they would.
[Alex Chadwick:] But it sounds like in other regards they're not.
[Ms. Alicia Rose Parlette:] Yeah, I think just emotionally I hit this wall. Where it's like oh, my god, I have cancer, Like, what is going on here, you know. At the last appointment it was a lot of good news, but I was just sobbing the entire time because I was in there because I have cancer. It just was hitting me over and over again and I think I had had these little walls of denial built up and they all just kind of broke down because so much was going on.
[Alex Chadwick:] Maybe that's what happens to you when you have cancer at any age. Although you've also had a twenty fourth birthday. Twenty four.
[Ms. Alicia Rose Parlette:] I have. Which was actually really good because I think when I first found out about the cancer you know I was wondering if I would have a twenty-fourth birthday.
[Alex Chadwick:] And that says Alicia is the problem. She finds it very hard to make any long term plans. There's just too much uncertainty in her life about her life.
[Ms. Alicia Rose Parlette:] I get kind of afraid about hoping too much and making really long term goals. Because if I just focus on what's going to happen like five years from now and then there is no five years from now, I spent all that time now hoping instead of doing stuff right now.
[Alex Chadwick:] You've traveled?
[Ms. Alicia Rose Parlette:] I've traveled. I went to Europe.
[Alex Chadwick:] So, you can learn to live with cancer. At least a little.
[Ms. Alicia Rose Parlette:] Right, right.
[Chadwcik:] You can learn to live with a cat.
[Ms. Alicia Rose Parlette:] Right.
[Alex Chadwick:] And you can learn to go to Europe to just go, go.
[Ms. Alicia Rose Parlette:] Right. Yeah, it was pretty empowering to just do that.
[Alex Chadwick:] What is going on with this pain medication that you're taking? Are you in pain now?
[Ms. Alicia Rose Parlette:] At this moment no because of the pain medication. I, I was on Vicoden for a couple of months and it just wasn't doing the job, and I was in pain pretty much all the time. And yeah, so now, I'm on Oxycotin and it's been kind of a rough adjustment, but right now I think it's worth it because it's the first time really in a few years that I haven't had pain. And I didn't realize how much the pain was bringing me down emotionally until it wasn't there and I felt so much better about everything.
[Alex Chadwick:] Over the months since she was diagnosed Alicia has managed to work at the paper most days. She says her editors at the Chronicle have been very compassionate, understanding for instance when a few weeks ago she asked for time off while she's trying to adjust to her new medication. Alicia has a broad network of friends and co-workers to keep her spirits up. Most of all there's her father who she says is her greatest support. He lost his wife, Alicia's mother, to a different cancer about three years ago. Now, even with all her problems, Alicia worries about her dad, and what her cancer is doing to him.
[Ms. Alicia Rose Parlette:] I think he thinks that he has to act like the strong dad all the time, and forgets that it's okay for him to be upset and scared and not know what to do. Because I don't know what to do, I don't know what's going on.
[Alex Chadwick:] But, you know, you seem as though you know what to do.
[Ms. Alicia Rose Parlette:] Oh.
[Alex Chadwick:] Since I saw you, since I saw you almost ten months ago, you just, you just have this clarity and sharpness.
[Ms. Alicia Rose Parlette:] Well, thank you.
[Alex Chadwick:] Or maybe it's being twenty-four, it's just that maturity.
[Ms. Alicia Rose Parlette:] I'm older now. I mean, I don't feel very clear a lot of the time. But, I mean, I don't know. What else am I going to do? I mean, it was okay for me and good for me to break down for a week and a half, couple weeks, stay home from work for a month, but I can't do that forever. I mean, I wouldn't want to do that forever. So, I kind of have to regroup and get a little bit more clear, and go back to my life, I guess.
[Alex Chadwick:] Alicia Parlette. You can listen to the first conversation that we had last summer, and find a link to her stories, her diaries in the San Francisco Chronicle. That's at our website, npr.org.

[Audie Cornish:] In India, food prices are low. This keeps poor people from starving. It also means little profit for farmers. That's caused Indian farmers to take to the streets.
[Unidentified Protesters:] [Chanting in foreign language].
[Audie Cornish:] They're demanding the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi forgive their debt and set higher prices for produce. NPR's Lauren Frayer traveled to rural Maharashtra to meet farmers, a powerful voting bloc in the upcoming election.
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] Sanjay Sathe grows onions on about an acre of land on a roadside.
[Sanjay Sathe:] Onion, onion.
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] This little farm prospered under Sathe's grandfather and father. Now the family has a side gig raising goats because the price of onions keeps falling. We're looking at about a football field-sized onion field. And how many onions can you grow in this field?
[Sanjay Sathe:] [Speaking Marathi].
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] From a good harvest, he says he can make the equivalent of about $350. That has to last his family half a year. But this harvest was not good. He made a paltry 15 bucks and decided to pull a stunt. Sathe sent a money order for his entire profit, that whopping $15, to the prime minister of India, who's running for re-election. Sathe wanted to show him how little farmers have to live on.
[Sanjay Sathe:] [Through interpreter] The government neglects farmers. It gives tax breaks to big business, and it plays up controversies over Hindu temples and such, all of it for votes. But look at us. We're dying here.
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] He's not being dramatic. There's been a suicide epidemic among Indian farmers as food prices drop and pesticides and fertilizers get more expensive. This Indian government has been cautious about meeting farmers' demands for higher food prices, says economist R. Ramakumar.
[R Ramakumar:] Farmers want higher prices. Consumers want lower prices. So there is enormous opposition to the idea of increasing the minimum support prices for farmers because it is argued that it will lead to inflation.
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] In the case of onions, there's no minimum price, so it's particularly volatile. In recent weeks, the price of onions has dropped by more than 80 percent because of surplus and fewer exports. Workers pack onions at Maharashtra's wholesale market. My producer and I found rows upon rows of flatbed trucks overflowing with onions rotting in the sun.
[Unidentified Farmer:] [Speaking Marathi].
[Unidentified Interpreter:] So they wait to see the prices will go up. So they waited, waited, waited. And now these have become really old.
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] Whose onions are these? Is it someone here?
[Unidentified Interpreter:] [Speaking Marathi].
[Unidentified Farmer:] [Speaking Marathi].
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] Farmer Vijay Ghayal simply refuses to sell at a loss.
[Vijay Ghayal:] [Speaking Hindi].
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] At this rate, he says he can't even afford the rent on his truck. The farmers all look desperate. Meanwhile, farmer Sathe got his money order returned from the prime minister. And he got some somber news from fellow farmers. Two local onion growers had killed themselves.
[Irabai Jadhav:] [Crying].
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] Sitting cross-legged on her cement floor, Irabai Jadhav describes how she lost her son. He was about $40,000 in debt. He drank pesticide in late November. Irabai's husband died of a heart attack 12 days later. And now she is left with all of their bills.
[Irabai Jadhav:] [Through interpreter] My son was the only one educated in our family. He's the only one who understood the loan documents. I'm worried about how I'll feed his children. I rue the day we ever became farmers. The farmer dies feeding this country, but no one fights for the farmer.
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] With elections coming, political parties are fighting for farmers' votes, offering to forgive debt owed to state banks. But many loans to farmers are private and predatory. Interest rates average around 40 percent. Half of India works in agriculture, and people here say onion prices can sway elections. The widow Irabai Jadhav's family says whoever's willing to help them will have their votes. Lauren Frayer, NPR News, in rural Maharashtra, India.

[Ari Shapiro:] This has been a dramatic week in politics. Here in Washington, President Obama delivered his final State of the Union address. In South Carolina, Republicans met for their latest presidential debate, the most fiery one yet. And in Iowa, caucuses are just a couple of weeks away. To discuss all of this, we're joined by Mary Kate Cary, who's a columnist for U.S. News & World Report, and Joy-Ann Reid, who is a national correspondent for MSNBC. Welcome to both of you.
[Joy-ann Reid:] Thank you.
[Mary Kate Cary:] Thank you.
[Ari Shapiro:] Let's start with last night's debate, where the biggest fireworks were between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Here they are debating whether Cruz is eligible to run for president having been born in Canada. Let's listen.
[Ted Cruz:] Listen, I've spent my entire life defending the Constitution before the U.S. Supreme Court, and, I'll tell you, I'm not going to be taking legal advice from Donald Trump.
[Donald Trump:] You don't have to. Take it from Laurence Tribe.
[Ted Cruz:] What I'll tell you also...
[Donald Trump:] Take it from your professor.
[Ari Shapiro:] Mary Kate, you were a speechwriter for the first President Bush. Is it fair to say you've got your roots in the establishment Republican camp. It sounds like if you were looking for somebody to eclipse Trump last night, it didn't happen.
[Mary Kate Cary:] I would say that's right.
[Ari Shapiro:] And so is there any hope left for the establishment Republicans to get their guy get in there or do they just have to come to grips with the fact that this is going to be a race in which Trump and Cruz and the other people on what's considered the fringe of the party are going to seize the day?
[Mary Kate Cary:] Well, for most of the establishment Republicans I've been talking to, I think step one right now is bargain with God. Start begging. Step number two, though you know, the RNC officially can't do anything. They're supposed to just be the referees here. So the party officially is not going to step in. So of the crowd that I am familiar with, their response is to get to Iowa and New Hampshire. For example, there is a huge crowd of longtime Bush family supporters, and they're all going up to New Hampshire the weekend before the New Hampshire primary and they're going to go door-to-door and work the phone banks and anything else they can do sit in diners, talk to people. And that's the answer. I assume Rubio people are doing the same thing, I assume Christie people are doing the same thing. And that's what's going to turn it around in their minds. That's how to fix it.
[Ari Shapiro:] Joy, there were a couple of lines in the debate last night about president Obama that rankled a lot of people. Chris Christie called the president a petulant child, and Ted Cruz said, we're going to kick your rear end out of the White House. And some observers said, you'd never make that remark about a white president. What do you think?
[Joy-ann Reid:] Well, I think that gets to the kernel of one of the many ironies of the situation that the establishment of the Republican Party finds itself in because right so Chris Christie is a part of that establishment wing, but he speaks about the president in such a degrading way as if the president is a child and not the commander in chief of the United States such a disrespectful way. That's suborned the kind of rage and the kind of paranoia, frankly, that you see among the base of the Republican Party. The problem for the establishment is that they've lost control of it. They suborned things quietly like birtherism. They winked and nodded at ideas like death panels. They have sort of allowed this kind of fury and paranoia to help them win midterm elections, but it's now out of control. So they've both locked themselves out of even the possibility of reaching out, particularly to African-American voters, who read the entire Republican Party not just Donald Trump, but all of it, every single part of it as being essentially sowing hatred of the president based at least in part on race. And that bleeds over to Hispanics, it bleeds over to Asian-Americans. It creates a vie that the Republican Party can't fix, and Donald Trump is just better at them at exploiting it.
[Ari Shapiro:] Mary Kate, you're shaking your head. You're looking quizzical.
[Mary Kate Cary:] Wait, wait. [Laughter]. I think, Joy, there are certainly elements of what you're saying that are true, but it seems to me that you're painting with a very broad brush. And there are plenty of good Republicans in the world who are not dealing in hatred and vitriol and racism. And I do think over the last few years when we have these candidates who say these crazy things the birtherism, you know, things like that that you pointed out there are people who stand up and say, I disavow that, I don't agree with that.
[Ari Shapiro:] But unfortunately, those people don't seem able to speak for the party in the primary right now unfortunately for them, unfortunately for the establishment Republicans.
[Mary Kate Cary:] Right. Yeah. It's a lot more fun to watch Donald Trump, you know, on TV with all this craziness coming out of his mouth than watch somebody disavow it. So that's why.
[Ari Shapiro:] Let's move on to the other big political story this week, President Obama's final State of the Union address, where he talked about one shortcoming of his presidency. Let's listen.
[Barack Obama:] It's one of the few regrets of my presidency that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better.
[Ari Shapiro:] Joy, why do you think President Obama has been so unable to bring Republicans into the fold?
[Joy-ann Reid:] I think it was partly on the part of the president of the United States. Barack Obama is he's accustomed to the way he was able to deal with the other party in Springfield, Ill., where he could go down state and play cards with Republican members and essentially build alliances on the ground that he could then take back with him to the floor of that body. But you have to remember that he also had the support of the president of the Senate. His mentor, Emil Jones, ran the party at that time. He ran the Senate at that time, the state Senate. And so he had a lot of back up and he was able to make those deals because it was Republicans who were in the minority and had to make deals to get things done. I think that the president, because he's grown up in this milieu where he's been able to talk across racial and party lines, presumed he'd be able to do that in Washington. But the fact is that the opposition party made a decision when he first got into office literally the day of the inauguration, there was a meeting among members of the Republican caucus to include Paul Ryan, to include Kevin McCarthy, who decided that total obstruction was the way they were going to go. I mean, you know, Vice President Joe Biden talks about this, that he would go to his even his friends in the United States Senate, and they'd say, we can't vote with you, we can't agree with anything that you want to do. Even when they put forward essentially Bob Dole's 1996 health care reform idea, Republicans couldn't vote for it. They couldn't vote for anything. It was total obstruction.
[Ari Shapiro:] Well...
[Joy-ann Reid:] And so I think he was speaking into a void and the president neither deployed fully his rhetorical gifts to try to fix it, nor I think, would it have been very effective, given the strategy on the other side.
[Ari Shapiro:] Well, Joy, if you put a lot of the blame on Republicans, my sense, Mary Kate, is that you think Barack Obama himself stands to blame for alienating Republicans early on.
[Mary Kate Cary:] I think what started it here in Washington, at least. I can't speak to the Chicago part like you were, Joy but in Washington, those first two years when he had both houses of Congress with him, he had absolutely no incentive to reach out to Republicans. And so that sort of started the muscle memory and I think he he canceled the Congressional barbecues, there weren't movie nights. All the things that used to sort of keep people at the table giving each other the benefit of the doubt have all disappeared under him. And I think that you sort of reap what you sow. And what bothers me is, for example, when he said in the State of the Union peddling fiction and political hot air and things like that, that is very divisive language, and it makes the other side not want to come to the table.
[Ari Shapiro:] That's Mary Kate Cary, former White House speechwriter and columnist for U.S. News & World Report and Joy-Ann Reid, MSNBC national correspondent and author of the new book, "Fracture: Barack Obama, The Clintons, And The Racial Divide." Thanks to both of you.
[Joy-ann Reid:] Thank you.
[Mary Kate Cary:] Thank you.

[Mary Louise Kelly:] For the third straight day, President Trump has lashed out at Congress. Today, he's questioning why the House voted tonight on a resolution to condemn his racist tweets instead of the four freshmen lawmakers he was tweeting about. Here's the president expanding on the sentiment in his tweets on the South Lawn of the White House yesterday.
[President Donald Trump:] If you're not happy in the U.S., if you're complaining all the time, very simply, you can leave. You can leave right now.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Well, House debate over the resolution has been bitterly partisan and at one point was suspended for more than an hour after Republicans argued that Speaker Nancy Pelosi's floor speech should be stricken from the record.
[Nancy Pelosi:] Every single member of this institution, Democratic and Republican, should join us in condemning the president's racist tweets.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Pelosi's comments were ruled out of order. The parliamentarian relied on precedent to say those comments were out of bounds, but Democrats defeated the GOP's attempt to strike them from the official record. Still the resolution passed mostly along party lines four Republicans and the newly Independent Justin Amash voted with Democrats to pass it. Earlier today, I spoke with Democratic Congressman Tom Malinowski of New Jersey. He introduced the resolution.
[Tom Malinowski:] When I heard the president's remarks, my first reaction was, I may not share the same politics as some of the congresswomen that he has been attacking, but we are all Americans. And unlike three of them, I was actually born in a foreign country. I was born in Poland. I'm an immigrant. I took the oath to defend and support the Constitution of the United States for the first time when I was 10 years old sworn in to be a citizen of this country. Does the president think I should go back? Obviously, he was not talking to me, and I think we understand why that is, and that concerns me.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] I mean, just to say it directly, you think it's because you're white.
[Tom Malinowski:] I'm a white guy, of course. These remarks were clearly as even some of my Republican colleagues have acknowledged, these were racist remarks. This is the old leave America if you don't look like us that so many of our fellow Americans, immigrants and otherwise, have faced over the years.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] The other thing this vote does is it forces your Republican colleagues to go on the record, to take a stand. Is that intentional?
[Tom Malinowski:] It's intentional. I want everybody to take a stand, and what this resolution does is embracing the remarks of a great Republican president, Ronald Reagan, who gave I think some of the most eloquent tributes of any American president to the virtues and value of immigration to our country. They get to choose tonight are they with Reagan, or are they going to be with Trump?
[Mary Louise Kelly:] The official title of this resolution is resolution condemning President Trump's racist comments. Did you debate whether to include that word? It's a word a lot of your colleagues have been reluctant to use, even those who've condemned it as vile or outrageous, his language. Many, particularly Republicans, have not gone so far as to call it racist.
[Tom Malinowski:] Well, I think it's a word that makes some people uncomfortable, but even some of my Republican colleagues, and it's very difficult for them for obvious reasons, have been willing to say these were racist remarks. Now, you know, I get back to this point. This is not really about President Trump. We know who he is. This resolution is about who we are. Who are we going to be in the Congress and in the United States of America? A chance to affirm the values that he is daily denigrating.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] What does a non-binding resolution accomplish though? Some of your colleagues are pushing for more, for a vote of censuring the president or actual legislation that would force some kind of change.
[Tom Malinowski:] The president made a statement. We are making a statement that says he does not speak for anybody but himself. He does not speak for America. I hope my Republican colleagues will be willing to say he does not speak for them. Words really do matter. In my congressional district, every single synagogue is debating whether to have armed security, and many of them do. Every mosque has state police coming to Friday prayers because we know that there has been a huge increase in anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-Sikh attacks in our country. And it's partly because these fringe ideas, these fringe conspiracy theories, fringe hatred is now being legitimized by the highest leaders of our land. That has not happened in our country in recent memory. So this is real for people who I represent. It's a matter of public safety. And the point here is to say it's just him. We as a body do not stand for this.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] The president says a lot of Americans agree with him, that he stands behind his comments, a lot of Americans agree, and I we've had members of his administration on air in the last 24 hours on NPR supporting this view.
[Tom Malinowski:] If you're a member of his administration, my goodness, I feel sorry for you at this moment because what are you supposed to say? You know, I would not be a member of his administration under these circumstances.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] I should note just for people listening, you were a member of the Obama administration, so that is probably not a surprise.
[Tom Malinowski:] I certainly was. It's not a surprise. But, you know, again, there are many patriotic Republicans who would not be a member of this administration because of moments like this where they are forced to defend the indefensible.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] What kind of conversations are you having on the Hill today? Can you give us a sense of the mood and how the conversation is playing out?
[Tom Malinowski:] Well, it's not the conversation any of us wanted to have. I was planning to spend today talking about transportation funding for New Jersey. We had a hearing about that. The president does this because he wants to distract us from talking about health care and infrastructure and prescription drug prices and the debt limit and all the work that we have to do. And the great dilemma that we have is that, you know, if we say nothing, then his words stand. He stands for the United States, and we cannot allow that.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] That is New Jersey Democrat Tom Malinowski. Congressman, thanks for your time.
[Tom Malinowski:] Thank you so much.

[Renee Montagne:] NPR's Scott Horsley reports.
[Scott Horsley:] That's cast a dark cloud over tomato fields in Florida, where half the nation's fresh tomatoes are grown. President Michael Stuart of the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association says if the investigation drags on, farmers could be left with unsold tomatoes, rotting on the vine.
[Michael Stuart:] They're extremely frustrated in that business has basically ground to a halt at this point in time. We're anxiously awaiting a determination by the Food and Drug Administration as to what the specific source of this problem is. And until that happens, quite frankly, we're dead in the water.
[Scott Horsley:] Scott Horsley, NPR News.

[Jennifer Ludden:] All week, Mitt Romney has been battered for not releasing more of his income tax returns. People in both parties have applied pressure. Among the most vociferous: Democratic members of Congress. But in a piece for McClatchy Newspapers, David Lightman and Kevin Hall point out that the very members of Congress chastising Romney for non-disclosure have themselves refused to disclose. In recent months, McClatchy asked all 535 members of Congress for their tax returns, but only 17 provided them. Among those who did not: former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was asked about this at a press conference today.
[Representative Nancy Pelosi:] There are no rules. He there's no rule about Romney releasing his tax returns. So what rules are we what rules are you referring to?
[Unidentified Man:] Why is the standard different?
[Representative Nancy Pelosi:] It's up to the American people. The American people are the judges of that.
[Jennifer Ludden:] We'll talk more about the rules of disclosure, such as they are, in a moment. We'd also like to hear from you. If you've run for public office, did you disclose your finances? Why or why not? Call us: 800-989-8255. Our email address is talk@npr.org. And you can join the conversation at our website. Go to npr.org and click on TALK OF THE NATION. David Lightman is the congressional correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers. Welcome.
[David Lightman:] Thank you very much.
[Jennifer Ludden:] So are there rules? What are they?
[David Lightman:] Pelosi's right on that score. As far as I know, there are no rules about saying that anybody has to disclose these tax returns. There are, of course, financial disclosure rules where they disclose details about their holdings, their income, their outside sources. A lot of people criticize those independent analysts criticize those financial disclosure forms as being far too vague. And they don't disclose tax liabilities.
[Jennifer Ludden:] So members of Congress and presidential candidates alike are not required to disclose their tax returns, just the financial...
[David Lightman:] Not that I know of.
[Jennifer Ludden:] So but do they, routinely? I mean, at least presidential candidates.
[David Lightman:] Yeah, presidential candidates have done this for going back quite a ways. Members of Congress have not. And as you saw today, we asked Democratic leader Pelosi and then Speaker Boehner later about this: Why don't you disclose? Why particularly in Pelosi's case are Democrats holding Mitt Romney to this standard that they themselves won't adhere to?
[Jennifer Ludden:] You called it a self-imposed double standard.
[David Lightman:] Oh, I didn't call it that.
[Jennifer Ludden:] I read that in your article. You suggest there's a self-imposed double standard in the article.
[David Lightman:] OK. Fair enough.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Tell us more about the responses you got when you were asking for tax returns.
[David Lightman:] Yeah. Well, not much. I mean, we sent out the letter three separate times over a three-month period. And, in many cases, I would go to offices personally particularly of leadership and say: You know, what are you going to do here? And just no response. I mean, Senate Majority Leader Reid, for example I must have gone in there four times. Are you going to disclose? They would say, no. And I said, well, why not? We'll get back to you. Never did. Others, the same way. So they just don't want to talk about this.
[Jennifer Ludden:] One representative actually suggested that your publishers and editors should disclose themselves, telling you they have great influence over public policy. Was that fair?
[David Lightman:] No. And, in fact, Leader Pelosi made that point today: you know, why don't the people who run the media disclose? In fact, she why don't the writers disclose. We are not public officials. We are not paid by taxpayer dollars. We are not running for public office. That's the difference.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Why do you think or maybe I've has there been much interest in this in years past? Is it anyone ever thought that there should be a rule for members of Congress?
[David Lightman:] It comes and goes. It's suggested now and then, but it really doesn't go very far. Different public interest groups have suggested this sort of thing. They just want more transparency, particularly in years when major tax legislation is up, 2001, 2003 and presumably this year and next, when the Bush-era tax cuts expire. Public interest groups would want to know: Are there conflicts of interest? Or what is the self-interest in some of these tax votes? And that's a big reason we want to see these tax returns.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Because Congress is looking at potentially overhauling tax rates.
[David Lightman:] That's right. And we want to know: What is the self-interest? I mean, the reasons for financial disclosure to begin with are so we can cite what the self-interest is. Are there any potential conflicts of interest? When should a member recuse himself? If we don't see those tax returns, we don't know what tax breaks they themselves may gain from. We're not asking members to stop making money and to stop taking tax breaks. I mean, they're citizens just like we are. But we want to know: What's your self-interest?
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right. Let's get a caller on the line here. Rick is in McConnelsville, Ohio. Hi, there.
[Rick:] Hello.
[Jennifer Ludden:] What's your story? Go right ahead.
[Rick:] I ran for state office in 2008, and I happened to be a public employee at the time. So, of course, all of my income is public record, anyway. So it was an easy decision for me to make to make all of my information public. But that is not the case is currently not that everyone has to do that. So my opponent didn't have to do that. But I think that obviously, when people are in public office, they're working for the taxpayer. I think we have some rights to know what the investments are and to know what the income is from other sources.
[Jennifer Ludden:] So your income was public because you're a public you were a public official. Did you actually go ahead then and also reveal your tax returns?
[Rick:] Oh, yes. I did. And it was actually my income was not public because I was public official. My income was public because I was a public employee, and I just happened to be running for public office. I also happened to be an educator at a state institution. So all of my records are public. My personnel files are public record. And, of course, technically, anything according to our university attorney, anything that we put into writing becomes public record.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Do you think members of Congress should be required to disclose their tax returns?
[Rick:] Absolutely, I do. Absolutely.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Why?
[Rick:] Well, because I've they're working for me. And just like, as when I ran for office, I felt that it was my duty to be as transparent as I could about the sources of income that I have, where my money's invested. I believe members of Congress should be held to that same sort of a duty.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right. Rick, thanks for the call.
[Rick:] Thank you.
[Jennifer Ludden:] And let's take another, here: Rudy in Dearborn County, Indiana. Hi, there.
[Rudy:] How you doing?
[Jennifer Ludden:] Good.
[Rudy:] Yeah. I'm currently running for office here in the county, and I've decided I'm going to put my tax returns on my Internet site, you know, rudyhoward.com. I think it will better illustrate my sincereness. One of the things I've talked about is I've been one of the masses out of work for the last two years, and it's one of the reasons I'm running for office and getting involved because I'd like to see change. And I think it'll demonstrate my sincerity and probably cast some differences myself and my opponent.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Well, because your tax return will kind of show the situation you've been in. Is that...
[Rudy:] That's right. I've had to liquidate my 401 [k] s, you know, to, you know, maintain and survive over the last year or two. And I think it will, A, demonstrate my sincerity of what I've told people is actually true. They can see it in writing. And it probably will also, you know, cast a little bit of a difference between myself and my opponent.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Are you calling on your opponent to release his, or should that just be up to him or her?
[Rudy:] Well, I think I'm going to leave it up to him to decide. But if I lead by example, hopefully others will follow.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right. Rudy, thanks for the call.
[Rudy:] Thank you.
[Jennifer Ludden:] So what David Lightman, what about cabinet members? We've I've heard Nancy Pelosi say that, oh, Mitt Romney could not is that become a cabinet member. Is the law different there?
[David Lightman:] Right. Right. Harry Reid has also said that, that the again, you're as these two gentlemen said, you're running for public office. You're going to be beholden to the taxpayers. The taxpayers are paying your salary. You're working for them. Why not be transparent? Why not tell them all they need to know about your investments, your income, your liabilities and so forth? I should add, by the way, nobody wants to see their home addresses. Nobody wants to see their Social Security numbers. We understand that that kind of information should and must actually remain private. We want to know what their self-interest is. I'm sorry to keep coming back to that point, but I think it's crucial.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Now, it made me think also about the recent stories some months back about this insider trade legal kind of insider trading among members of Congress. Remind us what was discovered. And might that have come out earlier with the tax returns?
[David Lightman:] Yeah. I believe it was The Washington Post did that excellent series on all the various stockholdings and investments that members had. At the same time, they were voting on measures that, in fact, could have boosted those earnings. And had we seen the tax returns, we might have been able to pinpoint that much, much earlier. And the public, more important, would have been able to pinpoint that much, much sooner.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right. Let's get another caller, here. Eric in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Hi, there.
[Eric:] Hi. How are you doing today?
[Jennifer Ludden:] Good.
[Eric:] I love your program, and I always listen. I never get on the radio, though, so I'm glad to get on today.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Well, we're happy to have you.
[Eric:] My opinion is that I have run for the Board of Education before, but that's got nothing to do with it. It has to do with this is a democratic republic. The only way this is ever going to work, this experiment in democracy is ever going to work is if there's full disclosure on everything, except for, you know, the most sensitive, you know, military stuff. And if you don't want to disclose something, then why? I mean, is there a reason why you want to don't want to say something or show something that you feel is embarrassing? If everybody has to do it, then everybody's got to be out there naked.
[Jennifer Ludden:] And the financial disclosure forms in and of themselves is not enough for you?
[Eric:] No, not enough, not enough at all, because they're limited. And they're limited for a reason by the Congress. They limited to a certain point, tax returns or something else. You've got to put everything down on tax returns you're claiming, and that you want to take credit for or not credit for.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right. Eric, thanks so much for the phone call.
[Eric:] You're welcome.
[Jennifer Ludden:] David Lightman, what about, you know, how far back, I mean, people have called for Mitt Romney to disclose more than the two years he says is one is coming, and another one has already been disclosed. I mean, how much is enough?
[David Lightman:] Yeah, that's an interesting question. Congressman Sander Levin has a bill that he he doesn't have it yet. He's preparing a bill that would require presidential candidates to release 10 years of returns. Is 10 years enough? Is 20 years enough? I think what's enough and this is hard to define is enough to give the public a pretty good sense of where you've been making your money, what you've been investing in throughout your adult life. I don't think anybody wants to see your return from when you were 18 years old and a busboy at the local restaurant. But give us some sense of how you've been earning your money, whatever it takes, be that five years or 20.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Does that piece of legislation have any legs?
[David Lightman:] I don't think so. But you never know around Congress. I don't think so.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News. Let's get another caller, here: Cal in Norman, Oklahoma. Welcome to the program.
[Cal:] Thank you very much.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Go right ahead.
[Cal:] Well, it's really pretty simple. If you want to run for public office and I did 13 times over 28 years and won all 13 times you reveal what the public wants to ask. That's not complex and...
[Jennifer Ludden:] Did they ask about your tax returns?
[Cal:] Oh, absolutely, sure, and everything else in the world. The law in Oklahoma requires financial statements and that kind of stuff, but that really is not revealing when the ranges are so great. So when the press asked, I was honored to tell him how poor I was. And I just, as you know, in 2011, like the rest of us, filed our income taxes. My rate my wife and I's rate was 29 percent.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Did something bring this up? Was there an issue that brought this up in the campaign, or was it sort of a routine request?
[Cal:] Well, a million things come up in a campaign. But if you don't have anything to hide, just answer the question, you know? If you're an ax-murder, you shouldn't be running. And if you're ashamed of your tax returns, you shouldn't be running. Just reveal them, and the press will go on to something else, as they should.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right, Cal. Thanks so much for that.
[Cal:] You're quite welcome.
[Jennifer Ludden:] David, what I feel like I'm hearing here is that there's more a lot more disclosure at the local level than up in the national office.
[David Lightman:] Yeah, it sure does, and I like the points that they're making. I mean, we in the media feel that if you're going to put yourself out there in public life and run for office, everything's on the table. I mean, we like to think we have enough discretion that we're not going to deliberately embarrass you, but you have to assume your life is going to be an open book. And if you don't like that, if you can't deal with that, well, don't run for public office. And this tax stuff seems to me basic. We have the same debate every few years about the health of a candidate. Should their health records be public, for example? And if not, well, why not? If you're running for president cabinet or a cabinet appointment or maybe a judge, that's one thing. If you're running for local office, it may be another. But that's another debate, here. How far do you go? And I agree with these people. You're going to run for public office, assume everything is going to be out there.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Now, what about the congressional spouses? Because I was thinking, well, you know, maybe they don't want their spouses' finances out there. Maybe it's not fair. But then I read that there are some who say, actually, that could be quite relevant, and there's calls for that, as well.
[David Lightman:] Sure. And, again, this is an age-old debate: how detached might the spouse be financially. The assumption, again, is that it's your spouse. You're living together. You're seeing each other. You're all part of the same household disclose. If you don't want your spouse's income or holdings disclosed, again, maybe you shouldn't be in public office.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right. Let's squeeze in one more fast call. Paul, we just have a moment left. You're in Montara, California. Go right ahead.
[Paul:] Hello. Here in California, public officials have to file a Form 700 disclosure. I'm in a sort of unusual situation, because my husband and I are in a gay relationship, and whether or not he counts as a spouse or not depends on the status of the decisions on the legality of gay marriage. So whether I need to disclose his financial situation, as well as my own, complicates matters. With regard to the presidential disclosures that are under discussion right now, I think one of the main reasons that Mitt Romney's campaign doesn't want to show those earlier tax returns is that I'm sure that he's used various tax loopholes. And that would require explaining how the very rich are able to manipulate the tax system in order to gain benefits that the ordinary population like the rest of the 99 percent of us don't have access to. And I don't think they want to discuss that.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right. And we've got to leave it there. Paul, thanks so much for the phone call. And, David Lightman, as I understand it, you got 17 returns back, but you agreed not to make them public. Is that right?
[David Lightman:] Yeah, that's right. Again, we wanted to protect the privacy of the Social Security numbers, the names and so forth.
[Jennifer Ludden:] OK. So we learned a little bit, but not a lot.
[David Lightman:] A good way of putting it. A very little bit, unfortunately.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Well, thanks for the conversation.
[David Lightman:] A pleasure.
[Jennifer Ludden:] David Lightman, the congressional correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers. He's covered every presidential campaign since 1980. His article, "Most Members of Congress Keep Their Tax Returns Secret," ran today, and you can find it on our website. Go to npr.org and click on TALK OF THE NATION. Thanks, David.
[David Lightman:] Thank you. It's a pleasure.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Tomorrow, it's TALK OF THE NATION: SCIENCE FRIDAY with a look at climate change in Antarctica, where glaciers are slipping into the sea at anything but a glacial pace. And Neal Conan returns on Monday. This is TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News. I'm Jennifer Ludden, in Washington.

[Renee Montagne:] Peace talks about Syria are due to begin today after two weeks of a shaky cease-fire there. But that cease-fire does not apply to the fight against ISIS. In the east of Syria, forces backed by the U.S. and its allies say they are pushing ISIS back, and U.S. officials say those forces are becoming more cohesive and effective. NPR's Alice Fordham has spent the last few days in Syria, and she was able to reach a town recently retaken from ISIS. She joins us now from Syria. Good morning.
[Alice Fordham, Byline:] Good morning, Renee.
[Renee Montagne:] Now, I gather you visited a town that had been retaken from ISIS just recently a couple of weeks ago and met some of those U.S.-backed forces. But tell us first what you saw.
[Alice Fordham, Byline:] Well, the town is called Shadadi. My initial impression, actually, was that it looked like ISIS had left there without much of a fight in that particular area, which I should also say is a very rural, small town, but it is important because it's strategically located on the highway between the ISIS-held city of Mosul in Iraq and their Syrian stronghold of Raqqah. And they had a tight hold on it for about two years. I met some people there who stayed through the whole period when ISIS was in charge. They were very clear that they were under the group's total control.
[Renee Montagne:] And they must have had some stories.
[Alice Fordham, Byline:] Yes, they did indeed. They appeared very relieved to see the back of ISIS. You know, we'd actually just been standing in the middle of town looking at a sign that ISIS had put up urging women to cover their faces and their hands and their whole bodies. And we were just picking our way through the debris going around a corner. And there were two women sitting outside a mom and her daughter wearing colorful clothes and loose headscarves. And the mom was an older woman, and she was just laughing when she met us, showing all these gold teeth. And she seemed exuberant.
[Renee Montagne:] So it sounds like the town is coming back quite a bit even just since these last couple of weeks since it was retaken.
[Alice Fordham, Byline:] Very, very slowly, actually. The people who were there who had stayed under ISIS are kind of hardy souls. Most people had left. And we only saw a very few people on their way back. The fighting does seem to be over for now. Those U.S.-backed forces advanced about 10 miles further down the road, and they said they've now stopped. They're digging a trench. There are still some unexploded bombs being cleared. Water and electricity are yet to be restored. So that could be a factor, but it's still definitely spookily deserted.
[Renee Montagne:] But then who now is controlling this town of Shadadi?
[Alice Fordham, Byline:] Well, this is a very relevant question and it is where things get complicated. So Shadadi is an almost entirely Arab area. Now, the forces that the U.S. backs with airstrikes and with ammunition, they're called the Syrian Democratic Forces, and they're dominated by ethnic Kurds. And there have been concerns that as these Kurdish forces start to retake Arab areas from ISIS, they won't be welcomed because Arab residents might think that the Kurds are trying to expand their area of influence. So the U.S. and others has been trying very hard to incorporate Arab fighters into these forces Arab fighters and some of the other minorities here.
[Renee Montagne:] And has that worked?
[Alice Fordham, Byline:] Well, I've spoken with commanders here Arab commanders and others within these anti-ISIS forces, and they insisted that they made sure that there were Arabs on the frontline moving into that Arab area of Shadadi. Now, that may be true but a couple of weeks later, before most people have come back, we only saw Kurdish forces there. They were speaking Kurdish, they were flying the flag of their Kurdish faction and not of these unified Syrian democratic forces. And another thing maybe worth noting, Renee, is that there were few of these forces. I saw maybe a couple dozen inside the town itself. You know, as these anti-ISIS forces are advancing, they're now spread out over a wide area in Syria. And just in the last few days, we've seen ISIS carry out attacks against them in different corners of the country maybe testing these slightly stretched forces.
[Renee Montagne:] NPR's Alice Fordham is speaking to us from Syria. Thank you very much.
[Alice Fordham, Byline:] Thanks for having me, Renee.

[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] After Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas last month, dozens of aid teams rushed in, some from the United Nations agencies, others from neighboring Caribbean countries. Nonprofits were also there, too, providing water and relief assistance. This is a story, though, about one veteran-led group based in the U.S. As NPR's Jason Beaubien reports, crews from Team Rubicon are gutting storm-damaged buildings all over Marsh Harbour.
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] Hurricane Dorian turned large swaths of Marsh Harbour into a wasteland. The damage was so bad that the government policy was to evacuate most of the remaining population to the capital Nassau, which left an eerie silence amidst the flattened fields of debris. But that silence is shattered wherever Team Rubicon is working. Jason Roberts walks up a hillside that one of his crews just cleared.
[Jason Roberts:] I didn't know this was a driveway when I walked up to it.
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] Team Rubicon brings its own tools including chainsaws, trucks, small bucket-loader tractors, generators into a place where all of these things are in short supply. Here they're working on a church. Roberts has one team of nine volunteers cleaning the main chapel while another crew guts the pastor's house.
[Jason Roberts:] There wasn't a ton of water damage in this section of the house, but the wind blew in all the ceiling Sheetrock. And so they've been taking it out and salvaging what furniture that they can.
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] Roberts, like many of the Team Rubicon volunteers, served in the U.S. military. He did two deployments to Afghanistan with the Army. He's still active with the California National Guard and works as a substitute teacher in Northern California. Here on Abaco, roughly 50 Team Rubicon volunteers are working at the moment. Another 50 are on neighboring Grand Bahama, which was also hard-hit. The volunteers fly in for two weeks at a time and camp right next to the projects they're working on. A city official has stopped by their base at a church school they've just gutted.
[Bob Bledsoe:] How can we help you?
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] Bob Bledsoe, a former Air Force F-15 pilot, is the division supervisor for Team Rubicon on Abaco. He's taken time off from his job with FedEx to volunteer here. Bledsoe says that initially, Team Rubicon deployed medical teams, but now they've moved on to in his words mucking and gutting. And they're focusing on salvageable communal spaces.
[Bob Bledsoe:] We started with schools, churches, community centers. We're actually still doing that right now, trying to build areas where people could come back to central distribution points for information, food, water.
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] Team Rubicon has gained a reputation in town for getting things done. Kristen Wussler, a nurse from the Philadelphia area, is on her first mission with the group. She's part of the team clearing the pastor's house.
[Kristen Wussler:] My thinking when I saw the house, being a novice I was like, this is we're going to be here all week. And the guys around were saying, no, this is, like, a day and a half operation, and then we'll hit the church. So it's pretty impressive how fast they work.
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] Wussler, who is not a veteran, used all of her vacation time from work to come volunteer here. Many of the veterans say Team Rubicon gives them a sense of purpose and connections as they transition back to civilian life. They've deployed to disasters, big and small, across the United States, from Hurricane Harvey in Houston to small house fires in the Midwest. Now the crews in their gray T-shirts are all around Marsh Harbour. Some are down at the docks, unloading supplies from a boat. Others are building a fence in front of the World Central Kitchen's food distribution point. A team is fixing a roof on a house in a devastated residential area. Colin Bethel is one of the deacons of the Marsh Harbour Gospel Chapel, where Team Rubicon is now working.
[Colin Bethel:] This was the what I would say is the most heavily damaged building on the site.
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] While the church structure survived Dorian, it was in terrible shape.
[Colin Bethel:] There was mold starting to grow. The carpets were wet. The Sheetrock was wet and falling down in the ceiling.
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] Colin went to Nassau a week ago to pick up his family, and when he came back, he was shocked. The Team Rubicon crews had gutted all the classrooms for the school that serves 300 students, cleaned out the chapel and patched the roof.
[Colin Bethel:] It was like somebody performed magic or a miracle here. Everything was out. It was gutted.
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] He says so many church members have evacuated. There's no way any of this could have gotten done quickly.
[Colin Bethel:] Yeah. There was no manpower here to do anything in terms of emptying the building and gutting and doing the job.
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] Bethel says being in Marsh Harbour right now can be quite depressing. So much of the town is in ruins that he started keeping a notebook just of positive things.
[Colin Bethel:] I started to write down, in order to stay positive, different highlights each day of things that just keep you going and keep, you know, the hope alive that we have because it's so grim here right now when you go through the town.
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] And he says the volunteers from Team Rubicon were one of the first things he put in his notebook. Jason Beaubien, NPR News, Marsh Harbour, the Bahamas.

[Noel King:] Good morning. I'm Noel King. Cambridge engineers wanted to set a record for most people playing a piano at the same time. A standard piano has 88 keys, so how about 88 people? The Daily Mail reports the engineers had school kids design long mechanical fingers to make this possible. Every kid played a single key. And they performed a composition called "88 Pianists."
[Unidentified Schoolchildren:] [Playing piano.]
[Noel King:] Sounds like a record.

[Robert Siegel:] From Nature magazine comes an extraordinary proposal. How about a home where the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope play for some of those critters' bigger and more exotic cousins: elephants, lions, camels, African cheetahs? Cornell University ecologist Josh Donlan is the lead author of a piece in nature called Re-wilding North America. The `re'is in there because those animals-the lions and the elephants-had distant relatives that lived on this continent some 13,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene.
[Mr. Josh Donlan:] Our vision begins immediately and spans the coming century. When we talk about the now, we're advocating bringing back large tortoises that were once present in North America 13,000 years ago and are now restricted and critically endangered in a small part of North America. And that moves on forward in time, in terms of the vision, talking about treating horses as ecological analogs for the 13 species of horses that were present in the late Pleistocene, and on to elephants and cheetah and lions, all of which were present and played a very important role in North American ecosystems.
[Robert Siegel:] How do you answer the problem of the rancher who has enough problems with mad cow disease already, think, you know, `Well, the last thing I need is to have wild predators around in the environment who are going to be taking a calf now and again'?
[Mr. Josh Donlan:] Right. That is a huge cultural obstacle in terms of convincing people the benefits of having predators on the landscape. I can give you an example in terms of elephants and camels.
[Robert Siegel:] Mm-hmm.
[Mr. Josh Donlan:] We know now in the southwestern United States that woody species-that is mesquite, creosote and other bushes-are overtaking and replacing the grasslands of the Southwest. This is a very serious threat, not only to biodiversity, but it's also an economic threat to ranchers. One might ask if Asian or African elephants can serve as a proxy for the five species of elephants we had in North America, perhaps they can knock back these woody species that happen to be overtaking the grasslands of the Southwest, a threat to biodiversity, but also an economic threat to ranchers.
[Robert Siegel:] If we, in fact, did reintroduce elephants or lions or camels to wild areas in the American Plains, would they have a dramatic effect on the environment with respect to other species that we enjoy having around? In other words, would they, in turn, prey upon other animals, not just the livestock, but other wild creatures, which would disappear because we've introduced these bigger-or, as you say, megafauna-into the American environment?
[Mr. Josh Donlan:] Well, it's clear that there is the definite possibility for unexpected ecological consequences. Having said that, we do know from decades of research now that large vertebrates-that is, large herbivores and large predators-often play a disproportionate role in an ecosystem in terms of structuring the ecosystem and in terms of maintaining biodiversity. We know that from long-term studies in Africa; we also know that from long-term studies in North America and elsewhere.
[Robert Siegel:] What kind of feedback have you gotten to your article today?
[Mr. Josh Donlan:] One of the main purposes of putting forth this plan and putting out this paper is to invoke a debate: to get people thinking about ecological history, to get people thinking about ecological function and to address the inconsistencies in our conservation strategies. I think it's obviously going to be highly controversial, but we hope it'll get people talking.
[Robert Siegel:] So people talking right now might be a more likely result of the paper than elephants braying in Oklahoma anytime soon.
[Mr. Josh Donlan:] Time will see.
[Robert Siegel:] Well, Josh Donlan, thanks a lot for talking with us about it, in any case.
[Mr. Josh Donlan:] Thanks for having me.
[Robert Siegel:] Mr. Donlan, who is an ecologist at Cornell University, is the author of an article in Nature magazine titled Re-wilding North America. He spoke to us from Flagstaff, Arizona.
[Michele Norris:] This is NPR, National Public Radio.

[Don Gonyea:] December is a time when many of us take a pause from the daily grind to feel gratitude and appreciation for things in our lives that bring us happiness. With that in mind, we've been asking NPR podcast hosts this simple question what gave you joy this year, especially if it was unexpected? My colleague Michel Martin posed this question to NPR Politics Podcast host Asma Khalid.
[Asma Khalid, Byline:] So you know this about me, but maybe listeners don't, but I adore fashion, clothing of all sorts. And so I sort of stumbled upon this Instagram channel online retailer that I have been, I would say, rather obsessed with all year. It's called The Modist, and its sort of brand image style is that it's trying to present, quote-unquote, "modest clothing" to women. But it's very aspirational kind of luxury fashion. So, in all candor, I can probably afford, like, 1 percent of the stuff on their website. But it's very aspirational. And I look at it, and it's so beautiful. And there's a whole lot of reasons why I've sort of been just fascinated with this. I find myself, like, you know, late at night when I can't sleep just scrolling through [LAUGHTER].
[Michel Martin, Byline:] I'm so excited that you admitted this because everyone knows we are very serious journalists, but we also like to look fabulous. And [LAUGHTER] I was wondering, you know, why you think it is that we still like to look at things that we perfectly well know we're not going to buy, we can't buy?
[Asma Khalid, Byline:] Yeah.
[Michel Martin, Byline:] We're not going to look like those ladies.
[Asma Khalid, Byline:] [Laughter].
[Michel Martin, Byline:] But why do you think we like it so much? What do you think?
[Asma Khalid, Byline:] For me, I feel like it's an extension of our own personality and our own character and sort of how we see ourselves. It's the same way that I think, like, people will ask, why do you go to art museums? I see clothing in kind of the same way. It's beautiful, and it sort of sparks your own creativity of what you could do by mixing and matching things in your own closet.
[Michel Martin, Byline:] And why is having this particular site so joyful for you just it sparked such joy, this particular site highlighting modest clothing has been...
[Asma Khalid, Byline:] Yeah, so...
[Michel Martin, Byline:] Is there anything else like it that you've been able to find?
[Asma Khalid, Byline:] Not really. And I should say this for listeners who might not know what I look like [LAUGHTER]. So I am a Muslim, and I do wear a headscarf. But I should preface this by saying that the site itself I think is very clearly non-denominational. And so they will highlight sometimes Muslim women, but they'll often highlight pictures of Kate Middleton. And so their version of modesty is just this overall vision of clothing that is somewhat, like, loose-fitting. It's basically not sheer, it's not too tight and there's no, like, extremely plunging necklines. That's kind of the one consistent factor of that. And what I will say is that when you look at a lot of clothing in places, it's not always that easy to find things that kind of meet those three characteristics. So I've just been amazed that there are so many dresses available that fit that niche, and, a lot of times, it doesn't feel like that.
[Michel Martin, Byline:] So, before we let you go, how would you encourage other people to find that joy if they don't have a particular need or interest in modest fashion, per se? Do you any tips kind of finding something that would spark that creativity or that sense of delight?
[Asma Khalid, Byline:] Yeah. I mean, so for me, I was saying it's fashion in part because I find that it's it makes me really value how I can look at the world creatively, right? So I would say [LAUGHTER] the things that bring you joy are the things where you find yourself when you are kind of bored at night, and you really can't sleep, you find yourself going again and again to those websites. And I would say, hey, look there's no harm in it. Just don't buy everything on there.
[Michel Martin, Byline:] [Laughter] That's Asma Khalid, one of the hosts of the NPR Politics Podcast. Asma, thank you so much for talking with us.
[Asma Khalid, Byline:] You're welcome.
[Rupaul:] [Singing] You better work...

[David Greene:] This morning, we're remembering two moments from the civil rights movement. One involved the basketball team at Loyola University Chicago. They are, of course, the Cinderella story in this year's NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. They also had an amazing run 55 years ago and made headlines for a different reason. In 1963, Loyola Chicago played a tournament game against Mississippi State. Sports journalism professor Kevin Blackistone recently wrote about the game for the Washington Post, and he says it almost didn't happen.
[Kevin Blackistone:] The state of Mississippi at that time basically had a rule that said white teams were not allowed to play against black teams. Mississippi State, which had missed out on a couple of NCAA tournament opportunities in previous years because of that rule, snuck out of the state in the dark of night to go all the way to Lansing, Mich., to play in the first round of the NCAA tournament that year against Loyola, which happened to have four black starters. So it was a violation of Mississippi Jim Crow laws. And it really made for a fascinating story. And Loyola would go on to win the national championship.
[David Greene:] Well, so was Mississippi State doing this to make a statement about civil rights or mostly just because they wanted to keep playing in the tournament, didn't matter who they were playing, but they're like, we're not going to let a law get in the way of us?
[Kevin Blackistone:] Well, you know, a half a century later, it has become lore that Mississippi State may have been trying to make a statement. But when you look back, they really weren't. They were a little ticked off that they hadn't been able to play in the NCAA tournament. They thought they had a good team. Their coach, Babe McCarthy, wanted to get them that opportunity. He thought he was a really good coach, and he wanted to win.
[David Greene:] And this is where some of the feel-good narrative starts to break down in your mind. I mean, this was called the Game of Change in the midst of the civil rights movement. What, if anything, did it change?
[Kevin Blackistone:] It really didn't change very much. Some of the most horrific incidents in racial violence in this country that happened in the state of Mississippi happened after that game the horrible beating that Fannie Lou Hamer suffered, the murders of the three civil rights workers, the assassination of NAACP leader in Mississippi, Medgar Evers, happened after this game, James Meredith, his march in which he was shot. So there were a number of things that happened after this particular Game of Change, which evidenced the fact that not really that much changed in the state of Mississippi.
[David Greene:] You actually went a bit farther in writing about this and talking about some deeper lessons about the role of people who are white who make sacrifices. Can you tell me what you were really digging into there?
[Kevin Blackistone:] Sure. Well, we've been involved in a lot of mythmaking in sports writing, particularly when it comes to the role of sports stories in the civil rights movement and in social justice. We kind of make white figures the central figure. So Babe McCarthy, the white coach of the all-white Mississippi State team, gets talked a lot about being a conduit for making this happen.
[David Greene:] What would you say is the larger lessons about how we deal with civil rights from this story?
[Kevin Blackistone:] I think we have to look at it in context. I think we have to look at it in terms of history. It troubles me every year at the star the baseball season where we talk about Jackie Robinson and he gets lionized at these games. And it is as if the three generations of black men who were unable to play this game, it gets lost. And so we only think of 1947 going forward. We heroize the white men who helped him come into the game, who shook his hand on the field. And we have all but forgotten those who kept the Jackie Robinsons out of the game for so, so long.
[David Greene:] Hey, Kevin, thanks so much for chatting, as always.
[Kevin Blackistone:] Hey, thank you, David.
[David Greene:] Sports commentator Kevin Blackistone.

[Ira Flatow:] You know, species die out all over the world in remote places we never heard about, but there is one species that is dying right before our eyes, in our lifetime. We've been talking about it for years on this program, and now a group of scientists writing in the journal Science says there's a 99 percent chance little brown bats, once a very common species, may be extinct in the Northeast within the next 16 years. What's killing them? Is it this fungus we see on the bats, the white-nose syndrome? Or is that just a symptom of some deeper problem? Scientists have spotted infected bats as far west as Oklahoma now. Could this infection soon threaten bats all over the continent? That's what we'll be talking about at the beginning of this hour, our number, 1-800-989-8255. You can tweet us, @scifri, and join the discussion on our website at sciencefriday.com. Let me introduce my guest. In fact, we have up on the Web page a bat video, a tour of a bat cave where the bats were falling victim to white-nose disease, up there on our website. You can take a look at that. We did a couple years ago. That's how long this has been around. Winifred Frick is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California Santa Cruz and Boston University. She joins us from the studios at Boston University today. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Frick.
[Dr. Winifred Frick:] Thank you, Ira.
[Ira Flatow:] What is the situation today with the bats? Where has the white-nose syndrome been found so far? I say it's as far out as Oklahoma?
[Dr. Winifred Frick:] That's correct. You know, it was first discovered in Albany, New York, in 2006, but this and every year, we've seen a huge increase in its distribution, but this year was really the worst. It made it up to Quebec and Ontario Provinces in Canada and as far west as Oklahoma, as you mentioned, as well as as far south as Tennessee. So we've seen it spread halfway across the continent.
[Ira Flatow:] And how fast do you think it could make it over the Rockies to the West Coast?
[Dr. Winifred Frick:] Well, that's a good question. Faster than we would like, I'm sure. The one of the distressing things about the record in Oklahoma was that it was found on a new species, Myotis velifer, which is the cave myotis, and that species happens to have a more western distribution. It makes it all the way to California. So we could very likely see it into the Rockies this winter and even further west than the Rockies.
[Ira Flatow:] And in your paper, you're predicting that there's a big chance these bats may be gone in 16 years, at least from the Northeast. How do you come up with that number?
[Dr. Winifred Frick:] Yeah, so what we did was we took two very extensive data sets, a 17-year record of mark recapture, which is, Scott Reynolds went out and captured little brown bats in a maternity colony every year, starting when he started his Ph.D. here at Boston in the early '90s. And so we had a really good record of the annual variability before white-nose hit, of the survival of little brown bats. And then we also looked at historic records collected by New York Department of Environmental Conservation and Pennsylvania Game Commission of counts of bats at hibernating sites and sort of meshing those two data sets to look at the natural variability in the populations before white-nose hit. We learned that the populations were actually doing fine. They were healthy and thriving before the disease was discovered in 2006. And then we took the information from caves that have been infected since 2006 and looked at the mortality, the empirical evidence of the mortality at those caves. And we put all that data together in population models and asked the question, okay, if given the natural variability in the system and the known mortality that we've seen, if those population dynamics continue if the mortality and the spread of the disease continue the way we've seen for the past four years -what will be the chance that these bats will be on the landscape in 20 to 100 years? And that's where we got that very dire prediction.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah, well, you see the fungal infection, the white-nose on all the bats, but you're not sure if that's the cause or possibly just a symptom of the problem, right?
[Dr. Winifred Frick:] Well, we're scientists, and we like to be very careful and not be definitive, but until something's really proven. But, you know, we have very strong evidence at this point that the fungus, Geomyces destructans, is strongly associated with white-nose syndrome. It is what's growing on the bats. It grows on their wings and causes the necrotic and scarred wing tissue, and the bats are waking up too frequently during their hibernation, and they're starving to death. So we refer to it as the putative pathogen, because we have to satisfy Koch's postulates before we can say for sure that this pathogen causes the disease, and that work is ongoing and being done right now.
[Ira Flatow:] So it's not the fungus. They're not being shred to death by the fungus. They're waking up in their hibernation period, going out, freezing and starving to death is what's happening.
[Dr. Winifred Frick:] That's what we think, yes. Yeah.
[Ira Flatow:] And why would they wake up from the fungus?
[Dr. Winifred Frick:] Well, we're still working on some of those details, but we have what's called the scratch and the itch and scratch hypothesis, which is perhaps the fungus growing on them irritates them. You know, as anybody who's had athlete's foot knows that those kind of fungal infections, skin fungal infections, can be very irritating. And so perhaps that. It could be that their, you know, they need to mount immune response, and their immune systems aren't active while they're hibernating, and so perhaps they know they need to try to mount their immune response, so that's why they're waking up. A lot of researchers are working on these sort of mechanisms-of-death questions.
[Ira Flatow:] So they wake up, they fly out, they starve to death, and I understand that this is not the first case of this kind of bat death, that it occurs in Europe, also.
[Dr. Winifred Frick:] Well, we have confirmation that the fungus, Geomyces destructans, the same species of fungus, has now been documented on a handful of species in a number of countries in Europe. But what we're not seeing in Europe is the symptoms of the syndrome, so the aberrant behavior, flying around in winter, the scarred and necrotic wing tissues, the loss of body fat, and then we're not seeing the massive die-offs in Europe, either.
[Ira Flatow:] Isn't that interesting?
[Dr. Winifred Frick:] It's interesting, and it may be a ray of hope. I mean, if this fungus has been around a long time in Europe, and the bats there have, you know, evolved with it and learned to coexist with it, then that could be a big ray of hope for us here.
[Ira Flatow:] Last year, we talked about the possibility of building warm bat boxes inside the caves so that the bats wouldn't freeze after losing their fat. Has that been tried?
[Dr. Winifred Frick:] Yes, so Justin Boyles and Craig Willis, who are the authors of that paper, tried that this winter, and unfortunately, the bats didn't use those boxes. And this is the case where, you know, where because we're facing such a major crisis, people are really sort of thinking outside the box, if you'll excuse the pun, and trying to come up with as creative options as possible. And so I applaud Dr. Boyles and Dr. Willis for thinking, you know, putting an idea out there, but at this time, it doesn't look like that's going to be the saving grace.
[Ira Flatow:] Let's go to the phones, Ken in Alfred, Florida. Hi, Ken.
[Ken:] Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I've been following this for a couple of years myself, and it's really worrisome indeed. My understanding is that the white-nose fungus is an opportunistic, and that what I'd heard is that there's a problem with the bats' digestive systems, something about key enzymes showing up missing or not showing up, as it were, and that they were burning through their fat stores much faster and therefore waking up and trying to eat. It would be nice to keep them warm during this time, but what they really need is something to eat. Can you speak to this research about the lack of enzymes, and is there anybody actually coordinating the research? Is there is the funding adequate?
[Ira Flatow:] Okay, good questions.
[Dr. Winifred Frick:] Yeah, those are great questions. In terms of whether the fungus is opportunistic or not, there's very compelling evidence that this was a novel introduction of this fungus to North America, because we don't have any record that this fungus was growing on bats in North America beforehand. We actually have very good data on that, because people were taking photographs of bats in hibernating caves for years prior to this, and people have gone back and looked through those photographs. And you would expect, if this is opportunistic, you would see it sort of flare up from time to time. And we also have a very clear pattern of spread, that it really has spread from an epicenter and radiated out, which is another good indicator that there was a point source of introduction. So, you know, early on, people weren't sure, and that actually motivated our work to try to understand how the populations were doing before 2006, because you would expect that this was already present in the system, and somehow the bats were just sort of succumbing to it now, that there would be other indicators that the bats were in poor health. And that data has showed that they were doing fine, prior to 2006.
[Ira Flatow:] Do these bats eat mosquitoes?
[Dr. Winifred Frick:] They do. Their diet...
[Ira Flatow:] And then that's a huge problem, if you lose all these bats, and what happens to the mosquito populations?
[Dr. Winifred Frick:] Well, that's true. I mean, we're basically in the middle of a terrible natural experiment about what happens when you remove a very abundant species that plays an important role in terms of ecosystem services. They don't eat exclusively mosquitoes. They eat a wide variety of insects, and some of those insects are agricultural pests and forest pests, as well as some mosquitoes in the diet.
[Ira Flatow:] There are frogs dying all over the world from a fungal infection. You have bats dying now from fungal infections. Could there be some kind of link between the two?
[Dr. Winifred Frick:] Well, there's no link between the two fungi, that are the chytrid fungus that's attacking amphibians and this Geomyces destructans that's attacking the bats. But it does, you know, speak to the broader problem of wildlife disease and pathogens creating significant risks to species. And in the case of white-nose, the potential role of humans moving pathogens around.
[Ira Flatow:] And there had been talk about using fungicide on the bats. That hasn't worked or is not practical, either.
[Dr. Winifred Frick:] That's not practical for a number of reasons. One is you know, maybe as anybody knows who's had athlete's foot, to use that analogy again, a lot of fungal infections require multiple treatments. And so the idea of trying to treat bats with an anti-fungal, say, as they're entering a cave would be very difficult. The other thing is we can't just go in and mass-spray inside these caves because these caves themselves are valuable ecosystems with other rare or endangered species. And we can't just go in and mass-spray inside a sensitive ecosystem.
[Ira Flatow:] All right. We'll just have to wait and hope for the best and keep track of what's going on. Thank you, Dr. Frick, for joining us.
[Dr. Winifred Frick:] Thank you very much.
[Ira Flatow:] Winifred Frick is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California-Santa Cruz, and Boston University. We're going to take a short break, switch gears and talk about cooking for geeks. Yeah, are you a geek who likes to cook? We're going to have some interesting ways that you can cook, how to turn well, there's so much to talk about. I don't want to give it away. So stay with us. We'll be right back with Jeff Potter, cooking for geeks and your questions, 1-800-989-8255. Or you can tweet us, @scifri, @-S-C-I-F-R-I. We'll be right back.

[Renee Montagne:] As you just heard, scorpion venom may someday improve the treatment of children with brain cancer. Turns out, scientists have been turning to natural poisons for a variety of purposes.
[Steve Inskeep:] Bee venom is used in cancer treatments. In India, cobra venom is used to treat arthritis. And now tarantula venom could have a new use.
[Renee Montagne:] In the latest edition of the journal Plos One, scientists say they've discovered a way to use a protein found in the venom of the Australian tarantula as an environmentally friendly insecticide. Tests show the protein is particularly effective against the cotton bollworm. It's a pest that wreaks havoc on cotton, corn and other crops.
[Steve Inskeep:] Now, it's not surprising the venom would kill bollworms. Spider venoms are usually toxic when injected into insects, the way it is when a tarantula bites. But it turns out, the small, poisonous protein also kills worms when they consume it. The study finds that when ingested, the venom is as toxic to the worm as a synthetic insecticide.

[David Greene:] This weekend thousands of hackers will converge on Las Vegas to try their hand at breaking into, well, all sorts of stuff medical devices, cars and even voting equipment. They're being encouraged to do this in hopes of finding vulnerabilities ahead of the 2020 election. Joining us from Las Vegas, site of the Def Con hacking conference, is NPR's Miles Parks who covers election security. Hi there, Miles.
[Miles Parks, Byline:] Hi, David.
[David Greene:] Well, so how important is this in terms of election security, getting people to try and break into voting systems so you can really understand what's vulnerable and what's not?
[Miles Parks, Byline:] Well, it's really important, especially when you consider the context of how voting officials have viewed this sort of behavior in the past. I mean, we're only just a couple years removed from election supervisors, people in Congress casting doubt on whether Russia was Russian attackers were able to break into any sort of voting equipment at all and then, more broadly, whether the equipment that we were using to vote to register was vulnerable. So we're past that point. You know, there's pretty broad consensus that this issue cybersecurity in voting is something worth talking about. You know, the Senate intelligence committee released a report about Russian interference a couple weeks ago, and they cited work that was found at this conference last year. And then this weekend, a U.S. Senator, Ron Wyden from Oregon, is actually going to be giving the keynote address. So this has gone pretty mainstream at this point.
[David Greene:] OK, a lot of confidence that they can learn a lot of important stuff there. So how does it actually work? I mean, what do you actually watch as you're at this conference?
[Miles Parks, Byline:] So let me set the stage here. Going back to just how our voting system works right? private companies, not government officials are actually overseeing the equipment that we use to vote, whether it's websites, the actual voting equipment, the registration equipment. And they don't allow anyone behind the scenes to poke around and see what's actually going on. And not just, like, you or me I'm talking about the government officials who are actually contracting these companies out. They don't even let those people look at it and confirm the security of the equipment. So this weekend is the time for that poking around to happen. So there is going to be thousands of people poking around equipment that was purchased on eBay, purchased at government auctions to either take a shot at messing with the equipment or to take notes on the people taking a shot and messing with the equipment. And these people, David, they're really good. I've been warned by multiple people I need to have my cellphone off when I'm walking around here because there's going to be hackers who are going to be in the public Wi-Fi trying to get into whatever equipment they can.
[David Greene:] Oh, wow. OK, keep your phone off, Miles. So there's been so much scrutiny of 2016 and what happened. I mean, do people feel like things have improved since then as we start heading into 2020 with the potential for more cyberattacks?
[Miles Parks, Byline:] There's no question that things have definitely gotten better. Federal resources are on a completely different level in terms of communicating about this subject. But the actual equipment we're going to be using to vote will be largely the same. On a whole, no one I've talked to was has been willing this week to say that they don't think there won't be cyberattacks in the future. I talked to Amit Yoran. He's the CEO of a cybersecurity company called Tenable. And he's also a former DHS cyber official.
[Amit Yoran:] Just when you think it couldn't get worse, there's always a creative, innovative, manipulative influence. And this is very much a cat and mouse game.
[Miles Parks, Byline:] So it's important, right here, to say that there's no evidence that any votes, even in 2016 when we saw those cyberattacks into a voter registration system in Illinois, for instance no we have no evidence that any votes or any voting data was changed. But as we'll see this weekend, there are still vulnerabilities in a lot of different aspects of this system.
[David Greene:] NPR's Miles Parks in Las Vegas. Thanks, Miles.
[Miles Parks, Byline:] Thank you, David.

[David Greene:] When Donald Trump said Muslims should be banned from entering the U.S., he sparked a backlash from across the political spectrum. Trump was labeled many things, including a demagogue. And that is fitting, according to Michael Signer, who teaches politics at the University of Virginia. Signer's a longtime Democratic activist and author of a book on demagogues and democracy. He says there are four traits demagogues typically share.
[Michael Signer:] One is that they fashion themselves as a man of the masses, second is that they trigger waves of great emotion. The third is that they use those waves of emotion for political benefit. The fourth is the most concerning, which is they threaten or break established rules of governance.
[David Greene:] Now before you go on, I just listened to those four criteria, and it doesn't necessarily paint the picture of a bad person.
[Michael Signer:] That's a great point. If you go to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first definition of demagogue when you're going back through the centuries actually has a positive connotation. We wouldn't tend to think of it that way today, but they can have a beneficial effect if the system that they're attacking is truly corrupt and if they're marshaling the common people against it.
[David Greene:] OK.
[Michael Signer:] However, in the great majority of the cases, especially when they're attacking a constitutional democracy, which is what Trump is, I liken them to an autoimmune disorder, where the body's defenses sort of turn against itself.
[David Greene:] And let me just make sure I understand the metaphor here. I mean, demagogues are part of the defenses in a democracy to make sure that people retain power but that they can actually turn against a democracy and cause major problems.
[Michael Signer:] Yeah, so in the founding of this country, the Founding Fathers were extremely worried about demagogues. Because basically, what they do is they create a substate that is accountable to them alone. And that state by breaking these rules, by breaking rules of governance, that state can grow and grow and grow, and ultimately it can topple a democracy. That's what happened in Weimar, Germany, where Adolf Hitler came up from the democracy and then attacked the democracy.
[David Greene:] Could you argue or could some of Trump's supporters argue that they, you know, see him as a positive kind of demagogue? I'm imagining voters who are sick of the American political system, who don't feel like their voices have been heard, who feel like it is corrupt, and to them, Trump is kind of a hero.
[Michael Signer:] Yeah, I think that that's his argument. And then now if you look at the variables we have today, you have terrorism. You have economic fear. You have this idea of American decline. You have collapse of statesmanship as an ideal. We don't talk very much about our leaders becoming statesmen, which is one of the great ways to diffuse or attack demagogues is when you have leaders that we respect rising up against them. That's what happened with Joseph McCarthy. And we have a worship of celebrity, and we have kind of a festival of the appetites is what you would call these emotions that somebody like Trump plays to. And he's really a perfect storm of all of those things, and I think that his supporters I agree the people that he's playing to would think that the system that he's attacking is corrupt, weak, all those other things. But the problem is that he's now turning on the basic precepts of American constitutional democracy, freedom of religion, an open society, you know, the state having monopoly on violence. He's getting close to encouraging violence.
[David Greene:] You know, it's interesting. You hear different people talk about different Donald Trump, his supporters saying many of the things you're talking about, that at a time when they're so angry at the system that he's just the kind of candidate that they want. You hear some of Trump's critics saying, you know, the time is going to come at some point when he will lose support because he will just cross a line. I mean, have you seen a line crossed yet that you see is the moment when he's going to begin losing some support?
[Michael Signer:] There is a majority who's going to be worried, panicked, appalled by what he's doing, and I think that may be the fact that he just fell to second in Iowa is that starting to happen. I just can't believe that even among the Republican base there's too many people whose parents, you know, fought in World War II or who know what the Statue of Liberty says or who understand how important it is that we remain an open country or have some connection of some Muslim-American somewhere. And so I think the fact that he just fell to second in Iowa might actually explain why he is acting out so much. He's so desperate.
[David Greene:] If you look at some people today who say, I am just sick of the political system, it seems so corrupt, can you blame some American voters for looking for a demagogue-like candidate?
[Michael Signer:] Yes, I can. There is a burden of responsibility that comes with being a citizen of a constitutional democracy. And if you decide to go with your gut as opposed to caring about those values, then you are hurting this country. Demagogues have been talked about for millennia as flatters, so they flatter the people. They play to our need for gratitude. And we're supposed to better than that. So one of the reasons that demagogues are hemmed in is because people say, I hear you, that feels good, but I'm not going to fall in love with you. This is too indulgent. And politicians, usually, are too ashamed to do what demagogues do. And then, Trump, who's a creature, comes from the entertainment world, comes from a culture of narcissism, he doesn't care about any of those rules. So I don't think it's OK to say, well, you know, I know about the principle of separation of church and state, and I know about not having violence in our politics, but I'm going to go with Trump anyway because I'm so angry at the system. That's not OK. It's definitively not OK in the United States of America, and it needs to be condemned.
[David Greene:] Michael Signer, thanks so much for talking to us. We appreciate it.
[Michael Signer:] You're welcome.
[David Greene:] That was Michael Signer. He's a lecturer in politics at the University of Virginia, and he's coming out with a new book soon, "Becoming Madison: The Extraordinary Origins Of The Least Likely Founding Father."

[Jennifer Ludden:] Lebanese voters went to the polls today in Beirut in what was the first of a four-phase national parliamentary election. The vote was the first since street demonstrations and international pressure forced neighboring Syria to finally end its 30-year military presence in Lebanon. NPR's Ivan Watson reports from Beirut.
[Ivan Watson Reporting:] Small armies of political party workers manned the entrances to Beirut's polling stations today. They handed out slips of paper with the names of their candidates, all to the beat of political anthems blaring from nearby loudspeakers. The atmosphere was festive, but party workers like this 21-year-old student named Maherai Tanni agreed there wasn't much of a contest at the polls.
[Mr. Maherai Tanni:] No, there's no competition at all. All of the people are electing one person, so let it be.
[Watson:] That one person would be Saad al-Hariri, the 35-year-old son of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, who was assassinated by a car bomb last February. Today Saad led a slate of candidates under his father's name. The Hariri candidates ran unopposed for nine of Beirut's 19 parliamentary seats. Some voters, like this man named Fouad Sadhi, are putting their trust in the younger Hariri, even though he's untested.
[Mr. Fouad Sadhi:] We don't know yet, but we think that he might be able to do the job. With the team that he has, of course, he's not alone, so he has a good team, so hopefully they'll be able to accomplish something.
[Watson:] But many others, like teacher Michel Schmai, did not share their enthusiasm for the day's vote.
[Mr. Michel Schmai:] Very angry, and I'm not going to vote. There is no election. It's not an election.
[Watson:] In fact, many Lebanese seem to share this view. Government officials say less than 30 percent of eligible voters showed up at the polls today. That's a stark contrast to two months ago when a coalition of anti-Syrian parties organized more than a million people into the largest street demonstration in Lebanese history. The protests may have succeeded in pushing out Syrian troops, but Lebanon's system of rule by clans based on sectarian allegiance remains. Top government positions are reserved for politicians from each of the country's main religious communities. Lochman Saliam is the founder of a non-governmental organization that printed and distributed protest ballots against today's vote. The group wants to do away with Lebanon's sectarian political system.
[Mr. Lochman Saliam:] The system is continuing to defend itself through families, through confessions, through fake equilibrium. And it's almost forbidden to think Lebanon following new or different terms of reference.
[Watson:] Lebanese across the rest of the country will complete parliamentary elections over the next three weeks. Ivan Watson, NPR News, Beirut.

[Robert Siegel:] Two major European banks say they've agreed to pay large penalties, a combined $12-and-a-half billion, to the U.S. government. They are settling claims that they knowingly sold toxic mortgage debt, the securities that fueled the financial crisis eight years ago. NPR's John Ydstie reports.
[John Ydstie, Byline:] Under separate agreements, Credit Suisse will pay a total of $5.3 billion, and Deutsche Bank will pay $7.2 billion. About half the money will go to modifying home loans for struggling consumers. The U.S. Justice Department has declined to comment on the deals. In the case of Deutsche Bank, the settlement is about half of what the Justice Department initially wanted, says Hal Scott, a professor at Harvard and director of the nonpartisan Committee on Capital Market Regulation.
[Hal Scott:] One of the things that is puzzling about these settlements as well as the prior ones is exactly how these numbers get calculated.
[John Ydstie, Byline:] Scott says the process isn't transparent and should involve specifying how much people lost as a result of the bank's activities. Deutsche Bank shares rose on the news that the actual penalty was lower. There were worries the bank would have struggled to pay the larger amount. Some observers have suggested that the Deutsche Bank deal may have been rushed because the Obama administration wanted to complete it before handing the White House over to Donald Trump. He reportedly has loans from the bank of around $300 million. Scott is skeptical.
[Hal Scott:] You know, the Justice Department, the people who are conducting this, are professionals. And I highly doubt that that would have had any impact on this.
[John Ydstie, Byline:] U.S. authorities have extracted more than $46 billion from U.S. banks in similar cases. Yesterday, the DOJ sued the British bank Barclays after it turned down a settlement. Justice Department probes involving three other big European banks continue. John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.

[Ed Gordon:] From NPR News, this is NEWS & NOTES. I'm Ed Gordon. Three billion dollars. That's what the government is now promising the city of New Orleans to help rebuild its broken levee system. The new pledge came after a meeting between President Bush, Donald Powell, head of the federal recovery effort, and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin. Nagin says he hopes the promise of stronger levees will entice residents and businesses to come home and speed up what has been a slow and difficult recovery.
[Mayor Ray Nagin:] Now the Big Easy is not very easy right now. So when you come back to New Orleans, come back ready to work. Come back ready to rebuild and to help us to make the Big Easy the great international city that it once was.
[Ed Gordon:] In just a moment, we'll speak with US Congressman Elijah Cummings about the federal role in the recovery effort. He and other Congressional Black Caucus members met yesterday with David Paulison, acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. But first, for a perspective of life on the ground in New Orleans after Katrina, we're joined by Louisiana state Senator Ann Duplessis. She represents New Orleans' devastated Lower Ninth Ward. Senator, welcome.
[Senator Ann Duplessis:] Thank you.
[Ed Gordon:] Let me ask you, so much in the headlines today about what's being spent to shore up the levees. I'm sure that there are a number of people who are excited about that. But one of the questions is the immediate need of the people of the region and what kinds of dollars and the state that they are in today. Give a sense of what you are seeing.
[Senator Ann Duplessis:] You're absolutely correct with that. The resources that are now being provided to the region and to the city as it relates to levee protections are absolutely critical. But immediately my constituents and the people of New Orleans who were mostly devastated and impacted have one-on-one financial needs. You know, we have been forced to leave our homes, and we are not able to return, but yet the expenses are still there. The mortgages are due. The other bills are due. So at this particular time, we have been lobbying with our congressional leadership to create some legislation that would at least, on temporary basis, help individuals financially so that that would not be another devastating impact on their lives, having to lose the homes that they can't go back to or having to file bankruptcy or things like that. So we are working very hard to try and help create some legislation that would give some temporary financial relief on mortgage payments and debt.
[Ed Gordon:] When talking with your constituents, talk to me about the biggest concern that you are hearing from folks who want to return to New Orleans. You know, there's the debate that there will be some who will not want to return, but what of those who want to return? What are you hearing most from them?
[Senator Ann Duplessis:] Mostly we're hearing how will we be protected from future events such as this? Now what-the announcement that we heard yesterday is a very good starting point. To commit dollars to bringing the levee system back to a Category 3 is good, but I'm just not sure that is enough with all of the data and the information that we have gotten thus far. And so the commitment to a Category 5 or better or greater is what is really needed, and not only for our constituents to have some assurances and some security, but for the industries that we would depend on in those areas where they believe pose a risk.
[Ed Gordon:] Let me ask this. When you see the governor, when you see the mayor in Washington talking about the situation, are you satisfied that we are out of the finger-pointing that really got to some degree a big nasty and we can now move forward, or do you think there is still need for all concerned, from the federal government down, to still try to lay blame elsewhere?
[Senator Ann Duplessis:] You know, right now, this really-I don't think it's about blame. I think what is happening is that our leadership at the local level, the mayor, and at the state level, the governor, were inundated with a disaster that no one could have written a play-or there was no playbook on. We are still in a reactive mode here. So the finger-pointing that I guess-between our family, as I want to say, that the outside world saw, they did what they thought at the time was appropriate based on the information, the data and the intelligence that they had to make decisions.
[Ed Gordon:] All right, Senator. Thank you so much for updating us and give us a look on the ground.
[Senator Ann Duplessis:] Thank you.
[Ed Gordon:] Ann Duplessis is a Louisiana state senator. She represents New Orleans 2nd District, which includes the Lower Ninth Ward.

[Farai Chideya:] From NPR News, this is NEWS & NOTES. I'm Farai Chideya. The 110th Congress officially took office yesterday, and it was a day of firsts. Nancy Pelosi became the first female speaker of the House, Democrats have control for the first time in 12 years and African-Americans have more leading congressional positions than ever before. In addition, some African-Americans broke racial barriers in state office positions. Nancy Pelosi said it all in her remarks yesterday to the Congressional Black Caucus.
[Representative Nancy Pelosi:] The Democrats are back and the CBC is in the lead in the lead.
[Farai Chideya:] So what's ahead for this new class of leaders? Joining me from our NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C. are Donna Brazile, former campaign manager for Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore in 2000. She now runs her own political consulting firm in Washington. Plus Robert Traynham, a political strategist in Washington. Welcome.
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] Hi, Farai.
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] Hello.
[Farai Chideya:] How you all doing?
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] We're great. Thank you.
[Farai Chideya:] Yeah, lots of excitement in your town.
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] Indeed. Happy New Year.
[Farai Chideya:] Yes. Happy New Year to you guys, too. Well, we have to go there. Michael Eric Dyson at the CBC inaugural ceremony, he did this whole routine that was more reminiscent of a roast than a swear-in. Let's take a listen.
[Mr. Michael Eric Dyson:] It was Kenneth Edmonds, better known Babyface... ...who said he had whip appeal. But that whip appeal compares nothing to this man's whip appeal. James E. Clyburn is the whip. She may be the only member here today who has a biblical verse named after her let justice roll down like Maxine Waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. Congresswoman Maxine Waters. The people who have spoken against him couldn't prevail against the people who spoke for him. So, he's here. I think it was the philosopher Shawn Carter... ...who said, [unintelligible] man, I'm just trying to do me. If the record is two mil, I'm trying to move three. Representative William Jefferson.
[Farai Chideya:] Applause. Applause. All right. What do you think, Donna? I mean, you know, it's like, this definitely was like it was like the Essence Awards or the NAACP Image Awards for black politicians.
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] Well, you know, for the first time in our history, African-American leaders have real political power that they can use to help better African-Americans and all Americans. I mean, look, Charlie Rangel, Ways and Means, that's the tax writing committee. That's the committee that oversees all of our retirement security issues, Medicare, Social Security. John Conyers, overseeing everything from immigration to criminal justice reform; Bennie Thompson, Homeland Security. I mean, should I say more? Yes. Stephanie Tubbs Jones will now be in charge of enforcing the ethics rules on Capitol Hill. And Juanita Millender-McDonald will oversee election reform as the chair of the House Administration Committee. So, we have real political power. We're not just sitting in the room on the sidelines. We're at the table and we can help shape the future of this country.
[Farai Chideya:] Robert, I'm only a little worried in the sense that there's there was that year of the woman that lasted for about a year, and then women were not really taken that seriously. Are we at all concerned about, OK, this is the year of the black folks and then next year it won't be.
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] Well, we should be able to. Look, I mean, Donna is absolutely correct. I mean this is an opportunity for black leaders to help black people. And that's just exactly see exactly what's going to become of that. I mean, really, the proof is in the pudding. You know, Congressman Boehner from Ohio said it best yesterday when he was introducing speaker-elect and now Speaker Pelosi. He said, and I quote, "a congressional majority is simply a means to an end. The value of a majority lies not in the chance to wield great power but in the chance to do great things." And this is the opportunity for Democrats to stop talking the talk but actually do the walk. And what that means is, it's not just simply, you know, bashing the Republicans or bashing the Bush administration, but actually do something and actually produce. And, you know, Congresswoman Pelosi Speaker Pelosi said that in the first 100 hours they're going to push new healthcare. They'll going to try to strengthen homeland security. They're going to try to strengthen education. They're going to try to do something on energy proposal and pay as you go. We'll see. I mean they literally have a honeymoon now. And we'll actually see exactly if they're going to be able to produce something. The Senate, frankly, in my opinion, is really where the power really lies in terms of the 51 to 49 slim majority that the Democrats have. And keep in mind, in the Senate you need 60 votes, really, to do anything in the United States Senate to pass key pieces of legislation. And Senator Reid, the new majority leader in the Senate, is going to have a very, very hard time trying to lead his Democratic caucus. Why? Well, the simple reason why is simply because, number one, you've got a lot of Democrats that are running for president. But also, number two, you also have which, what I mean by that is that you also have an attendance problem. But you also have a lot of Democrats, frankly, that are going to stick their own ground that necessarily might not be the Democratic line. But secondly, and arguably more importantly, Senator Reid has a very moderate caucus. I mean, when you take a look at Mr. Tester from Montana, when you take a look at Mr. Casey from Pennsylvania, when you take a look at Mr. Lieberman from Connecticut, there are a lot of Democrats that are moderate and that, frankly, are not going to swallow the Democratic pill.
[Farai Chideya:] All right. Well, I want to go to you, Donna, about the CBC, the Congressional Black Caucus. Question is, what is the Congressional Black Caucus' agenda? Let's take a listen to Carolyn Kilpatrick, who is the new head of the CBC.
[Representative Carolyn Kilpatrick:] Today is an awesome day. It is the first day of the rest of our lives. I want to thank my colleagues, all 43-strong, for standing, for entrusting me with the responsibility to lead. And I pledge to you, I will never let you down.
[Farai Chideya:] The question is, what can the CBC do? There's, you know, civil rights groups like the NAACP. There are different grassroots movements dealing with everything from juvenile incarceration to jobs. But what is the CBC's role as a whole?
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] I think the CBC will play a very influential role in helping to set the agenda. First of all, the Democrats be they conservative, moderate, liberal they all agree that in the first 100 hours we must enact a recommendation to the 911 Commission. That vote will take place on January 9th, the following day, on Wednesday, January 10th, we will raise the minimum wage. Democrats have introduced this legislation to raise the federal minimum wage. The Black Caucus supports this. This will benefit African-Americans who are part-time workers as well as those who are working two, three jobs to make ends meet. Before the end of the first week of the 110th session, we will also pass legislation on stem-cell research and negotiate for lower prescription drug prices. So the Congressional Black Caucus will assist the Democrats in passing this agenda, implementing this agenda and ensuring that those issues that are near and dear to the Congressional Black Caucus, be they on criminal justice reform, jobs, education, the CBC is now in a position to help shape public policy.
[Farai Chideya:] Robert, there was a definite chill when Nancy Pelosi kind of dealt with William Jefferson over ethics issues, although she gave Murtha a hall pass, another congressman. But let's listen to Nancy Pelosi talking about ethics.
[Representative Nancy Pelosi:] Let us join together in the first 100 hours to make this the Congress the most honest and open Congress in history. One hundred hours.
[Farai Chideya:] Robert, is there a double standard when it comes to how Nancy Pelosi, newly head of the Democrats in the House, is dealing with ethics according to different members in the House?
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] I believe so. I mean, look, there's no question about it that Speaker Pelosi certainly gave Mr. Jefferson the cold shoulder. But, look, I mean the fact of the matter is that $90,000 was found in his freezer. There's no question about it.
[Farai Chideya:] I want that.
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] [Unintelligible].
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] No, you do not want that.
[Farai Chideya:] You're right. I don't. I don't.
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] But nevertheless, there is a double standard with Speaker Pelosi in that regard. And certainly the Congressional Black Caucus was very upset with Speaker Pelosi, how she handled that and how she is handling that. But the fact of the matter is that there is a double standard. But what I find very, very interesting here is that in the first, I guess, five hours of Speaker Pelosi's speakership ethics reform was passed almost unanimously in the United States House, which is very, very interesting. It's going to be even more transparent. And then what's also even more interesting about this is that when Republicans were in control just a few months ago we tried to pass a comprehensive ethics reform package and Speaker Pelosi said no. So there is a symbol of a double standard. But the fact of the matter is that now she has the lead and, frankly, all eyes and the spotlight is going to be on her and on Congressman Jefferson.
[Farai Chideya:] Donna, how is Speaker Pelosi going to deal with the issue of the war? You have people who are on the left of the party, a couple of Californians, including Congresswoman Barbara Lee and Lynn Woolsey, who have been constantly advocating to get out of Iraq entirely. You have some very moderate centrists, and even sort of right-leaning Democrats. I mean, certainly Joe Lieberman in the Senate, I don't know if he really counts as a Democrat anymore. But for what it's worth, he has been supportive of the war. How is the House speaker going to deal with the divisions within the Democratic Party over the war?
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] You know, I don't think there are many divisions anymore. Look, we have Dennis Kucinich who is now running for president, well, the congressman from Ohio, the former mayor of Cleveland. He supports withdrawing resources for troops. We do not support that as a party. We also know that there are Democrats as well as Republicans there's a bipartisan consensus being formed now to begin to withdraw troops. Leading Republicans like Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Gordon Smith of Oregon have also spoken out against any escalation or surge. So, I think Pelosi will help keep the Democratic caucus unified. In her remarks yesterday, she said the American people rejected an open-ended obligation to a war without end. She said President Bush will address the nation on the subject of Iraq. It's his responsibility to articulate a new plan for Iraq that makes it clear to the Iraqis that they must defend their own streets and their security, a plan that promotes stability in the region and allow us to responsibly redeploy American forces. That's our position. That's our position. And Democrats will not alter this position. We're waiting for the president to address the nation and we will hold oversight hearings to ensure that his plan is a plan for victory and a plan to bring our troops home.
[Farai Chideya:] All right.
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] Well, with all due
[Farai Chideya:] We're going to have to leave it there. I'm sorry, unless you can give us 10 seconds, Robert.
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] I'll just say Clinton, Obama, Biden and Edwards, they're all running for president and they hold very different positions. So what Donna said was slightly disingenuous because they all have different positions on the war of Iraq in terms of...
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] It doesn't matter what...
[Farai Chideya:] All right, guys. It's a wrap. We're going to be back with you guys soon. Robert, Donna, thank you very much. And Donna Brazile is the former campaign manager for Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore in 2000. She runs her own political consulting firm in Washington. And Robert Traynham is a political strategist also in D.C. Just ahead, is New Orleans botching its rebuild, and a look back on the college football season in our sports segment.

[Arun Rath:] Demonstrators across the nation are staging hundreds of protests against illegal immigration this weekend. They reflect a backlash against government resources going to the more than 50,000 unaccompanied minors who have crossed the southern U.S. border in recent months. This week, Los Angeles mayor, Eric Garcetti, announced he'll house some of those miners in L.A. as they await court hearings with funding from the federal government. City resources will not be used. I asked Mayor Garcetti why his city should take this on.
[Mayor Eric Garcetti:] Well, I think that we have always been a nation that has been defined by and that has been open to immigrants. They've been the strength of our communities. But I don't come to this from a partisan perspective. I come into this as a father and as somebody who sees kids who need to be cared for, who need to be reunified if possible and whose legal needs have to be met. I think that Los Angeles as a city of immigrants should proudly be a part of that.
[Arun Rath:] Determining the final status of these children could take a while. Immigration hearings can take years to schedule. This take us sort of beyond housing to, you know, schools, health care, other services. Won't this seriously strain city resources over the long-term.
[Mayor Eric Garcetti:] Well, you know, Los Angeles already faces the broken immigration system and its costs when we can't award scholarships to students who are A-students and have only known the United States but might be undocumented, when we see, you know, emergency room visits and other things. There's no doubt that there's been a strain on local budgets, which is why I think we need comprehensive immigration reform. But this is a different issue here. This is an emergency situation. These are kids first and foremost. And then of course, you know, we do have to go through formal procedures on what will happen with them. I would love to see those things accelerated. I would love them to see, you know, a faster path to citizenship for people who already live here. I would love to see our borders secured, but that shouldn't keep us from action at moments of humanitarian crisis.
[Arun Rath:] You mentioned that you're trying to do this in a way that does not pull resources away from other needs in the city. But you've been criticized by some homeless charities, one of whom called this a slap in the face for U.S. citizens. What do you say to them?
[Mayor Eric Garcetti:] Well, ironically yesterday or earlier this week, I was with First Lady Michelle Obama and announced our plans here to end veterans' homelessness and then to attack chronic homelessness here in Los Angeles. As a fellow service member, I'm appalled to see that people who would put on the uniform of this country are sleeping under our bridges, our freeway overpasses, places that they should not be.
[Arun Rath:] Beyond the veterans, what about the rest of the homeless?
[Mayor Eric Garcetti:] So the challenge is to end veterans' homelessness by the end of 2015. And next after that, I'll be looking at the chronic homeless population, which we've already made some dents in. I'm looking to the state and federal government, which have cut our housing dollars in recent years, to re-up those as well as for us to locally generate a consistent source of funding to build permanent, supportive housing that won't just get people off the street, but give them the services that they need to stay in those apartments and to stay permanently in housing and to get employed. So we're looking at this in a holistic way so we don't throw money at a problem and people wind up back on the street.
[Arun Rath:] You said that you're not trying to do this in a partisan way, but as you know, all of this debate has been very politically fraught. And there would be a cynical take that, you know, being in Los Angeles, being in California, it's politically safer for you to make this kind of move than it might be in other places.
[Mayor Eric Garcetti:] Well, you know, I'm only moved by my conscience and by good management. I'm in charge of running a city. I'm a CEO of a great American city of 4 million people. And I have to do what works. We don't have time to engage in partisan politics. A pothole isn't Republican or Democratic. We have problems to solve. And we certainly see part of our future success as a nation and certainly as a city as being tied to the world. And certainly that's where the investment, jobs and prosperity will come from in the future. That's why I'm so focused on this as a mayor.
[Arun Rath:] Mayor, what would be your message to potential immigrants or those who are considering potentially risking their children's lives to get them to this country?
[Mayor Eric Garcetti:] Well, I don't think the system that we have, it's very wise. And for me, the reason that I'm reaching out is we have children that are here. But I certainly wouldn't encourage people to send their children or for children to cross the border. That's an incredibly dangerous journey. And I'd want people to hear that loud and clear. But just as loud and clear, I think we have an obligation, once we suddenly have children that are in our country here, to be caring about them while we determine their final status.
[Arun Rath:] Los Angeles mayor, Eric Garcetti, joined me from his office in City Hall. Mayor Garcetti, thanks very much.
[Mayor Eric Garcetti:] Great pleasure to be with you.

[Audie Cornish:] An update now on fighting in Myanmar that's been going on for decades. Several thousand people in Shan State have been displaced as ethnic minority insurgents fight for greater autonomy from the central government. Now, as Michael Sullivan reports, Myanmar's lucrative drug trade is increasingly fueling the conflict.
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] This month, rebels of the so-called Northern Alliance staged a daring series of surprise attacks against Myanmar's military in Shan State and beyond, one of them against a highly symbolic target uncomfortably close to Myanmar's heartland, says David Mathieson, an independent analyst based in Yangon.
[David Mathieson:] This was in Mandalay region when they rocketed basically Myanmar's version of West Point. This is really quite unprecedented. We haven't seen anything like this in decades of civil war in Myanmar.
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] The Northern Alliance, which includes the newly resurgent Arakan Army, also targeted a bridge on a major trade route with neighboring China. At least a dozen members of Myanmar's military were killed in the attacks along with several civilians. They come at a time when Myanmar's military has been involved in fierce fighting with the Arakan Army in Rakhine State for months, Mathieson says.
[David Mathieson:] This is a truly national insurgency with multiple allies, and there's very little understanding of this. And then you have the United Wa State Army, the Shan State Progressive Party, all of these groups that have been around for a very long time and are barely understood outside of Myanmar. And they need to be understood better, otherwise this conflict won't be resolved.
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] But there are a number of factors working against an end to Myanmar's long-running civil war, understanding is just one of them. The government's refusal to budge on the ethnic groups' demands for greater autonomy is another. And then there's money.
[Jeremy Douglas:] The biggest source of finance for conflict is clearly drugs.
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] Jeremy Douglas is regional director for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Bangkok. He says the trade is much bigger now than it was decades ago, when the area was better known for its opium and heroin production. Now it's mostly synthetics like crystal methamphetamine, or ice, destined for markets in Australia, Japan, South Korea and beyond, a business the UNODC reckons is worth a staggering $60 billion a year.
[Richard Horsey:] If you're a conflict actor in Shan State and you've got to get income to support your fight, what do you turn to?
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] Richard Horsey is one of the authors of the recent International Crisis Group report, "Fire And Ice: Conflict And Drugs In Myanmar's Shan State."
[Richard Horsey:] There isn't a thriving licit economy that will make you the kinds of money that you need to sustain fighters. So you turn to illicit resource extraction, logging, money laundering and, of course, illicit narcotics.
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] And that's a problem because..
[Richard Horsey:] Pretty soon, the profits from this became so large that they are the dominant the largest part of the Shan State economy. And so at that point, people start to be incentivized by the money and not just by politics.
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] Which makes it easier for transnational criminal organizations to operate in the area under the protection of or in partnership with local militias, and not just militias from the rebel side. The UNODC's Jeremy Douglas.
[Jeremy Douglas:] There's militias up there in North Shan State, for example, that are allied with the government. And we know, and there have been very, very strong evidence through cases seizures of drugs coming out of their territory. So it's clear.
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] It's also clear that all that money will make it hard to end the conflict and bring lasting peace, stability and the rule of law.
[Richard Horsey:] You'd have to say that the ordinary person living in Shan State pays the highest price for all of this.
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] Richard Horsey.
[Richard Horsey:] They live with conflict. They live with insecurity. They live with bad governance. They live with poor services. And they don't have very much else to show for it.
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] And likely won't for a long time to come. For NPR News, I'm Michael Sullivan in Chiang Rai, Thailand.

[Renee Montagne:] NPR's Audie Cornish has more.
[Audie Cornish:] With people waving their hands and printed signs in the air, the feeling was more pep rally or tent revival then press conference.
[Wade Henderson:] Good morning. Good morning. Come on, let's pump it up. I love those signs. Hey. Lift up those signs. Back off of Social Security. That's right. That's right.
[Audie Cornish:] Wade Henderson, head of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, set the tone.
[Wade Henderson:] Aren't we tired of hearing how the federal debt is being used as a justification to raid Social Security? Aren't we sick of that? And aren't we going to push back and fight against that?
[Audie Cornish:] The more than 250 people crammed into a Capitol hearing room were only a hint of the fervor Democrats hope to whip up if Republicans add Social Security to their entitlement reform effort.
[Harry Reid:] The Republicans don't seem to care. Look at HR1.
[Audie Cornish:] Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tried to draw a connection between entitlement reform and recent budget cuts to an IT fund for the Social Security Administration, even though the cuts were approved by Democrats, as well.
[Harry Reid:] Back off Social Security. It's in great shape for the next many decades. Let's worry about Social Security when it's a problem. Today, it's not a problem.
[Audie Cornish:] According to the non-partisan budget analysts at the Congressional Budget Office, it'll be another 25 years before Social Security reserves are exhausted. Even then, income from payroll taxes would cover benefits for another 50 years. But it's also the case that last year, the program paid out more than it took in. Republicans say that the fact that the program is projected to eat a larger and larger part of the GDP means the time is now to address the problem.
[Eric Cantor:] Harry Reid has said that Social Security does not have a problem. That would be reflecting what the illness is in Washington, and we're not backing down.
[Audie Cornish:] That's House Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor at a recent speech at the Hoover Institution. Cantor tried to send a clear signal to key voters with concerns about the GOP's plans.
[Eric Cantor:] I mean, just from the very notion that it said that 50 percent of beneficiaries under the Social Security program use those moneys as their sole source of income. So we've got to protect today's seniors. But for the rest of us? For you know, listen. We're going to have to come to grips with the fact that these programs cannot exist if we want America to be what we want America to be.
[Audie Cornish:] Audie Cornish, NPR News, the Capitol.

[Liane Hansen:] Flu season has arrived at some colleges and universities even before classes have begun. Symptoms are spreading in at least two schools in the South and 2,000 students are reported sick at Washington State University. NPR's Larry Abramson has more.
[Larry Abramson:] The American College Health Association says that on average, nine students are reporting flu-like symptoms for every 10,000 students in college. But in Georgia, the rate is nearly 10 times as high. Michael Huey is health director at Emory University, which already has 250 cases.
[Dr. Michael Huey:] I think it's much faster than we expected. We didn't anticipate that we would had to ramp up our efforts before classes even began.
[Larry Abramson:] Huey says Emory is following health guidelines, urging students who can, to stay at home till they are free of fever for 24 hours. Those who can't are being sent to a special dorm for sick students.
[Dr. Michael Huey:] Most of our freshmen and sophomores are not from Atlanta or even from Georgia and this gives them a place that they can self-isolate.
[Larry Abramson:] Emory is counting on this isolation tactic to keep the flu under control and has not canceled any classes or public events. In neighboring Alabama, Stillman College canceled its scheduled Saturday football game against Clark Atlanta University because many players had symptoms typical of the flu.
[The Biggest Concentration Of Cases So Far:] Washington State University, where 2,000 students may be sick. The good news, according to health officials like Dr. James Turner of the University of Virginia, is the bigger flu outbreaks remain localized in a few states.
[Dr. James Turner:] About 45 percent of the schools are reporting no cases. So, there still are a number of schools, particularly the Midwest, Northeast and the Southwest, that aren't really reporting much activity right now.
[Larry Abramson:] And Turner notes, symptoms on college campuses remain mild with only a handful of hospitalizations nationwide and no deaths. Larry Abramson, NPR News, Washington.

[Robert Siegel:] There are primaries tomorrow in Nevada, where Republicans will choose an opponent for Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. And the incumbent Republican Governor Jim Gibbons faces a very strong challenge in the GOP gubernatorial primary. For those stories, we're joined now by Jon Ralston, columnist for the Las Vegas Sun. Welcome to the program once again.
[Mr. Jon Ralston:] Hi, Robert.
[Robert Siegel:] And first, Majority Leader Harry Reid, fair to say that he's vulnerable this year?
[Mr. Jon Ralston:] Oh, he's very vulnerable. His numbers are below 40 percent in his approval rating. I think that almost anybody put up against him in a head-to-head with a Republican after their name would have a shot to beat him.
[Robert Siegel:] So there are three Republicans who at least have a chance it seems from the polls: Sharon Angle, Sue Lowden and Danny Tarkanian. Tell us about them.
[Mr. Jon Ralston:] Well, Danny Tarkanian is the easy one, of course. He is competitive mostly because of his last name. He's the son of the legendary basketball coach here. But he's run a very aggressive, and actually maybe the best campaign of all, and so he is in position to be competitive. Next is Sue Lowden, who was the frontrunner for many, many months the establishment candidate, favored I think privately by national and local Republicans because of her viability against Harry Reid. But then she had some very high-profile self-inflicted wounds, including this statement that in the olden days her grandmother used to give chickens for health care. People used to barter for health care, which she refused to back away from, became the subject of national ridicule because, of course, chickens are very, very funny. That has very much hurt her. And then in that same time period, Sharon Angle, who was way behind in the polls in single-digits was suddenly catapulted into contention by being endorsed by the Tea Party Express, and then having the Club for Growth which has a lot of money come in and spend money on her here. In addition, a Democratic front group called the Patriot Majority has also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to hurt Lowden here. And now you have a situation where Sharon Angle, who was invisible a couple of months ago, thanks to chickens and outside forces is now the frontrunner.
[Robert Siegel:] And Sharon Angle is the candidate, it is believed, whom Senator Reid would most like to run against.
[Mr. Jon Ralston:] There's no doubt about that because she can't come back to the middle. Maybe Sue Lowden can.
[Robert Siegel:] Now, in the governor's race, the Republican incumbent Jim Gibbons also has a very tough race tomorrow.
[Mr. Jon Ralston:] Unless thousands upon thousands of people get lost going to the polls tomorrow, Robert, Jim Gibbons is going to be the first incumbent governor in the history of the state of Nevada to lose in a primary. He's behind by 15 to 20 points to a former federal judge who left a lifetime appointment that, quite ironically, Harry Reid helped him get. The Republican Party establishment is desperate to hold onto the governorship. They believe that Jim Gibbons cannot win the general election and so they and others are supporting Brian Sandoval, who is going to win that race fairly easily, I think.
[Robert Siegel:] Now, Nevada was one of the hardest hit states in the housing market collapse. And we now routinely speak of Las Vegas as the city that used to be the fastest-growing city in the U.S. How much does all that drive whats happening politically in the state now?
[Mr. Jon Ralston:] There's a lot of anger in the state, mostly because of the economic conditions you mentioned. We were the epicenter of the foreclosure crisis. Our unemployment rate is one of the highest in the country. You look at polling thats done and in that question thats asked at the beginning of polls: Do you believe the state is going in the right direction or the wrong direction, over 80 percent more than 80 percent in some polls. People are talking about the anti-incumbent fervor, the anger across this country, Robert. Nowhere is it more pronounced than it is right here in Nevada.
[Robert Siegel:] Well, Jon Ralston, thanks a lot for talking with us.
[Mr. Jon Ralston:] You're welcome.
[Robert Siegel:] Jon Ralston, columnist for the Las Vegas Sun and also host of the paper's political news program "Face To Face with Jon Ralston."

[Robert Siegel:] More than 2,300 American troops have been killed in the war in Iraq, and 15,000 have been wounded. Many have been grievously disfigured by roadside explosives and car bombs. Those who survive arrive in daily, often hourly helicopter loads at the U.S. military's medical center in Balad, north of Baghdad. NPR Pentagon correspondent John Hendren recently spent several days there, and he has a report. A note: This report contains graphic descriptions that some listeners may find disturbing. JOHN HENDREN reporting When you arrive at the U.S. military hospital at Balad, you start here, on a bustling helicopter pad on the U.S. military's busiest air base anywhere. Then you roll under the canvas of a tented emergency room where thousands of wounded American and Iraqi troops have come this year. Some days there are more than two dozen. On a recent day, not a particularly busy one, there were 14. Typically more than half are Americans, like this 101st Airborne Division soldier stifling the sting from a hole in his right leg.
[Mr. Patrick Meyer:] My name's Patrick Meyer.
[Hendren:] What happened to you tonight?
[Mr. Patrick Meyer:] We had a gunshot wound, and I was just doing my part of the role, doing my job.
[Hendren:] Increasingly, as Iraqis move to the vanguard of confrontations with a persistent insurgency, the patients are Iraqi police and soldiers. Four Iraqi soldiers are carted in from a seemingly unending caravan of Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters, their figures riddled with shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade attack. When things are serious, and they usually are, patients in the ER are rolled the hundred yards down to one of the shipping containers that serve as operating rooms at the far end. That is where an Iraqi police officer ends up after a local hospital botched a surgery to repair the damage from an insurgent's bullet. His American surgeon, Army Major S.P. Bowers, says the injuries are often extensive. Major S.P. BOWERS [U.S. Army surgeon, Iraq]: The constellation of injuries is unlike anything we've seen. Every once in a while, a patient will have what we call the Balad special, which means that we'll have sometimes three or four surgical teams operating simultaneously. So we have to all cooperate with each other and stay out of each other's way and everything. Less than an hour into his surgery, the operating room gets crowded. Next to the Iraqi policeman who's been shot by an insurgent, the nurses roll in a suspected insurgent apparently shot by an Iraqi policeman as he tried to plant a roadside bomb. Beneath blindfolded eyes and plugged ears is a grimace of agony. Urologist Jay Bishoff shows how a bullet designed to rip through flesh has torn a fist-size hole in his leg and shredded his genitals.
[Dr. Jay Bishoff:] And this is a serious injury. I think there a lot of places where they'd go ahead and just amputate this. But we treat all the patients the same. And if this was an American soldier, we'd give him a chance to save his penis. And we're going to give him that same chance. So we're going to do all the reconstruction just like we would any other patient.
[Hendren:] Major Steve Resnick, a Reservist surgeon from Kansas who's come to the OR to observe, says the patient could have it worse.
[Major Steve Resnick:] This guy, unfortunately, because of his, you know, the environment in which lives, the country in which he lives, he'd never have a quality of surgeon that he, that he's getting exposed to today.
[Hendren:] Do you find that ironic?
[Major Steve Resnick:] Tremendously ironic. Somebody who is experiencing the best the U.S. has to give after trying to create more death and dismemberment.
[Hendren:] Most urban ERs deal with a lot of blunt trauma. But here the surgeons try to repair bodies riddled with shrapnel and bullets. Those with the worst wounds are called Humpty Dumpties by a staff that can't always put them back together again. The patients who survive, and more than 96 percent of those who make it to Balad do, end up down the hall, in an internal care unit. Major Beth Ivers, a Reservist nurse, gives a tour, stopping at the bedside of a wounded Iraqi.
[Major Beth Ivers:] His injuries are the result of an IED explosion. He was literally peppered with shrapnel down the entire left side of his body, from his head to his toe. He has wounds, as you can see, in his face, which go all the way down the side of his body. This gentleman did lose both of his eyes in this explosion. So he will no longer be able to see, obviously.
[Hendren:] Some of the medical staff have made considerable sacrifices to get here. Major Hans Bachen is a neurosurgeon who gave up a lucrative practice in August and joined the Army for a fraction of his salary.
[Major Hans Bachen:] I was in a private practice in Tacoma, Washington, and it just wasn't what I was interested in doing. And wanted to do something that I thought made more of a difference. I realized shortly after joining that it just didn't make me want to come to work in the morning. The salary wasn't enough.
[Hendren:] Some days here, there is little reward. In the four days after the torching of the Shiite Shrine in Samara set off factional violence last month, the staff at Balad lost several badly wounded patients. The nurses in particularly took it hard. Lieutenant Colonel Susan Jano remembers one soldier in particular. Lieutenant Colonel SUSAN JANO [United States Army nurse]: The guy from the chopper crew just, like, walked out with this soldier in his arms and just handed it to one of the pad folks. And when they turned and ran, his foot fell off. And, so when they got him to the emergency room, they had worked on him and he had a, the patient expired in the emergency room. And then they had to go back and look for the foot. Major Linda Stanley recalls two soldiers killed by a roadside bomb.
[Major Linda Stanley:] I cleaned a trail of blood from the ER to the OR and actually, I thought to myself, somewhere in the states is a mom or a dad that has no idea they lost their son tonight. And, uh, there's just a lot of death, and people dying here.
[Hendren:] Lieutenant Colonel Paulette Shank, a nurse anesthesiologist, says a spontaneous grief counseling session began with a nurse who was haunted by a fallen Marine. Lieutenant Colonel PAULETTE SHANK [United States Army nurse anesthesiologist]: She can't sleep at night. She hasn't been able to get through one night yet since that one night where you had three deaths. And then you heard the next person who talked about her husband's in the theater here, and her son has just enlisted and will probably be coming over shortly. The next one talked about the fact that her husband would worry too much if she ever shared the stories of what happened here, so you don't want to tell your husband or your wife at home what you just experienced, because there's nothing they can do. It was interesting because we started with a box of tissues sitting over on the table, and the next thing I know that box went from one person to the next person, to the next, and there wasn't a dry eye in the circle before we ended. The surgeons also band together, coping through a community governed by ritual. They gather Thursday's for Mongolian BBQ at the mess hall. They lounge between procedures on a patio they've dubbed The 19th Hole. They watch light films like Fletch in a housing trailer they're not supposed to have. They've registered it under a bogus name. And they park their dirt bikes at the swamp, a shack behind the hospital where they nap and puff the odd cigar. But sometimes, says Bachen, death breaks the routine.
[Major Hans Bachen:] Every time someone dies in the operating room it affects me pretty profoundly, and I don't try to cover that up. I mean, people around me know that I'm very upset. And my simple way of thinking about it is, you must have some kind of a tank, like, for emotions that, like, you can shunt things over there for a while, but it gets filled up. And eventually it has to go somewhere. So, the way I deal with it is I, I experience the emotions at the time and at later times, and I don't try to push them away. I think that if you had cases like this and you were not extremely sad, and frustrated, there's probably something wrong with you.
[Hendren:] On this day, the wounded policeman and the insurgents survive, and are rolled out of the OR as another copper-load of patients touches down. John Hendren, NPR News.

[Melissa Block:] In Pakistan, one month ago today, the Taliban attacked an army-run school in the city of Peshawar 150 people were killed, the vast majority of them children. Today, Pakistanis remembered the victims with demonstrations and vigils. The school that was attacked reopened earlier this week and NPR's Philip Reeves joins us from the capital Islamabad to talk more. Philip, we were just hearing that sound of a demonstration. Tell us more about how this day was marked in Pakistan.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] Well, there were vigils like that in Islamabad across the country. Talking to people at that particular vigil that you just heard -people were saying they're just fed up after eight years of conflict in which tens of thousands of people have been killed. They feel that it's time to, you know, crush violent Islamist groups once and for all. And there were ceremonies at the school itself where the massacre occurred. So all in all, it was a day of high emotion.
[Melissa Block:] When this attack happened a month ago, Philip, it was assumed that this would be a turning point for Pakistan that it would fundamentally change the country. Has that turned out to be true?
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] Well, there's no doubt the country was engulfed by a wave of disgust and anger. Some people have for ages been unhappy about the killing of civilians including children by US drones and Pakistan's military offensive in the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan. But the sheer scale of the massacre by the Pakistani Taliban at this army school in Peshawar has led people to set that apart as a crime of, you know, particularly horrific proportions. And I think that's why it's changed the political environment here. And the change is being reflected in a batch of counterterrorism measures passed by the government, which have been in some cases controversial.
[Melissa Block:] What are some of those counterterrorism measures?
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] Well, for the last several years, there's been a moratorium on capital punishment that's now lifted. At least 18 people have been hanged since the Peshawar attack. The authorities also say they're cracking down on the dissemination of militant ideology. For instance, by confiscating loudspeakers from certain mosques and also printing presses. But the most controversial and important measure is the introduction of military courts to handle terrorism related cases for the next two years.
[Melissa Block:] Controversial so there has been push back on that question?
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] Yes. I mean, it's been justified by the authorities on the grounds the judges and prosecutors and witnesses are intimidated and too scared to rule or take part in terrorism related cases. And the courts are anyway dysfunctional and there's a huge backlog and so. Nonetheless, there is a lot of debate about replacing that system with military courts. Pakistanis, you know, are very aware that for the half of this country's history, the nation's been ruled by the military, and after the ousting of the last military ruler Pervez Musharraf people began to hope that civilian government was here to stay imbedding in. But allowing the military to run these courts is fueling concerns that once again, behind the scenes the Army which has always remained very influential is stealthily assuming control of key leaders of power.
[Melissa Block:] And Philip, the school where so many died one month ago has been as we said reopened and, I gather, with new layers of security.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] Security is extremely tight around that school. But also other schools the government has actually ordered that schools should have eight-foot walls with razor wire on top and security cameras. So the experience for a kid going to school is going to be a very different one from now on.
[Melissa Block:] OK. NPR's Philip Reeves speaking with us from Islamabad, Pakistan. Philip, thank you.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Steve Inskeep:] Mitt Romney has also accelerated the pace of his campaign. Yesterday, he was in four states and four time zones, as the endurance test intensifies. NPR's Ari Shapiro is traveling with the Romney campaign.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] Mitt Romney woke up in Colorado and flew to Nevada. His event there was just across the street from a resort called Circus Circus not a bad metaphor for this final election season hullaballoo. The Republican candidate catapulted back and forth across thousands of miles yesterday, holding his first rally of the day in Reno. He tried to make this election personal for the audience, describing how his presidency would impact each member of a family. He gave specific examples for seniors, working parents and a girl graduating from college. Housing is one reason Republicans feel good about their chances in Nevada. The foreclosure crisis hit the state hard, and stories like this one from Joe Lovin are easy to find.
[Joe Lovin:] My stepson, he's in Las Vegas. He's been hurting for several years now. In fact, my wife gave up a house in Las Vegas because it was underwater. He couldn't afford it. He had to walk away from it. So that's probably too common a story.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] Romney said if this president knew how to fix the problem, he would have done it by now. Democrats are trying to remind voters that Romney said the answer is to let the housing market hit bottom. That position does not faze Romney supporter Betty Hennig.
[Betty Hennig:] I think that's just bunk. I think that if people had jobs and I think Romney can get us jobs, and I think that's what's important. We won't lose houses if people have jobs. They can pay their mortgages.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] Unemployment and personal bankruptcies in Nevada are way up, too. Democrats point out that the state already has some of the lowest taxes and regulations in the country. They say if Republican policies worked, Nevada would be booming. But Republicans think the state's tough situation gives Romney an opening. He insists he can bring the economy back where the president has not. Both candidates are emphasizing early voting, here and across the country, to bank as many votes as they can before Election Day. In this tight election, even Nevada's six electoral votes could make a difference. The next place Romney visited has six electoral votes, too, and, like Nevada, it could have a large impact despite its small size. In Iowa, Romney's plane with the big R on the tail pulled right up to a massive airplane hangar. When he stepped up to the podium inside, he once again tried to make this race personal. Romney's also striking a more confident note in his stump speeches. He told this cheering crowd: We are going to win. Then he returned to his plane for a flight to Ohio, having spent a total of 80 minutes on the ground in Iowa. Ari Shapiro, NPR News, traveling with the Romney campaign.
[Steve Inskeep:] Endless numbers of people talk about the presidential campaign. Your public radio station does something distinctive: It gives you a chance to listen. This is where you hear the candidates, hear the voters, hear people think. We're glad you're with us on MORNING EDITION this morning, and remember that you can follow us throughout the day on social media. We're on Facebook. You can also find us on Twitter. Among other places, we're @MorningEdition and @NPRInskeep. You're listening to MORNING EDITION, from NPR News.

[Neal Conan:] I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Peter Bergen has been reporting and writing about Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda since the late '90s, when, as a producer for CNN, he got bin Laden to agree to an interview. Over the past 10 years, Bergen's travelled to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to report on bin Laden and his organization. He's also been kind enough to be a regular guest on this program. His most recent book is "The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al-Qaeda's Leader." Now, along with fellow scholar, Paul Cruikshank, he has an article in the current issue of the New Republic called "The Unraveling: Al-Qaeda's Revolt Against bin Laden," where he chronicles the growing disillusionment, and in some cases, the outright repudiation, of bin Laden and al-Qaeda's leadership by several former supporters and mentors. That doesn't mean that al-Qaeda is no longer a threat, they conclude, but that it is losing the war of ideas. Peter Bergen joins us in a moment. We'll also talk with a former mujahedin fighter who's among al-Qaeda's critics. Later as exercisers move indoors to escape the heat the gym gets weirder. What are the worst gym sins you've ever seen? But first, the jihadist revolt against bin Laden. If you've read the New Republic piece or if you have questions about the growing criticism of bin Laden and al-Qaeda from former allies, give us a call. The number is 800-989-8255, email us, talk@npr.org, and you can join the conversation on our blog at npr.orgblogofthenation. Peter Bergen joins us here in Studio 3A, and always nice to have you on the program.
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] Afternoon, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] And when you argue that bin Laden is losing the war of ideas, you emphasize he's not losing it to Washington or to the West, but to former allies with credentials as mujahedin.
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] Yes, I mean, a number of the people we spoke to for the piece are people who either fought with bin Laden in Afghanistan, Noman Benotman, a Libyan, the leader of a militant group, Abdullah Anas, who's going to be on the show later, who is a son in-law of Abdullah Azzam, arguably the most important figure in the jihadist movement. Sheikh Salman al-Oudah, a very important religious scholar in Saudi Arabia, who bin Laden looked to for spiritual advice, who's now very publicly turned against him. So, what's interesting about this, Neal, is it's militant scholars, people who fought in Afghanistan, people who very hard for al-Qaeda to paint as sort of stooges of the West who are making this critique on both religious and strategic grounds.
[Neal Conan:] What are the religious guys to do then?
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] Well, it's so basic, as you know. The Koran forbids the killing of civilians, particularly fellow Muslims. This is something bin Laden's never really been able to satisfactorily explain. When he's been asked these questions about, how do you justify the killing of civilians, say, on 911, and he'll say, well, the people in the World Trade Center weren't at a playground. They were helping finance the American economy, and they're all responsible for American foreign policy in that way. Well, that's not an argument from religion. It's an argument it's a political argument. So he bin Laden well knows that on religious grounds this is very hard to justify, and this is what people are pointing out.
[Neal Conan:] And what about on the strategic level, then?
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] On the strategic level, people like Noman Benotman, the leader of this one of the leaders of the Libyan Islamic fighting group, is saying, look, we're trying to get regime change around the Middle East, replace these dictatorships with, you know, Islamists regimes, in a sense. And that by attacking the United States, bin Laden has made that much more complicated, and I think that's true. I mean, the authoritarian regimes in the Middle East are stronger than ever after 911. If the intent was to get rid of them, as bin Laden intended to do by attacking the United States, that's been a strategic failure.
[Neal Conan:] And as you look into this, though, a lot of these people you talk to, again, yes, some are former mentors, and you mentioned Sheikh al-Oudah, a very important one. Nevertheless, are these al-Qaeda insiders? Are these people who are important to him are defecting now?
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] Well, it's more complicated than that, Neal. I mean, Sheikh Salman al-Oudah has never been an al-Qaeda insider, but he has been an by bin Laden's own account to myself and Peter Arnett in '97, when we interviewed him from CNN. The reason he turned against the United States is that Sheikh Salman al-Oudah was one of the principal critics of American forces being put on Saudi territory as a result of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and then he was imprisoned by Saudi authorities. So bin Laden said that the reason I declared war against the United States in part was the imprisonment of this very cleric Sheikh Salman al-Oudah who's now turned against bin Laden. And Neal, the important thing is he's not condemning terrorism. He's not condemning 911. He's condemning bin Laden by name. This is very important11 was wrong, or terrorism is wrong. But really, you know, turning against bin Laden personally, one of the people who Noman Benotman wrote an open letter to, al-Qaeda's number two, late last year, which got a lot of play in the Middle East. And so, when they're critiquing bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri by name, this is very different than just saying, well, you know, terrorism is wrong, 911 was wrong.
[Neal Conan:] There's another figure you mentioned in the piece known as Dr. Fadl, who is, again, another important intellectual architect of jihadism.
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] Yeah. In fact, you could easily paint him as a real al-Qaeda insider because he was the founder of jihad group in Egypt which would later morph into al-Qaeda. And by his own account, early in al-Qaeda history, the leaders of al-Qaeda would consult Dr. Fadl for all sorts of religious and sort of strategic purposes. So, this guy has now written a book from prison condemning al-Qaeda, condemning bin Laden, and also given interviews repeating these charges. In fact, he got so much under Ayman Al-Zawahiri's skin, the number two in al-Qaeda, that Ayman Al-Zawahiri took it upon himself to write a 200-page book in reply. So, clearly al-Qaeda's leaders are realizing this is a problem.
[Neal Conan:] And as you say, they're trying to reply to it. Nevertheless, has this affected their recruiting? Has this affected their finances?
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] Well, that is a hard thing to tell, but I think, you know, I think it is commonplace to say we're in a war of ideas. And if some of the important architects of the war on the other side of the equation are withdrawing their support from al-Qaeda, I mean, that is very damaging in the long term. This isn't going to happen overnight, that but you know, one metric that we're seeing is a sharp decline in Muslim civilians support for al-Qaeda, whether it's in Pakistan or Indonesia, which, after all, are two of the largest Muslim countries in the world, where support for suicide bombing is tanking, support for al-Qaeda is, you know, plummeting, support for bin Laden is plummeting. So, it's not just that the elite levels. It's also at the kind of man-in-the-street level that this is happening. And which is not to say that al-Qaeda isn't a threat, but they are losing this particular war of ideas.
[Neal Conan:] And some take comfort in the idea that where regular civilians, Muslim civilians, are exposed to al-Qaeda, they tend to reject it, and point to Anbar Province in Iraq.
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] No doubt, and I was just coming back from Iraq two days ago, and clear al-Qaeda in Iraq is not destroyed, but it is largely defeated, precisely for all this Taliban-style regimes that they try to install wherever they held territory.
[Neal Conan:] And yet some people are saying, look, al-Qaeda is failing to rally the masses, and other people say, well, rallying the masses that isn't what they are trying to do.
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] Well, that's a very good point. I mean, if Bruce Hoffman, one of the great theorists of terrorism, he would point out correctly that Brigate Rossi and Baader-Meinhof in the '70s, you know, had no popular support at all, yet basically, you know, created an immense amount of chaos in Germany and Italy. So, it doesn't require a great amount of public support, but as the public support evaporates, that doesn't help them, surely. And so, al-Qaeda may have re-grouped on the Afghan Pakistan border, that is, certainly a problem for the Britain and potentially for the United States, but and militarily, they are doing quite well right now, compared to the way they were in 2002. Ideologically, they're beginning to lose the battle.
[Neal Conan:] And you say, in fact, contain, ideologically, the seeds of their own destruction.
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] Yes. It's by this doctrine of taqfir which is they decide who's Muslim and who isn't. And what turns their decision is that basically anybody who doesn't precisely share their views is actually not a Muslim. And that allows them to say, well, they're apostates and eventually to kill them, which is basically the chain of reasoning we've seen in Algeria in the '90s, and Egypt in the '90s, and Iraq, and Anbar Province, as you pointed out, where most many of their victims were Sunni Muslims. Al-Qaeda in Iraq killed a lot of Sunni Muslims, people, you know, people who were smoking, for instance, or very trivial things that didn't, by any standard which resulted in deaths for people they thought were doing wrong.
[Neal Conan:] Nevertheless, we've seen tremendous upsurge in suicide bombings in Pakistan. And as you mentioned, al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies are doing extremely well at the moment, or seem to be, in Afghanistan.
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] Well, that's absolutely right, Neal. So, you know, in Pakistan, we've seen more suicide attacks in Pakistan last year than in the rest of Pakistani history, something like 60 suicide attacks. So, this organization on the Afghan-Pakistan borders still has life in it.
[Neal Conan:] There were also those who say al-Qaeda itself, well, it represents part of the threat. But its real concern has to be about these disparate organizations, many of them in Western Europe who are inspired by, though not controlled by, al-Qaeda.
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] Well, certainly that is a threat. But I think it's a question of how you order the threat. I mean, al-Qaeda's a strategic threat to the United States if it's capable of doing a 911. Self-starting, homegrown radicals can maybe kill a few people here and there, but they aren't strategic threats to the United States and their allies. I mean, we've seen in the United States a number of plots, none of which were very serious, by self-starting, homegrown radicals since 911. But it was basically amateur hour. In Europe, you know, the Madrid attack of 2004, which killed 191 commuters, looks pretty much like a self-starting, homegrown radicals' kind of attack. But11. So, if al-Qaeda it's when these things join, self-starting, homegrown radicals and al-Qaeda central. It's when they meet. It's when those radicals travel to Pakistan, get the training that you really begin to have a problem. We saw that on July 7, 2005, in London. Radicals in the north of England travel to Pakistan, get the training, kill 52 commuters on the way to work in London, the biggest terrorist attack in British history. So, that's these aren't either, or categories. Both of these are problems.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking with Peter Bergen. He's the author of or co-author of "The Unraveling: Al-Qaeda's Revolt Against bin Laden." If you'd like to join us, 800-989-8255. Email is talk@npr.org. Jeff is on the line, Jeff calling from Cleveland.
[Jeff:] Good afternoon. My question concerns the funding for al-Qaeda at this point. Obviously we've been told they're still a threat. Who's giving them the money to help train people and send them out into the world and cause all this?
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] Well, I've been looking at some of the documents of al-Qaeda in Iraq that were seized by the U.S. military. And what's really interesting about it there's two interesting things. The people who came to conduct suicide operations, the terrorists who are mostly foreigners in Iraq, they pay for themselves to come. In fact, they brought money with them to contribute. So, this was a self-financed operation. On the other hand, running the insurgency in Iraq was quite expensive. And where did that money come from? I think it came from a combination of kidnapping, corruption, oil smuggling, all sorts of things. So, if you look at it depends where the insurgency is. Obviously in Afghan, Pakistan, you know, the big money draw there is the opium trade. Running an insurgent operation is expensive because you have to pay salaries. Running a terrorist organization is very inexpensive, because people volunteer. The London attack of July 7, 2005, was entirely self-financed on credit cards.
[Jeff:] Sad.
[Neal Conan:] Jeff. And where do the bills go? That's what I wonder. Anyway, Jeff, thanks very much for the call.
[Jeff:] Thanks for having me on.
[Neal Conan:] All right. Peter, stay with us. If you'd like to join the conversation, again, our phone number is 800-989-8255. Email is talk@npr.org. Coming up, we'll speak with the former mujahedin who is now a critic of Osama bin Laden. I'm Neal Conan. Stay with us. It's the Talk of the Nation from NPR News. This is Talk of the Nation. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. We're talking today with terrorism expert, Peter Bergen, who's the co-author of an article in the New Republic about criticism of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden from within and how the organization is changing as a result. If you've read the New Republic piece, or you have questions about the growing criticism of bin Laden and al-Qaeda from former allies, give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email is talk@npr.org. And you can read what other listeners have to say on our blog at npr.orgblogofthenation. Joining us now on the line from London is Abdullah Anas. He's the Osama bin Laden he met Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 1984 and fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan for nine years in the 1980s. Nice to have you today on Talk of The Nation.
[Mr. Abdulla Anas:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] And can you tell us, was there a moment al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden did something about was there a moment when you decided to go public about your criticisms of them?
[Mr. Abdulla Anas:] You know, we have this is our duty to defend the innocent everywhere. So, because we are Muslims, we are mujahedin, in the past we were mujahedin in order to defend the rights of people, to defend the rights of the innocents. So, any group, any person, anyone could harm or damage the people, we are against him. This could be Osama bin Laden, or not, everyone in the East or in the West, Muslim or non-Muslim. So, this is our duty. We are not happy for the killing of the civilians, or for damaging the societies, or attacking the innocent everywhere. So, this is our duty. I'm not doing it because for politics. I'm not an American, I'm not European, and also I'm not a member of al-Qaeda. So, we have we believe in our principles. So, that is why it is our duty.
[Neal Conan:] So, by that definition of jihad, the struggle in Afghanistan against the Soviets was justified as would the struggle against the United States in Iraq be justified?
[Mr. Abdulla Anas:] You know, in Afghanistan in 1984, there was a fatwa. We call it in Islam, fatwa. It's an order signed by group, very large group of scholars through the Islamic world, that Afghanistan was occupied by the Soviets, and it's a duty of every single Afghani, or every single Muslim, in the world to help the Afghans to liberate their land. So, this is something legitimated in Islam. But you know, we have to separate between two things. What we saw in Iraq, it was not at all similar to what was in Afghanistan. First of all, the Afghans, the Afghan-Arabs or the foreigner fighters in Afghanistan, they were under leadership of the Afghans themselves. In another way, the politicians who were playing the role of the liberation in Afghanistan were the Afghans themselves. They were free to negotiate or not to negotiate, to stop, to cease fire, or not. We were just supporting them. But in Iraq this completely it is a big division happened in Iraq. Al-Qaeda, when they went to Iraq, they declared themselves an independent group, an independent political party, fighting without the orders of the Iraqi leaders. So, that's why instead of helping the Iraqis, they made it more worse. They started fighting against Shia. They started fighting against U.N. They started fighting against the other Sunnis who are not agreeing with their point of view. They started fighting in Amman. So, it's completely different. We cannot I cannot compare jihad in Iraq to the jihad in Afghanistan during the Soviet Union.
[Neal Conan:] And some would say that in Afghanistan now, with the United States there, and NATO forces there, in many ways it's not different from the days when the Soviet Union tried to steal Afghanistan's independence.
[Mr. Abdulla Anas:] Yes, it's completely different. This is, of course, my personal point of view. I don't know if it will get them majority in the Islamic world. This sharing this view, or not, but, at least I should take responsibility. I don't think so what is happening in Afghanistan, from both sides, I cannot say that Taliban are fighting jihad. Or also, I don't think that NATO is in there fighting against terror. Because it's everything went in the wrong direction there. The people who are staying, fighting, that they are fighting against fighting jihad against NATO. I think we should ask them. I don't think so if 11 of September did not happen, I wouldn't see any soldier there. So, I don't think so the matter of occupation is there. And at the same time, I don't think so now, the international forces are fighting against terror. Because the mistakes happening every day, every week, bombing sometimes weddings, bombing sometimes, civilians. So, I don't think so it's the same situation. I cannot compare it with the jihad during the Soviet Union.
[Neal Conan:] And finally, some people would worry that speaking out publicly against Osama bin Laden, and al-Qaeda, might expose you to retaliation, to attacks?
[Mr. Abdulla Anas:] You look, we say what we believe. If anybody attack us for what we believe, we don't mind. I'm in the death list twice. I was in the death list of GIA in Algeria, the armed group, Islamic armed group, and at the end everyone knows that in Algeria that this group was bloody group was criminals, were criminals, killing civilians. And also we are not I'm not spokesman of anyone, East or in West. I'm spokesman of my Islam, of what I believe. So I don't mind.
[Neal Conan:] Abdullah Anas, thank you so much for your time today. We appreciate it.
[Mr. Abdulla Anas:] Thank you very much, bye.
[Neal Conan:] Peter Bergen, just a little bit more. Who is this man, and why is he so important?
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] Well, Abdullah is a friend of mine. And he's got extraordinary credibility on these issues because he is the son-in-law of Abdullah Azzam who is arguably the founder of the modern jihadist movement. Basically, also Osama bin Laden's most important mentor, who, between them, set up the services office which became the office that bought foreign fighters and also Muslim from around the world to help the Afghan jihad against the Soviets. And, as you mentioned in the introduction, Abdullah fought personally for nine years inside Afghanistan for Ahmad Shah Massoud. So, he is the real deal.
[Neal Conan:] Let's get a caller on the line. And this is Matthew, Matthew with us from Sacramento in California.
[Matthew:] Hi. I just wanted to ask, given that al-Qaeda is a relatively young organization, do you think it's possible that they're going to follow the same development that groups like the IRA have? Where they've become more like political parties, and less like militant organizations? And I'll take my answer off the air.
[Neal Conan:] OK, Matthew.
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] That's an excellent question. By the way, al-Qaeda is about to celebrate its 20th anniversary in August. A little over a dozen people spent a couple of weekends in late August of 1988 and founded al-Qaeda. That organization, within 13 years, afflicted more direct damage on the United States than the Soviet Union had done during the Cold War. So, this organization has been around for awhile. Will it turn into a political organization? I don't think so. You know, the terrorist groups that become political organizations tend to usually have one demand. Get the British out of Northern Ireland, for the IRA. You know, let's have a Basque home country for ETA in Spain. You know, al-Qaeda wants global transformation. It wants a Taliban-style furocracies from Indonesia to Morocco. This is not really a negotiable demand.
[Neal Conan:] So, they're not likely to morph into something with a political arm, as Sinn Fein was for the IRA?
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] Or has Hezbollah in Lebanon. I just don't see that. Hezbollah in Lebanon wants to create a, sort of, Shiite-like state in one country. Bin Laden wants global transformation.
[Neal Conan:] Another thing that Hezbollah or Hamas has done, their social activist organizations providing services to the people. Al-Qaeda has never been about providing services to the people.
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] Do the full experiment of an al-Qaeda hospital, you know, it's an oxymoron. It's not going to happen.
[Neal Conan:] Let's get Mike on the line. And Mike is calling us from Columbia in South Carolina.
[Mike:] Yes. Thank you for taking my phone call.
[Neal Conan:] Go ahead please.
[Mike:] I wanted to ask if Mr. Bergen could recommend or knew how we could best exploit this potential divide, because al-Qaeda has used religion as the basis of their argument. And if we can somehow turn religion against them, and turn them into criminals, or portray them as criminals, I was wondering if that is possible, or if that would have any kind of effect. And unfortunately I'm away from my car right now, so if I could possibly hear the answer on hold, I'd appreciate it.
[Neal Conan:] Oh, sure, that's no problem.
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] You know, there's several I think the United States there is a natural tendency to do things, because we have so much kind of firepower and different means at our disposal. This one we should just let happen. I mean, there's the kiss-of-death problem. We don't have credibility on this issue. We don't have the knowledge to really talk about it in any great with any great authority. And it's much more it's much more valuable that this criticism is coming from within the Islamic community.
[Mike:] A club on parmesan...
[Neal Conan:] That's why you're away from your car.
[Mike:] I know, sorry.
[Neal Conan:] I'm sorry. We're out of the parmesan, Mike. Thanks very much for the call. We get the best calls on Talk of the Nation. Jen is with us, Jen calling from Fort Wayne, Indiana.
[Jen:] Hi there. How are you today?
[Neal Conan:] I'm well, and we're glad our callers are well fed, but go ahead, Jen.
[Jen:] I'm just curious as to how it has played out. Information like this about the internal dissent in al-Qaeda has filtered in to the West. Has this been covered a lot in the mainstream media in other countries in particular, and do politicians in Europe and the West, have they found a way to take advantage of that? And I'll take an answer off the air.
[Neal Conan:] OK, Jen, thank you.
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] Certainly this has been wide these disputes have been widely covered in the Arab world, and now, you know, Larry Wright has a piece in the New Yorker making some of the same points this week. We did our piece. I see a piece in Newsweek this week taking up a slice of this. Our story is being reprinted in some British and Canadian newspapers. And I think that, you know, this is getting wide attention, and General Hayden, sorry, Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, testified in February, made a sort of glancing reference to this, and other counterterrorism officials within the U.S. administration have started paying attention to this. So I think it is getting some wide attention.
[Neal Conan:] Yet one hesitates to accept good news on its face. You know, it often precedes a big letdown.
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] Yeah. In this case, I'm fairly confident that this is this has got some legs.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking with Peter Bergen about an article that of which he is the co-author that appears in the current issue of the New Republic. It's called "The Unraveling: Al-Qaeda's Revolt Against bin Laden." If you'd like to join us, 800-989-8255. Email is talk@npr.org. And this is Talk of the Nation from NPR News. The stage where a lot of this is playing out is, in fact, in London, where well, for example, tell us the story of the Finsbury Avenue Mosque.
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] Well, you know, London itself has been referred to as Londonistan, and you know, arguably London is the most important place in the Arab world for ideas, because that's where their principal newspapers are published. That's where the principal television stations have studios. That's where a number of the most important dissidents live. So trends in London really mean a lot. So the Finsbury Park Mosque was where Abu Hamza, the famous one-eyed, no-handed cleric, ran a sort of rest stop for al-Qaeda wannabes, like Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker. And what has happened there is there was sort of a coup, helped by the British metropolitan police, installing a more moderate regime. Now, when I say more moderate, it's sort of a Muslim Brotherhood-flavored regime, which means that their views on Palestine may be quite different from a number of people listening to this show, but...
[Neal Conan:] And certainly from the British government's.
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] Well, yeah, yeah, but I mean, I think the British metropolitan police are savvy enough to realize that, you know, let's choose let's assign you know, let's be let's all sort of pretend that everybody's all in one basket, and if we have if they have ideas that we disagree with, somehow they're all our enemies, which I think is, you know, we've seen too much of that. What they're saying is, you know, if people are Muslim fundamentalists and they want to take over this mosque and they're not involved in violence and they've abjured it, fine.
[Neal Conan:] And they have taken over the mosque, despite the protests of the supporters of the previous regime, who came out in force.
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] Yeah, well, Abu Hamza had a lot of sort of, you know, jihadi wannabes who were part of his congregation, so, but you know, that has been quite a successful takeover, and Finsbury Park Mosque is one of perhaps two mosques in London that were, you know, the most militant mosques in the capital, and now it's in very different hands.
[Neal Conan:] Let's talk with Robert, Robert on the line with us from Tallahassee, Florida.
[Robert:] Yes, good afternoon, gentlemen.
[Neal Conan:] Good afternoon.
[Robert:] Peter, I have a question. How much has the strength of the U.S. military or our resolve over the past seven years to go after al-Qaeda relentlessly, how much of an effect has that had on their internal decision-making, and has that led to some of their dissent? Thank you.
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] You know, I mean, a lot of this is happening independently of what we do. I mean, no one in our piece that we talked to is in, you know all the people we interviewed or talk about, they've got nothing to do with the U.S. military, good, bad, or indifferent. They don't you know, this is an internal debate that's taking place within the Muslim community, you know? And you know, where bin Laden is located is in Pakistan, almost certainly, where we have no U.S. military presence that I'm aware of. If we do, it's, you know, a handful of people. And so, you know, he's certainly not feeling the pressure from that point of view. In Iraq, having just got back from there, clearly the surge was one of about eight different factors that has produced al-Qaeda in Iraq taking a number of severe hits, but that includes Sunnis themselves in Anbar turning against this group, a much larger Iraqi army, trained by, of course, the U.S. military, the Maliki government making some right moves now in Mosul and the north against al-Qaeda, and many other factors. But I've noticed on the blogs that came out after our article was released, that a lot of people wanted to paint it, well, this was because of United States military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, which, frankly, this has got almost nothing to do with what the debate is about. The debate is about it's a religious debate, mostly about whether it's OK to kill Muslim civilians, which is, we have unfortunately done too much of that ourselves in Afghanistan, where last year, Afghan, American, and native forces killed more Afghan civilians than the Taliban did, something we need to obviously change.
[Neal Conan:] Yet, you know, the criticism would be that nevertheless, people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are now in Guantanamo Bay. They're not on the loose in Karachi.
[Mr. Peter Bergen:] Well, yeah, I mean, that's great. Of course, he wasn't caught by the U.S. military. He was caught by a combination of the CIA and the Pakistani ISI, for what it's worth. So, you know, unfortunately our military actions in Iraq, you know, eventually we've got to the point where we've almost defeated al-Qaeda in Iraq, but we introduced al-Qaeda into Iraq. They didn't exist there before our invasion. I mean, al-Qaeda in Iraq officially came into existence October of 2004, which is a little over a year after we first invaded. So it's been a long and expensive process, and so many lives and so much money has been spent, but we are doing better there now today.
[Neal Conan:] Peter Bergen, thanks very much. Appreciate it. Peter Bergen, coauthor of the story in the latest issue of the New Republic called The Unraveling: Al-Qaeda's Revolt Against bin Laden," and he joined us here in Studio 3A. Coming up, whether it's a pool of sweat on the elliptical machine or foot fungus in the showers, there are a myriad of sins that could be committed in the gym. What have you seen? Plus, your letters on what you want your final resting place to be. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the Talk of the Nation from NPR News.

[Renee Montagne:] Two sets of bombings in London over the past two weeks have rattled those who depend on the city's mass transportation. No one was killed in yesterday's four new explosions that rocked underground stations and a city bus. Joining me now is Marina Calland from her office near Victoria station. Hello.
[Ms. Marina Calland:] Hello.
[Renee Montagne:] Your commute this morning, how did it go?
[Ms. Marina Calland:] It went fine actually, but before I set off I took a spare pair of shoes, walking shoes, in case I do have to walk back home but-you know, and don't have to wear heels.
[Renee Montagne:] I guess it's just a good little extra bit of caution there.
[Ms. Marina Calland:] Pretty much so, yeah. I've had to watch the traffic news and just check which tube lines are working, which buses are running and if they are running at all. You have to be prepared a bit more these days.
[Renee Montagne:] Tell us about yesterday, when you heard about these latest explosions. I mean, what were you thinking? What went through your mind?
[Ms. Marina Calland:] My first reaction was shock and then a bit of a surprise, because it was rather a silly time to have explosions, at lunchtime when, you know, the first ones were obviously targeted at the commuters at rush hour, and then lunchtime bombs. And nobody could understand what was going on. I mean, it was still unclear in the evening what was the point of those attacks. And, of course, now they're saying that the bombs just didn't detonate, so they could have been lethal, which is rather alarming.
[Renee Montagne:] When you got together, and I imagine you did, with friends and maybe family throughout the day and last night, what are people saying?
[Ms. Marina Calland:] Well, people were just amazed and shocked and scared and angry, didn't know what to think, didn't know who to blame. I mean, obviously, started blaming all sorts of people. Why are they blowing us up? What's the point? But it was-to be honest, when the first bombs went off, everybody was quite cool and chilled and sort of took it on the chin, but this time people were rather angry. Having it happen twice was rather scary and people were not happy.
[Renee Montagne:] Is there a sense that this is sort of the beginning of a long-of a series? After you, you know, you had the one set of bombings, that might have been thought to have been just a single event.
[Ms. Marina Calland:] Well, I hope not. I hope it's not going to be a series of attacks, but obviously in the back of your mind you're thinking what if, you know; sort of follow the pattern, you know, two weeks to the date and, you know, sort of attacking on the same principle, one bus and three tube stations. It must be connected, unless somebody's just following the example of somebody else and sort of tramping on somebody else's same train. But, yeah, hopefully it's not going to happen again, because it getting a bit uncomfortable.
[Renee Montagne:] Are you doing anything differently at all as far as traveling, commuting, living?
[Ms. Marina Calland:] Well, apart from taking an extra pair of shoes to work, too, this morning, nothing else really. What can you do, you know? You still have to live your life and go to work and continue doing what I was doing before. I can't just stay at home and just wait for, you know, something unknown.
[Renee Montagne:] Marina Calland works and lives in London. She's a media consultant. Thank you very much.
[Ms. Marina Calland:] You're welcome.
[Renee Montagne:] This is NPR News.

[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] I'm Lourdes Garcia-Navarro. It seems like not a week goes by that we don't hear about a major crime on the Internet credit card data stolen, our home computers infected with bad software that we never downloaded. The problems of cyber security seem big but also really abstract. All this week, NPR's Aarti Shahani has been in Las Vegas with thousands of experts for whom these problems are very real. Hi, Aarti.
[Aarti Shahani, Byline:] Hi.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] So we heard this week about the supposed theft of 1.2 billion usernames and passwords. That's billion with a B. That sounds like a big problem to me. Do the experts there think so?
[Aarti Shahani, Byline:] Yes and no. It's important to keep in mind about the Russian hack that it was not independently verified. And so we don't actually know what the company has in its databases, who exactly was hacked, whether the passwords and usernames are old from five years ago or recent. So we have to put that in perspective.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] Yeah, it seems like we're hearing about these security threats all the time. I mean, they're in the news everyday. How real are they or do they just get a lot of attention?
[Aarti Shahani, Byline:] They definitely are real. And part of what's happening here this week in Vegas is some of the best minds in the industry are trying to come up with solutions. And, you know, some of the solutions that I've actually seen this year that I found interesting and the variety that I've seen here is for example, this company Tanium is working on real-time detection meaning that, you know, it's not good enough to find out you've been breached 5 weeks or even 5 days later. To know when it's happening will actually help you to respond. So they're trying to work on systems that help corporations to do that. And apparently it's a very hard problem to even know that you've been breached. Another company that I ran into called Pindrop which maybe I'm interested in because I'm a broadcaster. They focus on phone fraud. So apparently, when you're getting a call let's say you're working at a bank or something. And you get a call from someone who says that they're the account holder. Through an analysis of the quality of their phone call, you can tell if they're on a Skype line or a regular line and, you know, are they calling from Nigeria or Minnesota.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] There's two conferences. There's the Black Hat one that we've just been talking about. But there's also DefCon, the original conference for underground hackers. What was that scene like?
[Aarti Shahani, Byline:] Oh, I really like the scene at DefCon. I don't think there's a single corner of the U.S. or, you know, maybe even the world, where people take their privacy more seriously.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] People pay their own way, right? Why do they go?
[Aarti Shahani, Byline:] Well, people come here for a mix of reasons, OK? Some people are coming here for skills building. There are little villages in DefCon as they're called. So one village, for example, teaches you how to break locks. Another village is focused on social engineering. And that's when you can learn to how to use the deep web the parts of the web that are not on Google to fish for information, which is a great tool for a journalist to have. Other people come here for recruitment. While this is a very countercultural space and you have, you know, mohawks and tattoos even face tattoos you know, this is also a place where the establishment comes over to look for their next talent. So you actually have a lot of side-conversations between people that look very different. And you can tell that people are talking about jobs and career.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] Have they played spot the fed this year? I mean, has there been any government presence any NSA on site?
[Aarti Shahani, Byline:] Last year, the NSA was very much the talk of the town, particularly with the Snowden revelations. I think that this year the assumption is yes, obviously the government is here. Obviously, the NSA is here. That's been the case for a long time. But an interesting kind of government presence, for example, is the FTC the Federal Trade Commission is here. And they're actually sponsoring a hackathon a competition because they're trying to recruit hackers to help them with the problem of phone fraud. And I think the fact that there's another kind of government agency here illustrates a bigger problem that we have across government agencies, which is that there's one that is hyper-concentrated with cyber security knowledge. And then every other agency is just, you know, really limping along trying to do some basics and not having very many resources.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] NPR's Aarti Shahani joining us from Las Vegas. Thank you, Aarti.
[Aarti Shahani, Byline:] Thank you.

[Steve Inskeep:] Here in Washington, Facebook is the new kid on the block the new rich kid. Last year, the company spent almost $4 million on lobbying. In today's Business Bottom Line, NPR's Martin Kaste asks what they got for the money.
[Martin Kaste, Byline:] Facebook's big priority in Washington this year is the immigration bill, specifically the piece of the bill that opens the gates wider to tech workers from overseas. Dan Turrentine of the trade group TechNet says his industry is desperate for foreign talent.
[Dan Turrentine:] Microsoft has 3,500 high-tech jobs that they cannot fill. Intel has 1,700. I mean, you can go on and on.
[Martin Kaste, Byline:] So, the bill hammered out by the so-called Gang of Eight senators increases the limit on H1B visas, visas for skilled workers. But the bill also turns the screws on outsourcing companies, which have a track record of abusing the visas to bring in cheap replacement workers. Those companies face tougher rules. And Turrentine says that's fine, up to a point.
[Dan Turrentine:] There's a bipartisan recognition that not all users of the system are the same. And we think that's an important difference that people need to recognize.
[Martin Kaste, Byline:] The Gang of Eight certainly recognized it. Their bill contains language that's now been dubbed the Facebook exception. Basically, it means that the tougher rules will not apply to a company like Facebook that is, a company that applies for permanent residency for its foreign workers.
[Daniel Costa:] That was a complete surprise to me when I read about it.
[Martin Kaste, Byline:] Daniel Costa follows immigration law for the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. He says the Facebook exception could undermine the bill's reforms.
[Daniel Costa:] You won't have to pay a higher wage. You won't have to do the extra recruiting for U.S. workers. And so, really, you can get around all of the protections that were built in for U.S. workers.
[Martin Kaste, Byline:] Facebook wouldn't do an interview for this story, but in a prepared statement, the company says that provision of the bill, quote, "strengthens our immigration system by incentivizing companies to bring top talent to the United States for the long term," unquote. The company is taking some flack this week. It's being boycotted by some liberal groups. Josh Orton is with Progressives United.
[Josh Orton:] The organizations and now it's up to, I think, 11 organizations have pledged to either pull down existing Facebook paid Facebook ads, or not buy ads for at least two weeks.
[Martin Kaste, Byline:] But here's the thing: This boycott is not about the Facebook exception, nor is it about a recent EPI study casting doubt on the claims of a tech worker shortage. It's not about any of that. What the liberal groups are peeved at is this...
[Unidentified Man #1:] When Lindsey Graham's in Washington, what does he do?
[Martin Kaste, Byline:] TV ads, on behalf of senators who support the immigration bill.
[Senator Lindsey Graham:] Change you can believe in after this health care bill debacle has now become an empty slogan.
[Martin Kaste, Byline:] The ads are meant to bolster the senator's conservative cred with voters, and they were paid for by Forward.us. That's the new pro-immigration group launched by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. It's a classic Beltway squabble, but John Miano expects it won't imperil the tech industry's alliance with the left.
[John Miano:] We have this grand bargain between these two political interests, and the average American workers in the middle are have been completely left out.
[Martin Kaste, Byline:] Miano is a former programmer. Now he's a lawyer who represents displaced tech workers. He blogs for the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that's decidedly right-wing. But for now, groups like this are just about the only ones opposing the increase in tech worker visas. Miano says with tech giants like Facebook teaming up with well-heeled liberal groups, he doubts his views will get much of a hearing on Capitol Hill. Martin Kaste, NPR News.

[David Greene:] Good morning. I'm David Greene. A woman went skydiving in Snohomish County, Wash. On KING 5 News, Kathryn Hodges spoke to her son before she made the leap.
[Kathryn Hodges:] This is going to be a record? This is going to be a record, mother. Oh, well, hallelujah.
[David Greene:] It may be a record because Hodges is 103 years old. She flew past the Guinness World Record holder for oldest woman tandem skydiving. That woman was 100 years old. Hodges said it's fun, so why not have some fun?

[Steve Inskeep:] It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
[David Greene:] And I'm David Greene. Good morning. The fall congressional campaign season has officially kicked off. And President Obama fired the opening salvo yesterday in Milwaukee. Speaking at a Labor Day picnic, the president stuck to the economy. He accused Republicans in Congress of blocking popular economic initiatives. And he urged the audience to turn their frustration into political action in November. Obama was speaking to union members who are generally supportive of his priorities. Overall, though, the president's approval numbers have been sagging. And he does not have the political firepower he once did. NPR's Scott Horsley reports.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] President Obama's been dogged all summer by rotten news from overseas. But the economic news here at home is actually pretty good. You might not know it to watch TV, he says, but the job market is enjoying its best six-month run since the late 1990s.
[President Barack Obama:] More folks are working, the economy is growing stronger, the engines are revving a little louder.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Greg Greer, whoâs a member of the local laborerâs union, has seen that here in Wisconsin where construction cranes have begun sprouting up.
[Greg Greer:] We finally came back 32 stories, 16 stories; Madison is booming, people coming from all over the country to work in the state of Wisconsin right now.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] But despite those encouraging economic numbers, more than 4 in 10 Americans say they're worse off now than when the recession began. Obama says what the country really needs is prosperity that's more widely shared.
[President Barack Obama:] It's a good thing that the stock market's booming. You know, a lot of folks have 401 [k] s in there. I want them to feel good. But I also want to see the guy who's breaking his back on two eight-hour shifts so he's got enough money to send his kids to college. I want to make sure that guyâs getting a break. I want to make sure he's getting some help.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] But nearly all the president's moves in that direction, like his push to raise the federal minimum wage, have been blocked by congressional Republicans.
[President Barack Obama:] Every inch of it, we've had to work against a lock-step opposition that is opposed to everything we do. But it was worth it. Every gray hair is worth it.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Obama notes even with gridlock in Washington, more than a dozen states have acted to raise their own minimum wages. And several more could do so this fall if voters approve minimum wage ballot measures in November. Democrats hope the issue will prompt some voters who might thought otherwise sit out the midterm election to show up at the polls.
[President Barack Obama:] Because the only thing more powerful than an idea whose time has come is when millions of people are organizing around an idea whose time has come, millions of people are voting for an idea whose time has come.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] But it's not clear that Obama, the community-organizer president, can still inspire that kind of mobilization on a grand scale. With his approval ratings underwater, Obama did not spend Labor Day campaigning with any of the vulnerable Senate Democrats up for reelection. And the Democratic candidate for governor here in Wisconsin chose not to appear publicly with the present even though she was at the same Labor Day picnic. Still, organizing is what unions do. Jose Angel Negron is a retired member of the machinists union and he promised to do his part.
[Jose Angel Negron:] Being a Latino myself, I've always tried to inspire everybody else in the Latino community to get out and vote because that's our voice. That's the only thing that we have is our voice.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] The president's own voice tried to strike a populist tone on Labor Day. Obama talked in folksy terms about brats and baseball and a vacation spot that's a little more homespun than Martha's Vineyard the Wisconsin Dells.
[President Barack Obama:] That's where Michelle and I used to take Malia and Sasha. We'd be in that water so long, fingers all pruned up. And there were a lot of little kids in there, which made you a little suspicious about the water; I'm just saying.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Parents in the audience exchanged knowing smiles. But summer vacation is over now. The fall campaign is in full swing. Scott Horsley, NPR News, Milwaukee.

[Andrea Seabrook:] Now, the Opinion Page. The percentage of Americans who think President Obama is a Muslim climbed from 11 to 18 percent since March of last year. That's according to a Pew poll released earlier this month. The exact reasons are unclear. President Obama has clearly said he is a Christian. Still, evangelist Franklin Graham recently told CNN that the president was born a Muslim, and cited his father's religious beliefs. And Graham went on to add...
[Reverend Franklin Graham:] Of course, the president says he is a Christian, and we just have to accept it as that.
[Andrea Seabrook:] And the confusion continues. But Chris Cillizza says the more important number in the Pew poll isn't the rise in people who think Obama is a Muslim. It's the drop in the number of Americans who think he is a Christian, from 48 to 34 percent. That, he warns, signals a growing discontent between the American people and the president on a basic, gut level. Do you agree? Is that what's at the what's the heart of the question about the president's faith 800-989-8255; the email address is talk@npr.org. And you can join the conversation at our website. Go to npr.org, and click on TALK OF THE NATION. Now, Chris Cillizza, you write for the you write "The Fix" for the Washington Post, and you join us from the headquarters in Washington, D.C. Thanks so much.
[Mr. Chris Cillizza:] Andrea, thanks for having me.
[Andrea Seabrook:] So why is the 12 percent drop, this drop in the number of people who think he's a Christian, more why is it really any different from the number of people who think he might he is a Muslim?
[Mr. Chris Cillizza:] Well, you know, I think the Muslim headline is the one that was -the headline, frankly, got most of the attention because it's, you know, it's the sort of thing that, you know, drives news. But it very closely correlates to the job approval the people think the president is doing. That is, people who disapprove of him are much more inclined to say, yes, he's a Muslim, than those who approve of the job he's doing. Conservative Republicans are the group that are the most inclined to say that. So I think in some ways, it's a cipher for disapproving or not liking the president. You're sort of willing to believe these things which, just for the listeners, have been proven repeatedly to be false.
[Andrea Seabrook:] Mm-hmm.
[Mr. Chris Cillizza:] There's no debate about the president's faith. He is a Christian. But I do think that that draws the headlines. Why the I think the other number is more important. Number one, the Muslim number went from 11 to 18, which is not insignificant. But remember, as you pointed out, the Christian number went from 48 to 34...
[Andrea Seabrook:] Mm-hmm.
[Mr. Chris Cillizza:] ...a double the drop. I think, you know, the president there are two ways of looking at this. Either the president is not fundamentally all that religious, or he's privately religious which is what the White House says, that he doesn't want to wear his religion on his sleeve, but he regularly consults with religious leaders; he prays. You know, he has a faith. He just doesn't outwardly talk about it. The issue, I think, just from a purely political perspective, is that lots and lots and lots of people in this country go to church, and do talk much more outwardly about their religion. It's a way in which they often feel as though they can connect with someone who's, you know the president of the United States, not exactly a job that a lot of people have. And empathy matters in politics. Feeling as though you need the people who vote for you to feel as though you understand their problems, you understand their life. And that's always been the president's most difficult you know, he's an obviously, a very gifted communicator. But the thing that he has struggled with at times is he is not naturally empathetic. He's more sort of intellectual. He likes to step back, hear a variety of arguments, then and then come down on it. He's not the Bill Clinton, I feel your pain, wading-into-the-crowd-to-hug-people sort of president.
[Andrea Seabrook:] Mm-hmm.
[Mr. Chris Cillizza:] And that's no value judgment. You can succeed or fail in politics doing either. But the lack of the fact that so many people say they now don't know what religion he is, it makes it more difficult, at least in some demographics, for him to connect.
[Andrea Seabrook:] It's interesting because it doesn't sound like you're saying they think he's not Christian or they're just sort of not walking around, thinking about it. He's they're not identifying with him. Is that what you're saying?
[Mr. Chris Cillizza:] Yeah. They just right, exactly. They just don't know. And again, for lots and lots of people in this electorate, it doesn't matter at all. But there are a segment of people for whom it does matter, and it matters greatly. And they do not have a good read on him. Again, his resume and background are very different than many people. And so, it's harder for them to sort of identify with him as someone who does get what they're going through, as someone who...
[Andrea Seabrook:] That's so interesting. You know, during his campaign, he was almost the everyone could identify him because he had such a varied resume and background, or at least that was the story that the Democratic Party would like people to believe. Now, you're saying it's the same story, just backwards.
[Mr. Chris Cillizza:] Yeah. I mean, I think that's what's fascinating, Andrea, about covering politics at least from my perspective is that, you know, your strengths can become your weaknesses and vice versa, you know? And I do think that you're exactly right. I think his campaign in a brilliant way and he, himself, as a candidate brilliantly was able to take sort of everything that people wanted out of politics and felt like they weren't getting, and put it into him that this was a person, as you mentioned, with a sort of, a very different resume, background frankly, literally looked different than any president we've ever had before. And so he was able to serve as a, you know, as a vessel through which everyone saw the best of what politics can be. Governing and campaigning are two very different things. We've learned that any number of times throughout history, including over the last 18 months or 20 months now, with President Obama. And I think some of that vagueness, that unwillingness to again, he always is going to get compared to Bill Clinton because Bill Clinton was the last Democratic president before him. You know, Bill Clinton, with the tearing up and the hugging and the very famous, you know, I-feel-your-pain line that is not Barack Obama. That doesn't make him a good, bad or indifferent president, but that's not who he is. And so religion would be a way in which he could bridge some of that sort of natural unease with doing the kind of empathetic outreach that I think he views as somewhat political politically phony. But again, he has shown time and time again, he does not tend to bend as the political reeds blow. And I think this is an issue where we're very likely to see the same approach by his White House.
[Andrea Seabrook:] Chris, let's take some calls now. We have Mariette in Sacramento, California. Hi. You're on the air.
[Mariette:] What I'd like to say is, you know, is people don't understand that there is a machine behind this what-is-the-religion-of-the-president. It's kind of like the woman who made the statement during the election, he's an Arab. There was a machine behind that as well. The reality is, church and state are supposed to be separate. We have never put a president on trial like this over his religion. And as far as him being different from Bill Clinton, wasn't anybody talking about Bill Clinton, what his religion was, whenever Monica Lewinsky was in the picture. This is just a campaign to slaughter the president in the public. They don't like what he's doing. He's not leaning to the far right, and they just don't like it. So what can they question? His religion, and call him a Muslim. Why? Because they know there are so many Americans that are so sensitive to Muslims. Why? Because of the machine of hate behind that, trying to get Americans to hate Muslims, to continue this terrorist war.
[Andrea Seabrook:] Thanks so much for your call. Chris, what do you think?
[Mr. Chris Cillizza:] I mean, that's why frankly, I think the caller addresses at least why I thought the Muslim numbers were a little bit overblown and some of the other fascinating numbers in the poll were lost which is, there is a very a close correlation between those who disapprove of the job the president is doing, and those who say that he is of the Muslim faith. There are always in any election, in any presidency, there are going to be 15 or 20 percent pick, actually frankly, pick whatever number, but it's probably under 30 and above 5 on each side, who fundamentally do not want whoever it is, is president to be president, and are willing to believe the worst of them. We saw it with George W. Bush. We saw it with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Lyndon Johnson. I mean, pick a president, and you will see that happen. And so, in some ways, while I guess it's a little eye-opening that you have almost one in five people saying something that is factually untrue, I think, really that that number is also read as, these are the people who are the most anti of the anti-Obama crowd, in just the same way that there are certain number of people who would be ready to believe almost anything about George W. Bush, almost anything about Bill Clinton, almost anything about George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan. You know, I think that that core exists. I think it's rallied around the idea that Barack Obama is either a Muslim or a socialist. Why those two things have gained credence, I don't know. But again, I think it's more a reflection on an element within each party's base willing to believe the worst about the other side than it is something that's particularly unique to him.
[Andrea Seabrook:] Bringing up the idea that being Muslim is the is what that side believes is the worst or could be the worst. So you're saying, then, if you called people who hated Barack Obama and said, do you think Barack Obama has antenna an as and is an alien, they would say yes.
[Mr. Chris Cillizza:] I think I don't know if they'd say yes, Andrea, but I'd say there's a whole heck of a lot larger percentage or chance that they would, than if you called an independent who maybe voted for George Bush in 2000 and Barack Obama in 2008.
[Andrea Seabrook:] Huh. Here's a good email from Michael. He says: Barack Obama goes out of his way to avoid Christian activities, but takes part in Muslim activities.
[Mr. Chris Cillizza:] You know, I think what that the email addresses the idea that Barack Obama is not regularly seen going to church. He speaks at churches occasionally but doesn't attend, although the White House says he attends regularly at Camp David. And you know, the comments he made about the controversial New York City mosque came at an iftar dinner a few weeks ago at the White House. I think look, I think Barack Obama has said and believes that his election allows outreach to be done to the Muslim world in a way that can help us win the war on terrorism. That is that, you know, the idea that all Muslims are terrorists clearly not true. And Barack Obama sees this as his chance to both show the Muslim world the best of America, and show America the best of the Muslim world. Again, it's a somewhat complex argument that people who are not inclined to like or agree with Barack Obama are simply not going to follow him down that road. It is something that is persistent in American politics, that not having to do with religion per se. But there's in some ways, there's nothing new under the sun, and I think this is a case of that.
[Andrea Seabrook:] Melissa in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Hi, you're on the air.
[Melissa:] Hi, I just said that I said, who cares. I don't understand why we're talking about this when we really should be talking about the actions that he's taking, and whether or not these actions are acceptable or unacceptable, rather than talking about his religion. It just I just think it's inconsequential.
[Andrea Seabrook:] Thanks for your call, Melissa. We also have an email that makes a similar point from this is from Riswan. The email says: The real question to ask is, so what if he's a Muslim? Chris?
[Mr. Chris Cillizza:] I mean, in some ways it's immaterial, I think. The problem with saying so what, is then people say, so is he? That's the problem that you go down that road, you have to kind of say no, he isn't, as the White House put out a statement that said. I mean, look, it shows the level to which this had permeated into the news. And that the White House, as President Obama was leaving for a 10-day vacation, Martha's Vineyard, felt compelled to put out a statement saying that he was a quote, committed Christian. Should it matter? No. Was it an issue when John Kennedy was running as a I'm a Catholic, speaking as a Catholic when John Kennedy was running in 1960 as a Catholic, that he was going to take his orders from Rome? Yeah, it was. But again, we're it's kind of an apples and oranges comparison because John Kennedy was Catholic. Barack Obama is not Muslim. That's the problem. That comparison kind of fades.
[Andrea Seabrook:] We would be remiss if we didn't bring up this question that Vicky has. She says: People believe what the propaganda media tell them because they don't know it isn't news. Is that part of it, Chris?
[Mr. Chris Cillizza:] You know, Andrea, I think it one number, you know, I said I think a lot of numbers got overlooked. One number I found fascinating was 60 percent of people said they "learned" and I'm putting learned in quotes that Barack Obama was a Muslim from the news media by far, the largest. They ask, sort of, where did you get this information? Of course, that led to lots of media bashing, which is very, you know, popular and easily done. We're a terrific scapegoat. But I would say, I think a lot of people are defining the media very broadly: email chains, message boards, you know, conservative media strings that are not part even in the broadest definition of the mainstream media, and saying, well, the media told me. Well, getting an email chain from someone is not the media. But you know, I think people kind of lump it in again, because the media is easily scapegoated. I'm not sure that I know that anytime it's ever come up in my conversations, whether doing interviews, whether writing, whether being on television, I always say, I'm more than happy to talk about it, but let's get the facts straight first. Barack Obama is not a Muslim. He is a Christian. We have absolutely no evidence anywhere in his life to draw any other conclusion on that. Now, I'm happy to talk about the people who believe wrongly that that's the case, but let's say that at the start.
[Andrea Seabrook:] Hmm. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News. Let's go to Jean in Richmond, Virginia. Hi, Jean.
[Jean:] Hey, there.
[Andrea Seabrook:] Go ahead.
[Jean:] Hi. I agree with a lot that's been said. However, I have friends who unfortunately from my point of view are conservative Republicans, and they don't believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. I think that 12 percent, as has been talked about, represents a group of people who not only dislike him, but are extremely fearful of him because, let's face it, he's an African-American -or a mixed-race American. And that frightens a lot of people. It's very politically incorrect to say that out loud. And so people will say instead, you know, he's a Muslim. And they probably don't do the due diligence that they would do in any other case if it were a man who looked different, let's say.
[Andrea Seabrook:] Thanks for your call, Jean. Chris, let me we have to make this point as well, and that is that the Pew poll was taken before the current flap...
[Mr. Chris Cillizza:] Absolutely.
[Andrea Seabrook:] ...about the Park 51 mosque broke out. Is that going to affect this, going forward?
[Mr. Chris Cillizza:] You know, I think if they took the poll a week after, maybe. Long term, I think it would probably settle, Andrea, back to kind of where it is now, somewhere between 12 and 18 percent. You know, the caller brought up the issue of race. And the hard thing if you're myself, a political reporter, you look at the data and it's nothing in there suggests it, and it's hard to extrapolate away from it. I think, you know, one of the things when I wrote about this, obviously there's a lot of commentary, as you might it might not surprise you. And you know, one of the things was simply, these people do not like him because he is the first African-American president. It's very difficult to either prove or disprove that from the data, and the data is kind of what we have to go on. Anything else, I'd feel like, is kind of anecdotal. You know, you have a friend who says this, and a friend who doesn't. That doesn't really get to what we're trying to do as political reporters, present the situation. But it's clearly tied up with his history-making presidency and, you know, an issue that we're going to, I think, be dealing with as we move forward in 2010 and 2011, 2012.
[Andrea Seabrook:] Chris Cillizza, he writes "The Fix" for the Washington Post. And he joined us from the Washington Post studios. It's been great talking to you, Chris. Thanks for coming on.
[Mr. Chris Cillizza:] Thank you for having me.
[Andrea Seabrook:] I'm Andrea Seabrook, and this is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

[Farai Chideya:] For all of you football fans out there, the wait is over. Tonight, the Indianapolis Colts and the New Orleans Saints kick off the 2007 NFL season in downtown Indy. Or if you prefer tennis, your big game was yesterday. When tennis titan Roger Federer beat upstart Andy Roddick for a shot at his fourth consecutive U.S. Open title. For these stories and more, we've got New York Times sportswriter and NEWS & NOTES resident sports guru, William Rhoden. How is it going, Bill?
[Mr. William Rhoden:] Farai, how are you doing? I'm great.
[Farai Chideya:] I'm doing great. So I just have to whine and complain this is an old complaint the Colts used to be the Baltimore Colts, but anyway. They're...
[Mr. William Rhoden:] I'm with you. Listen, I went to school in Baltimore, I went to Morgan and that, you know, there's always the Baltimore Colts. But, you know, I'm this is my profession so we have to move on.
[Farai Chideya:] We have to move on. We must press on.
[Mr. William Rhoden:] That's right.
[Farai Chideya:] So the Indianapolis Colts and the Saints what can we expect?
[Mr. William Rhoden:] Well, it's sort of the we have the sweet and sour. I mean, this game sort of represents all the goods, you know. You have Tony Dungy has become the nation's beloved football coach, you know. He's mild-mannered great guy. Peyton Manning is the beloved the nation's beloved quarterback. And the New Orleans Saints, you know, are sort of [unintelligible] team after how well they rebounded last year and they represented the hopes and the dreams of a city that was devastated. So tonight's, you know, a good time Charlie night. It's a night in the football league. Everything is, you know, everything is love and hugs. Sunday, of course, will be something different when the Atlanta Falcons open up in Minnesota. And there's, you know, Farai, this is such a bizarre open to season because I just described the warm and fuzzy feeling around tonight's opening. But there's this cloud hanging over the league because it's probably one of the most popular player, Mike Vick, is not going to be around. He's facing, you know, he's facing jail time. And it's I think among a lot of players, it is sort of a bittersweet beginning to this season because of some of the things that happened to Vick and, you know, the dogfighting. This dark cloud is kind of over the league because of all the players who have been suspended. So it's a very bizarre opening to the night of the nation's past time.
[Farai Chideya:] Let's hop back to the Colts for a second.
[Mr. William Rhoden:] Yes.
[Farai Chideya:] They are led by Coach Tony Dungy and he has a new book out. He's had a tough couple of years. Do you think that he and his team have another win in them?
[Mr. William Rhoden:] I think they do. I think that Dungy has a really nice biography, and you're right. I think he's son committed suicide tragically a couple of years ago. And Tony has such a deep spirituality around him that's that I think has attracted sort of warmth and great respect from everybody who watches football. His team really believes his team is a reflection of him. And, yeah, I think, absolutely, if Peyton Manning doesn't get hurt, if Marvin here and gets hurt. There's no really great injuries. Yeah, I think that your Baltimore I mean, I'm sorry. I think that he they didn't have more [unintelligible] Colts. No, I think that the Colts definitely can put themselves in a position to repeat.
[Farai Chideya:] Now, let's move, Bill, to tennis. You have Roger Federer holding his ground at the U.S. Open. It was a good match but begs the question: Is Federer unbeatable?
[Mr. William Rhoden:] Well, first of all, nobody's unbeatable, you know. I've been doing this for 35 years. And just when you think that somebody's unbeatable, they get trampled in an upset. But Federer is close. He is as close to a perfect tennis player as you can come. Last night, you know, Roddick Andy Roddick, threw everything he had. I mean, he just played probably the best he can play and he still couldn't win a set. So and I think that's probably what makes men's tennis attractive now although you don't have the depth that you get in the women's field. You need an Attila the Hun. You need someone who seems to be unbeatable, somebody for anybody to shoot you. And that is clearly Roger Federer. He's trying to become the first men's tennis player since the '20s to win four straight Opens. Can he be beaten? Yeah. But, stand in line.
[Farai Chideya:] All right. We're going to have to whip through this one quickly. What about the Williams sisters? We were looking for a Williams-versus-Williams match. But Serena got knocked out of the tournament. What do you see ahead for those girls?
[Mr. William Rhoden:] Yeah. I don't think the Williams sisters want to play each other. But Venus Venus coming off of Wimbledon is very strong. I think it's going to be great match tomorrow. She's going to play Justine Henin. I like Venus. She's really focused. She's out for revenge. She wants to beat the one who beat her sister. I like Venus in this match. I like Venus actually to win the women's side of the U.S. Open.
[Farai Chideya:] All right. Well, we will certainly stay tuned, and, Bill, it was a pleasure as always.
[Mr. William Rhoden:] It's always a pleasure. Go bowl some more.
[Farai Chideya:] Bill Rhoden is a regular sports commentator for NEWS & NOTES and a sports writer for The New York Times. He is also the author of "$40 Million Slaves: The Rise, Fall and Redemption of the Black Athlete."

[Steve Inskeep:] Syria's ruling Baath Party opened a congress today. It's the first country-wide meeting in five years, and it's met to discuss planned reforms, what the Syrian president, Bashar Al-Assad, has labeled `the great leap.'More than 1,100 Baath Party members are attending this congress in Damascus, and that's where NPR's Ivan Watson is this morning. And, Ivan, one reason we're interested in this meeting is because of the timing. It comes after Syria has faced intense international criticism, been forced to withdraw its troops from Lebanon. So given all that, what's expected of this meeting?
[Ivan Watson Reporting:] Well, Steve, President Bashar Al-Assad, he opened up this meeting and he said that the Baath Party, which has ruled Syria for 43 years, does face new challenges and new changes and it has to adapt. It has to make a great leap forward to meet the hopes of the Syrian people. But then one by one, I've been watching septuagenarian delegates stepping up to the podium here and repeating much of the same rhetoric that Syrians have grown accustomed to hearing during the past 43 years of Baath Party rule. In fact, every time they even mention President Bashar Al-Assad's name the audience automatically applauds, and some Syrians I've spoken with say they're not hearing or seeing anything that signifies a great leap forward.
[Steve Inskeep:] Hm. Well, this is a president who took over from his father five years ago, was supposed to be a young and more modern leader. What is his record at home?
[Watson:] Well, he does seem to be quite popular with the people. They do think he wants to bring about reform, and he has introduced some freedoms, such as liberalizing a bit this centrally planned economy here; introducing private banks, ATM machines, credit cards and cell phones. And there's a bit more political freedom. But according to the constitution, the Baath Party is still enshrined as the leader of this society, and in the month before this congress, we've seen an apparent show of force from the authorities. They rounded up members of the country's only public political and cultural discussion group, they test-fired several scud missiles in the past week, and yesterday, clashes with the Kurdish minority in a Kurdish town of Qameshli on the border here where protesters were calling for an independent investigation into the mysterious death of a Kurdish cleric. So getting mixed messages here.
[Steve Inskeep:] Is the government under any internal pressure to reform?
[Watson:] I'm hearing from every Syrian that I talk to that they do want change. First of all, economic change. There's 20 percent unemployment here. University students I've spoken with all talk about going-leaving the country to find work after they graduate. There's also a lot of complaint about huge corruption, bloated government agencies that squeeze Syria's middle class for bribes and, again, loosening up the economy. And that's not even talking about political freedoms. For instance, the Kurdish minority here, hundreds of thousands of Kurds, don't have citizenship, don't even have the right to jobs or education.
[Steve Inskeep:] Ivan, we mentioned that international pressure forced the Syrians to withdraw from Lebanon. Do other nations have any leverage to force the Syrians to reform at home?
[Watson:] Well, Europe has held up a trade deal with Syria, and Syria's also under huge pressure from the US. It's a big concern among Syrians I'm talking to. They are afraid of the looming threat of a confrontation with the US. The US has been accusing Syria of allowing insurgents to cross the border into Iraq and also continues to denounce what they say is Syria's support of armed militants in Lebanon and in the occupied Palestinian territories.
[Steve Inskeep:] Ivan, thanks very much.
[Watson:] You're welcome, Steve.
[Steve Inskeep:] That's NPR's Ivan Watson. He is in Damascus where Syria has begun a congress today. This is NPR News.

[Noah Adams:] From NPR News, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Noah Adams.
[Michele Norris:] In Myanmar, the United Nations is estimating that the death toll from the cyclone could reach 100,000. And the U.N. upped its estimate of survivors severely affected by the storm to as many as 2.5 million. Today, more U.S. aid flights reached the country also known as Burma. But the military rulers still are not granting visas to foreign aid workers. In a moment, we'll talk with someone who has just returned from one of the hardest-hit villages. First, from Bangkok, NPR's Doualy Xaykaothao reports that a Thai team and groups from several other countries will be allowed in.
[Xaykaothao:] Tons of blankets, bottled water and mosquito nets were put into U.S. planes headed once more for Myanmar. But the Americans who delivered the aid didn't stay in the country; they can't. Not until visas are approved. However, Myanmar did okay more than a 150 relief workers from India, China, Bangladesh and Thailand. They'll be allowed to travel there soon to help with relief efforts. The U.S. ambassador to Thailand, Eric John, said earlier this week...
[Noah Adams:] It's absolutely critical that disaster-response specialists be allowed into Burma to help those struggling with the massive devastation that confronts them.
[Xaykaothao:] That's the sentiment of many agencies with staff awaiting visas in Bangkok, including the International Federation of Red Cross Red Crescent. Spokesman John Sparrow said they are talking to government officials in Myanmar at all levels about how to scale up faster.
[Noah Adams:] It's an ongoing dialogue about the needs that our assessment teams for Myanmar, Myanmar Red Cross, bring back about the response that we can provide, how we can support Myanmar to move more effectively on this crisis. So yes, it's an open and very frank dialogue.
[Xaykaothao:] By the end of Friday, he said, the Red Cross will have had 17 flights into Yangon with about 180 tons of relief goods, much of it shelter materials.
[Noah Adams:] Our pipeline is certainly now, I would say, running with the rhythm. We would like it to be bigger and much have much more going in. But since Wednesday last week, things have been picking up.
[Xaykaothao:] That's true, said Champa Blueman with UNICEF's East Asia and Pacific Regional Office. There has been progress, but...
[Noah Adams:] Sanitation remains an enormous challenge. Water we've got good water purification, chlorine, bleaching powder, going out. The challenge now is for looking at more sustained supplies of water in these affected communities.
[Xaykaothao:] One of their organization's major concern is schools. Almost 2,500 primary schools have been damaged, according to U.N. agencies, and classes are supposed to start in June.
[Noah Adams:] Our priority is to try and get at least some temporary schooling going. Even if it's under a tarpaulin under a tree, as long as it's a place they come to where they've got some supervision and they can get some more of that emotional guidance and support that they need.
[Xaykaothao:] Doualy Xaykaothao, NPR News, Bangkok.

[Neal Conan:] Over the course of the long war in Iraq, we've spoken many times with Gary Anderson, first to ask about military issues he retired from the Marines with the rank of colonel and more recently, to ask about his experiences as a civilian adviser with the State Department on a provincial reconstruction team. He's just back from a year in Iraq, where he worked as a governance adviser and joins us again as Iraqis head to the polls this weekend in the second parliamentary election since the U.S.-led invasion. We'd especially like to hear from those of you who've been to Iraq about how things have changed, what are the big issues that lie ahead? 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our Web site at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Gary Anderson is with us here in Studio 3A. Welcome home.
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] Good to be here.
[Neal Conan:] And you were working in the Abu Ghraib area that's around the notorious prison.
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] That's west of Baghdad. The prison is about in the middle of the district, in a little town called Kandari. Yeah.
[Neal Conan:] And that is then one of the areas that has been mixed Sunni, Shia. And you write, when you got there, it was still very much in the heart of the insurgency.
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] It was still very much in play when we got there, really in April of last year. It had been overlooked by not overlooked, but it had not been a priority effort as they tried to get a handle of Baghdad proper. And then, as Baghdad quieted down, we moved out west to Abu Ghraib. When I left, I felt pretty good. I think we we've reduced the level of violence to something that's essentially random terrorism. We took our last fatality in our associated partner brigade in May. And things have calmed down quite a bit. And I think we got a lot of good work done. I felt pretty good about coming out.
[Neal Conan:] And what do you attribute that to? Who gets the credit?
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] Well, General Petraeus, General Jim Mattis, his Marine partner, when they put together their counterinsurgency manual based on a lot of work done over the years, I think pretty much got it right. You clear the area of the insurgents, make it dangerous for them, and you go in and you try to hold that area, make sure that you get all the pieces in place so civilians like me can come in and try to build on whatever they've done. And I think that's a good formula. It's not perfect. It doesn't work 100 percent across the board. Every little village is its own little entity. But it's a pretty good, solid way of doing things, I think.
[Neal Conan:] And were you able to build?
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] I'm sorry?
[Neal Conan:] Were you able to go ahead and build?
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] Oh, yeah. I think we did. We got a lot of you know, we were called a reconstruction team, and I think I can safely say that the war damage and a lot of the damage done by Saddam Hussein's neglect since the Iran-Iraq War, particularly to the infrastructure, the canal system, which is really important on a rural area like Abu Ghraib, has been rebuilt to a point where they've got a fighting chance to go on from there.
[Neal Conan:] What is the economic basis there? Is it farming?
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] It's farming, largely dairy farming. And there's a lot of Rust Belt defense industry that will never come back. They're going to have to redo the industry in Abu Ghraib. They're going to have to retool, just as your earlier guests were saying. But I think we've got them on a pretty good path to really get their act together as far as agriculture in the future. It's not a sure thing, but I felt pretty good about leaving.
[Neal Conan:] That's encouraging because U.S. soldiers are going to be leaving there pretty soon.
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] That's true. And you know, the interesting thing is -this is a real it's hard for the Iraqis to come to grips with us, that they'd you know, we told them we we're going to leave. We told them weren't going to stay. And even the most cynical Iraqis are starting to realize we're really going to leave. And this is not a non-traumatic thing for them. And believe it or not, there's a lot more angst about us leaving than you would have expected, than you and I certainly would have expected when we started this thing in 2003.
[Neal Conan:] Well, because that would require people to have the faith in the police, in the you know, their national army, the structures for justice and administration.
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] Yeah. I think the security force has done a pretty good job. And I think Prime Minister Maliki has done a good job with security. But the hardest part I found was getting particularly at the local level getting confidence back in the civil infrastructure. And there's still a lot of skepticism on the part of the Iraqis that I know about their ability to handle that portion of it.
[Neal Conan:] Their competence or their integrity, shall we say?
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] Both. A lot of the problem, quite frankly, is that their as is a case of most nations in the Middle East, their civil salaries are very small and there's a tremendous temptation to make that up in graft and corruption, and there is a lot of graft and corruption. Not to the extent that there is in Afghanistan, but Iraqis will tell you there's a lot and they're right.
[Neal Conan:] As you move ahead as they move ahead, how important are these elections?
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] I'm sorry...
[Neal Conan:] As they move ahead, how important are these elections?
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] Well, this is where we have to be careful. And I don't want to sound like a negative Nelly here about elections. Elections are good, but we can't I think we really have to be careful about thinking the elections are going to be the cure-all, end-all for Iraq. There are a lot of underlying problems that are very, very serious that actually could cause us a lot of problems after the elections. And I think we have to be careful of getting our expectations so high that if this election is successful and I think it will be, I don't think they'll be a lot of violence, and most Iraqis are going to vote. So...
[Neal Conan:] Including most Sunnis who didn't vote last time.
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] Including most Sunnis who didn't vote in the first election. Most of them did vote in the parliamentary...
[Neal Conan:] Yes.
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] ...or in the local, or I should say the provincial elections, last time.
[Neal Conan:] Yeah.
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] The Sunnis learned their lesson. They're not going to stay away from the polls this time, one way or the other.
[Neal Conan:] Let's get some callers in on the conversation. Our guest is retired Colonel Gary Anderson. 800-989-8255. Email us: talk.npr.org. Otto is on the line from Sunnyvale in California.
[Otto:] Yes, good morning. I just got back from Iraq a couple of months ago. And for my past year there, I certainly have seen a lot of progress has been made, that the U.S. is clearly helping the people there. Initially, I was personally opposed to the invasion myself, personally. But as a soldier, I really have to carry out what ever I was told to do when I was sent there. And one thing I have been very impressed is how high the morale is for U.S. soldiers [unintelligible] Marines over there, and also what we are doing, really, to help one base at a time, one turnover at a time. I helped out on the turnover of a lot of the bases and the inventory of the things to figure out what to do with the stuff that we brought over there, a lot which really needs to be left behind in order to help the Iraqis for the rebuilding effort generators, things that some people might say we need it back at home. But ultimately having been in the desert for so many years blasted by the sun and the really hot weather, a lot of those, really, are not moving to anywhere else. So a lot of the work that we were doing is making sure that these items get -put to the best use for the Iraqis and also some of those that we could potentially take back and send to Afghanistan to help out our soldiers there as well.
[Neal Conan:] Otto, where can you tell us where you were working, what part of Iraq?
[Otto:] Yeah. I was in Baghdad. I was in Camp Victory, where the headquarters of the multi-national force of Iraq was based was the logistic headquarters. And [unintelligible] really close to the various base closure issues we have. And I could tell you that the efforts that we have put in really have helped the Iraqis quite a bit before we leave. For example, things that we left behind for Iraqis, we do not leave junk behind. We leave things that have maintenance, with support in order to make sure that they would [unintelligible]. And I think these are things that we've been able to do that I'm very proud to be part of when I was over there.
[Neal Conan:] Otto, thanks very much for the call. Appreciate the update.
[Otto:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Bye-bye. Were you seeing equipment being turned over to Iraqis? This is quite a bit of equipment being turned over. One interesting thing as an aside, one of our our Navy commander on our provincial reconstruction team or embedded team came up with an idea for some very, very interesting uses for shipping containers. We got shipping containers laying all over the place. And he's come up with some modularized housing units, ideas and so forth I think are really, really kind of neat. And I wonder, you were talking about infrastructure, which was a big issue there in the Abu Ghraib grave, canals particularly. What about things like parks?
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] Well, you know, one of the things that I kind of divided the work we did into what I call feel-good projects and, you know, real hardcore real infrastructure projects. I wouldn't poo-poo the feel-good projects like soccer fields and playgrounds and that. I really considered that to be a force protection thing. You know, if you're out there building parks and playgrounds and things people see good things happen in their neighborhoods, they're lot less slightly who try to blow you up, which is near and dear to my heart.
[Neal Conan:] That's a good thing, yes. Let's go to Christopher calling from South Lake City.
[Christopher:] Hi.
[Neal Conan:] Yes.
[Christopher:] I wanted to ask the question of how morale was with the troops considering that this new round of elections would possibly bring the new suicide bombings. And in addition to that, how are contractors faring in Iraq right now? I haven't heard too much on the news about contractor issues or the opportunities that [unintelligible].
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] To speak to the troops themselves, the two brigades that we worked with I thought were magnificent. I'm an old Marine, but I worked with primarily with soldiers over there, and I can't say enough good things about them. They...
[Neal Conan:] By that, he means U.S. Army.
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] U.S. Army, yeah. They're superb troops, and I can't say enough good things about them. The contractors over there, I think, you know, I physically lived aboard Camp Victory, Camp Liberty portion of it, and they do a lot of good work. They work hard. I think they earn their money. I can't say anything bad about them.
[Neal Conan:] Christopher, thanks very much.
[Christopher:] Yup.
[Neal Conan:] Gary Anderson has written a piece for the Small Wars Journal called "Counterinsurgency vs. Counterterrorism: A Civilian's View." If you'd like to read it, there's a link to it on our Web site. Go to npr.org. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And let's see if we can get another caller in. This is Tehrik, Tehrik with us from Boston.
[Tehrik:] Well, I might lose you because I'm going into the Boston Harbor right now.
[Neal Conan:] Well, see if you get a question out then.
[Tehrik:] Yes. I'm going to say I agree with the gentleman that, you know, the elections are just a facade. The allegiance of the people is to their local leader. You know, it really doesn't make a difference. I'm from Pakistan, and no matter what party gets elected, you know, we are -the local residents, we are in power. The people have to listen to the people who are the tribal leaders or the [unintelligible] as they're called in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And I'll take your comments off the air.
[Neal Conan:] All right, drive carefully, Tehrik.
[Tehrik:] Thanks.
[Neal Conan:] Bye-bye.
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] Yeah. Well, you know, getting confidence from the local leaders was really something I struggled with. And I think my results were mixed. I did a thing that I call governance patrols. And I'd go out to various neighborhoods, in the various village areas and talk to people and say, you know, what's right what's going right, what's going wrong? And if I found something that I didn't like, I'd go back to find the local ministry rep or the local what we call baladia, the public works guy and, you know, give him a good swift kick in the rear end and get him out to do it. But getting them to do that on their own as a part of their normal daily routine was not it was not the easiest thing in the world to do.
[Neal Conan:] Accountability difficulty.
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] Yeah. Some extent, you started to see it them do it themselves. Other cases, they still need a boot in the rear end.
[Neal Conan:] Let's get another caller in. This is Cole, Cole with us from Tempe, Arizona.
[Cole:] Yes, hi. I was actually in Iraq in 2006 and 2007. And obviously that was a very dangerous time. Today is actually the three-year anniversary of us losing our first soldier in the brigade. But while we were there, we saw the implementation of the surge. And one of the methods they used in urban areas was literally dividing communities, so Shia communities from Sunni communities, so they wouldn't have violence between them. I'm wondering if they're still doing that, and whether or not that's had an effect.
[Neal Conan:] I saw that in Belfast in the old days.
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] Yeah, it has had an effect. Unfortunately, they have not been able to take the barriers down as quickly as they wanted to. A lot of that is not so much sectarian anymore. It's because of the threat of suicide bombings and so forth. They've had they've actually had to maintain the barriers a lot more than I think Prime Minister Maliki would've wanted to. But that's probably the price that you pay for still having at least a low level ongoing insurgency going on.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks, Cole.
[Cole:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] And Cole, I we're sorry for your losses. It's a sad day.
[Cole:] Every day is a sad day.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks very much. Bye-bye. As you look ahead, Gary Anderson, you said you did not expect a lot of violence associated with the elections; a lot of people have wondered if there may not be a surge of violence after the elections, sectarian divisions that are still there and not going away.
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] Yeah. I that's my main concern. And I think that's why I take a cautionary note about the elections. If you and I talked to about 200 Iraqis before I left, specifically to find out they're going to vote. Didn't ask them how they were going to vote. But if you talk to them too long, everything came down with the Iranians. There's a tremendous amount of fear and apprehension that the Iranians have got too much power in the country through some of the senior Shiite leaders and I'll name names like Chalabi. And he's done a lot of, in my view, a lot of things that detracted from this election. And I suspect that you're going to see some fallout from that after the election. Now, how bad that is, I don't know. But what I do know is that I think there's going to be an eventual conflict between the pro-Iranian and the pro-nationalist faction. And I don't think it's I think it's a mistake to think it's going to be entirely sectarian. I think it's going to start out Shia on Shia, with the nationalist Shia going after the what I would call the Persian-dominated faction. And I think that politics in Iraq has a tendency to be a full contact sport. So I would expect to see some problems after the election; how bad they're going to be, I'd like to hope they're not going to be that bad, but let's see what happens.
[Neal Conan:] Gary Anderson, again, welcome home. And thanks again for your time.
[Colonel Gary Anderson:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Retired Colonel Gary Anderson, with us today here Studio 3A.

[Michele Norris:] Back in this country, Easter sermons are often a pastor's best chance to impress potential new members of his or her church, people who show up on Easter, but don't attend services regularly. In the past, preachers went to the bookshelves to help shape their messages. Many still do, but an increasing number have found inspiration from the internet in the form of religious podcasting or they call it Godcasting. They download theological lectures, sermons from other churches, as well as short films and music. Nick Fatato is one of these savvy clergymen. He's senior pastor at the Boston Worship Center.
[Pastor Nick Fatato:] You know, when I walk down downtown Boston, two out of five people have white things coming out of their head, headphones from iPods, and I thought there's got to be a way to do that, to get some information there. The church, traditionally, has been, you know, plays catch up with technology, and I just felt like we're going to jump up and try to grab it. It's a whole different way to come into community.
[Michele Norris:] So is it a case where you keep your iPod on shuffle and you hear a piece of music, and somehow, a lyric or something, I guess a thought that that music inspired will find its way into your sermon.
[Pastor Nick Fatato:] Yeah, exactly, I was probably at the gym because that's about the only time I have time to listen to my iPod, and I heard this song. It's called Dare You to Move. Ever since I heard that song, I thought, man, that's a message.
[Switchfoot:] [Singing] Welcome to the fallout. Welcome to resistance.
[Pastor Nick Fatato:] Switchfoot, I think they're a pretty hard-driving rock and roll band. That particular song, Dare You to Move, there's a part of it that just says, you got to live for something more than this, and I think all of us kind of think about that a lot, and so I started listening to the song, and actually, I was walking home. I jotted down a couple ideas, and it resulted in a three-part series. I called it Dare You to Move, and I would play the song each service, and then I would talk about how it led me to pieces of scripture.
[Michele Norris:] So how did the audience respond to that guitar-driven rock and roll on a Sunday morning?
[Pastor Nick Fatato:] Typically, if you throw a piece of video or a song, all of a sudden, everybody sits up because we're a visual and kind of a different stimulated world right now than just lecture. You know, coming up with this thing every week, it's a workout.
[Michele Norris:] Hard to hit a homerun every Sunday morning, huh?
[Pastor Nick Fatato:] That's right. That's right.
[Michele Norris:] Well, and there are a lot of people that are going to be showing up on Sunday, and they're going to expect you to swing for the fences on Easter Sunday. Is there a lot of pressure on your shoulders right now?
[Pastor Nick Fatato:] You know, I approach Easter a little bit different. What I try to do is try to do pretty much the same sort of thing that I do each week so that I can stand there and say if you do come back, this will be what you'll see next week.
[Michele Norris:] So what have you found on the end of the keyboard this week?
[Pastor Nick Fatato:] You know, again, I did a couple things. I found online this great video, this real kind of high-energy, edgy video on the Apostles Creed, so we're going to open our service with this video, which are just different faces from all over the world reading the Apostles Creed, and then the other thing I found was, I'm going to use a clip from, you know, now that THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA is out on DVD, there's a point in there, where the lion resurrects, and he says death works backwards, so I'm going to use that little clip from that movie, and then I also found a man-on-the-street interview that just says what is Easter? We'll open that for the discussion and time of the sermon, so there's a number of different things that I located online that I think will be, kind of give some color to the service.
[Michele Norris:] Do you have any concern that this is sort of taking the service and the sermon away from something that was really unique to the experience of being in a sanctuary, a man speaking to an audience, that this is becoming not much different than you would see if you were watching television or if you were going to a Broadway show?
[Pastor Nick Fatato:] That's a great question. I personally went through kind of a journey on this. I'm in downtown Boston. I have a very young congregation, and there was all this stuff that was kind of coming about that I thought I could use, and to be frank, I really felt God was challenging me to just be able to use the spoken word because, ultimately, that's the most important thing, and so still, I still believe that's the centerpiece on a Sunday morning. In fact, I think all the technology, whether it's a podcast or iTunes or we use, we do a blog and those kinds of things, if you're still not delivering a good solid message on Sunday morning, those things are all secondary.
[Michele Norris:] Nick Fatato is a senior pastor at the Boston Worship Center. Pastor Fatato, thanks for speaking to us, and Happy Easter to you.
[Pastor Nick Fatato:] Same to you.

[Michel Martin:] Now we'd like to tell you about the latest chapter in a saga that's frustrated Mexican and U.S. authorities alike. We're talking about the drug kingpin, Joaquin Guzman, known as El Chapo. He was recaptured Friday. He'd been missing since July, and that was his second escape from prison. Guzman's being held in Mexico for crimes there, but he's also wanted for several drug trafficking charges in multiple U.S. states. Now Mexican officials say they are willing to consider extradition to the United States. Here to tell us more about this case is Jimmy Gurule. He teaches global criminal law at the University of Notre Dame. Thanks so much for speaking with us.
[Jimmy Gurule:] It's my pleasure.
[Michel Martin:] We understand that he is to be returned to the same prison from which he escaped last July. Why would that be?
[Jimmy Gurule:] Well, it's perplexing to me because as you know that was the prison from which he escaped, and it was a very bold effort on his behalf that involved a tunnel that went under the prison yard. It took one year to construct and as much as a million dollars. So the question now is why does the Mexican government believe that his security will be anymore guaranteed there now than it was before?
[Michel Martin:] One of the things, I think, that's adding to the kind of the friction between the U.S. and Mexico on this point is that we understand that the U.S. had issued an extradition request to prosecute Mr. Guzman in the United States some three weeks prior to his escape. And we also understand that there was some intelligence that they say was shared with Mexican authorities that this escape was planned. You know, so given all that, what is the likelihood that he will now be extradited to the U.S.?
[Jimmy Gurule:] I think it's unlikely. Now, it's certainly possible, but I think it's highly unlikely for a couple of reasons. First, extradition involves important issues of sovereignty. And in this particular case, El Chapo was tried, convicted and sentenced in Mexico, and therefore should serve his prison sentence in Mexico. At the same time, I don't think that Mexico wants to be perceived as being dictated to by the United States and caving into U.S. extradition demands. Further, I think that if Mexico surrenders El Chapo to the United States, that could be perceived as a tacit admission that Mexicans' criminal justice system is broken and it cannot hold major drug pins accountable such as El Chapo.
[Michel Martin:] But is there any precedent though for extraditing an individual, even perhaps to a third country if it's been demonstrated that, for whatever reason, the legal system the criminal justice system is not capable of incarcerating this person? I mean, is there any precedent for that based on the fact that he has two prior escapes?
[Jimmy Gurule:] There certainly is. I mean, there's no question that Mexico has the authority, I think, the legal authority to go ahead and extradite him. There is an extradition treaty between the United States and Mexico. The drug offenses for which the United States is seeking to hold El Chapo accountable were extraditable offenses within that treaty, so the legal authority is there. I think the more interesting question is whether the political will is there. Having said that, I think that there is one compelling argument in favor of extradition and that is this if he's returned to the same prison where he escaped and if he escapes again, this would be the third escape. That would be so embarrassing. That would be so humiliating to the Mexican government that their concerns regarding whether they can guarantee that he will not escape again may dictate that it would be better to release him surrender him to U.S. authorities.
[Michel Martin:] Jimmy Gurule is a professor of criminal law the University of Notre Dame. He joined us from South Bend. Professor Gurule, thanks so much for speaking with us.
[Jimmy Gurule:] My pleasure. Thank you.

[Steve Inskeep:] The counterterrorism challenge since 911 has involved a series of moves and countermoves by al-Qaida and the United States government. Al-Qaida comes up with a surprise attack, say, using airplanes as weapons; the intelligence and law enforcement communities come up with a new defense, and in response al-Qaida seeks another approach. We're going to go through that process in the next few minutes. This is a sort of war game: blue team versus the red team, as the military will sometimes say. Good guys versus bad guys. Here to take us inside that game are counterterrorism correspondent Dina Temple-Raston, who will give us the al-Qaida side, and Tom Gjelten, who explains how the U.S. responds. We'll start with Tom and the reaction after 911.
[Tom Gjelten:] In the beginning, the United States saw al-Qaida almost as an enemy state. The reaction was to go to war against it. That was 2001 in Afghanistan. When Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders fled to Pakistan, the United States pursued them there. In the last two years, we've seen hundreds of missile strikes on their hideouts. As a result, the original al-Qaida leadership is on the run, no longer able to command worldwide terrorism operations as it once could. Advantage: the United States.
[Dina Temple-raston:] Al-Qaida adapted by shifting a lot of its attack planning and execution to its affiliates, groups like al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen or al-Shabaab in Somalia. They are among almost a dozen terrorist groups now shouldering new responsibilities. Its affiliates operate independently. They have their own membership, financing and they plan their own operations. Al-Qaida's Yemen branch has been a particular problem. The face of the group is an American-born cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki. He's called on his followers to make the same transition that he did: from American Muslim to terrorist fighter.
[Mr. Anwar Al-awlaki:] I eventually came to the conclusion that jihad against America is binding upon myself just as it is binding on every other able Muslim.
[Dina Temple-raston:] His message, easily found on the Internet, has inspired individuals to act, individuals including the young Nigerian who carried explosives in his underwear onto a U.S. airplane last Christmas. That plot had all the hallmarks of the new terrorist threat, a relatively simple attack executed by an individual. Advantage: al-Qaida.
[Tom Gjelten:] Smaller, simpler attacks do less damage but are more difficult to detect. Individuals operating alone are harder to discover than conspiracies, like the one behind 911. With diverse threats emerging on a smaller scale, U.S. intelligence officials had to work harder to connect seemingly unrelated pieces of information. That became especially clear when the Christmas Day bomber slipped through the cracks. A new, more finely focused approach was necessary. The director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter, told a Senate committee he had created so-called pursuit teams to track down each and every terrorism lead.
[Mr. Michael Leiter:] We have done a better job since Christmas Day of identifying new cases, domestically and overseas, and enhancing our understanding of individuals who may pose a threat to the United States.
[Tom Gjelten:] Individuals that's what counterterrorism work has come down to: finding those lone wolf terrorists one-by-one.
[Dina Temple-raston:] To make that search harder, al-Qaida started recruiting Westerners, people with no arrest records and clean passports from countries that don't raise red flags. As a result, the plots come from all directions. Earlier this year, one al-Qaida affiliate trained Germans to launch commando-type attacks against Europe. Al-Qaida's North African arm had designs on France. Terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman says this is part of a broader pattern.
[Mr. Bruce Hoffman:] We see a threat that's morphing, that's transforming, that's assuming new and one has to say more pernicious forms as our adversaries are constantly searching to identify and then exploit the gaps in our security.
[Dina Temple-raston:] Gaps like the security on cargo jets bound for the United States.
[Tom Gjelten:] Air cargo is hard to secure because there's so much of it. Screening all of it effectively would require an enormous effort. Yet again there's a new security challenge. Philip Mudd, a CIA veteran and former head of the FBI's national security branch, says intelligence and law enforcement agencies just have to get smarter in the way they look for things, like suspicious packages.
[Mr. Philip Mudd:] There are countries that are centers for militant activity. There are the kinds of packages that might come out of those countries, that might contain a small device. Instead of just looking at the global activity, are there countries and attributes of packages we might look at that make this problem more manageable?
[Tom Gjelten:] The big thing now is creativity. To fight al-Qaida, you have to be able to think like al-Qaida. You have to imagine what they might do next and prepare for that.
[Dina Temple-raston:] Which is the reason why investigators are looking into whether last week's package bombs may not have been a plot as much as a test. For nearly a week now, al-Qaida's watched the United States react and they've learned from it. I'm Dina Temple-Raston.
[Tom Gjelten:] And I'm Tom Gjelten, NPR News.

[Mary Louise Kelly:] So President Trump showed his hand on immigration last night. The White House released a one-page proposal. A senior White House official calls the new immigration plan, quote, "a bipartisan compromise position." Well, it is already attracting a lot of bipartisan criticism. NPR congressional correspondent Scott Detrow is here to walk through all the latest on immigration. Hey, Scott.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] Hey there.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Before we get to the criticism, let's lay out what is being criticized quick recap of what the White House is proposing.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] So the White House is taking a step toward the Democratic position on this. On one issue, they support a 10- to 12-year path to citizenship for people in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program but also people who would be eligible for the program but aren't in it. So we're talking about 1.8 million people here.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] All right.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] But they want a lot in exchange for that $25 billion for construction of a wall and other border security, additional money for immigration personnel on top of that. And then they want changes to the legal immigration system. They want to limit family considerations when visas are awarded to just parents and children who are minors, and they also want to completely end the visa lottery system.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] So a lot to unpack in this plan, and we mentioned it is already coming in for a lot of criticism. Start with Democrats. How what's the reaction been there?
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] They do not quite view this as the compromise that the White House is framing it as.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] OK.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] I'll read you a couple quotes here. And I should point out this came out yesterday after Congress left town, so most of the reaction so far has been on Twitter, in statements, things like that. So here's Joe Crowley, who's part of House Democratic leadership. This isn't an immigration proposal. It's a ransom note. And here's House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi. She says this is, quote, "an anti-immigrant framework" and, quote, "part of the Trump administration's unmistakable campaign to make America white again." A lot of similar responses, and I think it just comes down to the fact that President Trump's shifting positions on immigration and also the rhetoric he's used from the campaign through his presidency, notably the slur he used in that infamous moment in the White House a couple weeks ago talking about African countries. Democrats just don't see him as trustworthy, and they don't view his motives they're incredibly suspicious of his motives on the issue of immigration.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Not a huge surprise that Democrats are not onboard with this plan or at least not yet. Are Republicans any more receptive?
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] Well, a lot of key Republicans are. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton is someone who's long been pushing for these changes to legal immigration that are included in this framework. He said in a statement that this plan is generous and humane while also being responsible. If you look at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's statement, he seems to mostly be just grateful that President Trump is finally putting his views on paper. McConnell's been trying to negotiate this as Trump has shifted from position to position. And McConnell's response bubbles down to, thank you for saying this; now we'll work on it. But here's what's important. House Republicans...
[Mary Louise Kelly:] I was going to ask. That's the Senate side. What about on the House?
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] And they are the majority in the House...
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Right.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] ...Just like they are in the Senate. A lot of House Republicans are real hard-line positions on immigration. And there's a lot of skepticism, especially from the Freedom Caucus part of the world, who view any sort of path to citizenship as amnesty. So the key to getting them onboard is how much President Trump sells this, how much he sticks to this plan. So if he comes out in the State of the Union next week and says, this is what I want, they could come around. Otherwise, they might remain critical to this.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] NPR congressional correspondent Scott Detrow. Thank you, Scott.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] Thank you.

[Alex Chadwick:] I'm Alex Chadwick. You know that overall college tuition is going up, but still, many parents and students are especially irritated by the cost of textbooks. A government report found that in the past two decades the price of these books has increased at twice the rate of inflation. DAY TO DAY's Madeleine Brand spoke with our personal finance contributor, Michelle Singletary.
[Michelle Singletary:] College students can expect to spend about $900 a year for their textbooks. And in some cases much more than that, if they're taking very technical type courses.
[Madeleine Brand:] And are there some ways that students can save on the cost of books?
[Michelle Singletary:] First of all, try to buy a used book. You can go to the bookstore and get used books from students who are finished with the course, but you want to do that right away because those are the books that go fast. I know when I was in college many, many years ago, I was...
[Madeleine Brand:] Like five years, right?
[Michelle Singletary:] Yeah, just five years ago. That was the first thing I'd do. I'd drop my stuff in my dorm room and make a beeline for the bookstore to try to get used books. That's one way. More students are going online. I mean, you know, we're shopping online more often. And this is a great way to buy your schoolbook. And there are many sites that will help you find really good prices on your textbooks.
[Madeleine Brand:] So is it usually cheaper to go online than to go to the campus bookstore?
[Michelle Singletary:] It can be. Anywhere from 30, 40 percent, sometimes as much as 50 percent, but you also have to factor in shipping costs. So you want to be careful. Compare what is in the bookstore to what you can get online. And one site which I like, called campusbooks.com, will allow you to basically price shop so that you can comparison shop how much your school bookstore will charge for the books as opposed to some other sites where you can get discount prices on your textbooks.
[Madeleine Brand:] And any pitfalls? What should students look out for?
[Michelle Singletary:] Well, you want to be careful that, first of all, that you're getting the right textbook. Many courses change from year to year. They update it. So you want to look for the 10-digit International Standard Book Number. It's called the ISBN number. So you want to be sure, because you don'want to pay all that money, have it shipped and find out you've gotten the wrong textbook. That means you're going to need to get your syllabus so you have the right textbook. And then be sure that you're getting a good price when you add on the cost of shipping. Now, this time of year you may get a deal where they're not going to charge you. But you want to be careful because you could get the book cheaper in the bookstore, minus the shipping cost.
[Madeleine Brand:] And maybe you want to avoid those professors who are published because you know that they're going to require that you buy their books.
[Michelle Singletary:] You know, that's actually a good strategy. When you're looking for courses, because sometimes, you know, there are two courses, pretty much the same subject and taught by different folks; you want to see what books that each professor suggests that you get. One professor may have a long list of required books and the other one may say, you know, I can do with just this one. So that is actually a really good suggestion, that you look at the courses, look at the books that are required. And one other way to do it is to, you know, you can share a book. If you've got a roommate and you're taking the same courses or someone on your dorm floor you've got to be able to schedule now that maybe you can share a book, because this can be very expensive, especially for people who are taking on a lot of loans to go to school.
[Madeleine Brand:] Thank you, Michelle.
[Michelle Singletary:] You're welcome.
[Madeleine Brand:] Michelle Singletary is our regular expert on personal finance and she writes the nationally syndicated column, The Color of Money. To hear more from Michelle, you can check out here NPR podcast. Just go online to npr.orgcolorofmoney. That is all one word.

[Debbie Elliott:] We turn now to Cecilia Munoz. She's vice president of the National Council of La Raza, a national Hispanic advocacy group. Ms. Munoz, hello again.
[Ms. Cecilia Munoz:] Hi, there.
[Debbie Elliott:] We spoke a couple of weeks ago, before the Senate started these discussions and now, as we just heard, this much heralded compromise has been scuttled. Where does this leave you and those you represent?
[Ms. Cecilia Munoz:] Well, we are determined to bring immigration reform to this country. So we are not done and we are hopeful that the Senate isn't done either.
[Debbie Elliott:] You know, we've just heard an analyst tell us that the stalemate in the Senate reflects that this nation doesn't really know how to deal with this. Realistically, do you think that this can be resolved in an election year?
[Ms. Cecilia Munoz:] I believe it can be resolved in an election year because the level of bipartisanship on this issue grew this week. We had Republicans who a week ago were saying they wanted to do what the House did, a sort of ugly enforcement-only approach, sign on to a bi-partisan compromise. The leadership in the Senate on both sides of the aisle needs to sit down work out and agreement for bringing this bill to the floor. I think once it's brought to the floor, it'll get somewhere around 70 votes.
[Debbie Elliott:] What's the motivation for them? It's risky passing controversial legislation in an election year.
[Ms. Cecilia Munoz:] It's riskier not acting on immigration reform. On both sides of the aisle. And for either Republicans or Democrats to come to any community and say, we worked this issue to an impasse and now please vote for us, I think is not a good election strategy.
[Debbie Elliott:] Now, I understand Monday has been set aside as a day of big protests. What do you hope the message will be from these marches?
[Ms. Cecilia Munoz:] People are marching to communicate that they're outraged by some of the enforcement approaches which are on the table in both the House and the Senate. It's really an expression of hope that this debate will get past the politics and towards actually legislating.
[Debbie Elliott:] Cecilia Munoz is the vice president for the National Council of La Raza. Thanks so much for being with us.
[Ms. Cecilia Munoz:] Thank you.
[Debbie Elliott:] Dale McGlothlin from the Federation for American Immigration Reform is on the phone. His group lobbies for tougher enforcement of immigration law and for stricter border security. Welcome to the program.
[Mr. Dale Mcglothlin:] Well, good afternoon, Debbie.
[Debbie Elliott:] What was your reaction this week when the Senate compromise on immigration fell apart?
[Mr. Dale Mcglothlin:] Well, we were, we worked awfully hard to help make that happen. We were thrilled that that fell apart.
[Debbie Elliott:] Do you think that immigration legislation is dead for this Congress?
[Mr. Dale Mcglothlin:] I certainly hope not. You know, if the Republican Party is smart, they'll crack down on border security and enforcement. The Sensenbrenner Bill in the House is a good start. If Bill Frist would step up in the Senate and put up one that is only border security and enforcement, then we could marry those two in conference and we would have some landmark legislation. I think the American people are gonna be on our side of this issue in two weeks. Once these protests take place in the streets and people demand rights of American citizens, it's gonna work in our favor. And our lobbying strategy is to help the Senate keep a backbone, and then we've gotta work with the House. We've gotta keep the House strong because if we do have a bill, we've gotta have the support of the people who've been saying we're tough on border security, we're tough on enforcement. We've gotta get them to stay the line on that when it comes to conference.
[Debbie Elliott:] Now, why is your group so opposed to any sort of program that would allow the people who have been here in this country and working illegally to become legal?
[Mr. Dale Mcglothlin:] Well, Debbie, we think it's the worst possible precedent that we set. We're a nation of laws, and we have to abide by the rule of law. If there's anything that makes America great, it's our sense of justice.
[Debbie Elliott:] So you don't think paying a fine and paying back taxes is enough?
[Mr. Dale Mcglothlin:] Certainly not. No, we think that, you know, it sets the precedent of that you can break our laws with impunity and eventually you're gonna be forgiven. And we also know that from the last two amnesties that have happened, it is a huge magnet that draws more illegal immigration to the United States because people believe that all I have to do is cross the border, stay quiet long enough, and I'll be amnestied.
[Debbie Elliott:] How do you see the solution here since there are so many businesses that say they have to have this labor to stay afloat?
[Mr. Dale Mcglothlin:] Well, I'm not sure that we actually need that labor. I mean, it's embarrassing for the President of the United States to go out to the rest of the world and say that there are jobs that Americans won't do. We can compete with China. We can compete with Vietnam. But we can do it while we're fair to the American worker.
[Debbie Elliott:] Dale McGlothlin is the chief operating officer of FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Thanks for speaking with us.
[Mr. Dale Mcglothlin:] Thank you, Debbie.
[Debbie Elliott:] This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.

[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Forty-six-year-old Keith Ivey of Jacksonville, Fla., will be doing something this year he's never done before vote. Ivey is a felon. He committed property crimes and served 8 12 years in prison. Florida had permanently banned people convicted of a felony from voting until this past week when Amendment 4, passed in November2 million Floridians, including Ivey, can register to vote. Ivey joins us now from his family's car dealership in Jacksonville. Welcome.
[Keith Ivey:] Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Did you ever think this day would come?
[Keith Ivey:] I really had given up on it. It's been over 20 years. So to actually get to that date, it's been a long time coming.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] You're married, and you've got kids. Have you been talking about this with them?
[Keith Ivey:] Not in detail. My daughter is 19, so she definitely knows what I've been through. So this year, she was able to vote. And she was very proud to tell me that she voted for Amendment 4.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] That must have been amazing. She voted for the amendment that would allow you to vote.
[Keith Ivey:] Yes, she did.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Why are you so passionate about the right to vote?
[Keith Ivey:] Personally, I feel like it's a redemption. It's a chance to be a part of society and have a voice. It's almost like we are having taxation without representation. Our debt has been paid to society. We just want to get back on track with life and want the general public to know that we're just like every other person. We've made mistakes like any other person. But that does not define us. That does not define me.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] I understand that you have registered to vote. But you still haven't gotten your card in your hands. And there's been a lot of back and forth, since this amendment was passed in November, about how these restored voting rights will be rolled out. Are you worried that perhaps this won't yet come to pass?
[Keith Ivey:] There is a little bit of worry there. I just have to ask God to direct me, to lead my path. And I'm still waiting. When I get my voter registration card in the mail, then I will actually have a shout of joy. I've been happy but still reserved because I know that there's a waiting period. But we do know that there's an election coming up in March, and we definitely want to be there to vote. We're just hoping and waiting that they will send the card out faster than normal.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] And right now you are at your place of business. Right? You've been paying taxes. You've been working. You've been a member of society, and this is kind of the last piece of the puzzle.
[Keith Ivey:] Yes, ma'am. We've been paying taxes and doing everything that every other member of society does and, you know, trying to live an upstanding life, trying to be a mentor to people that have gone through what I've gone through. There's no blueprint for life after a conviction, so you're just trying to figure it out as you go. And there are so many disappointments, so many opportunities lost housing, employment just so much that comes with life after a conviction. And no one ever speaks about it. And you wonder why recidivism is so high. It's the opportunity to get back on track isn't there, and the system is broken.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Do you have any celebration planned when you do finally get that card in the mail?
[Keith Ivey:] [Laughter] Hopefully, I'll be by myself 'cause I'm probably going to scream a loud shout of joy. I'm going to give God his praise.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] [Laughter].
[Keith Ivey:] I probably will do a kick in the air and clap my feet together once I see my voter registration card in the mail.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Keith Ivey of Jacksonville, Fla., thank you so much.
[Keith Ivey:] Thank you.

[Audie Cornish:] I'm Audie Cornish, and it's time now to Ask A Grown Man.
[Melissa Block:] Ask a what?
[Paul Rudd:] Ask A Grown Man. So thank you.
[Audie Cornish:] That's actor Paul Rudd in a monthly video advice column on the website RookieMag. The site was started by 16-year-old Tavi Gevinson.
[Melissa Block:] In the videos, famous grown men including Paul Rudd and fellow actors B.J. Novak and Jon Hamm answer questions from teenage girls, from the serious...
[Paul Rudd:] Number 3: Do you think girls and guys can really be just friends?
[B.j. Novak:] How do I tell him I don't want to go out with him, without ruining our friendship?
[Jon Hamm:] Oh, it says: One day, a guy wanted to get with me and the next day, he already changed his mind. What do I do with this flip-flopper?
[Melissa Block:] ...to the semi-serious.
[Paul Rudd:] Why twice, capitalized why are men oh, boys, she writes so obsessed with boobs?
[Novak:] Does the amount of kisses on the end of a text show how much a guy likes you? I've been texting a boy I like for about three months, and he sends five to seven kisses even though I always send four.
[Jon Hamm:] Ah, number 3: Is it gross if a girl accidentally farts in front of her significant other? Should she feel embarrassed?
[Melissa Block:] Again, those are grown men Jon Hamm, B.J. Novak and Paul Rudd.
[Audie Cornish:] Creator Tavi Gevinson says the idea behind the column is pretty simple.
[Tavi Gevinson:] Adults, you're able to have more of a perspective on what happens, since you're kind of able to pull back and see yourself and the decisions you made more clearly, maybe more logically unless your memory is sort of warped and you've, like, blocked out part of high school, as many people do.
[Audie Cornish:] Indeed, the grown men offer some heartfelt and sage advice. Here's B.J. Novak, explaining how one advice-seeker can tell a good friend that she just wants to be friends.
[Novak:] I'd say, if he asks you out, keep saying no for this or that reason. Be honest, be vague. Don't lie. I feel for this guy already. I'm cringing for him. He's going to get some bad news, isn't he? Don't worry so much about the friendship. If you are honest and kind, your friendship will survive anything.
[Melissa Block:] Gevinson says the teens who write in don't know who will be answering their questions. If they did, she says, it might change what they write.
[Tavi Gevinson:] My friend was going when I told her we got Jon Hamm, my friend was going to send a question that was like, I feel so ugly, just so she could have on video Jon Hamm being like, no, you're beautiful.
[Melissa Block:] That's Tavi Gevinson, creator of the website RookieMag, and its video advice column.
[Paul Rudd:] Ask A Grown Man.

[Rachel Martin:] Eating fresh, local foods and cooking at home seem to be all the rage nowadays. And thanks to bloggers and other foodie types, there are now new words to describe every food niche or gastronomical preference. Can't stand little kids running amok in your favorite Korean fusion restaurant you might have bratophobia. And you could be a gastrosexual if you use your cooking prowess to attract that new special someone. In his new book "Eatymology," humorist and food writer Josh Friedland has collected many of these new words in a 21st-century food dictionary, including my favorite, sourdough hotel.
[Josh Friedland:] So this is in Stockholm. There is a place, a bakery, where, you know, if you are devoted to keeping your own sourdough starter and feeding it every day with flour, if you need to go on vacation, you can leave your sourdough with this bakery. They'll keep it on a shelf and feed it daily for you while you're gone. It's like a boarding for your pet.
[Rachel Martin:] [Laughter] Do you have a favorite?
[Josh Friedland:] You know, I do like sourdough hotel. One I thought was fun was brogurt. So this is yogurt marketed to men yogurt for dudes.
[Rachel Martin:] [Laughter] What's an example of a brand of yogurt that's a brogurt?
[Josh Friedland:] The one that did it was this company Powerful Yogurt. It's on store shelves now, and they target you know, it's like marketing, like, an energy drink for guys.
[Rachel Martin:] Not all the words in your book are funny. Let's talk about blood cashews.
[Josh Friedland:] This was based on a Human Rights Watch report on the way cashews are processed in Vietnam, which is one of the world's biggest exporters of cashews. So it turns out that in Vietnam, people who are convicted for drug offenses are sent to drug treatment centers where they are basically forced labor for producing cashews, for processing them and getting them ready for export. And, you know, it borrows from this idea of blood diamonds, obviously. So yeah, no, the book blends the hilarious and the ridiculous and the quite serious.
[Rachel Martin:] You have actually won a James Beard Award for humor. I mean, the James Beard Award is this very prestigious award given out every year to recognize chefs and food writers. You got it for being funny. That's cool.
[Josh Friedland:] Yeah, no, I'm it's pretty. I'm excited. I'm excited to also take credit for it now because I didn't really win it. Ruth Bourdain, which is this character I created, is the one who won the award. And so it's nice to actually come out and just...
[Rachel Martin:] And own that.
[Josh Friedland:] ...Take ownership, yeah.
[Rachel Martin:] Tell us about Ruth Bourdain. This is your twitter handle. It's basically a mashup between these two huge food personalities icons in the food world, Ruth Reichl and Anthony Bourdain. What does Ruth Bourdain talk about?
[Josh Friedland:] So what gave rise to it was basically spoofing Ruth's daily tweets about her food. They're very poetic, like little haiku, and I would take those and then rewrite them through the mind of, you know, the hedonistic uber bad boy chef, Anthony Bourdain. But they've been very sweet. I am so thankful for them on Thanksgiving.
[Rachel Martin:] Josh Friedland's new book is called "Eatymology: The Dictionary Of Modern Gastronomy." Josh, thanks so for talking with us.
[Josh Friedland:] Thanks for having me.

[Neal Conan:] I'm Neal Conan in Washington. A lot of ingredients go into cooking up a traditional Thanksgiving Day: turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole you know the one football and family, of course, who all arrive with their delightful quirks and loads of baggage duffle bags, Pack n Play, suitcases and secrets yes, secrets. Today, as millions of Americans celebrate with their loved ones around the Thanksgiving table, much will be said and perhaps even more left unsaid. This hour, we're going to delve into the mystery of secrets. Why do we keep them? Are they healthy or harmful? We'll talk with Frank Warren, creator of the Web site PostSecret, about the thousands of secrets strangers have mailed to him over the past couple of years. We'll also talk with Harvard Professor Dan Wegner about the psychology of secrets. Does keeping a secret stress the mind, and how does it keep one? If you have a secret, why are you holding on to it? Or if you have a good story about a secret spilled perhaps after one glass too many of holiday punch, join the conversation. Our number here in Washington is 800-989-8255. That's 800-989-TALK. E-mail is talk@npr.org. Later in the program, a modest proposal. Should we ditch our traffic signs and stoplights for the good of mankind? But first, secrets. Our first guest is an expert on secrets, a reader and keeper of secrets. Frank Warren is the author of the books "PostSecret" and "My Secret." He joins us form the BBC studios in London. Nice to have you from far afield here on this Thanksgiving Day.
[Mr. Frank Warren:] Well, it's good to be there.
[Neal Conan:] What kinds of Thanksgiving secrets are posted on your Web sites today?
[Mr. Frank Warren:] I actually have one on the Web site today that says my grandmother's cooking sucks.
[Neal Conan:] There's another one that I saw that had it might have not been not from today, but it had a picture of, you know, a turkey with all the trimmings, and around the edge it was written, handwritten, we only come out of guilt.
[Mr. Frank Warren:] Yeah. I think a lot of the secrets I receive express, you know, politically incorrect thoughts, or they kind of reflect the full diversity of what we keep inside of us but not always express.
[Neal Conan:] Uh-huh. Are those typical of the kinds of secrets people share with you?
[Mr. Frank Warren:] I get all kinds of secrets. I get between 100 and 200 postcards every day with secrets written on them from around the world, and they surprise me every day. And they really for me reveal our full diversity and complexity as human beings. They've funny, they're sexual, they're remorseful, they're joyful. Anything you can imagine, I've read it in secret form.
[Neal Conan:] Now, what have you learned about secrets after reading all of these?
[Mr. Frank Warren:] One of the things I've learned is that sometimes when we think we're keeping a secret, that secret's actually keeping us. And it can separate us from people we love, it can separate us from our past. It can affect our relationships. It can affect how we feel about ourselves. And I think sometimes facing our secrets is one of the ways that we can learn more about ourselves and really become more whole as people.
[Neal Conan:] So secrets we keep from ourselves.
[Mr. Frank Warren:] Yeah. There are the secrets that we keep from other people and the larger ones, I think, sometimes that we keep from ourselves.
[Neal Conan:] Give us a for instance of a secret you keep from yourself.
[Mr. Frank Warren:] Well, maybe you're a student and you've worked all your life to get into an Ivy League school, and now that you're there, you're not as satisfied as you thought you would be. And that's something I think that's difficult to admit to yourself or to a family member or even to a friend.
[Neal Conan:] Yeah. There was one in a lighter vein I saw that I've cheated in every single round of golf I've ever played.
[Mr. Frank Warren:] That's not yours, is it?
[Neal Conan:] No, no, it's not mine. That's not mine. I've only played one round of gold, and believe me, I did cheat, so it would qualify. Those we keep from other people, though, they may not be quite as secret as we think they are.
[Mr. Frank Warren:] I think that's right. Sometimes when we think we're keeping a secret and we're not telling it to our friends and family, they might actually know what it is and just not mention it because they think it'll make us uncomfortable.
[Neal Conan:] Tell us a little bit about the Starbucks secret.
[Mr. Frank Warren:] I received a postcard, I guess you could call it a postcard. It was actually a Starbucks cup with a stamp and my home address on it. And somebody had written on the cup, I give decaf to customers who are rude to me.
[Neal Conan:] Yeah, okay. That's you know, there are always, though, family secrets, and I wonder, can you divide out, you know, how many of the what percentage of the stuff you get is family secrets?
[Mr. Frank Warren:] I think secrets by nature can be very complex, and one of the reasons I think we keep secrets is because they can be feelings or thoughts or emotions about family members or about friends. And if you're keeping a secret, and it's about your family member, well, it's difficult to share that one. And so sometimes I think people who mail me secrets and the secrets I post on the Web site at PostSecret.com are secrets that people have felt like they could share with me because I'm trying to provide a safe, non-judgmental place where people can share their secrets without a social cost that they might get if they were to reveal it to a friend or a family member.
[Neal Conan:] And there might be a social benefit, that first glimmering of admission of a secret, one of those you might have been keeping from yourself even.
[Mr. Frank Warren:] I like to hope so. I get e-mails from people who've mailed me secrets, and one of the things they say is that for them, facing a secret on a postcard and then releasing it to a stranger, they've found that therapeutic. They've found a sense of healing in that. And sometimes I think people send me a secret as their first step down a journey of reconciling with a part of themselves that has been difficult to face. If you have a secret you've been keeping why? And if you've had a good secret spilled at the Thanksgiving dinner table, give us a call: 800-989-8255, 800-989-TALK. E-mail us: talk@npr.org. And we'll start with Peter. Peter's with us from Berkeley, California.
[Peter:] Hi. I wanted to call up and just kind of on behalf of a lot of families, I believe, just mention that covering up for alcohol and drug abuse must be one of the biggest, most damaging secret patterns, don't you think? I just it can be very difficult, especially on children and young adults.
[Neal Conan:] Frank Warren?
[Mr. Frank Warren:] I think that's very true. I think families have all kinds of secrets. I think some secrets are probably good to keep, but I think there are others that children probably know about in one sense or another, even though they've never been discussed. And sometimes just the covering up of those secrets, the stress that we go through to keep them secret, is the most unhealthiest part of them.
[Neal Conan:] The elephant-in-the-room secret.
[Mr. Frank Warren:] That's right.
[Neal Conan:] Peter, I wish you Happy Thanksgiving and hope that all of your secrets are open ones.
[Peter:] And let's hope for a lot of sobriety and clarity and joy natural joy in the world.
[Neal Conan:] Okay.
[Peter:] Okay.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks very much.
[Peter:] Bye.
[Neal Conan:] Bye-bye. Let's see if we can get this is Missy. Missy's calling us from Reno, Nevada.
[Missy:] Hi there.
[Neal Conan:] Hi.
[Missy:] Thanks for taking my call.
[Neal Conan:] Sure.
[Missy:] I just wanted to let you know that secrets in our family are big on both sides. On my mother's side, my grandmother doesn't know who her father was, and her mother would never come clean about it, but everyone knew that she wasn't the daughter of the father of all of the other kids. And then on my dad's side, my dad doesn't know who his dad is, and my grandmother got Alzheimer's. My grandmother, my dad's mom, has Alzheimer's, and we thought that it may be safe to ask her now because, you know, she didn't have much to lose, and she still wouldn't tell us. It was just taboo. We're not talking about that.
[Neal Conan:] That's interesting. Frank Warren, you're of course the recipient of people who want to tell secrets, but as Missy reminds us, there are a lot of people who don't.
[Mr. Frank Warren:] I think that's true. I think also that secrets are viewed differently from people in different generations. I think young people are more open to discuss their secrets and share private parts of themselves with others, but I think people from different generations feel differently about that, and that might be because during the times when they were growing up, maybe the country required more from them, and so they had to kind of buck up a little bit and not share some of these feeling that they were feeling but just move forward and take the action that needed to be taken at the time.
[Missy:] I think that that's true as far as the generational factor, but there was some hanky-panky on both sides in my family and nobody wants to talk about it.
[Neal Conan:] Well, I'm sure that stopped with your generation, Missy, no hanky-panky whatsoever.
[Missy:] I'm a straight arrow.
[Neal Conan:] Absolutely. Have a Happy Thanksgiving.
[Missy:] Happy Thanksgiving.
[Neal Conan:] Bye bye.
[Missy:] Bye bye.
[Neal Conan:] Our next guest studies how we keep secrets and how they affect us. Dan Wegner is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of "White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts." He joins us today from Tampa, Florida, and thanks very much for taking time out of your Thanksgiving to be with us.
[Professor Dan Wegner:] Glad to join you.
[Neal Conan:] Do all of us have secrets?
[Professor Dan Wegner:] I think pretty much everyone. Generally it's kind of a talent we develop as we grow up. Little kids are notoriously poor at keeping secrets. You never want to tell a seven-year-old about the surprise birthday party that's coming up. But as we get older we all find that there's probably something rather that would be better left unsaid, and so we unsay it.
[Neal Conan:] And then we keep on saying it and keep on saying it.
[Professor Dan Wegner:] True. True.
[Neal Conan:] I wonder. Holidays, Thanksgiving is that as particularly stressful time for people with secrets, do you think?
[Professor Dan Wegner:] Well, one of the things that makes a secret particularly stressful is when we're around people that it's a secret from. And on holidays, when we're around family, if there is that elephant in the room, that's precisely the time when we can get stressed. We worry that it might enter into our thoughts. It might somehow pop up in something we say or in a certain look we have and we have to keep these things exactly when the audience is there.
[Neal Conan:] Don't we all sort of suffer from the, you know, post tell-tale heart syndrome? If we're thinking this secret, how can they not hear the heart beating beneath the floor? How can they not read my mind and know what I'm thinking about?
[Professor Dan Wegner:] Of course. And I think what happens is we actually try not to think about it. And the problem there is that that is exactly the strategy that's going to make us most obsessed with it. One of the things we've done in our laboratory for several years is ask people to try not to think about things. And for example, if you have somebody just sit and talk into a tape recorder as they're not to think about a white bear, don't mention it for about once per minute for as long as you want to have them talk.
[Neal Conan:] Really, the white bear will come in no matter how much you try and not to talk about the white bear?
[Professor Dan Wegner:] Precisely. Even though you would never have thought about it before in your life, the task of trying not to think about it suddenly makes it loom large.
[Neal Conan:] Do they get around it by saying polar bear?
[Professor Dan Wegner:] They'll try that, but that reminds them of white bear and it comes right back.
[Neal Conan:] So in other words, we may think we're fooling our mind, but not so easy?
[Professor Dan Wegner:] Right. And so when you keep a secret, you're trying to suppress the thought. You put yourself in precisely that situation. You become preoccupied with the very thing that you're trying to keep others to others from knowing.
[Neal Conan:] Uh-huh. So stay away from that second glass of wine, I think is what I'm hearing.
[Professor Dan Wegner:] Well, that's one of the burdens of thought suppression, is that when we're stressed or distracted or the term psychologists use is we are given a cognitive load, but I guess you could call it something else with the second glass of wine.
[Neal Conan:] Yes indeed.
[Professor Dan Wegner:] A different sort of load. That's when the secrets generally pop right out.
[Neal Conan:] Stay with us, Dan Wegner, and also Frank Warren. We're going to continue talking about the secrets we keep and sometimes spill, particularly on the holidays, and take more of your calls, 800-989-8255, if you'd like to join us, 800-989-TALK. Our e-mail address is talk@npr.org. I'm Neal Conan. We'll be back after the break. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. We're talking today about secrets, why we keep them, how we keep them and what happens when we let them go. Our guests are Frank Warren, he's editor of "PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives" and the new book "My Secret"; also Dan Wegner, professor of psychology at Harvard University, author of "White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts." And we want to hear about the secrets you keep and why you keep them, or if there's a not-so-secret story of somebody who spilled the beans at Thanksgiving dinner, give us a call, 800-989-8255, 800-989-TALK; e-mail is talk@npr.org. I remember one year at my aunt's house after Thanksgiving, we all sat back after dessert when she announced that our little cousin Duffy had spat into the cake. Anyway, a small secret there. Let's get another caller on the line, and this is Nathan. Nathan calling from Phoenix.
[Nathan:] Yes. Kind of going back to the white elephant in the room, I have brothers and sisters that are much younger. And I came out as being gay about five years ago and my parents haven't really discussed it with them. And kind of days like today kind of bring that back up, that there is that white elephant that my younger brothers and sisters don't know about. And you know, it makes it difficult to talk about relationships and things that I am doing in my life without kind of spilling the beans to them and bringing up that uncomfortable conversation that my parents have to have with them.
[Neal Conan:] Yeah. And there's, you know, you can think of thousand questions, you're I don't know what the ages of your siblings are, but a 12-year-old girl might ask that would just be, you know, lead you down all sorts of paths that you don't want to take.
[Nathan:] Exactly. Exactly.
[Neal Conan:] Yeah. Dan Wegner, I think Nathan certainly not the only one with this kind of a problem.
[Professor Dan Wegner:] No. It's pretty common. I think one of the reasons that sometimes our conversations with relatives in these situations tend to drift to really important things like the weather, or what's on TV, or because it's so difficult to distract ourselves from those unwanted thoughts, the things that we would really love to be thinking about but we can't. So we tend to distract ourselves with the second best thought. And the second best thought sometimes isn't all that exciting. It tends to be, gee, what's the weather going to be tomorrow?
[Nathan:] Right.
[Neal Conan:] Nathan, I wonder, in a way, before you came out, you were leading a bit of a secret life, at least secret to some people. And then you...
[Nathan:] Oh boy.
[Neal Conan:] And then you came out and you're still in a way leading a secret life. It's just sort of been reversed.
[Nathan:] Right. And I know a lot of my friends that, you know, other gay people are in the same situation where it's because it is uncomfortable for people to talk about. It's kind of how do you breach the topic with people who aren't as understanding. So...
[Neal Conan:] Well, Nathan, good luck...
[Nathan:] Oh, well. Thanks.
[Neal Conan:] ...and happy Thanksgiving.
[Nathan:] Happy Thanksgiving.
[Neal Conan:] Appreciate it. I wonder, Frank Warren, the postcards that you get, are second lives a part of that?
[Mr. Frank Warren:] I think so. I think sometimes the secret life is our rich interior life, and sometimes the life that we're living is more socially acceptable. And I kind of picture people as wearing social masks a lot of the times. And I think sometimes confessing or moving that social mask is a way that we can make a healthier change in our life and maybe feel more holistic and more integrated as individuals.
[Neal Conan:] A secret identity, if you will. I mean, I'm not this mild-mannered reporter for the Daily Planet. I'm really somebody special.
[Mr. Frank Warren:] Well, I have a lot of postcards that kind of reveal lives like that. I received one a while back. It was a postcard with an image of the Twin Towers on it. And the secret read, everyone who knew me before 911 believes I'm dead.
[Neal Conan:] Wow. I wonder, secret lives, Dan Wegner, those are about the biggest secrets you can have.
[Professor Dan Wegner:] Well, I think one of the most common kinds of secret lives that people have is a secret relationship. If you are seeing someone on the side or if you are even infatuated with someone and you are actually in a relationship, you're trying to keep that from your main person. And that can be a common enough occurrence that it shows up in a lot of people's descriptions of their own inner lives. One of the findings we've come across in our studies is that oftentimes people describe their secret relationships as being more important to them because of the tendency to keep thinking about them all the time. It's a the tendency of become pre-occupied with secrets. We did a little study a few years ago in which we actually introduced people who had never met before in the laboratory and had them sit at a table with a group of other people and play a game. And in some cases we had these unacquainted couples, a male and female, play footsy underneath the table. At least we didn't tell them that. We said we'd like you touch feet under the table in order to influence the way the game is going.
[Neal Conan:] You didn't use the footsy word.
[Professor Dan Wegner:] We didn't use the footsy word, but that's in fact what they were doing.
[Neal Conan:] Yeah.
[Professor Dan Wegner:] And for some of the couples in the situation, that was the entire instruction. For others we explained to them that the other people at the table knew that this was going on. And so after this was over, we took people into separate rooms and individually asked them to rate how attracted they were everyone at the table. And what we found was the couples who had been induced to play footsy and who kept it secret from others at the table were the ones who found each other most attractive.
[Neal Conan:] Interesting.
[Professor Dan Wegner:] So there's something about keeping a relationship secret that adds an extra allure, a bit of I think this obsession enters mind and you mistake the obsession for attraction.
[Neal Conan:] Let's get another caller on the line. This is Ron. Ron with us from Portland, Oregon.
[Ron:] Oh, hello?
[Neal Conan:] Hello, Ron, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.
[Ron:] Yes. And had a secret I'm a twin and we ran a marathon and we fudged, we cheated a little bit. I ran the first half. He ran the second half. It was one where you had Olympic qualifying time, and after I felt a little guilty about that, and still after the about 30 years later.
[Neal Conan:] Thirty years. Have you ever told anybody?
[Ron:] No, just a couple of friends. In fact, the gentleman who sort engineered this for us was an attorney in Monterey. It was the San Francisco Marathon. But one of us did one half and then dipped down into the underbrush, the under-story, and the other one was waiting there, took his jersey and...
[Neal Conan:] Number?
[Ron:] ...race number and finished up in a mighty fine time.
[Neal Conan:] And were you invited to try the same trick at the Helsinki, the Olympics? Or...
[Ron:] Well, it was a time that would have actually qualified one to go to the trials, the American trials. And but we did not follow up on that. Actually, we felt somewhat guilty about keeping the trophy for having finished so well.
[Neal Conan:] You kept the trophy.
[Ron:] So every time I see that trophy, I think, well...
[Neal Conan:] Well?
[Ron:] Sharing the same event, well, it's a little iffy in terms of the truth.
[Neal Conan:] Well, Ron, we hope you're not featuring the trophy as the centerpiece at you Thanksgiving dinner today.
[Ron:] Oh, probably not.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks very much for the call.
[Ron:] Thanks.
[Neal Conan:] Bye bye. Frank Warren, I think Ron's secret is I've seen your blog and there are a lot of things like that.
[Mr. Frank Warren:] I think so. I've actually received quite a few secrets from twins. I think twins keep some very juicy secrets sometimes. But he also mentioned that he'd been keeping it for, what, 30 years? And for me, the most poignant secrets I received are the ones that do come from older folks who've carried secrets sometimes since their early childhood. And those are the ones that really affect me the most.
[Neal Conan:] Here's an e-mail we got from Laura in Salt Lake City, Utah. I wonder what the perspective is on secrets versus privacy. The word secret seems to have a negative connotation, something that's hidden that perhaps shouldn't be, whereas privacy has a more honorable connotation, something we each have a right to. Is it just semantics or is there a real difference in the intention behind keeping something private versus keeping something secret? Dan Wegner, what do you think?
[Professor Dan Wegner:] Well, there's a moral dimension to secrecy. A secret is a kind of lie. And just keeping something private, failing to inform somebody about something typically doesn't have to be a secret. A secret is a moral affront of some kind to the person who it's being kept from because part of the definition of a secret is that somebody cares who's not being told. So it's really a lie, but it's a lie of omission and it hurts the person that it's a secret from.
[Neal Conan:] So just as bad as a lie of fact, of statement.
[Professor Dan Wegner:] Exactly.
[Neal Conan:] All right. Let's see. We could to Ari. Ari's on the line with us from Los Angeles. Hi, Ari, you're on the air. Go ahead.
[Ari:] Sorry about that. I'm a grad student down at UC San Diego in California and I'm currently looking for employment with the federal government in the intelligence community. And one of the fun parts about getting into the intelligence community is going through security clearance. And it's been a bit of an emotional experience, having the federal government trying its damnest to pick up all the secrets they can on me.
[Neal Conan:] Hmm. Yeah...
[Ari:] And I was just going to say, you know, emotionally, it's been very draining, trying to dig into my psyche and figure out, you know, what are my secrets, even, you know, some of the things that I don't even really think about anymore but could potentially be used, you know, five years down the line as a...
[Neal Conan:] To trip you up, yeah.
[Ari:] ...an intelligence employee.
[Neal Conan:] Yeah, and you do face the prospect at some point, I would think, of taking a lie detector test.
[Ari:] Yes, I have to take a polygraph, and that's especially, I guess, I don't want to say frightening, but bothersome, because, you know, having someone sit there and grill you for two hours while you've got, you know, three different machines hooked up to you and saying, you know, we know you're holding secrets, what are they, you know, and then having to figure out, well, am I holding secrets or, you know, am I in a state of denial that I didn't even know I was in a state of?
[Neal Conan:] Yeah, Dan Wegner, it seems interesting, I mean first of all, is it realistic for the Homeland Security or the CIA or anybody else to think that they're going to find out all of our secrets?
[Professor Dan Wegner:] I'm not sure that anybody knows how to find what's going on in the secret parts of a human mind. This is certainly the long-term desire of certain kinds of psychotherapy, is to help people uncover secrets. Now, it turns out that some kinds of searching for secrets can find more than what's there. Now, if a really good interrogator working for a government agency suggests to you that you have some things in your past and they keep suggesting it long enough and hard enough, there's a proportion of people who will go ahead and agree, even though the events didn't ever happen. So there are the worry that we might have a secret can sometimes be profound enough that we start thinking, yes, maybe I did sweep it under the rug. Maybe I somehow forgot.
[Neal Conan:] Hmm. And Ari, the same point. I mean you're going back in your memory to, oh my God, did I shoplift a candy bar when I was six years old?
[Ari:] Exactly. You know, I've been sitting here pretty much journaling everything I've ever done since I can actually remember. And you know, everything from downloading MP3's when I was an undergraduate to, you know, having a crush on someone while I was in a relationship and, you know, asking myself, is this something that could come up in a security clearance. And it's been an interesting experience finding out what are my secrets, actually.
[Neal Conan:] Well, Ari, good luck, and we hope that overeating on Thanksgiving does not come up in the lie detector test.
[Ari:] Thank you very much. Have a good Thanksgiving.
[Neal Conan:] You too. Here's an e-mail we got from Tori from Michigan. It came out a family Christmas party that a cousin slept with her mom's boyfriend, which made for a very tense, if not interesting, night. We're talking about secrets today with Frank Warren, editor of "PostSecret: The Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives," and with Dan Wegner, professor of psychology at Harvard University. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And let's to go to Mark. Mark with us from Cincinnati.
[Mark:] Hi, how are you?
[Neal Conan:] Hi, I'm good. Thanks.
[Mark:] You know, the more you talk about it, this, I mean, you can go all day with this. This is interesting.
[Neal Conan:] We were hoping.
[Mark:] But one of the things is, secrets are, you know, it's like a powerful thing, too. That's why I think that people use it. It's like I was talking to this screener or something. It's like kids, you start at a very early age saying, you know, like, I got a secret on you.
[Neal Conan:] Uh-huh.
[Mark:] That type of thing where it mushrooms into, you know, nations trying to find, like you were talking about earlier, nations trying to find out other secrets. It's like a leg-up. You know, like you know something about somebody or something or some country and that's a powerful thing. The other powerful thing on it is a protection tool, as, you know, I got this secret on you so you don't, you know...
[Neal Conan:] Oh, so don't you better not say anything about me. I've got something on...
[Mark:] Yeah, you don't say anything about me...
[Neal Conan:] ...oh, I see.
[Mark:] ...because I have this secret on you.
[Neal Conan:] All part of the power game. Frank Warren, is secrecy powerful?
[Mr. Frank Warren:] I think there is a lot of power that can be found in secrets in keeping them, but also in revealing them.
[Mark:] Yeah, in...
[Mr. Frank Warren:] I received a...
[Mark:] ...yeah, also, which is just oh, you could just go all day on this thing, you know.
[Neal Conan:] Revealing them, Frank Warren?
[Mr. Frank Warren:] Yeah, I received an e-mail message from somebody not long ago about participating in the project, and the person wrote, I've made six postcards all with secrets that I was afraid to tell the one person I tell everything to: my boyfriend. This morning I planned to mail them to you but instead I left them on the pillow next to his head while he was sleeping. Ten minutes ago, he arrived at my office and asked me to marry him. I said yes.
[Neal Conan:] Aah, that's nice.
[Mr. Frank Warren:] So there's something about secrets, too. I think when we share them with people, we can really develop deeper channels of intimacy.
[Neal Conan:] But let's ask the professor of psychology about this power thing. Dan Wegner, secrecy is power, isn't it?
[Professor Dan Wegner:] Yeah, it certainly is. There's a sense in which one person having a secret in front of another is somehow the winner. Information is generally a matter of power, and we can hold power over each other. I think the point that Frank Warren keeps bringing up and I really wanted to point out the agreement of research with this he suggests that revealing secrets is often a therapeutic and a helpful thing to do. So even if we do have this secret on our minds, the chance to say it to somebody, even to say it to ourselves, to be able to reveal it into a tape recorder or our diary or journal or somehow let it be known, ideally to a trusted confidante, is something that's going to help us psychologically.
[Neal Conan:] Well, Mark, are you going to spill a secret here on the radio for everybody? Mark is either being very quiet or he's hung up the phone to listen to other people's secrets. It's probably a wise policy. I thank him for the call and we wish him a Happy Thanksgiving. We're going to take a short break and when we come back, more about the secrets we keep and why we keep them. Plus, we'll present a modest proposal, that we take down all the traffic signs and make roads and sidewalks shared space. If you want to get in on that conversation, give us a phone call. Our number is 800-989-8255; that's 800-989-TALK. Our e-mail address is talk@npr.org. A couple of places in Europe and even here in this country are experimenting with this idea of naked streets no speed limits, no stop signs, no traffic lights. Would it work where you live or unleash anarchy and road rage? I'm Neal Conan. We'll be back after the break. You're listening to the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. Today we're talking about family secrets, why we keep them and the ways they tend to come out. Our guests are Frank Warren, editor of "PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives" and the new book called "My Secret." Also with us, Dan Wegner, professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of "White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts." Let's get another caller on the line. This is Celine. Celine with us from Monterey, California.
[Celine:] Hi.
[Neal Conan:] Hi.
[Celine:] I was attacked by the big white bear.
[Neal Conan:] You were?
[Celine:] Yes.
[Neal Conan:] How did it manifest itself?
[Celine:] About 12 years ago, when my husband, my current husband, was just my boyfriend and he was in Europe and I was here in California, I was having a relationship with somebody else. And when he called me one evening, I was so preoccupied with sounding normal...
[Neal Conan:] Uh-huh.
[Celine:] ...that I called him by my other lover's name.
[Neal Conan:] Oh, so you blurted out Bruce by mistake or whatever it was?
[Celine:] Actually it was Tom, and then I had to backpedal and I said that I said Mom instead of Tom.
[Neal Conan:] Ooh, did that work?
[Celine:] No, it didn't.
[Neal Conan:] I didn't think so.
[Celine:] It didn't work at all. But we never talked about it after that and we are now married and have two children. So I guess some secrets just kind of float out into the atmosphere.
[Neal Conan:] Uh-huh. But you never went beyond explaining it was really Mom and not Tom.
[Celine:] Exactly.
[Neal Conan:] Well, have you talked about it subsequently? I mean, after the birth of two children, is this now safe?
[Celine:] No, we have never talked about it. But he's on the road somewhere in the car and he may well be listening now.
[Neal Conan:] Well, is Celine your real name?
[Celine:] Pardon?
[Neal Conan:] Is Celine your real name? Or...
[Celine:] It is absolutely my real name, so I'm not keeping any secrets.
[Neal Conan:] Right. Celine, congratulations, and we hope even though you're separated from your husband today that you both have a Happy Thanksgiving.
[Celine:] Thank you very much.
[Neal Conan:] All right. Bye-bye. And Dan Wegner, I suspect the elephant in the room that she's talking about, that verifies your theory.
[Professor Dan Wegner:] Oh, this is a great example of how secrets really dwell on the mind. We actually did an experiment that produced a very similar kind of result. We had people sit at a computer and they were asked to watch as a series of words appeared on the computer screen. And they were to press one button if a word appeared in the color red and another color another button if it appeared in the color blue. And normally we are pretty good at this kind of thing. And what you find is, if you ask the person also to keep something a secret at the time, and if you play that word on the screen, they're much slower in naming the color.
[Neal Conan:] Uh-huh.
[Professor Dan Wegner:] It's as though the word pops to mind before the color does and it kind of lurches and they're unable to name the color as quickly. The same thing happens if your own name appears on the screen. But we find that we can make this happen in a matter of minutes just by saying keep this word secret from the experimenter. Suddenly everything else is slow because that word jumps to mind so quickly.
[Neal Conan:] And I wonder, I know that there have been experiments with brain scans of various sorts to see if they can detect our brains going to the effort of lying, and it sounds as if, at least from your experiments, there could be possibilities in that.
[Professor Dan Wegner:] Certainly it does. There are a number of studies now on what the brain is doing when we are suppressing thoughts. And they indicate that one part of the brain is kind of looking for unwanted thoughts even while we're trying not to think about them.
[Neal Conan:] Hmm. And I wanted to talk a little bit more with Frank Warren about the postcards you get and, again, obviously the president calling the troops, we think that Vice President Cheney may be in Baghdad as well. You get cards from soldiers and their families. What do they say?
[Mr. Frank Warren:] I do. I invited people to mail their secrets on postcards to me about two years ago. And since then I've received over 80,000 from around the world. And I asked people to mail them to me anonymously and also to include artwork on the postcard that I think further can express their secret in ways that they might not feel comfortable expressing in words. And I've received, sure, postcards from Afghanistan, from Iraq, from soldiers' families. And usually what they do is they express sentiments that we don't commonly hear.
[Neal Conan:] Such as?
[Mr. Frank Warren:] A postcard from Iraq saying I'm glad I'm here, I don't want to come back.
[Neal Conan:] Hmm.
[Mr. Frank Warren:] A postcard from the States talking about a husband who's away in Iraq and expressing the thought or the feeling that things are easier now that he's away, and I'm not sure how things are going to work when he returns.
[Neal Conan:] If people wanted to take a look at the blog that posts your postcards, how would they get there?
[Mr. Frank Warren:] It's www.postsecret.com.
[Neal Conan:] And there's also the books, "PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives," and a new version, "My Secret." Frank Warren, thanks very much for being with us today.
[Mr. Frank Warren:] It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
[Neal Conan:] Frank Warren, who joined us today from the studios of the BBC in London. Dan Wegner, appreciate your time, too.
[Professor Dan Wegner:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Dan Wegner, the professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of "White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts." Thinking about unwanted thoughts: driving into a town you've never been in and seeing no traffic signs that after this.

[Steve Inskeep:] President Obama is in Mexico City this morning and later today, he heads to the fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago. The leaders of every country in the hemisphere except Cuba will be gathering for a meeting of the Organization of American States. Cuba was suspended from that group in the '60s. The rest of the hemisphere will discuss everything from drugs to migration to the economy, as NPR's Jason Beaubien reports.
[Jason Beaubien:] In President Obama's first trip to Latin America, he'll spend the weekend with 33 heads of state from throughout the hemisphere, and it could be contentious. Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez has already called Mr. Obama a poor ignoramus, and said the new U.S. president should study Latin America. Chavez held his own, alternative summit ahead of this one, and went to Havana to meet with the only leader who's barred from the conference: Raul Castro. Bolivian President Evo Morales was threatening not to attend because he was on a hunger strike over term limits. But he ended that protest on Tuesday. Cristina Kirchner, who went straight from being the first lady to the president of Argentina, is struggling with a daunting financial crisis at home. And amidst the strong personalities, the region faces serious economic, social and political issues.
[Mr. Luis Fernando Ayarbe:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Jason Beaubien:] Louis Fernando Ayarbe is from Argentina, but he teaches international relations at the State University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. He says each country has topics that are important for them at the summit. In the case of Brazil, for example, they want the U.S. to eliminate agricultural subsidies and to wrap up the Doha round of trade talks. Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua are all expected to push for a declaration calling on the U.S. to lift its embargo on Cuba. Free-trade issues were highly contentious during the last Summit of the Americas, four years ago in Argentina. The Obama administration wants to talk about expanding renewable energy sources throughout the hemisphere. But Fernando Ayarbe in Sao Paulo says the issue that's really on everyone's minds is the United States and whether under President Obama, the U.S. relationship to Latin America is fundamentally changing.
[Mr. Ayarbe:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Jason Beaubien:] The big question, he says, is whether the United States is going to practically show a new approach towards Latin America that respects the autonomy of the various countries. Under President Bush, Latin America was largely ignored by the White House, which in turn fueled anti-American sentiment in parts of the region. Fernando Ayarbe says countries in Central and South America want a relationship with Washington in which they're treated as equals. And ahead of the meeting, that's what the Obama administration has been promising. Jeffrey Davidow, the White House adviser on the Summit of the Americas, opened the forum at the Council on Foreign Relations last week saying that the U.S. wants a new foreign policy with Latin America, rather than a policy for Latin America.
[Mr. Jeffrey Davidow:] Coming so early in the administration, this is legitimately can be seen as a new beginning.
[Jason Beaubien:] Davidow said President Obama is going to the summit to listen. Michael Shifter with the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, says the global economic crisis and its effects are going to be at the forefront of the discussions at the summit. Shifter says Cuba will probably provide some spirited debate. But he agrees that the most important thing about this summit is that it's a chance for the world's superpower to re-engage with Latin America.
[Mr. Michael Shifter:] I think this is Obama's moment. This is Obama's show. This is his debut. He's never been south of the border.
[Jason Beaubien:] Shifter says the weekend conference in Trinidad and Tobago will be a chance for regional leaders to talk to President Obama in person, look him in the eye, and see if he's really serious. Jason Beaubien, NPR News, Mexico City.

[Neal Conan:] While Iran was among the principal topics at the Republican presidential debate last night, Tom Donilon, President Obama's national security adviser, delivered a speech yesterday afternoon on efforts to prevent the development of nuclear weapons in Iran. Speaking at the Brookings Institution here in Washington, the national security adviser noted the recent report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which raised a lot of questions about Iran's intentions but stopped short of an outright declaration that a nuclear weapons program is currently underway. Donilon, however, minced few words.
[Tom Donilon:] The facts are undeniable. Despite decades of Iranian denial and deceit and notwithstanding the setbacks I've described, it should be clear for all the world to see that under the guise of a purely nuclear secure civil nuclear program, the government of Iran is seeking to develop a nuclear weapons capability. Now, put simply, the Iranian regime has not fundamentally offered to alter its behavior, but we have succeeded in slowing its nuclear program. And the international community has the time, space and means to affect the calculus of Iran's leaders, who must know that they cannot evade or avoid the choice we've laid before them.
[Neal Conan:] National Security Adviser Tom Donilon said the U.S. will use every tool available, including new sanctions announced earlier this week and said sanctions have left Iran weaker, more isolated, more vulnerable and badly discredited.
[Tom Donilon:] At home, Iran is feeling tremendous pressure. It's harder for banks that support Iran's nuclear program and terrorism to engage in international finance. Just recently, President Ahmadinejad called sanctions, quote, "the heaviest economic assault," unquote, in the country's history. Continuing the quote, "Every day our banking and trade activities and our agreements are being monitored and blocked," he said, "and our banks cannot make international transactions anymore." It really is becoming exceedingly difficult for Iran and its business entities to deal in euros or dollars anywhere in the world. It's becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, for them to deal in the legitimate banking system in the world. We've also made it harder for Iran, for the Iranian government to purchase refined petroleum and goods, services and materials to further develop Iran's oil and gas sector. According to the Iranian oil minister, the country is facing a shortage of $100 billion in investment deals for the oil and gas sector, a shortage that will increasingly affect future revenues. Other sectors are being affected, as well. The international business community is shunning Iran. Major companies Shell, Toyota, Kia, Repsol, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Credit Suisse and a long list have ended or drastically reduced business with Iran, again, as a result of the decisions made by the Iranian leadership. Now, the impact of sanctions is compounded by rampant corruption and patronage in Iran. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps continues to expand its involvement in the legitimate Iranian economy. At a time when the Iranian people are being squeezed by a shrinking economy, the coffers of the IRGC, as it's called, are being filled, and these funds are passed onto violent movements in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. This only adds to Iran's economic woes and, with it, to the frustration of the Iranian people. As a result, Iran's economy is increasingly vulnerable. Inflation we estimate is around 20 percent; unemployment is persistently high. And contrary to what's been written, frankly, on this, despite high oil prices, Iran will have negligible economic growth this year. These are the heavy costs the Iranian regime has chosen to impose on its people by flouting its international obligations.
[Neal Conan:] National Security Adviser Tom Donilon also argued that Iran is increasingly isolated in the region, that it's failed to attract great support in Iraq, failed to intimidate the Arab states of the Persian Gulf and failed in what he describes as cynical attempts to take advantage of the Arab Spring.
[Tom Donilon:] Today, in the face of a region increasingly united against Tehran, Iran is basically down to just two principal remaining allies. And I wanted to go through this in some detail. The Assad clique the Assad group, if you will in Syria and Hezbollah. And like Iran, they, too, are fundamentally at odds with the forces that are now sweeping the region. The Assad regime the Assad group, if you will Tehran's most important ally, is thoroughly isolated and now increasingly and universally condemned. The Arab League, appalled by the region's brutality, has shown remarkable leadership and taken the extraordinary step of suspending Syria's membership. In Turkey, Prime Minister Erdogan's government, which spent a decade deepening its ties to Syria and invested a lot in this, says it no longer will be fooled by Assad's promises. And today, Prime Minister Erdogan joined the international chorus calling for President Assad to step down. The handwriting is on the wall. Change is inevitable. As President Obama has said, and I quote, "Through his own actions, Bashar al-Assad is ensuring that he and his regime will be left in the past, and the courageous Syrian people who have demonstrated in the streets will determine its future." Now analytically, what does this mean? The end of the Assad regime would constitute Iran's greatest setback in the region, a strategic blow that would further shift the balance of power in the region against Iran. Tehran would have lost its closest ally in the region, having actively funded and assisted in very material ways the regime's brutality and the killing of its own people. Iran will be discredited in the eyes of the Syrian people and any future government. Iran's isolation from the Arab world will have deepened, and Tehran's ability to project violence and its instability in the Levant. Through its violent proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas will be vastly diminished. That's our analytical judgment.
[Neal Conan:] National Security Advisor Tom Donilon in a speech yesterday at The Brookings Institution. NPR foreign correspondent Mike Shuster joins us now from NPR West in Culver City. Mike, always good to have you on the program.
[Mike Shuster, Byline:] Hi, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] And, Mike, that's a different characterization than we often hear about Iran, which seems to, in other's estimates, be burgeoning.
[Mike Shuster, Byline:] I think it's the most detailed accounting of the Obama administration policy toward Iran. And through Tom Donilon's analysis, you get a picture of how they view Iran. And I think their view is a whole lot closer to reality, at least the reality that I saw when I visited Iran many times in recent years. But I think that they are looking carefully at just what shape Iran is in, either in its attempt to control events or influence events in the wider Middle East or to pursue smart or, in this case, not so smart economic policies or how far they've gotten really in their nuclear program. And Donilon and others in the White House see Iran coming up short in each of those categories.
[Neal Conan:] It is unusual for the national security advisor to make such a detailed statement on such a sensitive issue as Iran. Why do you think now?
[Mike Shuster, Byline:] Well, I think there's been a lot of talk in the air and a lot of criticism of the Obama administration, particularly from the right and the Republican Party and more recently Republican candidates running for president characterizing Obama's approach to Iran, which initially was open to diplomatic engagement. But the criticism has been very sharp, and I think that the White House wanted to put somebody out there to explain in more detail, more thoroughly just what the Obama policy is with regard to Iran and to try to analyze whether it's been a success or not.
[Neal Conan:] The picture that Tom Donilon painted, though, is a country that is seemingly exhilarating towards crisis economically and strategically.
[Mike Shuster, Byline:] Well, I think that that probably is true. There have been economic sanctions on Iran, both unilaterally from the United States and multilaterally through the United Nations for many years now. And they have built in intensity over time. The most recent round of sanctions that the United States has imposed on Iran, particularly to try to dry up the use of its banking sector in pursuing the nuclear program, appears to have been become more successful gradually. And there's talk of even greater sanctions now. I have to I always wonder about this. The United States has, essentially, tried to put the screws on Iran's banking sector in order to prohibit the movement of a very large amount of money through the banking sector, which comes from selling oil every day on the international market. And despite the claims of the White House and others that this is successful, it's fairly clear that, somehow, the government of Iran does acquire millions and billions of dollar over time to sell its oil. How it does it right now is somewhat of a mystery, given the pressure on the banking sector that the United States is leading.
[Neal Conan:] Other parts of the speech, the national security advisor talked about the internal divisions within Iran. And just this week, senior advisor to President Ahmadinejad arrested.
[Mike Shuster, Byline:] I know. This is really an extraordinary story. This is a man he's name is Ali Akbar Javanfekr, and he's been a close advisor to Ahmadinejad since he was first elected president in 2005. And he overtime, he has made some quite critical remarks about the hard line, cleric-oriented, religious-oriented leaders of Iran, implicitly suggesting that these are criticisms of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. And earlier this week, there were security forces that entered a newspaper that he controls, with fired tear gas as far as we know, really made a mess of the newsroom and put him in handcuffs. This is a pretty extraordinary step to take against someone as close to the president of Iran as Javanfekr was. And it really shows I think, it demonstrates if we need even greater evidence that there is really serious tension between the two conservative power centers in Iran, between those around Ahmadinejad, the president, and those around Khamenei, the supreme leader.
[Neal Conan:] I'm sure other people wonder, these are the two conservative wings. Do they not worry that they are weakening each other, their position in general, and leaving an opening for those who might be interested in reform or, indeed, a revolution?
[Mike Shuster, Byline:] Well, there is much talk of that in Iran, but Ahmadinejad is coming to the end of his second term, four-year term as president. And he's limited to only two terms. But it's fairly clear that he enjoys his position on the world stage and wants to he has demonstrated that he wants to extend his influence. Ayatollah Khamenei does not seem to be in favor of that. And, in fact, there's a lot of talk about whether Khamenei may move to eliminate the office of presidency all together. It's a surprise, Neal. I mean, this has been going on for the better part of a year. But after the disputed election presidential election in 2009, when the clamp down really came on the liberals and the reformists, to see the two conservative power centers in effect consuming themselves and undermining the government of Iran, the government that they are in control of is quite extraordinary.
[Neal Conan:] Mike Shuster, NPR foreign correspondent. We're talking about a speech given yesterday by Tom Donilon, the national security advisor. You're listening TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And strong words, not just about Iran, Mike, but also about Syria. The handwriting on the is on the wall, said Donilon. Change is inevitable.
[Mike Shuster, Byline:] It certainly seems so. Syria really is a key Arab ally of Iran and, effectively, the only key Arab ally that controls a state. And Syria has been important to Iran, and to Iran extending its influence in the Arab Middle East for many, many years. I think there's a great deal of concern in Iran among conservatives about what it will mean if the Assad government or when the Assad government falls in Damascus. The pressure has been so strong inside Iran to say something about this that this has actually also divided Ahmadinejad from the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. They have said different things and taken different position with regard to the Assad government. Effectively, Ahmadinejad recognized that Iran could not be seen as completely backing a government that almost everyday sends its troops out to shoot down unarmed civilians in the streets just next door. So there's a good deal of concern about what's actually happening in Syria, in Iran, as well as the uncertainty that the fall of the Assad government will bring.
[Neal Conan:] In when the United States and President Obama announced that the all combat troops will be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of this year, many of his critics said this is a gift to Iran. In his speech, Tom Donilon said, wait a minute. We look at polls. Only 14 percent of the Iraqi public expresses a positive opinion about Iran. And they're not likely to take over there.
[Mike Shuster, Byline:] Well, this is where sort of simplistic judgments about the political situation in Iraq can get you into trouble. Yes, the government in Baghdad is a Shiite government and it's leaders have good relations with some in Tehran and spent some time in Tehran in the past, but it's fairly clear from when you go to Iraq and you talk to both Shiites and Sunnis about Iraq, they don't want to become the puppet in any way of the Shiite government in Tehran. I mean, Tehran does have some significant influence among some quarters and forces in Iraq, but it's quite clear that the Shiite government in Baghdad wants to be independent and pursue an independent future for Iraq.
[Neal Conan:] The national security advisor, also the latest senior American official, this goes all the way to the president, to talk openly about the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C., in a restaurant half a mile from the White House. And Tom Donilon said: I have to confess, I was initially struck by the reaction in some quarters, those who looked at the plot and said, is this really how Iran operates? This doesn't sound like Iran. He said, well, as those of you in this room know so well and those who have followed this story for the last 30 years, this is exactly how Iran has operated.
[Mike Shuster, Byline:] You know, this was a pretty amazing story, and a lot of people shared Tom Donilon's initial skepticism. I have to tell you, Neal, I had a conversation last week with a very senior U.S. military official, and we talked about this a little bit. And he said that he was, too, flabbergasted by the news of this. But then he looked me in the eye and he said, but I know it to be true. This is obviously from the intelligence that the administration and the Pentagon hasn't made public. But there seems to be absolute conviction inside the administration that this was a real plot.
[Neal Conan:] And given that unlikely that we are going to see any sign of a new opening to Tehran, absent a fundamental change in policy, which does not seem to be forthcoming.
[Mike Shuster, Byline:] No, it doesn't. And, in fact, one of the things that Donilon didn't talk about were the covert operations that are underway that are clearly the work of the CIA and other Western intelligence agencies. And that seems to be where much of the pressure is coming on Iran, and it's quite clear that that's going to continue as well.
[Neal Conan:] Pressure from the Mossad, as well.
[Mike Shuster, Byline:] That's right. Yeah. I mean, the, you know, we've heard the story about the Stuxnet worm, and it destroying a certain number of gas centrifuges that enriched uranium in Iran. And there's every reason to believe that these that the success of that cyber attack will lead to additional cyber attacks.
[Neal Conan:] Mike Shuster, thanks very much for your time today.
[Mike Shuster, Byline:] You're welcome, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] Mike Shuster, NPR foreign correspondent, with us from NPR West in Culver City, California. Tomorrow, Dave Isay of StoryCorps will be here. This year's Day of Listening focuses on the teacher you want to thank. John Donvan will be sitting in for me tomorrow. Have a happy Thanksgiving, everybody. This is the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.

[Norris:] There is still a shortage of hope in the city of New Orleans despite the big Superdome football win. For commentator Andrei Codrescu, mixing imagination with the unimaginable despair after Katrina seems like a logical way to cope.
[Andrei Codrescu:] Linnzi Zaorski, my favorite chanteuse, was bemoaning the dearth of performance opportunities at Post-K New Orleans and the fact that she was now on the other side of her mid-20s and she was broke.
[Ms. Linnzi Zaorski:] My fur coat sold, oh Lord, ain't it cold, bottom knocked down the holler, got to steal, got a dollar and when I get broke whoa I get high.
[Andrei Codrescu:] When she had refugiated herself to New York after the storm, she hadn't lacked for gigs. She worked every night, sometimes two clubs a night. She gave generously of her time when I asked her to introduce a reading I was giving at the Bowery Poetry club. Among other things, she sang Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans, and she teared up singing it. And it was not long after that, I believe, that she decided to come back to New Orleans, beautiful move, her whole heart, but how to survive. I suggest that she star in a movie soon, because she looks just right a cross between an icy Hitchcock blonde in the silent movie era comedienne.
[Ms. Zaorski:] My man walked out, now you know that ain't right, but he better watch if I met him tonight, when I got low whoa I get high.
[Andrei Codrescu:] I envisioned a Japanese setting for her to star in. I dreamed up this scenario. It's 1936 and the Emperor of Japan keeps hallucinating this American jazz singer. She appears to him every night dressed in different '20s and '30s styles and sings songs that keep the Emperor agitated and sleepless. He travels incognito to America and one night in a New Orleans jazz club hears Linnzi and realizes that she's his hallucination. He kidnaps her and takes her to Japan, but she is accused of being a spy and arrested. In fact, she is a spy and is condemned to death by a military court. After she is executed sorry, Linnzi, that's the only bad part she returns to haunt the Japanese royals and military class. They hear her singing every night. In order to stop the jazz madness that's underlying her morals and her posture, they bomb Pearl Harbor or something like that. I'm no screenwriter, but I figure that an apocalyptic ending with a reference to history never hurt a movie. Anyway, that plus lots of eventual complications, other flashbacks, flash forwards, flash upwards, flash across borders, should give Linnzi just the vehicle. Now we need a writer, director and producers. And I found a new pastime, imagining movies for my New Orleans friends. They need them.
[Norris:] Music by Linnzi Zarowski, essay by Andrei Codrescu. Both live in New Orleans when they can.

[Ed Gordon:] On today's Roundtable: Mexico's president stirs up controversy on both sides of the border; and teachers helping students to cheat. Joining us from NPR studios in Culver City, California, is syndicated columnist Joseph C. Phillips. At member station WQED in Pittsburgh, Bev Smith, host of "The Bev Smith Show" on American Urban Radio Network. And Jeff Obafemi Carr, co-host of the radio show "Freestyle" in Nashville, Tennessee. He joins us from Spotland Productions. All right, folks, let's talk quickly about Mexican President Vicente Fox, who has tried to convince the United States government to ease up on immigration controls for Mexican workers. Instead he's stirred up a controversy by saying that there is no doubt that Mexicans, filled with dignity, willingness and ability to work, are doing jobs that not even blacks want to do in the United States. Well, obviously Mr. Fox stirred up a lot of controversy, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton among others, who've demanded an apology. Initially President Fox had refused to back away from his statement but then certainly saw that just the juxtaposition of words there and clearly the use of `not even blacks' was obviously offensive to many. Jeff, your thoughts.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] Well, I think this has stirred up some-excuse me-controversy, and Reverend Al Sharpton particularly is involved asking for apologies, and I hate to sound kind of strange on this, but I really would like to know if Sharpton's going to ask my barber, several preachers I know and most old black men on street corners in my neighborhood the same thing, because I'm kind of sorry, but President Fox is about 10 years behind the underground black American grapevine on that statement. I've heard this over and over, and if you talk to many of our esteemed elders, they will confirm that blacks used to dominate in certain industries, and I won't even get into the whole maidhotel stereotype, but say, for instance, in masonry and stonework and construction, honorable, dignified professions, trades. I don't know how it is in New York, since I move to Pennsylvania or California, but all over the South, you just don't see blacks doing that much work anymore. You see a lot of people, particularly Mexicans, doing that kind of work. And as is the case in a big construction project in my neighborhood, there were a lot of brothers standing on the corner watching those guys work, saying the same kind of statements, and I think that's the greater shame. I think Sharpton and Jesse should redirect their energy on this one and start working toward making sure our brothers can take up some of those trades and look up... [unintelligible]. This has all mattered before.
[Ed Gordon:] That being said, though, Bev, the inference of `not even blacks,'meaning that it would possibly be even below them, I think, is what most people took offense to.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Well, I didn't, and I'm in total agreement with Jeff. I think on this one, that we can redirect our energy. I think it's too easy to just look at this as a racism issue. It's multifaceted. It's what-the issue that Jeff just mentioned about jobs. I also see it as an issue of...
[Ed Gordon:] Would you feel the same way had Trent Lott said this?
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Maybe so. If the debate involved an ethnic-Trent Lott is a very rich, white man in America who may not even be involved in this debate. This debate centers around opportunity. This debate centers around opportunity, and what I think the-if you look at what he said before and after the statement, what he was saying is there are certain jobs that blacks no longer will take. For example, in Maryland, you have Mexicans and people who speak Spanish, because not all of them are Mexicans, doing jobs in poultry factories where they do not get breaks, where their fingers are cut off. You have young African-Americans in Maryland-I've heard them say it-have them on the show say, `We won't do those types of jobs anymore.' The issue should be the kinds of jobs that we're talking about, and there ought to be someone raising the issue of Spanish-speaking people and black people talking about opportunities, talking about the jobs and talking about a clever way of using those people who are disenfranchised against each other in very low-paying, unworthy jobs.
[Mr. Joseph C. Phillips:] Well, it's not an issue that black people will not do these jobs. It's an issue of Americans will not do these jobs at that price. But I think that Jesse and Al have completely missed the point on this. I'm not offended by what President Fox said. What offends me more is that he feels the freedom to be so involved in our domestic policy discussions. Listen. Illegals are coming across the borders of-our Southern borders primarily is what we're talking about-being exploited by coyotes who stuff them into trucks in the beds and sneaking them across the border.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] No, Joe.
[Mr. Phillips:] And the reason is because the economy in Mexico is a mess, the government there is corrupt, the people are impoverished. I think that President Fox should spent a little less time being involved in what we are doing here, spend a little more time fixing the problems down there, then we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] But don't you think that's hypocritical? Because the United States...
[Mr. Phillips:] It's not hypocritical at all.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] ...is involved-it is hypocritical because the United States is involved in telling everyone what to do around the world. That is the controversy of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan. That is the controversy of China, Russia. We're in everyone's business.
[Mr. Phillips:] Bev...
[Ms. Bev Smith:] And our house is not clean. So I think that's awfully hypocritical.
[Mr. Phillips:] Well, your house does not have to be clean in order to speak to certain issues. But the fact of the matter is is that Fox is involved in what we're talking about because a large part of his economy is supported and driven by American dollars being sent back to Mexico. Illegals coming...
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Well, some of that is because of our trade agreements. And some of them...
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] ... [Unintelligible] to do with that.
[Mr. Phillips:] No, no, no, no. I'm not talking about trade agreements. I'm talking about illegals coming here, working and sending dollars back.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Well, when you start worrying about European illegals who come here, dancers from Russia, and we give them opportunities, when you look at that issue of opportunities of jobs around the world and the way the Seven Sisters and the political giants have made this a have-not...
[Mr. Phillips:] Bev, 500,000 Ukrainians dancers are not streaming into our cities...
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Because of geographics.
[Mr. Phillips:] ...and into California.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] They're being-many of them aren't being invited in.
[Mr. Phillips:] Europeans are not costing the state of California five to $10 billion a year.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] This is not the issue.
[Mr. Phillips:] It absolutely is the issue.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] This is the issue of fairness.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] In all fairness, you've got a huge-you've got a big ocean between Europe and America.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Hello.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] You don't just step across the border. So there is kind of a difference in the issue. And if you kind of eliminated that ocean, I think you'd have the same kind of problems.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Absolutely.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] But that's neither here nor there. He's got 10 to 12 million illegal people in the United States.
[Mr. Phillips:] We're going to eliminate the ocean? What-What?
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] What I'm saying is geographically, as Bev was saying, if we were next to Ukraine and they could step over into the United States...
[Ms. Bev Smith:] They would.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] ...you might face the same kind of situation.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] They would. They would.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] So it's not necessarily Mexico's fault.
[Mr. Phillips:] And maybe the moon is made of green cheese.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] He's got a lot of people in this country. He's got a stake.
[Mr. Phillips:] The point is...
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] Right.
[Mr. Phillips:] ...that Mexicans and-it's our Southern border, Hispanic-speaking Mexicans, and we're talking about-listen, no one is talking about objecting to legal immigration into our country. What we're talking about is the fact that we are a sovereign nation and we are allowed to dictate the terms of who comes into our country and when.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Joe, when are you going to get back to the issue of work? When are-you know, it's a real interesting thing, the way you have taken the issue of whether or not the people who are in this country are treated fairly on the job, and that's an issue that we as African-Americans and those who speak Spanish in this country, those who are Asian in this country, those who are Native American should be united on culturally. That's what Jesse and Al Sharpton should be talking about. I don't think that Mr. Fox made a mistake at all. He said, as Jeff pointed out earlier, what all of us know. And our young people are saying, `We don't want those jobs. We don't want to work'...
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] That's right.
[Mr. Phillips:] At that price.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] ...`in chicken factories.'We don't...
[Mr. Phillips:] `We don't want those jobs at that price.'
[Ms. Bev Smith:] And you wouldn't want it at that price either. It's interesting that the corporate presidents who say that they can't afford that price get their bonuses every year. This is an issue that should not be treated so simplistic, my newly political friend.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] And it's-yeah, and it's not always...
[Mr. Phillips:] Well, I think...
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] OK. Go ahead.
[Mr. Phillips:] ...that the talking about Ukrainian dancers is a more simplistic...
[Ed Gordon:] Hang on, Joe.
[Mr. Phillips:] ...analysis of this than talking about illegal immigration and its impact on our cities here in California, the crowded highways, the impact on our schools, the impact on our budgets and the taxpayers.
[Ed Gordon:] All right, Joe, hang on. Jeff, go in and then we're going to move on another subject.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] Yeah. OK.
[Ed Gordon:] You guys have made my job easy today. Thank you. It's a lot of fun.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] Jeff, go ahead.
[Ed Gordon:] I enjoy you guys so much.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] When we look at the systemic kind of issues here, there's a huge organization here in town in Nashville, Tennessee, that-it runs one of the three largest hotels in the world, and they have an entertainment industry. What they did a few years ago was they bought a strip of motels in a depressed area of Nashville. They renovated the motels. Why did they renovate the motels? So that they could ship workers in from Mexico to actually work in the hotels. So this is an issue of labor. Now you can say...
[Ms. Bev Smith:] It's bigger than...
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] ...`Well, Vicente Fox doesn't have anything to say,'but he has a stake in saying something about his people, who are being shipped.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Absolutely.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] And these are legal people who are being shipped over by corporate America to take these jobs and to work in these positions that frankly, like my barber says, black folks don't want to do anymore.
[Mr. Phillips:] If Vicente Fox...
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Absolutely.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] And that's what the issue is.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Absolutely.
[Mr. Phillips:] If Vicente Fox...
[Ed Gordon:] All right.
[Mr. Phillips:] ...took care of business south of the border, we wouldn't be having this discussion right now.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] If we would get out of his business south of the border, he might be able to do that.
[Ed Gordon:] All right, guys. We're going to move on.
[Mr. Phillips:] What?
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] And if... [unintelligible] was a fifth, we'd all be drunk.
[Ed Gordon:] And it seems to me that one hand washes the other, and both, frankly, are in each other's business. And I don't know how you divorce the two. All right. Moving on, in Houston, an international investigation-or an internal-Forgive me-investigation has found that teachers in four public schools helped students cheat on statewide mandate tests. Houston Independent School Districts, which is the largest of the Lone Star State, sent teams of investigators into 23 schools that had suspiciously large swings in standardized test scores. And what we are seeing here, quite frankly, because these test scores are ofttimes married to dollars, is the idea that principals, students-I'm sorry-principals, teachers and administrators are suggesting that they need to raise these test scores by any means necessary, obviously, to get and secure this money. Bev?
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Well, I think that that's part of the problem. I think that they're being forced by the system, the No Child Left Behind and the pressure, to make people who may not have been trained right earlier, who may not have been educated properly earlier, come up to par so that they keep the grade, they keep the job, and their school doesn't lose valuable tax dollars. But it's also an issue of the values, or lack of values, in this country that cheating is almost acceptable. We had it in the Navy, we lied to the American public. This is a moral issue as well as an issue of what is happening to education across the board. I keep saying that these issues are not simplistic, that they're multifaceted, and you have to look at them that way: the teacher and the pressure on the administrator and the school, the pressure on that student who has not been-and by and large, is poor and African, or poor and white, or poor and Spanish-speaking-who's not been educated properly in the schools and the pressure to get those dollars. And then the issue of what is happening to our morality, that cheating around this country in many forms is acceptable.
[Ed Gordon:] We should note that all of those who've been accused of cheating have denied to this point doing so. Jeff, pick up.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] Yes. I think, that it's a travesty in education. Right here in Robertson County, there's an investigation that got launched yesterday into the Gateway exams. And the Gateway exams decide whether you're going to graduate from high school. They also determine teacher pay and incentives. And we live in a world now where if you can't beat them, cheat them. And one of the local debates here is whether the current school superintendent should be judged by test scores alone and the success there. And what that makes the way for is a shift of focus in the school system, not on comprehension but learning the materials needed to boost the scores. And I taught high school for a while, and I know that value is in comprehension and the application of knowledge, not simply the test scores. And ultimately, test scores end up in this situation helping the superintendent and the principals get raises, and it makes way for corruption.
[Mr. Phillips:] It also doesn't do anything for the...
[Ms. Bev Smith:] And there's...
[Mr. Phillips:] ...kids, who, as you point out, are not learning anything...
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] No.
[Mr. Phillips:] ...particularly when the professors or teachers are helping them cheat. I found fascinating in this story the fact that two of the students with the help of the teachers still got two of the questions wrong. So that, you know...
[Ms. Bev Smith:] So maybe we ought to be talking about educating the teachers also.
[Mr. Phillips:] Educating the teachers, actually.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Yes. Absolutely.
[Ed Gordon:] But Joe brings up an interesting point, and it seems to me, lost in all of what we see on the educational front today is a growing generation that is being-and as Bev so astutely pointed out, these are typically minority and poor, but poor and white fall into this category-that are being left behind by an ever-moving, ever-educated group of folks who don't have to deal with the same pressures. What are we doing for this generation?
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Well, we're showing them that cheating is OK. I mean, we have skaters who no longer want to be competitive with the other person; they want to break their legs. We have people who pump chemicals into their bodies so they can be better than the other, not by skill alone. We have this all the time. We have people in the Navy who cheat. And we have a television show, gentlemen-and I do mean gentlemen-we have a television show that is called "The Cheaters" where somebody runs around with a camera.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] Right.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] This way of thinking is all right in America. We must also make this a discussion about values and morals and ethics, gentlemen.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] Yeah.
[Mr. Phillips:] Well, and I think that certainly when it comes to those questions, they transcend the economic stations in people's lives because, as you point out, the cheating in the Naval Academy and such, they're not done by poor kids. I'd want to make that point. But you're absolutely right. And I think it's also important to point out that all these teachers have been fired. So the response to the cheating is also important and how hard we come down on this kind of thing.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Absolutely, because I'm not so sure that that would-Joe, I actually agree with you on that. I'm not so sure...
[Mr. Phillips:] Write it down.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Write that down. I actually...
[Mr. Phillips:] Yeah. We're going to be trading e-mails very soon.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Pretty soon.
[Ed Gordon:] All right. All right, guys, we've got about a minute left. Let's stay with it. Go ahead, Bev.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] I actually agree with you. I do not believe that to resolve this dilemma is to come down hard on the teachers, because it's bigger than that. But I see that as a cop-out: Fire the teachers, and we move on, and that...
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] And you move on without...
[Ms. Bev Smith:] ...concluded the issue.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] Yeah, without changing things.
[Ed Gordon:] ... [Unintelligible]
[Ms. Bev Smith:] And you move on without it, right. Right.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] Yeah. If you don't change the culture and the mentality of the thing, then you will continue to have that behavior. One of the things that is sad about the situation in Robertson County here that's-same thing in the public school district in Houston-is that now teachers will not be able to administer the tests to their own students, because there's too much-they're looking out for themselves. I think that's pretty sad. I think it's a trust issue. When I was coming up, we trusted certain teachers to look out for us, and they didn't help us cheat, but they prepared us because they cared about us. I think that that has changed in the culture of education in America, and unless we do something about it, we're going to continue to have a number of reality shows that encourage us to continue to cheat to get whatever we need.
[Ed Gordon:] All right.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] By hook or by crook.
[Ed Gordon:] Joe Phillips, Bev Smith and Jeff Obafemi Carr, thank you very much. We were in so deep with the Vicente Fox conversation, we didn't get to two of our issues today, and that is that Harvard will spent over $50 million to make its faculty more diverse; more controversy there with Lawrence Summers. And then a look at the new X-raying devices that see a little bit more than you may want them to.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Yeah.
[Ed Gordon:] We'll talk about those in the days to come. You're listening to NEWS & NOTES from NPR News.

[David Greene:] A British woman exposed to a nerve agent just over a week ago has died in the hospital. Authorities say she was poisoned by the same military-grade nerve agent that came close to killing a former Russian spy and his daughter back in March. As NPR's Scott Neuman reports, U.K. officials are demanding answers.
[Scott Neuman, Byline:] London's Scotland Yard says it is treating the death of 44-year-old Dawn Sturgess as a homicide. She was admitted on June 30 with her partner Charlie Rowley, who is 45. Rowley remains in critical condition. Novichok is a nerve agent developed in Russia that poisoned former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the same community in southern England. Last week, samples taken from Burgess and Rowley confirmed they, too, were exposed to Novichok. London Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu.
[Neil Basu:] Following the detailed analysis of those samples, we can confirm that the man and woman have been exposed to the nerve agent Novichok, which has been identified as the same nerve agent that contaminated both Yulia and Sergei Skripal.
[Scott Neuman, Byline:] Medical officials say the Skripals were lucky to survive the attack. The working theory is that they touched something contaminated with Novichok left over from the attack on the Skripals. Prime Minister Theresa May says she is appalled and shocked by Sturgess' death. Here she is speaking last week.
[Prime Minister Theresa May:] To see two more people exposed to the Novichok in the U.K. is obviously deeply disturbing. And the police, I know, will be leaving no stone unturned in their investigation.
[Scott Neuman, Byline:] Russia has strongly denied any role in the attack on the Skripals. And on Monday, spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Kremlin was sorry to hear that Burgess had died but reiterated that it is absurd to suggest Moscow's involvement. Russian media have suggested that the poisonings are a plot by London to discredit the Kremlin in the eyes of the international community. Following the poisonings of the Skripals, the U.S., U.K. and European allies expelled dozens of Russian diplomats. Speaking before Parliament last week, British Home Secretary Sajid Javid accused the Russians of a disinformation campaign and said London would not stand for more attacks on its soil.
[Sajid Javid:] We will stand up to the actions that threaten our security and the security of our partners. It is completely unacceptable for our people to be either deliberate or accidental targets or for our streets, our parks, our towns to be dumping grounds for poison.
[Scott Neuman, Byline:] Despite those harsh words, Javid said there are no current plans for further sanctions to punish Russia. Scott Neuman, NPR News.

[Debbie Elliott:] For today's food moment, we go to a military base in Fort Drum, New York. It's a mostly white, rural place, so a lot of the Southerners and Latinos who are posted there find themselves pining away for their comfort food. North Country public radio's David Sommerstein reports on two women who started a restaurant for the soldiers' stomachs and spirits.
[David Sommerstein:] In the kitchen of Willie Mae's Restaurant, Valerie Perry plates sticky barbeque ribs, steaming cornbread, and homemade mac and cheese.
[Ms. Valerie Perry:] [unintelligible] for the soul food side.
[David Sommerstein:] Okay, this is for the soul food side.
[Ms. Valerie Perry:] I'm come on, one more minute.
[David Sommerstein:] Perry serves the table of four and scolds one guy for leaving his collard greens.
[Ms. Valerie Perry:] You didn't finish your greens, Gary. What's the problem here?
[David Sommerstein:] Willie Mae's is a two-in-one joint. Perry satisfies African-American soul food lovers. Lucy Ruiz makes Puerto Rican soul food. She plops plantains in a deep fryer, then flips a golden-brown pork chop in a skillet.
[Ms. Lucy Ruiz:] This is all Hispanic, and I read ingredients in Hispanic.
[David Sommerstein:] Valerie and Lucy insist this is two restaurants. Separate checks. They even buy different chicken. And they're picky about each other's food.
[Ms. Lucy Ruiz:] Well, you see, I don't like her collard greens.
[David Sommerstein:] You don't like those collard greens?
[Ms. Lucy Ruiz:] No. I'm not a collard greens person.
[Ms. Valerie Perry:] And I don't like rice.
[Ms. Lucy Ruiz:] I cook a lot of rice.
[David Sommerstein:] And you don't like rice?
[Ms. Valerie Perry:] I don't like rice.
[David Sommerstein:] How do you guys even get along?
[Ms. Ruiz:] Oh.
[Ms. Valerie Perry:] Because I don't have to put up with the guys. We can't help but get along.
[David Sommerstein:] Faith brought these two women together. Valerie's pastor of a Pentecostal church in nearby Watertown. Lucy's sister is pastor of her church.
[Ms. Lucy Ruiz:] So that's how we met. We had a women's conference and that was...
[Ms. Valerie Perry:] Oh, my God.
[Ms. Ruiz:] ...it was the Holy Ghost there.
[Ms. Valerie Perry:] Yes.
[Ms. Lucy Ruiz:] Oh, my Lord.
[Ms. Valerie Perry:] Hallelujah.
[Ms. Lucy Ruiz:] Praise the Lord.
[David Sommerstein:] Now their ministry offers soldiers culinary salvation.
[Ms. Inez Babbin:] I swear in upper New York there's no food that tastes good to me like Southern food. This tastes good.
[David Sommerstein:] Inez Babbin of Louisiana brought fellow soldier Anthony Carter of Florida to try Willie Mae's. Carter says he feels right at home.
[Mr. Anthony Carter:] When I first walked in, it was kind of a home feeling, you know, like, you know what I'm saying, my grandmamma, aunties, they up in the kitchen, my mamma, you know what I'm saying she up in there cooking from scratch.
[David Sommerstein:] Valerie and Lucy spend as much time in the dining room as the kitchen. They say they need to minister to soldiers' spirits, not just their bellies, especially the ones who return from Iraq and Afghanistan.
[Ms. Lucy Ruiz:] Yes, when you go over there...
[Ms. Valerie Perry:] And you come back, they it's a bewildered look about some of them, and...
[David Sommerstein:] Really, you see it?
[Ms. Valerie Perry:] I see it, as pastor I see that.
[David Sommerstein:] Lucy says after lunch they listen and soldiers talk.
[Ms. Lucy Ruiz:] [unintelligible] two hours just talking.
[Ms. Valerie Perry:] We just talk.
[Ms. Lucy Ruiz:] Just talking. They just letting themselves everything out.
[Ms. Valerie Perry:] This is a place of a outlet for people on post, and we just give them what the word of God has to say.
[David Sommerstein:] Lucy Ruiz says just the other day a soldier had a religious conversion right there in the dining room amidst rice and beans and fried chicken, and that, says Pastor Valerie Perry, is soul food. For NPR News, I'm David Sommerstein in Northern New York.

[Ira Flatow:] You're listening to Talk of the Nation: Science Friday. I am Ira Flatow. In a little bit later in the hour, we'll be talking about drug testing in the Olympics, but up next, continuing more space news. First, a new study makes the case for why our solar system is special, why is it unique. Astronomers have long figured that solar systems similar to ours could probably be found all over the universe. But a new model that simulates the birth and evolution of planets shows that conditions need to be just, just right to get a solar system like ours. We're going to hear about that. And a strange new space object has just been discovered by a Dutch schoolteacher named Hanny van Arkel. She was participating in an online research project called Galaxy Zoo. She was cataloging images of galaxies when she saw something in one image that she couldn't place. She couldn't find it, you know, match it up in the galaxies. Well, it turns out that astronomers don't know for sure what it is either. They've dubbed it a cosmic ghost, and hope to get a better look at it next year when they can get some telescope time on the Hubble Space Telescope. One of the cofounders of the Galaxy Zoo was here to talk about this comic ghost cosmic ghost. And hello, armchair astronomers. If you are one of them can pitch in on the project, our number is 1-800-989-8255, 1-800-989-TALK. As always, you can join us also in Second Life. Search for Science Friday's Island. Let me introduce my guest. Edward Thommes is an adjunct professor in the department of physics at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, and he joins us today from his office. Welcome to the program, Dr. Thommes.
[Dr. Edward Thommes:] Thank you. It's a pleasure to be on the show.
[Ira Flatow:] Kevin Schawinski is a cofounder of the Galaxy Zoo Project and a post doctoral associate in the Yale Center for Astronomy & Astrophysics at Yale in New Haven. And he joins us today from the campus there. Welcome to the program, Dr. Schawinski.
[Dr. Kevin Schawinski:] Thank you. It's wonderful to be here.
[Ira Flatow:] Let me ask Dr. Thomas first, you have a new model that shows how our planets are formed, and what does it tell us why we're so special?
[Dr. Edward Thommes:] Well, it seems to us, from these simulations that we did, that sort of a history of violence is the norm, rather than the exception, when it comes to the formation of planetary systems. And it seems like our own was a more rare and more orderly and peaceful instance of this process.
[Ira Flatow:] So, let's go through the two kinds. Let's go to the normal or the violent one first. What happens there?
[Dr. Edward Thommes:] Well, the violent one, which we think is the more common version, is you basically have sort of a rapid succession of giant planets forming. We're talking here in particular about big things like Jupiter, like Saturn. So, we think these things are sort of popping out one after another. These discs out of which they're forming are basically forming planets early and often, and at the same time, the disc then pushes these planets inward and sort of pushes them up against each other. They gravitationally interact, and we get these sort of eccentric, elongated orbits and also these sort of closed-in, or what are often called hot Jupiters, which, interestingly, are exacting the sort of thing we see in many cases amongst the exoplanets that have been discovered.
[Ira Flatow:] But you say that's not what you think happened to our solar system.
[Dr. Edward Thommes:] Well, what we think happened in our solar system is that we are an example of a system that was sort of near the boundary between something that actually formed gas giants, formed, well, the Jupiter and Saturn that we see today, and something that if conditions had been a little bit different wouldn't have really formed any gas giants at all. It would have just contained a bunch of smaller rocky terrestrial bodies, maybe a couple of Neptune mass things. And because of that, the planets, the gas giants which did form, had a relatively peaceful birthing process and their orbits essentially stayed relatively close to where they were originally born.
[Ira Flatow:] And we had to have just the right conditions for that to happen?
[Dr. Edward Thommes:] It seems like you need a fairly narrow range of conditions. You kind of you have to have the planets that do form forming just in time. They don't form too early. They don't form too late. So, the conditions have to be relatively tuned in order for that to happen.
[Ira Flatow:] 1-800-989-8255 is our number, talking about the planetary formation. So, that means that there was not that violence in our solar system.
[Dr. Edward Thommes:] Not really, I mean, it's all relative. We think there may have been some violent events in our solar system. It's possible that the smaller giant planets Uranus and Neptune, these guys are usually called ice giants rather than gas giants they may have had some violence in their history. And we had this event later on called the late heavy bombardment, which we think took place in the terrestrial regions. So, it's all relative. Even in our relatively sedate system, violent things probably did happen. But what we think is that the really big guys, Jupiter and Saturn, had it relatively easy and they didn't suffer so much at this.
[Ira Flatow:] And how are you able to come up with this idea? Is this something you thought up on your own? Or did you look at other planets out there and say, hey maybe we had a little bit different evolution than they did?
[Dr. Edward Thommes:] Well, there's been this sort of almost disconnect in a way between these exoplanets that we have been discovering in our own system because we have been really finding all of these hot Jupiters and eccentric planets. And certainly for awhile, and even now still, it does make sense to a degree that the hot Jupiters are simply easier to find and they're quicker to find. So, to a large degree, we are still suffering from what scientists call selection effect. We don't really see the true distribution of these planets. But at the same time, what we started to understand about the formation process, we thought there would indeed be a lot of these orbits of giant planets spiraling inward after they're born and things that give you, for instance, hot Jupiters. And then we started, you know, scientists, astronomers started to wonder, well, why is it that Jupiter and Saturn seem to be pretty much where we expect them to have been born? And so that was sort of the jumping off point in what we did.
[Ira Flatow:] Let me turn now to Kevin Schawinski and this cosmic ghost. Why are we calling this a cosmic ghost?
[Dr. Kevin Schawinski:] The reason we call it a ghost is because we believe it is something called a light echo. It is sort of the dying embers of what we think was a very luminous and powerful event in an object right next to this ghost. And it may encode some information about the past of a super massive black hole.
[Ira Flatow:] So, that is what you're seeing we're seeing information about the past, the history of the black hole?
[Dr. Kevin Schawinski:] Yeah, it's essentially an echo. It's what we call a light echo, an effect that we've seen around supernovas stars that explode and because of the vast scales involved, the speed of light is actually very slow. And so, you can actually, like, in an echo in sound, you can see the light moving outwards. And so, what we believe in this case happened is there used to be an extremely luminous quasar right next to this gas cloud. But this quasar has now disappeared. It shut down. But this gas cloud, because it is so far away, about 40,000 light years is still seeing the quasar, though we are not.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow. So, it's just shining there.
[Dr. Kevin Schawinski:] It's just shining.
[Ira Flatow:] So, is it moving towards us or away from us?
[Dr. Kevin Schawinski:] It's right next to this galaxy with the telephone number IC249,7 and it's sort of in our cosmic backyard. It's not incredibly distant, but it's also not exactly nearby.
[Ira Flatow:] I find it surprising. I'm always delighted to hear that amateur astronomers continue to make these interesting discoveries and in something called the Galaxy Zoo Project. Tell us what that is.
[Dr. Kevin Schawinski:] The Galaxy Zoo is an Internet portal that invites members of the public to participate in astrophysics research. The basic task that we have as astronomers studying galaxies is trying to classify them and divide them into their basic categories, which have been with us almost a century. There are spiral galaxies, like our own Milky Way, and then there are elliptical galaxies, sort of football or rugby ball shaped. And it turns out, that computers are actually not very good at distinguishing the two classes. And nowadays, we have so much data with these vast surveys with millions of galaxies and it's just impossible for small teams of astronomers to sort through them by hand, by eye, and classify them. And so we invited members of the public to do this with us.
[Ira Flatow:] Are members still open to join?
[Dr. Kevin Schawinski:] Absolutely, anybody can do this. Anybody can sign up at galaxyzoo.org, and after a brief tutorial where you just see some examples of what you're supposed to look for, you're ready to go. And the really marvelous thing is that after about 10 minutes of training, most people are as good as professional astronomers at this.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow. Is there a name, besides cosmic ghost has this been named, this object?
[Dr. Kevin Schawinski:] Yeah, as discoveries usually are named after their discoverer, it has been named after Hanny van Arkel, but instead of calling it Hanny's Object, it quickly became known in our online community as Hanny's Voorwerp voorwerp simply being the Dutch word for object but it sounds cooler.
[Ira Flatow:] And a lot easier for you to say than for me to say. 1-800-989-8255, while we get some phone calls up there. And you can have some telescope time on the Hubble to get to take a better look at this?
[Dr. Kevin Schawinski:] Yeah. So, next year after the service mission with the space shuttle, which will hopefully take place later this year, after the new instruments that are going up have been installed, and the old instruments that have broken have been repaired...
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hm.
[Dr. Kevin Schawinski:] We'll hopefully get a really fantastic look at it.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hm. Cora in San Antonio, welcome to Science Friday. Hi.
[Cora:] Well, hi. Well, I'm always calling, I'm never on and today it's, like, oh, I'm on, so excited. Anyway, I had a real good conversation just last weekend with a young friend who is Bible-oriented and I'm evolution-oriented. And yet when I was confronted with a question, but how did it all began, did we come out of nothing? What kind of an answer can I give him? You know, how can say, well, it always was. Well, that's what God is...
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hm.
[Cora:] You know, he always was in and he created it.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hm.
[Cora:] How do I answer that?
[Ira Flatow:] Edward...
[Cora:] I'll take my answer off the air.
[Ira Flatow:] OK.
[Cora:] Thank you.
[Ira Flatow:] You're welcome. Edward Thommes or Kevin, you want can anybody give a shot at that?
[Dr. Edward Thommes:] A little bit outside of my area, I think, where we can sort of just deal with the stuff that the life stands on after it's created.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hm. Kevin, any...
[Dr. Kevin Schawinski:] Similar answer, I mean, I think the best starting point is to look at the universe around us, and see what does nature tell us, what can we learn about the universe...
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hm.
[Dr. Kevin Schawinski:] And over the last centuries and in particular the last century, we've learned an awful lot about what our place in the universe is. And that knowledge is still, you know, not complete, but it does tell us an awful lot.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hm. 1-800-989-8255, a caller to let's go to Lynette in La Fargeville, New York. Hi, Lynette, are you there?
[Lynette:] Hi. Yes, I'm here.
[Ira Flatow:] Where is La Fargeville? Where is that?
[Lynette:] La Fargeville, we are a little over an hour north of Syracuse, New York.
[Ira Flatow:] Ah.
[Lynette:] We're the Canadian border.
[Ira Flatow:] Right by the Finger Lakes, and right by the Great Lakes.
[Lynette:] North of the Finger Lakes.
[Ira Flatow:] Closer Great Lake area.
[Dr. Edward Thommes:] Yeah, OK.
[Lynette:] Yes, we're near Lake Ontario, actually.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hm, all right. Go ahead. Do you have a question?
[Lynette:] Yes, I do. I have a friend who's very interested in things astronomical, and he told me that our sun is our second sun. Is that true?
[Ira Flatow:] You mean S-U-N?
[Lynette:] Our sun, S-U-N. Right. Our sun, our star.
[Ira Flatow:] You want to get into family matters here, then.
[Lynette:] Is that I and I didn't question him, because he's quite, you know...
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah.
[Lynette:] You know, he's somewhat of an authority or [unintelligible]...
[Ira Flatow:] Precocious. OK. Let's see if we get an answer for you.
[Lynette:] OK.
[Ira Flatow:] Gentlemen?
[Dr. Edward Thommes:] That's an intriguing statement.
[Ira Flatow:] Any reaction? How do we know this is our first sun?
[Dr. Kevin Schawinski:] Ah...
[Dr. Edward Thommes:] Well, as far as we know, it this our sun goes back to about four and half billion years, and I don't know of any indication that we ever swapped suns with anybody, but it's...
[Lynette:] Or that there was a second second oh, dear...
[Ira Flatow:] You mean, like, we have two suns?
[Lynette:] I know I'm really going to go out there. I'm going to say a second coming. What I mean is, like, a second explosion or whatever formed the first one.
[Dr. Edward Thommes:] Because with something that has been sort of bandied about is the theory that we've had a close encounter with another sun, with another star in our past, and there are actually some traces in the outer ranges, in the outer reaches of our planetary system, in the so-called Kyper Belt, that there may have been some gravitational disturbance in the past, which may have flung things around, and one of the theories is that we may just have had a sort of, you know, two-ships-passing-in-the-night kind of thing with another star.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm. Interesting.
[Lynette:] OK.
[Ira Flatow:] All right?
[Lynette:] OK.
[Ira Flatow:] Maybe Kevin wants to drop a comment there.
[Dr. Kevin Schawinski:] Sure. I think there's another possibility for that I might refer to. It might be the fact that he meant that our Sun is a second generation star. Our sun is enriched with heavy elements, with metals, and oxygen, and so forth, that have to have been made inside another star that died before our sun and our solar system formed.
[Ira Flatow:] Ah.
[Dr. Kevin Schawinski:] And so our sun is at least a second generation, if not the third generation star.
[Dr. Edward Thommes:] Ah, yes. That might be what he meant indeed.
[Ira Flatow:] We're talking about the solar system this hour of Talk of the Nation: Science Friday from NPR News. Explain that a bit more. The sequence would be what, Kevin?
[Dr. Kevin Schawinski:] So, in the very early universe, most of the elements that were made in the Big Bang were hydrogen and helium, and very few trace elements of heavier elements, like oxygen and iron and so forth. And these heavy elements are very important for making stars, because they allow the hydrogen and the helium to clump together, and collapse into stars then, and start to shine. And so the first generation of stars was probably very massive and short-lived...
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hm.
[Dr. Kevin Schawinski:] Though this very much a lot of work going on in that topic at the moment that then seeded the material around it, as these stars exploded in supernovae, allowing the second generation of stars with a little bit more heavy elements to form, and then probably, you know, our solar system and our sun was made was probably has gone through the cycle probably at least a couple of times, before this particular cloud collapse that gave us our sun and our solar system around it.
[Ira Flatow:] Where do we still see remnants of those originals, any around?
[Dr. Kevin Schawinski:] They probably would have disappeared a long time ago.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah.
[Dr. Edward Thommes:] And this fact that we are a later generation is probably also good news for our existence here, because what observers have been finding is that it is the more metal-rich stars that are seem to be more likely to have planets orbiting them. So, there seems to be it seems to be the case that a higher content of heavy elements actually helps you form planets
[Ira Flatow:] I in the few moments we have left, Dr. Thommes, what would be the chance of finding a solar system just like ours, if it's so special?
[Dr. Edward Thommes:] Well, it's more rare. Having said that, it's certainly not unique. I mean, even in our, you know, hundred or so simulations, we found several that sort of resembled the solar system. So, we think there are more of them out there.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hm.
[Dr. Edward Thommes:] We had have ordered a few percent of systems that where the giant planets at least resemble the architecture in our own system, as to whether we would then have terrestrial planets in the habitable zone, the chances of that actually aren't too bad, because the terrestrial planets, we think, they kind of sprout like mushrooms pretty much anywhere.
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Dr. Edward Thommes:] So, that's that is the picture that we have. Well, gentlemen, I want to thank you for taking time to be with us. Good luck in your work. Thank you very much.
[Dr. Kevin Schawinski:] Thank you.
[Ira Flatow:] You're welcome. Kevin Schawinski is cofounder of the Galaxy Zoo Project and a post doctoral associate at the Yale Center for Astronomy & Astrophysics at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Ed Thommes is adjunct professor in the department of physics at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Have a good weekend, gentlemen. We're going to take a short break and when we come back, we're going to talk about the Olympics. This is the first day of the Olympics. Ceremonies are getting underway. And also, there's already talk about doping there. We'll talk with a scientist about that issue. Stay with us. We'll be right back. I'm Ira Flatow. This is Talk of the Nation: Science Friday from NPR News.

[Neal Conan:] Now Oliver Stone, one of the great filmmakers of our time he made "Wall Street" and "JFK," won three Academy Awards, including Best Director for the blockbusters "Platoon" and "Born on the Fourth of July." His follow-up, "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps," is due out later this year. Throughout though, Stone also makes documentaries. In 2003, both "Persona Non Grata" about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and "Comandante," where he spent several days with Cuban leader Fidel Castro. In his latest documentary, Stone returns to Latin America to focus on another controversial head of state, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, and goes on to speak with the leaders of Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil, and with the current leader in Cuba, Fidel's brother, Raul Castro. He showed "South of the Border" at the Silverdocs Film Festival yesterday at the American Film Institute Silver Theater here in Washington, D.C. The film is now playing in select cities across the country. If you have questions for Oliver Stone on his work or about his new film, give us a call: 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Oliver Stone joins us now from his hotel in Washington. Nice to have you on the program with us today.
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] Hi, Neal. How are you?
[Neal Conan:] I'm well, thank you. You argue in the film that well, I'm going to play a clip from here that most of us had a highly distorted image of Hugo Chavez. And there's a montage of clips from Fox News. Well, here's about 20 seconds worth.
[Unidentified Man #1:] The Venezuelan president has become more dangerous to the U.S. than Fidel Castro ever was.
[Unidentified Woman:] Exxon Mobil says it's been ripped off by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
[Unidentified Man #2:] The Latin-American strong man...
[Unidentified Man #3:] There is such a thing as a killer clown and he may be it.
[Mr. John Roberts:] He is more dangerous than bin Laden. And the effects of Chavez, his war against America, could eclipse those of 911.
[Neal Conan:] And much of your film attempts to say, wait a minute, there's a little bit more to this.
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] Yeah, there is. Yeah. Am I talking now?
[Neal Conan:] Yes.
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] Okay. So, look, I mean, first of all, I mean it's not opening today. I just want to make clear that's opening in New York City, one theater Friday, and then it opens up gradually over the next few weeks in various cities in United States.
[Neal Conan:] Okay, thank you.
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] Two, film is not really only about Chavez. It's about a big -much bigger issue to me, which is South America. There are six countries there under UNASUR, who are united in their condemnation of the United States meddling in their region and the International Monetary Fund. And they are, each one, in their different ways, with their different societies, are dedicated to the concept of preserving their own resources and returning them to people. And they're going about it in a way in reform measures. All Brazil, Ecuador you didn't mentioned Paraguay, where there was a Catholic priest who was elected democratically. All these leaders were elected democratically. This is amazing moment in time. There are six countries, never happened before, where there were six individual countries at the same time who wanted independence from the United States.
[Neal Conan:] And why do you think that is happening at this particular moment?
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] Because I think, because of the neoliberal economics of Reagan and Thatcher and that era. The 1980s had brought devastating poverty to much of Latin America and Asia and Africa. I think it backfired and there was revolts, natural revolts from the people in Bolivia and Venezuela and in Argentina. And there was a change in government with democratically elected new leaders emerging, people who came from the people, people who were actually born in the lower classes often and worked their way up honestly, not the old corrupt oligarchs and leaders and the educated elite from the Americas that used to rule over most of Latin American.
[Neal Conan:] There are some identified in the film as people from from the American point of view, the good left, and that would be Lula da Silva in Brazil, and people from the bad left, which would be Hugo Chavez.
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] And you might include Evo Morales too, well, yeah, and Raul Carrera from Ecuador.
[Neal Conan:] Yes. And why do you think that distinction, because they...
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] The distinction was made in America, not by them.
[Neal Conan:] Ah. And why do they see what Brazil and Venezuela and Bolivia are very different places.
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] Of course they're much different. They're different societies, different backgrounds, different languages. But Lula and Chavez have expressed tremendous support and admiration for each other over the years. There are differences here and there, but overall it's very clear from the film that they're brothers. They consider themselves brothers. Lula has supported Chavez constantly. And recently, by the way, Chavez Lula of Brazil has been condemned by the U.S. for so-called meddling in their Iran policy. Now, this raises a whole distinction of what, you know, what is meddling in our is America the policeman of the world? Do we decide who will that we are going to run the world by our rules? Are not Brazil and Turkey allowed to talk to Iran? And they actually did come up with a uranium swap there. So some -and by the way, at the security council, they voted Turkey and Brazil voted on the security council against vetoed the against I mean, voted against the resolution on sanctions in Iran.
[Neal Conan:] They're members of the security council at the moment but not the permanent five members. They're the only ones with the...
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] Yeah. That's the first time its happened, I gather.
[Neal Conan:] On the occasions of the sanctions against Iran, I believe it's the first time it has not been unanimous or at least with one country abstaining. Lebanon also abstained in that particular vote.
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] That's correct. It's quite something. It's in other words, there is a third bloc. There was, when I grew up in the 1950s, there was a neutral bloc. It was made up of great nations like Egypt, like India, like Indonesia. And in Africa, there was Kwame Nkrumah. There was a leader a group of leaders who emerged and that has and that concept was eroded as each one was destabilized, often by United States' participation against them. So, you know, now here we are in this post-Soviet world and we're alone. Were trying to ride it out alone, it won't work. China is too big. Venezuela is too big. Russia is way too big. Turkey, by the way, is a regional power. And America seems to want to dominate the world. And these regional powers are, I think, are a very strong and good antidote to our policies.
[Neal Conan:] This film was made in the last days of the Bush administration. And there is hope presented in the form of a newly-elected President Barack Obama at the end. Do you think those policies have changed in the year and a half...
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] No, I don't think so and the film says it, but it doesn't say excuse me, the film doesn't say it. And it ends on the note, because it was made in 2009, of hope. And, unfortunately, I am hoping and I think they are still hoping. But the behavior of United States in the Honduras coup was very disheartening to all of them, and it was universally condemned as a coup. United States did nothing to get that guy out. And now there's a new president who they're saying is illegally elected. So journalists have been killed in Honduras, people tortured. There's we're back to the old ways. And America was standing stood on the sidelines. So there was no action. Also, America expanded under Obama its seven military bases in Colombia. This was a deadly thing to do. Why do we need military bases there? Why, I wonder. We have to ask ourselves. But that, nonetheless, war on drugs is perceived by the rest of them as a war to of control and of espionage. So, in addition to that, we have also have the four fleet sailing around the waters of South America, which also is a offensive to them. So we don't you know, what they're asking is mutual respect. They want mutual respect. This is the first time in centuries we've heard that fired back at us from South America. Often, there was one leader in the past who came along, said this kind of things in Guatemala in '54, Arbenz or Allende in Chile, in Argentina, in Brazil. Separately, and at part, we took them down each one. And now we have a situation where we're working active with them to scramble up, to disunify this group and to take each out each of these leaders out. And we can because they're democratically elected. And we can always influence elections with money and all the other dirty tricks learned from Nixon. So it's an interesting and ugly situation, but it doesn't -America is still going against the concept of reform, the concept that these people are trying to help the poor. And we always end up on the side of corporations, which brings us back to our situation in this country. And, you know, we are beholden to corporations. We are a corporate-governed state. And I we seem to be fighting. This is an epic, primal struggle. And America, of course, is coming down on the side of the corporations.
[Neal Conan:] Here's an email from Bryan in Iowa City. Could you ask Oliver Stone how he justifies President Chavez silencing media outlets that criticize him? Would he support an American president shutting down similar media outlets?
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] Oh, that's you know, this is part of the propaganda war that's been waged against Chavez since the beginning. This is, you know, this is a man, first of all, who's elected three times democratically. Hes also held close to 12 other elections. And each one not each one, but most of them have been monitored by international organizations such as the European Union Commission, also the Jimmy Carter organization. They have an electronic ballot and they have a paper ballot, which makes them far more transparent democracy than our joke in Florida of 2000. So, you know, let's get off that crap that's been passing around. Now, the media in Venezuela is outspoken and vibrant and angry. They are owned mostly by private media families, very rich families, very few. They can and they their venom is beyond belief. You have to go walk around and you'll see it for yourself. It's like Fox News on steroids down there. And, you know, we have situations where occasionally some of the media stations call for the overthrow of the government or step over the line and do things that are illegal. In our country, we take their license away, and they're doing the same damn thing in Venezuela. Most of the media is completely outrageous. And if you want to go right now to your BlackBerry, pick it up and look at any one of the stations in Venezuela, look what they're writing about him and it's all junk and negative. And one thing that resembles the American media, it's a war. It's a war of the media against a guy like Chavez. We can declare a war on these people and we get away with it for a certain time. We call it human rights. We call it terrorism violations. We go after them again and again and again until we get them. If we can't get them that way, we put guess what? We go to plan B. Usually, it's something military.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking with director Oliver Stone. His new film is "South of the Border." As he mentioned, it opens on Friday in New York, and then later in other cities around the country. Can I ask you, why do you if you if this film succeeds in the documentary world very well, it would be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. If you make if your film "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" succeeds, itll be seen by many millions of people. Why do you continue to make documentaries?
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] Because theyre you know, it's a form of exercise where you want to stay close to the field. You want to do the research. You want to stay in touch with people. It's a humbling form because usually it's very fast and not a lot of money to make. And you make it because it cleans you up. It makes you feel better, you know. Movies I love movies but they are tremendous effort. They take more than a year. They involve costumes, script, actors. And they have their rewards, certainly. They're big and I enjoy making them if I can make the right movie. But it's a system where you have this tremendous marketing cost and all that. And a documentary, you know, we're making the movie because, really, we consider that's a public service to the American people too.
[Neal Conan:] Oliver Stone. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And let's see if we can get a caller up. This is Caroline, Caroline calling us from Anchorage.
[Caroline:] Good morning. Or good afternoon.
[Neal Conan:] Good afternoon where we are, but, yes. Go ahead, please.
[Caroline:] I had wanted to ask first of all, Im very proud of what you do and appreciate that there's someone out there doing these kinds of films. I know you're not alone in that. And if this were the '50s, you'd be blacklisted.
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] Sure.
[Caroline:] But I wanted to ask, what do you think was the impact of your experience in Vietnam on how you see how this country operates?
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] Well, it's pretty [unintelligible] a young man. I grew up here during Cold War. I was and we know and then one day [unintelligible]. There is even now there's a revisionist approach. Even with the McChrsytal affair, they're saying, you know, that they're going to say, you know, the military was betrayed in Afghanistan by the president. I can see that coming down the tubes. It's always been this way in America. We've been in this military security gridlock ever since the World War II. So, I'm fighting against it my way. I have a documentary, another documentary I've been working on for two years, more than two years. It's called "The Secret History of the United States" and it goes 10 hours, actually. It's going to be on Showtime early next year. And it's a lot of work, believe me, to do a documentary. But I'd like to leave something for my kids besides the usual brainwashing that they get in their history books.
[Caroline:] I thank you very much. And I wanted to give you a quick challenge, if you could. My thesis is that we will never have peace until we figure out a way for the corporations to make money on it.
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] Very good. Very good, indeed. And that's a very well and wise statement. You've lived long enough to know.
[Neal Conan:] Caroline, thanks very much for the call.
[Caroline:] You're welcome.
[Neal Conan:] Obviously, when you're making your feature documentaries, well, they're sponsored by corporations, and corporations make a lot of the profits there.
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] Feature documentaries? No.
[Neal Conan:] No, feature films, I'm talking about.
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] Oh, feature films. I'm sorry yeah, I have to work inside the system. And so, by the way, I work any way I can. I sometimes get feature funding from a studio. Sometimes I get independently. Sometimes I have to go, like with "W.," the movie I did on George Bush, it was financed from France and Hong Kong, primarily, and Australia.
[Neal Conan:] And the new Wall Street movie, is that...
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] The Wall Street movie was with Century Fox. They own the original. I worked with them back in 1987. And they were very cooperative and helpful, and they did not interfere creatively in my process. And the movie represents my point of view.
[Neal Conan:] And as we look ahead to it, we remember Gordon Gekko, of course, famously from the first film. I gather Michael Douglas reappears...
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] That's right.
[Neal Conan:] ...and is the star of the is it fair to say he's the star of the second film?
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] He's the yeah, okay. He's the older star of the second film. Shia LaBeouf is the younger star. Josh Brolin is the [unintelligible] star. Carrey Mulligan is the daughter. And Frank Langella is the mentor, the older mentor of Shia LaBeouf.
[Neal Conan:] And given recent events on Wall Street, do you see the first film as sort of, well, you have the opportunity now to tell a completely...
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] Well, it's the same story, redux absurd what's the word?
[Neal Conan:] Reductio ad absurdum.
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] Yeah, exactly. My Latin fails me. Now, it's gone on. I was shocked because in the '87 film, I thought it was over, that era. But it just kept subtly going on. The greed factor, as Caroline pointed out in the phone call, has driven our corporations to the point of excess. Not just our corporations, not just but the bank themselves have changed their very nature. They are no longer what the banks I knew in '87. They became essentially private casinos funded by the government and for losses when they were bailed out, you know. And the bailout was enormous and they got the money, not the people who are unemployed or losing their jobs. So we've come a long way down. And by the way, Gekko is, in the new movie, is broke at the beginning of the movie. So he has to find a way to back to get back in. But he has another ballgame to play, which is he realizes the banks control the ballgame. So it's not just them, but it's the big banks, the big insurance companies. It's the country's gotten bigger, bigger, bigger. We Wal-Mart's bigger. We have a bigger empire abroad. We have the Pentagon. We have Afghanistan, Iran. We Iraq, and now probably Iran, maybe. And now, you know, we're losing it. We can't get we're too big, Neal. We're just too big, and you can't it reaches a place of overreach. What happened with McChrystal is interesting because it feels like the praetorian guard with the Roman Empire now.
[Neal Conan:] Oliver Stone, good luck with the new film.
[Mr. Oliver Stone:] Thank you, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] Oliver Stone's new film, "South of the Border," opens in New York City on Friday, and then gradually in other theaters and other cities around the country. He joined us today on the phone from his hotel here in Washington D.C. Tomorrow on TALK OF THE NATION: SCIENCE FRIDAY, a look at the science of medical marijuana. Can smoking pot be good for your health? Talk to you again on Monday. Have a good weekend, everybody. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.

[Scott Simon:] I'm Scott Simon. Russia and Georgia have both signed a cease-fire, but so far Russian troops show no sign of leaving Georgia. We're going to talk to our reporters in the field. NPR's Gregory Feifer is with Russian troops in Gori. Greg, thanks for being with us.
[Gregory Feifer:] You're welcome.
[Scott Simon:] And NPR's Ivan Watson is at a Russian checkpoint in a village called Kaspi that is, I guess, just outside the capital. Ivan, thank you for being with us.
[Ivan Watson:] It's my pleasure, Scott.
[Scott Simon:] And gentlemen, Greg first, what's it look like where you are?
[Gregory Feifer:] Well, it's very eerie. The entire area that I see, the north part of the city, is occupied by Russian troops. Most of the residents out in the street are elderly. They're going around to various spots where they're being given food aid, bread and water. There is a significant Russian military presence. I drove down here with the Russian military from the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali. And when we crossed the border into Georgia, it was a very, as I say, eerie sight. Houses had been torched. There were cars on the side of the streets, the roads, destroyed cars. And it was virtually empty, almost no citizens. Just convoys of Russian military trucks driving north and south.
[Scott Simon:] Ivan, what's it look like where you are at Kaspi?
[Ivan Watson:] Well, I'm at a Russian checkpoint. The Russians advanced to this position last night. It's about 20 miles west of the Georgian capital. The Russian soldiers here have been digging in throughout the morning, Scott. They've dug in a number of tanks and armored personnel carriers on the side of the highway. They've planted a Russian flag. And they've fanned out up into the hills as well. They are searching cars that pass through on this very key highway that links the capital to the rest of the country. I'm being told to move back by a Russian soldier right now. As for the civilian population here, there are just a few old Georgian villagers here and invalid villagers who are kind of sitting on benches under trees outside their homes, clearly very worried about what's going to come in the next couple of days, and rather depressed, I'd say, Scott.
[Scott Simon:] Let me pass along to you both a report that's coming in now on wire services now. The... Are you all right? Whoever, I'm hearing some clatter...
[Gregory Feifer:] Yeah, it's Greg. I'm in the back of a Russian military truck. We're being packed up, and just about to start and drive to another part of town.
[Scott Simon:] OK. Well, do you know anything, Greg? There are reports in wire services that the country's main east-west rail link has been blown up by Russian troops.
[Gregory Feifer:] That's right. We've been hearing that this railway bridge has been blown. I've been asking around. People on the streets don't know much of what's going on. They're quite scared. I mean, this is land that is occupied by Russian forces, and people are afraid to give their names. At first they repeat that we wish everyone would get along. We don't know why this is going on. If you ask them several times, they admit that they're scared and that they're deeply, deeply unhappy. I think they were just very frightened, and they're waiting for this to end as soon as possible.
[Scott Simon:] And your impression, from both of you, from what you can observe of Russian troops, that the end is at hand, that the cease-fire agreement is going to make any difference?
[Ivan Watson:] I'd say, Scott, that these soldiers are digging in, and they have advanced in increments into Georgian territory here near the capital and in other parts of the country steadily over the course of this week. And the Georgian forces, there are several hundred Georgian troops behind me, between me and the capital, who are amassed on the side of the road. They've just been giving ground. They have been observing a cease-fire. And there has been no contact, really, significant contact between the two sides. But bands of irregulars backed by the Russians who've been systematically looting and torching buildings, that is what has really scared the population. And when we approached this checkpoint today, we could see smoke from fires just behind the Russian front lines. And it's anybody's guess why something's burning there.
[Scott Simon:] So even if the Russian troops withdraw, the irregulars paramilitaries, if you please still seem to be at work.
[Ivan Watson:] They definitely have been at work, and we've heard multiple accounts from refugees fleeing, describing how even livestock were set on fire with fuel by some of these people who've been going through houses, stealing everything that isn't nailed down. And when you look at these elderly folks who were staying behind when most of the young people have left the village, you know, offering fruit from their fruit tree to any passerby and water, actually, for the journalists who've been gathered here, you just wonder whether they will also have to join the waves of refugees in the coming days as the chaos that has followed the Russian military catches up with their villages.
[Scott Simon:] Gregory, do you have any idea where you're going with your troops?
[Gregory Feifer:] We're driving closer to downtown Gori. And I can tell you that the Russian forces feel very much at home. They are moving around freely. It's almost like a lark for them, a holiday here. It's absolutely not clear how long this is going to last.
[Scott Simon:] Gentlemen, I thank you both very much for bearing with us, and thank you for your good work. Take care of yourselves. Gregory Feifer with Russian troops in Gori and NPR's Ivan Watson at a Russian checkpoint in the village of Kaspi.

[Ari Shapiro:] Michael is one of many reporters who've come to the Virginia State Capitol to record these events as they play out. Mallory Noe-Payne of member station WVTF has been there too, and yesterday, she took a break for lunch at Croaker's Spot, a soul food restaurant where she ended up talking with the staff there about the racial controversies consuming their state.
[Mallory Noe-payne, Byline:] It's not too busy, even though it's lunchtime.
[Unidentified Person:] All right. Two piece...
[Ari Coleman:] It's ridiculous.
[Mallory Noe-payne, Byline:] That's chef Ari Coleman taking a break from the kitchen. He wants to talk about his elected officials who have admitted to wearing blackface.
[Ari Coleman:] From the governor and now the attorney general as well. And we're talking about the '80s talking about the '60s. The '60s and the '50s, OK, maybe need to say, OK, well you know, they was in their thing in that moment. But in the '80s? In the '80s, we supposed to have been over all that apparently not.
[Mallory Noe-payne, Byline:] He thinks they should all just step down.
[Ari Coleman:] Because it's a completely racist statement and a completely abominable, racist, disrespectful statement.
[Mallory Noe-payne, Byline:] For him, it's not just having fun at a party. This is Virginia. Racial violence is not in the distant past.
[Ari Coleman:] You know, KKK basically says, let's kill the black boys. Let's kill the black folks. Let's spray them with water hoses and sic the dogs on them and hang them from trees, you know. That was their rhetoric.
[Mallory Noe-payne, Byline:] It's not like the staff here is just sitting around talking about these controversies. But when they come up, everyone has something to say.
[Ari Coleman:] I would rather racism be in my face and for me to know what it is and let me deal with it, make that decision. You know, I think a resignation needs to happen.
[Mallory Noe-payne, Byline:] Franklin Williams is the manager here. He's lived in Virginia his whole life. None of this surprises him.
[Franklin Williams:] Racism hasn't gone anywhere, it just gets a new face every year. That's how I feel. They find a new way, you know, as quick as they can. They hide because it's so taboo.
[Mallory Noe-payne, Byline:] Williams voted for the governor. He feels slighted and angry.
[Franklin Williams:] What was the point? You know, was it a joke? Was it fun? How do I know that your mentality has changed?
[Chanta Massenburg:] You know, some of the greatest accomplishments have come from people who have had shady histories or, you know, bad histories.
[Mallory Noe-payne, Byline:] Chanta Massenburg works the register. She thinks people should be given a second chances, especially if they're remorseful.
[Chanta Massenburg:] We all have things we've done that we aren't proud of, and I don't think those things should be held over your head if you're 30 years later trying to better yourself and do things to benefit the greater good.
[Mallory Noe-payne, Byline:] You think even blackface falls into that category?
[Chanta Massenburg:] Of course it falls under that category.
[Mallory Noe-payne, Byline:] Customers stop in, grab their takeout. The staff here get back to work. And who will run Virginia? That question continues to play out a couple miles north in the state house. For NPR News, I'm Mallory Noe-Payne in Richmond.

[Steve Inskeep:] New Orleans may take another step today in its recovery from the last disaster. The Orleans Parrish Criminal District Court is scheduled to hold its first jury trial since Hurricane Katrina. Until a few days ago, the head of the court system was Judge Calvin Johnson. He delayed his plans to step down so he could oversee the recovery.
[Judge Calvin Johnson:] It has been the most difficult nine months of my life. It has been truly the most difficult nine months of my entire life.
[Steve Inskeep:] In the days after the storm, Judge Johnson went to the court building to recover computers and other key material. He came and left by boat.
[Judge Calvin Johnson:] I saw buildings surrounded by water, and that's the last glimpse I had of my building for months.
[Steve Inskeep:] When you have walked around your court building that you were using before Hurricane Katrina, what do you see?
[Judge Calvin Johnson:] I see now a beehive of activity, work going on all around our building, in and out of it. And we are holding court. I mean, it's not what we were doing before Katrina, but at least we're doing something.
[Steve Inskeep:] Now there must be an immense buildup of cases, prisoners, and other problems to deal with.
[Judge Calvin Johnson:] Oh, yeah. Because of the lack of jail space, for instance, we had to ship out those individuals who should be incarcerated in the city of New Orleans, we had to ship them out to other facilities. And we still haven't gotten them back because of the lack of jail space. And so that contributes to our inability to operate in an efficient fashion, because a number of individuals must be transported from all over Louisiana back to New Orleans just for their day in court.
[Steve Inskeep:] Now Judge, you've just explained some of the reasons that you need to get jury trials going again as quickly as possible, but are you really ready to get going?
[Judge Calvin Johnson:] We are ready. And this is where sometimes it's confusing when we talk about a system. The court really consists of a judge, a minute clerk, and a court reporter. That's the court. The other aspects of a court are its ancillary pieces. You have the sheriff, the DA, the public defender, the clerk. We actually, we're in control of none of that. But we are dependent upon each of those entities to do what they're supposed to do. And if they...
[Steve Inskeep:] Well let's ask about well let me ask about another one of those parts, a very critical one defense attorneys, public defenders. All but about a half dozen or so of the public defenders in New Orleans were let go due to lack of funds.
[Judge Calvin Johnson:] And that became just a true stumbling block to an efficient operation of a system. Without having defense lawyers, without having those who can represent the indigent and we had a system where about 85 percent of the individuals who came through the system were indigent well, without having lawyers to represent them, we can't operate. If that piece can't function, then the court can't function.
[Steve Inskeep:] Granting that, you're the one who'll decide whether to go forward with trials. Are there enough public defenders to represent defendants adequately when your trials go forward?
[Judge Calvin Johnson:] Well, I think now they are, in the sense that there are enough for us to begin. But now, are there enough to adequately handle the number of individuals who need representation? No. But they're in that process of making themselves new again.
[Steve Inskeep:] The Department of Justice, as you probably know, put out a report last month saying that what was necessary was at least 70 public defenders in New Orleans. When I see it, there are thousands and thousands of defendants. It's hard for me as a layman to believe that even 70 is enough. Do you have anywhere close to 70?
[Judge Calvin Johnson:] Oh, no, indeed. And honestly, in terms of, just like McDonalds' inability to hire workers, the Public Defenders office is having a problem finding lawyers. And so to get up to that number 70, it's going to take a real effort and a period of time. But, heck, for our purposes, naw, if they can get up to 20, that would be a considerable improvement.
[Steve Inskeep:] Judge, what's the first case up on your docket?
[Judge Calvin Johnson:] A murder trial that I really think is going to happen in the month of June, where I know all of the necessary witnesses have been found and either are in the city of New Orleans, or are capable of coming to the city of New Orleans. So that trial should happen.
[Steve Inskeep:] Calvin Johnson was, until just a few days ago, the Chief Judge of the Orleans Parish Criminal Court. Judge, thanks very much.
[Judge Calvin Johnson:] Thank you.

[Robert Siegel:] Joining us now are our Friday political regulars, David Brooks of the New York Times and E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and the Brookings Institution. Good to see you both.
[David Brooks:] Good to see you.
[Robert Siegel:] Throughout today's program, we're hearing about Boston, the bombings, the manhunt. Let's leave that to the rest of our staff and talk about things that happened in Washington this week, which were pretty momentous, especially about guns. David, what happened?
[David Brooks:] Well, I confess I was surprised. I thought something would pass on the gun issue. You know, there's always been an underlying structure to the gun debate, which is the people who oppose gun control vote on the issue, and the people who support it generally don't. And that's been the reason people have generally not tried to introduce legislation. After Sandy Hook, it seemed like that underlying structure had changed. I think we learned this week it hadn't.
[Robert Siegel:] Leaving aside what might have happened in the House, E.J., in the Senate it was two freshmen who undertook the task of writing an amendment: Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the Democrat; Republican Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. Was it perhaps a task too great for two rookies, or could no two senators have been capable of gotten agreement of getting agreement?
[E.j. Dionne:] Well, I only have respect for the two of them because they were really trying to get something done. They both had A ratings from the NRA, and most of their colleagues just didn't have the guts that they did. They said, look, this is a very narrow idea but it's helpful. The people who care about preventing gun violence know that background checks might do more than anything to prevent violence or at least reduce violence.
[Robert Siegel:] And what was really striking is that a lot of senators who said after Newtown, we're ready to vote for background checks, they all went south. I think the real question here is whether the newly the resurgent movement for gun control, which really finally got organized for this fight, decides to continue. And I think there's enough anger about how this vote went that I don't think this movement's going away. So I think there are going to start to be electoral consequences for people who voted against this and I think there's going to be a lot more organizing. But electoral consequences, David, would mean that, you know, in 2014 there will be talk about guns again. Is the issue essentially dead for now?
[David Brooks:] Yes, and I really don't think there will be electoral consequences. I just think, especially in red states, whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, all the political pressure is to oppose these gun control measures. It has been and remains sort of a cultural issue. A lot of people see it, especially in rural places, they see it as urban coastal people trying to impose values. And I think if you want to pass this kind of measure, you really had to start from the red part of America and then go to the blue America. And having people like Michael Bloomberg and Barack Obama leading the charge wasn't helpful because I think it re-aroused some of these cultural symbols around the issue.
[Dionne:] Right, because it should not be a cultural issue. If there's any cultural issue here, it's about reducing fighting against the culture of violence in our country. And I think some of the fighting will start in the red states. I'm not sure it's dead yet. Harry Reid switched his vote so he could bring it up again. And there's going to be real opposition to the fact that 54 senators representing 63 percent of the American people voted yes. And to have this go down without even a real filibuster, I think, opens the way to reconsider this another time.
[Robert Siegel:] In the minute that remains, what's the omen here if indeed after a movement that was spurred by the mass murder of children couldn't bring about a bipartisan amendment, or at least a cloture vote, what does that say about immigration, David?
[David Brooks:] Well, I think you have to be more pessimistic for this reason. What we saw in guns, as in immigration, is a very focused minority opposing a broad and fragile bipartisan coalition trying to defend a compromise piece of legislation none of them are thrilled with. And in those situations, often the focused minority ends up winning that fight.
[Dionne:] I think people who support immigration reform who were rather optimistic a week ago now know the forces they could be up against. About that I agree with David because I think that there are lots of pieces, moving parts to immigration reform, and the opposition is going to concentrate on particular pieces that they're going to try to tear down. But the difference is a very large part of the Republican Party really would like to pass immigration reform because they saw what a paltry percentage of the Latino vote they got in the last election. And so, I think the politics of immigration reform may turn out to be easier, but still there's anxiety now that didn't exist before.
[David Brooks:] Yeah, I agree. The Republicans were not divided on guns; they are divided on immigration. And really, the future of the soul of the Republican Party is going to be settled on this issue.
[Robert Siegel:] David Brooks of the New York Times, E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post, thanks to both of you.
[David Brooks:] Thank you.
[Dionne:] Good to be with you.
[Melissa Block:] This is NPR.

[Steve Inskeep:] Vice President Biden is in Ukraine today, and he will pay respects at a memorial to what Ukrainians call Holodomor, or death by starvation. That was the famine of 1932 and 1933 that hit Ukraine as well as parts of Russia and Kazakhstan. There had been other famines in the Soviet Union, but this one was different. One historian calls it Soviet dictator Josef Stalin's original sin. Brigid McCarthy reports.
[Brigid Mccarthy:] It started with Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture in the late 1920s. Millions of peasants, especially in Ukraine, responded to the confiscation of their land and livestock by refusing to work on the new, state-run farms. Grain production fell and by 1932, Soviet cities were running out of food. Stalin was furious, so he sent special detachments into the villages to seize whatever food they could find. Petro Matulla lived in a village about 75 miles south of Kiev. He was only 4 years old at the time.
[Mr. Petro Matulla:] But I do remember when they came to search for our food.
[Brigid Mccarthy:] He says the Soviets did this for a simple reason.
[Mr. Petro Matulla:] So you wouldn't eat. So you'd die.
[Brigid Mccarthy:] His family managed to survive on a sack of grain his grandfather hid under their barn. But many other families in his village slowly starved to death. Petro Matulla says his mother was haunted by one image.
[Mr. Petro Matulla:] A dead mother was laying on the street, and the baby was sucking on her breast.
[Brigid Mccarthy:] Other survivors and eyewitnesses describe villages where virtually everyone died of starvation. During the famine, Soviet policies enabled the government to feed cities and factory workers, and export more than a million tons of grain to the West. No one knows how many people in the countryside died, but the latest research suggests 6 or 7 million. That's seven times as many as perished during the political arrests of Stalin's great terror a few years later. Andrea Graziosi, a historian at the University of Naples, says Stalin didn't just take food away from the villages. In Ukraine, he also blockaded the cities so peasants couldn't escape from the famine zones.
[Professor Andrea Graziosi:] In 1933, they tried, but they were shipped back to their villages to die.
[Brigid Mccarthy:] Professor Graziosi says the Soviets were using hunger to teach the peasants a lesson.
[Professor Andrea Graziosi:] At the end of '33, they spoke of victory. The famine completely tamed the peasants.
[Brigid Mccarthy:] Historians say after that, Stalin could do almost anything. The Soviet government never acknowledged the famine. But with the collapse of the USSR, Russian and Ukrainian scholars have been unearthing a flood of new information. Now, Ukraine is an independent country, and the famine has become a major political issue. Ukrainian nationalists, including President Viktor Yushchenko, call the Holodomor a genocide, and they're waging a campaign to get other countries to do the same. Nineteen nations have agreed. So has a special commission set up by the U.S. Congress. But the U.S. government has not. The Russian government says the famine was a shared tragedy that affected many parts of the Soviet Union, not just Ukraine. Moscow also accuses President Yushchenko of using the issue to poison Russia's relations with the West. John-Paul Himka, a historian from the University of Alberta, thinks the political debate draws attention away from more important moral questions.
[Professor John-paul Himka:] How is it that a young man or a young woman gets fired to serve the fatherland and to serve the cause of socialism and justice and equality, and ends up taking food away from a starving family?
[Brigid Mccarthy:] Oha Matulla, a famine survivor who lives in the U.S., is just grateful this issue is finally getting attention.
[Mr. Petro Matulla:] For us, it fulfills our goal in life because we cannot forget our past.
[Brigid Mccarthy:] And when long-suppressed crimes are acknowledged, she says, it brings a measure of healing. For NPR News, I'm Brigid McCarthy.
[Steve Inskeep:] This is NPR News.

[Leila Fadel:] Now to Afghanistan. Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. special envoy to that country, says the U.S. and the Taliban are at the threshold of an agreement after nine rounds of talks in Doha. Those talks have been going on for months with both parties negotiating a greater political role for the Taliban and the withdrawal of U.S. forces. But Taliban fighters are still on the offensive. This weekend, they launched two separate attacks on two northern cities. Reporter Jennifer Glasse is in Kabul. Jennifer, thanks for joining us.
[Jennifer Glasse, Byline:] Great to be with you, Leila.
[Leila Fadel:] So this isn't the first time we've heard from negotiators that a deal is close. This war has been going on for two decades. What's different this time?
[Jennifer Glasse, Byline:] Well, we know that the U.S. secretary of state had said he kind of wanted a deal to happen by today, September 1. We have presidential elections happening later this month, September 28. There have been nine rounds of talks, as you said. But now we have the U.S. negotiator and the Taliban both saying that this latest round was successful. He is saying they're on the threshold of a deal, and he's on his way here to Kabul to consult with the Afghan government.
[Leila Fadel:] So last week, President Trump said that the U.S. is considering only a partial troop withdrawal. And this was a surprise to the Taliban, according to a spokesperson who spoke to NPR. The impending deal they thought hinged on a full withdrawal. Do we actually know what's in the deal?
[Jennifer Glasse, Byline:] We're not sure. It hasn't been made public. What we understand is that there'll be a timeline for some sort of phased withdrawal of American forces in exchange for counterterrorism assurances from the Taliban. But really what's crucial is what's not in the deal. In March, there were four conditions these counterterrorism, the U.S. withdrawal but also the inter-Afghan dialogue and a comprehensive cease-fire. Now then, Zalmay Khalilzad was saying there is no final agreement until everything is agreed. And now it seems as though he is saying that the inter-Afghan talks that will happen after this agreement is signed will basically spell out any sort of long-term peace and a long-term cease-fire. So we don't know how many specifics are in it and a lot of people here uneasy that they don't know what's what exactly has been agreed.
[Leila Fadel:] And then in the meantime, the Taliban is still launching attacks, and it seems like a tool for leverage. What will end the fighting?
[Jennifer Glasse, Byline:] Well, that is a great question. And the real question here and the son of the famed Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Massoud this week is actually hedging his bets. He is bringing together on Wednesday an anti-Taliban coalition. They say they're going to fight the Taliban politically and militarily, if necessary really kind of an indication that the Afghans aren't sure that they can trust the Taliban at all. Leila, while these negotiations have begun going on for nine months, the Taliban have continued to fight on the ground trying to increase their leverage on the battlefield so that they would have more influence at the negotiating table. And so Afghans aren't sure whether this any peace agreement will mean the fighting is going to stop.
[Leila Fadel:] So then what does that mean for Afghanistan's upcoming presidential elections scheduled for later this month?
[Jennifer Glasse, Byline:] Well, President Ghani has insisted these elections should go forward. But this week, Abdullah Abdullah, his main contender and his chief executive officer, has said, he's ready to quit the elections for the sake of peace and that kind of throws things into question. So far, we understand the elections are going forward. Election materials are being distributed now as we speak. The elections are only four weeks away. And it what's really uncertain is whether the Taliban who have vehemently opposed these elections have said that they will attack anything associated with the elections whether they're trying to make this a condition for further talks with the Afghans, which is the next step in this process.
[Leila Fadel:] That's reporter Jennifer Glasse in Kabul. Jennifer, thank you.
[Jennifer Glasse, Byline:] Good to talk to you, Leila.

[David Greene:] We'll have two reports. In a moment, we're going to hear from U.S. bikers who are keeping close tabs on the Tour from afar. But first, Eleanor Beardsley has our preview from Paris.
[Unidentified Man:] [French spoken]
[Eleanor Beardsley:] Gilles Simon, editor-in-chief of L'Equipe newspaper's cycling coverage, says this year, Tour organizers are determined to revive the good old days of the race.
[Gilles Simon:] [Through Translator] We all have nostalgia for a Tour De France when doping didn't exist and there was fair competition between riders and Romanesque gestures of sportsmanship. Those are the memories of our youth.
[Eleanor Beardsley:] French anti-doping officials will also be cracking down. For the first time, each rider will have what is known as a blood passport from samples taken throughout the year. That blueprint will allow officials to detect fluctuations from the norm. Michel Rieu is a scientific advisor to the French anti-doping agency. He says another main concern has been that doping techniques are always ahead of detection efforts.
[Michel Rieu:] [Through Translator] So for the first time this year, we will be able to conserve blood and urine samples for eight years and test them retrospectively. That way, we'll be able to take away cheater's titles years later.
[Eleanor Beardsley:] There is a great deal of excitement this year over the return of Lance Armstrong, even though some now view his seven wins suspiciously. Nevertheless, says L'Equipe cycling writer Pierre Callewaert, the French are glad to see him back, and despite his age, think he has a real chance to win again.
[Pierre Callewaert:] He's got the strongest mental will to win. The story of his comeback illustrates that very deeply, when he fall in Spain, broke his collarbone, and then he came back.
[Eleanor Beardsley:] At the Cafe de l'Esplanade in Paris' 7th Arrondissement, the Tour will soon be blaring from a small TV that sits in the corner. Waiter Michel Bausjeau says he can't wait to see Armstrong ride again.
[Michel Bausjeau:] [Through Translator] I like his style. He's beautiful to watch in action, whether it's in time trials or up the mountains. He's something different.
[Eleanor Beardsley:] For NPR News, I'm Eleanor Beardsley in Paris.

[Arun Rath:] Also this week, there was more tough news for Americans who rely on federal unemployment benefits. At the end of last year, Congress failed to extend Emergency Unemployment Compensation, which helps the long-term unemployed. And on December 28th, about 1.3 million people lost benefits. This week, members of Congress brought the program back up for debate, but they could not agree on how to pay for the benefits. And each week, the number of people losing their unemployment checks grows. They're watching Congress closely.
[Amy Roberts:] I can't afford a newspaper subscription right now, so I go to the library, which is close to my house, every morning to read the paper.
[Arun Rath:] Take, for example, Amy Roberts from Columbus, Ohio. She's been out of work for nine months. She spends hours every day searching for jobs.
[Amy Roberts:] I just want anything. I'll take anything right now. You know, I'll take retail, but I don't have a retail background.
[Arun Rath:] Her background is in marketing and event planning, and she's taking classes to earn her master's. Since losing federal benefits three weeks ago, no money is coming in. She's resorted to dog sitting and organizing people's closets.
[Amy Roberts:] I'm selling everything I can. My savings is almost gone, so anything that I had around the house that I didn't need that was valuable I've tried to sell. And I've been pretty successful, but I don't have much left to sell. So...
[Arun Rath:] Plus, she has her 9-year-old daughter to take care of. Roberts says the anxiety eats her up.
[Amy Roberts:] You know, I wish I could stress about being late to work or not being able to buy the shoes that I really want. But this kind of stress is it goes so much deeper. You know, how am I going to pay my phone bill? What if I can't pay for my car? What if my car breaks down? It's every single day and it's constant.
[Sally Linda Edlund:] It was horrible.
[Arun Rath:] In Minneapolis, Minnesota, Sally Linda Edlund has been in a similar situation. She was laid off last February. Her husband was let go two years ago.
[Sally Linda Edlund:] Just that stress of looming over your day-to-day activities and knowing that you have to plan with virtually nothing to plan with, it was really stressful.
[Arun Rath:] Edlund says the unemployment benefits had been a lifeline for her family. She and her husband have three young children.
[Sally Linda Edlund:] We would use that to buy groceries that my car payment came directly out of that, any time we would have to pay medical expenses, yeah, I mean, as soon as that went into our account, it was gone. We relied on that basically for day-to-day living expenses and food and everything. Yeah.
[Arun Rath:] But she is one of the luckier ones. A week after the family lost those benefits, Edlund was hired by a medical device company. But it's only temporary.
[Sally Linda Edlund:] It's worrisome to know that it's eventually going to run out. And so every day that I go in, I'm wondering, gosh, how much longer am I going to be here?
[Arun Rath:] Back in Columbus, Amy Roberts says she's not giving up.
[Amy Roberts:] I'm just being optimistic. I'm just taking it one day at a time. I'm hoping that when I read the paper tomorrow, there's going to be good news.
[Arun Rath:] Lawmakers are expected to resume debate on the legislation in the next two weeks.

[Jacki Lyden:] Lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, wrath, and pride: the seven deadly sins. They've been an inspiration for artists for centuries. Award winning poet Sharon Dolin adds an eighth sin in her new collection, "Burn and Dodge." Sharon Dolin, what is it?
[Ms. Sharon Dolin:] It's guilt, guilt, something we all have. Yes!
[Jacki Lyden:] Will you read your poem "To Guilt" for us, please?
[Ms. Sharon Dolin:] Sure. [Reading] To guilt, eighth deadly sin, half-hidden dissembler, you resemble dwarf centipede, hunching among dead leaves and soil. Or are you between envy, who bites her nails and sloth who can't be bothered? You vanish when I'm hard at work, then gash me when I sit to read a novel or even think of running to the movies or out to buy a skirt. Or else your stepsister, mother guilt with her 82 legs barges in on me here in the cafe when I think I've given you the slip. She finds me slacking off for five minutes, not with my child but reading the paper about a new species of centipede discovered in Central Park. How else assuage you but equate you, draw you in. Among leaf litter, at less than half an inch, you are shorter than your name, Nannarrup hoffmani. With your poisonous fangs, you will probably eat me when I am nothing but body. For now, feed on this.
[Jacki Lyden:] I'm just thinking, Sharon Dolin, it's not everybody who can get guilt and a centipede into the same poem.
[Ms. Sharon Dolin:] Well, actually it's mother guilt, which is a particular brand of guilt. And then since I've become a mother I do seem to be prone to even more sins or vices than before. And there is a way in which you're sort of eaten up by these various vices, and certainly mother guilt. Oh, that's one I carry all the time.
[Jacki Lyden:] Now, you've written this book. There are no less than four poems about envy in here. And you have a lot of fun and play with the seven deadly sins. But the book is not named for that. It's called "Burn and Dodge," this collection of poems. Would you please explain where the title comes from?
[Ms. Sharon Dolin:] Well, it is a photographic term. It does refer to photographs where you burn in the light or you dodge the light. But I was thinking of it metaphorically. I was thinking about myself burning up in these various vices. And then, I thought, what is the way out of them? Well, through linguistic play and through praise, ultimately. So I think of the collection as really about the burning up in the vices. And then, how do you dodge them? How do you get away from them? And sometimes it happens in the same poem.
[Jacki Lyden:] You've got a very quirky and wild style. I like it. It's very uninhibited. But when you talk about these themes, when you think about sins, do you think that any of the sins I mean, if you had to pick one, which one would you say you enjoy the most, or relish the most perhaps is the word?
[Ms. Sharon Dolin:] Yeah, each time I think about them, each one feels like my chief vice. So envy, yes. But indecision, I think, has really been with me for much of my life.
[Jacki Lyden:] You know, I have to say that your poem "Entreaty to Indecision" was one of my favorites in this collection. Maybe you can read that one for us.
[Ms. Sharon Dolin:] [Reading] "Entreaty to Indecision." Anxiety's flunky, you do, in your undoing, her grunt work. Heart flutterer, sleep depriver, It is to you, two-headed turncoat I have offered up my life. Dun-colored peahen, why can't I oust you at last from the roost of me? You know how to tempt me on the one hand with your lavender veils, on the other with sea green. So, I'm a swivel-headed spendthrift. Or when two paths or men loom before me, I stand there, medusa'd quivering on caffeine until one or both dries up or grows overgrown with brush or moves on. And so I plod, plod, plod. The one still left, or else bereft, always leaning toward dreaming about the right one. Can't you stop? I've worshiped at your twin altars long enough, not to decide is to decide on my teenage wall, my postered boast to live by. Thirty years later, you're in my blood, And when your anxious mistress wells up inside, don't I know by now, what I have to do to be rid of you? Or do I?
[Jacki Lyden:] That seems like a poem that not only speaks to midlife, but to our times right now.
[Ms. Sharon Dolin:] Well, at certain moments I'm extremely decisive, and then I have these moments where I just get paralyzed. And so, I thought, well, maybe if I turn her into a goddess and I petition her, maybe she'll leave me alone. At least I get a poem out of it.
[Jacki Lyden:] Sharon Dolin, her new collection is called "Burn and Dodge." It's been a real pleasure speaking with you. Thanks so much for joining us.
[Ms. Sharon Dolin:] It's been a real pleasure for me too, Jacki. Thank you.

[Noel King:] Some new satellite images show that North Korea is dismantling key facilities at a satellite launching station on its western coast. It looks like follow-through from last month's U.S.-North Korea summit in Singapore. But NPR's Elise Hu reports North Korea is dismantling something it doesn't really need.
[Elise Hu, Byline:] The place is called the Sohae Satellite Launching Station. Researcher Melissa Hanham has used satellite imagery to watch its campus over the years. It features an assembly facility...
[Melissa Hanham:] A command center, hotels. Reporters have visited this location before. Really, the most noticeable thing is a huge launch pad.
[Elise Hu, Byline:] Sohae has served as the country's primary launch site for rockets.
[Melissa Hanham:] Symbolically, it is a important place. It's, you know, a well-known place.
[Elise Hu, Byline:] Now, North Korean authorities have started raising a rocket engine test stand and a related building located not far from that huge launch pad. North Koreans used the test stand to experiment with a series of engines that went into intercontinental ballistic missiles you know, the ones that in theory could reach the mainland U.S.
[Melissa Hanham:] What it actually means to dismantle that site unfortunately, it's not as exciting as we had hoped. You know, there's a lot of parts of North Korea's missile and nuclear program that we would like to pay attention to. And this is really just the lowest hanging fruit.
[Elise Hu, Byline:] She says North Korea doesn't need this test stand anymore, making the dismantling more a confidence-building signal than substance. A South Korean national security adviser said today, quote, "it's a better sign than nothing." North Korea watchers say the denuclearization agreement in Singapore was so vague that it left out verification measures leaving moves like this in the eye of the beholder.
[Bruce Klingner:] The two sides are still very wide apart on what they feel denuclearization is.
[Elise Hu, Byline:] Former CIA analyst Bruce Klingner is now a researcher at the Heritage Foundation.
[Bruce Klingner:] Now that North Korea is, by their definition, inside the nuclear club, they will go down to zero nukes when everyone else in the club does.
[Elise Hu, Byline:] They appear to be going down one engine test stand, but it's not hard to rebuild one. And on the concrete measure in Singapore to return remains of soldiers from the Korean War, the U.S. and North Korea are still haggling over the details. Elise Hu, NPR News, Seoul.

[David Greene:] It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm David Greene.
[Renee Montagne:] And I'm Renee Montagne. After a long political fight, Congress has passed a compromise on student loans. The bill is now waiting for President's Obama signature, just in time for students entering classes this fall. As NPR's Ailsa Chang reports, the legislation will lower student interest rates in the short term, but those rates are expected to rise.
[Ailsa Chang, Byline:] The weird thing about this long, protracted battle is that in the end the differences between the sides weren't that monumental. President Obama and the House had similar plans months ago. Senators dickered for a while and then in the end came up with a proposal the House approved overwhelmingly on Wednesday.
[Unidentified Man:] The yays are 392. The nays are 31.
[Ailsa Chang, Byline:] But the whole debate took weeks and weeks. The Senate blew past a July 1 deadline, which ended up doubling interest rates on subsidized loans. And House Republicans had been gloating ever since. Lots of them got in one last dig on Wednesday, like Virginia Foxx of North Carolina.
[Representative Virginia Foxx:] As a former teacher, I would say that while the Senate turned in their assignment rather late, it's always better to turn in an assignment, even if it's late.
[Ailsa Chang, Byline:] But the Senate still got a passing grade. So what's the final legislation? Student loan interest rates will now be tied to the 10-year Treasury note. That's the borrowing rate for the government, so it's really low. And it's what House Republicans wanted all along. Here's Eric Cantor, the House majority leader.
[Representative Eric Cantor:] I'm very, very excited the Senate and the White House finally decided to put politics aside and come down on the side of the students and join us in making sure that student loan interest rates do not escalate.
[Ailsa Chang, Byline:] Well, actually, the rates will likely go up. Right now undergrads will see a rate of 3.86 percent. But as the economy improves, that rate will rise. There's a cap at 8.25 percent, but a lot of critics say that cap is too high. At any rate, many lawmakers acknowledge tweaking interest rates isn't going to make or break whether most people can go to college. More reform is needed to make college affordable, they say, and they promise to tackle that issue after summer recess. Ailsa Chang, NPR News, the Capitol.

[Renee Montagne:] A federal appeals court has gotten in the way of part of the Bush administration's legal strategy in the war on terror. For more than three years, the government held Jose Padilla as an enemy combatant, saying he plotted to carry out terrorist attacks in the United States. Padilla's lawyers challenged the enemy combatant designation in court. After the government won an appeals court victory, Justice Department lawyers changed course and indicted Padilla. Then they asked the court to forget about the enemy combatant issue and the court said no. NPR's Ari Shapiro has the story.
[Ari Shapiro Reporting:] This was a win for Jose Padilla's defense lawyer, Andrew Patel, but he had surprisingly little to say in reaction.
[Mr. Andrew Patel:] Look, this is an astounding document. There's really nothing that I can add that Judge Luttig hasn't already said.
[Shapiro:] Judge Michael Luttig of the 4th Circuit Appeals Court in Richmond said a lot in his opinion yesterday. Much of it rebukes the government. That's notable because Luttig is widely considered to be sympathetic to the Bush administration. Back in September, Judge Luttig agreed with the government's argument that it could hold Jose Padilla as an enemy combatant indefinitely without bringing criminal charges against the American citizen. Then Justice Department officials brought criminal charges. They maintained Padilla was no longer an enemy combatant, just a regular criminal suspect. They asked the 4th Circuit to vacate its opinion and hand Padilla over to the criminal justice system and that's where they lost the court's favor. Carl Tobias teaches law at the University of Richmond.
[Professor Carl Tobias:] Judge Luttig is-this was calling the government to task and asking it to explain why there is this impression left that the government may have held Padilla erroneously or that it's trying to avoid ultimate resolution in the Supreme Court.
[Shapiro:] Luttig authored a three-judge decision, saying the Supreme Court should decide whether to hear the Padilla case despite the government's wishes. He questions why the Padilla indictment makes no mention of the crimes Padilla was originally accused of and he says the timing of the indictment, just days before Supreme Court briefs were due has, quote, "given rise to at least an appearance that the purpose of these actions may be to avoid consideration of our decision by the Supreme Court." Professor Tobias says this means the Bush administration's theory of executive war powers will be reviewed once again.
[Professor Carl Tobias:] This is an important case, one of the most important on the issue of the president's unilateral executive authority to declare someone an enemy combatant and detain that person indefinitely.
[Shapiro:] Justice Department officials were disappointed with the ruling. Spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos released a written statement. She said the Justice Department has a right to prosecute federal crimes and that that has nothing to do with whether or not someone is an enemy combatant. She says the DOJ will go on pursuing the criminal charges and is considering its next move. Defense lawyer Patel says it's nice to see judges keeping the executive Branch in check, especially the 4th Circuit judges who've decided against him in the past.
[Mr. Andrew Patel:] The big picture of what Judge Luttig is saying, which is questioning what the government is doing and why they're doing it, that's a very healthy thing.
[Shapiro:] Next comes the long-awaited word from the Supreme Court on enemy combatants. Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Washington.
[Renee Montagne:] This is NPR News.

[Steve Inskeep:] The man you hear playing keyboards on this Bruce Springsteen hit has died. Danny Federici played on Springsteen records and solo albums for decades.
[Mr. Bruce Springsteen:] [Singing] Everybody's got a hungry heart, everybody's got a hungry heart.
[Steve Inskeep:] Federici battled melanoma for years before his death at age 58, but he continued playing as recently as a Springsteen concert last month. Danny Federici's recordings included the keyboards on this song, called "You're Missing."
[Mr. Bruce Springsteen:] [Singing] God's drifting in here, devil's in the mailbox, got dust on my shoes, nothing but teardrops.
[Steve Inskeep:] This is NPR News.

[Steve Inskeep:] OK. Now, this next story is jaw-dropping, in a sense. Scientists in China have unearthed a fossil fish that is the most primitive animal yet discovered that has a jaw. As NPR's Rhitu Chatterjee reports, the finding throws new light on where our own jaws came from.
[Rhitu Chatterjee, Byline:] The new fossil is 420 millions years old. It was dug up from a reservoir in China's Yunnan province. Xiaobo Yu works at Kean University in New Jersey, and is a member of the team that studied the fossil.
[Xiaobo Yu:] Oh, this is such a beautiful specimen. Three-dimensionally preserved.
[Rhitu Chatterjee, Byline:] He says he immediately recognized the fossil's significance.
[Xiaobo Yu:] It's kind of like your adrenaline level goes up, like the feeling of having hit a gold mine.
[Rhitu Chatterjee, Byline:] The specimen belongs to a group of ancient, extinct fishes called Placoderms. It has armored plates on its head and upper body.
[Xiaobo Yu:] So it looks like almost like a small turtle, but with a fish body.
[Rhitu Chatterjee, Byline:] But to Yu's surprise, this fish had a complete upper and lower jaw. Now, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and bony fishes all have jaws. And scientists know that jaws first appeared in fish. But they didn't expect to find jaws in this very primitive type of fish. The new discovery suggests jaws may have originated very early on in evolution. The findings are published in the latest issue of the journal Nature. Matt Friedman is a paleobiologist at Oxford University. He says this early fish didn't have teeth.
[Matt Friedman:] But this remarkable creature has an arrangement of bones that looks very much like modern fishes in terms of the composition of the bones that are sort of encircling the mouth.
[Rhitu Chatterjee, Byline:] And these bones are remarkably similar to the bones in our own jaws.
[Matt Friedman:] It has what looks like a dentary. It has what looks like a maxilla.
[Rhitu Chatterjee, Byline:] The dentary is the main bone in our lower jaw. And the upper jaw is the maxilla.
[Matt Friedman:] This is in a very, very deep part of our own family tree, suggesting that those features we still have are of much greater antiquity than we might have previously thought.
[Rhitu Chatterjee, Byline:] Rhitu Chatterjee, NPR News.
[David Greene:] We appreciate you spending part of your morning with us, listening to MORNING EDITION on one of our fine public radio stations around the country. We are also allover social media. Come visit the MORNING EDITION Facebook page. And you can find us on Twitter. Steve is @nprinskeep. I'm @nprgreeene. And all of us are @MORNING EDITION. It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News.

[Kelly Mcevers:] Now a look at one of the largest sources for rented theater costumes in the country. The Theater Development Fund is best known for running discount ticket booths in New York City. Reporter Naomi Lewin checked it out when she was asked to portray Johann Sebastian Bach in a video.
[Naomi Lewin, Byline:] If you were a little kid who liked to play dress-up, this place would knock your Wicked Witch of the West socks off.
[Stephen Cabral:] We have a little bit of everything here. We have some odd pieces. Like, I see a strawberry. I see a bunch of skeletons.
[Naomi Lewin, Byline:] Is that an elephant head?
[Stephen Cabral:] That is yeah, that is an elephant head.
[Naomi Lewin, Byline:] Stephen Cabral is the director of the costume collection at the Theater Development Fund, TDF for short. The not-for-profit is dedicated to making theater more accessible through ticket education and disability programs. TDF got into the costume business in the mid-1960s when the Metropolitan Opera was about to move to Lincoln Center.
[Stephen Cabral:] They had 22 full operas that they knew that they would not be taking with them but they didn't want to just toss away. So TDF took on all these old productions from the Met and began to at a very, very, very inexpensive rate rent out these costumes.
[Naomi Lewin, Byline:] To anyone who's doing a performance anywhere in the United States.
[Stephen Cabral:] We're not renting for Halloween, and we're not renting for parties with food or liquids where something could happen to the costume. But if you're doing something that seems of an artistic nature in some way, we're going to be able to rent to you.
[Naomi Lewin, Byline:] Money from those rentals goes to pay the nonprofit's staff and for overhead. The collection is housed in a vast subterranean space in Queens three flights down from the largest soundstage east of Hollywood. All of the costumes are donated. They include Bob Mackie gowns designed for Carol Burnett, Shakespearean garb from the Public Theater and dresses from Broadway shows.
[Stephen Cabral:] These are both from the musical "Gypsy." This is from a production on Broadway with Bernadette Peters. It's very flirty. You know, it's very light. It's very short. She's not very tall.
[Bernadette Peters:] [Singing] Some people can get a thrill knitting sweaters and sitting still.
[Stephen Cabral:] Then you have this costume which was worn by Patti LuPone in "Gypsy." This is a three-piece brown wool suit probably 1920s, '30s. It has this outer coat that is very heavy, predominantly black.
[Patti Lupone:] [Singing] You'll never get away from me. You can climb the tallest tree.
[Naomi Lewin, Byline:] Cabral points out a gown from a Met production of "Lucia Di Lammermoor."
[Stephen Cabral:] It is very Elizabethan but done Metropolitan Opera. So the sleeves are a little longer and the fabric is a little bit more ornate.
[Naomi Lewin, Byline:] This particular gown was once shipped to an opera company in the Midwest. Afterwards, Cabral got a phone call saying...
[Stephen Cabral:] You had one of my singers in tears last night. The person being fitted for this costume was a young opera singer. And when she saw the costume and saw that it had a Metropolitan Opera label and it said Beverly Sills, the young woman broke down because she couldn't believe that she was so fortunate to not only wear a Metropolitan Opera, but to wear something by Beverly Sills.
[Naomi Lewin, Byline:] This costume is part of what TDF calls its special stock. After these costumes have seen their share of use, they're moved into regular stock. And once they start looking shabby, they might go into the distressed section. Or they could go straight to the semiannual bag sale, where Cabral says there's a set price for everything you can stuff into one bag.
[Stephen Cabral:] And the rule is we just don't ever want to see the costume again.
[Naomi Lewin, Byline:] So keep your eyes on the TDF website if you, too, are looking to dress up as a famous composer. For NPR News, I'm Naomi Lewin in New York.

[Audie Cornish:] It's Monday, time for All Tech Considered. And today, robots to the rescue. Imagine a cockroach-sized robot, for instance, finding people trapped in a collapsed building, or a walking humanoid robot fighting fires aboard Navy ships. Researchers are working on both of those things.
[Robert Siegel:] And around the Greek island of Lesbos, an American team is putting a robot to work to help rescue migrants crossing the Mediterranean. The researchers from Texas A&M are sending a jet-powered, remote-controlled lifesaving buoy into the surf. Joanna Kakissis has the story.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] It's a cold, rainy morning here on the coast. A first responder from the Hellenic Red Cross, Vassilis Hatzopoulos, points at the sea. Eight migrant rafts, including one that's not moving.
[Vassilis Hatzopoulos:] OK, this boat up there no engine failure of the engine. That's it. So they asked for help from the Coast Guard.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] Two other rafts move closer to the shore. I'm walking with John Sims. Back home, he's a fire chief in Arizona. But here, he's teaching the Hellenic Red Cross to use a device called EMILY. And there she goes into the water. You might call her a boat. You might call her a buoy. She's about 4 feet long, weighs 25 pounds and looks like a cylinder wrapped in an orange life jacket. John Sims is steering EMILY with the remote. She's speeding toward the migrant rafts.
[John Sims:] I'll keep her about 20, 30 meters behind her.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] Wow, she's going pretty fast.
[John Sims:] Yeah.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] She rides waves really well.
[John Sims:] She does rides really, really well. The only thing that affects her sometimes over a wave is a little bit of wind.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] So somebody falls in the water, they can just, like, hug EMILY?
[John Sims:] Yep, just jump onto it. And it gives enough time for a lifeguard then to get suited up and get out to them.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] The raft arrives onshore. Red Cross volunteers cover the shivering Afghan migrants in Mylar blankets. No one falls out. They did not need EMILY to help rescue anyone in this situation. Sims says she was standing by just in case she was needed.
[John Sims:] EMILY is perfect as a floating life buoy or a floating life jacket. We can throw it in the water, and it doesn't take much time. We can go out there and we can escort the boat in. If anybody has a problem they're hypothermic, they're sick, there's a problem with the boat and they happen to fall overboard EMILY can be on site within seconds.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] Sims and I are now talking with Tony Mulligan, who invented EMILY. He owns a maritime robotics company and says he designed these rescue robots to be practically indestructible.
[Tony Mulligan:] They're made out of Kevlar and aircraft-grade composites, so they can handle a 30-foot wave, they can be thrown out of a helicopter or off of bridges.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] And EMILY has saved lives. Her first rescue involved a father and son caught in rough surf off the coast of Oregon.
[Tony Mulligan:] The helicopter wasn't going to be able to get there for an hour, the water's 50 degrees, and it was too rough to put swimmers in. And the boat ran out with a line, they grabbed on, and they pulled them back.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] Since then, Mulligan has sent 260 EMILYs to first responders around the world.
[Tony Mulligan:] We've been told that she's done a lot of really cool things in Mongolia and Kazakhstan during floods. It's common in Indonesia for tsunami response.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] And he's part of this team that brought two EMILYs to Greece.
[Tony Mulligan:] We're Roboticists Without Borders. So the whole purpose is bring technology to the first responders, and make it safer for them and make them be able to do a better job.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] But it's more than a job for Mulligan. It's personal. He shows me the back of EMILY, which stands for Emergency Integrated Lifesaving Lanyard at least officially.
[Tony Mulligan:] You'll see there's a little rose on the logo. And there's three initials, ERS, which stood for Emily Rose Shane.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] Mulligan named EMILY after his daughter's best friend, who was killed in a car accident. She was just 13. Mulligan remembers she loved helping people, and now EMILY the rescue robot is doing just that. For NPR News, I'm Joanna Kakissis on Lesbos.

[Steve Inskeep:] Europe has survived one financial crisis after another. A bailout of Cyprus is only the latest, following catastrophes from Ireland to Greece and beyond. The solutions to each of these disasters have varied widely, but they share one common factor one country that provides much of the money for bailouts, and ends up dictating many of the terms. Zanny Minton Beddoes, economics editor at The Economist, has been visiting that country, and she spoke with us for today's Business Bottom Line. Would you remind us why it is that Germany ends up in the center of crisis after crisis after crisis, in Europe?
[Zanny Minton Beddoes:] Because Germany is essentially, the paymaster. Germany is the biggest, the most successful economy; the one that ultimately has the fiscal capacity to support the others. And Germany is gradually becoming the political powerhouse of Europe. And for much of its post-war history, Germany was a economic success story but a political pygmy. Now...
[Steve Inskeep:] Trying to be very modest.
[Zanny Minton Beddoes:] Absolutely, given...
[Steve Inskeep:] It didn't want to repeat the failures of World War II.
[Zanny Minton Beddoes:] Of course. And now, thanks to the fact that Germany survived the financial crisis much better than many other economies, Germany is the only big economy in a position, really, to support the others. And what Germany wants, essentially, sets the parameters for what each, individual euro rescue will be like. And Angela Merkel is, by far, the most powerful politician in the euro area.
[Steve Inskeep:] She's the chancellor of Germany; she has been, for years. She's up for re-election. So when she looks at one crisis after another, what does she want?
[Zanny Minton Beddoes:] She has two time horizons. Her short-term time horizon is to get re-elected in September. And that demands, first of all, maintaining the aura of competent stewardship that she has developed in Germany. She is seen as someone who has protected Germans from the euro crisis. And Germans save huge amounts; they're very focused on financial security and financial stability. And the main concern about the euro crisis, amongst Germans, is that in the end, they will pay and they will lose their financial security.
[Steve Inskeep:] Mm-hmm.
[Zanny Minton Beddoes:] And her second time horizon is a longer-term one, which is that of following what she thinks is the best route towards ensuring that Europe as a whole the euro area is competitive, and can succeed in the 21st century economy. There's a phrase that Angela Merkel likes to repeat, again and again. She points out that Europe accounts for about 7 percent of the world's population, around 25 percent of the world's GDP. But it finances about 50 percent of the world's social spending; which means that its governments are incredibly generous, in terms of social spending, compared to others around the world.
[Steve Inskeep:] Paying for the elderly, paying for health care, things like that.
[Zanny Minton Beddoes:] Absolutely. And she takes that to be a very clear indication of how Europe needs, essentially, to buck up and become more competitive.
[Steve Inskeep:] Meaning that Europe needs to make more money, or Europe needs to spend less on its people?
[Zanny Minton Beddoes:] Both. Both.
[Steve Inskeep:] Now it's interesting that you talk about Germany dominating Europe because I'm thinking about the United States, the way that it has a giant place in the world and consequently, many people deeply resent the United States for acting self-righteous; for telling other people what to do. Are people getting to really resent Germany, at this point?
[Zanny Minton Beddoes:] Yes, they are. If you look at the popular press in Greece, even in Cyprus, you will see pictures of Angela Merkel with swastikas or a mustache I mean, that there are lots of historical...
[Steve Inskeep:] A Hitler mustache.
[Zanny Minton Beddoes:] ...caricatures which can be made quite easily about Germany, and which the U.S. there's no equivalent to. And the question, to me, is whether Germany itself sees the need to lead, in setting up a new architecture of Europe. It is very hard for Germans to lead in an overt way because of all these overtones that come the minute Germany very obviously pushes forward.
[Steve Inskeep:] Are Europeans broadly concerned about losing their position of leadership in the world?
[Zanny Minton Beddoes:] I think Angela Merkel is concerned about it; and I think the Germans are very focused on this need for competitiveness and the need for Europe, as a whole, to reform. More broadly, I think Europeans are very focused on their crisis right now, and they're very focused on the right way to deal with it. So there hasn't been an awful lot of breathing room to kind of stand back and think about Europe's position in the bigger picture. But I think that's what motivates her. And I think that there's a very clear sense she has that Europe needs to kind of shake up, and buckle up, and therefore, do a lot of reforms in order to maintain its position within the global economy.
[Steve Inskeep:] Zanny Minton Beddoes, economics editor of The Economist. Thanks for coming by.
[Zanny Minton Beddoes:] Thank you.

[Ed Gordon:] Joining us now from our NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C. is Maria Foscarinis. She's founder and executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. Welcome to the program.
[Ms. Maria Foscarinis:] Nice to be here, Ed.
[Ed Gordon:] We should note that, as Mr. Peck said in the end, these are issues not just of feeding the homeless, but the indigent people have a struggle against human rights violations in this country in terms of housing, religion, education and many other aspects that come into play. And we should note, disproportionately, race comes into play. It's reported that about 40 percent of the homeless in this country are African-Americans.
[Ms. Maria Foscarinis:] Absolutely. I think that this is a very important point to note, that when we talk about homelessness, we're really talking about extreme poverty, and poverty is on the increase in our country. And it affects disproportionate numbers of minorities. Primarily African-Americans, people of Hispanic origin are disproportionately represented, and that's also reflected in the homeless population. A disproportionate number are African-American or of Hispanic origin. Interestingly, this is a human rights issue and it is something that is increasingly perceived as a human rights issue. And interestingly, the human rights committee in Geneva, the UN body responsible for monitoring human rights violations, chastised the United States. And this was the first time it drew attention to the issue of homelessness in the United States. And it specifically focused on the disproportionate racial impact. And...
[Ed Gordon:] Is it possible, Ms. Foscarinis, to find the happy medium, if you will. Because as altruistic as people want to believe themselves to be, often it becomes a not in my backyard situation as well.
[Ms. Maria Foscarinis:] Exactly. Well, that's true. I think there is a happy medium, and I think the happy medium we reach that by focusing on solutions. And I think that's exactly what Las Vegas is not doing. It and other cities around the country are trying simply to sweep homeless people away, to sweep poor people away, to sweep away any evidence of poverty in America. And I think that's exactly the wrong way to go. It's understandable that cities and neighbors do not like to see poor people, do not like horribly impoverished people living in their backyards or in their neighborhoods or in their city streets. Nobody wants that. We don't want that. The people themselves don't want that. But the solution is not to make it a crime. It's not to sweep them away. The solution is to work for, to address the causes. Why are people in these extreme and these dire circumstances? We've got to talk about affordable housing, we've got to talk about living wage jobs, we've got to talk about safety net programs healthcare, mental healthcare. Those are the solutions. That's what we're working for.
[Ed Gordon:] We should note, as you suggested, as poverty grows across this country, we're starting to see these fights grow hand-in-hand. This is not just happening in Orlando and Las Vegas. We're seeing these fights, quite frankly, across the country.
[Ms. Maria Foscarinis:] Exactly. And I think we've got to we really have to focus on this as a national issue, and we've got to look at it as a human rights issue. It's embarrassing. It's a violation of basic human rights, of standards that the world community have agreed to about basic rights of human beings. And in a country as rich as ours, I think we can do much, much better. And that's why I think it's very significant that the UN has now drawn attention to this issue. So our country is now up on a world stage being criticized for its treatment of poor and homeless people, and especially for the disproportionate impact on racial minorities.
[Ed Gordon:] We should note that we're going to see some conferences, including a conference on September 24th or 21st I should say a forum for the homeless and housing rights activists. But we should also note that this is beyond just a poverty question. This really is a civil and human rights issue, is it not?
[Ms. Maria Foscarinis:] It is a civil rights issue, and it's a human rights issue. Certainly as we see in Las Vegas, the civil rights and I think the ACLU representative was very right to point this out we're seeing people being discriminated against based on their economic status. We're seeing also, people being at least de facto being discriminated against based on race. It may not be intentional, but it's a reality that the large proportion 40 percent of homeless people are African-Americans. And it may not be explicitly stated as an intentional discrimination, but that is the reality. And there's a reason for that, and it's all of the reasons of economic injustice in our country that disproportionately affect racial minorities. And so it is an issue of civil rights. It's an issue of human rights because the world community has said that there is a human right to housing, and that's not honored in our country. Even though the United States itself has also said, you know, over 50 years ago made a commitment to provide a decent home for every American. In federal legislation the 1949 Housing Act and that is a commitment that has been broken over and over again. Funding for housing programs has been cut repeatedly. And that means that people who are poor and who can't afford to find a place to pay for a place to live without assistance are really being squeezed out.
[Ed Gordon:] Well, it's more than important to keep this issue in the fore. Maria Foscarinis, she's the founder and executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. We thank you for joining us today. Appreciate it.
[Ms. Maria Foscarinis:] Thank you so much.
[Ed Gordon:] Coming up, Israel and Lebanon have agreed to a cease-fire in the Middle East, but will it last? And a Dallas school is accused of crossing the line to increase white student enrollment. We'll discuss these topics and more on our roundtable. This is NPR News.

[Robert Siegel:] The election of Egypt's first Islamist president could alter alliances across the Mideast. Diplomats and analysts are trying to figure out how Egypt's relations with Iran, Israel and other countries may change now that a member of the long-banned Muslim Brotherhood will be leading the country. From Cairo, NPR's Peter Kenyon has our story.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] As world leaders offered congratulations to Mohammed Morsi, the Obama administration was quick to seek assurances that Egypt would continue to honor its international obligations in particular, the peace treaty with Israel. Morsi himself has been circumspect about his foreign policy, saying only that he will strive for a balanced approach. But here's how a senior advisor, Gehad El-Haddad, responded when a BBC interviewer him asked him if Morsi views Israel as an enemy.
[Gehad El-haddad:] Yes, Israel is an enemy of human rights. It is an enemy of peace and an enemy of stability. All of these are interests of the Egyptian nation and the Egyptian people within their region.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] But Haddad stopped short of calling Israel an enemy of Egypt, and Morsi has promised to respect existing treaties. Haddad did repeat Morsi's demand that the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip be lifted. But again, he was cautious, saying only that Egypt would lobby the international community to do more to end Palestinian suffering. Haddad also spoke about Iran, flatly denying reports alleging that Morsi had told an Iranian news outlet that he wanted closer ties with Tehran.
[Gehad El-haddad:] This was an entire hearsay story. It was made up by one of the Egyptian newswires, unfortunately. Since the second round of elections, Dr. Morsi, President Morsi has not made a single interview with any press agency.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] Publisher and analyst Hisham Kassem told Al Jazeera's English-language channel that fears that Egypt might suddenly embrace Tehran are overblown for two reasons. First, the Egyptian military retains power over major foreign policy moves. And second, the Muslim Brotherhood doesn't support Tehran's regional ambitions any more than the military does.
[Hisham Kassem:] If we start getting too close to Iran, we're going to antagonize the Gulf and the Trans-Atlantic at once. And again, it's not in our best interest that Iran acquires a nuclear weapon at any cost.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] Persian Gulf analyst Mustafa al-Ani, at the Geneva-based Gulf Research Center, says if Egypt wants to normalize diplomatic ties with Iran that's one thing. But any move to ally itself with Tehran will cost Egypt something it can't afford to lose the financial backing of wealthy Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia. Another source of anxiety surrounding Egypt's new president is the rising profile of the Muslim Brotherhood around the region. The Brotherhood-influenced Hamas runs the Gaza Strip, and the Syrian Muslim Brothers are a powerful component of the rebellion against the regime in Damascus. The Brothers are a noticeable presence in Kuwait, and are causing serious concern among the rulers of Jordan, the other Arab state to have a peace treaty with Israel. Veteran Egyptian analyst Abdel Monem Saeed says it's ironic that Jordan's King Abdullah, who a decade ago warned of an Iranian-led Shiite crescent of power forming in the Middle East, is now worried about the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. Saeed believes what Jordan is really concerned about is an Arab Spring uprising against a monarchy that refuses to enact political reforms.
[Dr. Abdel Monem Saeed:] That did not happen in Jordan. And King Abdullah, he has an anxiety about the Muslim Brothers in cooperation. Because the model we got is actually revolutions are made by youth, by discontent, and then the Muslim Brothers come with their organizational, financial abilities to the fore.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] But Saeed and other analysts agree that if there is to be a rise of the Brothers, Egypt won't have much of a role in it anytime soon. Mohammed Morsi will be far too busy struggling to cope with a deeply entrenched military and a devastated economy. Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Cairo.

[Rachel Martin:] Whoever wants to win the White House in 2016 needs to consider the Latino vote and how to mobilize it. Political action committees, like the Latino Victory Project, are working to boost traditionally low voter turnout and to build a donor base. The group's president, Cristobal Alex, says his PAC is modeled on liberal groups like EMILY's List, which promotes Democratic women. Alex says his PAC is nonpartisan, albeit with a caveat.
[Cristobal Alex:] Well, we are nonpartisan. It just so happens that to date, our candidates that we have endorsed have been Democrats. But what we look at is not party affiliation but really the core values that the candidates stand for and whether or not they represent Latino values, which are American values access to opportunity, at least a minimum wage, immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship. Those are the things that we look at when we select our candidates. And in September, we'll release our endorsements for 2016.
[Rachel Martin:] Are you endorsing any Republicans or trying to encourage more Republican Latinos to run for office?
[Cristobal Alex:] Right now we're looking very carefully at that question. Our focus in '16 will be to be as strategic as we can and to make a difference in battleground states where Latinos have a sufficient number to basically make the decisions as to who's going to be in the Senate, who's going to be the next president of United States. And in those states, including Nevada, Colorado, Florida, it's going to be it's going to come down to the Latino vote.
[Rachel Martin:] You talk about particular states and how this election, a lot of it will turn on whether or not Latinos turn out to vote. But those numbers haven't been great over the years. The number of Latinos who actually show up on Election Day is probably not what you would like to see. What's been the challenge in mobilizing Latino voters?
[Cristobal Alex:] You're exactly right. Our numbers aren't what they need to be. Last presidential cycle, in 2012, about 11 million Latinos turned out to vote, almost 10 percent of the electorate. But even more Latinos almost 12 million stayed home on Election Day. And we think that if you get a good strong Latino running for office that represents the community and has the right support and backing, including financial backing, they can win and, in the process, increase Latino turnout. It's a virtuous cycle.
[Rachel Martin:] How do you get people to become donors? Is that harder than mobilizing voters?
[Cristobal Alex:] Well, I've got to say it's not easy. Politics is not inexpensive. And if we want to make change in this country, we're going to have to invest politically in our own community. And so we've set out to do that by creating a donor pipeline. And one of the exciting things about it this year is we're launching a program called the Firsts. In a lot of Latino communities, you've got in families you've got the first to hit educational and financial milestones, the first child to graduate from high school, the first to go to college, the first lawyer, doctor, etcetera. And we're going to target these folks, who are generally apolitical, and bring them into the political process and ask them to donate.
[Rachel Martin:] But I imagine you get pushback when they say, but, you know, we don't have the candidates. Who am I giving the money to?
[Cristobal Alex:] A good question, and what we come back to is, do you want to stand with the community? That messaging is really important for the Latinos because what we see in different parts of the country and even if you don't have a Latina running for the United States Senate, you want to give to help the political change in this country in places where we do. So for example, we've got the chance to make history in 2016. We've never had a Latina United States senator. We have a shot to do that in Nevada. We've got a shot to do that in California and a number of other places where we can break a glass ceiling. In fact, we might even see the first Latino vice president this time.
[Rachel Martin:] Cristobal Alex is the president of the Latino Victory Project. He joined us here in our studios in Washington. Thanks so much for coming in.
[Cristobal Alex:] Thank you so much for having me.

[Robert Siegel:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel. A former NFL owner, who was loved by one city and loathed by another has died. Art Modell was 87 years old. To football fans in Cleveland, he was the owner of their beloved Browns, who whisked the team to Baltimore in 1995 and renamed it the Ravens. But to fans in Baltimore, he was the man who brought football back to the city after it had been abandoned by the Colts. Bill Rice has our story from Cleveland.
[Bill Rice, Byline:] Art Modell bought the Browns in 1961, and the team won the championship three years later, shutting out the Baltimore Colts 27-0. That would be the Browns' last championship. In 1996, Modell, while clashing with city officials over a deal to renovate Cleveland Municipal Stadium, was secretly meeting with Maryland officials. Soon after those meetings, he decided to move the team to Baltimore. Clevelander Pat McCann remembers that.
[Pat Mccann:] It was a hard day. Yeah, we all hated Art Modell for it. Yeah, I don't think I've forgiven him yet.
[Bill Rice, Byline:] TV sports director Andy Baskin says Modell's contributions to Cleveland went way beyond football. He was a philanthropist, giving away millions of dollars. But Baskin understands why some Browns fans still vilify him.
[Andy Baskin:] They'll always remember him for moving the team when they were out there supporting him and buying tickets and doing what they needed to do to support the team. And I think when I look back at it, it's not only Art's fault that the team moved. I look back at the city and I blame the city and I also blame the NFL for letting it happen.
[Bill Rice, Byline:] It's a very different story in Baltimore, though. In the mid-'80s, football fans there were devastated when Colts' owner Jim Irsay moved that team in the dead of night to Indianapolis. Baltimore was without a team for 13 years before Modell brought the Browns to town, renaming them the Ravens. Dave Rather owns Mothers Federal Hill Grille Sports Bar near Camden Yards.
[Dave Rather:] He's considered a hero here in Baltimore. There's a lot of fond memories, and just a lot of tributes and a lot of thank yous. The Ravens are a huge part of our community.
[Bill Rice, Byline:] Art Modell did leave the Browns' name and colors in Cleveland, and three years later, the city was granted an expansion team. Some here in Cleveland do appreciate his contribution to the city and to football. He's credited with ushering the game into the age of television and starting the Monday Night Football tradition. For NPR News, I'm Bill Rice in Cleveland.

[Audie Cornish:] It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Audie Cornish.
[Robert Siegel:] And I'm Robert Siegel. We begin this hour with a crash of a Malaysian Airlines passenger jet. It went down in eastern Ukraine with 280 passengers and 15 crew members. The plane crashed in the part of Ukraine that has seen intense fighting between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian government forces. Each side is now accusing the other of shooting the plane down. Video of the site shows wreckage spread over a wide area. Emergency workers say they have counted more than 100 bodies. NPR's Corey Flintoff joins us now from Moscow. And Corey, what do we know so far about this crash?
[Corey Flintoff, Byline:] Well, we know the plane was a Boeing 777 a jumbo jet. And it was on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. The airline says it lost contact with the flight over Ukraine just as it was about to cross into Russian airspace. Ukrainian aviation officials say the flight appeared to be normal right up until the time it disappeared.
[Robert Siegel:] That might be seen as supporting the idea of foul play here.
[Corey Flintoff, Byline:] Yes, and that's what the Ukrainian government is saying specifically, that the plane was shot down at an altitude of around 33,000 feet by a ground to air missile. The Ukrainian officials are even specifying that it was a kind of Soviet and Russian missile known as a Buk that's a mobile missile launcher on tracks. They say that Russia provided these Buk missile launchers to the rebels and that the rebels must have shot the plane down.
[Robert Siegel:] But the rebels are claiming that Ukrainian forces fired the missile that shot the plane down.
[Corey Flintoff, Byline:] Yes they are. And Ukrainians also have these Buk missile systems. But, you know, it's worth remembering that the two sides are involved in this very intense and bloody conflict right now. And they both seize on any opportunity for propaganda. And frankly, they both lied about things that have happened. One thing that's worth noting is that the rebel's military commander he's known as Strelkov Igor Girkin is his actual name, he's a Russian citizen. He said on Twitter that his forces had shot down a Ukrainian military cargo plane just at about the time that this Malaysian jet disappeared. And that tweet was later deleted from his account.
[Robert Siegel:] Corey, this is not the first plane that has gone down in the area recently. What can you tell us about that?
[Corey Flintoff, Byline:] Well, Ukraine says that one of its military transport planes was shot down on Monday. They say it was shot down by a missile fired from the Russian side of the border. The Ukrainians also say that one of their jet fighters was shot down yesterday by an air-to-air missile. And since the rebels don't seem to have fighter aircrafts, that would seem to imply that their missile was fired by a Russian military jet. And that's the strongest allegation so far from the Ukrainian government that Russia's military is now taking a direct part in this fighting. Russia, of course, is denying that it has any military involvement in the conflict.
[Robert Siegel:] A U.S. official has said on background that the U.S. believes the plane was, in fact, shot down by a missile. And NPR reporters have heard from congressional sources that U.S. officials expect to have a pretty clear idea of what happened there by tomorrow. Does that seem possible given the conditions on the ground?
[Corey Flintoff, Byline:] Well, the area where the plane went down is under rebel control. It's actually not very far from Donetsk. And, of course, there's been speculation that whoever controls the area basically controls the evidence. Russia has offered to work jointly with Ukraine to investigate the crash, but that seems pretty unlikely, frankly. One thing about this conflict though is that this region has been under very intense scrutiny by NATO analysts who've been looking at satellite data. So it may actually be possible to figure out what happened on the basis of that data.
[Robert Siegel:] OK, Corey. Thank you.
[Corey Flintoff, Byline:] My pleasure.
[Robert Siegel:] That's NPR's Corey Flintoff reporting on today's crash of the Malaysian airliner in eastern Ukraine, speaking to us from Moscow.

[Ira Flatow:] I'm Ira Flatow. Now for the naked truth about bacteria. Well, not exactly the naked truth, because in fact many bacteria wear a suit of armor, an outer layer or coat of many proteins. What exactly that armor looked like has been a mystery, but in a study in Nature this week, researchers say they have imaged the armor down to the level of single atoms, and it looks like chainmail, just what you'd expect armor to look like, no? Dr. Han Remaut is a structural microbiologist at Flanders Institute of Biotechnology and the Free University of Brussels. He was co-author of the paper in Nature and joins us from Brussels. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
[Han Remaut:] Hi, Ira. It's a pleasure to be here.
[Ira Flatow:] What was the purpose of looking and, you know, under the microscope and looking for that coat on the bacteria?
[Han Remaut:] So scientists have known about the existence of these protein coats for quite a while. They've actually known about them for half a century. So they started seeing them when they started looking at bacteria with electron microbes, and they saw these very regular structures which were, you know, patterned structures which turned out to be protein. But that was the vision that they had. It was a low-magnification view and so we really wanted the more atomic view, a higher resolution view of these structures.
[Ira Flatow:] We don't normally think of I think generally that bacteria wear a suit of armor.
[Han Remaut:] So all bacteria, they need they do wear kind of a protective coat, so not all bacteria wear this S-layer or surface layer which is this protein coat. Others will wear, you know, a slime coat, if you want a buildup of sugar. So but, you know, very many bacteria use a protein coat, and this is what we've been looking at here.
[Ira Flatow:] Were you surprised to see what it looked like when you got to see it down there?
[Han Remaut:] Well, as I said, these things have been observed before, and we had a low-resolution view. So we knew that it looked like that you could compare it a way like chainmail. It's individual proteins that assemble themselves. The bacteria secrete about a few thousand a few 10,000 copies of these, and these are all assemble in this nice ordered monomolecular layer. It's really understanding how the protein units are able to do that. So they self-assemble into this S-layer and we for that you need higher resolution structure, and that's what we looked at in this study.
[Ira Flatow:] What's the next step in this study? What else would you like to know using this technique?
[Han Remaut:] So we've now been looking at harmless bacteria, so and we've been using that as a model system. So there's, I think, two major interests. One is a biological one, a microbiological one, is understanding bacteria better. And so it turns out there's also a number of pathogens that wear these coats, and so we would really like to look at what they look like and how they're able to interact with the host. And another interest is that because they are these highly ordered structures and really the proteins, they assemble themselves, and that's a property that material sciences are interested in. So it's those -both those aspects that are interesting.
[Ira Flatow:] If the bacteria have this chainmail that surrounds them, how do nutrients and things get in and out of them?
[Han Remaut:] So it there you can really compare it like a chainmail. A chainmail is also not just like the armor that we probably know. It is little rings sitting next to each other, and they have holes. The nutrients get across those holes.
[Ira Flatow:] And does do does the chainmail look the same on all different kinds of bacteria, or are there distinctive patterns on some? Could you say, oh, I recognize that one?
[Han Remaut:] Yes. I mean, there are very distinctive patterns, so some of them will just have all the units next to each other, and others will have more regular patterns like hexagonal patterns and trigonal patterns. So it is very different, and also the kind of proteins that they use, even though they all form this nice ordered monolayer, that the kind of protein that they use for it is very different from one bacterium to another.
[Ira Flatow:] How come when we see when we see microscopic pictures of bacteria, we don't see anything coating them?
[Han Remaut:] I mean one thing is the resolution. So when we look at when we see microscopic images, we don't have enough magnification to really see those individuals, then you really need a high magnification electron microscope. Another thing is that not all bacteria have them, so, you know, E. coli, for example, which is one of the bacteria that is really a model bacterium, doesn't have one. So there you won't even see it. And another thing is that bacteria wear these coats when they're out in the environment, which is a hostile environment. When you do grow them in the lab, they often shed these structures. They lose these structures.
[Ira Flatow:] Is that right? They have a home? They feel safe? They don't need their suit of armor?
[Han Remaut:] That's right. That's exactly right.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow.
[Han Remaut:] You probably don't realize that bacteria, out in the environment, that they're under all sorts of stresses. There's other bacteria attacking them. There are viruses attacking them. So, you know, that's where they need their armor.
[Ira Flatow:] And is it effective armor? Does it really help?
[Han Remaut:] Well, we think, though. The bacteria, they really put a lot of energy in producing this. It's about you know, it can be up to 20 percent of the entire protein that the cells produce. So it's really a big effort in wearing these coats. And so that's when we see, when we do bring them in a less hostile environment for many very many bacteria, they don't put the effort in producing this surface layer.
[Ira Flatow:] You can hear them go, whew, I'm getting rid of this, when they come inside.
[Han Remaut:] Right.
[Ira Flatow:] What happens when they age? Does the armor change as they get older?
[Han Remaut:] It doesn't change as they get older, but they can dress up for different parties, if you like. I mean, some bacteria have more than one kind of protein that they can put in this surface layer. So they can exchange it depending on the environmental condition.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow. I want to see them on New Year's Eve. Thank you very much, Dr. Remaut, for taking time to be with us today.
[Han Remaut:] It's a pleasure.
[Ira Flatow:] Dr. Han Remaut is a structural microbiologist at Flanders Institute of Biotechnology and the Free University of Brussels. He was co-author of the paper in Nature.

[Tony Cox:] Time again now for your letters. And with me, of course, is producer Christopher Johnson. Hey, Christopher.
[Christopher Johnson:] What's happening, Tony?
[Tony Cox:] So what do we have this week?
[Christopher Johnson:] Well, you know, some folks got a little upset about our recent story on charter schools. Now, listener Mike Castanza of Rochester, New York, found that segment a little one sided. He emailed to say: One of the strengths of most charter schools is the ability to pick its students. If you'd ever worked with a child with behavioral problems, you'd know how much of an advantage that can be. Though I'm not a teacher, I have worked with such children before. Why didn't Miss Chideya raise such questions?
[Tony Cox:] Well, Mike, she will. We are already planning a segment that lets African-Americans critical of charter schools speak out, so listen up for that.
[Christopher Johnson:] And as for our Memorial Day show, Hillary Maroon of Oakland, California had some problems with our focus. She wrote: Memorial Day is a holiday for remembering those lost in war, and for dealing with the lost felt by those left behind. This should be the theme every Memorial Day, especially while this country is at war. Instead, your show focused on veterans. But this is not Veterans Day. Have the guts to deal with the actual subject matter that the holiday marks.
[Tony Cox:] And you know what, Christopher?
[Christopher Johnson:] What's up, Tony?
[Tony Cox:] She's right. We blew it, plain and simple. And for that I apologize, because I hosted the show that day, and the distinction went right past me as well. While it was never our intention to disparage or ignore those who died in combat, our interviews with some veterans focused on how our subjects managed to survive. And there were some very good, compelling stories. But in hindsight, we should have had the segments that focused on the stories of soldiers we lost, the families that were impacted and the way our culture has to continually keep finding ways to heal from the tragedies of war. It was Memorial Day, not Veterans Day. Thanks for that letter, Hillary. It's a point well taken.
[Christopher Johnson:] Now, as you probably know, every Tuesday, we've been presenting our StoryCorps Griot Initiative. That's a project that features first person's stories from blacks across the country. Now this past Tuesday, we heard from Omar Leech. He grew up in Ohio, where he started gangbanging at a very young age.
[Mr. Omar Leech:] By the time I was 25 I had three prison numbers. All this time I did in prison, did a person from my gang ever write me one letter? Send me one penny? That's not family.
[Christopher Johnson:] After Omar finished his third prison sentence, he decided to leave the gang life behind. He moved to Atlanta and started his life over. Omar Leech passed away just a few weeks ago after a car accident. Now, a lot of you were moved by Omar's story. Aaron Martin of Pompano Beach, Florida, wrote to say this. I'm sad to know the world lost a great man, no matter his past. For it is his past that allowed him to grow to who he became. I tried to bring the lesson from any situation, even if it is years later, and it sounds like Omar and I have a lot in common for being true believers in giving everything to someone we love and hold dear only to realize they wouldn't notice if we went missing tomorrow. Thanks for that, Aaron.
[Tony Cox:] That's it for our letters. Please keep writing. And you can also leave a voicemail for us at 202-408-1271. That's 202-408-1271.
[Christopher Johnson:] And don't forget our News & Views blog. You can post your comments there by going to npr.orgnewsandnotes and clicking the News & Views blog link.
[Tony Cox:] There's also email. Just log on to npr.org and click on Contact Us. It helps a lot if you tell us where you're writing from and how we should say your name. Thanks, Christopher.
[Christopher Johnson:] No problem, Tony.
[Tony Cox:] That's our show for today. Thanks for being with us. To listen to the show or subscribe to our podcast, visit npr.orgnewsandnotes. To join the conversation, visit our blog, News & Views. Just check out the link at the top of our Web page. NEWS & NOTES was created by NPR News and the African-American Public Radio Consortium. Tomorrow, the first white graduate at an all-black high school in Alabama. I'm Tony Cox, in for Farai Chideya. This is NEWS & NOTES.

[Eric Westervelt:] He's done most of our Common Core reporting, and he edited this postcard series. Cory, thanks for coming in.
[Cory Turner, Byline:] Thanks for having me, Eric.
[Eric Westervelt:] Cory, the Common Core standards aren't that new but there's a lot of misconceptions out there about them. What are the big ones for you?
[Cory Turner, Byline:] I'll start out with uniformity. It's in the name. It's totally understandable that people hear Common Core and assume that what's happening in one classroom is happening in every classroom. But what people don't realize is that the Core are standards, they're not curriculum. They don't come with lesson plans or textbooks. Teachers are large doing this themselves as they always have. So just because let's say a fifth-grade teacher in Louisville, like we just heard, decides Minecraft is a great way to get his kids using grids. Well, that doesn't mean that teachers everywhere else are doing the exact same thing.
[Eric Westervelt:] Another criticism we hear across the political spectrum, Cory, is that the Common Core has created an ever more toxic testing environment. That kids are simply taking tests, you know, all the time now. I mean, do they have a point?
[Cory Turner, Byline:] Yeah, you know. Lots of folks who don't follow education, don't realize that this requirement, that states test kids once a year. That started more than a decade ago with No Child Left Behind enacted in 2002 under President George W. Bush. And No Child is still the law of the land. Schools do it so they can get federal Title I dollars and again because the Common Core are standards. States realizing under No Child Left Behind, they had to still test their kids, they needed to make new tests that are aligned to the Core. But the idea is -and this is generally what we expect to see next year, is all of these new that are aligned to the Core will simply replace all of the old state tests. So technically no additional tests for the Common Core.
[Eric Westervelt:] So it's built on the testing regimes started under No Child Left Behind, but it doesn't necessarily mean an increase in testing, correct?
[Cory Turner, Byline:] For the most part, yes. Next year again kids should not be taking extra tests. But I do have to say, there have been real growing pains this year. I recently spoke with a mother in Montgomery County, Maryland who was really angry about her daughter's algebra final. What happened is and I'm going to try to keep this simple. This past year was the first year that the county's algebra curriculum was aligned to the Common Core and so was the algebra final exam that the district wrote, again aligned to the Common Core, OK. But at the same time because they haven't phased completely in the Common Core, kids in the district were still required to take the old Maryland State end of year test. And what happened is teachers realized about three weeks before the end of the year that there were a lot of math concepts on this big state test that aren't in the Core. And so teachers started cramming in these concepts, trying to teach the kid what they need to do well on this test. And ultimately, what happened is when the kids came around to take that Common Core Algebra final, they bombed it. Eighty-two percent failure rate among high school kids in the district. It was so bad that the district actually applied a 15-point curve and had to delay report cards.
[Eric Westervelt:] Wow. Eighty-two percent of high schoolers failed. I mean, doesn't that underscore how, sort of chaotic and hard implementation of these standards will be?
[Cory Turner, Byline:] I think it is, at least to a certain extent, it's hard to know where else this may have happened or may be happening. But let's face it, adopting new standards and implementing new standards, it's a really tough thing, especially when you find yourself straddling two worlds, old state tests that you still have to administer and new Common Core tests that you're phasing in. It's hard to know if we'll be hearing the same stories next year. We'll just have to see.
[Eric Westervelt:] Cory Turner of the NPR Ed Team. Thank you for coming in.
[Cory Turner, Byline:] Thanks, Eric.

[Renee Montagne:] And with no primary opponent to worry about, President Obama's campaign had nearly a full year's head start for fundraising over Republican challenger Mitt Romney. But as NPR's S.V. Date reports, the president's advantage is rapidly disappearing.
[S.v. Date, Byline:] Just one month after the start of the general election campaign, Mr. Obama has seen his financial cushion sliced in half. An $80 million cash-on-hand lead at the end of April was down to $45 million at the end of May, according to new Federal Election Commission filings. Romney did out-raise Obama in May. It was the first time he'd done so.
[Renee Montagne:] But Romney and his supporting superPAC also spent about a third of what team Obama spent on television ads, yet did not get drowned out on the airwaves. That's because Crossroads GPS and two other so-called social welfare groups spent $16 million on ads in the swing states, hammering Obama. Karl Rove, Crossroads' co-founder, told Fox News the group is not a political committee, a distinction that allows it to keep its donors' names secret under tax rules.
[Karl Rove:] Well, it's a social welfare organization because it spends the vast preponderance of its money in furtherance of its social welfare goals.
[Robert Bauer:] It's a social welfare organization in his mind. That doesn't determine its status under the law.
[Date:] That's Obama campaign lawyer Robert Bauer. He filed a complaint this week with the FEC, citing recent court rulings and asking that it declare Crossroads GPS to be a political committee. If that happens, it would eliminate an attractive feature for donors who want to influence the election, but do not want to alienate customers.
[Karl Rove:] Crossroads' IRS filings show it has raised $77 million. Nearly 90 percent of that came from donations of at least one million. It's not clear how many would continue to give if they believed their names would be public.
[Date:] S.V. Date, NPR News.

[Robert Siegel:] We're going to shift our focus now from South Carolina to Iowa. All this week, we've featured stump speeches from the Republican presidential candidates. And today, we bring you Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. In Iowa last week, Bachmann took on President Obama. That's Michele Bachmann speaking at a Pizza Ranch restaurant in Rockwell City, Iowa. And our next stump speech comes from another Pizza Ranch, this one in Carroll, Iowa, and former Senator Rick Santorum. If elected, he said, he would balance the budget and beef up national security. He also took a moment to talk broadly about the American family.
[Rick Santorum:] You know, we have some people running here who think America is just about doing what's best for you. Well, that's the popular culture, but that's not what America's about. America is about more than just you. America's about service and sacrifice and doing what's, you know, making a contribution to the greater good, serving your God and your family and your country. And that's what America's about. That's what we use our freedom for. At least that's what we have used our freedom for that made us the greatest country in the history of the world. And at the core of that is the family. The core of that is what motivates most people to go out and work. And the Marine Corps is an amazing, amazing fighting force. How do they get people to do such heroic things and amazing things day after day? It's because the Marine Corps is a family. They're committed to each other. It's a special relationship. Just like each one of us is a family. And people say, oh, the individual is the basis of our society. The individual rights, but the foundation of our country is the family. When the family breaks down, America doesn't survive.
[Robert Siegel:] That's Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum campaigning in Carroll, Iowa.

[David Greene:] And we're back with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm David Greene.
[Maria Bartiromo:] Panic selling on Monday causing U.S. markets to take a big plunge.
[Unidentified Man #1:] The economy stinks.
[Maria Bartiromo:] The Dow Jones Industrial Average traded in a 640-point range in a massive seesaw day for the market.
[Unidentified Man #2:] It's madness...
[Maria Bartiromo:] Another day of big losses for the markets on Wednesday.
[Unidentified Man #3:] Is there anything...
[Unidentified Man #4:] We can do to get our mojo back?
[Maria Bartiromo:] The rebound in the market over the last two days has taken a bit of the edge off of nervous investors.
[David Greene:] It was one wild week on Wall Street. That was Maria Bartiromo and some of the voices from CNBC this past week as they try to sort through the market's fluctuations. To help us sort it out, we've brought in James Fallows of The Atlantic. He joins us, as he does most Saturdays. Hi, Jim.
[James Fallows:] Hello. Nice to talk to you, David.
[David Greene:] So the Dow Jones Industrial Average, I mean, down 634 on Monday, up 429 the next day, down, up. I mean, these huge swings all week. What did you make of all this?
[James Fallows:] Well, I think most people feel that the problem or the phenomenon is that all the world's markets now seem to be connected, and when things are going badly in North America, the same thing in Europe, and the same thing in Asia. So you see these worldwide magnified swings up and down, and that's what everyone is coping with now.
[David Greene:] And I guess it used to be that you sort of counted on world markets to buffer some of these large gyrations, and now it seems to actually encourage them. Talk about that difference, if you can.
[James Fallows:] Yes. I think that during most of modern times, as the last generation or two, the world economies have, of course, been connected. When the U.S. went off the gold standard in 1971, that had effects all around the world. But it's until about 10 years ago, it was more the case that when the U.S. was struggling, you would find maybe the Japanese economy doing better or the German. And as the Chinese economy has risen in importance in the last while, we have seen instead the phenomenon that since the Chinese economy depends so heavily on markets in the United States, and since the United States has all of the sort of flows of its economic and financial forces around the world, instead we've seen a worldwide coordinated market as opposed to the somewhat more modified phenomenon we would've known in previous panics. You know, panics have always been bad, but they used to be somewhat buffered.
[David Greene:] Some news in Washington. The 12 members of the supercommittee have been chosen. That's, of course, the committee in Congress that's tasked with finding $1.5 trillion in federal budget cuts before November 23rd. No easy task. And I know one thing that's been sort of bogging you about this whole debate is maybe a kind of misunderstanding about what effect the deficit has on the economy.
[James Fallows:] I've thought a lot about the presidential debate in the 1992 campaign, which was in a town hall forum where the first George Bush and Bill Clinton and then Ross Perot were taking questions from average people in the audience. And there was a woman who asked then current incumbent President Bush how the deficit was affecting him. And the president gave this sort of technical answer about how actually the federal budget deficit didn't make that much difference at all. And then Bill Clinton stepped in to answer the question the woman was really asking with the wrong words, which was how was the economy affecting him and affecting her and affecting the whole world. And perversely, the very measures that would reduce deficit problems can make economic problems worse.
[David Greene:] It almost sounds like for voters that they're looking for a way to express their economic concerns. I mean, something that they can sort of feel connected to is the idea that, god, I don't want to have debts for my family, and so I don't want my government to have debts. And it's just an expression of sort of economic concern.
[James Fallows:] Yes. And I think Tea Party representatives have captured the general trans-party unhappiness with how things are going right now and saying here is something to do about it. And I think the Democrats, particularly President Obama, have in a way played into this. The more the president says families have to tighten their belts, so, too, do we have to tighten our belt, the more he has advanced this narrative too. In fact, since the Great Depression, the government has played a contrary role to individual families. When families tighten their belts, the government makes things worse for them by tightening its belt.
[David Greene:] James Fallows is national correspondent with The Atlantic, and you can read his blog at jamesfallows.theatlantic.com. Jim, thanks so much.
[James Fallows:] Thank you, David.

[Ed Gordon:] Unless you've lived under a rock for the last week or so, you know that "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" is the hottest thing going this summer. The sixth book in the best-selling series is already on its second print run. Adults are reading it almost as much as children, and NPR's Allison Keyes reports that readers of all race relate to the young wizard's latest adventure.
[Allison Keyes Reporting:] In the first 24 hours of its release, the newest Harry Potter novel sold 6.9 million copies in the United States. By a second day, it had raked in $100 million. That's more than the combined weekend box office for the movies "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and the "Wedding Crashers." The US publisher Scholastic calls it a cause for celebration for book lovers everywhere.
[Keyes:] That includes readers of color. Harlem's black-owned Hue-Man Bookstore hosted one of 5,000 midnight book-release parties held across the nation. Marva Allen is one of the three owners. She says Hue-Man usually sells around six copies when a new kids' book comes out. With the latest Potter, the store had sold more than 200 copies in the first four days of sales.
[Ms. Marva Allen:] Why shouldn't they read this book, you know? It's kind of a fantasy and, you know, encourage imagination whichever way, you know? And it's a good story.
[Keyes:] Allen says that means African-American and Latino kids are definitely reading this book, even though there aren't that many black characters.
[Ms. Marva Allen:] Kids just like the fantasy. Kids, you know, maybe at that age right now are not so totally aware of the color divide, and are just into good stories.
[Keyes:] Ten-year-old Samantha Green, an African-American soon to be a sixth-grader, says she agrees.
[Samantha Green:] I don't really, like, pay attention to that. I don't really, like, care at all.
[Keyes:] Green, of Fairfield, Connecticut, says when she saw on the news that everybody was reading the book, she wanted to read it, too. So far, Samantha says, she really likes it.
[Samantha Green:] I sometimes read that in the dark, and my mom, she catches me sometimes. I get to-and I try to get as closest to my night light as possible, 'cause the font's pretty small. So yeah, I read that under the bed, too.
[Keyes:] Twelve-year-old Austin Gibbs in Fayetteville, North Carolina, says he's been into books for a long time.
[Austin Gibbs:] I've been a pretty strong reader before I got into Harry Potter. I like to read mystery. I like "Lemony Snicket Series of Unfortunate Events," and I like to read fantasy, like the "Star Wars" and stuff, and I like to read adventure titles.
[Keyes:] He says some of his classmates are bookworms, too.
[Austin Gibbs:] I have several friends who like to read. It might not be books, but they like to read, like, comics and Japanese title books and stuff.
[Keyes:] Angela Dodson, executive editor of Black Issues Book Review, says the success of the Potter series, "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy and the movies of both are luring kids back into literacy.
[Ms. Angela Dodson:] I think reading is cool again, and it could be attributed to Harry Potter, but it's cool because there are more books to be offered that show children of color, that have children of color.
[Keyes:] Dodson's publication is recommending several, including Marilyn Nelson's "A Wreath for Emmett Till," Brenda Woods' "Emako Blue" and Walter Mosley's "47." She says there are several ways parents could help get their children more involved in reading, including helping them to create reading clubs or taking them to book-related events at stores. The best way, Dodson says, is to show your children that you value books by letting them see you read. Allison Keyes, NPR News, New York.
[Ed Gordon:] To see more of the Black Issues Book Review recommendations, visit our Web site at npr.org. This is NPR News.

[Audie Cornish:] We're going to get a firsthand account now of the fighting in Aleppo, Syria. Erika Solomon is Middle East correspondent for Reuters. She made it into Aleppo a week and a half ago and just left this morning. She joins us now from Turkey. Erika, give us a sense of what life was like in Aleppo, where you stayed, what you saw.
[Erika Solomon:] The whole time I was there, you could sense that residents were a bit confused as to what to do, where to go. Most of the shops were closed so the busiest places that we saw were the breadlines and the rebels had been trying to keep a somewhat steady supply of flour in order to be making bread for people. The rebels are patrolling the streets, as there are cities in the area they control. They have bases, which where I saw, were always at elementary or middle schools. And some civilians can come in and make special requests if they need fuel or money or food or something. I don't know I didn't get any insight into how easily those requests were granted, but they were trying to sort of make themselves an administrative presence as well in the area.
[Audie Cornish:] We also saw a video this week suggesting rebels are committing atrocities, executing captured members of government-backed militias. Did you see any sign of that?
[Erika Solomon:] Yes. I didn't see the execution itself that has gotten a lot of play on some news channels, but I was near the area where they took over Salhin Police Station, which is where, allegedly, they took a large group of what they argued were unofficial militia men, which in Syria they call Shabiha. And they insist that they knew their faces and they knew who they were and they felt justified in killing these people. And some of the rebels openly admitted to me that they saw some of these men and they got chances to, you know, abuse them, basically kick them or step on them. And they would insist to me that this was totally fair. They would say things like, you know, our cousins were raped. They sent my brother to jail. These people are horrible people. What else would you expect us to do? We suffered so long because of them. On the other hand, they didn't treat everyone that way. When I made it to one of the rebel bases where rebels had attacked that police station, they had a large group of prisoners as well who, as far as I could see, hadn't been touched. They say that these are people who they agreed with ahead of time to surrender themselves and they said to me, they really don't want to have to fight everyone. So if there's a group of people that wants to surrender, they'll take them as prisoners and transfer them to court. They have made their own, what they say, their own Sharia court, which is a form of Islamic law. And they say that they'll try them there.
[Audie Cornish:] Erika, you described rebel groups trying to maintain some kind of order. Can you tell us what the morale is among the rebels that you saw?
[Erika Solomon:] The rebel morale is very high. They really feel like their winning this battle and they really think they have a chance at advancing and taking the center of the city, which is a square called Saadallah Al-Jabri. And they say that if they can take this square, symbolically they'll have toppled the regime in Aleppo, at least. They're less than a kilometer away, so they feel really confident. But residents don't have the same rosy view. They say all it takes is the government to decide that we'll just come in and shell them or fire on them with our planes and helicopters and all of the advances that the rebels have made will have been moot. So that's what worries the locals.
[Audie Cornish:] So right now, people may hear the news and assume that the government is essentially going all out against the rebels in Aleppo, but you're saying essentially that the government is holding back, right now at least.
[Erika Solomon:] Yes. I do get the sense that there's an impression of what's going on in Aleppo that anywhere you stand you're going to get shelled and that's actually eerily not the case. And residents have told me they kind of feel like they're living in this calm before the storm, that they just don't believe that the government is going to allow a large swath of the city to stay under rebel control. But they've been waiting for days now, almost maybe seven days and there hasn't been a very heavy shelling campaign on the eastern part of the city that the rebels are controlling. So for now, I mean, they're in a holding pattern and the rebels are going to try to keep advancing. But all of these advances won't mean much if the government still has the option and chooses to use the option of shelling them.
[Audie Cornish:] Erika Solomon is Middle East correspondent for Reuters. She spent the past week and a half in Aleppo, Syria. Thanks so much, Erika.
[Erika Solomon:] Thank you.

[Mary Louise Kelly:] There is no better, faster way to start a barstool argument with another sports fan than to trot out a list of the world's greatest teams. That's a line from the new book "The Captain Class." The author is Sam Walker, and he set out to produce exactly such a list, the all time best sports teams. He settled on 16 of them, then he set about figuring out what they had in common. Sam Walker is in the NPR New York bureau. Hey there.
[Sam Walker:] Hi, Mary Louise.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Hi. So people should know you have watched a lot of good sports teams in action over the years as a sports writer and editor for The Wall Street Journal. What makes a team the greatest, greatest ever?
[Sam Walker:] Well, I'll start with what doesn't which came as a great shock to me. I assumed it would be superstar talent or the coach or, you know, a lot of money or great tactics. But when I finally isolated this sample of 16 teams, I realized that none of those things apply equally to all of them. In fact, there was only one and only one thing that they all had in common, and their winning streaks were very closely bracketed by the presence of one player. And this player in all cases was or would eventually become the captain or the leader of the team. And these captains were, you know, interesting characters because they weren't the captains you thought. It's not Michael Jordan and Derek Jeter or Pele or big superstars. A lot of them were people I'd never heard of and who really played in the shadows and were not famous people.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Michael Jordan, Chicago Bulls didn't make the cut what? six titles in eight years wasn't good enough for you?
[Sam Walker:] Yeah. Well, you know what? It's funny. I mean, everyone remembers then they were so spectacular and what they did was incredible. But, you know, one of the criteria I use to define the greatest teams ever is that what their accomplishments were completely unique inside their own sport. And I'm sorry the Bulls won six titles in eight years, but, you know, the Boston Celtics of the '50s and '60s won 11 titles in 13 years including eight in a row...
[Mary Louise Kelly:] OK. So you had to do something nobody else has done before to make this list.
[Sam Walker:] Yes, yes. Exactly.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Tell me about the moment that it came to you that the secret was all down to the captain, who, as you say, is not necessarily the superstar on these teams.
[Sam Walker:] Well, you know, it jumped right out. It was the first thing I noticed about these teams because I looked at all their rosters, and I realized that there was always uncannily one player that kind of ran the course of the streak. And I thought it was just way too simple, and it couldn't possibly be that obvious. So I went through all the other possibilities, you know, and I found that some teams had great coaches. Some didn't. Some were tactically advanced. Some were not. Some had a lot of money. Most of them had none. So there was no other factor that they shared, and it was really obvious in the end that the only common thread was the character of the captain.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] So you were watching a team and looking and they would be middling or good, but not great, and then one captain would come in and the years that that captain was running the team, you saw a difference, you saw the breakthrough?
[Sam Walker:] Uncannily so. I mean, there was one of the first teams I looked at was the Boston Celtics and Bill Russell. You know, the moment he showed up his rookie season, they won their first title. And they won their last of that streak the year before he retired. And after that, they fell off. They'd never won a championship before he showed up, and it took them a long time to get back there after he left. And this happened over and over. Every team I looked at, there was a real clear cutoff that was readily apparent.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] So what is it that makes a great captain?
[Sam Walker:] Well, you know, it's not what you think. You know, we I think if we were asked to construct a captain in a laboratory, we would pick a superstar. We'd pick someone who is charismatic, a celebrity. But what I discovered was that the great captains of these teams were not obvious people. They were rarely stars. They did the grunt work. They also had other surprising characteristics, like they embraced dissent and conflict inside their teams. It can be really problematic when they thought something wasn't going well, and they were really relentless. And they hated giving speeches. They had a different style of communication that was much more low-key and individual. And they had incredible emotional control. I mean, to an extreme, and they also had this tendency to test the rules. I found all these examples of unsportsmanlike things they did in competition, and it took me a long time to figure...
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Unsportsmanlike things they did.
[Sam Walker:] Unsportsmanlike they would do things like insult the opponent as a strategy or, you know, they would do very physically aggressive things or even push the rules to the limit. And this confused me. But I did a lot of research and looked into science and looked more closely, and I realized that in all these cases, these captains only did this in competition. Off the field, they were completely different. They shunned attention and never got in trouble, so this was something that they did within the confines of the rules of sports and competition.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] One thing you said there surprises me which is that great captains embrace dissent, embrace conflict on their team. Give me an example of a team where you saw that.
[Sam Walker:] The Soviet hockey team in 1980 famously lost to the U.S. in what was called the Miracle on Ice. On the flight back to Moscow, the coach of the team started trashing a lot of the individual players and blaming the loss on them. Now, a veteran defenseman named Valeri Vasiliev overheard this and just went bonkers, ran over, started choking his coach and threatened to throw him off the plane if he didn't take it back. So, you know, he could have been sent to the gulag for this clearly. And, you know and probably should have been, but, you know, the interesting thing that happened was they went from there to put on this incredibly dominant run for four years. But they were almost unbeatable. And, you know, that's a great example of, you know, there's a certain kind of conflict and dissent inside a team that I found over and over again, this kind of conflict that's actually really essential to forming a great team.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] When you share this theory that you've arrived at, that it's all down to the captain, when you share that with current athletes what do they say? Do they buy it?
[Sam Walker:] You know, the captaincy is a funny thing. In fact, it's fallen out of fashion. You know, a lot of teams are not naming captains. They're naming a group of captains. They're very suspicious of the tradition. Some of this is economics because as television supports sports, there's an emphasis on putting on a good show. And these are the kinds of bankable stars that put, you know, butts in seats to be blunt about it. So what's happened is that the superstar and the coach tend to be this sort of two poles of power on a team. And the captain's role is really fascinating. It was always a middle manager. It was an intermediary between the players and the coaches. It wasn't necessarily the best player. So a lot of teams simply give the captaincy to the best player, but that's not the model that's been successful over the years.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] That's Sam Walker. His book is "The Captain Class: The Hidden Force That Creates The World's Greatest Teams." It's out next Tuesday. Sam Walker, thank you so much.
[Sam Walker:] Thanks, Mary Louise.

[Melissa Block:] If you step back a bit and take the long view of rich people and the good they've tried to do with their excess cash, you discover a few interesting facts.
[Michele Norris:] First, as ambitious as Bill and Melinda Gates are in tackling disease and hunger and poverty, history tells us that at least one big-time philanthropist of the past had even loftier ambitions.
[Dr. Leslie Lenkowski:] When John D. Rockefeller created the Rockefeller Foundation, its purpose was to improve the wellbeing of mankind throughout the world.
[Melissa Block:] That's Leslie Lenkowski. He studies what the insanely rich have done with their wealth. He teaches at the Center for Philanthropy at Indiana University and he's run some foundations himself.
[Michele Norris:] Lenkowski says that foundations can be traced back to the time of Socrates. In this country, foundations blossomed after the Civil War, when new wealth was being accumulated and there were new problems to fix.
[Melissa Block:] Millionaire George Peabody used his and others' money to help newly-freed slaves. By the beginning of the 20th century, the first truly modern foundation was created.
[Dr. Leslie Lenkowski:] A woman named Margaret Olivia Sage inherited money from her husband Russell, who was a notoriously stingy man, and she used that money for charitable purposes.
[Michele Norris:] The Sages were soon imitated by the Rockefellers, Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie.
[Dr. Leslie Lenkowski:] Carnegie actually didn't intend to create a foundation. He had hoped to give away all his money in his lifetime, but he failed at that.
[Melissa Block:] And while we know of Carnegie today from his name on libraries and other institutions and in NRP funding credits another millionaire of his day has vanished from our memories. Julius Rosenwald was a merchandising genius. In 1917, he set up a foundation to educate blacks in the south.
[Dr. Leslie Lenkowski:] Rosenwald also provided that his foundation wouldn't go on forever and he felt very strongly that when foundations become very big and are set up to exist forever, the tendency is for them to become stale and bureaucratic.
[Michele Norris:] Leslie Lenkowski of the Center for Philanthropy at Indiana University.

[Mary Louise Kelly:] Funding runs out for a quarter of the federal government on Friday. And President Trump has threatened to shut down the government unless Congress gives him $5 billion for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
[President Donald Trump:] I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I'm not going to blame you for it.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] But you knew there was a but coming today, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced a short-term funding deal without any of that money Trump is demanding.
[Mitch Mcconnell:] We need the government to remain open for the American people. We need to wrap up our work for this year.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] So what happens now? NPR's congressional correspondent Scott Detrow joins us from Capitol Hill. Hey there, Scott.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] Hey there.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] So for context, what exactly was going to shut down if there were a shutdown? Which I guess it's now looking like there won't be a shutdown.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] Right, more theoretical at this point.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Right.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] It is just a quarter of the federal government, but that included some important parts the Department of Justice and Homeland Security. It did include the National Park Service, which of course is always one of the most high-profile casualties of a shutdown, even though probably not as much camping planned for late December as if this were midsummer.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] And help me get my head around what just unfolded because, as we heard, the president said he was going to shut down the government unless he got his $5 billion for a border wall. This deal does not include $5 billion for a border wall. What happened?
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] Well, it looks like President Trump backed down. There was a real sense of frustration, even apathy from lawmakers from both parties this week, just a lot of standing around waiting for the White House to decide what it would or would not accept in a funding deal. Trump's press secretary Sarah Sanders had laid the groundwork for softening some of President Trump's ultimatum earlier this week, saying the White House could always use money from elsewhere in the government to build a wall. Democrats pointed out that's not how things work, that Congress is the one that appropriates how money is spent.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Yeah.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] And the bottom line here is neither side in Congress wanted a shutdown, and they have made a deal here. They've agreed to a bill funding the government through early February. And it does not have that $5 billion.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] It does not. So might the last laugh be the president's? Is he definitely going to sign this bill?
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] Well, the White House is remaining a bit cryptic as of right now. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway talked to NPR earlier today. And she sounded pretty frustrated.
[Kellyanne Conway:] The first, foremost question is why does Congress always take the path of least resistance? And this is a Republican-led Congress. That why are you just going for the short-term funding through the CR and not tackling the bigger issues immigration reform, border security? The president is looking at the CR. And I will allow him to make the [LAUGHTER] announcements on whether he's signing it or when he signs it.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] So unclear there. But the fact is that Mitch McConnell would not have introduced this and set the process of a vote on it unless he had gotten an indication from the White House the president would sign this bill. Still, we know this is a president who likes to change his mind at the last minute. And some hard-line conservatives like Mark Meadows are urging him to veto this.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Assuming all does go to plan, to Mitch McConnell's plan, and the president does sign, that would push us into February right? when Democrats will control the House. So is the president ever going to see this $5 billion that he wants?
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] It's really hard to see how he ever gets it at this point. He has repeatedly not gotten it at points that government funding has run out when Republicans have controlled all branches of government. When Democrats take charge in January of the House, it's really hard to see them giving him anything more than they have right now when it comes to funding for border security.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] All right-y. Thank you, Scott.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] Thank you.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] NPR's Scott Detrow.

[Steve Inskeep:] On a Thursday, it's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
[Renee Montagne:] And I'm Renee Montagne. Good Morning. In one of his final appearances on Capitol Hill, normally media-shy FBI Director Robert Mueller made some news. Mueller, who's retiring in September, acknowledged that the FBI has started to deploy unarmed drones in the U.S. Still, he played down how often agents use those drones. NPR's Carrie Johnson has more.
[Carrie Johnson, Byline:] Iowa Republican Senator Charles Grassley got right to the point.
[Senator Charles Grassley:] Does the FBI own or currently use drones, and if so, for what purpose?
[Robert Mueller:] Yes and for surveillance.
[Carrie Johnson, Byline:] FBI Director Robert Mueller has learned a thing or two about Congress after nearly a dozen years in the job. So later in his Senate Judiciary testimony, Mueller decided to elaborate.
[Robert Mueller:] Well, it's very seldom used and generally used in a particular incident where you need the capability.
[Carrie Johnson, Byline:] Incidents like the abduction of a five-year-old boy earlier this year in Alabama, where the kidnapper hid the child in an underground bunker for days. Mueller told lawmakers the bureau's developing a policy for how it uses surveillance drones. And others pointed out that federal agents along the Southwest border have used unarmed drones for a while. It's the reach of that technology and the boom in the commercial market that worries California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein.
[Senator:] I think the greatest threat to the privacy of Americans is the drone, and the use of the drone, and the very few regulations that are on it today.
[Carrie Johnson, Byline:] Feinstein says she's far less concerned about a U.S. surveillance program that keeps Americans' phone records for years in a huge NSA database. But that view is not shared by a bipartisan group of lawmakers who want to impose new restrictions on the dragnet data collection and force the Obama administration to share more details about the secret program. To which FBI director Mueller injected a note of caution.
[Robert Mueller:] Inevitably, the communications are the soft underbelly of the terrorists. They've got to communicate, and to the extent we can intercept those communications, to that extent, we can prevent terrorist attacks.
[Senator Charles Grassley:] Mueller says if Congress changes the law, the FBI will abide, but he says transparency can have a price.
[Carrie Johnson, Byline:] Carrie Johnson, NPR News, Washington.

[Scott Simon:] At the height of its power five years ago, ISIS governed major cities in Iraq and Syria and controlled territory spanning 34,000 square miles. Believers flocked from all over the world to the self-declared Islamic caliphate. Now thousands of them have ended up together in a remote detention camp in northeastern Syria. NPR's Jane Arraf went there and has this report.
[Unidentified Aid Worker:] [Speaking in Foreign Language].
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] An aid worker in a red vest on the back of a truck calls out names and tent numbers in a muddy field. It's been raining for days. Women and children crowd around waiting for a slip of paper to exchange for a box of food blankets and children's clothes, all of those things in short supply. There are hundreds and hundreds of women crowding around and little boys with these homemade carts. They're using them to put in the blankets and the food and the other supplies that they're getting. They're huge crowds of women around each of the tents where they're passing down boxes. And the little boys are carrying them away in these carts. This is the al-Hol camp in Syria's Hasakah province, a five-hour drive from Baghuz where ISIS made its last stand. The camp is meant to hold 20,000 people. Now there are almost 80,000. Most of the women are completely covered in the long, black cloaks they wore when they lived in what they called al-dawla, the state. Their faces are covered, only their eyes visible. And you can't tell that they're from all over the world. A woman comes up to me with a piece of paper she's had someone write for her in English.
[Um Mohammad:] [Unintelligible] English?
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] Yes. And you? Where are you from? Thank you. So she's handing me a piece of paper, this woman who has just come up. And it says I'm Um Mohammad. The paper says she's from Turkmenistan. She's trying to get back money she says was taken from her son when they were sent here.
[Um Mohammad:] [Speaking Arabic].
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] She tells me in broken Arabic that if she contacts her family in China, part of the Muslim Uyghur minority, her relatives will end up in prison there. There was a riot here last week over bad conditions. People inside are furious. The guards are edgy.
[Unidentified Person:] [Speaking Arabic].
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] A Syrian woman, who was lined up in the rain for hours, shouts that they're human beings not animals.
[Unidentified Person:] [Through interpreter] They don't give us food. They don't give us water. They are the same as ISIS. They put Iraqis and Syrians together. And every day, they are fighting over food. Why did they mix us together?
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] If we're criminals, punish us, she says. But don't leave us here. Another woman in the group trying to take shelter under a metal awning raises her finger to the sky in the sign of allegiance to ISIS. Most of the adults here are women who are married to ISIS fighters. They're believed to be hundreds of kidnapped women and children from the Yazidi minority kept here with ISIS families. And there are others.
[Moussa Abdullah:] [Speaking Arabic].
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] Moussa Abdullah, one of the few adult men here, says his house in Deir Azzour was hit by an airstrike. But that's not why he can't go home.
[Moussa Abdullah:] [Through translator] I am wanted by the Syrian regime, that and we have problems between the tribes.
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] The Iraqi government plans to repatriate the roughly 30,000 Iraqis in this camp. But there are people whose governments won't take them back. In addition to Iraqis, camp officials say there are almost 10,000 foreigners here from 53 countries. Gaylan Su from Trinidad and Tobago sits outside the camp management office. She's searching for her son.
[Gaylan Su:] I'm a new Muslim when I came here. I just got married to a man. And this silly man brought me here with my child. He never told me he was bringing my child to be a soldier.
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] Su carries a notebook of her son's drawings. He's almost 17. She wears a red scarf wrapped around her hair. And her face uncovered. She's one of the very few camp residents who isn't completely covered in black. She was married to five different ISIS fighters. She seems lost.
[Gaylan Su:] All of those women who wants to stay in this black clothes they've been giving me a hard time all morning for the way I am. I want to get out of this clothes. I had enough. Yes, I believe in one God. Yes. There's no doubt about that. I believe in God. OK? But all this, I need a break, man. I need I'm so tired.
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] Kurdish Syrian leaders are pleading for international help for this camp and for countries to take their citizens home. But most countries have refused. They say they don't know what to do with them. Jane Arraf, NPR News, in the al-Hol camp in Northeastern Syria.

[Scott Simon:] I'm Scott Simon. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Thursday that patenting natural human genetic material must stop. But the court also ruled that synthetically produced DNA is fair. The decision was prompted by patents on a gene test for breast cancer which was issued to Myriad Genetics of Salt Lake City. We're joined now in our studio by Arthur Caplan, who's head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU's Langone Medical Center. Thanks very much for being with us.
[Arthur Caplan:] Thanks for having me.
[Scott Simon:] What do you think this ruling means for Myriad Genetics and other biotech companies?
[Arthur Caplan:] Well, for Myriad, it means less than you might think because their patent was going to run out in another year. For other genetic testing companies that have sort of presumed we own the intellectual property, we see a gene sequence, we know that it associates with a disease, the decision is not good news. They're going to lose their monopoly practice, prices will drop, competition will enter the genetic testing market. So, I think that's good for patients, not so good for the industry.
[Scott Simon:] So, what's your general reaction to the Supreme Court's decision?
[Arthur Caplan:] I think it's way, way, way overdue. It's the correct decision. You know, to make a metaphor, it is as if Galileo Galilee had a telescope and looked up and saw the moons of Jupiter and said I'm patenting those. I discovered them. You don't get patents for discovery. You get publications. In my world, you get tenure. You might even get a Nobel Prize if it's a really interesting discovery, but you don't get a patent. And what the Supreme Court basically did was it said, look, these genes just exist. You're finding their function, you're understanding their correlation in terms of what a misprint causes a disease. But you didn't do anything. You just found what's out there. So, I think the decision is sound.
[Scott Simon:] Even if it's philosophically sound, did if I might put it this way monetizing discoveries provide incentive for new and better discoveries?
[Arthur Caplan:] It did. There's no doubt that people said, look, it's kind of like the Oklahoma land rush. We're going to rush out over the human genome, stake our claims, have patent protection. It gives us an incentive to go out there and look through the vast number of genes that make up us and figure out whether we can find disease correlations and so on. That said, that was kind of the old model, Scott. The newer way to go at this is to change those genes try to insert a gene, alter a gene.
[Scott Simon:] This is the synthetic material.
[Arthur Caplan:] That's the synthetic side. And that's where the action is now. It's not, you know, the companies that were out there doing what I'm calling the turf grabs across the genome, in a way I think their work is over and the action is going to be on the synthetic side.
[Scott Simon:] Which I think to repeat what we said when introducing you that's legally fine, right?
[Arthur Caplan:] That's legally fine. The court made a point of saying if you change genes, alter genes, insert genes or put chemicals around genes to make them do something different or even thaw out certain genes so that you can get a cleaner understanding of what the key genetic components are all patentable, all fine. And I would agree with that.
[Scott Simon:] I guess I didn't understand until I read about the decision, as we read about it this week, the degree to which, I guess it's been called, patent trolling has been going on.
[Arthur Caplan:] It's a big problem, because people will do two things: they will claim the patent, not really understanding fully what those genes do and just try to fend off anybody else from coming into that territory. And then there are people who sort of go around and say, you know, I'm going to buy that patent and block anybody from being able to enter research in this area unless you pay me a pretty good size fee. Not good for patients, not good for genetic testing pretty good for entrepreneurs who get and lawyers who get involved in that kind of trolling business.
[Scott Simon:] If you foresee and a lot of people do that synthetically produced DNA is going to be maybe in a better position to take off now, surely there are ethical implications for that, too.
[Arthur Caplan:] Oh, there are huge ones. One interesting angle here is, you know, we love our own genes. We're humans; we think our genes must be the best, we're at the top of the food chain of evolution. But synthetic biology has been working at the microbe level. There are simpler systems. They're easier to alter. This court decision is not restricted to human genes. That is patents have been taken out on the plants, on microbes, on animals. All of that moves into flex a little bit too. In the synthetic field, I think what we're seeing is a lot of activity of people trying to insert genes into a virus to say make proteins that would be useful medically, alter a virus to see whether it could act like a vaccine and attack, say, Ebola or something that got into us, or the flu. And in other areas, you're seeing people engineer viruses and bacteria to try and do things like suck pollution out of the ocean waters and so on. So, a big area of activity but probably not where you might think. It's not the humans that are the target so much as the microbes.
[Scott Simon:] Arthur Caplan. Head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU's Langone Medical Center. Thanks very much for joining us, Art.
[Arthur Caplan:] Thanks very much for having me.

[Rachel Martin:] Those Cleveland fans are waiting for their parade. But will they get it? Let's ask Mike Pesca. He is host of "The Gist" on Slate. Good morning, Mike.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Good morning. I mean, parade logistics are beyond my ken. I don't know. And of course, you got to predict if they win or lose. That's a thing in itself.
[Rachel Martin:] Oh, yeah, that. OK. So we're going to talk about that. But first, I have to take a moment to acknowledge that you are the father of two amazing young boys. And it's your day. It's Father's Day. And you're talking to us. So thank you for taking time.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Thank you for saying that.
[Rachel Martin:] So you going to watch the game with them later?
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] It the game tends to go long, but I have no problem ruining them for school tomorrow. So, yeah, why not?
[Rachel Martin:] Perfect. OK, to the task at hand no team has ever come back 3-1 to win the series. Can Cleveland do it?
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] You know, if you didn't know that much about basketball or the NBA, but you just knew maybe one thing about the Cavaliers, you'd say, well, I guess it all depends on LeBron James. And here I am to say it pretty much depends on LeBron James. But he has been so amazing. He leads both teams in points, assists, steals, blocks and is tied with his teammate Tristan Thompson in rebounds. On the Warriors side, Steph Curry is a great player. But, you know, he averaged 30 points a game, 30-and-a-half points a game in the regular season and is averaging, I should say, only 25. But that little difference or...
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] The difference Steph having a great game and Steph having a game that he has been having, which sometimes is only good that could be the difference in this series.
[Rachel Martin:] OK. Side question, perhaps, but I don't understand how the team with the biggest star in basketball, the Cavs, came to be the underdog in this contest. This is crazy.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] I think we, of course, take LeBron James for granted. That's why I didn't get an MVP vote. But I should also say he's playing better in this series than maybe we've ever seen him play and pretty much better than we've seen anyone play, Jordan-esque. I mean, he's put back to back 40-point games. And when he has his such complete game, but when his jump shot is dropping and I don't know why it does the basketball gods either bless him or don't. When his jump shot is dropping, he is unstoppable. And that's why, for a 10-minute stretch, the end of the third, start of the fourth in Game 6, he was responsible with scoring or assisting on 35 of 36 straight points. And all he would do is score whatever he wanted to. Or when the entire team collapsed around him, he'd lob it to Tristan Thompson who would get a dunk. It was this unstoppable, unbelievable thing. Now we use unstoppable is the word we used to use for the Warriors offense.
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] And when I say used to, I mean in Games 1 and 2 in this series. So yeah, this is compelling. You know, the teams have scored the same number of points in the series. And yet, there's been no game within 10.
[Rachel Martin:] Wow.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] So it's fascinating.
[Rachel Martin:] All right. So we'll end on the big question it's a big game. It's Game 7. That's always exciting. But this is bigger, right? Like put this in context for us. How big is this game?
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] You know, Rachel, obviously everything you talk on the show the election, terrorism it's all bigger. And this sport. And this is a game. But it's also a subculture. And the consequences of tonight will define this team, the Warriors, will define the player LeBron James. It's so meaningful to all of northeast Ohio. It's just this amazing opportunity. I'm more compelled by tonight's game than I have been for a game in 20 years.
[Rachel Martin:] Wow. There you have it. Mike Pesca of "The Gist" on Slate. Thanks so much, Mike.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] You're welcome.
[Rachel Martin:] And you're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.

[Rachel Martin:] Oh, to be a fly on the wall at the White House today.
[David Greene:] Yeah, if only. Rachel, President Trump is having lunch with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell today. And their relationship is, well, complicated. Here is Trump evaluating McConnell after the big failure on repeal and replace.
[President Donald Trump:] I was not impressed. Now, can he do good? I think so.
[David Greene:] OK so showing some faith in the majority leader there. When they meet today, the two men will definitely discuss getting a tax overhaul done. If Republicans fall short on that second big promise, how much trouble are they in, as the midterm elections start to loom pretty large?
[Rachel Martin:] Let's ask Scott Detrow. He hosts NPR's POLITICS Podcast. He's with us in the studio. Good morning, Scott.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] Good morning.
[Rachel Martin:] The president kind of went his own way last week, took a series of executive actions on things like health care and Iran. Presumably, that is to demonstrate that he does not need so much this particular Congress.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] Yeah. President Trump is someone who is always eager to show results, whether or not the results are fully there. Remember, he at one point held an event that looked like a bill signing, when he was really just transmitting a message to Congress saying, hey, I want you to act on this certain thing. He often talks about how he signed more bills than any other president at this point, when that is not actually the case. But executive orders are a way to show you're making progress. But they have a limited shelf life, as we're seeing with President Trump right now. He has rolled back order after order after order that President Obama put in place. The next president, if it's a Democrat, could presumably do all of this to all of Trump's orders.
[Rachel Martin:] But the president absolutely needs Mitch McConnell, especially for tax reform, right?
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] Absolutely.
[Rachel Martin:] He can't just executive action his way around Congress on that.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] Yeah. I think health care is the attempt to repeal Obamacare is a perfect example of why the president and his party's majorities have to work with each other. Health care was by and large an effort that the White House stayed kind of not fully involved in. President Trump wasn't out there doing campaign rallies, wasn't out there trying to put public pressure on key votes, other than tweets here or there. And that's one reason why it came up short.
[Rachel Martin:] So do we presume that he's going to have he's going to be more involved in tax reform, the president?
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] That's the indication. And you have seen him hold several public rallies on the tax issue that was mostly focused on tax reform, not just talking about it here and there. And he's strategically done that in several states where there are vulnerable Democrats up for re-election next year. The thought is that Republicans might be able to get a handful of Democrats to vote for this, as well.
[Rachel Martin:] So while the president is reaching out to Mitch McConnell, reaching out to the leader of the so-called Republican establishment, Trump's own former presidential adviser Steve Bannon is trying to blow the whole thing up from the outside. So what's Bannon's play here? Is he on the president's side?
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] It seems like a real short-term gain, long-term loss approach because if you blame all the failures so far on congressional Republicans, that isolates President Trump and keeps his approval rating, keeps the energy up for him when it comes to the base. It's hard to see the strategy for next year with that. If you're telling Republican voters, hey, the problem here is congressional Republicans, that's a hard argument to get them to show up at the midterms...
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] ...And vote for those Republicans.
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah. We should say Bannon is leading this push to support all these further right candidates against mainstream Republican candidates. And he talked about it at the Value Voter Summit a few days ago. OK. NPR's Scott Detrow, thanks so much for your time this morning.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] Thank you.
[Rachel Martin:] All right. Over the past few years, two crucial allies have helped the U.S. fight ISIS in Iraq.
[David Greene:] Yeah. Those allies are the Iraqi army and the other Kurdish Peshmerga forces. But this is a very complicated part of the world. And now those two groups are fighting one another. The Kurds want their own state. They held a referendum last month. Iraq's government rejects that referendum. And now the Iraqi army, which is backed by Iran, is assaulting the Kurdish-held city of Kirkuk. Big question is, could this blow up into a civil war?
[Rachel Martin:] Very big question. Let's put it to Fazel Hawramy. He's a journalist. We're reaching him on his cell phone in Iraq. Fazel, thanks for being here.
[Fazel Hawramy:] You're welcome.
[Rachel Martin:] Fazel, why is the Iraqi government doing this right now?
[Fazel Hawramy:] Well, for the last three years, the Peshmerga forces have been fighting the Islamic State. The Iraqi army has been fighting the Islamic State. And the Iraqi central government is using a referendum that the Kurds held on the 25 of September for independence they're using that as an excuse to retake the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. They started their offenses last night.
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah.
[Fazel Hawramy:] The Shiite ministers, the Iraqi army and various forces have trapped the Peshmerga forces in and around Kirkuk from several fronts. And apparently, many people inside Kirkuk the civilians have taken up arms. And they want to defend their city. And this situation is pretty escalating out of control.
[Rachel Martin:] OK. Let me just repeat what you've said because it is such a rough line. You're saying that the Iraqi security forces are taking advantage of this moment because the Kurds did just have this independence vote that would clearly be a risk to the sovereignty of Iraq as a country. And the security forces are attacking Kirkuk. Obviously, it's an oil-rich city. And you're saying civilians are taking up arms. I mean, Fazel, this has been long brewing. Kurds have wanted an independent state for generations. So how does this ever get resolved? I mean, we've got now this conflagration in this moment. But even if it's tamped down, this is not an issue that's going to go away.
[Fazel Hawramy:] Absolutely. I mean, the ultimate aim of the Kurdish people is to have their own independent state. But the Kurdish authorities have said that they want to do this through dialogue with Baghdad. And they said that the 25 of September referendum was the expression of the will of the Kurdish people. And they repeatedly said that doesn't mean that they're going to declare an independent Kurdistan that they asked to be in the referendum. And they want to have dialogue with the central government. But the what the central government has done for the last three years that the Kurds have helped the Iraqi forces to fight ISIS losing around 1,800 Peshmerga. And 81,000 Peshmerga have been wounded. They've been helping the Iraqi army to do this. And now that the Iraqi army is strong with the help of the anti-ISIS coalition the U.S.-led coalition they've taken this opportunity to take the fight to Kirkuk and the Peshmerga forces. And today I spoke to people inside one of the hospitals. And there were around 40 Peshmerga wounded in the hospital being treated. There are around...
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah.
[Fazel Hawramy:] ...Probably over 10 Peshmerga dead...
[Rachel Martin:] And so...
[Fazel Hawramy:] ...As a result of the fighting.
[Rachel Martin:] So we're seeing casualties on both sides. This is obviously a story that is rapidly developing. Fazel Hawramy he's a journalist. We've reached him on his cell phone from Iraq, talking about the battle in Kirkuk that is underway. Thank you so much for your time this morning.
[Fazel Hawramy:] My pleasure.
[Rachel Martin:] So Kurds in Iraq want independence. So do many people in Catalonia.
[David Greene:] That's right. And in a referendum earlier this month, Catalans voted to separate from Spain. The region's president, though, said not so fast and proposed dialogue with Madrid before fully breaking away. So Spain put him on a deadline ending today. Basically, you've got to decide now have you declared independence, or haven't you? And he seems to have ignored that deadline.
[Rachel Martin:] All right. We need help breaking this down. We called up journalist Lucia Benavides. Lucia, thanks for being with us.
[Lucia Benavides:] Thank you.
[Rachel Martin:] This was supposed to be a simple yes or no, right? Did you, Catalan leader, declare independence, or did you not? And what did the president say, exactly?
[Lucia Benavides:] Right. So the president did not directly answer that question. Basically, he addressed a letter to Spain's prime minister, where he did not declare independence. But he asked that the two governments meet as soon as possible to open up a dialogue over the next two months. And on Saturday, Spain's interior minister had said that the central government would invoke Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution if it did not get a clear answer from the Catalan government. And so what this article...
[Rachel Martin:] What does that yeah. What does that article mean?
[Lucia Benavides:] Yeah. What it means is that it would suspend Catalonia's autonomy. So the Spanish government would take over politically. It would throw out of office the current Catalan government. It would temporarily replace the government with Spanish officials. And it would also replace the local Catalan police force with the Spanish national police. And then...
[Rachel Martin:] That clearly is not moving the Catalan leader.
[Lucia Benavides:] Right. Right. And so and this is obviously the last thing that people in Catalonia want because they want more autonomy, not less autonomy. And we actually just heard back some minutes ago from Spain's deputy prime minister, responding to the letter that the Catalan president had addressed to the central government. She said that, from their perspective, the Catalan government did not provide an accurate response to Spain's request on whether or not the region had declared independence. And because of that, they are moving forward with invoking this Article 155. And unless, you know, they back away from independence by Thursday, Catalonia's autonomy may be suspended for...
[Rachel Martin:] Will be stripped.
[Lucia Benavides:] Yeah, we don't know how long.
[Rachel Martin:] So we've got another deadline, it looks like. We'll be having this conversation again in a couple of days.
[Lucia Benavides:] Right.
[Rachel Martin:] Meanwhile, the people of Catalan and Spain wait to see what is going to happen. Lucia Benavides she is a freelance journalist in Barcelona talking to us on Skype this morning. Lucia, thanks so much.
[Lucia Benavides:] Thank you.

[Lakshmi Singh:] When NPR last visited with Gugu Mbatha-Raw, she was fresh off a starring role as Belle, the title character the movie is named for. She played Dido Elizabeth Belle, the illegitimate daughter of a Royal Navy captain and an African slave entrusted to a powerful English lord. Gugu Mbatha-Raw has since played roles in some seven films at the box office and in an episode of the acclaimed TV series "Black Mirror." We checked in with her because she's also in the political thriller "Miss Sloane" out in theaters this weekend. She joined us from our NPR West bureau, and I asked her to give us the latest on what she's been up to since she last spoke with NPR two years ago.
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] I can't believe it was two years since I was talking about Belle. It really has flown. It's been phenomenal. I mean, I've had some wonderful opportunities. I spent a chunk of time in New Orleans doing the movie "Free State Of Jones" getting to work with Matthew McConaughey and also did "Concussion" where I got to work with Will Smith. So it's been fascinating, you know, getting to learn from those movie icons, and then really lovely to be doing "Miss Sloane," you know, with a female lead. Jessica Chastain is an actress that I've admired for such a long time.
[Lakshmi Singh:] Over the years, I know that you've taken on a lot of roles examining race in depth. You know, this comes at a time at least here in the United States where racial tensions seem to be at an all time high, I think, depends on who you ask. But why do you think we're having so many discussions about race particularly in the United States?
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] I think being biracial is a different experience. I think that and coming from the U.K. I feel as much white as I do black. And so it's really important for me to address these issues of identity in my work. But also, you know, we're always stronger when we work on, you know, what we have in common. And I love exploring that in my work.
[Lakshmi Singh:] I ask because as a biracial, bi-ethnic journalist of Latina and South Asian descent, it seems that that conversation happens so much more in the United States than when I'm, you know, traveling overseas. I wonder if you've had that experience.
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] I absolutely have. I think that may be coming from the U.K., it wasn't something I was as used to talking about. It wasn't really something I was asked about very much in the U.K. For me I think it's a question of cultural legacy, and I think that it cannot be denied that slavery happened here in America. And I think that the wounds of that are still being worked through. And I think that's a very specific cultural legacy to the United States of America.
[Lakshmi Singh:] Are you ever concerned at all about being pigeonholed?
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] I really don't think so. You know, I feel like my work has been incredibly diverse. You know, I'm always working on doing different projects in different areas. You know, Belle was one thing a few years ago, but then being able to do something like "Beyond The Lights," which doesn't really explore the issue of race at all. It's more about identity and pop culture and women and misogyny in the music industry, you know, and then to be able to go and do something like "Black Mirror" which is, you know, again, another period of history and, you know, has this sort of sci-fi element to it.
[Lakshmi Singh:] Well, I'm glad you actually pivoted to that. We were going to go there because another role this year has been that of Kelly in the episode of Netflix's "Black Mirror." You play a 1980s party girl in a same-sex relationship. And, first, here's your character Kelly meeting her love interest for the first time. Both women are outside in the rain.
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] [As Kelly] Sorry I pushed you into it. Saturday nights once a week it's like no time. I get impatient.
[Mackenzie Davis:] [As Yorkie] No, no, it's not that. Everyone was looking.
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] [As Kelly] Looking?
[Mackenzie Davis:] [As Yorkie] Yeah. You know, two girls dancing.
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] [As Kelly] OK one, folks are way less uptight than they used to be, and two this is a party town. No one's judging. Face it. If they were staring, it's because I am bodacious.
[Lakshmi Singh:] Bodacious oh, look at you.
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] [Laughter].
[Lakshmi Singh:] So the episode was definitely praised for its moving portrayal of a lesbian relationship with LGBT representation lacking in Hollywood, many might say. Was this something in the back of your mind this you know, what this role would actually mean in the broader sense?
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] You know, what? I actually have to confess my ignorance at this point because I had no idea, really. I wasn't aware of the misrepresentation, I guess, of, you know, the LGBTQ community. And I confess I was ignorant to that. And so I was very surprised and delighted that so many people have found so many layers to it.
[Lakshmi Singh:] Let's get to the next layer of your career which is the latest film. You play the character of Esme Maniturian. Is that right?
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] Manucharian [LAUGHTER].
[Lakshmi Singh:] I would have lost the bet on this one. OK.
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] No. It's OK, and it's kind of ironic because we do have a scene in a radio studio in the movie where the announcer mispronounces the character's name, which I could relate to so that was fun.
[Lakshmi Singh:] Oh, I didn't mean for that parallel to happen.
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] [Laughter].
[Lakshmi Singh:] You play the character of Esme...
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] Manucharian.
[Lakshmi Singh:] ...You work for the lobbying group that's very similar to the Brady Campaign which fights for gun control.
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] Yeah.
[Lakshmi Singh:] Let's take a listen to your opening lines in the film with Jessica Chastain who plays Miss Sloane.
[Jessica Chastain:] [As Elizabeth Sloane] We're all here to ensure safe passage of the Heaton-Harris bill into federal law. How do we do it?
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] [As Esme Manucharian] Realistically, we don't. We fight as hard as we can, build a strong base of support, so we have a better chance when they introduce the next year's Heaton-Harris or the one after that.
[Jessica Chastain:] [As Elizabeth Sloane] I didn't just move across town with the aim of losing as slowly as possible. Name and seniority?
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] [As Esme Manucharian] Esme Manucharian nine years.
[Jessica Chastain:] [As Elizabeth Sloane] Manucharian I've heard that name. You led the fight to preserve the concealed carry ban in Illinois.
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] [As Esme Manucharian] Ultimately, unsuccessfully, but yes.
[Jessica Chastain:] [As Elizabeth Sloane] OK, Esme, why are we going to lose?
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] [As Esme Manucharian] For every dollar Brady spends on campaign contributions, you know how much the gun lobby spends?
[Unidentified Actors:] [As characters] 38.
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] I got to do a lot of research. I got to visit Washington, D.C., for the first time and with Jessica. We were actually there doing research together.
[Lakshmi Singh:] And you talked to lobbyists?
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] Yeah. I got to meet several lobbyists. We had a lobbying firm that were sort of our consultants for the movie. And myself and Jessica got to do a tour of Capitol Hill which was fascinating. I also got to meet with leading members of the Brady campaign as well as a young woman whose mother was involved in the Sandy Hook and how that had motivated her to become involved in gun violence prevention.
[Lakshmi Singh:] Sort of becomes more than headlines doesn't it?
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] Absolutely.
[Lakshmi Singh:] Well, Gugu, what's next for you?
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] Well, I'm here in LA right now about to start work on "A Wrinkle In Time" with Ava DuVernay which I'm really excited about. [Laughter].
[Lakshmi Singh:] I bet.
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] Yeah, yeah. I'm thrilled. You know, I didn't grow up with the book as a little girl in the U.K., but I'm reading it now [LAUGHTER]. And, you know, Ava is just so dynamic, and it's just such a phenomenal cast in that film. So I'm really thrilled to be able to get to work on that in the next couple of weeks.
[Lakshmi Singh:] That was Gugu Mbatha-Raw. You can watch her in "Miss Sloane" in theaters this weekend. Gugu, thank you so much for being here.
[Gugu Mbatha-raw:] Thank you so much for having me.

[Mary Louise Kelly:] To Texas now and an important political gerrymandering case that begins today in federal court in San Antonio. The case involves the maps that determine how Texans are grouped into districts when they vote for both state and federal elections. The question is whether the current maps discriminate against the state's fast-growing Hispanic population. NPR's Wade Goodwyn is here to explain the case to us. Good morning, Wade.
[Wade Goodwyn, Byline:] Good morning.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Give us the back story here. This all started back in 2011, I gather.
[Wade Goodwyn, Byline:] Yeah, it's been a long case.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Long haul.
[Wade Goodwyn, Byline:] This case is about charges of racial gerrymandering, pure and simple. The Hispanic population has been exploding all across the state. But after these maps were drawn by Republicans, their opportunity to elect representatives actually was diminished. It was quite a sophisticated and, at times, cynical map-drawing operation. Emails in the court case revealed Republican operatives were trying to achieve districts that had what they called optimal Hispanic Republican voting strength. That was the phrase. And what it meant was GOP map drawers should try to create districts that looked Hispanic, but nevertheless, they would still be dominated by Republican candidates. And in another email, a San Antonio Republican House member wrote this. There's one area which includes two condo buildings with many GOP supporters and the San Antonio Country Club adjacent to my district; I would really like to get that. And here, we have a rather naked example of politicians choosing their voters, choosing their voters down to the level of condo buildings and country clubs. And this question in a democracy who should get to make this choice, the voters or the politicians, that cuts to the heart of these gerrymandering cases all around the country.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] You're talking about GOP map drawers here. Are we only talking about Republican gerrymandering?
[Wade Goodwyn, Byline:] No, it's mostly about Republican gerrymandering, but there's one part of the case that involved a white Democratic state House representative from Fort Worth, I think. And he was also afraid of the growing Hispanic population in his district, afraid an Hispanic Democrat would run against him and beat him in the primary. So he asked the Legislature that his district be redrawn, make it less Hispanic, and they did the power of the incumbency in all it's not-so-glorious display.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] [Laughter].
[Wade Goodwyn, Byline:] But it was in vain. The white Democrat did eventually get beat by a Hispanic Democrat in the 2014 primary. So I think the moral of the story is sometimes, demography is destiny, gerrymander though you might.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Well, let me ask you about one of the intriguing aspects here. This case is being heard by three judges, a federal panel, all this week. They are looking at the maps that these same three judges drew back in 2013 in an attempt to make things fair. So is what's happening this week judges are going to be judging their own maps?
[Wade Goodwyn, Byline:] It is bizarre. The question is that these judges, these drew the maps. They tried to fix the discrimination problem that they felt the case might reveal based on the evidence they had before them. So the question now is, did these maps really fix the discrimination problem the Republicans created with their original maps back in 2011? And from their recently published findings of fact, it appears the federal panel is inclined to think more map fixing may need to be done.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Wade, real quick how might this case change the balance of partisan power in Texas?
[Wade Goodwyn, Byline:] It would affect it, but it wouldn't change it. Texas is a Republican juggernaut. Even if the maps are drawn more fairly, Texas is solid Republican for now and for the foreseeable future.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] All right, Wade, thanks very much.
[Wade Goodwyn, Byline:] It's my pleasure.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] That's NPR's Wade Goodwyn reporting.

[Ed Gordon:] Now we turn to our roundtable. We're joined today by Roland Martin, executive editor of the Chicago Defender. He's in our Chicago bureau. Karen Narasaki joins us. She's president and executive director of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium. She joins us from our headquarters in Washington, DC. And George Curry is editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service. He joins us from Maryland. All right. Folks, we heard what Dr. Dean had to say earlier this week in his response to my questions. Karen, when you hear this man, I'm curious what your thoughts are. A number of people will suggest that this is a political partisan tool for people to bandy about. What's your thought?
[Ms. Karen Narasaki:] I think it's sad, though, that it's become a partisan discussion, like much that's going on in Washington today. It's taking away the focus from what we really need to be thinking about, which-one of the things that he raised-which is the poverty that's there. Congress is out now rushing to look at who's to blame for the response, but I think Congress needs to be looking at who's to blame for the fact that they had 30 percent unemployment in that city. And my guess is it's much higher for the African Americans there. We need to really be focusing on what's happening to the poor in our country, and we as the richest nation in the world, what are we going to be doing about it?
[Ed Gordon:] Roland Martin.
[Mr. Roland Martin:] I mean, I certainly concur. I mean, what you're dealing with really is years and years and years of neglect. And so there's no doubt in my mind that had the majority of the people had a different skin color, you would have seen a different reaction. But the one thing that I would really hope that leaders from New Orleans and Louisiana-although we're still talking about rescue and relief and relocation-I really think the conversation can really shift towards the reconstruction issue, and that is, we begin to talk about how can New Orleans, these same four individuals, have a hand in rebuilding their city in terms of jobs, in terms of training and nationwide with community colleges. And so I think we-you know, of course, we can sit here and talk about a 911-type commission, but there's still lots of work to be done to get that city back on its feet because it's a vital city to this country.
[Ed Gordon:] George Curry, I asked the government about a fine line, walking a fine line in saying what he sees in earnest and playing a political game. He says-and we'll hear more from him next week-he doesn't care what people think. He believes what needs to be said needs to be said and needs to be said now.
[Mr. George Curry:] Well, I agree with that, but I think we can go beyond his comments. There was a report issued yesterday by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and it showed a couple of very interesting things. This racial divide is real in terms of how Americans look at this. Two-thirds of African Americans say that the government would have had a faster response if most of the victims had been white; two-thirds. But by even a larger margin, 77 percent of whites said it wouldn't have made any difference. Another finding was that 71 percent of blacks say that-you know, shows that racial inequality remains a problem, but 56 percent of whites say it doesn't. So you're going to have this massive dialogue, you've got to start right here with this perception of totally two different views of America, everybody looking at the same major event. There is this racial divide. And so Dean is right on that and this is fully documented in this Pew study that came out yesterday.
[Mr. Roland Martin:] Now, Ed, you may find this interesting. I got an e-mail from a woman in Chicago who read a column that I wrote and she said that she and her husband of means wanted to write a $50,000 check and was going to write a second $50,000 check, but she was offended by the images of the individuals, stating that they were demanding federal help out of this whole deal and was put off by that, said that they should have been more respectful and be pleased with what they've gotten thus far. And as I read between the-you know, of course, I obviously replied to her to explain to her what the real issue was, and I certainly was reading between the lines that here was someone of means seeing these largely African Americans demanding help-This wasn't a few days afterwards. So this was still when everything was crazy in the Superdome. She was offended by them demanding assistance and said that, `You know, we worked for these funds.'And you can read through racial, you know, statements within those lines. And I just thought it was very interesting again how white Americans perceive this particular issue where here these folks are-people are dying around them and she thought they should have been more grateful.
[Ed Gordon:] Well...
[Mr. George Curry:] Now while there has been-there certainly is a racial divide on some of these issues. There are some things that Americans agree on, and what is important to me-and that Pew study really surprised me-for the first time since 911 a majority of Americans, 56 percent, said it's more important for the president to focus on domestic policies than the war on terrorism. That's a major finding and a major shift.
[Mr. Roland Martin:] Absolutely.
[Ed Gordon:] Well, I'll say this, and I've said it over the course of the last two weeks, and I'll continue to say it, I think if this country doesn't talk about race, this go 'round-I think we had a great opportunity after the Simpson trial to do it because people were actually saying things they believed in public. We have that opportunity again, and I hope we don't drop the ball. Karen, let's turn our attention to FEMA.
[Ms. Karen Narasaki:] Well, can I just add to that, Ed?
[Ed Gordon:] Sure.
[Ms. Karen Narasaki:] I just think it's doubtful that this administration is going to do that. I mean, they have tried very hard to basically whitewash any racial disparities. There was the report of the official at Department of Justice who was removed from his job because he was fighting the fact that they wanted to-that his bosses wanted to eliminate any references to the fact that Latinos and African-Americans were being racially profiled at high rates from a government report. This has been going on for the last six years. Every kind of report that comes out, whether it's health disparities-even when it's meant to focus on the issue of race, they don't want to talk about it. So I think that's going to be a very hard climb.
[Ed Gordon:] Yeah, I know, but I think it goes beyond just the administration. I just mean people, in general, whether it be the media, folks on the street.
[Mr. Roland Martin:] Absolutely.
[Ed Gordon:] I think we all have to start talking about race and be real about where we stand on it and get past some of the taboo thought and issue that we still have. Let's turn our attention to FEMA, and we heard from a representative of FEMA this week that the agency does not want journalists who accompany them in rescue boats to take pictures of those that are floating still in the streets of New Orleans, those on the side of the road. They say that this kind of recovery needs to be done with dignity and respect.
[Mr. George Curry:] Yeah.
[Ed Gordon:] George Curry, it's hard to hear those words from FEMA right now, isn't it?
[Mr. George Curry:] It's hard for me to hear anything from FEMA, quite frankly. First of all, they wanted dignity and respect, they should have gone out and rescued the people, and they did a poor job of that. So, I mean-and secondly, it's not their decision. I don't want to trust any government official, I don't care whether they're Republican or Democrat, to decide what we can show the American public. I think the news media is smart enough not to show people's facial features, but at the same time, let's not try to sanitize this whole thing. Part of the problem with FEMA-and they've got to focus on photographers and everything else-is that they don't want to focus on their ineptitude during this whole crisis. And part of that-there's a story in The Washington Post this morning that shows that five of the top eight FEMA officials came to their post with virtually no experience in handling disasters. And the top three had connection with Bush's 2000 campaign. So you've got this political payoff here, and you've got inept, inexperienced people at the top, and they've botched this whole operation. And they want to talk about photographing? You talk about their performance.
[Mr. Roland Martin:] Hey, Ed, I was...
[Ed Gordon:] Karen, does Michael Brown...
[Mr. Roland Martin:] Go ahead.
[Ed Gordon:] ...who heads FEMA-Karen, does he need to be fired? And if so, does he need to be fired today? There are those who are actually going as far, as I said, to call for suspending money to this organization until, in fact, he's fired.
[Ms. Karen Narasaki:] I think he does need to be fired. His total lack of sensitivity that has been shown in glaring light over the last week shows that he's just not fit to lead an agency that is going to have a long time in trying to help this region fully recover. I want to note something, though, on the whole photography issue. I think it's a little different than the issue of the ban on photographing the coffins of dead soldiers coming back from Iraq, which I feel is clearly wrong, 'cause it is this issue of seeing individual people whose bodies have been deteriorating for several days and the sensitivity to their families. But I agree that you should be able to photograph something, in that, the media, with appropriate guidelines, about not showing people's faces, the public really needs to know. When you weigh it against the public's need to fully understand and grasp the tragedy, I think that really outweighs FEMA's concerns at least...
[Ed Gordon:] Here's the real unfortunate part. Roland, pick up but let me just say this. Here's the real unfortunate part of this. Anyone that would be photographed at this point probably would be quite frankly unrecognizable by virtue of them laying in the heat, the humidity, the water, and that is the sad part of all of this. Roland, pick up on that.
[Mr. Roland Martin:] Well, I actually ran a photo on our front page of one of those bodies, and the reason being-that is on The Chicago Defender-because I wanted people to fully understand exactly what is going on there. First, those of us in the news media, we know how to make the judgments. We don't need FEMA making those kind of judgments for us. If we're going to show the National Guard rescuing people from helicopters, if we're going to show aid drives, if we're going to show the American Red Cross and FEMA in meetings assisting people, I think you show the good, the bad and the ugly of various situations and allow those of us in the business to make the decision. And if the readers and the viewers decide that we have gone too far, trust me, from experience, they will let us know immediately.
[Mr. George Curry:] And I think there's nothing wrong with when you use a certain taste here. If you got people in a body bag, you don't see the dent anyway. You remember we saw that picture over and over of the elderly person in the wheelchair draped in it. You know, you saw it but you saw it in a respectful manner. And I think as long as you operate along those manners, I think there's nothing wrong with showing them.
[Ed Gordon:] Let us also not lose the lesson that the late great John Johnson gave us when they decided to show the picture of Emmett Till in Jet magazine and the movement that caused. Sometimes a grotesque picture can speak volumes, Roland Martin, to moving people.
[Mr. Roland Martin:] I mean, absolutely. When it was shown in Jet, when it was shown in The Chicago Defender, people responded to it, and again, it's all about judgment. And those of us in the business-I mean, this is not the first tragedy that we have covered. I mean, it is not. And so as far as FEMA, what they should be doing-they're saying we don't have room in our rescue boats, as they say it; that's fine. Do what we do in other tragedies. You have a press pool. A press pool follows a president around when he's doing his photo ops and so if you have a press pool in the situation of a press pool as they're going through rescues-because also we're still discovering that they're still finding people who are still trapped...
[Ed Gordon:] Yeah.
[Mr. Roland Martin:] ...we saw again. We don't need FEMA deciding that. They need to try to figure out how to take care of people and let the press do what we do.
[Ed Gordon:] All right. Roland Martin...
[Mr. George Curry:] Mark my word on this. Mark my word on this. They can't stop the press from showing those pictures.
[Ed Gordon:] ...Karen Narasaki and George Curry, I thank you all for joining us today. Greatly appreciate it.
[Mr. Roland Martin:] Thank you.
[Mr. George Curry:] Thank you.
[Ms. Karen Narasaki:] Great.
[Ed Gordon:] You're listening to NEWS & NOTES from NPR News.

[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] Great to be with you, Neal
[Conan:] And when you describe that divided nation, you conclude that the U.S. economy is a zero-sum game. It didn't always used to be, you say, but it is now. What do you mean by that
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] Well, there was an idea early in the 20th century coming from Henry Ford, for example, that employers had to pay enough to their workers so that their workers could buy the product. Henry Ford wanted to pay his workers enough so that they could buy Fords. And then somewhere, like, in the 1970s, 1980s, we went away from that, and the idea in every company became to squeeze as much as you could out of the workers, and not worry too much if they weren't really able to be the same kind of consumers anymore. That, in a nutshell, is why we are where we are today, you know, with people defaulting on debts. People can't, you know, buy more stuff and cause economic growth
[Conan:] Yet, we've seen, except in recent years, that the standard of living for most Americans has been rising steadily over all those years
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] Not for in the most recent years. What happened in..
[Conan:] I agree with that, but certainly since the 1970s..
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] Yeah, yeah. In the most recent years, in the last, oh, you know, four, five years of this decade, we've seen a real stagnation in people's wages and salaries. The only big gains were among the 0.1 percent at the very top
[Conan:] So if you look at employers, and you have a lot to say about our largest employer in your book. A lot of people are talking about, we have to find ways to make service jobs, which are the jobs that most people have in this country these days, to make those jobs the same kind of job you were talking about, the Ford jobs, where people could afford to buy the products of the companies that they worked for. Is there a way to do that
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] Well, we'd have to reverse a lot of things we've been doing. We'd have to have, you know, more protection of worker's rights, so that they can organize, for example. That's the traditional American way of kind of bootstrapping your way up, was to have a union. We'd have to have more living-wage legislation and higher wages than we now do. We'd have to raise the federal minimum wage above the measly seven dollars and change it's going to go up to in 09. All kinds of things, yeah
[Conan:] And, but it takes a huge reversal of policy
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] Yes, it would take a big reversal, because everything has been going the other way. Look at, you know, the last eight years' tax cuts for the wealthy, cuts in various services for the middle class and the poor and the elderly and children. So, yeah, we'd have to turn all that around
[Conan:] You write, at one point, and you're a sarcastic writer, so I'm never quite sure what you mean, but do you feel betrayed by your country
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] I think that was in a satirical essay [Soundbite of laughter
[Conan:] OK
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] Yes, entitled "Flee America.
[Conan:] Yes
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] And how it's about it's sort of a satire about being a fake website to match you with an alternative nation. But no, I don't feel betrayed. I wouldn't use that word. But I feel ever more angry and determined to get America as we used to know it up and running again
[Conan:] And do you see any prospect now that we're in this economic situation, where everybody's deeply concerned about what's been going on, the stock market falling and the house values falling and unemployment going up, though still much lower, well, than it was in the 1970s. Nevertheless, with the economic situation as it is, do you see any prospect for some of these changes to start happening
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] Only if we make them happen. I mean, just because things are bad doesn't mean that good change will happen. I think we have, you know, have a chance for a new approach, depending on who we elect for president. But it's still, you know, if that were to be Obama, it's going to take a lot of pressure on him, I think, to get him to realize that this is an emergency in many people's lives
[Conan:] Do you find him an advocate for the poor
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] Certainly more than the alternative
[Conan:] Sounds like it's the lesser of two evils you're thinking about
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] No, I think there are some very inspiring things about him, but I also think he needs a lot of pressure from below
[Conan:] Let's see if we can get some callers on the line with Barbara Ehrenreich. Again, her new book is called "This Land is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation." 800-989-8255 is the email address and is the phone number. The email address is talk@npr.org. Let's start with Sara, Sara is calling us from Rochester in New York
[Sara:] Hi, how are you? Thank you for taking my call
[Conan:] Go ahead, please
[Sara:] Barbara, I'm a big fan of your books, and I appreciate the work that you do to expose realities for many Americans. My comment is about the statement was made earlier that the American standard of living has gone up, and I just wanted to say I think that there is a strong relationship between the appearance of that and the availability of credit, and also the marketing of credit to people who can't afford to pay it back. And I think that there needs to be much more strict regulation of markets that have been taking advantage of people by making them believe that they are able to afford more than they are through the extension of credit. And we actually have a negative savings rate and a humongous amount of consumer credit. Between the national debt and consumer debt, we are the largest debtor nation in the world. And I think it's an unfortunate thing that we refuse to regulate those industries
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] Thank you, Sara. You know, I should have said that. You beat me to it. That was good. You know, is it one thing that sort of glossed over our grave problems in the last five or six years was easy credit, and easy credit became our nation's substitute for decent wages. You know, you couldn't hope to save enough for that house, but boy, did they have a mortgage for you, you know
[Conan:] And then you could take out a home-equity loan, even putting yourself further in the whole
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] Oh, yes
[Sara:] Exactly, and I have many friends in their mid-30s who are losing their houses and who will have a very long-term issue in terms of their credit standing because they were promised that they could just skip all the steps of saving and everything else and just buy on time for things that were just way beyond their means
[Conan:] Do you think they bear any responsibility for the fact they didn't read the fine print
[Sara:] Absolutely, but even if you do read the fine print, it's written in such ridiculous jargon that it's impossible to understand. And then you have someone standing across from you, or sitting across from you at the table telling you, you know, we believe that you will be able to pay this back. We know that you are credit-worthy. And people are pretty prone to believing what people say to them about what they can have versus..
[Conan:] Do you think they bear any responsibility for not..
[Sara:] Instant gratification culture here
[Conan:] Sara, excuse me, do you think they bare any responsibility for not thinking that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is
[Sara:] Yeah, I think that people do, but the thing about it is, there's very little consumer education around this, and that's been I think very consciously designed as well. Many of the people that I went to college with didn't have any financial education until college, and that personal money management, which is a very basic overview, was like a shock to their system. Most of them had already been extended credit before they were even out of high school. So, I think that there is a tremendous amount of information coming at us from one side with a certain point of view that you can have, have, have and you must have, have, have, versus being very wise and intelligent consumers
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] But Neal, I have to take issue with you. I think there is way too much emphasis today on consumer education, financial education, as a solution to these problems. I think it's way overstated. You probably don't read the fine print. I bought a house last summer. Did I read the mortgage? Of course not
[Conan:] But did you think that you couldn't afford it
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] No, no, I thought I could, and so far..
[Conan:] And I suspect that's true
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] Knock on wood, I can so far. But I think, you know, partly, you know, things are designed to be tricky. But also, you know, a lot of people don't have enough money to manage. You know, if you're making 10 dollars an hour, 15 dollars an hour, even, you don't have a whole lot to even, you know, to bill with. It's just triage every month
[Conan:] Sara, thanks very much for the call
[Sara:] Thank you. Have a good day
[Conan:] So long. Let's see if we can talk to Joe, and Joe is with us from La Crosse in Wisconsin
[Joe:] Good afternoon
[Conan:] Good afternoon
[Joe:] I think you just exempted a third of the workforce from demonstrating any personal responsibility, if they don't have that much money to manage. I think it becomes incumbent that we demonstrate that personal responsibility, particularly when we don't have that much money to manage. Which actually wasn't my point, but I felt I had to respond to that. But what I was going to say was one of the things that seems to have gone unnoticed is that up until and including the Reagan years, whenever there was an increase in the productivity in the workforce, particularly in manufacturing, that increase translated to increase in pay and or benefits to the workforce. But beginning in the 1990s what happened was we saw, in some cases, dramatic increases in productivity. Manufacturing productivity in the last 10 years has gone through the roof. But that has not translated to any significant benefits to the workforce. And I do agree with much of your point. We need a minimum wage. We don't have one. We have a number that's ridiculous when you think about somebody trying to support themselves, much less a family. So, we do have to rethink the structure of our economic system. But part of the problem, and I think the fundamental problem, perhaps, is that now money chases its own tail, and we no longer talk about the purpose of money, which is to help develop the initiatives and the creativity of the individual. And I think that's something that's lost from our discussion, and I think when we don't include that, then it makes it all too easy to start thinking about people and paper clips and go merrily on our way discussing economics and high finance without including the human element and indeed ultimately the spiritual element
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] Joe, you make a really good point I couldn't emphasize this more is that one of the disturbing and fascinating thing that's happened in recent years, like the last five years, is the decoupling of the major economic indicators from how people were actually feeling and living. You had plenty of economic growth, that didn't translate into wage increases. You had increases in productivity, as you talked about, didn't translate into wage increases. You had falling you had low unemployment. All of these things, because it's not just about, you know, economic indicators. It's about power. And what's impossible for people to organize to get more money out of their bosses, well, it doesn't help you that your productivity is so high
[Conan:] Yeah, we just did a show this week about inflation is theoretically at four percent but to a lot of people it feels like it's a lot higher
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] It sure does. Four percent, that can't be right
[Joe:] Absolutely, and I think one of the things that sometimes gets lost is we make the statement, it's not personal, it's just business. But if you think about it that statement is always and has to be a lie because, ultimately it's going to personal to somebody somewhere along the line
[Conan:] Joe, thanks very much for the call. We appreciate it.
[Joe:] Thank you
[Conan:] We're talking with Barbara Ehrenreich about her new book, "This Land is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation." You're listening to Talk of the Nation from NPR News. And John is with us, John from St. Louis
[John:] Hi, great show. It's something that really touches my heart. I was wanting to know if there was anything in the book about one company buying another and letting thousands go. My wife and myself are victims of Pillsbury being bought by General Mills. And you know, they come in and they have a smile on their face and they just rip your life apart with the stroke of a pen, just like the previous caller said, in the name of business. And God knows there's something wrong with that. And we need a separation of corporate America and our government. Thank you very much
[Conan:] John, thanks for the call. Corporate mergers
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] Yeah, excellent point, John. It's not only the mergers. It's the whole downsizing trend that began really in the '80s, accelerated in the '90s, where companies and the CEOs, especially the stockholders, were rewarded the more they could cut costs in the short term by laying people off. And mergers are another part of it. There's no thought in any of this about of accountability toward people, toward the workers, toward the community or anyone
[Conan:] Let's go to Nate. Nate's with us from Cleveland
[Nate:] Yes, hi. Thank you. I just wanted to ask the author, I'm a small business owner, and she talks about raising the wages for workers. That's fine and I understand, you know, it sounds good, but the problem is that if you raise the wages, then the cost of the good produced will go up. So therefore, the goods will go up along with their wages and they'll cancel each other out
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] Well, you know, we've had an experiment in this since about 1998. Twenty-nine states have raised their minimum wages above the federal minimum wage
[Conan:] You write about Washington, the state of Washington
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] Yeah, the state of Washington, for example, you know, getting up to eight dollars an hour. And so the question was, all these predictions were being made, Nate, saying well, when that happens, you know, the states that raise their minimum wages, they are going to go downhill right away. Nobody will live in them. The company you know, restaurant and hotel industries will shut down. Did not happen, did not happen. In fact, you know, there's interesting comparisons between state of Washington and Idaho, which has a very low minimum wage. People, they were doing better in Washington. Business was booming. Now more and more small businesses are saying, yeah, we want a better we want a higher minimum wage, but we want it for everybody
[Nate:] Yeah, I see that point, I guess, just personally speaking, I just know for my business what it will do and I just I think there should be a better way. I just think that across the board mandating that wages go up sometimes is shortsighted. So, I thank you for your time
[Conan:] Nate, thanks for the call, and good luck with your business
[Nate:] Thanks
[Conan:] And Barbara Ehrenreich, as you write about the book, there's essays about a lot of things. In fact, as I understand it, this book started as a blog
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] A lot of the essays in it, yeah, were blogged on my website and also at thenation.com and Huffington Post. And then I just thought, hey, you got a bunch of these, maybe they make sense together in some way
[Conan:] And are you continuing to write the blog
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] Yeah, I posted one on Sunday, in fact
[Conan:] And your interests are wide-ranging. I mean, you write about everything from the movies to obviously economics and the like..
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] And science
[Conan:] And science as well, yes. What fascinates you the most, do you think
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] Oh my God, how can I answer that? Everything fascinates me. That's the trouble That's why I have to be a journalist, because it's, you know, short attention span, on to the next question. You know what I'm talking about, Neal
[Conan:] I do. I've had a life of short attention spans And regrettably, this span has just about evaporated, but thank you so much for being with us today
[Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich:] Oh, my pleasure
[Conan:] Barbara Ehrenreich and her new book, "This Land is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation." She was kind enough to join us here today in Studio 3A. We'll be at the Newseum tomorrow and talking about relations between the media and the FBI. We'll also be talking with the brother of the Unabomber, the man who turned him in. Stay with us for that. I'm Neal Conan. This is Talk of the Nation from NPR News

[Liane Hansen:] In state after state, lawmakers are targeting teacher pay, tenure, seniority, and questioning how teachers are evaluated. Many teachers and their unions say they're getting the blame for just about everything that can go wrong in schools. NPR's Claudio Sanchez reports.
[Claudio Sanchez:] Central Falls High, a struggling school in Rhode Island, recently fired all its teachers, in large part because only 7 percent of its 11th graders passed the state's math test. But here's the question: Are the teachers at fault?
[Mr. George Mclaughlin:] No. They probably deserve a portion of the blame but now, we're just being stepped on.
[Claudio Sanchez:] That's George McLaughlin, one of the 89 faculty members who was fired. He says teachers want students to succeed, but more and more people are convinced...
[Mr. George Mclaughlin:] The problem with education is teachers.
[Claudio Sanchez:] Even the president of the United States seems to be saying it, says McLaughlin. Mr. Obama made headlines when he injected himself into the labor dispute at Central Falls High, and condoned the firings after teachers refused to work more hours without pay to raise students' abysmal test scores.
[President Barack Obama:] If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, but doesn't show any sign of improvement, then there's got to be a sense of accountability.
[Claudio Sanchez:] Mr. Obama, of course, is not the first politician to criticize teachers unions for opposing tough measures, ostensibly to approve schools. But firing teachers en masse?
[Mr. Dennis Van Roekel:] That's not part of the administration policy, and I wish they would speak out and say that.
[Claudio Sanchez:] Dennis Van Roekel is president of the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union. He says he's astonished by the hostility towards teachers, and the administration's reluctance to denounce it.
[Mr. Dennis Van Roekel:] I would hate to see this administration labeled as anti-teacher.
[Claudio Sanchez:] Van Roekel says teachers are taking the brunt of the most aggressive efforts to turn around failing schools, not just shutting them down or firing principals and teachers, but attacking hard-earned benefits like tenure and seniority. Van Roekel says the Obama administration's Race to the Top fund is even offering states and local school districts billions of dollars to tie teacher evaluations to students' test scores. An example of how this unprecedented level of scrutiny from Washington is affecting teachers, says Van Roekel, is Guilford County, North Carolina. A school board there is asking the U.S. Education Department for $2 million to help pay for a complete overhaul of 10 schools. And yes, teachers in at least one school will be dismissed, says Mo Green, the county school superintendent.
[Mr. Mo Green:] Dismissal is maybe too strong a word. It certainly would require that the faculty would have to no longer be at the school. Because if you -obviously, if you close the school then there would not be any faculty at that school.
[Claudio Sanchez:] By the way, what would you say to anyone who would say: What they're doing down in Guilford County is nothing more than teacher bashing?
[Mr. Mo Green:] This is not teacher bashing at all. This is what amounts to a fresh start.
[Claudio Sanchez:] Teachers in Guilford County say they're demoralized, for a good reason, says Van Roekel.
[Mr. Dennis Van Roekel:] You ignore your own policies of due process, you ignore the rights of employees. I mean, how do you look in the face of a PE teacher, a history teacher or a cafeteria worker and say: The reason you don't have a job is because our fourth graders, compared to last year's fourth graders, didn't do well on a math and reading test?
[Claudio Sanchez:] So, if schools are failing and kids aren't learning, the question remains: Do teachers and their unions deserve more of the blame than -let's say, shrinking education budgets, poverty or bad parenting? Maybe not, says Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, but teachers are easy targets.
[Mr. Rick Hess:] If the unions in the past 25 years had been more aggressive partners in trying to police their own ranks, in trying to work with reform-minded superintendents, we would be at a very different conversation today.
[Claudio Sanchez:] What's clear, says Hess, is that Mr. Obama and the secretary of education, Arne Duncan, are on a collision course with teachers and their unions.
[Mr. Rick Hess:] I think they understand that to build a bipartisan coalition to drive school reform, they can't be seen as letting teachers off the hook.
[Claudio Sanchez:] The risks for the Obama administration are that teachers and their unions will increasingly oppose and block the president's school reform proposals at every turn, and that more teachers, including the best ones, will leave the profession if they think they're not being treated as educators but as punching bags. Claudio Sanchez, NPR News.

[Neal Conan:] And now, the Opinion Page. He may be the most famous New Mexican of all time, Billy the Kid. Governor Bill Richardson wants to reconsider the case against the legendary outlaw who's best known as one of Hollywood's favorite Western characters. In many movies, he's portrayed as a kind of Wild West Robin Hood. In an op-ed in The New York Times, writer and New Mexican Hampton Sides saw a very different character. What do you know about Billy the Kid? Does he deserve a posthumous pardon for his crimes? 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Hampton Sides joins us from a studio in Santa Fe. His most recent book is "Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin." And, Hampton, nice to have you on the program.
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] It's good to be back with you. How are you?
[Neal Conan:] I'm well. Thank you. Now take us back to this character, Billy the Kid. I think I remember him most vividly as, well, Paul Newman in "The Left Handed Gun."
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Yeah. He's been in so many films that he may actually be the subject of more films than any other American historical figure. Of course, many of those portrayals are exaggerated or play around with the facts. But the real Billy the Kid, I argue in the piece, was a thug, basically, who doesn't deserve a pardon. He killed eight or nine people, depending on who you're talking to. He was a cattle rustler. He was a cattle thief. And he was, you know, someone who basically was involved in a mercantile feud over beef contracts.
[Neal Conan:] Well, that's the Lincoln County War, which is sometimes portrayed...
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Right.
[Neal Conan:] ...as a class struggle.
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] And as a New Mexican, I you know, I've just I guess I I'm amused by it, but I'm also a little resentful that this episode of our history is the most famous and most bankable sort of tourist commodity in the state, a state that has a rich and fascinating history. This is the guy. People can't get enough of him. They just the romance of gun smoke and leather, you know? So...
[Neal Conan:] Mm-hmm.
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] I'm I argue that maybe Richardson, as his final act as governor -and I've spoken with the governor about this you know, maybe he shouldn't be dredging up tired, old stories from a shoot-them-up. And, you know, and what promises to be a fairly cheesy affair, they're going to have, you know, lights and cameras and Wild West costumes and...
[Neal Conan:] Oh, a moot court kind of a deal?
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Right, exactly. Exactly, with Wild West facial hair and outfit. And Governor Richardson will preside over it. And, you know, I got to get I'll hand it to him, he does have a sense of humor. He is somewhat tongue-in-cheek about this. But he is very interested in the case for pardoning Billy the Kid because he was the governor of the at the time in the 1880s, Lew Wallace did offer Billy the Kid amnesty from prosecution. And he kind of fulfilled his side of the bargain but Lew Wallace didn't fulfill his. And in the end...
[Neal Conan:] While Lew Wallace was busy writing his novel.
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Yeah, he was working on "Ben-Hur" and really trying to get out of New Mexico, because it was so violent and crazy. He realized, you know, this was not the place for him. And so I think Governor Richardson thinks, you know, his predecessor may have wronged Billy the Kid, and it's well worth looking at you know, well what could Richardson do to right the course of history?
[Neal Conan:] Well, he's not doing it for naked political opportunism. He's term-limited. He's not running for reelection, so...
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] I think he's doing it for publicity too. I mean, he's got a very studied sense of theater. He understands what gets headlines. You know, it's been in papers now, all over the world already and my op-ed piece, and now here we are talking about it on TALK OF THE NATION. So it's clearly it works. People are interested in this saga. And, you know, he knows what he's doing. Of course, publicity does play a role in it.
[Neal Conan:] That never hurts any political figure no matter what point in his career. But all right, then-Governor Lew Wallace offers Billy the Kid a, you know, an amnesty if certain conditions are met and Billy the Kid meets those conditions. After the governor apparently went back on his deal, did after that, did Billy the Kid go on and continue his nefarious ways?
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Yeah, I mean, that's my understanding, is the reason Wallace didn't fulfill his end of the bargain is during the intervening months, Billy the Kid went on to kill a number of other people, including a sheriff. He may have robbed you know, he certainly stole more cattle and sheep, and he may have robbed a bank. So, you know, in other words, the circumstances changed. The goal posts moved.
[Neal Conan:] Mm-hmm.
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] And it became really hard for Governor Wallace, as the territorial governor, to essentially pardon a cop killer.
[Neal Conan:] Let's see if we can get some callers in on the conversation. Our guest is writer Hampton Sides. His op-ed in The New York Times takes Governor Bill Richardson to task for his effort to possibly pardon posthumously Billy the Kid. 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. Let's start with Susan. Susan with us from Laramie in Wyoming.
[Susan:] Hello. Thanks for taking my call.
[Neal Conan:] Sure.
[Susan:] I think Governor Richardson has so many other more important things to be worrying about. Theatrics aside, I was listening to your program about education. Let's worry about that. Billy the Kid will go down in history. No one will ever really know what happened to him. And there's no time like the present.
[Neal Conan:] Well...
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Right.
[Neal Conan:] She has a point, Hampton. Among the other things that Governor Richardson could pay attention to is his popularity ratings, which are not very good.
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] That's true. And, you know, there has been some investigations and questions about propriety. But, you know, Governor Richardson has a very forward-looking set off policies. And his legacy is very positive in many ways, of serious investments in solar power, wind power, high-tech industries, light rail, film industry. And for him to sort of go back and look and sort of dredge up these old stories as one of his last acts as governor, it just seems a little backwards and possibly a little cheesy. But...
[Neal Conan:] Well, you mentioned tourism is an important industry in New Mexico as well, and presumably a lot of people come to, well, hear about the Billy the Kid.
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] It is. It is. And that's what the party's banking on. I mean, you know, he knows what he's doing. And I supposed, you know, this is the hypocrisy of it for me is that, you know, I'll be the very first to tuned in if they do do this hearing. I may go down there and cover it as a reporter. It is fascinating. And anything that can get history back on the front pages of the papers, it ain't all bad.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks, Susan, for the phone call. Appreciate it.
[Susan:] Yeah. Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Bye-bye. Let's see if we can go next to Barbara, and Barbara is calling us from Lamoni in Iowa.
[Barbara:] Yes, yes. I wish people would leave him alone. That is I am actually his great, great, great granddaughter.
[Neal Conan:] Really? Of Billy the Kid?
[Barbara:] Yes. Yes. And I wish they would just leave him alone and let him rest in peace. I am so sick of people dredging up the past, okay. And about him killing the sheriff, he did not. He did not kill anybody. The governor when they gave him his pardon, he went straight according to my grandfather, okay? I know all about my great grandfather's history. I know all about him. He went straight. He did not kill anybody. He did not rob any more banks. As a matter of fact, he settled down and he married. That's how I got here.
[Neal Conan:] And then brutally shot down by Pat Garrett?
[Barbara:] Yes.
[Neal Conan:] All right. Hampton Sides, how does history accord with Barbara's grandfather's account of her great grandfather?
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Well, that's that may be a new one to me. I know that there have been a number of people who have claimed to be descendants of Billy the Kid. There was a guy in Texas who his name is Brushy Bill, who claimed that he wasn't killed by Pat Garrett, and lived a long and happy life.
[Barbara:] Yes, he was...
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] So is that are you a descendant of Brushy Bill?
[Barbara:] No.
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Okay.
[Barbara:] No, I...
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] That's okay.
[Barbara:] I knew who Brushy Bill is. I have all I've got all my family tree. I've got all that stuff. He was killed by Pat Garrett. Yes, he was.
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Okay.
[Barbara:] He was shot in the back by Pat Garrett.
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] So if he had descendants, it would've been during this he would've had to have met and married someone during the brief period between when he broke out of jail and when he was killed by Pat Garrett.
[Barbara:] Yes.
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Okay.
[Barbara:] As a matter of fact, he was. My great, great, great grandmother was pregnant with my great, great grandfather at that time...
[Neal Conan:] Well...
[Barbara:] ...he got killed. Yes. So he never got...
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Well, I haven't...
[Barbara:] He never got to see his son.
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] I hadn't heard this. But you should definitely go down to the hearing and make your you know, get your story in there because it's an interesting I mean, there are a lot of other folks as well who claimed to be descendant of Billy the Kid.
[Barbara:] Right. Oh, I understand that. Yes, I know. I know that. And, you know I mean, I have all my history. You know, I've kept up with it. You know and I'm sitting here listening to the radio and they said Billy the Kid, and I said, oh, no, I got to get my input on it because...
[Neal Conan:] Okay.
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Okay.
[Barbara:] I am just people have just been some people, you know, talk, you know. He actually from what I understand from my family history, he after the governor gave him the pardon and he went straight, he married he got married. He would you know, his wife was fixing to having a baby, you know, and he went straight. He did. And then turned around and Pat Garret shot him.
[Neal Conan:] Barbara, thanks very much for the call. We appreciate it.
[Barbara:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Bye-bye. Let's see if we can go...
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] And this is the reason right here, I think, why the saga is so endlessly fascinating to people, is that people come out of the woodwork who claim all sorts of things like this. And I'm not disputing her story one way or the other. I just think it's an interesting part of this it's an interesting dimension to it is that, you know, the story lives on.
[Neal Conan:] Well, in fact, you say in your piece, we're not exactly sure what his name was.
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Yeah. I mean, there's disputed there's all sorts of things in dispute: his name, his birth date, so many facts about his life. All of which allows people to kind of superimpose their own interpretations on him. And so, yeah, he was a Robin Hood or he was Rob Roy figure or he was a folk hero or he was a thug who killed you know, some people say he killed 21 people, one for every year of his life. But most likely, killed somewhere between eight and nine people.
[Neal Conan:] And he got the reputation as the left-handed gun. I mentioned the Paul Newman movie earlier, because the one picture of him was flipped around accidentally.
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Right. Right. Right. You know, it's sort of a little bit like Robert Johnson, the bluesman from the Mississippi Delta, who had one photograph that we know of...
[Neal Conan:] Mm-hmm.
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] ...and who, you know, there's so many facts missing. Some instead of making it less interesting, it actually makes it more interesting because we don't know those we don't know the true story. So the mystery is more interesting sometimes than the fact.
[Neal Conan:] We may not know William Bonney's true name, but we do know that Robert Johnson met the devil at the crossroads. Anyway...
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Of course.
[Neal Conan:] ...you're we're talking with Hampton Sides about his op-ed in The New York Times. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. Let's go next to Marcus, Marcus with us from Rockford, Illinois.
[Marcus:] Yes, although I'm a big fan of Billy The Kid mythos you know, I grew up watching "Young Guns" movies. But honestly that I think to try and give him a pardon posthumously, I think, one, it's irrelevant. It's not going to do any good. And, you know, when you hear so many criticisms, people callously getting, you know, getting on the case of video game makers, of gangster rappers, well, here's a guy who wasn't portraying violence, who was actually committing it. And I don't think we need to be glorifying that. I think that he's dead. Let him rest. But to go and try and pardon him and all that, to me it just seems ridiculous, it seems like a waste of taxpayer's money.
[Neal Conan:] And he's that's another point there, Hampton, whether he was maligned or not, Billy the Kid is dead. What's the point? There's very few instances in American history where executives go back and pardon dead people.
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, like, it's sort of a joke, like a lot of governors seem to go out in a blaze of glory, you know, pardoning all these criminals for maybe for, you know, kickback reasons or something. And I do think that Governor Richardson is sort of playing off of that by pardoning a dead guy. Obviously, it's not going to do him any good unless there's some way to bring him back to life.
[Neal Conan:] If he could do that, he could run for more than governor next time.
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Yes, he could. Yes, he could. But, you know, and I also wonder, just from a legal point of view, whether he actually has the authority to pardon a dead person. You know, I don't know, maybe this could go all the way to the Supreme Court and we could decide whether governors have this sort of authority retroactively, you know?
[Neal Conan:] Let's go to Carlos, Carlos with us from San Antonio.
[Carlos:] Good afternoon.
[Neal Conan:] Afternoon.
[Carlos:] My great grandfather was a gentleman named Paco Anaya. And he was a Lincoln County constable...
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Uh-huh.
[Carlos:] ...and knew Billy the Kid. As a matter of fact, Paco was one of the gentlemen who buried Billy the Kid after Pat Garrett shot him. And I have all his old journals. And based on some of the entries in the journals and some of the stories that have come down through the family, Billy the Kid only became a criminal after he witnessed the murder of his employer. And...
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Right.
[Carlos:] And he decided to take the issue into his own hands, which was pretty common in those days. And...
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Yeah.
[Carlos:] ...in my great grandfather's journals, he refers to him as William Antrim. And all in all, his opinion of Billy the Kid wasn't all that bad, and thinks that he got cheated by the governor, by other local officials who Pat Garrett was instrumental in taking him down and was paid off by the cattle growers association.
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Mm-hmm.
[Carlos:] So...
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Santa Fe ring, yeah.
[Neal Conan:] And Hampton, it sounds like you've got a book coming out here, you know? You've got some historical records.
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Well, I mean, you know, there have been great histories...
[Carlos:] [Unintelligible] is also available. A lot of the information about Billy the Kid from books and movies is mostly garbage. It there are some factual parts of it, but the actual story of what transpired and his involvement was all together different, you know, it was fictionalized in these movies and stories. And...
[Neal Conan:] I think...
[Carlos:] ...much different than anybody else in those days, he the law was very few and far between. And when you were wrong, you usually took matters in your own hands, and that's what he did.
[Neal Conan:] Well...
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Yeah. And it's been said also that, you know, the outlaws were sometimes you know, the guys who wore the badges were not necessarily any better than the outlaws.
[Neal Conan:] So in this case, the effort to restore the situation to Billy the Kid -is there going to be prosecution? Is there going to be a defense?
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Well, Governor Richardson told me that he was hoping to have, you know, historians. And I'm a historian of New Mexico history, but I'm not an expert on you know, I've never written a book on Billy the Kid. There are some great new books that have come out on Billy the Kid. I think the idea is get these historians up there, get some lawyers, get a prosecutor, and have Bill Richardson preside over it sort of like Judge Roy Bean or something. And have...
[Neal Conan:] The only law west of the Pecos. Sorry, I remember that, yes.
[Mr. Hampton Sides:] Exactly. And, you know, I, you know, it's a spectacle. It'll be fun. It's pretty silly. And, you know, my op-ed piece is meant to be taken as a little bit tongue-in-cheek here. I mean, you know, it's an interesting idea, and Governor Richardson is nothing but, you know, he's never been accused of being dull, let's put it that way.
[Neal Conan:] Hampton Sides, we could say the same of you. Thank you very much for your contributions today. Hampton Sides is the author of "Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin." You can find a link to his op-ed titled "Not-So-Charming Billy" at our website, npr.org.

[Ira Flatow:] I'm Ira Flatow. Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled that human genes cannot be patented. The case involves a dispute over patents held on the BRCA1 and the BRCA2 genes, the so-called breast cancer genes; and tests a company, Myriad Genetics, used to look for mutations to those genes. In its unanimous ruling, the court found that just isolating a gene on a chromosome was not enough of an invention to qualify for patent protection. Separating a gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention, wrote Justice Clarence Thomas. Genes, the court found, are a product of nature. But the court also found that some synthetic sequences of DNA, created in the laboratory, could be patented. The decision has big implications for biotech companies doing genetics research and for researchers who want free access to the genome for their own work and, of course, for the patients. Mary-Claire King is a professor of medical genetics and of genome sciences at the University of Washington here in Seattle. Her work isolating a genetic marker for breast cancer led to the discovery of the gene at the center of this court case. Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
[Mary-claire King:] Thank you, it's so good to be back, Ira. Welcome to Seattle.
[Ira Flatow:] Well, thank you very much. I'm sure you've been talking about this. What's your opinion on the ruling?
[Mary-claire King:] Well, I'm delighted. I'm absolutely high as a kite. I said yesterday, I'm high as the flag on the Fourth of July, and it's the way I still feel today.
[Ira Flatow:] And does this ruling change the way researchers will be able to work?
[Mary-claire King:] It has a less of an impact on research, which has never been subject to the enforcement of a patent, than it does on the availability of this approach for patient care. The enforcement of the monopoly on testing by Myriad was in the realm of patient care, that is testing for patients who were referred by their physicians or genetic counselors for sequencing of BRCA1 and 2.
[Ira Flatow:] Does this mean that it will open up the realm of other people, other companies, coming up with a test also and maybe drive the price of the test down.
[Mary-claire King:] That's exactly right, Ira. It will both drive the price of the test down, I expect, although as you can imagine scientists are not consulted on the pricing of tests, but it will do two very important things qualitatively. One is it will make it possible to use modern genomics approaches to evaluate these genes. The approach that Myriad uses is Sanger sequencing, which is a perfectly respectable approach, but it's certainly out of date now. And it will also the ruling will also allow us to incorporate BRCA1 and BRCA2 into panels of genes that include all of the genes that predispose to breast and ovarian cancer. We developed for example we developed a panel like that back in 2010, have been using it for research in my lab, where no money changes hands, it's purely research, but now our hospital can use this panel, which we call BROCA, for patient care. So it's really opened the entire research development sphere to the clinical sphere, and we're just enormously pleased that's happened.
[Ira Flatow:] So this is a win-win for everybody then? What about for companies or for the company that claimed the patent? Is it going to be losing money? Does it lose on this?
[Mary-claire King:] Well, I certainly can't speak to Myriad's situation in particular. I have absolutely no knowledge of it. But I can speak to the question of the impact of this ruling on development in biotech generally. This is subtle but I think important point for us all to realize. The development of a genetic test, once a gene is discovered that is responsible for a particular serious condition, the development of the genetic test after that discovery is very quick. It the creative and economic investment is prior to discovery. This is in marked contrast to the development of, say, a drug, for which there must be, after the original discovery, millions and millions of dollars devoted to phase three testing, to clinical trials, to FDA approval and so on. None of that expense applies to genetic testing, and hence the patent, which is limited to that abrogation of patents on genes, will have no impact at all on patents that are, in my view, appropriately given for drug discovery.
[Ira Flatow:] Well, thank you very much, Dr. King, for taking time to be with us today.
[Mary-claire King:] My pleasure.
[Ira Flatow:] And congratulations, I think, are in order.
[Mary-claire King:] Thank you very much.
[Ira Flatow:] Mary-Claire King is professor of medical genetics and of genome sciences at the University of Washington here in Seattle.

[Ari Shapiro:] The D.C. gun ban that led to yesterday's ruling is one of the strictest laws of its kind. Chicago's is similar. And some gun owners there have already filed a suit challenging their city's anti-gun law. NPR's David Schaper has that part of the story.
[David Schaper:] I'm standing in front of Shore Galleries. It's a gun shop in the North Chicago suburb of Lincolnwood. And on this side of the street, Devon Avenue, where the shop is located, the handguns sold in this shop are completely legal. Across the street, well, that's the city of Chicago and Chicago has a ban on handguns similar to that in Washington, D.C. So some customers here at Shore Galleries are praising the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling striking down the Washington, D.C. gun ban.
[Mr. Frank Johnson:] You should have the right to defend yourself.
[David Schaper:] Frank Johnson owns a home inspection company in Chicago's northern suburbs.
[Mr. Frank Johnson:] You know, I'm not saying I'm going to defend myself with a, you know, grenade cannon or something, we're just talking about a regular pistol. So I think that was a just ruling.
[David Schaper:] Johnson says he comes from a shooting family and that he takes his 10-and 13-year-old children, who have had gun safety courses, out hunting and skeet shooting. He says he doesn't mind that the Supreme Court decision leaves some restrictions on gun ownership in place, such as prohibiting felons from owning guns and requiring owners to register their guns.
[Mr. Frank Johnson:] We're a state that has to have a FOID card where you have to produce document, you know, that you haven't been institutionalized or some other background challenges. And if you pass that you get the right to carry a gun. I think the whole country should be like that. I really do. I think the gun card thing is a great thing. It winnows out some people that probably shouldn't have a gun.
[David Schaper:] The waiting period and...
[Mr. Frank Johnson:] Oh, three days, yeah. I think it's awesome.
[David Schaper:] There's a shooting range in the back of Illinois Gun Works, another gun shop just over the border of Chicago in suburban Elmwood Park. Owner Don Mastrianni says he too is happy that the Supreme Court finally upheld an individual's right to keep and bear arms in his or her home for protection. And he calls it hypocritical for some politicians to prohibit handguns in the first place.
[Mr. Don Mastrianni:] In Mayor Daley's case, he's got armed security. He's got his own bodyguards. You and I can't afford that. I don't see any gangs chasing him down the street trying to shoot him.
[David Schaper:] Mastrianni says that while the 26-year-old Chicago ban on handguns mirrors the Washington, D.C. ban struck down by the Supreme Court, he doesn't expect to be able to sell handguns to any Chicago residents soon.
[Mr. Don Mastrianni:] Locally, I don't think it's going to make any difference because there's going to be a lot of litigation. I'm sure Mayor Daley's going to fight it.
[David Schaper:] That litigation has already begun. Four Chicago residents who say they legally own handguns but keep them outside of the city filed a lawsuit in U.S. district court in Chicago yesterday, challenging the city's ban on handguns. The Illinois State Rifle Association and the Second Amendment Foundation have joined the plaintiffs in filing the suit. David Schaper, NPR News, Chicago.
[Ari Shapiro:] You can read a timeline with milestones in the history of gun legislation at our Web site, NPR.org.

[Madeleine Brand:] Look at the contents of your wallet. You'll see your credit cards, your driver's license and quite possibly something with your Social Security number on it. Take that out immediately and leave it at home. Otherwise, if you lose your wallet, your identity could be up for grabs. That advice from us is free, but plenty of paid services offer help in avoiding identity theft. NPR's Mike Pesca reports on whether their advice is worth the cost.
[Mike Pesca Reporting:] Bob Sullivan has done everything possible to build a cocoon of protection around himself to ward off identity theft. As the author of "Your Evil Twin: Behind the Identity Theft Epidemic," Sullivan shreds check statements and never answers e-mail solicitations. And then a few months ago, his identity was stolen. Another victim: Deborah Platt Majoras. She's the head of the Federal Trade Commission, the government agency charged with combatting identity theft. We can only hope the Deborah Platt Majoras who testified before Congress that identity theft has cost businesses and consumers over $53 billion a year is the real Deborah Platt Majoras. To get your head around that $53 billion figure, by the way, consider this: ExxonMobil, America's most profitable corporation, didn't even take home half that amount last year. $53 billion is a windfall for thieves, but it's also an opportunity in the eyes of Pre-Paid Legal Services, a company which sells access to lawyers like an HMO sells access to doctors.
[Unidentified Man:] ...market trends that are creating an...
[Pesca:] This is from an online conference call touting one of their plans.
[Unidentified Man:] But, ladies and gentlemen, when you attach that identity theft shield to our company's Pre-Paid Legal plan, we're actually going to reduce that price down to $9.95 a month. Ladies and gentlemen, the reason that's so important is because every article you read on identity theft, they say the first thing you should do is hire an attorney.
[Pesca:] No, they don't. And the FTC doesn't say, as the conference call claims, that the average loss for an ID theft victim is $1,500. They say it's about $500 and that most people don't pay at all. ID theft expert Bob Sullivan lumps Pre-Paid Legal in with many other identity theft protection services when he says...
[Mr. Bob Sullivan:] I know of no identity theft protection service that I would recommend to people that they pay for. The only thing you can do is shorten the amount of pain you suffer as a result of it, but right now, there's nothing that will stop it from happening to you.
[Pesca:] Sullivan thinks that credit monitoring might be useful, though is very uneasy paying for the service. Mari McQueen of Consumer Reports says for most people, it's no better than carefully reading statements, because the monitoring services don't prevent fraud.
[Ms. Mari Mc Queen:] They do detect it early enough for maybe you to limit the damage. We find that to be superfluous in most cases.
[Pesca:] McQueen calls Social Security numbers the keys to the kingdom when it comes to ID theft, and the truth is that Social Security numbers have become nearly impossible to protect. Businesses, schools and the workplace all use Social Security numbers as forms of ID, as do charities. Take the case of David, a financial professional from New York who's doing a good deed and had no idea he was opening himself up to swindlers.
[David:] I donated blood at a corporate blood drive and it was the only time I'd used that address with my Social Security number. So a week later when I started getting phone numbers from merchants and credit card companies that-asking me about charges, it was pretty easy to track back and figure out where they had gotten my Social Security number from. It had been from the blood drive.
[Pesca:] In this environment, caveat emptor isn't sufficient. Some states have opted for freeze laws, which allow victims to issue what amount to desist orders, so no potential lender could read credit reports. No one will be extending you any credit under these circumstances, and no one will be extending any credit to your impostor, either. Texas, California, Louisiana and Vermont now all have freeze laws. Vermont's attorney general, William Sorrell, says whenever a state proposes this type of law, it's zestily opposed by businesses who see credit as their lifeblood.
[Mr. William Sorrell:] They're saying this is really bad for consumers. Consumers don't know that they're not going to be able to just go right in and take out a new car loan just, you know, in 10 minutes or a new department store charge account. And what we're saying is, `Hey, how paternalistic is that?'
[Pesca:] The National Retail Federation, the American Bankers Association and the credit reporting agencies oppose the freeze laws, saying they're overkill. The FTC does cite some evidence showing that identity theft has leveled off. It's just that our awareness of security breaches is growing. More good news: By September, everyone in the US will be able to access three free credit reports a year, one from each reporting agency. So space them out, read them carefully and when you're done, for God's sake, shred them, burn the remains and bury them in your back yard. Mike Pesca, NPR News, New York.
[Madeleine Brand:] More coming up on DAY TO DAY from NPR News.

[Melissa Block:] Today is day two of the World Cup soccer tournament in Brazil. Fans of course are geared up, and when the team takes to the field, the nation it represents grinds to a halt. Mexico is no exception. The country played and won its first World Cup match today, beating Cameroon 1-nil. As NPR's Carrie Kahn reports from Mexico City, practically everyone, from office workers to politicians, took the day off.
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] The main board room at Warner Records Headquarters near downtown Mexico City is standing-room only. Those not lucky enough to get a seat crouch on the floor, balancing their overflowing plates of spicy chilaquiles and beans. It's a tense first half. Two of Mexico's goals are disallowed, but Lupe Macedo, the head of finances here, says she's lucky the company lets everyone watch the game. Not all work places are so generous.
[Lupe Macedo:] [Spanish spoken].
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] She says some won't even let workers use the Internet to watch, so many just call in sick. And not just workers took the morning off, so did the national Senate. Here in Mexico, soccer can be as contentious as politics. For the past few days, the leading political parties have been fighting about whether to work during the World Cup, while the Senate hashes out rules for the historic opening of Mexico's state owned oil industry.
[Senator Rabindranath Salazar:] [Spanish spoken].
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] Senator Rabindranath Salazar of the opposition PRD party says he feared everyone would be glued to their TVs and not pay attention to this important debate. After days of wrangling, the hearings went ahead for today, but not until after the game. And it took 61 minutes of play before Mexico scored its winning goal. The gang at Warner Music offices erupted. Finance Manager Macedo says Mexico is ready to take on host country and soccer powerhouse, Brazil.
[Lupe Macedo:] [Spanish spoken].
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] Macedo says no problem, Mexico has beat Brazil before. And like today, they'll all be back in the boardroom to root. The only difference the menu will be carnitas. Carrie Kahn, NPR News, Mexico City.
[Melissa Block:] You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.

[David Greene:] British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has lost big votes again, and again in Parliament. Now, he has suffered a huge defeat in court. The U.K. Supreme Court has ruled against the prime minister. Let's remember. Johnson suspended Parliament for five weeks in what was seen as an effort to limit debate on Brexit. Well, that is the act that the court has found to be illegal. And let's bring in NPR's Frank Langfitt, who is in the English seaside city of Brighton this morning. Hi, Frank.
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] Hey. Good morning, David.
[David Greene:] Well, what exactly is the court saying here?
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] Well, if you remember, David, that Johnson argued that he needed this long extension so he could work on his legislative agenda, but Lady Brenda Hale, she was speaking for the 11 justices this morning, and she said the suspension effectively prevented legislators from doing their job. This is the way that she put it.
[Brenda Hale:] It had the effect of frustrating or preventing the ability of Parliament to carry out its constitutional functions without reasonable justification.
[David Greene:] OK. Frank, so a big setback for the prime minister I mean, after a series of setbacks in Parliament, now defeated in the courts.
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] Yes. He hasn't won a vote yet, David.
[David Greene:] Has not won a vote yet. So how is he is he sounding still upbeat?
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] Well, it's interesting. He is going along with this. I don't think he has any choice. This was such a resounding verdict from the Supreme Court, but he also says he's going to continue with his policy, which the plan, as we've been talking about, is for Britain to leave the European Union on October 31 one way or the other. Johnson, of course, is in New York for the U.N. General Assembly meeting, and here's what he had to say from New York.
[Prime Minister Boris Johnson:] Obviously, this is a verdict that we will respect, and we respect the judicial process. I have to say, I strongly disagree with what the justices have found. I don't think that it's right, but we will go ahead and of course, Parliament will come back. I do think there's a good case for getting on with the Queen's speech, anyway, and we'll do that.
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] And, David, when he says the Queen's speech, what he's talking about is his legislative agenda, which he has planned he's supposed to give on October 14 so he does plan to go through with that. But House Speaker John Bercow, he says that Parliament will sit tomorrow, and we'll see how they spend that time. Certainly, we're going to probably hear a lot more criticism and scrutiny of Johnson's policies in the days and weeks ahead.
[David Greene:] What and practically, I mean, what does this mean for, among other things, Brexit and this October 31 deadline?
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] Well, I think that, politically, this is yet another setback for Boris Johnson, but I don't think you're going to see him back down at all. He's already said to his party, I'm going to do this do or die. And he has I don't think he has a lot of choice there. We are expecting a general election coming up in November or December. And certainly, Johnson knows that if he goes back on his word, he could lose a lot of voters and his greatest fear would be actually not being able to stay as prime minister and serving not a very long time.
[David Greene:] Well, that brings up the opposition the opposition Labour Party, and you're actually covering their convention right? in Brighton. I mean, they have had their own problems as this Brexit process has been going on.
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] They have had their own problems, David. One thing is they've not been able to come up with a policy that is clear. They're kind of straddling the fence on this, but I got to say today, this morning, for Labour this was a big victory. They were euphoric, very excited. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader he came out on stage, he said that this verdict showed that Johnson had contempt for democracy, he'd abused power. And this is how Corbyn put it.
[Jeremy Corbyn:] I invite Boris Johnson, in the historic words, to consider his position... ...And become the shortest-serving prime minister there's ever been.
[David Greene:] OK, Frank. Let's summarize. British politics in turmoil and we have no idea what happens in Brexit. Is that about where we still are?
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] And it feels like it's been that for more than three years, David.
[David Greene:] NPR's Frank Langfitt reporting this morning. Thanks so much, Frank.
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] Happy to do it, David.

[Alex Chadwick:] As we've been reporting, in the wake of today's bombings in London, US officials have raised the terror alert level for mass transit systems. That alert level is now at orange; that's high. There's no increased alert level for airports, and the general alert level remains at yellow. Earlier, US Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff outlined some steps that are being taken by mass transit officials in this country.
[Secretary Michael Chertoff:] We have asked state and local leaders and transportation officials to increase their protective measures including additional law enforcement, police, bomb-detecting canine teams, increased video surveillance and increased numbers of inspection of trash receptacles and other storage areas.
[Alex Chadwick:] Cities across the nation are already putting the added security measures into place. We have two reports on America's response to the London bombings. We'll begin with NPR's Ina Jaffe in Los Angeles.
[Newly Elected Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa And Top Law Enforcement Officials Had Two Messages For La Residents At A Morning Briefing Today:] There is no credible threat against Los Angeles right now, and they've been preparing for this for a long time. They said an orange alert was in effect for trains, buses and the airports. There will be two sheriffs deputies on every single train, both subways and light rail, and additional police presence at train stations and on buses. Villaraigosa said he wanted to show Angelenos that the transit system was as safe as possible.
[Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa:] I will be on that subway and that light rail line today to encourage people to remain calm and to demonstrate my confidence that this system is safe and that we are doing everything possible to ensure the safety of our passengers.
[Jaffe:] Law enforcement's doing all it can, said LAPD Chief William Bratton, but there's really only so much they can do.
[Chief William Bratton:] Being quite frank with you, it's not a matter of if; it's just a matter of when in terms of terrorism attacks. That's the reality of the world that we live in. London, like New York, like Chicago, like Los Angeles are prime targets.
[Jaffe:] Bratton said that he's been in touch with police chiefs in other American cities, and he says he hopes to send some of his people to London soon to learn whatever they can from today's attacks. Ina Jaffe, NPR News, Los Angeles.
[Ina Jaffe Reporting:] I'm Mike Pesca in New York, where heightened security is visible at the transportation hubs. Bomb-sniffing dogs could be seen today in Penn Station and Grand Central Station. There are more police everywhere. One of the things the governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut did was to put state troopers on trains in the suburban states, and as those trains cross state lines into New York, the troopers retain their police authority. Commuters in New York reacted this morning in the same way as the morning of the 2004 Madrid train bombings. Lynn, who I spoke with as she waited for a subway at Grand Central Terminal, was typical of the wary but resigned attitude.
[Lynn:] I was kind of skeptical taking the train in this morning. I mean, normally, you know, I would watch to see if there's anything, but this morning, I was extra cautious. I was looking under the benches, seeing if there was anything unusual, and I was happy when I got to work safe.
[Pesca:] Commuter Marcel Fererra decided to take the train and not drive after waiting to see that there were no follow-up attacks. He said that he thought the US was safer than Europe.
[Mr. Marcel Fererra:] We're farther away from-see, in Europe, there's all the countries all together. We're much farther away from a lot of international flights like that. I think it's a lot easier in Europe for someone to get, you know, something through like that than here.
[Pesca:] Why this is interesting is that it puts stock in the idea that the ocean of separation between the US and Europe and the Mideast provides a measure of security. Of course, 911 shook this common belief. And we have so many signs of the intertwined world-the pictures being transmitted from Europe before the bombing or the leaders of the great industrial nations standing shoulder to shoulder. And just yesterday, the biggest cities of four of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council were in competition to host the Summer Olympics. Twenty-four hours ago, New York was offering London congratulations; today, its condolences as this city goes about its business with caution. Mike Pesca, NPR News, New York.

[Steve Inskeep:] We do not know the composition of President-elect Trump's cabinet. We do know that the early figures mentioned include quite a few from Wall Street. It shouldn't be a surprise, since Trump is a wealthy guy from New York, but he's also a candidate who ran on helping the little guy. Many of the names being floated for top positions are big guys in the financial world. A historian told Politico you'd have to go back to the 1920s to see so much Wall Street influence coming to Washington. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a critic of Wall Street, has already offered to provide Trump with better names. We called a Trump supporter with a financial background to talk about this. Anthony Scaramucci founded the hedge fund Sky Bridge Capital and is a member of Donald Trump's transition team.
[Anthony Scaramucci:] Well, listen, I think there's been an unnecessary and irrational demonization of Wall Street over the last eight years to score political points, at least on the left-leaning base. And I think that's really unfortunate because I've spent 28 years in the financial services industry, and we're not demons. We're filled with integrity and are trying to do a great job for our clients. So in my personal conversations with the president-elect, I think it's absolutely critical for him that he gets world-class people A-plus-plus, to use his own expression on the cabinet and members of his team. So if that means he's going to draw from Wall Street to do that or other parts of the U.S. economy or other people from academia, that's what he's going to do.
[Steve Inskeep:] Well, one thing that's odd about that, though, is that, in his campaign, Mr. Trump himself had commercials and speeches where he denounced global bankers and global financiers. In fact, his closing ad of the of the campaign included quite a bit of of such language, and he said he was standing up for the little guy. Is there any irony here?
[Anthony Scaramucci:] No, I really don't think so. I mean, he's basically saying that there's been an intense focus on global elitism where common people are left out of these salons that have not served the interests of the American people. And I think that's more of a broad, general statement. As it relates to specific individuals, I think Mr. Trump has a very, very good judgment, a very good temperament for understanding the people that have this kind of background and finance background that want to serve the American people and not their own self-interests.
[Steve Inskeep:] There are two issues here. One is the overall growth of the economy, but the other is the distribution, the fairness. How are people on the bottom doing? Do you believe that some of the people who've been mentioned Steven Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross, even possibly James Dimon of JP Morgan that those are folks who are going to understand people on the bottom and craft policies that can help them?
[Anthony Scaramucci:] I know all those guys personally. I think they're some of the most exceptionally talented people in the United States. And so I think every one of those people is qualified to do that. And just to remind your listeners, you know, I grew up in a blue-collar family. My dad had a lunch pail. And so those three gentlemen that you mentioned understand that intuitively. I understand that from my life experience. And so we will do everything we can to create that aspirational opportunity again in the working class.
[Steve Inskeep:] Trump campaigned against the Dodd-Frank law, which imposed new regulations on banks after the financial crisis in an effort to prevent a repeat of that. Do you think the administration is going to be serious about pursuing a repeal?
[Anthony Scaramucci:] Well, listen, I have to let Mr. Trump and the eventual economic team specifically talk about that from the administration's point of view. So I will share with you my personal opinion. One of the biggest problems that Dodd-Frank has caused is it has restricted the lending to small businesses. The lifeblood of the economy is that the banking community is a circulatory system for American capitalism. So if you're restricting that arterial flow, which is what Dodd-Frank has done in an effort to make people super and ultra-safe, well, that's a very big mistake for the economy because what we know about life is that we don't want to make ourselves too-too safe, and then we take all the risk out of the equation, and then we can't get the innovation, the growth and the things that we need to do to populate the economy with terrific entrepreneurs. So not to say that we're going to deregulate, because that's the wrong word. We're just going to regulate in a way where the capital will start flowing again in areas of the economy where we need it.
[Steve Inskeep:] When we talk about Wall Street people and you talk about demonization of Wall Street, there are a lot of people who hold Wall Street responsible for the financial crisis in 2008. There are a lot of people still suffering going to have long memories there. Is there is some explaining that needs to be done?
[Anthony Scaramucci:] I mean, if you really want to understand the narrative, there are three people to be blamed here, and I'll speak very generally. Number one, it's Washington the push for over-allocation of capital into that housing area. Number two, it was the greed of Wall Street in terms of the production of these products. And number three, frankly, was mainstream because many people overreached in their homes because there was easy money and easy credit before the financial crisis. And so it is really that triangle of blame that happened. And Wall Street certainly deserve some of the blame, but it doesn't deserve all of the blame. And so I think that sort of nonsense hopefully will stop on January 20. And there'll be some voices in the administration that can stand up and advocate against that sort of nonsense.
[Steve Inskeep:] Anthony Scaramucci, always a pleasure to talk with you.
[Anthony Scaramucci:] I really appreciate it, sir. Thank you.
[Steve Inskeep:] Hedge fund manager Anthony Scaramucci with his case for Wall Street's voice in the Trump administration. He is on the president-elect's transition team.

[Debbie Elliott:] And now a controversy in the Muslim world: for decades, the din of traffic in Cairo has been thickened five times a day by a cacophony of Muslim calls to prayer. They come out of loudspeakers atop thousands of mosques. But now, Egypt's government is in the final stages of a plan to replace the independent calls to prayer with a single call broadcast by radio throughout the city. NPR's Peter Kenyon has our report.
[Peter Kenyon:] According to Islamic tradition, the Adhan or call to prayer is meant to be an attractive sound, reminding and encouraging faithful Muslims to fulfill their duty to pray five times each day. In the 1860 edition of his book, "An Account of the Matters and Customs of the Modern Egyptians," British writer Edward William Lane wrote that the muezzin would climb the minaret of his mosque and sing out the ritual phrases, always in the same order: God is great, four times; I testify that there is no deity but God, two times; I testify that Muhammad is God's apostle, two times; Come to prayer, twice; and finishing with, there is no deity but God, one last time. These days, there are more minarets than ever in Cairo, and in many neighborhoods, the call to prayer comes at you from several directions at once, blared from loud speakers that amplify the call to prayer sometimes to the point of distortion. Even without the call to prayer, Cairo is a noisy city. Inside the office of Hassim al-Gindi with the Ministry for Religious Endowment, with the windows closed, the sound of the traffic four floors below is still loud enough to rattle the windows. Al-Gindi says the combination of more mosques and highly variable sound systems has made the call to prayer something to endure rather than enjoy.
[Mr. Hassim Al-gindi:] So without perfect synchronization between the call for prayer in the different mosques, you find some interference. And what you hear is somewhat close to noise more than call for prayer.
[Peter Kenyon:] One good place to hear what al-Gindi is talking about is atop one of the twin stone towers of Bab Zuweila, the enormous 11th century gate that was once the southern entrance to the old walled city of Cairo. As the spring Hamassin winds whip desert sand across the city, the call of peddlers and the honk of horns are suddenly submerged in a wave of muezzins, their chants bouncing off one another and melting into a puddle of sound. What the government plans to do, possibly by the summer, is eliminate the independent calls to prayer in favor of a single voice rebroadcast throughout the city via a series of radio transmitters. After staging a competition, the government selected 40 muezzins to take turns issuing the new call. But for generations of Cairians, the dissonant symphony of the muezzins is part of daily life. Fifty-seven year old shop-owner Mohammed Ibrahim says the new system just won't be the same.
[Mr. Mohammed Ibrahim:] [Through translator] The call to prayer gives spirituality. While you hear the sounds from more than one mosque, it gives a good feeling. Instead of listening to just one person, it's not the same feeling it's different.
[Peter Kenyon:] The government says people need to give the new system a chance. And they may find they prefer a single, clear call to prayer over the current pandemonium. On the street, people say they're waiting to hear the difference, but they can't help feeling that a part of Cairo's raucous charm is being lost. Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Cairo.

[Robert Siegel:] For the first time since the pullout began, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas spoke out today. He told cheering crowds that Israel's pullout from Gaza is a first step that would hopefully end with further withdrawals from the West Bank and Jerusalem. NPR's Peter Kenyon has that part of the story.
[Peter Kenyon Reporting:] After staying in the background as scenes of Israeli soldiers clashing with Jewish settlers flashed around the world, Mahmoud Abbas spent the day at public events. He attended a Friday prayer ceremony to honor Yasser Arafat, Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and others referred to as the martyrs who gave their lives to free Gaza. Then he traveled to the still-closed Gaza Airport in the southern Gaza Strip where he spoke to a cheering crowd.
[President Mahmoud Abbas:] [Through Translator] Today we are witnessing a historic joy and happiness following the exit of the Israeli occupation from Gaza Strip.
[Kenyon:] The day's events were seemingly designed to steal the thunder of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the other armed factions which have been holding their own victory celebrations all week. At Gaza's long, sandy beach, children played in the surf a few yards from where Islamic Jihad men in camouflage and face masks trotted in line onto waiting boats, mostly Gaza fishing boats hired for the afternoon. Islamic Jihad official Mohammed al-Hindi said the demonstration was to mark a mostly forgotten chapter in the intifada that raged for nearly the past five years.
[Mr. Mohammed Al-hindi:] [Through Translator] Islamic Jihad had its own naval squad that, in fact, destroyed one of Israel's gunboats.
[Kenyon:] But for Gazans on the front lines of Israel's settlement project here, the harsh realities of everyday life press too hard on the consciousness to permit much debate over who gets credit for what, now that the Israeli army and settlers are leaving. Fifty-one-year-old Noah Bashir has spent his life in the shadow of the settlement of Kfar Darom. His olive groves are gone, taken by Israeli bulldozers like the one now moving earth into a berm along a road outside the settlement. Forty-two-year-old Adell Bashir is nearby, his left arm hanging limp at his side. He says last year, Israeli soldiers shot him as he lay resting in the doorway of his house. He's had two surgeries and will need several more if he's to have any hope of using the arm again. Noah Bashir points to a family walking to their house nearby, carrying a large white flag as they cross a field in the shadow of an Israeli guard tower. He's looking forward to the day when Gazans don't have to signal surrender to reach their front door, and he doesn't want any Palestinian violence or even premature celebrations to delay that moment.
[Mr. Noah Bashir:] [Through Translator] I don't agree with the celebrations right now. I believe we should be happy, but we can be happy by ourselves because those Israelis are waiting for any mistake that we make to change things.
[Kenyon:] Bashir speaks of immediate simple needs. He hopes the settlement lands will someday hold Palestinian homes for some of the young couples who can't get married because they have nowhere to move. But he implicitly understands the tangled politics hemming in both sides at this critical moment. He's seen Israeli soldiers moving in, however gently, on Jewish settlers. And he knows Mahmoud Abbas will have to take on the Palestinian armed factions if he wants to enact his vision of a Palestinian state. And while Bashir has spent much of his life literally on the front lines, his comments could reflect the situation of any number of Palestinians or Israelis for that matter.
[Mr. Noah Bashir:] [Through Translator] Because until this moment, I'm sitting in my house unsafe, 'cause I stay between the two fires, the fires of Arabs and the fires of Jews.
[Kenyon:] Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Gaza.

[Robert Siegel:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
[Melissa Block:] And I'm Melissa Block. The U.N. Security Council today was the scene of a diplomatic showdown over Syria. The United Kingdom drafted a resolution calling for a response to Bashar Al-Assad's alleged use of chemical weapons, although Russia contends there's no proof of that. U.N. chemical weapons inspectors are still in Damascus and the Syrian regime wants those inspectors to investigate its claims that rebels used poisonous gas against Syrian troops. NPR's Michele Kelemen reports the Obama administration and its allies say they won't be tied by diplomatic paralysis.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] British Foreign Secretary William Hague says his government had to give it a try at the U.N., but Russia says a resolution is premature. State Department spokesperson Marie Harf says given Russia's position, the U.S. sees no avenue forward at the U.N.
[Marie Harf:] We do not believe that the Syrian regime should be able to hide behind the fact that the Russians continue to block action on Syria at the U.N.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] Russia argues that the Security Council can't discuss the chemical weapons attack before it receives a report from U.N. inspectors on the ground, and Syria's Ambassador Bashar Jafari is demanding that the team turn its attention to Syria's allegations that rebels used something close to sarin gas three times in recent days.
[Ambassador Bashar Jafari:] Dozens of Syrian soldiers are currently treated in the Syrian hospitals due to this use of chemical agents by the terrorist-armed groups operating in the countryside of Damascus.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] The U.S. accuses Syria of using the U.N. team as a stalling tactic. Investigators now seem to be caught in the middle and that's not a comfortable place to be, says Charles Duelfer, a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq.
[Charles Duelfer:] The irony of the position taken by the White House is that if you didn't know who was speaking, you might think it was President Bush prior to the Iraqi invasion.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] Duelfer says the benefit of having a U.N. investigation is that it has more international credibility, but it does take time and the U.S. is unlikely to wait.
[Charles Duelfer:] The intelligence agencies of various governments may have data which is very good, in fact may even be better than what the U.N. inspectors can obtain, but it will not be seen as credible. So there's this dilemma for governments. Do they want to act on the basis of unilateral information or do they want to act on the basis of internationally agreed data?
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] There's also the question of the timing of a military strike. Duelfer says having U.N. inspectors on the ground hasn't prevented action in the past. A Russian U.N. inspector once watched a U.S. cruise missile fly by in Iraq, Duelfer says, and in 1998 his office received a warning ahead of President Clinton's bombing campaign in Iraq.
[Charles Duelfer:] They weren't explicit about what was going to happen, but you didn't, you know, we weren't stupid.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] The inspectors left. He says the U.N. team now on the ground in Damascus may not get the same warnings. But U.N. officials are asking for more time and urging the U.S. not to strike before the Security Council weighs in. The U.N. and Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi says international law requires that.
[Lakhdar Brahimi:] President Obama and the American administration are not known to be trigger happy. What they will decide, I don't know. But certainly, international law is very clear. The Security Council has to be brought in.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] Brahimi says the U.S. and the Russians both keep telling him they're committed to bringing the warring sides to the negotiating table. In his news conference in Geneva, he wouldn't speculate about how a military strike would affect that diplomacy. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.

[Cory Booker Had Everything He Needed To Win:] money, advertising and celebrity endorsements. But what does a candidate do when he has none of those? He yells at people out of speakers from the top of a truck. NPR's Robert Smith was also in Newark, New Jersey on election day, what some consider to be the loudest day of the year.
[Robert Smith:] In Newark, only the hard of hearing could possibly forget to vote.
[Unidentified Man:] [Singing] Vote for Mayor Minor, he can handle your problems, major or minor...
[Robert Smith:] A political tradition here: plaster the car with posters, strap on your home stereo and hit the neighborhoods.
[Unidentified Man:] [Singing]...you know hes the choice. Voice of the people, so come on out and vote for the choice of the people...
[Robert Smith:] Some trucks like this one have a recording. Others have live talent.
[Mr. James Nance:] Come out and vote. Exercise your right.
[Robert Smith:] I actually ran after this black Ford Econoline van cruising the south ward of Newark. Excuse me for a second. Can I ride along with you?
[Mr. James Nance:] Sure. I'm James Nance. I'm a retired police officer here in the city of Newark.
[Robert Smith:] And he's been driving sound trucks for decades. He's almost 80 years old and you can't buy his services. He has to love a candidate before he'll jerry-rig his sound system.
[Mr. James Nance:] So, I adapted my own type of apparatus to hold the speakers.
[Robert Smith:] Yeah, it looks like you have bungee cords. And I got string wrapped around me here sitting in the front seat.
[Mr. James Nance:] Yes. Those are wires there going up to the speaker. And as you see, I had to have this contraption so I could speak while my hands are on the wheel. All righty, all righty. It's that time where we're going to show our power, our voting power.
[Robert Smith:] The thing about a sound truck is that it's not broadcasting per se, it's more amplified conversation. Nance will pick out specific people.
[Mr. James Nance:] Step up. You know Rod? You know Rod, don't you?
[Robert Smith:] He'll tell people riding bikes, he'll yell at residents just peeking out from behind the curtains of their homes.
[Mr. James Nance:] Hello there. This is Jim Nance, retired police officer, asking you to lend support to my colleague, Cliff Minor.
[Robert Smith:] I don't know. They don't look too impressed.
[Mr. James Nance:] You can't judge them by looking at them. Some people are, some people aren't.
[Robert Smith:] But no one complains about the noise. Olivia Doherty even comes out of her beauty shop, Boswell's House of Coiffeurs. She says it would be like complaining about fireworks on the Fourth of July.
[Ms. Olivia Doherty:] And believe it or not, we look forward to this day.
[Robert Smith:] Why do you look forward to this day?
[Ms. Olivia Doherty:] To liven up your neighborhood.
[Robert Smith:] It would be a very quiet election day if people just handed out literature?
[Ms. Olivia Doherty:] Yes, and we would stay right in the house.
[Robert Smith:] And that's just not going to happen if James Nance can help it. Not that he doesn't have a sensitive side. When she sees a woman pushing a sleeping baby, he backs up the mic just a tap.
[Mr. James Nance:] You make sure that baby votes for Cliff Minor, okay, honey?
[Robert Smith:] Robert Smith, NPR News.

[David Greene:] And I'm David Greene, good morning Let's say you're at work and you find a document that shows your company has been giving out misleading information. Or, let's say you see a co-worker act in an abusive or unethical manner. Would you speak up? Well, social scientists have been asking why whistle-blowers become whistle-blowers. NPR's Shankar Vedantam has been checking out their work. And he joins us, as he often does, to talk about interesting social science research. Shankar, welcome back.
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] Hi, David.
[David Greene:] So, you know, we kind of think of whistleblowers when they emerge as big heroes. And I guess there is question: Why aren't there more of them?
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] You know, David, that might be part of the problem. There are these two big theories on why people step forward to report problems. The first is that they are heroes. They always do the right thing. And the management textbooks say it's all about ethical leadership, because when someone reports a problem it's up to managers to either ignore the problem or to act on it. I spoke with David Mayer. He's a researcher at the University of Michigan. And along with his colleagues, he decided to test these theories. He looked at survey data involving more than 30,000 Americans. And he looked at how often people report seeing or hearing violations of their companies' code of conduct. And astonishingly he found that as many as one-in-five people reported seeing these kinds of violations. But remarkably, only half of the people spoke up and said anything about it. Mayer told me that he dug a little bit deeper. And he found that what made the difference was not whether people had ethical leadership.
[David Mayer:] What we've neglected is understanding better the role of people who are not in formal positions of power our peers. If we don't get consistent support from our coworkers, we're much less likely to act.
[David Greene:] OK. So, Shankar, what they say is that the assumption was that you take, kind of, ethical cues from bosses. He seems to be saying that we're actually taking cues from our coworkers.
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] That's right, David. He's finding that the effects of having an ethical supervisor are completely neutralized, if people felt their peers were unethical. So when people felt they had ethical peers they reported problems. When they felt that coworkers were unethical they were much less likely to speak up.
[David Greene:] Is the data really clear on this? I mean couldn't there be other things going on? It just strikes me as taking a leap to say that if my peers or unethical, I'm going to make an unethical decision and not report something.
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] Mayer told me he had the same questions. He wanted proof. And so, he decided to conduct this experiment involving about a hundred adults. He asked them to come up with a solution to a problem. He sat them down at a computer. And told them they were going to be working with others, working at other computers. If the team as a whole got the answer right, there would be this big $300 cash prize. But they were not allowed to go on the Internet and get any information that could help them solve the problem. As soon as the volunteers sat down at the computer, he or she got an instant message from one of the coworkers. At the coworkers said, Hey, guess what I figured out I could use my iPhone to go on the Internet...
[David Greene:] Sneaky.
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] ...and get the information that we need. Now, here comes the experimental manipulation. For some of the volunteers, Mayer had the other coworkers act in an ethical fashion. They said, Look, this isn't right we are breaking the rules. But for some of the volunteers he had the coworkers act unethically. They said, Great, I wish I had thought of that I'm sure we're going to win the cash price now.
[And The Experimental Question Was:] Would the volunteers themselves report the problem afterwards to the researcher. And what he found was when the coworkers were ethical, two-thirds of the volunteers reported that there was a problem. When the coworkers were unethical, only one-third of the volunteers spoke up. And Mayer it's prompted him to rethink the very way in which human beings make moral decisions.
[David Mayer:] About 20 to 25 percent of people just tend to do the right thing, regardless of the environment. And then I think maybe we get 10 to 20 percent who might just be a little bit more likely to do that self-interested thing. And then the majority of us follow in this area in the middle. And I would say really good people, who fall in this area in the middle, but are just heavily influenced by their environment.
[David Greene:] Well, I mean this is interesting because we, sort of, think of ourselves as making up our own moral minds. But it sounds like that it might be, in some ways, less about who we are as individuals and sometimes more about the environment.
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] You know, David, many of us buy the idea that it takes a village to act ethically. I think what Mayer's experiment show is that it also takes a village to act unethically.
[David Greene:] Interesting stuff. Shankar, thanks for coming in as always.
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] Thanks, David.
[David Greene:] Shankar Vedantam, who regularly joins us to talk about interesting social science research he's come across. You can follow him on Twitter @hiddenbrain and, while you're at it, you can follow this program @nprgreene, @nprinskeep and @morningedition.

[Guy Raz:] We're back with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. The pressure on President Obama to intervene militarily in Libya is growing. Yesterday, leaders from the Arab League called on the U.N. Security Council to impose a no-fly zone over the country. It's one of the few times the league has called on outside powers to intervene in the Arab world. There are only a handful of countries that have the resources to do it. The U.S., of course, is one of them. And on Friday, the president was asked about that possibility.
[President Barack Obama:] NATO will be meeting on Tuesday to consider a no-fly zone, and we've been in discussions with both Arab countries, as well as African countries, to gauge their support for such an action.
[Guy Raz:] So what would a no-fly zone entail? Well, DB Grady, a former paratrooper with the U.S. Army Special Operations Command and a veteran of the Afghanistan war, recently wrote an article in the Atlantic magazine answering that very question. And as he explains, a no-fly zone isn't just a place where planes aren't allowed to fly; it's a military intervention.
[Mr. Db Grady:] Step one is going to be to make sure that our guys in the air are safe. In order to do that, you're going to have to launch missiles against surface-to-air missile sites that the Libyans might have, fighter jets that the Libyans might have, runways that the Libyans are using to launch these fighter jets. It's a bombing campaign from day one.
[Guy Raz:] And then only after that do you have airplanes continuously flying in the air to make sure that no Libyan planes are up in the air at all.
[Mr. Db Grady:] That's correct. It's constant aerial surveillance. To give an example from, say, Bosnia, 100,000 sorties were flown to maintain that no-fly zone. So that's what we're looking at in Libya. We're looking at a sustained and very significant investment of our air power over that country.
[Guy Raz:] Could the U.S. do this, obviously with NATO, with relatively little risk, either financially, or in lives, or even the risk of losing political capital?
[Mr. Db Grady:] Financially, there's no getting around the fact that this is going to be an extraordinarily expensive operation. Whenever you involve air assets and missiles, you're talking serious dollars. When it comes to American lives, we're pretty safe from the air. The men that we have on the ground are going to be JTACs or joint terminal attack controllers. Whenever you hear about laser-guided weapons, these are the guys pointing the lasers. Those guys will be at risk. We'll have Delta guys on the ground, Special Operations forces on the ground. But it's unlikely that we send in, say, the 82nd Airborne from day one. That said, I'm unaware of any no-fly zone that's been imposed by the United States that didn't ultimately end up with military intervention that actually put soldiers on the ground: Bosnia and Herzegovina started out as Operation Deny Flight. Once you launch that first missile, the shock is gone, and then it's very easy for mission creep. It's very easy to move on from there.
[Guy Raz:] You mentioned Bosnia and Iraq. I mean, both of those no-fly zones that the U.S. led did, in fact, lead to eventual military intervention. So I wonder if, in a sense, a no-fly zone in Libya is a kind of a slippery slope.
[Mr. Db Grady:] Oh, absolutely, and that's one of the things that I have argued in the past. If you look at Iraq, we established the no-fly zone in 1991. The no-fly zone ended in 2003 with Operation Iraqi Freedom. Once we get started in Libya, I would say that it will also involve ground troops. It's going to become a war.
[Guy Raz:] That's DB Grady. He's a former paratrooper with the U.S. Army Special Operations Command and a military analyst. DB, thank you so much.
[Mr. Db Grady:] It's a pleasure.

[Melissa Block:] Several presidential candidates went to Fort Lauderdale to talk to civil rights activists today. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Florida governor Jeb Bush were among those who appeared on the same stage at the National Urban League Conference. They took the stage with different messages about racial inequality. NPR's Greg Allen was there.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] This was an event reserved for Urban League members and the media. All the candidates received a polite reception, but it was clear from the introduction who the favorite was.
[Hillary Clinton:] Good morning.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] For Hillary Clinton, African-American voters are especially important. Barack Obama won with a historically high voter turnout among African-Americans in 2012. Clinton hopes to recapture as much of that support as possible. More than any of the other speakers, Clinton tailored her speech to address the concerns of the audience. It's important, she said, to realize racial discrimination is still holding many people in America back.
[Hillary Clinton:] I'm not saying anything you don't already know. You understand this better than I do, better than anyone. But I want to say it anyway because I'm planning to be president, and anyone who seeks that office has a responsibility to say it.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] Clinton talked about the disparity between incomes of white and black Americans and about the continued segregation of U.S. schools. Two other Democrats spoke former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders. But although invitations to speak went out to 13 Republicans, only two accepted retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and former Florida governor Jeb Bush. At least in Florida, Bush has friends in the Urban League. Nearly 20 years ago, he partnered with the Urban League's Miami chapter to create the state's first charter school.
[Jeb Bush:] And together, we got it done. That first year, 90 black children in Liberty City began their journey toward success. And the day that school opened was one of the happiest, proudest moments of my life.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] As governor of Florida, Jeb Bush had a mixed record in his relations with African-American groups. In 1999, black groups launched protests after Bush ended affirmative action in admissions to state universities. He didn't mention that in his speech but did talk about another action he took as governor.
[Jeb Bush:] Fourteen years ago, when the question was whether to keep the Confederate flag on the grounds of the Florida State Capitol, I said no and put it in a museum where it belongs.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] Bush used his campaign catchphrase "right to rise" just one time, talking about education. Hillary Clinton did use it, however, to take aim at a candidate whose actions, she said, as president might not match his words.
[Hillary Clinton:] I don't think you can credibly say that everyone has a right to rise and then say you're for phasing out Medicare or for repealing Obamacare. People can't rise if they can't afford health care.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] After his speech, Bush told reporters he hadn't heard Clinton's remarks. A Bush campaign spokeswoman called them, quote, "just more false, cheap political shots." Dotty Harrison, an Urban League member from Maryland, said she gave Bush credit for accepting the invitation and speaking to the group. But she believed many African-Americans will tie him to his brother, former president George W. Bush.
[Dotty Harrison:] We were hit. We, meaning African-Americans, were hit very hard with George W. And just like the mother said, we don't need another Bush in the White House.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] An Urban League member from Virginia, Isabel Crocker, said she was impressed most by Clinton.
[Isabel Crocker:] The reality is how the world as she sees it through her eyes was realistic.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] One phrase that came up today in the speeches of all three democrats Clinton, O'Malley and Sanders all said black lives matter. Greg Allen, NPR News, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

[Audie Cornish:] Time now for your letters, and one correction. Last week, we reported on the Volcker Rule and its effect on community banks. Well, in our story, we mistakenly identified the president of Tioga State Bank as Richard Fisher. In fact, his name is Robert Fisher. Our apologies, Mr. Fisher.
[Melissa Block:] Now to your letters. On Tuesday, I spoke with Kerry Candaele who's turned his obsession with Beethoven's "Ninth" into a documentary film. It's called "Following the Ninth: In the Footsteps of Beethoven's Final Symphony." In it, Candaele tracks the "Ninth's" influence around the world, from Japan to China to Chile, where it became an anthem of solidarity. Women would sing it over prison walls to those who were inside being tortured. Eric McDowell of Bellevue, Wash., writes this: I had just finished an eight-hour workshop on the things that divide us racism, hatred and prejudice, to name a few. I got in my car to drive home, exhausted after such an intense day. As I turned on the radio to NPR, I heard the story on Beethoven's "Ninth Symphony" and was immediately moved and refreshed. It was wonderful to be reminded that despite our differences, despite all obstacles, music and beauty can unite us.
[Audie Cornish:] Betty Modin of Oakridge, Ore., was also touched by our story. After humming "Ode to Joy" while doing a few chores, she says she felt compelled to look up the words in the music her choir uses.
[She Writes:] The last verse in the translation we use says it all: Mortals, join the mighty chorus which the morning stars began. Love divine is reigning o'er us, binding all within its span. Ever singing, march we onward, victors in the midst of strife. Joyful music lead us sunward, in the triumph song of life.
[Melissa Block:] Thanks to all who wrote in, and please keep your letters coming. You can go to NPR.org and click on Contact at the very bottom of the page.
[Audie Cornish:] You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, from NPR News.

[This Is Talk Of The Nation:] Science Friday from NPR News. I'm Joe Palca sitting in for Ira Flatow. A few years back, people in Upstate New York started to notice brown bats cruising for insects in broad daylight, in the middle of winter. Of course there aren't any insects in the snows of February when the bats should be hiding out in the caves, living off their fat stores until the spring. So state scientists went to check out some caves near Albany hoping to find an explanation for this unusual winter excursions by the bats, and instead what they found was thousands of dead bats. The ones still alive were emaciated and had a mysterious white substance on their noses. The next year, these die-offs had spread to caves in Pennsylvania, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut and scientists aren't sure how or why. But my next guest has been doing some detective work in the lab trying to figure out what's killing off these bats, and let me introduce him. He's name is David Blehert. He is the head of the Diagnostic Microbiology at the United States Geological Surveys National Wild Life Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin. And he joins us on the phone today from Wisconsin. Welcome to the program, Dr. Blehert.
[Dr. David Blehert:] Thank you very much, Joe. Happy to be here.
[Joe Palca:] And if you want to join the conversation. Give us a call. Our number is 800-989-8255 that's 800-989-TALK. And if you want more information about what we're talking about this hour, go to our website at www.sciencefriday.com where you'll find links to the topic. So, just recently there's a paper by you and some colleagues in Science magazine that looks at this white substance and maybe has identified it. So what is the white substance that they found on the bat's nose?
[Dr. David Blehert:] Right, so what we found is a fungus that belongs to the genus Geomyces, which is actually a common soil fungus around the world involved in the decay of organic matter. The one that we've isolated from bats, we believe has some unique properties that may have allowed it to emerge as a new pathogenic threat to bats in the Northeast.
[Joe Palca:] So well first of all. I mean would people have noticed this if it had been occurring on bats before, or is this is something that they're sure that this is a unique experience for bats to be infected with this fungus?
[Dr. Belhert:] I think that we can be fairly certain that this is a unique thing among bats. So for example there is a species of federally listed endangered bats, the Indiana myotis or Indiana bats. And so Indiana bats for example in New York State, their hibernation caves are surveyed every other year. And literally, every single bat they find in the caves is photographed and counted.
[Joe Palca:] Uh huh.
[Dr. Belhert:] So people are out there monitoring.
[Joe Palca:] So this would have been noticed if it I mean it would've been picked up if it had occurred before. So that suggests that it's related, but I guess the question is you know is this a cause or an effect of the bats whatever is doing in the bats.
[Dr. Belhert:] Right, and that still does remain somewhat of a question. We have our hypotheses on this, and some of us favor some over others.
[Joe Palca:] Well what would be what would be the mechanism that a fungus on a bat's nose would be lethal?
[Dr. Belhert:] Right, so first of all it's much more extensive than just a bat's nose, that's perhaps the most visible manifestation which led to the name for the disease, "white nose syndrome." But we also do find the fungus growing on other exposed skin surfaces such as the ear, pinna, and then perhaps most importantly the wings, which, wings are critical for flight, and flight is critical for feeding. So severe damage to the wings, if it affects the ability of the bats to fly through scarring or holes that the fungal infection puts in the wing...
[Joe Palca:] I see.
[Dr. Belhert:] Once the bat emerges from hibernation, this could then impact its ability to effectively feed.
[Joe Palca:] Uh huh, uh huh. So this may be a problem that's actually occurring during the warmer months. But they're experiencing this they're experiencing the problem during the cold months and they're forced to go out and try and feed some more.
[Dr. Belhert:] Well actually so we have actually characterized this disease as a disease of hibernation. So one of the properties of the fungus is that it's what we call a psycrophile or cold loving fungus. So it selectively only grows at cold temperatures. And these are temperatures that are fully consistent with the Huron temperatures of the bat hibernation caves, which is about the same as the temperature within your refrigerator. So once the bat, if the bat survives fungal infection and emerges in the spring, they warm up their body temperatures by activating their metabolism. They move to warmer environments. I don't think that those warmer temperatures would kill the fungus, but it can't actively grow at those temperatures. So effectively during the summer, I believe that the bats are capable of still spreading the fungus among each other, but they do have this opportunity potentially to mount some recovery to damage done during hibernation.
[Joe Palca:] OK, well let's take a call now from one of listeners. And again the number is 800-989-8255. Let's go to Ron in Amherst, New Hampshire. Ron, welcome to Science Friday.
[Ron:] Hi, thanks. I was wondering, I know there's been an outbreak of rabies in different animals, raccoons and I understand I know I out in Michigan, bats and rabies are big problem. If rabies could be involved in this? You know, I know, rabies can cause unusual behavior in animals and things like that. But you said you didn't know if the fungus was the cause or the effect. You now maybe, could rabies be involved?
[Joe Palca:] Interesting question. What about that?
[Dr. Belhert:] Right, so we actually, I think, can fairly confidently say that rabies is not involved. Rabies does exist at low incidents among insectivorous bats, or insect feeding bats, like we would find in the Northeastern U.S. But as a matter of fact, virtually all of these animals that have come to the laboratory have been tested for rabies and they've all been negative. Something else worth noting is one of the initial observations that something was wrong in the population is bats that gets tested for rabies are generally bats that are aberrantly behaving, a manifestation of some of the neurological effects of the rabies virus infection. And what was noticed at the New York State Department of Heath, where rabies testing is done, was that they're rabies infections of little brown bats, the primary species infected by the fungus, spiked to about 25 about ten times the 25 year average for the winter month. So really there should be no bats coming through rabies lab in the winter because the bats are all hibernating away in their caves, but with bats flying around and dying on the winter landscape, a lot of those animals are being submitted for rabies testing.
[Joe Palca:] Interesting.
[Dr. Belhert:] And once again they were all negative.
[Joe Palca:] Interesting OK well we'll have to look for another explanation. Let's try let's go to another call now and go to Paul in Provo, Utah. Paul welcome to Science Friday.
[Paul:] Hi, thank you. This is really intriguing. It was mentioned that the bats were found dying in one place, I think it was Albany, and then they were found with the same malady in another geographic area nearby, and it makes me wonder if you have tried to trace this fungus through insects whose larvae emerged from the ground or various terrestrial sources. And that's maybe they are transmitting or transferring this fungus from one geographic area to another based upon natural migrations, or winds patterns, or something like that rather than it being contagious from bat to bat.
[Joe Palca:] Interesting Paul. What do you think about that David Blehert?
[Dr. David Blehert:] I actually think that's a good idea, and potentially we could look at some of the newly introduced invasive insect species to the regions, such as the introduced gypsy moths for example. So that is something we've talked about. And if does turn out to be primarily pathogenic fungus that was introduced, there is many means by which it could have introduced, starting with humans, ranging to some animal species, to an insect species, even to wind- borne dust.
[Joe Palca:] Interesting. We have a question from somebody called Kanis Luming on Second Life who says, is there an emerging infectious disease? Is this an emerging infectious disease that might be applicable to other mammals? Any is this an opportunistic infection that's grabbing bats selectively or could it be other mammals?
[Dr. David Blehert:] Right. Well, once again, one of the important properties to consider here is that this fungus cannot grow above about 65 degrees Fahrenheit. So, humans and most other warm-blooded mammals, for example, have an internal body temperature and even a very warm skin temperature somewhere around 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. So, right now, I would consider it a potential concern for hibernating animals that drop their core body or skin surface temperatures down to below 70 degrees Fahrenheit even in the 40 degrees Fahrenheit ranges, where this fungus grows optimally. I don't think it possess a threat to humans.
[Joe Palca:] No, no. From what you describe, it doesn't sound like it would. OK. Let's try another call now and go to Daniel in Denver, Colorado. Daniel, welcome to Science Friday.
[Daniel:] Thanks. First of all, I am not a scientist, but I am just trying to find a little bit of common sense right here. Here in Colorado we have a pine beetle killing out millions of pine trees because of what is believed to be a direct result of global warming, where the pine beetle is actually surviving higher temperatures than normal in winter time, so that allows it to attack and kill the trees right here, the pines in this particular point. The first question is, why is this fungus able to attack these bats, and what was different before that it wasn't able to attack them? That would the first question, the second one is, could there be a relationship between higher temperatures, because due to global warming and the worst case scenario is, what happens if the entire population of bat, I doubt that this is going to happen but if the deaths if they do get wiped-out, what would the direct impact be on humans?
[Joe Palca:] OK, Daniel, I have to get David Blehert to answer that quickly because we are almost out of time for this segment but global warming causing this infection or why now? I guess, were the two big questions.
[Dr. David Blehert:] Right. So, why now? So, first of all, we do have to consider that perhaps this fungus was recently introduced and if so, that's why now. It's a new introduced pathogen that's just emerged as a problem. Alternatively, there could be some environmental perturbation that in the Northeast region that has allowed a fungus that was always present in the environment to emerge as an opportunistic pathogen. With regard to global climate change, that certainly is something we all consider. We don't have I need to emphasize we don't have any data to indicate such, but if we really want to go out on the limb and speculate, Geomyces fungi have been discovered in Antarctica associated, for example with an Antarctic birds called skuas. You know, one could go out on the limb and hypothesize that, if you want to get science fiction on this, that maybe this is something that was once locked in Arctic permafrost, and then with the decrease of Arctic permafrost, was liberated and, you know, perhaps then brought southward through animal migration.
[Joe Palca:] Well, as you say, it's an interesting speculation but we'll have to leave it there because we're out of time. Thank you David Blehert, he is the head of the Diagnostic Microbiology at the United States Geological Survey in Madison, Wisconsin. Stay with us, we have more to talk about on bats when we come back after this break. This is Talk of the Nation from NPR News.

[Madeleine Brand:] From NPR News, this is DAY TO DAY. Earlier this year a group of American woman traveled to Thailand to compete in a martial arts tournament. It provided the basis for the documentary Fight Girls, which premiers tonight on the Oxygen cable channel. Here is TV critic Andrew Wallenstein.
[Andrew Wallenstein Reporting:] Splice together movies like Million Dollar Baby, The Karate Kid, and the last four Jean-Claude Van Damme flicks and you would end up with something like Fight Girls. Only this is actually a true story about an old Thai master out to prove his coaching skills by recruiting American woman to fight in his homeland. How he chooses and trains these women is part journey of self-discovery, part comic misadventure. And yet the suspense the documentary builds over how the fighters will fair pins you to the ropes and packs a wallop. The fight style of choice is Muay Thai, a particularly violent strain of martial arts that allows you to strike with hands, elbows, shins and knees. That women are delivering this barrage of blows only adds to the novelty of the documentary. As fighter Lisa King explains, being a female Muay Thai fighter comes with certain gender challenges.
[Ms. Lisa King:] There's a lot of things that are taken into consideration being a female fighter. One, you don't want to put your hair in a ponytail in any way, shape or form. Judges look for effective aggressiveness. You can have an opponent just swinging at you at the angle they're looking at, if they're connecting, but if you've got your hair in a ponytail and you're hair is flip-flopping back, it looks like they've actually hit you harder than what they have. So I'm kind of having to pick and choose where my hair's going to go. It's either going to go long in braids or it's going to go in the center of my head so she can't grab onto it either way. I don't want it to become a handle for her or a tool to use against me.
[Wallenstein:] King and her fellow combatants are an interesting lot. You might expect these women are a rare breed. But Fight Girls underscores how utterly normal they are. Who would've thought the girl next door kicks ass for a living. But their mysterious mentor, Master Toddy, is right out of central casting. Blustery, yet tender, this former champion seems to delight in keeping his charges off-balance with weird training techniques. In this scene, Master Toddy has the women fighting blindfolded on bubble wrap.
[Master Toddy:] You don't need to see. Use memory to hear, to hear. Okay? In my country we fight a lot. They use dry leaves, the dry leaves. Anybody walk, we know where you are. If they kick you with a left kick, you're going to remember it. If the noise if they start to sweep the leg to kick you, oh, do feel that? [Unintelligible] coming at you, you feel that, they're going to attack. Do you understand?
[Wallenstein:] Regrettably the lives of these fighters' Thai counterparts are barely broached. But it's not difficult to understand why. Fight Girls finds subjects who command the cameras attention. Their quest to be the best may be something of a movie cliché, but this documentary renders it fresh again.
[Madeleine Brand:] The documentary Fight Girls debuts tonight on the cable channel Oxygen. Andrew Wallenstein is an editor for the Hollywood Reporter. He is also co-host of Square Off on the TV Guide Channel.

[Jacki Lyden:] I've been joined now by Nicholas Burns, the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Welcome to the program.
[Under Secretary Nicholas Burns:] Thank you very much.
[Jacki Lyden:] Secretary Burns, the Serbian government sponsored a huge rally on Thursday to protest Kosovo's independence. Now, the vast majority of the demonstrators were peaceful, as we've heard, but does the U.S. believe the Serbian government somehow incited or fomented the rioting and attack on the U.S. embassy and the other embassies? Under Sec. BURNS: Well, put it this way. The Serb government did fail to protect our embassy. There were police around the embassy. They disappeared and melted into the crowd as the mob attacked our embassy. We had 14 people inside. The mob set fire to the ground floor of the embassy. They tried to break further into the embassy. It was a very dangerous situation. And I called the prime minister of Serbia, Prime Minister Kostunica, and I said we hold him and his government to be personally responsible for what happened. Unfortunately, there have been all sorts of provocative statements, incendiary language by the Serb ministers in the days leading up to the demonstration, and unfortunately, I think we're seeing a return of the darker side of Serb nationalism and the ugly face of Serbia [unintelligible] that produced this very, very unfortunate and disagreeable episode the other day. What sort of rhetorical suasion do you think you have with the Serb government? Have they given you any assurances that this won't happen again? Under Sec. BURNS: Well, the prime minister and the foreign minister personally gave me assurances that our embassy would be secured. We're going to hold them to that. The Serb government, unfortunately, is whipping up sentiment in his own country in opposition to what the European Union and the United States have done in recognizing Kosovo, and I think what we're seeing is we're seeing the last act in the disintegration of Yugoslavia. And unfortunately, the Serb leadership seems to be facing backwards, not forwards, and we would urge them to think in more modern terms, recognize Kosovo, get along with the people there and put all of these historic enmities and animosities behind them. Did anyone give you an explanation for why the government didn't deploy enough riot police? Under Sec. BURNS: There was no valid explanation. I asked why the police did not stay, why they weren't there in the first place in adequate numbers, and the prime minister and the foreign minister could not give me an explanation for what happened, and it is one of the fundamental responsibilities of host country to protect foreign embassies in conflict. And in a country that is quite anti-America, in a country that is opposed to American policy in Kosovo, they should have anticipated that that huge crowd on Thursday night, some of those people would have turned violent, as they certainly did. Now, we just heard from our correspondent in Belgrade, Sylvia Poggioli, that even the pro-Western groups in Serbia, people that the U.S. would term Democrats, are feeling betrayed because the United States recognized Kosovo without the United Nations passing a new resolution on its independence. What do you say, Secretary Burns, to those people who are feeling betrayed? Under Sec. BURNS: Well frankly, I find that quite hard to believe, and I find that a, historical let's remember the history here. The Serbs started four wars in the 1990s, and they were bloody wars, the Bosnian War for instance, 250,000 people killed and two million homeless. That's when NATO went in. We saved those people. We stopped the war. We've kept the peace for nine years, and the United Nations took Kosovo away from Serbia in June of 1999, and the province has been under U.N. administration since. The independence of Kosovo was recommended by the United Nations by special envoy Martti Ahtisaari. The great majority of countries in Europe have recognized Kosovo as independent, so for the for Serb nationalists or the Serb government to say somehow this took them by surprise, it is just beyond belief that they would hold that opinion. Nicholas Burns is the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Thank you again for being with us. Under Sec. BURNS: Thank you very much.

[Steve Inskeep:] What does a U.S. troop withdrawal from Syria mean for neighboring Iraq? It is a big question. Just a few years ago, ISIS spread out of its base in Syria to capture much of northern Iraq. Iraqis have largely recovered their territory, but they do not want ISIS to regroup now that President Trump has ordered U.S. forces to leave. NPR's Jane Arraf joins us from Baghdad. Hi there, Jane.
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] Hi, Steve.
[Steve Inskeep:] How does the Syria withdrawal, whenever it's completed, affect Iraq?
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] Well, you know, there's some concern here because even though ISIS was actually driven out of a third of Iraq, which is a huge accomplishment accomplished at great cost they're still there along the border. So if the U.S. is pulling out troops from Syria, it means that the push against ISIS has to come from somewhere. And there's a lot of talk here among diplomats, among military people that that's going to have to be based at least partly in Iraq, where there are U.S. troops at that base in Al Anbar where President Trump visited at Christmas and where they're already launching attacks across the border in conjunction with the Syrian government, actually.
[Steve Inskeep:] Oh, this is a good point. U.S. troops may be leaving Syria, but they're still based in Iraq a few thousand of them, anyway. So what are Iraqis thinking about this situation?
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] So on the Iraqi side, they're kind of scrambling a bit, as are a lot of the Iraqi allies. So it's been a very busy week here at the presidential palace, in the prime minister's office. You know, Iraq, for a long time, was kind of isolated from the Sunni Arab world. But now there's been a parade of visitors. There's been Jordan's King Abdullah first time here in 11 years the French foreign minister, who said he was surprised at the pullout talk. And notably, there has been Iran the Iranian foreign minister here because U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo came. And his big preoccupation, of course, is Iran containing Iran.
[Steve Inskeep:] Oh. Oh.
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] That's a tough balancing act.
[Steve Inskeep:] Well, now, this is interesting. Pompeo is very focused on Iran and as is President Trump. Of course, Iraq is influenced by Iran. Were Iraqis reassured at all when Secretary of State Pompeo came to say the U.S. is still with them?
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] Reassured I'm not quite sure. You know, they understand the political realities in the U.S. But it is tough. I spoke with the Iraqi presidential spokesman here, Ambassador Lukman Faily, this morning. And here's what he had to say.
[Lukman Faily:] We have the security and the clear statement by the government that the intelligence, security, cooperation, training with the United States need to continue. But at the same time, we cannot as a government continue just having this roller-coaster relationship based on this nuclear deal with Iran. It needs to be a bit more predictable for us.
[Steve Inskeep:] Roller-coaster relationship.
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] Yeah. So what he's referring to there is there you know, there's an ongoing push here among some political parties to get rid of the U.S. troops in Iraq. The prime minister yesterday here said there were 6,000 of them still here. But at the same time, Iraq needs those troops, and it's trying to balance relations with Iran. Iran is its biggest neighbor and a big trading partner. So thus, the roller-coaster reference oh the roller coaster because the United States is trying to isolate Iran. The United States is allied with Iraq. Iraq has a relationship with Iran. So you go up. You go down. It's awkward. You got it.
[Steve Inskeep:] Jane, thanks for the update.
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] Thank you.
[Steve Inskeep:] That's NPR's Jane Arraf in Baghdad.

[Renee Montagne:] New numbers out this week show that foreclosure filings are up 32 percent from a year ago, adding to the millions who are losing their homes. NPR's Chris Arnold has been working with our Planet Money team. He's found that some in the mortgage industry believe that as many as half of these foreclosures don't need to happen.
[Chris Arnold:] Lenders keep foreclosing on all these houses, but they don't really want the houses. In fact, they take huge losses when they foreclose. And so, there's this paradox a lot of these people really shouldn't be losing their homes. It's not that they deserve help out of some doe-eyed feeling of charity, or because hard working people deserve a break, but because of the math. In many cases right now, it's a win-win to cut people deals, lower their payments to keep them in their homes. Then the lender would keep getting payments. It would also help the housing market, and the whole economy, but the system just isn't working right.
[Mr. Mark Pierce:] Unfortunately only five to ten percent of the people that probably need the help are actually getting something that's going to enable them to stay in their home.
[Chris Arnold:] That's Mark Pierce. He's North Carolina's deputy banking commissioner and he says it's a huge problem. Pierce has been meeting with executives at all the major banks and mortgage companies and he's been getting the industry's own data on foreclosures.
[Mr. Mark Pierce:] The other 90 to 95 percent of homeowners, the system drives them to lose their home.
[Mr. Danny Shapone:] So far today, almost 3,000 calls have come in just to home retentions. It's 3:30.
[Chris Arnold:] Danny Shapone is a manager at a call center run by a company named Ocwen and we came here to find out basically what's going on.
[Unidentified Woman:] Okay. And go ahead and just verify the last four of your social and your name please.
[Chris Arnold:] This is like the engine room of the foreclosure crisis, right here. If you own a house and you send in your mortgage payment, it comes to a company like this one. Ocwen is what's called a loan servicer. Most people have never heard of loan-servicers, but they're the middle man between you and the person that you owe. They're also the people you call when you can't pay. Or they'll call you. They're a debt collector.
[Unidentified Man:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Chris Arnold:] We're in a big room, lots of cubicles, and call center workers with headsets. Ocwen agreed to talk to us probably because they're different than a lot of other loan servicers in one important way. If you call, they might actually help. They modify a lot of mortgages. That means that when a borrower can't pay, they say that 75 percent of the time, they work out a deal that keeps the homeowner in their home. They do this for three times as many people as they're foreclosing on, because it makes good business sense. Margery Rotundo is a vice president who manages the call center. She shows us Ocwen's computer system. This is where they crunch the numbers that allow them to be nice to people.
[Ms. Margery Rotundo:] So here's the other financial information that we gather, you know, your monthly food, electric, cable.
[Chris Arnold:] Margery points to a computer that actually calculates how much money would be lost in a foreclosure for one of their loans. The software knows what the average repair costs are for foreclosed properties in any given neighborhood. It calculates the legal fees.
[Ms. Margery Rotundo:] You're broker fees once you sell it is going to be $6300. The closing cost, $1,837.
[Chris Arnold:] Then a lot of these houses are what's called upside down or under water. That means that they're worth less than what the homeowner owes on their mortgage. That's huge. Say I'm the bank and a borrower owes me $400,000, but now it turns out that the house is only worth half that. If I foreclose, I own a house that I can only sell for $200,000. I've lost at least half my money. So even if I cut the homeowner an incredible deal, I tell them to forget about $50,000 or even $100,000 of that 400 that he owes me, I still come out ahead. I've lost less money. Or by slashing the interest rate, I can cut the borrower's payments in half. It's all there in the numbers on Margery's computer screen.
[Ms. Margery Rotundo:] Any type of situation that a borrower is in, if they communicate with us, there's a way out.
[Chris Arnold:] Ocwen is just one company that's gotten religion about doing loan workouts. The problem is there are dozens of other loan servicers. The biggest ones are owned by the big bank, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Chase the same big banks that are getting bailed out by the government right now. They all have big servicing divisions. We sat down with Ocwen's president, Ron Faris, in his modest conference room. He said those bigger companies, the big banks, it turns out were just not set up to deal with this problem.
[Mr. Ron Faris:] One of the largest servicers in commercial banks in the country came down to visit and this was probably back in about, you know, mid-2007 and what they said to us was, we know that delinquencies are rising. We know that, you know, we're not going to be able to hire enough experienced collectors. And to compound that, we don't have all of that mathematical stuff that you're talking about, the models and whatever, and we're not sure what to do because we're pretty sure that by the time we get it implemented, it will be too late. And I'm talking about one of the largest, you know, banks in the world sat here in this room and told us that story.
[Chris Arnold:] And they're basically saying, well if everybody pays on time, everything is great, but we really don't have the systems in place to deal with it if people stop paying.
[Mr. Ron Faris:] It was eye-opening to hear them actually say that they have a problem and they weren't sure what to do.
[Chris Arnold:] Ocwen on the other hand has been doing this for a while. They've always specialized in so-called distressed debt, which means that they were the industry's problem loan guys. They were like the messed up loan foreclosure specialists. Before this crisis, that was a tiny part of the market. Now it is the market. There are all sorts of other reasons that the big banks and loan servicers aren't modifying more mortgages. Some say homeowners don't return their calls. And inside the industry there are backwards incentives, complicated accounting reasons, conflicts of interest, all these problems.
[Mr. Rod Alba:] That's exactly right and you know, the whether to engage in the loan modification is indeed a bank specific calculation.
[Chris Arnold:] That's Rod Alba, the vice president for mortgage finance at the American Bankers Association, which represents banks around the country. He basically agrees that a lot more loan modifications would make good business sense. But many big loan servicers haven't figured out how to make that happen.
[Mr. Rod Alba:] The level of the market disruption just caught many servicers by surprise, and indeed, in many instances, we are still learning and we're still getting our systems in order in order to be able to handle the massive levels of defaults that certain communities are suffering.
[Chris Arnold:] Meanwhile, a chief economist at the ratings agency, Moody's, estimates that of the six million foreclosures we're facing in the next few years, about half don't need to happen. The Obama administration has a new plan to try to help, but for now, we're still right in the middle of this giant foreclosure mess. People are losing their houses at a faster rate every month, another one every eight seconds. Chris Arnold, NPR News.
[Renee Montagne:] And you can hear a longer version of Chris's story this weekend on Chicago Public Radio's "This American Life." And find out more about fixing the foreclosure mess on our Planet Money blog and podcast at npr.orgmoney.

[Scott Simon:] The House rebuke of the U.S. role in Libya may signal a new note being heard among Republicans. A growing number of prominent Republicans, including several candidates for president, are calling for a speedier withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan and question U.S. involvement in Libya. The course of candidates calling for America to stay home plainly upsets the last Republican presidential nominee, Senator John McCain, who told ABC's "This Week."
[John Mccain:] This is isolationism. There's always been an isolation strain in the Republican Party, the Pat Buchanan wing of our party. But now it seems to have moved more center stage so to speak.
[Scott Simon:] Joined now by another Arizona member of Congress, Congressman Jeff Flake joins us from Capitol Hill. Thanks so much for being with us.
[Jeff Flake:] Hey. Thanks for having me on.
[Scott Simon:] And how do you feel about that term isolationist?
[Jeff Flake:] Well, I certainly don't think it applies to me or very many of my colleagues. I think we have to differentiate between the readiness to, I guess, or the willingness or desire to use military force with other actions that might be more appropriately defined as isolationist.
[Scott Simon:] You've called to the U.S. to keep a much smaller presence in Afghanistan and certainly circumscribed action only, if any, in Libya. Explain your thinking, sir.
[Jeff Flake:] We've completed much of our mission there. We certainly, we routed the Taliban early on, we've now killed Osama bin Laden and we're now engaged in what is termed counterinsurgency policy. But I don't think it really is. It's more nation-building than that. So, I've called for a change to counterterrorism that would require much smaller footprint and I think be just as effective or perhaps more so.
[Scott Simon:] Would your thinking be different if there weren't the domestic budget pressures we observe now?
[Jeff Flake:] No. No, I don't believe so. When you look at Afghanistan and you look at what we're doing there, it's hard to imagine that the situation will be much different 10 years from now, even if we could afford to spend what we're currently spending. So, no, certainly you can't divorce, you know, our economic situation from the argument but I think I'd feel the same anyway.
[Scott Simon:] Is this a new direction from the Republican Party?
[Jeff Flake:] No. I think frankly it returns much more to our roots.
[Scott Simon:] And we're going to have to note that a number of your fellow Republicans, great number, obviously, historic number of freshmen, many of them backed by the Tea Party you don't agree that this might signal a shift in the views of the Republican Party over the past decade?
[Jeff Flake:] Perhaps over the past decade. But I would argue that probably returns us to more of where the Republican Party has been traditionally; the party that is not isolationist by any means, but is perhaps a little more skeptical of the ability that we have to change the world in ways that we perhaps think we can.
[Scott Simon:] What about the argument, Mr. Flake, that when you see widespread mass murder perhaps on the verge of happening in a place like Libya, it is in the interest of the United States to apply power to prevent that from happening.
[Jeff Flake:] I certainly think that that is a compelling argument. And Senator McCain makes that in a very compelling way. But there are compelling arguments that can be made in that same vein in Syria right now or in Yemen or elsewhere. And I think you have to be judicious in where you apply military force and some of us think that we erred in Libya.
[Scott Simon:] Are you concerned that in the campaign to come President Obama might be in a position to accuse the Republicans of being weak on defense?
[Jeff Flake:] Well, there are some on the Republican Party that think we've always got to be more hawkish than the president. And I don't think that's the case. I think Republicans have traditionally been and will remain more committed perhaps to national defense. But that doesn't mean that we should engage in every battle that is out there. And if there are areas where we think it's imprudent to move ahead overseas then I hope we Republicans do the right thing.
[Scott Simon:] Congressman Jeff Flake who represents the sixth congressional district of Arizona. Thanks so much for being with us.
[Jeff Flake:] Thanks for having me on.

[Debbie Elliott:] This week, Senator John McCain pulled off a feat of political triangulation, by giving the same graduation speech to a conservative religious institution, an Ivy League school, and a liberal New York university. The Senator got a warm reception at Liberty University in Virginia, faced a few protestors at Columbia, and yesterday, at the New School University in Manhattan, NPR's Robert Smith has that story...
[Robert Smith Reporting:] Ah, the traditions of graduation. The ceremony. The names...
[Unidentified Man:] Denise Walsh.
[Smith:] And of course the heckling of the commencement speaker.
[Senator John Mccain:] I supported the decision to go to war in Iraq. Many Americans did not.
[Smith:] The voice is Senator John McCain's. And the boos are a good portion of the 2006 graduating class of the New School University. For weeks, students at this progressive institution in Greenwich Village have been protesting the choice of a pro-Iraq War, anti-abortion Republican as their commencement speaker. They gathered more than 1,000 signatures on a petition to get him dis-invited. McCain, for his part, seemed resigned to the controversy. Most of his speech was devoted to championing the right of protest, and the value of civil discourse.
[Senator John Mccain:] So let us argue with each other then. By all means, let us argue. Are differences are not petty. They often involve cherished beliefs. Let us defend those beliefs. Let's do so sincerely and strenuously.
[Smith:] But the message didn't exactly capture the audience. Dozens of graduates turned their backs on McCain as he spoke. Others held up orange signs that said: Our commencement is not your platform. As the speech went on, the taunting escalated. One man shouted, Go home. Another yelled at the politician that they were graduating, not voting.
[Senator John Mccain:] We have nothing to fear from each other.
[Unidentified Man:] Sit down!
[Smith:] The scene was not what the president of the New School, former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, had imagined when he invited McCain to speak. Kerrey said he picked the Arizona senator because he was one of the most important leaders in the world, and could bring some visibility to the school. There was clearly something in it for McCain, too. When he was challenged about his decision to speak at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, McCain bragged that he was speaking at the liberal New School, also. This political balancing act didn't go over well in New York. Some of the graduates of the New School said they felt like they were props in a future presidential campaign. Jean Sara Rohe, a music school graduate, tossed out the speech she was going to give at commencement. And instead, addressed McCain.
[Ms. Jean Sara Rohe:] The senator does not reflect the ideals upon which this university was founded. Not only this... Please. Not only this, but his invitation was a top down decision that did not take into account the desires and interests of the student body, on an occasion that is supposed to honor us above all, and to commemorate our achievement.
[Smith:] When McCain finished speaking, he received a standing ovation from a handful of parents in the audience, while many of their sons and daughters jeered. Then an embarrassed Bob Kerrey took the protesting students to task.
[Mr. Bob Kerrey:] There will come a time in your life when the question occurs: Will you stand, not heckling from an audience where no bravery is required... But will you stand and say what you believe when you know, when you know that heckling and laughter and boos will arise?
[Smith:] After the hat tossing and thousands of pictures, some of the less political members of the New School's graduating class were left to wonder what happened. Evan Pinto, a liberal arts major, says he felt like his graduation ceremony was hijacked.
[Mr. Evan Pinto:] You know, I just spent the last three years of my life sitting at my desk doing homework. And I wanted some recognition for that. I didn't want have to listen to somebody think about what he thinks about what the world needs to do. I put a lot of solo, isolated work into myself the last three years, and I want recognition for that.
[Smith:] Instead, his graduation somehow turned into a political debate. Robert Smith, NPR News, New York.

[Robert Siegel:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel. This is the eighth Christmas American troops have spent in Iraq. And there may be only one more Christmas, if the U.S. stays true to its promise to withdraw all troops by the end of next year. Well, we're going to hear what the holiday sounds like with the First Infantry Division in northern Iraq. The division is known as the Devil Brigade, for fighting through hellish conditions in the First World War. NPR's Kelly McEvers paid the troops a visit today and found that it's been business as usual. They launched an operation to detain suspected insurgents, an operation called Devil's Eve, a play on Christmas Eve. But they started the day with some giving.
[Kelly Mcevers:] On many days, whether it's a holiday or not, this is what the war in Iraq sounds like. Soldiers like Lieutenant Evan Kerrane promising heaters to a local village chief.
[Lieutenant Evan Kerrane:] You should be able to get two. It may take me a week. If it takes me a week, they should be able to get it at the checkpoint and just call you and have you pick it up.
[Kelly Mcevers:] Sitting on the floor and sipping tea and making promises, this has long been the strategy for officers here. Soldiers no longer kick down doors, they give out toys and leftover Christmas candy.
[Unidentified Child:] I want candy.
[Unidentified Man #1:] Sorry, it's melted. Don't squish it.
[Kelly Mcevers:] Before they leave, the officers tell the village chief they think the war is over.
[Unidentified Man #2:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Kelly Mcevers:] The chief politely says he looks forward to a day when Americans will visit him without armored trucks and big guns. Later the same day, this is what the war in Iraq sounds like. American commanders with their Iraqi counterparts landing in a remote village of mud brick houses that's thought to harbor insurgents, and immediately stepping in front of the camera.
[Colonel Eric Welsh:] They've captured over five caches. They've detained already nine targeted individuals.
[Kelly Mcevers:] That's Colonel Eric Welsh. He helps lead Operation Devil's Eve.
[Colonel Eric Welsh:] Now, this joint cooperation between this police chief and that division commander are unprecedented in this area.
[Kelly Mcevers:] His goal is to send the message that Americans are no longer leading these raids. Instead, they help plan the missions then tag along in case something goes wrong. Today, now that the raid is finished, dozens of men are being held for questioning. So we've got a line of men and boys. What would you say, about 30 people lined up right here, sitting down in the salty sand? And they are here for tactical questioning. Is that right?
[Unidentified Man #3:] Tactical questioning.
[Kelly Mcevers:] Tactical questioning. An America soldier takes one glowering suspect and holds his fingers to a handheld screen.
[Unidentified Man #4:] Right now, Ma'am, we're putting them into the Hide system, which is basically a mass database of all types of information their background, fingerprinting, iris scans.
[Kelly Mcevers:] Iraqis will search to see if the man is wanted for previous crimes. Analysts say one reason the violence is down in Iraq is because the message is getting out, the occupier is leaving. And, they say, because Iraqis are getting serious about finding and capturing insurgents who target their own people, like a triple suicide bombing near here last month. Here's Iraqi police Major General Jamal Taher Bakr.
[Major General Jamal Taher Bakr:] Before the terrorists, they say that we struggle against the American forces. But that is a lie because, you know, that is against the people, the children, the women, everyone.
[Kelly Mcevers:] Because of this shift, Jamal says Iraqis are beginning to provide police with information about insurgents. What it all amounts to is that on most days, the war in Iraq for the Americans, at least sounds like something that is ending. Phrases like, working to make ourselves irrelevant and respectable exit, are the norms these days. That's all the more true now that Iraq's newly-formed government seems increasingly unlikely to ask U.S. troops to remain beyond the December 2011 deadline. As one commander here put it, the coming year is the final chapter in the Iraq War, and while this war will be remembered for how it began, it also will be remembered for how it ends. Kelly McEvers, NPR News, Kirkuk.

[Melissa Block:] More than three million children now play organized soccer in the U.S. That's a lot of kids in uniforms and cleats and a lot of adults yelling at them from the sidelines. Recently, the U.S. Soccer Federation issued new guidelines for the adults who coach youth soccer and they pretty much boil down to this advice, don't coach so much. Commentator Mike Woitalla is the executive editor of Soccer America magazine and he says the new guidelines sound like good advice.
[Mike Woitella:] What would happen if we treated a day at the playground like a youth soccer practice? Make the six-year-olds line up and wait to take turns on the monkey bars. If one of the wanders off toward the swings, scream at him. At the sandbox, do not let them dig around making castles or mounds. Line them up for the shovel drill and yell, dig, dig, dig. After 50 minutes on instructions on the various aspects of proper playground usage, give the kids ten minutes to play, the sit them down for a lecture. It sounds absurd, but it's equally ludicrous to drill six-year-old soccer players, to make them wait in line to kick a ball, instead of setting up small goals and letting them play. It unnecessary and rude to yell nonstop instructions at soccer playing children. It's senseless to make little kids play positions, to force them to remain in certain sections of the field as if they were wooden chess pieces. And it's clear that children are much more likely to become talented soccer players if they're allowed to explore the game without adults bossing them around. The U.S. Soccer Federation is concerned about creating great players. That's why is has created guidelines for youth coaches warning them that youth soccer has become too organized, too structured. The world's greatest players have something in common. As children they considered the soccer ball a wonderful toy and they wanted to play with it whenever they could. That's because their early exposure to soccer was pure play. The Peles, Meradonas and Renaldo's developed their skills without adults looking over their shoulders, stifling their creative impulses or critiquing their mistakes. In the United States, youth soccer comes with a dominating adult presence and 60 percent of kids quit the sport by the time they're 12-years-old. The thing is you don't have to teach soccer, the game is the best teacher for young players. That's the message for youth soccer coaches in the U.S. Soccer Federation's new guidelines. They advise coaches to organize less, to say less, to encourage dribbling, to let kids move wherever they want on the field and to make practices simulate pick-up games. Most importantly, the message is that youth soccer should be play time for children and that playing is the best practice.
[Melissa Block:] Mike Woitalla is the executive editor of Soccer America magazine and co- author of the book More Than Goals: The Journey From Backyard Games To World Cup Competition.

[Joe Palca:] And that flute music can only mean one thing. It means we've reached that hour, that moment in the hour when we talk to the fabulous Flora Lichtman about the video pick of the week. Flora, what's up?
[Flora Lichtman:] Hi, Joe.
[Joe Palca:] Hi, Flora. What's up?
[Flora Lichtman:] Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
[Joe Palca:] Thank you very much. It's a delight to be here and thank you so much for having me. OK.
[Flora Lichtman:] OK. Down to business.
[Joe Palca:] Down to business.
[Flora Lichtman:] This week, we have a story about scientists who have basically made a stun gun for worms.
[Joe Palca:] A stun gun for worms. What does that mean?
[Flora Lichtman:] Very important research.
[Joe Palca:] Yeah, right. Because a lot of worms. You know, worm attacks are being rampant all over the place.
[Flora Lichtman:] All right.
[Joe Palca:] No, it's more important than that.
[Flora Lichtman:] All right, so here's the story. Neil Branda who's a chemist at Simon Fraser University in Canada and his colleagues took a nematode worm, also known as C. elegans, this experimental model organism, they fed it a light-sensitive chemical. So that's a chemical that changes when you expose it to different types of light.
[Joe Palca:] Mm-hmm.
[Flora Lichtman:] And then they shined the worm with UV light.
[Joe Palca:] Ultraviolet light, OK.
[Flora Lichtman:] Ultraviolet light. And something kind of remarkable happened. First, the worm turned blue�
[Joe Palca:] Mm-hmm.
[Flora Lichtman:] �which is kind of a side point, and then it became paralyzed.
[Joe Palca:] Paralyzed?
[Licthman:] So here's where the stun comes in.
[Joe Palca:] You don't think it's just resting?
[Flora Lichtman:] Apparently, enough worms started resting after the UV light had been�
[Joe Palca:] Right. OK. So they decided it was paralyzed. OK.
[Flora Lichtman:] And then the next part and here's where it's new when they shined the worms back with visible light�
[Joe Palca:] Mm-hmm.
[Licthman:] �they started moving again.
[Joe Palca:] So this was a reversible�
[Flora Lichtman:] Reversible�
[Joe Palca:] �stun�
[Flora Lichtman:] �mechanism.
[Joe Palca:] �mechanism that's switched on and off by light.
[Flora Lichtman:] Right.
[Joe Palca:] And�
[Flora Lichtman:] And you can see it on our Web site, at sciencefriday.com.
[Joe Palca:] I knew that was coming. No, I actually, I have to confess. I took a peek out of it. It's pretty remarkable. You should go have a look. Flora, thank you very much.
[Flora Lichtman:] Joe, thank you.
[Joe Palca:] OK. And that's it for today's hour. Flora Lichtman is the digital media producer for SCIENCE FRIDAY, and that was her you were just hearing.

[Steve Inskeep:] Think of that choice in Virginia's mountains as one of many that affect a close vote for that state which in turn could alter the electoral map, which we'll talk about next. NPR's national political correspondent Mara Liasson is with us. And Mara, Virginia is one place where Democrats are competing where they haven't been able to in the past. Where else?
[Mara Liasson:] Well, there are a lot of places that all of a sudden Barack Obama is competing where Democrats didn't win last time. Florida, Colorado, Nevada, Ohio is always a battleground state, New Mexico, Iowa looks very good for him. I mean, he has a lot of ways to get to 270 electoral votes. That's what's happened recently. The electoral map seems to be shifting in his direction. And even in states that are pure tossups, he is leading by a little bit in current statewide polling.
[Steve Inskeep:] So Barack Obama's got the money to gamble a little bit on some of these states to take a chance and see if he can get over the 270 electoral votes that decide the election. What about John McCain?
[Mara Liasson:] John McCain has a much narrower path to winning. He just pulled out of a very important state, Michigan, one of those blue states that he had hoped to turn red. He needs to hang on to everything that Bush got in 2004. And assuming that Barack Obama is going to pick up a couple of those Bush states, he needed to win some blue states. Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and New Hampshire were all places where McCain had hoped to be competitive. Michigan just dropped off the list. Pennsylvania is looking more and more solid for Obama. So is Minnesota and Wisconsin. He just has fewer resources to play with, and that's why he has to drop out of a state like Michigan. He's basically doing triage.
[Steve Inskeep:] But what is happening in the election that's giving Obama more chances to play on Republican turf than the other way around?
[Mara Liasson:] Two things. One is he has so many more resources than John McCain. And also the economy. The economy was always part of the wind at the back of the Democrats. But with the latest financial crisis on Wall Street, all of a sudden the landscape that was tilted to Democrats got even more steeply tilted to them.
[Steve Inskeep:] That's NPR's national political correspondent, Mara Liasson. And by the way, you can check out NPR's electoral map and work with it to make your own predictions about the 2008 presidential election. Just go to npr.org.

[Michel Martin:] I'm Michel Martin. We're going to take another look at last night's election results in the 2016 race for president. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton scored an important win, but Bernie Sanders is not going away.
[Hillary Clinton:] Is this a great night or what? We just won Nevada.
[Bernie Sanders:] The wind is on at our backs. We have the momentum.
[Michel Martin:] Clinton is hoping to shut down that momentum as the Democrats move to South Carolina this week. South Carolina helped shape the Republican race last night as Trump finished first, Rubio second, and Ted Cruz took third place.
[Ted Cruz:] Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina have given the voters a clear, defined choice.
[Marco Rubio:] After tonight, this has become a three-person race, and we will win the nomination.
[Donald Trump:] Let's have a big win in Nevada. Let's have a big win at the SEC. Let's put this thing away.
[Michel Martin:] The question for the GOP after Donald Trump's win last night is whether he has effectively locked up the nomination. NPR National Political Correspondent Don Gonyea is just off the plane from South Carolina, and he is in the studio with me now. Welcome back, Don.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] I'm hearing that tape, I'm having flashbacks. But it was only yesterday, so [LAUGHTER].
[Michel Martin:] [Laughter] It was only yesterday. OK, have another sip of coffee.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] Yes.
[Michel Martin:] So Donald Trump has won New Hampshire, northern state, South Carolina, southern state. If history's any guide, there should be little doubt now about his chances to win the nomination. So is that the case for Republicans looking forward to the next couple of big primaries?
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] Well, that's certainly the argument Donald Trump makes. Look, no Republican has won those two states New Hampshire and now South Carolina and not gone on to win the nomination. So you have to look at Donald Trump astounding it is to say it, as astounding as it, you know, seemed to us, you know, just a few months ago as the front-runner. But Ted Cruz let's talk about Ted Cruz for a moment. He has a really big win big opportunity for a win coming up in Texas. It's his home state. It's March first. It's on that Super Tuesday day. It's really critical for him. It's a place it's one of the few places where actually he leads in the polls. But here's what has to scare him. Donald Trump beat him among evangelical voters, despite the hard, hard pitch that Cruz made for them in South Carolina.
[Michel Martin:] What about Marco Rubio? Now that Jeb Bush is out, it would seem that he would be the person around whom the establishment, so-called, can coalesce.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] It feels like that will happen. And when you talk to people anecdotally, you kind of think that will happen. He's hoping to pick up every single person who supported Jeb Bush. He's already getting a lot of Jeb Bush's money people, people to help him raise money and all that. And he will probably do very well among Jeb Bush supporters. But John Kasich is still that kind of nagging character out there, the governor of Ohio. He didn't do well yesterday in South Carolina, but he's looking ahead to Ohio his home state, votes March 15. He'll be in at least until then. But also before that, Michigan, Massachusetts, Minnesota places where he could still do well and create problems for Rubio.
[Michel Martin:] So we have about a minute left. Talk about the Democrats if you would. We know that Hillary Clinton won last night, the first primary with a more diverse electorate. What does that tell us about the path for both candidates moving forward?
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] Here's the thing. The exit polls or entrance polls, technically, they were tell us that Bernie Sanders won the Latino vote. And that's a little bit shocking to the Clinton camp. And they actually disputed. She, in 2008, running against Barack Obama, won the Latino vote 2 to 1. She's already in Texas working on that vote going forward. She did win three-quarters of the African-American vote. That is really critical for her. South Carolina is a majority African-American Democratic primary coming up. If she can replicate that, she can start to get a ball rolling, and more states look good in that regard for her.
[Michel Martin:] All right, that's NPR's Don Gonyea. Don Gonyea, thank you.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] Thank you.

[Melissa Block:] To hear more about how police are trained to deal with people in extreme agitated states, we're joined by Jason Williams. He's the defensive tactics training coordinator with the Michigan State Police Department. Thanks for being with us.
[Sergeant Jason Williams:] Thanks for having me.
[Melissa Block:] And how do you train police there in Michigan to recognize someone who is in this state, which is called excited delirium? What do they look for?
[Sergeant Jason Williams:] Well, there's an agitated state, somebody who's extremely combative or violent, psychotic behavior, altered mental status, any kind of bizarre behaviors, profuse sweating, incoherent speech, superhuman strength and endurance. People that are experiencing this syndrome usually like to break glass, whether it's windows, bottles, something to that effect. That's one of the things that we train people to look for.
[Melissa Block:] Well, if officers are responding to someone who does seem to be out of control, what are the first initial techniques that you tell officers they should use when they're trying to respond and calm someone down?
[Sergeant Jason Williams:] Well, obviously, our first stage of any use of force is use our voice. It's our first and best tool that we have.
[Melissa Block:] And if voice commands don't work, what then?
[Sergeant Jason Williams:] We have what's called a subject-control continuum here in Michigan. For instance, talking to somebody or showing up in uniform is considered officer presence or verbal traction. That's the lowest level of force that a police officer will use. The next step up is simply using techniques like joint locks or pressure points, or things like that. The next step that they would use if those were ineffective would be physical controls like strikes or takedowns, things like that. Our next step up would be intermediate controls, impact weapons, batons, using chemical sprays or even Tasers. The final level of response would be a deadly force response.
[Melissa Block:] Is it a common experience that when people are in this extremely agitated state that they're not responding to pain in the way that you'd expect them to?
[Sergeant Jason Williams:] That's very typical of somebody experiencing excited delirium. In fact, one of the symptoms is they just don't feel or respond to the pain-compliance techniques that we use.
[Melissa Block:] And what will officers tell you about what it feels like to actually be in a confrontation with somebody who is exhibiting superhuman strength?
[Sergeant Jason Williams:] Usually what you hear is, you know, the guy was 5'6" and 120 pounds and, you know, the officers are six-foot and 180, 200 pounds and it's all they can do to control this guy. And they call for back-up again and three or four guys come and it takes six officers to control this one guy who's about 120 pounds.
[Melissa Block:] If you're dealing with someone who's believed to be in this state, would you call, say, an ambulance or medics or people who could actually tranquilize the suspect, lower their heart rate, things like that?
[Sergeant Jason Williams:] That's one of the things that we've started to train our troopers for, is to recognize these symptoms, get medical aid in route as quickly as possible, get this person under control so that medical personnel can start to help.
[Melissa Block:] And then would that suspect be taken to prison or to a hospital?
[Sergeant Jason Williams:] Ideally, what's going to happen is they're going to get them under control as quickly as possible, get them restrained so that the ambulance people can take care of them, turn them over to the ambulance and get them to a medical facility where they can get the treatment that they need.
[Melissa Block:] Sergeant Williams, we heard in reports from Laura Sullivan that there is a great deal of controversy about excited delirium. Civil rights groups feel that it's basically an excuse to cover up police brutality of misconduct. What's your perspective on that?
[Sergeant Jason Williams:] Depending on who you talk to, the National Association of Medical Examiners, they've recognized excited delirium for more than a decade. Some medical studies have been done over in the United Kingdom that clearly show that it does exist. But as far as police officers using this as a cover for justifying excessive force, the last thing that any police officer wants to do is to have somebody physically injured or worse yet even to die while -after they've been taken into custody or during the arrest procedure. We train our officers to use the minimum amount of force necessary to in effect arrest but to do it safely.
[Melissa Block:] Sergeant Williams, thanks for talking with us.
[Sergeant Jason Williams:] Certainly. Thank you.
[Melissa Block:] Jason Williams is defensive tactics training coordinator with the Michigan State Police Department. You can hear the first part of our report on excited delirium at our website, npr.org.

[Renee Montagne:] This battle was decided by a tough economy. And if there was any doubt, voters made it clear on Tuesday. Illinois voter Thalan Doherty has one question.
[Ms. Thalan Doherty:] So what are they going to do to ensure that we stay employed? That's what's most important to me.
[Renee Montagne:] Wisconsin voter Deedee Wytell, who also lives in Wisconsin, hopes the new Republican lawmakers will be more responsible with taxpayer dollars.
[Ms. Deedee Wytell:] I am shocked that America has lost the belief that we need to balance our checkbook, like the American taxpayers do.
[Renee Montagne:] Some comments from voters in Wisconsin. And you're listening to all the results this morning on MORNING EDITION, from NPR News.

[Deborah Amos:] In business news today, likely job cuts at a pharmaceutical giant. Pfizer has announced it's scrapping the most important product in its drug development pipeline. The world's biggest drug maker says its halted work on a new medicine aimed at raising so-called good cholesterol after an independent board found increased deaths and heart problems among patients in late-stage clinical trials. The drug was expected to make up for financial losses once patents expire on other Pfizer drugs, including the blockbuster anti-cholesterol medication Lipitor.
[Some Other News:] U.S. and South Korean officials are set to resume talks today over a free trade deal. This could be the biggest such pact since the North American Free Trade Agreement. President Bush is hoping to reach a deal before his negotiating authority runs out in June.
[Deborah Amos:] But it could be a difficult start. South Korea has just rejected a shipment of U.S. beef due to concerns about Mad Cow Disease.

[David Greene:] Now some news from 1871 and a whaling expedition that headed into Arctic waters too close to winter. Thirty-three ships got trapped in the ice. Well, now 145 years later archaeologists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say they have discovered the hulls of two of those lost ships. They're on the seafloor off the coast of Alaska. To understand how they got there, we reached Peter Nichols. He's author of the book "Oil And Ice," and he remembers a time when people got their oil from whales.
[Peter Nichols:] Whale oil was used for everything. It was the lubrication for machines. It was lighting. It was very very close to what petroleum oil is today.
[David Greene:] Well, so tell me about these doomed ships and who was on board them.
[Peter Nichols:] Well, this was sort of the dwindling end of the world's whaling fleet. It was like the last gasp of the first oil business. By 1871, when these ships were all up in Alaska they were all there because that's where all of the whales were. And when the ice began to retreat from the Alaskan shore, the whales then followed this little channel and the ships followed them, too. And 1,200 people were on these 33 ships.
[David Greene:] And were there there were families on board these boats as well?
[Peter Nichols:] Yeah, a whale ship captain or wailers typically would go off on voyages that lasted three to five years. And whaling captains who might have a 40-year career often spend no more than, say, five years at home in total. So a lot of wives and their children went on these voyages around the world. And the whale ships often moved in company with other whale ships. So on Sundays they'd have a church service on board one or other of these ships, and the women would get together, and they'd all be rowed over to each other ships to talk and as the men would, too. So they moved in these flotillas around the world following the whales.
[David Greene:] So this whole community on board ships gets trapped in this channel what happens? Did people survive?
[Peter Nichols:] Amazingly, everybody survived. What happened was the weather turned. The wind blew from the sea, and it blew the ice onto this channel. And the ships were all pushed up against the shore by the ice, and the ships began to be destroyed by the ice. And at that point they thought how are we going to get 1,200 men, women and children out of here? So they took to their whale boats, these little peapods from classic Arctic whaling illustrations. And they rode down the coast sometimes there was so little water that they had to drag them over the ice all these people until they got far enough south that they were into open water. And there were seven whale ships that were not trapped, and they all made it.
[David Greene:] That's extraordinary. You have 1,200 people marching across the ice dragging little boats, I mean, did it have a big impact on the industry in 1871?
[Peter Nichols:] It actually finished it off. Petroleum had been found in 1859. Whale ships did go out afterwards but in one year, 1871, this disaster wiped them all out.
[David Greene:] But whaling remained an enterprise, I mean, through you know, into the 20th century.
[Peter Nichols:] Yes, it did. But the world didn't turn on it as it had in the 19th century. And actually I was sailing across the Atlantic on a little leaky wooden boat in 1971, and I stopped in the Azores.
[David Greene:] Those are those are Portuguese islands sort of way off in the Atlantic right?
[Peter Nichols:] They're Portuguese islands. And those people there were still practicing whaling in little open peapod boats along the traditional model. And while I was there a great shout went up a bell rang one day, and these people dropped their tools in the field. They all ran down to the beach and jumped in these whale boats and went after Sperm whales that I could see spouting. They paddled out there and spent hours chasing these whales and harpooned them by hand.
[David Greene:] Well, Peter, it's been really cool hearing about all of this. Thank you so much for talking to us.
[Peter Nichols:] Thank you, David.
[David Greene:] Peter Nichols, he's author of the book "Oil And Ice." This is NPR News.

[Michele Norris:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
[Robert Siegel:] And I'm Robert Siegel. In London, forensic experts are still working round the clock to identify all of the 54 people who were killed in last week's bombings. So far they've identified 41 bodies. When we report on stories such as that one, we take for granted the idea that peoples' bodies can be identified with certainty, not just by their clothing or by their fingerprints, but by their DNA. We can also link criminals to victims or to evidence and we can link people to their biological relatives. All this began just over 20 years ago in England. Recently, I spoke with the man who discovered the DNA fingerprint. He is Sir Alec Jeffries. He was subsequently knighted for his work. He is a geneticist at the University of Leicester, just as he was in 1984 when he was conducting a DNA experiment that had nothing to do with identifying individuals.
[Sir Alec Jeffries:] The last thing on my mind was identification and forensics and paternity cases and all the rest of it. What we were interested in doing back in those early days of human molecular genetics was just trying to find out some basic information about inherited variation in our DNA. And it was purely by accident in those studies that we generated, totally out of the blue, what proved to be the very first DNA fingerprint.
[Robert Siegel:] Hmm.
[Sir Alec:] And that emerged. I remember it very clearly. This was a real eureka moment. It happened at 5 past 9 on the morning of Monday, the 10th of September, 1984. That was the-that split second in time when my life completely and utterly changed. So that very first DNA fingerprint, which I can see in front of me right now on the wall of my office-I still have the original-a very murky, grubby bit of X-ray film. On that we could see what appeared to be pretty variable and informative patterns of DNA. Purely by chance, we had a family group on there, one of my technicians and a mother and father. Not only could we tell those three people apart, but we could see how the technician's pattern was a composite of some of mum's and some of dad's characters. And on that very first test, we just had a set of DNAs plotted at random really. So we had not only people, but I think a mouse and a rat. We had a baboon. We had a cow. We even had tobacco, believe it or not. And, to my amazement, not only did this work on people, it worked on absolutely everything else as well. It was-having seen this very first pattern, the penny dropped almost immediately. Within a minute I suddenly realized, `Wait a minute. We're looking here, potentially, at DNA-based biological identification.'
[Robert Siegel:] Now this eureka moment, you had discovered something that you had not set out to discover?
[Sir Alec:] Absolutely not. And I think if we had been charged with the task of inventing DNA fingerprinting-let's suppose some remarkably prescient funding agency two years previously had said, `OK, come up with a method for individualizing people using their DNA,'we would have been totally stumped. We wouldn't have known where to go. And this happens all too often in science. The basic discoveries then lead either directly or after a while to applications, but the driver behind the discovery is basic scientific curiosity, but not a desire to solve a particular medical or social problem. And that was certainly true for DNA fingerprinting.
[Robert Siegel:] The first great arena of applying your discovery was forensic and also establishing paternity. I guess it remains as such today.
[Sir Alec:] My feeling was that, yeah, this might have a specialist niche and will probably take 10 years before it's ever moved into real casework. I couldn't have been more wrong. Our first case-and this was following publicity of our first scientific paper on this-the write-up in one of the national newspapers in England was spotted by a lawyer who was representing a family trapped in an immigration dispute. So not paternity, not a criminal case; this is an immigration dispute. And, in fact, it was that case that we were asked to take on, which we did, which represented the very first time ever that DNA was ever used to sort out a problem of that sort.
[Robert Siegel:] This was a boy from Ghana?
[Sir Alec:] That's exactly right. Yeah.
[Robert Siegel:] And the question that you answered with DNA was?
[Sir Alec:] Well, the problem was that this family originally from Ghana-they were UK citizens-the youngest boy in the family went back to Ghana and then returned after a while to the UK on a passport that had been tampered with. So as he came back into the UK, this was picked up by the immigration authorities and the assumption was that the returning boy was a substitute either for a boy unrelated to the family or for one of the mother's nephews. So when we set out on this, I thought this is mission impossible. We'll never do this. We did the DNA fingerprinting and the results suggest-I mean, absolutely stunning. I was amazed. Basically, we used three undisputed children in that family to reconstruct the DNA fingerprint of the missing father and then show for the boy in dispute that every genetic characteristic matched either mum or the missing dad. So we could rule out even the possibility that he was a nephew rather than the son to this woman with better than 99.999 whatever percent certainty. So that's what really started the whole story. That was the very first case. And a happy outcome: The British authorities dropped the case against the boy. He was allowed back permanently into the UK as a UK citizen, and the family was held together. Wonderful story.
[Robert Siegel:] When the penny dropped and when it was clear to you that each of us, indeed, could be identified by something about our DNA and it could identify our relations to other people, did you think, `Oh, brave new world, life is going to get a lot better as a result of this. Or I've-there's a genie that just got out of a bottle that poses great harm to humanity.'What did you think?
[Sir Alec:] I don't think I thought too much about that. I mean, I think I was much more concerned would anybody take a blind bit of notice in the work that we were doing. Once the genie was out of the bottle, what it was being used for-for example, our immigration disputes. This is a family threatened with being broken apart by a immigration dispute that we brought back together. Shortly after that, we were inundated with similar requests. Many, many families in the UK trapped in exactly the same sort of problem. This was science very clear societal good. And so that, in a way, sort of reassured me that this was science where the-yeah, I mean, all technology has an upside and a downside. The upside on this was strong; the downside was vague concerns where in the future possibly about Big Brother, civil liberties and all the rest. But, I think, if you look back then and look now at the totality of forensic DNA testing, it's absolutely for the good.
[Robert Siegel:] Well, Professor Alec Jeffries, Sir Alec Jeffries, thank you very much for talking with us today.
[Sir Alec:] It was my pleasure talking. Thank you.
[Robert Siegel:] Alec Jeffries is a professor of genetics. He spoke with us from his lab at the University of Leicester. His discovery of the DNA fingerprint two decades ago made DNA profiling and testing possible.
[Michele Norris:] This is NPR, National Public Radio.

[Rachel Martin:] Later this morning, the 45th president of the United States will be sworn into office. Donald Trump arrived in Washington, D.C., yesterday.
[David Greene:] And the inaugural events got started last night with a concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Afterwards, Trump spoke to his supporters.
[Donald Trump:] We all got tired of seeing what was happening. And we wanted change, but we wanted real change.
[David Greene:] OK. NPR's Scott Detrow, who spent so many mornings with us throughout the campaign, helping us understand what was happening, is going to do the same today for this inaugural day. Scott, welcome back.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] Morning, David.
[David Greene:] So take us through the day. What exactly is going to happen? I mean, it seems like every moment has a little bit of weight of history with it.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] Yeah. Donald Trump talked about change. Basically, every incoming president talks about change when they run for president. But Inauguration Day itself, there's not much change. There's a very set schedule. It's ceremonial. There's a few markers. And one of them is the day begins around 8:30 with a prayer service at a church right near the White House. At 9:30, the Trumps go to the White House, and they meet the Obamas. And they all sit down for tea together. And this is...
[Rachel Martin:] You know that it's tea?
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] It is tea.
[Rachel Martin:] [Laughter] OK.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] We have seen that it's tea. Yeah, this year coffee or tea. But they all sit there in the Blue Room. They chitchat.
[David Greene:] That's where I really want to be a fly on the wall.
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah.
[David Greene:] I mean, that must be extraordinary.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] An interesting conversation, especially for all the ways that Donald Trump attacked Barack Obama over the last eight years. And now Barack Obama hands over power to him. And this is not on the set schedule. But we know that right around this time is when Donald Trump will be given a really important briefing. And that's familiarizing him with the nuclear codes, walking him through that nuclear football and how to use it starting at noon today, when he's in charge of it.
[Rachel Martin:] Wow.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] So they all get in a limousine around 10:30. And they go to the Capitol. And that's when all the moving trucks pull up at the White House because they have a very small window. Think about how long it takes you to move in and out. David, you just moved across the country. So you can relate.
[David Greene:] I did. Yes, I know what it's like. But these are not, like, Ryder trucks. I mean, these are probably some special...
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] They're big trucks. But they pull up. The Obama stuff all goes out. The White House is cleaned, redone as much as it can. The Trumps move in. And by the time the Trumps get there after all the ceremonies this evening, they're moved in.
[David Greene:] And then, of course, the big speech comes. And that'll be at midday.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] Right. Yeah. Around 11 o'clock hour is when that gets started. There's music. There's some prayers. Donald Trump will take the oath of office around noon and will give his inaugural address. We're expecting it to be shorter around 20 minutes or so and big-picture. Philosophical is the word that his spokesperson used.
[Rachel Martin:] OK, Scott. Stay with us throughout the hour as we follow all of this.

[Ed Gordon:] From NPR News, this is NEWS & NOTES. I'm Ed Gordon. Going against the Bush administration's wishes, last week the House of Representatives voted to maintain the Hope VI public housing program in the federal budget. A young up-and-coming Democrat from Alabama, Arturo Davis, played a key role in sustaining the program, but it still faces obstacles. Congressman Davis spoke with NPR's Farai Chideya before the House voted. He explained why he was willing to put his political clout on the line to keep Hope VI alive.
[Representative Arturo Davis:] Well, Hope VI has been an enormously important program for renovating inner-city communities and for bringing vitality and health back to a lot of those communities over the last 15 or 16 years. It was initially a bipartisan project. It was started under Bush 41. HUD Secretary Jack Kemp was the instigator of the program. And for about 16 years the program has had enormous bipartisan support from Congress. Unfortunately, the last several years, the Bush administration has tried to not just cut the program, but to do away with it altogether. And the last two years the president was unsuccessful. The president proposed no new money for Hope VI. Congress restored funding the last two years. This year, the president, for the third time, has tried to do away with Hope VI, and the Transportation, Treasury and Housing Appropriations bill does not contain any provision for Hope VI. That's a big disappointment to those of us who care about economic development in the inner city and that's why we played a major role in leading this fight. My district alone has three Hope VI projects that we've gotten in the last six years. These projects have had an enormous impact around the country. FARAI CHIDEYA reporting When you talk about these projects that are in your district, paint us a picture of what they look like. Give us a sense of who lives there. Well, Hope VI targets public housing projects, to revitalize them, to turn them into mixed-income dwellings. People aren't displaced. The people who live there are given the first opportunity to stay. But they're physically renovated so they look like more conventional, modern town homes, which draws young professionals, which draws families back into the community, and which also creates a basis for businesses to relocate near the area. So what you get from a Hope VI project is an area that's often been blighted and neglected is physically transformed into a vibrant center of city life. We think it's important to get Hope VI funded at some level so that we keep the program going and that we get additional projects in the pipeline.
[Chideya:] Let's turn a little bit to some of your background and history. You grew up in a family where you didn't have a ton of money, ended up going to Harvard, going into private practice, and then, when you were elected, you beat out a fairly traditional, old-school African-American Democrat, the first Democratic African-American representative since Reconstruction. Did you burn some bridges when you ran against an incumbent?
[Representative Arturo Davis:] Oh, I don't think that we burned any bridges with the voters in our district. The reality is that whenever you run for Congress against an incumbent, most incumbents tend to view their positions as their job, and they tend to view their position as something they're gonna fight very hard to hold on to. The district is still in very strong Democratic hands, and I think the district has a representative in myself who's committed to issues at the core of the Democratic Party: lifting up the conditions of people who've been left behind; giving people help when they need it; giving them a fair shot at opportunity in this society. I consider those to be the values of the Democratic Party and those are the values I've been fighting for since I've been in Congress.
[Chideya:] How do you, as a congressman who's part of a minority party, advocate for these quality-of-life issues for jobs when you are not in power?
[Representative Arturo Davis:] Well, make no mistake, it's been a very, very difficult task for those of us who have a certain set of values for America to prevail in the last couple sessions of Congress. The Republican majority in Congress has a very different vision of America, and Hope VI is a good example of that. I firmly believe that you can make a difference by engaging particular issues and by challenging Republicans to make their rhetoric fit their votes. We did it two years ago when President Bush tried to cut funding for black land-grant colleges like Alabama A&M and Tuskegee University in my state. We managed to get Congress to pass an amendment restoring that funding. We managed to get Congress to expand the child tax credit for working-class families. So I'm a very strong believer that if you find some issues that you can press, and you can challenge Republicans on their own rhetoric, if you can challenge them to make their votes and their rhetoric catch up, you can make a difference every now and then. But, obviously, this has been a long and difficult fight for Democrats.
[Chideya:] Let's talk a little bit more about the Democratic Party. You are often grouped with a new generation of African-American leadership, including Harold Ford and Barack Obama, that try to promote a big-tent theory of how the Democrats should reach out to America as opposed to perhaps a more traditionally partisan one. Do you agree with that assessment, and is it a strength or a weakness in a highly partisan atmosphere to try to be a centrist?
[Representative Arturo Davis:] Well, I reject a little bit the generational argument because I think that the generational divide-you can find younger politicians who embrace inclusive politics, you can find younger politicians who don't embrace the politics of inclusion, and the same with politicians who are on the other side of the generational divide. I think the real division is not so much whether or not you're born after 1960 or after 1965; the real division is what your experiences have been and how you can use those experiences to serve the people that you represent. I'm a very strong believer that for Democrats to regain the House and Senate, to take the White House back, we've obviously got to find out how we can reach out to people who have not been voting for Democrats. That's self-evident. And we can't just be a party that bashes what the Republicans do without having some constructive alternative to put on the table. We have to have our own compelling vision of what this country ought to be and I think we've gotten one. We're a party that believes that if you work in this country, you ought to have a shot at opportunity, you ought to have a shot at health care, you ought to have a shot at being able to take care of your family and send your kids to college, and we understand that government can play a role in making those things happen. Final point that I'll make is that those of us who are trying to push the Democratic Party forward recognize that we have to be a commonsense party. We have to be a party that speaks to people's basic sense of values and their basic sense of what our country ought to be. We're a country that believes in fair play for people. We're a country that believes if you work hard, you ought to be rewarded for that. We're not a country that believes in government of the privileged, by the privileged and for the privileged, and that's what we've had the last four years. But we have to be direct about those things, and we have to paint this picture for the American people if we're going to be successful.
[Chideya:] Before we let you go, I want to do two things. First of all, want to ask you about some of the other legislation you've been involved in, or the votes. You took a strong stand on flag-burning, saying that though you thought it was odious, that it was constitutional and part of the government. You were trying to increase the amount of money to preserve cord blood for future stem-cell research. What do those decisions say about how you operate in this highly partisan world of left and right? What kind of vision are you trying to shape?
[Representative Arturo Davis:] Well, I voted against the flag-burning amendment, which is not a popular vote with everyone in the state of Alabama, but this is the reality. We have all kinds of offensive and outrageous speech in our society. I'm offended when someone burns a cross. I'm offended when someone displays the swastika. I'm offended when people use racial slurs to try to demean people. But we permit all that discussion, we permit all of those symbols, not because we like them, but because we believe in the First Amendment. We believe that even the worst ideas in our country ultimately will be pushed down by the better ideas. Only weak societies need flag-burning amendments. Only weak societies need to hold up symbols and to say that we value the symbol more than the substance of the symbol. We're a strong enough country that we don't need to do that. We've marginalized people who hate our country. We marginalize people who burn flags. They're not a part of the respectable political discourse, and we've won this argument, and we don't need to amend our Constitution. As far as the cord-blood bill goes, I'm a supporter of stem-cell research. I'm also a supporter of cord-blood research. We've learned in the last several years that the umbilical cords can be used-rather than being discarded, they can be used for blood transfusions, they can be used for important research, and they're very important for combatting diseases like sickle-cell anemia, so I was fortunate that a few months ago I was the lead Democrat on a bill that passed the House 431-to-1 that will lead to expanded federal research and expanded availability of cord blood cells. The broader point I'll make about my voting record is that, on the overwhelming majority of issues facing this country, there's not a simple liberal or conservative solution. A lot of the issues are packaged on liberal or conservative dynamic, but on the basic questions of how you educate our children, how you provide adequate health care, how you provide the right balance between environment and growing jobs, the answers aren't easily packaged on a liberal or conservative bias. So my obligation is to try to find some way to move toward commonsense solutions on the problems that impact people in my state and my district.
[Chideya:] Final question: You have been written about as someone who could be a contender for statewide office, whether that was the governorship or perhaps moving up into the Senate from the US House of Representatives. But David Bositis, who is with the Joint Center in Washington, a think tank that analyzes black participation in politics, said, `Alabama hasn't made it to the 20th century, let alone the 21st.'Now in terms of allowing an African-American to be considered for that prominent a role, do you believe, as David Bositis says, that Alabama is just not ready for you to go any further than you are?
[Representative Arturo Davis:] Oh, I think those of us from Alabama, are used to people underestimating our state. I think those of us from Alabama are used to people doubting our capacity to move forward and we've been dealing with that for years. When John Lewis and Martin Luther King mobilized the people of Selma to demand their voting rights, they were told that Selma was the wrong place to go, the people of Selma were too passive to stand up; they were told there was no way that Alabama would ever bend. When Martin Luther King and Fred Shuttlesworth attempted to mobilize the people of Birmingham to resist segregation, they were told that Birmingham was the most segregated city in America and would never change. I'm used to people doubting the state of Alabama. If I decide to make a run for the governorship or the Senate seat, A, that wouldn't be in any scenario that I can see until 2010, but if I decide to do that, it will be with the conviction that if you talk about the right issues, if you talk about issues that matter to people, they will give you an opening. And I would submit that Alabama is not fundamentally different from Tennessee or Maryland or Illinois. The reality is that-or Virginia, which elected Wilder. The reality is that whenever black candidates run breakthrough races, they're always expected to fail at the outset. No one expected that Wilder would win in Virginia. When my friend, Barack Obama, ran for the Senate in Illinois, his prospects were widely dismissed. The reality is that people rarely see the potential of a breakthrough until it's on the eve of happening.
[Chideya:] All right. Well, we are going to keep an eye on that issue and an eye on you. Democratic Congressman Arturo Davis represents Alabama's 7th District. Thank you for joining us.
[Representative Arturo Davis:] Thank you.
[Chideya:] Farai Chideya, NPR News.
[Ed Gordon:] This is NPR News.

[Jacki Lyden:] Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Jacki Lyden. Violence in Afghanistan has escalated to levels not seen since the U.S.-led invasion seven years ago. Yesterday, scores of people died when coalition and Afghan forces launched an air strike and raid on what they said was an insurgent stronghold. But witnesses said the victims were residents of a small village holding a memorial service for a militia commander. President Hamid Karzai condemned the attack, saying at least 76 civilians died. Military officials contradicted that and said most of the dead were insurgents. NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson is in the capital of Kabul, and I asked her exactly what we know about yesterday's attack.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] Well, we certainly know that the numbers are very confusing. As you mentioned, the American military officials as well as Afghan defense officials are saying that most of those killed were insurgents. But what we're hearing on the other side, and this includes official government sources like the Afghan interior ministry. They're reporting that 76 civilians minimum were in fact killed in this operation. And that drew condemnation pretty quickly from the Afghan president. He's very angry with Western forces. He says they should've coordinated with local officials, and he feels there's just too much of this that's going on in Afghanistan.
[Jacki Lyden:] So, there were protests afterward as there had been before?
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] Actually, the residents of this particular village it's a small village called Azizabad and it's outside of Herat in western Afghanistan. About 100 to 200 of them went to the road, the main road that goes between Herat and Kandahar. So, basically connecting western to southern Afghanistan. And they blocked it; they would not let traffic through. This apparently ended up causing conflict with Afghan soldiers who opened fire. Apparently two or three people were wounded. And then what happened was that when the police went to the village to try and bring food and supplies to help people who were in need there, they were stoned and were driven away. And initially the villagers wouldn't even allow investigators to come in to actually find out what happened. Now, slowly they seem to be letting people in because they want to show that in fact it was civilians were killed and not insurgents, as the military claims.
[Jacki Lyden:] As we mentioned, this has been an escalation and quite a week. Earlier in the week, on Monday, ten French soldiers were killed just a few miles outside of Kabul itself. Is there a sense of impending siege and anxiety in the capital?
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] Absolutely. There's a real feeling that NATO and the Afghan government don't really control things in the countryside anymore. And the Taliban have also learned that there is a lot to be gained for doing these sorts of attacks in the capital or close to the capital that not only does it create fear or anxiety and uncertainty, but it also gets a lot of headlines around the world.
[Jacki Lyden:] Soraya, what are Western military officials saying, and have you been able to talk to any Western diplomats about the strength of the insurgency?
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] NATO officials told me not too long ago that there was an increase of about 40 percent in terms of the number of attacks that were coming across the border. They blame that on the fact that Pakistani military officials are not doing as much as perhaps they could and they feel that the government in Pakistan is trying to cut deals with the Taliban or there is this sense. And as a result they're sort of coming across the border more openly than they have in the past.
[Jacki Lyden:] NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson in Kabul, Afghanistan. Thanks very much for joining us, Soraya.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] You're welcome, Jacki.

[Michele Norris:] And I'm Michele Norris. If you're eating your Thanksgiving meals somewhere between Philadelphia and Boston, chances are the Brussels sprouts and the carrots came through the Hunts Point produce market. The market in the Bronx is the largest wholesale produce market in the country. Hunts Point wholesalers are busy when most of us are asleep. Adam Davidson and Chana Joffe-Walt of NPR's Planet Money team spent a night following the buying and the selling. And they began their story at 10 p.m.
[Chana Joffe-walt:] Eddie One Way need some pears.
[Adam Davidson:] His name is actually Edward Joseph. They call him Eddie One Way because he wants prices to go one way, down. He's a buyer, one of thousands of guys who show up here every night.
[Chana Joffe-walt:] They're buying for pretty much every grocery store, restaurant, corner market in the North East. If you have ever bought a golden delicious apple or ate a salad in a restaurant between Philly and Boston, chances are it came through here. And it is nothing like when you or I buy salad at a restaurant. There are no posted prices. It is pure supply and demand.
[Adam Davidson:] And right now demand. That's Eddie One Way, the buyer, is looking for supply.
[Mr. Edward Joseph:] I'm still here with my salesman. Oh, Mr. Timmy.
[Adam Davidson:] Timmy, is Timmy Sampson. He is a salesman at the largest wholesaler here De Rigo Brothers.
[Chana Joffe-walt:] Eventually, Eddie One Way finds Timmy.
[Mr. Edward Joseph:] Here's Timmy.
[Chana Joffe-walt:] And they enter into a ritual that will happen thousands of times throughout the night. They try to negotiate a price. Eddie thinks $15 for a box of pears seems fair. Timmy doesn't.
[Mr. Timmy Sampson:] No way.
[Mr. Edward Joseph:] We could do with�
[Mr. Timmy Sampson:] I charged you 20 yesterday.
[Mr. Edward Joseph:] Yesterday is gone.
[Mr. Timmy Sampson:] Eighteen.
[Mr. Edward Joseph:] Today is a new day. It's a new horizon.
[Mr. Timmy Sampson:] Twenty dollars yesterday, 18 today. That's it.
[Mr. Edward Joseph:] Stay close, Timmy.
[Mr. Timmy Sampson:] Why do you want to pay 15 while it's 18?
[Mr. Edward Joseph:] I'd like to pay 13, but I'm being generous.
[Mr. Timmy Sampson:] That's it, brother. That's it, man. Eighteen is the right number. You know, it's what the worth.
[Mr. Edward Joseph:] The night is still young.
[Adam Davidson:] Eventually, Eddie One Way walks away. The night is still young. At this hour, the sellers, guys like Timmy, feel like they are in control. They don't want to give anything away to cheap yet. There's lots more buyers still to come. But Eddie, the buyer, is hoping that if he comes back later in the night, Timmy won't have sold that much. He'll be desperate to get rid of his pears and will accept a lower price. But Eddie is really taking a risk here.
[Chana Joffe-walt:] I know. I actually thought this risk play out with carrots. And it was really stressful. Jeff Steinberg, he's a buyer like Eddie. And he was looking for this one particular kind of carrots, fancy one, loose California's. And I followed him around walking the aisles one seller to another. And at first everyone has the carrots, but Jeff is offended or at least acts offended by the high prices. And then an hour passes. And now nobody has loose California's anymore. Jeff can't find the carrots he needs at any price. So he's thinking he may have to settle for something inferior, loose Canadians.
[Adam Davidson:] Jeff asks a seller named Carlos how much for the loose Canadians. Carlos tells him eight bucks a box.
[Mr. Jeff Steinberg:] I'll be right back.
[Chana Joffe-walt:] What's he doing now?
[Carlos:] Going to look at something, then he's going to comeback and tell me he doesn't like.
[Chana Joffe-walt:] Where is it what does he mean that he's not going to like it?
[Carlos:] Probably because they're not good enough for his customers. He's fairly picky.
[Chana Joffe-walt:] And sure enough Jeff comes out of the warehouse shaking his head.
[Mr. Jeff Steinberg:] No good.
[Chana Joffe-walt:] No good. Then where you're going to look for carrots next?
[Mr. Jeff Steinberg:] That's a good question because I pretty much looked all over the place.
[Chana Joffe-walt:] So, it's 11:30 at night and carrots are your problem at moment.
[Mr. Jeff Steinberg:] At the moment. It's coming down to that get hour where I'm probably going to have to pay what they wanted. But I don't want to pay.
[Chana Joffe-walt:] Around midnight, it starts to get hectic. Buyers fill the streets, sellers weave their arms and yell into faces and cell phones. There's a lot of sweating.
[Adam Davidson:] This is the point in the night when the market really changes. There are none of those people buying fancy stuff for high-end restaurants and specialty Manhattan stores. They're all gone. There's no more high-end guys like Jeff inspecting every carrot.
[Chana Joffe-walt:] A whole new group of buyers enters the market now. And they're buying for not-so-fancy places bodegas and grocery stores and working class neighborhoods, pushcart vendors. They're not quite as concerned with getting the best possible quality. They want a good price.
[Adam Davidson:] It's in the second phase of the dynamics between sellers and buyers starts to shift. Remember early in the night when Eddie One Way had to go searching for someone to sell him pears. Over the next couple of hours, it's the reverse. The sellers are looking for the buyers.
[Chana Joffe-walt:] That is exactly what a guy named Mike Zack, Big Mike, is trying to do right now.
[Mr. Mike Zack:] No.
[Chana Joffe-walt:] We catch with him toward the end of the night.
[Adam Davidson:] Earlier in the night buyers were begging Big Mike to lower his prices. And he didn't, he refused. And that worked out pretty well for him. He sold a lot of red grapes and mangoes and made a killing in persimmons. But now that daylight is approaching, he's got piles and piles of oranges from Chile. And he is the one begging. He's pleading with one of his regular customers, a guy named Amerigo Pereira to buy some of those oranges. Amerigo is pretty clear about his wishes.
[Mr. Amerigo Pereira:] No oranges.
[Mr. Mike Zack:] Kind of give it a medical today. You got to be nice.
[Mr. Amerigo Pereira:] What part of no oranges don't you understand?
[Mr. Mike Zack:] There, I'll give you one pound.
[Mr. Amerigo Pereira:] No, stop playing.
[Mr. Mike Zack:] Be nice today.
[Mr. Amerigo Pereira:] Stop [unintelligible].
[Mr. Mike Zack:] Be nice in front of camera.
[Mr. Amerigo Pereira:] There's a lady present.
[Mr. Mike Zack:] Be nice in front of camera.
[Mr. Amerigo Pereira:] Shut up already.
[Mr. Mike Zack:] Can I give you one [unintelligible]?
[Mr. Amerigo Pereira:] No, Mike, no.
[Mr. Mike Zack:] Just be nice.
[Mr. Amerigo Pereira:] No.
[Mr. Mike Zack:] Why?
[Mr. Amerigo Pereira:] I don't need it.
[Mr. Mike Zack:] One skin only.
[Mr. Amerigo Pereira:] No.
[Chana Joffe-walt:] At around 4 a.m. all the sellers in the market find themselves pretty much in the same situation as Big Mike tired and with too many oranges. Listen to Henry so tired.
[Henry:] Oranges, oranges are moving slow. So, you know, you try to give everybody some oranges, even if they don't want it they're taking them. Do you know what I mean? [Unintelligible] this is like what time you go at bed at night?
[Chana Joffe-walt:] What time do I go to bed?
[Henry:] Yes.
[Chana Joffe-walt:] Probably like 11.
[Henry:] So, this is like your 9 o'clock. You know, I hate the day.
[Adam Davidson:] What, you hate the day?
[Henry:] Oh, I hate it.
[Adam Davidson:] What do you hate about the day?
[Henry:] I don't know. The sun, everything. I get a headache. How are you my friend?
[Unidentified Man:] [Unintelligible].
[Henry:] I just don't like the sun. I don't like it. I like the dark.
[Chana Joffe-walt:] At 5 a.m. Henry heads home. He rakes some leaves in the front yard and then heads to sleep just as the sun comes out.
[Adam Davidson:] The rest of the world wakes up. And later that day, a fancy grocery store in Greenwich, Connecticut might have some very nice but kind of pricey tomatoes, a high-end restaurant in Manhattan may be offering the chef's tomato bisque.
[Chana Joffe-walt:] But further out in poor neighborhoods in South Boston, Brooklyn, Queens, tomatoes will be very hard to come by. Oranges though will be very cheap and there will be lots of them.
[Michele Norris:] That was Chana Joffe-Walt and Adam Davidson of NPR's Planet Money team. We'll have more about Hunts Point on Chicago Public Radio's �This American Life,� this weekend.
[Melissa Block:] This is NPR National Public Radio.

[Steve Inskeep:] Who will be the next governor of Puerto Rico? The island begins this week with one governor prepared to leave and no one yet prepared to take his place. Wanda Vazquez, the island's current Justice secretary, had been expected to replace current governor Ricardo Rossello. But Vazquez says she does not want the job. Let's talk about this with Luis Trelles, who's been following this from Puerto Rico. He is an editor for the NPR podcast Radio Ambulante, and he joins us now. Good morning.
[Luis Trelles, Byline:] Good morning, Steve.
[Steve Inskeep:] What do the rules say about who takes over?
[Luis Trelles, Byline:] Well, I'm going to try to make this as succinct as possible. But it's a complicated game of musical chairs. Next in line to take over the governor's job would be the local secretary of state. But that position has been vacant for the past two weeks because the former secretary of state resigned his position because he was involved in the original leaked chat that led to the governor's resignation.
[Steve Inskeep:] Oh, the same scandal got the next the second in line before it got the first guy. OK, go on.
[Luis Trelles, Byline:] Right. And then it would be Wanda Vazquez's turn. But as we've seen, she's a controversial figure, and she has already expressed her desire that she doesn't want the job. After that, it would be the Treasury secretary's turn. But he's been in his post for less than a month after Governor Rossello fired his predecessor for publicly denouncing corruption schemes within the Puerto Rican Treasury without first consulting with the governor's office. So the problem with the current Treasury secretary is that he's 31 years old and doesn't meet the minimum age requirement to be governor...
[Steve Inskeep:] Wow.
[Luis Trelles, Byline:] ...Of Puerto Rico. [Laughter] So that would leave the secretary of the Department of Education fourth in line. And he took over that agency from Julia Keleher, who is facing corruption charges in federal court.
[Steve Inskeep:] Oh, my goodness.
[Luis Trelles, Byline:] And I think it's important to remember that the arrest of the former Department of Education secretary almost three weeks ago initiated this head-spinning series of events that has led to Governor Rossello's announcement last Wednesday that he was resigning.
[Steve Inskeep:] Mr. Trelles, I just want to know because we're going so far down the line of succession, is there some point in the rules where the governorship just falls to you, that it's the editor of Radio Ambulante who becomes governor of Puerto Rico?
[Luis Trelles, Byline:] [Laughter] It is quite possible at this point. It seems that it all depends still on who Governor Rossello may name as the secretary of state in his last days in office. He leaves Friday. And if he names someone that is acceptable for the local legislature, then that person would take over the job.
[Steve Inskeep:] We get the impression from the reporting of our colleague Adrian Florido in Puerto Rico that this was the protests that drove out the governor, they were a protest against the governor but really against the whole political system. And the descriptions you've just given of the various positions would seem to back that up. Does anybody have credibility to take the job?
[Luis Trelles, Byline:] I think there are people that do have the credibility and that have the experience. But I it's not clear to me that political leadership has heard the message that has been delivered loud and clearly by the thousands, in some cases hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans that took to the street to let, you know, their distaste and their indignation known.
[Steve Inskeep:] What do you mean they haven't heard the message meaning that the political leadership doesn't understand how angry people are?
[Luis Trelles, Byline:] I think that that could be the case, and it is demonstrated by the fact that there are reports of backroom dealing over who could be that next secretary of state that could take over the governor's position.
[Steve Inskeep:] Luis, thanks so much.
[Luis Trelles, Byline:] Thank you, Steve.
[Steve Inskeep:] Luis Trelles is the editor of the NPR podcast Radio Ambulante.

[Kelly Mcevers:] Donald Trump says he's a different kind of presidential candidate. He has his own playbook. But he also lacks what most major party candidates have a lot of money in his campaign fund. One place where that's clear is the big battleground state of North Carolina. Democrat Hillary Clinton is pouring in cash, but there's hardly a trace of Donald Trump. From member station WFAE, Tom Bullock reports on what that disparity looks like.
[Tom Bullock, Byline:] If you turn on a TV here in North Carolina, you're likely to see an ad like this.
[Unidentified Woman:] For Hillary, it's always been about kids. And when millions couldn't get health care, this first lady worked with Republicans and Democrats to fix it.
[Tom Bullock, Byline:] This is part of what the Hillary Clinton campaign says is a six-week-long, eight-figure ad blitz not just in North Carolina but in all the big battleground states. The Trump campaign's response has been nothing. This seeming surrender in the ad war in a crucial swing state has left political watchers gobsmacked. Michael Bitzer with Catawba College is one of them.
[Michael Bitzer:] For somebody who studies modern campaigns and election strategy, I have to be thinking, boy, this is this is a huge tactical error on the part of the Trump campaign.
[Tom Bullock, Byline:] It's not just ads. Trump has no official campaign offices in the state and just one North Carolina staffer on the payroll. The Trump campaign did not reply to our interview requests, but in the past, Trump has countered these kinds of arguments by saying he's running a leaner, more cost efficient campaign. But that's risky in a state Mitt Romney won in 2012 by less than 2 percent.
[Troy Clair:] You got to put some shoe leather down, and you got to get out there, have to get on the phones. You have to register voters, and you have to show people that you're here.
[Tom Bullock, Byline:] That's Troy Clair, state director for Democrat Hillary Clinton's campaign.
[Troy Clair:] It was not a given that the campaign would invest in North Carolina. And we are doing that and investing seriously and competing seriously.
[Tom Bullock, Byline:] Clinton already has 60 staffers in the state and plans to open six new field offices in the next few weeks. They train and organize volunteers and manage get-out-the-vote efforts. Trump has effectively outsourced those tasks to the Republican National Committee and the North Carolina Republican Party.
[Robin Hayes:] We have had paid staff on the ground since 2013.
[Tom Bullock, Byline:] That's Republican Robin Hayes, chairman of the state party. And the staff he's referring to are more than 40 people paid for not by Trump but by the RNC.
[Robin Hayes:] So we are well-prepared, but we are not slowing down. We're building from a great start into what should be a very successful November 8 finish.
[Tom Bullock, Byline:] But this can be a risk for a presidential candidate known for clashing with other Republicans. None of those staffers work for Trump. Their loyalties are to the party, not the candidate. Even if outsourcing much of the campaign's work to the RNC is a success, political scientist Michael Bitzer believes Trump's failure to run an ad campaign will haunt him.
[Michael Bitzer:] You've got to have an effective air war. And if Hillary Clinton's air war campaign has already started, it's awfully hard to play defense rather than to be on offense.
[Tom Bullock, Byline:] If Trump loses in North Carolina, the consequences may be felt further down the ballot in a state where a Republican governor and U.S. senator are in tough re-election races. For NPR News, I'm Tom Bullock in Charlotte, N.C.

[Ira Flatow:] NASA scientists say a short circuit has killed the main camera on the Hubble Space Telescope. The Advanced Camera for Surveys, the equipment that has given us those amazing images of deep space, that camera switched off last Thursday. A circuit breaker tripped after a malfunction in the electronics that control it. The camera is actually three cameras in one unit, and it was installed in 2002. It was one month shy of its fifth birthday when it stopped working. Joining me now to tell us more about what might have happened and whether it can be fixed, is my guest Michael Weiss, deputy program manager for the Hubble Space Telescope at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Thanks for talking with us, Mr. Weiss. Michael Weiss, are you there? Well, can you hear me?
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] Yes, I can hear you.
[Ira Flatow:] Hi, good. Thanks for being with us today.
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] My pleasure.
[Ira Flatow:] Tell us exactly what do you know, what exactly what happened in the Hubble?
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] Well, it started last Saturday when Hubble entered a safe mode. It's a protective condition when the space craft detects that something's wrong. So our first opportunity, we had Hubble send data to the ground, and what that data told us was that there was a serious short circuit in the avionics of the Advanced Camera for Surveys and a blown fuse. So we've got our engineers off looking at that data trying to understand the exact cause and the effects of it.
[Ira Flatow:] Is that camera the one that sends back all those beautiful deep space pictures?
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] It's one of two cameras that sends back those spectacular images. It was the most sensitive camera that we had onboard Hubble, and it was responsible for some of the most recent deep surveys that we did and the high resolution images that we got back. But it is one of two cameras onboard Hubble that can send back spectacular, visible images.
[Ira Flatow:] Is there a backup system for the electronic circuitry that malfunctioned?
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] That actually was the backup. Each one of our electronic circuitries has a, if you will, a twin brother on each instrument. The primary side had experienced failure in a power supply last summer, and we switched over to the backup side. So it was this backup side that has experienced the short circuit.
[Ira Flatow:] So it's actually not the camera itself that's broken but some the instrument that controls it.
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] That's the appearance. It appears that the electronics that control the camera's detectors, if you will detectors similar to what you have in digital cameras the detectors seem like they're OK. We still have to let the engineers pour over the data. But we also know that one of our detector channels on the other side is still OK, and our hopes are to go back to that channel as soon as our failure board tells us it's safe to do so.
[Ira Flatow:] So you want to diagnose the problem first before you...
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] Right, exactly.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah, and that but if you shut that down the first time, why would you go back to it?
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] We shut it down the first time because we wanted to have the full capability of the camera, which actually includes three separate cameras, if you will. They all have different capabilities. So in order to get that full capability, we switched over to the redundant side of electronics that control the camera.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm.
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] And with a blown fuse, it's now impossible to get to the electronics on that redundant side, but it is still possible to get to that one remaining channel on the primary side, and we hope to do that very, very soon.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm, if it turns out that side one isn't fixable, is there a plan? Is it possible to go up there and repair the camera that's not working, or the system that's not working?
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] We're looking at that but only after the failure board determines what the failure was. We have to understand that so we know what to study if we're going to even consider the feasibility of a repair.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm.
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] So that's the first step. We really have to understand what happened and then go from there.
[Ira Flatow:] This camera was put in the Hubble, what, five almost five years ago.
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] Right, it was put in in the last servicing mission that we did in 2002.
[Ira Flatow:] Is there a spare camera on the ground? You go up and just replace the whole thing.
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] Well, you can't exactly replace what this camera did, but we do have two cameras sitting on the ground right now that are scheduled for installation in the next servicing mission, which NASA has now resurrected. And they're extremely powerful cameras, and they'll actually to some extent go beyond the capabilities of the Advanced Camera.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm, and as you say there are other pieces on the Hubble that are still working.
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] There are three remaining cameras, if you will, onboard Hubble: the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer we call that NICMOS it's an infrared camera; the Wide FieldPlanetary Camera 2, which was actually the camera that fixed the original mirror arbitration problem, and it's that one that was installed on the very first servicing mission, and it's really the one that has returned all those really, really spectacular images that you see in newspapers and magazines.
[Ira Flatow:] And so how much better is this one that's malfunctioned than that one?
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] The one that has malfunctioned is a denser CCD, if you will...
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm.
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] ...it's a 15 mega pixel camera, and it's really optimized for different things than the other camera. Wide FieldPlanetary Camera 2 is perfectly capable of returning really spectacular science. In fact there's many scientists who were waiting to continue their campaigns after the Advanced Camera campaigns were finished, and they're now in the queue. And in fact Hubble has been returned to operational mode, and tomorrow is when we do what's called intercepting the science timeline, when we go back to taking full science.
[Ira Flatow:] Well, let's see if we can get a phone call or two in here. Let's go to Ryan in Wichita. Hi, Ryan.
[Ryan:] Hi, how are you?
[Ira Flatow:] Hi there.
[Ryan:] I had a question for the guest here. I was curious to know what he thinks the lifespan has left on the Hubble and, secondly, if there are any other space telescopes in progress to be launched in the near future if in fact the Hubble does come down at some point.
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] Well, Hubble eventually will come down. It won't stay up forever. Its lifetime is hard to speculate. It's been functioning extremely well. It's still very, very healthy. In fact it's almost 100 percent healthy, so we expect it to last a very, very long time. And with the next serving missing, when we're going to put new batteries and new gyroscopes on, you know, our anticipation is at least five years and beyond that. There is another telescope in production. It's called the James Webb Space Telescope. It's an infrared telescope, and it's meant to look at the infancy of stars and galaxies. In the analogy of the human life cycle, you know, Hubble is looking at adolescence, you know, to death of these stars and galaxies, and James Webb is going to take us as far back in time as we can get and look at the actual embryos and the birth of stars and galaxies in the infrared spectrum.
[Ryan:] That's amazing. Can I ask one more question before I get off the air here?
[Ira Flatow:] Sure.
[Ryan:] The question is: do you believe, personally, that more federal funding should go towards science exploration and NASA versus what's being spent on it right now?
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] Well, I'm I'd prefer not to share my personal opinions.
[Ryan:] OK.
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] I'm a guest of this show representing NASA so, you know, as a NASA representative I'll tell you that we firmly believe in exploration.
[Ryan:] OK, that's fair enough. Thank you.
[Ira Flatow:] All right, Ryan. Thanks for calling.
[Ryan:] Bye-bye.
[Ira Flatow:] Bye. What are you surprised the kind of reaction you get about the Hubble? I mean people are so concerned about it. It's sort of the jewel of the NASA space program I think.
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] Well, we're not surprised by it at all. We've seen it for a long, long time. When you see a visible image, it's something that you can really relate to and to some extent take ownership of. You know, this vehicle and its capabilities are paid for by the taxpayers, and they're actually able to, you know, see the return on that investment. And you know, you'd be hard-pressed to open up a textbook anywhere and not see an image taken from Hubble so, you know, we're not surprised. We see that people take great ownership in what Hubble can do.
[Ira Flatow:] How soon will you know about the ability to repair make those repairs you were talking about?
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] Well, this is a really, really important thing to do. As you know, NASA has decided to resurrect the servicing mission. It's on the manifest to fly in about 20 months. This is really important work. We've asked the failure board to try to give us answers to these really, really tough questions in about 30 days. You know, we know that this has to be on the fast track, and after we understand what's going on then we can move forward with further feasibility.
[Ira Flatow:] And scientists now who wanted Hubble time to work on other projects are now able to work on those other projects.
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] Yeah, they are. In fact when we experienced that failure back last summer, and knowing that we were now on our one remaining side of electronics, we actually put a contingency plan in place for the people that planned the observation time, where we said, you know, what would we do in the event that we lost either this instrument or another instrument? So we had those plans all queued up. And we actually implement those tomorrow, and we're going to be doing things like looking at quasars, and supernova, and planetary nebula.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm, is the Hubble at an age where it now has to be continually maintained and up-kept?
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] Well, we basically have done that every three years with the space shuttle. We've been up there four times. The state of the art on these cameras changes rapidly, you know, as you know from just looking at digital cameras. They change every few years. Well, it's the same thing with these state-of-the-art cameras. So we've been very fortunate to have been up there four times and put in really advanced electronics and cameras, and it's these advances that have allowed us to return extraordinary amounts of data and really spectacular images. So we're looking forward to that next mission when we can get two new cameras onboard and new batteries and new gyros and have this thing last for a long time.
[Ira Flatow:] Well, we wish you luck, Michael Weiss. Good luck to your repair efforts, and hopefully we can restore it back to full health.
[Mr. Michael Weiss:] OK, thank you. Appreciate that.
[Ira Flatow:] You're welcome. Michael Weiss is deputy program manager for the Hubble Space Telescope at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center out there in Greenbelt, Maryland. We're going to take a short break. When we come back, we're going to switch gears and talk more about neuroscience and plasticity and how the brain can actually change its circuitry by thinking about it, something that we never thought could happen before. Sharon Begley's here with her new book to talk about the science she's collected in this area. So stay with us, we'll be right back after this short break. I'm Ira Flatow. This is TALK OF THE NATION: SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR News.

[Rachel Martin:] I'm Rachel Martin. President Obama leaves tonight for the Netherlands. It's the start of a four-nation trip that includes a meeting with the pope and a visit to Saudi Arabia. But the crisis in Ukraine will hang over his agenda. NPR's Ari Shapiro will be on the trip. He joins us now. Hi, Ari.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] Hi, Rachel.
[Rachel Martin:] Give us a sense of what we expect to happen tomorrow when the president and other world leaders meet at The Hague.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] Well, this is a nuclear summit that has been planned for years. One of President Obama's top national security initiatives from the time he took office was keeping nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists. That's what this summit is about. One of the key partners with the U.S. in this nuclear disarmament project has been Russia, and, of course, the situation in Ukraine now overshadows all of that. There are real questions about whether Russia will continue to cooperate with the nuclear disarmament project, and also questions about how much the nuclear summit will be able to keep to its agenda when Ukraine is, to some extent, is sucking all of the air out of the room.
[Rachel Martin:] So, the shadow of the Ukrainian crisis looms large, but are there specific formal talks about the Ukraine scheduled for the president?
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] Yes. The president has called a meeting of the G7 that's the group of seven industrialized nations. We often talk about the G8. The eighth is Russia, which is, needless to say, not part of this meeting that will take place on the sidelines focused entirely on Ukraine. So, you have this kind of split-screen situation where world leaders are trying to work together with Russia on nuclear disarmament, while at the same time sort of aligning against Russia on the issue of Ukraine, sanctions and so on.
[Rachel Martin:] From The Hague, President Obama flies on to Brussels in Belgium. What's going to happen there?
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] Well, originally, the focus of that visit was going to be trade talks between the U.S. and Europe. Now, it seems that, again, Ukraine will dominate the conversation. President Obama is going to visit NATO headquarters. NATO has taken on a big role in this situation. And it's in the same city where the EU had its spring meeting, where European Union officials decided to put new sanctions in against Russia, signed a new agreement aligning Europe with Ukraine. And so the outlook for Brussels has really changed as well.
[Rachel Martin:] What does that mean for NATO? You say their organization is now taking on a bigger role in the Ukrainian crisis. This is, obviously, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. This is a defense alliance that was for many years established as a counterweight to the Soviet Union.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] Yeah, and it's interesting timing because for the last decade or so, NATO's main focus has been Afghanistan. And, of course, this year ends the combat mission in Afghanistan. And there's been this real question about what is NATO's role going into the future. Well, to some extent, that question has been answered. There is now a global crisis right in NATO's backyard and it is becoming the new focus of this military alliance.
[Rachel Martin:] NPR's Ari Shapiro, speaking with us from our London bureau. Thanks so much, Ari.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Audie Cornish:] The government of India said today more than 750 people have died since mid-April because of a heat wave. Temperatures have consistently been above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It's one of the worst of spells of hot weather in decades. From New Delhi, NPR's Julie McCarthy has more.
[Julie Mccarthy, Byline:] It's so hot in the capital 114 degrees yesterday that the roads are warping. Zebra-striped crosswalks are mere smudges on melted blacktop in this sizzling sun. But 91-year-old Sri Krishan Sethi, sporting a loose-fitting wrap-around known as a lungi, worn in sweltering climes, takes what might be called a typical Indian view.
[Sri Krishan Sethi:] It's a normal phenomena in our country. Let's accept it. We have lived with this all our lives.
[Julie Mccarthy, Byline:] He rightly points out that people, mostly from the poorest segment of society, die in India at the height of summer every year. The current intense heat has taken its greatest toll in south-central India. In the twin states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh alone, authorities say at least 750 people have perished. Andhra Pradesh's special commissioner for disaster management, P. Tulsi Rani, recommended that drinking water camps be opened. A heat wave that swept through that state in 2002 killed some 3,000 people. India's meteorological department says the current choking weather pattern is caused by missing pre-monsoon showers and an undisturbed high-pressure system. It's issued so-called red box warnings for three states, meaning a high chance of sunstroke, dehydration and fatality, as temperatures creep up to 113 degrees and higher. India treats avalanches, earthquakes, floods, cloudbursts, cold waves and even frost as natural disasters, entitling victims to relief from the national coffers. Not so a heat wave. The officer responsible for operations at India's National Disaster Management Authority, Major General Anurag Gupta, says, while a heat wave is a calamity, it is not part of the official list of disasters. He says its inclusion is still under consideration. The website of the Disaster Management Authority, however, says that India is feeling the impact of climate change, in terms of increased instances of heat waves that it says are more intense each year. The misery from the current sizzling heat is expected to continue until the end of the week. Meanwhile, unflappable Delhite, Sri Krishan Sethi, advises...
[Sri Krishan Sethi:] If you have to go out in the sun, take two precautions. One drink enough water. And, keep an umbrella.
[Julie Mccarthy, Byline:] Julie McCarthy, NPR News, New Delhi.

[Steve Inskeep:] And I'm Steve Inskeep. Having lost at the Supreme Court, civil rights groups say they will try Congress next. That was their response after the high court limited the rights of employees to file pay discrimination suits. The ruling came in the case of a woman who discovered that for years male co-workers who did similar jobs were paid more than she was. By a 5-4 vote the court ruled against her. It said the Civil Rights Act prevents her from bringing a suit based on sex discrimination. Here's why: the law said she had to file her complaint within 180 days of the company's decision to pay different salaries. Here's NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg.
[Nina Totenberg:] Lily Ledbetter worked as a supervisor for the Goodyear Tire Company in Gaston, Alabama for 19 years, never knowing for sure whether she suspected she was paid less than her male counterparts. She finally learned the truth in 1998, when she was sent anonymously a list of supervisor salaries that showed she earned $6,000 less a year than the lowest paid man. She took early retirement and sued for illegal gender discrimination under the Civil Rights Act.
[Ms. Lily Ledbetter:] It's affected not only my livelihood, what I did for my family during those years, but it's affected my retirement and my Social Security which I draw, because my retirement was based on the amount of money that I earned, and so is my Social Security. And all of that is much, much less than what the men are drawing because I wasn't paid according to what they were.
[Nina Totenberg:] A jury ruled in Ledbetter's favor and she was awarded $360,000 in back pay and damages. But yesterday the Supreme Court by a 5-to-4 vote overturned the jury's verdict. Noting that the Civil Rights Act imposes a 180-day deadline on most claims, the court said that an employee is not entitled to recover for anything that occurs before that cut-off. Writing for the court majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that by setting the 180-day deadline, Congress clearly meant to protect businesses from having to defend themselves against stale claims of discrimination that are long passed. Joining Alito and the majority were Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas. The dissenters, led by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, noted that it often takes years for employees to figure out pay disparities, and even small disparities when piled on each other year after year can add up to large sums overtime. Congress understood that, the dissenters contended, and never intended the 180-day deadline to prevent claims based on an accumulated wrong. In blunt terms, Ginsburg said it's now up to Congress to fix the statute if it doesn't like the court's interpretation. Wade Henderson, director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said that given the addition of Justice Alito to the court after the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, yesterday's ruling was a not unexpected disappointment.
[Mr. Wade Henderson:] There is a silver lining. The problem of statutory construction can be remedied. And I think the civil rights community is going to be pressing aggressively to have Congress fix the problem.
[Nina Totenberg:] Robin Conrad, general counsel for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the business community sees no need to change the existing law.
[Ms. Robin Conrad:] I think the balance and the fairness occurred a long time ago. I don't think any tweaking here would be at all fair.
[Nina Totenberg:] Civil rights leaders point to 1991 as their model. That year Congress, by large bi-partisan majorities, passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act, which reversed a bunch of Supreme Court decisions handed down by a court with a then-new conservative majority. This time, though, could be different, with business pushing back and Congress more closely divided. The new conservative majority was so unfazed about that possibility yesterday that for the first time in 15 years a majority opinion cited as precedent one of those Supreme Court decisions reversed by the 1991 Civil Rights Restoration Act. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.

[David Greene:] Federal immigration officials are in a major push right now. They are targeting Central American families for deportation. Now, these are people who crossed into the United States from Mexico last year during a surge in migration. They were detained then and told that they would be ordered to leave the country if they did not have legal options to stay. And so immigration officials say these sweeps should come as no surprise. So far, as least 120 people have been detained. But immigration advocates are very angry about these raids. And we have one of them on the line with us. Jonathan Ryan is executive director of RAICES, a San Antonio group that provides legal services to immigrants. Jonathan, good morning.
[Jonathan Ryan:] Good morning.
[David Greene:] Jonathan, who exactly is being rounded up here?
[Jonathan Ryan:] The people that are being targeted by Immigration Customs Enforcement and the administration for these immigration raids are women and children who fled the violent countries in Central America and sought protection here in the United States in the form of asylum.
[David Greene:] Now, you mention that many of these people have been fleeing violence. And that's obviously one reason that advocates like yourself say that the United States should be sympathetic and try to help. But what do you make of the argument from the Obama administration that these are people who were warned in 2014 that if they did not have clear legal options by this point, they you know, they faced deportation?
[Jonathan Ryan:] I think that it's not reasonable to think that a young woman and her child who have been victims of abuse for most of their lives would be able to do what it has taken me and other practitioners years to do, which is to be able to present an asylum case before a U.S. immigration judge. This is the kind of action that we would expect from a President Trump. But that this is happening under the Obama administration is confusing and maddening.
[David Greene:] You brought up Donald Trump there. He, it seems, is taking credit for all of this. He tweeted last week and I'm just quoting here. He said, "Democrats and President Obama are now, because of me, starting to deport people who are here illegally."
[Jonathan Ryan:] I think that Donald Trump has a lot of reason to take credit for this action. There is no crisis of people coming in at the border. What we are seeing here is the Obama administration arming itself against Republican or right-wing attacks. The problem is, is that it's building this suit of armor out of the souls of these women and children who sought protection here. And what they found instead was detention, police state, borderline tyranny in some respects, the exact same treatment that they were fleeing from.
[David Greene:] I guess someone might hear tyranny and a comparison made between the United States and some of the countries that these families are coming from and might push back on you there a little bit.
[Jonathan Ryan:] I think that... I'm not trying to throw that gauntlet out there. I mean, I...
[David Greene:] No, no, I understand. I think our listeners will find it very valuable to hear you kind of flesh this out, so and...
[Jonathan Ryan:] Those of us advocates who have been working along the border with refugee populations for many years have unfortunately witnessed that our own government often replicates the very harsh police tactics, the persecutory behavior that we hear about from refugees fleeing countries like Eritrea. It's the same sort of harsh interrogation, detention and enforcement that we hear about from police states.
[David Greene:] That's Jonathan Ryan. He's the executive director of the advocacy group RAICES. Thanks for talking with us, Jonathan.
[Jonathan Ryan:] Thanks for your time.

[Madeleine Brand:] I'm Madeleine Brand. In a few minutes, what not to wear to your gay wedding. "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy's" Carson Kressley, coming up.
[Alex Cohen:] But first, 217 days. That's how much time President Bush has left before his two terms in office come to an end.
[Madeleine Brand:] It's not a lot of time, but President Bush has his eye on the years ahead, on his legacy and how people will assess his presidency. Right now, it's not looking positive. Mr. Bush's approval rating is hovering at around 28 percent.
[Alex Cohen:] But that could change over time. At least, that's what the president himself has been suggesting. And he's tried to back up that thesis with history, a subject he majored in at Yale. Lately, in speeches and interviews, President Bush has been drawing parallels between current events and those of the past. He's referenced Abraham Lincoln's inaugural speech and Franklin Roosevelt on D-Day. Then there was this speech President Bush delivered just last week in Paris while commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Marshall Plan.
[President George W. Bush:] We must go forward with unity. Over the course of the Cold War, the Transatlantic Alliance faced moments of serious tension, from the Suez Crisis in the 1950s to the basing of missiles in Europe in the 1980s. Yet with the distance of time, we can see these differences for what they were, fleeting disagreements between friends.
[Professor Robert Dallek:] [History, Boston University; Presidential Historian]: This sort of use of historical analogy is a very dangerous business. I say this as a historian.
[Alex Cohen:] Presidential historian Robert Dallek says French leader Charles de Gaulle experienced a bit more than a "fleeting disagreement" with the U.S. during the Cold War.
[Professor Robert Dallek:] What he didn't remark upon is how distrustful de Gaulle was of the United States and whether we would come to their rescue if there was a confrontation with the Soviet Union. There was a lot of animus toward France on the part of U.S. government, so it's not quite that simple.
[Alex Cohen:] To be fair, George Bush isn't the only president who's reached back in time to prove a point, and Robert Dallek isn't the historian who thinks some of President Bush's analogies gloss over some key points. Take a listen to this commencement address delivered two years ago at West Point Academy.
[President Bush:] President Truman positioned U.S. forces to deal with new threats despite enormous pressure to bring our troops home after World War II. He kept American forces in Germany to deter Soviet aggression and kept U.S. forces in Japan as a counterweight to communist China. Together with the deployment of U.S. forces to Korea, the military footprint Truman established on two continents has remained virtually unchanged to this day.
[Alex Cohen:] When he uses the phrase bring our troops home, Bush seems to link Truman's war to present-day situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sean Wilentz is a professor of history at Princeton University. He says if that idea showed up in a student paper, he'd give it a C.
[Professor Sean Wilentz:] The Cold War was the same thing as the war on terror would it would be it would make sense. But they're two different entities, two different things, two different wars we're fighting.
[Alex Cohen:] Wilentz says the war on terror is a war based on speculative threats, and that President Bush ignored the warnings of fellow leaders. To borrow from yet another politician, "You sir, are no President Truman," Wilentz says of Bush. Sure, Harry Truman did have incredibly low approval ratings when he left office.
[Professor Sean Wilentz:] But you know, in retrospect he looks better, not so much because of the Korean War, but because of other things he did.
[Alex Cohen:] Things like the Marshall Plan, desegregating the armed forces. But, Wilentz says, so far the current administration hasn't made that kind of mark on history.
[Professor Sean Wilentz:] He doesn't talk about, you know, Hurricane Katrina and the Justice Department and all the rest of the things that have been more typical of his administration. On that basis, I think it's going to be much less likely that, you know, President Bush is going to be able to pull a Harry Truman, as it were.
[Alex Cohen:] And many historians agree. In a survey conducted by the History News Network of George Mason University this spring, only two out of a 109 historians said Bush would be judged a success. But some argue those numbers say a lot more about historians and how their individual political views can taint their assessments of a president. Critics say overall, historians tend to have a liberal lean.
[Dr. Larry Schweikart:] I wouldn't call it a lean. I'd call it almost falling over.
[Alex Cohen:] Larry Schweikart teaches history at the University of Dayton in Ohio. He argues that had the same survey been done 20 years ago, you would have seen similar low ratings for Ronald Reagan.
[Dr. Larry Schweikart:] And look at how history, even now, has come to view him. Even some of the more liberal textbooks have started to slowly change their view of Reagan, and he's turning out to look like one of the greatest presidents of the 20th century.
[Alex Cohen:] Of course, no one is sure what history books will be saying about President Bush in 2028. As the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl once said, history is argument without end.
[Madeleine Brand:] Thank you, Alex. Health care costs keep rising, when Day to Day continues.

[Neal Conan:] I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Santorum steps aside, the sitting president banks on the Buffett Rule, and a former president laments a labeling problem. It's Wednesday and time for a...
[President George W. Bush:] I wish they weren't called the Bush tax cuts...
[Neal Conan:] Edition of the political junkie.
[President Ronald Reagan:] There you go again.
[Vice President Walter Mondale:] When I hear your new ideas, I'm reminded of that ad: Where's the beef?
[Senator Barry Goldwater:] Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
[Senator Lloyd Bentsen:] Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy.
[President Richard Nixon:] You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore.
[Sarah Palin:] Lipstick.
[Governor Rick Perry:] Oops.
[Bush:] But I'm the decider.
[Neal Conan:] Every Wednesday, political junkie Ken Rudin joins us to recap the week in politics. Rick Santorum's Gettysburg address clears the way for Mitt Romney. Newt Gingrich bounces out of the Utah primary. New jobs numbers give the president pause. Illinois Republican Tim Johnson wins his congressional primary, then decides to sit it out come November. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor supports a superPAC that opposes some of his own members, and jury selection begins tomorrow in the John Edwards trial. In a few moments, the challenge of keeping a nominee's name in the news between now and the convention. Later in the program, Canada cans copper coins. Should we punt the penny? Email us, talk@npr.org. But first, political junkie Ken Rudin joins us here in Studio 3A, as usual. And as usual, we begin with a trivia question. Hey, Ken.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Hi, Neal. OK, here's a tough one: What two major stars of TALK OF THE NATION will be going to the Yankees-Orioles game tonight at Camden Yards?
[Neal Conan:] Well, that's going to be a difficult one, Ken.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] OK, that's Ken and Neal, just in case some autograph hounds are coming by. OK, the trivia question is: Rick Santorum, of course, pulls out of the race. He won 11 primaries and caucuses but lost 26. Which candidate lost the most primaries on his way to winning his party's presidential nomination that year?
[Neal Conan:] So if you think you know the answer to this week's trivia question which major-party candidate lost the most primaries on the way to winning his party's presidential nomination give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] You don't even need major party because there are no minor-party primaries.
[Neal Conan:] There are no minor...
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Very few.
[Neal Conan:] Very few, but yeah, well, anyway, let's not quibble about in the meantime, the withdrawal of Mr. Santorum, well, a couple of weeks to go before the Pennsylvania primary, he looked like he was trailing and might lose well lose his home state.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Well, he kept saying that he is going to stay and fight for the nomination, said he would stay all the way to the convention. He said he'd stay until Mitt Romney got his 1,144 delegates. And certainly he said he would stay until the April 24 Pennsylvania primary, which of course is his home state. But of course he's been losing a lot lately. I think last week, when Romney won the trifecta in Wisconsin, Maryland and D.C., a lot of people started to look ahead towards the general election between Mitt Romney and President Obama, and...
[Neal Conan:] The arithmetic got pretty remorseless.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Absolutely, and he met with a he, Santorum met with some conservative and evangelical leaders over the weekend, and basically I think he got the same bad news that he's gotten from most people, saying that there's just no way he can get the nomination.
[Neal Conan:] And there was also the occasion of his daughter, who's got a congenital illness, a genetic illness, going into the hospital again last weekend.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] And she has pneumonia in her lungs and three years old, right, Bella.
[Neal Conan:] And you can also see that this was all beginning to wear on his family.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] It did, but, you know, if you wonder whether he comes away stronger, remember when you think of the presidential field, the Republican presidential field last year at this time, he was the only one who was not a frontrunner. We had Rick Perry, we had Michele Bachmann, we had Herman Cain, we had Newt Gingrich. Everybody was overlooking Rick Santorum. And then...
[Neal Conan:] Don't forget Tim Pawlenty.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Well, I don't know if he was a frontrunner, but nobody ever talked about Santorum as the guy who's going to beat or the alternative to Mitt Romney. And here he is, he wins Iowa, albeit several weeks after they went to the caucus sites there, and he became basically, with apologies to Newt Gingrich or Ron Paul, he became the last man standing. He was the conservative alternative.
[Neal Conan:] In the meantime, those other two guys are, I guess, still standing.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] They are, and it's ironic because, you know, Santorum kept saying to Newt Gingrich get out of the race so I can run against Mitt Romney one on one. Now with Santorum gone, Newt Gingrich is trying to tell his supporters, well, now I am the conservative alternative, back me.
[Neal Conan:] Time for a new birth of Newtdom.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Exactly, and please send me money, at least enough to cover the check because his check, when he tried to file for the June 26 Utah primary, his $500 check bounced. Now of course he still has until April 20 to pay the fee, but a clear sign of some of the problems with the Gingrich candidacy.
[Neal Conan:] In the meantime, Ron Paul continues to insist he's in the race.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Yeah, I mean, Piers Morgan, that great interviewer on CNN, said to him: Why don't you do the decent thing and drop out of the race? Because, you know, Piers Morgan knows...
[Neal Conan:] What, did he hand him a loaded Luger?
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Well, we'll talk about Indiana later. But as Ron Paul said, he said: Look, why don't you stop asking me some stupid question? That'll be decent of you to stop asking stupid questions.
[Neal Conan:] In the meantime, a lot of people are asking: Will those conservatives who lurched from one of those candidates to another, all this time trying to avoid the final determination of going from Mitt Romney, will they finally warm up to the nominee?
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Well, those in the Republican Party started to. We saw yesterday, right after Santorum dropped out, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Rick Scott the governor of Florida, other conservatives, other Republican conservatives, are drifting, are endorsing Mitt Romney. But some movement conservatives, like Gary Bauer, we're not sure. A lot of conservative, movement conservatives who said that I'm still waiting for Mitt Romney to take back some of the mean things he said about these conservatives, and they're not willing to go just yet.
[Neal Conan:] In the meantime, it does look like some conservatives are beginning to rally around.
[Herman Cain:] And the mission is to get control of the Senate, maintain control of the House and defeat Barack Obama. That means get behind the nominee. So yes, I'm ready to get behind the nominee.
[Neal Conan:] The Herminator, not quite an endorsement but just about there.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Yes, but again, some of the as I say, the movement conservatives, the people who still held out hope for Rick Santorum, they're not ready just yet to move over to Mitt Romney.
[Neal Conan:] In the meantime, we have some people on the line who think they know the answer to this week's trivia question, and that is...
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Which two people from NPR, TALK OF THE NATION...
[Neal Conan:] Are going to be freezing at the ballgame tonight. Which presidential candidate lost the most primaries on his way to winning his party's presidential nomination that same year? 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. And we'll begin with Scout, Scout with us from Rochester, Minnesota.
[Scout:] Yes, hi, I think it's the two going to the baseball game are is that the question?
[Neal Conan:] No, I'm afraid that's not the question.
[Scout:] The right answer: Bill Clinton in 1992.
[Neal Conan:] Bill Clinton?
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Well, Bill Clinton is not a bad guess. I mean, he did actually he didn't win until March with Georgia. But as it turned out, Bill Clinton only lost seven primaries. Bill Clinton is not the answer.
[Neal Conan:] Nice try, Scout. I think he would've gotten that first one, though. Let's see if we can go next to this is Roberta, Roberta with us from South Bend.
[Roberta:] OK, I guess it's Adlai Stevenson.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Well, Adlai Stevenson is not a bad guess. As a matter of fact, I believe in 1952 he or in '56, as well, he lost most of the primaries. But then there were only about five or six primaries going between New Hampshire and California. So he may have lost a bunch of primaries, but that was only five or six.
[Neal Conan:] That was back in the days when smoke-filled rooms were still smoke-filled.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] That's right, when you were allowed to smoke...
[Neal Conan:] Thanks very much for the call, Roberta. Let's see if we can go next to Ken, and Ken's on the line with us from Lincoln, Delaware.
[Ken:] Yeah, first of all, go Orioles tonight, and...
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Wait, wait, wait, take him off the air.
[Neal Conan:] OK. Go ahead, Ken.
[Ken:] I'm going to go with 1976 and Governor Jimmy Carter.
[Neal Conan:] Jimmy.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Well, Jimmy Carter also lost a bunch of primaries, but he lost nine primaries. But...
[Neal Conan:] To Ted Kennedy, yeah.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] To Ted Kennedy no, no.
[Neal Conan:] That was '80.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] In '76...
[Ken:] Jerry Brown.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Right, most of them to Jerry Brown and Frank Church, the senator from Idaho who got in the race late. But he only lost nine primaries and of course won the nomination on the first ballot.
[Ken:] It was a shot in the dark, like the Orioles tonight.
[Neal Conan:] Well, no, they may have a better chance than that. It's going to be well, I'm not going to go [unintelligible]. Thanks very much for the call, Ken. Let's see if we can go next to this is Steve, Steve with us from Cleveland.
[Steve:] Hey, guys.
[Neal Conan:] Go ahead, who do you think it is?
[Steve:] I'm going to guess Mike Dukakis, 1988.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Well, that's a very good guess, although he did lose a bunch. He lost 14 primaries, mostly to Jesse Jackson and Al Gore, when Al Gore was a Southern conservative. But Michael Dukakis lost 14, still not the most primaries lost by the nominee.
[Neal Conan:] Steve, thanks for the call. And let's go to this is Scott, and Scott's with us from Auburn, Alabama.
[Scott:] Yeah, I'm going to guess Barack Obama in '08.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Barack Obama, well, he is the most recent actually, that is the correct answer.
[Neal Conan:] Ding, ding, ding.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Barack Obama lost 20 primaries, all to Hillary Clinton, and he lost some big ones, too: Ohio, California, New York. And yet he won the...
[Neal Conan:] Won a lot of those little caucuses.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Exactly, he did. He won he lost 20 primaries, and if memory serves, he was elected president of the United States that year.
[Neal Conan:] So Scott, congratulations, and we'll put you on hold and collect your particulars. In exchange for your promise of a digital picture of yourself wearing our fabulous political junkie no-prize T-shirt, we will mail one out to you.
[Scott:] Absolutely. I'll absolutely do it, thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks very much, and Ken, I even pushed the right button. In the meantime, the president, we've been talking a lot about the GOP nominee, the president of the United States has been on the campaign trail this past week pushing the so-called Buffett Rule.
[President Barack Obama:] A lot of the folks were peddling these same trickle-down theories, including members of Congress and some people who are running for a certain office right now who shall not be named. They're doubling down on these old, broken-down theories.
[Neal Conan:] Now, the Buffett Rule is going to get a vote in the Senate next week. It's not going to pass, and even if it did, it would never pass the House of Representatives. This is a campaign issue.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Absolutely. This has nothing to do with legislation in Congress. This is President Obama not only trying to talk about tax equality, which is an issue that's out there, but he also, when you talk about rich people, Warren Buffett who may not pay as much in taxes as his secretary, which is of course the Buffett Rule...
[Neal Conan:] Pay the same as much rate.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Right, the rate, exactly, not the same amount of money but the rate. Then of course the mind switches to Mitt Romney, who paid like 14 percent of his income in taxes, and so that's obviously what President Obama and the Democrats are trying to do.
[Neal Conan:] So this is campaigning on raising taxes, even taxes on millionaires, that's got to be that's dangerous, isn't it, tax-and-spend Democrats?
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Well, it's one thing for Walter Mondale to stand up in the '84 convention and say Ronald Reagan will raise your taxes and so will I, and that's kind of a weird thing to campaign on, but I think Obama's talking more about tax fairness. But ultimately, what he is talking about is raising the taxes on the wealthy. Now, we could also define what wealthy is. Is it a million dollars more in income? Is it $250,000 more in income? And both the Republicans and Democrats are fighting over that, as well.
[Neal Conan:] More with political junkie Ken Rudin in just a moment. Up next, the challenge of keeping a nominee's name in the news in the months leading up to the convention, after the nomination has been wrapped up, so stay with us for that. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan. It's Wednesday, political junkie day. Ken Rudin is here, as he is most weeks. And Ken, ScuttleButton winner this week?
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] I believe there is, yes. There was four buttons last week. There was a button with the letter A on it. There was a Margaret Chin for city council button, a Charlene Haar, she ran for the Senate in South Dakota, and a block captain for Ike. So when you add the four of them, you got H&R Block, which is taxing, by the way...
[Neal Conan:] I think that's...
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Yeah, exactly. But anyway, Robert Marlowe of Annandale, New Jersey, was the lucky winner, or the unlucky winner.
[Neal Conan:] And will get a fabulous political junkie no-prize T-shirt. You can find the latest ScuttleButton puzzle and the political junkie column both at npr.orgjunkie. Now that Mitt Romney recaptured the mantle of inevitability, not just the mantle but the inevitability, too, Rick Santorum bowed out yesterday, of course. Romney can turn his focus to November and to President Obama. Yes, Newt Gingrich continues to campaign, even though he expects Romney to win. Ron Paul hopes to pick up a few delegates between now and the convention, which is not until late August. So the Romney campaign faces several months between effectively sealing the deal and officially sealing the deal in Tampa at the nominating convention. So what does he need to do now? Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation at our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Joining us by phone from his office here in Washington is Vin Weber, managing partner of Clark & Weinstock, a senior advisor to Mitt Romney. Vin, nice to have you back on TALK OF THE NATION.
[Vin Weber:] Great to be with you. I'd like to get my political junkie T-shirt from Ken now.
[Neal Conan:] No, you've got to win something.
[Vin Weber:] Oh jeez.
[Neal Conan:] You've got to call in with the answer to one of those trivia questions.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] But Vin, I can be bought, though, Vin. We'll talk about it later.
[Vin Weber:] I may have better luck trying to buy you off, Ken.
[Neal Conan:] First of all, congratulations.
[Vin Weber:] Thank you very much. I think congratulations go to Governor Romney. But since I'm surrogating for him today, I'll accept it.
[Neal Conan:] And what does he need to do now other than maybe get some sleep?
[Vin Weber:] Well, Mitt Romney is not a big sleeper. He's a worker. I do think that the pace of the campaign obviously changes. And, you know, anybody who's been on the road with a candidate, much less somebody who has been a candidate, will tell you that there is a sense of relief when you're not constantly up in competition with somebody, and that will shift now quite a bit for Governor Romney. But I do think you have to emphasize that there's different things now that require the attention of the campaign. Yes, we've got a few months where there's a challenge in terms of visibility, but it also means you've got a few months when you have time to actually go out and raise the money, which is necessary; hone your message for the fall campaign in a thoughtful way, as opposed to kind of the instant reactions that you have to do when you're going from primary to primary to primary. And the whole pace of the campaign changes quite a bit, but there's a lot to do.
[Neal Conan:] But is there a moment to sit back, meet with the campaign staff, meet with your advisers and say: What do we need to do now? Is there a moment to reflect before plunging on to the general?
[Vin Weber:] Yeah, kind of. I think yes, there are things that happen now that require a little more reflection, a little more conversation. But I want to emphasize that the pace of a campaign, a presidential campaign, in my experience, really doesn't slow down substantially. You're in a marathon all the way through until November, and there's just a lot of work to be done.
[Neal Conan:] Ken?
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Vin, one quick thing about Rick Santorum: Did the challenge help or hurt Mitt Romney?
[Vin Weber:] Well, I think Governor Romney is an excellent candidate, and I think we're going to find that out as we go forward, that the time that he has put into this campaign has really served him well. You know, running for president is a unique experience in all of life, and somebody who hasn't done it before, and that includes me, can't know exactly what it's like. But I think Governor Romney is an experienced candidate. The Santorum challenge probably, on balance, was helpful in terms of honing his rhetorical skills and getting him ready for the attacks that are bound to come from the other side. Obviously, we would have liked to have ended it a little sooner just so we could devote our attention to President Obama, put some money in the bank and things like that. But it was not harmful.
[Neal Conan:] Also with us from his office in Washington is Ed Rogers, chairman of the consulting firm BGR Group. He was a senior deputy to the Bush-Quayle campaign, so he's done this. Nice to have you back on TALK OF THE NATION, Ed Rogers.
[Ed Rogers:] Hey, it's good to be here.
[Neal Conan:] What's the most important thing Mitt Romney can do in this couple of months before he actually goes down to Tampa and makes his acceptance speech?
[Ed Rogers:] Well, during the next couple of months, he's got to get his organization in order. He's got to expand his campaign staff. He's got to expand his pool of advisors. He also has to refine his message more toward the filet or target area in the battleground states that are going to matter. When it's all said and done, there's probably going to be 12, and then fewer than that, really competitive states with a competitive bloc of voters that are going to make the difference in this election. Obama can't count on the turnout that he had among African-Americans and the turnout and the overwhelming support he had among young voters. So he's got to win with independents. And Romney has got to recognize that and sharpen his appeal to the independents, and the independent group that I am most concerned about is what I call the working worried: people that are just barely hanging on, that had a close call sometime over the course of the recession, and they're calculus is going to be am I going to stick with Obama even though it's fragile, my situation is very fragile and very tenuous, or am I going to take a chance with Romney, who Obama will try to label as a heartless financier, as a Wall Street cruel banker and as a laissez-faire eat-what-you-kill type of a politician. Romney's not a good bad guy. He's got a good heart, and he has a history of a lot of compassion and a lot of reality in his policies, but nonetheless, he's got to appeal to this working worried that their situation is going to improve, and they're not going to be cut off and left adrift.
[Neal Conan:] He's also going to be painted as the conservative he campaigned as. Of course, he was attacked from the right in the Republican primaries as the Massachusetts but adopted a lot of conservative positions, and the Democrats are going to try to tie him to that.
[Ed Rogers:] That's not all bad, as long as it's not Romney doesn't let it become identified as harsh, cruel and indifferent.
[Neal Conan:] Vin Weber, we heard a lot about the Etch-A-Sketch moment, but he does want to try to tack back a little bit towards those independent voters that Ed Rogers is talking about, in particular women.
[Vin Weber:] Well, I think Ed is exactly right, and I like that phrase, working worried. I think, Ed, that describes it really, really well. I don't think that Governor Romney has to do a whole lot of changing of positions, if that's what we're talking about. The main thing that needs to happen now is that you re-emphasize the economic message, which is what exactly those working worried voters that Ed described are concerned about, as opposed to some of the other issues that come up more often in the campaign. But Governor Romney has really focused on the economic message for a long time now. Nobody is going to look at him talking about the economy and say gee, Mitt Romney's trying to reinvent himself. That has been the Romney message from the beginning of this campaign.
[Neal Conan:] Let's see if we can get some callers in on the conversation, 800-989-8255. Email talk@npr.org. What does Mitt Romney need to do now? Scott's on the line with us from Fort Myers in Florida.
[Scott:] Hi, thanks for taking my call.
[Neal Conan:] Sure.
[Scott:] I think something that might be useful would be for Governor Romney to identify early vice presidential running mates. I think it would if he identified the right person, it would energize his campaign, and it would get people like me, you know, excited about him and the Republican ticket. Right now, I'm lukewarm. I don't really identify with Governor Romney. I'm not sure I identify with his sort of views on wealth and personal wealth. And I think if you can get the right person to energize the ticket and the party, that would really give him a lot of momentum going into the general election.
[Neal Conan:] And Scott, do you have any nominees for him?
[Scott:] I don't. I'm not smart enough for that.
[Neal Conan:] OK.
[Ed Rogers:] This is Ed Rogers. I just want to say that's a great idea. And we are stuck in this historical template of waiting until the convention that is now something of an archaic entity in its own right. But I would be for having a nominee sooner rather than later. It may not be for enthusiasm's sake, but a lot of it is a lot of fundraising is a mathematical equation: You raise X number of dollars per event. You can have X number of events per week. The only real substitute you have for the nominee is the vice presidential nominee. If we had that person sooner rather than later, out doing some of what Joe Biden is doing for the ticket fundraising, party-building, et cetera that would be a good thing. More time would mean more money. More time would mean more infrastructure, more organization. So I hope, then, that you can use your influence in the campaign to get him to think outside the box and this notion that we have to wait until the convention I think is obsolete.
[Neal Conan:] Vin...
[Scott:] I think there's an accounting side to that, but I think there's also a human side to that. I think Governor Romney really needs to expand sort of his human outreach. And I think people a lot of, maybe, Republicans, like myself, they just don't identify with Governor Romney. And I think if he can if he can pick a vice presidential candidate that people can really develop a, sort of, relationship with intellectually, philosophically, politically, it would help his campaign tremendously.
[Neal Conan:] All right. Scott, thanks very much for the phone call. There is, of course, one other surrogate who is turning out to be very useful for the Romney campaign, and that is Mitt Romney's wife, Anne.
[Anne Romney:] That's the gang. Those are the five boys. I hate to say it, but often, I had more than five sons. I had six sons and he would be as mischievous and as naughty as the other boys.
[Neal Conan:] And, Vin Weber, this is a real asset for the candidate, in particular, again, he's polls showing running behind with women voters, this could help.
[Vin Weber:] Yeah. Well, I think his family is a huge asset. As frankly, President Obama's family is an asset to him, too. But Anne Romney has proven to be tremendous on the campaign trail. And I've gotten to know her quite a bit. The five Romney sons I've met. I don't know them well, but they're also tremendous. And they have no problem connecting with anybody at all, whether it's their dad or the average voter. So I think a lot of that on the campaign trail will be helpful. And then I'm taking in Ed's suggestion on the vice presidency, that you don't the I understand what you're saying, Ed. The other side of the coin is, you know, we've always wanted to go into the convention with the Republican base fired up as the convention opens. And that's why they've kind of done it later on. But, you know, whenever he picks, I think he's going to be pick a good person.
[Neal Conan:] Ken?
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Well, the expanding on that problem, naming the V.P. early. If they name like Dan Quayle or Gerladine Ferraro, or even Sarah Palin, in April of 2008 or April of the year, you know, other things would come out. I think you lose that excitement value if you name them now, you know, you're maybe basically stuck with that nominee through the convention. There's no excitement. And if you're looking for excitement, you did have it with Sarah Palin, but you only had it for a couple of weeks. And so the question back to Scott's original question. Do you want or even what Ed just said do you want to excite the rank and file, or do you want to get somebody who's very comfortable with Mitt Romney and could seen as an ultimate president one day?
[Ed Rogers:] That excitement factor, my experience has been, lasts the political equivalent of about three seconds. The V.P. nominee does not drive any votes. We had the worst possible comparison in 1988. Vin will remember. We even had the debacle of the debate with Dan Quayle against Bentsen. And at the end of day, the vice president doesn't drive any votes, maybe they drive votes in their home state. Edwards could not deliver North Carolina for Kerry. So, you know, maybe not. But what they can do is they have convening authority. They could be good surrogates. They can do fundraisers. And at the end of day, they're not going to drive any votes. The Democrat convention has already got their V.P. nominee. They're going to have some sort of synthetic enthusiasm coming out of their convention that doesn't include a surprise V.P. presence. And so let's forget that. Let's go ahead and you know, you got to do the vetting. You got to do it right. But let's go ahead and have that asset earlier, rather than later.
[Neal Conan:] You're ignoring one important constituency. Me and Ken want you to wait till the last minute so we've got plenty to talk about for the remainder of the summer. OK.
[Ed Rogers:] Good point.
[Neal Conan:] Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time today. Appreciate it.
[Vin Weber:] Great to be with you.
[Ed Rogers:] Thanks.
[Neal Conan:] Vin Weber, former Republican member of Congress from Minnesota, now managing partner of Clark & Weinstock here in Washington, a senior adviser to the Mitt Romney campaign. Ed Rogers is the chairman of the consulting firm BGR Group, former deputy assistant to President George H.W. Bush and senior deputy to the Bush-Quayle campaign. It's The Political Junkie. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And, Ken, a couple of items we didn't catch up with. A Republican Congressman in Illinois won win a primary fight and then decides, well, maybe I should retire at the end of this term.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] This is a big surprise. Timothy Johnson, who's been in Congress since 2001, he won his primary his March 20th primary in Illinois pretty convincingly. And then he announced, last week, that that he decided, because of family reasons and he's actually seems like, you know, you always see I want to spend more time with my family. I think he really did want to spend more time with his family. He's running against a Democratic guy he's beaten three times in the past, overwhelmingly, but a big surprise. And now, the Republicans have to come up with a new Republican nominee in a district that, because it's redrawn, went for Barack Obama with 55 percent of the vote in 2008. So it would be a tougher battle for the Republicans, but it makes it a little more difficult with a new nominee.
[Neal Conan:] And a couple of people have emerged as candidates, who say they're going to run.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Right. And we think we're going to get a nominee around April 20th when they finally certify the March 20th results.
[Neal Conan:] In the meantime, up in Maine, there's been a big question mark about whether independent candidate Angus King ahead in the polls for the U.S. Senate race. The former independent governor would caucus, if elected, with the Republicans or the Democrats. He won't say, but he then held a news conference in which he said there wasn't a Republican he agreed with since Abraham Lincoln.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Well, that's exactly right. I mean, he keeps saying that he's truly an independent. He doesn't know what party. But the Republicans clearly see him as a Democrat, because they saw a lot of notable Democrats deciding not to run when Angus King got in the race. And King has already endorsed President Obama. He's already attacked the Paul Ryan budget plan. So the Republicans know that he's not one of them, shall we say, and they're going after him.
[Neal Conan:] And also this week, the majority leader of the House of Representatives sending a lot of money to a superPAC which supports, at least in part, some people who want to oust some of his members.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] That was very, very surprising. We knew that he's supported Adam Kinzinger against a fellow incumbent, Don Manzullo, in the Illinois primary; but he also gave $25,000 to the Campaign for Primary Accountability, which was also supporting Kinzinger over Manzullo. But that superPAC also opposes a lot of Republican incumbents. And it's very strange that Cantor would give money to this superPAC.
[Neal Conan:] And finally, there is a major defection. Somebody has decided to abandon 49 states and, well, just work for one.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Yes. Peter Granitz, our indefatigable producer for TALK OF THE NATION the past...
[Neal Conan:] I thought you liked him.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Yeah. I do. Very much. TALK OF THE NATION Political Junkie the last two years. He's leaving to become the Washington correspondent for Alaska Public Radio. And as you know, there's no place like Nome.
[Neal Conan:] OK. Peter Granitz, thanks very much for your work these past couple of years. We're going to miss you and good luck up there. When are we getting Lisa Murkowski on the show? Come on. In the meantime, Peter Granitz is going off to Alaska Public Radio. Ken Rudin, however, will be back...
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Sadly.
[Neal Conan:] ...in that chair again next week for another edition of The Political Junkie. In the meantime, his latest column and the ScuttleButton puzzle and, of course, in a little bit, we're going to be scurrying off up I-95 to Camden Yards. Coming up, though, it's an argument that it's time to kill the one-cent coin. How do you use the penny? Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

[Renee Montagne:] The store is known for high-quality food, cheaply priced. And even those who don't have a Trader Joe's in town might have heard of its famous Two Buck Chuck a decent bottle of wine for just $2. The store has inspired such loyalty in its customers that one posted a YouTube tribute that's been viewed over half a million times.
[Linda Wertheimer:] [Singing] It's booze. It's nuts. It's pills. It's peas. It's the peanut butter made of sunflower seeds. It's a box of soup. It's a bell from a boat. It's yogurt made from the milk of a goat. A bottle of juice with a crazy name. Ten kinds of soy milk that all taste the same. A $2 wine that tastes like 4. All your favorite stuff they don't have anymore.
[Renee Montagne:] Good morning.
[Beth Kowitt:] Hi. How are you?
[Renee Montagne:] Fine, thanks. And I guess we can tell from that little clip that there's a certain jokey affection for Trader Joe's, from those who shop there. But in fact, as you report, this is a very successful company with sales last year at roughly $8 billion.
[Beth Kowitt:] That's right. And I think that's one of the secrets behind the company, that they have this neighborhood store vibe, yet they are actually quite large. And you know, in the story we note that they're bigger than Bed, Bath Beyond, even.
[Renee Montagne:] How can the store afford to sell this high quality of food for such a low cost?
[Beth Kowitt:] Well, it has a very streamlined distribution center, which takes out a lot of the costs. But they also they buy directly from producers whenever possible, which takes out a lot of costs. So there are no middlemen involved. So they're not going through distributors. Also, because they're buying in such large volume, they can secure large discounts from producers.
[Renee Montagne:] You know, one thing about Trader Joe's, for people who've shopped there a long time, is that there was once there was a Joe. Tell us what the story is: who started it, and who owns it now.
[Beth Kowitt:] Trader Joe's was founded by Joe Coulombe, who is still alive. He's 80. He had the idea that this growing class of educated consumers, that was well-traveled, was going to want things that reminded them of being abroad. But Joe hasn't had anything to do with the business in about two decades. He sold to the Albrecht family of Aldi Nord, which is a supermarket empire. They're German. And the company is now held in a family trust.
[Renee Montagne:] You tried to get Trader Joe's to cooperate on your story. And your story's very positive. But Trader Joe's declined. NPR called them to get their take on your story, and a spokesman politely declined. What's with all the secrecy?
[Beth Kowitt:] They don't want to talk about, you know, who's supplying for them. They don't want to talk about their streamlined distribution center. They don't really want their consumer to know Stacey's, which is owned by PepsiCo Frito-Lay, is making their pita chips. It's just they would rather you think that, you know, it's Trader Joe's brand.
[Renee Montagne:] So about that YouTube song: What do you make of that? I mean, what does that say about the whole Trader Joe's experience?
[Beth Kowitt:] I think that's going to be the big challenge for them going forward. You know, they'll hit 350 stores soon. They're going into Omaha. And I think, really, they're going to have to work to keep that quirky, off-beat vibe as they get bigger.
[Renee Montagne:] Thanks very much.
[Beth Kowitt:] Thanks.

[Liane Hansen:] From NPR News, this is WEEKEND EDITION. I'm Liane Hansen. High prices, riots and bans on exporting rice and other staples are forcing governments worldwide to find a way to alleviate the global food crisis.
[Mr. Raj Patel:] The World Food Programme has called the current crisis a silent tsunami.
[Liane Hansen:] That Raj Patel, a political economist and fellow at the Institute for Food and Development Policy in Oakland, California. He testified this past week on the global food crisis before the House Financial Services Committee. Raj Patel joins us from the studios of KQED in San Francisco. Welcome back to the program.
[Mr. Raj Patel:] Good to be here again, Liane.
[Liane Hansen:] What is the current status with the food crisis?
[Mr. Raj Patel:] There's been a slight decline in price levels recently, but they're still at historical highs. And in fact in the testimony a range of witnesses kind of agreed on the basic reasons why it was happening. You have the high price of oil, biofuels, the sort of increase of demand, particularly in Asia, poor harvests and financial speculation. All of these reasons are ones that, across the political spectrum, people believe to be the reasons behind these high prices. Few people see any of these reasons particularly going away in the short to medium term. So we are in the era of expensive food but part of the point of the testimony was to be able to think how to manage this new social fact.
[Liane Hansen:] You said in your testimony this past Wednesday that out of the 854 million people starving in the world, 35 million are American citizens and yet I mean, there are people that are throwing food away every day. How, why is this happening?
[Mr. Raj Patel:] This is a consequence of political choices because of what we're effectively endorsing in the way we distribute food today is a market-based approach. Which means that if people are too poor to be able to afford food, then they're going to find it hard to eat. And although food stamp programs in the United States go some way to meeting that need, there's still a gulf. And particularly you're hearing reports all over the place of working American families now doing things like skipping meals women in particular skipping meals so that their kids can have something to eat on the table, people growing their own fresh foods and vegetables because they can't afford to buy them. These are the kinds of survival tactics that you see in developing countries. And it is a mark of how desperately the food crisis has become that it's starting to be seen here in the U.S. too.
[Liane Hansen:] What do you think the United States can do about its own hungry people?
[Mr. Raj Patel:] What's happening in the United States around hunger is the same that's happening around the world. People go hungry not because of a lack of food but because of poverty. Policies like welfare like, you know, a decent social security system, a safety net for working Americans. Those are the kinds of things that prevent poverty and therefore that prevent food and security. So I certainly think that there are lessons from the past that we might apply in the future and that they involve providing safety nets so that no one in this country has to go to bed hungry at any night.
[Liane Hansen:] Raj Patel is a political economist and fellow at the Institute for Food and Development Policy in Oakland, California. His new book is called "Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System." He joined us from the studios of member station KQED in San Francisco. Thank you.
[Mr. Raj Patel:] Thank you, Liane.

[Noah Adams:] But first, Nick Miroff reports from Havana on how Cubans are remembering the Bay of Pigs at a time when Cuba is recasting its brand of socialism and still at odds with its old rival.
[Nick Miroff:] Manuel Orgalles was a 17-year-old recruit in Fidel Castro's revolutionary army when American bombers flown by Cuban exiles launched the attack on April 15, 1961. Two days later, his artillery brigade was sent to fight on the beaches of the Bahia de Cochinos along Cuba's south coast. Under heavy mortar fire, Orgalles and his team shot down a B-26 bomber with a 37-millimeter Soviet anti-aircraft gun at a pivotal moment in the battle.
[Mr. Manuel Orgalles:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Nick Miroff:] We had something to fight for, said Orgalles. We had seen how things had changed for the better after the revolution. Today, his walls are decorated with war medals, photos of Castro and an empty shell casing he saved as a souvenir. He chokes up with emotion when he remembers the terror of combat and the teenage comrades he saw killed.
[Mr. Manuel Orgalles:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Nick Miroff:] Everyone gets scared, he said, but you don't have to be old to be brave. The CIA-trained Cuban exiles were hoping to spark an anti-Castro uprising, but instead, they were overwhelmed by thousands of militiamen and forced to surrender after just three days. The failed attack would lead directly to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and the 50-year standoff with the United States that continues today.
[Unidentified Man:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Nick Miroff:] On Saturday, Cuba marked the Bay of Pigs victory with a massive march and military parade. Buses brought in students and workers from all over the region. As Russian-made MiG fighter jets roared in formation over the Plaza of the Revolution, 72-year-old Candida Abreus said she was working at a government office for agrarian reform during the invasion, sending food from nationalized foreign companies to the soldiers. She remembers the sounds of bullet shells falling on the roof during an air attack on the Havana power plant.
[Ms. Candida Abreus:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Nick Miroff:] We're the first country in the Americas to show the United States that you don't need to be a rich country, said Abreus, proudly explaining the origins of Cuban fortitude. You just need ovaries and testicles and principles, she said, and that's what we've got plenty of here, even me, at my age. Raul Castro and the island's aging leaders are now meeting for the country's first Communist Party Congress since 1997. They're poised to adopt a series of reforms that would ease state control over the economy and scale back Cuba's suffocating bureaucracy. Saturday's military showing seemed to also send the message that Cuba was wasn't letting down its guard, since relations with the U.S. have improved little since Frank Villanueva fought at the Bay of Pigs.
[Mr. Frank Villanueva:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Nick Miroff:] No one has ever burned an American flag here, Villanueva said. We don't have any problem with the American people, but the U.S. government has been trying to strangle us for 50 years. In a two-and-a-half-hour speech Saturday evening to kick off the Party Congress, Raul Castro made a surprise call to limit Cuban officeholders to two five-year terms, including himself. It was a sign that the Castro era in Cuba is winding down, even as old animosities from the Bay of Pigs still remain. For NPR News, I'm Nick Miroff in Havana.

[Madeleine Brand:] I'm Madeleine Brand. Last summer, we read about a Buddhist couple who truly defines the concept of togetherness when they eat, they share a plate; when they read, they share a book. Well, last summer, my old radio soul mate, Alex Chadwick, and I talked with another couple that tried something like that. Slate's David Plotz and his wife, Hanna Rosin, spent 24 hours never separated by more than 15 feet. Hanna realized from the start it wasn't going to be easy.
[Ms. Hanna Rosin:] Well, you know, I had stuff that I do that I don't even think about doing, namely, I've put little things away. It's like the thing the wife does at night. It's like, you know, some the child's shoe here on my bed and a gong, in this case, like my son's gong. So, I just run around frantically and put them away, while David sits in bed and reads whatever he's reading. And so, David...
[Mr. David Plotz:] While David takes care of other things that maybe Hanna doesn't take care of.
[Ms. Hanna Rosin:] No, no. David is very, very super helpful, highly helpful, excellent domestic.
[Mr. David Plotz:] I would put the gong away.
[Ms. Hanna Rosin:] You would not put the you wouldn't even see the gong. And so, I make David, who's already, like, snuggled in the bed, you know, doing his nighttime snuggleness, say, get up and follow me around. And so, which he says, this is annoying, this is annoying, this is annoying the whole time. So, that's how the experiment began. It was not auspicious.
[Madeleine Brand:] So, yes. [Laughing] So much for, you know, Buddhist mindfulness.
[Alex Chadwick:] David, I get this, when you're describing your morning starting off, where Hanna, to your complete surprise, actually goes through a routine of hair and makeup and selecting and you know, you all have married for quite some time. You had no idea that she does this every single day.
[Mr. David Plotz:] Yes, there's a period in the morning when Hanna's upstairs, you know, I assume getting dressed. And so, I was just sitting around in the bedroom waiting for her. And I discovered that, for example, she doesn't get dressed once, she gets dressed several times and tries on many different outfits. And then, there's a whole series of creams and emollients and powders and so forth, which I didn't even know existed, that are in our bathroom that she uses to enhance her natural beauty.
[Ms. Hanna Rosin:] Well, this is why you wouldn't see the gong. Can I jump in there? I mean, routine and many is extremely exaggerated. It's hardly a routine like, that's what ladies do. I don't have like a dressing room in which I, you know, luxuriously go through my clothes like Tyra Banks and like, shoes, you know.
[Mr. David Plotz:] But OK. No, but it was no, but I I'm not sorry I'm not really criticizing you, Hanna. I'm just saying it was a surprise, even after we've been married for 11 years, to discover your morning routine, because I've just never tune into it. There was no need to pay attention to it.
[Ms. Hanna Rosin:] Right, right.
[Madeleine Brand:] So, then after you guys you get dressed and go through all your morning rituals, you then go to David's office at Slate and, Hanna, you discover a little secret of your own about David.
[Ms. Hanna Rosin:] Yes, the minute we get the first thing David does when he gets to the office is head for the refrigerator and make sure that there's a cold Fresca in the refrigerator. Now, there are so many levels on which this [Laughing] was surprising to me, like, A, David's like a food snob, you know, he's you know, food the natural and the farmer's market. So, the idea that's not even 10 a.m., and he's having a cold soda is sort of a surprise to me. So, I'm happy to learn that. And B, David, like, has a prima donna fit because somebody's forgotten to put the col and he's like he's like heat coming off of his body. He's so angry about the fact that nobody put a Fresca.
[Mr. David Plotz:] But it's not...
[Ms. Hanna Rosin:] First of all, who drinks Fresca? I mean, to go back even further Fresca? Isn't that like a 1991...
[Mr. David Plotz:] Fresca it's a delicious citric soda. It's a office courtesy, when you finish the soda to replace the soda, and no one had replaced the Fresca. So, I was upset about the Fresca.
[Ms. Hanna Rosin:] You know, this is like this is where knowledge I just say the word Fresca and David's still...
[Mr. David Plotz:] I'm still I'm sweating, Madeleine. If you could see me...
[Ms. Hanna Rosin:] [Laughing] Goes through the whole routine again like it's, you know this is not knowledge and Buddhism. I think you're supposed to sort of learn and have self-knowledge, but I bet in 10 years if I just say Fresca, David will launch into this tirade.
[Mr. David Plotz:] Well, there was one moment I thought of shared consciousness, which was that Hanna when we came into the office at Slate, Hanna got into conversation with a colleague of mine who has children at the same school as our daughter. And I had had exactly the same conversation with this colleague a day earlier, and so, it was actually really very tedious to me, especially because all I wanted to do was get started on the work day. As I stood there tapping my feet, as an act of will, I said, you know what, this is the experiment is try to be with Hanna and feel how she's thinking and take the pleasure in the conversation that she was having. And I found that it was a moderately successful venture.
[Madeleine Brand:] Hanna, were you thinking, I need to have this conversation, or were you thinking about David standing there kind of tapping his foot and wanting to get away?
[Ms. Hanna Rosin:] You know, I'm going to sound really mean here. I think that there was a part of me that was doing it a little bit on purpose. I mean, he could clearly tell that he really wanted to get to his cubicle and do his thing, and so, I was doing it a little bit on purpose, just a little bit.
[Alex Chadwick:] David, there actually comes a moment she kind of goes behind a cubicle and you're there's a wall between you. You're both working away there, but it's the first moment in the day when she's actually disappeared for some period of time, and suddenly, what?
[Mr. David Plotz:] It was very disconcerting. We were very close. We were only, you know, eight feet apart, say, but there was a barrier between us, and I found it bizarre. I was anxious.
[Madeleine Brand:] Hanna, did you notice?
[Ms. Hanna Rosin:] I didn't, I'm sorry to say, but you know, the more I hear David talk, I think, you know, he really was fixated on the 15 feet. It's like, anxious? No, I knew David was right there. I saw him out of the corner of my eye, like, I had no reason to be anxious. I think David was anxious because we were [Laughing] violating the rules of the experiment.
[Mr. David Plotz:] No, we weren't. You're that's so uncharitable of you. We weren't, that's what I was saying. You were eight feet away. We weren't violating it. It was like...
[Ms. Hanna Rosin:] Right, but you just couldn't see me for a minute. Right.
[Mr. David Plotz:] I couldn't see you. We were inhabiting different worlds, physically and psychologically.
[Madeleine Brand:] Well, speaking of minds and consciousness and all that, do you feel like you got a little step closer to this Buddhist notion of mindfulness or not?
[Ms. Hanna Rosin:] I only felt that way at the very end of the day. There is this thing that couples do at the end of the day which is the "what did you do today" ritual. You might be bragging. You might be sad. I mean, it's just it's like a narrative you're saying to your spouse. And it's not a bad thing, but it's a bit of an artificial thing, and David and I did not have to do that because we spent the whole day together. And so, there was just kind of a peace descending at the end of the day. We didn't have to have that conversation, except sort of psychically or spiritually. You know, we were connected in that way without the presentation.
[Madeleine Brand:] Would you do it again? Ms.ROSIN: I would. David wouldn't, I bet? Really?
[Mr. David Plotz:] I began this totally as a stunt, and, you know, it was very fun to do. But it was also I really did feel like I'd learned something about how Hanna and I spend time together and, you know, what I value and what I don't. And I thought it was incredibly enlightening.
[Ms. Hanna Rosin:] Nine out of 10 emails I've gotten have been people saying, you know, ugh, yuck like, not ugh, yuck, you guys but ugh, yuck about their own relationship, like, no ways we could get through 24 hours of this. And I don't believe it. I mean, really, it seems to me any couple could get through 24 hours, even if they don't believe about themselves.
[Alex Chadwick:] Hanna Rosin and David Plotz write about a day no more than 15 feet apart from each other. It's at Slate.com and Slate V. Hanna, David, thank you.
[Ms. Hanna Rosin:] Thank you guys.
[Mr. David Plotz:] Thank you.
[Madeleine Brand:] Thank you. NPR's Day to Day continues.

[Stacey Vanek Smith:] We're going to start the hour in Charlottesville, Va., where at least one person was killed after a car plowed into a crowd of people who had left an anti-racism demonstration. The incident happened just hours after violent clashes erupted between white nationalists and counter-protesters. The events were sparked by the city's plan to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Two more people were killed in a helicopter crash that authorities say was linked to the protest. The governor of Virginia has declared a state of emergency. And in a press conference, President Trump decried what he called terrible events.
[President Donald Trump:] This egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides it's been going on for a long time in our country.
[Stacey Vanek Smith:] We're joined now by Sandy Hausman, the Charlottesville bureau chief of member station WVTF and Radio IQ. She's in Charlottesville. Hi, Sandy.
[Sandy Hausman, Byline:] Hi.
[Stacey Vanek Smith:] Sandy, Charlottesville's mayor says one person has died in today's violence. What more can you tell us about this car that plowed into protesters?
[Sandy Hausman, Byline:] Well, Stacey, I didn't actually see it, but I did speak with an eyewitness John Nigro. He's a cameraman from Brooklyn. And he told me he was actually hit by the car.
[John Nigro:] I saw the car come by, take the body of my camera off my phone and hit me and then plowed into the protesters and ran over protesters, smashed into the bottom smashed into two cars at the base of the hill, reverse it and then ran over people again coming backwards. The street medics were performing CPR immediately. They were also trying to stop bleeding. I saw a number of head wounds and broken bones.
[Sandy Hausman, Byline:] There are reports the car has been found, and the drivers in custody.
[Stacey Vanek Smith:] Now, this crash came just hours after clashes in downtown Charlottesville. What were those clashes about?
[Sandy Hausman, Byline:] Charlottesville City Council had voted some months ago to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee from a downtown park. And opponents sued to stop them, and the whole matter's now tied up in court. But Southern heritage activists and white nationalists wanted to show, among other things, their support for keeping that statue.
[Stacey Vanek Smith:] Now, the governor of Virginia has declared a state of emergency. Practically speaking, what does that mean?
[Sandy Hausman, Byline:] That announcement enables the National Guard, which has been on standby, to come to Charlottesville and help state and local police. And they might frankly be needed tonight when protesters could again clash on the city's popular downtown mall. About 200 businesses around town have announced they're going to close, but some, including the city's best-known gay bar, intend to stay open as a protest against hate. Todd Howard's the owner of Escafe.
[Todd Howard:] We know that this is not the image of Charlottesville we want to, you know, purvey. We know what kind of town we have, and it's a positive town.
[Sandy Hausman, Byline:] He adds that his business and others have a shelter in place plan. And if violence erupts tonight, they're ready. Meanwhile, the city's mayor, Mike Signer, says he's heartbroken, and he's urging people to go home.
[Stacey Vanek Smith:] That was Sandy Hausman of member station WVTF and Radio IQ in Charlottesville. Thank you, Sandy.
[Sandy Hausman, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Audie Cornish:] Now to Kentaro Toyama, an award-winning computer scientist who teaches at the University of Michigan. Now, he argues in his book "Geek Heresy" that there's a misplaced belief in the transformative power of technology. And Toyama is skeptical about stories that present technology projects as major solutions for developing countries.
[Kentaro Toyama:] So I think one of the things to be aware of with most of these projects is that what they're doing is helping a relatively well-educated elite in the developing world plug into an elite industry in the developed world but in no way addresses the far deeper inequalities within those countries. So for example, in Nigeria, you know, there's a country with 170 million people, most of whom earn, you know, relatively very small amounts of money. I mean, even if 100,000 of them became software developers in the United States, that's a small drop in the bucket. It's not even 1 percent.
[Audie Cornish:] You argue also that technology promised solutions to some global problems it couldn't keep. Can you give some examples of that?
[Kentaro Toyama:] Sure. There's many examples. Probably the best-known one is a project called One Laptop per Child. This was founded by Nicholas Negroponte who was a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab. And his idea was that in so many places in the world, education is in shambles, and so the solution is a low-cost laptop for children. He would insist that it wasn't a laptop project as much as it was an education project. And I think in that case, it was exactly the opposite. It was in fact a laptop project. The problem with these projects is that in and of themselves, the technology doesn't actually provide the education. You still need very good adult guidance.
[Audie Cornish:] For you, why does technology tend to fall short of delivering on social change?
[Kentaro Toyama:] Well, I do think they change the world in some way. The question is whether they're really causing some kind of social progress of the kind that we would be interested in, whether it's alleviation of poverty or the reduction in inequality. In the United States, we've seen a golden age of digital technology and innovation over the last four decades. But during that same span of time, the rate of poverty has actually only increased. Inequality has skyrocketed, and social mobility has stagnated. So that suggests that without something else also being tended to, technology by itself simply does not address these problems.
[Audie Cornish:] Where is Silicon Valley itself in all this? I mean, is there truly any kind of commitment in this direction, or are these kind of one-offs, business opportunities?
[Kentaro Toyama:] On the whole, I would say at this point that Silicon Valley's movement, at best, is rhetoric, and the worst case is, it's largely a way for companies to increase shareholder value by claiming to address a societal problem but in fact really working only at the margins at best.
[Audie Cornish:] Kentaro Toyama, before you leave us, how would you like people to start thinking about this differently?
[Kentaro Toyama:] Well, if you believe that technology is a tool that amplifies what human forces already exist, then the more technology we have, it's all the more important that we focus on the human forces and making sure that those are right. It's a little bit like the engine in your car. The more powerful the engine, the more important it is that the person behind the wheel knows where they're going and knows how to drive well.
[Audie Cornish:] Kentaro Toyama, thank you so much for speaking with us.
[Kentaro Toyama:] Thank you very much.
[Audie Cornish:] Kentaro Toyama he's author of the book "Geek Heresy."

[Michele Norris:] But as NPR's Michel Martin reports, that's put African immigrants at odds with some African Americans.
[Michel Martin:] For decades the U Street corridor was known as the heart of black commerce and culture in Washington. Madison Avenue and Broadway, all in one. These days a new group is setting up shop with their own language and rhythm. As many as 200,000 Ethiopians have migrated to the Washington area over the last 30 years, believed to be the largest population outside of Ethiopia. Many have thrived in Washington, opened restaurants and other business to serve their own, as well as customers from across the city, which sparked an idea. Why not name a block off U Street Little Ethiopia?
[Tomrat Madine:] I know people were thinking, hey, we've been here for quite a while, the generation who came here as refugee here have brought their own identity, their culture, their food their religion. And they say, why don't we try to have something to name our identity and our presence in Washington, D.C.?
[Michel Martin:] That's Tomrat Madine, a real estate agent who has lived in the areas for 30 years. He thought with a dozen Ethiopian businesses clustered along just one block, who would object?
[Sandra Butler:] I say to them find another block, because that block is a historical block for blacks.
[Michel Martin:] When you first heard about this idea what was your reaction?
[Sandra Butler:] When I first heard about it I was very angry, because it was my thought, the nerve of you. I mean, yes, I welcome you into the community to do whatever it is that you need to do. But I don't like the idea of you coming to my country, my city, my whatever, neighborhood, and saying that I should change something and make it Ethiopian Way.
[Michel Martin:] Butler-Trousdale's family has owned a house in the neighborhood for more than 100 years. Her father ran an accounting business on U Street at a time when Washington was more segregated southern town than urban Metropolis. Her store is part art gallery, part black history museum.
[Sandra Butler:] That is a black and white photo that was taken in New York City.
[Michel Martin:] Hung, floor to ceiling, with portraits of artists and legends, who made U Street the place to see and be seen.
[Sandra Butler:] It was a wonderful place to be. It was Easter Sunday. It was Memorial Day. It was, let's get out and boogie woogie at the Lincoln Colonnade, Lana Hampton, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker.
[Michel Martin:] Butler-Trousdale believes the newcomers don't appreciate what the oldtimers went through, the riots, the crack wars, the red-lining to make the area livable, let alone desirable. But not everyone who shares that legacy shares that view. Take Rick Lee.
[Rick Lee:] A lot of it's happening now, as a matter of fact, there's more diversity now.
[Michel Martin:] We talked with Rick Lee at a spot called Duke City. He owns Lee's Flowers and Card Shop, a business on the U Street corridor, founded by his parents in 1945. Lee thinks Little Ethiopia could be good marketing in the way Chinatown is shorthand for exotic food and fun.
[Rick Lee:] I love the Ethiopians, I love the Latinos, the Asians are up here, you know, and the yuppies. I don't have problems with the yuppies. Yuppies work for me. The color of money is green, so I'm selling flowers. I'm not worried about who's buying them. I just want you to buy my flowers, okay?
[Michel Martin:] Rick Lee may have the detachment of a pragmatist, but the disagreement has left plenty of hurt feelings on both sides of U Street, an unwelcome undertone to the strings of jazz, hip-hop and [unintelligible] music heard along this bustling thoroughfare. Among those with bruised feelings is Tomrat Madim, who still hopes to see Little Ethiopia recognized.
[Madim:] I really was surprised at first. I said, well, we are [unintelligible] who came late, but [unintelligible] come early, and I thought they should be trying to bring us together. They should try to you know, help us to be part of the system.
[Sandra Butler:] I am offended by some of the actions and reactions to our saying that we don't want this to happen.
[Michel Martin:] Sandra Butler-Trousdale.
[Sandra Butler:] The persons that I talk to seem not to want to acknowledge that history that's there. That's my concern.
[Michel Martin:] Michel Martin, NPR News, Washington.

[Alex Chadwick:] Now a Valentine's story about an elderly couple, Sandy and Ed Meskys. Ed's a retired physics professor. Sandy works part time at her town library in Moultonborough, New Hampshire. Four years ago, Ed's retirement savings, beyond Social Security, ran out. So now they budget $200 a month for groceries and get a box of food from the government every few weeks. The Meskys struggle to get by, but they do it together. Dan Gorenstein of New Hampshire Public Radio went with them on a grocery-shopping trip.
[Mr. Ed Meskys:] Cottage cheese, Brown sugar and cos-cos and couscous, or however.
[Dan Gorenstein Reporting:] Sandy and Ed spend hours shopping on Thursday afternoons.
[Mr. Ed Meskys:] We go to five, six, seven, eight stores we can consider going to. We don't stop at every store every time.
[Gorenstein:] Looking for bargains is one reason why it takes such a long time, the other is that Ed is blind. Ed's seeing-eye dog, Judge, is old, so sometimes the dog stays in the car and Sandy takes her husband around.
[Mr. Ed Meskys:] I've been known to have him on my arm and walk him into a concrete post because I forgot he was there. He's been known to forget that I'm his wife and say, Left! Left! Sometimes he gets, I don't know, maybe nervous that he's going to loose me. And he'll grab too hard on the arm. Where he holds has upon occasion has gotten bruised. Sometimes I really wish he could see.
[Gorenstein:] But they're a team. Ed does the price per pound calculations in his head. Sandy remembers where to find better deals, and they leave 39 cent loaves of bread on the shelf, knowing they can get ones for 33 cents. Sandy calls it squeezing money until it squeaks.
[Mr. Ed Meskys:] Four ninety-nine for... Two pounds. Yeah. And how much was the price? Four nine nine. So this is a dollar or less. No, less. But I think we can still do better. Okay. I would love to go into a store and say, Hey, let's have a roast tonight, and not have to worry about, let's see, if I do it as a pot roast I can have it as cold beef and then I can take some of it and grind it up with the gravy and we can have it over potatoes. It gets old really fast. But we can roll with it. Or we can go, Oh, life is so hard. Oh, I'm not enjoying this at all. Well, can you enjoy what you can enjoy?
[Gorenstein:] Though shopping can be difficult, it can also be intimate. Here they joke and on occasion indulge each other.
[Mr. Ed Meskys:] They've got what looks like a really nice crusty five-grain bread for a dollar. Yeah, but it's a dollar sixty. I don't mind crusty, but it's crusty I think a little further in than we want. Squeeze here. Well, the middle is always loose. I'd be tempted by this anyhow. You say so-so.
[Gorenstein:] Even though this is the third store of the day, they still haven't found couscous. Then Sandy sees the bulk section. Bingo!
[Mr. Ed Meskys:] Here we go, a dollar seventy-nine a pound? Okay. That's, that's it. Get a plastic bag and fill it up.
[Gorenstein:] Satisfied, they head for the checkout.
[Mr. Ed Meskys:] You know, we were working together to beat the system. And it feels good to cooperate, to work together, to achieve something together.
[Gorenstein:] For NPR News, I'm Dan Gorenstein in Concord, New Hampshire.

[Robert Siegel:] Last year, a committee of scientists laid out steps it saw as necessary to combat climate change. The group was convened by the United Nations. And it said that eventually, the world will need to wean itself from oil, coal and natural gas. As NPR's Richard Harris reports, that task may be even more daunting than the scientists suggested.
[Richard Harris:] That issue here is just how much heavy lifting we'll all have to do in order to push the world's economy away from fossil fuels. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, argued that some of this will happen all by itself, just by the nature of how technology is evolving. Roger Pielke Jr. at the University of Colorado says that's not necessarily true. Professor ROGER PIELKE JR. [Environmental Studies, University of Colorado]: The assumptions in all of the scenarios used by the IPCC assume that the world will get more efficient as economic development continues. That efficiency implies that carbon emissions won't grow as fast as the world's economy does. The IPCC projects that natural evolution of technology will give us a bit of a free ride, and indeed that was so at least through the 1980s and 1990s.
[Prof. Pielke:] But it turns out that the trend has reversed itself, at least in the short term.
[Richard Harris:] In recent years, the world has actually become less efficient and more polluting. One major reason for that is there's a building boom in China of inefficient coal-fired power plants, so pollution there is growing even faster than the economy. Pielke and colleagues write in Nature that this has thrown off the IPCC projections. And if improvements in efficiency remain stalled out, we'll have to make even bigger changes in our way of life to achieve the same reductions.
[Prof. Pielke:] The first reaction to our paper will be to say, well, this is a much harder challenge. But I guess our view is that the challenge is impossible if we don't fully understand it.
[Richard Harris:] Pielke acknowledges that the recent trend could be an aberration and that technological efficiencies will once again help offset the growth of carbon dioxide driven by global economic growth. Dutch scientist, Bert Metz, who played a leading role in the IPCC report, still stands by the report's assumption that natural technological change will ultimately help curb emissions.
[Dr. Bert Metz:] We know from our own experience, but also from well-documented studies, that technologies are improving all the time.
[Richard Harris:] Just think about how different computers are now compared with 20 years ago. He says it's reasonable to assume the last few years are a blip. And in the long run, technologies will improve a lot, making our economies more efficient and less polluting.
[Dr. Bert Metz:] We're not sure yet. The scenarios are looking at 100-year timeframe, so that's a very long period and you should be very careful not to jump to conclusions.
[Richard Harris:] Whether the natural evolution of technology gives us a big boost in dealing with climate change or no boost at all, Metz and Pielke agree on one thing — policymakers will have to push hard to drive a lot of the changes required to slow global warming. Richard Harris, NPR News.

[Steve Inskeep:] It's taken years to get this far, but negotiators in Congress are close to passing an energy bill. The overall goal is to cut reliance on foreign oil and promote conservation. House and Senate negotiators agreed early this morning on some key provisions, though they are still debating tax breaks for energy companies. NPR's Brian Naylor reports this morning on what's in the plan and, just as important, what's left out.
[Brian Naylor Reporting:] President Bush has pushed Congress to adopt a nationwide energy policy since he first came to office, and now appears on the verge of reaching his long-sought goal, largely because lawmakers have avoided some of the pitfalls of the past. The biggest fell out of the bill over the weekend when House negotiators conceded defeat over a controversial proposal to give producers of the gasoline additive MTBE immunity from legal liability. The additive has polluted groundwater supplies in several states, and a similar liability clause torpedoed energy legislation in the last Congress. But while the House negotiators conceded the MTBE provision, they gave no ground on some modest conservation provisions favored by the Senate. Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan, of North Dakota, argued for a provision calling for cutting energy consumption by a million barrels of oil a day.
[Senator Byron Dorgan:] We need oil. I understand that. But we are increasingly addicted to oil that comes from off of our shores. It's now 60 percent. The expectation is that will grow to 69 percent. We need to address it. This is addressing it in the most minimal way, but, nonetheless, is a step in the right direction.
[Naylor:] But House negotiators, led by conference chairman Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, were dismissive of the proposal.
[Representative Joe Barton:] Just telling the president to wave a magic wand, and tell each and every one of us that we need to conserve may sound good, and, obviously, our friends in the Senate think it's good policy, but those of us who are elected directly by the people every two years have a little bit different view of that.
[Naylor:] The House also rejected a Senate-backed plan that would have required 10 percent of electricity be generated by renewable sources. But renewables weren't left out of the bill entirely. The measure contains billions of dollars in loan guarantees offered for everything from wind generation to coal gasification to nuclear power plants. Massachusetts Democrat, Ed Markey, said the guarantees were unnecessary subsidies at a time when energy prices are at record highs.
[Representative Ed Markey:] It's bad enough that we are allowing the oil companies, the coal, the gas, the nuclear to tip consumers upside down and shake money out of their pockets, and we're not going to do anything about it in this bill, but to then shake money out of them as taxpayers, as well, to subsidize the very same companies, is absolutely fiscally irresponsible.
[Naylor:] Opponents of an inventory of offshore oil sites also used fiscal arguments to press their case. They say the inventory could be the first step toward drilling on the outer continental shelf, the OCS, something Florida lawmakers, such as Republican Michael Bilirakis, opposed.
[Representative Michael Bilirakis:] We have to ask ourselves: Why do we want to spend billions of dollars to take an inventory of all of this OCS area-is under a moratorium, which it is-which cannot be drilled for oil and natural gas.
[Naylor:] But the effort to remove the provision from the bill failed. The energy bill's biggest impact may be on grain farmers. It would double production of ethanol to seven and a half billion gallons by 2012. The tax parts of the measure remain a work in progress, work that's being done behind closed doors. But lawmakers are likely to provide some $10 billion in tax breaks for energy companies, which the White House says are unnecessary, but which the president is not threatening to veto. Brian Naylor, NPR News, the Capitol.
[Steve Inskeep:] This is NPR News.

[Alex Chadwick:] In parts of West Africa, traditional remedies used in religions like voodoo or juju are as popular as Western medicines. In Togo, in the capital city Lome, the local Fetish Market is a source of potions for just about any ailment or simply for good luck. NPR's Ofeibia Quist-Arcton goes shopping. OFEIBIA QUIST-ARCTON reporting Children fling foam used in purification rites. On the outskirts of Lome, tucked away down a dirt road, sits the Fetish Market, le marche de fetiche.
[Mr. Joseph Oba Mayebe:] Now we are in the Fetish Market now. And this place be like a farm market for everybody in the world. When somebody have a sickness now, even if that sickness is... [unintelligible] hospital, then we send you to the Fetish Market here.
[Quist-arcton:] Joseph Oba Mayebe is a herbalist from the neighboring country Benin, but runs his market store here in Togo. He's one of the traditional healers at the Fetish Market who sell supplies and make up potions, powders and remedies.
[Mr. Oba Mayebe:] Here now we have a different kind of... [unintelligible] market. This here now we have different birds-vultures, and an owl. We have chameleon, the head of a snake viper, cobra, skin of a tiger, lion, hyena.
[Quist-arcton:] Oba Mayebe, nicknamed the Doctor, leads his reporter through the dusty, fetid fetish market among rows and rows of stalls hawking neat paths of hundreds of all manner of dried animals, birds and crustaceans and skulls and skeletons.
[Mr. Oba Mayebe:] That is a vulture's head, and we garnish with herbs. And after that, we have to put it on the fire, she has to be, like, a black powder.
[Quist-arcton:] Inside the voodoo market, taking center stage is the market fetish itself, erected for protection. It's a messy bonfire mix of birds beaks and feathers, snake skins and other animal pelts and a wooden statue bound together with dried blood. It's a quiet day and the traders, men and women, are lounging by their goods hoping for customers.
[Unidentified Man:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Quist-arcton:] Amidst this setting, slightly offset from the rain bucket in his shrine, was the fetish priest and voodoo chief of the market. Chanting incantations, he was offering spiritual benediction and healing powers at a price. Faced with a reporter, he came up with an instant prescription.
[Unidentified Man:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Quist-arcton:] `You need a telephone talisman,'said the fetish priest. And so a tiny little key chain-sized wooden doll goes through the motions and is handed over as a good-luck charm.
[Mr. Oba Mayebe:] And this is now-this is one of spiritual power. Then we call it [foreign language spoken]. In English, people call it telephone fetish for a traveling one. They maybe want to travel from Togo to America, take it with your left hand.
[Quist-arcton:] Addressing skeptics, Oba Mayebe, the traditional healer, said customers from all over the world come to the fetish market in Lome in search of healing.
[Mr. Oba Mayebe:] If you came here with your problem, he can help you. He doesn't use the black magic, only the white magic to help everybody in the world. When the people came here, they say that they need black African power. Group of Boys: [Singing in foreign language]
[Quist-arcton:] These teen-age boys just out of school perform one of the songs reserved for the special Lome Fetish Market closing ceremony held once a year. Group of Boys: [Singing in foreign language] Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, NPR News, at the Fetish Market in Lome. Group of Boys: [Singing in foreign language]
[Alex Chadwick:] I'm Alex Chadwick. More DAY TO DAY just ahead from NPR News.

[Renee Montagne:] Congressional leaders have a big task ahead of them today. Democrats and Republicans need to convince their membership to approve a budget deal worked out with the White House last night. It would cut at least $2 trillion from federal spending over the next decade and would raise the nation's borrowing limit.
[Steve Inskeep:] As leaders in Washington call for support for that agreement, cities and towns across the country are struggling to balance their budgets. Few cities face a struggle as big Central Falls, Rhode Island. A few weeks ago, we told you the city was seeking to make deep cuts to its pension benefits to avoid bankruptcy. It has now asked retirees to vote on those cuts. As Catherine Welch of member station WRNI reports, Central Falls will announce today whether enough retirees have agreed to the cuts to prevent further drastic measures.��
[Catherine Welch:] Last month, in a sweltering high school auditorium, the receiver of Central Falls told scores of police and firefighters that to keep the city from going bankrupt they'd need to take cuts to their pensions and help pay for healthcare. Sitting front and center was retired firefighter Howard Baskins.
[Mr. Howard Baskins:] I have no earning capacity. I have no way of making up the difference. I gave all I can give my body.
[Catherine Welch:] But the city wants more. It's proposing cuts that could chop some pension checks in half. Central Falls got to this point because like many towns it didn't fully fund its pension obligations. Combine that with a lack of financial planning, and some sketchy deals by politicians, and the city is in such a financial mess that the mayor turned the keys to city hall over to a receiver more than a year ago. That receiver is Robert Flanders, who's now trying to cut pensions. He knows he's asking for a lot, but says Central Falls' coffers are depleted and the city will run out of cash by the end of this month.
[Mr. Robert Flanders:] An $80 million unfunded pension liability on a $17 million budget is a huge hole to try and fill.
[Catherine Welch:] To help fill that hole, Flanders wants to take a chunk from everyone who retired before turning 60. That includes Howard Baskins, who back home in his modest two-bedroom apartment, pulls out the letter he got from Central Falls detailing cuts to his pension.�
[Mr. Howard Baskins:] Dear Mr. Baskins, you are aware on July 19th, 2011...
[Catherine Welch:] Baskins and the other 140 retirees got a ballot to vote on whether they'll accept or reject the cuts. When Baskins first heard that there would be pension cuts, he wasn't sure what to think. But when he saw that Central Falls would cut his checks by $6,000 a year, he knew how to vote.� That's a very strong, dark X in the I reject.
[Mr. Howard Baskins:] Yeah, that's anger.
[Catherine Welch:] Did you have to think about it?
[Mr. Howard Baskins:] Not very long, I think about maintaining the things that I have to do daily to live. You know, the rejection came easy.
[Catherine Welch:] If enough of them feel the same way, receiver Robert Flanders says one of the only choices left is for Central Falls to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, allowing a bankruptcy judge to rip up all union contracts.
[Mr. Robert Flanders:] A haircut still looks a lot better than a beheading. In a bankruptcy it's possible that there could be a worse situation than what we're proposing.
[Catherine Welch:] Jefferson County in Alabama and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania are also considering bankruptcy. And then there are a handful of other cities in Rhode Island with serious pension problems. That's why Flanders says the state won't save Central Falls, because a bailout could send a message that Rhode Island just can't afford. For NPR, I'm Catherine Welch.

[Noah Adams:] Parts of the Midwest have been struck repeatedly by tornados this spring -lately, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas. Rebuilding usually starts right away, but perhaps not ever in the town of Picher, Oklahoma. Picher was hit back on May 10th. Homes and businesses were leveled. Picher, once a prosperous lead mining town of 20,000, has long been a Superfund cleanup site. The government's been offering people money to get out of town completely because of contamination from the pile of lead tailings called chat and the threat of collapsing underground mines. Now comes the tornado. Gary Linderman is the owner of Ole Miners Pharmacy in Picher. Welcome, Mr. Linderman.
[Mr. Gary Linderman:] Good afternoon, sir. I'm glad to be here.
[Noah Adams:] What was the situation when the tornado came through? How much damage did you have?
[Mr. Gary Linderman:] Okay, I was very fortunate. I was on the north part of town, and the only thing I suffered was some hail damage, which was the size of softballs, to my roof.
[Noah Adams:] Now you must know that many people consider Picher to be a very hazardous place to live, and especially to raise children.
[Mr. Gary Linderman:] That's correct. Yes. Uh-huh.
[Noah Adams:] What do you think about that?
[Mr. Gary Linderman:] Like in any mining situations, there's always hazards. I have been here since I was in 1975, when I started school of pharmacy. And the biggest concern is possible sink holes from the old mines. But that can happen anywhere in the country, you could say.
[Noah Adams:] You have these piles of chat, the tailings from the mining around town?
[Mr. Gary Linderman:] Oh, yes. They're like little mountains. Yes, sir. Uh-huh.
[Noah Adams:] Mountains, almost.
[Mr. Gary Linderman:] Uh-huh.
[Noah Adams:] And you're saying the mining's been underground. That all could collapse.
[Mr. Gary Linderman:] Oh, very possible. That's correct. Yes.
[Noah Adams:] Well, why not take the money and get out of town?
[Mr. Gary Linderman:] Well, I'm very happy here. We've been here for so long, it's home to us. And they've been saying this for so many years. It hasn't happened yet, but they're calling for it.
[Noah Adams:] But on top of that threat, you've got the tornado...
[Mr. Gary Linderman:] That's right.
[Noah Adams:] ...and more than a hundred homes destroyed.
[Mr. Gary Linderman:] Oh, yes. A third of our town. Yes. Incredible.
[Noah Adams:] You have been called Lights Out Linderman.
[Mr. Gary Linderman:] Yes, sir.
[Noah Adams:] Why is that?
[Mr. Gary Linderman:] Well, my minister started that a year ago, and I told people as I'm telling you right now and the listeners that either I or the city government will be the last ones out of town, and we'd be the ones to pull the main power main.
[Noah Adams:] Shut it down on the way out, right?
[Mr. Gary Linderman:] On the way out be it either I or them. So that's why the Lights Out Linderman got attached to me.
[Noah Adams:] Now with so many people leaving and especially now, because people will be taking buyout money, not rebuilding, just leaving you're not going to have many people around. How are you going to make income for the pharmacy?
[Mr. Gary Linderman:] Most of the people who are moving to the closest towns are eight to 10 miles away, and I have always been able to mail medicine to people, or I make home deliveries, also. Then as time goes out, with the gas prices and everything else, I might have to move. But as long as I can able to do this and till my patients and friends gets resettled again, I'll have to wait till that point in time.
[Noah Adams:] Gary Linderman is a pharmacist and the owner of Ole Miners Pharmacy in Picher. Thank you for talking with us, sir.
[Mr. Gary Linderman:] My pleasure. And thanks for calling.

[Ira Flatow:] I'm Ira Flatow. What's to be found at the very, very bottom of the ocean, in the deepest recesses of the Mariana Trench right out there in the South Pacific? Earlier this week, director James Cameron, the man behind "Avatar" and "Titanic," he went down there, solo in a tiny sub. And here is what he saw. I'll tell you right now. He was down there, and he was able to come back. And when he came back, he told us all what was going on down there. He conducted a news conference and we'll get to that in a minute, all right? Before we get to that, let me introduce to you Captain Don Walsh because although Cameron was went down there, he's just one of two living people to have visited the deepest gash in the Earth. The other man went 52 years ago in 1960 and has been an adviser and mentor to Cameron on his trip, and he's here with us today. Captain Don Walsh is an oceanographer, honorary president of the Explorers Club, president of International Maritime. He joins us by phone from Waikiki. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Captain.
[Don Walsh:] Thank you, Ira. It's good to speak with you.
[Ira Flatow:] Tell us about that adventure. You went down there, what, 52 years ago in 1960.
[Don Walsh:] Yeah. It was Jan. 23rd, 1960. We had been operating the U.S. Navy bathyscaphe on test dives at Guam for about five months, each dive being progressively deeper to find out the moods and modes of the Trieste, a rather radical craft for its time. And at that time, there was like only two airplanes in the world or only two of these manned deep submersibles in the world. The French navy had one and our navy had one.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah.
[Don Walsh:] And we culminated that dive series then in January of 1960 with a dive to 24,000 feet, and then about 10 days later, the dive to the deepest place in the world ocean.
[Ira Flatow:] Now what did you see when you got down there?
[Don Walsh:] Well, just before we landed, we spotted what we thought was a flatfish, a white flat like a halibut or a sole, a foot long. And that was quite a sighting, if true, of a higher-order marine vertebrate in such at such a great depth. And it was a bottom-dwelling type of fish, so it meant that it was where it belonged and that there was food down there and sufficient oxygen to support it. Now Jacques Piccard, who was my co-pilot and son of the inventor of the bathyscaphe, Professor Auguste Piccard, he and I were not ichthyologists. We were engineers. We were, if you would, test pilots of this vehicle trying to prove out its capability. So in the subsequent years, we've been advised by all kinds of scientists that we didn't see that.
[Ira Flatow:] Uh-huh.
[Don Walsh:] Yeah. After we landed, though, we stirred up the bottom sediment, which is very fine, very granular, and it remained in suspension for the full 20 minutes we were down there. It was like sitting in a bowl of milk. So we did not get any images on our dive. And that was stirring up sediment was not unusual. Every dive, you do it when you land. But there's a subtle current that'll move that sediment away from the window, and you could make pictures. In this case, it did not happen. And so the first images ever made of the deepest place in the ocean were actually made 25 years later by a Japanese sorry, 35 years later by a Japanese unmanned submersible called Kaiko or a Japanese word for trench.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm. Let's I want to I held playing back the clip because I wanted to hear you describe what you saw. Now, we have a little clip of James Cameron who just came back, and we have a clip about what he saw when he went down there.
[James Cameron:] When I came down, I landed, it was a very, very soft, almost featureless plain, and it just went out of sight as far as I could see. The Challenger Deep, which is only a small part of the Mariana Trench, is something like 50 times the size of the Grand Canyon. So, you know, this is a vast frontier down there that it's going to take us a while to understand.
[Ira Flatow:] Now, can you relate to what he saw? Are you or were you in a different part of the trench?
[Don Walsh:] No, no. Absolutely, Ira. The actual Challenger Deep is consists of really three deep places. But generically, they're called Challenger Deep and all of about equivalent depth over, say, an axis of about 30 miles. And yeah, what he said is quite correct. He had the advantage, though, that with modern technology, 50 years later batteries and modern sensors and equipment he could stay down there. So he could not only wait out the cloud of sediment, if you will, but he could move around. So he just waited out the initial cloud from landing and then was able to make direct observations, something we were unable to do.
[Ira Flatow:] Cameron is working with a team of scientists to solve some of the mysteries of the deep, and one of the researchers whose working with him is with us now, Doug Bartlett, chief scientist in the Deepsea Challenge. He's also professor of marine microbial genetics at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UC San Diego. He joins us by satellite phone from the middle of the Pacific. Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Bartlett.
[Doug Bartlett:] Hi, Ira. It's great to be here. Hi, Don.
[Don Walsh:] Hi. Good why don't you come home?
[Doug Bartlett:] Well, it's pretty nice out here. Here we are camped out in the Ulithi Atoll, which is within Yap State in the Federated States of Micronesia. It's a pretty beautiful place out here, and we're getting ready to steam out once again to the Challenger Deep.
[Ira Flatow:] And what are you what is the purpose what is the aim of doing this?
[Doug Bartlett:] Well, as Don, and as you heard Jim say, this is a large area. This is a significant portion of our biosphere, the deep sea in general, not atoll environments in particular so much. But these are places of extreme adaptation. They may be inverted islands of biodiversity, places down deep where distinct life forms exists, and we'd like to know a lot more about who's down there and what are they doing, how do they influence Earth's biogeochemical cycles, and what kinds of extreme adaptations do these life forms have. So at the biological level, those are some of the questions we'd like to address. And of course, there's the issue of why is this big gash down there in the Mariana Trench, in the Challenger Deep? What is the subduction process that accounts for that great trench?
[Ira Flatow:] You know, it's hard to believe that more people have walked on the moon than have actually been down to the deepest part of the ocean.
[Don Walsh:] That's correct. Twelve people have been on the moon and only three have been to the deepest place in the ocean.
[Ira Flatow:] And Doug, did you guys put a chicken down there in one of the trenches?
[Doug Bartlett:] We did during some of the engineering work that was going on in the New Britain Trench, we did some experiments with bait. It's useful to attract organisms to landers or to the submersible. And we did some work with chickens. And we had a whole chicken in one trap when we deployed it. And when we recovered it, it was completely deboned. I mean, there was just no meat there at all. It was just bone. It was as if scarab beetles had gotten a hold of this chicken and gnawed it all the way to the bone. It was very impressive. What we had found were these large amphipods. Amphipods are crustaceans. They're sort of like shrimp and amazing abilities to smell out food sources in the deep sea. And they had been attracted by the smell of the chicken and had devoured all of the meat. It was quite a sight.
[Ira Flatow:] Captain Walsh, you had an unusual event happen on your descent, did you not? Something unexpected occurred?
[Don Walsh:] Yeah, we had several. That was unusual was usual, if I can mix the metaphor. Yeah, at about 30,000 feet we had a non-pressure boundary acrylic window crack. We didn't know what it was at the time. We had this huge bang. And you know, the outside pressure is 5 tons per square inch so that if there had been a failure of a pressure boundary that is, our cabin we would have been dead before we even knew it, if you will. And we looked at all our gauges and such, and everything seem to be normal. We didn't know what the heck it was, but we just decided to go ahead and proceed with the dive. And then once we got on the sea floor, I was able to do an inspection at my leisure, if you will, and I discover the crack in this window. But it was not mission-limiting in the sense that it was a violation of pressure boundary. It may have affected our ability to get out of the cabin once we got back to the surface. As it turns out, we were able to get out and get topside while we were afloat on the surface.
[Ira Flatow:] Doug Bartlett, Jim Cameron was talking about almost describing the bottom of the ocean there as looking like so barren, like the surface of the moon, like in, I think in one interview he described it as it looked like being on another planet. Why are we not seeing the giant tube worms and stuff that we normally associate with deepwater places?
[Doug Bartlett:] This is an oligotrophic or low-nutrient deep-sea environment in the Challenger Deep. The New Britain Trench was much more productive, and so I think that accounts for some of the difference between the trenches. But with regard to hydrothermal vents and cold seeps, these are places where there's lots of energy and there's lots of biomass, and you have all these exotic and charismatic life forms, like tube worms and clams. Off of the trench, in the forearc of the Mariana, there are some amazing seeps and hydrothermal vents, and you can find liquid CO2 and liquid sulfur in some pretty exotic, extreme places. But down at great depth in the Mariana Trench, where there are very few nutrients, along Jim's transect we saw amphipods. There were some of these smallish amphipod crustaceans, but not much beyond that. And I think it just relates to how little productivity exists in the overlying waters. There's not a whole lot of photosynthesis that's taking place in the shallow waters above the trench.
[Ira Flatow:] So are the living things down there just depending on what falls down that they can eat, like your dead chicken you set down there, waiting for stuff to come down and eat it, from above?
[Doug Bartlett:] I think that's true. I think they're largely dependent on the particulate organic matter that makes its way down deep. Now, some of the organisms, the microorganisms, are able to fix carbon, and they probably get energy from unusual sources. So, for example, during some mineralization processes, hydrogen can be produced, and some of the organisms down there are undoubtedly living off of hydrogen. And so at the microbial level there are diverse physiologies that may not be so dependent on the particulates. But overall, I would suggest that the ecosystem is dependent on particulate organic carbon, and things like chickens or whales or large carcasses coming down from above are manna from heaven.
[Ira Flatow:] Hmm. I'm Ira Flatow. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR, talking with Doug Bartlett from Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Captain Don Walsh, who's honorary president of the Explorers Club, president of International Maritime Incorporated. What in the next dive, Captain Walsh, did you well, in the first dive, did you advise Jim about how to take this dive and what to see and give him general advice?
[Don Walsh:] Well, he's most generous in saying that I had some advisory role. My advice just before he shut the lid the hatch, that is on his sub to go down, I said, Jim, today you move from being an adventurer to an explorer. Have fun. That was my advice. Have fun.
[Ira Flatow:] Doug, was it fun, Doug?
[Doug Bartlett:] Well, I think all of the dives that Jim has been involved with have been exhilarating to him, to the engineers and the other personnel here on the Mermaid Sapphire ship, the support ship for the submersible. It's just thrilling, absolutely thrilling to see what Jim has done. After every dive, there's an opportunity to review some of the high-definition filming associated with it, and some of the images are just stunning. With all of the LED lights and the high-definition cameras, 3-D cameras, macro and wide-angle lenses, the views are just simply amazing. I think Jim's analogy to being on another planet when he went down to the Challenger Deep, I think when all of us have a chance to see this in an IMAX movie or see this at home in a documentary, we'll be amazed at the beauty of it all.
[Ira Flatow:] And we have a clip of it on our website at sciencefriday.com, about some of the stuff that has been seen. Yeah, we can't wait to see it because, as you say, there are two fascinating things about that area, about that earth and under the water, one is the life that's down there and one is how the heck did a rift in the Earth's crust open up to create this what, it's 50 times the size of the Grand Canyon?
[Don Walsh:] That's correct.
[Ira Flatow:] That...
[Doug Bartlett:] That's right. You know, we have a geologist here, Ira, on the cruise, and she's written Patty Fryer is her name, from University of Hawaii, and she's written about this big gash and why it exists. And I think what Patty would tell you in terms of why is the Challenger Deep so deep, is number one, when you look at the Earth's surface and the various crustal plates, oceanic and continental plates, the part of the Pacific plate near the Challenger Deep is the very oldest plate. And by being old, that makes it dense, and by being dense, that makes it more amenable to going down deep. As one plate goes underneath another during the process of plate tectonics, the denser plate goes deep. And the denser it is, it'll go even deeper. Also, when one plate goes underneath another, sometimes it gets scraped and sediment gets built up at that interface between the two plates, and that decreases just how deep the trench is. And there's very little of that happening in this case. And then finally at the Challenger Deep, there seems to be a tear in the down-going plate, and that tear allows it to take a steeper angle, and it also influences the structure of the overriding plate. And so for those three reasons and it's probably more to it than that, but at least what I can gather from talking to Dr. Fryer, those three reasons account for much of why the Challenger Deep is so deep.
[Ira Flatow:] And it's and, you know, we talk about going into outer space, but there's so much to learn about our own planet right here. It's amazing. I want to thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Doug Bartlett, chief scientist of the Deepsea Challenge, also a professor of marine microbiology and genetics at the Scripps in UC San Diego. Captain Don Walsh, oceanographer, honorary president of the Explorers Club and president of International Maritime. Thank you both. And good luck to you, and we wait to see those films come back, as they used to say. Stay healthy and report back when we're ready to have a look.
[Don Walsh:] Thanks, Ira.
[Ira Flatow:] You're welcome.
[Doug Bartlett:] Thank you.

[David Greene:] Women will soon have something that men have had for years, a drug they can take to help improve their sex lives. The Food and Drug Administration yesterday approved the first drug designed to boost a woman's libido. As NPR's Rob Stein reports, this decision is getting some mixed reaction.
[Rob Stein, Byline:] The drug is called Addyi. It's been approved to treat women suffering from a condition known as hypoactive sexual desire disorder. Cindy Whitehead heads Sprout Pharmaceuticals, the company that makes the drug.
[Cindy Whitehead:] This condition causes really a distressing lack of interest in sex for women. And the impacts of that condition goes well beyond the bedroom.
[Rob Stein, Byline:] Whitehead says the condition can make women miserable. They want to want to have sex, but just don't. Their marriages often fall apart. Nevertheless, the FDA twice rejected Addyi, saying there just wasn't enough evidence it worked and big questions about its safety. That prompted Whitehead and some others to accuse the FDA of being sexist, especially since men have had drugs like Viagra for years.
[Cindy Whitehead:] There's a societal narrative that really appreciates, I think, the biology of sex for men as witnessed by countless medical treatment options for them to address some of the disorders that can negatively impact sexual function. By contrast, I think we've really reduced all things related to sex and women to psychology.
[Rob Stein, Byline:] So the company launched a campaign to convince the FDA to reverse the decision. Whitehead was thrilled by yesterday's victory.
[Cindy Whitehead:] Finally to have a medical treatment option is a very important advance for women.
[Rob Stein, Byline:] Some women's health experts and advocates agree. And Terry O'Neill of the National Organization for Women hopes Addyi will just be the first of many drugs to help women with sexual problems.
[Terry O'neill:] Women need to have an array of choices that meets their specific medical needs. So with this success, I think there will be more development of more medications. And that is all to the good.
[Rob Stein, Byline:] But not everyone is happy with the FDA's decision. Other experts on female sexuality and women's health oppose the drug. They question how well Addyi works and whether it's safe. Among other problems, Addyi can cause a sudden drop in blood pressure that makes some women faint. Cindy Pierson is with the National Women's Health Network.
[Cindy Pierson:] This drug either doesn't work at all or barely works. And the safety concerns are real troubling and not well enough understood so that women will be able to make an informed decision about how much risk they are willing to accept.
[Rob Stein, Byline:] Critics like Pierson charge the FDA was pressured to approve the drug by an intense lobbying effort sponsored by the company.
[Cindy Pierson:] This decision is a victory for marketing and for corporate skullduggery. It's not a victory for women's rights.
[Rob Stein, Byline:] The FDA is requiring the drug to carry some warnings to make sure women use it safely. For example, women will be advised not to use something else to get them in the mood while taking Addyi alcohol. It will be available by prescription in October. Rob Stein, NPR News.

[Scott Simon:] There's something missing this year from the fall scenery in the Northeast, especially in upstate New York. The state is normally a top pumpkin producer, but about a third of its crop was destroyed in the recent tropical storms. Marie Cusick, of NPR member station WMHT in Albany, takes us to one farm that was spared.
[Marie Cusick:] There's no shortage of pumpkins at the Black Horse Farms roadside stand in Athens, New York. But some customers still aren't taking any chances.
[Karen Dicicco:] I was worried about getting a pumpkin and I figured I'd get mine here since I'm here.
[Unidentified Man:] Sixteen twenty-eight.
[Marie Cusick:] Karen Dicicco heard about pumpkin shortages, so she's happy to snag an extra-large large one here and happy to pay less than she would have at home in New York City.
[Karen Dicicco:] Looks like a perfect pumpkin. Ten dollars, perfect. I can drive it home and not have to deal with it when I get back to Queens.
[Marie Cusick:] Although fall has just begun, demand for pumpkins has been steadier than usual, says Chellie Apa, who manages her family's farm stand.
[Chellie Apa:] I believe they're buying pumpkins earlier, because I think they're afraid there won't be any.
[Marie Cusick:] Black Horse Farms is nestled in the Hudson River Valley along the northern edge of the Catskill Mountains. It was spared much of the flooding from Tropical Storms Irene and Lee that devastated other parts of the region. Apa says she's grateful.
[Chellie Apa:] Oh, we feel so blessed, and we feel so horrible for those poor people that have been so destroyed by the hurricane.
[Marie Cusick:] But her family business didn't escape the storms unscathed. Apa's sister, Lisa Burhmaster helps run their main farm, down the road from the stand. Burhmaster says they lost about a fifth of their pumpkin crop, when a field they own 40 miles away was inundated.
[Lisa Burhmaster:] We lost a field up in Schenectady that was along the Mohawk River. And those pumpkins are completely useless now. We've got a little bit of the damage in the fields here, which everybody does. But for the most part, most of the pumpkins are good.
[Marie Cusick:] Burhmaster says they were lucky to have a bumper crop down here in Athens. Workers are busy power-washing the pumpkins and loading them into bins.
[Farms:] It takes a lot. There's about 20 guys we have that harvest these pumpkins and bring them down, and they're just working all the time. They're great.
[Marie Cusick:] Most of their pumpkins are retailed to local grocery stores. Some go to New York City. Others are sent to national chains like Whole Foods. The rest are sold at their farm stands.
[Farms:] Yesterday, there was about 5,000 pumpkins that went out of here.
[Marie Cusick:] But with her losses, and shortages elsewhere, Burhmaster admits that people will pay about 20 percent more for her Jack-o'-lanterns this Halloween. However, she says, there's no need to get spooked about the supply.
[Farms:] Don't do a run on the pumpkins. But do buy your pumpkins. Don't be scared.
[Marie Cusick:] For NPR News, I'm Marie Cusick in Athens, New York.
[Scott Simon:] This is NPR News.

[Noah Adams:] In January, President Bush said he would send more than 20,000 additional troops to Iraq. He said Iraqis must see progress in their communities.
[President George W. Bush:] So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced.
[Noah Adams:] So, are these benchmarks indeed being reached? Here is NPR's Mike Pesca.
[Mike Pesca:] The president laid out four main areas for improvement: Security, oil revenue, domestic spending and electoral reform. Philip Zelikow was Condoleezza Rice's top adviser for much of her tenure as secretary of state. He offers this assessment.
[Mr. Philip Zelikow:] The oil law: good. The other benchmarks political and economic -not so good.
[Mike Pesca:] Let's go through them one by one. The first benchmark the president announced was what all Iraq watchers say the fundamental goal from which all other progress will follow.
[Pres. Bush:] The Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq's provinces by November.
[Mike Pesca:] Carlos Pascual, the director of foreign policy studies at The Brookings Institution, says this goal will be all but impossible to meet. He points to the number of troops needed.
[Mr. Carlos Pascual:] It's a start with 150,000 on the part of the Americans, 50,000 on the part of the Iraqis who are competent. You still need, perhaps, another 200,000 forces, competent forces, to be able to deal with something like this on a sustained basis.
[Mike Pesca:] Where will they come from especially if Americans leave? The goal seems unrealistic. Philip Zelikow agrees. He says the U.S. has likely rethought that particular aim. On to the next benchmark.
[Pres. Bush:] Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.
[Mike Pesca:] Both Pascual and Zelikow said this is happening as we speak. Details are still to be worked out, but sharing oil revenue is something the Iraqis can point to as an area of real progress, much more so than the third plank that the president touch on.
[Pres. Bush:] The Iraqi government will spend $10 billion of his own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs.
[Mr. Carlos Pascual:] They may actually appropriate the money. In fact, it's actually been included in the budget this year, but there's no way that they're going to spend it.
[Mike Pesca:] Carlos Pascual says there's a huge difference in a broken society like Iraq, between an item in the budget and cash in people's hands. Even the U.S. can't spend nearly all the billions it appropriates for Iraq. Zelikow concurs with Pascual.
[Mr. Philip Zelikow:] The money is in the bank. They have the money.
[Mike Pesca:] Budget execution that's the term the experts used for actually getting the funds flowing.
[Mr. Philip Zelikow:] They've actually been so worried about being accused of corruption that they're reluctant to spend money.
[Mike Pesca:] Onto the last batch of benchmarks.
[Pres. Bush:] Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year and to allow more Iraqis to reenter their nation's political life. The government will reform the de-Baathification laws, and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq's constitution.
[Mike Pesca:] Pascual, a lifelong diplomat, who dealt with elections in places like Bosnia, says this about Iraqi provincial elections.
[Mr. Carlos Pascual:] They may happen, I think it would be a bad idea.
[Mike Pesca:] His point is that elections that result in no reforms are real progress could dishearten the populace.
[Mr. Carlos Pascual:] Democratic participation can actually be counter-productive because people will become disillusioned with their votes. They will see it as not meaningful.
[Mike Pesca:] Zelikow begs to differ.
[Mr. Philip Zelikow:] Also elections in this case actually are a pretty big part of democracy, and I think actually the provincial elections would be a very good thing.
[Mike Pesca:] He points to provinces like Ninawa province, currently governed by Kurds, but where Sunnis are, in fact, the majority. Zelikow says a good provincial election could right that wrong. That's where reforming de-Baathification laws and constitutional reform. Zelikow was less sanguine.
[Mr. Philip Zelikow:] It's going along slowly, and not as well as the United States would like.
[Mike Pesca:] But the most important thing that Zelikow emphasizes is that meeting benchmarks isn't the same thing as progress or solving the problem of Iraq. Carlos Pascual analogizes Iraq to a terminally ill patient.
[Mr. Carlos Pascual:] The point that people make is that the Iraqis are the ones that are in the end responsible. Absolutely. A patient has to take part in his or her own recovery.
[Mike Pesca:] But he says the sick patient needs all the expertise and assistance he can get. Mike Pesca, NPR News, New York.

[Steve Inskeep:] We now have a defense of parking refugees on a remote Pacific island. Australia has placed some refugees on that island, vowing they will never be allowed into the country.
[Renee Montagne:] In recent weeks, we've heard their stories refugees who have no idea of their future, a woman who attempted suicide, aid workers who said the abuse of refugees was effectively ignored.
[Steve Inskeep:] Today we hear from Peter Dutton, who is Australia's Immigration Minister, who offers a reason for the policy his country has pursued since 2013. Australia, he says, wanted to stop refugees from coming and often dying on dangerous boat journeys.
[Peter Dutton:] I've spoken to the sailors on our boats, on our vessels who were pulling half-eaten bodies out of the water. Now, I don't want to return back to those days. And the fact that, in two years, we have not had one drowning at sea, I think that is something to be very proud of.
[Steve Inskeep:] Dutton says that outcome is worth all of those stories of people left in permanent limbo, stories he plays down.
[Peter Dutton:] This is where I think it's important to stick with the facts and not the emotion. There is a big body of argument, generally from the extreme left, in the Australian political debate that are completely opposed to strong border protection policies. So they advocate a position of effectively open borders. And as we said, as we're seeing in Europe, as you've experienced in the United States, we have to have...
[Steve Inskeep:] I just have to stop you for one thing, Minister, to note that people use the phrase open borders in the U.S. political campaign, and it's completely inaccurate. Are you sure that open borders is actually the policy of your political opponents in Australia?
[Peter Dutton:] This is what they advocate. And as I say, this is the extreme view of the argument, and they're very active on social media because, in the end, what they want to do is disrupt the policy that the government's implemented. And we're very keen to provide significant support to our two neighbors who are offering the regional processing centers. We have settlement packages that we offer to people to return back to the country of origin. So we have an absolute desire to treat people with dignity and respect. And in the end, though, people do want to come to Australia, and many of them resist any offers to go back to their country of origin, even when they've been found not to be refugees.
[Steve Inskeep:] And some of them are found in fact, most of them are found to be refugees, aren't they?
[Peter Dutton:] Well, some of them certainly are, but we've been clear in saying that we are not going to take people off boats. We will take people in an orderly way. The United Nations points out that Australia is one of the leading countries in the world in terms of the amount of assistance that we provide to refugees. We want people to lead a dignified existence. But we've said we are not going to settle people under that situation.
[Steve Inskeep:] What is the fear if you were to let some people into Australia this way?
[Peter Dutton:] The fear is that the 50,000 would come again on 800 boats and we would have 1,200 hundred people drowning at sea. The image that people saw on the television screens of the little boy who died in the waters of the Mediterranean that played out out 1,200 times.
[Steve Inskeep:] As you know, there's been quite a lot of publicity about allegations of abuse, including sexual abuse of children, on the island of Nauru. I know you've disputed how many of these are serious, but you've also said that you will not tolerate any cases of sexual abuse. How many people have been prosecuted?
[Peter Dutton:] Well, if you look at the report to which you make reference, there were 2,107 documents. Twenty-one so 1 percent were classified as critical, which includes, for example, an adult female disciplining her child. That was considered as a critical incident. Clearly, in my mind, that is not a critical incident. Now, there are a number of cases where some people have made complaints of sexual abuse. And when the police have investigated, they've withdrawn their complaints. Now, that may be for cultural reasons. It might be for other reasons. So there have been no prosecutions, but there have been investigations. Nobody wants to tolerate any instance of sexual abuse. Now, we will work with the Nauruan authorities to investigate matters, and we've provided significant support through Australian Federal Police and other agencies, significant amounts of Australian taxpayers' money to provide a humane environment on Nauru. But in the end, as the United Nations points out, there are 65 million people who are forcibly displaced and people who would want to come to a country like ours or yours tomorrow. And the intake system must be conducted in an orderly way, and that's what I intend to do as immigration and border protection minister.
[Steve Inskeep:] We interviewed an Iranian refugee. We've got a document in front of us here stating that he's been certified as a refugee. He doesn't think that he can safely go back. He says he'd like to go to some other country, if he would be able to go to Canada or the United States or anywhere, but he doesn't really know how to do that. He's not allowed into Australia. He feels stuck there permanently, and his wife has attempted suicide tried to hang herself. That's what he said. Are you comfortable with that outcome, given the policy imperatives that you've described?
[Peter Dutton:] We already have one of the biggest intakes of refugees in the world, but the reality is that we provide a humane and safe environment for people. We do it in an orderly way. We don't do it in a way which is dictated to us by organized criminal syndicates who have taken money from people that want an outcome. But we can only provide as much support as we can. And we provide it in a record number and in a very significant way. And of that, Australia is very proud.
[Steve Inskeep:] Minister Dutton, thanks very much for taking the time. Really appreciate it.
[Peter Dutton:] Thanks, Steve, pleasure.

[Alex Chadwick:] Our friend Madeleine Brand is on assignment in Japan right now. She's doing stories for our Climate Connection series. And while she's in Tokyo, she's gone by the world's largest fish market. It's a place famous for the ultra high-quality tuna featured at Tokyo's best sushi restaurants.
[Madeleine Brand:] The demand for tuna is so great now that even though it seems like there's a glut of tuna standing here in the Tsukiji fish market, just looking at the [unintelligible] of tuna lying here on palettes, they really are being over-fished. And it's a big problem for the tuna worldwide.
[Alex Chadwick:] Now, Madeleine doesn't really know her way around this market yet. So she went with a guide. His name is Tim Horniac. He's a freelance writer, a big sushi fan. He had all kinds of statistics about the fish in this market, fish from all over the world.
[Mr. Tim Horniac:] two thousand, five hundred tons of fish, worth over $23 million are sold here everyday. And tuna can fetch prices up to 20 million yen, which, correct me if I'm wrong, is something like $200,000 for a single fish.
[Madeleine Brand:] What kind of [unintelligible] lying here. They looks like sad little porpoises with their tails cut off, a big gash under their fins.
[Mr. Tim Horniac:] And you can see the tails are sliced off in sort of 90-degree angle cuts so that the traders can directly inspect the meat with their flashlights. And they're looking for the freshest, fattiest tuna that will fetch the highest price.
[Madeleine Brand:] Okay, and this is where it all ends up. We're sitting in a sushi restaurant right next to the fish market. It is 7:00 in the morning and we're having sushi.
[Mr. Tim Horniac:] This is the best sushi in the world right here at Tsukiji fish market. Ground zero for sushi.
[Madeleine Brand:] Okay. Eat your heart out, Alex, because I'm about to eat some delicious sushi. Ba-bye. Sayonara.
[Alex Chadwick:] Madeleine Brand, enjoying a sushi breakfast with Tim Horniac at the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo

[Audie Cornish:] Fall, especially the Thanksgiving holiday, conjures a painful memory for commentator Susan Straight. It reminds her of a little boy from her neighborhood who disappeared from her life long ago.
[Susan Straight:] When the leaves turn lime and gold, I think of Deon. I met him as kindergartener 15 years ago. On Mondays, I volunteered in my middle daughter's class. My job was to help with scissors and paste, making a book of jack-o-lanterns. He liked to pull on my daughter's slinky-like black curls. His hair was uncombed. His sneakers, dusty hand-me-downs the size of bread loaves on his small feet. Kindergarten seemed exhausting to him, all the listening and pasting. He would study the web of dried glue on his palms if he sat in my lap. During one recess, Deon kept tugging at the waistband of his jeans. Then, he lifted his striped polo shirt absentmindedly to scratch and I saw burns on his lower belly. Hey, little man, I said, let's go inside and get some cream for that ouchie. He shook his head and I said, sweetie, we have to get that checked. In the nurse's office, he said a pot of soup fell on me. When she unsnapped his jeans, there were round pink burns like rosettes lower down. That was not soup. That was cigarettes. Child Protective Services was called. His grandfather said it was soup. His mother said it was soup. Deon said it was soup. I met his mother in October in the school parking lot. She was about my age and she looked vaguely familiar. Had we seen each other in high school at a football game or a dance? She smiled at me gently and I couldn't help but say that it was hard to see Deon in pain after the spilled soup. She smiled again patiently and said, I don't know how that happened. At Thanksgiving, I took her a frozen turkey, clothes and shoes from my nephews. I put the bag on the Formica counter and she got up so we could talk briefly about turkeys. Then we left, and after the holiday, Deon didn't come back to school. He never came back to school. Last month, my three daughters heard me read a story about a boy like Deon. I did not write the truth. The burns were on the boy's back because I couldn't bear to think that someone could look at a boy's face while scarring him with a lit cigarette. I said to the audience that my daughter remembered this story. But afterward, she said to me with some anger that she hadn't known about the burns. Of course, I never told her back then. I didn't want her to know that kind of pain had been felt by a boy who liked to touch her own curly hair.
[Audie Cornish:] Writer Susan Straight, her most recent novel is called "Between Heaven And Here."

[Renee Montagne:] The last winner of the Iowa caucuses on the Republican side in 2008 was Mike Huckabee, and he's back. Last night in Des Moines, he hosted four of this year's contenders at a premier of an anti-abortion film in which Huckabee appears. There was no endorsement from Huckabee. But there was a lot of talk about the need for abortion and other social issues to play a role in selecting a nominee that in a year when polls show that even evangelical voters are most concerned about jobs and the economy. NPR national political correspondent Don Gonyea was there.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and now a Fox News personality, decided last spring he would not be a candidate this year. But he still got a hero's welcome in the state that gave him victory in its caucuses four years ago. All of the candidates for this year's GOP nomination were invited to attend this film screening. Here's Huckabee. Those candidates were Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Texas Governor Rick Perry and former Senator Rick Santorum. Each has been courting the Iowa GOP's large contingent of evangelicals and Christian conservatives. Each was on topic last night. Four years ago, Huckabee won the caucuses because these voters rallied behind him. This time around, the votes of conservative Christians are not just going to one candidate. Take this couple at last night's screening, Charles and Wilda Albrecht. He's 70, she's 66. His choice...
[Charles Albrecht:] Almost 100 percent, it's Rick Santorum. I just think he is consistent. He's a conservative.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] And hers...
[Charles Albrecht:] I like Michele Bachmann. And...
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] Tell me why.
[Charles Albrecht:] Because I believe she tells it like it is.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] As to whether it would be better if there were a consensus candidate among Christian conservatives...
[Charles Albrecht:] We all have a right to vote how we want.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] A recent CBS NewsNew York Times poll shows Newt Gingrich leading among white evangelicals in Iowa, getting 34 percent. Also in double digits are, in order of support, Ron Paul, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Mitt Romney. That fragmentation makes it less likely that evangelicals will be able to take credit for picking Iowa's winner as they could with Huckabee in '08. Each of the candidates speaking last night would love Huckabee's endorsement. I asked him about that as he headed to a waiting SUV. No, I don't plan to endorse. Because I really think that at this point if I walked into the voting booth, I'm not sure who I would vote for tonight. But he predicted that whoever wins the nomination will be supported by Christian conservatives. Don Gonyea, NPR News, Des Moines.

[Alex Chadwick:] Oh, no, a million dollars at the Masters, golfer Zach Johnson now has to worry about taxes. But he's got a cushion that the rest of us can only dream about as we face tax day next week. And if the time crunch isn't stressful enough, the fear of an audit is. Humorist Brian Unger has some advice on how not to raise red flags with the IRS. That's in today's Unger Report.
[Brian Unger:] These are scary times for rich people. Commissioner Mark Everson says the IRS is increasing its audits of high-income taxpayers. This means if you earn more than $100,000 or you're a millionaire, you're a lot more likely to be audited than you were a few years ago. This marks a big strategy ship for the IRS, to audit people with lots of money. The message to the poor: Go crazy on your deductions this year, while your chances of staying poor had never been greater, your risks of being audited has never been less. Very few will be scrutinizing the money you're not making. So while the IRS is storming the country club, don't get caught planting any red flags in this year's tax return. The Unger Report has these classic audit triggers that can trip you up at tax time. Establishing yourself as your own tax deductible religion is just asking for trouble. No one disagrees the church of you is an important institution providing charitable relief to you. But under IRC Section 501-C3, you and your congregant, you, are not a religion exempt from federal income tax. The IRS can be prickly when it comes to self-worship, and takes a Judeo-Christian approach to tax exception rather than supporting exceptions for narcissistic, self-loving people who idolizing themselves and their houses in St. Barts. And even though, it's easier to prove your own existence over God, your church is very young. I mean the Old Testament is really old, the [Unintelligible] is much older than your Range Rover. Now deducting $250,000 for appearance maintenance, this is going to be a big red flag for the IRS too face-lifts, lipo and botox are not tax deductible unless you live in Beverly Hills. The IRS recognizes for those who live in the 90210, getting a nose job is an actual job, not a hobby. Another red flag raised by tax filers is the old campaign contribution to a political candidate, especially when you claim that candidate is you. Important to remember, you're not running for office. Barack Obama's 25 million is exempt. Your war chest is not. And in the end, make sure you get a good accountant, specifically, stay away from any CPA who worked for the CPA, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. That CPA lost $9 billion in reconstruction money, big red flag. And that is today's Unger Report. I'm Brian Unger.
[Alex Chadwick:] DAY TO DAY is a production of NPR News with contributions from Slate.com. I'm Alex Chadwick.
[Alex Cohen:] And I'm Alex Cohen.

[Linda Wertheimer:] I'm Linda Wertheimer. Tomorrow, Pope Francis will meet, for the first time, with survivors of clerical sex abuse. The meeting will be at his Vatican residence. His decision to meet with six European survivors comes after criticism that this pope has been slow to speak out on an issue that has severely damaged the credibility of the Catholic Church. NPR's Sylvia Poggioli is with us now on the line from Rome. Sylvia, hello.
[Sylvia Poggioli, Byline:] Hello, Linda.
[Linda Wertheimer:] So this meeting with survivors is a private one. And I understand that the Vatican has not released any details about it. Do you know who's going to be there?
[Sylvia Poggioli, Byline:] There'll be six people two each from Britain, Germany and Ireland. The victims are in the 30's age bracket, which suggests their abuse occurred 15, 20 years maybe more. They will attend a mass in the chapel in the pope's residence. And then they'll have an opportunity to give Pope Francis a first-hand account of their suffering. Each group will be accompanied by a member of the pope's commission on the protection of minors. One of the escorts will be Marie Collins, the Irish woman who was abused by a priest at the age of 13.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Rachel Martin spoke with Marie Collins not very long ago on this program. Sylvia, the Vatican was criticized this year by two United Nations committees. What did the committees say?
[Sylvia Poggioli, Byline:] Well, the U.N. committees on the rights of the child and against torture accused the Vatican of systematically following policies that allowed priests to rape and molest tens of thousands of children worldwide and blasted the practice of transferring suspects from one parish to another to cover up their crimes. In an interview, Pope Francis defended the church, saying it tackled the issue with the utmost transparency and responsibility. But then in April, Francis asked forgiveness from victims of sex abuse and compared the crime to a satanic mass, and he vowed zero tolerance. And in a signal, you could say, of increased accountability inside the church, the Vatican announced just nine days ago that the Polish Archbishop, Jozef Wesolowski, accused of sex abuse while he was Vatican ambassador in the Dominican Republic, had been expelled from the priesthood. He was defrocked. He could now face a criminal trial and even prison if confirmed guilty. But the Vatican has yet to issue a blanket, worldwide order to all dioceses to report suspected cases of clerical sex abuse to civil authorities.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Sylvia, what was Pope Francis's record on the issue of sex abuse before he was pope when he was Bishop of Buenos Aries?
[Sylvia Poggioli, Byline:] Little was known in English-speaking world until the Boston-based group bishopaccountability.org recently published a report showing that when Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was president of the Argentine Bishops Conference, the future Pope Francis was silent on the issue. In the book he wrote together with his friend Rabbi Abraham Skorka, then-Cardinal Bergoglio says there were no cases in his diocese. And when a bishop called him for advice, he told him not to allow the suspect to exercise as a priest and to start a canonical trial. But according to this new report, Bergoglio was aware of at least four cases in Argentina. And his former spokesman says the cardinal declined to meet with the victims. The report says it would have been particularly appropriate for Argentine victims to be present at the meeting with the pope tomorrow.
[Linda Wertheimer:] There also are not going to be any abuse survivors from the United States at that meeting. And that is, of course the entire scandal first erupted here back in 2002.
[Sylvia Poggioli, Byline:] Yeah. And that's also surprising because the person who heads the pope's commission on protection of minors is Cardinal Sean O'Malley, archbishop of Boston, who has worked hard to try to restore credibility to the archdiocese where the scandal first exploded. Now presumably, Cardinal O'Malley had a lot to do with selecting the participants in this meeting tomorrow. So the absence of American victims is striking.
[Linda Wertheimer:] NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reporting from Rome. Thank you very much, Sylvia.
[Sylvia Poggioli, Byline:] Thank you, Linda.

[Renee Montagne:] And as the candidates wrap up their marathon campaigns, early voting is taking place on a wider scale than ever before. NPR's Carrie Kahn found that early voters are facing lines as long as the ones you might expect on Election Day.
[Carrie Kahn:] I'm in Los Angeles, California, one of the bluest of blue states. Democrats hold a substantial registration advantage here, and polls show Barack Obama with a double-digit lead. But from the length of the line yesterday circling the county's one early voting station, you'd think this was Ohio or Florida.
[Ms. Grace Lopez:] It's like, oh, this is crazy. It's kind of exciting.
[Carrie Kahn:] This was Grace Lopez's first time voting. She's 18. She had only waited one hour. Dan Martinez had three under his belt, but was equally awestruck by the thousands in line.
[Mr. Dan Martinez:] I came on Friday, Halloween, and the line was three hours. I drove by yesterday, the line was about five hours. And today I just got up early and said whatever it is, it's going to be. And I want to be part of history.
[Carrie Kahn:] Support in line was overwhelming for Obama, but Donna and Dean Anderson said they wanted their voice heard too.
[Ms. Donna Anderson:] Some of the polls on the news programs and everything have already written off John McCain. And I just think it's important for people to express their own opinion and express their own vote and not listen to that. You know, at least we can say we did our part.
[Unidentified Woman:] 924, 642...
[Carrie Kahn:] It took five hours before Derrick Brown's number to vote came up.
[Mr. Derrick Brown:] I made it. I've made it. I've made it safe and sound.
[Carrie Kahn:] Was it worth it?
[Mr. Derrick Brown:] Oh, yeah, most definitely.
[Carrie Kahn:] Brown says he's anxious to get home and not be in a line anymore.
[Mr. Derrick Brown:] I'm going to try to stay lay low until Tuesday. You know, anything can happen. But yeah, this is definitely history though. And I'm proud to be a part of it too.
[Carrie Kahn:] The Los Angeles registrar put out a plea to voters to cast their ballots after 9 a.m. or before 4 p.m. Election Day to hopefully avoid long lines. Carrie Kahn, NPR News.

[Steve Inskeep:] Next on this Friday morning, our film critic Kenneth Turan has this pitch for a baseball movie.
[Kenneth Turan, Byline:] You can see the stuff "Million Dollar Arm" throws at you from miles away, but that doesn't stop it from being genially enjoyable. It's an example of the pleasant things that happen when a better class of people work on Disney family films. "Million Dollar Arm"'s focus is on sports agent JB Bernstein, played by Jon Hamm of "Mad Men." Desperate for a deal to keep his firm afloat, Bernstein gets a brainstorm. He decides to go to India, find capable young cricket players, bring them to the U.S. and turn them into ace major league hurlers. It's all dollars and cents to him. Bernstein is initially flummoxed when he arrives in India, where things don't always go according to plan. Bernstein perseveres and brings two players back to the U.S. They have to learn baseball but, this being a Disney family film, the agent has to learn a thing or two as well. Bernstein is used to putting the deal first. But with help from an attractive neighbor, played by Lake Bell, he realizes he has to pay attention to these young men as people if he wants them to perform as athletes. All this sounds rather didactic. As written by Tom McCarthy and directed by Craig Gillespie who did the wonderful "Lars and the Real Girl," "Million Doll Arm" doesn't push. Star Jon Hamm is especially effective, displaying an easy charm and nice comic instincts in a role that fits him like a broken-in glove. Watching someone become more of an adult is rarely painless, but "Million Dollar Arm" makes the lessons go down easy.
[Steve Inskeep:] Kenneth Turan reviews films for MORNING EDITION and for the Los Angeles Times. It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News.

[Jacki Lyden:] It's been another rough week for Attorney General Eric Holder. He was already fielding attacks from Republicans for his handling of terrorism detainees. This week, the conservative National Review magazine unearthed a Supreme Court brief that Holder did not tell Congress about during this confirmation process. The Senate Judiciary Committee top Republican said Holder must address the issue immediately. NPR's Ari Shapiro joins us to discuss the ongoing controversy. Nice to have you in the studio.
[Ari Shapiro:] Thanks, Jacki.
[Jacki Lyden:] So give us a big picture view of how Eric Holder's doing right now.
[Ari Shapiro:] You know, if you look across President Obama's cabinet, Eric Holder, the attorney general, is the one who more than anyone else is in the conservative crosshairs. There has been an unending series of attacks on his national security decisions. Some of that is because he is taking the lead role in the effort to close Guantanamo, which is very controversial. And some of that frankly is because things keep coming up that provide avenues of attack for Republicans.
[Jacki Lyden:] So, what exactly is in this Supreme Court brief? What does it have?
[Ari Shapiro:] Well, it was a brief from 2004, the case of Jose Padilla, who was an American detained as an enemy combatant. The case went to the Supreme Court and a bunch of former senior Justice Department officials submitted a brief arguing against President Bush's interpretation of his authority to hold this person indefinitely. Eric Holder was a former deputy attorney general he was deputy attorney general in the Clinton years and so he signed on to this brief. And what's interesting is that the brief says: in America, there's a tension between presidential power and liberty and security. He says we can't have unfettered presidential power. And so sometimes, accused terrorists may be acquitted and go free. And what the two former Bush officials who wrote about this brief in the National Review pointed out is that that's different from what Holder has said as attorney general. As attorney general, he has said we won't release anybody who is a threat to the United States, even if somebody like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged 911 mastermind, is acquitted in civilian court, he won't go free. And these four Bush officials are saying that's not consistent with what the Supreme Court brief says.
[Jacki Lyden:] So, since it's already on the record, how is the Justice Department going to explain the brief now?
[Ari Shapiro:] Well, the problem is there were arguably two instances when the Justice Department should have told Congress about this brief and didn't. There was the confirmation process, where Holder gave a list of all the Supreme Court briefs he had signed onto and this was not included. Then more recently an assistant attorney general sent Congress a list of all of the attorneys at Justice who had worked on detainee issues. This again was not included. The Justice Department says, well, it was just an oversight. But the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, is not satisfied with that explanation. He said, the opinions expressed in this brief go to the heart of his responsibilities in matters of national security. Sessions called it an extremely serious matter and said the attorney general will have to address it immediately.
[Jacki Lyden:] But it seems like some of these people are looking for something. As we discussed, the Justice Department is already under attack, it's very controversial as you know, for hiring attorneys who've represented detainees, which is of course the basic fight.
[Ari Shapiro:] Well, what's interesting about that controversy, about hiring attorneys who worked for detainees, is that when that came up in this ad that was created by conservatives Liz Cheney and Bill Crystal, you saw a lot of very high-profile, very conservative people immediately come to the defense of the Justice Department lawyers who represented detainees, saying that the ad was inappropriate, that it undermined the justice system, that it was shoddy. And there was an immediate blowback from conservatives to that conservative ad attacking Justice Department lawyers.
[Jacki Lyden:] How might this come to a head?
[Ari Shapiro:] Well, March 23rd, Attorney General Holder is scheduled to testify before Congress. And so a lot of this back and forth that we have seen played out in the media in competing press releases and statements will happen then. And, as one Senate official told me, it may be a long hearing; you should bring snacks.
[Jacki Lyden:] Ari, any idea how it's playing out inside the attorney general's office, whether it would...
[Ari Shapiro:] It obviously a huge headache for Holder and he doesn't like it. But at the same time, Justice people tell me that there are a lot of initiatives Holder is very involved in that are below national security on the agenda, but that are very important to Holder in a very personal way, and I think he finds solace for lack of a better word in his pursuit of those initiatives underneath all the controversy surrounding the national security initiatives.
[Jacki Lyden:] NPR's Ari Shapiro, thanks so much.
[Ari Shapiro:] Thanks.

[Ed Gordon:] You might think that you're good at multitasking, but keeping that cell phone to your ear while driving isn't such a good idea as commentator Clarence Page tells us.
[Clarence Page:] If you're driving while using a cell phone while listening to this broadcast, put down the cell phone or pull over right now. A new study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found drivers who use cell phones are four times-Four times!-more likely to get into serious collisions even if they use hands-free headsets. A friend of mine told me about it while I was driving to work this morning. Seriously, we all know that yacking on cell phones can be as dangerous as any other distraction behind the wheel. That's why Chicago, New York, Washington, DC, and New Jersey have all passed laws to ban cell phone use while driving unless you've got a headset, but I'm both frightened and fascinated by the possibility that it's the cell phone itself. No matter how many hands grip the steering wheel and no matter whether you've got a headset or not, it's so much more distracting than, say, your car radio or your iPod or your CD player. That's not news to communications professors like Paul Levinson at Fordham University. He's been writing for years about the telephone as a medium. Unlike radio or TV, Professor Levinson says, the phone engages us differently because it is a two-way medium, interactive. Our eyes watch one thing at a time. Our ears are built for multitasking. Our brains respond differently to a real conversation than they do to a one-way presentation. That's what makes the telephone more demanding of our attention. Professor Levinson told me all of this on his cell phone. At the time, he was not driving. Neither was I. The conversation got me to thinking. If radio is theater of the mind, the cell phone must be a "Star Trek" transporter, bringing people to us, taking us to other places, making us forget about the place we really are. So that's why you hear people shouting their personal business into their cell phones on trains and planes and on the street, secrets loud enough for the rest of us to hear even if we'd rather not. Don't forget where you are, dear listener, and drive carefully.
[Ed Gordon:] Clarence Page is a Washington-based syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune. This is NPR News.

[Farai Chideya:] Most African-American families have roots in traditional Christian faiths, but today black Americans are also Buddhists, Muslims, agnostics and atheists. Still, other blacks put their faith in mankind and call themselves humanists. So what is humanism and how is it different than traditional religion? NPR's Tony Cox talked to Norm Allen, who heads African Americans for Humanism. That's based in Buffalo, New York. And joining them was Anthea Butler, assistant professor of religion at the University of Rochester. We start out with Norm, who grew up in a Baptist family during the time of the Black Power movement.
[Mr. Norm Allen:] Well, I'm a member of the Council for Secular Humanism. We believe in the primacy of reason. We believe in the scientific methods of investigation. We believe that human beings can take control of their own destiny. That probably is opposed to, say, a type of religious humanism or a religion in general. So as humanists, we primarily are concerned with life in the here and now and what we can do as human beings to solve our problems.
[Cox:] Well, Anthea, help make the distinction for me even more so, if you can, between humanism and, say, organized religion.
[Professor Anthea Butler:] Well, humanism would have human agency as its focus. In other words, you wouldn't focus on a particular theistic type of being whatever that you might call that. For organized religion, let's say, you are organized in terms of hierarchies and groups with the top of the hierarchy, of course, being a deity, some type of figure that you would worship.
[Cox:] In this country African-Americans are generally identified when you start talking about religion with either Christianity or Islam and to a lesser extent Buddhism, but not a great deal do you hear about African-Americans and humanism. Norm, what's your thought about that and why that is?
[Mr. Norm Allen:] If you look at the statistics, most African-Americans do tend to be deeply religious. And if you look at the African-American community as far as humanist go, we tend to only be about four percent of that population when you look at most of the studies that have been conducted onto topic. However, our influence has been strong, and it's been strong not only in the civil rights movement but it's been strong in general throughout the community. For example, if you look at the civil rights movement, you'll see that a lot of people will look at Martin Luther King and numerous other religious figures who, of course, were extremely influential. But you also have secular humanists involved, such as A. Philip Randolph, James Farmer, James Foreman and numerous others. So though our numbers haven't been large, our influence has been great.
[Cox:] The question I have for you, though, is whether or not your message has been received in a strong way. Even though you have small numbers, the message is that getting through?
[Mr. Norm Allen:] Our message has been getting out there but we don't really have the resources that you'll find among organized religion. So we still tend not to be very well known throughout the community.
[Cox:] Well, Anthea, you are a professor of religion at the University of Rochester. Put it in your expert opinion for us why humanism has not caught on with the larger African-American community.
[Professor Anthea Butler:] I think historically what we could look at is people who've critiqued the sort of religious milieu African-Americans Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois and others. This has been a longstanding question because of issues of slavery, racism, the inherent evils of society, sometimes it has been caused by people who espoused religious beliefs. So I think the questions have always been there and the people have always been within the community. It's just that their voices have been sort of, in a way, muted by this broader discourse. And I'd also probably say the broader stereotypical notions of what African-Americans are. I always like to say to my students, when you look at a black person, just don't see a Baptist because that's not the truth.
[Cox:] Norm, for the masses of people in this country do you find perhaps that humanism as a concept is something that people just are not quite clear about?
[Mr. Norm Allen:] Well, yes, we do have that problem. In fact, some people within the humanist movement have said that trying to define humanism was like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. There are so many different kinds of humanism, or if you will, humanisms. I try to do what I can to get the message out in a very clear way. We have a newsletter and that goes out to various people who are interested in knowing more about what humanism is. So we have been able to spell it out. But the problem has been trying to get our message into the media, which has not always been receptive.
[Cox:] You know, earlier this year, National Public Radio, in fact, reported about the rising appeal of books that might be described as anti-religion. Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" is the best example of that. Anthea, is this a sign, an indication that this thought through this books is gaining traction?
[Professor Anthea Butler:] You know, I think it's always been there. What Dawson and Sam Harris and others have done is made public the discourse in a certain sort of way. And the way I like to tell my students, I think this is the backlash. It gives the sort of theocratic way of government and sort of evangelical push that we've had for the last 15 to 20 years to be involved in government. I think that people who hold to humanistic belief without believing in a divine entity would say that it's time for them to proselytize just as much as it's time for Christians to proselytize. The problem I think is that between the two groups the level of discourse at this point is more polemic than useful. And that's what I find problematic within the African-American community, because we've had to work through a lot of issues. I hope that our discourse could be a little bit more intellectual and not so much polemical.
[Cox:] Well, Norm, W.E.B. DuBois, as a humanist not withstanding the fact that he was one and he was obviously at the turn of the century and through the Harlem Renaissance how much of the issue of humanism and how widely accepted or not accepted it is within the African-American community, how much of that is generational? Think about grandmothers who go to the Baptist Church and, you know, you can't talk to them about humanism, can you?
[Mr. Norm Allen:] Well, it's very difficult. In fact, that is true. It does seem to be generational. And it seems to be even more so in other parts of the world. For example, if you look at Africa, you'll see that there are numerous humanist groups that are proliferating there. There are about now 60 humanist groups throughout the African continent, and they're almost all headed by young leaders, almost all coming straight out of the colleges. And so, yes, there is that generational divide.
[Cox:] Anthea Butler, Norm Allen, thank you very much. It was an enlightening conversation.
[Mr. Norm Allen:] Thank you.
[Farai Chideya:] That was NPR's Tony Cox speaking with Norman Allen, head of African-Americans For Humanism, also with Anthea Butler, a professor of religion at the University of Rochester.

[Renee Montagne:] Condoleezza Rice is in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk today to urge reconciliation among Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen in this oil-rich region north of Baghdad. And the secretary of state flew from Paris, where yesterday, more than $7 billion was pledged by the international community to help the Palestinians create their own state. Here to talk to us about that Paris conference is NPR's Linda Gradstein. Hello.
[Linda Gradstein:] Hi, Renee.
[Renee Montagne:] What has been the reaction in the West Bank and in Israel to this huge sum of money, considerably more than the Palestinians even were looking for?
[Linda Gradstein:] Well, Palestinians are extremely pleased. The Palestinian officials say it shows the commitment of the world to improving their economic situation and to helping them create an independent Palestinian state. At the same time, they say that unless Israel makes substantial changes on the ground — in other words, removing roadblocks and making it easier for Palestinians to move around the West Bank — that money won't really do all that much good. Israeli officials also welcomed the money and they say that they want life to improve for the Palestinians and they want an independent Palestinian economy so that Palestinians won't be dependent on Israel. But at the same time, a senior Israeli official said that they won't remove one roadblock unless the Palestinians show that they're really serious about cracking down on terrorist groups.
[Renee Montagne:] And the conference had barely finished when Israel launched separate air strikes in the Gaza Strip. What about that?
[Linda Gradstein:] Their target was the small radical Islamic Jihad group, which has been responsible for most of the rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel. Israeli officials say that over the past year, there have been about 2,000 rockets. These are small, crude homemade rockets. But recently, they say there have been new longer range rockets developed, and it's made life intolerable for thousands of people in the southern Israel. And if the rockets increase their range, it'll get worse. There has been really a lot of pressure from the Israeli public for Israel to do more. And some Israeli officials are even talking about a widespread military operation in Gaza. It seems that what they've decided, at least as a first step, is to really go after Islamic Jihad. One of those killed in the air strikes was the senior commander of Islamic Jihad. And Israeli military officials are calling the operation a huge success.
[Renee Montagne:] Of course, the militant Hamas organization continues to control the Gaza Strip. But how much support, eight months on, does it have?
[Linda Gradstein:] Well, interestingly, a poll published today found that support for Hamas has not decreased significantly despite the sanctions and despite the Annapolis peace conference. One of the ideas of the Annapolis peace conference was to encourage support for the rival Fatah movement. The sense you get when you travel around the West Bank in Gaza is that people are really fed up with both of those groups. They don't see leadership from Fatah or from Hamas and yet they don't see any alternative.
[Renee Montagne:] Well, the Annapolis conference was intended to jumpstart Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Has it worked so far?
[Linda Gradstein:] Not really. I mean, officials on both sides say it's too early; it's all going to take time. There was a meeting last week of the negotiating teams. And that meeting ended up quite acrimoniously with the Palestinians accusing Israel of building 300 new homes in a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem called Har Homa, which the Palestinians call Abu Ghneim. And, in fact, a senior Israeli official says that Israel will continue to build in built-up areas. There's a disagreement with the United States about this, but if Israel is going to keep expanding settlements, Israel says the Palestinians are not doing enough to crack down on militant groups. So it doesn't really seem to have jumpstarted much.
[Renee Montagne:] Linda, thank you. NPR's Linda Gradstein speaking from Jerusalem. This is NPR News.

[Melissa Block:] The New York Stock Exchange, Dow Jones and many, many investors are still trying to figure out exactly what went wrong yesterday. It's become clear that there was a series of cascading computer glitches. These errors compounded each other and made it difficult for many people to make the trades they wanted to. NPR Adam Davidson has that story.
[Adam Davidson:] Officials at the New York Stock Exchange and the Dow Jones are being quite careful about what they will say and declined invitations to be recorded. Dow Jones acknowledged yesterday that there was a problem with their computers. Today, we learned that the stock exchange had its own separate computer problem that affected trading. Holly Stark was on the Market Performance Committee at the New York Stock Exchange.
[Ms. Holly Stark:] I'm not exactly sure precisely what happened. Sorry.
[Adam Davidson:] She does know that yesterday afternoon, after 3:00 p.m., in the busiest hour just before the close of trading, a major computer system at the New York Stock Exchange began slowing down so much that it became, in some cases, unusable. Trading on the floor came to a total halted point. People wanted to sell stocks, other investors wanted to buy, but the computer couldn't handle the trades. Pretty soon, investors went to a very old system: paper and pencils. Stark knows the computer failed, but she says the New York Stock Exchange has not explained why.
[Ms. Holly Stark:] They're still looking at what happened, trying to point to exactly what fell down.
[Adam Davidson:] So the reason they're not telling us is they don't know themselves yet.
[Ms. Holly Stark:] I'm sure if there was a very simple explanation, we would have heard about it.
[Adam Davidson:] Here's what we do know. Around 2:00 yesterday, the computer that calculates the Dow Jones Industrial Average stopped working, so investors all over the world thought the Dow Jones average was not changing. They kept seeing the same number on their screens. They didn't know that the Dow was slowly, steadily creeping downwards because the computer wasn't telling them that. Around an hour later, just before 3:00, Dow Jones switched to a backup computer which was working. In an instant, the backup computed the right number for the Dow. Rather than that slow, steady decline, it looked at traders and investors like the Dow had fallen 200 points in less than 60 seconds. People thought the market was in freefall. So suddenly investors all over the world were trying to buy or sell stocks, or just log on to the computer to find out what was going on. The New York Stock Exchange system was overwhelmed and pretty much collapsed.
[Mr. Abelardo Gonzalez:] Once I sat down in my desk and PR went you need to drop whatever you're doing and look at this, that's when realized how big of an issue it was.
[Adam Davidson:] Around the same time, Abelardo Gonzalez saw that lots of other computer systems were also experiencing problems. He works for Keystone, a sort of Consumer Reports monitoring online trading sites like E-Trade, Ameritrade and lots of others. Keystone has computers all over the country which automatically login to online trading sites and make trades to see how well the sites are doing. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: The company Abelardo Gonzalez works for is called KEYNOTE.] And most of the time, all the online trading sites do pretty well. They execute a trade in 10 to 15 seconds, but not yesterday.
[Mr. Abelardo Gonzalez:] We saw some of our sites take upwards of a minute to execute the transaction.
[Adam Davidson:] A minute, of course, is an eternity on a day like yesterday. Gonzalez says, surely thousands of people lost hundreds of thousands of dollars because of those delays. Yesterday was by far the worst day of glitches in seven years, he says. And Gonzalez says the worst thing is that it's quite easy to imagine a much busier trading day. So how concerned should we be that the computers the financial markets depend on are not ready to handle a very big event?
[Mr. Abelardo Gonzalez:] Well, not panic, but it's definitely a wakeup call.
[Adam Davidson:] The New York Stock Exchange did issue a release, saying it's in the process of upgrading its computers. Adam Davidson, NPR News, New York.

[Steve Inskeep:] It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep.
[Renee Montagne:] NPR's Juan Forero reports.
[Juan Forero:] Protesters chanted no more FARC, no more FARC, referring to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a rebel group that's been kidnapping people for years. Here in the Venezuelan capital, more than 2,000 people, many of them Colombian, hit the streets. Among them was Alivio Cerna, a Colombian who's been here since 1957.
[Renee Montagne:] We want that all the people in Colombia can live in peace.
[Juan Forero:] Support was generated in recent weeks on Facebook and in the media. By Monday afternoon, police in Colombia said nearly five million people were protesting in that country, with many thousands more as far away as Tokyo, Washington and Paris. The FARC holds 750 hostages, many of them pawns the group uses to win the release of rebels in Colombian jails. Juan Forero, NPR News, Caracas, Venezuela.

[David Greene:] Scenes of West Baltimore's troubled neighborhoods do raise natural questions. One is why they seem heavily segregated generations after legal segregation ended.
[Steve Inskeep:] Richard Rothstein studied that question. He's with the Economic Policy Institute, and he says Baltimore neighborhoods reflect a national legacy of segregation. Generations ago, during President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the federal government started subsidizing a lot of housing. But they did it a certain way.
[Richard Rothstein:] The New Deal was a coalition of Northern Democrats and Southern Democrats. The Southern Democrats were segregationist, and in many cases, the Northern Democrats compromised with them in order to get housing programs enacted.
[Steve Inskeep:] From the 1930s onward, white people moved into new houses. Many were in new suburbs like Levittown, N.Y. Black people got public housing apartments in the same center cities where they already lived. Decades later, there's an enormous gap between the grandchildren of one group and the grandchildren of the other.
[Richard Rothstein:] In 1947, when Levittown was first opened, homes were sold to white, working-class families for about $8,000 apiece. That is about $125,000 today. African-Americans were prohibited from buying into those developments, even though they had the economic means to do so. Well, a half-century later, those homes are now selling for $500,000. They are no longer accessible for working-class families. We passed a law in 1968 saying that African-Americans now have the right to buy into Levittown. But giving them a right to buy into a place that's no longer affordable when they could have bought into it when it was affordable had they been permitted to do so is not a very meaningful right. In that half-century, the white families, working-class families who moved into Levittown gained equity appreciation of perhaps 350-400,000 dollars They used that wealth to send their children to college. They bequeathed it to their children and grandchildren. African-Americans living in crowded central city areas were able to accumulate none of that wealth. As a result, today, nationwide, African-American wealth is 5 percent of white family wealth. That enormous difference is entirely attributable to federal housing policy, to suburbanize the white population and keep African-Americans in central cities.
[Steve Inskeep:] Now, help me connect this history to the news because we've been focused on Baltimore because of a police force that is accused of well, a number of police officers are accused of killing a man, and we have reports of a pattern of this kind of abuse. What is the connection between historic housing segregation and historic wealth gaps and this kind of police behavior in a community?
[Richard Rothstein:] Well, the police behavior is something that should be remedied. It's a terrible criminal operation on the part of the police departments. But it doesn't start with police departments. When you have a low-income population concentrated in the area, little hope, unemployment rates in places like inner city of Baltimore are two and three times the rate for whites, well, you get behavior in those kind of communities that reinforces police hostility. It becomes a cycle of misbehavior and police aggression, and it's attributable to the concentration of disadvantaged families in very crowded inner-city communities.
[Steve Inskeep:] In recent days, have you found yourself yelling at the TV that everybody is missing the point?
[Richard Rothstein:] I try I hope I don't sound like I'm yelling.
[Steve Inskeep:] Muttering at the TV, let us say.
[Richard Rothstein:] Well, I do think that Americans have forgotten this history of a purposeful, racial segregation. You know, in 1970, during Richard Nixon's first term, he had a secretary of housing and urban development, George Romney, the father of the recent presidential candidate. Romney said that the federal government has created a white noose around African-American communities in urban areas, and it was the federal government's obligation to untie that noose. And he implemented a series of programs designed to force metropolitan areas to desegregate. He denied federal funds for sewers and for water projects to communities that didn't take action to desegregate, and he actually denied federal funds to Baltimore County because it refused to desegregate its area. Eventually, the Nixon administration reined him in. The program he was following was terminated. He was forced out of the secretary of housing and urban development, and we haven't had anything that aggressive since. But we once knew, the American public knew, even moderate Republicans like George Romney knew that the federal government had established the segregation, and they understood it was a federal government obligation to undo it. But since that time, we've forgotten this history, and we think somehow these ghettos arose by accident and there's nothing we can do about them to reverse the segregation.
[Steve Inskeep:] Richard Rothstein, thanks very much.
[Richard Rothstein:] Thank you.
[Steve Inskeep:] He's with the Economic Policy Institute.

[Ms. Patti Austin:] [Singing] There's a boat that's leaving soon for New York.
[Farai Chideya:] Singer Patti Austin is back with a CD that she calls "Avant Gershwin." It features big band renditions of some of George Gershwin's classic and sometimes controversial music. Now, Patti Austin was barely out of diapers when she started in the music business. She's the goddaughter of two musical legends, Quincy Jones and Dinah Washington. She told NPR's Tony Cox that growing up in that world gave her a deep respect for the classics. She says her love for entertaining is in her blood.
[Ms. Patti Austin:] I call it the ham gene. It's from the womb. I loved to perform. And my mom would go to Woolworth's and she would inevitably go to the sewing department. And they always had Muzak in the stores. And I knew pretty much every song ever made because my dad played music all the time in the house. So I knew all kinds of music. And I would begin to perform with whatever the Muzak was. And inevitably, my mom would return from the findings department of the sewing section and there would be about four or five people standing around me. I'd be building a nice crowd and working my show.
[Tony Cox:] Just singing and doing your thing.
[Ms. Patti Austin:] Singing my little heart out. Looking for an audience. Just a ham.
[Tony Cox:] Now, I understand that your first professional, let's put it that way, debut was at the Apollo.
[Ms. Patti Austin:] Yes. And that was completely by accident. In those days they used to do six shows a day and the show would usually consist of a female vocalist, male vocalist, big band, some kind of dancer and a comedian. On this particular day, the singer was Dinah, and Dinah Washington was one of the people that my dad had worked with when he was a jazz musician. Because by the time we moved out to Long Island, there were no more big bands really to speak of. So he stopped playing, stopped being a musician completely at that point. And so we went backstage to meet Dinah. And Dinah dared me to sing. She was really being facetious with me. She leaned over and she said, hi, I'm Dinah Washington and I'm a singer. And everybody in the dressing room laughed and I said, well, I'm Patti Austin and I'm a singer too. And everybody just kind of looked at me like Scooby Doo, particularly my parents who were like what is she doing? And Dinah said, oh really? Well, if you're a singer, then you're going to go out and you're going to sing on the next show. And I said, okay. And totally fearless and precautious, and her musical director walked by the door and she stopped him and said, this is Patti Austin and she's a singer and she's going to sing on the next show. And he leaned over and he continued being facetious, and said, what are you going to sing? I said, Teach Me Tonight. So everybody started laughing and he said, yeah, what key do you sing it in? And I said, B-flat.
[Tony Cox:] Oh my.
[Ms. Patti Austin:] Because at that time I knew more about music than I knew about reading words. Because I would sit with my dad when he would practice for hours and he would show me what every note meant, and he'd put a metronome on and he'd make me keep time with the metronome and he'd play notes and have me sing them back. And so Dinah calls me onstage and I go out to sing the song and the band starts playing the intro, and the musical director forgot to tell them that I was doing it in a different key and so I stopped them. I said, you guys are in the wrong key. And the audience went wild.
[Tony Cox:] Oh, gosh.
[Ms. Patti Austin:] And they started the song up again in the right key and I sang the song in the right key, and everybody loved it and I ran off the stage and into the arms of Sammy Davis Jr., who was waiting on his knees. So I thought he was actually my height. And I ran to him, and he almost was my height actually at that time. And he grabbed me and picked me up and said, oh my God, you've got to do my show next week. And he took me out into the hallway off the wings of the theatre and went up to my parents and said, can she do my show next week? So that's how I got started in showbiz. [Singing] Swanee, how I love you. How I love you, my dear old Swanee...
[Tony Cox:] Let's talk a little bit about this new CD that you have, the Gershwin. There are some songs on there that you have how should I say this? Patti Austinized?
[Ms. Patti Austin:] What a fabulous term! I shall use that forevermore. I'm going to Austinize it.
[Tony Cox:] I guess you did.
[Ms. Patti Austin:] My goodness...
[Tony Cox:] "Swanee" was one of the songs that you've made what I thought was an interesting change to. Tell us about that.
[Ms. Patti Austin:] Yeah. Everybody's kind of it's interesting that it's interesting to everybody that I did it. And I was hoping that it would get that response, because one of the things I wanted to accomplish with this project was to take Gershwin tunes that have really kind of become hackney for people to hear. Take those tunes and give them a different spirit and a different meaning. And, of course, you know, many black people tend to shudder when they hear "Swanee."
[Tony Cox:] Yes.
[Ms. Patti Austin:] They get very nervous. They think that they're going to hear a lot of banjos and they start freaking out. They think of lynchings, the South, segregation...
[Tony Cox:] Al Jolson.
[Ms. Patti Austin:] Al Jolson, blackface. All of that goes with that song. And I have the exact same impression of the song because the only versions I've ever heard of it, people have been either looking like they're in a minstrel show or actually are in a minstrel show. So my intention was to reconnect that song to what's happening now and the way people feel about the South now. And a lot of the battles that were fought there were resolved in the South before they were resolved in the North, because the racism that existed in the South was very blatant. You never wondered if somebody didn't like you because you were black. You knew immediately.
[Tony Cox:] So you changed the...
[Ms. Patti Austin:] So...
[Tony Cox:] You changed the words.
[Ms. Patti Austin:] I wanted to change the perception of the song and make it a joyous celebration of the South, and that's really what the song is about. It's somebody talking about, I love and cherish my homeland, my home place, because my parents are there and my roots are there and my life is there. And that's really what "Swanee" is saying. But unfortunately, it had that word in it. That mammy word.
[Tony Cox:] The M word.
[Ms. Patti Austin:] The M-word. The mammy word, just took all of that out of it and that, you know, as a black person, your ears went what? With my who? I don't think so. So that is mama now. And we and in changing that, just changing that word automatically changed the connotations that are in there. [Singing] Going home. Won't be long. And then, on top of all of that, musically I wanted to put a hump on it. I wanted it to a have groove because the South has a groove. The South is all about a rhythm. And the rhythm isn't... [Singing] Swanee, how I love you, how I... No, no, no. No, no, no, no. That's not the rhythm of the South I know. The rhythm of the South I know is grooving. So that's why we put the groove under it that we did. [Singing] How I love you, how I love you. Take me to that good old Swanee shore.
[Tony Cox:] You sometimes have fun singing what you have described onstage as the male version or the male part of a song.
[Ms. Patti Austin:] [Singing] Jonah, he lived in a whale. Whoah, Jonah, he lived in a whale. For he made his home in that fish's abdomen, oh, Jonah he lived in a whale. We have a "Porgy and Bess Medley" and I decided in the medley that I would do most of the guy's parts because most of the women's songs in "Porgy and Bess" are about, Lord, don't leave me, oh, my life is horrible. Don't go away, Oh Lord Jesus, don't take him away. So, it's like, we do that enough in real life. I figured I wanted to play the villain. And so "Sportin'Life" has all this great villainous, creepy, wonderful lyrics. And so I decided that was the character I wanted to portray more than the suffering woman. So I do "Ain't Necessarily So." [Singing] It ain't necessarily so. I got plenty o'nothing. And nuttin's plenty for me. I got no car, I got no mule, got no misery. And Porgy sings like I got plenty of nothing, which is kind of like my mantra of life. And so I wanted to do that because I love what that lyric says and represents. [Singing] I got no lock on the door. That's no way to be...
[Tony Cox:] It's hard to imagine the great Patti Austin having a what did you say? -a whole lot of nothing?
[Ms. Patti Austin:] I've got plenty of nothing. I do, but I think the point of the lyric is that nothing is everything. You know, the stuff that we think is everything is really nothing, and the stuff that's nothing is really everything. [Singing] I've got my guy, got my song, got heaven the whole day long.
[Farai Chideya:] That was Patti Austin speaking with NPR's Tony Cox. Her latest recording is called, "Avant Gershwin."
[Ms. Patti Austin:] [Singing] Got my song. Oh, I got plenty o'nothing. Nothin's plenty for me. I've got the sun, got the moon, got the deep blue sea. The folks with plenty o'plenty got to pray the whole darn day. Seems with plenty...
[Farai Chideya:] That is our show for today, and boy, didn't it swing? And thanks for sharing your time with us. To listen to the show, visit npr.org. NEWS & NOTES was created by NPR News and the African-American Public Radio Consortium. Tomorrow, a new take on ending domestic violence.

[Robert Siegel:] Dr. David Cole is chairman of the Center for Automotive Research; it's a non-profit group in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Dr. Cole, these cutbacks at GM are going to create more retirees. Can the GM pension fund meet its obligations in the coming years?
[Dr. David Cole:] I think the pensions are really not the major problem here. This has been booked; money's been set aside for that. What has really been a problem is the excess capacity, the health-care costs. Those are the more dominant factors than pension. But the number of people that they're taking out is pretty much along the normal attrition curve anyway. These are people that they expected to leave, but what they're doing this now with is some very discreet plant eliminations. But if you don't have capacity in line with your market, you have a problem in this business.
[Robert Siegel:] Let's talk about health-care costs first. When GM renegotiated the health benefits its retirees receive, which I believe used to be free essentially...
[Dr. David Cole:] Essentially free. It was a very, very low co-pay.
[Robert Siegel:] ...the columnist George Will wrote that GM was getting back into the automaking business and out of the health-care business.
[Dr. David Cole:] That's right. Well...
[Robert Siegel:] Can GM continue to provide health-care coverage for a million people and be a competitive auto company?
[Dr. David Cole:] I don't think they can provide health care in the same model that they had been historically. You would guarantee somebody a level of care forever. We're moving rather quickly, I think, to a defined contribution in the sense that, `Here's some money to use for health care. When it runs out, good luck.'And that's really realistic and is pretty much happening across the country today.
[Robert Siegel:] Now you spoke also of excess capacity. Beyond cutting back capacity, does GM have a plant to qualitatively change its operations, so that it will regain some capacity or be more competitive in the future?
[Dr. David Cole:] Well, actually GM, from an operational standpoint-and if you look at product development, product quality, plant productivity-is very, very much world class. And what they are is kind of like an Olympic swimmer that's trying to carry some lead weight while they swim across the river, and that lead weight represents, for example, this year almost $6 billion in health-care costs or excess capacity that is just not being used. And, at the same time, they're working very hard on the revenue side, which is developing products that you can sell profitably and people want to buy. And that still is a continuing challenge for the industry.
[Robert Siegel:] But before we leave the question of health costs, one could say that GM accepted the liability to pay all this out in health-care costs by winning some concessions on wages, so that, in effect, this is part of the picture of compensation that it's negotiated.
[Dr. David Cole:] Yeah, it was part of the total compensation. And I think, realistically, when this began was during the time of the oligopoly of the Big Three, where you could kind of do anything you wanted and ultimately pass those costs along to the consumer.
[Robert Siegel:] Should we look at these GM cuts and say the GM of the future will simply employ fewer autoworkers, and the deal they get, in terms of pension or health benefits, will simply not be as good as it used to be?
[Dr. David Cole:] Absolutely right.
[Robert Siegel:] It's not conceivable that there could be some renaissance of the company that would bring it back up-bring back 30, 50,000 jobs over the next few years?
[Dr. David Cole:] I think the basic-there are two phrases that I would use. It's, `Change or die,'or, `Shrink to grow.'`Shrink to grow'means that you get to a profitable, sustainable basis, and then potentially you could grow in the future. But absent a shrinkage, where you have an alignment between capacity and size of the market that you have, you're in deep trouble. And I think GM has to restructure as a matter of necessity. And absent, really, a fundamental restructuring to a new business model, it would not likely survive.
[Robert Siegel:] Well, Dr. Cole, thanks a lot for talking with us today.
[Dr. David Cole:] My pleasure to be with you.
[Robert Siegel:] That's Dr. David Cole speaking to us from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is the chairman of a non-profit group, the Center for Automotive Research.

[Michele Norris:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris. And we're going to begin this Fourth of July in Afghanistan, where there are unconfirmed and sometimes conflicting reports about missing members of a US special operations team. The four-man team disappeared last week. A helicopter was shot down while attempting a rescue. Yesterday the military announced that one member of that team has been found alive. Today a provincial governor said that a second member had been located and was being treated in a remote village. But an American official is disputing that. Also today, the BBC is reporting that the bodies of two other members of the team have been found. Andrew North is following the story from Kabul for the BBC.
[Mr. Andrew North:] The latest that I have been hearing from American government sources, and they're speaking anonymously, is that the US military has now accounted for three members of the Special Forces team. One of them, of course, was rescued on Saturday. But they now say that two members of the team have been found dead. These sources haven't given any other details, but one of them described it as a terrible tragedy. And as to the fourth member of the team, it is still unclear as to his whereabouts or his condition. Now the governor of Kunar Province, he has said he has had reports of a wounded American serviceman being treated by villagers in a remote part of the province. He says that his men received this information on Sunday. But it is still not clear whether that may refer to the serviceman who has already been rescued or whether it is evidence that a fourth member of the team is still alive. And the other thing we should make clear is that the American military, at the moment, is still not confirming any details of the search for these men.
[Michele Norris:] Also today, Afghan officials said that 17 civilians died in a bombing raid last week not far from where all of this is taking place. Has the US military had anything to say about that?
[Mr. Andrew North:] Yes, it has. In fact, it released a statement today regretting the loss of innocent lives, was the words it used, in this strike. Now to be clear on this, what it also said was-it is insistent that it did hit a legitimate target. It said that this was a hideout for people it calls terrorists. But it said, in the process of bombing this target, innocent civilians were killed. This is against a background of continuing military operations in Kunar Province. Indeed, those Special Forces who went missing, my understanding from talking to US military officials is that they were involved in a mission to hunt down some senior militant figures. Kunar has long been seen as a problem area, as something of a haven for militants. And the US military was trying to step up efforts to, if you like, end this sanctuary, and this is what the Special Forces were involved in. But at the same time, will carry out the search for them. They have continued with some elements of this operation.
[Michele Norris:] The Kunar Province is in northeastern Afghanistan. It's near the region in Pakistan where al-Qaeda leaders are thought to be hiding out. Does al-Qaeda seem to be moving back and forth across this rather porous border?
[Mr. Andrew North:] There are certainly many reports that al-Qaeda may have influence there in many different ways. There may be individual members of al-Qaeda who may be crisscrossing backwards and forwards across the border, or they may be providing support to these militant groups. I mean, what you have to remember is that you can't really draw a distinction a lot of the time between al-Qaeda and Taliban. But there are certainly concerns that some al-Qaeda influences there may have grown.
[Michele Norris:] The BBC's Andrew North in Kabul. Andrew, thank you.
[Mr. Andrew North:] Thank you.

[Steve Inskeep:] NPR's Business News starts with rising computer prices. A component used to make computers has become more expensive. The reason why, is around the world in Southeast Asia. NPR's Wendy Kaufman reports.
[Wendy Kaufman, Byline:] Thailand has been devastated by the worst floods in more than half a century. The death toll exceeds 600, and the economic impact has been severe. The country is a major producer of computer hard drives that has been making about 45 percent of the world's supply. But production and the supply chain have been badly disrupted, and with fewer hard drives being produced, prices are going up. Hard drives represent about seven to ten percent of the wholesale cost of a computer. Some small computer makers are already increasing the price consumers will pay. Loren Loverde, an analyst at IDC, suggests that other PC makers may choose to install smaller hard drives or lower quality graphics processors in order to avoid raising prices. So here's Loverde's advice. If you need an external hard drive right now, spend the extra money and buy it. Ditto for a PC.
[Loren Loverde:] But if you don't need a PC right away, you may be able to get a more capable, even more affordable system, in the middle or late part of 2012.
[Wendy Kaufman, Byline:] By then, production of hard drives should be back to normal. What's more, Loverde says Microsoft is expected to release a new operating system in the middle of next year, and computer makers are trying to build more tablet-like features into their PCs. Wendy Kaufman, NPR News.

[Melissa Block:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
[Michele Norris:] And I'm Michele Norris. They're known as ghost nets. Every year, fishing boats lose or abandon nets that can stretch for miles in the open ocean, and as they drift, they sweep up fish, turtles, sea birds and whales. Until recently, nobody knew how to find these nets. Now a team of American scientists says it has learned how to track their movements through the Pacific Ocean. NPR's John Nielsen reports.
[John Nielsen Reporting:] Mary Donohue, a marine biologist, used to lead a team of divers whose job it was to keep isolated coral reefs in the Hawaiian islands clear of ghost nets. She says it was an impossible job.
[Ms. Mary Donohue:] When you think of an old fishing net, you think of maybe one piece or two, but there are just hundreds of thousands of pounds of this gear, and it's on nearly every island and on nearly every coral reef.
[Nielsen:] At times, these ghost nets balled up into blobs of whitish nylon that Donohue says could weigh a ton and drift 60 feet beneath the surface of the water.
[Ms. Mary Donohue:] And what happens is they roll along the reef like a giant bulldozer. There's just this swath of broken coral and scoured bottom and animals here and there.
[Nielsen:] The divers on the ghost net team worked for the National Marine Fisheries Service. Armed with knives and rust-proof scissors, they kept an eye out for man-eating sharks and critically endangered Hawaiian monk seals, especially the ones with fishing nets wrapped around their necks like nooses.
[Ms. Mary Donohue:] Sometimes, even, there are two or three inches of skin over the piece that's entangled around the seal's neck, so it's almost like, you know, digging around in there and doing surgery to get the piece of netting off of the animal.
[Nielsen:] Donohue, who now works for the Sea Grant program at the University of Hawaii, says the ghost net problem didn't exist back when fishing nets were made of biodegradable materials like hemp. Now, however, nets are made of nylon and other substances designed to last basically forever. Nobody knows exactly how many ghost nets there are in the world's oceans or how much damage they are doing. Also, until recently, nobody even knew where they were, according to Tom Veenstra. He's the leader of a federally funded effort to find ghost nets in the North Pacific.
[Mr. Tom Veenstra:] Yeah, it's your typical needle in a haystack. People don't quite realize how large the North Pacific Ocean actually is; it's huge. And we know the nets are out there. If they're widespread, it's not even worth thinking of going out to find them. You just happen-it'd be happenstance that you would run across one.
[Nielsen:] Veenstra's team just made that haystack much smaller. First, armed with satellite readings of ocean temperatures, climate patterns, currents, winds and wave heights, they built a computer model. It predicted that in many winters these forces would push ghost nets and other debris into places called convergence zones, north of the Hawaiian islands. To see if the model was right, the team tried an unusual test. Late last winter Veenstra and a colleague named Jim Churnside went to Hawaii and boarded a research plane operated by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. The plane bristled with specialized sensors and high-resolution cameras. But when the plane took off, the pilots didn't get their flight plan from Veenstra but from a satellite expert sitting in an office in suburban Maryland. He was using the computer model to guide the plane to where the ghost nets were supposed to be. Veenstra says he say nothing at first. And then on the horizon, he saw a lot of birds. Then one of his cameras photographed what might have been a ghost net and then another and then another.
[Mr. Tom Veenstra:] In the three flights we took, roughly 2,000 sightings that we had. We're now going through the data and we expect that number to increase.
[Nielsen:] Jim Churnside said he saw at least a hundred balled-up fishing nets in these floating landfills, along with a lot of other kinds of trash.
[Mr. Jim Churnside:] Plastic bags, plastic bottles, oil pads that they use to soak up oil from surface spills, one life ring without a body in it. And we saw one drift net that was 2 to 300 meters long that was still stretched out. You could still see the whole line of floats, so it was, you know, still presumably fairly efficiently fishing.
[Nielsen:] Veenstra says he's disturbed to discover that these ghost nets are converging on one of the more biologically rich parts of the Pacific, an area known to teem with fish, birds, turtles and whales. But he also feels vindicated because now he knows where the nets are.
[Mr. Tom Veenstra:] It's actually in an area that maybe we can go clean it up. Maybe it's economically feasible to now take a vessel or a number of vessels and send them out in this area and actually do some mitigation efforts at sea.
[Nielsen:] Meanwhile, back in Hawaii, Mary Donohue says she hopes this cleanup starts fast. The longer it takes, the closer those balled-up ghost nets will get to the Hawaiian coral reefs and to the Hawaiian monk seals that live in them. John Nielsen, NPR News, Washington.

[Michel Martin:] In a few minutes, we'll meet one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. And that reminded us that, often, a movement becomes identified with a key word or phrase. In the civil rights era, that phrase was we shall overcome. Ironically, the song that gave rise to the phrase has become intertwined with prolonged litigation. But yesterday, a federal judge in New York signed an order that puts it into the public domain. Rick Karr reports.
[Rick Karr, Byline:] A couple of music publishing companies claimed that they owned the copyright on a version of "We Shall Overcome" from 1963. It's credited to a group of writers, including the late Pete Seeger.
[Pete Seeger:] [Singing] We shall overcome.
[Rick Karr, Byline:] But even Seeger knew that the song predated his version.
[Pete Seeger:] It was known among the food and tobacco workers, mainly Negro union members. And I heard them singing it in 1947.
[Rick Karr, Byline:] Last year, musician and filmmaker Isaias Gamboa filed suit to strip the song of copyright. He based his claim on years of research for a documentary film about the song's history. The case was set to go to trial next month until Gamboa laid out his evidence in a deposition.
[Isaias Gamboa:] One of the things that I opened with is there's only one truth. And somebody here is telling the truth and somebody isn't.
[Rick Karr, Byline:] Gamboa found lots of older versions of "We Shall Overcome." The judge in the case had already stripped copyright from the song's first and most famous verse. After Gamboa's deposition, the music publishers backed down. Now that the song's in the public domain, Gamboa says, anyone can use it, like the dance student who contacted him last year.
[Isaias Gamboa:] He wanted to perform "We Shall Overcome" in a dance recital for his final. And his professor told him he could not do so unless he had a clearance from the people who were claiming the copyrights. And it broke his heart.
[Rick Karr, Byline:] Gamboa says he's not interested in damages, but the judge still has one decision to make how much money the music publishers, who collected well over a million dollars in royalties from the copyright, owe attorney's fees and court costs. For NPR News, I'm Rick Karr.
[Mahalia Jackson:] [Singing] We shall overcome, oh, Lord, one day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[Guy Raz:] Copenhagen dominated the news this week. But the big story on the domestic front turned out to be health care.
[Senator Harry Reid:] This bill will do so many good things for so many people. Some on the right think this bill goes too far. To them I say, you have a lack of understanding what the problems in America are today.
[Senator Mitch Mc Connell:] If they were proud of this bill, they wouldn't be doing it this way. They wouldn't be jamming it through in the middle of the night on the last weekend before Christmas. This bill is a legislative train wreck of historic proportions.
[Guy Raz:] Joining us now to talk about this and other stories from the week is James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic, and our news analyst here on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Jim, have you been outside yet today?
[Mr. James Fallows:] Awkward question. I watched my wife as she shoveled the walk. I have the ideal marriage.
[Guy Raz:] All right. Well, let's start with health care, Jim. A dramatic turn. This morning, the Democrats got 60 votes, the votes they needed, picking up Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson's support.
[Mr. James Fallows:] Well, I think that, you know, this is something the Democrats and the Obama administration had been saying all along, that it would be close, but finally they would make the compromises on abortion, on the public option, on everything else necessary to hold their 60 votes together. I think what's worth mentioning right now, apart from all the merits of health reform, which we'll discuss for weeks and months to come, is the procedural issue. You know, we've been so used to hearing about 60 votes is being what's necessary to do anything in the Senate.
[Guy Raz:] Right.
[Mr. James Fallows:] You know, historically, there had been the role to cut off the Senate has unlimited debate. And so to end that, there had to be a cloture vote, which until 1975 was 67 votes, a two-thirds majority. And since then, it's been 60 votes. But until, really, the Clinton administration, it was done only rarely. I worked for Jimmy Carter long ago when it was maybe eight or 10 times per year. Starting really with Bill Clinton's time in office, and ever since then, there's been this sense that to do anything, to confirm a Supreme Court appointment, to get anybody appointed, to do any sorts of bill, you had to have this supermajority. And it's had, I would argue, a kind of, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, it has a distorting effect on the way we do business. It makes it hard to direct any public attention on things that need to be done.
[Guy Raz:] Jim, going back to Copenhagen for a moment. As we just heard in David Kestenbaum's report, there had been this huge rift between China and the U.S. over the issue of verification. Is that rift now closed?
[Mr. James Fallows:] I think it is a very important rift. And I think the report by from Copenhagen portrayed it accurately. This is in a way the perfect storm, if you will, of problems for China. On the one hand, data coming out of China are admitted even by the Chinese to be very, very suspect. For example, a pollution reading above 100 in Beijing would qualify as a polluted day. So day after day, the readings would always be 99, and all sorts of other illustrations of that sort. So to have any agreement with China, it has to be somehow testable. On the other hand, there is still, even in modern China, this almost this very partly understandable, partly primitive fear of just having foreigners go around the country. The fact that Google Earth can show things in the country that people have never known about is still very disturbing. And so, the way to solve this gap of being able to prove things from China without offending China's sense of security and national dignity, that is a difficult problem and will be a significant one going forward.
[Guy Raz:] Hmm. An interesting story, Jim, out of Iraq this past week. Insurgents apparently were able to hack into video and then intercept video from an American predator drone, using a piece of computer software that they bought off the Internet for $26.
[Mr. James Fallows:] I have a bulging file in my office, back when I used to keep files with paperclips, of the so-called weapons of the week sorts of countermeasures like this. Certainly, back in the Vietnam War with bamboo sticks and other things of the sort, the adversaries, they were able to overcome America's vast high-tech arsenal. And this is the fundamental challenge for a technological power like the U.S. militarily. We have the huge advantage in information technology and weaponry, and sometimes there are very cheap ways to thwart the advantage we have. So I'm sure that coping with this asymmetrical warfare is going to be the next headache for the Pentagon.
[Guy Raz:] That's James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic, and our news analyst here on the weekend. Jim, stay warm.
[Mr. James Fallows:] Same to you, Guy.

[Neal Conan:] I'm Neal Conan in Washington. This week's report from the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog bolsters beliefs that Iran continues work on nuclear weapons and ballistic missile delivery systems. The United States, Britain, France and Germany all expressed varying degrees of alarm and vowed to find ways to pressure Iran. But while more sanctions would hurt, few believe they would change Iran's policy. Israeli officials speak more and more openly about military strikes, but attacks would not go unanswered and might set Iran back for no more than two or three years. Another approach is to support the Iranian opposition in an Arab spring-style movement, which might not work and, even if it does, might destabilize a government that's already acquired nuclear weapons. Some argue that Iran can be deterred by the threat of retaliation, but the stakes are for Israel are very, very high. One or two nuclear weapons could effectively destroy the country. So what's the least bad option to deal with Iran's nuclear ambitions? Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Later in the program, the lack of ice exposes coastal towns in Alaska to storm surge, and the ins and outs of confidentiality agreements. But first Iran. We begin with NPR foreign correspondent Mike Shuster, who's back with us here in Studio 3A. Hey Mike.
[Mike Shuster:] Hi, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] And it more details, more evidence, but no smoking gun from the IAEA.
[Mike Shuster:] That's right, lots and lots more details. Essentially, this report was far larger than any of the other prior reports from the IAEA going back eight years. And they basically laid out what their suspicions have been all these years based on interviews with people who had some secret connection to nuclear activities in Iran and based on what the IAEA said was more than 1,000 pages of documentation, intelligence from, it said, 10 member states of the International Atomic Energy Agency. So lots and lots of information, but the nothing solidly conclusive. Essentially, the report said there was a systematic nuclear weapons program before 2003. In 2003, it was abruptly disclosed, much to the chagrin of the Iranians, and then shut down. But it is believed, and there is good evidence, according to the IAEA, that elements of a nuclear weapons program have may have continued. And it wasn't really conclusive about what's actually happening now. So it's very hard to conclude that they have a full-scale nuclear weapons program. But there is no question that there are many aspects of nuclear weapons technologies and projects that the Iranians have worked on.
[Neal Conan:] There's also no timetable in there, but no surprise, Iran condemned the IAEA report. Russia, though, had harsh words, as well, and rejected any new sanctions, as they described it, an attempt at regime change.
[Mike Shuster:] Well, the Russians have been resisting sanctions against Iran all along. There have been four sets of U.N. Security Council sanctions. They have been relatively moderate in order crafted by the United States and other states in order to get the agreement of Russia and China. The U.N. Security Council sanctions of course carry the force of international law, but they're not strong. Unilateral sanctions that the United States has imposed on Iran are much more powerful. They have much more to do with the banking system now, and the United States, for several years, has been trying to force third-party banks in Europe and Asia to stop cooperating with the Iranians and making it much more difficult for them to carry out some of these suspected activities.
[Neal Conan:] Would it be fair to say that getting the Security Council to go along with internationally agreed sanctions would be a slow process at best?
[Mike Shuster:] It's always a slow process, and it's doubtful that there you can imagine the difficulty that there may be in getting a fifth round of sanctions. I think that the United States, the Obama administration has been careful in its response, not too aggressive at all about this, I think waiting to see where things move with it. The it's clear that the Obama administration wants to tighten screws on the banking side, and that may be the thing that they focus on.
[Neal Conan:] In the meantime, Israel Israeli officials raising questions about how long they can wait.
[Mike Shuster:] Yeah, that there was a lot of talk and a lot of reporting about both Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Defense Minister Ehuk Barak reported to believe that there should be they should mount an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. But I'll tell you something that's very interesting, Neal. Today, it was reported that the head of Israel's atomic energy commission this is after the report came out, his name is Uzi Alum said Israel can't afford to act alone. We must guard against hysteria. Iran is not an existential threat to Israel. I think that there is, at the very least, an emerging debate, now, in Israel about what should be done.
[Neal Conan:] Well, we want to focus on what's the least best option. We have a couple of people who have studied this question with us here in Studio 3A. We begin with Robert Kagan, senior fellow at the Brooking Institution's Foreign Policy Program, also an advisor to the campaign of GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney, though he speaks for himself here. And Robert Kagan, nice to have you back on TALK OF THE NATION.
[Robert Kagan:] Thanks for having me.
[Neal Conan:] What's the least bad option?
[Robert Kagan:] You know, all the options are bad. I mean, you're absolutely right in your lead-in to this discussion. I think we have to think about what it means for Iran to get a nuclear weapon and work backwards from there. I think there's a couple of things we know for sure, especially after all the turmoil of the Arab spring. I think the odds are very high that Saudi Arabia would turn to getting itself a nuclear weapon and perhaps other countries in the region, as well. So we really are talking about not just Iran getting nuclear weapons but the nuclear weapons proliferating throughout the region. At a time when America's sort of commitment to allies in the region is under question, not necessarily deservedly so because a lot of this has to do with what's happened in the Arab spring, the further step of Iran sort of winning in this battle to get a nuclear weapon could have a very unsettling effect on the region. And then of course, as you say, as you mentioned, there is what is Israel going to do. So when you add all that up, I think the least bad option, obviously, is to convince the Iranians not to do it, if you can, through tougher sanctions and international isolation. that's going to be difficult. But the least bad option may in fact, at the end of the day, be some kind of military action undertaken, I would say preferably by the United States, not by Israel.
[Neal Conan:] Aaron David Miller also with us here in Studio 3A, he is former U.S. Middle East peace negotiator, author of the forthcoming book "Can America Have Another Great President?" Nice to have you back on TALK OF THE NATION.
[Aaron David Miller:] Pleasure to be here, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] And sanctions, as international sanctions unlikely to be agreed anytime soon. There are unilateral sanctions. What's going to work?
[Aaron David Miller:] Well, there are three or four possible options. Sanctions will not work, it seems to me. Diplomacy cannot work, in large part because the Iranians use the absence of a meaningful relationship with the United States to validate their own legitimacy. They need the anti-American trope, particularly this magocracy in Tehran. Cyber-worm, technical sabotage has clearly helped to retard, but in the end, given enough time, it will not prevent the Iranians, should they want to weaponize, from weaponizing. The default position, it seems to me, is military action. I don't come to that conclusion happily. I think there's certainly no reason for it now. But I think if, in fact, the Israelis or the Americans choose to exercise a military option, then they have to ask themselves some basic questions: one, will it work? That is to say, can they absolutely not just retard but undermine and destroy Iran's capacity to produce a weapon, or are we just mowing the grass, and will have to cut the grass periodically when the Iranians reseed? Second, what's it going to cost? When America acts, the issue is not just can we, it's what is it going to cost us. And then the third consideration is: Is the alternative of not acting worse, whatever the risks? And those are three very important questions that need, particularly in the wake of Afghanistan and Iraq, the longest wars in American history in which victory is determined by not can we win, but when can we leave, we need to do some very hard thinking before we get into this with the Iranians.
[Neal Conan:] Mike Shuster, it's been interesting. Many American military figures active duty and retired generals and admirals have said: wait a minute. We don't want to get involved in a conflict with Iran.
[Mike Shuster:] That's right, and I think that has to do with the great difficulties that the U.S. military encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan, the fiasco of much of what happened in those two countries. And they I think that this has been gamed out in many places, in the Pentagon and elsewhere, about what an attack on Iran would look like and what benefits it would get. And it seemed that the at least, recent top brass have come to the conclusion that they don't want to do this again. I mean, after all, Iran is a much larger country, geographically, than Iraq. It has three times the population. It is there are very mountainous areas in parts of it. And it would be very difficult, I think experts believe, to mount an effective attack on the nuclear weapons...
[Neal Conan:] We're talking airstrikes. Nobody's talking invasion.
[Mike Shuster:] The discussion has been about airstrikes, but who knows whether that once that begins, given the nature of the problem, the fact that it's all spread out, the hostility the long-term hostility between the United States and Iran, it's, I think, very difficult to predict and perhaps contain a conflict like that.
[Neal Conan:] Robert Kagan?
[Robert Kagan:] Well, I think you have to think about that going in. Obviously, things don't end necessarily the way you want them to. I wonder whether the military's views may be changing a little bit for a couple of reasons. One is ironically, the impending withdrawal from Iraq. One of the reasons the military's been very wary of getting into a conflict with Iran is worry about what they might do to U.S. troops in Iraq. Well, as it happens, starting in January of next year, there won't be any American troops in Iraq. That's one thing. The other thing is the military's gotten very upset with Iran, to say the least, because of activities by Iranian-backed elements, if not Iranian elements themselves, killing American troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I think, obviously, no one wants to send in 500,000 troops to Iran, but the possibility of an airstrike, especially with the capabilities the United States has, I agree with you, you have to think about the next step that might have to be taken. I wonder whether the calculations might be shifting a little bit.
[Neal Conan:] One of the effects you could guarantee is an immense spike in the price of oil.
[Robert Kagan:] Which apparently is deterring the administration at the moment, even from moving ahead with another round of unilateral sanctions against the central bank. There is this concern, at a time of economic difficulty in the world, precisely about a spike in oil prices.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking about the least bad option with Iran and its nuclear ambitions. Our guests: Robert Kagan you just heard from the Brookings Institution; also with us Aaron David Miller, public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center's Middle East Program; NPR's foreign correspondent Mike Shuster also with us. We'd like to hear from you, as well, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan. Iran's president pushed back this week after the U.N. report that detailed Tehran's progress toward a nuclear weapon. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his country will not retreat one iota from its nuclear ambitions, though he continues to argue those are strictly for peaceful purposes. So what now? China and Russia insist more sanctions will not solve anything. The U.S. and other Western countries say they're considering their options, including new sanctions. Some in Israel's government warn of a pre-emptive military strike. What's the least bad option to deal with Iran? 800-989-8255. Email talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation at our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Our guests are NPR foreign correspondent Mike Shuster; Aaron David Miller, former U.S. Middle East peace negotiator, now public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center's Middle East Program; and Robert Kagan, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, author of "The Return of History" and "The End of Dreams" and advisor to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who is here speaking for himself. Let's get a caller in, and we'll begin with Francesco, Francesco with us from San Francisco.
[Francesco:] Hi, before President before election, the president said that he's going to have talk to Iranians and this and that because we have mutual interests with them. They fought against al-Qaida, all that. And they went to the meeting once, and they basically told them if you don't do this and that, they're going to bomb you, and they left. Why we can't do the nobody talks about diplomacy.
[Neal Conan:] Aaron David Miller, you were a career diplomat.
[Aaron David Miller:] Well, you need a balance of interest. It's not much different than a good marriage, a good business proposition or a good friendship. I mean, both sides have to be able to get and extract out of any diplomatic relationship something of value and utility. And in this particular case, I think the president was somewhat some would argue very but somewhat naive in believing that American and Iranian interests would somehow be coincident, and the fact is they're not. I can think of no other nation right now in this region which we are at odds across so many fronts, whether it's support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, pursuit of nuclear weapons, opposition to the existence of the state of Israel, even as an ideological trope, forget whether or not the Iranians are really serious about trying to get rid of the Israelis. Tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia, most of our allies, the whole Arab Spring has fundamentally contradicted the Iranian message that somehow only through Islamic extremism and violence can you have relatively positive change in the Arab world. So on almost every single issue we're at odds with Iran. The notion that somehow we're going to patch this up and against that, by the way, you've got 50 years of conspiracy, miscommunication and the perception on the part of the Iranians, perhaps with good reason during the '50s and perhaps even later, that we were determined somehow to fundamentally change the regime. So diplomacy, in my judgment, was never an option, and it's not an option now.
[Neal Conan:] Mike Shuster, is it fair to say that there was a sincere attempt to open dialogue with Iraq Iran, excuse me, after the Obama administration came to power?
[Mike Shuster:] I think from the outside it looked like there was, and I think it was very short-lived in 2009, and I also think that the Iranians did not reciprocate. They didn't show much interest. The Iranians always say we'll talk, we'll talk, we're willing to talk about anything. But when they get in the same room, not much happens. And I think that the Obama administration was discouraged early on and then turned actually, Neal, to other options that a lot of which, I think, most of which have been covert operations that may have been much more effective than anything.
[Neal Conan:] The Stuxnet worm...
[Mike Shuster:] The Stuxnet worm, and there have been other what appear to be covert operations to throw the Iranian government off-balance, and they've been somewhat effective.
[Neal Conan:] Let's go next to Chris, Chris with us from Kansas City.
[Chris:] Hi, I appreciate the program. I'm a huge believer in diplomacy, but you're dealing with a nation that its three pillars are the veil, conflict with U.S. and the destruction of Israel. You're dealing with a nation that science us tells us behaviorally the only thing you can predict future behavior is on past behavior. They're completely inconsistent. Even if you reached a diplomatic agreement with the nation now, you couldn't be assured that two weeks from now, something wouldn't change. Plus they're committed to arming terrorists, and they have multiple interests that are counter to ours and even to those in the Arab nations themselves. I think it's naive to talk about anything except [unintelligible] because two nuclear weapons wipes out Israel. We have to have zero tolerance. There has to be a military strike at the appropriate time, and we can't allow them to ever rearm. It's just it looks really clear from the outside. I understand all the other issues you're talking about, but the bottom line is do you want Israel to exist. Do you want terrorists armed with nuclear weapons? Can you actually deal with the Iranian government? And I think those questions all have been answered already.
[Neal Conan:] Chris, thanks very much, and Robert Kagan, let me turn that, if you will. Why won't deterrence work? If the Iranians were to launch those two nuclear weapons at Israel, they would know first they would face a devastating response from Israel, and the United States would jump in.
[Robert Kagan:] We're back to the same problems we had during the Cold War: What good are nuclear weapons? And the answer is they're not good once you fire them, but they're good before you fire them. And I think why Iran wants a nuclear weapon, I mean, Aaron touched on most of the reasons why we can't have an agreement with them. One of them is they think it's a core national interest. They think their survival depends on it. What having a nuclear weapon does gives Iran greater freedom of movement already than they have in the region. If they step up their support for terrorism in the region or even against the United States, and then we want to try to think about taking military action against them, we will be sorely deterred, much more than we are now, by the fact that they have a nuclear weapon. So what it gives them is an opportunity to drive things to a crisis and feel much more secure that there's nothing that anyone can do to them. And I think that's why they want a nuclear weapon. I think it's also about regime preservation at home. You know, we are going to be much more worried about toppling them, have less capacity to topple them when they have a nuclear weapon, they believe, than when they don't.
[Neal Conan:] Aaron David Miller, one's reminded of the quote from the Pakistani general after the first Gulf War: What is the great lesson you have learned? And the lesson is never fight the United States without a nuclear weapon.
[Aaron David Miller:] That's an interesting point. You know, if you look at the countries that actually have nuclear weapons, outside of the five permanent members of the Security Council, the Israelis may be something of an exception here but maybe not. They all are driven by this profound sense of insecurity on one hand and this driving sense of entitlement on the other.
[Neal Conan:] You're talking about Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea.
[Aaron David Miller:] Right. It's a curious combination. It's a curious mix. They also have remarkably efficient technological capabilities. They're not all wealthy countries, but the ones that aren't wealthy, in the case of the Israelis, they've managed to compensate by brainpower and technology. So I think Iran is the latest edition, and I think Bob's right. I think the notion that Iran fashions itself as a great power, I believe that had there been no revolution, the shah, who was developing a civilian program on the nuclear side, would probably have wanted a weapon as well. So the question really becomes, unless you can somehow alter the character, the inquisitive character of this regime, I'm not sure how you would will ultimately deny them such a weapon.
[Neal Conan:] Let's go next to Al. Al's on the line from Eugene in Oregon.
[Al:] Oh, thank you for taking my call. You know, I am one who also doesn't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon. But I think to for the whole argument to make sense for the people of the region, how can we allow Israel, who is committing human rights against the Palestinians, taking their land and who with an apartheid system. Yet we close our eyes. And to be honest with your guest, I've read a book by Miller, who was part of the negotiation with the Palestinians, who basically covers up for Israel taking Palestinian land. So maybe eventually it will give up its apartheid system and nuclear weapon as South Africa did. You see, to the people, why don't we speak of a Middle East that's free of nuclear weapons, free of weapons of mass destruction? We cannot let someone have it, and somebody else doesn't.
[Neal Conan:] Well, the ad-hominem attacks aside, why can't we have a nuclear-free Middle East? And that would begin with Israel. Robert Kagan?
[Robert Kagan:] Well, you know, we are not going to persuade Israel to give up its nuclear weapons. Once countries get their nuclear weapons, no one ever persuades them to give them up. And, you know, the nuclear world is a world of a double standard. The non-proliferation treaty is a huge double standard. It permitted five countries to have nuclear weapons based on who had them at an arbitrary date. Then India pressed ahead. What it really has to do, if you're an American, and I think if you might come from a different, you have a different view, who is a strategic threat? Who poses a threat to our vital interests, to the vital interests of our allies? For the United States, that's not Israel. That's not India. At the moment, I hope, it's not even Pakistan. But it is Iran. And we make decisions in America based on our perception of our vital national interests.
[Neal Conan:] Well, Ron Paul, one of Mr. Romney's rivals, says Iran represents no strategic threat to the United States, maybe to some of its interests but not to the United States and not to those interests if it withdraws from the region. Aaron David Miller, is that not another approach?
[Aaron David Miller:] Well, you know, great powers are great powers in large part it's because of their job description. They can behave hypocritically, and inconsistently and in contradictory fashion. And we do. And I think Bob is right. It, you know, the perception of threat may be in the eye of the beholder, but essentially, we determine what our national interests are. As far as withdrawal from the region, you know, I would actually like to see a lower profile. We're stuck there. We can't fix this broken, dysfunctional region, and we can't extricate ourselves from it. That's the real dilemma. So we're not going anywhere, and in fact, what you're going to see, I suspect, Arab Spring, Arab Winter notwithstanding, is an increase in the American footprint in certain regions like the Gulf. I mean, we're on the verge of a $60 billion arms deal with the Saudis. If the Iranian program continues, we will look for various conventional means of shoring up our allies in that region and hopefully being smart about it, creating a more effective profile. So I don't think we're on the way out at all. As a consequence of the Iranian nuclear program, we may be on the way back in, hopefully in a smarter capacity.
[Neal Conan:] Mike Shuster, what about the Iranian opposition? Is that something with quiet support from the outside, represents a serious threat to the Iranian government?
[Mike Shuster:] Oh, I think without a doubt. And actually it's a point I've been wanting to make about this discussion. One of the callers talked about the inherent hostility between the United States and the Iranian nation. And I think that we have to focus on the Iranian government because there's an enormous portion of the Iranian nation that hates their own government. And we saw that in the actual voting in the summer of 2009 that supposedly re-elected Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But there was an enormous movement against the current Iranian government, and it's been suppressed, but it continues to be there. It is not a small thing, and it's not an ephemeral thing. Many, many, many Iranians disagree with their government, don't want to live under their government, would like to see a change. Now, how is that going to happen in the future is impossible to predict, but it's, I think, a very important consideration when we have a discussion like this.
[Neal Conan:] And, Robert Kagan, does even the threat of a military attack spark nationalist interest and, well, tend to dampen that movement?
[Robert Kagan:] Well, that's a good question. I don't think we know necessarily what the answer to that is. I've my preferred option of all has always been to try to support the opposition and get a moderation of this government, if not an overthrow of this government. Unfortunately, the clock is ticking it appears. And we're not it's hard to see how we're going to get a change in regime or even a moderation in the regime in time to stop this. Now, what does a strike do to the Iranian public? I mean, I think it's true that whatever else may be the case, they're not going to rally around that government. There may be Iranian nationalism. You could see opposition figures trying to take advantage of that nationalism for their selves, but I don't think we should underestimate the degree. And Mike is exactly right. A very large percentage of the Iranian people really detest this government and especially after what happened in the summer of 2009 and the crackdown that followed.
[Neal Conan:] Robert Kagan is with us, also Mike Shuster, who just heard a moment ago, NPR foreign correspondent Aaron David Miller. We're talking about the least bad option with Iran. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And let's go to Brian. Brian with us from Birmingham in Michigan.
[Brian:] Yes, yes, I am. And I'm listening to the last comments, and I'm hearing something I would agree with in principle that we have to take a look at the history of American-Iranian relations going back at least to the end of the Second World War. The United States was very effective in dealing with the Mosaddegh regime, in particular using covert action, as well as appealing to the Iranian people. We have a tremendous integration of Iranian people in the United States supporting alternatives to the current government in Iran. I think focusing on that probably more than saber-rattling is going to be a much more effective technique.
[Neal Conan:] Aaron David Miller?
[Aaron David Miller:] You know, I have to say watching the Arab Spring and the Arab Winter and understanding the role that we played in all of this, which frankly is marginal, the notion somehow that Iraq was the first domino to fall in the chain of democracies and that somehow the previous administration had it right, I'm not sure that's right at all. I think American fingerprints are still viewed as illegitimate fingerprints. I think when we start to monkey around in the internal politics of these countries, we aren't very good at it, first of all, either clandestinely and rhetorically publicly. We end up creating risks of encouraging people to do things and then not being able to really deliver. You had the American ambassador to Iraq I found this extraordinary last week holding a press conference, apologizing to the Shia community because during the first Bush administration, we encouraged the Shia to mount an uprising against Saddam, and the American ambassador is apologizing that the Bush administration never delivered, never was there to rescue them. So I think we have to be extremely careful about the expectations that we create or the clandestine means of operation when in fact we can end up delegitimizing the very people we want to help.
[Neal Conan:] Mike Shuster, Robert Kagan was talking about a timeline that seems to be running out. What do we know?
[Mike Shuster:] Well, actually, I have my doubts about this. The Israelis have been saying for 10 years that there's an Iranian nuclear bomb right around the corner. That's proved not to be the case. Many in the United States have been saying for five or six years that it's right around the corner. That has proven not to be the case. I think that there's no question that the Iranians are involved in a lot of research and a lot of advanced technological work. But we have at least evidence in the gas centrifuges and how they've worked not so well in Natanz where they've built a big uranium enrichment facility. I think that there is reason to believe that the Iranians struggle with all this technology. And sometimes it breaks down, and sometimes they're at fault for it breaking down. And it is a slow slog for them, it seems to me.
[Neal Conan:] So we sometimes see all of our problems and see their problems magically solving themselves.
[Robert Kagan:] Well, someday, the people who predict that it's going to be around the corner will be right, right? I mean, eventually, it is around the corner. And the question is how much closer are we now? I think there are some concerns that the amount of low-enriched uranium that Iran has acquired is enough to build one or two bombs. The question of now whether they have the technology to do it is the next question.
[Neal Conan:] It has to be confirmed [unintelligible]...
[Robert Kagan:] It has to be moved up. And so but we're not talking I think we're not talking about five years at this point. Whether we're talking about one year or two years, I think that's more the range we're in.
[Neal Conan:] Well, a subject to which we will return. Robert Kagan, thanks very much for your time today.
[Robert Kagan:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Our thanks as well to Aaron David Miller. And, Mike, nice to have you in Washington. You're going back to Los Angeles tomorrow?
[Mike Shuster:] I am, yes.
[Neal Conan:] All right. Well, sorry to lose you, but the West Coast, it will be benefit.

[Rachel Martin:] There's been a lot of soul searching in the social media world since the presidential election. How much did fake news stories inform voters' choices? And did social media allow hate speech, which may have deepened the divides in this country? Two big things happened over the past few days. Twitter announced new rules to try to curtail hate speech and suspended several accounts linked to the so-called alt-right movement, which has been associated with white nationalism. And Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg underscored what his company is doing to stop the spread of so-called fake news. To talk more about this and the broader role of social media in our democracy, I'm joined by Vivian Schiller. She's the former head of news and journalism partnerships at Twitter and also the former CEO of NPR. Vivian, thanks so much for being with us.
[Vivian Schiller:] Hi, glad to be with you.
[Rachel Martin:] I want to start by asking you about Mark Zuckerberg's statement. And I'm going to quote here. He said, we will continue to work with journalists and others in the news industry to get their input, in particular to better understand their fact-checking systems and learn from them. You've been on both sides of this. What should the relationship be between mainstream journalism and social media companies, especially when it comes to this idea of misinformation?
[Vivian Schiller:] First of all, there's a lot of definitions flying around of what we mean when we say fake news. And there's also a lot of pitfalls and I think some misguided recommendations that are out there about what Facebook and Twitter and the others should and shouldn't do. It's very difficult and I, you know, recommend sort of very thoughtful slow going for everyone.
[Rachel Martin:] So let's go slow in the conversation. What is fake news, as you understand it?
[Vivian Schiller:] So my definition of fake news is a content-like object that is a story, an article, a video, a tweet that has been fabricated, completely invented out of thin air, intentionally for the purpose of misleading. So an example from the election, from the campaign was when a so-called news organization called the Denver Guardian which, by the way, doesn't exist wrote an article and pushed it on social media that said that the pope had endorsed Donald Trump. That's the perfect definition of fake news. It was intentionally designed to deceive.
[Rachel Martin:] So what has been lumped into that category that shouldn't belong there?
[Vivian Schiller:] Well, lumped in there is a lot of stuff, including stories that were intended to be serious journalism but just got it wrong, statements that are made by public officials that are wrong but are reported. And then there's this whole sort of mushy area in the middle of stories that are missing context, might be laden with innuendo, missing facts.
[Rachel Martin:] So you say there's fake news and then there's just bad journalism [LAUGHTER].
[Vivian Schiller:] Well, that's the short answer, yeah.
[Rachel Martin:] So if you set aside the shoddy journalism which I can understand would be very hard for any social media company to try to fix or prevent the spread of but just taking the idea of just outright false news, these fake news stories like the one you cited, do social media companies have an obligation to try to prevent the spread of those stories?
[Vivian Schiller:] Let me just say I think it would be a mistake for social media companies to try to, on their own, determine or deign what is a fake news story and what isn't and shut it off, or what's a good news organization or a bad news organization. That's a very, very slippery slope.
[Rachel Martin:] Let's talk about your former employer, Twitter, which announced just a few days ago that it's going to make it easier to report abusive language on its site. It also suspended, as we mentioned, several accounts linked to the alt-right. Do you think these changes are a good idea?
[Vivian Schiller:] Well, those are two very, very different things, so let's separate them. The first one, which is allowing a greater range of tools to prevent abuse on Twitter, I applaud Twitter for that move and I encourage them to keep going. The second action they took is much trickier and frankly concerns me a little bit. Twitter has selected certain Twitter accounts most of them are from the so-called alt-right and has suspended them. The problem is there is very little transparency and consistency when it comes to what accounts Twitter is suspending and which they are not. As long as there is an even playing field for all and the rules are clearly understood, that would be a good thing. We are not there yet. There's more to do.
[Rachel Martin:] Do you still believe in these sites in social media as a harbinger for good when it comes to protecting democratic values?
[Vivian Schiller:] A hundred percent. The way that information is shared around the world, important information that we might not ever see or hear and I would hate for us to go backwards on that. Does it come with a whole bunch of problems? You bet.
[Rachel Martin:] Vivian Schiller's the former head of news and journalism partnerships at Twitter. Thanks so much, Vivian.
[Vivian Schiller:] Thank you.

[Neal Conan:] I'm Neal Conan in Washington. There's a new generation of boom towns across the American West sparked by the explosive growth of oil and natural gas. When these industries move in, small towns near the fields change almost overnight. Once-sleepy main streets suddenly boast improved schools, libraries and community centers. Quiet rural airports expand to take corporate jets. Restaurants and motels and hardware stores all thrive. But the infusion of cash doesn't come without complications. Outsiders double or triple the population. Service industries include prostitution and drugs. The air and water can suffer. And then what happens when the wells run dry? If you've lived in a boom town, we want to hear from you. Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Later in the program, we continue our Oscar docs series. "The Invisible War" focuses on sexual assault in the U.S. military. But first boom towns. Ann Chambers Noble is a longtime resident of Pinedale, on the edge of the gas fields in Wyoming's Green River Valley. She documented the town's history for a book on Pinedale's centennial and joins us now by phone from Rock Springs. Good to have you with us today.
[Ann Chambers Noble:] Well, thank you very much for having me.
[Neal Conan:] And is there one moment for you that captures the rapid change that you saw in Pinedale?
[Ann Chambers Noble:] Well, it did seem to happen awfully fast. And it was in about 2000, the year 2000 our sleepy, quiet, dusty, isolated little cow town was changed really rather rapidly and stayed changed for several years, well over the decade.
[Neal Conan:] Well, what happened, for example?
[Ann Chambers Noble:] Well, I think before I'm going to give you a quick geography lesson that our county, for which this gas boom occurred, is Sublette County, and it is almost the size of Connecticut. So we're talking a very big, very isolated mountainous area in western Wyoming. And in this county, just before the boom, there were only about 6,000 people living there, half of them divided between two towns, Big Piney in the South and Pinedale in the North, and the rest of them were like myself and my family, on isolated little cattle ranches. So when you only have 6,000 people in that kind of space, and when you suddenly double and triple the population, it has a huge impact on absolutely everything: our schools, our medical clinics, our streets, our housing. And it was a very stressful time.
[Neal Conan:] You raised four children in Pinedale. Tell us about some of the changes to the school.
[Ann Chambers Noble:] Well, they were all girls, and when they were real little, they believed, and they did, live in a very, very safe community, very safe town, and they knew they could walk anywhere at any time, and it was never a problem. But when as a parent all of a sudden your children are about middle school or high school, and there's a tremendous amount of usually men coming to the community from different parts of the country, you're not sure you want your daughters walking all over town at any time. Well, I also though refer to this time in our history, and it has ended, we one thing about a boom, there is always a bust, and we're in the bust now, is that I always stole a line from Charles Dickens that it was the best of times and it was the worst of times. The best of times is referring to the money and the jobs that were available It's nice to live in a community when you can have all the money you want. We have beautiful facilities, beautiful schools. And in the classroom are smartboards, every kid has a computer, our wonderful hot lunches cost us 50 cents, our breakfasts were 25 cents. And we're not on any aid, this is just the school covering everything for us because they have plenty of money. And we were paying our teachers very, very high salaries. The downside was those teachers were really earning absolutely every extra penny they were earning because the classroom setting was perpetually changing. Every week there were new kids coming in, other kids leaving out. The population was constantly in transition during for years, all through the 2000s. And that's hard on us old-timers, that's hard on those new kids, and that's got to be very hard on those teachers.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking about boom towns. If you've lived in one, give us a call. Tell us what happened to your town, 800-989-8255. Email us talk@npr.org. Let's go to Scott, Scott's on the line with us from Fairbanks.
[Scott:] Yeah, hello.
[Neal Conan:] Hi.
[Scott:] Yeah, I've been here nine years. You know, I didn't live through the boom of the building an oil pipeline, but I've sort of seen the aftermath. And, you know, what happens is that all the, you know, salaries are raised to get people to move up here, and then, you know, when the boom ends, you know, people the state has to figure out how to attract people in the university and the hospitals without the same wage level. And then the downtowns the downtown of Fairbanks has really suffered. You know, you have all this infrastructure, a lot of it's vacant or rundown, and you've got to figure out what to do with abandoned buildings, and you're still paying, you know, for services on those things, but the city is left with a big price tag. And it can hurt, you know, the local government. Even though you enjoyed a big tax base for a while, it can really hurt in the aftermath.
[Neal Conan:] I visited Fairbanks just last summer, and you're right, the downtown area, it looks like a lot of shuttered storefronts.
[Scott:] Yeah, that's exactly right. So there's got to be you know, the boom is great, but there has to be a lot of planning by the city fathers and mothers to make sure that they put money away and decide what's going to happen after the boom has passed.
[Neal Conan:] Well, thanks very much for the call, appreciate it. Ann Chambers Noble, any indication the powers that be in Pinedale have done that kind of planning?
[Ann Chambers Noble:] I do have to take hats off to our government leaders, all the way from the mayor to the county commissioners to the governor. Our governor during the boom, Dave Freudenthal, visited all of the communities and really pushed us hard to be pro-active about this boom that was coming, to be proactive rather than reactive. And hats off to, for instance, our county commissioners that built all these beautiful big structures. At the time they were making the budgets for building these our buildings, they at the same time put in at least a 30-year maintenance fund for them. So we fortunately, because of the great leadership from the state all the way down to the mayors, we did put in some good safety belts for that. But our whole state history has been boom and bust. So we've had a little bit of practice at this. Not Pinedale, but at least we tried to learn from our neighboring towns.
[Neal Conan:] Our former NPR colleague John McChesney recently stepped down as director of the Rural West Initiative at Stanford's Bill Lane Center for the American West, where he reported and wrote about boom towns. He joins us now from member station KRCB in Rohnert Park, California. John, nice to have you on the program. John, are you there? I guess we're going to try to re-establish contact with John McChesney at KRCB and see if we can get him set up and get him on the program. Let's see if we get another caller in on the conversation. John's on the line, John with us from Rapid City.
[John:] Hi, great to be on the program. It's kind of deja vu all over again with the oil boom in Williston. I lived there back in late '70s, early '80s, during the last boom, and I remember there being these large fields that used to hold trailer house complexes now being empty and kids in high school racing up and down the streets; there were no speed limits. Apartment buildings that were, I mean row after row of apartment buildings that were abandoned and were later bulldozed because of the shoddy construction work. I'm kind of thinking, you know, is all that going to happen again in Williston?
[Neal Conan:] Well, have you been out there recently? Is it is the building quality the same?
[John:] You know, I was up there just last summer, and I didn't get off to see any of the additional apartment buildings that were built, but the growth was exponential, the traffic was frightening. And it was just there was, like, shades of deja vu all over again.
[Neal Conan:] Well, thanks very much, we'll have to see what happens there in Williston. And Ann Chambers Noble, in Pinedale, part of the package that, along with the boom, came a lot of environmental damage.
[Ann Chambers Noble:] Yeah, that was probably the hardest for us locals to accept. There is the immediate doubling of the population that was scary enough to deal with, but you could try to at least handle that. But when it really got scary for many of us is when our air quality became very, very poor. In fact we had ozone levels that matched really the poorest of inner city like Los Angeles. And it was very dangerous. And we didn't quite know how to handle it. Do you not let your kids go to ski practice because breathing in this air is very bad when we live in these pristine mountains? And that was probably some of the hardest part to deal with. And then there was also lots of concerns, which we still don't even know the effects yet, of whether all of this quick drilling, massive drilling, what impact it had on our water as well. I mean we're in the headwaters of the Green River. We're in the most pristine environmental part of the world, and yet we were horrendously impacted in the environment because of all this drilling.
[Neal Conan:] And that's the controversy over fracking, not just there in and around Pinedale, but of course up in North Dakota as well. I think John McChesney, is on the line with us. John, are you there?
[John Mcchesney:] I hope so.
[Neal Conan:] Good to talk to you again. Hi John, how are you doing?
[John Mcchesney:] Hi.
[Neal Conan:] We've had as Ann Chambers Noble was saying, this is a long history of boom and bust, not just in Wyoming but throughout the American West, and depending on the industry, well, gold towns turned into ghost towns. And what's different about this round?
[John Mcchesney:] Well, let's talk about North Dakota because North Dakota is a little different from what's going on right now in Wyoming. People in North Dakota think this new horizontal drilling and fracking boom up there is going to last 20 or 30 years. You have to re-frack these wells over and over again. So normally you go through a place, a point where you stick a straw in the ground and suck oil out, and then it goes away, the production goes way down. But up in North Dakota they're expecting this to last for a considerable period of time, 20 to 30 years. Now, no one really knows whether that's going to happen. If the price of oil drops below 70 or 60 dollars a barrel, the enthusiasm for drilling up there may drop off. But what happens in these situations is there's no forward planning ahead of time. People in these areas know that drilling's going to happen, and you'll find very few people who are just totally opposed to drilling there. What you do find is: Why can't we plan ahead? Why can't we pace this so that the local governments can adjust themselves to the impact? And that doesn't happen. Over and over and over again, everything, as Ann said, is overwhelmed. Local governments, what used to be part-time jobs suddenly become, you know, 12-hour-a-day jobs. And there's no pay for that. Schools are overwhelmed not only in terms of the number of students, but the wages that teachers earn are not commensurate with the rents that are in the area. Schools up in North Dakota are thinking about building their own housing now in order to compete with the housing prices that the oil boom has created. Health care systems are overwhelmed. They're not only overwhelmed by numbers and the horrendous accidents that happen when an 18-wheeler chews up a passenger vehicle, which happens all the time in North Dakota, they're overwhelmed by bad debt. The folks who move in there don't have permanent addresses, they don't have they only have cell phones. I talked to...
[Neal Conan:] John? We have to take a short break, John. We'll have more with you and with Ann Chambers Noble in just a minute. Stay with us. This is NPR News. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News; I'm Neal Conan. This hour we're talking boom towns, oil and gas. These days, they're mostly the result of oil and gas discoveries. It's hardly a new concept, though. The Western gold rush in the mid- to late 1800s produced a number of boom towns like Bodie, California. That little town in the Sierra Nevadas was formed in 1861 after William S. Bodey discovered gold. Miners didn't find much else until 1875, when a cave-in revealed a rich vein of ore. The rush was on, and Bodie's population swelled with families, miners, entrepreneurs, crooks and prostitutes. Then it was known as the most lawless, wildest and toughest mining camp the far West has ever known. But two fires wiped out much of the town, and now Bodie is one of America's most famous ghost towns. If you've lived in a boom town, we want to hear from you. Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. John McChesney, who just stepped down as director of the Rural West Initiative; and Ann Chambers Noble, author of "Pinedale, Wyoming: A Centennial History" are our guests.
[I Wanted To Read This Email We Got From Bob In Seattle:] I'm an experienced truck driver. I've heard about the job market in North Dakota for years. I was interested in working there but decided not to. That's the thing for me: What about winters there? What's the working conditions the working conditions like? It would be one thing if after working there for five years I could retire at age 44, but that's not how it works. Further, the cost of living is a big issue. A well-paying job working 70 hours a week that also comes with a very high cost of living still makes you poor. Why would I want to be poor? The same things apply to workers that earn less than truck drivers, like those working at McDonald's or cleaning people. What's the quality of life for them? And John McChesney, you hear about these fabulous job opportunities in places like North Dakota. Is Bob right, or is it less than what it looks like?
[John Mcchesney:] Well, I think there are fabulous job opportunities there and especially for truck drivers, but you're going to have to live in rather austere circumstances, probably in a man camp or you know, which is temporary housing, where you live with a lot of male drivers and male oil workers. And the wages are good, and you can probably put money away. The roads are terrible. The chances of accidents are very high. The hospitals are overburdened with accidents between 18-wheelers and passenger cars. So there's a it's a mixed bag, but basically you can make good money there driving.
[Neal Conan:] Let's see if we can get another caller in. This is Teresa, Teresa from Beaufort, South Carolina.
[Teresa:] Yes, hello, thank you. I lived in Pinedale for 17 years. I left it six years specifically because of the boom. It was it hurt, Tom, it just hurt. The nature things the degradation that I saw, there was a 13-to-one ratio of men to women with the man camps that came in. They're not just they weren't, when I left, temporary structures. They're still up. There was a huge we called it big brown cloud that just, as I think was mentioned, the pollution that just never went away. The intrinsic beauty of the place was to me being raped and pillaged. Every day I watched an oil rig, another one, go up in the mesa and the roads and the trucks. And it was endless and ceaseless. It never stopped. It was all for, I imagine, making money or the good of the country, but I who lived there did not feel that, and I left because it was not the place I knew it to be, and it would never return because once you take nature, once you tear it apart, you just can't get that back. It won't come back. And it saddens me because I really loved being in Wyoming. And yeah, that's what I have to contribute to that. Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] All right, Teresa, thanks very much for the call. And Ann Chambers Noble, there are some of those trailer camps still around Pinedale.
[Ann Chambers Noble:] Right. It we have some big, beautiful, gorgeous structures as a result of the money from the gas fields, no doubt about it. But yes, there's definitely a lot of homes in foreclosures and buildings that are no longer in use. But could I just add a comment: You're talking about those wonderful high-paying jobs that the gas fields did bring to the community, and that is very true. But that also became a huge burden for people like my husband and I, who have cattle ranches there, because we couldn't begin we weren't getting any more for our cattle, and we couldn't begin to compete for wages with what the gas fields were paying. So we were very labor-starved. We couldn't begin to compete with the gas companies when it came to getting parts for our tractors, or if our trucks broke down, we couldn't afford now the mechanic that used to be $50 an hour was now $200 an hour, and he was plenty busy with work out in the gas fields. So that those increased wages may have been great for those temporary workers, but for the local businesses, it was a huge burden, and it's one we still have not recovered from.
[John Mcchesney:] And that, Neal, is true in spades up in North Dakota. The schools, the hospitals and the police and ancillary service workers cannot compete in the wage market created by an oil field. So teachers are being recruited in there and being housed the last time I was up there, there was discussion of the schools buying housing for their teachers so that they could actually live there. Police come in there, they've been recruited from academies across the country, they get there, and they discover they can make a lot more in the oil field than they can driving in a cruiser, and they leave. And in the hospitals, the support workers who, you know, do all the scut work in a hospital, the hospitals can't compete. It's a really difficult situation in terms of wages.
[Neal Conan:] Leanne is on the line with us from San Antonio.
[Leanne:] Hi Neal, thank you for this program. Yeah, I live down in a tiny town called Falls City, right in the middle of the Eagle Ford Shale. And everything you all are saying, it's true. It's what we're living right now. And what's so frustrating to me is I say this and hear what's happening in the rest of the country, and I see it happening, but it's like the first time anyone's heard about it. When you complain to the railroad commission about the environmental concerns, the traffic, the rent, all these costs to our little community, it's like it's the first time it's happened. And I don't understand. Why isn't there some sort of support? Where's the research, the evidence that we should use to say this has happened somewhere else? We know the chemicals are bad for our water supply, we know there's going to be air pollution. We need help to fight. But it seemed like whatever happened in Pennsylvania doesn't apply to Texas. I just don't understand.
[Neal Conan:] And she's talking about the some of the problems there have been with fracking in Pennsylvania and that of course it's going on in Texas, as well as in Wyoming and North Dakota and other places. John McChesney, talk about big field in California, as well, in Mendocino.
[John Mcchesney:] I'm sorry, Neal, I'm having a little difficulty hearing you.
[Neal Conan:] Oh that's all right. We're just talking about the possibility not just in Texas, as Leanne was saying, and in Wyoming, which we've been talking about, North Dakota, Pennsylvania there have been problems with fracking, and they're talking now about opening a big field in California, as well.
[John Mcchesney:] They are, and it's actually there's discussion of Mendocino, but they're actually talking about a big shale formation down around Bakersfield, down in the southern San Joaquin Valley. And some people are saying that that could dwarf the Bakken up in North Dakota. So California is looking at the possibility of an oil boom, as well.
[Neal Conan:] Let's go next to Spencer, Spencer on the line with us from Pinedale.
[Spencer:] Hi, I just wanted to mention I've lived here in Pinedale for a few years and don't work directly in the gas industry but I actually work at the local airport, which has benefitted a lot from the increased traffic. But I've just noticed that the Pinedale area has kind of leveled off. We had the boom, but now things draw down. The community seems to be finding ways to make other income besides just the gas boom, trying to focus on tourism and use the money from the boom to make a sustainable, long-term economy.
[Neal Conan:] Ann Chambers Noble, you talked about some of the structures that Pinedale has benefited from, including the wonderful Sublette County Library there in Pinedale, and there's a beautiful aquatic center that any community would be proud to have.
[Ann Chambers Noble:] Yes, for a community of only a couple thousand people, we have close to a $30 million aquatic center, a couple of swimming pools, beautiful indoor walking track. We have a couple of basketball fields. The best part about that, and this is definitely the upside of a boom, it's nice to live in a place that has a lot of money, is that as it every single age group in our community benefits from that what we call the PAC, Pinedale Aquatic Center. There's day in the morning, it's full of people that are 60 and older. We'll have our geriatric groups in there walking every day, and yet it's also full of preschoolers. Our school kids use it constantly. It's a wonderful facility that we have all benefited, and that never would have been possible without the boom. And especially this time of year, you know, seven months of the year, we're in snow cover, and if you want to be able to exercise, you if you're not on skis, you need to be inside.
[Neal Conan:] But are you going to be able to sustain that when the economy, if as people say, the boom flattens out and begins to ebb away, and the fields start drying up, with a tourist economy and with cattle ranching as Pinedale used to have?
[Ann Chambers Noble:] Well, it's definitely already slowed down. We are definitely seeing the results of a bust, and we are seeing budget cuts, no doubt about it. I was telling someone just recently, my freshman in high school this year brought home for the first time ever a supply list. I had to buy her supplies for school. I've never done that. So we are beginning to see where the decline in the income. But as I mentioned earlier, we have some very smart city and county planners that did set money away. They found some legal way to set money away at the time the boom was at its peak to maintain these buildings. So we're not too worried about that at this point. But that was a case where we did do some planning. You could always have done more planning. And what an earlier caller mentioned about the importance of planning. I will say that it's very easy to say that and very difficult to do that because you don't know what you're in for. And we, in some ways, over-planned because we built this gorgeous elementary school clear out in a field that was going to be the next new neighborhood, and then the bust came. So now we have this beautiful elementary school out in the middle of nowhere with no neighborhood. So that was a case, potentially, of over-planning.
[John Mcchesney:] Well, there are...
[Neal Conan:] Spencer, thank go ahead, John.
[John Mcchesney:] There are two levels of planning, and, as you know, one is what you do on the field in terms of where you drill and how you drill, and the other is the infrastructure planning that you do. And one of the Williams County supervisors up in North Dakota told me, he said when Hewlett-Packard or some big company like that comes to town, they come in and they say, we're going to need X number of houses. We're going to need we're going to bring in this number of students. It's a centralized operation, so it's easier to plan for. When an oil development happens, it's all over the place, and there are dozens and dozens of companies that are operating independently. So it's very hard for planners to get a grip on it and try to make it happen in a more orderly way. But most people I've talked to said they'd much rather try to slow it down and get that orderly plan in place, rather than the rush that you've seen in North Dakota and I think you saw down in the Upper Green River Valley.
[Neal Conan:] And even in the service industries, there were motels in Pinedale and motels in Williston, main. As soon as they built it, the oil company would call and say, we will rent every room for the next three years. This doesn't teach people how to run a competitive business.
[John Mcchesney:] Right. When I went to North Dakota, I had to stay in a private home. I could not find a motel room within a 100-mile radius of Williston.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking with John McChesney, just stepped down as director of the Rural West Initiative at Stanford's Bill Lane Center for the American West. Also with us, Ann Chambers Noble, historian and longtime resident of Pinedale, Wyoming. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. David's on the line with us from Willow River in Minneapolis.
[David:] Minnesota.
[Neal Conan:] Minnesota. Go ahead.
[David:] Yes. Yes. I worked in Williston on a frack crew for the last for nine months last year. I was went out in the field every day. It was 110 hours per week, two weeks straight, one week off, lived in a man camp. Two weeks ago, we buried one of my co-workers, died out there in a frack accident.
[Neal Conan:] I'm sorry to hear that.
[David:] It was not a pretty place to work.
[Neal Conan:] I can't imagine that it was, but how was the money?
[David:] Well, the money, it started out pretty good because we were getting well bonuses. Each well we drill that we were successful on without any sort of environmental mishap, we would receive $1,500, maybe $2,000 well bonus a month. And that was pretty much our, I would call, profit. The hourly wage was not bad, but so many hours, so we had a lot of overtime. But I spent a lot of money driving back and forth to Minnesota, and it was a 700-mile drive, so I would spend four days driving back and forth. So I essentially had three days off per month. And eventually I broke down with anxiety. I had to see a neurologist. I so I spent a lot of money on medical bills, and ultimately they would not reduce my hours, and I ultimately quit.
[Neal Conan:] Well, David, again, sorry to hear about your loss, and we wish you the best of luck.
[David:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks very much. Let's see if we can get Nadine with us, Nadine with us from Rock Springs, Wyoming.
[Nadine:] Yeah. Hi.
[Neal Conan:] Hi. Go ahead, please.
[Nadine:] I was just calling to say that, you know, my family moved here in '71 into Rock Springs at the end of a boom, and at the end of that boom ended up with a whole generation of children coming up with alcohol and drug problems, with nothing to do and nothing to look forward to in the future, you know?
[Neal Conan:] Because there's Rock Spring's a mining boom there.
[Nadine:] Yeah. Well, we had mining in the [unintelligible], you know? They all overflow and come living there, and then we boomed out and everybody moved away. The smaller class sizes made the teachers know you very well, but your parents no longer have the income coming in to maybe send you off to school somewhere, you know? And at the time, when you're going to school, you're thinking that you're going to be in the mines or the oil fields.
[Neal Conan:] And those jobs then go away. And, John, I just wanted to ask you. The those ancillary problems, I guess, of drugs and prostitution, those happen a lot of places.
[John Mcchesney:] They do. I mean, you had the history of Gillette, Wyoming much earlier where the it became the Gillette syndrome, which was an influx of prostitution and so on. I don't think North Dakota North Dakota does have those problems but that they're not anywhere near on the scale of the earlier rough days of the '70s and '80s. You do have a lot of gun permits being issued up there, particularly to women. It's a little rough. The male versus female proportion is way out of balance, so it gets a little rough for women up there. One of the things I wanted to mention is that there's a lag, there's a revenue collection lag between the beginning of production and when the revenue starts flowing, and that doesn't match the impact on these local small towns. They don't get any revenue for two, three years. And so the impact piles up and you're trying to catch up afterwards, and that's still happening in North Dakota, and there's no guarantee that that money that's coming into the state gets back into the local towns that are being impacted because the states really have to go hat in hand, I mean, the towns I'm sorry, have to go hat in hand to with the states to get special grants to mitigate the damages to their roads and everything else.
[Neal Conan:] John.
[John Mcchesney:] So there's a real problem in that revenue collection and I won't get down on the weeds on it but it's a real problem and collecting tax revenue for the rainy day, as you pointed out earlier, when these non-renewable resources run out.
[Neal Conan:] John McChesney with us, and also Ann Chambers Noble. Thanks to you both. This is NPR News.

[Alex Cohen:] And I'm Alex Cohen. We go now to the summer of 1967. The country had been teetering from the effects of the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam and a bourgeoning counterculture; America suddenly went haywire. The first riots happened in Newark, New Jersey. There were others in smaller cities. And then, forty years ago today, Detroit, Michigan erupted into five days of civil unrest. The violence began at an after-hour's club known as a blind pig where people had gathered for a party for two returning Vietnam servicemen. Loretta Holmes, then 17 years old, had gone to the club with a girlfriend.
[Ms. Loretta Holmes:] And I remember when we got up to leave, I was going downstairs, I was in front of her and a big sledgehammer came through the door.
[Alex Cohen:] Loretta ran back into the club, where she encountered policemen blocking all of the exits.
[Ms. Loretta Holmes:] And everybody just started panicking, running to the back of the place, turning over tables, hiding under the tables.
[Alex Cohen:] But there was nowhere to go.
[Ms. Loretta Holmes:] They put us all in a single file and they marched us all down the stairs into paddy wagons.
[Alex Cohen:] Loretta and the 81 other African-Americans at the club were arrested. For black residents of Detroit, it was the last straw. Angered by a nearly all-white police department that had used excessive force too many times, by cops who called them boy and worse, they took to the streets.

[Alex Chadwick:] This morning, the Nobel Committee announced that this year's peace prize will be shared by the International Atomic Energy Agency and its director-general, Mohamed ElBaradei. The Nobel Committee praised the IAEA's commitment to a multilateral approach in curbing nuclear weapons. Speaking to reporters today, Mr. ElBaradei said he sees the Nobel as a vindication of his leadership in the eight years directing the agency.
[Dr. Mohamed Elbaradei:] The prize would strengthen my resolve and that of my colleagues to continue to speak truth to power, to continue to speak our minds. We have no hidden agenda except to ensure that our world continue to be safe and humane.
[Alex Chadwick:] NPR diplomatic correspondent Mike Shuster joins us. Mike, Mr. ElBaradei-there he is speaking about a hidden agenda, denying that there is one. Tell us about the IAEA's mandate, and how much authority does it wield?
[Mike Shuster Reporting:] Well, the IAEA is one of the UN's various multilateral organizations. It's based in Vienna; it was started in 1957. And from 1957 until 1991, its basic job was to make sure that nations that had some kind of nuclear infrastructure, civilian nuclear power program, that they were telling the truth about the nuclear material, where it was and what they were using it for. But they did it differently from 1957 to 1991, and they've done it differently since then. And that's because the job basically was for nations to tell the IAEA what they're doing and then for IAEA inspectors to go in and essentially confirm what nations were telling them, but not to search for cheating. It was learned during the Gulf War, the first Gulf War with Iraq in 1990 and 1991, that Saddam Hussein's Iraq-which was part of the IAEA system-was cheating and was actually developing a secret nuclear weapon. And so afterwards, the IAEA got the job of trying to ferret out cheaters, and this is where Mohamed ElBaradei comes in. He was an Egyptian diplomat for many years. He became legal counsel to the IAEA in the 1980s, and then its head in 1997. And since then, he has worked to put in place more strict inspection protocol, which they call the additional protocol, to really get at this issue of who might be cheating.
[Alex Chadwick:] And when he says, `We have no hidden agenda,'who's he speaking to. the Bush administration? Because didn't this become an issue in the lead-up to the Iraq War? Or is he speaking to countries like Iran and North Korea?
[Shuster:] Probably both. This did become an issue in the lead-up to the Iraq War. International Atomic Energy inspectors got into Iraq before the Iraq War, and ElBaradei came to the UN Security Council and said, `There is no evidence that we have uncovered a renewed nuclear weapons program inside Saddam Hussein's Iraq,'and the United States didn't like this. And after the Iraq War, last year and into this year, US diplomats,n probably led by John Bolton who is now the UN ambassador for the United States, wanted to remove Mohamed ElBaradei from the director-general's seat. The United States did not carry the day; ElBaradei just recently was appointed to a third four-year term. So he's probably speaking to the United States, but also to Iran and North Korea, which has opted out of this system and developing nuclear weapons, that he will intend to continue to pursue what they're doing, as well.
[Alex Chadwick:] So if you were looking at this as an international diplomat, is this award to Mr. ElBaradei also something of a rebuke to the Bush administration?
[Shuster:] I'm not sure that you could say it's a rebuke to the Bush administration. It's certainly a reward and a boost to the IAEA and to ElBaradei's stewardship of it, and it's the Nobel Peace Prize Committee saying, `Continue this work. This is important work, and we want to tell the world just how important it is.'
[Alex Chadwick:] NPR diplomatic correspondent Mike Shuster. Mike, thank you.
[Shuster:] You're welcome, Alex.

[Robert Siegel:] This week, Michelle Obama, Chelsea Clinton and Bernie Sanders are paying visits to Arizona. They're campaigning for Hillary Clinton. Latino voters have put that one solidly Republican state in play. Arizona Republicans are trying to woo Latinos, but they're finding that's a challenge with Donald Trump at the top of their ticket. Jude Joffe-Block of member station KJZZ reports.
[Jude Joffe-block, Byline:] Here in Arizona's Santa Cruz County on the Mexican border, more than 80 percent of the population is Latino, but only 16 percent of voters are registered as Republicans. Thirty-three year old Sergio Arellano has been trying to lure more of these voters to the GOP, but this year has been tricky.
[Sergio Arellano:] What we encounter on the grassroots is, Republicans are racist; Republicans and Trump wants to deport everybody, want to build a wall.
[Jude Joffe-block, Byline:] Arellano is the son of Mexican immigrants and works for both the Republican National Committee and state party. He wants to spread the message that Republicans are about opportunity and jobs.
[Sergio Arellano:] [Speaking Spanish].
[Blanca Castro:] [Speaking Spanish].
[Sergio Arellano:] [Speaking Spanish].
[Jude Joffe-block, Byline:] We're going door to door in the border city Nogales. First-time voter Blanca Castro. answers. She's from Mexico and recently naturalized. She tells Arellano she backs Clinton.
[Sergio Arellano:] [Speaking Spanish].
[Jude Joffe-block, Byline:] Arellano tries to tell her Donald Trump will bring jobs.
[Sergio Arellano:] [Speaking Spanish].
[Jude Joffe-block, Byline:] But Castro isn't convinced, and that's hardly surprising. Some polls show fewer than 20 percent of Latinos support the Republican nominee. Many Latinos have not forgiven Trump for saying that Mexico is sending rapists and criminals across the border.
[Blanca Castro:] [Speaking Spanish].
[Jude Joffe-block, Byline:] Castro says, "you have to understand. I'm Mexican, and at least Clinton isn't racist." However she does vow to support a local Republican candidate for county supervisor. As we walk away, we can overhear Castro's family inside the house talking and laughing. Were they talking trash about Trump?
[Sergio Arellano:] The husband was talking about that you should have told them that Trump is a crook.
[Jude Joffe-block, Byline:] Still, in Arellano's book, this interaction was a partial success.
[Sergio Arellano:] Democrat for president, Republican for supervisor.
[Jude Joffe-block, Byline:] Hello, may I speak with... That supervisor candidate is himself a recent convert to the GOP. I met him at the party's brand new campaign office in Nogales, the first of its kind here in this strongly Democratic county.
[Mike Melendez:] My name is Mike Melendez, and I'm running for Supervisor District 1 here in Santa Cruz County.
[Jude Joffe-block, Byline:] Inside the office, a handful of volunteers, most of them Latino and bilingual, make phone calls to voters. The office doubles as a store where Melendez sells crafts from his native Mexico. He says there are more Latinos like him ready to be flipped.
[Mike Melendez:] I didn't understand why was I a Democrat, so because everybody here locally was Democrat or still thinks that they are, but they're thinking Republican family values and pro-life.
[Jude Joffe-block, Byline:] Meanwhile Sergio Arellano continues his quest to persuade these voters. Twenty-year-old Yolanda Mejia, an independent, answers the door.
[Yolanda Mejia:] I just always said that if Bernie never made it, that I was just going to vote for Trump because he's a better alternative than Hillary.
[Jude Joffe-block, Byline:] Bingo. Arellano invites her to join his team.
[Sergio Arellano:] I feel happy. It's pretty good, but I don't want her to stop at Trump. I want her to fill out the whole ballot Republican.
[Jude Joffe-block, Byline:] No matter what happens in the presidential race, Arellano hopes his work will build inroads for the GOP with Latinos in this part of the state. For NPR News, I'm Jude Joffe-Block in Nogales, Ariz.

[Madeleine Brand:] When Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans recently referred to Ground Zero as a hole in the ground, New Yorkers reacted angrily. But no one disputes the accuracy of Nagin's remark. In the five years since the 911 attacks, progress has been slow at Ground Zero. NPR's Mike Pesca talked to New Yorkers frustrated with the pace of rebuilding.
[Mike Pesca:] Yesterday was a brilliant afternoon here in New York as residents lounged and jogged through a strip of grass off the West Side highway called Hudson River Park. Five years earlier would have been the last afternoon you could have seen the Twin Towers looming over this vantage point. It was made famous in news stories when a dust cloud bellowed through here after the buildings collapsed. There's still nothing built where the towers stood. And some people are laying blame. Marion Collins is from Scotland, but after more than two decades here, she's acquired the bluntness of a New Yorker.
[Ms. Marion Collins:] Well, I think Pataki's a waste of space, don't you? I mean, he's done I don't see what he's done.
[Mike Pesca:] Some New Yorkers just say politics is tough and building is complicated. But many were like Alice Albrecht and Peggy McCullough of Queens. They largely absolved Mayor Michael Bloomberg, but blamed Governor George Pataki for the delays.
[Ms. Alice Albrecht:] If anybody, it should be the governor. You know, he should have stood up a long time ago and said this is what we're going to do you know, not just walk around and look at each other and say, all right, now what are we going to do?
[Mike Pesca:] And the only relevant local politician who was there on September 11th, 2001 and who's still there today, Governor Pataki will of course come in for criticism. Rebuilding Ground Zero is an enormously complicated job. And so many players hold a stake. There's the leaseholder, Larry Silverstein, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, the Port Authority, the families, local residents. You could go on and on. And the planning and replanning has. But as David Dyssegaard Kallick a fellow with the Fiscal Policy Institute -notes, all those government entities answer to the same person.
[Mr. David Dyssegaard Kallick:] There needed to be some kind of political leadership to round that up and to form some sorts of consensus and to really kind of move things forward so that you didn't get blocked up in the way that New York projects too often do. The obvious person to lead that would have been the governor. He didn't have all of the cards, and he couldn't just say, okay, this is how it is. But he certainly was not the obvious one to play that kind of leadership role. And the fact is he didn't.
[Mike Pesca:] Yesterday, Bob Schieffer on CBS asked Pataki if he was surprised that rebuilding was taking so long.
[Governor George Pataki:] No, Bob. I'm really not. And you focused on part of the reason that I believe as you do that this is hallowed ground. And we have to act very respectfully and prudently.
[Mike Pesca:] The governor went on to note that 30 million square feet of office space was lost five years ago. We're now two-thirds of the way back towards replenishing it.
[Governor George Pataki:] What we are doing at the actual site is being done respectfully. And this cornerstone is going to be the memorial. You'll see that rising behind me. But it's not going to soar to heights.
[Mike Pesca:] But the Freedom Tower is to soar 1,776 feet of defiance. Only many New Yorkers on the street say I wouldn't want to work there. David Kallick.
[Mr. David Dyssegaard Kallick:] It's a kind of, in my opinion, a kind of amity project for the governor because there's not a market demand. And Larry Silverstein doesn't want to build it and the Port Authority doesn't seem to want to be stuck with it. But the governor wants to get it done.
[Mike Pesca:] It's a project that the governor frequently touts in speeches as he pursues the possibility of a presidential run. No Republican candidate has been to the state of Iowa more than Governor Pataki 12 days spent there in 2006. He's also taken half a dozen trips to New Hampshire. To the historian Mike Wallace co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history of New York titled, Gotham George Pataki's presidential ambitions are very much tied in to his Ground Zero vision.
[Mr. Mike Wallace:] I think that if George Pataki had not been under the grip of this astonishing fantasy that he could someday be president, and therefore was going to tailor every move in this business to what would play best as a wet finger to the wind constantly before doing anything we would have been far better off.
[Mike Pesca:] In the past five years, New Yorkers have had to call upon their resources, including courage, ambition, and humor. The feelings are all right there on the newsstands today. The New York Post offers a glimpse of President Bush laying a wreath. The New York Times offers a 19,000-word story on the rebuilding process. And the satirical newspaper The Onion shows a current photo of Ground Zero under the headline, NYC Unveils 911 Memorial Hole. Mike Pesca, NPR News, New York.

[Steve Inskeep:] Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is the latest U.S. official whose first job is explaining whether to take the president of the United States literally.
[Rachel Martin:] Candidate Donald Trump attacked China for unfair trade policies, even accused China of, quote, "raping the U.S." These days, the president has been a bit quieter.
[Steve Inskeep:] And now his secretary of state is in Asia this week, with China as the final stop. Michael Green, once a senior national security official in George W. Bush's White House, was just in Beijing and found some hope there.
[Michael Green:] They see an administration that has different ideological lines, different power centers. Both the Chinese and our allies, the Japanese and Koreans and Australians, would prefer that Rex Tillerson, secretary of defense Mattis, prevail, that their more international, engaged version of American foreign policy is what comes next.
[Steve Inskeep:] Help me out here because for a lot of Americans, Rex Tillerson is a blank. He's said hardly anything in public. He's not a veteran diplomat. He's the former head of ExxonMobil. What is it that gives Chinese authorities the idea that he's an internationalist or that he has a different view of the world than the president does?
[Michael Green:] Well a couple of things, one is his tenure at ExxonMobil demonstrated to every major country in Asia that he understands free trade, global trade, forward presence of our military and our diplomats. The other is that his colleague, Secretary of Defense Mattis, traveled to the region in March and said all the things that President Trump had not said, that Japan is a good ally, that we will defend our allies. So they're hoping that he will lean a little forward in a way he hasn't yet and that the secretary of state will reaffirm some longstanding commitments that people are waiting to hear.
[Steve Inskeep:] Are Chinese officials prepared to deal, in a substantive way, with the new secretary of state? Or will they go around him and just go straight to the White House?
[Michael Green:] Oh, the Chinese already are. They're already developing a relationship with Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, while dealing with Secretary Tillerson. But they will want him to be one of the major power centers. That's for sure.
[Steve Inskeep:] Now, when we hear the fear expressed that the United States will in some way withdraw from East Asia, not be as supportive of U.S. allies, does China like that?
[Michael Green:] You know, it's interesting. The nationalist press that are reflecting the propaganda department's line but are really pushing the envelope, they're chortling a bit about the difficulties in American politics, about the prospect that we might back away from our ally...
[Steve Inskeep:] Because they think they can expand into that space.
[Michael Green:] ...Because they see room for expanding. But, you know, for Xi Jinping and the Chinese leadership, this is a very sensitive year. The 19th Party Congress will convene this fall and decide the new lineup of the Standing Committee of the Politburo, the leading group. And the...
[Steve Inskeep:] Choosing the next generation of leaders.
[Michael Green:] Basically the next generation of leaders and almost certainly reconsolidate or further consolidating Xi Jinping's leadership. So they don't want any external trouble. And Xi is more aggressive, assertive, nationalistic. But he's basically following the line of the last Chinese leader, who's going to Deng Xiaoping, which is, don't overtly challenge the Americans. It will bring on more trouble than you can handle. So they're divided. But I think the prevailing view is, let's try to make this work. And Rex Tillerson's trip is really their first chance to show that that's possible.
[Steve Inskeep:] I want people to know that you were traveling in East Asia because you've got a book called "By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy And American Power In The Asia Pacific Since 1783." So you're doing book talks. And I know when any American travels abroad, it's almost as if they're the ambassador from the United States. People have all sorts of questions and opinions. What kinds of questions were people asking you as you traveled around?
[Michael Green:] Well, every audience, whether it was Tokyo, Hong Kong or Beijing, wants to know the house of cards, the inside. I'm from Washington. Who's up? Who's down? But what I tried to tell them was, look also at our history. Look at the structure of American interests in Asia. Over half of Americans say it's the most important and dynamic region to us. Look at the structure in East Asia with the North Korean threat, with China's rise. And you'll realize that while there's a lot of debate in the administration right now, and there will be some uncertainty, the basic parameters of American engagement are not going to change that much, in all likelihood. Presidents matter. They matter a lot. Presidents can articulate strategy. They can have bad strategies. But there's an awful lot of structure, an awful lot of demands and an awful lot of interests that will make it hard for any president to check out of the region. And that's why I think you steadily see more and more reconfirmation of more traditional American policies.
[Steve Inskeep:] You think that the weight of history is going to prevail here, even with this new president who doesn't seem that interested in history and explicitly wants to shake up everything.
[Michael Green:] So we've had presidents who were uninterested, who disengaged and created danger. We've had other presidents who were fascinated and intrigued and ambitious about Asia who pushed our interests and our leadership well beyond what our actual power was. So presidents matter. But the second world war and Korea have all created a very deep understanding, I think, in the Congress and the American people, that we have to be forward-engaged. And every governor of every state in the union wants more trade with Asia, more investment from Asia. That hasn't changed. So there will be uncertainty. There will be disruptions. But there will also be some pretty strong interest groups in the U.S. that have a stake in us being engaged and leading in Asia.
[Steve Inskeep:] Michael Green, thanks for coming by.
[Michael Green:] Thank you.
[Steve Inskeep:] He's now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Georgetown University.

[Alex Chadwick:] Madeleine, thank you for that. And as you mentioned, Mr. Pombo is one of the Republicans suffering from his past association with the corrupt lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He pleaded guilty back in January to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials. He was sentenced to prison. He's currently free and cooperating with an FBI probe. Peter Stone is the author of Heist, that's a new book about this scandal. And earlier he told me how Jack Abramoff became so powerful.
[Mr. Peter Stone:] What Abramoff excelled at was a rainmaking ability. He was able to bring in big clients, and he was also someone who combined his aggressive fundraising and lobbying with a certain flair and a certain flamboyance. He was known as someone who established a restaurant that became a prime place for GOP fundraisers, a hangout for Republican leaders. It gave free meals, as we've now learned, thousands of dollars of free meals to some members. One who has been clearly identified thus far is Bob Ney, who was convicted in the scandal. At its opening, it drew people from the White House; friends such as Karl Rove, Tom DeLay and others attended it. And he also sports suites. He entertained lavishly in skyboxes in Washington. These seats were very much sought after by young Capitol Hill staffers, members, lobbyists, and he handed out tickets to these as a way of currying favor. I say he had a kind of concierge service for folks.
[Alex Chadwick:] But, you know, how different is Jack Abramoff as a lobbyist from what hundreds, and indeed thousands, of other people are doing in Washington?
[Mr. Peter Stone:] Well, there are limits on gifts, there are limits on meals. Abramoff went way, way, way over the limits, so he was, as one of the people I interviewed for the book, a former FEC official said: He wasn't just pushing the envelope, he was shredding the envelope. What I try to point out in the last chapter of the book is that while Abramoff and those associates, lobbyists, who have been convicted Ney, David Safavian, the former Bush administration official while they clearly were egregious cases, some of the tools, as you said, tools of lobbyists that Abramoff employed, have proliferated in recent years: Junkets, for instance, which are legitimate fact-finding missions, dozens of members of Congress take them. There are a growing number of these which are sponsored by private groups and private business. Some of this is legal. In Abramoff's case, what is illegal and what is against the House ethics rules is for a lobbyist, a law firm or a foreign agent to sponsor a junket. There are other ways, too, as getting to your point about how common were the excesses of Jack Abramoff. Jack was also a considerable user of what are called earmarks.
[Alex Chadwick:] These are little attachments to bills right before they're voted on. Say we need $50 million for a bridge here and...
[Mr. Peter Stone:] Right, they're often in highway bills, they're often in defense bills. They're snuck in at the last minute. They're very similar in many ways. They're varieties of pork. And these, too I think the Congressional Research Service came out with a study a few months ago that showed that these have roughly quadrupled in just the last four or five years, the number of earmarks.
[Alex Chadwick:] Peter, where is the public outrage on this story? It's a week before the election and still we're not hearing a lot about Jack Abramoff and what happened.
[Mr. Peter Stone:] Well actually, Alex, we're seeing some outrage in certain campaigns where Abramoff's ties, his influence with certain members was particularly acute. I think one thing that underscores your point is that many Americans seem kind of inured to this. In a way, it seems like it validates their conception of Washington as a place where there's a lot of corruption underway. The American public is very cynical about a lot of this. But at the same time, recent polls from Gallop, from USA Today, recent polls that have come out in the last month or two show that the issue of ethics and the issue of corruption is likely to be a significant one for many voters this year. It's a scandal that is complicated, and so in a way it's hard for Americans to grasp, but I think it's slowly seeping into consciousness. And the investigations by the Justice Department have been very time-consuming, they've been very thorough. They started over two years ago. They've had eight convictions thus far. They've just got their first member of Congress, the first Bush administration official. We are going to see more indictments probably before the end of this year. There are scrutiny of other members that's very intense still underway. My betting is it will be one for the history books.
[Alex Chadwick:] Peter Stone, author of Heist: Super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, His Republican Allies and the Buying of Washington. Peter Stone, thank you.
[Mr. Peter Stone:] It's been a pleasure, thanks.
[Alex Chadwick:] Stay with us on DAY TO DAY from NPR News.

[Scott Simon:] It's been a very long time since anybody has rung the Liberty Bell. But here's pretty much what it would sound like. The Normandy Liberty Bell, tuned to the exact same E-flat note of the original. In his new book about the cracked American icon Liberty Bell, Gary Nash points out that the bell we venerate today is itself a replica, created after the original that had been sent from London cracked upon testing. So on this 4th of July weekend, Gary Nash joins us from the studios of NPR West. Thanks very much for being with us.
[Mr. Gary Nash:] My pleasure, Scott.
[Scott Simon:] So tell us about this bell, commissioned in 1751 for the State House in Philadelphia. And what happened though when the bell got to town?
[Mr. Gary Nash:] They tested it. People gathered around and to the mortification of the political leaders of Pennsylvania, it cracked.
[Scott Simon:] Now, you say in a new book, called "The Liberty Bell," that youve got some revisionist history as to how the bell got its famous crack.
[Mr. Gary Nash:] People like to claim that it cracked when it was tolling for the death of John Marshall, first Supreme Court justice of great note. There are many other stories a little boy called up by the janitor, we might say, to have a go at ringing the bell. And, well, thats not true either.
[Scott Simon:] We dont know the truth yet though.
[Mr. Gary Nash:] We're pretty sure that it cracked tolling George Washington's birthday in 1843. And they tried to repair it. And then again in 1846 it developed a much more severe crack at that point it lost its voice.
[Scott Simon:] And let clear up another something. Taco Bell didnt really buy the Liberty Bell, did they?
[Mr. Gary Nash:] That was quite a hilarious moment. That was in the issue of the metro newspapers Washington Post, New York Times, L.A. Times but it was April Fools' Day when they announced that they had purchased the Liberty Bell and they would rename it the Taco Liberty Bell. And they paid a lot of money for it and that would help reduce the national deficit.
[Scott Simon:] Yeah, but they didnt really, right?
[Mr. Gary Nash:] Oh, no, no. It was a publicity stunt. But, you know, they sold a lot of tacos and burritos and enchiladas.
[Scott Simon:] And how do you assess its value as a symbol today?
[Mr. Gary Nash:] Well, it has become the touchstone of American values. It really is a stand-in for liberty and equality and unalienable rights and not just in this country but around the world. There are Liberty Bell replicas all over the world. And foreign visitors come by the hundreds of thousands every year to Philadelphia and they stand in front of that bell. They gaze at it and there is some magical power to it.
[Scott Simon:] Mr. Nash, thanks so much.
[Mr. Gary Nash:] A pleasure to be with you, Scott.
[Scott Simon:] Gary Nash is the author of "The Liberty Bell." This is NPR News.

[Ari Shapiro:] President Trump threw a curveball at Capitol Hill this morning where negotiations over health care were already tense. He tweeted that Republicans should consider repealing the Affordable Care Act first and figuring out a replacement for it later. Congress is still at work on a bill that does both. What's unifying most Republicans right now is the view that doing nothing on health care is their worst option of all. NPR congressional correspondent Susan Davis has more.
[Susan Davis, Byline:] No one on Capitol Hill knows exactly how Congress is going to get a bill to President Trump, not even House Speaker Paul Ryan. But like most Republicans, he believes they will because of this.
[Paul Ryan:] We have a promise to keep, and the promise we made is we would repeal and replace this health care law.
[Susan Davis, Byline:] That promise has been the single unifying campaign pledge of the Republican Party for the past four elections, which is why Texas Congressman Bill Flores says failing to pass a health care bill is the most politically devastating option on the table.
[Bill Flores:] We told the American people that we were going to repeal and replace Obamacare. And if we fail on that, A, it makes the rest of our agenda hard. And B, I just think the American people are going to be terribly disappointed in us.
[Susan Davis, Byline:] Flores's concern is shared by most Republicans that failing on health care would make moving the party's other top legislative priorities nearly impossible.
[Bill Flores:] If we can't work together and get this done, it doesn't portend well for working together to get tax reform done which is not easy, either or to get infrastructure done.
[Susan Davis, Byline:] Lawmakers are well aware of the risks they face with this bill. Nevada Republican Mark Amodei voted for the bill even though it's not popular back home. He explains the choice Congress is facing this way.
[Mark Amodei:] There's a fire burning on the west side of town, and the wind's blowing out of the West. And it's time to see who's a firefighter and who's going to leave town and hope that their house doesn't burn. And it's like, I'd rather burn up fighting it.
[Susan Davis, Byline:] But a few Republicans do think it's better to leave town without fighting that fire. In other words, passing a new law with Republican votes alone is a mistake, says Pennsylvania's Charlie Dent.
[Charlie Dent:] The problem that the Democrats had with the ACA or Obamacare is that they muscled that law through on a partisan basis, and we have been fighting about Obamacare ever since. As Republicans, we should not make that same mistake.
[Susan Davis, Byline:] Dent is a moderate who is 1 of just 20 Republicans who voted against the House bill. He says he won't vote for the Senate bill either if it comes back to the House. He's one Republican who thinks his colleagues are miscalculating the risks of defeat.
[Charlie Dent:] I am not of the opinion that if we fail to pass this legislation that somehow that will bring about the end of our party.
[Susan Davis, Byline:] Conservative activists like David Bozell disagree. He says the only way for Republicans to succeed is to keep the party's base united. Here he is on a conference call with Grassroots Groups.
[David Bozell:] The one constant between President Obama's victories and President Trump's victory is that to win, each party needs its base fired up and motivated to turn out.
[Susan Davis, Byline:] Bozell says failing on health care would deflate that Republican base and risk the party's control of Congress in next year's midterm elections. Adding to the pressures on Congress are activists like Ken Cuccinelli, who say the Republican health care bill under negotiation doesn't make good on their original campaign promise.
[Ken Cuccinelli:] The Republican base, including conservatives, libertarians, tea party people, traditional Republicans, all want repeal. They want what was promised.
[Susan Davis, Byline:] Conservatives don't like a bill that doesn't go far enough. Moderates don't like it for going too far. And party leaders are in the middle, trying to find a balance between the two. New Jersey Republican Tom MacArthur helped craft the compromise that got the bill through the House. He believes the bill is good policy and the public will ultimately support it.
[Tom Macarthur:] I think it would be healthy to get a bill passed and then actually educate the American people about what that specific bill actually does over time because right now, there's a lot of fearmongering going on.
[Susan Davis, Byline:] But in order to find out, Republicans have to keep their promise to enact a health care law. Susan Davis, NPR News, Washington.

[Scott Simon:] And as Mr. Coll mentioned, Secretary Clinton spoke yesterday on U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan and urged Taliban fighters to split from al-Qaida, saying that they face a stark choice. She did not mention the direct talks with the Taliban that Mr. Coll just told us about but did say diplomacy plays an increasing role in Afghanistan and Pakistan and announced a new envoy to fill the shoes of the late Richard Holbrooke who ran U.S. policy in the region. NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
[Michele Kelemen:] Secretary Clinton said that along with the military campaign against al-Qaida and the Taliban and ongoing U.S. development efforts, the U.S. is preparing for what she calls a diplomatic surge.
[Secretary Hillary Clinton:] Now, of course, we had always envisioned Richard Holbrooke leading this effort. He was an architect of our integrated military civilian diplomatic strategy and we feel his loss so keenly.
[Michele Kelemen:] She did find someone to take his place, though: Marc Grossman, a veteran diplomat who had once worked with Holbrooke. Clinton says he'll hit the ground running and he has a big job ahead.
[Secretary Hillary Clinton:] Just before the protests began in Tunisia and Egypt, I warned that the region's foundations were sinking into the sand. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, conflict is blasting the foundations apart brick by brick. Reconciliation and reform offer another way.
[Michele Kelemen:] Her reliance on envoys not just Grossman but also Middle East Envoy George Mitchell has surprised some foreign policy watchers, including Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation.
[Mr. Steve Clemons:] It moves the spotlight to someone else. It makes it look like Marc Grossman's package of things or George Mitchell's as opposed to Hillary Clinton's. I think that we're moving into an era though and this is why I've been a bit surprised by the Marc Grossman appointment that Hillary Clinton wants to move in and have more ownership of these big issues.
[Michele Kelemen:] Clemons says she's spent much of the first two years on the job trying to wrestle the State Department back into relevance and to elevate issues that she cares about.
[Mr. Steve Clemons:] I think that her objective is to raise the weight, the throw weight if you will, of women's rights, of interconnectivity in foreign affairs, of concerns about development as a national security issue.
[Michele Kelemen:] Secretary Clinton makes a point of visiting with students, businesspeople and activists on nearly every foreign trip she takes. She set up a special office on social media and the Internet and gave her second major speech on that issue just this past week. Carnegie Endowment Visiting Scholar David Rothkopf, who contributes to Foreign Policy magazine, says what's happening now in Egypt shows that Clinton was ahead of the curve.
[Mr. David Rothkopf:] A lot of other people poo-poohed and said, no, this is playing at the margin. Well, guess what? Not only is not playing at the margin, it's become absolutely central to the most important issues that the United States is facing and it shows that she really came in with a real kind of vision and sensitivity to how the business of diplomacy was changing in a way that I think has served the president very well.
[Michele Kelemen:] It's a good thing, he argues, that she has envoys working day-to-day issues and trying to cut across bureaucratic lines in Washington.
[Mr. David Rothkopf:] She is going to spend as much of her time dealing with political transition across the Middle East as she does dealing with the issues she thought she was going to deal with when she came into office.
[Michele Kelemen:] The turmoil in the Middle East is going to test all of her diplomatic skills as she tries to convince leaders in the region that it's in their interest to reform. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.

[Ed Gordon:] For NPR News, I'm Ed Gordon, for Friday, February 3. This is NEWS AND NOTES. Two days and counting before the big game, the 40th annual Super Bowl will bee played in Detroit on Sunday, and the Motor City is where we're broadcasting again today. We're coming to you live from the Detroit Breakfast House and Grill. The restaurant is just one of the many hot spots to hit, as the city of Detroit plays host to the biggest game in town, in fact, the biggest game in the country. Putting on the Super Bowl is no small task, and cities vigorously compete to host a game that will infuse millions of dollars into the local economy and shine the national spotlight on the city. Today, we're joined by the man who runs the city, and he's the man who's welcomed thousands to his town. We're joined by the mayor of the city of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick. Mr. Mayor, good to have you.
[Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick:] Thanks a lot Ed, how are you doing?
[Ed Gordon:] I'm good, man, I'm good.
[Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick:] All right.
[Ed Gordon:] We should note that you and I had a conversation about bringing this here. You took over the reigns from Dennis Archer, who initially laid the foundation. You for years have told me how exciting this time was going to be. Has it met your expectations?
[Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick:] Absolutely. Actually, it's exceeded my expectations. We knew in 2001, when I went to my first Super Bowl meeting, that this was going to be a major challenge, but I told the Committee we would have 50 new businesses downtown; we have 70. I told them we would get all these construction projects done on Washington, Broadway, Campus [unintelligible], all of the things you see have been done in four year. Really 40 months of construction has produced 142 construction projects. So it's been a roller coaster.
[Ed Gordon:] You certainly understand the importance of shining the national spotlight on this city and polishing it up a bit, if you will. You have people like Rush Limbaugh who have been taking hits at it, calling it [unintelligible]. Talk to me about how you see that and what you want to say to critics like that.
[Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick:] One of the things that I think has that ignorance so pervasive is that people haven't been here. They've taken the new stories from the '80s or the '90s; they've taken some scene that they saw back in 1984, which was 20 years ago, and they're using that in today's rhetoric that they use on the radio. And it's unfortunate because a lot of those people have huge mikes. They do it for entertainment purposes; they do it to fill space in their shows; but we want people on the ground, and the Super Bowl gives us an opportunity to give people from all over the country, all over the world, to come to Detroit and experience it for themselves. And I think the rhetoric will start to change. I mean, we're not perfect, but we come from a mighty long way, and this is a great city, and people are recognizing that.
[Ed Gordon:] How much do you believe part of the issue in bringing the image of Detroit back, and, quite frankly, bringing the city back is that you really face, unlike many cities...and I've always said, you can call Washington, D.C. "Chocolate City" but this is the blackest city in America.
[Mayor Fitzgerald:] There's no question.
[Ed Gordon:] How much of that is problematic, to a degree?
[Mayor Fitzgerald:] Well, I don't think it's problematic. I think that because of the mindset of many of us, we're so color struck in a country that's getting more diverse every day, this region, and a lot of us are still trapped in a black and white conversation. And we have a growing Hispanic and Latino community, a growing Arab and Chaldean, an African community, Indian community, Asian community. We need to talk about who are the best people that help the economy. What people can come in and sustain a strong middle class tax base. And image in very important to that, especially when you're Motown. When you hear about GM, Ford, Delphi that also sticks to us. Mayor Coleman Young, who was the mayor when you grew up here, used to say that when America catches a cold, Detroit catches pneumonia. So we catch everything that you hear out there. So it's important for us to have image turnaround so people could start second look at our town.
[Ed Gordon:] Mr. Mayor, you know we're about to have a special roundtable with three African American auto executives from the Big 3. But you face a challenge beyond the Super Bowl, and that really is solidifying the industry that made this town great. It's going to be a difficult task, a lot of hard days ahead. How realistic do you see that in terms of suring up the foundation?
[Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick:] I think it's very realistic. I think that the autos will do what they need to do, what's necessary to compete. I have a tremendous amount of respect for our car companies. I'm biased, of course, but they're getting leaner; they're getting tougher; they're putting out better products; and they'll lead again. But we also on our transformational committees are making an adjustment, you know, changing our heavy reliance on the manufacturing industry, moving into other industries. Now, we're engaged in this fuel cell economy. We just built a new $56 million facility on Wayne State's campus for this hydrogen economy; the financial economy. We're going out and getting new financial markets; and also healthcare, and all the different healthcare technology research that's being done at the DMC.
[Ed Gordon:] How do you bridge the gap though because you've got a lot of unemployment in this town?
[Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick:] Training. That's the...
[Ed Gordon:] How do you bridge the gap between now and then?
[Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick:] That's the biggest issue that we have in the city of Detroit. My grandfather came here to work in the plant. That's why he came to Detroit. And generations of people have done that. So now we have to take those workers, retrain them to go into a more skilled workforce, and retraining dollars the federal government, workforce development is going to be very important to cities like Detroit, not just Detroit. I want to make it a larger issue than Detroit so we can get some political...
[Ed Gordon:] What do you say to the president who says to the car companies, don't look for us. He said, don't look to us for federal help.
[Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick:] He's wrong. Thank God that we will have a new president in a couple of years, because we have to have a new focus on that. When you have the base...
[Ed Gordon:] Have you reached out to him after that statement?
[Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick:] Absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm hopeful that I get a meeting with him. What I can say about the president, if there's a good thing to say about him, he's been very responsive anytime that I've reached out, whether it's a HUD issue or whether it's an energy issue, he's been accessible. But on that particular issue, we've got to do something about pensions and healthcare. A lot of companies in America who provided the base, the middle class tax base for the country, cannot survive if we don't get some federal help...
[Ed Gordon:] What do you tell critics who say the base that kept the black middle class alive is no longer what we knew, and generationally, we should not look for that same industrial base to help these people survive?
[Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick:] I think that some of that is true. But I also believe that there needs to be an alternative investment in education and training for what's next. You can't say, that's not allowed and then forget about it. I mean, you can't outsource all the jobs to China or Mexico. We have to have some base or we won't be a country. I mean, we can't only put money in defense because you can't keep fighting everybody to stay powerful. You have to be on an economic base, and the economic base is within the people of this country. And it's the least of these. If you can raise up people from poverty to middle class, you supply the GDP for this entire country. 86%, Ed, of the GDP of the United States of America, comes from 360 cities in America. If cities are not strong, America is not strong. And so we need to make sure that those dollars...if you're moving out of Ford, if you're moving out of GM, then there must be some retraining to go into nursing, to go into healthcare, lab techs, some alternative workforce jobs that make sure people can still provide a quality of life.
[Ed Gordon:] How daunting is it though for you to hear the numbers when Ford announces the people there releasing...Kraft just announced a week ago all of the numbers that have got to come down. These companies, these corporations have to become lean, and quite frankly we didn't see the same kind of foresight that built these companies over the last decade to keep them lean.
[Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick:] It's awesome. I mean, it's something that...when you say, how do I feel, just getting real specific, when Ford announced its cuts and said, you know, the Wixom Plant will close, which is in a suburb of the city of Detroit, we know a large percentage of the people that work in that plant contribute to the economy of Detroit. The residents contribute income and property tax or sales tax, you know, from retail and restaurant revenue. And so it's hard. It's hard right now. This is a rough economy we live in. And every time they make cuts, the city has to make cuts. So it's important for us, the image change, bringing in Super Bowls, Final Fours, all of that gets people in town so we can start to market our city in a different way and bring new investments...
[Ed Gordon:] Mr. Mayor, there have been critics who have suggested to you, and you write in today's Detroit Free Press, that you see this in terms of the world seeing the true transformation that you're trying to make in this city. There are those who are saying that you're banking on the money, the infusion that you'll see here too much to sure up the economic base of the city, that it's not going to wipe away the deficit, and maybe you've put too much stock in this money coming.
[Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick:] I don't know where they got that from. I don't believe that this economically will benefit us that much. This is not the panacea. I've also said that. I don't think that the city will even come out in a positive position. We're spending more money than we'll make. We'll see when all of the receipts are in from restaurants and hotels, how much tax dollars we get, but we're spending an incredible amount of overtime on police.
[Ed Gordon:] You see this simply as a roadmap to say this is where you need to be.
[Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick:] This is a roadmap. This is a transformational point that we can use as a catalyst to get the type of things that we need to get in this city because it's hard to for 50 years nobody was coming to Detroit, and so now we're starting traffic back in. I mean, we've landed some major, incredible deals down here. Like I said, 140 construction projects, 70 new businesses in the city of Detroit in four years, and so we've done some good things, but now it enables us to go after some different type of businesses to get them down here. Just, Ed, yesterday, I made a huge presentation to a law firm that had 600 lawyers. We brought them in this week because we wanted them to see Detroit at its best, and they were excited about what they saw here, and we're going back at them next week.
[Ed Gordon:] Talk to me, finally, with a couple of minutes left, about so many people knew that you were caught in the middle of a contentious race here. There was question about the image and whether or not you had to change it and kind of reduce the hip-hop mayor label a bit. You were very frank about the lessons you learned. Talked to us about where you are today.
[Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick:] Where I am today is I'm much more mature, much more polished and much more knowledgeable mayor. You know, when you take this job of mayor, there's no mayor school. Coleman Young took this job at 57, and they asked him a reporter said, you know, how long is it going to take you to turn the city around? Four years? And he said, it's going to take me four years to find out how much money these people done stole. And I use that sentence to simply say, there's no way that you can know the entire breadth of things that you need to know to do this job, and I do now. I know where we need to go. I know where the resources are, and we're in a much better position from a Kilpatrick administration perspective to lead this city where it needs to go, and I think the people of the city saw that.
[Ed Gordon:] Mr. Mayor, the eyes are on the city. The eyes of the world, quite frankly, on the city, and as of today, right now, Detroit has done a shining job of showing them what kind of city we are here.
[Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick:] Absolutely. And we're proud of you. We're proud of all Detroiters doing great things around this country, but I'm so proud of the citizens of the city who stood up, 10,000 volunteers, to make sure that we're killing people with kindness this week.
[Ed Gordon:] All right. Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. I didn't put you on the spot and say who you're going for, but I know you're going for the Steelers and Jerome Bettis. Up next, on today's special roundtable: the auto industry at a crossroads. We'll be joined by top executives from the big three automakers to discuss the futures of their companies and the challenges ahead. That's coming up next on our roundtable.

[Steve Inskeep:] And from Paris we have more this morning from Eleanor Beardsley.
[Eleanor Beardsley:] Societe Generale's CEO Daniel Bouton said the trader had been able to conceal his own mini-company from the rest of the bank.
[M:] [Through translator] He was intimately knowledgeable about our control processes, so he was able to build his own positions and hide them each time by other positions that were completely fictitious.
[Eleanor Beardsley:] Kerviel had been betting Societe Generale's billions over the last year but was only discovered last week. The company frantically closed out its remaining exposure to his trades early this week as markets whipsawed. The bank's losses were magnified by the market plunge, says economist Catherine Lubojinsky, but this has happened before.
[M:] [Speaking French]
[Eleanor Beardsley:] Now out of jail, Leeson says the system needs more reforms.
[M:] There should have been, you know, there should have been checks and controls in place to stop him stepping outside of those limits. You're still looking at a system or a situation where the systems and the controls aren't good enough. The people in place to look after those systems and controls simply aren't good enough, either.
[Eleanor Beardsley:] For NPR News, I'm Eleanor Beardsley in Paris.

[Ailsa Chang:] And now a story about an instantly recognizable voice.
[Stephen Hawking:] Can you hear me?
[Unidentified People:] Yes.
[Ailsa Chang:] That, of course, is physicist Stephen Hawking, who died earlier this month. That machine voice became Hawking's voice after a debilitating neurological disease took away his own ability to talk. Hawking used to joke about getting stuck with an American accent. But the truth is, the late scientist grew quite attached to it so attached that he got a group of tech whizzes to take on the painstaking task of rescuing his voice. After nearly 30 years, the 1986 hardware that powered Stephen Hawking's voice was degrading. And one of the engineers who had to figure out how to save it was Eric Dorsey. Hi, Eric.
[Eric Dorsey:] Hi, Ailsa. How are you doing?
[Ailsa Chang:] I'm good. So when you first got a call in 2014 about preserving Hawking's voice, the same 1986 version which you helped develop, what went through your mind?
[Eric Dorsey:] The first thing that went through my mind was I was just kind of shocked that he was still using the same original hardware and that, you know, the same voice because, of course, technology had moved on quite a bit with products like Siri or Alexa.
[Ailsa Chang:] What was it specifically about the 1986 voice that he seemed so attached to?
[Eric Dorsey:] You know, one was the kind of intonation that it had. You know, he wanted a voice that people could listen to for an hour for a lecture and not get...
[Ailsa Chang:] [Laughter] Irritated.
[Eric Dorsey:] ...You know, bored, irritated but also be extremely intelligible.
[Ailsa Chang:] So you and a team go on this quest to save Stephen Hawking's voice. And your first lead was some software from 1996 that you guys unearthed. And from what I understand, a tech company had already pitched using this software back in 1996 to help Hawking preserve his voice. Let's hear his 1986 voice and the '96 voice side by side.
[Computer-generated Voice #1:] So let me finish by reflecting on the state of the universe.
[Ailsa Chang:] And this is a sample of the '96 software trying to upgrade that.
[Computer-generated Voice #2:] So let me finish by reflecting on the state of the universe.
[Ailsa Chang:] That sounds cleaner to me. What did Hawking say back then when he first heard the 1996 version?
[Eric Dorsey:] Right. So even though you could argue that acoustically it is better, it's obviously different. And, you know, he wasn't interested in the voice being better in any way. He just wanted to be exactly the same. And so we looked at, you know, the acoustical differences and we talked about, you know, reverse engineering the 1996 version to bring it back to the 1986 version, which was the first approach we looked at.
[Ailsa Chang:] OK, so this gets super technical and I'm totally simplifying here. But basically the solution you guys came up with is you got some software to mimic the old 1986 hardware and you finally came up with this voice.
[Computer-generated Voice #3:] So let me finish by reflecting on the state of the universe.
[Ailsa Chang:] Ok, so when Hawking heard that, was he like, yeah, this is it?
[Eric Dorsey:] Yes. After 3 12 years, we finally presented it to him at the end of January of this year. And he said, yes, that is identical to my voice. That's the one I want.
[Ailsa Chang:] And that final version, Hawking got it just this year right? in January just a couple of months before he died.
[Eric Dorsey:] Yes. I know. It was a race because, you know, when we started, we knew he was in his 70s. But we finished it in January and unfortunately, you know, he passed away about six weeks later.
[Ailsa Chang:] What did it mean to you to be part of this whole project?
[Eric Dorsey:] For me, it was extremely meaningful because it's rare that you can actually reuse engineering work that you did 30, 40 years ago and have such a large impact on his life. I mean, a lot of times, you work on software that, you know, maybe is useful or fun. But, you know, it's not critical to a person's life where this obviously was critical to Stephen Hawking, his ability to communicate with his colleagues and his family.
[Ailsa Chang:] Eric Dorsey, who helped save Stephen Hawking's voice. Thank you very much for joining us.
[Eric Dorsey:] Thank you, Ailsa.

[Kelly Mcevers:] As the fighting grinds on in Syria, many are still wondering if the U.S. should intervene beyond its campaign against ISIS. Fifty-one diplomats and State Department officials recently said yes. In a so-called dissent memo, they called for limited military strikes against the Syrian regime. But the Obama administration has stuck with no, repeatedly pointing to what it calls failed interventions in Iraq and Libya. Nussaibah Younis is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and she says the administration has learned the wrong lessons from the Iraq War.
[Nussaibah Younis:] I think the lesson we ended up learning was that military intervention is almost always destined to fail and that there are very real limits on the ability of the United States to project its military power to achieve its national security goals.
[Kelly Mcevers:] Instead, she says, the lesson should have been that military interventions can work if they're based on good intelligence and have clear goals and enough resources behind them. Like in Syria, she says, where she says the U.S. should do more to support moderate rebels and set up safe zones to protect them against Syria and Russia. That would pressure President Bashar al-Assad and his Russian backers to stop bombing Syrian civilians.
[Nussaibah Younis:] We've effectively taken all the military engagement except against ISIS totally off the table. There's not even really a credible threat of military intervention, and that is not helping us to achieve our national security goals in Syria.
[Kelly Mcevers:] That's Assad, but what about Russia? The U.S. ratchets up its military involvement. Russia responds and then we get into a situation where we don't know where it ends.
[Nussaibah Younis:] Yeah. I think it's partly about just I don't think there is a military solution to this war, and I'm not suggesting that the United States engage militarily, you know, to secure an end to the conflict. It's just about showing that Assad and the Russian forces don't have a carte blanche to do anything that they want in the country, including engaging in mass bombings. So it's about changing the realities on the ground just to the point where we can incentivize the regime to come to the table.
[Kelly Mcevers:] It sounds like a good plan, but, as we all know, the best laid plans...
[Nussaibah Younis:] Yeah.
[Kelly Mcevers:] ...You know, we want them to come to the table, but then we end up in an all-out war that lasts years and years and costs blood and treasure.
[Nussaibah Younis:] Yeah, I mean, look, there's no American or Russian interest in having all-out war, certainly not between the United States and Russia. Ultimately, we are engaged. We are conducting air strikes. We are conducting training and equipping missions. The problem is we're doing it on such a tiny scale that we have no chance of succeeding in achieving our goals. So the Iraq War should have taught us that when we have decided that we have this national security goal in the country, we need to come to a clear-headed decision on the kinds of resources that would need to be committed to that effort in order to achieve our goal. Otherwise, we might as well not bother because we might end up making a worse situation rather than a better one.
[Kelly Mcevers:] How do you imagine policy on intervention in Syria changing in the next administration? I guess we should talk about either scenario Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.
[Nussaibah Younis:] Yeah. I think with Donald Trump it's it remains very unpredictable. Although, Donald Trump is very isolationist in general. When it comes to ISIS, he is pretty hardline, and that reflects the wider sentiment in the Republican Party. I think for Hillary Clinton, she really bears the baggage from the Iraq War, which, I think, is another tragedy of the Iraq War. But I think when she separates her own national security assessments from her desire to remain popular with the Democratic base, I think she comes out on the side of more robust intervention than President Obama has done.
[Kelly Mcevers:] Nussaibah Younis, thank you very much.
[Nussaibah Younis:] Of course, thank you.
[Kelly Mcevers:] Nussaibah Younis is a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council where she also directs the Task Force on the Future of Iraq

[Melissa Block:] In Washington, the US Supreme Court entered the politically charged arena of congressional redistricting today. The justices said they will examine the legality of Texas' redistricting plan. It was bitterly contested by Democrats, and it resulted in Republicans gaining six seats in Congress. NPR's Nina Totenberg reports.
[Nina Totenberg Reporting:] The plan was the brainchild of then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who had a razor-thin majority to work with in the House of Representatives in Washington. DeLay's idea was to undo a previously approved redistricting plan that had been completed after the 2000 census and to substitute a new plan redrawing district lines so as to virtually assure Republicans six additional House votes in Texas. To that end, he aggressively raised money to elect enough Republican state legislators to pass the new reapportionment plan. Democrats in the state Legislature fought back, even fleeing the state to deny the Republicans a quorum. Latino and black voters objected to the plan, claiming it diluted their voting strength. But the Justice Department in Washington ruled that the plan did not violate the Voting Rights Act. And, finally, after a long struggle, the plan was enacted. On the legal front, though, the challenge to the plan continued, and today the Supreme Court said it would examine the issues presented by four separate groups of voters. The court said it would devote an unusual two hours of oral argument to the case in March. Among the questions before the court are these: Once the plan has been approved after a census, does the Constitution allow a second middecennial redistricting? Does the Constitution put any brakes on a redistricting plan that, in this case, the Republicans concede was done for a purely partisan advantage? Were the voting rights of minorities diluted by this plan, in violation of the Voting Rights Act? And was the one person, one vote doctrine violated because the second redistricting was based on census data that, by that time, was old?
[Professor Pam Carlin:] So the court will have a menu of claims in front of it.
[Totenberg:] Stanford law Professor Pam Carlin is an expert on voting rights laws.
[Professor Pam Carlin:] And it's possible that the court will strike down the plan without ever reaching whether it's politically fair or not. It's also possible that the court will develop some rule with real teeth in it for what counts as a politically acceptable plan under the equal protection clause. It's anyone's guess.
[Totenberg:] In short, the court could invalidate the plan as a violation of the Voting Rights Act and not tackle any of the other questions, or it could tackle all of them. A good deal has happened since the plan was adopted in 2003 by the Republican-controlled state Legislature. For Tom DeLay, the plan has proved to be something like quicksand. DeLay now faces a felony charge that he laundered money in violation of state law in order to elect a state Legislature that implemented the plan. The House Ethics Committee has reprimanded him for improperly using the Federal Aviation Administration to locate some Democratic state legislators who had fled the state during the legislative fight over the plan. And earlier this month a two-year-old Justice Department memo surfaced disclosing that the career lawyers in the voting rights section unanimously concluded that the plan was illegal under the Voting Rights Act. The conclusion, however, was overruled by Bush administration political appointees in the department, thus allowing the plan to go forward. With confirmation hearings set for Samuel Alito in January, it is unclear which justices will hear the Texas case. In the last major test of partisan redistricting at the Supreme Court, the court was evenly split, with Justice Kennedy casting the deciding vote against intervention by the court while at the same time questioning whether there might be some limit to partisan redistricting. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
[Michele Norris:] This is NPR, National Public Radio.

[Ed Gordon:] Towns like Bluffton say they're working to promote communities of inclusiveness, but what does that really mean, and will people of color come? Jim Hunt is president of the National League of Cities based in Washington, D.C. He heads up the group's partnership for working toward inclusive communities. Mr. Hunt joins us from West Virginia Radio in Morgantown, West Virginia. And joining us via phone is Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree. Professor Ogletree leads the law schools' Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. Gentlemen, great to have you on the program. Professor, let me start with you. Give us a quick historical view, of you will, of these, quote, sundown towns.
[Professor Charles Ogletree:] Well, thanks, Ed. As you know, when I was doing research on the Tulsa race riots from 1921, I was astounded to learn of the literally hundreds of towns now we've discovered thousands of towns around America in the South, but not exclusively in the South, where blacks were told leave before sundown. There were sirens, there were notices, and the consequences of staying in those towns were death or other serious bodily injury. And the good news is that that is largely historical, but it's a frightening sense that people could not live in the community. They could work there, they could visit there, but they couldn't'be there after dark because of the strongly held feelings about segregation. And sundown towns were just that: if you're black, get out of town before the sun goes down.
[Ed Gordon:] Mm hmm. Jim Hunt, while those sirens may have gone away, there are certainly still areas in this country where when the sun goes down, minorities know that this is an area a region you should not be in. That continues today.
[Mr. Jim Hunt:] Right, Ed. And I think when we look around and, obviously, the inclusive agenda is a broader agenda than just race, but clearly race plays a very significant part in the program.
[Ed Gordon:] Mr. Hunt, why are we seeing this sense of inclusiveness? Is it totally altruistic? Are there financial benefits to these cities? Why are we seeing this rush now to try to move to include minorities?
[Mr. Jim Hunt:] Well, and I think when we look across the board of what's happening across the country when we look at Dr. Richard Florida's work on the rise of the creative class, and some of the economic development needs of cities throughout America we recognize that if we're not going to be inclusive, we're going to suffer from an economic development perspective. And also the fact of just the basic fact that it's the right thing to do. And I think when we look across that broad spectrum of what inclusiveness includes, you know, we see that we kind of ask the question, who should be excluded from our communities? And I think as you engage in that debate in your communities, you'd find out that, obviously, there is some people that feels that should be an exclusive, gated community still in America. But I think that thinking communities and progressive communities are handling that in an entirely different way.
[Ed Gordon:] Charles Ogletree, we see a number of other efforts to bring people of color into communities. Recently, three Ohio mayors band together to try to show that they are in unison in welcoming people who heretofore had not been welcomed in these cities. Talk to me, if you will, about the communities. The lay people often in these communities, do they go along with this as political favor? Or do they come kicking and screaming often?
[Professor Charles Ogletree:] I think there's a skepticism, Ed, that's been developed because of historical concerns. And I applaud Jim Hunt and what the National League of Cities has done. But for everyday citizens and they were largely African- Americans, but now they're Hispanics and other immigrants and foreigners who face this sense the phenomena is greater than simply sundown towns. What we see now in urban American, in many of these urban communities is that folks are locked in which means everything closes at six anyway. The vitality of the cities of many major urban cities has been damaged. It's been moved to the suburbs. And when you talk about the suburbs, they're locked out. They can't live there, they often can't work there. So the National League of Cities is doing tremendous work. But if it doesn't change America's urban cities like Detroit and Chicago and Philadelphia and parts of Los Angeles and San Francisco and Houston and Dallas and Washington, D.C., then we're not going to solve the problem. And I like what they're doing, but it would be very great if we could see the urban areas get some benefit and people of color feel that they're welcome anywhere. That's not the case. It's not just race and ethnicity, it's really economic discrimination. The sense is that people of color are going to bring crime, they're going to bring drugs, they're going to bring down the economy on the property values that's the larger phenomenon that I hope NLC will confront and take on some of these urban cities who need to have something happening after 6:00. Because if not, it becomes a corollary of the sundown towns of the last century.
[Ed Gordon:] Jim Hunt, what about that? What about attacking that issue? Because a city like Detroit, for instance, after 5:00 p.m. downtown -outside of a hockey game and a couple of other small restaurants here and there it's hard to find whites on the streets of Detroit downtown.
[Mr. Jim Hunt:] Absolutely. And I think Charles have been reading some of my e-mails, some of the little heated e-mails that comes back after leading a program on inclusivity. But when I think when you look around and you see some examples that are the good examples, as in Vancouver, Canada recently. And they have had this resurgence of housing in the urban center. And I think that is housing is the key to this. Because as Charles pointed out, you know, I travel all over the country. I was in Tempe, Arizona, and the average person cannot afford to live in Tempe, Arizona. So it makes no difference whether it's race, whether it's culture or whatever, you end up having these exclusive communities. And I think that's one driving fact that we're looking at is to have these community discussions and figure out where we're going to have the workforce and affordable housing in our communities. Because in certain areas of the country, it is literally impossible for persons who are in the workforce that are doing the services that are needed in communities to actually live in a community. And to segregate these folks outside of the centers where the economy is driven just seems wrong. And it also I think what built America strong was that fact that we had in my own case as a poor kid in Clarksburg, West Virginia, I didn't have to go far to find the rich people in Clarksburg, West Virginia. I could walk down to a neighborhood and cut somebody's grass and learn the economics and learn how to be a success. And many of our young people today that are stuck in communities of poverty clearly don't have that lifeline out, and that's something we have to address and that has to be addressed through community-driven decisions.
[Ed Gordon:] All right. Jim Hunt is president of the National League of Cities, and Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree is founding and executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. Gentlemen, thanks.
[Mr. Jim Hunt:] Thank you.
[Professor Charles Ogletree:] Thank you.
[Ed Gordon:] Coming up, a special Roundtable. It's hard to find jazz on the radio today. Why is that, and what does it mean for the art form? That's up next.

[Steve Inskeep:] It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. We know for certain that the president of Yemen has returned home today. What we do not know is why, or what he'll do next. Ali Abdullah Saleh had been in Saudi Arabia for medical treatment for weeks. Few expected him to show up again in the country where he'd faced protests for months. But when he returned to a capital city torn with fighting today, reporter Tom Finn said some people welcomed him with celebratory gunfire.
[Tom Finn:] Saleh has returned and now the noise you can her in the background are these pro-Saleh forces. They're waving their daggers in the air and shouting, Yeah, Ali, yeah, Ali. So I mean, yeah, so that's the situation we find ourselves in, but obviously it's an incredibly dangerous time to return. We've had these four days of clashes between renegade troops and the Republican Guard. And it's hard to understand exactly what the motive is, returning at this time. But nevertheless, you know, as you can hear yourself, there are lots of people who still support the president. And you may be able to hear the gunfire that's just started again in the background.
[Steve Inskeep:] That was reporter Tom Finn on this program earlier this morning. A short time ago we called Mr. Finn back as anti-government protesters and the outside world tried to understand what the president is doing.
[Tom Finn:] When he left, lots of analysts were saying that Saudi Arabia would make sure that Saleh did not return to Yemen. Both Saudia Arabia and the U.S. and other Gulf countries had been pushing for Saleh to step down at that time, and it was presumed that they would reach some sort of an agreement whereby he wouldn't be allowed to return and Yemen would be able to press on with this long-needed political transition. But clearly that's not? has not been the case. And I was speaking to Western diplomats in Sanaa this morning who just had absolutely no idea that he was coming back.
[Steve Inskeep:] Well, what has the president said, if anything, about what he's doing there?
[Tom Finn:] Well, we've had one brief statement from the president, which came via the Ministry of Defense, which was essentially a call from the president for a ceasefire and some more dialogue. Now, as I said, we've had these clashes between these two different factions of the military. Whether or not they'll heed his call for a ceasefire is another matter altogether. And to be quite frank, President Saleh has been calling for negotiations and for dialogue since the last eight months? he hasn't gone anywhere in Yemen.
[Steve Inskeep:] Now, an analyst who was on this program earlier in the week suggested there weren't just two sides in Yemen but maybe as many as five. Is it clear how many of the various factions are even on the president's side at this point?
[Tom Finn:] No, that's a very good point, and actually I've been speaking with the? some of the members of the U.N. who are here at the moment trying to negotiate some sort of ceasefire, and they continuously remind me how difficult it is to operate in Yemen with so many different political factions. You've got the defected troops under Ari Mossen, who have been protecting protesters. Then you've got the protesters themselves, who are tens of thousands of, you know, of young men and women, some of whom are aligned with the political opposition, some of whom are completely independent. And then of course you've also got the military chiefs, the tribal chiefs in Yemen, and the big fear now is that Saleh returning will suck these tribal chiefs back into the conflict.
[Steve Inskeep:] Mr. Finn, I don't want to ask you to speculate about what's in the mind of the president at this unpredictable point, but just thinking about human nature, it's a little hard to believe that he would return to his country, with all the dangers that entails, simply to quit his job. You would presume that if he was coming back, he intends to rule, he intends to do something.
[Tom Finn:] Well, I mean, as I said, we're still at the stage of speculation now, and I've been talking to as many Yemeni analysts as I can. One of them who I spoke to this morning said that this was a characteristic Saleh move. You know, he's a mercurial president. He's never been a predictable president.
[Steve Inskeep:] Freelance journalist Tom Finn is in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, to which the president has returned today. Thanks very much.
[Tom Finn:] Thank you.

[Mary Louise Kelly:] President Trump's announcement that shuttered federal agencies will reopen for three weeks came with another promise.
[President Donald Trump:] I will make sure that all employees receive their backpay very quickly or as soon as possible.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] The president is talking about the 800,000 workers who were furloughed or working without pay during the shutdown. But contract employees far outnumber regular employees in the federal government, and there is no certainty about what will happen to them. Here's NPR's David Welna.
[David Welna, Byline:] Greg Hanna is the president of Toeroek Associates, a Colorado-based firm with 60 employees. About two thirds of their business is assessing contamination and liabilities at Superfund sites under contracts with the Environmental Protection Agency. Hanna says its shutdown has hit them hard.
[Greg Hanna:] If it weren't for having the other part of our business that is not shut down, we would be looking at being very close to bankruptcy.
[David Welna, Byline:] The last thing Hanna wants to do is lay off idled workers. But while the EPA's been shuttered, he's received no payments for hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of invoices for work already performed, and that's left him with a cash flow crunch.
[Greg Hanna:] What happens is people have vacation time and can, you know, continue to get paid. So you're still have ongoing payroll expenses that you have to meet, but your cash stream has dried up or, in our case, you know, significantly dwindled.
[David Welna, Byline:] Other federal contractors have been shut down entirely by the shutdown.
[Celeste Voigt:] They don't pay me. I'm a private business owner. I get nothing.
[David Welna, Byline:] Celeste Voigt sells lunches in two federal workplaces in South Dakota that have been shut down. She's had to let all four of her employees go.
[Celeste Voigt:] You shut your business down, and you leave yourself enough money to start it back up when they decide to open, which doesn't mean I have money to pay my employees. It just means I have enough money to just get it open.
[Tina Smith:] Today we are introducing a bill that is called the Fair Compensation For Low-Wage Contractor Act.
[David Welna, Byline:] At the Capitol, Minnesota Democratic Senator Tina Smith rolled out a bill last week in a room filled with furloughed low-wage federal contract workers.
[Tina Smith:] What this is about is that every day, people go to work as federal contractors or employees for contractors just like you around this table and around tables all around the country.
[David Welna, Byline:] One of the contractor employees was Audrey Murray.
[Audrey Murray:] I've worked eight hours for the Smithsonian. I've been furloughed since January 1. I also work for a contractor at the State Department. I am now a single mother. I lost my husband last year. I bought me a house in the process. Ma'am, I'm worried about how I'm going to pay my mortgage.
[David Welna, Byline:] The bill to make whole people like Audrey Murray is backed so far by 14 senators all on the Democratic side of the aisle. Maryland's Chris Van Hollen is one of them.
[Chris Van Hollen:] We're not talking about compensation going to people at high salaries. What it would do in its current form is cap the total reimbursement at people who are making 50,000 a year.
[David Berteau:] Our concern is that it's pretty hard to tell where to draw the line of who deserves this and who doesn't.
[David Welna, Byline:] That's David Berteau. He heads the Professional Services Council, a trade group for federal contractors.
[David Berteau:] Within the federal government civilians, there's no cap that says if you make above this level, you don't get your money back. You get your money back at any level at which you were operating for the federal government. We think the same should apply for contract workers who are put in unpaid status.
[David Welna, Byline:] And federal contractor Hanna says while the congressional fix sounds simple, it would effectively be paying contractors for having done nothing.
[Greg Hanna:] It's not quite clear how those payments would actually work under the procurement rules that we all have to work under. But, I mean, I'm certainly in favor of it if they're able to do it.
[David Welna, Byline:] It's never been done before, but then no other shutdown's hit contractors like this one has. David Welna, NPR News, Washington.

[Ailsa Chang:] "Black Panther" was shown last night at a movie theater in Saudi Arabia. It was an invitation-only event that marked the end of a three-decade-old ban on cinema in the ultraconservative kingdom, and more theaters are supposed to open soon. NPR's Jackie Northam went to the city of Jeddah for a look at Saudi showbiz. She says filmmakers are eager to light up the screens, and the censor is ready to check their work.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] You need to climb three flights of stairs to reach Cinepoetics production company. Its rooms are bright and cluttered with film posters. In one room, there are sagging couches and a large white wall to watch movies. The founder and filmmaker Abdulrahman Khawj has given the space a glorified name after Sidney Lumet, one of his film heroes.
[Abdulrahman Khawj:] That's the Sidney Lumet theater, I think my favorite director. I love him and his work.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] What was your favorite movie?
[Abdulrahman Khawj:] I think "The Verdict" is my favorite movie of his, although "Network" is very close also, yeah.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] The 30-year-old Khawj has welcomed us to talk about this new era for Saudi filmmakers in which cinemas are no longer haram, forbidden.
[Abdulrahman Khawj:] For me, it's fantastic. I no longer want to flee the country and go to New York. Here we're doing something very new.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] Khawj says it will be much easier now to get permits to shoot feature-length movies and less chance of being harassed by religious police. Khawj says it's always nerve-wracking auditioning females for movie roles in this highly segregated country. He was once hauled into the police, accused of solicitation.
[Abdulrahman Khawj:] I walked out of there. I sat in my car and almost cried because what we do is already hard as it is, and then having all this pressure and having every little move you do criminalized.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] Allowing cinemas in the kingdom again is part of a drive by the Saudi government to modernize the country and create more business opportunities. It hopes to turn Saudi Arabia into a regional hub for moviemaking. But while the government may say it's all right to make commercial films, it's a tough place to work.
[Unidentified Person:] [Unintelligible] Take two and action.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] Not far from Khawj's studio, an all-female crew works on a short film. We spent some time with the crew, including Reem Almodian. The 22-year-old is petite and fine-boned, wearing an abaya and a dark blue headscarf.
[Reem Almodian:] I really wanted to be an actress, but it's kind of something I cannot actually talk to my parents about.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] Almodian's parents told her she had to cover her face if she wanted to be on screen. So she decided to go behind the scenes, enrolling in Saudi Arabia's only film school at an all-female university. But her family doesn't see filmmaking as a good career choice and doesn't like her mixing with men on the set.
[Reem Almodian:] They don't like it. But they know that it's my dream and it's a thing that I want to follow, so they're supporting me on that side. But they actually don't like it.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] It's not like Saudis haven't seen movies. There are private showings in homes. There's HBO and Netflix. And short films on YouTube are hugely popular, as are TV serials like this one called "Takki." But even the established creator of that show, Mohammed Makki, thinks lifting the ban on cinemas is a huge deal. His lifelong dream has been to make full-length feature films, and he wants Saudis to be able to see films from their own country.
[Mohammed Makki:] I'm sure Egyptian cinema or American cinema they're going to come in and show their films here. We kind of have a small fear that they might take over if we don't go with our own films.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] Still, Makki says while Saudi filmmakers may lack the technical expertise of Hollywood, they can tap into a rich vein of Saudi stories that haven't been told for decades.
[Mohammed Makki:] We are the people who lives here, and we have to tell our own stories. They don't know us as much as we know each other. That's our advantage point.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] Still, Saudi Arabia is an ultraconservative kingdom with an absolute monarchy that keeps tight control over expression. All movies will be subject to censorship. There will be red lines no nudity or criticism of the political and religious establishment. But the censor told NPR everything else remains unclear. Redha Mohammed al Haider says he's having trouble coming up with rules given the rapid changes in the country.
[Redha Mohammed Al Haider:] A certain scene could be viewed as normal for one individual, but for another individual, it's not appropriate. So how can we come up to an understanding where the majority of people at least agree that this is acceptable for most of the people?
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] The government is making the changes slowly. It wants to open some 350 cinemas by 2030. In the meantime, it plans to provide more funding for things like studios and film schools. Jackie Northam, NPR News, Jeddah.

[Sarah Mccammon:] The longtime TV economic analyst Larry Kudlow is being tapped to be President Trump's top economic adviser. Kudlow, who appears on CNBC, will replace Gary Cohn as chairman of the National Economic Council. Cohn announced his departure from the White House last week after coming out on the losing end of a battle over imposing sweeping steel and aluminum tariffs. Kudlow, like Cohn, also opposed those tariffs, but Trump likes him anyway. Here's what he said Tuesday about Kudlow.
[President Donald Trump:] I want to have a divergent opinion. We agree on most. He now has come around to believing in tariffs as also a negotiating point.
[Sarah Mccammon:] NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson joins us now from the White House. Hi, Mara.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Hi, Sarah.
[Sarah Mccammon:] So Mara, is Trump right? Has Kudlow changed his mind on tariffs?
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Not completely. Kudlow has been very adamant. He has said that raising tariffs is the same thing as raising taxes, and he thinks across-the-board tariffs, especially ones against our allies instead of just ones targeted to the really bad actors, is the wrong policy. And this is the reason why, as you said, Gary Cohn resigned. But a source close to Kudlow says that even though he hasn't changed his supply side, free market, free trade views, he has come to believe that now that Trump has given Canada and Mexico and Australia exemptions from these tariffs, that Trump is using them not to spark an all-out trade war but more as a negotiating tactic. And Kudlow was in his on his podcast a couple of days ago, and he said, Trump comes at you like he's going to punch you in the teeth with these tariffs. Then he pulls back and starts making deals. Here's what he said.
[Larry Kudlow:] That looks to me like what he's doing here on tariffs. He comes out really hard and strong, scares everybody. Then he starts to pull back, withdraw.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] And Trump, if he says if Trump is willing to use these tariffs just to get a better NAFTA deal, for instance, with Canada and Mexico friends of Kudlow says that's something Kudlow can live with. He wants to keep NAFTA going, but he's willing to modernize it.
[Sarah Mccammon:] But given that they don't necessarily see eye to eye on tariffs, what is the appeal of Kudlow for President Trump?
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] As Trump said yesterday, he's known Kudlow for a long time. Kudlow worked for Ronald Reagan. He was once the top economist at Bear Stearns. He's a longtime television personality on CNBC. He's a New Yorker. And really important he was one of Trump's original backers. Trump pointed this out yesterday. We know Trump values loyalty. And during the campaign, Trump used Larry Kudlow like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. He would say Larry Kudlow likes my tax plan. Larry Kudlow probably helped him design the tax plan. But also, Kudlow is an enthusiastic supporter of every other part of Trump's economic agenda the tax cuts and deregulation. He just differs with him on trade.
[Sarah Mccammon:] So with all the other changes we're seeing this week like replacing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Mara, what's your takeaway from all these staff moves?
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Well, one takeaway is that it isn't as simple as just Trump wanting nationalists or people who agree with him. At first glance, it might appear that way. But Kudlow is he's not a protectionist. So Trump likes a team of rivals. And as he said yesterday, I want divergent opinions. It's also in part about comfort level and chemistry. And he likes the debate that's happening inside the White House right now. You still have Peter Navarro and Bob Lighthizer and Wilbur Ross. They are on the more protectionist side. And I was told by an outside adviser to Trump that he's still trying to thread the needle on trade. He's still obsessed with the trade deficit. He still sees it like a score card and a zero-sum game, not as an indication of comparative advantage. But he doesn't want to hurt the stock market, and that's one of the reasons he wants someone like Larry Kudlow there with him. You saw this also with Mike Pompeo. He's replacing Rex Tillerson at the State Department, and he's somebody that Trump is very comfortable with. Donald Trump did not come into office with a ready-made network of Cabinet members. Now he's getting his sea legs, and as he said yesterday, we're getting very close to having the Cabinet and other things that I want.
[Sarah Mccammon:] That's NPR's Mara Liasson at the White House. Thanks, Mara.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Thank you.

[Arun Rath:] Almost as soon as the Oscar nominations were announced this week, many people were pointing out an uncomfortable fact. Every director nominated is a white male. All the nominees for lead and supporting actor are white.
[Deborah Sathe:] This felt like a real shame.
[Arun Rath:] That's Deborah Sathe, head of talent development and production at the British nonprofit Film London.
[Deborah Sathe:] Dare I say it, I was really gutted for the industry. And I was really gutted personally because I feel there have been some extraordinary films that could have been in there.
[Arun Rath:] She heads Film London's Microwave project, a program that provides mentorship and training to help filmmakers make their first feature on tiny budgets. Twelve film projects are selected out of more than 100. The goal is to ensure that half of the filmmakers that end up on that long list are racial or ethnic minorities. These teams go through an intensive boot camp to sharpen their skills, and in the end, two films are commissioned.
[Deborah Sathe:] We wanted to have a very aggressive drive to enable our long-lists to reflect the make-up of London. And both in my experience in television and in film, the talent pool often are those who are in the know. And I felt that what we needed to do, in order to broaden Microwave's reach, was to run a targeted recruitment campaign across London. And so we made sure we were talking to all the organizations that had a foothold in communities that sometimes we don't see reflected in the cinema. And we use social media. We used theater outreach groups. And all the sessions that we ran, all the roadshows, all the master classes were full, and it was really, really exciting.
[Arun Rath:] Last year, a successful film came out of the project. It was called "Lilting."
[Andrew Leung:] [As Kai] If only she liked you, then it's a lot easier.
[Cheng Pei-pei:] [As Junn] [Foreign language spoken].
[Naomi Christie:] [As Vann] He was my only child.
[Ben Whishaw:] [As Richard] He was my life.
[Arun Rath:] Can you tell us about that film?
[Deborah Sathe:] Hong Khaou, who is an extraordinary storyteller, is a London-based filmmaker. It's just been nominated for a British Academy Film Television award as the most outstanding debut, and it has sold across the world. And it is an incredible achievement, considering his budget was under 150,000 pounds.
[Arun Rath:] Wow, so you've set a goal to get 50 percent filmmakers from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, and you've reached that goal with 12 long-listed films.
[Deborah Sathe:] Yes.
[Arun Rath:] What're you aiming for beyond that?
[Deborah Sathe:] Sometimes, I think, the greater public think that it is an earnest endeavor, which I don't agree with. I think that we have to look at the changing face of the audience and how we enable and grow a new audience to champion television and film. That doesn't mean to say we ignore the film fan that exists there already, but I think that film fan is able to consume stories from everywhere. And if you look, particularly in London, in our big urban centers, the most quickly growing population is a diverse one.
[Arun Rath:] So if the push is successful, what would be your measure of success? What would you like to see the Oscar nominees look like in 2025 or 2030?
[Deborah Sathe:] I would love to see them champion extraordinary innovation and bravery and performance, as well as the traditional kind of big hitters. And I feel like, as an industry, in order to survive, we have to innovate. And sometimes that feels terribly scary, but ultimately, it will strengthen our industry in the long run.
[Arun Rath:] Deborah Sathe runs Film London's Microwave project. Deborah, thanks very much.
[Deborah Sathe:] My pleasure.

[Scott Simon:] Hurricane Harvey reached land in south Texas late last night as a Category 4 storm, with winds of more than 130 miles an hour. It's weakened since then, but winds and heavy rain continue to threaten millions of residents on the Gulf Coast. Low-lying southwest Louisiana is especially vulnerable to flooding. NPR's Debbie Elliott reports from Cameron Parish, where people are leaving the coast.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] Scott and Michelle Trahan look out from their back deck in Creole, La., a remote and tiny town near the Texas border. Harvey's outer bands have brought rain much of the afternoon.
[Michelle Trahan:] You see already, the water, that little dock? Usually, you can see underneath it, but it's already the pond's starting to fill up.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] Beyond the dock is a pasture and marsh.
[Michelle Trahan:] That's where we run our cattle out on Michelle and them's family property back here.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] But the cattle field is empty, save for a lone white egret. The Trahans have spent the last three days herding the livestock into trailers and moving them to high ground in a neighboring parish.
[S. Trahan:] We have about 60 mama cows. And we have three bulls with them and then got about we're close to 40 calves.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] Now they're back at the house to pack up the tractor and other heavy equipment that would ruin if Harvey's storm surge pushes in saltwater.
[S. Trahan:] I've already hauled my cow pen and portable cow pen, portable chute, dozer, cattle feeder.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] The Trahans live on a narrow ridge of land in Cameron Parish in far southwest Louisiana. There are not many options in and out of South Cameron a ferry, a pontoon bridge and narrow coastal roads bound by marsh and waterways.
[S. Trahan:] So you've got to get everything out to high ground just in case.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] When the last load is packed, they'll leave, too.
[M. Trahan:] You have to leave for safety. And it's just not wise to stay and take a chance. Drowning ultimately is what it would be. Things can be replaced, but lives? Not so much.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] The Trahans have seen their house flooded before, even though it's up on pilings nearly 12 feet high. The Parish was devastated by Hurricane Rita in 2005 and then was hit again by Ike in 2008.
[M. Trahan:] We have to heed the warning and run from the water. And then we go from there and then take shelter and come home, if there's a home to come to, and start over.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] Communities south of the intracoastal waterway here are under a mandatory evacuation. Danny Lavergne is the director of emergency preparedness for the parish. He's worried about...
[Danny Lavergne:] Storm surge, water above ground, flooded roads where people could get trapped. But yet, just a few days down the road, we could have a tropical storm or hurricane coming.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] About 2,500 full-time residents are under the evacuation order. But in addition, Lavergne says he's also had to make sure that some 14,000 workers left the area. They're here doing construction on two major liquefied natural gas plants. What's next? Lavergne says it's hard to say because unlike most hurricanes, Harvey is forecast to stay put.
[Danny Lavergne:] This is different because most hurricanes come in, everybody evacuates. You let it pass, then you come on back in. Well, this one here, OK, well, evacuate for this part of the storm and then here comes the second part four days down the road possibly, you know.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards is worried people will wake up and assume they're in the clear because Harvey made landfall in Texas.
[John Bel Edwards:] The greatest risk we have is for complacency and people to not pay attention and think that this thing is over prematurely, only to have it come in our direction and visit more devastation.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] Harvey is forecast to dump up to 15 inches of rain on southwest Louisiana, drenching an area that is already saturated from a rainy summer. Debbie Elliott, NPR News, Creole, La.

[John Ydstie:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm John Ydstie. Pope Benedict XVI told Islamic leaders in Germany today that they had a duty to steer young people away from terrorism. The pope met with religious leaders from Germany's top Turkish community as part of his visit to his homeland for this year's World Youth Day festival for young Catholics. NPR's Sylvia Poggioli is with the pontiff in Cologne. Hi, Sylvia. SYLVIA POGGIOLI reporting Hi, John. Sylvia, this sounds like a pretty blunt message that the pope delivered today. What exactly did he say to the Muslim religious leaders?
[Poggioli:] Benedict said the world would be exposed to the darkness of a new barbarism unless religions work together to combat terrorism, which he called a cruel fanaticism. He said those who instigate terrorist attacks want to poison relations between faiths and use all means, including religion, to prevent coexistent and mutual respect. The pope focused in particular on the duty of Islamic leaders in educating young people. He said teaching is the vehicle through which ideas and convictions are transmitted, and addressing the leaders directly, he said, `You have a great responsibility for the formation of the younger generation.'
[John Ydstie:] A very blunt message, and how did the Muslim leaders react?
[Poggioli:] Well, in their prepared statements, two Muslim leaders of Turkish origin focused primarily on interfaith dialogue and the need for mutual respect between religions and the issue of terrorism was somewhat secondary. But one leader, Nadeem Elyas, head of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, called for a mea culpa by both the Islamic and Christian worlds for what he called the black chapter of our common history. He said this is necessary for Christians and Muslims to fight their common enemy: terrorism. Now today's meeting came at a very crucial time because there's an increasing suspicion between Europeans and the 15 to 20 million Muslims living in Europe, and Europeans have begun asking out loud whether the multicultural ideal has failed and whether it's possible to integrate Muslims into European societies.
[John Ydstie:] Of course, before Benedict became pope when he was known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he often remarked on the Christian roots of Europe. Does this message today complicate his outreach to the Muslim community?
[Poggioli:] Well, you know, in fact, last year, as then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he spoke out against Turkey's membership in the European community, saying it had always been in permanent contrast to Europe, but as pope, he's already softened his language somewhat. For example, he reportedly overruled an aide who wanted to brand the July 7th London bombings as anti-Christian and instead he called them acts against humanity. And Benedict has taken pains to reject the theory of a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. And he's made it clear that on many issues dear to him-the decline of family values and the increased secularization of the West-Islam can be a powerful ally in the pope's campaign against what he calls the dictatorship of relativism. But today the pope also stressed another issue that's very dear to him, and that's the concept of reciprocity which means recognition of religious freedom for Christians and other minorities in some majority Islamic countries. The Vatican has long complained of increased harassment of Christians in the Middle East, but most of all, Benedict wants equal religious rights. For example, if Saudi Arabia can spend millions to finance mosques in the West, why are Christians banned by law from building churches in Saudi Arabia.
[John Ydstie:] NPR's Sylvia Poggioli in Cologne. Thanks very much, Sylvia.
[Poggioli:] Thank you, John.

[Steve Inskeep:] Tens of thousands of freshman have just finished their first month in college. They've signed up for classes, met a bunch of other people and, if history is any guide, asked themselves a question: What am I doing here? Everyone else is smarter and better adjusted than I am. And for some, that question totally changes the college experience, may even cause them to drop out, which is why a researcher was determined to intervene. He told his story to NPR's Shankar Vedantam, who's here to tell it to us. Hi, Shankar.
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] Good morning, Steve.
[Steve Inskeep:] OK. So, what did he do?
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] Well, Greg Walton was looking at this fact that all students go through difficulties when they get to college, Steve. But some students look at the problems that they're facing and they draw global conclusions from them. They say this is not just a professor giving me a bad grade or someone not sitting next to me in the cafeteria. This reflects that fact that I am not ready for college, or I shouldn't be in this college at all.
[Steve Inskeep:] Because they're in this sensitive moment, and they're judging themselves.
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] And they feel like impostors. So, Greg Walton who, by the way, is a psychologist at Stanford here's how he explained it to me.
[Greg Walton:] If you're walking around in an environment, asking yourself whether you belong, when something bad happens if you get criticized, if you feel excluded or lonely to you, in your head, you might think that it means that you don't belong, in general, in that school.
[Steve Inskeep:] And that is the moment at which you might, I suppose, socially withdraw, or just withdraw from school.
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] That's right. And Walton said that some minority students and some women were especially affected by this. You already feel like you don't quite belong or you stick out in class, and now you get negative feedback. And you connect the two things together, and now you feel like you really don't belong.
[Steve Inskeep:] And that's interesting, because you're suggesting that women or minorities might feel more like outsiders. There's a lot of different kinds of people that might feel like outsiders. I went to a university in eastern Kentucky, and there were a lot of people from small towns that just seemed overwhelmed by that experience in the same way you're describing.
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] That's exactly right, Steve. Because I think what Walton is talking about is that some students are just going to be more vulnerable than others. And he conducted an intervention to see if he could actually reverse this. He brought a bunch of freshmen in. He told them this is what earlier students who've been to this college have experienced. They went through difficult periods of time and then things got better over time, and they heard ostensibly from these earlier students who said when I first got to college, I didn't have any friends, but I realized it takes some time to make friends. And in the long run, everything worked out great. And then he had the freshmen themselves tell stories about how their own experiences matched this pattern.
[Steve Inskeep:] OK. So, all they really did was find out they're not the only people in the world who are having these feelings. How much of an effect did that have on them?
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] It had a remarkable effect. It improved the academic performance and well-being of students who went through the intervention compared to students who didn't go through the intervention. And what was most remarkable, Steve, is that the effects of this one-time intervention lasted the next three years of these college students' lives.
[Steve Inskeep:] Just from having, what, one brief session?
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] It seems remarkable, Steve. And I asked Walton this, because I said it's hard to imagine that this one session could have had such a big effect. He explained to me that he didn't think, actually, it was the intervention that made the difference. The reason these students did well in college is because they studied hard, they worked hard and they did well. That's why they did well. All the intervention was doing was it was removing a barrier inside their heads, this barrier that made them see a local setback as some kind of a global statement on themselves.
[Greg Walton:] What the intervention did was it prevented students from feeling that they didn't belong in general when they had negative experiences. You can then imagine how if you're feeling less vulnerable to threats, you are better able to connect with other people, to peers, to teachers and build the kinds of relationships that actually sustain performance over a long period of time.
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] You know, Walton gave me another analogy, Steve. He said this intervention might be like engine oil in a car. The engine oil doesn't actually make the car go forward, but it removes some of the friction inside the car and helps the engine run more smoothly, and that's what helps the car move forward.
[Steve Inskeep:] OK. So, did the young people who had the engine oil applied, did they themselves sense the difference after this intervention?
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] Here's the interesting thing, Steve. When Walton went back and talked with these students later on, they didn't even remember that they had done this three years ago. And Walton was very careful, when he brought them in in the first place, not to signal that he was actually doing an intervention. He dressed up the intervention as saying you're going to be helping future freshmen deal with coming to college. So, he placed them in a role where they were seeming like they were helping others rather than being in need of help themselves.
[Steve Inskeep:] Oh, because if you just went directly at them, it's one more adult giving you one more homily. But this way, the message just sneaked up on them.
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] Yeah, and not just that. When you bring students in and say we're doing an intervention to help you, what's the message you're sending those students?
[Steve Inskeep:] You're messed up.
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] You're messed up, and you need help. And I think Walton's point is if schools want to apply this intervention, it needs to be done with some subtlety, or it could backfire.
[Steve Inskeep:] Shankar, thanks very much.
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] Thank you, Steve.
[Steve Inskeep:] That's NPR's Shankar Vedantam. You can follow him on Twitter @HiddenBrain. You can follow this program, as always @MorningEdition and @NPRInskeep, as well as NPRGreene.

[Ari Shapiro:] The Stonewall riots 50 years ago sparked a wave of gay activism at a time when many LGBT people were afraid to show their faces publicly. Just over a decade after Stonewall, a plague would begin to wipe out gay men. This was an ABC News report from 1982.
[Unidentified Reporter:] It's mysterious, it's deadly and it's baffling medical science acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
[Ari Shapiro:] As we mark the 50th anniversary of Stonewall this week, we're going to look now at how the activism of Stonewall transformed into the fight against AIDS. David France is an investigative journalist. He created the book and documentary "How To Survive A Plague." Welcome to the program.
[David France:] Thanks for having me, Ari.
[Ari Shapiro:] To start with the big picture, did Stonewall change the mindset of gay people in a way that allowed them to publicly protest in the face of AIDS that they might not have if Stonewall hadn't happened?
[David France:] What we learned from Stonewall was that the community no longer felt comfortable being as isolated and disenfranchised as it had been. But we had carved out these little kind of pockets of semi-freedom, and Stonewall said, that's not enough. And all the organizations that grew from that time said, you know, we have a right to citizenship. We have a right to kind of all the responsibilities, but all the benefits of, you know, being human, being an American. And when AIDS hit, what became really clear very early on was that we were being denied really basic fundamental things. And that sense of entitlement is what carried through when we started to realize that hospitals were routinely not taking AIDS patients, that nobody in the public health firmament was doing anything effective in response to the disease. So we started taking care of ourselves by creating organizations like Gay Men's Health Crisis and the Shanti Project in San Francisco that took on the caregiving challenges that the community needed.
[Ari Shapiro:] Let's talk about one specific group that sprang up to respond to AIDS ACT UP New York which staged protests and actions like die-ins that were deliberately, intentionally in your face.
[Unidentified Person:] Stop killing us. Stop killing us. We're not going to take it anymore.
[Ari Shapiro:] Obviously, the group ACT UP was a response to AIDS, but did you see that as an outgrowth of what had happened in Stonewall?
[David France:] People who were really on the front lines of the formation of ACT UP were a new generation. Six years into the epidemic, 1987, there still was no medication online to treat the disease. There was no public health response on the federal level or the academic level. Nobody was responding to this at all, and this new generation of LGBT folks were outraged. And that's what ACT UP was. ACT UP was a response of outrage.
[Ari Shapiro:] Different cities responded in different ways to the epidemic. How would you compare what happened in New York to San Francisco?
[David France:] The San Francisco model of responding to the disease was really care-based. It was a kind of a familial response to the disease. People were kind of helping ease AIDS patients into death in the most comfortable way possible. The activism of anger and of politics was really an East Coast response. It was an effort, finally, to break down those walls around the ghettos that we had built and to say that we are not going to be able to do this ourselves. We've done so much else ourselves, but we are not going to find a cure to this mysterious retrovirus. And so we started going to the doors of Big Pharma and the halls of scientific research and demanding action from the people who had the training and the background and, really, the ethical obligation to respond.
[Ari Shapiro:] And so when you take a step back and look at this arc from Stonewall 50 years ago to AIDS activism, what lessons do you take away for today, for 2019?
[David France:] What we learned from AIDS activism is that, really, street action and street organizing can be incredibly effective, that even the most disenfranchised populations and certainly, the queer population was as disenfranchised in the '80s as any other can seize power, can find a way to make positive change to end the disenfranchisement. And the fact of that being a possibility, I think, is really the lasting message from that time.
[Ari Shapiro:] Journalist and filmmaker David France. Thanks very much.
[David France:] Thanks, Ari.

[Audie Cornish:] A new presidential initiative is touching off heated debate about the Internet. President Obama is calling for stronger rules to protect what's known as net neutrality. That's the idea that broadband providers should treat all traffic on their networks equally. The president's critics accuse him of trying to regulate the Internet, which they say would hurt innovation and investment. That may be a catchy critique, but as NPR's Joel Rose reports, it also may be misleading.
[Joel Rose, Byline:] Texas Senator Ted Cruz has been leading the latest charge against net neutrality. At an event in Austin this month, Cruz brought an old black rotary phone up on stage to make his point.
[Senator Ted Cruz:] The Telecommunications Act of 1934 was adopted to regulate these.
[Joel Rose, Byline:] Cruz is unhappy that President Obama wants to regulate broadband Internet access under Title II of the Telecommunications Act of 1934, a law that was written for the old phone monopoly. Cruz and other critics say it would be a mistake to apply that to broadband.
[Senator Ted Cruz:] Don't mess with the Internet. The freedom that has enabled this to develop the worst thing that could happen is letting a whole bunch of politicians come in and regulate every aspect of what you're doing.
[Joel Rose, Byline:] But supporters of net neutrality say there's a crucial flaw in Cruz's argument.
[Marvin Ammori:] We're not regulating the Internet. We're regulating access to the Internet.
[Joel Rose, Byline:] Marvin Ammori is a fellow at the New America Foundation, and he says that's a big distinction. Ammori says no one is talking about regulating what websites you can visit or what you can say in your e-mail or what service you can use to send that e-mail.
[Marvin Ammori:] All we're making sure is that Comcast, Verizon, AT&T can't interfere with your access to your e-mail or anything else on the Internet. That's all we're talking about.
[Joel Rose, Byline:] Net neutrality advocates want to ensure that broadband providers can't block competitors' access to their pipes or charge companies like Google or Netflix more to deliver their data to you faster. Here's how President Obama put it in a video message earlier this month.
[President Barack Obama:] Cable companies can't decide which online stores you can shop at or which streaming services you can use, and they can't let any company pay for priority over its competitors.
[Joel Rose, Byline:] The Federal Communications Commission has tried before to create net neutrality rules, but they've been struck down in court. Supporters of moving to Title II say it would give the FCC broader power to enforce its rules. But the broadband industry and its allies worry it would give regulators too much power. Rob Atkinson is president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in Washington.
[Rob Atkinson:] Moving to Title II is certainly a heavy-handed regulatory step. It's a very, very detailed top-down regulations of what you can do. There are over 200 separate provisions in there.
[Joel Rose, Byline:] Including some that would allow the FCC to put a cap on how much your broadband provider can charge. Critics say Title II would give the FCC the power to regulate the broadband industry like a public utility. The Obama administration says it does not want the commission to do that. Obama is urging the FCC to exercise forbearance, which is basically bureaucrat speak for we'll skip the parts of the law we don't like. But Atkinson is skeptical.
[Rob Atkinson:] It's just unclear what's going to happen. We don't know how Title II if it were applied, how it would be applied.
[Joel Rose, Byline:] The broadband industry would prefer rules that would allow it to create special fast lanes on the Internet for companies that can afford to pay more. That would probably include such big names as Netflix, Amazon and Google. Senator Ted Cruz describes this as a fight between big boys on both sides. And he says federal regulators should stay out of it.
[Senator Ted Cruz:] I promise the regulations over and over and over again will favor the big guys that have armies of lobbyists in there and will end up putting more burdens on the startups and the entrepreneurs.
[Julie Samuels:] I have a hard time taking that seriously. Title II is what's going to maintain a level playing field so that all startups can get online.
[Joel Rose, Byline:] Julie Samuels is the director of Engine Advocacy which represents about 500 startups and small companies, including Etsy and Kickstarter. She says the biggest Internet companies can afford to pay more for faster access to their customers.
[Julie Samuels:] They can afford to pay Verizon or Comcast or Time Warner more, even if it sucks for them. But let me tell who can't afford that. That's the small companies and the startups and the ones who are just trying to get out there and reach consumers and reach users.
[Joel Rose, Byline:] Samuels says strong net neutrality rules won't just enrich those entrepreneurs; they'll benefit everyone who uses the next killer app that hasn't been developed yet. If that's regulating the Internet, she's all for it. Joel Rose, NPR News, New York.

[Robert Siegel:] Here's a story from Chicago's southwest side, the neighborhood that 18-year-old Yvonne Gutierrez calls home.
[Yvonne Gutierrez Reporting:] So a bunch of us are sitting in front of Jose's house by the corner of 65th and Cowley. The porch has these fans that move side to side, like a parent shaking their head no.
[Gutierrez:] The guys, they have no shirts on and long gym shorts or jerseys from their favorite teams, Green Bay, Bears, Eagles, with braids zigzagging around their heads. Dressing like this lets people know they have that gangster, hip-hop image. Only one is dressed different.
[Unidentified Man #1:] Yeah, I'm a rocker, I rock on, all right?
[Unidentified Man #2:] Hey, I'm not quite sure if you know what an emo is.
[Unidentified Man #1:] What kind of music is that you listen to?
[Gutierrez:] Gino. He has jeans that actually fit. He has black boots with a black long sleeve shirt. He's the outcast of the group just because he's a rocker. Here they are, free styling, joking around, having a good time.
[Unidentified Man #1:] What about this rocker man? His hair look like a box of Crayolas.
[Unidentified Man #3:] Guy has a Mohawk. He looks like a big rooster or something.
[Unidentified Man #4:] Pop rocker, it look like he slapped himself with a pop tart before he left the house.
[Unidentified Man #1:] Look at your hair man, it look like you're about to weed whack.
[Unidentified Man #2:] Well look at your forehead.
[Gutierrez:] The jokes turn into these arguments.
[Unidentified Man #1:] I don't care all right? Shut up talking to me.
[Unidentified Man #2:] Do you need a hug or something?
[Unidentified Man #1:] Do you need a hug, you freak?
[Unidentified Man #2:] You look you've been beaten. I mean I was just playing. I didn't really mean it.
[Unidentified Man #1:] All right then shut up.
[Unidentified Man #2:] Then you don't have to, like, put any curses on me.
[Unidentified Man #1:] You know what, just say one more word. We're gonna smack you.
[Gutierrez:] Who's better? Hip-hoppers? Or Rockers? I'm trying to stay out of it so I look out into the street. There I see two old ladies stroll past. They look about in their 80s and one has half-moon glasses and the other has pearls. They spot us. The lady on the right clutches her purse to her chest and the lady next to her wraps her hands over her pearls. And there I start to realize Rocker, Hip-hopper, it doesn't matter. To the rest of the world, we're just teenagers and not everyone thinks that's good.
[Robert Siegel:] Yvonne Gutierrez is a member of Curie Youth Radio and will graduate from Curie High School in June. She lives on Chicago's southwest side.

[Steve Inskeep:] In 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson went to Congress to propose the Voting Rights Act, he outlined some of the bill's provisions.
[Lyndon B. Johnson:] Finally, this legislation will ensure that properly registered individuals are not prohibited from voting.
[Steve Inskeep:] But even now when it comes to voter registration laws, there's a good deal of confusion and, in some cases, controversy. Here's Noel King with commentator Cokie Roberts, who answers your questions about how politics and the government work.
[Noel King, Byline:] Ahead of this year's election, some states have already closed voter registration, while other states allow people to register at their polling places on Election Day. What is the deal with this patchwork system?
[Cokie Roberts, Byline:] What is the deal? [Laughter].
[Noel King, Byline:] What is the deal? All right. Here's our first listener question.
[Kori Renee Hart:] This is Kori Renee Hart from San Francisco, Calif. I'd like to ask Cokie whether voter registration laws were controversial before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. How have the laws changed since the Supreme Court granted black citizens the right to vote? Have white citizens ever faced barriers to voter registration?
[Cokie Roberts, Byline:] The basic answer is yes, voter registration laws were controversial. At first, people staffing the polls were just expected to know everybody in their neighborhood. But then in 1800, Massachusetts instituted the first voter registration. And as the century moved on, it became more widespread, partly in a move to make sure that noncitizen immigrants didn't vote. By the late 19th, early 20th centuries, rural-dominated state legislatures imposed registration on city voters. Again, it was aimed at immigrants and at fraud by big city political machines.
[Noel King, Byline:] What about the rest of her question there? What about the effects on black citizens versus white citizens?
[Cokie Roberts, Byline:] Well, of course, black men were given the right to vote in the 15th Amendment in 1870. But the Jim Crow laws in the South effectively stripped African-Americans of their voting rights. In terms of whites, of course, white women and black women couldn't vote nationally until the 19th Amendment in 1920. But, you know, before the '65 bill, a lot of whites in the South couldn't vote either just because the registrars had frozen the rolls. They didn't want anybody new voting.
[Noel King, Byline:] All right. We have a couple of questions about current controversies.
[Rachel Gershman:] My name is Rachel Gershman from Shaker Heights, Ohio. Why is a candidate for governor allowed to purge voter rolls? Shouldn't he recuse himself as secretary of state while he's a candidate?
[Cokie Roberts, Byline:] Well, I assume this is in reference to the Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, who is the current secretary of state and isn't thinking about recusing himself. He's provoked a lawsuit by putting more than 50,000 new voter applications on hold for minor inconsistencies. The lawsuit charges discrimination, saying 80 percent of those applicants are members of racial minority groups. Though they can't vote early or by mail, they can still vote if they show up at the right polling place with the proper ID.
[Noel King, Byline:] OK. That idea of proper ID that gets right to our next question.
[Amy Pignatore:] Hi. My name is Amy Pignatore, and I live in Omaha, Neb. When I heard about the Supreme Court ruling that IDs for voting would need to have a street address, it didn't faze me. Then I heard that a lot of Native Americans on reservations only have a post office address. How is that going to affect their ability to vote?
[Cokie Roberts, Byline:] Well, they are complaining about it. This has to do with the recent Supreme Court decision upholding a North Dakota voter ID law, which does require a current residential street address. Native American groups say that often on reservations, they don't have those and pointing out the irony that the nation's original residents are being questioned about their residency.
[Noel King, Byline:] Very dark irony. Thanks so much, Cokie.
[Cokie Roberts, Byline:] Good to talk to you.
[Steve Inskeep:] Commentator Cokie Roberts with Noel King. You can ask Cokie your questions about politics and the government by emailing us at askcokie@npr.org or by tweeting us with the hashtag #AskCokie.

[Lakshmi Singh:] Oil and gas giant ExxonMobil is accusing one of America's best known philanthropic families, the Rockefellers, of using their wealth and influence to mastermind a conspiracy against ExxonMobil. To find out more, we reached John Schwartz, a science writer for The New York Times. He joined us from New York, and I asked him to walk us through Exxon's allegations.
[John Schwartz:] They're saying that the Rockefeller family through funding lots of private organizations and encouraging attorneys general has been at the center of a network of activism that has gone after ExxonMobil both for its past research and its present statements and past statements about climate change. And they used the word conspiracy in saying it, and the attacks have gotten pretty fierce.
[Lakshmi Singh:] It's not unusual for them to use the word conspiracy or is it?
[John Schwartz:] It's not the kind of language that you normally hear from corporations, but Exxon when challenged can be pretty tough. Now, the point of contention is over how much Exxon actually knew. There's a whole hashtag and activist movement built around the idea that Exxon knew uniquely that climate change had catastrophic consequences for the planet and used this knowledge both to improve its processes and to plan its for instance, floating platforms and stuff like that, but that it also fought climate change regulation and fought action in Washington by funding activist groups, by funding groups that would spread doubt about whether climate change is real or not to emphasize the controversy.
[Lakshmi Singh:] How is the Rockefeller family responding to ExxonMobil's accusations?
[John Schwartz:] You know, they're very private people. I mean, Rockefellers have run for office, but they don't generally go out and make big public statements about things. And, in this case, as they've increasingly come under fire, they've decided to fight back. And so David Kaiser and Lee Wasserman who runs the Rockefeller Family Fund, they together wrote a piece for The New York Review of Books that lays out the Rockefeller family positions over time, how they've tried to work with Exxon quietly as large shareholders to get the company to change its ways and then talked about their funding and who they funded and why, what they're doing is civic engagement and not a conspiracy. And so they are going out and, you know and standing their ground.
[Lakshmi Singh:] You know, John, your article points to irony in these claims because much of the family's wealth actually comes from John D. Rockefeller's founding of Standard Oil which later became ExxonMobil. So how does this generally taking a step back how does this generally square with the family?
[John Schwartz:] Well, first of all, they are fully conscious of the fact that Rockefellers going against Exxon is news in and of itself. And they hoped that the weirdness of that would propel the story, and it has. Look, they got in the New York Times, OK? You know, it's it is an attention-getting stand for them to take, but it is not a stand inconsistent with the way the family has been over the last few generations that they have been very big in conservation, environmental protection and very, very focused on climate change both in their personal work and their philanthropies since the '80s. You know, when they talk about their like David Kaiser's great-great-grandfather John D. Rockefeller and other members of the family I've spoken with, what they say is, look, he was a very smart person. If he were alive today, he wouldn't be betting everything on fossil fuels, and he would be looking toward moving into renewable and alternative energy because those things are going to be the profit centers of the future. And he was always looking toward the future.
[Lakshmi Singh:] That's New York Times science writer John Schwartz. John, thank you so much for joining us.
[John Schwartz:] It's a pleasure.

[Steve Inskeep:] NPR's business news starts with some recovery in Asian stock markets. The sudden rate cut by the U.S. Federal Reserve did the trick, at least for now, at least in Asia. After yesterday's three quarter of a percent cut in the key federal funds rate, investors in Asian stock markets regained some confidence and some money yesterday after the big sell-offs earlier in the week. But the recovery is tentative. Investors in Asia are still nervous about the U.S. economy, and they're waiting to see what Wall Street and the Fed do next. NPR's Anthony Kuhn reports from Beijing.
[Anthony Kuhn:] Japan's main stock index ended the day 2 percent higher after posting its biggest single loss yesterday since 911. South Korea's main stock index managed to eke out a gain of just over 1 percent while Australian stocks posted gains of about 4.5 percent. The biggest recovery was in Hong Kong, where the Hang Seng index ended trading on Wednesday more than 10 percent higher the best one-day performance in nearly a decade. Shares in mainland China companies did especially well. Investors in Chinese companies were actually relieved by this week's declines, saying it let some air out of the country's stock market bubble. Andy Xie is an independent economist based in Shanghai.
[Mr. Andy Xie:] [Speaking foreign language]
[Anthony Kuhn:] Hong Kong's stocks are now approaching a fair price, he says. After posting big losses, U.S. banks had to reign in their credit and this cost overvalued stocks here to fall back to Earth. Despite the rebound in stock prices, many in the region are still nervous and they're seeking safer investments like government bonds. They're keeping a close eye on the U.S. Federal Reserve, which is scheduled to meet again in a week. The hope here is for more interest rate cuts. Anthony Kuhn, NPR News, Beijing.

[Melissa Block:] There is some legal news in American sports as well today. The Justice Department announced it will join a whistleblower lawsuit against Lance Armstrong. The suit was filed by one of Armstrong's former teammates on the U.S. Postal Service cycling team. And for more, I'm joined by NPR's Mike Pesca. Hey, Mike.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Hello.
[Melissa Block:] This lawsuit was filed by cyclist Floyd Landis back in 2010. Landis was stripped of his 2006 Tour de France win for doping. What does it mean now that the Justice Department is getting involved?
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Well, it greatly strengthens the case. The vast majority of these whistleblower cases that go on to win are joined by the Department of Justice. And let's go back for a second. The reason this is a federal whistleblower case is because, although Lance Armstrong admitted to doping, admitted to cheating and had a number of sponsors along the way, one of his sponsors was United States Postal Service. And this lawsuit, which was brought by Landis, said that he saw firsthand all the doping that was going on, is essentially claiming that the U.S. government, the Post Office is a quasi government agency, was defrauded out of money. The government by law, if they win, would get to keep some money, which I guess this means we all get to keep some money. And Floyd Landis stands to get a percentage of the amount of money at stake. You know, Lance Armstrong's contract with the Postal Service was worth tens of millions of dollars.
[Melissa Block:] Well, if you look at the record of the federal government as it's pursued these steroid cases, it hasn't been exactly stellar. Is there any reason to think that this one will come out better?
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Well, that exact objection, that's what Travis Tygart, who's the president of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, put in a letter to Eric Holder that the site Velonews got a hold of. So, arguing to the Attorney General Travis Tygart, acknowledged it's understandable that the government would have some reluctance to spend public dollars in another sports case. He's obviously talking about the Barry Bonds prosecution, which did not go well for the government; the Roger Clemens prosecution, which totally failed in terms of getting a conviction. But as Tygart says, the essential fact of doping is no longer an issue in this case. And while the federal government dropped its case against Armstrong, its criminal case, Tygart's arguing that Lance Armstrong himself is admitting to doping. We're not arguing a did he or didn't he issue.
[Melissa Block:] Any reaction to this news, Mike, from Armstrong's camp?
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Yeah. Yeah, Robert Luskin, who's his lawyer, said something. I think it's a pretty interesting argument. He is, like Tygart said, not disputing if he doped but he said the Postal Service's own studies show that the service benefitted tremendously from its sponsorship. He's not saying it didn't happen. The Armstrong camp is saying there was really no harm. The Post Office got $100 million in benefits in terms of, you know, sponsorship and name recognition. I guess we all bought a lot of stamps during that time.
[Melissa Block:] So they're saying there's no fraud there.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Well, they're saying that you have to cause you have to show harm.
[Melissa Block:] Yeah.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] And there was no harm.
[Melissa Block:] Mike, one last thing before I let you go. There is a big moment for women in sports coming up this weekend. For the first time, a woman, Danica Patrick, will race in the pole position in the Daytona 500. What's the significance of that? Well, the pole position has never been won by a woman. That means she was the fastest in qualifying. Now I have to say, due to the nature of NASCAR, sitting in the pole position does not correlate necessarily or historically with winning. The last time the pole position won the flag won the checkered flag was the year 2000. It's just because of the nature of NASCAR. All the cars go exactly as fast and there's a lot of randomness.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] So it's a great accomplishment. If she can win, that would be unbelievably historic. We should note, Danica Patrick is currently 40 to 1 to win the race in Las Vegas, so I guess the experts aren't thinking that she's going to win.
[Melissa Block:] Okay. NPR's Mike Pesca. Mike, thanks so much.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Ailsa Chang:] Hurricane Michael has been downgraded to a tropical storm but not before wreaking havoc all across the Florida Panhandle. Michael's ferocious winds ripped off roofs, obliterated homes and trees, tore down power lines and flooded communities all along the state's Gulf Coast. One hard-hit town is Port St. Joe. It was right in Michael's path. Port St. Joe. Mayor Bo Patterson has been going around the town, surveying the damage. We reached him on his cellphone earlier today, and he told us what he's been seeing.
[Bo Patterson:] There's just so much destruction all over town not just in the city of Port St. Joe but the areas right around us. Everything got destroyed. Several businesses got totally destroyed. Flooding even that in my house, which never flooded before.
[Ailsa Chang:] Really?
[Bo Patterson:] Of course the flood's all receding some of the water, but now we just got a massive, massive cleanup.
[Ailsa Chang:] How difficult has it been to even just drive through the area?
[Bo Patterson:] It was pretty bad yesterday afternoon and early this morning. But the city crews and county crews they all been out today. And the main thing they've been doing right now is clearing [inaudible] debris off the roads. And they're looking pretty good where I'm sitting now in front of my house, and there's not a whole lot of debris on the road right now.
[Ailsa Chang:] Now, I know that Port St. Joe has somewhere between 3,000 to 4,000 residents. Did most of them evacuate?
[Bo Patterson:] I would say less than half.
[Ailsa Chang:] Less than half, OK. Where did they evacuate to that portion of...
[Bo Patterson:] To Georgia, Alabama got as far away as they could get where they didn't think the storm would affect them that much.
[Ailsa Chang:] OK.
[Bo Patterson:] Probably in Alabama.
[Ailsa Chang:] So for the residents who stayed, I mean, where are they mostly now? Are some sheltering at schools? Are there other facilities where they're hunkering down?
[Bo Patterson:] Yes. We're filling them up pretty fast, though.
[Ailsa Chang:] Now, this storm it picked up strength so quickly. It was not forecast originally as a Category 4 hurricane. So did you feel that residents were prepared enough in advance of this storm?
[Bo Patterson:] As prepared as they could be. Like you say, it happened quickly. You know, Tuesday, we were looking at a 2. And the next thing we knew, Wednesday, we were looking at a 4.
[Ailsa Chang:] Right.
[Bo Patterson:] So we had a little bit of time. And I think if people had realized it was going to be a 4 longer time, they would have probably more people left. So we've never had to deal with something like this. So as I say, it's be a long recovery, but we'll get it done. We've got a lot of volunteers. And this is a close-knit community, and I'm sure the community people will do everything they can to help each other out.
[Ailsa Chang:] That's Bo Patterson, the mayor of Port St. Joe on the Florida Panhandle. Thank you very much, Mayor.
[Bo Patterson:] Thank you.

[Robert Siegel:] Sure, we could spend another minute detailing yet another American industry that's in financial quicksand this week, but devoted as we are to reporting the sounds of this country, we thought we'd take some time out instead to bring you this one...
[Lloyd Mager:] Ow. That hurt my ear.
[Robert Siegel:] That is a sound of a conch shell, C-O-N-C-H. And it was also the sound of the man who was blowing it, a conch-honker who is not just any conch-honker: Lloyd Mager is now king conch-honker after winning Key West's 47th annual Conch Shell Blowing Contest. Congratulations.
[Lloyd Mager:] Yeah, I won in 2007, also.
[Robert Siegel:] So this is you're a return champion.
[Lloyd Mager:] I am a return champion. Thank you.
[Robert Siegel:] Well, since you have performed and you've been you've won the competition, what are you going to play for us right now?
[Lloyd Mager:] "Strangers in the Night."
[Robert Siegel:] Okay.
[Lloyd Mager:] Here we go.
[Robert Siegel:] And that was the winning performance.
[Lloyd Mager:] Yes, this year.
[Robert Siegel:] Lloyd Mager, again, your day job in Key West?
[Lloyd Mager:] Lloydstropicalbiketour.com. Check it out.
[Robert Siegel:] Okay, thank you very much for sharing your artistry with us. Lloyd Mager, who is this year's king conch honker in the Key West Conch Shell Blowing Contest.
[Lloyd Mager:] Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much.

[Steve Inskeep:] And I'm Steve Inskeep. A news item last week got us thinking about how American schools are changing. Many high school students in Los Angeles now have school-issued iPads. Some hacked the security on the iPads to surf forbidden sites on the Internet. School superintendent John Deasy weathered some awkward headlines and tried to turn this into a teachable moment.
[John Deasy:] Met with the students, collected the devices, and began a conversation about so, you're smart, but we need you to be responsible.
[Steve Inskeep:] The incident was one of the bumps as John Deasy rolls out the plan, under which L.A. is spending $1 billion to eventually put an iPad in the hands of every student 650,000 of them, grades K through 12. L.A. is not the first school system to try something like this, but is by far the largest. Of all the things that you could do with your district budget, what made you think that an iPad for every student ultimately would be a thing that you'd want to do?
[John Deasy:] All students should have access to technology. And all students should have access to live digital curriculum. I mean, what we would want for the most privileged students, it's our obligation to make sure that students who live in circumstances of poverty have exactly that.
[Steve Inskeep:] When you say live digital curriculum, are you essentially saying that the textbook is an iPad now, or you're heading in that direction?
[John Deasy:] I think that's fair enough to say. I mean, the textbook is information that's static. So, like most people would assume, I know of no school district and certainly not here in Los Angeles where there is information in our textbooks about the Arab Spring, a very important part of understanding world history and our own history. Live digital content is constantly updated so that students could understand the Arab Spring.
[Steve Inskeep:] You know, help me think through some of the implications of having the text on an iPad instead of in a book. I'm thinking about issues in recent decades in education in which there is a national textbook market and we discover that if Texas, for example, sets a particular standard for its textbooks, it can influence the books that end up in the entire country, because a publisher wants to make sure the textbooks are acceptable everywhere. I would imagine that, for better or for worse, that when your text is on an iPad, you could make it specific to a state, specific to a county, specific to a school.
[John Deasy:] That's a very, very I think, a very good insight, which means that the monopoly is no longer there around a largest state driving the textbook. In the Common Core for English Language Arts, for example, we're moving to a balance of 50 percent of the material being what would call traditional fiction text, like Shakespeare, and 50 percent being what we would call nonfiction text, like Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. You could have taken that in California and talked about the comments that Cesar Chavez made after breaking his fast and using that as an exact piece of nonfiction text. And that does not have to be the same in every state in the Union.
[Steve Inskeep:] Oh, the advocate for migrant workers, you might have included that in California.
[John Deasy:] Absolutely.
[Steve Inskeep:] At the same time, I think about the flipside of that. It makes me wonder if, as this technology spreads, we might end up in a situation where there is a red state history of the United States and a blue state history of the United States, that takes different facts or things that aren't even facts, and could even make them specific to particular parts of states that are politically inclined one way or another.
[John Deasy:] I think that that is a possibility. I don't think I'm equipped to make that judgment, will it happen. But you raise a point that is, I think, very legitimate.
[Steve Inskeep:] Can technology replace teachers?
[John Deasy:] Oh, absolutely not. Absolutely not. We know both through the psychology of education and the sociology of education that the ability to learn is deeply, deeply dependent upon having an expert side-by-side coaching us, helping us make sense of information, helping us scaffold information, which is taking pieces we know and growing to a place which we don't know. That cannot be done through technology.
[Steve Inskeep:] We had an interview with Diane Ravitch, an education expert and author, who's very much a critic of a lot of changes in education in recent years, on the program a few days ago. And one of the things she said was this: That she's concerned that corporations are selling education technology, that ultimately that comes at the expense of teachers' salaries. Could you envision a situation where there's more and more education that is automated, in effect? And you can do not do without teachers at all, but reduce the number of teachers, increase the class size?
[John Deasy:] I mean, I can't envision that. I don't find that to be a responsible direction to move in. I think that Ms. Ravitch's concerns are ones that she's expressing of the present, and she's a historian. So I would imagine we faced these things in the past: the monopoly on textbooks, the monopoly on school transportation, the corporate monopoly on buildings and chairs. I mean, we certainly have seen this in the past. Every student seems to have to sit down in a chair. And those companies who had the monopoly on that was a corporation. And one could have made the same comments 50, 75, 25 years ago.
[Steve Inskeep:] John Deasy is the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Thanks very much.
[John Deasy:] Thank you very much.

[Jacki Lyden:] In New Zealand, the country's most important cut of cloth is at the center of a nationwide debate. New Zealand's flag has long been criticized by some as a symbol of British Colonialism. The U.K.'s Union Jack remains in the flag's upper left-hand corner. But it was only this year that Prime Minister John Key proposed a referendum to change it. Tim Watkin, journalist and founder of the politics and culture blog Pundit, is on the line with us now from Auckland, New Zealand to tell us more. Hello there, Tim.
[Tim Watkin:] Hi. How are you?
[Jacki Lyden:] I'm just fine, thank you. Now, tell us what the objections might be to having the Union Jack. After all, it's been there a long time. What's wrong with having it [unintelligible] on the flag?
[Tim Watkin:] It is. It's been there over 100 years. But it was appropriate to a time and place. Back in the 1800s, it gave us identity and a sense of loyalty that applied to a young colonial country that had a small population at the bottom of the world and was very much a colony of Britain. Very different country today. We are part of the Asia Pacific region now. We trade mostly with China, Australia and the U.S. We simply don't have those ties to the old country as we used to, and it's always felt inevitable that at some point we take that symbol away and say, hey, we're independent. We're new. We're fresh. We're a different country now.
[Jacki Lyden:] But there must be, Tim, after all this time, older people who would like to keep the flag.
[Tim Watkin:] It is largely an age distinction. There are younger people who think that our geography has now trumped our history. We are in the world where it's more relevant than the ties we used to have. But for an older generation, those ties are really important, especially when it comes to war, and World War I and World War II, and New Zealand lost more soldiers per the population than most countries in the world. And they died and served under that flag.
[Jacki Lyden:] Well, what are some of the alternatives that have been proposed?
[Tim Watkin:] The prime minister, John Key, here is a big fan of the silver fern. We have a symbol that we use on our sporting outfits. And one of our major teams, which is literally of a plant, a wee fern plant on a black background. For others, though, that's a bit too much like a brand or a logo than really a sovereign flag. There are artists who have come up with sort of designs of white skies and 'cause, you know, it's also known as [Foreign language spoken] in Maori, the land of the long white cloud. There are Maori, the native people here, have independence flag that are talked about. So, quite a lot of options on the table to be debated.
[Jacki Lyden:] Who gets to choose?
[Tim Watkin:] The first step now, the way it's being proposed, is that a working party of politicians wait until some of them will wait till the anniversaries around World War I are out of the way in the next year or two, and then they come up with a referendum process, which is probably two steps. First, we decide whether we want a change or not, and then if we do want a change what we would change it to. So, we're, there will be a lot of debate in the next couple of years, you can be sure.
[Jacki Lyden:] Speaking with us from Auckland is journalist Tim Watkin. Tim, thank you so very much.
[Tim Watkin:] Hey, you're welcome. Great to talk to you.
[Jacki Lyden:] This is NPR News.

[Ira Flatow:] Up next, Flora Lichtman is here with our video pick of the week, and we have a special treat this week, right, Flora?
[Flora Lichtman:] It is a special treat. I think this is the kind of treat that SCIENCE FRIDAY listeners have probably been waiting for for a long time. The pick of the week this week is you, Ira. You are the pick of the week.
[Ira Flatow:] Drawn and quartered.
[Flora Lichtman:] So we went out...
[Ira Flatow:] We went on the roads of New York.
[Flora Lichtman:] We went on the roads of New York in Nissan's new plug-in electric vehicle, the Leaf.
[Ira Flatow:] The Leaf. And this is not a hybrid. This is totally plug-in.
[Flora Lichtman:] One hundred percent electric. And you drove.
[Ira Flatow:] I drove it.
[Flora Lichtman:] So if you want to get in the passenger seat if you've been you know, you've listened to Ira in the car all these years and now you can actually be in the car with Ira.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. Flora took our cameras out on to the streets of New York and drove around Central Park, up and around in the Nissan Leaf. And I own a Prius everybody knows that and I tried to compare it to that.
[Flora Lichtman:] Yeah. So what did you think actually?
[Ira Flatow:] I thought it was quiet nice. I mean, it handled very well. It was quiet. And if you want to see that, our little trip around, you can go to sciencefriday.com where your video is up there.
[Flora Lichtman:] Let's so how did the acceleration feel to you? I think people are so worried that electric cars aren't going to be as powerful or maybe they won't feel as sturdy.
[Ira Flatow:] You know, electric motors accelerate, I think, faster than gasoline actually.
[Flora Lichtman:] Really?
[Ira Flatow:] You step on I've even said it in the video. I made the mistake of saying: I step on the gas. Well, there is no gas.
[Flora Lichtman:] Yeah, it's true though. There is going to have to be a switch, right?
[Ira Flatow:] We have to find a different word. Step on the pedal, step on the electrons. And the immediate acceleration, you know, we who use subways and live on subways, we always feel that, you know, whoa, it's moving very quickly immediately. That's what happens. But this is very smooth. It was very sturdy. And I thought it was, you know, a great ride.
[Flora Lichtman:] And the quietness was really noticeable. It's funny, you know, doing video every week, I hear the background noise. And in this car, you heard nothing. You turned on the car and you couldnt hear any difference.
[Ira Flatow:] No, the car you know, the car is sitting there and you say, well, turn it on and you push the button, it's on.
[Flora Lichtman:] You just can't hear that.
[Ira Flatow:] Can't hear it. And people were worried I know that people you talked to saying, well, should they put an artificial engine sound in it so on the streets people will hear you coming. Well, you know, in New York, it doesn't matter whether how much noise you would put in that car.
[Flora Lichtman:] It would have to be very loud to be heard over everything else.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. But what's interesting is, you know, as you show in the video, there are plugs. You just plug it in and it charges. It can charge rapidly or...
[Flora Lichtman:] Yeah.
[Ira Flatow:] ...overnight.
[Flora Lichtman:] That was one of the things that I thought was really interesting about the car is showing it's really like an outlet...
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Flora Lichtman:] ...just in the front of the grill. And there's the two sizes, and one is the I think it's 240 volts. It's like your electric dryer...
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm.
[Flora Lichtman:] ...is what Mark Perry, who's the product manager, described it as. And it charges up really fast. Eighty percent of the charge in 30 minutes...
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah.
[Flora Lichtman:] ...if you have this sort of special...
[Ira Flatow:] That special charger. And for people who are going to have these and I know there are 30 of them, he was telling me, that are running around in test phases you could have a special built in to your garage, that special rapid charger. And, you know, of course, since it gets 100 miles on a charge, most people are not going to need to go home and recharge it during the day.
[Flora Lichtman:] Well, this is an interesting thing. I was looking on the Leaf materials, and it sounds like depending on and we saw this, too, driving -depending on the climate control and that kind of stuff, you can get only 60 miles...
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah.
[Flora Lichtman:] ... you know, depending on the conditions.
[Ira Flatow:] If it's cold outside, you need that heater.
[Flora Lichtman:] Right.
[Ira Flatow:] If it's hot, you need the air conditioner.
[Flora Lichtman:] Right.
[Ira Flatow:] Now this may sound like a commercial for the Leaf. It's not. We want to drive all the plug-ins when they come in.
[Flora Lichtman:] Yeah.
[Ira Flatow:] I know that China has one. And this one is not available immediately, is it? You have to wait.
[Flora Lichtman:] No, you have to wait. You have to have first of all, I think there are no new reservations for this car. So even if you fell in love with it, it would be hard to get it. And I think deliveries begin in December. So it's not even actually on the roads yet.
[Ira Flatow:] And it's over $30,000 for the car, but you get an incredible tax break on this and a refund, right?
[Flora Lichtman:] Yeah. And there was actually an article on today's Times just about all of these refunds you get.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. If you get the refund for like $7,500 and if you have a state tax, that gets cancelled, so you can get almost $10,000...
[Flora Lichtman:] Yeah.
[Ira Flatow:] ...return on the car. And I'm just hoping it opens up the new era of plug-ins because we all like to have more plug-ins, I think. And I'd love to take some more rides in them.
[Flora Lichtman:] And I think we'd like to make more videos of it. So one special shoutout because this video, you know, the real treat of this video is some music that was put together by John Boswell of the Symphony of Science. And you may be one of the millions of people who have seen his handiwork in the Carl Sagan Auto-Tune video.
[Ira Flatow:] And that's how we'll go out today. [Singing] You get some overhead lifters and some four-barrel-quads, oh yeah. That's me.
[Flora Lichtman:] Yeah.
[Ira Flatow:] Is that me?
[Flora Lichtman:] That's you.
[Ira Flatow:] Well, I'll read the credits over it. I'm Ira Flatow, in New York.

[Robert Siegel:] Joining me now is Alan Milstein. He's a lawyer who's been following this story closely. He's actually litigated in front of Judge Berman in another case against the NFL. Welcome to the program.
[Alan Milstein:] My pleasure.
[Robert Siegel:] The National Football League intends to appeal Judge Berman's decision to the Second Circuit. Do you think the league has a chance of overturning today's result?
[Alan Milstein:] No, I don't think they have any chance whatsoever. The judge was very careful to write what we call a bulletproof opinion. I mean, he could have decided that Goodell was a partial arbitrator, which would've given the NFL a good chance to appeal. But instead, he just held that the hearing that was held was fundamentally unfair because Brady wasn't allowed to call the witness that he needed to call and didn't have access to the important documents.
[Robert Siegel:] Yeah, who, by the way, was the witness that Brady wasn't allowed to call?
[Alan Milstein:] Jeff Pash, who is the person who edited down the supposed independent investigation report.
[Robert Siegel:] Now, you have said on the record before today that Brady would win, the four-game suspension would be vacated by the judge. Why were you so confident of that?
[Alan Milstein:] Well, for one, Goodell doesn't have a very good record in having his arbitrations upheld. And two, it just seemed that this was an arbitration that just wasn't fair, that the findings didn't comport to the evidence, and that certainly the penalty didn't comport to what the findings were. Does this result weaken Goodell as commissioner so much so that other players might see they have a better chance of circumventing punishments by taking their cases to court? That's certainly possible, but really what happened here is that the NFL was told, if you're going to have these kinds of arbitrations then hold them in a fair manner. So if in the future the NFL does just that, players may not be able to so easily overturn those awards.
[Robert Siegel:] Judge also said that even if Tom Brady had had general knowledge of other people who were deflating the football, even if that knowledge came from phone calls or texts on a phone that he then destroyed, none of that would have nailed him, none of that would've justified the punishment that he received. Is that how you read it?
[Alan Milstein:] I don't read it quite like that. I mean, when a judge looks at an arbitration decision, he or she is not supposed to essentially substitute his conclusion as to the facts for that of the arbitrator. So the judge more or less accepted the factual findings of the arbitrator, who in this case was Roger Goodell, but he said, those facts were based on an arbitration that was fundamentally unfair so I'm going to vacate the award. And, you know, it's an important decision well beyond a few deflated footballs. You know, all of us have signed contracts probably once we didn't even read that has arbitration clauses in them. And really what this decision says is, even if you have to submit to an arbitration as opposed to going to court, you're entitled to a fair hearing.
[Robert Siegel:] Mr. Milstein, thanks for talking with us today.
[Alan Milstein:] My pleasure.
[Robert Siegel:] That's lawyer Alan Milstein, a litigator who spoke to us from Mount Holly, N.J.

[Ira Flatow:] Up next, space exploration, visiting planets like Mars. You know, that's always been a dream of science fiction writers, film and television producer. And this week, that dream may have come just a bit closer to reality. This week, Congress approved a bill that outlines a new direction for NASA. Say goodbye to the shuttle program and a return to the moon. NASA's orders are to get astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, Mars by the 2030s. But how does the agency prepare for expeditions like that? And how do you prepare the astronauts for missions that could take years of lonely travel, perhaps cost them their lives? The psychological challenges may be as great as the technological ones, and writers like Rod Serling have thought about the stress of space travel and actually include it in programs.
[Mr. Rod Serling:] Up there, up there in the vastness of space, in a void that is sky, up there is an enemy known as isolation. It sits there in the stars waiting, waiting with the patience of eons, forever waiting in the twilight zone.
[Ira Flatow:] A safer place than waiting in the twilight zone for contemplating a visit to Mars is right in your living room, reading a new book. And here to tell us more about the challenges NASA will face in sending people to Mars is Pat Duggins. He's the news director of Alabama Public Radio, the author of "Trailblazing Mars: NASA's Next Giant Leap." Welcome back, Pat.
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] Thank you very much, Ira. How are you?
[Ira Flatow:] Thanks for joining us. Before we get to Mars, let's talk about the news that's happening in a little closer to where you are than I am, and what's going on with NASA and budget cuts and their new direction.
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] Well, unfortunately, the unpleasant stuff started just a few minutes ago, I'm afraid, Ira. Just a few moments ago, we had 1,200 layoffs at the Kennedy Space Center. Another 250 are expected at the Marshall Space Flight Center here in Alabama, another 400 at ATK Thiokol. They build the solid rocket boosters for the shuttle. So as NASA begins the move into this brand new world that President Obama has in mind, there will be casualties, and some of these folks unfortunately are included.
[Ira Flatow:] And please describe for us exactly what that new world is, what NASA announced its new mission is.
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] Well, when Congress sat down and came up with what was known as the authorization bill for NASA it's kind of like, you know, the instructions, this agency will do this, this and this, had a whole number of things in mind. Number one, the space shuttle obviously is going to go away but not as fast as what NASA was talking about. They're thinking of keeping it around at least until the end of this current fiscal year, which is kind of ironic because they've got the spare parts for two official missions and then one more that's being referred to in some quarters as the suicide mission. We can go into that if you like. But in addition to that, they're also talking about a new heavy-lift launch rocket, which is pretty big news for Alabama because it would be built at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. And that would enable NASA to go beyond low-Earth orbit for the first time since 1972, which was the last of the manned moon missions of Apollo. But maybe the most problematic one for NASA is going to be seed money to commercial companies to come up with commercially built capsules to go to the International Space Station. I got a phone call from NASA a couple of months ago, and they asked me to fly to Washington and give a lecture to their engineers on what the future of the space program was going to be like. And I kind of asked them, you know, don't you have somebody on staff that knows this stuff a little bit better than I do? And they said no. So I went ahead and flew on up and talked to them. And I said that assuming one of these run-and-gun entrepreneurial companies, sort of like an either SpaceX or Orbital, gets the contract to build these capsules for NASA, it's almost the analogy of you've got a workplace where you've got a baby-boomer on one side, and that's NASA, and then you've got Gen-Xer on the other side, and that's one of these run-and-gun companies. And NASA is sort of like the baby boomer, and they've waited for their opportunities, and they've gone the slow route, and they played by the rules, and they may have had an occasional mistake here and there, but it's like okay, well, we'll, you know, just take the good with the bad. Well, then you've got the up-and-comers...
[Ira Flatow:] Pat, I've got to interrupt because we have to take a break.
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] You got it.
[Ira Flatow:] So we'll come back and talk lots more with Pat Duggins, author of "Trailblazing Mars: NASA's Next Giant Leap." Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. I'm Ira Flatow. We're talking about future missions for NASA, now that NASA has issued a new direction that it's going. We're talking with Pat Duggins, author of "Trailblazing Mars: NASA's Next Giant Leap," and it's very fitting, his subtitle, "NASA's Next Giant Leap" because in the announcement made this week about NASA's future, Mars was in their picture, was it not, Pat?
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] It was, indeed. In fact, well, it's kind of ironic there that you think about it, NASA's been talking about sending people to Mars ever since the very beginning of the space program. I mean, you know, NASA was created what, October 1st, 1958. The very next day, they hired a fellow by the name of Harold Finger, whose job was to head up a NASA office called Project NERVA, which was Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications. And as far as he was concerned, I mean, NASA was building that rocket in order to go to Mars. There was a speech that John F. Kennedy gave one time. I mean everybody remembers, you know, Rice University, you know, we go well, everybody forgets one year prior, he gave the exact same speech to a joint session of Congress, but he included wording in that earlier version of the speech that said hey, we've got to put together money for a nuclear-powered rocket, and everybody at NASA, that meant Mars.
[Ira Flatow:] Well, why did this administration decide not to go to the moon and instead go to Mars and an asteroid? And what happened to all that hardware that they were designing to do that?
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] Well, that hit Alabama hard, too. The rocket and the capsule to go to Mars was called Project Constellation, and that was one of the things that the Obama administration didn't like very much. They said get rid of it. So NASA sort of will be following with those instructions. What the Congress said this week was okay, you're not going to go to the moon, but take the parts that you've got and sort of use them to help NASA's mission of exploration and, you know, we'll try and, you know, and ease the pain that way. I think what the White House was worried about was that if we went to the moon and then suddenly the funding stopped, then everybody would pick on NASA for achieving nothing more than our grandparents did with slide rules back in the 1960s.
[Ira Flatow:] Right, 1-800-989-8255 is our number, if you'd like to talk to Pat Duggins, author of "Trailblazing Mars." And tweet us. Do you think we should go to Mars? Should we spend people to Mars and spend it, or spend the money and the time on that, or should we continue with these robots and the great success they've been having, the Rovers and such. Pat, does that mean that we're going to have fewer of these robots if we're going to spend the money on sending people and creating rocket ships for them?
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] Well, there's always been the debate, Ira, as to whether or not it's a good idea to send humans, or whether it's a good idea to send robots. I mean, nobody can argue that the Voyagers did not contribute tremendously to science. The two Mars Rovers that are currently crawling around on the surface of Mars, you know, Sprit and Opportunity, they've done great things. But the scientists that I've spoken to say okay, look. If you really want a good reason for sending human beings to Mars, it's to solve the most obvious question, and that's whether or not life exists on Mars or did exist. Because they say the best places to go to look for that are areas that are geologically or were geologically active, but those are kind of dangerous because they've got gulleys and ravines, and you can't have robots like the Mars Rovers explore them because they just haven't had a great track record of that. I remember one of the Rovers, Opportunity, was, it was just crawling along and got stuck in something called Purgatory Dune, and it took, like, NASA five weeks to get it out of there. That dune was one-foot thick. I mean, when was the last time you ever went to the beach and called the Coast Guard to save you because you were stuck in a one-foot sand dune? I mean, there are some things that robots can do and some things they just can't.
[Ira Flatow:] 1-800-989-8255 is our number, and you can tweet us @scifri, @-S-C-I-F-R-I. We've talked with a scientist before about some of the great challenges of going into space and especially going to Mars. And I played a little bit of Rod Serling talking, doing his great stuff on "The Twilight Zone." And he focused a lot on space travel, and one episode was about the loneliness and what might happen, you know, to your mind and your psyche as you're spending years in space. Is this one of the challenges that NASA's going to face if they decide to send people, if it decides to send people to Mars?
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] Well, if they do, it depends on what route they take to actually send people to Mars. There's sort of an express route that might get you there in three months, but the smart money is being put on more like a six-month one-way trip. And then you're on Mars for, like, a year, waiting for Mars and the Earth to line up so it's a quick trip back, and then that quick trip would be probably six months back. So the one thing that I write about in the book is how NASA is going to have to take a look at what the right stuff is and how it's going to change in terms of sending people to Mars. I mean, the Type A, best of the best of the best, A-okay, Tang-drinking folk that we send up into space now may not be able to cope with the periods of isolation and the frustration that goes on with these very monotonous trips to and from Mars. So the analogy that was made, as well, instead of hiring Superman, you might think of hiring Clark Kent because he might be able to take the trip better.
[Ira Flatow:] And they also talk about the radiation dangers, the radiation hazards from radiation that's evident in space, coming from the sun, other places, and that maybe we should be sending people who are ready to just go only one way there.
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] I know Buzz Aldrin's really interested. Yeah, Buzz Aldrin's really interested in that. I think what he's leaning toward, and I think what you're referring to, is a change in the mindset of average Americans when it comes to what it means to go into space. I mean, right now, we've been doing what basically is like very, very short summer vacations. Neil Armstrong once, you know, made that quip in front of the Kennedy Space Center one time. And when we go to Mars, it's more like trying to tame the American West in the late 18th, 19th centuries, that sort of thing. And I think that everybody's got to kind of get used to the fact that that's what space travel really is, and we really haven't done any of it yet. And so keeping that Western sort of analogy going here, I mean, it was very tough. A lot of people died along the way, but you didn't have CNN telling us what happened to the Donner party. So it's going to be completely different when we actually decide to go Mars, if we decide to go to Mars.
[Ira Flatow:] And if we go to Mars, will we be able is it in NASA's plans to outsource any of that to private companies to build parts, instead of NASA taking on the whole shebang there?
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] Well, they're talking about possible international cooperation because, you know, the Russians have demonstrated that they're doing some interesting things, and who knows what the future may bring. I mean, China is placing a lot of emphasis on developing the ability to not to put astronauts in space. They call them taikonauts. But that's one possibility. But as far as big business getting involved in space, probably the earliest you're going to see are these commercial space capsules that would carry people to and from the space station, kind of like what you had in "2001: A Space Odyssey." I mean, everybody got either dragged to that or decided under their own volition to go and see it. In the beginning of it, you had a space shuttle that blasted off. It was by Pan Am, and it visited a space station that was run by Hilton. Thats sort of what Arthur C. Clarke had, and it seems like that's what the White House is leading us toward.
[Ira Flatow:] I can't let you go away without telling us what you mean by a suicide mission of the next space shuttle.
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] A little harsh possibly. Okay, NASA's got the parts for three shuttle flights to go up to the International Space Station, two official ones and then the one rescue mission. So when the two actual flights, the ones that are on the books right now, go off, if there's some kind of damage to the spacecraft, you've got that rescue shuttle sort of waiting there that can blast off and save the astronauts and bring them back. Now, somebody, most notably U.S. Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, said hey, why don't we just, you know, once we've launched those two actual shuttle missions, the one that's going to go up in November and then the one that's going to go in maybe February or March of next year, once those two are gone, and we've got that one shuttle left, why don't we get four astronauts, to one degree or another with a death wish, and let them blast off with no hope of rescue. In other words, if this last vehicle blasts off, and there's damage to the shuttle, there's no spare parts to send another space shuttle to get them and bring them back. Now some people say, well, they can evacuate into the International Space Station, but NASA thinks two and three moves down the road. Okay, what happens if something happens to the International Space Station? You've got rescue capability, life rafts, that can take down six people, but you're going to have 10 people on the space station. So what do you do, play rock, paper, scissors to figure out who stays and who goes? It's very controversial, but there's at least, in the authorization bill, that extra mission. It's just whether or not there's going to be the extra money coming from the appropriations process, which is a whole other mess of monkeys, and that'll come down the road to see whether or not that extra mission actually goes.
[Ira Flatow:] Well, let's talk about it for a second, that whole mess of other monkeys, because that's really where it hangs, the money. Congress really controls the purse strings on this. And could the committee decide not to spend all this money or to spend it in a different direction?
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] Well, that's entirely possible because, for example, I know the White House was looking for about $3 billion in seed money to help pay for these commercial space capsules that we were talking about earlier. There's only about, I think, if memory serves, about maybe like $1.9 billion that was actually included as a suggestion in the authorization bill. So you have less money there. There were some earlier complaints from NASA supporters on Capitol Hill that there was not enough money being set aside for the new heavy-lift launch rocket, which would pave the way either to going to an asteroid or going on to Mars or both. And so if you don't have enough money there, then it takes longer to build it, and then we're more dependent on the Russians to get people to the space station on Soyuz ships because we don't have enough money for the commercial capsules just yet. So it's always been a case of you get what you pay for, and the concern is that the White House and Capitol Hill may not spend enough in order to be able to get NASA going. And should they spend that money? There's an equally good debate that maybe this money would be better being spent on something else.
[Ira Flatow:] Donald in New Hampshire, welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
[Donald:] Yes, it's of my opinion, after following NASA for a number of decades, that they're not capable of building a vehicle. They have too much institutional inertia, and they're regarded as a political jobs program by Alabama and Utah. And that's why Constellation failed. They insist on using obsolete solid rocket boosters, which are, you know, iffy technology at the best. They've already killed the crew, and including Christa McAuliffe up here in New Hampshire, and, you know, the only way I see of making a go at this is using, you know, commercial companies, like SpaceX, Boeing and Lockheed, which all put forward, you know, designs for commercial spacecraft.
[Ira Flatow:] Pat, how do you react to that?
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] Well, Donald, I think you make a very good point. And somehow I'm kind of, you know, wondering in the background if the reason the White House is emphasizing commercial rocket launchers and capsules is to try to drive down the cost of putting a pound of anything into low-Earth orbit. Right now, the cost is about $3,000, so if that astronaut has a really big breakfast before launch time, he's really sticking it to the taxpayers. So if you can lower that cost somehow, then maybe you would make space more practical and more accessible. Then when you start talking about going to the moon, it's like $15,000 to send that one pound to the moon. Forget about Mars. That's $140,000 by estimates. So anything that drives down the cost of launch and if the commercial companies can do that, that would definitely, you know, benefit NASA in its efforts to try to get people off the ground.
[Ira Flatow:] Do you think it is practical to ever expect that, you know, every president seems to push off going to Mars another 20 years in the future. Now, they're talking about in the 2030s. In your book, you talk about what it would take to go Mars. Do you really think that we're ever going to get there? Or, is it always going to be somebody else's problem or somebody else's success?
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] Well, you do make a very good point that politicians, by their very nature, like to set goals that somebody else has to pay for down the road, so it's difficult to really imagine, without, you know, really steeling themselves, whether or not members of Congress or even the American people are going to go ahead and go through the long-term situation of sending people onto Mars. If we're going to do it, it's long term. It's expensive. Remember, when JFK said let's go to the moon, we had 15 minutes of experience in space, and we didn't even make orbit. I mean, Alan Sheppard became the first American in space, but he was a glorified man shot out of a cannon. He didn't even make it into orbit, and yet, we went ahead and took our hat off and threw it over the wall and said let's go to the moon. That would probably take some kind of a similar challenge to get us going to Mars because the technical difficulties and the technical challenges of safely sending people to the Red Planet and back are really, really huge. And I go into a lot of them in the book, obviously, but it's going to take a lot of time, a lot of money and a lot of willpower on the part of the American people.
[Ira Flatow:] Talking with Pat Duggins, author of "Trailblazing Mars: NASA Giant Leap." Do you think that this administration is going to get this through Congress? Is it impossible to read the tea leaves or how they might change what actually gets funded here?
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] Well, I think they're talking a stair-step process, and the big deal was the fact that they want to build the heavy-lift launch rocket that would be, you know, managed and designed out here in Alabama. Because right now there's some people say, hey, why don't we take the space shuttle and use that to fly to the moon? Well, that's a nice idea, except the space shuttle, the way it's designed, uses absolutely every drop of fuel it's got just to achieve Earth orbit. There are sensors inside the shuttle that say, okay, you're using your fuel to much. They instantly shut the engines down. Because if you don't, then the turbo pumps run wildly out of control and the whole thing blows up, which is a bad day for the astronauts. So the notion of going anywhere other than Earth orbit means getting rid of the shuttle and getting a brand new rocket that may be based on shuttle-based technology. They're thinking of taking the external tank, making a stretched limo, bigger boosters and more engines and fly that way. But it would be something completely different from what we've got now.
[Ira Flatow:] This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. I'm Ira Flatow. We're talking with Pat Duggins, author of "Trailblazing Mars: NASA's Next Giant Leap." Did you know this was you wrote this book a while back, you had to start writing, did you know that Mars was going to be NASA's next giant leap? At least...
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] Oh, it was kind of like, you know, everybody's talking about it. So it's like, you know, it's like you're a mountain climber and you say, oh, I've been up Mount Kilimanjaro, and I've been up K2, and I've done this and I've done that, and the conversation stops right there. What's the first thing everybody is going to think? Well, has he been up Mount Everest? I mean, that's the one thing that everybody has been talking about going to Mars all the way back when they sent the first spacecraft to explore Mars back in 1964. It's always been there, and NASA has always talked about it. So sooner or later, they sort of have to, you know, paint and get on the ladder, assuming they get the okay from Congress and the American people.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm. If we do select people to go to Mars, is it important where on Mars we decide to land? And, I guess, that would be why we have all these robots surveying Mars at the present time.
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] That's going to be a big fight.
[Ira Flatow:] Figure it out, right?
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] Yeah, that's going to be a big fight. Because if you think about it right now where NASA lands its robotic explorers right now are you're on Mars, and that's really cool, but you're also in what scientists consider to be not really scientifically interesting areas because you want a pretty benign surface, so you don't crash and then you have to go before Congress and have them ask you what were you thinking and all that sort of stuff. And if you do send people to Mars, are you going to want some place that's very friendly, very habitable, or are you going to go to the areas that are of more interest? I mean, I spoke to some scientists who say, hey, wouldn't it be cool that we build a ship that flew into Valles Marineris, which is a canyon, you know, that's like five miles deep and can stretch from New York to Los Angeles. Fly into it, get out and look up as opposed to you landing on the side and just, you know, walking out and looking down, so there are all kinds of really interesting places on Mars. But there's going to be a pitch battle between NASA and the scientific community on what's scientifically interesting as opposed to what's more practical to keep the astronauts alive. That's definitely coming, assuming we ever undertake this kind of flight.
[Ira Flatow:] We have a tweet from Ordersponge who says: We're not just in it for science. We're in it for survival. That sounds very much like Stephen Hawking has talked about, that we've got to get off this planet.
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] Well, they're always talking about I know John Young, an astronaut he grew up in Orlando, Florida, by the way, a hometown hero that you got to eventually move out because eventually the Earth is going to wear out, so they say, and we're going to run out of resources. So we have to start, you know, moving in the general direction of going somewhere. And if you wanted to go to Mercury, it's what? How many hundred degrees there? And if you go to Venus, it rains sulfuric acid. And you can't stand on one of the gas giants. So if you're going to go somewhere, then it would seem that Mars would be the next logical step for you to go.
[Ira Flatow:] Does NASA have, you know, ways of looking for the right people who have the right stuff for this? And I know that, for example, the Russians are conducting a very long isolation test for their cosmonauts, are they not? They'll be, what, six months, a year in isolation?
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] Well, it yes, indeed. And what they're trying to do is early on what the Soviet space program would do to test the compatibility of cosmonauts, they would put them in a car and send them on a road trip through Siberia. And they figured, okay, well, if these guys make it from point A to point B and they don't kill each other, then, you know...
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm.
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] ...then they probably would make a pretty good space crew. I write in the book about Biosphere 2, which, if everybody remembers is that big glass terrarium in the southwest part of the country, well, there were a lot of fights between the people there and NASA said, well, of course, you got eight people there. You know, you're going to break into two parts of four, and you have a fight.
[Ira Flatow:] All right. We're going to take a break, come back and talk. We got lots more with Pat Duggins, author of "Trailblazing Mars." Stay with us. We'll be right back for a question or two. Don't go away. I'm Ira Flatow. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR. You're listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR. I'm Ira Flatow, talking with Pat Duggins, author of "Trailblazing Mars." Pat, one last quick question, have you any idea when Congress might make a decision on all this funding?
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] Well, they're thinking of maybe having a lame duck session after the elections, at which time they might be able to put a budget together. But, however, the Republicans have said that if they get the majority back, then they may actually drive NASA's funding back to 2008 levels instead of the boost that they're talking about right now, so it just it depends on the politics. And we'll see how it goes.
[Ira Flatow:] All right, Pat. Thanks very much for taking time to be with us, and good luck to you on the book.
[Mr. Pat Duggins:] Oh, thank you so much. Oh, by the way, just a quick note here, I've just received a very flattering invitation from The Smithsonian to be up at the National Air and Space Museum to sign books on November 20th. So anybody in the D.C. area, there you go.
[Ira Flatow:] All right. There you go. Thanks, Pat Duggins, author of "Trailblazing Mars: NASA's Next Giant Leap."

[Tess Vigeland:] Let's move on to Kenya now, where on Friday a pair of bombs exploded at a market in the capital, Nairobi. Ten people were killed, at least 70 wounded. The U.S. Ambassador to Kenya has asked for more security for the embassy. The British government evacuated its citizens from the resort town of Mombasa in response to what it said were reports of a planned attack there by Islamic extremists. NPR's Africa correspondent Gregory Warner joins us now. Hi, Gregory.
[Gregory Warner, Byline:] Hi, Tess.
[Tess Vigeland:] These are now the first terror incidents in Kenya recently. What do we know about these bombs and what can you tell us about the ongoing security situation there?
[Gregory Warner, Byline:] Well, on Friday there were two bombs and one was placed in a public bus that was dropping people off at a very large downtown market in Nairobi called Gikomba. The other bomb was in the market itself and these were timed so that people rushing to help victims of one explosion would be caught up in the next one. This totals about a dozen explosions in Nairobi over the past eight months, many using a very similar MO, where a bomb is placed in a public bus or a grenade is tossed inside a bus. At times when people have claimed credit for these it's been al-Shabab, which is a militant group based in Somalia.
[Tess Vigeland:] Now, the U.S. and Britain have both issued travel alerts for Kenya. And there were some new warnings about the possibility of attacks this week. What is the Kenyan government's reaction to those warnings?
[Gregory Warner, Byline:] Well, Kenya always, always has a beef with any Western travel warnings. They always feel that these are used to punish African countries rather than protecting Western citizens. Sometimes the timing of these warnings does allow for that interpretation. In this case, it's not just a warning. As you said, the U.S. embassy is asking for more support. They're also reducing the number of staff, and this is the largest U.S. embassy in the region. Two large British tourism companies just cancelled all flights to Mombasa until October. This is at a time when Kenya's tourism industry is just trying to get over the hit at Westgate Mall. This was this upscale mall that was hit last September. And it's interesting, if you look at Westgate Mall, that as a very deadly attack aimed at foreigners and upscale Kenyans. The most recent attacks have been aimed at public buses, markets. But the fear is, all these small explosions, if you'll call them that, heightens the sectarian tension in Kenya between Somalis and Kenyans, between Muslims and Christians. And that's making Kenya feel a lot more dangerous.
[Tess Vigeland:] Gregory, elsewhere on the continent of course, the group Boko Haram is still holding hundreds of kidnapped schoolgirls; this story that has captured the world's attention. I wonder, does this signal that Africa really is a growing epicenter of terrorism?
[Gregory Warner, Byline:] I think there is a shift. Boko Haram started as a domestic insurgency and then you have the war against terror in Mali. All of a sudden all these militants, jihadist and terrorist know-how is coming over from Mali into Northern Nigeria. And most recently, there's been a report that Boko Haram has now attacked over the border, committed another abduction at a Chinese-owned gas plant in Cameroon. And just this week in Paris at a security conference there, the Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan called Boko Haram an al-Qaida operation in West Africa. That is what he called it, however, there's a fair amount of evidence that al-Qaida is not very happy with Boko Haram's recent antics, kidnapping schoolgirls, firing on Muslims as they're praying. Clearly, not everyone is following the same script but they are trading militants, they are trading know-how. And Africa has increasingly become a haven for them.
[Tess Vigeland:] NPR's Africa correspondent Gregory Warner. Thank you and stay safe.
[Gregory Warner, Byline:] Thanks, Tess.

[Noel King:] There's a small but very significant change coming to the 2020 census. The Commerce Department, which oversees the census, says the questionnaire will ask people about their citizenship, and that has some people very worried. California's state attorney general is filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration to try and stop the question from being added. NPR's Hansi Lo Wang covers demographics. He's with us now from New York. Good morning, Hansi.
[Hansi Lo Wang, Byline:] Good morning, Noel.
[Noel King:] So why is a question about citizenship being added to the 2020 census?
[Hansi Lo Wang, Byline:] Well, the Justice Department sent in a request. They said they needed a better count of citizens old enough to vote in order to enforce the Voting Rights Act and, specifically, protections against racial discrimination in voting. But after the Justice Department put out this request in December, which has now been approved by the Commerce Department, many civil rights groups questioned that reasoning because they said the government has used estimates of how many citizens are in the U.S. ever since the Voting Rights Act was enacted. And so these civil rights groups are questioning, you know, is this really a cover to make sure that noncitizens are not counted in the 2020 census, which has direct implications on representation in Congress and on federal funding?
[Noel King:] So let's just draw that out a little. The assumption, I guess, is that people who are not U.S. citizens would not want to answer the census, would not want to take the questionnaire.
[Hansi Lo Wang, Byline:] That is the theory. And also that's combined with what the Census Bureau has been encountering for decades, which is a growing reluctance from the American public of giving up personal information to the federal government.
[Noel King:] California's state attorney general is suing to stop that question from being asked on the form. What laws does he say it would violate to ask people about their citizenship?
[Hansi Lo Wang, Byline:] Well, California's state's attorney general says that it would violate the Constitution because one of the few instructions in the Constitution is for the government to do an actual enumeration or a head count every 10 years. And he says that adding a citizenship question would likely discourage immigrants and their relatives from participating. In California, that's a really big deal because it's a state with the largest immigrant population. And so this would really undermine the government's ability to conduct a full enumeration, a full head count. He also says that his complaint also says, rather, that adding a citizenship question would violate what's known as an administrative procedure act. Essentially, it's a law that prohibits federal agencies from taking actions that are arbitrary and capricious. And the argument is that if there is an undercount, that would really undermine the reasoning for adding a citizenship question because there would be inaccurate data for enforcing the Voting Rights Act. And also the timing of the Justice Department's request, that was noted in this complaint. It came nine months after the Census Bureau finalized its question topics for the 2020 census.
[Noel King:] Has the U.S. census asks about citizenship in the past?
[Hansi Lo Wang, Byline:] Yes. This is not a new topic. Smaller Census Bureau surveys, including this survey known as the American Community Survey, ask about citizenship every year, actually. But it's only to 1 in 38 households, and the last time the census asked all U.S. households about citizenship, that was back in 1950. So this would be a very big change.
[Noel King:] Quickly, Hansi, you've been following a trial run of the census being conducted in Rhode Island. What are people saying there about the citizenship question?
[Hansi Lo Wang, Byline:] One thing to note is that in Providence County, R.I., there is no citizenship question on this test questionnaire because the requests came in so late. But many of the immigrant advocates, many of the immigrants I spoke to, said they're worried and are thinking about not participating.
[Noel King:] NPR's Hansi Lo Wang. Thanks, Hansi.
[Hansi Lo Wang, Byline:] Thank you.

[Renee Montagne:] In Iraq, a joint U.S.-Iraqi operation is continuing north of Baghdad. The offensive is dubbed Operation Swarmer and is aimed at rooting out insurgents near Samarra. That's the city where last month's massive bombing of a revered Shiite shrine touched off weeks of sectarian violence and brought fears of a civil war in Iraq. The U.S. Military is providing little information about the offensive. General John Abizaid of the U.S. Central Command said it's not a big departure from normal operations. But it is known that 50 helicopters and some 14 hundred troops are involved. The BBC's Jim Muir joins me now from Baghdad. What more can you tell us about this operation? It's being described, as I just said, as the biggest air assault since the invasion of Iraq three years ago.
[Jim Muir:] Well, that's why we're talking about it, because it has been described as the biggest air assault. But what that means is simply that the largest number of helicopters have been used to ferry in the troops for this operation, a larger number than in any similar campaign in the past three years, is what they're saying. But they're also saying there has been no firing from the sky, none of those helicopters, according to the U.S. military, have been actually involved in rocketing or firing bombs at insurgents. In fact, one of the American commanders in the area on the ground is being quoted as saying they've had no contact with insurgents. There has been a lot of over-expectation emanating from that initial announcement about this being the biggest air assault in the past three years. And the troops involved are now being scaled down from 1,500 to just 900.
[Renee Montagne:] Do we know the targets and where it's being concentrated?
[Jim Muir:] The focus is on this area of wasteland to the northeast of Samarra. Now of course, that's an emotional motive word now, Samarra, because it's where there was the destruction of the Shiite shrine last month, triggered a whole wave of sectarian reprisals between Shiites and Sunnis. So that is the geographical location, in part, perhaps, of the context, and also a lot of the interest of this operation. In that area, obviously, there has been insurgent activity. The U.S. Military says that six arms caches, bombs and also insurgent materials, have been found. So there is, obviously, some kind of insurgent presence there, but quite hard to get at. It's much more dispersed.
[Renee Montagne:] Just very briefly. This comes at a time when the U.S. military is seeking to reduce its military profile in Iraq. What does this suggest?
[Jim Muir:] I think this comes at a time when the Americans are struggling to find the right way out for the military, both politically and militarily. It's a time of great soul searching. But also, we're just coming up for the third anniversary of the war to overthrow Saddam. The American military machine is well aware that all the journalists are preparing anniversary pieces. So I think this operation was perfectly normal in operational terms, but that it has got a political spin on it to show that the U.S. military is not just sitting here taking casualties, being bombed by insurgents. It is getting out there and trying to get to the roots, to cut out the roots of the insurgents.
[Renee Montagne:] The BBC's Jim Muir in Baghdad, thanks very much.
[Jim Muir:] You're very welcome.

[Mary Louise Kelly:] President Trump is making plans to go to Parkland, Fla., where Wednesday's deadly school shooting happened at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. This morning, the president ordered flags across the country to be lowered to half-staff in honor of the victims. He also gave a televised address from the White House where he said the nation is united in grief. NPR's Scott Horsley has more.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Since the Sandy Hook massacre five years ago, there have been more than 200 school shootings in America. President Trump says no child or teacher should ever be in danger at an American school. He says all Americans are praying for the Florida victims with one heavy heart.
[President Donald Trump:] To every parent, teacher and child who is hurting so badly, we are here for you whatever you need, whatever we can do to ease your pain.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Trump thanked the teachers, paramedics and law enforcement officers who responded to the shooting. Then he spoke directly to young people across the country.
[President Donald Trump:] I want you to know that you are never alone and you never will be. You have people who care about you, who love you and who will do anything at all to protect you.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Earlier today, Trump tweeted about the warning signs that the 19-year-old shooting suspect was troubled, and the president says he's committed to tackling what he calls the difficult issue of mental health. The president said nothing at all about gun control. But Florida Governor Rick Scott did go there. Scott, a Republican, says he wants to have a real conversation on the subject with lawmakers in Tallahassee next week.
[Rick Scott:] How do we make sure that individuals with mental illness do not touch a gun?
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Under a 1960s law, people who've been committed for mental illness or found insane by a court of law are already barred from buying or owning a gun. But the standard is narrow and enforcement uneven. Last year, the Republican Congress rolled back an Obama-era rule that would have added about 75,000 people to the no-gun list. Florida Senator Marco Rubio says there's a danger in making the prohibition too broad.
[Marco Rubio:] If getting mental health care would deny you the ability, for example, to own guns to go hunting, people would seek to avoid mental health care because of the stigma associated with it.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] House Speaker Paul Ryan also cautioned today against a reflexive move towards gun control, though Ryan didn't close the door entirely.
[Paul Ryan:] This is not the time to jump to some conclusion not knowing the full facts. We've got a lot more information we need to know. But if someone who is mentally ill is slipping through the cracks and getting a gun because we have a system to prevent people who aren't supposed to get guns from getting guns. And if there are gaps there, then we need to look at those gaps.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Several states have enacted laws to temporarily keep guns away from people who are judged to be dangerous, but action at the federal level appears unlikely. Trump was elected with strong backing from the National Rifle Association, and at the group's annual convention last year he promised to guard against any encroachment on Second Amendment rights.
[President Donald Trump:] You came through for me, and I am going to come through for you.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Every high-profile shooting, though, brings a renewed call to at least discuss gun safety legislation. School Superintendent Robert Runcie says he's hearing that from the students in Broward County who survived yesterday's shooting.
[Robert Runcie:] Now is the time for a real conversation on sensible gun control laws in this country. Our students are asking for that conversation, and I hope we can get it done in this generation. But if we don't, they will.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Scott Horsley, NPR News, the White House.

[Robert Siegel:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
[Audie Cornish:] And I'm Audie Cornish. President Obama flew to Colorado this afternoon to rally support for national gun control laws. Colorado recently passed its own laws requiring background checks for all gun purchases and limiting the size of ammunition magazines. In Denver, the president delivered a speech and met with local law enforcement officials and community activists. NPR's Scott Horsley joins us now from Denver. And, Scott, is the president looking to show Colorado as a kind of model for the rest of the country?
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Well, he is holding up action by this state's Democratic legislature saying, if a Western state like Colorado can adopt universal background checks and limits on ammunition magazines, why can't Congress?
[President Barack Obama:] Look, this is a state that has suffered the tragedy of two of the worst mass shootings in our history. Fourteen years ago this month in Columbine, and just last year in Aurora. But this is also a state that treasures its Second Amendment rights. The state of proud hunters and sportsmen.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Now, next week the president will travel to Connecticut where the legislature is also moving forward on gun control legislation. Connecticut, of course, suffered its own horrific mass shooting last year at the Sandy Hook Elementary School.
[Audie Cornish:] And even in Colorado, I take it, these new laws are controversial.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Well, they didn't pass without a fight. Colorado has a vigorous gun lobbying group, the Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, and they have vowed political payback against lawmakers who voted for the new laws. Only one of Colorado's two Democratic senators attended the president's event today. We've also seen some county sheriffs in Colorado speaking out against gun control legislation.
[And On His Way Into Town Today, The President Passed A Small Group Of Protesters Who Were Holding Up Signs Saying Things Like:] Stop taking our rights.
[Audie Cornish:] Now, polls show broad support for universal background checks, for example, 90 percent in most polls and high even among gun owners. But this hasn't necessarily translated into support in Congress. So what's happening there?
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Well, that's right. Here in Colorado, a Denver Post poll found more than 80 percent support for universal background checks. But this is one of those issues where opponents may be in the minority, but they have very strong feelings. They are worried that background checks are just a first step towards registering guns and eventually having the government confiscate them. The president tried hard to allay those concerns today. But even though opponents are in the minority, they tend to vote with single-minded focus. And that has a lot of lawmakers in Washington running scared. President Obama himself acknowledged today that opponents of gun control are well-organized and well-financed.
[Audie Cornish:] So what does the president hope to accomplish with events like this one in Denver?
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Well, he's trying to get soft supporters of gun control to speak up in the same loud voices as the opponents. You saw that last week when he spoke at the White House, surrounded by some of the family members who lost loved ones to gun violence. And he's delivering a similar message here in Colorado. He's, in particular, pointing to lawmakers in this purple state as leading the way for lawmakers in D.C.
[Audie Cornish:] Scott, thank you.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] My pleasure, Audie.
[Audie Cornish:] That's NPR's Scott Horsley, speaking with us from Denver.

[Madeleine Brand:] North Korea's nuclear test has not been confirmed. Seismic experts say something happened at the time the test was announced. But the U.S. geological survey could not say whether it was an atomic explosion or a natural earthquake. So how are nuclear tests confirmed? Here to tell us is Philip Coyle. He's with the Center for Defense Information in Washington. And he joins us today from his home in Sacramento, California. Welcome to the program.
[Mr. Philip Coyle:] Hi. Nice to be with you.
[Madeleine Brand:] Well, this was allegedly an underground test. So how can nuclear monitors confirm it actually took place?
[Mr. Philip Coyle:] Well, South Korea has a seismic monitoring station close to the border with North Korea. And then there are worldwide seismic monitoring stations that are all now looking at their data to see what happened. But it looks like it was a small nuclear test, small by nuclear standards, meaning about 1,000 tons of TNT equivalent.
[Madeleine Brand:] And also I understand the U.S. has a sniffer plane in the area that can detect nuclear chemicals?
[Mr. Philip Coyle:] Yes. Both the United States and Japan have air sampling aircraft, flying vacuum cleaners, that can basically take air samples and look for radioactivity. And if they see any, that will actually help them sleuth out what sort of a nuclear test device this was.
[Madeleine Brand:] When will we know for sure?
[Mr. Philip Coyle:] I think the Air Force will probably have a pretty good idea in the next 72 hours. It depends a little bit on whether they see anything at all, if the test didn't leak, if there was no radioactivity released, and so far North Korea says there wasn't any released. They may not find anything at all.
[Madeleine Brand:] And just because North Korea conducted this test, it doesn't mean it actually has the ability to put a warhead on top of a missile.
[Mr. Philip Coyle:] No, it doesn't. North Korea has tried twice now to launch long-range missiles, missiles with enough range that they might reach, say, Hawaii, or perhaps the mainland of the United States. But both times they failed. In 1998 they failed and then they tried it again recently last July, and again failed. But presumably if they keep trying long enough, they'll figure it out.
[Madeleine Brand:] How far away are they from that?
[Mr. Philip Coyle:] It's a little hard to say. It appears that their efforts, even with short-range missiles, are pretty primitive still. But they want to get the Bush administration to face-to-face negotiations over the bargaining table. And the administration keeps resisting that. And so North Korea keeps raising the stakes.
[Madeleine Brand:] There is some speculation that North Korea plans more of these tests. I'm wondering if it's possible for a country to conduct nuclear tests without anyone knowing.
[Mr. Philip Coyle:] It is possible if it's done underground in a cavity such that the explosion doesn't reach the surrounding rock right away. Imagine blowing off a firecracker in marshmallows. Then the seismic signals are damped out and you might not see it at all.
[Madeleine Brand:] Israel has never confirmed that it has the bomb, yet everyone assumes it does.
[Mr. Philip Coyle:] That's correct. And if they have ever done a test, there's been great dispute about that. But North Korea's goal is different. North Korea unambiguously wants to be seen as a power that needs to be reckoned with. And in particular they feel threatened by the United States. And so their point of view here is the sword rattle.
[Madeleine Brand:] Phillip Coyle is with the Center for Defense Information in Washington. Thank you for joining us.
[Mr. Philip Coyle:] My pleasure.

[Jennifer Ludden:] The federal government is looking for a new manager for a stunning 25,000-acre property in northern New Mexico. There are beautiful canyons, plenty of sun, historic buildings and nearby ski slopes. The catch? Tons of plutonium and multiple congressional committees that will watch your every move. The site is Los Alamos National Laboratory, often called a birthplace of the atomic bomb. The Department of Energy has put the lab's contract up for bid after a string of controversies over safety and security. It now looks as if a for-profit company will for the first time take a lead role in running things. NPR's David Kestenbaum reports.
[David Kestenbaum Reporting:] Sixty years ago, the scientists who built the first atomic bomb insisted that Los Alamos be run like a university. They wanted to be able to argue and share ideas. So in a secret deal, the government hired the University of California to run things. Today, the lab is still run by the university. It's a $2 billion-a-year operation with some 14,000 employees. Joe Marts went to the University of California and says the arrangement has not always been popular on campus. He's now a deputy division leader for the lab's X Division, where many of the nuclear weapons scientists work.
[Mr. Joe Marts:] I have protesters at my graduate seminars saying the university should not be involved in this type of work. I would counter by saying that who better than someone without bias to ensure that the right answers are given to the country, so that when a tough decision has to be made about the safety or reliability of something as important as our nuclear deterrent, that it is done so with the upmost integrity. An institution like the University of California brings that integrity that you might not have with the for-profit defense contract.
[Kestenbaum:] Marts says if a defense contractor does take a dominant role, it could also make hiring difficult for him.
[Mr. Joe Marts:] In X Division, the average age of my staff is in the range of 50 years old, and when I'm trying to attract the best and brightest new recruits and they look at whether or not they would work for a defense contractor vs. a University of California, the choice for them becomes very easy.
[Kestenbaum:] They go with the university, he says. It looks as if a university will continue to be involved but with a defense contractor as a major partner. The University of California is teaming up with Bechtel, a global engineering and construction company. Competing against them for the contract so far will be a team led by the University of Texas and Lockheed Martin, known for building fighter jets and missiles. Jack Gandler has no problem with for-profit companies getting involved. He's a former undersecretary of Defense. Two years ago, he served on a panel that advised putting the Los Alamos contract up for bid.
[Mr. Jack Gandler:] I'd rather almost have a defense contractor because they're used to dealing with the security aspects of a place like Los Alamos. And Los Alamos, of course, is originally the nuclear facility for nuclear weapons and a very highly sensitive area, one in which the national security literally is involved, and defense contractors are more used to dealing in that environment.
[Kestenbaum:] Lockheed Martin, for instance, already runs Sandia National Laboratory. Lockheed recently hired Sandia's former director, Paul Robinson, to help prepare his proposal to run Los Alamos. Robinson says scientists shouldn't worry that academic freedom will be strangled if Lockheed moves in, and as for concerns about conflict of interest, Robinson says Lockheed isn't in it for the money.
[Mr. Paul Robinson:] This is certainly a national service. One sense, they're doing it for pride. The other sense is to make sure they stay aware of breaking research developments that can change certainly the defense industry or national security writ large.
[Kestenbaum:] Whoever wins the contract will get access to thousands of top scientists and engineers, experts in super computers, explosives, genetics. Still, the prestige of running the birthplace of the bomb was apparently not enough on its own. The Department of Energy originally said a new contractor could earn as much as $30 million a year for running the lab. They then upped the maximum to $79 million. That's 10 times what the University of California can make under the current arrangement. Proposals are due July 19th. The winner will be announced in December. David Kestenbaum, NPR News.

[Melissa Block:] Eleanor Beardsley fills us in from Paris.
[Eleanor Beardsley:] In the heart of Paris's Montparnasse neighborhood, Francis Dubourg stands behind the bar in his restaurant, La Cabane a Huitres, or the Oyster Shack, shocking oysters and greeting customers. The 62-year-old fourth generation Oysterman farms his oysters in the Bay of Arcachon off France's Atlantic Coast and brings them to Paris where he serves them up four days a week. Dobourg says he is one of the last growers to raise oysters in the traditional way.
[Francis Dobourg:] [Through translator] My oysters are raised directly on the sand, the way it was done in the old days. They lie flat. They are not hanging bunch in bags. And this is very important because an oyster takes it properties from the sand, just like a good one absorbs the oil it's blended in.
[Eleanor Beardsley:] At a dozen simple tables in this small wood paneled room that smells like the sea, Dobourg's patrons enjoy his bountiful harvest. For Jean Gouse say, eating the sacred sea fruit is all about French culture.
[Jean Gouse:] We are having oysters for Christmas and for New Year's Eve. The tradition is that you have to eat oysters for feast. So if there are no oysters for New Year's Eve, for instance, something is missing.
[Eleanor Beardsley:] Oysters accompanied by white wine or champagne are eaten raw in France, scrapped out of their shells with tiny forks while still alive. Jean Pierre Stalla, who comes here to enjoy oyster every week, says there are several schools of thought on eating them.
[Unidentified Man:] [Singing foreign language]
[Eleanor Beardsley:] For NPR News, I'm Eleanor Beardsley in Paris.

[Ed Gordon:] We turn now to our weekly feature, Political Corner. Today, NPR senior correspondent Juan Williams and his guests discuss health care for veterans and the next Supreme Court justice.
[Juan Williams Reporting:] I'm joined now by Donna Brazile, former campaign manager for Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore in 2000. Also with us, Robert Traynham, deputy staff director for the Senate Republican Committee. Thanks for joining me.
[Ms. Donna Brazil:] Thank you, Juan.
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] Thanks, Juan.
[Williams:] Last week the Senate voted to spend an extra $1.5 billion on veterans' health this year. It was in response to a shortfall at the Veterans Affairs Department-in specific, money that would be supplied to take care of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. It was so interesting to hear Larry Craig, a Republican from Idaho, say that, quote, "it was a frustration to me and an embarrassment that there wasn't enough money to take care of American soldiers." And Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate minority leader, said, `This is just the latest example of how poorly the administration planned for and prepared for the war.' Donna Brazile, is Harry Reid right?
[Ms. Brazile:] Well, absolutely. Look, Jim Nicholson, who is the director of the VA, came up to the Hill and he said that more money was needed to take care of some of the soldiers who are coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Right now VA facilities across the country are no longer accepting new clients, and this is causing a lot of problems. The House bill currently has 975 million; the Senate is perhaps adequate in terms of $1.5 billion, but this again demonstrated the administration did not adequately plan for some of the, you know, returning troops who are back from the war and they're in need of medical care.
[Williams:] Robert Traynham, how are Republicans responding to this charge?
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] Listen, Secretary Nicholson came up to the House and to the Senate and explicitly said, `We do not need any more money. We're OK.'And then, sure enough, when we come around to last week-and it looks like we have egg on our face. And the reason why is because now they're saying that we do need additional funding. And so, yes, it was a very frustrating moment, if you will, for the administration to say one thing and then to come around and say, `Oh, no, we changed our mind. We do need this.'
[Williams:] Robert, though, how do you respond to what Donna Brazile just said, that it was an indication of poor planning by the administration for dealing with the aftermath of the war-in specific, dealing with American soldiers coming home with injuries?
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] I'm not sure if it was poor planning. I think it was oversight. And perhaps maybe we're splitting hairs here, but the fact is, is that when the secretary of Veterans Affairs comes up to the Hill and says, `We don't need any more money,'listen, you take them for their word at it because they usually say, `We need more funds.'And so we took their word.
[Ms. Brazile:] Robert is absolutely right. The administration said no money was needed, but these veteran groups have been screaming about the lack of adequate medical care for the troops who are returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. I know personally-because my father goes over to the VA hospital in New Orleans almost weekly to visit those troops, and he personally started calling around saying that they don't have adequate supplies. Those troops are coming back with injuries that, quite frankly, the medical staff-they're unable to supply those troops because they don't have the resources.
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] There's no question about it. This was a very embarrassing moment for the administration. It was embarrassing for the secretary. It was embarrassing for Republicans and Democrats. And the reason why it's embarrassing is be-or was embarrassing is because we are still in the middle of a war. And as Donna accurately mentioned-is that we have troops, unfortunately, that are coming home with health care needs and so forth and with limbs missing. And so this was a politically embarrassing moment. It was a patriotic embarrassing moment. And there's no question about it that our leaders, both on the House and Senate side, Republican and Democrat, very quickly fixed the problem.
[Williams:] All right. Topic two today: the Supreme Court nomination. President Bush was asked on Monday by Judy Kreen of USA Today if he is including women and minorities among the people that he's looking at as a prospective Supreme Court nominee. The president responded that he's considering, quote, "a pretty good size group of people right now and, of course, there's a diverse group of citizens." And he went on to add that it's important that people from around the country know that he's interested in diversity on the court. Robert Traynham, who besides Attorney General Gonzales is a minority that is being seriously considered for this Supreme Court nomination?
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] Well, again, I don't want to split hairs, but a minority is a minority. You take a look at Janice Rogers Brown from California, supreme-former Supreme Court justice on the California Supreme Court who is a very accomplished African-American woman. General Gonzales, as you mentioned, is another person, Hispanic from Texas. You also have Priscilla Owen, who is a-obviously a female from Texas. So you have a number of individuals out there that are eminently qualified to serve on the bench. As an African-American, I strongly do-would argue that there should be diversity on the court. And I would hope that when the president searches through resumes and qualifications and so forth, he will take into consideration the need, if you will, for even more minorities on the court.
[Williams:] Now, Donna, what are the key issues among black Americans, Latinos when they look at this nomination? Is it only affirmative action?
[Ms. Brazile:] Oh, no, there's-it's also voting rights. As you well know, many of the voting rights cases involving redistricting and the interpretation of the Voting Rights Act have also been heard before the Supreme Court. That's another important issue.
[Williams:] Do you agree, Robert?
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] Absolutely. And if I can add something, what this president has pledged to do-and I hope to goodness that he does do this-is to bring integrity back to the process, is to make sure that people's reputations are not dragged in the mud, to make sure that petty partisan politics are left to the side and to make sure that America is proud of the process, to make sure that-clearly, that the nominee's views are heard and understood and interpreted, but to make sure that the president's nominee gets a fair up-or-down vote and to make sure that his or her integrity is not impugned.
[Williams:] Well, you know, Robert, when you were mentioning having a fair and-a process with some sense of decorum about it, I think back to the Clarence Thomas hearings.
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] Mm-hmm.
[Williams:] Is that what Republicans have in mind in terms of a problem that they want to avoid?
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] Well, it's not only Clarence Thomas, but it's Justice Rogers Brown. It's also Mr. Gonzales and some other people out there that unfortunately have been maligned, if you will, through special interest groups. And, yes, you are correct. I mean, Clarence Thomas is the prime example of someone that literally went through the mud in terms of his reputation, in terms of his personal life, in terms of allegations and so forth and so on.
[Williams:] All right.
[Ms. Brazile:] That's why we...
[Williams:] Donna.
[Ms. Brazile:] ...must vet these candidates, and the president should consult with senators from both sides of the aisles before nominating someone.
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] I do know that President Bush has extended an invite to Senators Leahy, Reid, Specter and, I believe, Senator Frist sometime next week to come down to the Oval Office to talk about the process.
[Williams:] All right. I want to thank my guests, Donna Brazile, a Democratic political strategist with her own firm in Washington. She's the author of "Cooking With Grease: Stirring the Pots in American Politics"-and Robert Traynham. Thanks so much to Robert, the deputy staff director and communications director for the Senate Republican Conference. Thank you both.
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] Thank you, Juan.
[Ms. Brazile:] Thank you.
[Ed Gordon:] Join us next Thursday to hear more from Juan and our political insiders right here on Political Corner.

[Deborah Amos:] And I'm Deborah Amos. Coming up, with a U.S. pullback looking more likely, the big questions are when and what happens to Iraqis who helped the U.S.?
[Adams:] But first, the Bush administration has released key findings of a new national intelligence report. It warns of al-Qaida's ongoing efforts to strike at the U.S., other targets around the world, including targets in Iraq. NPR's Don Gonyea has the report.
[Don Gonyea:] Administration officials say the National Intelligence Estimate, also called an NIE, lays out just how much of a threat al-Qaida remains almost six years after the attacks of 911. Frances Townsend is the top White House advisor to the president on homeland security issues. She spoke to reporters this morning, stating that al-Qaida will continue to attempt visually dramatic mass casualty attacks on the U.S. The NIE also predicts that by working with regional groups, al-Qaida will enhance its capabilities.
[Ms. Frances Townsend:] Of most concern is that al-Qaida will try to exploit the conflict in Iraq and leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qaida in Iraq, it's most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have expressed the desire to attack the homeland.
[Don Gonyea:] Townsend denies that it is the war in Iraq that has led to the strengthening of terror groups, such as al-Qaida. And she insists that even with al-Qaida's resurgence, the group is not as strong as it would have been had the U.S. not confronted terror threats aggressively since 911. As for the timing of the report, the White House says it's been in the works for years and insists it was not time to counter the Iraq debate this week on Capitol Hill. Don Gonyea, NPR News, the White House.
[Adams:] And later in the program, we'll talk to a former CIA counterterrorism chief about the NIE and its implications.

[Audie Cornish:] Last spring, the state of Indiana declared an emergency after a major HIV outbreak in the small town of Austin. Drug users there were injecting the painkiller Opana and sharing needles.
[Robert Siegel:] At the time, the response was to open a one-stop shop where people could pick up clean needles and information about drug treatment. They could also get health insurance, state IDs and job training. Well, now, one year later, that response has been scaled way back. And the people at the center of this outbreak have been left with very few resources. Our colleague, Kelly McEvers, has the story.
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] Four days a week, this is what happens in Austin, Ind. A little white SUV goes up and down the streets with clean needles and sharps containers where you can throw away old needles. So you've got people who are expecting you?
[Brittany Combs:] Yes.
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] Oh, OK.
[Brittany Combs:] We have, like, a set schedule that we do, and then we kind of drive around.
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] Brittany Combs is a public health nurse for the county.
[Brittany Combs:] We're just going, like, right down the road for this first one, so...
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] She drives up and down the streets of Austin, passing out clean needles.
[Brittany Combs:] Everybody's going to be outside today.
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] This is most of what's left of the one-stop shop this mobile needle exchange run by Brittany Combs and two other staffers in their spare time. Most days, Brittany Combs does her regular job for eight hours, then she comes out here for two to three more hours and doesn't get paid for it.
[Brittany Combs:] We're basically volunteering our time, yes.
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] I mean, basically, if you stopped caring, like...
[Brittany Combs:] Oh, it wouldn't it wouldn't get done. Oh, there's no way. There's no way it would get done. There's Theresa now.
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] We pull up to a house, and two women open the door. One is named Theresa, and the other doesn't want to give her name. They don't want to be identified because they're doing drugs illegally.
[Brittany Combs:] How are you doing?
[Unidentified Woman #1:] Oh, pretty good.
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] Brittany writes down how many needles one woman is getting.
[Brittany Combs:] And you don't share with anybody, right?
[Unidentified Woman #1:] Hell no. Hell no.
[Brittany Combs:] I didn't think so. And you only use them once, right?
[Unidentified Woman #1:] Right.
[Brittany Combs:] What have you been using, just Opana?
[Unidentified Woman #1:] Yeah, Opana. Opana anything I can get in me. Can I just get my needle?
[Brittany Combs:] Yep.
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] Then, Teresa says she wants to quit using Opana. She says she went to the health department's satellite office in town. There is an addiction clinic there with a doctor who comes once a week. Theresa says she couldn't get an appointment. She says what she really wants is a prescription for Suboxone, a drug that blocks the effects of opioids, like Opana and heroin, and helps with withdrawals.
[Theresa:] I need, you know, Suboxone to get off the stuff. But I never did get to go see a doctor, so, you know, I just quit.
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] She doesn't mean she quit using Opana. She means she quit trying to stop using Opana.
[Theresa:] I mean, I can't wait. I can't get off of them by myself.
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] Brittany Combs, the public health nurse, says this happens a lot. People say they want to stop using drugs, but there aren't very many options. Research has found that medication-assisted treatment through drugs like Suboxone helps people stop abusing other drugs. And it's linked to stopping the spread of infectious diseases.
[Brittany Combs:] The Suboxone is what most of our people want. They're actually buying it illegally on the street to try to quit themselves. That's how desperate they are.
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] But not many doctors are authorized to prescribe Suboxone, and even they are limited in how many prescriptions they can write. Also, many doctors only take cash for Suboxone. Brittany Combs says one patient called around for months looking for a doctor who would prescribe it and take insurance.
[Brittany Combs:] I have somebody who came in the program, and he's excited. He said, I finally got a Suboxone doctor. He has to go almost to Cincinnati to get his Suboxone. So now he has to get someone to drive him over there in order to get his meds.
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] So that is if you're extremely motivated.
[Brittany Combs:] Extremely motivated and have access to things like car rides, which a lot of these people don't.
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] Cincinnati is almost a hundred miles away. That doctor Theresa was talking about the one who comes once a week can prescribe Suboxone. But this doctor will only do that after a drug user has completed a 30-day inpatient treatment program. The closest one is the next county over, and the waiting list there is four to six weeks.
[Jason Mount:] There's the old jail there.
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] One of the few places you can get help if you're drug user in Austin, Ind., is the county jail, says Jason Mount, the local prosecutor.
[Jason Mount:] Well, in a rural county, what you find is that, you know, the jail is where people await trial, but it's also a mental health facility. It's also a detox facility. It's also a homeless shelter. We don't have any of those resources otherwise, so a lot of those people in the margins this is where they wind up.
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] Most drug users end up detoxing in jail basically quitting cold turkey. But they can also get hooked up with services, like a nurse, and they can get on that waiting list for inpatient rehab. Plus, officials say, the jail will still soon administer another medication-assisted treatment, Vivitrol. That's a once-a-month shot that blocks the effect of opioids. The state of Indiana has just budgeted an additional $30 million over the next two years to try to get people treatment rather than jail time. But that's earmarked for people with felony convictions.
[Jason Mount:] I would love to see a situation where it would be easier for somebody Scott County, before they ever came in contact with the criminal justice system to be able to walk in someplace and get themselves into treatment. We're working on those things, and they're getting better. But historically, that's been a real obstacle for us.
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] There are people in the county who are applying for grants to train hospital workers to deal with addiction. And they're trying to highlight the stories of people who've been through recovery. Still, Scott County, Ind., is the lowest-ranked county in the state for health outcomes. Officials say it's like a lot of places in Indiana and around the country that are just starting to deal with the opioid epidemic.
[Robert Siegel:] That's our co-host Kelly McEvers. Tomorrow, we'll have the story of one woman in Austin, Ind., and her struggle to stop using Opana.
[Unidentified Woman #2:] This time last year, I had a home. I had a car, my house full of furniture, a lot of nice stuff you know, a big sectional sofa and a glass coffee table and a real heavy cherry dinette set. I had my kids, rings on every finger, you know, money in the bank. And in 12 less than 12 months gone.
[Robert Siegel:] That story tomorrow on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.

[Ira Flatow:] Here's some news to raise a glass to: the idea that red wine may help us live longer and healthier lives. Well, it got a new boost this week. According to a team of researchers, a compound found in the skin of grapes could be an antidote to aging by slowing down the process and even fending off disease and inflammation associated with getting old. It's the topic of a new study published this week in the journal Science. But before you pop the cork on that merlot, this story doesn't end there. The study's researchers are hoping these findings will help drug companies develop anti-aging drugs to treat diseases like Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and even obesity. Sound too good to be true? Well, my next guest is here to talk about it. David Sinclair is professor in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Med School in Boston. He's lead author of the study that was published this week in Science. He joins us from California. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
[David Sinclair:] Hi, Ira, thanks for having me on.
[Ira Flatow:] Are we talking about resveratrol here?
[David Sinclair:] Well, the resveratrol discovery was about 10 years ago. We, my colleagues and I, made that discovery. But what we've done since then is use that as a just a stepping stone, a proof of concept to make much more potent synthetic drug-like molecules that are just in the beginnings of human clinical trials. And this paper is about the finding that these molecules from grapes and the synthetics all seem to work through this one particular gene, genetic pathway we call the sirtuin pathway.
[Ira Flatow:] Let's back up a little bit and talk about the study you did in mice. What did you find what did you give the mice, and what did you find there?
[David Sinclair:] Well, originally we found resveratrol just in a test tube, looking for molecules that would turn on this enzyme, this protein that seems to defend against diseases in aging. We then moved to nematode worms and flies. We've done some work with bees even. The mouse study was in 2006. These were mice that were fed a Western diet. They were chubby, and they were developing usual signs of disease that we see in elderly obese people. The mice that had the resveratrol in their diet were still obese, but they were seemingly or relatively immune to the effects of the obesity. So their arteries were clear, their liver was nice and thin. Their bones were stronger. They could run further. And so that was really the first evidence that we were on to something important for potentially for human health.
[Ira Flatow:] And so then you identified the action of how the molecule works.
[David Sinclair:] Right, so that's what we've been doing for the last few years, is trying to figure out, first of all we've been criticized for this. It does sound too good to be true. And turning on proteins rather than just inhibiting them is fairly rare in drug development and even biology. So this was, on multiple levels, seemingly too good to be true, and what we've done in this paper with my colleagues, and there are actually 30 authors that I'm here representing, we were able to, I think, very well demonstrate how these molecules work not just in the test tube but even within cells, hitting a very precise part of this protein that we think controls health and possibly aging.
[Ira Flatow:] Well, give us some of the details of that. When you mean it controls aging and these other miraculous-sounding things, give us some idea of what you're talking about.
[David Sinclair:] Well, it's important to know that I'm also here representing a field of scientists, probably hundreds of labs around the world who are focused on finding what are the causes of aging and more important, actually, the genes that can slow that down. And we know of probably 100 of these genes now, and they fall into certain groups. There are about four major categories. One of them is the sirtuins, which I work on. There are others. There's even a compound from Easter Island that seems to have also remarkable effects on anti-aging, on aging and extending lifespan in mice. So what we're all hoping to do, us researchers, is to develop ways to not really just extend lifespan but to keep people healthier for longer. We may just have a greater impact than a single drug because these drugs could potentially treat one disease but prevent 20 others.
[Ira Flatow:] And so you actually co-founded a company called Sirtris, which is now owned by GlaxoSmithKline, to come up to create these compounds, these anti-aging compounds?
[David Sinclair:] Well, it's true. A lot of scientists are hesitant to get involved with industry. It's seen as, you know, getting in bed with the devil, actually. But I found that doing this has been really the only way and one of the best ways I know to take a finding from the bench side to people. There's no other way, in fact. This drug, if we ever succeed, is going to cost probably a billion dollars, and no academic lab can do that. So yeah, I'm still working with, as a consultant to, GlaxoSmithKline. But they're the ones who have done the hard chemistry. They've made 4,000 different variants of chemicals that activate this pathway, and the best couple of those have gone into human studies.
[Ira Flatow:] So when you activate the pathway, this enzyme, what does what kind of benefits happen from that?
[David Sinclair:] Well, there are probably 1,000 papers now on this genetic pathway and the benefits of resveratrol. Not all the effects of resveratrol of course go through this one pathway. We think many of the important ones do. So for instance, we commonly see with these molecules that the animals are, as I mentioned, protected from the effects of obesity, so the lack of inflammation, their hearts are a bit stronger, their arteries are cleaner. They also seem to have improved brain function. They're protected against diseases like Alzheimer's. And they also seem to have more energy. We see that the mitochondria, these energy battery packs in our muscles and our liver, in fact in all of our cells, get revved up by these drugs. And this could be a way to give elderly people or sick people more energy and to fight disease, and possibly live longer.
[Ira Flatow:] Why not just drink a lot more red wine and get it that way?
[David Sinclair:] Well, I don't recommend people do that because the amount of resveratrol that's needed I estimate to be about 100 glasses a day, which is probably not recommended. So really what we're trying to do here is to develop drugs that could be taken as a little pill, maybe 250 milligram little pill, that could be used to treat diabetes but would also prevent cancer, Alzheimer's and inflammatory diseases. And yeah, I don't recommend people try to get resveratrol out of red wine, though I've been drinking red wine every few days because I know there are some health benefits, but definitely don't go overboard.
[Ira Flatow:] Could you do it with grape juice too?
[David Sinclair:] Well, actually, there's not much resveratrol in grape juice. Red wine has about a milligram or two per glass. But we're talking about hundreds of milligrams in these studies.
[Ira Flatow:] How is it that you get such a widespread benefit in all the different organs from just this one enzyme?
[David Sinclair:] That is the best question. What we think is going on is that well, let me back up. The old idea was that resveratrol and a lot of these compounds that seem to improve health work just because they're antioxidants. But it turns out resveratrol and red wine generally, it's not really a great antioxidant, and in fact it's been rather disappointing, the results for antioxidants in the aging field. So what we think is going on to have these, as you said, miraculous-like effects, is that these longevity genes, that there are many of these in our body, they get activated by adversity. So when we exercise, when we have a very low-calorie diet or even calorie-restrict, these pathways get activated, and they tell proteins in the cell to go off, say repair DNA better or turn on the energy supply more. And we think that those complex pathways downstream regulated by these master regulators of health are responsible.
[Ira Flatow:] And resveratrol is knows the pathway of how to do that, and these other drugs that you're developing basically do the same thing?
[David Sinclair:] Well, that's the theory. And in this paper that we just put out, what we're showing evidence for is that we're on target, that we are making drugs, and resveratrol as well, hits this enzyme in the cell that has these remarkable benefits, at least in animals so far.
[Ira Flatow:] So could you eventually market these as anti-aging drugs then?
[David Sinclair:] Well, if they worked, it would be great. I think proving that is going to take too long, I think, for most of us to wait. The way I think the first anti-aging drug will hit the market, and I don't know if it's going to be this work or someone behind us or even in front of us, there are a lot of people trying, but when it happens, and I think it will happen in our lifetimes, it'll be for a particular disease, because the drug approval process doesn't recognize aging as a disease. You couldn't get it on the market. But eventually I think if enough people take this medicine, let's say 10,000 people are on the drug, we would start to see even within a few years whether those people are generally healthier and possibly even longer lived than the general population.
[Ira Flatow:] And how soon will these trials start?
[David Sinclair:] Well, my colleagues roll their eyes whenever any of us gives an estimate. But I can say that we're in the companies are in phase one studies. Phase one studies means very small trials with, say, a dozen, up to 100 people. And the results so far have been promising, but they haven't proven anything. The timeframe forward typically from here on is about five years if things go well. But, you know, we have to be cautious because things can go wrong, and they often do in drug development. But, you know, we're certainly a lot closer than I ever thought we would be in my lifetime, and I certainly never thought that I'd be seeing patients given a drug that came out of the aging field so quickly.
[Ira Flatow:] Are there any bad side effects to this?
[David Sinclair:] Well, if you use really, really high doses of resveratrol, many grams, there can be some untoward side effects, some toxicity. So again, people shouldn't consider doing that. In the mouse studies, we haven't seen any signs of toxicity yet. We've been actually quite surprised. We've looked hard. We thought maybe there was a tradeoff, cancer would be invoked, or fertility would decline. We haven't seen any of that. And in these initial human studies that have recently been published with the synthetic compounds from that are in the clinical trials, they also, at least so far in small numbers of people, seem to be safe. But we need more people, of course. But there's nothing that I'm particularly worried about right now.
[Ira Flatow:] So in effect you basically slowed down the aging process in mice, or did you reverse it? Did you take away the aging process so they could live a lot, lot longer?
[David Sinclair:] Well, my colleagues and I debate whether we're really slowing down aging or we're just preventing diseases. That's probably going to be a debate we continue for a while. But in my lab, we are working on compounds that clearly do reverse aging or aspects of aging. We've got mice we haven't published this yet, but just as a heads-up, we've got compounds that can take a two-year-old mouse, which is a pretty old mouse, and reverse its metabolic aging within just a week. So I'm looking forward to not just delaying aging but even possibly reversing some of it.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow. Well, we'll talk about it some more. We've run out of time. David Sinclair, thank you very much for joining us.
[David Sinclair:] Hey, thanks for having me.
[Ira Flatow:] Dr. Sinclair is a professor in the Department of Genetic at Harvard Med School in Boston. We're going to take a break, and when we come back we're going to switch gears and take a closer look at bees bumblebees, honeybees, you name it, bee-autiful, coming after this break. Stay with us.

[Alex Chadwick:] Through this hour, we'll continue to bring you news about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. There is another big story now, though, and it is not good news. In Baghdad today, more than 600 people died in a stampede during a religious festival. The crush began after someone yelled they'd seen a suicide bomber heading for the crowd. Dan Murphy is a reporter for The Christian Science Monitor. He's based in Baghdad. Dan, tell us more what happened.
[Mr. Dan Murphy:] Well, the death toll's moving all the time, but I think now they're confirming at least 841 people killed. And health officials here are saying they expect that to rise to around a thousand. Today was the celebration of the death of Imam Al-Khadim, who's one of the 12 imams that Shiites venerate. As many as a million people were making it into this area on foot. Some of them were coming from days away from towns in the deep south of Iraq. And the bridge that these people were coming across acted as a bottleneck. Apparently, there was a checkpoint at the shrine end of the bridge where people were being checked for suicide belts because of course many Shiite holidays have been hit by insurgents in Iraq in the past few years, and that bottleneck was coupled, as you said, perhaps by somebody shouting that there was a suicide bomber there. Very quickly there was panic; there was a crush of people trying to get onto the bridge that probably didn't even, you know, know the panic had started. And the people that were on the bridge were caught between two walls of folks. And again, most of the dead are women and children who were either crushed to death on the bridge or jumped into the river about 50 feet below and drowned. You know, just a horrific, horrific day here.
[Alex Chadwick:] Well, it sounds horrific. I wonder, given that this is a important religious event for the Shias and there's this concern about a suicide bomber, there was no actual suicide bomber there, just a panic about one. But I wonder if this is not going to significantly worsen the already deteriorating relations between the Shia and the Sunnis.
[Mr. Dan Murphy:] It could. It's hard to know how this will play out. And it's also hard to know if the relations can get a lot worse at the moment. This is a country that is riven with sectarian tension and distrust. Earlier in the morning-this incident happened at around 10 AM local time-at about 8:00, mortars and Katyusha rockets slammed into crowded areas with pilgrims, killing about 15 of them. There were also many rumors floating around that insurgents had poisoned the free food and water at some places that are typically given out in these types of Shiite holidays. And so as you point out, there was no suicide bomber there and this was a case of panic overtaking people, the context of the violence and the tension that surrounds people all the time. In the past history, there was horrific suicide bombing about a year and a half ago in this same neighborhood on a shrine day that killed, I think it was, at least 50 people. This is in the back of everyone's mind and is a big part of the reason this happened.
[Alex Chadwick:] The context of the fear in Baghdad must be just overwhelming if you can have this kind of situation where, if the projections are correct, a thousand people die in a panic stampede.
[Mr. Dan Murphy:] I think the levels of fear in Baghdad are, you know, if there was a measure for it, they'd be off the charts. However, to be fair, if you have crowds of people moving in areas that aren't built to accommodate them with poor crowd controls we had today, these things can happen. But there is no question that particularly in Baghdad, which is of course one of the most ethnically and religiously mixed cities in the country, which makes it one of the most violent and dangerous parts of Iraq, that there are, you know, assassination squads, there are sectarian killings every day, there are bombings frequently, and all of this is at the forefront of people's minds all the time.
[Alex Chadwick:] Dan Murphy with The Christian Science Monitor in Baghdad. Dan, thank you.
[Mr. Dan Murphy:] My pleasure, Alex.
[Alex Chadwick:] Again, our top story is the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast region. President Bush flew back to Washington today to coordinate the federal response to the disaster. He's expected to visit the region later this week. Our NPR correspondents in the field continue to report on the rescue and recovery efforts. We'll hear more from them throughout the program, and you can find their latest dispatches and more information on the disaster at our Web site, npr.org. I'm Alex Chadwick. There's more coming on DAY TO DAY from NPR News.

[Audie Cornish:] Now for an issue that doesn't get a lot of time on the campaign trail but will be something the next president has to deal with what to do about the nation's growing patchwork of marijuana laws. That's our topic on this week's Platform Check, where we examine what the candidates would do if they were president. NPR's justice correspondent Carrie Johnson is in the studio with us. Welcome back, Carrie.
[Carrie Johnson, Byline:] Hey, Audie.
[Audie Cornish:] So nine states will vote on marijuana-related ballot measures this fall. Five would legalize the drug for recreational use, four for medical use. But under federal law right now, it's still illegal to possess or sell marijuana, right?
[Carrie Johnson, Byline:] Absolutely. Marijuana is tightly restricted under the Controlled Substances Act. Authorities believe it has a high potential for abuse, and there's no federal currently accepted medical use. Under the law, it gets the same treatment as heroin and LSD. And just last month, the Drug Enforcement Administration rejected attempts to loosen some of those restrictions on marijuana what's called rescheduling the drug. Here's what the DEA leader, Chuck Rosenberg, told me about that.
[Chuck Rosenberg:] Well, marijuana is not as dangerous as heroin, for instance clearly not as dangerous. But this decision isn't based on danger. This decision is based on whether or not marijuana, as determined by the FDA, is a safe and effective medicine. And it's not.
[Carrie Johnson, Byline:] The DEA did open up a way for more universities and institutions to grow marijuana for federal research purposes, and the Obama administration says it does support a lot more study of whether some component part of marijuana could be useful for medical patients.
[Audie Cornish:] All right, so that's where things stand right now at this White House. And we're going to dig into what the presidential candidates have been saying, starting with Hillary Clinton.
[Carrie Johnson, Byline:] Clinton says she wants to reschedule marijuana to loosen some of those restrictions on it. She talked about her thinking on a town hall on ABC this year.
[Hillary Clinton:] And we need to be doing research on it because I am a hundred percent in favor of medical uses for marijuana. But I want to know what the evidence is. I'm also someone who believes that the states can be those laboratories of democracy. So I'm watching carefully what's happening in the states that have legalized it.
[Carrie Johnson, Byline:] In other words, Hillary Clinton wants more science and to leave things to the states.
[Audie Cornish:] Now, what has Donald Trump said about all this?
[Carrie Johnson, Byline:] Audie, it's been a little bit difficult to pin Donald Trump down. The campaign didn't respond to my request for detailed information. Twenty-five years ago, long before Donald Trump became a national political figure, he said he backed legalization of marijuana, at least for adults. But Bill O'Reilly, the Fox News host, asked Trump about his position on this issue back in February.
[Donald Trump:] I would really want to think about that one, Bill...
[Bill O'reilly:] All right.
[Donald Trump:] ...Because in some ways, I think it's good, and in other ways, it's bad. I do want to see what the medical effects are.
[Carrie Johnson, Byline:] Audie, Trump went on to say he's a hundred percent in favor of medical marijuana. I talked today with Michael Collins of the Drug Policy Alliance, which supports legalizing the drug, and Collins told me that close aides to Donald Trump, people like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, have taken a hard line against marijuana legalization.
[Audie Cornish:] Now, what about the third party candidates Jill Stein and Gary Johnson? I know this issue does come up quite a bit for them.
[Carrie Johnson, Byline:] Yeah, Gary Johnson actually worked as CEO of a marijuana business, a job that he left to run as the Libertarian candidate for the White House. He has openly talked about his use of medical marijuana, though he says he's stopped doing that when he began the run for the White House. He's endorsed by the Marijuana Policy Project, which has given him an A-plus on the issue. They gave Jill Stein of the Green Party an A-plus as well.
[Audie Cornish:] That's NPR's justice correspondent Carrie Johnson. Carrie, thanks so much.
[Carrie Johnson, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Michele Norris:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Michele Norris.
[Melissa Block:] Im Melissa Block. And its time now for All Tech Considered. Imagine turning on your Web cam and being able to talk to anyone, anywhere in the world. You can, of course, already do that but what if you couldnt choose whom to talk to? You'd press a button and find yourself eye to eye with a stranger. Well, thats the high stakes world of Chat Roulette, a new viral phenomenon. And to talk me through it, why we should be excited or perhaps concerned about it, is Omar Gallaga. He covers technology culture for the Austin American-Statesman and for All Tech Considered. Omar, welcome back.
[Mr. Omar Gallaga:] Hi, Melissa. Thanks for having me.
[Melissa Block:] And you gave Chat Roulette a spin over the weekend. Tell us about it. How does it work and whom did you meet?
[Mr. Omar Gallaga:] I did. Im a little rattled. Chat Roulette is a service, a very basic Web service that combines existing technologies, Web cams connecting on the Internet, like you do on Skype. But whats interesting about it is that its completely random. You have no control over who youre talking to and it just connects you to someone that could be across the world. It could be in your neighborhood and you really dont know who it is. So, when I got on there, I mean, you go through a lot of just people skipping past you, as theyre looking for someone maybe more attractive or someone that they want to talk to. But I did have some really interesting conversations with a group of guys in Tunisia. I spoke to a woman in Germany. My brother and I found a guy in France who he was wearing a bath robe and a very short pair of shorts. We thought, oh, no this is going to take a terrible turn. But what he did was he got up and he put an extra camera and an extra computer in front of the laptop and created this feedback loop. And he had music in the background. He was sort of deejaying for us. So, you find these really serendipitous encounters with really cool people. But, then the dark side of it is that you see a lot of people doing very dirty things, a lot of Web feeds of advertisements, things like that. So, just like kind of the old days of the Internet where you never knew what youre going to get, its kind of really good stuff happens and then really, really, really horrible things that you never want to see again can happen.
[Melissa Block:] Yeah, and a huge red flashing light for parents here. There are no age filters on this. I guess, they ask you if youre over is it 17? But theres no way they can screen it out.
[Mr. Omar Gallaga:] Right. And thats how it differs from a traditional chat room where there might be a moderator or you might have to log in first and provide some information, just something basic where they can find you later if something goes down. This is completely, completely unmoderated. You dont even log in. You just connect your Web cam, hit connect, and youre there. And for parents, yeah, it can be it's something I would definitely, definitely keep my kids from because you see a lot of male genitalia, you see a lot of just bad things, very disturbing things. But on the other hand, because its random, sometimes you come across someone really interesting that just wants to talk. So, but yeah, for kids it definitely, definitely not for kids.
[Melissa Block:] Omar, do you think that Chat Roulette tells us anything about the boundaries of the Internet? Where we're headed?
[Mr. Omar Gallaga:] Well, I think, in over the last, I guess, 15 years of Internet culture, weve sort of seen things kind of siloed and things become safer and more sanitized. I mean, Im thinking of Facebook as Im saying this, where you can actually see the identity of the person. And this kind of goes back the other way. This feels very retro to me to where there were no boundaries. There were no filters. And in that sense it kind of goes back to an earlier era where when you went to a Web page in 1996, 1997, you had no idea what you were going to get. It could be something horrible. And weve sort of moved away from that for so long with MySpace and then Facebook and even Twitter where there is some semblance of an identity. I think this is completely anonymous and in that sense is very interesting. But I think something like this taken to the Facebook level where you could put some filters or could decide do I want to touch someone from this country or that country and filter out some of the bad stuff could be really, really powerful. It definitely feels like the first step of something kind of new and interesting. It just started in November. And theres already tens of thousands of people using it. So, obviously, theres people out there that want to talk to random people online. And when you combine it with Facebooks hundreds of millions of users, I could definitely see something like this taking off somewhere like that.
[Melissa Block:] Okay, Omar, thanks so much.
[Mr. Omar Gallaga:] Thanks for having me. And we will be posting links to photos and information, and some kind of amateur sociology thats being done on Chat Roulette by people on the Internet, on the All Tech Considered blog at npr.orgalltech.
[Melissa Block:] Thats Omar Gallaga who covers technology culture for the Austin American-Statesman and for All Tech Considered.

[Ari Shapiro:] I'm Ari Shapiro. This week is the start of a new Supreme Court term. It's also a milestone as this session marks a decade with John Roberts as Chief Justice. Our legal correspondent Nina Totenberg, sometimes called the 10th Justice, joins us now to take a look back and ahead. Welcome, Nina.
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] So nice to be here, Ari.
[Ari Shapiro:] After 10 years with John Roberts as Chief Justice on the court, how would you say he has changed the Supreme Court in contrast to his predecessor William Rehnquist, who was also conservative?
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] You know, some of the changes are cosmetic. He's a little more willing to let counsel talk beyond when the red light goes on. The other changes are somewhat speculative, but this court, its most conservative thrust often is keyed to the First Amendment, oddly enough. It's a very libertarian court. So a way to attack all kinds of federal restrictions is through the First Amendment free-speech guarantee. I'm not sure that Rehnquist would've gone along with that. I don't know how he would've felt about some things in the campaign-finance area that this court has been extremely expansive about. And in the leadership sense, we're not sitting in the conferences so we don't know how much leadership there is. What we do know is that sometimes this chief justice is in the minority; sometimes he's very important in the majority as he was when he saved Obamacare. I think we're going to have to wait another 10 years before we have a real sense of his leadership capacity. And one wonders, you know, how much is leadership and how much is just votes the people who are there. You can't lead somebody who doesn't want to follow.
[Ari Shapiro:] Well, do you think of the nine, he has defined this court more than any others? Or would you put that with somebody like Justice Anthony Kennedy who is more often the swing justice?
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] Even in the campaign-finance area, Roberts was willing to go along at a very sort of incremental pace. And Kennedy, in the Citizens United case, circulated an opinion that eventually, essentially became Roberts' opinion, what was the dramatic opinion undercutting decades of law. So Kennedy took the ball away from him in that case. And I think there are probably some other cases like that and cases involving gay rights and same-sex marriage, where at least so far, Kennedy has been the fifth vote on the liberal side.
[Ari Shapiro:] There have been no retirements on the court since 2010. Many people are wondering whether one of the more liberal justices will retire while there is still a Democratic president in office. Any speculation or signs you can point to?
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] You know, if this were a more centrist court, I might think that was possible. But Justice Ginsburg most recently said that she's not about to retire. That she'll keep doing this job as long as she can do it well. And why should she retire, she said, when there is little if any likelihood that President Obama could get through the Senate somebody who she would like to have replace her.
[Ari Shapiro:] Well, you have a detailed preview on Morning Edition tomorrow of the major cases in the term ahead. Without spoiling the surprise for Morning Edition listeners, can you give WEEKEND EDITION listeners a few of the big headlines?
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] Well, a lot of them involve elections, whether it's limits in judicial elections to try to make sure there aren't conflicts of interest or state laws that allow independent commissions to draw congressional district lines to try to keep politics out, those sorts of things are all being challenged. And then there are a lot of cases in the pipeline that we all would recognize from the front pages of the newspaper; laws that make abortion less accessible, another affirmative action in higher education case, and another Obama care case that's very technical, but it could unravel the whole law.
[Ari Shapiro:] NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg. Thanks, Nina.
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] Thank you.

[Linda Wertheimer:] 3D is showing up everywhere, from the cineplex to your living room. There's just one problem. Most of the technology still relies on those cumbersome 3D glasses. But as Jen Sands-Windsor reports, that problem may soon be a thing of the past.
[Mr. Stephen Lang:] [as Colonel Miles Quaritch]: You're not in Kansas anymore. You're on Pandora.
[Laura Krantz:] This is "Avatar," the most financially successful movie of all time. It launched the 3D craze.
[Corey Dade:] Well, I think it's pretty well established that 3D is the future. "SANDS-WINDSOR": That's Anderson Smith, entertainment expert with YHR Analysts. "Mr. SMITH": There are going to be 3D televisions, 3D billboards, 3D computers. The only thing standing in the way now is those ridiculous glasses. "SANDS-WINDSOR": San Diego ophthalmologist Dr. Sebastian Marsh says he has a solution.
[Kevin Beesley:] We've developed the first surgical procedure that lets people's eyes act like 3D glasses. "SANDS-WINDSOR": The operation is still considered experimental. One of the first patients, Rebecca Stern, says she's happy with the results so far.
[Renita Jablonski:] Seeing "Gnomeo & Juliet" without those horrible glasses was life-changing. There are no words to describe it. "SANDS-WINDSOR": There are still some kinks to work out. "Dr. MARSH": Some patients have complained of blurred vision when they are not looking at 3D screens. So we're actually working now on some special corrective lenses that will allow our patients to see real life normally. "SANDS-WINDSOR": Stern says it's worth it for the convenience. She won't need to wear glasses in her living room when her 3D TV arrives. For NPR News, I'm Jen Sands-Windsor in San Diego.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Dr. Marsh and his team hope for a wider release of the procedure in select cities starting April 1st, 2012.

[Melissa Block:] Now to Cairo, where there was third day of confrontations sparked by anger over an anti-Muslim video made in the U.S. Outside the American embassy, rock-throwing protestors battled with police wielding teargas canisters. Protestors are demanding the removal of the U.S. ambassador and punishment for the people who made the video. NPR's Leila Fadel reports on that scene from Cairo.
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] The police wear surgical masks, helmets and wield batons outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo. For nearly 24 hours, they've been trying to keep a few hundred hardcore demonstrators away from the fortified U.S. embassy compound. Teargas hangs in the air, stinging the eyes of passersby. An exhausted police officer says that he's been here since yesterday and will probably be here tomorrow. The protests show no sign of letting up. In the distance, protestors chant that the police are thugs. Ambulances lay in wait on both the demonstrators' and police sides to treat the injured. Paramedics say they've treated more than 240 people and have also not slept.
[Unidentified Man 1:] [Speaking foreign language]
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] This isn't Islam, [unintelligible] says in disgust, standing between a group of riot police officers. Why are they doing this, he says, referring to the demonstrations. Protest, but not with violence, he says. He echoes a sentiment many in Egypt share. While there are a few hardcore demonstrators in a small area, it's business as usual in the rest of the country. The Muslim Brotherhood and the president, who comes from the organization's ranks, have condemned the attacks on the U.S. missions in the region. The once-banned Islamist organization has also consistently called for legal action against the filmmaker, who is reported to be a Coptic Christian residing in California. The government put people thought to be connected to the film on a watch list at Cairo's airport.
[Mohamed Morsi:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] President Mohamed Morsi went even further in his statements to a domestic audience, saying that making fun of the Prophet is a red line. A statement from the Muslim Brotherhood's political wing demanded that the American government take concrete action to stop the movie, which it said spewed hatred and extremism. The Brotherhood has called for nationwide peaceful protests on Friday in Egypt. Back in Tahrir Square, a few blocks from the U.S. embassy, protester Hamid Sameth's eyes water as he leans against a railing to catch his breath, after a heavy barrage of teargas. The protesters here are young and ready for a fight. But they don't seem to know much about the film at all.
[Hamid Sameth:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] We are Muslims and we are defending our faith, says Sameth. Of course, you know that America insulted our prophet, he tells me. He says he hasn't seen the film. He doesn't know who made it, but he wants the U.S. ambassador to leave and the filmmaker imprisoned. Still, those not directly involved in the clashes seem contemptuous of the protesters. Khaled Abdel Razaq points at the demonstration in disgust, as he returns from shopping.
[Khaled Abdel Razaq:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] If the people really want to vindicate the Prophet, at least we should follow the example he set, he says, not go demonstrate and pillage. The world is calling us terrorists and those protesters are proving it's true, he says. Leila Fadel, NPR News, Cairo.

[Robert Siegel:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
[Michele Norris:] I'm Michele Norris. And it's time now for All Tech Considered. The consumer electronics business is changing in a big way. That's according to a new report out today from the Consumer Electronics Association or CEA. And that change can be summed up with one word: tablet. Sales of tablets, the iPad chief among them, have skyrocketed. CEA predicts a 157 percent increase in sales this year over last year. And helping fuel that boost are high school and college-bound students. For more, we're joined by Sean Murphy. He's been crunching the numbers for the Consumer Electronics Association. He's there with me in the studio. And let's start with your forecast for 2011. Tablets are still relatively young technology. This time last year, some experts were still wondering if they had staying power. What do the numbers that you crunch actually tell you?
[Sean Murphy:] You're absolutely right. A year ago, the success of the iPad really came out of the blue. It was not predicted. So what we saw, I think initially was a typical sense of what's the staying power, is this a fad, how does this affect the PC platforms. What we're seeing now, and the numbers bear out, we're not even close to seeing what this might end up being in terms of units in revenue. So we're not at the peak yet and we don't anticipate being at the peak for a couple of more years.
[Michele Norris:] So does the tablet's success come at the expense of traditional desktops or laptop computers, or even the relatively new, very small sort of hybrid computers that are known as netbooks?
[Sean Murphy:] That's an inevitable question and we've actually been facing that. Every year or two, there's the new product that we're afraid is going to cannibalize all the other platforms. And I remember two years ago, at this exact time, netbooks were the next ascendant category, and we were worried are those going to eat into notebooks and desktops.
[Robert Siegel:] As tablets become more ascendant, notebook prices are increasingly getting cheaper and cheaper. The technology gets better. And in the CEA industry what we usually see is products get smaller, cheaper and better. So people maybe are waiting to see how the dust settles, are tablet prices going to come down. So notebooks haven't been affected yet. But I think in the next year or two, there'll be an inevitable impact.
[Michele Norris:] Should we assume that these are particularly well-suited for the classroom?
[Sean Murphy:] I think they're ideally suited for the classroom for a variety of reasons. A tablet gives you the functionality of a notebook, but it's easier to use, it's smaller. And I think what we'll see, in addition to the ease-of-use, is professors will be much more interested in incorporating lesson plans. We saw with e-readers, text books slowly but steadily being incorporated into digital content. That will certainly not slacken. And it's easier for everyone involved. I think it makes sense if the students are engaged using their technology. It's no longer a toy. It's a real actionable alternative to bring in the classroom.
[Michele Norris:] Now, I'm going to ask you, Sean, to look into your crystal ball.
[Sean Murphy:] OK.
[Michele Norris:] Because just as smartphones sort of displaced the handheld video camera and other devices, do you see another young technology that's out on the horizon that might one day overtake the tablet one day soon?
[Sean Murphy:] Well, that's the zillion-dollar question, right? I would imagine that the next evolution of content will be digital and it'll probably be it has to be portable. But as far as imagining, I think even we're at the point now, where even with science fiction, we've kind of caught up between Skype being able to project of conversation across the country in real time, to being able to download a book and read it in real time. It's hard to imagine what they're going to create that actually will compete. I'm constantly humbled by how technology finds ways to make the new product that everyone has to have.
[Michele Norris:] Sean, thanks so much for coming in.
[Sean Murphy:] My pleasure.
[Michele Norris:] Sean Murphy is a senior analyst with the Consumer Electronics Association.

[Renee Montagne:] And here in the U.S., for retailers, the cost they pay for consumer fraud is going up. Merchants who sell their products using mobile devices, or sell internationally, are seeing their costs climbing higher still almost 40 percent over last year. NPR's Wendy Kaufman reports.
[Wendy Kaufman, Byline:] Retailers will pay $2.70 for every dollar in fraudulent transactions. That's a big increase over last year, according to a new survey. And the reason it's worse in the mobile and e-commerce space, is that the fraud is harder to detect; and what fraudsters buy is often expensive. The same is true of global transactions. Jim Van Dyke, of Javelin Strategy and Research, conducted the survey for Lexis Nexis. He says retailers are not happy when they learn consumers were billed for things they didn't buy.
[Jim Van Dyke:] There's a charge-back, where the consumer gets a credit; the merchant gets socked for the full value of the goods, and then has to buy replacement goods.
[Wendy Kaufman, Byline:] What's more, Van Dyke says, when consumers are the victims of fraud, they often blame the retailer.
[Jim Van Dyke:] Consumers are often saying they'll never shop at a merchant again; merchants don't think that's going on at all.
[Wendy Kaufman, Byline:] Van Dyke's bottom line merchants need to double down on fraud protection; both for the out-of-pocket expense, and the cost to their reputation. Wendy Kaufman, NPR News.

[David Greene:] Today is Memorial Day, the day we remember the men and women who've died while serving in the Armed Forces. In Kabul, Afghanistan, the top U.S. commander, General John Allen, laid a wreath at a garden across from his headquarters. And he read a letter written by Marine Sergeant William Stacey to his parents in Seattle.
[General John Allen:] [Reading] There will be a child who will live because men left the security they enjoyed in their home to come to his. And this child will learn in new schools that have been built. And he will walk his streets not worried about whether or not some leader's henchmen will come and kidnap him. And he will grow into a fine man who will pursue every opportunity his heart could desire. And he will have the gift of freedom, which I have enjoyed so long myself. And if my life buys the safety of a child who will one day change the world, then I know that it was all worth it.
[David Greene:] The author of that letter, Sergeant Stacey, was 23 when he was killed in January by a roadside bomb. He was on his fourth deployment to Afghanistan. Stacey was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The number of American dead from the 11-year-old Afghan war is approaching 2,000. This is NPR News.

[Melissa Block:] And now, a tribute to a technology that is not new. It's old enough to become the butt of movie jokes from the likes of "Austin Powers," spoofing James Bond movies. It's the laser.
[Mr. Mike Myers:] Are those sharks with laser beams attached to their heads?
[Melissa Block:] Musician and writer David Was went in search of some tech geeks who might be celebrating a big birthday for the laser.
[Mr. David Was:] Having just returned from the digital bacchanal known as the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I was surprised how few of the participants knew that the once mighty laser turns 50 this year. Forgotten amid the din of tiny gadgets that go beep in the night, the laser beam can rightly lay claim to being the Rodney Dangerfield of high tech.
[Mr. Rodney Dangerfield:] I tell yeah, I don't get no respect. No respect at all.
[Mr. David Was:] But even if the laser's golden anniversary was being denied the respect it deserved, it wasn't hard to find lasers slaving away on the convention center floor. Most moderns are aware that it takes a laser beam to read a bar code, that CDs and DVDs are worthless silver Frisbees without lasers to decode the embedded bits and bytes. The laser also plays a role in delivering crisp images from small video display devices, like the many palm-sized projectors that debuted at CES this year.
[Mr. Ben Averch:] I love lasers personally.
[Mr. David Was:] Ben Averch, the global product manager from Microvision, was unstinting in his affection for the beam and its role in his product, the show WX laser pico-projector.
[Mr. Ben Averch:] Due to the quality of the laser light, we get about 240 percent of the available colors that you can see as opposed to an LED-based system.
[Mr. David Was:] Even the Swiss Army Knife, which has had a corner on analog multitasking for over a century, now has a weapon more suited to the board room than the wilderness. It has a 16 gigabyte USB flash drive that won't do you any good when a mountain lion attacks, but the red laser pointer might be used in a pinch to distract the critter, a parlor trick well known to cat fanciers everywhere. Swiss Army Knife's Dan Carpenter was properly laser-reverent.
[Mr. Dan Carpenter:] We're thrilled to have it as a part of our product and we hope for many more years of the lovely laser to come.
[Mr. David Was:] Finally, I sought out one of the little-guy firms, toiling in the shadows of the 10,000 square foot corporate behemoths. The Tokyo based Ariel 3D display project is responsible for those hovering logos you might see dangling in midair at a trade show like CES. I asked the company's rather earnest spokesman how many lasers it would take to project a digital effigy of a troubled female pop star.
[Mr. Tony Mercedez:] Britney Spears. Well, if you have enough laser machines and then enough all scanners, then we can create.
[Mr. David Was:] Tony Mercedez's literal answer to a facetious query was well worth the price of admission. At 50 years old, the humble laser is alive and kicking, removing tattoos, shooting down missiles, or projecting blimp sized Britneys into the stratosphere. Happy golden anniversary.
[Melissa Block:] That's writer and musician David Was for our weekly segment, All Tech Considered. This is NPR News.

[Tony Cox:] Americans have long prided themselves on the ability to make a fresh start. We learn from our mistakes, move on and reinvent ourselves. But in an era when three-quarters of employers say they check out job applicants on the Web, well, the days when you could leave your youthful discretions behind you may well be over, and never mind having different personas at work and in your free time. In his recent New York Times magazine article, law Professor Jeffrey Rosen explains that we're only just beginning to understand what it means to live in a world where the Internet remembers everything we've ever said or done. And when high-tech fixes to sanitize our online reputations can only go so far, Rosen says it's may be time to become more forgiving of people's lives outside of the office. What experiences have you had with controlling your identity online? Have mistakes come back to bite you? Our number here in Washington is 800-989-8255. Our email address: talk@npr.org. And you can join the conversation, of course, at our website. Just go to npr.org and click on TALK OF THE NATION. Jeffrey Rosen joins me now here in studio 3A. He is a professor of law at George Washington University in Washington and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. His article is titled "The Web Means the End of Forgetting." And you can find a link to it at our website. Again, npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION. Jeffrey Rosen, welcome back to TALK OF THE NATION.
[Professor Jeffrey Rosen:] It's great to be here.
[Tony Cox:] I have to tell you, reading your article, you know, it made me afraid. You know, and I don't know if that was what your intent was, maybe was to make us aware of what happens to us when we put things online personal, even truthful things that we don't think what the impact of that might be five or 10 years down the line.
[Professor Jeffrey Rosen:] You know, this is a story you don't have to exaggerate to make people afraid. I'm just so struck about how everyone gets this. They connect to it. They have stories themselves or they have friends who've been tripped up by some youthful Facebook photo or haven't gotten jobs, who have been fired or not promoted because of something they've said online. With 500 million people on Facebook, lots and lots of citizens are understanding the reality of what it's like to live in this world where the Internet never forgets and the stories just come tumbling out. Everyone's got one.
[Tony Cox:] They absolutely do. In fact, you talk in your article about Stacy Snyder. Tell us that story.
[Professor Jeffrey Rosen:] What a dramatic example of this problem. This was a young woman who four years ago was a 25-year-old teacher in training in Pennsylvania. And days before she was supposed to graduate from Millersville University, her supervisors at the high school where she was a student teacher found that she'd posted a picture to a MySpace page. It was a picture of herself in a pirate costume at a party. She was drinking from a plastic cup and the subtext was drunken pirate. So her supervisor says she was promoting underage drinking among her students. This was an inappropriate photo. They dismissed her from her post. The university didn't give her a teaching degree. She sued. She says the First Amendment protects my right to post this. And a judge in 2008 rejected the claim. He said because she was a public employee and her speech didn't relate to matters of public concern, it wasn't protected by the First Amendment. It seems that Stacy Snyder is going to be an icon when we look back on this early digital age because the problem she suffered is one that more and more people are experiencing.
[Tony Cox:] Is the issue, Jeffrey, is it one of technology, meaning that there is not the technology to dispose of this material, or is it one of a lack of either awareness or desire to clean up the Internet so that people can not have to go through what Stacy Snyder went through?
[Professor Jeffrey Rosen:] I think it really is both of those things. I mean, you could imagine technologies that would go a long way toward solving this problem. Facebook could, if it wanted, arrange things so that you are asked before you post the photo, do you want this to be stored forever or for three months or for three days? And if Facebook doesn't want to do it themselves, they can encourage the development of applications that would allow us to have expiration dates for data. But they've chosen not to do this. They want the stuff to be transparent, not private. And as a result, they've been resistant to these technologies.
[Tony Cox:] And on what basis? You're a lawyer. On what basis was Stacy Snyder's case lost, since she didn't break any laws per se and this yet prevented her from seeking the employment that she would apparently have otherwise been qualified for?
[Professor Jeffrey Rosen:] It's a great question and I think the judge said public employees, which she was, have a lower expectation of privacy than private citizens and -because her speech related to private matters, not public matters, it wasn't protected. Ironically, the fact that it was private made it even less entitled to First Amendment protection. It's a quirk of the fact that employers have broad discretion to fire you for all sorts of reasons.
[Tony Cox:] Now, we have seen this kind of behavior involving people who are public figures; politicians, celebrities, athletes. But now it is sort of calmed down to, you know, just like the rest of us, just regular folks.
[Professor Jeffrey Rosen:] It is. I mean, there was this woman, 25-year-old woman, told The New York Times newspaper she's got to run home from parties at 3:00 in the morning and de-tag herself from photos because she doesn't want people to know that she has two dresses, one she wears for dates and the other for work. And she said I'm just an ordinary person but I have celebrity problems. A lot of people are finding that.
[Tony Cox:] Well, let's take a call, because I know people out there have some thoughts about this. By the way, this is TALK OF THE NATION. Tony Cox sitting in with Jeffrey Rosen, talking about the dangers of the Internet, some of them hidden, you might say. Give us a call: 800-989-8255. Our email address is talk@npr.org. Lets go now to Portland, Oregon, where Jeff is standing by. Jeff, welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.
[Jeff:] Hi. How are you doing?
[Tony Cox:] Great. How are you?
[Jeff:] Good. So, I'm a school administrator and really have run into this headlong. We get particularly younger teachers or younger teacher candidates who want to have a really distinct line in their life between, you know, their play life and their work life. And they often will, you know, say, they're in a band or they're in some group and they tell their kids about it and then next thing you know they're you know, parents are googling and they see their second grade teacher, you know, at a big music festival with a beer in his hand and a buxom, you know, date. It doesn't work.
[Tony Cox:] What do you mean exactly? Does it I want to make sure that I'm clear on what you're saying. It doesn't...
[Jeff:] From a parent's perspective, you know, looking at the person who spends all day with their child and is in a position of great authority and responsibility...
[Tony Cox:] I see.
[Jeff:] ...seeing him of course people are allowed to have a private life, but the issue with the Internet now is that we all can see it. And it's very hard to keep the line bright between work and home, particularly in a job like teaching.
[Tony Cox:] Absolutely. I understand your point now. Thank you very much for the call, Jeff. What do you say to him?
[Professor Jeffrey Rosen:] I think it's a great point. You really crystallized the problem. It doesn't work to have a line between your work self and your play self, as you said. And a psychology professor I quoted said the same thing. He said, I have to reconcile my professor self with my having-a-few-drinks self, but that's a good thing because we'll be less hypocritical and everyone will be more accepting. But I'm not so sure. You point to the difficulty. I mean, one thing privacy protects is the ability to present different aspects of our identity in different contexts, to have a work self, a play self, a home self. And when that segmented self disappears and you have to be held accountable at work for everything you do at home and in private, lots of people stumble along the way. It's a very confusing world to live in, and I'm not sure it's going to be good for the development of individuality, creativity, all the things that we really value as human beings.
[Tony Cox:] Especially when that other self is from your past, perhaps way in your past.
[Professor Jeffrey Rosen:] Very much so.
[Tony Cox:] Absolutely.
[Professor Jeffrey Rosen:] And that ability to overcome your past, as you said, is such an American idea. I mean that's supposed to be the core of the self-made man or the ability to go to Texas, the constantly open frontier. The idea that you can never escape your past, figuratively, on Facebook with your high school friends contacting you, and then literally with these photos coming up like, you know, characters in a horror movie to haunt you years later, is just challenging that American ideal.
[Tony Cox:] Is seems as if this is something that is particularly acute for teachers, and we have a teacher on the line from Miami right now, Yvonne. Welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.
[Yvonne:] Hi. Thank you for taking my call. This is a little bit different situation maybe than what you're talking about, and I share your alarm with the situations that you're describing. But I'm a person who doesn't have a persona online, really, or have Facebook page, and yet I still feel very vulnerable. As a college instructor there are all kinds of sites out there where students are free to rate their professors. You know, they don't necessarily rate them on teaching ability. They might rate them on, you know, how hard they think they were graded or how horrible a person they think they've might have been. And, you know, I think that on the Internet people feel free to, you know, flame and insult and degrade people in ways that they never would in formal evaluations and things like that. So even people who, you know, are successfully pursuing their career sometimes I think can be I haven't had this experience, but it something that I think is very concerning, you know, that instructors like myself you know, discontented students can say horrible things. And, you know, I always wonder if my next employer is going to go and look up those things and use them as part of my student recommendation. I could counteract them with excellent recommendations from other people, but, you know, is it fair to have that record out there in the public? That's my comment.
[Tony Cox:] Thank you, Yvonne, for that. She raises a point that raises, in my mind, Jeffrey, this question: What can we do about it? Should we is the simplest answer to just be more judicious about what you allow to be put on the Internet either from yourself or those who know you if you're on Facebook, things of that sort?
[Professor Jeffrey Rosen:] Well, the caller notes that being judicious isn't going to save you. I mean, those rate-my-teacher sites are brutal. I should say, having been rated, I think I got only an average hotness rating, and that really stinks.
[Tony Cox:] I've been rated...
[Professor Jeffrey Rosen:] You know, that's tough.
[Tony Cox:] ...myself. I know what you're talking about.
[Professor Jeffrey Rosen:] But what's what that suggests is that just being judicious is not enough. We need technologies and laws to respond. Some people have proposed one solution to the problem that we're talking about here: Reputation bankruptcy. Jonathan Zittrain is a Harvard cyberscholar. And he says just the way you can declare personal bankruptcy every 10 years and your tax liens and your debts are not held against you, so you should be able to clean the slate for your reputation. You should have all negative information disclosed. You should be able to respond to it. And maybe at 10-year intervals your anonymous teacher ratings and your ratings on other people's sites should just be wiped clean. Very interesting suggestion.
[Tony Cox:] Sort of a mulligan, huh? A do-over?
[Professor Jeffrey Rosen:] Right, we all need it.
[Tony Cox:] Yeah, absolutely. Here's another emailer. This is a tweet question, actually, talking about things going into cyberspace and staying there forever. As early as November 10th of this year, the Library of Congress will begin archiving all and the writer capitalized the word all...
[Professor Jeffrey Rosen:] Mm-hmm.
[Tony Cox:] ...public tweets made on Twitter. I had heard about this. Once your tweet is archived, it is there forever. There is a six-month delay from the moment a tweet is made to the time it is archived. A free site called Noloc, NoLOC, N-O-L-O-C.org, N-O-L-O-C.org, will automatically delete your tweet exactly one week before it is archived by the Library of Congress. Have you heard of this?
[Professor Jeffrey Rosen:] I have indeed. What a fascinating response to this peculiar decision that Congress made without a lot of debate to archive all the tweets. I mean, we think about tweets as something closer to written gossip, water cooler chat, the kind of stuff that you don't expect to last forever. For some reason they decided to archive it all. Now, they've not decided when to make the tweets available, and there's going to be an administrative regulation about whether scholars should be able to look at these tweets immediately or should have to wait 10 or 20 or 30 years. But I think it's a good example of just an unthinking preference for permanent archiving can have very serious consequences that people are uncomfortable with.
[Tony Cox:] Talking about serious consequences, our next caller is from Sacramento, California, and her story is well, Stephanie, tell us your story yourself. There she is. Stephanie, you there?
[Stephanie:] Good afternoon, yes.
[Tony Cox:] Yes.
[Stephanie:] I was a senior at UCLA in 1996, and I intended to share a personal, private story with the student community in the student newspaper. And I published a private story about having been a survivor of date rape. In 1999, I was in a professional environment, in a cubicle environment, and I had a coworker come over to me and he said, so you're a survivor of date rape? I said, excuse me? And I went over to his computer monitor. He had pulled up some archived student newspapers. And unbeknownst to me, it made it on the Internet, and it's still there.
[Tony Cox:] Stephanie. Thank you very much for the call. We're sorry about that happening to you. By the way, you're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. Jeffrey Rosen, there must be countless stories, maybe not exactly like that one but certainly similar to that.
[Professor Jeffrey Rosen:] So many. Things that you do when you're in college or in high school. When I was in college, this stuff wasn't archived. Now the student newspapers are; it transforms your ability to experiment when you're a kid. And, you know, if it was false information, you could ask it to be removed from Google and from the college newspaper, but the truth is that there's not an easy solution to that problem. You thought you were sharing with a limited group of people, and all of a sudden it goes out to the world. It reminds us, it's not just privacy we're concerned about. Privacy protects us from being judged out of context based on information that's involuntarily disclosed. This is public information that you voluntarily disclosed to a limited audience, and then it was exposed to the rest of the world and you felt judged out of context.
[Tony Cox:] Now, we talked about, technologically, how some of this might be alleviated somewhat, but we haven't talked about it from a legal standpoint yet. What rights, if any, do we have as citizens to protect ourselves in this cyberspace environment?
[Professor Jeffrey Rosen:] There is not a lot you can do if the information is true but embarrassing. Obviously if it's false or slanderous, you could challenge them on those grounds. But true but embarrassing information, some scholars want to expand the law to take account of these situations. So one scholar, my colleague Daniel Solove at George Washington University, wants to allow you to sue your Facebook friends if they disclose information in violation of your privacy settings. An interesting suggestion, but it would have First Amendment problems because courts have generally said if you turn over information to one group of people, they can share it with the rest of the world. Another legal suggestion is not to allow employers to Google you and hold you accountable for legal off-duty conduct. So just as there are laws in a bunch of states now that say you can't fire someone for smoking smoking is a legal conduct, and you shouldn't be able to hold people accountable for that some scholars want to expand that to Facebook. An interesting suggestion, but again, often it's relevant to Google someone for a job search. Do we really want to totally prohibit that sort of background check? So the truth is that although the legal suggestions are creative and worth exploring, my hunch is that they're not going to be the core to solving this very difficult problem.
[Tony Cox:] Is there civil remedy, civil court remedy here?
[Professor Jeffrey Rosen:] There's a series of they're called torts, which sounds like a yummy dessert, but it's this civil... ...civil area of law. They were proposed by the great Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis about a century ago. If the information is highly offensive to a reasonable person say your landlord plants a hidden camera in your bedroom or someone uses your image to sell a product without your consent then you could sue. But generally, who knows what's highly offensive to a reasonable person? Is the drunken pirate picture highly offensive? That those civil remedies have proved too blunt an instrument to provide an awful lot of help to people.
[Tony Cox:] We've got to go, Jeffrey Rosen, but one question. Really quickly, I want to ask you, is there is this limitless cyberspace limitless in terms of the kind of information, the amount of information it can hold?
[Professor Jeffrey Rosen:] You know, some have noted that the data may erode or rust after time, so it's possible in the distant future it's going to go away. But for -in the long run we're all dead, and I'm not counting on it going away anytime soon.
[Tony Cox:] Jeffrey Rosen is a professor of law at George Washington University and legal affairs editor of the New Republic. He joined me today in Studio 3A. Jeffrey, thank you. Very interesting conversation we had.
[Professor Jeffrey Rosen:] Thanks. It was great.

[Tony Cox:] It's time again for your letters. And with me now is NEWS & NOTES editor Cory Turner. Hey, Cory.
[Cory Turner:] Hey, Tony, how you've been?
[Tony Cox:] I'm great. So what do we have this week?
[Cory Turner:] Well, our month-long hip-hop series has really been turning heads. As always, some people really seem to love it and some people don't. Listener Paul of Indianapolis cut right through the chase. He writes, yawn, hip-hop. I really missed the days of seeing black and Latino musicians playing guitar, drums, bass, keyboards, and even singing rather than, look at me, I'm so great, rappers and DJs. I'll wait until something new finally comes along and then young people will look at hip-hop as old news.
[Tony Cox:] You know, you're right, Paul, there's always something new coming along, and eventually, hip-hop may seem old school, too, but for now, there's no denying its power over our culture. And like it or not, hip-hop artists and their often complex messages mean a lot to a lot of people, not all of them kids.
[Cory Turner:] Tony, Gwen Moore of St. Louis, Missouri, is a fan of hip-hop and our series with one exception. She writes, first, I want to thank you for your intelligent series on hip-hop culture. However, I must take exception with Toni Blackman's defense of the use of the N-word and M-F word in rap lyrics.
[Tony Cox:] And for those of you who might have missed it, Toni was part of our global hip-hop roundtable on Monday. Here's what she had to say.
[Ms. Toni Blackman:] Certain words sound good in the mouth and this is not a rationale of [unintelligible] and forth. Like the MF word and certain words like I've been doing freestyle workshops for about 13 years, and I realize that the M-F word and the N word, they weren't even about disrespect or trying to appear to be hard, they were they make excellent pause words because they want cut the amount of time...
[Chideya:] It's better than um.
[Ms. Toni Blackman:] Yes.
[Cory Turner:] In response, Gwen Moore writes, surely, she could have come up with a better rationalization. The N-word probably feels good in the mouth of white racists. When I was growing up, I remember my elders asserting what's good to you, ain't always good for you.
[Tony Cox:] Words to the wise, Gwen. What else have we got, Cory?
[Cory Turner:] Well, this past Monday, we ran a story about subprime loan foreclosures. They have been going through the roof. Well, Kevin Astes of Baltimore, Maryland, wrote in with a little reality check. He's been a mortgage lender for 18 years and says, if the industry couldn't offer subprime loans to folks with bad credit, then an awful lot of people just wouldn't get loans. Plus, he says, he always makes it clear to his subprime customers that if they make their payments on time, they'll be able to refinance at a better rate.
[Tony Cox:] You know, lenders often do get a bad rep for subprime loans despite a strong, legitimate and growing market for them. But where the story gets complicated is when subprime loans become predatory, trapping folks into rates they can't afford and can't get out of without paying thousands and getting fees. I guess, the lesson here, Cory, is be careful what you sign up for. But I hear, we also got some mail from a really distant shore.
[Cory Turner:] You bet, Tony, we got a really nice note from Nikki Poupadopaloo. And Nikki, I hope I got that right. She was in Paris, as in Paris, France. She listens via the Internet and writes, I really do love NEWS & NOTES. Every day after work, I come home to my son, put on NEWS & NOTES and play. I love the topics you cover, I love the tone of the program and Farai had so much soul. Thanks for that, Nikki. We think she's got soul, too. And thanks to all who took the time to write us. If you want to drop us a note, just log on to npr.org and click contact us. It helps if you tell us where you're writing from and how you say your name. You can also leave us a voicemail at 202-408-1271. That's 202-408-1271.
[Tony Cox:] And don't forget our NEWS & VIEWS blog. You can post your comments there by going to NPR.orgNEWS&NOTES and clicking the NEWS & VIEWS blog link. Thanks, Cory.
[Cory Turner:] My pleasure, Tony.
[Tony Cox:] That's our show for today. Thanks for listening. To hear the show or subscribe to our podcast, visit NPR.orgNEWS&NOTES. NEWS & NOTES was created by NPR News and the African-American Public Radio Consortium. Tomorrow, a black congressman fights the Cherokee Nation. I'm Tony Cox. This is NEWS & NOTES.

[Ed Gordon:] Five years ago, Oprah Winfrey entered the world of magazine publishing. Much like her television show, the magazine's articles touch readers of all ages, races and backgrounds. Today, O is going strong with a circulation of more than two million. Gayle King is editor at large and Oprah's closest friend. Let's talk a little bit about five years, the fifth...
[Ms. Gayle King:] I know.
[Ed Gordon:] ...anniversary for this maga-I was shocked, honestly, when I saw that. Does it seem like five years?
[Ms. Gayle King:] Were you shocked because we made it or were you shocked because it's five years and it...
[Ed Gordon:] No. Now you know...
[Ms. Gayle King:] ...just seems like yesterday?
[Ed Gordon:] ...I would not be shocked that whatever Ms. Winfrey puts...
[Ms. Gayle King:] What are you trying to say, Mr. Gordon?
[Ed Gordon:] ...her face on, I would not be shocked.
[Ms. Gayle King:] What are you saying? Oh.
[Ed Gordon:] But just-it did seem like yesterday to me.
[Ms. Gayle King:] No, I hear you. I hear you so loud and clear, and it is interesting to me that it's been five years. And when we started this magazine, they said, `You know, most magazines are very difficult. If it succeeds, it'll be at least five years to make a profit or break even.'But, you know, the Oprah brand is so strong that I went into it saying it was ours to lose, in that she has a following, people love her, but if you don't deliver, it doesn't matter what you do. So, so far, knock on wood-I'm knocking on wood, people, Ed's head-I'm knocking on wood, and so far, so good.
[Ed Gordon:] Did you believe that you could really crank out a magazine monthly that essentially is to self-help, to empower?
[Ms. Gayle King:] Well, I actually did, and I don't look at it so much as self-help as I do about happiness. It really does resonate with women. It really does want you to be happy where you are. And if you're not, here are some things that maybe you should think about. But I don't know, you know, every month...
[Ed Gordon:] But don't you think that most of us need that help to get there, unfortunately?
[Ms. Gayle King:] Yeah, we do. We do. And sometimes, we don't even know that we need it. But every month, you have to come up with some thing. You know, when we sit around a room and kick around ideas and, you know, things just start to fall into place.
[Ed Gordon:] What do you say to those who are critical and say that what they hear from Oprah and will read in the magazine is too simplistic?
[Ms. Gayle King:] Who's critical? Who are those people?
[Ed Gordon:] Yeah. Let's find them, right?
[Ms. Gayle King:] Yeah, bring them over here. Let's step outside. You know, I think that that's somebody that really doesn't get the message and certainly doesn't get her. Many times, things are simplistic and simple, but the bottom line is it has to start with you.
[Ed Gordon:] And we make them hard.
[Ms. Gayle King:] Yeah, we do. But it really does have to start with you. There's nothing anybody can tell you, anybody can show you if you're not ready or willing or open to listening. Most people get it and get her and get the mission and get the message that she puts out.
[Ed Gordon:] How o...
[Ms. Gayle King:] And men get it, too. No, really, we have a lot of men readers. It's true.
[Ed Gordon:] Oh, no, I believe that. I believe that. You talk about the Oprah brand.
[Ms. Gayle King:] Yeah.
[Ed Gordon:] And I guess the last I saw you was at the Image Awards and Chris Tucker joked about how powerful she is, that she can be on the cover of this magazine every month...
[Ms. Gayle King:] Yeah.
[Ed Gordon:] ...and people will pick it up...
[Ms. Gayle King:] Yeah.
[Ed Gordon:] ...simply because of that.
[Ms. Gayle King:] Yeah.
[Ed Gordon:] But are you amazed at the brand and what she has been able to present?
[Ms. Gayle King:] Yeah. We got on an elevator once, and it was so funny, because the people didn't recog-they saw us but didn't recognize her. And so she starts talking to me, because Oprah was behind me, and she said, `You know, I like that magazine, but why you got to put Oprah on every month? Can't you think of anybody else?'This was in the... [unintelligible] and I go, `Well, what would you suggest?'She goes, `I don't know.'And I looked over at Oprah and Oprah's like-like I wanted to say, `You know, there's Oprah,'and she's like-she's shaking her head like, nope, just leave it alone. Because I thought it was comical. So the truth of the matter is this. Whenever Oprah's on anybody else's magazine, it sells like crazy, so why wouldn't we do that for our own magazine? You know, so far, it's working for us.
[Ed Gordon:] Let me ask you this, which I've always found interesting. Best friends-my best friend and I sound the same...
[Ms. Gayle King:] I know.
[Ed Gordon:] ...same cadence, same-you-all sound exactly alike. I'm sure...
[Ms. Gayle King:] I know. I know. People say that.
[Ed Gordon:] ...that you-all talk about it, the mannerisms and all. Do you-all see it?
[Ms. Gayle King:] Well, I see it when people point it out to me. You know, when I'm with my sisters, they'll go-or when they're watching "Oprah," they go, `God, she sounds Gayle,'or they'll say, `You sound like Oprah.'And sometimes we'll be talking, I'll be watching her on TV, going, `Hey, she stole my line. I said that.'But, you know, I think the truth of the matter is when you are good friends with somebody, you do tend to play off of each other unconsciously and pick up each other's mannerisms. You know, we are so like-minded, Ed, really from the very beginning in terms of how we think, what we like, what we dislike, our life philosophies, how we see people, and I think when I met her, it was the first time in a long time that I thought, God, I met somebody who feels the way I do. And we sort of clicked from the very beginning. You know, we were 21 and 22, and now we're 50 and 51. So I knew her before she was Oprah Winfrey. So it does sometimes take me aback, I have to say, that she has become this-you know, somebody used the word the other day, `empire,'and I thought, gosh, you know, when they started ticking off all the things that you do, I called her and said, `You know, you are sounding very empirelike,'and so that does sometimes take me aback. It's true.
[Ed Gordon:] How difficult has it been for you to have to change as a person based on just your simple friendship with this woman?
[Ms. Gayle King:] But, you know, I don't think I've had to change as a person. I really don't. I don't. Do you think I've changed?
[Ed Gordon:] I don't think you've changed necessarily, but I think just your juxtaposition to her affords you all that comes with her, good and bad, and so you just, by virtue of that, have become a celeb with the idea...
[Ms. Gayle King:] By the association, yeah.
[Ed Gordon:] ...by the association, but with the idea that also, you can become tabloid fodder just as she could-all of those things. I mean, you take the good with the bad, and I'm curious how you've had to deal with that?
[Ms. Gayle King:] That is true. You know, I didn't think of it that way, because...
[Ed Gordon:] See, that's why I'm here.
[Ms. Gayle King:] Yeah, I didn't-yeah, thank you so much, Dr. Gordon. No, I never thought of it that way, but I think, you know, certainly with the association, you know, I never see-people say to me, `Oh, it must be so hard being her best friend.'But honest to God, it's a kick. It really is.
[Ed Gordon:] Yeah. No, I would think...
[Ms. Gayle King:] It's a kick. I say this often.
[Ed Gordon:] ...that the positives certainly outweigh the negatives.
[Ms. Gayle King:] Oh, honey, please. I'm not living in her shadow. I live in her light and I'm her biggest supporter, biggest cheerleader and just so happy for all that she's accomplished, really.
[Ed Gordon:] Thank you so much for being with you.
[Ms. Gayle King:] Thank you.
[Ed Gordon:] Appreciate it.
[Ms. Gayle King:] Good to see you.
[Ed Gordon:] Gayle King, editor at large of O Magazine.

[David Greene:] The new lawyer on President Trump's legal team is already making news by contradicting previous statements by his client.
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah. Rudy Giuliani went on Fox News last night, and when he was talking with Sean Hannity, Giuliani confirmed that Trump reimbursed his lawyer, Michael Cohen, for $130,000. This was allegedly a payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels.
[Rudy Giuliani:] That was money that was paid by his lawyer, the way I would do, out of his law firm funds or whatever funds doesn't matter. The president reimbursed that over a period of several months.
[Sean Hannity:] But he had said...
[Rachel Martin:] Now, the problem here is a President Trump had previously denied any knowledge of this payment, which came shortly before the election. It was part of a settlement agreement concerning an alleged 2006 sexual encounter with Stormy Daniels.
[David Greene:] Let's bring in NPR's lead political editor, Domenico Montanaro, who's been following all of this. Hi, Domenico.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Hi there, David.
[David Greene:] All right. So does this, what we're hearing from Giuliani, directly contradict these past denials from the president? Is it now clear that President Trump knew about this settlement or repayment?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Well, this is quite the tangled web. Let's try to untangle it a little bit; we won't completely because there's so much that's still really not known, and Giuliani may have confused things further legally. But we'll talk about that in a minute. First of all, President Trump stood on Air Force One and told reporters that he did not know about the payment to Stormy Daniels and that he did not know where Cohen got the money. Now, that's a fine line on whether those were lies. Giuliani is saying that Trump made repayments to Cohen over several months. But as far as he knows, he did not know the specifics of what was of what it was for. He only knew in general terms. Now, how is that possible, someone might ask. Well, Giuliani says that Michael Cohen, Trump's lawyer, would have taken care of things like this his words. That certainly implies that what we've known for a while, that Cohen was more than just a lawyer, something more of a like a fixer for Trump and others. We still don't know exactly, though, what the truth is, so there's a lot more questions to be asked.
[David Greene:] OK, a lot to untangle there, but one thing Giuliani did say in this Fox interview was that the money was not tied in any way to the campaign. Isn't that something that if true could make it easier to be on the right side of the law?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Well, it's unclear. OK. Not even very smart lawyers on this subject this morning are quite sure. Giuliani, of course, says, yes, because it didn't come through the campaign. It was, quote, "funneled through a law firm." But some watchdog groups are saying that that funneling could be a problem. Here's why. If that money was, quote, "for the purpose of influencing the campaign," then it would still have to be reported as a contribution to the campaign. What's more the amount violates the maximum donation that one person could give in a campaign. You know, it would have to be determined if this payment was in fact for the purpose of influencing the election. If it is determined that it was for that purpose, these watchdog groups say it could open Trump up to a possible felony for knowingly and willfully causing the campaign to file an incomplete or false report.
[David Greene:] All right. We should mention a change another change in the president's legal team. Ty Cobb, the lawyer who manages President Trump's relationship with the whole Russia investigation, is leaving and being replaced by Emmet Flood, who once worked for President Clinton, right?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Right. And it's likely to mean a more aggressive and assertive posture. You may have seen that on day one with Giuliani going on Fox with what he was able to try to do last night. Flood's somebody who represented Clinton in those impeachment proceedings, though only as more of a minor player. He was also a lawyer in the George W. Bush White House, representing them on issues related to executive privilege.
[David Greene:] Domenica Montanaro NPR's lead political editor. Thanks, Domenico.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] You're welcome.
[David Greene:] OK. The U.S. has a high-ranking delegation heading to China.
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah. Their mission is going to be to try to head off what could turn into a bruising trade war between two of the world's top economies. Both sides have already imposed or threatened to impose billions of dollars in tariffs.
[David Greene:] Let's turn to Beijing now and NPR's Anthony Kuhn. Hi, Anthony.
[Anthony Kuhn, Byline:] Hey, David.
[David Greene:] So why are the United States and China suddenly willing to talk? And what exactly are they going to be talking about?
[Anthony Kuhn, Byline:] Well, they have been staking out some tough positions and talking tough as this whole trade spat has gathered steam. For China's part, it says, sure, we're willing to negotiate, but we're not going to make any concessions while the U.S. points this takes these tariffs and points them at our head like a gun. We're not going to cave in to foreign pressure. On the U.S. side, the attitude has been sort of, well, you know, we've talked enough for talk's sake. We want to see action. We want to see China reduce its trade surplus with the U.S. We want U.S. firms to get more market access in China. We want to see their intellectual property better protected. And we want to see Chinese government halting subsidies to Chinese high tech industries. But the threat of a trade war has made a lot of U.S. businesses uneasy. And plus, government-to-government economic dialogues have sort of broken down. They were sort of on hold for a while. So this appears to be some attempt to get things restarted.
[David Greene:] Well, Anthony, make sense of this for me. That's a long list of demands by the United States of what they want China to do. But the U.S. trade representative, Lighthizer, says the U.S. is not trying to change China's economic policy. So is that just managing expectations or trying to calm China down?
[Anthony Kuhn, Byline:] Right. Well, he said, you know, we're not trying to change China's basic state-directed, state-capitalist economic system. So, you know, the fear of some businesses and observers is that the U.S. is going to point to concessions China has already made. Recently they said they're going to lower tariffs on imported automobiles and give foreign firms more access to their to the financial sector. The U.S. is going to point to this and declare victory without really addressing the root causes, the underlying structural issues behind this whole trade spat. But, of course, you know, these are very important things for China. And as far as they're concerned, they're not up for negotiation anyway. They're not putting them on the table for discussion.
[David Greene:] China's just not going to not going to budge on its basic economic policies and structure.
[Anthony Kuhn, Byline:] Well, yeah. The basic thing is this long-term strategic plan named Made in China 2025, and it's really ambitious to take China in one leap to start producing artificial intelligence, quantum computers and really cutting-edge tech stuff. And it's planning to squeeze U.S. firms and other foreign firms out of the market. It sees this as a matter of economic survival, and it's not planning to compromise on this.
[David Greene:] NPR's Anthony Kuhn in Beijing. Anthony, thanks.
[Anthony Kuhn, Byline:] Sure thing, David.
[David Greene:] All right. Over the next few days in Dallas, the National Rifle Association is going to be getting together for its annual conference.
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah. An estimated 80,000 NRA members are expected to attend. And for a second year in a row, they will hear from President Donald Trump. This year, Trump is going to be joined at the conference by Vice President Mike Pence.
[David Greene:] All right. Reporter Brian Mann with North Country Public Radio is covering this event for us. He's with us. Hey, Brian.
[Brian Mann, Byline:] Good morning.
[David Greene:] So is this event going to be different than previous years?
[Brian Mann, Byline:] You know, I think it's going to be interesting to see how the NRA handles its message. They've gone after their critics really hard in past years, but that's a lot harder now that its most visible opponents are these young Parkland student survivors, right? So I think we should watch to see if the NRA leadership recrafts its message in any way now or whether it sticks to some of that rhetoric that's just been ferocious at times. I should say that there is no sign that their public support has flagged since Parkland. The organization actually saw a spike in donations in the wake of the shooting.
[David Greene:] All right. That deadly school shooting in Parkland, Fla., I mean, it seemed to create so much public pressure to put, you know, controls on the sale, ownership of firearms. I mean, are as you talk to people who are in the NRA leadership and even rank-and-file members, are they talking about some of these changes that a lot of people are demanding?
[Brian Mann, Byline:] Look, I think the NRA leaders know that there is a very different conversation suddenly taking place around the country. For a brief moment, even President Trump, a close NRA ally, was calling for a comprehensive gun control bill, though he backed away from that. Still, you know, at least seven states have passed tough gun laws since Parkland. That includes Florida and Vermont where they did it with help from top Republican leaders. And here's New York's NRA board member Tom King talking about that.
[Tom King:] Of course, it has increased the probability in some states of legislators passing more meaningless legislation. That's going to happen. It already has happened. OK. But has it eroded the NRA's position? I don't think so.
[Brian Mann, Byline:] And I should say that King describes that legislation around the country as meaningless because he believes gun control laws just don't make people or schools any safer.
[David Greene:] All right. So this event happening in Dallas, the president, vice president both going to be there; is will there be protests?
[Brian Mann, Byline:] Yeah, for sure. And, you know, one of the things that's interesting is that in the past, the NRA has actually built a lot of its energy in reaction to the kind of protests we expect to see in Dallas. NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch, who's been really high profile, has accused the left of spreading chaos and anarchy in the streets. And this could be volatile. I mean, emotions are really high over the gun debate right now. After Parkland, a lot of rank-and-file NRA members I talked to say they feel like their culture, you know, their way of life, their freedoms are under attack. So if these big crowds do materialize outside the convention center, I think you could see the NRA kind of reacting and feeding on that energy inside.
[David Greene:] OK. Brian Mann of North Country Public Radio is going to be covering that NRA convention for us in Dallas over the next few days. Thanks a lot, Brian.
[Brian Mann, Byline:] Thank you.

[Melissa Block:] While the president was in Annapolis, the vice president made a quick visit to Lebanon. Joe Biden's trip comes ahead of crucial parliamentary elections early next month. He met with top government officials and pledged fresh military aid, but he also told the Lebanese that the U.S. would reassess the aid commitment after the elections. As NPR's Deborah Amos reports from Beirut, Biden's comments reflect concerns that the militant group Hezbollah may win more political power in the elections.
[Deborah Amos:] The election campaign is loud and contentious for 128 seats in the Lebanese Parliament. The contest is close but many here predict that the coalition led by Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group, will win more seats, and the losers will be the March 14th coalition, staunch allies of the United States. Hezbollah officials protested the vice president's comments today as quote, clear interference in Lebanese affairs. This is the second high-level Washington visitor in a month, following a stopover by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It's an indication of the stakes in this election and Washington's support for Lebanese President Michel Suleiman. He's a former army general, a political independent, who may be a crucial broker in forming the next government. In Lebanon's complicated electoral system, where top government posts and parliamentary seats are apportioned by sect Sunni, Shiite, Druze and Christian no one party wins outright, says Paul Salem, with the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. Even Hezbollah's March 8th coalition can only gain a few more parliamentary seats than it has now.
[Melissa Block:] You know, some might paint a March 8th victory as Hezbollah taking over Lebanon, and paint it as if the Taliban took over Islamabad. The facts are very different.
[Deborah Amos:] The coalition led by Hezbollah includes a Christian army general and another Shiite Muslim party, says Salem parties with a long history in Lebanese politics.
[Melissa Block:] Hezbollah has been in parliament and has been in government for years, and the West has dealt with that pragmatically, as not talking, isolating makes things worse, not better.
[Deborah Amos:] But there is no doubt that a Hezbollah victory could complicate President Obama's strategy for Middle East diplomacy, says Osama Safa, a Lebanese political analyst. A win for Hezbollah's coalition will be seen as a gain for Iran, Hezbollah's ally and patron.
[Melissa Block:] But I think our election will become irrelevant five days later, after the Iranian elections.
[Deborah Amos:] What happens in Iran's presidential race matters in Beirut, says Safa.
[Melissa Block:] We'll see that definitely. Because the opposition movement here, the very difficult opposition movement is led by Hezbollah, which is a direct ally of Iran and a very close ally of Iran. And I think if you have a moderate rule in Iran, you'll definitely at least have a moderate discourse by their allies in Lebanon.
[Deborah Amos:] The Lebanese election has become a regional test of alliances. Vice President Joe Biden's visit suggests the outcome is crucial for Washington. Deborah Amos, NPR News, Beirut.

[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Here at home, the economy is booming. So why not take another crack at infrastructure week?
[Nancy Pelosi:] We just had a very productive meeting with the president of the United States.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] That's House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Tuesday. Democratic leaders and President Trump agreed to spend $2 trillion that's a number the president suggested on roads and bridges and more. But Senate Republicans and reportedly even Trump's own chief of staff expressed skepticism immediately. Oh, and then all the talk was about Russia again. NPR political correspondent Mara Liasson is with us this morning. Hi, Mara.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Hi, Lulu.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] All right, so the president says he's still looking hard at an infrastructure plan, though he's dialing the price tag down to 1 to 2 trillion. What odds do you give it?
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] I give it slim odds here. As you said, he immediately got pushback from his own chief of staff, from Republicans in the Senate, including the Republican leader, Mitch McConnell. They think that's too much money. They certainly don't want to raise the gas tax to pay for it. And it's just another example of how the president is having trouble working the levers of his own government. He couldn't get his own Homeland Security department to do what he wanted them to do at the border. And if he can't make a deal with Mick Mulvaney, the chief of staff, and Mitch McConnell, he's certainly not going to be able to make one with Nancy Pelosi.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Mara, we should say at this point that the president got some impressive economic numbers this week, record low unemployment for one. So are Democratic leaders maybe rethinking the wisdom of handing him another possible win on infrastructure?
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Well, the politics of infrastructure is a little unclear. Who needs an infrastructure bill more, Trump or the Democrats in Congress? Democrats presumably would want to show what they would do if they were in control of the government. Donald Trump wants to show that he can pass some kind of legislation. So the politics of that are unclear. But the bottom line is America's roads and bridges are crumbling, and nothing is happening about it in Washington.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Let's look abroad. There's fighting in Gaza, as you heard, with presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner's peace plan still in the works. There's Venezuela, North Korea, a lot.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] A lot and just as the president has been frustrated in getting his domestic priorities passed, he also hasn't seen his foreign policy agenda work out the way he wanted to. In Venezuela, Maduro is still there. North Korea just fired several short-range projectiles into the sea. And back to Russia, the president had an hour-long call with Vladimir Putin. And it almost was back to Helsinki because the president said he did not raise Russian interference in the 2016 election he did not warn Russia not to meddle in the 2020 election even though his own intelligence community says that the Russians have never given up trying. So another place where he's a party of one at odds with his own government.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] President Trump's line is that it's better to be, quote, "getting along," unquote, with Russia, right?
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Yes, and certainly everybody would agree. It's good to get along with countries around the world. The problem is that everyone else in the Trump administration acknowledges that Russia interfered in the 2016 election except for the president. The Mueller report said Russia interfered in a, quote, "sweeping and systematic fashion." The president has never consistently acknowledged that, except for when he's blaming President Obama for doing nothing about it. And the question is, is that because he's so insecure about his election he doesn't want to talk about anything that seems to undermine his legitimacy? Or is it because he's fine with Russia doing it again in 2020 on his behalf? After all, his own lawyer said recently on CNN, quote, "there's nothing wrong with taking information from the Russians." That was Rudy Giuliani. And, you know, you saw the president take Putin's line on Venezuela. After the phone call, he said Russia has is not looking to get involved in Venezuela. That directly contradicts his own secretary of state and national security adviser, who've said Russia not only is involved in Venezuela. It's working in defiance of the U.S. government. And Secretary Pompeo said the Russians have invaded Venezuela.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] That's NPR's Mara Liasson. Mara, thank you so much.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Thank you.

[Debbie Elliott:] Thousands of volunteers are now pouring into the Katrina disaster zone from across the country. Some are trained medics or heavy equipment operators; others just want to help. These do-it-yourselfers are headed south with chain saws, bottled water and a ton of goodwill. But aid officials are concerned some volunteers may become part of the problem. NPR's Eric Niiler has more.
[Eric Niiler Reporting:] After a couple of days of watching disaster footage on CNN, Carlos Gavidia said he had enough. He owns a successful financial services company in Virginia, and says he couldn't wait any longer.
[Mr. Carlos Gavidia:] I'm more of an action guy. And so I called my partner and I said, `Let's do something. Instead of just giving money to the Red Cross, let's hand-deliver something.'
[Niiler:] Gavidia and his partner bought $100,000 worth of meals ready to eat from a South Carolina contractor. They got Safeway and Costco to donate bottled water. A buddy from Boston loaned his 18-wheeler, and they're trying to get another one for all the supplies. The convoy leaves in a few days. Destination? Gulfport, Mississippi.
[Mr. Carlos Gavidia:] People tried to discourage me, tell me, `Oh, no, let the government handle it. Let them do it.'But this is just too devastating, and I've just been compelled that I've got to done something today, now.
[Niiler:] Gavidia's can-do attitude is being repeated across the country. Do-it-yourself aid convoys are loading up in many cities, including New York, Chicago, Charlotte and Cleveland. Many are being organized by local radio or TV stations, or on the Internet through community Web sites such as craigslist. Online, it's easy to see all the people who want to help. But Marietta Basil with the American Red Cross in Washington says all this help may be too much of a good thing.
[Ms. Marietta Basil:] Well, the major problem is that often there's no one on that end to receive them. So it creates chaos and disappointment.
[Niiler:] Basil says many volunteers who show up in a disaster zone don't know what they're doing. This was especially true earlier this year after the tsunami struck Indonesia when hundreds of Westerners arrived days later with little food or water of their own. Without training, a plan and a destination, Basil says they're more like disaster tourists.
[Ms. Marietta Basil:] They can really tax the resources and kind of be more of a hindrance than a help, actually.
[Niiler:] Don't tell that to Michael Belobradic, a 22-year-old bartender and college student in Columbus, Georgia. He's looking for a ride to New Orleans.
[Mr. Michael Belobradic:] I just don't feel like I can sit at home and, you know, drink with my friends and play video games and go to work-which is what I would probably be doing-for the next couple of months and live with myself if I didn't try to do something to help.
[Niiler:] Belobradic says he's tried calling the Red Cross, but couldn't get through. He says he's a good camper and knows how to work with people, but admits he has no special skills. Red Cross officials say many people underestimate the physical and emotional toll on rescue workers, even trained ones. Melissa Wenzel is a Red Cross volunteer from Phoenix who arrived in Baton Rouge on Monday.
[Ms. Melissa Wenzel:] Our main goal is providing immediate relief, such as food, sheltering and emotional support. And we just don't have the bandwidth to warehouse and package and distribute the massive amounts of donated goods that are coming in.
[Niiler:] Wenzel's best advice is for people to sit tight, wait a week or so. By then, officials will know exactly what is needed. Eric Niiler, NPR News, Washington.
[Debbie Elliott:] You can follow the career of Chief Justice William Rehnquist and the latest news on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina at our Web site, npr.org. This is NPR News.

[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] We're watching demonstrations in Hong Kong this morning. Protesters are angry over Beijing's tightening control and have taken to the streets again this weekend. NPR's Julie McCarthy is in Hong Kong, and she joins us now. Hi there.
[Julie Mccarthy, Byline:] Hi, Lulu.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] So, Julie, what have you seen? What's been happening there this weekend?
[Julie Mccarthy, Byline:] Well, I just came from the scene of one of these clashes. Tear gas is billowing through the streets, and protesters are taking them on in what has sort of become a staple of these protests. The police, as I say, were firing rounds of tear gas at protesters. Clouds of it were wafting over a large area. What looked like elite officers from a special tactical squad of police was deployed. They were nimble, well-equipped. But the only shots fired or that I heard appeared to be the detonation of tear-gas canisters. For most of the night, the protesters had played cat and [inaudible] games with the police, who then moved in full riot gear and kept coming. They raised a black flag, warning them tear gas was coming, and it caused pandemonium in this area that's filled with high-end shops and restaurants. The protesters are running from the scene, choking, flushing their eyes. And this is just an extension, Lulu, of the turmoil that has plunged Hong Kong into the worst crisis in its recent history.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Yeah, these marches have been going on since June. I mean, have the demands changed? What do the people want?
[Julie Mccarthy, Byline:] Well, you know, what we've got is earlier, we had a bill that would have allowed extradition to mainland China. And that really animated these protests. But and they still want that completely withdrawn. But, you know, this entire movement has morphed into something else. It's now about political reform, and that's at the core of the demands. Protesters want the government to preserve their liberties, not erode them and say the only way that's going to happen is if they can elect their own leaders. And those leaders are now heavily vetted by Beijing and, in some cases, appointed by them. One demonstrator, 61-year-old Yuan Quoc Wai, told me that Hong Kong was at serious risk. Here he is.
[Yuan Quoc Wai:] [Foreign language spoken].
[Julie Mccarthy, Byline:] He's saying, "The Uighurs, the Muslims of China were the precedent and that Hong Kong will be next. China is re-educating the Uighurs. It's brainwashing them," he says. "I've been in Hong Kong for 60 years, living under freedoms that we have. But, under China," he says, "we enjoy no such thing. There is no democracy." Lulu, he's basically saying China isn't honoring what Hong Kong was promised when it reverted back to China that is, one country, two systems and that China is eroding Hong Kong's system.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Yeah, how is the government of Hong Kong reacting?
[Julie Mccarthy, Byline:] Well, they're furious tonight. In fact, they're really putting the blame on the protesters. Now, in as a corollary to that, the protesters themselves seem to reserve a lot of tolerance for the more hardcore among them. They say, you know, no one wants violence. Most of us will not be part of any escalation. But they will extend empathy for those who do take part in more violent courses. They say, look. The protesters don't bear the burden of responsibility. The government does for ignoring them.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] That's NPR's Julie McCarthy in Hong Kong. Thank you so much.
[Julie Mccarthy, Byline:] Thank you.

[Renee Montagne:] A deadline looming Wednesday is the last day to file your federal taxes on time. And with the recession, it was a rough year for taxpayers. Some lost homes and jobs, which may raise a whole new set of tax questions. We asked Douglas Shulman, the IRS commissioner, to give us some tips for last- minute filers. He joined us in our studio in Washington, D.C. Good morning.
[Mr. Douglas Shulman:] Good morning.
[Renee Montagne:] April 15th just a couple of days away. What last-minute bits of advice do you have for those procrastinators who still haven't gotten their taxes in the mail?
[Mr. Douglas Shulman:] Well, we know this is a tough economic time for a lot of Americans. They're struggling to pay their medical, their gas, their food bills. We think there is going to be a lot of taxpayers who are sitting there, they filled out their return, and they literally don't have the money to pay the government. The most important thing for them to know is they should send in their return. If they don't send a return, interests and penalties will stack up. If they can't pay, there's a form they can attach to their return. They should send us what they can pay, and they should call us. We have the ability to work out a payment plan. We have the ability to compromise the debt if people really aren't going to be able to pay over time. So the most important thing for taxpayers to do in this tough economic time is not disappear. If they disappear, they'll end up in trouble with the IRS.
[Renee Montagne:] And obviously, some kind of toll-free number easily found and available?
[Mr. Douglas Shulman:] 1-800-TAX-1040, 1-800-TAX-1040.
[Renee Montagne:] Now is there one thing or maybe a couple of things that tend to trip people up as they quickly try and get through doing their taxes?
[Mr. Douglas Shulman:] The common mistakes are the simple mistakes. People make math errors. People transcribe their Social Security wrong. People don't sign the check that they send to the government. The best thing people can do is electronically file a return. Therefore, they'll be using software. They will have the math done for them. It'll double check to make sure all the information is there. The information will get to us, will get straight into our computers. And if you're getting a refund, like most Americans do, that refund will come to you quicker.
[Renee Montagne:] I'm sure a lot of people are wondering about this: Are there any benefits from the stimulus package that individual taxpayers can take advantage of this year?
[Mr. Douglas Shulman:] Absolutely. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was a very important bill that will hopefully get money into the pockets of American taxpayers. The president has asked every agency in government to make sure we work swiftly to get that money out to the American people. There's a couple key tax provisions in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. You may be able to get a refund if you buy a home or buy a new car, and you can claim that on this year's tax return. And there's also things in that bill like subsidizing unemployment, health care through the COBRA system, that we're working with employers 'cause they actually pay it through their taxes.
[Renee Montagne:] Millions of people lost their jobs this past year, clearly something you're well aware of. Is the IRS doing anything in particular to help people who may not be able to pay their tax bill?
[Mr. Douglas Shulman:] A couple things we're doing. First of all, in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, there's a couple key provisions for unemployed people. People aren't going to pay any income tax on the first $2,400 of unemployment compensation that's paid to them. They also are going to get a subsidy from the federal government to pay their COBRA or their ongoing unemployment health insurance. The IRS is also going to go the extra mile to work with taxpayers in difficult economic times. This is a fine line for us because we need to collect the money to fund the government, but we also need to be compassionate and understand each taxpayer as an individual. So what we've done is given our front-line employees some special flexibility around areas where we think there's going to be difficulty with taxpayers. In the collection context, we've given people more authority to put on hold a collection action if somebody's going through a difficult time. We've given people authority to work through missed payments and allow a missed payment if they feel the taxpayer will get back and get right with the government later. And we also understand that there's a number of people trying to stay in their homes, trying to either refinance or sell their home. And what we've done is made sure that a tax lien won't get in the way. So we'll actually put a tax lien second in line if someone's trying to refinance a home or sell a home so that they can stay in their home.
[Renee Montagne:] Douglas Shulman is the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service. Thank you for joining us.
[Mr. Douglas Shulman:] Thank you.

[Noah Adams:] It's DAY TO DAY. I'm Noah Adams. In a few minutes, there have been plenty of rock operas, so we will hear what opera that rocks sounds like. But first, these are days of reckoning for the Louisiana high school seniors that still remain in Texas schools after Hurricane Katrina. And now, with the end of the year fast approaching, many are struggling to graduate. Michael May from member station KUT looks at how one high school in Austin is trying to stop evacuee seniors from falling through the cracks.
[Michael May Reporting:] Lisa Rogers spends her days in a tiny office at McClellan High School. There the storm still rages. The walls are covered with graffiti scrawled butcher paper filled with the names of lost friends and neighborhoods. There's a line drawing of the Super Dome covered with water. Rogers' job is to keep the Louisiana kids who washed into Austin from just drifting away.
[Ms. Lisa Rogers:] Within my office, they can kind of unload the stuff that's clouding their brain.
[May:] Rogers is one of six counselors hired by the non-profit Communities in Schools to work exclusively with evacuee students.
[Ms. Lisa Rogers:] And then go back to class, they can focus.
[May:] Today, senior Edward Naebone strolls in. He's got a chain with dog tags and a bullet dangling over his oversized t-shirt. His academic skills have improved dramatically in the past few months, but it may not be enough. Like half the evacuee seniors at McClellan, Naebone is struggling to finish high school.
[Mr. Edward Naebone:] What would you do if you don't graduate? Hmm. I ain't-I won't settle for a G.E.D., because I feel like that's second best, and I feel as if I deserve a little more than second best.
[Ms. Lisa Rogers:] You've definitely got it in you to do it. I don't have any doubt.
[May:] Graduation would be a difficult transition for Naebone, even if he wasn't mourning the loss of his past life. The New Orleans school system had notoriously low standards. Texas, on the other hand, has rigorous high-stakes tests and strict truancy policies. Rogers says the first few months were absolutely chaotic.
[Ms. Lisa Rogers:] The biggest thing that I saw was just a lack of structure. They were skipping classes all the time, and that was just sort of an accepted part of the school day from New Orleans.
[May:] Rogers says the evacuees would spend their time just hanging out in the halls, and she found herself on the hangout circuit.
[Ms. Lisa Rogers:] As much as I loved it that they were coming in to ask for help, at the same time, I was being used. And, you know, I was an excuse to not be in class.
[May:] So the demure redhead with wide blue eyes got tough. She made it clear she was available by appointment only. And when the students come in to talk, she gives it to them straight.
[Ms. Lisa Rogers:] I can't pull their grades up for them. I can't attend a class for them. And so, a lot of what I'm doing is just calling them on the choices that they're making that don't match up with what they say their immediate goal is.
[May:] For example, she helped Naebone get the tutoring he desperately needs. All Texas students must pass the State Accountability Test to graduate. Naebone has failed the test twice. On top of that, his high school transcripts were lost, so he can't prove he has enough credits to graduate. Rogers suggests he call his New Orleans school, Carver High. Suddenly, Naebone's head drops and his tightly wound dreadlocks fall over his eyes. Rogers takes notice.
[Ms. Lisa Rogers:] Talking about Carver brought up a bunch of memories?
[Mr. Edward Naebone:] Yeah. All my friends that-all the fun day that we had. It's seems so wrong that we were separated this way.
[May:] At the same time, Naebone feels conflicted. His teachers here have him excited about education for the first time.
[Mr. Edward Naebone:] It's also a good thing, because a lot of people got a lot of new hopes and things. A good start. But after that's all and done, they're also going to still miss the place they was from.
[May:] Emotionally, the students are still fragile. So Rogers tries to keep the students focused on short-term goals, like helping the seniors graduate. Senior Douggy James only recently began attending his classes regularly.
[Ms. Lisa Rogers:] Talking about graduating from high school. How does that feel, given where you were a month or so ago?
[Mr. Douggy James:] I'm proud of what I'm going be able to accomplish like. Because at first, I was telling you I really didn't care about school, because, like, a lot of people with education died in the hurricane. And their education didn't stop them from dying. So why did I need to get an education? But after that talk I had with you, it kind of gave me some encouragement.
[Mays:] Now James wants to be a computer programmer who does choreography on the side. Naebone wants to play football for LSU and study journalism. They've got a long road ahead of them. But Rogers is teaching them to move steadily forward, keeping their eyes on the horizon. For NRP News, this is Michael May.
[Noah Adams:] DAY TO DAY returns in a moment. I'm Noah Adams.

[Andrea Seabrook:] Over the past six weeks as Americans have attended primaries and caucuses on the road the choosing a new president, voters have consistently told exit pollsters that the economy is at the top of their concerns. That's not the case in Russia, where a presidential election is less than a month away. Prospective voters aren't talking about skyrocketing prices or how Moscow is becoming one of the world's most expensive cities. NPR's Gregory Feifer reports that a sense of economic malaise may be creeping over the Russian electorate.
[Gregory Feifer:] Cash registers are busy here in a central Moscow supermarket, but many customers are buying only a few items. Pensioner Gallina Yvanna's shopping basket contains only bread and milk.
[Ms. Gallina Yvanna:] [Russian spoken]
[Gregory Feifer:] I can't afford anything else, she says; it's too expensive. Except sometimes for coffee; that I insist on having. But I can't buy meat. Rising prices have really affected the way I live, she says. Prices for almost every food product rose last year, some by more than 50 percent. Overall, inflation reached about 12 percent. It's part of a global trend and partly reflects rising costs for energy and transportation. But Illena Sharipava of the investment bank Renaissance Capital says the government won't address the economy's fundamental problems.
[Ms. Illena Sharipava:] [Through translator] Other countries take tough measures to fight inflation, such as raising interest rates. Russian officials instead prefer to just wait and see what will happen.
[Gregory Feifer:] What the government has been willing to do is engage in what many call window dressing, imposing Soviet-style price controls meant to generate support for the government ahead of the presidential election next month. It's ordered stores in the capital to freeze prices for some staple goods. But Slatta Prolishuk of the discount supermarket chain Dixie says that will actually hurt consumers in the long run.
[Ms. Slatta Prolishuk:] [Through translator] Ordering us to freeze our prices is not a way to fight inflation. It's not the way a market economy should work. It's a short-sighted, short-term measure that will probably lead to even higher inflation later.
[Gregory Feifer:] But Prolishuk says even though her Dixie chain targets lower-income Russians, inflation isn't hurting business. She says rising prices are simply putting all the burden on consumers by forcing them to pay more for essentials they have to buy. But not everyone has been hit hard. Global high prices for oil and natural gas, Russia's main exports, are helping create a growing class of wealthy and middle-class Russians who are taking part in a massive consumer boom. And some believe shops are raising prices because there are plenty of willing customers. Inside an enclosed street market, butchers are one stall chop meat with large cleavers. Although shoppers here too complain their family budgets are being stretched to the limit, inflation doesn't appear to be a political issue. Outside the market, accountant Yvgenev Smirnova says she wasn't able to afford a vacation last year but that she's still voting for President Vladimir Putin's chosen successor, Dmitry Medvedev next month.
[Ms. Yvgenev Smirnova:] [Through translator] There's just no alternative. Medvedev is the only candidate who will be able to make our country more powerful and respected in the world.
[Gregory Feifer:] The Kremlin's control of the national media has helped stop the opposition from airing its criticism of government policies. But political experts say there's another major reason Medvedev is expected to win a landslide next month: voter apathy. They say Russians simply don't link their daily struggles to the actions of a government they don't expect to help them. Gregory Feifer, NPR News, Moscow.

[Linda Wertheimer:] It's been almost three weeks since a gas leak explosion destroyed two apartment buildings in the D.C. suburb of Silver Spring, Md., killing seven people, displacing dozens. Most of them were immigrants, and they're trying to find out what comes next. NPR's Adrian Florido reports that rebounding from this kind of setback can be especially hard for immigrants.
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] Last week, a dozen people were standing at the fenced-off site of the explosion, a tangle of brick and wires and clothing and toys. Maria Viera said she's lived in this neighborhood for many years.
[Maria Viera:] [Speaking Spanish].
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] She said she's never seen anything like this and is in pain for the mothers who lost their kids. Among the seven people who died in the explosion, there were two boys, an 8-year-old and a 3-year-old. Viera was here with her two boys, also 5 years apart.
[Maria Viera:] [Speaking Spanish].
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] Like many of the families here, Viera moved to Montgomery County because of its reputation for being friendly to immigrants and for its good schools. Alma Couverthie of the nonprofit social service group CASA de Maryland, which is helping the victims, says this neighborhood called Long Branch is a place where working-class families feel they can start building a good life for their families.
[Alma Couverthie:] It's one of the poorest communities in Montgomery County. This is the place where immigrant families that are looking to provide children with the best education go and live because that's what they can afford.
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] But upward mobility is slow and fragile, and Couverthie says an event like the explosion at the Flower Branch Apartments can derail everything.
[Alma Couverthie:] It's heartbreaking when you think about how hard these families work, sometimes having two or three jobs. And in a few seconds, everything falls apart, and it's extremely hard to bounce back from that.
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] Take Antonio Citalan. He came to Silver Spring from Guatemala 11 years ago and rented a room in a friend's apartment here in this sprawling complex.
[Antonio Citalan:] [Speaking Spanish] shopping center [speaking Spanish].
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] He said he liked the place because it was close to stores and to buses he rode to his construction job. Soon Citalan met his wife, and after three years, they'd saved enough for a security deposit and first month's rent on their own apartment. When they moved into the place, a couple of friends who were just getting started moved in with them. Eventually, Citalan could afford a car. On August 10, he got home from work around 11 o'clock.
[Antonio Citalan:] [Speaking Spanish].
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] After dinner, he and his wife were about to go to bed, he said, when they heard the explosion.
[Antonio Citalan:] [Speaking Spanish].
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] They and their roommates rushed down three stories to the courtyard. Within minutes, fire was engulfing the building. Then the floors collapsed. Everything Citalan owned was gone, including the savings he had tucked away in a drawer. Like a lot of people here, he doesn't have a bank account. Families say they lost thousands in cash. That would be hard for anyone. Alma Couverthie says, for immigrants, it's worse.
[Alma Couverthie:] If you are born in the U.S. and you look in a particular way, your identity and your right to be there is not questioned. But when you're an immigrant, you have to prove that you were here. These people, they ran out in the middle of the night to save their lives with what they had on. They left behind their car keys, their documents, their driver's license, everything. And now they are out there trying to establish all of that and prove who they are.
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] On Friday, Antonio Citalan took the first steps in that process. He took a bus to the Motor Vehicle Administration to try to replace the driver's license he lost in the explosion. He got it after a recent Maryland law that allowed undocumented immigrants to get licensed. For now, families like Citalan's have been moved into temporary apartments where they're getting three months of free rent. CASA de Maryland has been arranging donations of clothes and other necessities.
[Antonio Citalan:] [Speaking Spanish].
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] But beyond that, Citalan said he doesn't really know what comes next. He just wants to get back to work so he can start saving again. Adrian Florido, NPR News, Silver Spring, Md.

[Melissa Block:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
[Audie Cornish:] And I'm Audie Cornish. Yemeni security officials say they have foiled an al-Qaida plot to attack fuel pipelines and two ports in Yemen. It's not clear if this plot is the one that prompted the U.S. to close diplomatic missions across the Middle East and Africa. Still, U.S. officials say today that American personnel in the region remain on high alert. NPR's counterterrorism correspondent Dina Temple-Raston has been following this story for us and joins us now. Hi there, Dina.
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] Hi there.
[Audie Cornish:] So let's start with this plot that's supposed to have been foiled in Yemen. What have you learned about it?
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] Well, a Yemeni spokesman said the plot involved seizing several ports in the eastern part of the country, while simultaneously attacking a gas pipeline in Yemen. Both ports employ a large number of workers from Western countries and the plot, they said, included kidnapping and killing them. And in that respect, this plan sounds a bit like the attack on an oil refinery in Algeria that happened last year. In that case, members of al-Qaida's affiliate in North Africa took over this refinery and tried to make off with more than 100 Western hostages. So al-Qaida's arm in Yemen seems to have been borrowing from their playbook in this particular plot.
[Audie Cornish:] So you have security officials in Yemen saying that they foiled that plot, but is there any chance that this is connected to what the U.S. has been worried about?
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] Well, U.S. officials are being very cautious about this. They're saying that it's possible this Yemen plot is just one piece of something larger, so they aren't standing down in any way. A State Department official wouldn't comment on the Yemeni operation except to say that the U.S. embassy there is going to remain closed. There's also a global travel alert that's still in effect and it describes the threat level in Yemen as being extremely high. Now, frankly, from a practical point of view, it wouldn't make sense for the U.S. to stand down at this point. We're at the beginning of August. The September 11th anniversary is coming up. And in the past, al-Qaida has tried to launch attacks on anniversaries. So I expect we'll see this heightened alert for weeks to come.
[Audie Cornish:] Now, there's also been reports of drone strikes in Yemen in the past couple of days. What have you learned about whether they're connected to this terror alert?
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] Well, I think we're seeing the first signs of how the Obama administration plans to use drones going forward. You'll recall that President Obama said in a terrorism speech earlier this year that he would be paring back the use of drones, not using them just to take out al-Qaida operatives has been the practice till now. But instead, being more judicious, using them only when the U.S. is more directly threatened. So there hadn't been any drone strikes in Yemen for almost two months and now there have been five in the past two weeks. And officials we talked to said that isn't a coincidence. The intercepted communications between al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, who's thought to be in Pakistan, and his new deputy, Nasir al-Wuhayshi, who's in Yemen, sparked the security alert and the drone strikes, too.
[Audie Cornish:] So this communication between these two al-Qaida leaders that's ramped all this up, I mean, what more do you know about that?
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] Well, we understand that it was an electronic intercept. U.S. officials say it wasn't a phone call. And in this intercept Zawahiri basically told his new deputy in Yemen to launch his attack. And the language seemed to indicate that the attack was supposed to happen last Sunday, but it's unclear where it would happen or exactly whether that was a firm date. There have been some reports of a phone call and possibly a conference call with Zawahiri and other al-Qaida leaders, but a former intelligence official told me that was highly unlikely. He's been tracking Zawahiri for more than a decade and he said in all that time, the al-Qaida leader has never been known to use a phone.
[Audie Cornish:] That's NPR's Dina Temple-Raston. Dina, thank you.
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Linda Wertheimer:] I'm Linda Wertheimer. Coming up, Neruda love poems set to music. But first, Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq for nearly a quarter century before he was toppled by the U.S. invasion in 2003. He led his nation into disastrous wars, first with Iran, then twice with the United States and its allies. Saddam Hussein was a man of immense and grandiose ambitions and profound and foolish mistakes, mistakes that led to his death by hanging today in Baghdad. NPR's Mike Shuster has this look back on the career of Saddam Hussein.
[Mike Shuster:] Saddam Hussein was the preeminent strong man in Iraq since the early 1970s. In Iraq and the wider Arab world, he inspired by turns awe, terror and hatred. But his name did not become a household word in the United States until August 2nd, 1990, when he launched his army on a blitzkrieg attack against Kuwait. In response, the United States built up a military force half a million strong in Saudi Arabia and in the waters of the Persian Gulf. And President George H.W. Bush gave the orders to go to war against Iraq on January 16th, 1991.
[George H:] Tonight, 28 nations, countries from five continents, Europe and Asia, Africa and the Arab League, have forces in the Gulf area standing shoulder to shoulder against Saddam Hussein. These countries had hoped the use of force could be avoided. Regrettably, we now believe that only force will make him leave.
[Mike Shuster:] Casting himself as the great leader of the Arab world, Saddam Hussein also took to the airwaves that night to appeal to Arabs everywhere to rise up against the United States in the titanic battle between the Arab world and the infidels.
[Saddam Hussein:] [Through translator] At 2:30 a.m. tonight, on the 16th of January, the treacherous fools and Bush, the Satan, has perpetrated this crime, he and the criminals [unintelligible] and the great battle has been initiated, the mother of all battles.
[Mike Shuster:] The mother of all battles proved to be short-lived. Allied warplanes pounded Iraq and Iraqi forces in Kuwait for nearly two months. Then a ground invasion took back Kuwait in 100 hours, leaving tens of thousands of Iraqis killed, but only 500 allied deaths. Saddam Hussein's life was permeated by violence, in wars, in coups successful and unsuccessful in assassination, treachery and terrorism. Born in the central Iraqi town of Tikrit in 1936, Saddam learned violence at an early age. By the time he was a teenager, his biographers say, he had carried out his first killing: the murder of a communist militant. The weapon, a knife. In 1959, he was a member of the hit squad that sought to assassinate Iraq's military leader, Abdul Kareem Kasem. Kasem's car was riddled with bullets, but he survived. Saddam was wounded in the leg and fled to Cairo. He returned to Iraq a few years later and began to organize gangs for the rising Baath Party. When the Baath took power in 1968, Saddam became Iraq's second most powerful leader, turning his gangs into an intricate array of secret police organizations that would eventually infiltrate every aspect of Iraq's political life. Saddam took the supreme spot for himself in 1979, eliminating his rivals in a power grab captured on videotape. The scene was a meeting of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council. Kanan Makiya is the author of a study of Saddam's Iraq, "Republic of Fear."
[Kanan Makiya:] You have a cigar-smoking Saddam Hussein in the beginning, chairing the session and then beginning to read out a speech in which he suddenly announces, to the amazement of his audience, that this huge conspiracy has been detected at various levels. And then he calls out people's names, and you can see them standing up in bewilderment and then being taken out of the hall. He then goes and sits down in the front ranks and one of the alleged conspirators gets up and details a whole long confession as to how he actually did participate in this obviously fabricated conspiracy.
[Mike Shuster:] Those who were taken out of the hall were shot by those who had allied themselves with Saddam. A year later Saddam made the first of his great political and military miscalculations. With the Islamic revolution only a year old in neighboring Iran, and covetous of Iran's oil fields just across the border, Saddam ordered his troops to invade. The IranIraq war lasted for eight years and eventually ended in stalemate. During the war, Saddam used chemical weapons widely against the Iranian army and his own Kurdish population. Saddam called it the second kottasea, a reference to a battle in the seventh century in which an Arab conquering army brought Islam to Persia, reflecting his immense ambition to be the great leader who unites all Arabs into one of the world's richest and most powerful nations. Oil and arms would be the means. Saddam spent billions to acquire a massive arsenal, which would include a crash effort to obtain nuclear weapons. But the war with Iran put enormous strains on the economy. Saddam needed more resources, and in 1990 he seized Kuwait and its oil fields, claiming that Kuwait was actually a province of Iraq. The invasion of Kuwait was Saddam's second great political and military miscalculation, says Andrew Parasiliti, former director of the Middle East initiative at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
[Andrew Parasiliti:] I think that Saddam Hussein believed that the United States suffered from the Vietnam syndrome, that he didn't believe that the United States had the military capability or will, more importantly, or will, to mount a sustained military attack on Iraq, and that the first American casualties would divide the United States or undermine political will to conduct this operation.
[Mike Shuster:] The Gulf War devastated Iraq and nearly toppled Saddam. In the north, the Kurds rose up against his rule, and in the south, Shiite Muslims rebelled. Saddam unleashed his military on both. The United States looked the other way, and Saddam retained his power in Baghdad. In the years after the Gulf War, Saddam continued to fight the U.S. and the West, but it was a more subtle war. It involved a hide-and-seek game with U.N. weapons inspectors over whether Iraq retained chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. And it involved an international propaganda struggle over economic sanctions, which the United Nations imposed, in part to rid Iraq of its prohibited weapons. Saddam proved as intransigent on these issues as he had on all others. And this proved to be his final undoing. Although U.N. inspectors could find no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Bush administration refused to concede how much the long years of war and sanctions had weakened Saddam Hussein. In 2002 and early 2003, President Bush and Vice President Cheney led the United States into yet another war with Iraq.
[George W:] Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger. To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence. To assume this regime's good faith is to bet the lives of millions and the peace of the world in a reckless gamble.
[Dick Cheney:] There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use them against our friends, against our allies and against us.
[Mike Shuster:] After decades in power, Saddam Hussein was forced out of Baghdad with astonishing speed. Just a few weeks after the U.S. military began its assault on Iraq in March 2003, the Iraqi leader and his loyalists disappeared. But not before Saddam made a last futile attempt to rally resistance on Iraqi television.
[Saddam Hussein:] [Through translator] The criminal, Junior Bush, committed, he and his aides, his crime that he was threatening Iraq with, and humanity as well. His criminal act comes from and his and the act of those who helped him and his followers, this is added to the series of their shameful crimes against Iraq and the humanity.
[Mike Shuster:] This time, though, the war did not end. Soon an insurgency exploded, spearheaded by Saddam's supporters. In the last three years, it has only gained in intensity. In December 2003, Saddam was captured by U.S. forces, who found him hiding in a hole in the ground. The new Iraqi government put him on trial for crimes against his own people. But he used the pulpit of the trial, televised across the Arab world, to portray himself still as the legitimate leader of Iraq. Defiant until the end, Saddam Hussein leaves behind an Iraq mired in turmoil and sectarian violence on the brink of chaos. Mike Shuster, NPR News.

[Alex Chadwick:] Once search-and-rescue efforts are under control in China, building experts are going to begin looking at the extent of structural damage. Stanford University's Ann Kiremidjian is a structural engineer. She helped assess damage years after China's 1976 huge earthquake that killed about 250,000 people. Ann Kiremidjian, when you look at the pictures and video of the collapsed buildings around Chengdu, I bet you see things that I don't notice.
[Professor Ann Kiremidjian:] Alex, what I have seen from the video clips is first of all a lot of concrete buildings, what we call concrete frames, and I would classify them as a non-ductile concrete frame. What that means is that there is very little steel reinforcement in the concrete and as a result, the concrete cannot resist displacement in the horizontal direction.
[Alex Chadwick:] It needs to have steel bars, I think that is called rebar. Yeah.
[Professor Ann Kiremidjian:] That is correct. Not enough rebar both in the vertical direction and in the horizontal direction. And in addition, you have to provide rebar going from the column to the beam at the joint to provide continuity and a way to transfer the forces from one member to the other.
[Alex Chadwick:] You inspected buildings after this last, huge, terrible earthquake more than 30 years ago. Did you make recommendations to the Chinese government then?
[Professor Ann Kiremidjian:] At the time, they didn't have earthquake-resistant codes in place. And since then, we've had numerous discussions, and the Chinese have had very strong programs to develop seismic codes, to develop seismic hazard maps. The seismic hazard maps similar to the ones that we have in the United States, are developed with the purpose to identify regions of frequent large earthquakes that can cause damage to buildings, the very first step in any earthquake-resistant design.
[Alex Chadwick:] And what about this region around Chengdu, the Sichuan province, is this prone to earthquakes?
[Professor Ann Kiremidjian:] Yes, all of China is in a highly seismic area. You would notice that there is a fault that runs along the plateau between the Himalayas and where Chengdu is. If you trace all the aftershocks, you can probably trace the fault line that has ruptured. To cause a magnitude 7.8 earthquake, you will need to rupture more than 100 kilometers of a fault, and it looks it is almost 200 kilometers of locations of aftershock which is likely to be the length of the rupture of the fault.
[Alex Chadwick:] Is there some way to measure the size of the earthquake and then overlay that on a map of the region and figure out, we have to look at every single building within a particular radius from the epicenter? I mean do you have to do that?
[Professor Ann Kiremidjian:] Oh, we do that all the time. In fact, what typically you would do is you would focus within the first 15 or 20 kilometers from the rupture zone. It's not just the epicenter, but it is the rupture zone, and the rupture can run about a couple of hundred kilometers, as it is in the case of China. So you are talking a lot of buildings. A single inspector or 10 or 20 inspectors cannot perform that task in a reasonable amount of time. What you have to do is recruit all the professional structural engineers to help with the inspection process.
[Alex Chadwick:] Ann, you're speaking to us from your home in Los Altos Hills, that's south of San Francisco. And it's two miles from the most notorious earthquake fault in North America, the San Andreas Fault.
[Professor Ann Kiremidjian:] Correct.
[Alex Chadwick:] Can you explain to me why a structural engineer would build a house there?
[Professor Ann Kiremidjian:] Yes, indeed. You have to take certain precautions. We have taken into consideration the fact that we are close to the fault. Can we do more? Yes, we can. There's always a balancing act between the economics, how much can you afford, and what you are willing to live with. It's a beautiful area, the weather is lovely, it's close to my work, that's where I live.
[Alex Chadwick:] Ann Kirmidjian teaches structural engineering at Stanford University. Professor, thank you.
[Ms. Kirmidjian:] You're welcome.
[Alex Chadwick:] NPR's DAY TO DAY continues.

[Steve Inskeep:] So we've heard the film clips. A bigger question is who is really producing that film. NPR's Carrie Kahn reports.
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] The movie was shot in Los Angeles County sometime last August, under the name "Desert Warriors." It's full of choppy dialogue, bad acting and scenes of a buffoonish Muhammad.
[Unidentified Man:] And this shall be the first Muslim animal. His name is Yafour. No, Yafour does not like the women.
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] The head of the agency that coordinates filming in Los Angeles says he had no idea what the movie was about. Apparently, neither did the actors who made it. Several who had listed the film on their resumes declined requests from NPR for interviews, but in a statement to CNN, they said they were misled about the film's content. One actress told the website Gawker she's sick over it and complained to the producer. Just exactly who is the movie's producer is where this story gets very murky.
[Jim Horn:] There are a lot of aliases out there. He is probably a North African, an Arab.
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] Jim Horn, a well known anti-Islam activist in Southern California, says he won't divulge the producer's real name, but he says he probably knows him. A man calling himself Sam Bacile, who claimed to be a Jewish California Real Estate Developer, phoned news outlets Wednesday saying he made the movie. But there are no records of a Sam Bacile. Jim Horn says of course he doesn't use his real name.
[Jim Horn:] He can't do that, and I can't betray him that way.
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] Horn frequently hands out anti-Islamic pamphlets at area high schools with an insurance salesman named Steve Klein. Klein, who has been linked to a militant Christian hate group, says he was a consultant on the movie and also knows the man called Bacile. The Associated Press traced the call it received from Bacile back to a Los Angeles area man Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, who says he's a Coptic Christian and sympathizes with the movie. The man has several court judgments and tax liens against him, including a 2010 bank fraud conviction that recently landed him a two-year prison sentence. Carrie Kahn, NPR News.

[David Greene:] The day before Hurricane Maria hit, Puerto Rico's governor predicted that the island would soon need, quote, "help from all our fellow citizens."
[Steve Inskeep:] He said our fellow citizens since Puerto Ricans are American citizens. Today the governor, Ricardo Rossello, meets his fellow citizen in the White House this, after President Trump battled on Twitter with San Juan's mayor and then said federal recovery aid should not last too long for Puerto Rico. Weeks after the storm, 19 percent of the island's population has electric power 19 percent. About 69 percent have clean drinking water.
[David Greene:] And NPR's Adrian Florido is in San Juan and joins us on the line. Hey, Adrian.
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] Hey, David. How are you?
[David Greene:] I just hear those numbers. Tell me what it feels like. What is it like living there right now?
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] I mean, things are not looking good, like you said. I mean, you know, most of the island is still in the dark. You know, people don't have running water on a third of the island. And so people still are either resorting to streams and rivers or looking for communal taps or just sort of looking anywhere they can for bottled water. There also have been a lot of recent heavy rains, and so those have caused mudslides and damaged bridges, which has sort of hampered the recovery effort because of obstructed roads. Everywhere you go, David, you see destruction in just about every direction. And the thing that really blows my mind is the power lines right? like, mangled power lines and utility poles absolutely everywhere on this island. And they all have to be repaired. And imagining how many people that's going to take to fix and how long just sort of boggles the mind. This recovery is absolutely going to take a very, very long time.
[David Greene:] Well, I mean, beyond doing what you just did and explaining the conditions the horrible conditions right now if you're the governor, I mean, what message does he bring to the White House and to the president today?
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] The message it's going to be very clear. It's going to be, we need more help. This island's recovery is going really slowly. And a lot of that has to do with the fact that Puerto Rico simply does not have the money to speed this recovery up. A week ago, the House did approve more than $6 billion in disaster relief, including about $5 billion in loans, so the island doesn't run out of cash. The Senate still has to approve that. But yesterday, the governor also said he'd be requesting an additional $4 billion to $5 billion dollars to help provide short-term relief to certain sectors of the economy. Those requests are obviously require, like, a delicate dance for the governor because of the mixed messages that Trump has been sending about the federal government's responsibility to help, saying that FEMA won't be here forever. He changed his tone by the end of last week. But I think the governor understands. And you hear this in his messaging, the importance of emphasizing that Puerto Rico is not some foreign land right? it's a U.S. territory.
[David Greene:] Sure.
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] It's home to 3.5 million U.S. citizens.
[David Greene:] Well and I mean, I guess the delicate dance he's going to be doing he has tried to be, the governor, upbeat about the FEMA response. He's had a good relationship with President Trump so far. But...
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] Right.
[David Greene:] ...I would imagine he's getting pressure from people on the ground who are not satisfied with how the federal government has responded here.
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] Absolutely. People just want their electricity restored and their water restored. Another big need that's not being met is the need for tarps, David. We're still in the rainy season here, and so water's coming into people's homes if their roof has been damaged. FEMA traditionally has provided tarps, but it's run out. And so they've got half a million on the way, but they're not arriving until the end of October. So that's something that people are really frustrated by.
[Steve Inskeep:] There's an argument over who and what is responsible. The president has been willing to engage in that argument, but you're reminding us of the bottom line, which is 2.7 million Americans, for weeks and weeks, without electric power.
[David Greene:] Which is extraordinary.
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] Absolutely.
[David Greene:] All right, NPR's Adrian Florido in San Juan. Adrian, thanks.
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] Thank you two.
[David Greene:] All right, a stream of partisan efforts on health care have failed. Now a bipartisan health care bill seems to be ready to see the light today.
[Steve Inskeep:] Democratic and Republican senators released their much-discussed bill to stabilize the health insurance market. It would restore, for a time, subsidies that President Trump ended by executive order the other day. Tennessee Republican Lamar Alexander says it's now or never.
[Lamar Alexander:] If we do nothing, we'll create chaos. And chaos will lead to a birthday present for Bernie Sanders, which is a single-payer solution which none of us want.
[Steve Inskeep:] Plenty of people have said the complicated and bitter fight over health insurance could end with a drive for a simpler answer, national insurance. But if Alexander is going to prevail, he needs to sell President Trump, who's alternately sounded like he's for and against and for and against restoring the subsidies.
[President Donald Trump:] Lamar Alexander is working on it very hard from our side. And if something can happen, that's fine. But I won't do anything to enrich the insurance companies.
[Steve Inskeep:] So how do you convince the president that he's not bailing out insurance firms?
[David Greene:] Well, NPR's Tamara Keith is on the line from NPR's Politics podcast. Hi, Tam.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Hi.
[David Greene:] So let's get to a fact. I mean, is this proposal, this bipartisan proposal, a bailout of insurance companies, as the president argues?
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Well, if you ask Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray, they would say no. And the reality is that these cost-sharing reduction payments are basically reimbursing insurance companies for what they're required to do, which is to lower the costs, for some consumers, of deductibles, co-payments and co-insurance.
[David Greene:] OK. We were right here in this same studio yesterday talking about whether President Trump was for or against this bill. And I think 24 hours have gone by, and I'm still I may be more confused now. Can you shed some light on the president's position on this?
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] I think 24 hours ago, he was mostly for it, and now he seems to be mostly against it. But I don't think that his view has actually changed that much. He does not want a bailout. And I think the key for Senator Alexander and others, if they are going to get the president to support this, is to convince him that it isn't a bailout for insurance companies. And it's not quite clear how they do it because it seems like the president has more or less made up his mind.
[David Greene:] Let me ask you about something else, the president and what he said or didn't say to the widow of a U.S. soldier who was killed in Niger. This has been getting a lot of attention in the last 24 hours.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] It has. And he called the family and was on the speakerphone in the car, so a lot of people heard it. And according to people who were in the car, he said that the fallen soldier knew what he signed up for. This was taken as very insensitive by the family and also by a Democratic congresswoman who happened to be in the car. The president said no, no, no, this is totally wrong. And it has turned into this has been a multiday fight. This is now a multiday fight, and at the center of it is this very sacred thing of how the nation respects families of the fallen, these Gold Star families.
[Steve Inskeep:] And it's noteworthy you remember the previous press secretary, Sean Spicer, was willing to back up President Trump and say it was the biggest inauguration crowd ever. The new press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, not quite willing to go that far in the last number of hours, not really backing up the president's initial claim that he was lied about.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Saying the tone was right is what she's saying.
[Steve Inskeep:] At least he was trying is essentially what she was saying.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Yeah. But she's not getting into the specifics of the words that he said.
[David Greene:] Hey, NPR's Tamara Keith thanks a lot, Tam.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] You're welcome.
[David Greene:] I think it's safe to say we rarely see the governor of a state declare a state of emergency over a speech.
[Steve Inskeep:] And Florida's governor did that as hundreds of police prepare for white nationalist Richard Spencer, who's scheduled to talk at the University of Florida today. The university president, Kent Fuchs, urged students to skip it.
[Kent Fuchs:] Do not provide Mr. Spencer and his followers the spotlight they are seeking. I urge everyone to stay away from the Phillips Center October 19.
[David Greene:] OK. NPR's Greg Allen is on the line from Gainesville. Hi, Greg.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] Hi, David.
[David Greene:] OK, you have the university president saying to stay away. So I mean, why is the university going through with this? Did anyone from campus actually invite Spencer to campus?
[Greg Allen, Byline:] Well, not really. I think the reason that the university is going through with it is I think they feel like they had no choice. It's a public university, the president has made clear. He feels that they should be open to the community, so they have their facilities open to rent. And Richard Spencer decided he wanted to speak on campus. Someone who one of the students who goes here booked it for him, but that wasn't necessary. He could book it himself. It costs like $10,000 to rent the hall, and so that's what they've done. The university denied the request at first but then, with some further negotiation, realized that a legal challenge could be hard to defend in court. So they're going ahead with this with lots of security.
[David Greene:] So interesting because, in some other cases we've seen, student groups invite, you know, potentially provocative speakers. This is an example of someone just using money to buy space. And this is Richard Spencer, who was involved in organizing that rally in Charlottesville where, of course, violence erupted. A woman was killed. So what's the university doing here to make sure things don't escalate?
[Greg Allen, Byline:] Well, this is Richard Spence's M.O. He goes to university campuses; it's a great place to take your free speech message. And he uses that to try to make his case. The university, because they had plenty of time to plan, have organized a lot of security. The governor of Florida declared a state of emergency for the county here. And that allowed them bring in sheriff's deputies and state troopers. And there's just an amazing array of law enforcement officers on the ground here just kind of marching around, checking out the scene. So I'm sure there'll be plenty of those folks on the scene today so lots of precautions. The campus, though, is open as usual. Classes are being held. Some students thought that classes should have been canceled today, but they're going ahead with this.
[David Greene:] You think students and others are going to take the university president's advice about not protesting, not giving him the spotlight?
[Greg Allen, Byline:] I think there's going to be a pretty substantial protest outside of the hall where Richard Spencer is speaking today. We've seen social media organizing that for quite some time, and so they'll be there. That's where the president of the university is most concerned about possibility of conflict, you know, after the speech when Spencer supporters if there are some here today come out and might actually, you know, have some interaction with those people outside.
[David Greene:] NPR's Greg Allen speaking to us from Gainesville, Fla. Greg, thanks.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Scott Simon:] President Trump has brought America First to Asia. Here he is Friday in Da Nang, Vietnam, at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.
[President Donald Trump:] We are not going to let the United States be taken advantage of any more. I am always going to put America first the same way that I expect all of you in this room to put your countries first.
[Scott Simon:] The president's already pulled the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal with 11 other countries. And now those countries have announced they're a step closer to going ahead with the deal without the United States. We're joined now by Wendy Cutler. She served as acting deputy U.S. trade representative during the Obama administration and helped negotiate the TPP. Ms. Cutler, thanks so much for being with us.
[Wendy Cutler:] Well, thank you.
[Scott Simon:] President Trump also said in that speech that multilateral trade deals, quote large ones like TPP quote, "tie our hands, surrender our sovereignty and make meaningful enforcement practically impossible." Does he have a point?
[Wendy Cutler:] Well, I disagree with that. I think multilateral agreements have been in our interest and continue to be in our interest. And I think it's interesting that just today, the other TPP countries, without us, announced a major deal. Basically, they're going to go ahead with this deal without the United States.
[Scott Simon:] Well and what are the implications of that?
[Wendy Cutler:] The implications are that U.S. companies and their workers, U.S. farmers, U.S. service providers are going to find that they're going to be disadvantaged in these 11 other countries' markets. So for example, if Japan has a 38 percent tariff on beef, that tariff will go away for the 11 or 10 other countries but not for us makes our products less competitive.
[Scott Simon:] President Trump says, though, that he's certainly open to bilateral trading agreements with any country, including those 11. Are is that a practical approach that could replace the effect of TPP?
[Wendy Cutler:] Well, to date, none of the other countries have responded with great interest. They're more interested in regional deals because they feel there's a bigger bang for their buck. It has more impact, and it involves more markets, so, therefore, they can get greater benefits from these trade agreements.
[Scott Simon:] So...
[Wendy Cutler:] It's possible that some in the future may change their minds. But right now none are banging on our doors for such deals.
[Scott Simon:] President Trump seemed to laud China in particular for having what amounts to China-first trade policies. Does he have a point about that that China has succeeded by pursuing their own self-interest?
[Wendy Cutler:] I think we have very serious trade issues with China that need to be addressed. And I applaud many of President Trump's statements with respect to China and his determination, along with his team, to make sure that China opens up its markets and plays by the rules.
[Scott Simon:] Well, let me press you a little bit on that more, though. Has China succeeded by using some of the same strategy and tactics that President Trump essentially wants to use to promote U.S. trade now?
[Wendy Cutler:] Well, they have succeeded by putting up trade barriers. They have heavily subsidized many of their industries. And they have not provided the type of intellectual property protection that companies around the world need to sell their products.
[Scott Simon:] All of which the United States would supposedly find objectionable. Am I correct in that?
[Wendy Cutler:] Correct.
[Scott Simon:] Yeah. Ms. Cutler, a last question, if we could. Is China filling a vacuum the United States hasn't occupied?
[Wendy Cutler:] Well, it was noticed that President Xi Jinping made a speech to the APEC CEO summit following President Trump's speech, where President Xi underscored that he is committed to multilateralism. He is committed to open trade. He's committed to fighting the forces of protectionism. And he wants to work with other countries on multilateral trade deals.
[Scott Simon:] Wendy Cutler, who is now with the Asia Society Policy Institute, thanks so much for joining us.
[Wendy Cutler:] Well, thank you.

[Renee Montagne:] NPR's Michele Kelemen has more.
[Michele Kelemen:] The U.S. never really had pliable clients it could boss around in the Arab world, says William Quandt a former Carter administration official who teaches at the University of Virginia. But now the limits of American power are becoming more clear, whether it's in Egypt or Tunisia or in Iraq.
[William Quandt:] So the perception now, and for several years, is that the Americans are on their way out. They've learned their lesson in Iraq that they can't do everything. They brought to power a government that's going to end up being a closer ally to Iran than they ever wanted. And that regional forces are going to reassert themselves.
[Michele Kelemen:] You see this is Turkey, he says, which has a more activist foreign policy now and in Lebanon, where a pro-western government recently collapsed. Quandt points out that the U.S. couldn't get Palestinians back to the negotiating table or convince Israelis to freeze settlement building in the occupied West Bank.
[William Quandt:] One of the messages, I think, Americans need to absorb is that if there ever was an American moment in the Middle East, it's in the past.
[Michele Kelemen:] The ground is shifting, says another Middle East expert Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress.
[Brian Katulis:] But it's a landscape that I think won't change rapidly overnight. Even if you have a new government in Egypt or a brand new set of faces in Tunisia or other countries, I think job number one of those new governments will be responding to what their citizens were protesting over, which is the economic concerns at home and the political reform. And that, I think, could take a very long time.
[Michele Kelemen:] Katulis thinks it's time for the U.S. to come up with a real strategy in the Middle East, which deals with the social and political unrest in a more serious way. U.S. policy has been far too dependent on the American military presence in the region, he says. University of Maryland Professor Shibley Telhami also calls this a time for reflection.
[Shibley Telhami:] We're kind of reacting to events what's next, how do we deal with it, how do we go about doing business as we have done it always. And I think we should be doing far more thinking about the broader strategic picture and what America's interests are and how to make them more harmonious to regional aspirations.
[Michele Kelemen:] Gone are the days, he says, when the U.S. could ask Arab leaders to support policies that are unpopular in their countries.
[Shibley Telhami:] Each one of these rulers who is close to the U.S. is going to think twice before they go against the public.
[Michele Kelemen:] Still Quandt of the University of Virginia is not in panic mode about what's happening in Egypt or Tunisia.
[William Quandt:] Both regimes will be healthier and better regimes for their own people. And ultimately we have a good opportunity to have good relations with them. But they're going to be more independent minded than their predecessors.
[Michele Kelemen:] Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.

[Michele Norris:] The Arthur Andersen document-shredding case, along with other high-profile bookkeeping scandals, ushered in an era of new rules and federal oversight in the accounting industry. To help us better understand how the industry has changed, we turn to Lynn Turner. He's a former chief accountant at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Thanks for being with us.
[Mr. Lynn Turner:] It is great to be here today with you.
[Michele Norris:] First, Arthur Andersen, the firm and its role in destroying Enron-related documents-was this seen as an isolated case or did the investigation and the eventual conviction have an immediate impact on the industry?
[Mr. Lynn Turner:] The impact of the document shredding that showed up all over the front pages of all the major newspapers, I think, did have a direct impact on the accounting profession. And, of course, it certainly had an impact on the subsequent legislation that got passed such that those type of events, hopefully, would not occur again today.
[Michele Norris:] You're speaking of the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. Explain to us the law and its impact on the industry.
[Mr. Lynn Turner:] Sarbanes-Oxley was legislation passed by Congress in the summer of 2002 and then signed by President Bush. In it, about half of the language deals with setting up a new regulator for the accounting profession called the Public Companies Accounting Oversight Board that oversees the audit firms. The rest of the legislation deals with some important things like ensuring that management is held accountable for the financial reports that they file with the SEC. It improves the independence of corporate boards, as well as the independence of the auditors, and it increased some of the penalties for those who shred documents or violate the security laws.
[Michele Norris:] There was a long of hand-wringing within the industry while this legislation was under discussion on the Hill. What's happened now, since the law's gone into effect?
[Mr. Lynn Turner:] We really are starting to see much better audits performed than what we used to see. Errors in the books get caught much quicker, such that the investors aren't given the surprises that they were in the case of Enron and WorldCom and Qwest and the like.
[Michele Norris:] Has there been a question about enforcement? You know, who's actually doing the oversight now?
[Mr. Lynn Turner:] With respect to the audit firms, it's very clear that the Public Companies Accounting Oversight Board has the role of enforcement, albeit the SEC is still playing the major cop on the beat. On the company side, I think all the law enforcement agencies, running from the Justice Department to the SEC to the state attorney generals, such as Galvin in Massachusetts and, of course, Spitzer in New York, are all playing very key and very important roles in protecting investors.
[Michele Norris:] You know, changes like this that we're talking about in the industry-does this largely impact the corporate world, or does this in some ways touch the lives of ordinary Americans, folks like you and me? And if it does, how so?
[Mr. Lynn Turner:] I think the scandals have touched many Americans. There are 90 million Americans who have put their money in the capital markets and have invested there through their 401 [k] s or IRA accounts. So the frauds and the loss in market value of some $9 trillion certainly affected everyone. In terms of the regulation and reforms, as the numbers get better you can have more confidence in those numbers. You can get better stock information, better stock prices. And, hopefully, you won't see your savings disappear like they did in the summer of 2002 as everyone watched their 401 [k] accounts just plummet in value. So I think the investor safeguards that have been put in place are impacting everyone today, especially as we start to talk about the greater use of private accounts and expansion of some of these retirement programs.
[Michele Norris:] Lynn Turner, thanks for talking to us.
[Mr. Lynn Turner:] Thank you for inviting me.
[Michele Norris:] Lynn Turner, managing director of the financial research firm called Glass, Lewis & Company. He's also the former chief accountant at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

[Michel Martin:] Let's turn now to college football and tomorrow's national championship game Alabama vs. Clemson. You might remember that this is only the second year that the national champion will be decided under a playoff system. Previously, they had a computer algorithm that crunched various polls to determine the top two teams in the country. Now a 12-person panel goes behind closed doors to choose the top four teams, and then they battle it out. We've called sports writer Jemele Hill up at the ESPN campus at Bristol, Conn., which is going to broadcast the game tomorrow. So, Jemele, welcome back. Thanks for joining us.
[Jemele Hill:] Hey, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
[Michel Martin:] So can we talk about the playoff system? You know, people used to, you know, just howl all the time about the old system. What about now? How are people feeling about the new one?
[Jemele Hill:] Well, I think people feel a little bit better about it just because they believe that the two best teams are the ones that wind up in tomorrow's championship game. I think before, it used to be so subjective. And on some level, that will never leave college football. Like, subjectivity is a part of it. And I think the argument and the quote-unquote controversy is a reason why fans stay invigorated, why they're so invested and emotional in the sport. But generally speaking, I think that the you know, the playoffs have been a resounding success. There's definitely a sense that the two best teams are playing in college football.
[Michel Martin:] Well, you know, speaking about the matchup, the Clemson Tigers of the number one team in the country. But they're considered the underdogs when they take on the number two, Alabama Crimson Tide. I mean, the Vegas odds-makers if you believe them have Alabama as roughly a one-touchdown favorite in the game. Why is a number two favored to beat a number one?
[Jemele Hill:] Well, Alabama you know, they're one of the powerhouse programs in college football. And, you know, Nick Saban you know, there, the argument is definitely in play about whether or not he could be the best college football coach ever. Certainly, I don't think any Alabama fans ever thought that they would see a day where a coach would come there that could be better than Bear Bryant. I think he's already a better coach than Bear Bryant.
[Michel Martin:] Can you even say Bear Bryant without the legendary Bear Bryant attached to it?
[Jemele Hill:] [Laughter] Yeah, I mean, he is a legend. I mean, for Nick Saban to have the kind of success that he's had there I think that has a lot to do with it. And, you know, quite frankly, it has to do also with not only type of season Alabama's had this year, but the their last game their last national impression that they left -unfortunately, I went to Michigan State, and I was at the game. And we took a beating by Alabama you know, didn't even score, lost 38-to-nothing, and that is why Clemson now is the serious underdog.
[Michel Martin:] Alabama also has this year's Heisman Trophy winner that's running back Derrick Henry. You want to talk about him?
[Jemele Hill:] Yeah, this is this is going to be interesting. You know, Derrick Henry, as great as he's been all season he's been a real workhorse in the last game against Michigan State, while he was a factor, he wasn't the factor. And...
[Michel Martin:] You know I just asked you that so you could feel better right? about the game.
[Jemele Hill:] Yeah, I know you did. You did. Thank you. [Laughter].
[Michel Martin:] I just I just wanted you to feel good, so [unintelligible].
[Jemele Hill:] I know. Thank you so much because trust me I was plenty depressed after that game.
[Michel Martin:] Well, he was kind of held in check. I mean, he was not a huge he did score two touchdowns, so let's say that but he was not a huge factor in the game. And so the question is can do is there a way that Clemson could repeat the same trick?
[Jemele Hill:] I do think that people are underestimating Clemson. They've had a great season. There's a lot of similarities, I think, between this game and the '06 Rose Bowl game, which was essentially for the national championship between Texas and USC. You had Vince Young, a Heisman Trophy finalist, DeShaun Watson, the Clemson quarterback. He finished third in the Heisman going against powerhouse USC, who had the Heisman Trophy winner with Reggie Bush. You have Clemson going against powerhouse Alabama with the Heisman Trophy winner in Derrick Henry. So while I still feel like Alabama will win this game, I think Clemson is certainly going to prove to people why they've been number one for as long as they have had. And I think they're going to give Alabama kind of all they can handle.
[Michel Martin:] That's ESPN Jemele Hill. Check out her show with Michael Smith called "His And Hers" on ESPN2. Jemele, enjoy the game.
[Jemele Hill:] All right, thank you very much for having me.

[Renee Montagne:] Major-league baseball's regular season ends this weekend. The New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox play three games, beginning tonight, to decide who's division champ. The games are at Boston's Fenway Park. That's where commentator Susan Orlean found one tradition that got her wondering.
[Susan Orlean:] Life is full of mysteries. I've been living in Boston for two years, and I've come across many of those mysteries here. For instance, why do people in Boston boil their meat? Why are they so fond of whale embroidery on their pants? And then there's the singing in the middle of the eighth inning at Fenway Park. Of course, every baseball game includes singing: the national anthem, "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." But at Fenway Park, the mystery isn't the singing. It's the song.
[Mr. Neil Diamond:] [Singing] Where it began, I can't begin to know it...
[Susan Orlean:] "Sweet Caroline" by Neil Diamond, mid-tempo, middlebrow, middle-aged, and yet, it's the sing-along anthem of Fenway Park for reasons to be named later.
[Mr. Neil Diamond:] [Singing] Wasn't the spring...
[Susan Orlean:] Everyone at Fenway has a theory or a theory about the lack of theories about why "Sweet Caroline" is sung here at every single game. Take Bob Dakoto, a retired teacher who now gives tours at Fenway.
[Mr. Bob Dakoto:] It does strike me as odd, and I'm a-really, a researcher. I research everything. And I just know President Kennedy's daughter Caroline, OK, is from Massachusetts, but I have no idea, OK, at all, all right, where the connection is, why the eighth inning and what have you. Do you know?
[Susan Orlean:] Well, no, I didn't. So I went to find out. I started with Megan Kaiser, who programs the music at Fenway.
[Ms. Megan Kaiser:] There was a fellow who works in this department before I came who had a daughter named Caroline, and when she was born, they played it as kind of a celebratory anthem to this new little girl.
[Susan Orlean:] Like I said, everyone has a theory. This is Megan's third season with the team. By the time she started, "Sweet Caroline" was already a tradition, but it was Megan who took it to the next level.
[Ms. Megan Kaiser:] My first year, I played it almost every game, but not every game. It hadn't yet become the "Sweet Caroline" that it is today.
[Susan Orlean:] Oh, really?
[Ms. Megan Kaiser:] And since that time, I've gotten to the point where I started choking down the sound at two different parts in the song so you could hear the fans singing. Want to hear it?
[Susan Orlean:] Yeah.
[Ms. Megan Kaiser:] Let's hear it. Let's see.
[Mr. Neil Diamond:] [Singing]...Caroline...
[Susan Orlean:] Good times.
[Ms. Megan Kaiser:] Ba, ba, ba...
[Susan Orlean:] Oh, I'm sorry.
[Ms. Megan Kaiser:] Good times never...
[Mr. Neil Diamond:] [Singing]...goods never...
[Ms. Megan Kaiser:] And this is your part, ready?
[Mr. Neil Diamond:] [Singing]...seemed so good. ORLEAN and Ms. KAISER: [In unison] So good, so good, so good. [Singing] My...
[Ms. Megan Kaiser:] So really, any idiot can sing the-there it is, yeah.
[Susan Orlean:] Ouch. I did wonder whether any of the Red Sox could explain the mystery of "Sweet Caroline." I stopped pitcher David Wells on his way into the dugout or should I say I tried to stop David Wells, who was about to walk right past me until he heard... The song "Sweet Caroline"?
[Mr. David Wells:] "Sweet Caroline."
[Susan Orlean:] Neil Diamond.
[Mr. David Wells:] Neil Diamond, yeah. Yeah. Of course, who wouldn't like it?
[Susan Orlean:] Does it surprise you that it's a Fenway anthem? I mean, it has nothing to do with Boston really.
[Mr. David Wells:] I don't know. It's catchy and then they just go with it, so...
[Susan Orlean:] Well, whatever. Of course, Fenway's resident musician, organist Josh Kantor, had his own notions.
[Mr. Josh Kantor:] It's a silly, cheesy song, but I think it's a fun song when everyone sings along with it.
[Susan Orlean:] Yeah. Hmm. Even the fan I was sitting next to, Michael Cardis, could offer only an existential explanation.
[Mr. Michael Cardis:] It started one time. It felt right, and it continued, and now every time I'm here, it's like clockwork. You know it's going to happen, and it's great. I love it. It's my favorite part of the game.
[Susan Orlean:] His favorite part of the game? People pay hundreds of dollars to get Red Sox tickets, and their favorite part of the game is singing along with Neil Diamond?
[Unidentified Man #1:] I'll play that song even at home when I'm watching the game on TV after a win, yeah.
[Unidentified Man #2:] Sometimes he dresses like Neil Diamond.
[Susan Orlean:] Wow, these guys were very serious. By this point, the game was under way. The Red Sox were giving a good spanking to the Kansas City Royals. The crowd was buoyant, and the middle of the eighth was drawing near. Everyone was warming up their vocal chords.
[Unidentified Man #3:] Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, [makes noises], wha, wha, wha, wha...
[Susan Orlean:] Finally, the big moment.
[Unidentified Man #3:] Here we go, ladies! Here we go.
[Crowd:] [Singing] Sweet Caroline, bah, bah, bah...
[Susan Orlean:] Beautiful. And yet, I felt unrequited. I still felt the need to clear up the "Sweet Caroline" mystery. And finally, I did. I spoke to a woman named Amy Toobey, who had been the music director before Megan Kaiser. It was Amy who started playing "Sweet Caroline." The reason: She just liked the song. That's it. She just liked the song, and when she played it at Fenway the first time eight years ago, people went crazy.
[Crowd:] [Singing] Good times never seemed so good. So good, so good, so good...
[Susan Orlean:] So good, so good, so good, so bad.
[Crowd:] [Singing] Sweet Caroline, bah, bah, bah. Good times never seem to go. So good. So good. So good. Sweet Caroline...
[Renee Montagne:] Susan Orlean is a staff writer at The New Yorker Magazine and the author of "The Orchid Thief." Her latest book is "My Kind of Place." You're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News.

[Ray Suarez:] A number of new laws restricting abortion were set to take effect this weekend. Some have been blocked at the last minute. Meanwhile, activists both for and against abortion rights are figuring out their next steps after a landmark ruling by the Supreme Court this week. The justices struck down a Texas law saying it did not protect women's health and safety. That decision is expected to have an impact well beyond Texas. NPR national correspondent Jennifer Ludden joins us. Jennifer, welcome.
[Jennifer Ludden, Byline:] Hi there.
[Ray Suarez:] I keep hearing phrases like that the decision will have an impact well beyond Texas. But states are still moving ahead with new laws, right? What's taking effect around the country?
[Jennifer Ludden, Byline:] They are. Well, what we're seeing right now is some laws to cut off public funding for clinics that provide abortion and also limit what can be done with the aborted fetuses. This is a reaction to last year's release of a series of undercover videos that targeted Planned Parenthood. Abortion opponents had alleged the group was illegally selling fetal tissue. Numerous states investigated. They never found any evidence of that. But lawmakers still use this to kind of pass more restrictions. In Florida, though, a judge said that cutting off funding interferes with a woman's constitutional right to an abortion. Interestingly though, in Florida, the judge did allow another part of a law to take effect, which requires doctors who provide abortion to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. And this is the same as one of the measures that the Supreme Court had just struck down in Texas this week.
[Ray Suarez:] So how is that? Even though the Texas law was found to be unconstitutional, other states can still move ahead with the same law and similar ones?
[Jennifer Ludden, Byline:] They can. And about two dozen states already have these kinds of laws on the books, either admitting privileges or requirements that clinics have hospital-style buildings. Now, some of those laws were being challenged already, and we've seen several go down this week because of the Supreme Court ruling. Alabama's attorney general said he was just going to drop the state's defense of an admitting privileges law. He said he just couldn't make the case that it's constitutional anymore. The Supreme Court, in a more quiet move this week, also declined to take up similar laws in Mississippi and Wisconsin. That means those challenges are over, and clinics in those states will stay open. But abortion rights groups say they are now going to challenge these laws state by state.
[Ray Suarez:] How does that work?
[Jennifer Ludden, Byline:] Well, Planned Parenthood announced this week they're targeting eight states to start with, more to come. They're working with state lawmakers to come up with legislation to repeal the laws that the Supreme Court has now deemed unconstitutional in Texas at least. But we should remember that this big wave of restrictions in recent years really came where we see Republican-dominated legislatures and Republican governors. So in places where you still have a Republican majority, it's not clear that they're just going to repeal these laws. We may still have to go through the court system where judges will now have this new Supreme Court ruling as a precedent.
[Ray Suarez:] Jennifer, what about other kinds of abortion restrictions? There are dozens across the country. And they're completely different from the laws just struck down in Texas.
[Jennifer Ludden, Byline:] Right. And they don't necessarily talk about the abortion procedure itself. Some of them have waiting periods up to three days or forced sonograms, where doctors have to take a sonogram and show the image to the woman. Abortion rights groups are confident that this week's ruling is going to actually be sweeping enough to apply to a lot of these other laws. They are focusing on something the justices did, which was attack a key strategy of abortion opponents. They have said that a lot of these restrictions benefit women's health and safety even when there has been no evidence for that. So abortion opponents are going to have to find another rationale, another legal reason when they defend these laws in court.
[Ray Suarez:] NPR national correspondent Jennifer Ludden. Thanks a lot, Jennifer.
[Jennifer Ludden, Byline:] Thank you.

[Robert Siegel:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
[Michele Norris:] And I'm Michele Norris. Their fate is now known. Twelve of the 13 men are dead in one of the nation's worst mining accidents in years. The president of International Coal Group, the company that owns the mine in West Virginia, called rescue workers true heroes. He also said the company did the best it could under trying circumstances.
[Robert Siegel:] There are still big questions about what happened at the Sago mine. What sparked the explosion that trapped the men more than 200 feet below ground? And why were family members allowed to believe false reports of the miracle rescue for hours? From West Virginia, NPR's Frank Langfitt reports.
[Frank Langfitt Reporting:] After a wrenching two-day vigil at a coal mine in Sago, West Virginia, rescuers found all but one miner dead. As federal officials prepared to investigate the cause of the blast, the mine company moved in to do damage control. At a news conference, officials with the mine's owner, International Coal Group, tried to explain how miners' family members received incorrect information that nearly all of their loved ones were alive. Company executive Gene Kitts said the root of the problem was miscommunication between rescue workers underground who were working with masks around their faces and the people who they relayed their information to.
[Mr. Gene Kitts:] All that we know is the mine rescue team knew what they found; when it was communicated to the surface, it came across as 12 alive.
[Langfitt:] That news quickly spread as rescue workers on the surface began calling others in the community by cell phone to share what seemed miraculous news. Coal company President Ben Hatfield said the company delayed relaying any information to family members for more than 90 minutes to make sure they had their facts straight.
[Mr. Ben Hatfield:] We fully recognize the criticism that the company has received about the manner in which the news was communicated to the families. Rightly or wrongly, we believed it was important to make factual statements to the families. We made what we believed to be the best decisions based on the information available while working under extreme stress and physical exhaustion. And in the process of being cautious, we allowed the jubilation to go on longer than it should have.
[Langfitt:] But for family members, the experience was excruciating. When Harley Ables was first told his soon-to-be brother-in-law Fred Ware was alive, he was elated like everyone else. Then three hours later, mine officials told everyone gathered in the church across from the mine that there had been a huge mistake. Harley Ables was furious.
[Mr. Harley Ables:] Ten minutes till 12, they said they had 12 survivors. Ten minutes ago they said they had one survivor and 11 deceased. Now they got the whole world thinking there was 12 survivors. The coal company is blaming it on communications failure. They straight out lied to millions of people watching.
[Langfitt:] People inside the church said a few fainted at news that nearly all the miners had died. Some in the crowd shouted down the mine company officials. Nick Helms lost his father Terry, who was a safety officer in the mine. He said mine officials did not apologize and that upon hearing the news, one miner's family member tried to rush company officials.
[Mr. Nick Helms:] There was no apology. There was no nothing. There they immediately-out the door with no words. There wasn't any punches thrown. There was-wrestled the one guy down before he got any closer.
[Langfitt:] Coal mining has been a way of life for generations of people in the hills of West Virginia, and it pays well, especially in a part of the country where good jobs aren't easy to find. Young miners can make $75,000 a year here. But the loss of so many miners at once has people rethinking the risks. Matthew and Danielle George got married last weekend. Matthew is 22, and he's been thinking of becoming a miner. Last night over dinner at a KFC a few miles from the mine, Danielle explained how their thinking had changed.
[Mrs. Danielle George:] He was wanting to go into the mines, and my mom was going to help him pay for the classes. And after I seen that the other day, I told him he wasn't allowed to go into the mines or I'd hurt him.
[Langfitt:] Matthew George says he'd rather work on oil rigs. It doesn't pay as well as mining, but he thinks it's safer.
[Mrs. Danielle George:] I thought the mines would be a good place to go, and then this happened. And it does discouraging things and...
[Langfitt:] As the hopes and fears of the community rose and fell last night, you could read it on the signs businesses put along the side of the road. When things looked bleak, the local Hardee's asked people to `pray for our miners.'When it looked like most were saved, another signed called them, quote, "our miracle miners." The sign was still up several hours after the company told the families the sad truth. Frank Langfitt, NPR News, Bridgeport, West Virginia.

[Steve Inskeep:] It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
[Renee Montagne:] And I'm Renee Montagne. Heavy fighting has returned to Baghdad. Rocket fire is again hitting the Green Zone, along with an military base in the city. Several U.S. soldiers have been killed. The rocket fire is coming from Sadr City, the Shiite enclave mostly controlled by the militia leader and cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. He had declared a ceasefire, which appeared to have ended last week's fighting. We turn now to NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro for more. She's in Sadr City. And Lourdes, what's happening there?
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] Well, I'm in the eastern part of the city, and coming into Sadr City from this direction is extremely eerie. People have to walk in and out from Sadr City for miles. They have placed checkpoints on the road. And what we're being told by local Iraqi police who are here with the American forces is that they're doing that to make sure that the Mahdi Army fighters cannot be resupplied, and to also stop Mahdi Army fighters from leaving Sadr City and going to other areas and spreading the instability. Here in Sadr City it is extremely tense. We're seeing U.S. military helicopters flying overhead. There is no one on the street in this part of the city. What we're seeing really at the moment is a sort of stalemate, at least here; of course in the other parts of Sadr City there are direct clashes between American forces, Iraqi army and Mahdi Army fighters, and that's been going on for the past several days. Yesterday was a very tough day. There was rocket fire coming from Sadr City to a U.S. military base and the to Green Zone that killed three U.S. soldiers, injured 31. And the clashes are continuing.
[Renee Montagne:] So Sadr's Mahdi Army fighters appear not to have laid down their arms, at least there in Baghdad. But there have also been political moves to isolate those followers of Sadr.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] There have been political moves. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki made some very tough statements, saying that any political group that had a militia would not be allowed to participate in the upcoming provincial elections, and that was a direct statement against the Mahdi Army. He said today that he would go after the Mahdi Army militia and that he would not stop until all militias in Iraq were disbanded. So very tough words. The Sadrists' political bloc is feeling extremely isolated. There was this joint statement from Nouri al-Maliki's office. It was also from the president, the two vice presidents, and many of the main political blocs, including, crucially, the Sunnis, who have also come on board on this. So at the moment, of course, they say they are not happy with this statement that's come out. They do not believe that they should have to disband their militia. So there's things happening on the political front, and of course things happening here on the ground on the military front where these clashes are continuing.
[Renee Montagne:] So interesting ally for Prime Minister Maliki, the Sunnis.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] It is interesting. I mean the Sunnis have no love of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. They've always said that he has not done enough to incorporate the Sunnis into the political process and into the Iraqi security forces. However, they don't like the Sadrists either. They don't like the Mahdi Army. Let us not forget, the Mahdi Army had a lot to do with the bloodshed and sectarian violence that happened in 2006, 2007.
[Renee Montagne:] And Lourdes, these developments come just before the U.S. commander in Iraq, David Petraeus, and also the U.S. ambassador, appear before Congress.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] That's true. And I can tell you, standing here in Sadr City right now, you get a completely different feel than probably what they will be discussing in front of Congress. I mean right here at the moment it feels incredibly tense. There is fighting going on a few miles away, and the surge, while of course it has worked in many respects, the Iraqi security forces are being backed up by U.S. forces, and in many cases, especially here in Sadr City, we're seeing U.S. forces taking the lead. So that of course begs the question, how ready are the Iraqi security forces to take control and when will U.S. forces be able to draw down? And those are going to be the key questions I think that will have to be addressed in the testimony coming up in the next few days.
[Renee Montagne:] NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro speaking to us from Sadr City, Baghdad.

[Steve Inskeep:] And I'm Steve Inskeep. Italy will retain one of the world's most restrictive laws on assisted fertility. The country held a referendum on a plan to repeal the law, but for that vote to be binding, at least half the electorate had to show up. They didn't, and that's considered a victory for the Catholic Church, which had called for a boycott. Here's NPR's Sylvia Poggioli.
[Sylvia Poggioli Reporting:] After two days of voting, only about one-quarter of eligible voters went to the polls, far short of the 50 percent quorum. The campaign was bitter. The Catholic Church is opposed to all forms of in vitro fertilization, and Italian bishops, with the endorsement of Pope Benedict XVI, openly campaigned in parishes and through the media, urging Italians to abstain from voting. The statute, introduced last year, restricts fertility treatment to heterosexual married couples, and it prohibits the screening of embryos for abnormalities. Voters were called on to lift a ban on embryo research, remove limits on the number of eggs that can be fertilized, lift the ban on egg and sperm donors and remove the article that attributes human rights to fertilized eggs. Supporters of the referendum were stunned by the large number of those who boycotted the poll, but Daniele Capezzone, leader of the radical party, the main promoter of the referendum, does not believe the result is a Vatican victory.
[Mr. Daniele Capezzone:] [Through Translator] We lost. We lost heavily, and the result must be analyzed carefully to understand what happened in the heart of Italian society. I fear that what prevailed was indifference or mistrust in the possibility to change things.
[Poggioli:] Many Italian analysts also attributed the result, in part, to referendum fatigue. There have been many referenda in the last few years, but the last to reach the 50 percent quorum was 10 years ago. Others say the fertility issue was too complicated. The issue divided the political world with several government and opposition leaders abstaining. Political analyst Sergio Romano acknowledges that in an atmosphere of collective insecurity, the Catholic Church's message had strong resonance.
[Mr. Sergio Romano:] There is no doubt that people are disconcerted, uncertain. They have anxieties and that sort of thing. And it is possible that in such a psychological state, they turn to the church and they're ready to listen to the church.
[Poggioli:] And in the last several weeks, the Italian Catholic Church has been very vocal. Leaflets saying `Life cannot be put to a vote'were distributed in churches. Pilgrimages were held to proclaim the sanctity of life. And from their pulpits on Sunday, when polls were open but political parties were banned from electioneering, priests continued to preach against the referendum. Political analyst Sergio Romano says the church has every right to speak out on ethical issues.
[Mr. Sergio Romano:] But when the church tells you exactly what kind of an electoral strategy Italian citizens should adopt, this is interference, in my opinion, and people who abstained, they just gave the church a victory.
[Poggioli:] The Vatican has not made any official comment on the referendum, but Cardinal Camillo Ruini, who spearheaded the boycott campaign, tried to play down the result. He said, `Victory is a mistaken term.'
[Cardinal Camillo Ruini:] [Through Translator] I did not fight to win. I didn't win. I tried only to do my duty as a bishop and listen to my conscience as a man, Christian and citizen.
[Poggioli:] Ruini's reluctance to sound triumphant could be a sign that church leaders are worried that the referendum outcome could have a backlash and trigger a wave of anti-clerical sentiment in Italy. This country has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, and according to a recent survey, 62 percent of churchgoers do not follow the precepts of the church. But supporters of the referendum are worried that the Catholic Church will now target Italy's abortion law, since it clashes with the fertility statute's article recognizing embryos' legal rights. Sylvia Poggioli, NPR News, Rome.

[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Adventure on the high seas is a concept that has captured our imagination stepping onto a ship, waving goodbye to your friends, family, land and sailing off toward the horizon. But once a ship leaves its shore, it's also sailing beyond the reach of law and order. Piracy, murder, exploitation, sea slavery, gun running, intentional dumping the criminal activity off shore is so extensive and so diverse that investigative reporter Ian Urbina continued reporting after his 2015 multipart series for The New York Times. All that reporting is contained now in his new book called "The Outlaw Ocean." And he joins me now. Welcome.
[Ian Urbina:] Thanks for having me.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] And we should remind people that we are deeply dependent on the ocean, both in and of itself, of course, and also as a means of how we get things and what we consume.
[Ian Urbina:] Yeah. Ninety percent of what we consume from iPhones to running shoes comes across the sea on cargo vessels, and 50% of the oxygen we breathe is produced by the oceans. And seafood is a massively expanding source of protein for much of the planet. The oceans are the temperature stabilizer for countering climate change's effect. So in all these ways, it's a pretty essential part of the planet.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Let's talk about the global fishing industry. You write in this book that the world wants to believe, quote, "that it is possible to fish sustainably legally and using workers with contracts making a livable wage and still deliver a five ounce can of skipjack tuna for $2.50 that ends up on the grocery shelf only days after the fish was pulled from the water thousands of miles away." I guess when you write like that, it doesn't seem like a very feasible thing that people want. But what is the reality?
[Ian Urbina:] The reality is that embedded in that supply chain are all sorts of hidden costs, often illegal activity and inhumane activity that are how companies save money. And those illegal costs range from, you know, hiring crews that don't ever get paid or using captive labor often called sea slavery all the way over to capturing fish, netting fish, that are in waters that are protected and are not supposed to be targeted. And sort of one of the points of the book was to highlight some of those hidden costs.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Yeah. The tales of people working in the worst conditions, enslaved people essentially, who are fishing on boats where you describe a kind of depravity that I have to say is truly shocking. You spoke to one man, a Cambodian man, named Lang Long who spent three years captive aboard a Thai fishing trawler. It's a jaw-dropping story.
[Ian Urbina:] Lang Long was courted by a trafficker, a human trafficker, offered a job in the construction industry. Then Lang Long, who had not a cent to his name and couldn't pay the trafficker, now he had a debt, and that trafficker sold Lang Long to a fishing boat captain, and off they went. And because Lang Long had attempted to escape at one point, Lang Long was subsequently shackled by the neck whenever he wasn't working. And that shackling is what got noticed by a supply vessel that serviced one of these fishing boats. And that became a whole long negotiation to buy Lang Long's freedom. And for the next couple years, I sort of tracked him as Lang Long attempted to put his life back together.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] And, of course, you make the point that even as the people on the ocean are being treated this badly, the ocean itself is receiving treatment that is also terrifying. Illegal dumping is turning the ocean into a trash can. What is the health of the ocean like as you see it?
[Ian Urbina:] The health of the ocean is not great. I think it's especially bad for the same reasons that these crimes against the people occur in that it's vast and therefore under policed. And I think there's also this long-held view that because it's so huge, it is indestructible and self-replenishing. And I think only in recent years have we realized that the dumping of oil, for example, doesn't dilute and after a while is causing systemic contamination or the industrial level fishing that's been happening for a long time actually is unsustainable. And so fishing stocks all over the world have collapsed, and species are going extinct because we now realize that as big as it is and as many fish as there once were, it's not a bottomless thing, the ocean.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Just listening to this, it sounds incredibly bleak. I mean, what should we be doing?
[Ian Urbina:] So I think, like, it's especially bleak if you think of it on the meta level of all of it at once, you know. But if you instead think of smaller order questions and they're isolated, achievable things that can happen on each of those fronts; A, sort of instigating more of a political will from governments to raise the bar on human rights and environmental laws and enforcement when those ships come into port because as long as they stay out there, they always have to come to land, and that's when you can exert authority. But there's also a role, I think, for the market and for consumers to play in pressuring companies to clean up their supply chains and know what was entailed in getting it to the shelves or to the plate. Has working on this book and on your previous story changed your habits? It has. I mean, I don't eat seafood, and I'm not advocating that for everyone, but I don't eat meat either. I think it has also as a journalist confronted me with a realization that there are lots of stories out there that are urgent and for which there's very little journalism systematically occurring. And this is one example where as we in the media often focus a lot of attention on a few stories, if we spread out, we can find a lot of really worthy topics out there.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Ian Urbina's book is called "The Outlaw Ocean." Thank you very much.
[Ian Urbina:] Thank you.

[Steve Inskeep:] Americans settled Western Colorado one canyon at a time. Rivers and streams were the original highways. Roads, when they came, followed rivers, often on narrow shelves of rock at the foot of canyon walls. And when floods hit Colorado, many roads washed away. In recent days, Colorado resident Mark Benjamin has helped to build a zip line to get supplies to neighbors cut off by flooding.
[Mark Benjamin:] I got 250 feet of cable 30 years ago I've been dragging around with me. And we took her down to the river, and we tied a rock to a rope and threw it across the creek, and my son caught it. And then we dragged the zip line across, and put it up in some trees. If we could get it higher, the sag would still allow a person to go across without dragging their butt in the water.
[Steve Inskeep:] Mark Benjamin lives in Bellevue, Colorado. Drought and forest fires swept through the area a few years ago, thinning out the vegetation, which made it harder for the earth to absorb the rains. We called to ask about the flood damage to nearby roads and what it will take to repair them.
[Mark Benjamin:] Starting about a quarter-mile down from our driveway, there's four major breeches where the creek crossed the road. And then, in the canyon itself, most of the curves are gone. The road is gone on the curves.
[Steve Inskeep:] I want to make it clear: When you say the road is gone in places where the river and the road curve, you don't mean the road is underwater.
[Mark Benjamin:] The asphalt's gone.
[Steve Inskeep:] It's just gone. You're an engineer yourself, right?
[Mark Benjamin:] Yes.
[Steve Inskeep:] You must have some feel for what kind of a project it would be to rebuild a road under these conditions.
[Mark Benjamin:] Yes. Yeah. You know, technically, I'm a structural engineer, but it's going to take a lot of dirt bringing dirt back up here, rebuilding the road bed underneath the asphalt and then repaving, actually assessing it. I guess part of the issue was why it might take years for our road to be rebuilt, is assessing whether it's even worth fixing, because of these type of flooding issues.
[Steve Inskeep:] Oh. Somebody might have to recalculate whether this is really a 100-year flood event, or maybe it's going to become more frequent.
[Mark Benjamin:] Yeah.
[Steve Inskeep:] Do you think that life is going to get back to the way it was? Or is this going to signal a permanent change in your area?
[Mark Benjamin:] Coupled with the Hyde Park fire from last April, it's going to make a severe impact on the people up here. There are 260 homes. There's less than 50 that have gotten building permits.
[Steve Inskeep:] Meaning there were homes that were destroyed, and they just haven't been rebuilt.
[Mark Benjamin:] Yeah. Plus, this road and this access, people who maybe were leaning toward rebuilding up here may not now.
[Steve Inskeep:] And if you're talking about roads that have been built in that area since the Great Depression, generations of infrastructure now severely damaged or washed away. It's going to take a long time to build that up again, if it ever is built up again.
[Mark Benjamin:] Yes. I'm surprised I'm talking on the phone to you, because about 17 years ago, they ran a new fiber optic cable up our roads so we could have phone service before the road was paved. And I can see that conduit, where it's just hanging out there in space. The water is hitting it.
[Steve Inskeep:] So we're talking through the water right now.
[Mark Benjamin:] Yeah.
[Steve Inskeep:] Well, you sound pretty good, considering that.
[Mark Benjamin:] Yeah, yeah.
[Steve Inskeep:] Well, Mark Benjamin, I hope the power holds out, and that the phone holds out, and that things get better.
[Mark Benjamin:] OK.
[Renee Montagne:] And as we've been reporting, Washington, D.C. is another place coping with tragedy this morning. A mass shooting yesterday at a U.S. Navy Yard left 12 victims dead. The suspected shooter was Aaron Alexis, a former Navy reservist. Authorities are still searching for a motive. We'll be bringing you updates throughout this morning.

[Steve Inskeep:] It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. Some of the world's leading powers are deciding what to do next about Iran. It missed a deadline to stop nuclear enrichment, so diplomats are meeting today in London. They include representatives of Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany. The American representative is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who faces regular questions about when the U.S. will talk with Iran.
[Secretary Condoleezza Rice:] They need to stop enriching and reprocessing, and then we can sit down and talk about whatever is on Iran's mind. But the international community has been steadfast. We have a Chapter VII resolution that demonstrates that Iran is isolating itself. It's time for Iran to take a different course, and we hope they will.
[Steve Inskeep:] And we should mention that tape of Condoleezza Rice comes to us from Fox News. We go now to NPR's Rob Gifford in London. Okay, Rob, Iran has said it's not going to stop nuclear enrichment. What can other countries do about it?
[Rob Gifford:] Well, the reason for the meeting today here in London, Steve, is just to start a bit more of a slow squeeze on Iran in terms of sanctions. There were sanctions imposed on the country in December, and they were given a 60-day deadline to comply with stopping their uranium enrichment, which has now passed. So the powers are meeting here in London to try to talk about a wider arms embargo, perhaps about freezing some of the export credits that are given by European governments for trade with Iran and just generally broadening the array of sanctions to be imposed upon Iran.
[Steve Inskeep:] Do all of these countries which include all the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council do they all agree on what to do?
[Rob Gifford:] Well, not exactly. And this, of course, is always the problem. The five permanent members will be represented here, plus Germany. And it is often the two countries China and Russia that are the ones that need to be persuaded. Beijing and Moscow have extensive dealings with Iran, and so they're very leery about stepping up any kind of sanctions regime.
[Steve Inskeep:] And there has certainly been some hard rhetoric in recent days.
[Rob Gifford:] Well, there has. You just heard Condoleezza Rice speaking yesterday about Iran. In fact, she was speaking in response to comments by President Ahmadinejad of Iran, who said over the weekend that Iran's nuclear program had no reverse gear and no brake. And so once again, the Iranian government continuing to insist that it's going to carry on with its nuclear program, that it's solely for peaceful means. Dick Cheney, the vice president, was in the Gulf over the weekend. He continued to insist that all options were on the table. And in return, a deputy foreign minister in Tehran also said we've prepared ourselves for any situation, even for war. So there's a lot of angry rhetoric, and we're going to have to see today whether these talks can bring about any more diplomatic solutions.
[Steve Inskeep:] Now I want to ask, Rob, how this situation compares with North Korea -a country that actually has nuclear weapons but the United States, after pursuing a different course for some years, finally decided to sit down and talk with them and reach some kind of agreement.
[Rob Gifford:] That's a very good question. I think there's two important issues to consider when comparing the two. One is that the North Koreans actually tested a nuclear weapon at the end of last year. So it really changed the equation, because Iran is thought to be a couple of years, still, away from having a nuclear weapon. I think one other important thing to consider in that comparison is whether a military action is still being considered by Washington, because in North Korea, it was considered not a possibility because Pyongyang could then hit back at Seoul and Tokyo. If military action is finally written off by the U.S. administration, then conceivably, I think we could see more moves towards some kind of negotiated settlement. But it seems as though the Bush administration is still saying that could be a possibility.
[Steve Inskeep:] We're listening to NPR's Rob Gifford in London, where six nations are discussing Iran's nuclear enrichment program and what to do about it. Rob, thanks.
[Rob Gifford:] Thanks very much, Steve.

[Robert Siegel:] If you are a sports fan, you'll probably be watching tonight's Game 7 showdown in the NBA Finals and if you're not, you should really consider it. This is one of the most anticipated pro basketball games in decades. The Miami Heat fought back from a five-point deficit in under 30 seconds to force this Game 7. The San Antonio Spurs are trying to become the first team since 1978 to win a Finals Game 7 on the road. NPR's Mike Pesca is in Miami and he's with us. And, Mike, I understand the last time a team won Game 7 on the road, it was the Washington Bullets and they beat the Seattle Supersonics. That's how long it's been. So the Spurs have quite a challenge tonight.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Right, one of those teams changed their name, the other team left town. So this is the stat du jour and everyone is talking about how long it's been. But, you know, it's only been five games, so that would be what a statistician would call a small sample size. So I don't know how much that stat means. Maybe more recent stats to look at are things like the Spurs are 14-and-3 when they've had a chance to close out a series on the road. Or and I think this is a big one Miami hasn't won back-to-back games in almost a month. It was the 22nd of May when they beat the Indiana Pacers to begin that series. That was their last back-to-back win, so perhaps that's more salient in recent point. Either way, I don't think any of these statistics or facts will come into play. I think it'll more be about pick and roles and three-point shooting.
[Robert Siegel:] Well, Game 6 on Tuesday night, with a furious comeback by the Heat, was such an exhausting emotional game. You have to wonder how either of these teams will have anything left in the tank for tonight.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Right, and LeBron James talked about going to empty on the tank and then hitting the reserve tank. So, of course, both of these teams are physically drained. And it's natural to wonder, are the Spurs also emotionally drained, especially because Manu Ginobili who had a great Game 5, an awful Game 6 just flat-out talked about being devastated and not knowing how to get reenergized. But I think perhaps his comments are being overblown. And the Spurs are, if nothing, resilient. Shane Battier, who plays for the Heat, was asked: Can you think of a player less likely to be emotionally affected by a loss than Tim Duncan... ...the Spurs' future Hall of Famer. And Shane just honestly said, no, he is stoic and he will be fine from an emotional standpoint.
[Robert Siegel:] OK, let's talk about strategy then. How are these teams likely to approach this big Game 7?
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] By not changing too much. They're great teams and that's why they're here. The Heat have to decide what they're going to do in terms of guarding three-point shooters or doubling Tim Duncan down low. Now, the Heat talk about you can do both but I haven't seen the evidence of that. They haven't been able to both play outside and inside basketball. So that will be a factor. Then I think turnovers will be huge part of the game. When the Heat, an active athletic team, have been able to turn the Spurs over, they have largely won. You know, the last big factor is Dwayne Wade. This is the Heat star who was pretty bad in Game 6, though he did contribute a bit defensively. But the statistics are shocking. If you look at when LeBron James and Dwayne Wade share the floor, the Heat don't do well. They've been outscored by a lot in this series when both those guys are on the floor. When its LeBron alone, has more room to operate, the Heat have outscored the Spurs.
[Robert Siegel:] But LeBron James in Game 6, took over and if Heat win this series, will all the criticism that he is scared or soft or tentative, will all that go way?
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] He will never be indemnified because the answer to this was, yes. Last year, if he wins the title will he get a free pass? There is just something about LeBron James. Maybe it was that one bad media spectacle that left a taste in people's mouths. But he is the most unfairly criticized athlete I have ever seen. And I guess it's just fun to, you know, call the guy soft and say he's scared. But it doesn't matter, you know. The Twitter thoughts about legacy will not compare to, in 30 years, what we think about LeBron James. And no one will tell their kids: Oh yeah, on Twitter that day, some guy called him soft.
[Robert Siegel:] OK, Mike. That's NPR's Mike Pesca in Miami for Game 7 of the NBA finals. Thanks, Mike.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Ari Shapiro:] North Korea seems to be sending signals. Satellite images taken yesterday show the regime has almost completely reconstructed one satellite launching station. And there are also reports, which NPR has not confirmed, of activity at another site related to the country's missile program. The White House is taking notice. Here's what national security adviser John Bolton told Fox & Friends about these developments this morning.
[John Bolton:] We're going to study the situation carefully. As the president said, it would be very, very disappointing if they were taking this direction.
[Ari Shapiro:] To help us understand this moment in U.S.-North Korean relations, we've called back Siegfried Hecker. He is a nuclear scientist who has been to see North Korea's nuclear sites many times. He's also an emeritus professor at Stanford University. Welcome back.
[Siegfried Hecker:] It's my pleasure, Ari.
[Ari Shapiro:] You and I spoke just over a week ago, right before the summit between President Trump and Kim Jong Un in Hanoi. And you were pretty upbeat then about things moving in the right direction. Now that the summit has failed to produce a deal and we're seeing this new activity, how are you feeling?
[Siegfried Hecker:] Well, today I'm less optimistic. I'm somewhat concerned because it looks like the U.S. may have moved the goal post and made it unreachable for the North Koreans at this time.
[Ari Shapiro:] What do you mean when you say the U.S. seems to be moving the goal posts?
[Siegfried Hecker:] Well, what it seemed to me the U.S. was going in with the understanding this is going to be a phased denuclearization with normalization.
[Ari Shapiro:] Getting rid of sanctions, those sorts of things.
[Siegfried Hecker:] That's exactly right. What it seems, from what we can hear from what happened at Hanoi the president encouraged Kim Jong Un to go bigger. And I think that meant actually giving up everything now, and North Korea is not prepared to do that.
[Ari Shapiro:] So after those talks collapsed, it became apparent that North Korea seemed to resume work on the sites that we were talking about. North Korea had to know that the U.S. would see that activity. What kind of message do you think they are trying to send?
[Siegfried Hecker:] Oh, there was no question the North Koreans know. And quite frankly, so far, the activities that this satellite launch station from a technical standpoint, that's really not the big concern. They just put it back to where it was at the beginning of 2018. So the technical message, you know, is really not that concerning. However, there's definitely a political message in that. They were sending a message to us.
[Ari Shapiro:] Do you think this activity is the message itself that North Korea wanted to send, or is this a lead-up to something like launching something into space?
[Siegfried Hecker:] Well, that's what we're really going to have to watch. You know, the space launches the North Koreans over the years had insisted that they have the right through space launches. However, almost every one of the space launches, then, really took diplomacy off the tracks because the Americans consider that to be a step, also, in the direction of missiles. And so it would be indeed very unfortunate if they went ahead with an actual space launch. I would say even engine tests would, at this point, be a concern.
[Ari Shapiro:] Is this about trying to get America's attention, trying to get more leverage? What do you think is the goal here?
[Siegfried Hecker:] Well, as I tried to analyze so how would I react, you know, if I were the North Koreans? They must be looking for leverage. I mean, they walked away from Hanoi with nothing. I think they must be looking for ways that they can send a message to look; we can still do more things however, not to be such a strong message that it's a provocation that would then turn the Americans off.
[Ari Shapiro:] You've followed this relationship for decades, and we're talking here about just a few weeks. Is there enough information here to really tell what direction the U.S.-North Korea relationship is going in?
[Siegfried Hecker:] Well, you know, the peculiar thing is most people, including myself, have had difficulty giving President Trump credit for turning things around with North Korea. But he did. You know, Singapore moved us away from the brink of war, and he seemed to indicate in Hanoi that he still has this special relationship. And even since then, he still indicates that, look. We're going to get over this. We're going to solve this problem. And so it could well be President Trump is different than what we've seen over the last 19 years. What we've seen in the last 19 years has failed terribly. I thought we were so close to taking a next big step, and we couldn't quite get there. My hope is that perhaps we will.
[Ari Shapiro:] Siegfried Hecker, a senior fellow emeritus at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford speaking with us on Skype. Thank you so much.
[Siegfried Hecker:] It's been my pleasure, Ari. Thank you.

[Steve Inskeep:] Now let's follow up on the tragic story of Abigael Adams. The four-year-old lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.
[Renee Montagne:] And a videotape spread online which she spoke for many people. She was listening to NPR election coverage in the family car when she started crying. In the video, which you can find at NPR.org, she announced she had enough.
[Abigael Evans:] It's because I'm tired. I'm tired of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.
[Renee Montagne:] Afterward, Time magazine declared: we are all Abigael Evans, and such heartfelt concern deserves an answer.
[Steve Inskeep:] We're reminded this morning of a famous incident when a girl wrote a New York newspaper asking if there was really a Santa Claus. The newspaper replied in an editorial saying: Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. In the same spirit, we have an assurance for Miss. Evans. Yes, Abigael. There is a November 7th. You're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News.

[Audie Cornish:] Let's take a moment to recognize one of last year's tech breakthroughs.
[Tiffany Beers:] We have what we call a lace engine.
[Audie Cornish:] That's Tiffany Beers, a senior innovator with Nike. The lace engine she's referring to is a motor, battery and control board combo hidden in the bottom of a new Nike shoe.
[Tiffany Beers:] When a user steps into the shoe, when their heel touches the foot bed, it triggers a sensor. What that sensor does is it tells it that the foot's there and that go ahead and tighten.
[Audie Cornish:] And after that, with the press of a button, hands are no longer required for tying shoelaces. Beers says it's more than a high-tech fashion statement.
[Tiffany Beers:] If you don't have any challenges tying your shoes, it maybe doesn't change your life very much. But for anyone that has any trouble tying their shoes and getting into their shoes, you know, spending 20 minutes a day maybe putting on your shoes, I get letters from kids all the time that have various challenges. For them, this is a complete game changer.
[Audie Cornish:] Now if you want this technology in your sneakers, you can buy it, but it'll cost you $720.

[Robert Siegel:] Equity Offices Property Trust is not a name that rolls off the tongue, but it happens to be the largest owner of office space in the United States after the federal government. Well, today came news that Equity Office is being sold to the large private equity firm, the Blackstone Group. It's just one of a flurry of corporate mergers and acquisitions announced today. NPR's Jim Zarroli joins us now. And Jim, how much is Blackstone paying for Equity Office and what is it actually getting?
[Jim Zarroli:] Well, Blackstone is paying about $20 billion, although it's assuming a lot of debt as well, so it's really this is going to set it back about $35 billion. Now what it is getting is a real estate investment trust, what is commonly called a REIT. REITs basically are investment vehicles that put money into real estate. You can buy and sell shares in them like stock, so if you want to invest in real estate but you don't want all the hassle that entails and you want to keep your money pretty liquid, REITs are the way to do it. Equity Office Properties Trust is a really, really big REIT. It owns 590 buildings, including properties in just about every major American city. Some of them well known buildings World Wide Plaza here in New York City, 1 Post Office Square in Boston, 161 North Clark in Chicago. So it's a big trust and so you might kind of say this is the biggest real estate deal ever.
[Robert Siegel:] Well, there are a lot of properties then that are being sold and it's an enormous price, so what does that say about the real estate market? Does it mean that Blackstone is getting lots of property on the cheap or that the real estate market isn't so soft?
[Jim Zarroli:] Well, the housing market is soft. The residential market is soft. The commercial real estate market is actually doing very well. Office vacancy rates are low. Companies have a lot of money to spend, so that's driving up the value of the kinds of properties that Equity Office owns, which is no doubt the major reason why Blackstone wanted to acquire it.
[Robert Siegel:] Now Blackstone is a private equity fund. And such funds have been in the news a lot, so I want you to explain to us what is a private equity fund.
[Jim Zarroli:] Just as their name suggests, they are private entities. They can invest in lots of different kinds of assets. Blackstone is one. Bain Capital, the Carlyle Group. Now investors have been putting a lot of money into these funds, so these funds have a lot of cash to spend. They're looking for things to buy. They've been snatching up some really well known companies Eddie Bauer, Burger King. Sometimes they hold onto these for a while. They make changes. Maybe they'll put new management in place. Maybe they'll close some factories and lay some people off. Then when the company is more profitable, they'll take it public again and make a lot of money. Sometimes critics say they just take a lot of money out of the company in the forms of fees and dividends and then try to unload it on other investors if they're able to do that.
[Robert Siegel:] So why have funds like that been particularly active lately?
[Jim Zarroli:] The economy's been doing well. They have a lot of money. Business confidence is pretty high. One thing about these funds is that because they're private, they have a certain kind of flexibility that they wouldn't have if they were in the public markets. For instance, the stock markets don't like it when companies take on a lot of debt, but you see private equity funds that acquire companies and borrow 90 percent of the money to do so. One of the questions you hear asked a lot today is, you know, are these firms going too far? Are they spending too much money and taking on too much debt? Obviously, private equity firms don't want to see companies they acquire go under. The question is, you know, are they taking the kinds of risks that will put otherwise healthy companies in jeopardy. We have seen these kinds of periods of excess before, after all.
[Robert Siegel:] Well, there have been quite a few other mergers. Some announced today. What were some of the more important ones?
[Jim Zarroli:] Well, the research firm Dealogic says that there were another $88 billion worth of deals today. The copper miner Phelps Dodge was acquired by a big mining conglomerate for $25 billion. Bank of America said it was buying US Trust for $3.3 billion. There were also a lot of deals announced in Australia, Canada, Europe. Euroficina. Just a huge rush of mergers this year.
[Robert Siegel:] Okay, Jim. Thank you.
[Jim Zarroli:] You're welcome.
[Robert Siegel:] NPR's Jim Zarroli speaking to us from New York.

[Melissa Block:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
[Michele Norris:] For more on those findings, we're joined now by Dr. Otis Brawley. He's chief medical officer and executive vice president of the American Cancer Society. Welcome to the program.
[D:] Thank you for having me.
[Michele Norris:] How significant is this study in the war against breast cancer?
[D:] Well, it's an important study. We've actually already had two studies to tell us that tamoxifen and raloxifene also prevent breast cancer. Now we have a third drug, so women who are concerned about breast cancer, and concerned that they are at high risk, can actually look and have a choice of three drugs to try to change their risk.
[Michele Norris:] This study looked at women who were all postmenopausal. Do the findings apply to women who have not yet reached menopause?
[D:] Unfortunately, they only work in women who are postmenopausal. It will not work in women who are premenopausal. However, the other two drugs, tamoxifen and raloxifene, actually do have a track record in decreasing risk of breast cancer in premenopausal women.
[Michele Norris:] Doctor, were you at all concerned that the study was relatively short, only three years? And I ask because other studies have been promising, but then later proved to be less than promising over time.
[D:] Tamoxifen in a postmenopausal woman can even cause uterine cancer. Interestingly, it can prevent breast cancer, but it increases risk of uterine cancer. It increases risk of blood clots and pulmonary emboli. And it's something that a woman needs to consider if she's going to want to take one of these drugs to try to decrease their risk of getting breast cancer.
[Michele Norris:] Tamoxifen is in wide use for many reasons, but in part because it's affordable. Would that apply to this drug?
[D:] This drug right now costs somewhere around $300 a month. And most women, by the way, who take this drug also will need to take a drug to prevent osteoporosis. Fortunately, exemestane is about to become a generic drug. And so the drug itself is going to become much cheaper within the next year.
[Michele Norris:] So how, or who, or what entity will ultimately determine how this drug might potentially be used? Will doctors began prescribing them to be used for prevention? Will women ask for them if they happen to know that they are in this high-risk category?
[D:] And also, people need to focus on other factors in breast cancer prevention. We know high caloric intake and lack of exercise all cause breast cancer. So people need to focus on all of those things. I'm a little worried, the fact that we have a pill to lower risk will make people ignore the other things.
[Michele Norris:] Are you worried anytime you hear the word prevention in the same sentence with cancer?
[D:] But I'd like people to know that it does improve overall health, and improves the chances that you won't get these diseases.
[Michele Norris:] Dr. Brawley, thank you for your time.
[D:] My pleasure.
[Michele Norris:] That's Dr. Otis Brawley. He's the chief medical officer and executive vice president of the American Cancer Society. Dr. Brawley is also a professor at Emory University.

[Allison Aubrey:] Since last month's election, it seems that gun sales have been on the rise. One indicator is that FBI background checks for gun purchases shot up to their highest level in two years on Black Friday, according to the gun control news site The Trace. And another group has been reporting a recent rise in the number of people interested in guns, The Liberal Gun Club. That's an organization for left-leaning gun lovers. It has nine chapters and members in all 50 states. According to the group's spokesperson, Lara Smith, The Liberal Gun Club has seen a big spike in inquiries since the election and a 10 percent bump in membership. Lara Smith joins us from El Cerrito, Calif., to talk about some of these figures. Hi there, Lara.
[Lara Smith:] Hi. Thank you for having me.
[Allison Aubrey:] So I want to begin by asking how The Liberal Gun Club is different from the NRA.
[Lara Smith:] The NRA has its political side. We are an organization strictly for education. We do not endorse candidates. And we're a place many of our members have joined NRA boards, other gun forums and found that they weren't welcome there because they didn't follow lockstep with the NRA's support of nearly unanimously Republican and right-leaning candidates.
[Allison Aubrey:] A lot of people may assume that liberal-leaning people are less likely to be gun enthusiasts. You're saying and then the name of your club suggests that this isn't necessarily so.
[Lara Smith:] This isn't necessarily so. Even long before this election, approximately a quarter to a third of people who identified in surveys as Democrats also identified that there were firearms in their homes. Democrats have always been and always will be gun-owners. It's just a perception in the media and, I think, in the party that Democrats aren't interested in guns.
[Allison Aubrey:] Tell us what you have been seeing since last month's election.
[Lara Smith:] We've seen significant more interest in our group. More women are joining, which is great. I actually run a women's shooting league here in the San Francisco Bay Area, about the most liberal area of the country you could find. And it's definitely picking up, although that's been true for a while. We are seeing more women concerned about protecting themselves, specifically about protecting themselves in their homes. The other group we are seeing more of and I have to give a reason for that. There is a man named Maj Toure who has started a group called Black Guns Matter. And he has been going around to urban communities getting urban communities interested in their Second-Amendment rights. He's doing great work. We have seen some uptick from that as well. So yes, definitely people who are not the stereotypical middle-aged white male.
[Allison Aubrey:] So why now? What do you think?
[Lara Smith:] I think, one, there's a very small subset who feel concerned about the new government. Specifically, is this new government going to take their guns because they've spoken out about an issue that Trump or the Republicans are seen as not supporting, whether it be LGBTQ rights, the environment, all sorts of issues. That's a small subset. More what we're seeing are people who are worried about their safety as a result of some of the rhetoric that was heard during the campaign not so much from the campaign but from really fringe groups who have encouraged a rise in hate crimes or a perceived rise in hate crimes.
[Allison Aubrey:] Lara Smith is a spokesperson for The Liberal Gun Club. She joined us from El Cerrito, Calif. Thank you, Lara.
[Lara Smith:] Thank you so much, Allison, for having me.

[Ailsa Chang:] Almost a year ago this week, chaos erupted in Charlottesville, Va. The Unite the Right rally brought white supremacist and white nationalist groups out of the shadows and into prominent view. And what followed is hard to forget clashes with police, clashes between protesters and counterprotesters, violence and the death of a young woman. The fallout from that event has caused changes to the white nationalist movement. And to understand those changes, we turn now to Heidi Beirich at the Southern Poverty Law Center. She has long tracked white supremacy, nativist and neo-confederate movements, and she oversees a yearly count of the nation's hate groups. Heidi Beirich, welcome.
[Heidi Beirich:] Thanks for having me.
[Ailsa Chang:] From what you've been seeing over the past year, would you say that the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville helped or hurt the white nationalist movement?
[Heidi Beirich:] Well, for the particular organizations and racist individuals who showed up in Charlottesville it's been a pretty rough year. They've lost PayPal accounts and Facebook pages. There's been extreme infighting in the movement. And some of the major figures have sort of abandoned things like Richard Spencer. He's no longer on his college speaking tour. But overall there's still a lot of energy in white supremacy in the United States. And that's very much indicated by, for example, the massive rally in Portland this past weekend.
[Ailsa Chang:] How have they tried to get around some of those obstacles? For instance, you said they'd lost PayPal accounts. Are they able to fundraise at the same level despite that?
[Heidi Beirich:] No. I think the loss of the PayPal accounts was probably the most damaging thing that happened to white supremacists in the last year. And they're basically stuck using things like bitcoin that are hard to, you know, convert into cash.
[Ailsa Chang:] What about litigation? I know that some lawsuits have been filed against various groups over the past year. Have legal bills set them back as well?
[Heidi Beirich:] There's no question that legal bills have been an issue. Roberta Kaplan, who is a lawyer in New York, has brought a massive civil suit against a bunch of the leaders who were at Unite the Right last year in Charlottesville, and the organizations and that lawsuit is moving forward. The city of Charlottesville did something similar. So there are also the legal bills to consider, which have been really painful for those involved.
[Ailsa Chang:] Despite these setbacks, I mean, Charlottesville did bring a ton of attention to these groups. There has been so much discussion about what these groups stand for. And I'm just curious. Is any publicity in the end still good publicity when you're talking about this movement?
[Heidi Beirich:] I think that there's a lot of truth to that. We know that in the days after Charlottesville a lot of the groups that showed up saw rises in their kind of Web interest, right? We also know that there are people, like I said, rallying on the West Coast in large numbers and Web readership that's huge. We have places like Gab that are infested basically with all kinds of hate material. So I don't think that the larger white supremacist movement is, you know, significantly hampered by the fallout from Unite the Right. It's affected the folks who were there, but white supremacy as a whole is flourishing in the United States.
[Ailsa Chang:] What do you mean by that? How is it still flourishing?
[Heidi Beirich:] Well, for example, some of the policies that folks in the white supremacist movement have wanted for years anti-immigrant policies in particular, the Muslim ban these are things that have seen their way into reality, right? This is a movement that has wanted forever to reduce the number of non-white immigrants in the United States. And when they see things like ICE raids and family separation, that is seen as a victory for white supremacist thinking.
[Ailsa Chang:] So there is going to be another Unite the Right rally. It's planned for this weekend here in Washington, D.C. What are you expecting to see? I mean, there's already talk that it's going to be substantially smaller than last year's rally in Charlottesville. But what do you expect to be the mood this weekend?
[Heidi Beirich:] Well, it definitely will be smaller from all the Web traffic we've looked at. I don't think Jason Kessler, who organized the original one and is organizing this in Lafayette Park in D.C., is going to have many allies on the ground. My guess is that the counterprotesters will greatly outnumber the white supremacist types who are going to show up. And I hope that there is no violence, that groups are kept separate and the mood is largely on the side of those of us who are against racism in the United States.
[Ailsa Chang:] Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center, thank you very much.
[Heidi Beirich:] Thanks for having me.
[Ailsa Chang:] And a final note in advance of the first anniversary of the Unite the Right rally. Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia and the city of Charlottesville have declared a state of emergency. This allows the city to have a heavy police presence in the hopes of preventing any violence.

[Renee Montagne:] And a former White House press secretary was in a Washington, DC courtroom yesterday. Ari Fleischer testified at the perjury and obstruction of justice trial of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who had been a vice presidential aide. On the stand, Ari Fleischer contradicted Libby's account of when he, Libby, learned the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plaim Wilson. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports.
[Nina Totenberg:] The parade of current and former Bush administration heavies continued yesterday, as details of intrigue and infighting at the Bush White House in the spring and summer of 2003. As former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer put it, there was something in the air that spring, hints, and more in the press, that the president in his state of the union speech justifying an invasion of Iraq had misled the American public. The president in his speech had cited intelligence information about an Iraqi attempt to buy uranium for a nuclear weapons program. And now there were reports that the information had been false. On July 6th, Ambassador Joseph Wilson went public, claiming that he'd been sent on a mission by the vice president and had reported back that the uranium story was bogus. At the white house the next day, press secretary Fleischer had a long scheduled lunch with Cheney's chief of staff, "Scooter" Libby. Yesterday Fleischer testified that in the course of that lunch, Libby reiterated that it wasn't Cheney who'd sent Wilson on the mission, it was Wilson's wife. She works for the CIA in the Counter Proliferation Division, Fleischer quoted Libby as saying. The vice president's chief of staff told the press secretary the information was very hush-hush, very much on the QT. But Fleischer said he did not take that to mean that the information was classified, since Libby did not follow the strict protocol of telling him the information was classified and couldn't be disclosed to others. And, in fact, within days, Fleischer said he passed the information on to a couple of reporters during a presidential trip to Africa. By then, he said, the White House was actively pointing the finger at the CIA, blaming the agency for the infamous 16-words in the president's speech about uranium. Then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told reporters that if the CIA had objected to the words, they would not have been included in the speech. And to reinforce that message, Fleischer said he mentioned to two reporters that Ambassador Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and that she had sent him on a fact-finding trip, not the vice president. Months later, Fleischer told the jury, when he read in the newspapers that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to conduct an investigation of the leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's identity, he was horrified. He said that he thought to himself, oh, my God, did I play a role in outing a CIA agent? I could be in very big trouble. He quickly contacted a lawyer and then refused to testify before the grand jury until he was granted immunity from prosecution. Lawyers for defendant Libby may have thought that immunity grant would give them ammunition to discredit Fleischer. But Libby's lawyer was just as unsuccessful at ruffling Fleischer, as reporters were in the years he deflected their blows in the White House briefing room. Indeed, Fleischer was a good deal more animated when talking to the jury, as opposed to the press, often smiling and gesturing as he testified. Fleischer was the fifth witness from the White House, State Department, or CIA to testify about discussions they had with defendant Libby about the wife of Ambassador Wilson and her CIA identity. All have said their discussions were prior to the date Libby told the grand jury that he learned of her identity. Fleischer was followed to the witness stand by Vice President Cheney's current chief of staff, David Addington, widely viewed in Washington as, quote, Cheney's Cheney. Addington to testify that in July of 2003, he met with Libby in a tiny office off the vice president's office in the West Wing of the White House. Addington had once worked for the CIA and Libby wanted to know whether, if someone had been sent on a trip by his CIA spouse, there would be any paperwork to show that. Addington testified that there likely would be, since, as he put it, this is the government so there almost always is paperwork. Addington said that the door to the next office where the vice president's secretary sat was closed. And at one point, Libby motioned for Addington to keep his voice down. Today, former New York Times reporter Judith Miller is scheduled to testify. She went to jail for nearly three months before finally testifying about three conversations that she said she had with Libby about Ambassador Wilson and his wife. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
[Renee Montagne:] You're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News.

[Liane Hansen:] On January 10, 1861, Florida became the third state to secede from the Union, after South Carolina and Mississippi. Eight other states would soon follow, igniting the bloodiest war in American history. WEEKEND EDITION commentator and Florida native Diane Roberts explores why the Civil War still has such a hold on the Southern imagination.
[Diane Roberts:] I used to drive my grandfather, Edgar Lafayette Roberts, to Natural Bridge Park, a few miles south of Tallahassee on the St. Marks River. His grandfather, Luther Tucker, fought there in 1865. Luther was 16 years old, part of the cadet corps which chased Union forces back down the river to the Gulf of Mexico. My grandfather liked to go there to remember Luther and also Luther's brother, Charles Broward Tucker, who died just after the Battle of Fredericksburg; and Luther's cousin, Washington Broward, who died in a Union prison; and his other grandfather, Richard Roberts, who somehow survived the nine-month siege of Petersburg and made it home to the north Florida swamps. Americans tend to look to the future, not the past. But old times are not forgotten, can't be forgotten, even here in Florida. We had plantations, lynchings, Klan cross burnings, white citizens' councils, segregated water fountains. Florida bears as much shame as Mississippi or Alabama. Secession, the first shots at Fort Sumter that was 150 years ago, yet the reverberations haven't died away. The governor of Virginia declares Confederate History Month without mentioning slavery, and an uproar ensues. The governor of Mississippi insists segregation wasn't that bad, then is forced to back down. Some white Southerners claim they just want to honor their ancestors. Many descendants of slaves beg to differ. It doesn't matter if your people arrived on the Mayflower, were kidnapped from the Gold Coast of Africa, docked at Ellis Island, or took a plane from Mumbai. The issues of 1861 haunt us still race, states' rights, the interpretation of the Constitution, the definition of who is American. We're even still talking about secession. There are groups from Texas to Alaska that want independence from the United States. The war didn't finish the debate. It was merely a violent interruption. There's not much to see now at Natural Bridge a few earthworks dug by the soldiers and one of those big, wedding cake monuments put up by the Daughters of the Confederacy. It lists the names of the dead and says in big letters: Lest we forget. We won't. We can't.
[Liane Hansen:] Diane Roberts is the author of "Dream State: A History of Florida."

[Audie Cornish:] After several years of fiscal dieting, President Obama says 2016 should be a time to splurge a little. Congressional Republicans were dismissive of the budget he released today, but left the door open to changes in the way U.S. businesses are taxed. NPR's Scott Horsley starts us off this hour with the details.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] President Obama's budget calls for nearly $4 trillion in spending in the upcoming fiscal year. But before we get to that, there's still a question of how the government's going to pay some of its bills this year. Congressional Republicans opted not to fund the Department of Homeland Security for the full year to protest the President's unilateral action on immigration. The Department's current funding runs out at the end of this month, setting up a game of chicken between Congress and the White House. Obama decided to unveil his budget at Homeland Security headquarters where he urged lawmakers not to jeopardize the paychecks of more than a quarter million Department employees including border patrol agents and airport screeners.
[President Barack Obama:] The men and women of the America's Homeland Security apparatus do important work to protect us. And Republicans and Democrats in Congress should not be playing politics with that.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] When it comes to the 2016 budget, Republicans say it's the president who's playing politics. Obama wants to bust the automatic spending cap that Congress adopted two years ago with tens of billions of dollars in extra defense spending and domestic programs such as subsidized community college.
[President Barack Obama:] I want to work with Congress to replace mindless austerity with smart investments that strengthen America. And we can do so in a way that it is fiscally responsible.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Many of the spending proposals in the budget were already telegraphed in last month's state of the union address, but one we're just now seeing details of is the president's plan to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on roads, bridges and other transportation projects over the next six years. Jeff Zients, who chairs the National Economic Council at the White House, says much of that money would come from a one-time tax on corporate profits that U.S. companies have stashed overseas.
[Jeff Zients:] Infrastructure is traditionally a bipartisan issue. It's also a twofer in that it supports good paying middle class jobs right away, and at the same sign it sets us up for long-term competitiveness.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Republican Congressman Paul Ryan, who chairs the House Tax Writing Committee, says he's open to working with the White House to reform the corporate tax code. But Ryan, who spoke this weekend on NBC, is much less receptive to other parts of the president's budget including a proposal to raise the capital gains tax and extend that tax to inherited wealth.
[Congressman Paul Ryan:] What I think the president is trying to do here is to, again, exploit envy economics. This top-down redistribution doesn't work. We've been doing it for six years. Look it may make for good politics. It doesn't make for good economic growth.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] The White House acknowledged most its spending blueprint is likely to fail in the new Republican Congress. But it could help shape the debate for the 2016 presidential election. Scott Horsley, NPR News, the White House.

[Scott Simon:] A question that's been out there ever since President Obama opened up every job in the military to women the draft should women now be required to sign up for it? A federal judge has ruled that requiring only men to register with selective service is unconstitutional. The government's appealing that decision and drafting women is now being considered by a congressional blue-ribbon commission. NPR's David Welna has the story.
[David Welna, Byline:] The Pentagon's top brass have made clear they're on board with requiring women to sign up for a draft. Here's Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley when asked about that at the Senate Armed Services hearing three years ago.
[Mark Milley:] Senator, I think that all eligible and qualified men and women should register for the draft.
[David Welna, Byline:] The Marine Corps commandant also agreed. And what does Congress do? It sets up a commission to study the matter.
[Joe Heck:] Purpose of this hearing is to address an important question. Should selective service registration be expanded to include all Americans?
[David Welna, Byline:] That's former Republican Congressman Joe Heck. He chairs the National Commission on Military, National and Public Service. It's to advise Congress next year on whether women should have to sign up for a draft. At its first public hearing on the matter here in Washington this week, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Mark Coppenger is the first to speak on a panel of ardent opponents.
[Mark Coppenger:] Drafting women, registering from the draft is forcing things. And it goes contrary, I would say, to the order of nature.
[David Welna, Byline:] Women in the military, according to former Marine and Iraq war veteran Jude Eden, are wounded up to 10 times more often than men are.
[Jude Eden:] Very fit women on military standards are injured at such higher rates. Drafting civilian women would mean even higher turnover, diminished combat effectiveness, more casualties and fewer of both men and women coming home alive.
[David Welna, Byline:] And conservative author Ashley McGuire worries that, like society as a whole, the military is drifting, as she puts it, in a genderless direction.
[Ashley Mcguire:] The push to expand the selective service strikes me as yet another manifestation of the belief that women are only equal with men if we do exactly as men do.
[David Welna, Byline:] Then proponents of women signing up for the draft have their say. Katey Van Dam is a former Marine combat helicopter pilot. She tells the panel women now outnumber men in higher education and have many of the skills the military needs.
[Katey Van Dam:] To absolutely ignore over half the talent pool of over half the population, it seems ill-advised is the kindest way I can think to put it.
[David Welna, Byline:] For a University of Minnesota Law Professor Jill Hasday, excluding women from selective service registration is a clear case of sex discrimination.
[Jill Hasday:] Even if the average man is more likely than the average woman to meet the physical strength requirements for a particular combat position, some women will meet those qualifications as well and should not be excluded simply because they are women.
[David Welna, Byline:] That exclusion sends a bad message, says retired Army general Flora Darpino.
[Flora Darpino:] And so as long as you're going to have folks register, it has to be both genders because, if you do otherwise, you are sending a message that they're not equal citizens.
[David Welna, Byline:] One panelist has a radically different remedy. Diane Randall is an anti-war activist who heads the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
[Diane Randall:] The answer is not to require women to register but to end the requirement for selective service registration.
[David Welna, Byline:] One way or another, says law professor Hasday, the law will be changed.
[Jill Hasday:] I would say the best outcome would be if Congress did it because that reflects more of a national conversation from our democratically elected leaders. But if Congress doesn't act soon, this case is coming to the Supreme Court in the next few years. It's simply inevitable.
[David Welna, Byline:] And unlike whatever this commission ends up recommending to Congress, a high court decision would be binding. David Welna, NPR News, Washington.

[Renee Montagne:] Extreme jobs could call for extreme team building. Those are activities that build trust and stimulate communication in the office with a twist. Ron Roberts runs Action Centered Training. That's a company that specializes in building teams at corporations using beach balls, hula-hoops, and moving dollies.
[Mr. Ron Roberts:] To create little exercises that help people simulate workplace issues around communication, teamwork, leaderships, strategic planning, process improvement, and systems thinking.
[Renee Montagne:] And if that's not extreme enough, there's paint balling, NASCAR racing, and even repelling down a mountain face. Then there's his special, what you might call foul way of dealing with anger on the job.
[Mr. Ron Roberts:] Nothing is more valuable than the Anger Management Chicken. Now, you'll hear some music, and then I'm going to grab it around its neck because it's anger management chicken. And you'll hear what happens when you squeeze the chicken.
[Renee Montagne:] Ron Roberts runs Action Centered Training. That's today's last work in business. This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.

[Jacki Lyden:] We'll turn to Russia now and the city of Chelyabinsk, which has become a major transit point for drugs coming from Central Asia and Afghanistan. Narco trafficking has led to a dramatic rise in drug use and with this, an explosion of HIV. Local officials estimate one in every 100 residents is now infected, twice the national average in Russia. The government was slow to address the issue of HIV. And as NPR's Anne Garrels reports, the area is paying a steep price.
[Anne Garrels:] Every night, a gray van from the city-backed AIDS center pulls into a different neighborhood. The team inside includes a doctor, a psychologist, and a former addict who now works for the Protestant Rehab Center. They offer blood tests and counseling. A young heroine addict accompanied by her child slides open the door to get her results. She's HIV negative, but positive for hepatitis C. Dr. Natalia Golubia gives advice on what to do next.
[Dr. Natalia Golubia:] [Through translator] 30 percent of those who come in for tests are positive for HIV. Almost all have hepatitis C.
[Anne Garrels:] The team also offers a needle exchange program, though Pavol Bimacoff, the team's 21-year old psychologist, says they don't talk about this publicly.
[Dr. Pavol Bimacoff:] [Through translator] Many people here are against it, and we don't want protests. Many think drug addicts and those infected with HIV should be isolated. Despite a recent information campaign, many still don't know enough, and many just don't want to know.
[Anne Garrels:] Compass, the city's AIDS center, is run by a hip young doctor, Sergai Avdeyef. He offers support groups, sends the mobile van out every night, and provides a few beds to former addicts just out of prison who are at risk on the streets.
[Dr. Sergai Avdeyef:] [Through translator] We only have five beds, but at least we can offer them a break and begin their case management.
[Anne Garrels:] He compares attitudes here to the backwoods of Arkansas, which he once visited. Battling prejudice and ignorance has been hard.
[Dr. Sergai Avdeyef:] It's not just the school administration, which can be a problem. It's the kids. Kids are cruel. We are most afraid of parents of children who can hurt and affect a child, so it's important this information remains confidential so a child can go to school.
[Anne Garrels:] The government's programs have focused on drug addicts, but Avdeyef says the hidden gay community is also at risk.
[Dr. Sergai Avdeyef:] Homosexuality is still considered a sin here. I don't know any openly gay men. Helping to find those who are infected is hard. You think it's not a problem, but it is.
[Anne Garrels:] Dr. Avdeyef attributes the good care now in place to his mentor, the head doctor at the Regional Infection Center, Alexander Vizcuzoff. He diagnosed the first case of AIDS here in 1990.
[Dr. Alexander Vizcuzoff:] [Through translator] The first patient was a homosexual. The authorities did not think it was much of a problem.
[Anne Garrels:] Vizcuzoff says the government waited six long years to respond. Faced with an economic crisis, officials had other priorities, and he didn't get necessary funds for medicine or prevention. In the meantime, drug use exploded. Addicts infected their partners and unborn children. He says one in every five prisoners now has AIDS, with many more probably HIV-positive. Some here say the government only truly got mobilized when the children of some senior officials got involved with drugs. Vizcuzoff now has all the medicines he needs to treat his patients for free, and he's constantly on the road educating the region's doctors and community leaders.
[Dr. Alexander Vizcuzoff:] I just met with the local Muslim leader and the Orthodox priest in a village where there are several new cases. The mulla was convinced AIDS is a curse from God. He now understands the problem.
[Anne Garrels:] He's drawn together specialists who help AIDS patients with legal and emotional problems, and he's clearly much beloved by his patients. 28-year-old Renad Pazvoy, a former drug addict with AIDS, comes in for blood tests. This thin, young man in jeans and a black baseball cap greets the doctor with a warm hug.
[Dr. Alexander Vizcuzoff:] He knows his blood counts. I love it when I can talk to a patient about details! When he understands his levels, it means he is involved in his treatment.
[Anne Garrels:] Renad, who lives in an outlying town, says he can't reveal he has AIDS or he would immediately lose his job.
[Mr. Renad Pazvoy:] [Through translator] This is not the West. This is the Urals. By law, they can't fire me, but if I told anyone in town, there would be real problems, and it's not going to change any time soon.
[Anne Garrels:] The AIDS program is understaffed. Vizcuzoff is worried about the impact of yet another financial crisis.
[Dr. Alexander Vizcuzoff:] These medicines are too expensive for people to buy on their own. Without them, my patients will die.
[Anne Garrels:] At Compass, Dr. Avdeyef invites me to come back to Chelyabinsk in another 10 or even 20 years, when the region might be more tolerant, qhen those with HIV are not afraid, when there's a gay bar, and when everyone who needs treatment can openly receive it. Anne Garrels, NPR News, Chelyabinsk.

[Melissa Block:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
[Robert Siegel:] And I'm Robert Siegel. Senator John McCain won't make his formal announcement that he's running for president until next month, but he is already campaigning hard in the early primary states, including the one that cost him the Republican nomination in 2000. NPR's Mara Liasson spent the weekend traveling with the senator in South Carolina, and she has this report.
[Mara Liasson:] Seven years ago this month, John McCain beat George Bush by 18 points in New Hampshire only to lose the nomination to Bush in South Carolina. Now McCain is back and working hard to appeal to the social conservatives who rejected him in 2000. On Sunday, he was in Spartanburg being introduced by former Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating, a hero to many conservatives.
[Mr. Frank Keating:] I feel very strongly about the social issues. I know this is an individual who will stand for conservative values, who has been pro-life for 21 years. He is the only candidate in the race that is a true blue Reagan conservative and that's why I'm for him.
[Mara Liasson:] After the introduction, McCain tells the crowd that he wants to overturn Roe v. Wade, a more emphatic statement of his anti-abortion view than in 2000. He also promises to appoint conservative judges and veto any bill that has pork barrel projects. At the same time, he's blunt about his break with conservative orthodoxy on global warming and immigration. But the main topic here and at every stop is the war in Iraq and McCain's support for President Bush's troop surge.
[Senator John Mccain:] I can't guarantee success though, but I can guarantee the consequences of failure: chaos, genocide in the region, and a situation where America would probably have to come back.
[Mara Liasson:] South Carolina is second to none in its support for the military, and here McCain's position on the war is not challenged. The questions point in a different direction.
[Unidentified Woman:] My nephew, Jay Patch, right here from Spartanburg, South Carolina, just left 12 hours ago. He's in the Marines. His mom and dad are really taking it hard. And we're just really, really concerned that John Murtha, that Nancy Pelosi, all the Democrats that took over are going to cut funds. It's like saying we don't care. We don't care that you're over there fighting and dying. They can't even get paid? I mean, give me a break.
[Senator John Mccain:] What you saw on the floor of the United States Senate was a publicity stunt on the part of the Democrat majority, but it was also a precursor to an effort to have some kind of irresponsible idea that we could somehow impose benchmarks on troops as to whether they can be deployed or not and what funding and what readiness.
[Mara Liasson:] McCain's referring to a plan by House member John Murtha to require a high level of training and readiness for troops assigned to Iraq, a plan Murtha hopes will make higher troop levels there impossible. McCain knows his political future is lashed to the president's policy, for better or worse. He knows this could be a problem for him in a general election, but South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who's McCain's oldest ally in the state, says it's helping him with Republican primary voters.
[Senator Lindsey Graham:] What rubs people the wrong way is that at times John is seen as straying from the party line. But the fact that he's leading on this war at a time when we need leadership and he's staying by the president when very few Republicans are is scoring great points with the Republicans of South Carolina. So the war transcends all other issues.
[Mara Liasson:] At the Sugar and Spice diner, hundreds of Republicans packed themselves in to see McCain.
[Unidentified Man:] I'm all for you all the way.
[Mara Liasson:] This year, McCain is trying to convince voters that he is President Bush's logical successor. Mike Piglard did not vote for McCain in 2000.
[Mr. Mike Piglard:] I was a George Bush supporter and still am. I think John McCain is probably about the closest to George Bush of options that we have.
[Mara Liasson:] Justin Bracket is a student at Furman University, but he says he's old enough to remember how nasty the primary got in 2000.
[Mr. Justin Bracket:] I remember it. I've got to say what happened to Senator McCain then was a shame and I wish he was president today, actually. I think that the way his reputation was tarnished in such a way was just unbelievably ridiculous for a political campaign to get that ugly.
[Mara Liasson:] Bracket remembers attacks such as leaflets saying McCain had a black child. In fact, McCain does have an adopted daughter from Bangladesh. This year, however, McCain has inherited the old Bush organization in South Carolina, and while he has not changed his stand for stem cell research or against a federal anti-gay marriage amendment, he has changed his approach to social conservatives themselves. In Spartanburg, he made a brief appearance at a church-sponsored abstinence-only rally. After a warm up act of Christian rap music, he was introduced to 1500 evangelical teenagers and their parents.
[Unidentified Man #2:] He believes in young people and we're honored to have him address this call for abstinence tonight. Senator, we welcome you to Spartanburg, South Carolina.
[Mara Liasson:] McCain will have plenty of company courting social conservatives. Mitt Romney is one rival working that vein in South Carolina and soon there will be more, says Winthrop University political scientist Scott Huffman.
[Professor Scott Huffman:] There's some real social conservatives getting in the race Brownback, Duncan Hunter and conservatives are going to see a wide variety of people that they can spread their votes out among. And the anti-McCain folks will probably and this is what McCain's hoping divvy up their votes among the other social conservatives.
[Mara Liasson:] And if they do, McCain could find the 40 percent of the vote he got here in 2000 will be more than enough to lead the pack in 2008. Mara Liasson, NPR News.

[Noah Adams:] After we read the drought study news this morning, we called around the Southwest for reaction. We found a car wash in Dallas, Texas. Mel Brose has run the White Rock Car Bath for 50 years. He says, in the long term, the drought could be good for his business.
[Mr. Mel Brose:] Because a lot of people won't wash their car in the driveway, and they're real attuned to saving water and things like that. And in a car wash, we can wash a car using less water than the man can, you know, wash it in his driveway.
[Noah Adams:] Several years back, the city of Dallas imposed water restrictions on its residents. So, for example, during the summertime, people can't water their lawns from 10:00 in the morning until 6:00 PM, and some car washes have installed water conservation devices. Mel Brose says that would be too expensive for his business.
[Mr. Mel Brose:] We started 50 years ago, and at that time, they didn't offer a reclaimed system. And to put it in in our car wash now would be cost prohibitive.
[Mr. Robert Cullick:] This is Robert Cullick, spokesman for the Lower Colorado River Authority.
[Chadwick:] His organization supplies water to Central Texas, and it's launched a campaign called Water IQ. It uses TV ads and billboards, even signs at gas stations, trying to tell Texans about where their water comes from and how little of it there may be. For instance, one ad pictures a dry lump of meat with the following slogan.
[Mr. Cohen:] This meatloaf is not the only thing that's parched and burned this summer.
[Noah Adams:] From Texas to Utah now, we talked to Jim Ekker there. He's president of a cattleman's association in the state. He has a registered herd of cattle on his private land. He lives in Vernon, Utah. That's 70 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, and we asked him about the drought and how it could affect his business.
[Mr. Jim Ekker:] Obviously, the water's a big portion of that for the crops we grow and for the pasture and stuff for the livestock. And so anytime we live in a pretty dry area as it is, and so when it's forecast and we see that we don't have the precip there, why we're obviously concerned.
[Chadwick:] That part of the country's already facing water supply issues. Western Utah, where Jim Ekker lives, shares some of its water with Nevada. And Mr. Ekker not happy that the Southern Nevada Water Association plans to pull more water out of aquifers in his state to supply the city of Las Vegas.
[Mr. Jim Ekker:] I understand the growth. We have the growth here in Utah everywhere, too, and the demands for water just are increasing daily. And, you know, we obviously don't want to see more go out of our state, and it would affect ranchers in western Utah, and I wouldn't want to see that, but I'm sure it's going to.
[Chadwick:] Voices from the Southwest on the drought.

[Melissa Block:] It was the tumultuous end of autocratic rule and the hopeful birth of a new Egypt. Reporter Robert Worth was there in Cairo in February of 2011 to witness the wild moment when news spread that President Hosni Mubarak had resigned.
[Robert Worth:] [Reading] In the street, a man running past almost knocked me down, screaming at the top of his lungs our freedom, our freedom. A few yards away, another man, dressed in laborer's clothes, arrived at the edge of the square on Talaat Harb Street and dropped to his hands and knees, kissing the filthy asphalt. A young girl in a head scarf leapt onto a car and began shaking her hips in an ecstatic dance. The crowds in the square were surging around wildly as if drunk.
[Melissa Block:] That's Robert Worth reading from his new book "A Rage For Order." He covered the revolutions of the Arab Spring for The New York Times in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria, a time, he writes, when he saw the world being remade before his eyes. His chapter on Libya is titled "Revenge." When you write about Libya after the fall Moammar Gadhafi, you focus on a militia interrogator named Nasser. And he ends up interrogating the Gadhafi loyalists who had tortured prisoners and even killed his own brother. What was that like?
[Robert Worth:] That was one of the most intense moments I've ever had as a reporter. They had created their own militia quarters in the basement. They had this makeshift jail. And they Nasser, who had always been kind of a black sheep of his family, was in a deep state of grief about his brother who'd been the leading son of the family a successful pediatrician and a very, very brave man. And Nasser wanted to sort of vindicate himself somehow by creating some sort of justice out of this. And that was why he refused to take revenge. He had this guy in his in the palm of his hands who had killed his own brother. But he insisted on treating him with what he saw as justice.
[Melissa Block:] The prisoners who had been held by these militias and turned over to the government what happened to them?
[Robert Worth:] They were kept for a long time in expectation of a real government forming. But finally, when the civil conflict got worse and worse in 2013, they were set free and given guns. And they ended up joining in the civil war, and I haven't heard anything. I mean, Libya's so chaotic now that it can be difficult to track any given person. But last I heard, they were still fighting.
[Melissa Block:] Yeah. You write in the epilogue about what happened to one of the leaders of the youth movement in Egypt, the movement that helped topple the Mubarak regime. It's a young man named Ahmed Darrawi. He had helped lead the revolution in Tahrir Square. He ran for Parliament and lost. And then he disappeared. What did you find out about what happened to him?
[Robert Worth:] Gradually, when he saw the polarization taking place and he saw the people who'd been together in Tahrir Square attacking each other in the street, he progressively lost hope. He became very, very depressed and then eventually fled without telling any of his relatives where he was going. And he went to Syria, and he ultimately joined ISIS. And he died in a suicide bombing.
[Melissa Block:] How do you account for that? How do you try to make sense of that journey from a young man presumably thinking about democracy thinking about a democratic change in Egypt joining ISIS and signing on with a jihadist group like that?
[Robert Worth:] I think it partly is a measure of just how transformative that moment in Tahrir Square was. People who had become resigned to living under a dictatorship, to, you know, having reduced expectations, to being surrounded by corruption and misery and lack of hope, suddenly saw the possibility for something much, much better. And they you know, Ahmed Darrawi essentially stopped working at his job he had a very good job because he thought this was the moment. You know, this was his lifetime chance to make something better, and then it all came crashing to the ground. And I think that sense of disappointment was so extreme that he went and searched for something that was, you know, a vision of the future that was equally radical and uncompromising. And of course, it was totally, totally different from what he'd been fighting for in Tahrir Square.
[Melissa Block:] I'm thinking about what you write in the introduction about what a Syrian friend of yours told you when you told her you were going to be writing this book about the Arab Spring and what happened. What did she tell you? What did she not want you to do?
[Robert Worth:] She said please don't make it seem as if we're just condemned to repeat the past, which I think, you know, as with the Balkans conflict in the '90s, there was this fear that you know, that the rest of the world will look at them and say well, these are these awful, ancient sectarian cleavages, what can you expect? You know, it was bound to happen.
[Melissa Block:] Yeah.
[Robert Worth:] And I don't think that's true. I think what you had here was a group of dictators who fought ferociously after these uprisings spread to retain their power, to claw back their power. And they used sect. They used everything they could to divide people again.
[Melissa Block:] That's Robert Worth. He's contributing writer with The New York Times Magazine. And his new book is "A Rage For Order." Robert, thanks so much.
[Robert Worth:] Oh, it's a pleasure. Thank you.

[Scott Simon:] As the Atlantic hurricane season gets underway, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, people are still mostly thinking about the last one. Two powerful storms, Irma and Maria, hit the islands last year, causing massive destruction. Nine months after those storms, the national park on St. John needs to rebuild beach facilities. NPR's Greg Allen reports that volunteers are doing much of the work.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] Francis Bay is a popular beach on St. John with picnic facilities and a handicap-accessible boardwalk through the mangroves. Joe Kessler says it was hit hard by the storm surge from Hurricane Irma.
[Joe Kessler:] You can see on that tree back there how high the...
[Greg Allen, Byline:] Right, how high the debris is 10 feet, 12 feet maybe.
[Joe Kessler:] All this boardwalk was up on top there.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] The National Hurricane Center isn't sure how high the storm surge was in the Virgin Islands because a key gauge stopped working. But here at Francis Bay, Kessler says the water toppled trees, washed away much of the beach and destroyed the boardwalk.
[Joe Kessler:] The sections were tossed everywhere. It looked like a roller coaster. Things were topsy-turvy. It was beyond impassable.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] Kessler is president of the Friends of Virgin Islands National Park. The group works with a staff to preserve and protect the beaches trails and coral reefs of one of the nation's most beautiful parks. In the months since the storm, Kessler's group has been busy clearing down trees, replacing picnic benches and pavilions and rebuilding the boardwalk at Francis Bay. Much of the work was done by volunteers.
[Joe Kessler:] We had one group came from Portland, Maine. Several of them were good carpenters. A couple of them were master carpenters. And they helped us wrap this all up.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] The national park on St. John covers most of the island and attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. Since last year's storms, the number of visitors is down because the island's largest hotels remain closed. The park's beaches and trails are all open but not as they were. On Leinster Bay, before the storm, Kessler says the trail we're walking on was essentially a road, popular with hikers, dog walkers and runners.
[Joe Kessler:] Now we're down to a kind of a winding path where you can see all the trees that have been knocked over, those that have been cut out of the way so that we do have a path.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] The path jogs around obstacles, including a 40-foot sailboat marooned on the beach since the storm. Boats damaged in the hurricanes, many since abandoned, have been a major headache for the park. After months of negotiations, the Park Service reached an agreement with the Navy to begin removing dozens of sunken vessels from park waters. Further along the trail, we come upon a group of volunteers clearing brush around the remains of an old, abandoned sugar plantation.
[Ashley Wagner:] We're just clearing out debris from around the ruins here, sniffing out some of the invasive things that had taken over, I think, before anyway.
[Joe Kessler:] Ashley Wagner is from Connecticut, taking time out from a vacation with her family to help restore the park. She's a regular visitor. This is her first time back on St. John since the hurricanes. She was surprised how good the island looks.
[Ashley Wagner:] I have seen a lot of turtles over at Maho. So it seems like life is coming back. With little, green sprouts coming up everywhere, even where all the mangroves are just totally dead and decimated, you're seeing the little, green shoots of life. Like, the plants are trying.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] Nearby, Tracy Slaktowicz was chopping weeds. He came to St. John from his home in Denver to help a friend rebuild. He took a day off from that to work here.
[Tracy Slaktowicz:] And it's cool. The spirit and the vibe on St. John's right now is everybody's kind of just pitching in and making it happen.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] There's still lots of work to do in the national park. The main campground and some other visitor services remain closed. Some park employees still haven't returned because their housing was damaged. But like the rest of the Virgin Islands, the national park is slowly coming back. Greg Allen, NPR News, St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands.

[Steve Inskeep:] So there's a plan for rebuilding New Orleans. Now here's a plan for rebuilding the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Commentator Paul Light is author of "The Four Pillars of High Performance," which outlines his strategy for strengthening organizations like FEMA.
[Paul Light:] Contrary to the now conventional wisdom, FEMA was not the victim of the Homeland Security merger. Flooded by inexperienced political appointees at the top, the agency already ranked dead last on the list of best places to work in government well before Katrina hit. According to the federal government's own surveys, employees reported sharp declines in morale and resources in early 2002. Less than a third said they held their new leaders in high regard. The concerns are familiar across government where employees complain about the lack of resources and the politicalization of even trivial decisions, but the FEMA opinions are the worst I have ever seen, period. FEMA had only recently rebounded from years as a political dumping ground for campaign aides with no place else to go. It failed miserably after Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992. Eight years of hard work brought the agency up to peak performance. Then inexperienced appointees brought the agency back down. Katrina shows yet again how important effective leadership is to government performance. On the day Katrina hit, half of FEMA's top political jobs were occupied by executives without any meaningful disaster experience. Seven of the top civil service jobs were filled by acting appointees. It's no wonder FEMA hesitated as the catastrophe took hold. Luckily, the 2002 surveys also show that FEMA employees are deeply committed to their agency's mission. The vast majority know why their jobs matter and two-thirds say they have the skills and training to succeed. The challenge now is to mobilize that commitment and give every employee the training and resources to do their jobs. FEMA still has a long way to go in rebuilding its reputation. Putting qualified leaders at the top is a critical start, so is focusing the agency on its primary mission as a fail-safe when local and state governments call. If there's a silver lining in Katrina, it's the possibility that the White House and Senate will finally start asking harder questions about appointee qualifications. Too many senators are willing to give the president's nominees the benefit of the doubt. That may work in some positions where experience doesn't matter but not at FEMA.
[Steve Inskeep:] That's a commentary from Paul Light. He's a professor at New York University. This is NPR News.

[Rachel Martin:] Admiral William McRaven should be dead by now, but he's alive, physically fit, mentally sharp and recently retired. McCraven is best known as the Navy SEAL commander who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. It's one of the tales he recounts in his new memoir, titled "Sea Stories: My Life In Special Forces". Steve Inskeep asked him about a routine parachute jump in San Diego in the year 2001. Shortly after jumping out, McCraven says something was clearly wrong.
[William H Mcraven:] And all of a sudden, I realize the guy to the left is underneath me. And he pulls. So in relative terms, I'm moving at about 120 miles an hour towards the ground, and he is, in relative terms, stopped as he pulled his parachute. Well, he pulls his parachute, and I collide with his parachute little bit like getting hit by an air bag. So I get hit. I kind of tumble through the parachute. But I'm stunned. I'm not exactly sure what's happened. I don't know whether I've been knocked unconscious. I don't know whether I've been dazed. And now I'm tumbling out of control towards the ground. So I reached for my rip cord, pulled the rip cord, and the pilot chute comes out of the back of the parachute. Well, because I was tumbling, the pilot chute came out and wrapped around one leg, and then another part of the parachute called the riser came out and wrapped around my other leg. So now I am tangled up in my parachute, falling towards the ground. The good news is, as I fell a couple hundred feet or a thousand feet or so, the parachute finally opened. The bad news is, when a parachute opens, it blossoms. And when it did, the leg with the pilot chute went one direction, and the leg with the risers went the other direction and kind of snapped me in two. So it broke my pelvis several inches apart, you know, ripped muscles out of my stomach and my legs, fractured my back, and I landed about two miles from the drop zone. And fortunately, you know, the guys found me, took me to the hospital. And you know, after a couple days, they pinned me and plated me and got me going.
[Steve Inskeep, Byline:] If I don't mistake this, your boss, Admiral Eric Olson, kind of bypassed a form that would say whether you were physically fit or not. Is that right?
[William H Mcraven:] Yeah. I never asked him the specific details. And I think he was probably glad I didn't ask him. Suffice to say, I'm not sure whatever happened to that paperwork, but I continued on in the service, and some things are better left unasked.
[Steve Inskeep, Byline:] You refer to remembering this incident, this kindness of effectively overlooking the regulations, you think, and how you behaved later as a commander, as the wars began in Iraq and Afghanistan. And you write, [reading] "not a week went by without some wounded soldier pleading with me to keep them in special operations they didn't need that second leg. They could see fine out of just one eye. They shot better with a prosthetic hand."
[William H Mcraven:] In Iraq and Afghanistan, of course, you saw these horrific injuries. When I went to visit guys in the hospital, they always said, I want to get back in the fight.
[Steve Inskeep, Byline:] You write that somehow your staff sometimes lost people's paperwork.
[William H Mcraven:] [Laughter] Again, some things are better not questioned.
[Steve Inskeep, Byline:] You're in a command position in Iraq, in a senior position in Iraq. How was it that you came to be inside Iraq, though, on the day that Saddam Hussein was captured?
[William H Mcraven:] I had arrived in Iraq in October of 2003, and we were hunting Saddam Hussein. We'd had a lot of leads on him, but frankly, none of the leads had panned out. And then as we start to get into the December timeframe, we had another lead. And some folks were a little dismissive. Some folks believe that maybe it was possible. But that particular day, I actually had a meeting down in Qatar. I had to fly from Baghdad down to Al Udeid. I got on the plane with my aide, Captain Hank Henry. And as we're taking off from the C-130 and we're kind of getting out of Baghdad, all of a sudden it hits me this is going to be the day we're getting him. There was something about the new intelligence, something about the confidence of the intelligence, something about everything. So I grabbed Hank and I said, Hank, turn the plane around; we got to get back to Baghdad. And sure enough, by the time we got back, the great Army Special Operations unit had gotten the lead. The lead, in fact, had led them to Saddam. And you've probably seen the iconic photo of the spider hole. The one source we had that led us to Saddam kind of pointed in the general direction. The guy stomped around on the floor and found this trapdoor, if you will. They pull it up, and there's Saddam. And he raised his hands, and he says, you know, I'm Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, and I'm here to negotiate.
[Steve Inskeep, Byline:] He wasn't in a very good position to negotiate, I suppose.
[William H Mcraven:] Yeah, he wasn't in a real good position to negotiate.
[Steve Inskeep, Byline:] How have people in the military that you have known dealt with the reality that they put their lives on the line, in some places lost arms or legs, for this purpose that turned out to be false?
[William H Mcraven:] You know, I think the military guys what I know is, you know, we go where the nation asks us to go, and we do what the nation requires us to do. And sometimes, you know, not our place to overthink it and to trust and rely on the decision-makers who were elected by the American people. But having said that, I mean, the troops are thoughtful. They are concerned about these things. But here's what I'll tell you. Late in 2010, you know, we were getting ready to pull out of Iraq by early 2011, for the most part, and yet, my guys were still conducting operations in downtown Baghdad. And they were going out every night, you know, trying to stop suicide bombers. And at one point in time, a senior chief petty officer, Navy SEAL senior chief petty officer, he said, Admiral, I don't get it; why are we still doing this? And I thought it was a fair question, and it's a question that needed to be answered. And what I told him is, you never know how the missions you conduct are going to change the lives of the people that you save. You know, if we go out and stop one suicide bomber from blowing up a market in Baghdad where a hundred people are killed, who are those hundred people? Will one of those hundred people be the person that cures cancer? Will they be the next president or prime minister of Iraq? Will they be, you know, somebody of importance? Will they just be a great mother or father that raises another kid who raises another kid? So, you know, there are times when you have to realize that the work you do, if it is good and honorable and it is trying to save people's lives, you have to take some comfort in the fact that that is good work.
[Steve Inskeep, Byline:] Admiral, one other thing occurs to me. We noted early on that you managed to get through a severe injury because of a commanding officer who maybe bent the rules a little bit, although you never confirmed that.
[William H Mcraven:] [Laughter].
[Steve Inskeep, Byline:] You tell story after story after story in this book. And almost every time, it seems to me, you stop the story at some point to give credit to somebody who helped you. What are you trying to tell me there?
[William H Mcraven:] You know, nobody goes through life and is successful all on their own. And I certainly didn't make it to where I was as a result of my own wonderful talents. It was really about the people that were around me, the people that helped me when I stumbled, the people that picked me up and dusted me off and said, you're going to be OK; keep moving. There were a lot of people that get you to where you are.
[Steve Inskeep, Byline:] Admiral William H. McRaven is author of "Sea Stories: My Life In Special Operations." Thanks so much.
[William H Mcraven:] My pleasure. Thanks.

[Steve Inskeep:] It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
[Linda Wertheimer:] And I'm Linda Wertheimer, in for Renee Montagne. In Egypt, the standoff between the ruling military council and demonstrators has taken over the streets of central Cairo. As we've been reporting, protestors rejected the military council's pledge to hand over power once a newly elected president and parliament are in place this summer. The protestor's demands are reminiscent of those that led to the ouster of Hosni Mubarak in February. They want an immediate end to military rule. NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson has been following a massive march in Cairo today. She has the latest. Soraya, first of all, tell us where you are and what you see.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] I'm in Tahrir Square, where protestors who were marching to the streets of Cairo have arrived. The Square is pretty much completely full, all sorts of people. And already, they're carrying signs denouncing the military rulers' decision to appoint a former Mubarak prime minister to be the new head of what they're calling the salvation government. This will be a caretaker government that would run the country until elections are held. They've also renamed the street where all the clashes have occurred this past week Martyr Street. This is a street where dozens of people were killed protestors were killed in clashes with the security forces, who were in front of the Interior Ministry.
[Linda Wertheimer:] What can you tell us about the man who is supposed to take over the government and what the crowd's reaction to him is?
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] His name is Kamal El-Ganzouri, and he's a former prime minister who was in the Mubarak regime during the 1990s. He did distance himself from the regime. He was one of the few members of his government that resigned. But the problem is for the people in this square and many other Egyptians, he's the remnant of the old regime. They want to be done with anybody who is associated with the generals, with the former president. So they really would like a fresh start. Some suggestions that have been put forward today by protesters include forming an interim civilian council that would include some potential presidential candidates that represent different walks of life that would be free of past associations with the Mubarak regime, or at least largely so, and have them take this government, or take this transition period until a parliament and a president can be elected.
[Linda Wertheimer:] What about reports that the demonstrations are spreading beyond Cairo now?
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] This is something that's been happening all week. It's important to note that there is a very large demonstration in a Cairo suburb called Abbasseya, and this is a pro-ruling military council demonstration. This is an impoverished neighborhood, a lot of frustrated, unemployed workers. They are out there in numbers that appear to be similar to what we're seeing in Tahrir Square.
[Linda Wertheimer:] What you're telling me is that there are competing protests now in Cairo?
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] There are competing protests in Cairo. And I think what this demonstrates is the very difficult and divisive period that is going to exist here until elections are completed.
[Linda Wertheimer:] NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, reporting from Cairo. Thank you.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] You're welcome, Linda.

[Kelly Mcevers:] There is nothing like a good book recommendation, and we have been collecting recommendations from booksellers across the country for our summer series, Pack These Pages. Janet Webster Jones says you can't ever pack enough pages.
[Janet Webster Jones:] I just encourage people to step into books, read them and enjoy them. They are our best portable, low-tech thing to read that there is in the whole world.
[Kelly Mcevers:] For 41 years, Janet Jones was a teacher and administrator in Detroit, her hometown. And now she owns Source Booksellers there. Her first pick is about balance.
[Janet Webster Jones:] I just love this little book. First of all, it has a bunch of balloons on the cover. And it's called "Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts For An Infantile Age" by Susan Neiman. Susan Neiman is a philosopher. And I'm particularly interested in that because I have a daughter that's a philosopher, so [LAUGHTER] we love philosophy. One of the things that she says is that maturity [reading] means finding the courage to live in a world of painful uncertainty without giving in to dogma or despair. A grown-up, Neiman writes, helps to move the world closer to what it should be while never losing sight of what it is. I really like that because I'm a grown-up and I like to practice being a grown-up, but I also keep my childhoodness with me, too. So that's, I think, a really good one to have for the summer. So we always have books on history and culture, so we have a book called "The Warmth Of Other Suns." This is a very well-known book. Isabel Wilkerson is the author. And it's an epic story of America's great migration. And I have to say that when I read this book, I had not thought of my parents as part of that migration. But they did yeah, they did come from the South. They happened to have met in college in Atlanta, Ga. And they're both graduates of classes of 1929. They've, of course, passed on by now. But I never thought of them in that regard. So we have a book on food because we do allow cookbooks. It's called "A History Of Food In 100 Recipes." This is from England and is from William Sitwell. And he writes about these many different recipes that we're really familiar with and talks about the history of them where they came from, how they got going. He has one called earth apples, potatoes fried and simmered in bacon bits. He talks about broth. It's he has a pair of pies, so he talks about pears in pies and how all that came about.
[Kelly Mcevers:] For Janet Jones' full collection of pages to pack this summer, go to our Facebook page or head over to Twitter, where you'll find us @npratc.

[Robert Siegel:] President Obama met at the White House today with the CEOs of several of the nation's biggest banks and financial institutions: JP Morgan Chase, American Express, Freddie Mac, among many others. The White House said he intended to urge everyone to look beyond our own short-term interests to the wider set of obligations we have to each other in order for America to succeed. Well, here's an increasingly popular short-term interest among banks that took money from the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program, the TARP: they want to give it back. Reporter Saskia Scholtes of the Financial Times wrote this week about the race to pay back the government, and she joins us from New York. Welcome back to the program.
[Ms. Saskia Scholtes:] Thank you.
[Robert Siegel:] How is it that, suddenly, dollars from the Treasury are what everyone wants to get rid off?
[Ms. Saskia Scholtes:] Well, the dollars have come with a lot of strings attached. Not least those on executive compensation, which began with the CEO and then the top five lieutenants at the bank, and then stretched to the top 20 lieutenants. And now, we have this issue of whether bonuses are going to be taxed at 90 percent, and that was passed in the House last week. The Senate is looking at a similar proposal. Heads look like they may be beginning to cool, but it's still a big worry about whether you can pay talent and keep the TARP money.
[Robert Siegel:] Yeah. I saw an item on the news wires today from Shore Bancshares, which got $25 million from the TARP, wants to give it back. They say it's no longer the program they signed up for, which they thought was for healthy institutions. Sound familiar to you?
[Ms. Saskia Scholtes:] That's very familiar. And actually, there are a lot of small banks, like Shore Bancshares, that has put in their formal applications to return the money: Bank of Marin, Bancorp, Iberia Bank, Signature Bank, the list goes on. It's about, only amounts to about 700 or so million dollars at the moment, combined of money that has formally applied to return.
[But For The Most Part, The Explanations Are The Same:] the terms have changed, we need to be able to compensate our teams of people, our business model was built on it, and we thought this was the healthy banks and we're doing just fine, thank you very much.
[Robert Siegel:] You wrote about the case of Northern Trust, which evidently wants to give back the TARP money it received.
[Ms. Saskia Scholtes:] Mm-hmm, yes. Northern Trust got a lot of heat from the media, amongst others, for hosting a series of sponsored golf tournaments and tennis tournaments and that sort of thing, whilst also receiving government money, and it became quite scandalous. And Northern Trust is a pretty profitable institution, hasn't had too many troubles, and they don't see any reason to keep money that is causing them all this trouble.
[Robert Siegel:] Now, I want you to explain a word here. You say that these institutions are applying to return their money to the Treasury. It's an odd kind of loan where you have to ask may I now pay you back.
[Ms. Saskia Scholtes:] Well, that's true. But remember that the initial purpose of the TARP money was to make sure that all banks were well capitalized, and that even healthy banks would have money to lend out to consumers, like you and me. So in order to return the money, the Treasury and the regulators want to be absolutely certain that the banks involved are well capitalized and can continue to make loans to people, like you and me, and are not going to otherwise constrain their lending activities simply because they want to take their bonus money.
[Robert Siegel:] You reported that Bank of America, a big recipient here, is interested in giving back the money as soon as it's practical. What does that mean, as soon as it's practical?
[Ms. Saskia Scholtes:] Well, the first step is they have to pass the stress test. And so the earliest that they'd be able to pay back the money, provided they get approval and they pass the stress test, would be late April. The approval may take a little longer remember that Bank of America is in the process of digesting its acquisition of Merrill Lynch. And so the regulators may feel that there are more capital hits to come out of the woodwork. But in terms of the sort of realistic timeline for an approval, it would be no sooner than late April.
[Robert Siegel:] It seems to be something paradoxical here, that if I'm a big bank and I've got $10 billion from the Treasury, that's supposed to shore me up and make me healthier. But if it implies to everybody else that I'm not healthy, then it's undoing the very job it's been sent there to do.
[Ms. Saskia Scholtes:] Well, the initial idea behind the TARP was that all banks, including healthy banks, would have to take it so that there wouldn't be any stigma attached with having the TARP money. And now, we're seeing that logic in reverse, whereby everyone wants to rush to say, I can pay it back now. You know, the regulators are going to have to sort the wheat from the chaff here. And eventually, there will be some who pay it back and look good, and some who are unable to pay it back and will be punished in the process.
[Robert Siegel:] Reporter Saskia Scholtes of the Financial Times, thanks for talking with us.
[Ms. Saskia Scholtes:] Thank you so much.

[Audie Cornish:] A year ago tomorrow, Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas. More than 60 people died in the state as the powerful storm pummeled Corpus Christi, inundated the fishing town of Rockport and stalled over Houston, where it dumped nearly 60 inches of rain. Now, a year later, Houston looks mostly back to normal. But as Laurie Johnson of Houston Public Media reports, that may not be the case.
[Laurie Johnson, Byline:] You know that saying everything's bigger in Texas? In this case, it's true. Hurricane Harvey dumped the most rain from a storm ever recorded in the U.S. And most of it fell in metro Houston, where more than 4.7 million people crisscross thousands of neighborhoods and strip centers and miles of freeways. Most of those freeways, by the way, were underwater. Here's a Houston Public Media reporter at the time.
[Unidentified Reporter:] Now I'm looking at a black Jeep down in the water. The windshield wipers are still on.
[Laurie Johnson, Byline:] More than 165,000 homes flooded in Harris County. One of them belonged to Porfirio De Leon. He along with his wife and six children had just remodeled their house when Harvey hit.
[Porfirio De Leon:] The only thing that was there we were able to save was just the studs. And because of the mold that the water created, we just had to destroy it completely.
[Laurie Johnson, Byline:] A year later, they're still working to rebuild.
[Porfirio De Leon:] Hopefully we'll never have to have any other type of disaster at this magnitude.
[Laurie Johnson, Byline:] But another major flood in Houston is very likely.
[Jim Blackburn:] We do not admit that we have a flooding problem.
[Laurie Johnson, Byline:] Jim Blackburn teaches environmental law and sustainable development at Rice University.
[Jim Blackburn:] It's sort of like being an alcoholic. You know, I'm Houston, and I have a flooding problem. Like, it's the type of thing we need to be honest about and we need to face up to.
[Laurie Johnson, Byline:] In fact, Harvey was the third severe flood in as many years. So Houston floods and is going to flood forever. What's a city to do? Houston leaders have taken steps like requiring new construction in flood plains to be built at higher elevations, but that doesn't apply to hundreds of thousands of existing homes. One of the people trying to figure out what to do is Ed Emmett. He leads Harris County and testified earlier this week at a Texas legislative hearing.
[Ed Emmett:] Being brutally honest, I was asked by a television station not long ago, are we better prepared now than we were pre-Harvey? And the answer is no. In fact, we're probably worse.
[Laurie Johnson, Byline:] Worse because the region's finances are strained by the recovery efforts. Emmett and his county colleagues have moved to snap up frequently flooded properties using federal buyout money. They'll be torn down, and the vacant lots will be turned into parks and wetlands. Sounds good, right? But even if the county gets every cent it asked for, that's only enough money to buy out a thousand homes max. Rice University's Jim Blackburn says moving people out of flood-prone neighborhoods is really the only meaningful solution. He calls what happens next a crossroads for Houston.
[Jim Blackburn:] We're either going to become the model solution for resiliency in the future, or we'll be the biggest failure. And I think it frankly could go either way right now.
[Laurie Johnson, Byline:] In the meantime, voters head to the polls tomorrow to decide whether the county should take out $2 12 billion in debt to pay for flood projects. For NPR News, I'm Laurie Johnson in Houston.

[Robert Siegel:] If the fighting in Iraq and Syria ever draws to a close, the region will someday have to address this perennial question what about the Kurds? The Kurds have no country of their own. They're spread out over Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. In September, Iraqi Kurds who run their own autonomous region in the north of the country have scheduled an independence referendum. Joost Hiltermann watches the Middle East and North Africa for the International Crisis Group and joins us now. Welcome to the program.
[Joost Hiltermann:] Thank you.
[Robert Siegel:] Iraqi Kurdistan has had a referendum before. They've voted for independence before. What, if anything, could be different this time?
[Joost Hiltermann:] Nothing will be different in terms of the outcome of the vote. It is clear that the Kurds, wherever they may be, in their hearts want to be independent. So Mr. Barzani, the president of the Kurdish region and the head of one of the parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, has called for a referendum and has scheduled it for September 25 of this year. This is indeed the second such time that a referendum will be held. In the first time, in 2005, the outcome was unanimously in favor of independence. This time is hardly going to be different. The importance of the referendum is not that it's being held again because clearly we know the outcome, but that it would give some ammunition to Mr. Barzani when he goes to Baghdad actually negotiate the terms of independence. It still has to be negotiated between the Kurdistan region and Baghdad.
[Robert Siegel:] It would seem that he would have other leverage that he could bring to Baghdad, which would be to say, hey, our Peshmerga is the Kurdish militia we've been doing a lot of the fighting in Iraq. And we've been pushing ISIS out. Does that give him any greater strength in arguing for whether it's deeper autonomy or legitimate independence?
[Joost Hiltermann:] Well, not really with Baghdad because Baghdad will answer that actually most of the fighting has been done by the Iraqi army and by the Shia militias that are technically under Baghdad's control but are in many ways directed by Iran. So if it comes to the Kurds asking for international help, for sure, the United States and European countries that are part of the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS, they will say, yeah, well, you've deserved it. But they're not the ones who decide.
[Robert Siegel:] But I hear you saying regardless of what the Kurds may deserve or may think they deserve, you wouldn't bet on independence anytime soon.
[Joost Hiltermann:] That's correct.
[Robert Siegel:] What's the role of the Syrian Kurds been in the fight against ISIS there?
[Joost Hiltermann:] Well, the same thing there, but a different party, Kurdish party, has been involved. In fact, there it's the affiliate of the PKK, the Kurdish party in Turkey, which to the United States officially is a terrorist organization. All the same, the United States has been supporting the Syrian affiliate. And they have fought very well against ISIS and pushed back the group in many places and, in the process, gained a lot of territory, which they would like to see turn into some kind of special arrangement as well for the Kurds there.
[Robert Siegel:] The biggest Kurdish population is in Turkey, where fighting between the Turkish army and the militant Kurdish group, the PKK, resumed a couple of years ago. What's happening in southeastern Turkey where so many Kurds live?
[Joost Hiltermann:] Well, that is the only Turkey is the only country where there has been an active fight between the central government and the Kurds in the past few years. And there has been major devastation. So the situation there doesn't look good for the PKK in that sense. But on the other hand, it has gained ground in northern Syria and in northern Iraq, which it's using as strategic depth against its principal enemy, Turkey. And in fact, there is a real risk that the fighting will continue to spill over from Turkey into northern Syria and northern Iraq when Turkish troops are present and the PKK is present in both countries.
[Robert Siegel:] As you've said, certainly in Iraq there's no question about what Kurds prefer. They like the idea of an independent state. And they even as part of Iraq, they fly their own flag and have great autonomy. Can you explain how it is that for all of these decades, if not centuries, the Kurds have been dealt out of a state? Is it just bad luck? Is it geography? Is it internal divisions? Why has it been so elusive for them?
[Joost Hiltermann:] Well, it's a legacy of the colonial manipulations that followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Britain promised a the Kurds a state, but it was actually much smaller and located in what is today Turkey. But that promise was reneged upon by Britain, and ever since the Kurds have been divided over four nations Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. And these countries have banded together against the Kurds because none of them want to see the Kurds independent. And that has worked until today. The only difference today is that the Iraqi government is extremely weak. Syria is in turmoil. And so it's only Turkey and Iran that stand between the Kurds and independence. I think it's very doubtful that as long as these two states are there that the Kurds will be able to push for independence because in the end, it will affect the situation in their own countries. They don't want their own countries to be split.
[Robert Siegel:] Joost Hiltermann of the International Crisis Group. Thanks for talking with us today.
[Joost Hiltermann:] Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.

[Steve Inskeep:] It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
[Renee Montagne:] And I'm Renee Montagne. Good Morning. The Bush administration's senior diplomat on the North Korean nuclear issue, is in Beijing today. The trip, by American envoy, Christopher Hill, follows a decision by the UN Security Council to delay voting on a resolution calling for sanctions against Pyongyang. That resolution was sponsored by Japan. As the world struggles to form a response to North Korea's behavior, the man at the center of the crisis has remained silent. The country's leader, Kim Jong-il, is characterized by some, as a paranoid madman who thrives on provoking global crises. So just how irrational is his behavior? Or is there some method behind the madness? On a recent trip to Seoul, NPR's Louisa Lim answers, asks the experts.
[Louisa Lim, Reporting:] This is the sound of an enigma. He's the leader the rest of the world loves to mock, but who inspires absolute fear at home. Kim Jong-il has become famous for his bouffant hairstyle, his built-up shoes, and his love of Daffy Duck cartoons. The North Korean leader is sometimes caricatured as a cognac-swilling gourmet, the one fat man in a country where hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have died from famine. His paranoia is legendary. But George Bush has said he loathes Kim Jong-il, on a visceral level. So, those fears that someone is out to get him, could be well-founded.
[Mr. Joun-yung Sun:] I'm not so sure whether Kim Jong-il is mad and extremely irrational, but he is absolute dictator.
[Louisa Lim, Reporting:] Joun-yung Sun is a former South Korean ambassador to the United Nations. He says Kim's unpredictable brinksmanship isn't so much a reflection of his personality, it's a characteristic inherited from his father, the country's former leader, Kim Il-sung.
[Mr. Joun-yung Sun:] I think this type of diplomacy is not confined to Kim Jung-il himself, because in the history of 60 years of North Korea's regime, they have been using same tactic.
[Louisa Lim, Reporting:] And some argue that these latest missile launches are a carefully calculated salvo, to gain attention and bring Washington to the negotiating table.
[Mr. Michael Breen:] From the outside, it looks like the actions of a mad person. But, it's not a paranoid action. If anything, it is the action of a leader who of a country, that wants to get taken seriously.
[Louisa Lim, Reporting:] Michael Breen is the author of a book about Kim Jong-il. He sees the leader as a shrewd political operator, who has managed to stay in power, despite North Korea's massive problems.
[Mr. Michael Breen:] It is using its one strong point. The one point where it's internationally competitive, is in its ability to militarily cause trouble. That's what he's doing. He's playing his only strong card, which is the ability to scare us.
[Louisa Lim, Reporting:] Probably the biggest unknown, is the domestic political calculation involved in launching these missiles. It could be an attempt to play to the country's powerful military, to win its support. And to the people who live in the hermit kingdom, Kim Jong-il's defiance of world opinion might look like courage. But it could also be driven by desperation, as the U.S. clampdown cuts off the regime's finances. Peter Beck, from the International Crisis Group, says Kim may need to strengthen his support base at home.
[Mr. Peter Beck:] I think there are growing signs, in recent months, of regime strain; whether it's getting tougher with the few hands that have been still trying to feed them with the World Food Program and NGO's and kicking some of them out, and making life more difficult for them. And so, that leaves me to speculate, that maybe things are difficult for the regime right now, and, uh, they need more enemies than friends, right now to, uh, rally people around them.
[Louisa Lim, Reporting:] North Korea's long been famed for its mass rallies, astonishing displays of synchronized movement by up to 100,000 people at a time. And this love of spectacle and political theater, might offer a window into the North Korean leader's personality.
[Mr. Clark Gable:] [as Rhett Butler] Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.
[Louisa Lim, Reporting:] Gone With the Wind is reportedly the favorite movie of this film buff. He's such a film buff, that in 1978, Kim Jong-il even ordered the kidnap of South Korean director Shin Sang-ok, and his girlfriend, actress Choi Eun-hee. They were kept in the North for eight years. Author Michael Breen, says this episode shows just how distorted Kim's values had become.
[Mr. Michael Breen:] When the actress was kidnapped, and when the boat came in, he was there, saying welcome to North Korea. This guy is not really aware of how he's violated somebody's rights. To me that's not madness. That's because his ethical system is subordinate to a loyalty to their regime.
[Louisa Lim, Reporting:] Ultimately, Kim Jong-il's actions have one aim: to ensure the survival of his regime and his country. It's a gamble of the highest stakes, maybe weakened by the failure of the long-range missile this past week. And with threats to launch yet more missiles, and perhaps now something more to prove, this dangerous game may not yet be over. Louisa Lim, NPR News.

[Melissa Block:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
[Audie Cornish:] And I'm Audie Cornish. And now for the latest on an al-Qaida plot to bomb a U.S. airliner. It appears the CIA had a secret source who was inside an al-Qaida bomb cell in Yemen. That informant actually brought the bomb out of Yemen, and it eventually ended up in the hands of intelligence officials. The FBI is now analyzing the bomb at its lab in Quantico, Virginia. NPR's Dina Temple-Raston is here with the latest. And Dina, to begin, what can you tell us about this latest development?
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] Well, the details are still a little sketchy. But what we understand is that there was this source that was secretly working for the CIA and other international intelligence agencies. And he was the one who told them about the plot, and actually found a way to get the bomb to them. We understand that this insider is now safely out of Yemen. We're not sure, exactly, where he or she is right now. We just know that the person is out of Yemen. We heard the Obama administration say that the public was never in danger from this plot. One reason it might have been so sure about that was because it had an insider and could see the plot unfolding.
[Audie Cornish:] So if the administration had this inside source, that person might have been able to provide intelligence not just about the plot, but maybe who was involved as well?
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] Exactly. What we aren't sure about yet is how much information beyond this one plot the insider provided. We learned over the weekend a top al-Qaida operative in Yemen was killed in a drone strike. His name is Fahd al-Quso. And he's somebody that was on the FBI's Most Wanted terrorist list. He was the new external operations chief for al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. That meant that he was kind of in charge of the plots against the West. And it's unclear if the insider provided new information that led the U.S. to target and kill al-Quso. But the timing certainly suggests that there could've been some connection.
[Audie Cornish:] Now, this bomb that the FBI is studying it's been said that it's similar to the underwear bomb used in the plot on Christmas Day a few years back.
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] Yes. It's an upgraded version, apparently, with a better detonation system. Officials say that the bomb didn't have any metal in it, so it could have slipped through some airport security. And the Department of Homeland Security said U.S. systems would have picked it up, but it might have gone undetected in European airports. Officials also say that it looks like it's the work of a man named Ibrahim Hasan al-Asiri. He either built this or at least, someone who learned bomb-making from him, built it.
[Audie Cornish:] Now, what more do we know about this bomb maker?
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] Well, we know he's a Saudi. We know he's about 29 years old, and that he was a chemistry major at a university in Riyadh. He wanted to go and fight in Iraq against the U.S. but apparently, he was arrested at the border. And then when he was thrown into a Saudi prison, he was apparently radicalized there. He's been with al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula for about six years. And he really made a name for himself among U.S. intelligence officials in 2009, when they discovered his fingerprint on that Christmas Day underwear bomb.
[Audie Cornish:] Lastly, Dina, has the Obama administration ruled out that there are other bombs out there? Do we have any more information on this?
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] I think there are two things that U.S. officials concerned about: more bombs and potentially, more bomb makers. As I mentioned, al-Asiri has been with al-Qaida for six years. And since that time, there's been this aggressive drone program against the group. In fact, the U.S. thought they had killed him last year, and they thought he was in the same convoy as the one that was carrying radical imam Anwar al-Awlaki. And it took them weeks to find out that he, in fact, was still alive. Intelligence officials are working under the assumption that AQAP doesn't want to lose their bomb-making ability if he gets killed in a drone strike. So they've probably trained other people. And so while they think this latest bomb is the work of al-Asiri, it's possible it's from one of his proteges.
[Audie Cornish:] Dina, thank you for giving us the update.
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] You're welcome.
[Audie Cornish:] NPR's Dina Temple-Raston, with the latest on the foiled plot to bomb an airliner headed to the U.S.

[Jacki Lyden:] We've invited Dr. Shibley Telhami to our studio to discuss another perspective on news from the Middle East: the view from the citizens of the Arab world. Dr. Telhami is the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland and the principal investigator for the annual Arab public opinion poll. The poll is conducted by the University of Maryland and Zogby International and surveys respondents in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates. And it's a real pleasure to have you back on the program and see you again.
[Dr. Shibley Telhami:] It's always good to be here.
[Jacki Lyden:] So what do you think are the most significant findings of this poll?
[Dr. Shibley Telhami:] There are a lot of things that are really striking about the poll. I mean, let's start with attitudes towards the U.S., and particularly President Obama and the administration. When I asked people if they're positive or negative about President Obama back in 2009, the surprise then was that a plurality were positive about him 45 percent. Only 23 percent were somewhat negative about him. This year, only 20 percent identify President Obama positively and 62 percent identify him somewhat negatively. You find the same kind of numbers when it comes to an assessment of optimism about American policy in the Middle East. Fifty-one percent in 2009, in the spring, after a few months of the administration, said they're optimistic. That was remarkable, given how typically negative people are about American foreign policy. Well, this year 63 percent say they're discouraged and only 16 percent say they're hopeful. So that is a huge transformation. And it's clear when I ask them what is the issue that you're disappointed with most over the past year from the Obama administration. The single biggest issue by far, 61 percent, say the Palestine-Israel issue.
[Jacki Lyden:] Another remarkable aspect of this poll is that a majority of the Arab public sees a nuclear-armed Iran as important for the Middle East. Explain why they feel that way.
[Dr. Shibley Telhami:] Well, you see, that's a fascinating angle, because when you look at Iran, a vast majority of the Arab public actually now thinks that Iran is trying to acquire nuclear weapons. So they believe that. But when you ask them whether the international community should pressure them to stop it, the vast majority believe that Iran should be allowed to have its nuclear program. And even worse, when you ask them do you think it's better for the Middle East or worst for the Middle East if Iran should acquire nuclear weapons, now a majority in 2010 says that it would be better for the Middle East if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons. And that is a huge contrast from 2009, when only 29 percent said it would be better for the Middle East. So what happened...
[Jacki Lyden:] And probably not something their leaders are thinking would be better.
[Dr. Shibley Telhami:] Absolutely. That's really an important distinction you make because there's no question that the Arab public and Arab governments are not of the same mind on Iran. No question. I think they have to pay attention to public opinion. Many of them are more concerned about Iran than the publics are. But when you are, so what happened, you know, between 2009 and 2010 that you have such a transformation of public opinion on this being better for the Middle East, well, it's all a function of the anger with the U.S. it's almost all. It's mostly the enemy of my enemy. There is no love for Iran in the Arab world. But when you ask them, identify the two countries that are most threatening to you personally, 88 percent say Israel and 77 percent say the U.S. and only about 10 percent say Iran. And so when 2009, they were hopeful 51 percent were hopeful the administration was going to have a new policy that's going to succeed and bring about Arab-Israeli peace, they wanted to push Iran out a little bit, out of the game. Now that they're pessimistic and they don't see a prospect on the horizon, it is rewarding the enemies. And I think that's the dynamic that has taken place. Not so much in embrace of Iran as much it is looking at the big picture of the threat as they see them and making their minds accordingly.
[Jacki Lyden:] Dr. Shibley Telhami is a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland. Thank you for coming in.
[Dr. Shibley Telhami:] My pleasure.

[Michel Martin:] Now it's time for a trip to the Barbershop. That's where we gather a group of interesting folks to talk about what's in the news and whatever's on their minds. Sitting in the chairs for a shapeup this week are NPR political reporter Sam Sanders. Welcome back, Sam. Thank you for...
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] Thank you, good to be here.
[Michel Martin:] ...Braving the storm...
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] I had to do it for you.
[Michel Martin:] ...To be here with us. Thank you.
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] Oh, yeah.
[Michel Martin:] Arun Venugopal is host of the WNYC series "Micropolis" which looks at race and culture in New York City. Arun, thank you so much for sticking with us through the snow, too.
[Arun Venugopal, Byline:] Thanks for having me on.
[Michel Martin:] And laughing at us all the way from NPR West in Culver City...
[Amanda Seales:] [Laughter].
[Michel Martin:] ...Calif., if you didn't know, is Amanda Seales. She's a comedian and a DJ. Welcome. Try not to rub it in.
[Amanda Seales:] I'll try not that hard.
[Arun Venugopal, Byline:] Yeah, right.
[Michel Martin:] Yeah, exactly not that hard.
[Amanda Seales:] [Laughter].
[Michel Martin:] All right. So we'll try to sneak back to the snowstorm in a minute, but we do realized that just because we are buried in over here, life goes on in the rest of the world. So we're not going to dwell on it too, too much. But with that in mind, our first topic is some controversial comments made by Fox commentator Stacey Dash. And if you don't know her from "Fox & Friend," you might remember her as the character Dionne from "Clueless," the 1995 teen flick about some ditsy Hollywood girls. And Stacey Dash, if you are not aware, has become a conservative commentator...
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] Yeah.
[Michel Martin:] Featured on Fox, and she was responding to a question about why some Hollywood stars have said that they were going to boycott the Oscars. And her response was to slam the BET network, so see if you can follow that. Let's play it.
[Unidentified Man:] So you say there shouldn't be a BET channel.
[Stacey Dash:] No, I don't think so, no, just like there shouldn't be a Black History Month, you know? We're Americans, period. That's it.
[Unidentified Man:] Are you saying there shouldn't be a Black History Month because there isn't a White History Month?
[Stacey Dash:] Exactly, exactly.
[Michel Martin:] Now, let's set aside the fact that if that's what she was saying, maybe she should've been able to say it herself. But the reason we're talking about this is this has actually gotten people fired up on Twitter. People are talking about it.
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] Well, my biggest beef with this whole thing I like Stacey Dash in "Clueless" and "Clueless" the TV series and that Kanye West video she did. But what she fails to acknowledge in that statement is that she has appeared on BET programming. They have paid her. She was on "The Game." She did a BET movie. So BET tweeted back at her after this happened and said, can we get that check back...
[Amanda Seales:] Ha, ha.
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] ...You know?
[Michel Martin:] I don't know. What do you think about that, Amanda?
[Amanda Seales:] Well, I'm not necessarily sure that the arguments to be made about Black History Month are even, like, within this context, you know? I think at the end of the day, Black History Month and BET are from the intention that, hey, this is a group of people that are in great numbers in this country but that are lacking in representation on mainstream media levels. So therefore, lets do Black History Month so the people who don't know about black folks can learn a little something about black folks other than Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman But we also need to remember Stacey Dash where who why...
[Michel Martin:] [Laughter].
[Amanda Seales:] She just showed up. Like, there was never any history of her even speaking about this in a public forum. You know, she's she was never a part of the conversation until she was inserted as someone with a valid voice in the conversation like myself. I mean, I'm not just showing up. I mean, I've gone to school. I've talked about things. I've written about things. I've had there's a canon behind it, you know? So...
[Michel Martin:] She's made a you've demonstrated an effort to educate yourself about this issues and to...
[Amanda Seales:] And be educated as well.
[Michel Martin:] ...Be educated, yeah. But Arun, let me ask you this. What about this whole question of these months I mean, I can tell you that for myself as a journalist, I find them useful as an organizing tool not just Black History Month but also Women's History Month. There's LGBT History Month. These are all congressionally designated. So Arun, what do you think about that?
[Arun Venugopal, Byline:] I mean, what I first think of is my daughter. You know, she's 14, and I think if this is the occasion when she's first exposed to James Baldwin or W.E.B. Du Bois or any black intellectual or thinker or some accomplishment that has gone otherwise unexamined in her education, then I think that's a great occasion for her to have the opportunity, you know? It might be an artificial construct, but that's fine. I think it still needs to be done. So I think what she's saying, really, is kind of it's tedious; it's silly. And I hate to sort of, like, you know, get on the fact that who is this person, but it seems like it very well could be an excuse just to get a little attention for yourself, you know?
[Michel Martin:] Let's move onto something else. We've got another related topic, maybe, kind of is that Macklemore and Ryan Lewis dropped a single, and it's called "White Privilege II."
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] Yeah.
[Michel Martin:] They already had a song called "White Privilege," so I think this is a sequel to that.
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] It is.
[Michel Martin:] It's a nine-minute song, so we can't play we're not going to play all of it here, but we're let's just play a little bit of the beginning which refers to the 2014 Black Lives Matter march in Ferguson, Mo., that Macklemore participated in. I just want to play that part.
[Macklemore:] [Rapping] Welcome to the parking lot parked it, zipped up my parka, joined the procession of marchers. In my head, like, is this awkward? Should I even be here marching, thinking that, they can't, how can I breath thinking if they chant, what do I say? I want to take a stance because we are not free. And then I thought about it. We are not we.
[Michel Martin:] Amanda, you're the DJ here, so I'm going to give you the first spin at this.
[Amanda Seales:] Ha, ha nice.
[Michel Martin:] Tell me what you think.
[Amanda Seales:] It's nine minutes. I don't know if the folks that he would necessarily want to receive this would listen for nine minutes, but I think that Macklemore, in general, makes music with good intentions, and so I do appreciate that. And there's many parts to "White Privilege," so he's on part two. And I you know, I don't really have anything negative to say. I think that he is just attempting to make music that matters, and I think that's great.
[Michel Martin:] Arun, what about you?
[Arun Venugopal, Byline:] Oh, man. So I [LAUGHTER] I've listened to this song about one-and-a-half times, maybe. And the first time, as I started listening, I immediately started wondering, you know, between the ambition of this song and the execution, I start asking myself, is this, like, the worst song of the year...
[Amanda Seales:] [Laughter].
[Arun Venugopal, Byline:] ...Or of the century, perhaps.
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] Oh.
[Arun Venugopal, Byline:] I thought this song was so bloated, and it's just so self-centered, you know? I mean, just in that part you just played, just count the number of times he says I or my. The whole song is really about his own, you know, thoughts about what's happening, and it's not about the substance of this experience or this protest. And then he kind of goes on these rants. He's talking about his fans coming up to him and how much they tell him they love him and anguishing whether it's OK to, you know, join in this. He starts talking about Miley Cyrus and Elvis and Iggy Azalea and all this. He starts calling them out. And it's just really tacky in my mind. It was just this bloated nine-minute kind of, like, you know, extravaganza. So I didn't really like it.
[Michel Martin:] Arun goes in.
[Arun Venugopal, Byline:] [Laughter].
[Michel Martin:] Arun goes in. So how do you really feel, Arun, right? Maybe you'll come out of your shell and share your feelings.
[Arun Venugopal, Byline:] Let me put it this way [LAUGHTER].
[Michel Martin:] Exactly. Now, Sam, what do you think?
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] I totally disagreed, and I'm the first person to hate on Mackle for two years, I called him Mackle-less 'cause I just couldn't stand him. But I listened to this song and read the lyrics as I played it, and I really thought it was quite thoughtful. And I think that I mean, to respond to what you said, Arun, all rappers rap about themselves. That a lot of rap, right? And I think that he perhaps felt he didn't want to speak for anyone else but him being a white person. He didn't want to speak for black people. I went through the lyrics, you know? There were some parts further on where he really gets deep on issues of privilege and what it means. He talks about white supremacy. I liked how self-reflective he was. I also think he's become a much better rapper. A lot of why I didn't him for at first was his rap just felt lazy to me. But he's gotten better at it. I think the song was well-produced. I think it was thoughtful. I think the most that he can do is acknowledge his place in this whole power structure, and that's what he does quite well, in my opinion, for nine minutes.
[Michel Martin:] I love the diversity here.
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] Yeah.
[Michel Martin:] I love the diversity of opinions. I love the...
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] And I'm the first to hate on him.
[Amanda Seales:] Well, I will admit...
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] But I really like this song.
[Michel Martin:] Go ahead, Amanda.
[Amanda Seales:] I feel like if he had been pontificating in waxing poetic on, like, you know, these marches and doing it from, like, a birds-eye view, that would've felt like white privilege...
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] Exactly
[Amanda Seales:] ...To me. I actually appreciated that he's speaking...
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] He stayed in his lane.
[Amanda Seales:] He's speaking from his privilege.
[Michel Martin:] So Arun, do you think it would have been better if he'd just avoided the topic? See; this is so tricky because then, when people want to be allies and show sympathy or support for people, then they're criticized for it. But then, if they're, like, you know what; this is not my issue; I don't care; it has nothing to do with me, then people are, like, well, how can you be my friend if you don't care about what interests me?
[Arun Venugopal, Byline:] And he talks about that in the song.
[Michel Martin:] I don't know, Arun. You don't have any sympathy for that whole question of, where do I stand on this?
[Arun Venugopal, Byline:] I do. I guess, basically, I can hear that being expressed outside of art in a more interesting way. Within this particular artistic context I mean, I have been thinking a lot about, you know, what is trying to be done artistically in response to this particular moment we're living through. It's a very interesting moment. I think they are just more subtle and artistic ways of getting at it, and I don't think he really achieved that here.
[Michel Martin:] Cool, interesting well, all right, before we let you go and see; now I feel awkward because this sounds so self-centered. But I want to talk about the storm... ...Because it's only a...
[Amanda Seales:] Storm privilege.
[Michel Martin:] Storm privilege thank you.
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] Oh, my goodness.
[Michel Martin:] Storm privilege I feel so exposed. But I wanted to ask about this. This is, again, something that has been described to me by my friends who are really deep into social media, and that is the whole question of the blizzard bae or the blizzard boyfriend...
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] Oh, my god.
[Michel Martin:] ...That there's a it's people taking to their dating apps looking for somebody to keep company with during the storm.
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] I yeah.
[Michel Martin:] And this is just simply reporting, not asking personal question. But...
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] I have one blizzard bae. It is red wine.
[Michel Martin:] Oh, OK.
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] I think that, like, sure, if you got someone to boo up with, do that. But if you get a blizzard bae, is that the proper way to start a relationship out of blizzard desperation?
[Amanda Seales:] Is...
[Michel Martin:] Can I tell you this?
[Amanda Seales:] Is there a proper way...
[Michel Martin:] Can I just be your old...
[Amanda Seales:] ...At this point?
[Michel Martin:] ...Your, like, boring, old, married friend.
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] Yeah.
[Michel Martin:] No. Can I just give you the answer right now no.
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] Bad idea.
[Michel Martin:] Bad idea.
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] Get your Netflix. Get your wine. Leave those apps alone.
[Amanda Seales:] Leave those apps alone. That's the tagline.
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] Yes hashtag.
[Michel Martin:] All right, that's all the time we have this week with Sam Sanders, Amanda Seales and Arun Venugopal. Thank you all so much. Sam and Arun, stay warm. Amanda, you know, be as fly as you're going to be in your crop-top.
[Arun Venugopal, Byline:] Stay hot.
[Amanda Seales:] I will. I promise.
[Michel Martin:] Stay hot.

[Scott Simon:] A switch in commanders gives General Petraeus a chance to adjust the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan. Earlier this week, we spoke with retired Army general Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl. He wrote, along with General Petraeus, the Army's manual on counterinsurgency operations and says the lessons learned in Iraq will inform the leadership in Afghanistan.
[Mr. John Nagl:] Many of the principles that General Petraeus used to such good effect in Iraq I think still apply. The primary one is providing protection and security for the population. But in addition to that, he has the ability to build coalitions and to reach out to people, even people who have been fighting against the United States. So his greatest accomplishment in Iraq almost, other than convincing the American people that we still had a chance to win there, a skill that he may use again, was reaching out to many of the Iraqi insurgents and bringing them onboard with the coalition effort. And it's that skill set, I think, of reaching out to the Taliban and convincing them that they have a brighter future cooperating with the Afghan government rather than fighting against it that is probably going to be his biggest focus over the course of the next year.
[Scott Simon:] The president of the United States, the commander-in-chief, as we were recently reminded this week, has vowed to start withdrawing troops next summer, about a year from now. How do you tell the Taliban that the U.S. and its allies are committed to winning, will stay there to do the job, while assuring Afghans and Americans that we're not going to stay there forever?
[Mr. John Nagl:] So the president has been very clear that Afghanistan is a war of necessity, that America has vital interest at stake there and he has demonstrated, I think, by putting General Petraeus in command in Afghanistan how committed he is to achieving those objectives. He has chosen our very best. But General Petraeus and Secretary of Defense Gates have been very clear that while the drawdown will begin in July of 2011, a year from now, the speed of the withdrawal and the rate at which American troops depart will be based on conditions on the ground.
[Scott Simon:] You're making it sound as if the drawdown might almost just be cosmetic.
[Mr. John Nagl:] It certainly won't be cosmetic for the soldiers, the Marines, who get to come home on time. The president is conscious of the fact that his army is under strain, that it's getting tired, and that he has to show some light at the end of the tunnel for his all-volunteer force. But he also has to put some pressure on the Afghan government that this lifeline will not be there forever. And my sense is that that message has perhaps not been conveyed as well as it could've been, but that if there's anybody who knows how to send a message and make sure that it's received very clearly, it's General David Petraeus.
[Scott Simon:] I want to ask you about the rules of engagement, because there have been articles this week, including the famous one now in Rolling Stone, that suggest that there are complaints from the field that U.S. soldiers find the rules of engagement restrictive. They have to go through so many levels to receive approval before they fire a mortar or order in an air attack, that by the time it's approved the target's moved, and that they feel that not only increases their exposure to casualties, it gives away their technological advantage over the Taliban.
[Mr. John Nagl:] And I feel their frustration. I had to go through procedures to clear mortar and artillery fire, close-air support, when I was serving in combat in Iraq in '03, '04, and what has happened since then, I think, is we as an army have learned a great deal, we understand even better that killing an innocent creates more insurgents. And so we've gotten even more careful than we were when I was fighting. I've read the rules of engagement that General McChrystal promulgated. I agree with them completely. I don't think they're too restrictive. But I think what has happened is, and this is no one individual's fault, but as those rules have been interpreted by the succeeding layers of command all the way down to the soldier on point for the nation, they've gotten more and more restrictive. And I do think that one of the things that General Petraeus is going to have to do and I think this is a real service, actually, provided by the now-famous Rolling Stone article is that General Petraeus is probably going to have to take a look with his intervening commanders at those rules of engagement to make sure we have the balance right.
[Scott Simon:] Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl. He's now president of the Center for a New American Security.

[Steve Inskeep:] We're also following the upheaval in Ukraine. The confrontation between demonstrators and the government has intensified. Anti-government protests that started in the capital have spread to other cities with protestors taking over some government buildings and clashing with security forces. The government has made some concessions this week, like rescinding a harsh anti-protest law, and talks with the opposition continue. The prime minister, in fact, stepped down today. All of this has been described as a protest against the elected president who rejected a trade deal with the European Union. He was under pressure from Russia. But there may be more going on, here. We spoke earlier with Steven Pifer, a senior analyst at the Brookings Institution and a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
[Steven Pifer:] Back in November, when the protests began, the focus was Europe and the desire of protestors to have Ukraine move closer towards the European Union. But since then, it's broadened, and you see now people out on the streets who are having more of a general opposition to Mr. Yanukovych's policies, the corruption. On January 16th, the Ukrainian parliament passed a number of laws, which are clearly anti-democratic, and that's caused a major backlash.
[Steve Inskeep:] OK. You mentioned corruption. You mentioned democracy. Let's take them one at a time: What is the problem with corruption in Ukraine?
[Steven Pifer:] Well, Ukraine has always had problem with corruption, but there's a general perception among the public in Ukraine that in the last four years under President Yanukovych, the problem has become much worse, including corruption by people that are fairly close to the president.
[Steve Inskeep:] What is it that people close to the president are at least alleged to be doing?
[Steven Pifer:] We have very close connections between people in business and people in the government. The concept of conflict of interest is not well-known or well-applied in Ukraine. And you see people, for example, the president's son, who was a dentist, is now becoming a very wealthy businessman from what people suspect are trading on his connections with the government.
[Steve Inskeep:] He's not doing dental work and becoming...
[Steven Pifer:] Not at all doing dental work. He's doing banks and other industries.
[Steve Inskeep:] Now, let's remember that President Yanukovych, as much as he has been protested against, was democratically elected. But you did mention Ukraine's parliament changing the rules of Ukraine's democracy. Is it still a democracy?
[Steven Pifer:] It's moved well away from democracy in the last three to four years under Mr. Yanukovych. And again, a specific trigger for what I think you've seen in the last 10 days were laws that were jammed through the Ukrainian parliament on January 16th. And they basically were intended to criminalize almost everything the demonstrators are doing.
[Steve Inskeep:] OK. And what did the new rules do?
[Steven Pifer:] They criminalize now wearing helmets. They criminalize wearing masks. They now criminalize slander. It's basically designed to apply more severe penalties to everything that the [unintelligible] have been doing for the last two months.
[Steve Inskeep:] One other thing, Ambassador Pifer, and this is something that Americans have asked in quite a few countries around the world: Is there anyone the United States can support here, particularly given that some of the opposition leaders used to be running the country and were thrown out of office in an election? People didn't like how they did.
[Steven Pifer:] No. My sense that the place where the United States should be, and I think the European Union should be, is basically on the side of trying to find a peaceful resolution to this crisis. The Ukraine right now is on the verge of spinning out of control, and the situation could get very ugly, very quickly. I think the United States and Europe have some leverage. They should be pressing the Ukrainian government very hard to negotiate seriously in good faith, and they should also be working with the opposition and encouraging the opposition not to overreach. American influence here is probably limited, but there are things that the United States could do. Last week, the United States announced the first visa sanctions against government officials connected to use of force. It may be time to broaden that and target visa and financial sanctions against the inner circle around Mr. Yanukovych to make the point that they need to be pushing the president to find a peaceful solution to this crisis, otherwise, they could lose their ability to travel to the West, and they may lose their ability to bank in the West.
[Steve Inskeep:] Steven Pifer is a former U.S. ambassador to the Ukraine. Thanks very much.
[Steven Pifer:] Thank you for having me.

[Guy Raz:] If you were wondering why the financial crisis and the recent rioting in Greece matters to you, well, the answer came on Thursday.
[Unidentified Man #1:] There was a lot horror because, you know, this was, to me, we were seeing right off the cliff. One minute it's down 400, the next minute it's down 500.
[Guy Raz:] The markets wiped out more than six months of gains in a matter of hours. And the debt crisis in Greece may have been a partial cause. That's still being investigated by Wall Street regulators. But one thing is certain: there is a lot of uncertainty now both on Wall Street and in Europe of where things are headed. And when economists start using medical terms, it's a pretty good sign that things are not going well. In recent days, you may have heard many of them using a specific term.
[Unidentified Woman #1:] How do you assess the risk of contagion?
[Unidentified Man #2:] And now we got the risk of contagion.
[Unidentified Woman #2:] Do you think that the risk of contagion...
[Guy Raz:] There's no single, agreed upon definition for contagion. It's basically a financial crisis that starts in one country and spread rapidly, like a virus, to several others. And the worry now is that what's happening is Greece is about to reach Spain like a fast-moving storm. Economist Jeffrey Sachs, who teaches at Columbia University, is widely credited with developing a way to stop the bleeding. It's informally called shock therapy. And he's with me to explain how this all fits in with what's happening in Europe. Jeffrey Sachs, welcome.
[Professor Jeffrey Sachs:] Nice to be with you.
[Guy Raz:] Right now, there's a fear that what's happening in Greece can move to Spain. It's being called contagion. Can you explain what your definition of contagion is?
[Professor Jeffrey Sachs:] Contagion means when a virus spreads, or in the case of finance, when a panic spreads. When the people and institutions who would be buying the bonds of governments are trying to cover their bills by selling this paper suddenly find that they can't sell them anymore because everybody fears that everybody else is going to stop buying.
[Guy Raz:] I'm curious about this idea that economists not only disagree on what contagion means, but they don't really know why it happens. I mean, how much of it is simply about smoke-and-mirrors, about perception?
[Professor Jeffrey Sachs:] That's the issue that, to an important extent, panic is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's like asking a question why was there a stampede out of the stadium after the football game. Something that happens on rare occasions, but then it's devastating. And the answer is there was a fight in the stands and people started to move away. Someone tripped. Someone tripped over them. People started to run. Others saw that they were running, then there was a mass movement towards the exits. In other words, a small change to the system can trigger momentous, often very tragic, effects. And that happens in financial markets as well.
[Guy Raz:] So right now, investors are pulling money out of Greece and the fear is that they may start to do the same in Spain and then in other countries with large debt burdens like Italy and Portugal and Ireland. I mean, is that a possible scenario?
[Professor Jeffrey Sachs:] Everything is possible. I think that it is not likely, in part, because Europe, which has a shared responsibility for their common currency, the euro, has finally woken up. And so just in the recent days, the European leaders, Chancellor Merkel, President Sarkozy of France have said: We need a much more effective and direct mechanism. But the fact of the matter is that letting the Greek crisis just continue to boil the way that it has in recent weeks is a tremendously undermined confidence in the euro. And it has opened the way for this risk of contagion actually occurring.
[Guy Raz:] And say it does happen, how would you stop it? I mean, would you use what was described as shock therapy? And, you know, what is that? And how would you implement that?
[Professor Jeffrey Sachs:] Well, shock therapy is a term that could cover all sorts of circumstances often as referred in the past to ending hyperinflations. Here, what one needs more is a kind of shock of confidence to the markets that country acts, whether it's Greece, or Portugal, or Spain, is simply not going to default on its bonds. And the way to do that is to say that the European Central Bank is not going to allow that to happen. That the other countries of the euro area will not allow that to happen, because they will lend the money needed to rollover the debts, or that the International Monetary Fund will make loans to enable this to occur, or our Fed would make swap agreements with the European Central Bank so that any run on dollar deposits in Europe could be met by loans from the European Central Bank.
[Guy Raz:] Jeffrey Sachs, we keep hearing about how our economy is on a more solid footing, you know, sort of heading out of recession and so on. But I wonder whether a massive financial crisis in Europe could send the U.S. economy back into recession.
[Professor Jeffrey Sachs:] What's happening in Europe is not good for us. And we also should take note, Europe is facing a crisis of confidence in the management of the budget in Greece, but also in some of the other countries. The UK also has a big budget deficit. We have a huge budget deficit in our country as well, about 10 percent of our gross national product. We also have bitter political divisions in this country of whether to cut spending or raise taxes or make some combination of the two. If we can't find a gradual flight path, which takes that budget deficit down in a way which commands a broad support, it won't happen now, it perhaps won't happen in six months or a year or two years. But this will weaken us one way or another and, at some point, could create yet another crisis.
[Guy Raz:] But in the short-term, what's happening in Europe could result in more fluctuations in our markets here.
[Professor Jeffrey Sachs:] Of course, we've seen how the stock market responds, how confidence responds. This is not good news for the U.S. or for the world. We need all parts of the world economy successfully pulling out of this downturn. And when any major engine of growth falters, the rest of the world feels the effects.
[Guy Raz:] That's Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs. His most recent book is "Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet." Jeffrey Sachs, thanks so much.
[Professor Jeffrey Sachs:] Pleasure to be with you. Thank you.

[Steve Inskeep:] Year after year after year, the story out of Afghanistan seems the same. The Taliban attack. American missile strikes go the other way. There are promises that Afghans will take control of their country's security one of these days. Now there may be a glimmer of hope. The Afghan government announced a cease-fire. U.S. forces supporting them will take part. The forces are both fighting. The Taliban says it's too early to respond. The head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan Gen. John Nicholson spoke with Rachel Martin from Kabul.
[Rachel Martin, Byline:] General, thank you so much for talking with us.
[John Nicholson:] Thank you, Rachel.
[Rachel Martin, Byline:] You, as the commander of U.S. forces, issued a statement supporting this temporary cease-fire. It is temporary, though. It lasts just through Ramadan. Do you believe that it carries larger significance?
[John Nicholson:] This cease-fire is in response to a call from 3,000 religious scholars who on Monday called on the government and all belligerents to engage in a peace process. There have also been calls from an Afghan grassroots peace movement on the government, as well. So it does have great significance in terms of the government responding to the calls of these parts of Afghan society, and I think this reflects their strong desire for peace after almost 40 years of war.
[Rachel Martin, Byline:] You say an Afghan peace movement. What more can you tell us about that?
[John Nicholson:] Yeah. We've had, in the last several months, spontaneous grassroots non-aligned peace activists around the country staging events in favor of peace. And this has occurred in over half the country. So this is something new and important.
[Rachel Martin, Byline:] Something like this has never happened before? I mean, you talked to Afghans for years who've been sick of the war and sick of the violence. But you're saying that you've never seen such a concerted movement?
[John Nicholson:] Yeah. What's been interesting is that you see this cuts across many sectors of society. So young people, civil society, but also women. There's been many women for peace. And so I think what we're seeing is sort of a critical mass building for peace inside the country, and it hasn't occurred in such a widespread manner as far as we know at any time otherwise in the war.
[Rachel Martin, Byline:] Has the Taliban responded to this cease-fire? Any indication they're interested in honoring it?
[John Nicholson:] We saw a report from a Taliban spokesman who said the leadership was considering it, and that's all I know at this point.
[Rachel Martin, Byline:] A central issue in any peace negotiation is the presence of U.S. troops. The Taliban wants them gone, or at least scaled back significantly. Is that something the U.S. would consider?
[John Nicholson:] I can't speak for the U.S. government on this point. This is going to be something that needs to be officially considered. I would say that we have seen a significant reduction in the U.S. presence here over the years. You know, at our peak, we had over 140,000 troops here. A hundred-thousand of those were U.S. We're now down to a fraction of that. And it's the Afghan security services that are doing the fighting. We are here to assist them, but they're the ones doing the fighting and keeping pressure on these terrorist groups.
[Rachel Martin, Byline:] What does it feel like to you right now on the ground?
[John Nicholson:] Yeah. I'm encouraged by this talk about peace. I've not seen this in my many years in Afghanistan before. I'm encouraged by the growth and competence and effectiveness of the Afghan security forces. These are the forces that are very adaptive, keeping pressure on terrorist groups with our help.
[Rachel Martin, Byline:] With all due respect, though, General, I've been hearing about the training efforts to train Afghan troops so they can stand up and U.S. forces can stand down. I've been hearing about that for 12 years.
[John Nicholson:] Well, and we're down to a lower level of U.S. forces than we've ever been before because they are doing it. But we need to continue to support them for a while longer to keep pressure on these enemy groups and protect the country.
[Rachel Martin, Byline:] But again, how do you determine when it's time to go home?
[John Nicholson:] When they can stand up on their own and they're making important progress in that regard. The other thing I would highlight is the movement towards peace. So when there is a reconciliation amongst the belligerents in this country then we're going to see the levels of violence come down, and then this instability that's caused by the violence is what provides an environment for these terrorist groups to thrive. So supporting and advancing the peace process is one of the most important ways that we can help bring stability to this country and then eventually look at our troop levels that are needed here.
[Rachel Martin, Byline:] Gen. John Nicholson is the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. Sir, thank you so much for your time. We appreciate it.
[John Nicholson:] Thank you, Rachel.

[Steve Inskeep:] Quick tutorial for those who don't stare at their phones all day there is a messaging service called WhatsApp. You can use it to send text messages or photos or videos and a lot more. It's popular in much of the world. And apparently, WhatsApp users include Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser. A House committee chairman, Elijah Cummings, asserts that Kushner has used WhatsApp for official business and failed to comply with federal record-keeping rules. Cummings also questioned the use of personal email by Ivanka Trump, and Kushner's email use has been questioned in the past, all of which brings to mind a famous chant.
[Unidentified Trump Supporters:] [Chanting] Lock her up. Lock her up. Lock her up. Lock her up.
[Steve Inskeep:] Lock her up a central campaign theme by President Trump and his supporters as they challenged Hillary Clinton over her use of an email server. NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith is on the line. Hi there, Tam.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Good morning.
[Steve Inskeep:] So why would this seeming detail of record-keeping rules be important? Isn't this this is, basically, about accountability, right? Somebody ought to be able like Elijah Cummings wants to be able to go in after Kushner and see what he's been doing?
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Well, and it's the law is the other part of it. The Presidential Records Act requires all of this to be kept for history and for other reasons. And this investigation is not some new thing that popped up when Elijah Cummings became chairman of the Oversight Committee when Democrats won the House. In fact, this goes all the way back to March of 2017, back when Republicans controlled the committee. But there's still a lot of information that Elijah Cummings says that he needs to conduct the investigation. As part of it, he met with the personal lawyer for Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. That lawyer is named Abbe Lowell. And he is citing Cummings is citing the conversation with Abbe Lowell in saying that Jared Kushner has used, and continues to use, WhatsApp as part of his official White House duties. In addition, this letter from Elijah Cummings to the White House says that Ivanka Trump hasn't stopped using her personal email account for official business. And it also alleges that Steve Bannon, a former adviser at the White House, and an early National Security Council deputy, K.T. McFarland, used personal email accounts, including an AOL account, to discuss a proposed transfer of U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia. So there were a lot of allegations in this letter from Cummings to the White House.
[Steve Inskeep:] Wow. OK. The AOL account that's a specific deal that's been discussed there. Let's circle back to Kushner, though. As best we can determine, who is it that Kushner has supposedly been communicating with on WhatsApp?
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Well, that is a very good question. And it depends on who you ask because what Elijah Cummings says is that Kushner's lawyer, Abbe Lowell, confirmed that Jared Kushner was communicating with world leaders and officials using WhatsApp. Well, Abbe Lowell after this became public put out a new letter saying, no, no, no, no. This is not accurate, and it's being misreported. He said that when he was asked about Kushner's use of WhatsApp, that he directed the committee to the White House. And that when specifically asked about whether these communications were with foreign officials or leaders, that Abbe Lowell simply said that they were communications with some people.
[Steve Inskeep:] OK. So what we have is two different accounts of a private conversation. I guess we must not have testimony under oath on this question yet.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] We and we also don't have documents in that case. And let me just say that, to me, what stood out the most from this Elijah Cummings letter yesterday was this line. He says the White House has not produced a single piece of paper to the committee in the 116th Congress in this or any other investigation.
[Steve Inskeep:] Wow. Tam, thanks so much.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] You're welcome.
[Steve Inskeep:] That's NPR's Tamara Keith.

[Steve Inskeep:] And I'm Steve Inskeep with a guide to this day's news. Rachel, what's up first?
[Rachel Martin:] Defense Secretary James Mattis, he is in Afghanistan today. And this visit comes after that deadly attack by the Taliban on Friday. This happened at one of Afghanistan's biggest military bases in the northern part of that country. More than a hundred people were killed. And that attack came not that long after the U.S. dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb it has ever used. They dropped that in Afghanistan. But the U.S. defense secretary's visit comes amid a bigger question.
[Steve Inskeep:] And that question is what the United States wants to accomplish and how, after almost 16 years of war. Gordon Lubold is with us now. He's Pentagon reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He's traveling with the defense secretary. Welcome, Gordon.
[Gordon Lubold:] Hiya. Thank you for having me.
[Steve Inskeep:] And we'll mention there's a little bit of a delay on the line. This war gets overshadowed by so much other news. We have to ask, how many U.S. troops are still there and what are they doing?
[Gordon Lubold:] Yes. So there are about 8,500 American troops here in addition to about 3,000 or 4,000, 5,000 other NATO troops. The American troops are kind of divvied up between counterterrorism missions and then kind of the typical train, advise and assist mission that U.S. forces are doing elsewhere. But here in Kabul, they there's about half of them doing that.
[Steve Inskeep:] OK, so still trying to stand up a strong Afghan national security structure there, trying to get that that going and, of course, billions of dollars of U.S. money also being spent. What's Secretary Mattis want to know?
[Gordon Lubold:] So there's a history here because when he was a Marine general, he was the [unintelligible] commander here in [inaudible] a long time ago. So he's back here the first time as defense secretary to really, you know, speak with the ground commander, speak with Afghan officials and really kind of get an assessment. You know, he owes a plan to his boss, President Trump, on what to do in Afghanistan. It is kind of the re-forgotten war. And there's so much other stuff going on that I think for Mr. Mattis it's slightly personal, which is he wants to come back and make sure that he's connected over here and provide the best kind of advice on what to do forward. General Nicholson, who's the commander here, has already said publicly that he thinks he would like another at least a few thousand advisers, you know, U.S. advisers to help with the mission here. But definitely, the events of the last couple days have pointed up, like, the need for attention on this mission over here.
[Steve Inskeep:] Very, very briefly, do Pentagon officials think the training mission is working?
[Gordon Lubold:] It's a funny question because I think that they do think it's working but I think folks in the Pentagon and over here probably if they were being honest would say they felt a little bit hamstrung by the efforts of the previous administration to end the war here, which resulted in fewer troops, you know, and troops being drawn out faster than what I think the Pentagon ever wanted.
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah.
[Gordon Lubold:] I think they think if it's if it can work but they need the troops to do it.
[Rachel Martin:] So it's interesting, Gordon, you say the mission the training mission, advise and assist, advise and assist. We've been hearing those words for more than a decade. American troops have been advising and assisting Afghan security forces in hopes that they could take on this fight themselves. The U.S. has spent billions of dollars. So the question is when do you decide that that investment is no longer paying off? So it's going to be interesting to hear how Secretary Mattis talks about the U.S. goals in Afghanistan.
[Steve Inskeep:] We'll be watching for that. Gordon Lubold of The Wall Street Journal, thanks very much.
[Gordon Lubold:] Thank you for having me.
[Steve Inskeep:] In this country, it's a week when Congress must get some business done.
[Rachel Martin:] Indeed, President Trump is hoping for a big win before the end of this week. He's up against this kind of arbitrary deadline that we, as the media, impose on the first term of a new president. It's called the first hundred days.
[Steve Inskeep:] And which some presidents impose on themselves, by the way.
[Rachel Martin:] Exactly.
[Steve Inskeep:] This one, for example please, continue.
[Rachel Martin:] Has talked about it. Yesterday, the Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney was asked on Fox News Sunday about whether President Trump is especially eager to show that he has accomplished something here.
[Mick Mulvaney:] What I think folks don't realize is that we've signed more legislation into law in the first hundred days than anybody in the last 50 years. We've put out more executive orders than any previous administration the last 50 years. And importantly, these are not creating new laws. Most of these are laws getting rid of other laws, regulations getting rid of other regulations.
[Rachel Martin:] The president wants to move this week on a replacement for the Affordable Care Act. Congress also has to pass a bill to keep the government open.
[Steve Inskeep:] So much to talk about. And Scott Detrow of NPR's Politics team is here to talk about it. Hi, Scott.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] Morning.
[Steve Inskeep:] OK, the president wants health care this week. He wants to drop a massive tax bill and there's some other business. So how much can Congress actually give him?
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] Honestly, probably just that spending bill.
[Steve Inskeep:] Yeah.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] The White House, you know, because of that arbitrary guideline is really desperate for accomplishments and pushing for a lot of things on a fast timeline. That's not how Congress works. Big complicated bills take a lot of time. And that's a big reason why health care did not pass the last time around. Over the weekend, we know House Speaker Paul Ryan talked to his caucus. They all got on a conference call. He told them all the spending bill is the primary focus. And he said that health care bill will come up only when we know we can pass the bill. That's polite same-party speak for not going to happen.
[Steve Inskeep:] Not this week, [LAUGHTER] maybe never, maybe never. Let's remember why that spending bill is the thing that has to get done. That's the other deadline here that's not so arbitrary, right?
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] Right, not arbitrary at all. It expires Friday, the end of the day Friday. So Congress needs to pass a new spending bill. Otherwise, we repeat the government shutdown that we've seen a few times over the last few years.
[Steve Inskeep:] Even though Congress and the White House are in control of the same party.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] That's right because this is one of those moments where Democrats are needed to pass a bill. The White House has all of the sudden insisted that they want money for that border wall in this bill. That's something that House and Senate Republican leaders don't want to do because they want to avoid that whole mess.
[Steve Inskeep:] Let's hear John Kelly. He's the Homeland Security secretary. And he talked about this yesterday on CNN.
[John Kelly:] It goes without saying that the president has been pretty straightforward about his desire and the need for a border wall. So I would suspect he'll do the right thing for sure but I will suspect he will be insistent on the funding.
[Steve Inskeep:] What chances are there that border wall funding will be in this spending bill, Scott?
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] It all comes down to how insistent the White House is because honestly, different aides have said different things at different points which happens a lot with this White House. So it'll all depend how hard-line I think they are on this.
[Rachel Martin:] President Trump has so candidate Trump, now President Trump, made all these promises. It's interesting to think about how different his life must have been in the world of business, where a decision will get up to the executive level and then it's a deal. He meets with one other person. He has to corral Congress. Now he needs the support of all these different people who have priorities that may or may not match with his. So it'll be interesting to see if those self-described dealmaking skills can move the needle for him.
[Steve Inskeep:] Scott Detrow of NPR's Politics team, thanks for being up early with us, appreciate it.
[Scott Detrow, Byline:] Sure thing.
[Steve Inskeep:] All right, France went to the polls yesterday. And now two candidates are heading for a runoff.
[Rachel Martin:] Yep. The pro-EU centrist Emmanuel Macron and far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen, they won the most votes in Sunday's elections in France. And they will proceed to a runoff that happens in two-weeks' time. Macron got 23.75 percent. Marine Le Pen got 21.5, so he edged her out. Both candidates ran as outsiders to the French political establishment. Macron is a former investment banker who has never held political office. Le Pen is known as a firebrand, championing policies that would restrict immigration. She has run before. She received a higher percentage of the votes than she did in 2012.
[Steve Inskeep:] And made this final round which NPR's Eleanor Beardsley is covering from Paris. Hi, Eleanor.
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] Hi, guys.
[Steve Inskeep:] What are French voters saying here?
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] Steve, first of all, let me tell you last night I was at Macron headquarters and it was very exciting, as you know, the results were announced. Here he is speaking to the crowds.
[Emmanuel Macron:] [Over loudspeaker, speaking French].
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] Now, basically he said despite the divisions in this country, people came together to take the destiny of the country in their hands. So, you know, he has the people's will and the destiny. This election is all about rejection of the mainstream and the status quo. I cannot tell you how much that message can it cannot be overemphasized. Let me just give you an example. The mainstream left and right have in 60 years have never not been in the second round. This is unheard of. And another example is the French Parliament has more than 500 members. Guess how many members Marine Le Pen's party has in it? Two.
[Steve Inskeep:] Wow.
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] And guess what? Emmanuel Macron founded his party only in August. And he has no members in the National Assembly. So that gives you an example.
[Steve Inskeep:] So it'd be almost like if Republicans and Democrats if neither of them made the general election for president of the United States?
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] Exactly.
[Steve Inskeep:] OK. And but it's not clear which direction French voters want to go, is it? Or is it clear at this point?
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] It's becoming clear. Look. It looks really close. The two are running off. And you can think OK, now they're facing off in a mainstream election. But actually, it's not that close because the other parties have called on their voters to vote for Macron. Fillon conceded. He was third place.
[Steve Inskeep:] Francois Fillon.
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] He said that's an extremist party that will that's Francois Fillon that will bring chaos, division and misfortune to France. And he said, let's vote Macron. People will probably line up pundits and polls are showing they'll line up behind Macron against Le Pen but she's very much part of the political landscape now. Her ideas are here to stay.
[Steve Inskeep:] OK. So she's not a favorite to win but there she is in the runoff. And who knows, who knows what might happen? Eleanor, thanks very much.
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] Thank you.
[Steve Inskeep:] That's NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reporting on this day that the next round of the French election campaign begins. And we'll be following it on NPR News.

[David Greene:] Let's turn to a conflict now, that has been simmering for three decades. Turkish forces have spent years battling militants from the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK as it's known. Today, thousands of PKK fighters begin a withdrawal to northern Iraq and this could lead to the group's eventual disarmament. Despite entrenched animosity, both Turks and Kurds seem, so far, to be pushing ahead with a peace process. For Istanbul, here's NPR's Peter Kenyon.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] Turks are not allowing their hopes to rise too high just yet. An earlier effort was right about at this stage a few years ago when it unraveled. And hard-line nationalists still believe that victory, not compromise, is the only answer.
[Unidentified Man:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] But while the demonstrations against the peace process continue, the broad mass of Turks and Kurds appears more ready than ever for peace. A new opinion survey, commissioned by the ruling AK Party, shows strong support for laying down weapons and granting Kurds civil and political rights. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, burned by the failure of the last peace effort, has his reputation on the line again after approving talks with jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan late last year. He sent groups of officials out to the provinces to prepare the public for negotiations with the PKK a group Turkey, the U.S. and EU still list as a terrorist organization. Analyst Hugh Pope, with the International Crisis Group, says Turkey finds itself on new ground with its largely Kurdish neighbors in northern Iraq and northern Syria. And thus, Turkey's approach to its own Kurdish population is becoming untenable.
[Hugh Pope:] We have Turkey becoming the big brother of the Iraqi Kurds, and increasingly becoming the effective power in northern Syria; both of which areas have large amounts of Kurds. Turkey has to have a defensible Kurdish policy.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] But if Erdogan wants to see the PKK move from withdrawal to actual disarmament, first he will have to display the kind of political skills in Ankara that have frequently eluded him in the past. Crucial and controversial reforms including preventing extended detentions without charges must be shepherded through a reluctant parliament. Columnist Asli Aydintasbas, with the Milliyet newspaper, says beyond that, the government must then prepare Turks for a political discourse that includes the long-hated PKK.
[Asli Aydintasbas:] What the Turkish government has to deliver is not only significant reform in terms of freedom of speech and political activity, but they have to make space for PKK in the political arena. The deal is, lay down arms and I will let you take part in politics. At this point, we have not yet seen the government talk about that aspect of the deal.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] Analyst Hugh Pope agrees that it's a problem that the government won't say clearly what it's going to do on reforms. But so far, fear of a backlash is keeping the reform push quiet.
[Hugh Pope:] Our discussions with officials in Ankara give me the impression that everybody knows what has to be done, and it's just a question of when people will dare to do it.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] Far from praising the peace process, Erdogan has taken to offering critical remarks. Yesterday, he said making big announcements about the start of the PKK withdrawal isn't nearly as important as the end goal disarmament. PKK commanders say the fighters won't lay down their weapons until their leader Ocalan is released from prison. But in the meantime, Turks have begun to notice the quiet the absence of PKK attacks, as what's come to be known as the Fighting Season begins. They've also noticed that their sons aren't being killed chasing PKK fighters. Whether that awareness turns into an active push for peace may be one of the biggest questions facing Turkey this year. Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Istanbul.
[David Greene:] This is NPR News.

[Michele Norris:] When President Bush first introduced the doctrine of preemptive war, we asked a number of people about the moral, legal and military justification for attacking a country without provocation. Father Richard John Neuhaus was one of the people we spoke to. He's the president of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, and he's editor-in-chief of the monthly journal called First Things. When we last spoke to him, he thought the president had made a strong case for attacking Iraq. Father Richard John Neuhaus joins us again today. And, Father, the president today reaffirmed his doctrine of preemptive war. Are you still steadfast in your support of this policy?
[Father Richard John Neuhaus:] Steadfast in support of this policy would be a bit of an exaggeration of where I was three years ago and where I am today. Yes, you can make that case if one understands preemptive as a response to a plausibly threatening aggression.
[Michele Norris:] There are many who believe that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq undermines this doctrine of preemptive war. How has the failure to find any evidence of those weapons changed your thinking about this doctrine, this policy?
[Father Richard John Neuhaus:] Well, I'm not sure how it affects the doctrine. I mean, there's a clear distinction, isn't there, between doctrine and the application of the doctrine? If you have reason to believe that someone coming into your office intends to do you violence, you think they have a gun in their pocket that they're pointing at you or whatever, that informs and supplies a moral rationale for the kind of response you might make.
[Michele Norris:] Now, I have to interrupt you here, because I guess the question is, are they standing at your threshold or are they sitting in their own house thinking about the possibility of breaking into your abode?
[Father Richard John Neuhaus:] Let's go back and consider some of the circumstances. Saddam Hussein, first of all, was clearly intent upon doing very nasty things to other people in the world, including the United States.
[Michele Norris:] So if we can extend that, then, based on the set of facts that we know to be true right now, does that justify going to his home and attacking him in his domicile?
[Father Richard John Neuhaus:] Oh, justify going he was, I mean, if what was believed to be the case in 2002-2003 and indeed for the whole 12 years before that, namely that he had or was rapidly obtaining weapons of mass destruction that he intended to use in an aggressive way against others, then you have a threat. That threat appeared quite plausible. Obviously, it appeared overwhelmingly plausible.
[Michele Norris:] Were you surprised that the president today, in issuing his new national security strategy, made this vigorous defense, actually reaffirmed his doctrine for preemptive war? Was that surprising to you?
[Father Richard John Neuhaus:] Obviously, it's not surprising that he would defend the action that he took is morally defensible in principle. Whether or not it turns out to, in retrospect, appear to be vindicated is quite another question. When you say that something is morally defensible, it has to do in large part with the intention and the circumstance within which that intention was formed, namely of a perceived serious, threatened aggression. Now, if you look back in retrospect and say, hey, Saddam Hussein was bluffing, and that he had even succeeded in bluffing his own generals into thinking that he had these weapons of mass destruction, does that change the moral judgment with regard to the decision that was made at the time on the premise of mistaken perceptions? And the answer, I think, is no. Morally it doesn't.
[Michele Norris:] Father Neuhaus, thanks so much for talking to us.
[Father Richard John Neuhaus:] Okay. Good being with you. God bless.
[Michele Norris:] Father Richard John Neuhaus is president of the Institute on Religion and Public Life. He's also editor-in-chief of the monthly journal First Things.

[Robert Siegel:] If you've had a baby, you're probably familiar with this problem. You're out of the house. Your baby needs a diaper change, and you can't find a bathroom with a changing table. You've probably resorted to a public diaper changing. It's a little awkward for everyone involved. But when the person who needs that diaper change is a disabled or elderly adult, it can be worse than awkward. Around the country, there are a handful of places that have installed private family restrooms equipped with adult changing tables. The airports in Phoenix, Baltimore and Orlando are a few. Sabrina Kimball of Tallahassee would like to see many more of them. She founded a group called Universal Changing Places and now joins us on the program. Welcome.
[Sabrina Kimball:] Yes, thank you so much for having me.
[Robert Siegel:] I'd like you to tell us the story of how you encountered this problem with your teenage son, Greyson, who had bacterial meningitis, I guess, as a very small child.
[Sabrina Kimball:] Yes, Greyson contracted bacterial meningitis when he was a baby. He was premature. And he developed it when he was 10 days old. And unfortunately, it caused a lot of developmental delays and cerebral palsy. So Greyson is non-ambulatory. He's now 19, and he weighs about almost 75 pounds. And this has become a big challenge for us as we go out in public to try to include him in different activities. There is no safe clean place to change him. He has out he outgrew the baby changing tables years ago. And what we're advocating for are powered height-adjustable adult changing tables to be added to family restrooms in different venues so that people have a safe clean place, and they're not resorting to either leaving the venue or laying their loved one on a public restroom floor.
[Robert Siegel:] In the absence of such facilities, what do you do? What happens?
[Sabrina Kimball:] Mainly I leave. If I can't find like if I'm at a mall, I will look in dressing rooms and try to see if there might be a bench that we might awkwardly do a seat cover change, but most of the time we leave, you know, unless it's a major accident. And then, you know, we have had to take out our pad and try to do something on a floor, which is, you know, not something I enjoy doing at all.
[Robert Siegel:] You spoke of a seat cover change.
[Sabrina Kimball:] [Laughter] Oh, I'm sorry. That is my nickname. As Greyson's gotten older, instead of saying a diaper change, I call them seat covers. It just sounded better because he's older.
[Robert Siegel:] What are you hoping to see? What would be a reasonable public response to this problem.
[Sabrina Kimball:] What we're hoping to see is that more and more venues like our hospitals, our malls, our rest areas, our airports will add these to their family restrooms so that you do have this facility to change somebody. It seems like such a simple thing, but it's a major thing for people that have older adults that are non-ambulatory or have self-care issues.
[Robert Siegel:] It would seem to me this eliminates both a terrible physical inconvenience you'd be posed with but also some embarrassment, I should think that it addresses.
[Sabrina Kimball:] Yes. But also, it's an area of dignity for that person, too. I mean, how many people if you have an accident like that want to have to stay in that until they get home because there is no place to change them? And I talked to a gentleman when I first started my campaign. He is a quadriplegic. And the one thing he mentioned to me when I first told him about what I was doing, he said, you don't want to know how many bathroom floors I've laid on in my life. And I was like it just broke my heart. I'm thinking this is not right. This is something we can do something about.
[Robert Siegel:] That is Sabrina Kimball speaking to us via Skype from Tallahassee. She's the founder of the Florida-based group Universal Changing Places. Thanks for talking with us.
[Sabrina Kimball:] Well, thank you so much for having me.

[Madeleine Brand:] I'm Madeleine Brand. Nowhere else is illegal immigration such an election issue as Arizona. So many illegals cross there, two years ago Arizona voters decided illegal immigrants could no longer get state and local welfare benefits.
[Alex Chadwick:] Now new ballot initiatives aim to limit their access to schools and legal help. NPR's Ted Robbins reports.
[Ted Robbins:] Here's the level of debate in Arizona over Proposition 100 on next week's ballot, which would deny bail to illegal immigrants arrested for serious felonies.
[Mr. Russell Pearce:] These are facts [unintelligible]. These are...
[Mr. Alfredo Gutierrez:] No. You make numbers up, Russell, and you've been called on it again and again and again.
[Ted Robbins:] On the phone, State Representative Russell Pearce, who helped write the propositions, is former State Senator Alfredo Gutierrez, who opposes them.
[Mr. Russell Pearce:] You don't want to believe them because, Alfredo, you continue to deny their truth and...
[Mr. Alfredo Gutierrez:] No, you just make them up, Russell.
[Ted Robbins:] Randy Capps of the Urban Institute in Washington says illegal immigration is such a hot button in Arizona because the state is ground zero for illegal immigrants.
[Mr. Randy Capps:] Arizona is in an unusual position in that it's paying a heavier price than almost any other state for undocumented immigration.
[Ted Robbins:] Aside from talk shows and official voter pamphlets, there's been very little debate and very little money spent on either side of this year's ballot propositions. One would deny bail to illegal immigrants accused of serious crimes, another would deny them punitive damages in lawsuits. A third denies them in-state college tuition, and the fourth mandates English as the state's official language. Lydia Guzman is chair of the Coalition for Latino Political Action in Phoenix. She says underneath the specifics, the intent of all the measures is the same.
[Ms. Lydia Guzman:] What we've got are folks that are trying to send a message, trying to attack the voiceless. That's the bottom line: How can we stick it to the undocumented person?
[Mr. Dean Martin:] This is not about who you are, not about where you came from, it's only about how you got here.
[Ted Robbins:] Arizona State Senator Dean Martin supports the propositions.
[Mr. Dean Martin:] We as a nation need to do a lot of things when it comes to fixing our immigration problems. The first thing has to be is to make sure that we're not providing an incentive for people to break the law.
[Ted Robbins:] Take the proposition to deny in-state tuition. Lydia Guzman says that will just punish children, Arizona's future.
[Ms. Lydia Guzman:] Denying them in-state tuition will totally make higher education unattainable for those thousands and thousands of students in Arizona that are here without documentation.
[Ted Robbins:] Martin says it's legal residents and citizens who need to be protected from rising education costs.
[Mr. Dean Martin:] This isn't denying anyone access, it just says we're going to treat those foreign citizens who are here illegally the same way we treat U.S. citizens from California, Texas, New Mexico or Florida.
[Ted Robbins:] But college tuition breaks are not the primary reason people immigrate illegally. Even those who support these propositions agree it's work that brings people here. But enforcing immigration laws is primarily a federal job, so on the state and local level the Urban Institute's Randy Capps says this is about frustration.
[Mr. Randy Capps:] As long as there's a perception that the federal government is not in control of immigration policy, either in terms of employers and who's hiring undocumented immigrants or the border or just the immigrant population generally, I think that we'll continue to see more activity at the state and local level.
[Ted Robbins:] The real impact of these efforts may be small. No one knows, for instance, how many illegal immigrants actually pay in-state tuition to attend Arizona colleges, but that doesn't seem to matter. According to the most recent poll, all four propositions on the Arizona ballot are leading handily. Ted Robbins, NPR News, Tucson.
[Alex Chadwick:] And here's an online reminder. We've had this month-long series on top political issues in Western states. You can see all of them at npr.org.

[Ailsa Chang:] Federal health officials are increasingly alarmed about the spread of measles around the country. They're urging parents to vaccinate their kids in the face of record-setting outbreaks. NPR health correspondent Rob Stein has the details.
[Rob Stein, Byline:] At least 704 cases of measles have now been reported in 22 states. And Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar says that's the most measles in the United States in 25 years.
[Alex Azar:] We are very concerned about the recent troubling rise in cases of measles, which was declared eliminated from our country in 2000. Vaccine-preventable diseases belong in the history books, not our emergency rooms.
[Rob Stein, Byline:] Most of the measles cases are from outbreaks in Washington state and New York. The Washington outbreak has subsided. But measles is still spreading in two outbreaks in New York, one in Brooklyn and the other about an hour north of Manhattan. Those are the largest and longest measles outbreaks since the disease was eliminated in 2000. And hundreds of college students have been quarantined because of measles in California. Why is measles back like this?
[Alex Azar:] While most parents are getting their children vaccinated, the vast majority of these cases involve children who have not been vaccinated.
[Rob Stein, Byline:] And have gotten exposed to measles by people who caught the virus in countries like Ukraine, Israel and the Philippines, where big outbreaks are underway and have brought the highly contagious measles virus into communities with lots of unvaccinated kids. Here's CDC Director Robert Redfield.
[Robert Redfield:] Measles is incredibly contagious. A person who has measles can make other people sick four days before they get a rash. If an infected person enters a room of 10 unvaccinated people, nine of them will get measles.
[Rob Stein, Byline:] Most will recover. But there's no way to treat measles, and it can cause severe complications. So far this year, about 3% of people with measles have ended up with pneumonia; 9% have been hospitalized. No one has died. But Health and Human Services Secretary Azar says that could happen.
[Alex Azar:] Most of us have never seen the deadly consequences that vaccine-preventable diseases can have on a child, family or a community, and that's the way we want to keep it.
[Rob Stein, Byline:] So federal, state and local health officials are racing to counter misinformation that's apparently being targeted at some communities about the measles vaccine. Nancy Messonnier directs the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. She says the measles vaccine is highly effective and safe.
[Nancy Messonnier:] We have definitely seen misinformation and myths about vaccines being sent to communities susceptible to that misinformation. And these vulnerable communities are the communities in which we're seeing these outbreaks right now.
[Rob Stein, Byline:] Like Orthodox Jewish communities in New York. Messonnier worries that if the outbreaks aren't brought under control soon, it could have longterm implications for the country.
[Nancy Messonnier:] The longer these outbreaks continue, the greater the chance that measles will again get a foothold in the United States.
[Rob Stein, Byline:] So officials are trying to counter the misinformation, and some lawmakers are calling for the elimination of rules that allow parents to opt out of getting their kids vaccinated. Rob Stein, NPR News.

[Steve Inskeep:] Some new research throws into question things we say all the time about the Internet. The research focuses on Twitter, the service that lets many millions of people send short messages to each other from computers or cell phones. It's commonly said that social networking like this is revolutionary, that it's created new communities, even that it's obliterated geography. You can connect with people who share common interests, not just people who happen to live nearby. NPR's Shankar Vedantam is here to explode all that. Hi, Shankar.
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] Hi, Steve.
[Steve Inskeep:] OK. What does the research is wrong with our assumptions?
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] Well, so Twitter is a micro-blogging service and it allows people to follow people anywhere else in the world. Now, the conventional wisdom, as you said, is that the way we make social connections is by who we live close to, who's in our neighborhoods. The premise of Twitter, one of the premises, is that geography no longer matters, that we are bound together by common interests and not by where we live. And the second premise is that Twitter is a truly democratic medium, that you could be living in a small town in a country no one's heard of but you could have a megaphone now that is heard all over the world.
[Steve Inskeep:] And you could be a lonely protestor in Libya and say something that changes the world.
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] Exactly. So this new research by this sociologist called Barry Wellman at the University of Toronto, where he analyzed half a million tweets, and he tried to find out where people are tweeting from and who is following them. And he's found two things that both contradict our conventional view of what Twitter has to offer. So the first is the idea that geography no longer matters, but Wellman finds that actually isn't the case. Here he is...
[Barry Wellman:] We found out that a lot of Twitter ties are local. People have local interests. You know, in Toronto we're worrying about subways, we're worrying about politics, we're worrying about the Toronto Maple Leafs, we're worrying about Justin Bieber, who's a local boy.
[Steve Inskeep:] OK, good. People elsewhere are worrying about Justin Bieber too. But go on, go on.
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] So now, the second premise is that Twitter is a truly democratic medium, and this is, of course, democratic with a small D, that it truly doesn't matter, we've exploded national hierarchies, it doesn't matter where you live, in a, you know, mega-world-class city or in a small town somewhere. And Wellman again finds that isn't the case, that if you in certain cities, you're much more likely to be followed by people in other similar cities than if you're living in a small town. Here he is again...
[Barry Wellman:] Los Angeles is more likely to be connected to Toronto than St. Louis. And my apologies to St. Louis, but Torontonians rarely go to there. Tweets to use the Twitter term are more likely to be connected to each other between those localities than not.
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] So I don't know if that makes sense to you, Steve, but if you take a look at this map that I've printed out for you, what do you think it shows you?
[Steve Inskeep:] Well, what I'm looking at here is something that looks like the map that you see in the back of an airline magazine that shows all the routes going from the various hubs across the country, around the world, and a bunch of lines drawn between cities.
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] Exactly. So these are airline connections, looking at all the hubs that are connected to one another. And what Wellman has found in Toronto is that the airline connections between your city and the rest of the world predict where your Twitter followers are going to be. So if your Twitter followers are an airline flight away, they're much more likely to have Twitter connections to you than if they're not accessible by a plane.
[Steve Inskeep:] Suggesting what? That Twitter connections are following the connections that we already have in the real world?
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] Exactly. So that the real world powerfully predicts what kind of connections we have in the virtual world. So if you are living in New York, you're much more likely to have followers in London than you are likely to have followers in a small town in the United States.
[Steve Inskeep:] Because New York and London are already connected in many powerful ways.
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] Exactly. So airline connections in many ways are predicting that these two cities have common interests, that there's a lot of trade maybe between them. There's a lot of people who have similar kinds of professions or similar interests who live in those kinds of cities. But this really calls into question the notion that Twitter is a truly democratic medium.
[Steve Inskeep:] Granting that Twitter in some ways is following our real-world connections, does it in some way intensify them and make connections possible in ways it wouldn't have been before?
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] Yeah. It is the case that you really can follow people anywhere in the world. But what isn't true is this vision that Twitter is a truly flat medium. You know, Tom Freedman wrote this book saying the world is flat, and what Wellman is basically finding is that, no, the world isn't flat. The world is actually very lumpy. And if you're living in one of those big lumps, you're much more likely to be connected to people in one of the other lumps than if you're living in the flat part of the world.
[Steve Inskeep:] Well, Shankar Vedantam, we're glad you're in our lump here.
[Shankar Vedantam, Byline:] Thanks so much, Steve.
[Steve Inskeep:] NPR's Shankar Vedantam. He regularly joins us to discuss interesting new research. You can follow him on Twitter, by the way, @HiddenBrain. And you can follow this program @MorningEdition and @NPRInskeep.

[Melissa Block:] Shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, US forces stumbled on a strange cache of documents in the basement of the Iraqi secret police building. They turned out to be documents and sacred texts that had belonged to Iraq's once-thriving Jewish community. Now the records have been taken to a national archives facility in Maryland to be restored. As NPR's Larry Abramson reports, that effort has been stalled by a shortage of funds.
[Larry Abramson Reporting:] Two years ago Doris Hamburg of the National Archives in Washington, DC, received an unusual distress call. It came by e-mail from Baghdad.
[Ms. Doris Hamburg:] Asking about how to take care of some books and documents that had become waterlogged and what was the best next steps.
[Abramson:] It seems that US troops in Baghdad had found a hoard of documents floating in about three feet of water in the basement of Saddam's secret police headquarters. The building had been damaged in the fighting. The documents were in Arabic and Hebrew and appeared to record the life of Iraq's Jewish community. Hamburg knew immediately that heat and humidity would produce a preservationist's worst enemy: mold.
[Ms. Doris Hamburg:] So it was very important, if at all possible, to get the temperature down as much as they could and, if possible, to freeze it.
[Abramson:] You could almost hear the Americans in Baghdad saying, `Yeah, right, freeze 27 chests full of soggy papers in a war zone in the desert.'But thanks to some very American ingenuity, a freezer truck was found, the trunks of papers were put inside, and Doris Hamburg was soon on her way to Baghdad to see what should be done next. Hamburg and her colleagues packed lots of special tools for restoring soggy texts. But when she got to Iraq and climbed into that freezer truck, Hamburg knew the papers needed intensive care that she could not deliver.
[Ms. Doris Hamburg:] Freezing stabilizes the situation and stops the mold from growing and stops damage from the water. It isn't a permanent solution, and the next step after something is frozen is to dry it out.
[Abramson:] And the only way to do that was to freeze-dry them, which could not be done in post-war Iraq. So the trunks were brought to Texas, where a company that deals in catastrophic damage drew that water out in a special chamber. The mold is so toxic, conservators must wear a mask and gloves when removing it.
[Ms. Allison Olson:] This is one of our conservation labs...
[Abramson:] This facility has a special relationship to time. Preservationist Allison Olson is delivering the final touches to records from the 19th century, which the US received after buying the Virgin Islands from the Danish in 1917.
[Ms. Allison Olson:] They have mold damage and insect damage probably prior to coming to the US. And initially they were all vacuumed to remove the mold spores, and now I'm going through and mending the tears that go through the text.
[Abramson:] This beautiful building is like an exclusive spa for old, tired texts, but it's usually reserved for documents owned by the federal government. Limited private funds have paid for the initial work on the Jewish archive. A lot more money will have to be raised to remove all the mold, repair and microfilm these documents so they can be studied. In March, the Archives invited Peter Geffen of the Center for Jewish History in New York to take a peek in the hopes that he would help raise that money. He was moved by what he saw.
[Mr. Peter Geffen:] Yes, we saw the Torah scroll and an awareness that quickly set in that these materials, in many ways, are amongst the last remaining documents and books of a community that is probably the oldest Jewish community in the world.
[Abramson:] The size of the Jewish community in Baghdad is one measure of its importance. Jews played an important role throughout the history of the area right through the Second World War.
[Ms. Carol Basri:] Almost 40 percent of Baghdad was Jewish in 1948.
[Abramson:] Filmmaker Carol Basri has chronicled the history of Jews is Iraq. She says the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 led to tough anti-Jewish laws, laws that helped speed the destruction of any records of Jewish life in Baghdad.
[Ms. Carol Basri:] The people who left at that time were limited to only taking clothing, 50 pounds. They were not allowed to take photographs or books or family heirlooms. So actually there is a dearth of photographs, there's a dearth of material, even prayer books of the community.
[Abramson:] With the rise of the Baath regime in the 1960s, anti-Jewish repression grew, peaking in the hanging of 11 Jews in a public square in 1968. Many Jews emigrated after that. Today there are believed to be only a couple of dozen Jews left in Iraq. No one can know exactly what's in the archive found in Iraq until the papers have been restored and studied. Some documents may be routine records of everyday life, but Peter Geffen says they are all important.
[Mr. Gephen:] These books, being amongst the last of that historic community, have an emotional and nostalgic value, even if they do not have a great historical value in the sense that they might end up in a rare book room or something of that kind.
[Abramson:] Archive staff say these documents are seen as property of the Iraqi Ministry of Culture and will likely be returned once the money is raised to rescue them. Full restoration of the archive is estimated to cost about $3 million. Larry Abramson, NPR News, Washington.

[Ira Flatow:] Still talking about galaxies, planets, but some places some planets not in our own solar system. Not too long ago, you know, if scientists wanted to study the origins of a planetary system and how planets form, there was a pretty limited dataset to work with. We had just the nine planets in our solar system, then eight planets, plus all the leftovers, like asteroids and comets and, of course, Pluto. But in the last two decades, scientists have confirmed the existence of over 500 planets outside our little corner of the Milky Way, planets with weird, unpronounceable names like HG9446C. And this week, a group of astronomers added 10 more planets to that list. But these are even more unusual. These are 10 Jupiter-sized planets that seem to be orbiting either very distantly from their host stars, or maybe even floating out there all on their own, orbiting no star at all. I mean, is it still a planet if it has no star? How did those planets get loose, then, in the first place? Could some planets have been kicked out of our solar system, too, long ago? That's what we're going to be talking about with my guests. Sara Seager is professor of planetary science and physics at MIT in Cambridge. She joins us from our studios on campus. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
[Professor Sara Seager:] Good afternoon, Ira.
[Ira Flatow:] Good afternoon. Joachim Wambsganss is a professor of astronomy at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and director of the Center for Astronomy there. His research appears in the journal Nature. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Wambsganss.
[Professor Joachim Wambsganss:] Good afternoon, Ira.
[Ira Flatow:] Good afternoon to you. What is Sara, can you give us an idea of these planets, how unusual are they?
[Professor Sara Seager:] Well, let's just say that the authors, this week, have discovered a new population, a new class of exoplanets. Until now, we didn't know that there were quite a large number of planets that are either really far from their star, or even free-floating altogether.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow. And how were these hard to discover?
[Professor Sara Seager:] Well, they weren't it depends. I mean, think about it this way: 10 or 15 years of background work went into leading up to this discovery. But what the authors did was change their research slightly, and they're monitoring millions and millions of stars, tens of millions of stars at one time. What they did differently this time was just change the cadence, the frequency for which they take data. So instead of taking data once a day, they took it once an hour.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow. And that's a lot of data they had coming in all that time. And they basically saw the planets and discovered that they did not have any stars associated with them.
[Professor Sara Seager:] Well, there's a lot of analysis behind this. But the overall picture is that they didn't see a star. There actually might be a star there, really, really far from the planet...
[Ira Flatow:] Wow.
[Professor Sara Seager:] ...but there's no evidence for the host star. And furthermore, the authors use information from a completely different planet-finding technique to come to the conclusion that most of the planets they found are indeed free-floating.
[Ira Flatow:] All right. We'll talk about free-floating planets. Our number: 1-800-989-8255. You can tweet us @scifri. We'll be right back after this break. Stay with us. I'm Ira Flatow. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR. You're listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. We're talking about some interesting a couple of handfuls of new planets that seem to be floating out there by themselves. We're talking with Joachim Wambsganss, who is professor of astronomy at University of Heidelberg in Germany, Sara Seager, professor of planetary science and physics at MIT. Our number: 1-800-989-8255. Dr. Wambsganss, why would you call them planets? Isn't the definition of a planet something that must be orbiting a star?
[Professor Joachim Wambsganss:] Well, indeed, this is one of the three criteria that currently sets the definition of planets: orbiting around a star. And therefore, I expect wild discussion among astronomers whether these new objects could be called planets or should be called planets, or whatever, great dwarf or objects of planetary mass, formerly called planets. There are already six, eight, 10 suggestions out there. And people are really not sure what to use as the proper name for it.
[Ira Flatow:] And so these are not rocky planets, right? These are giant gas balls, even bigger than Jupiter.
[Professor Joachim Wambsganss:] Well, so far, we can only determine their mass. And it's roughly the mass of Jupiter. And it's very likely that they are gas giants. But we don't have definite evidence of that yet.
[Ira Flatow:] And Sara, you want to tell us what they...
[Professor Sara Seager:] Sure, yeah. I'll just I'll add in that out of the 150 or so exoplanets that we do have a mass and a size and has density, none of them are massive rocks. All the massive planets we know are, indeed, mostly hydrogen and helium.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm. And could a planet, since you haven't found a noticeable star yet, could a planet like this support life if it's so far away?
[Professor Sara Seager:] Well, these gas giants if they are indeed gas giants, or hydrogen-helium giants we don't think those types of planets can support life, even their relatives like Jupiter and Saturn in our own solar system. It seems kind of counterintuitive, but the cold planets like Jupiter and Saturn, they're actually really hot on the inside, and you don't have to go too far down in their atmosphere until it's too hot for the molecules for life. However, the microlensing surveys that have announced these planets, they're not sensitive to smaller planets yet, lower-mass planets. But we believe there are also a lot of free-floating rocky planets out there, and if we can find them someday, those ones also might support life.
[Ira Flatow:] Would that, then, be the norm for planets, so to speak? I mean, out there and we are the abnormal kind of planet?
[Professor Sara Seager:] Well, you know, Ira, one thing is you're asking a lot of speculative questions. And in exoplanets, we know we just have to wait for the future, and we will have an answer then. But right now, you know, we could speculate that there are going to be a lot of ejected planets, but we don't know for sure.
[Ira Flatow:] What does it mean to be an ejected planet? You mean it was once part of a star, and now something threw it out, or it lost its star? Or what would have happened? Joachim, do you have any idea about that?
[Professor Joachim Wambsganss:] Yeah. What we can detect from these observations so far is that there might be a star nearby, but at least 10 times the Earth's sun distance. But they could as well be freely floating or ejected, and that means, indeed, that formerly, they were in a bound planetary system. So the assumption is that they could still form like Jupiter did, in a disk around a star, and then by some gravitational interaction or by some nearby encounter by a different star, they could be kicked out of their orbit and now float freely through the Milky Way.
[Ira Flatow:] So we really don't know what might have ejected them or caused them to...
[Professor Sara Seager:] Well, we do. I mean, it's like it's gravitational interaction, like a game of pool, billiards. They interacted with each other, and some of those interactions were violent and got kicked out. Have you ever played pool, where you knock the ball, and it goes right off the table? Well, if you're a beginner that may have happened to you.
[Ira Flatow:] Many times. Many times.
[Professor Sara Seager:] Okay, well, that's kind of what it's like. It gets hit in just the kind of right or wrong way, and gets ejected. Now, I want to add one other piece to the puzzle, and that is every planetary system with lots of planets that means more than four or five, including the solar system is what we call dynamically full. If you were to take another planet and stick it anywhere in the solar system, the solar system would become unstable. So some people take that to mean that planetary systems formed with so many extra planets and eventually ejected those to become full. The analogy is that if every morning, you woke up and found a perfectly full cup of coffee on your table, you might wonder: Did someone have to overfill that cup in order for it to be perfectly full? And that's the analogy that we carry around for exoplanetary systems.
[Ira Flatow:] Interesting. Let's go to Donny in Arizona. Hi, Donny.
[Donny:] Hi. Yeah, I just I had a couple of questions. And I guess it's well-timed, given what the conversation was. The first one is: How likely would it be for one of these exoplanets to be picked up into a solar system? How likely would it be for them to become part of a solar system that they're just floating around?
[And Then The Other Question I Had Was:] What's the likelihood that these planets could collide? And what would that debris look like?
[Ira Flatow:] All right, thanks. You know, that's sort of like sort of the chemistry idea of planetary motion of electrons. You lose one, it goes to another atom.
[Professor Sara Seager:] Well, let's just say that space is incredibly vast and empty. Anything in space floating around has almost a zero chance to hit another star or planet, unless it's an environment very different from our own solar system's environment, such as the very inside of a globular cluster.
[Ira Flatow:] And yet they did get hit, if they're not with their star anymore.
[Professor Sara Seager:] Well, they formed the idea is that they formed in a planetary system with other planets around a star. But once they're ejected, they have almost no chance of being captured by another star, if they're an environment like our own sun.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm.
[Professor Joachim Wambsganss:] And this ejection mechanism is not really a physical hit. So the other planet or the other star that kicked it out did not physically touch this planet. It was just sort of a nearby encounter that made it being kicked out of the orbit.
[Ira Flatow:] Ah-ha. That explains that. Now, Sara, tell us about these mini-satellites that you're planning to launch the exoplanets exoplanets at.
[Professor Sara Seager:] Well, let me first give you a bit of background. There are six different techniques to find exoplanets, and they all have a different type of star or planet that they can find. So the one we just talked about, microlensing, their stars are really far away, very, very far, halfway between where the sun is and the center of the galaxy. What we want to move to is to find very small planets around the very nearest and brightest sun-like stars. So here at MIT and at Draper Labs, we have embarked on a different kind of satellite. This is a very small satellite. It's almost the size of a loaf of bread. And we have a prototype getting ready to launch in about 2013. And what we hope to do is change the way that space telescopes are done. Instead of taking 30 years from concept to launch, they would just be a few years. You put one up, and then you put more. So instead of one big telescope, you have lots and lots of little, tiny telescopes.
[Ira Flatow:] Are they coordinated together, or each one works separately? Or how does that work?
[Professor Sara Seager:] Each one will work separately, but if one finds something interesting, for example, they could all be tasked to turn to the same object for a short period of time.
[Ira Flatow:] Do they are they they have their own artificial intelligence, that they look around on their own and find something?
[Professor Sara Seager:] No. They'll be told where to look for now. But all these ideas are out there, and many other projects want to try to put a kind of artificial swarm intelligence on their satellite fleets. But so far, this fleet concept is a new one.
[Ira Flatow:] So it's sort of a swarm, a little swarm, a little fleet of mini, loaf-sized telescopes that are looking for exoplanets?
[Professor Sara Seager:] Exactly.
[Ira Flatow:] How many are we talking about?
[Professor Sara Seager:] Well, we'll probably put dozens, dozens of them.
[Ira Flatow:] And do they hitch a ride on a different satellite being launched? So if you've got a little room on a yeah, you get a little room...
[Professor Sara Seager:] They do. Mm-hmm. They do, actually, they're called yeah. I mean, do you know have you heard the phrase three peas in a pod? Well, the phrase is three cubes three cube sats in a peapod. And a peapod is the standardized deployer being bolted to the upper stage of a rocket of more than 10 different launch vehicles. So NASA and other places support launch of these things, and dozens of them have already been launched not mine, but other, similar size-and-shaped satellites.
[Ira Flatow:] Does that account for their size and shape, so they could fit in these little pods?
[Professor Sara Seager:] Exactly. Exactly. They're standardized yes, exactly -standardized mass and volume so that they fit into these standard pods.
[Ira Flatow:] So they're hitching a ride, hitching satellites.
[Professor Sara Seager:] Hitching rides.
[Ira Flatow:] Hitching rides. And you think you'll have a...
[Professor Sara Seager:] But I think the point...
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah, go ahead.
[Professor Sara Seager:] I think I just want to make a point for the audience that there's so many different kinds of planets out there. There are many different ways to find them, and each different technique can find a different kind of planet.
[Ira Flatow:] Now, let's talk a bit about this technique. This was using gravitational lensing. That's kind of interesting. Joachim, go ahead. You can tell us.
[Professor Joachim Wambsganss:] Yeah, the technique of gravitational lensing works like a magnifying glass. So we use a lot of background stars just as light bulbs at the other side of the Milky Way. And then we wait for other stars or planetary systems to pass in front of them. They act like a magnifying glass. So for a short duration a few days or a few weeks we see the background bulb being brightened and then getting [unintelligible] again in a very predefined way. And this is the signature of this gravitational focusing that the foreground star-plus-planet produces. This was, in fact, predicted by Einstein 75 years ago. But in his favor, he was very skeptical. He says: Of course, there's no hope that we can ever observe this. And the reason is that this very close alignment of a background bulb, a background star and this foreground planetary system is very unlikely. So Einstein already estimated that we have to monitor at least a million stars to find one of these events, and that's why he was so skeptical. But by now, our techniques make it possible to monitor millions of stars, literally. This team, in fact, monitored 50 million stars, as Sara had said, for two years, once an hour. So they have 2,000 observations for each of these 50 million stars, and then they could sort of pick the needle in the haystack and find these 474 microlensing events, 10 of them being shorter than two days, and these are the ones produced by these planetary [unintelligible] objects that are either very far away from the host star or even freely floating.
[Ira Flatow:] Fascinating. We have a...
[Professor Sara Seager:] Yeah. I just want to emphasize how crazy these idea is and how amazing that it's successful. Imagine, a dark, unseen planet or planet plus star, thousands of light years from Earth. You can't even see it, but it just happens to line up perfectly with the background star and magnify it enough so that people on Earth can detect it.
[Ira Flatow:] That it has to be perfect.
[Professor Sara Seager:] Not perfect, though, but almost.
[Ira Flatow:] Almost perfect. Then that's why you have to look through so many different pictures...
[Professor Joachim Wambsganss:] Right.
[Ira Flatow:] ...to find one. Let's a tweet came in from Sia Salate. He says, what's the difference between an exoplanet and brown dwarf? If they're it's you know, they are giant gas right?
[Professor Joachim Wambsganss:] The definition for a brown dwarf is that it has enough mass so that in the central, hottest, and densest part the more [unintelligible] part of hydrogen, which is called deuterium, can fuse into helium and produce energy. This is this fusion is the process that makes a stars shine, but this is normal hydrogen. And the limit for this is about eight percent of the mass of the sun. If a star has a mass that is below eight percent of the solar mass but more than one percent, then it can still produce energy, very small amount of energy, by this deuterium fusion. And this is called a brown dwarf. And only objects with masses lower than that are then probably called a planet if they're in orbit of the sun.
[Ira Flatow:] Doctor Seager, you really sound passionate about the subject.
[Professor Sara Seager:] Yes. What I can I say?
[Ira Flatow:] Well, I know. I mean why have you always been interested? Is there something about this...
[Professor Sara Seager:] Well, you know, the thing is that imagine that when I was child and growing up, there were no exoplanets. So I couldn't be excited about it back then. But certainly, I remember one of my clearest memories is when I was a child and on my first camping trip and waking up in the middle night and going out to the dark sky and I was just literally blown away. I had no idea there were so many stars out there. And I carried that around with me for, I guess, many, many years until I realized there could be a lot more out there than stars.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. So are finding stuff beyond your widest imagination or is it pretty tame compared to what you were thinking about?
[Professor Sara Seager:] I think it's all beyond all of our wildest imaginations. Who would have expected all of these well, we did expect all these free floating planets because planetary systems, naturally, we think [unintelligible] and knock it out there. There are so many crazy planets out there. Let's switch for a second to Kepler. The Kepler science team, NASA's Kepler space telescope, which is looking for the frequency of other earths by monitoring the 150,000 sun-like stars for three and a half years. And that Kepler science team is meeting right now as we speak. I'm skipping the meeting. But they actually Kepler has so far found some completely crazy systems. They have found a multiple planet system with six planets and five of those planets had orbits closer to their star than Mercury is to our sun.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow. We're talking...
[Professor Sara Seager:] All packed of mm-hmm.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. That is whacky, as you would say.
[Professor Sara Seager:] It's a very tightly one of those tightly packed full systems that I was referring to. And moreover, they're not all Mercury-like planets. These planets have a mass and a size such that most of them do have hydrogen, helium and [unintelligible].
[Ira Flatow:] And...
[Professor Sara Seager:] They're not Jupiters. They're more like mini Neptunes.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. Mini and then if you read this in science fiction books, you would have said never possible.
[Professor Sara Seager:] Well, it's possible if you did a calculation, because it is dynamically stable. But you would have thought you probably wouldn't imagine a system like that. And one more think about Kepler I want to mention, is that it found a planet just called Kepler-10b, and that planet is so close to the star. It's 20 times closer to its star than Mercury is to the sun. And that means, you know what, its surface is hot enough not just to melt lead but to melt rock. So on the surface of that planet, we're thinking, there must be lava lakes, not caused by volcanoes but just caused by heating from the star.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow. What the SPF factor must be there. We're talking about exoplanets this hour on SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR, with Sara Searson and Joachim Wambsganss. It's 800-989-8255. Let's go to John Addo in Saugatuck, Michigan. Hi, John.
[John:] Hi, Ira. How are you?
[Ira Flatow:] Hi there.
[John:] Hello, Ira.
[Ira Flatow:] Hi. Hi, John. I should say Seager instead of Sara Seager. I said Sara Searson. I'm sorry. Hi, John. How are you?
[John:] Very good.
[Ira Flatow:] I think you got a question for us.
[John:] Well, I was I wanted to ask you and the professors if indeed they'd heard of Immanuel Velikovsky's hypothesis that Venus is indeed a new member of our solar system and was a an exoplanet until not too long ago, maybe 4,000 years ago.
[Ira Flatow:] Well, that's an old theory. It goes back decades. Let me Sara, what do you think of that?
[Professor Sara Seager:] I haven't thought of that but I mean, I have not heard of it but I can give it some thought while we turn to our other guest.
[Ira Flatow:] Joachim, you ever heard Velikovsky's idea?
[Professor Joachim Wambsganss:] Similarly, I haven't heard of this idea and I think it's unlikely. Our planetary system seems to be in a pretty stable orbit. And if only 4,000 years ago, another planet would have sort of joined us and keep in I don't I would not expect the motion of the known planets, Mars, us, Venus, to be as stable and as smooth. But, again, similar to Sara, I haven't really given any thought to the idea.
[Ira Flatow:] Would you be able to tell if one of our planets had come from somewhere else?
[Professor Joachim Wambsganss:] Well, if the we have tested the material of some of the planets with NASA missions. And as far as I understand, the sun is attached that all planets are of the same age. And I think this is a pretty robust result, which indicates that they are formed in the same -at the same time and the same place. I would expect a different planet, which formerly was orbiting another star consisting of different material, different ratios of whatever iron and other metals and also being of a different age.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm. Doctor Seager, where would you like to go from here? What would you like what would be exciting?
[Professor Sara Seager:] Well, what we really want to do is try to find planets around the very nearest stars, especially the very nearest sun-like stars. What we wanted the way I look like to look at exoplanets is think ahead to thousands of years from now when people look back to our early 21st generation of people scientists, engineers and just everybody else. And what do you think they're going to remember from this time? I mean, I hope they'll remember a lot of things. But I'm sure they will remember that we were the first people to go out there and find exoplanets and to hopefully find planets like ours out there. We're hoping that these people, thousands of years from now, have a way to travel to those other planetary systems and they'll look back at us, our generation just like we look back at the great explorers hundreds of years ago that we actually were the first to start this whole movement.
[Ira Flatow:] Well, good luck to you and good luck to your exoplanets idea. And we'll check in from now on. OK? Stay with us and tell us what's going on.
[Professor Sara Seager:] Thanks, Ira. Thanks.
[Ira Flatow:] You're welcome. Thank you, Joachim, for joining us, and good luck to you.
[Professor Joachim Wambsganss:] Well, thank you.
[Ira Flatow:] Joachim Wambsganss is a professor of astronomy at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, director of the Center for Astronomy there. And Sara Seager, professor of planetary science and physics at MIT. We're going to take a short break and come when we come back, get out your niobium-titanium party hats. We're celebrating the 100th birthday of superconductors. I'll get out the little party treats. Stay with us. We'll be right back. I'm Ira Flatow. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR.

[Michel Martin:] Now we're going to turn to this week's other big economic news story interest rate cuts. Earlier this week, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates for the first time in more than a decade. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said the decision was made in light of slow global growth and trade tensions. The stock markets tumbled a bit, and President Trump complained the rate cut didn't go far enough. We wanted to talk more about this, especially the reaction to the rate cut and why it matters, so we've called Gary Richardson. He's a professor of economics at the University of California, Irvine. He was also the historian for the Federal Reserve system from 2012 to 2016. Professor Richardson, thank you so much for joining us.
[Gary Richardson:] Thank you for having me on.
[Michel Martin:] The cut itself was a bit of a haircut you know, not that big of a change. But in a press conference after the decision, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell named weak global growth and trade tensions as some of the reasons behind the Fed's decision. So is the significance of this less the rate cut itself the what it says about where the Fed thinks the economy's going?
[Gary Richardson:] For sure that's a big concern. The Federal Reserve has generally better information about the economy than most of the public, and they have a lot of experts there they're trying to predict the future. And the Fed is acting now as if we're in a recession.
[Michel Martin:] And why do you think the stock market reacted as it did?
[Gary Richardson:] Well, the signal I got from this is that the stock market is thinking that the Fed is telling us a recession is coming. There's a lot of potential signals of recessions out there right now, and the Fed is acting as if we're in a recession and taking the policies to counteract a recession. And I think a lot of people took note of that.
[Michel Martin:] And at the same press conference, Chairman Powell said that we are in a, quote-unquote, "mid-cycle" adjustment. What does that mean?
[Gary Richardson:] It's a new phrase. But basically, when they say the middle of the cycle, that means the peak of the cycle, right? The cycle goes up, and then it goes down. So they're saying we're kind of at the peak, and after the peak usually comes a contraction. So the question is, how long is the peak going to last, how long they can sustain the kind of the peak of the boom before the economy shrinks.
[Michel Martin:] I think there's been a lot of talk about whether President Trump's jawboning. I mean, he's been complaining for some time now that he feels that the Fed isn't doing enough to stimulate economic growth. Is his jawboning relevant here?
[Gary Richardson:] By law and not to the Federal Reserve, all presidents complain about the Fed, either in public or in private. Many have complained about the Federal Reserve much worse than Donald Trump. But Congress has told the Federal Reserve's leadership and the Federal Open Market Committee, you must ignore that by law.
[Michel Martin:] Well, that's good to know, so thanks for clarifying that. So if people don't follow economic news closely, what should they be paying attention to as this story continues?
[Gary Richardson:] If you're thinking about refinancing your house, you might want to wait. The Federal Reserve is signaling potentially big problems, which usually means a series of rate cuts. For, like, businesses, there's a bunch of things to be concerned about. One is the Fed is signaling they're worried about the future. They might have information that a recession's really here. Another is that they may be signaling that they've changed policies. In the past, the Federal Reserve would wait to cut interest rates until they knew for sure we were in a recession. Now they're cutting interest rates when we don't it's not clear we're in a recession. This could be a policy that leads to kind of more stability, right? If we're head off recessions. But also, it leads to a lot more risk. If the Federal Reserve stimulates the economy, but there's not a recession, then the economy can get overheated, and the eventual contraction is going to be a lot worse.
[Michel Martin:] That is Gary Richardson, former Federal Reserve System historian and professor of economics at the University of California, Irvine. Professor Richardson, thank you so much for talking to us.
[Gary Richardson:] Oh, thank you. Hopefully it will be useful.

[David Greene:] So in baseball, the difference between being a hero and being a lousy cheat sometimes depends on which era we are talking about and which era we are living in. Here's Pablo Torre, senior writer for ESPN The Magazine.
[Pablo Torre:] If the Baseball Hall of Fame ever admits that it should be more of a museum and less of a shrine, these last two weeks would deserve space in a very special exhibit. Nothing related to this new season it's because of two asterisked sluggers whom we once banished from Major League Baseball, the most moralistic kingdom in sports. First, there was disgraced steroid user Jose Conseco taking on a new public role TV analyst for Oakland A's games on NBC Sports California. And then, not to be outdone, there was disgraced steroid user Alex Rodriguez, who became a full-time baseball analyst for Fox and a guest co-host on "The View."
[Joy Behar:] So you and J-Lo are an item. So do they call you J-Rod now?
[Sara Haines:] Or A-Lo...
[Alex Rodriguez:] We're having a great time. She's an amazing, amazing girl, one of the smartest human beings I've ever met and also an incredible mother.
[Pablo Torre:] Not long ago, these gigs for these men would have been unthinkable. As of 2005, performance-enhancing drugs seemed so irreparably toxic that ex-players were being grilled by Senator Bernie Sanders, not Joy Behar.
[Bernie Sanders:] I appreciate all of your efforts, and you're willing to stand up for the kids of America, that you know you're role models, you know that steroids are bad, and you want to do everything you can to prevent kids from emulating bad habits.
[Pablo Torre:] But it's not just Canseco and Rodriguez who've been returned. No less than Mark McGwire, who broke the single-season home run record on steroids in 1998, is now the bench coach for the San Diego Padres. And no less than Barry Bonds, the tainted home run king, was the hitting coach for the Miami Marlins last year. As with Canseco and A-Rod, nobody really protested their presence. So what's changed? Well, for one thing, Congress realized it had bigger fish to fry. And for another, revelations of steroid use clearly became less shocking and less evil to the average American, which is reasonable. We've learned that legions of players both pitchers and sluggers, both stars and scrubs have used performance-enhancing drugs. And as criminality goes, asterisks are nothing compared to the last decade of sports villains. The torrid news cycles around Ray Rice and Donald Sterling and Jerry Sandusky and Aaron Hernandez they've all reshaped the very concept of athletic scandal. And yet, one organization remains absurdly puritanical about the past. The voters for the holy Baseball Hall of Fame keep refusing men like Bonds and McGwire. But our most famous juicers belong in an exhibit right alongside Canseco and Rodriguez, one that reminds us how an asterisk was once a stigma and how it also became a star.
[David Greene:] That was commentator Pablo Torre. He is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine.

[Rachel Martin:] When Zalmay Khalilzad was named ambassador to Afghanistan back in 2003, that country was a much different place. The U.S. had just invaded in 2001 in an effort to root out al-Qaida terrorists by overthrowing the Taliban. Afghanistan's economy? Well, there wasn't really an economy at all. There was little infrastructure, few reliable institutions. Khalilzad's mission at the time was to rebuild the country.
[Zalmay Khalilzad:] Now Afghans are, on average, better off economically, socially than they were then. But in terms of security, the situation is more difficult. The Taliban are stronger, and therefore the mission now for me is to facilitate on behalf of the United States a peace settlement, a reconciliation agreement, between the government and the Taliban.
[Rachel Martin:] That could be a challenge. Khalilzad has a new role. He's been appointed U.S. special adviser to Afghanistan. Some 15,000 U.S. troops are still there, and the U.S. has started talking directly with the Taliban for the first time. I asked Khalilzad if the U.S. should have engaged more directly with the Taliban a long time ago. He spoke to us from his hotel in New York.
[Zalmay Khalilzad:] Well, there are complications on both sides. We had some preconditions at that time in terms of engaging the Taliban that they should accept the Afghan constitution, that they should renounce violence, that they should break ties with terrorist groups that would threaten the United States and others. Those preconditions have become more in-conditions that at the end of the talk we would like them to commit themselves in a way that we can be certain...
[Rachel Martin:] But doesn't that excuse me for interrupting. Does that not diminish the leverage that you have over the Taliban?
[Zalmay Khalilzad:] Well, no. I believe that what we are saying signals our seriousness in terms of wanting a negotiated settlement. And I think they also perhaps recognize that militarily they cannot prevail, that they cannot gain legitimacy by violence. They need to make the decisions that must be made for a negotiated settlement to work, and that means they will have to sit with the other Afghans about a roadmap, a political roadmap for the future of their country. And they also have to deal with the legitimate U.S. and international concerns that Afghanistan does not become a base for terrorists again that would threaten the United States.
[Rachel Martin:] But let me ask you. You outlined what the Taliban needs to do in order to secure a long-term peace deal. But these are the same conditions that were laid out and have been laid out for a decade. What makes you believe that they are at a position now that they would be ready to accept them?
[Zalmay Khalilzad:] Well, as I said before, Rachel, we had those as preconditions at the beginning. But now we're talking with them without insisting on those preconditions. So that's significant. But America's vital, critical, important interest is the terrorism issue. Yes, we have our values. Everyone knows what we stand for, and we want to see a settlement worthy of the 17 years of blood and treasure that the U.S. and others have sacrificed. Yes. But a lot of those issues are really Afghan-Afghan issues.
[Rachel Martin:] So if that means that the priority is to quell the threat of terrorism, does that mean that the U.S. you could see a future in which the U.S. removes all of its troops because the terrorism threat has been quelled, even if the civil war between the Taliban and the Afghan government persists?
[Zalmay Khalilzad:] Well, as President Trump has said, the American presence militarily in Afghanistan is condition based. Having troops in Afghanistan is not an end in itself for the United States, but not having a terrorist threat is the end, if you like, the most important objective.
[Rachel Martin:] But how can you ever be sure that the terrorism threat is over? Can you ever imagine U.S. troops being completely gone from Afghanistan?
[Zalmay Khalilzad:] It is the responsibility of the Taliban and other Afghans to bring about conditions that do not necessitate the U.S. military presence.
[Rachel Martin:] You know Pakistan is going to be crucial, though, to any long-term sustainable peace in Afghanistan. Do you trust the Pakistani government at this point and do they trust you?
[Zalmay Khalilzad:] Well, I mean, it's not about trust. I mean, we're talking about international politics. I used to work for Ronald Reagan. I mean, trust is good, but, you know, you have to verify, and that would apply to a lot of states.
[Rachel Martin:] Is that a no?
[Zalmay Khalilzad:] But Pakistan says now that it wants to turn a new page, that it wants to help the U.S. with this objective that I outlined. And we'll have to see.
[Rachel Martin:] President Trump talks very little about Afghanistan. Peter Singer at the New America Foundation did a count, and according to his tally, President Trump has tweeted six times more about the NFL anthem controversy than he has about Afghanistan, which is remarkable considering there are still thousands of U.S. troops in the line of fire there. And if the president says anything at all, it's that he wants U.S. troops to get out. Do you think there is a risk that this administration, because of its appetite to end this war, could leave too early?
[Zalmay Khalilzad:] I'm very positive about what the president has said with regard to a condition-based presence. I know that the president pays a lot of attention to Afghanistan, and I know that every time there is a report of a U.S. casualty that is very attentive to that and moved by it. So I'm comfortable that what the president has outlined as our policy will be helpful.
[Rachel Martin:] Just briefly, have you gotten a chance to be in a room and talk directly with President Trump?
[Zalmay Khalilzad:] Well, of course, I know the president. I introduced him when he gave his major foreign policy address.
[Rachel Martin:] But in your new post as the special...
[Zalmay Khalilzad:] In my new post, not yet. But I'm told I will.
[Rachel Martin:] Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan. Ambassador, thank you so much for taking the time.
[Zalmay Khalilzad:] Well, thank you, Rachel. It's good to be with you.

[Robert Siegel:] The Trump administration has signed a trade deal with China. The U.S. gets to export its beef and natural gas to a growing market. In return, among other things, China gets to send us its cooked poultry. We'll have more on what could turn up in our grocery stores in a moment. First, the administration says this deal could help narrow the trade deficit with China, as NPR's Jackie Northam reports.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] The deal is the result of trade talks that sprang from a meeting in April between President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago. They agreed a deal needed to be reached within 100 days or by July 16. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced the trade deal, saying it was accomplished in record time.
[Wilbur Ross:] It was pretty much a Herculean accomplishment to get this done. This is more than has been done in the whole history of U.S.-China relations on trade.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] Under the agreement, China will open its market to U.S. beef importers by mid-July. Ross says American beef producers have been locked out of China's enormous market since a mad cow scare in 2003.
[Wilbur Ross:] It's a very big market. It's at least a $2.5 billion market that's being opened up for U.S. beef.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] For its part, the Trump administration will allow imports of cooked poultry from China. Ross says the Department of Agriculture believes this will not cause major harm to the U.S. poultry industry. The deal will also allow China easier access to the U.S. banking system and let American energy companies export LNG to China, most of which it currently buys from Russia. Scott Kennedy, a China specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here in Washington, says the deal is...
[Scott Kennedy:] A productive first step in addressing some long outstanding problems that the U.S. has in its relationship with China. And there's some important elements to the agreement that they announced, but it is really just a first step.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] Kennedy says the deal doesn't address core problems the U.S. has in its relationship with China. He says China's industrial policy is discriminatory. It's trying to export and invest abroad where there are almost no barriers while limiting access to its own markets, which hurts U.S. industries.
[Scott Kennedy:] And that's not just for traditional industries like steel and aluminum. In fact, it's more important for high-value sectors like services and for advanced technology areas where the U.S. is a global leader.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] There may be more progress when negotiators from the U.S. and China meet again this summer to continue work on trade issues. Jackie Northam, NPR News.

[Farai Chideya:] I'm Farai Chideya. On today's roundtable, more from President Bush defining his position on terror, and New Orleans mayor, Ray Nagin wants people to rebuild at their own risk. Joining us today to discuss these topics and more, Glen Loury, professor of economics at Brown University. He's at member station WRNI in Providence, Rhode Island. And from our New York bureau, ER Shipp, professor of journalism at Hofstra University, and Michael Meyers, executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. Welcome, and let's start in Louisiana. Mayor Ray Nagin presented his plan for resurrecting New Orleans. He said residents should be allowed to rebuild anywhere as long as they understand they're doing it at their own risk. He said the city will continue issuing building permits, but warned that low-lying neighborhoods, like New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth Ward, could flood again. Now, this is in response to an unpopular plan that called for turning low-laying areas into parks or wetlands. But E.R., will this hurt the rebuilding if only some people build in these heavily damaged areas? Professor E.R. SHIPP [Professor of Journalism, Hofstra University]: It has the potential for doing that, sure. There's also the question of what kind of infrastructure there would be in some of these neighborhoods that are more likely to suffer from hurricanes. The season starts pretty soon, by the way. I think the mayor is being a bit irresponsible. It may sound politically correct to tell everybody they can come back and build wherever they want to, but this is an opportunity for New Orleans to rethink the environmental soundness of its plans, to rethink how it wants to reshape the city. Glen, you are a professor of economics, an economist. I recently went back to New Orleans and there's so many different competing economic interests. There's homeowners, renters, real estate speculators, federal, state, and local government.
[Mr. Glen Loury:] Right.
[Farai Chideya:] How do those economic interests get reconciled? And how should they be reconciled when it comes to rebuilding?
[Mr. Glen Loury:] Well, that is the question. I think the mayor is being a bit, sort of, lacking in leadership in not recognizing the need to coordinate the actions of all the parties involved here. And to ensure that people, who don't have otherwise a stake at the table, get represented. The people who were living in rental apartments, for example, who were flooded out, don't have any way really to get back in. And in general, these low-income areas, which might not be viable environmentally, nevertheless housed an important part of the city's population and culture. And a way needs to be found to give those people a seat at the table so that they can participate in the reconstruction of New Orleans.
[Farai Chideya:] Michael, how do you give people a seat at the table?
[Mr. Michael Meyers:] Well, you stop with the publicity gimmicks and you stop with the nonsense. You know, parts of New Orleans are like a ghost town. Are the levees fixed yet? I want to know. What does it mean to rebuild at your own risk? This is getting to be like the situation at Ground Zero in New York City. After four years, in New York City, there's still a big hole in the ground and it's become a tourist attraction. The ghost town in New Orleans is a tourist attraction. Katrina was a natural disaster, from which we should have learned lessons, and as E.R. suggested, it was an opportunity for imagination, an architectural plan, how to build, where to build, how high to build, the cost of building? What about a new town concept? There is no imagination here. There is no genius here. All there are seems to be is public hearings where there are constant charges of racism. There's a failure of the human intellect there and political, bold leadership.
[Farai Chideya:] Let me move you, Michael, to another topic. In a press conference yesterday, President George Bush said that the decision about when to withdraw all the U.S. troops from Iraq will be made by future leaders, suggesting that U.S. troops could stay in Iraq at least through 2008. Now, the President also defended Donald Rumsfeld.
[President George Bush:] I think he's done a fine job of not only conducting two battles, Afghanistan and Iraq, but also transforming our military, which has been a very difficult job inside the Pentagon. Listen, every war plan looks good on paper until you meet the enemy. Not just the war plan we execute in Iraq, but the war plans that have been executed throughout the history of warfare. In other words, the enemy changes tactics, and we've got to change tactics, too. And no question that we've had to adjust our tactics on the ground and perhaps the clearest example is in the training of Iraqi security forces.
[Farai Chideya:] Now, Senator Dianne Feinstein is calling for Rumsfeld to resign. Michael, is there real pressure behind Rumsfeld to get out of office?
[Mr. Michael Meyers:] No. The only pressure for Rumsfeld to get out would have to come from the president, and the president yesterday made a big concession and admission. And that is that we are going to be in Iraq even when he's not president, '08. Look, they might as well stick a fork in his presidency. This guy is done, and so there's no impetus for Rumsfeld to get out. The problem here is that speech, after speech, after speech, after speech, they are not working. They have Orwellian properties to them, fear, war is peace, victory over terrorism, sectarian violence. We have fake news in Iraq paid for by the U.S. government. After three years of war, we have an Iraqi parliament that cannot but for 30 minutes, and adjourns. What kind of situation is this? This is a disaster. Get out!
[Prof. Shipp:] Yes, but the president isn't going to get out, so we've got to figure out some kind of options. He said in that news conference that if he didn't believe in the war and didn't believe it could be won, he wouldn't have put those kids over there, meaning the soldiers, many of whom are not kids, by the way, particularly with the experience they've had. So he's not going to get out. I don't know that Congress has the will to insist upon anything.
[Mr. Michael Meyers:] They don't.
[Prof. Shipp:] So we're stuck there. We've been there three years, in what was supposed to be a relatively short war. More than 2,300 young people have died and countless thousands more wounded. So we are...
[Farai Chideya:] Sorry. E.R., you know, it strikes me that although we are certainly embroiled in this war, it's not the kind of war that some people think about every day. People with families in the military, yes, and people who are looking at policy, yes, but it's not as if every day we're asked to get up and look at car bombs or anything like that. So is that part of the issue here, that we just don't feel it in a visceral way at home?
[Prof. Shipp:] Sure, but the president took it in a different direction. He said that we're seeing too much of the negative side of the war and not enough of what's going on, the rebuilding of infrastructure, the rebuilding of schools, and all of that. So I notice today, that on television networks, correspondents were going out of their way to try to show how they're trying to do those positive stories, but that is dangerous there. So it's dangerous for the troops. It's dangerous for the press corps. They can help to shape the image, but the President would rather blame the media for undermining the war effort.
[Farai Chideya:] Glen, can you give us some kind of an overview of what a war might cost in economic terms and also political terms if it extends, say, through the 2008 presidency, whoever becomes president in 2008, if it goes on until 2012, what will this do to our country?
[Mr. Glen Loury:] Well, you know, I think Michael Meyers is right. This is a failed policy. We're spending $150 billion dollars a year. We have squandered our good offices with governments around the world. We've inflamed the enemy, as the president is fond of referring to this discontent in the Islamic world. This has been a failed policy. And E.R. is right. The president is sticking with it. He is betting the farm on this failed policy and I think the responsibility now falls to the American people who get to go to the polls in November to express ourselves, the scales having finally fallen from our eyes, in opposition to this government and the party that is running it. This is a failed policy, no good for the American people, and we need to say so in no uncertain terms at the polls this November.
[Farai Chideya:] Michael, however, although Democrats have been vociferous in criticizing President Bush, a lot of the Democrats gave him the power to proceed with this war. And some Americans, according to polls, are not necessarily that enthusiastic about a Democratic opposition in Congress, so it's unclear which way that will go. Do you think the Democrats are going to gain enough ground to become a true opposition party in the 2006 elections?
[Mr. Michael Meyers:] No. You used the word vociferous. I don't think the Democrat Party has been vociferous at all. Maybe one person in the Democrat Party, their so-called leader, chairman, Dr. Howard Dean has been vociferous, but he's the only one. The Democrats beat a quick path away from everything he says. No, this Democratic, pusillanimous party is-they are so ridiculous. They are so weak. They are so timid. They are so outrageously un-opposite, un-opposite the GOP, that it's embarrassing for them, and it's embarrassing for anybody who would be motivated to go to the polls. So no, this is not just President Bush's war. This is a Congressional war. It's the Congress that continues to fund this war. It's the Congress that continues to have deficit spending, and it's the Congress that continues to empower the president through overwhelming numbers of votes for the USA Patriot Act; and this so-called war on terrorism, this phony war on terrorism. It is Orwellian. I'm sick of it.
[Farai Chideya:] All right, well on that note, I'm going to move ahead to another conflict in the Sudan. Darfur, Sudan, has been called a place of genocide, but the New York Times ran an eight-page advertising supplement paid for by the Sudanese government claiming the country has, "peaceful, prosperous and democratic future." Now, human rights activists are seething and the Sudanese government probably paid close to a million dollars for these ads, should The New York Times, E.R., face any consequences?
[Prof. Shipp:] Well, that's for its readers and other advertisers to say, I suppose, but The Times is approaching this as strictly a business decision. Somehow, the First Amendment is involved and all of that, but it really does, to borrow Michael's words that he's used a couple of times now, Orwellian, to have the government in Sudan trying to convince the world that it is now a democratic society that is safe for all of its inhabitants. We know that the opposite is very true.
[Farai Chideya:] And Glenn, you know, one of the columnists at the New York Times has just been absolutely out there, Nicholas Kristof...
[Mr. Glen Loury:] Yeah.
[Farai Chideya:] ...criticizing the Sudanese government, so it puts The Times in an especially strange light because one of their editorial employees has been so far out there. You know, can you really separate business and the editorial side when it's a situation this grave?
[Mr. Glen Loury:] Well, I think you should. I mean, I think the free speech argument here is bogus. I mean, the spokesman for the Times is quoted in the newspaper as saying, in accepting this advertisement we do not endorse the politics, trade practices or actions of the country or the character of its leaders. Perhaps, but you do further their ends. Can they not know that? It's impossible that they cannot know that.
[Prof. Shipp:] And I'm sure that there are other instances where The New York Times and other newspapers have rejected certain advertising supplements, such as this particular one from the Sudanese government. So at some level, someone has to exercise some moral authority; but the rationale this time around is that it was more or less a business decision.
[Farai Chideya:] Michael, another topic.
[Mr. Myers:] Mm hmmm.
[Farai Chideya:] The American Red Cross has supported a lifetime ban on blood donations by men who have sex with men. Now, the organization is reconsidering its position, the Red Cross is prompting the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to do a risk assessment that could reverse a 16-year-old ban excluding any man who has had gay sex since 1977 from ever donating blood. So that means that if you've had gay sex since 1977 you can't give yesterday, today, tomorrow, next week, whenever. Is this an issue of rectifying undue discrimination or should the ban stay in place, Michael?
[Mr. Myers:] This policy is an ignorant as the advertisement for the Sudanese in The New York Times. Look, this is reminiscent of the bias against Haitians in the 80s when they excluded Haitians from giving blood. The safety of the blood supply cannot be based on donors' answers to questions, by the way, about their sexual partners. Beyond that, you cannot exclude the entire segment of the population based on some stereotype or prejudice. There is people on the down low, there is heterosexuals who are at risk, you get AIDS through unprotected vaginal and anal sex and through the use of [unintelligible] and dirty needles and so the transmission of AIDS is clear. Anybody can be at risk, so the point for me is, is there a reliable blood test? And unless there are reliable blood tests, everybody is at risk. But you cannot single out certain parts of the population based on their sexual practices and what they say their sexual practices are. It's just an ignorant policy and the FDA ought to know better, the courts ought to know better and all the leadership should be revamped and rehauled and just eliminate all that.
[Farai Chideya:] E.R., what do you think?
[Prof. Shipp:] Well, this is one of those vestiges of the hysteria that ran through the country quite rampantly in the 80s when AIDS was just being "discovered." People feared that you could get AIDS by touching someone with AIDS, by shaking a hand, by sharing a dish, all of those kinds of things. The blood situation goes back to that crazy period. We've come a long way, so it's about time that we address the exclusion of people as a group. And I think there's a practical side; the blood banks aren't'getting a sufficient supply of blood if they keep excluding entire groups and we'll have a hurricane season and we'll need blood because of the war effort. So, I think this has a practical side also.
[Farai Chideya:] Certainly we are in a blood crunch. You mentioned the war, hurricane season; it's a time when there is a great need. Glenn, what should be done, not only to deal with the question of who should be allowed to donate, but how do you generate donations in a time of need like this?
[Mr. Glen Loury:] Yeah, well, I think we have a case of profiling here of, you know, homosexual profiling and it's subject to all the criticism that you would make of racial profiling or anything else. I think Michael hit on the key point though, you need to have reliable ways of testing the blood supply, you can't be basing the security of the blood supply on people's answers to these kinds of questions. So I think that's the key thing.
[Chiedya:] So we've talking with Glen Loury who's a professor of economics at Brown University at member station WRNI in Providence, Rhode Island, and also with contributors in our New York bureau: E.R. Shipp professor of journalism at Hofstra University and Michael Myers, executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. Thank you all so much for joining us.
[Mr. Myers:] Thank you.
[Prof. Shipp:] Thank you.
[Farai Chideya:] Next on NEWS AND NOTES the man behind Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was his legal council, speech writer and right-hand man in the fight for civil rights. We'll hear from Clarence B. Jones. You're listening to NEWS AND NOTES from NPR News.

[Scott Simon:] I'm Scott Simon. Coming up, the larger-than-life president of one of Louisiana's hardest hit parishes. But first, Mogadishu, Somalia has been relatively quiet since an Islamist militia seized control of that city earlier this week. The militia, which is also known as the Islamic Courts Union is now reportedly negotiating with rival clans to consolidate power in Mogadishu and beyond. Mohamed Olan Hazan is a Somali-freelancer. He's on the line from Mogadishu. Thanks very much for being with us.
[Mr. Mohamed Olan Hazan:] Thank you.
[Scott Simon:] There are reports that the Islamist militia is moving north to try and take control of some of the cities that warlords have held for some time. Does this seem to you as if there's a strategy on the part of the Islamist militia to try and extend their control beyond the capital?
[Mr. Mohamed Olan Hazan:] One of the [unintelligible] speaking to a local radio that there were people in their struggle throughout the country. Other Islamic courts obviously say, no, they are not moving anywhere. They are going to restore law and order in the capital. On the other hand, moving to other areas in the country has created anger in some of the main clan [unintelligible] Mogadishu [unintelligible] Mogadishu, the Afghan clan has been against any move of the Islamic courts, so they have been demonstrating and then warnings to the Islamic courts to stay out of these areas.
[Scott Simon:] You know there is concern in the United States and Europe that the Islamist militia are tied to al-Qaida and perhaps other terrorist groups. What do you make of that concern? Do you see any evidence of that?
[Mr. Mohamed Olan Hazan:] Really there have been rumors in the Somali capital of Mogadishu that within the Islamist militia, a number of foreign terrorists [unintelligible], but nobody's come verify whether these terrorists are still hiding out here in Mogadishu.
[Scott Simon:] What about reports that the Islamist militia has received some financial support from Saudi Arabia and Yemen?
[Mr. Mohamed Olan Hazan:] That's something widely believed here in Mogadishu. Nobody can verify, but we know the Islamists are now funding a lot of militias here in Mogadishu, giving some salaries to their militiamen. About $100,000 is spent every day in this militia, so people are skeptical where this money comes from.
[Scott Simon:] What about reports that we have read here in the United States that people in Mogadishu, some were quite glad to see Islamist militia take over. Is that true? Did you see evidence of that?
[Mr. Mohamed Olan Hazan:] Most of the people here in Mogadishu are Muslim so there are many people who are very happy with the steps taken by the Islamic court. They say the [unintelligible] this nation for the last 16 years without development. So now we have to give the Islamists their chance to restore law and order.
[Scott Simon:] Are there Islamist courts operating in Mogadishu now?
[Mr. Mohamed Olan Hazan:] Yes, there have been about 12 Islamic courts in Mogadishu. As soon the Islamists took over the Consulate of the capital, three other Islamic courts have joined the union.
[Scott Simon:] And that could make a big difference in the way people in Mogadishu live, couldn't it? Like women could be forced to wear a shadur [ph] or not even go out on the streets alone, women might be removed from schools.
[Mr. Mohamed Olan Hazan:] No, that has never happened here in Mogadishu. That's a very extreme position of the Islamists, but these Islamists here in Mogadishu seem to be have taken light steps before they go farther into that area.
[Scott Simon:] Thank you very much, Mr. Mohamed.
[Mr. Mohamed Olan Hazan:] Thank you [unintelligible].
[Scott Simon:] Mohamed Olan Hazan, a freelance reporter speaking from Mogadishu.

[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] The polls were wrong. We've heard that a lot, especially after the 2016 presidential election. Exit polls then, for instance, substantially underestimated the number of white voters without a college degree. Now Fox News and The Associated Press are rocking a quarter-century of standardized practice of how exit polls are done. For more, NPR lead political editor Domenico Montanaro joins us now from Denver, where some of the country's top pollsters have gathered this past week and where Fox News and the AP have detailed their joint venture for the first time. Hey, Domenico.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Hey there, Lulu.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Sounds like a fun gathering. Lots of pollsters in a room I'm sure there's jokes. What makes this new effort such a big deal?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Look, this is the first time since 1992, when all the media organizations bought into one National Election Pool, that there's going to be competition. And it's a totally different approach to measuring the electorate. They're launching it, by the way, they announced, in all 47 states where there are elections this fall for statewide elections in these midterms. And it's a massive undertaking that really is you know, just talking to people here starting a crackup of American election polling.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] That's fascinating. What is different, though, about what Fox News and the AP are doing?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Well, first of all, it's not an exit poll [LAUGHTER].
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] OK. Well, that's a big deal.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Think of this really as a massive pre-election poll of likely voters, in other words, making phone calls and online surveys that they'll be doing up to election day of about 5,000 voters per state. Now, to put that into some context, most decent polls that survey now with a, you know, good low margin of error are about 500 people in the state. So we're talking 10 times the sample size of a regular poll. They also break up the states into more subregions than the current exit polls do. They think that this is going to help them be more accurate. And Fox and AP are pretty confident that their results are better than the traditional exit polls in some ways. They actually did shadow polls with the new system in three big specials this year special elections in the 6th Congressional District in Georgia, the New Jersey governor's race and the Alabama Senate race. And guess what they got the winner right in all three.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] That sounds promising. But are there pitfalls to this way of doing things? I mean, are people asking questions about whether or not they are going to be able to keep their winning streak?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Yes [LAUGHTER]. And there's a big degree of risk when you're not actually speaking to voters. They're not actually speaking to people who have gone and voted. There's always a number of people who say they're going to vote who don't. And this is an experiment. AP and Fox even though they're putting this they're operationalizing this, they acknowledge that there are some demographic shortcomings. They found this in their tests in their poll. They underestimated in Alabama, for example, the number of black voters who would show up. But like scientists, they acknowledge those shortcomings. And they're going to be tinkering with their models along the way. So we may have something good eventually, but it's a whole new Wild West era here.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] What has been the reaction to this from the pollsters at this conference that you're at?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] In the hallways here, I was surprised to hear, actually, that academics and pollsters are mostly saying that this effort is overdue. There's general consensus that the traditional exit polls are oversampling Democrats because older voters don't like having to fill out these forms. And they, of course, lean pretty heavily Republican. Many people I talked to here said that they've been raising alarm bells with the National Election Pool for a decade to no avail. And they see this as a pretty good thing to light a match under those exit pollsters to change. I talked with a consultant to one of those exit polls. And he said that they are actually going to be trying to make changes and that this is part of that.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] That's NPR's lead political editor Domenico Montanaro in Denver. Thank you so much.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Madeleine Brand:] And NPR's Mike Pesca is monitoring all the action, too. He's collected some of the memorable moments so far.
[Mike Pesca:] Twelve hours of speeches and we're not even half done. At least by Friday every argument to be made about the surge will have been made in triplicate, unless Georgia Republican Jack Kingston is right.
[Representative Jack Kingston:] Fortunately for us, and the free world, they don't sit around and watch C-Span and what silly politicians do.
[Mike Pesca:] If they did, they would have heard the word war uttered 681 times yesterday, peace 52, failure 45, success 83. Those are specific words. Members of Congress often relied on the general.
[Unidentified Man #1:] The great Southern general Robert E. Lee was really [unintelligible]...
[Unidentified Man #2:] Well, he gets part of it from General Giap book in Vietnam.
[Unidentified Man #3:] The quotation from Douglas MacArthur...
[Unidentified Man #4:] We have heard generals after general, after general...
[Unidentified Man #5:] Apparently all of our best generals have become congressmen.
[Mike Pesca:] There was plenty of talk about the very relevant generals of today -Petraeus, Casey, Abizaid but for some reason discussion took a turn to 1836. California Republican Darrell Issa.
[Representative Darrell Issa:] That makes as much sense as telling the people at the Alamo, stay the course. That wasn't the right solution at the Alamo.
[Mike Pesca:] Iowa Republican Todd Akin picked up the Bowie knife and ran with it.
[Representative Todd Akin:] Could you picture Davy Crockett at the Alamo, looking at his Blackberry getting a message from Congress?
[Mike Pesca:] New Hampshire Democrat Carol Shea-Porter was puzzled by this particular analogy.
[Representative Carol Shea-porter:] There's no Davy Crockett in Iraq.
[Mike Pesca:] Truer and stranger words have hardly ever been uttered. Mike Pesca, NPR News, New York.
[Madeleine Brand:] And there's more coming up on DAY TO DAY from NPR News.

[Scott Simon:] The serial bomber who terrorized Austin blew himself up this week. Investigators still search for a motive. The attack shook the city, as residents everywhere felt at risk and no more so than in east Austin, which experienced the initial bombings. Susana Almanza is president of the Montopolis Neighborhood Association in east Austin and joins us now. Thanks very much for being with us.
[Susana Almanza:] Thank you for having me.
[Scott Simon:] I understand you lived just six houses away from one of the people who was injured lives. What's it been like for your neighborhood these past couple of weeks?
[Susana Almanza:] Well, it's been kind of scary. People have been anxious, and people have been very worried. And we are very concerned that because it had happened on east of Interstate Highway 35, and it was communities of color that somebody was targeting people of color.
[Scott Simon:] The first victims were African-American and Latino, as you note. The authorities have said so far they haven't identified a motive. But I'm wondering if you can help us understand historically, maybe, why some of those feelings might run deep in your community.
[Susana Almanza:] Well, you know, historically, we've always been a very segregated community and also economically segregated. And so, you know, when the first bomb went off, the city the police thought, well, it was either maybe a drug deal that went bad, or maybe he had done this to himself. So looking at it, that's very kind of racial profiling. You know, because of all the racism that exists, we just say it's easier for the institutions, whether it's, you know, the FBI or ATF it's easier for them not to be honest with the people that race had a place to play in it. The fact is that three people-of-color families were devastated, and it was done by a white young guy conservative. To us, it's pretty much very much racial. And I don't think they'll be able to change our minds about that.
[Scott Simon:] Ms. Almanza, tell us about east Austin. You grew up there.
[Susana Almanza:] Yes, I did.
[Scott Simon:] What was it like when you were growing up? What's it like now?
[Susana Almanza:] Well, you know, like I said, it was pretty much segregated. The city put together their 1928 master plan, which began to at one time, Austin was pretty much integrated. But in that master plan, it decided that all people of color would be moved east of the highway. And not only would we be moved east of the highway, but all the unwanted facilities, you know, hazardous facilities, chemical using facilities would also be in our communities. We have substandard housing. We have lower educational attainment in east Austin. So you think about, you know, higher crime rates. You talk about more poverty, so when you look at all this evidence you can just see how the big there's two cities within Austin.
[Scott Simon:] East Austin is changing, from what we've read, isn't it?
[Susana Almanza:] Absolutely. East Austin is changing. And I tell you that it took us a decade to clean up our communities and get rid of the most hazardous facilities. And after that, the city then began to gentrify our communities. We all bought our homes from $2,000 to $18,000. If you look now, they're all valued from $250,000 to a million dollars. So the taxes have displaced us.
[Scott Simon:] May I ask, have you ever thought of just selling your house, making a bundle and moving elsewhere?
[Susana Almanza:] Well, they call me all the time. And it's gotten to where it looks like it's a personal letter, but it's really you open it, and they wanted to buy your house. And so I've called their realtor, and I said, I got this notice that you want to buy my property. And they say, oh, yes, yes. We are very much interested. And I said, well, I want $1.5 million. And they say, oh my, Ms. Almanza that is not the value of your house. I said, I don't care. I'm setting the value of my house. I'm saying that if you want it, it's $1.5 million. And if you don't, then take me off the list and don't call me and don't write me anymore because I don't want to leave.
[Scott Simon:] Susana Almanza is the director of PODER, a community organization in Austin. Thanks so much for speaking with us.
[Susana Almanza:] Thank you.

[Steve Inskeep:] It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
[Renee Montagne:] And I'm Renee Montagne. Venezuela is in a state of mourning for its late president, Hugo Chavez. The outsized leader died yesterday in the capital, Caracas, after a two-year battle with cancer. He was 58. Hugo Chavez was both a polarizing and charismatic figure, and during his long rule he became an icon, beloved by Venezuela's poor and others in the region who admired his defiant stance toward the U.S. NPR's Juan Forero has been covering Chavez for more than a decade and he joined us on the line to talk about him. Good morning.
[Juan Forero, Byline:] Good morning.
[Renee Montagne:] Now, when Hugo Chavez first ran for president 14 years ago, he promised to take on political corruption and to make sure that all Venezuelans especially the poor benefited from the country's substantial oil wealth. Looking back, how did he do?
[Juan Forero, Byline:] Well, he's a guy who came in and he promised a revolution, basically, and in many ways you have to say that he delivered. He took over institutions, like the judiciary and the state oil company and he began to use them to overturn the old order and install what he called 21st century socialism. Now, sort of on a tangible level that meant taking over private farms, taking over companies, and for ordinary Venezuelans Chavez created all kinds of social programs. He called them missions. They were small programs in poor neighborhoods, teaching people how to read. There were markets for people where they could buy food at lower cost. And the government claimed that all of this reduced poverty. But there's a dark side to this legacy too, because Venezuela today is a country where the president controls everything. I mean all the levers of power are in his hands, corruption is rampant, and the economy is dysfunctional right now. The state is the job's provider and private industry has been in a long decline. And what some critics say is that Chavez, what he was really doing was creating a system that was designed to ensure that he stayed in power.
[Renee Montagne:] Well, and during all of this time, Venezuela and the U.S. were and have been important trade partners, which I think might surprise a lot of Americans because what we hear about this relationship is the volatile and even dark side. The rhetoric coming mostly from President Chavez was quite something to listen to. Let's take a listen right now to his television show, "Hello, Mr. President," lambasting then-President George W. Bush.
[President Hugo Chavez:] [Spanish Spoken] You are a donkey, Mr. Bush.
[Renee Montagne:] OK. Well, he also called Mr. Bush a devil at the U.N. once, said he smelled the sulfur from where he had stood. Pretty strong stuff.
[Juan Forero, Byline:] Yeah. Well, the antagonism goes way back. I mean there's a history to this. Chavez, from the beginning, when he took office in 1999, really from the beginning he sought to distant himself from the United States. And he criticized U.S. policy from the beginning, like the war in Afghanistan, the drug war in the Americas. And in 2002 he accused the Bush administration of being behind a coup that ousted him briefly. But Chavez also seemed to need an enemy. I mean that was part of his persona, part of his policy, part of his programs, and the United States just fit perfectly because of the U.S. policy in Latin America and because of U.S. in Latin America. So he claimed constantly that the U.S. could invade at any moment, that CIA agents were at work, and that the goal would be to one day take over Venezuela's oil. And he also called the opposition, you know, a rancid oligarchy that was working hand in hand with the Americans to end his rule and to take back people's social programs. And I think that that narrative was really very important and was really part of the Chavez PR machine. Millions of people, of course, didn't believe Chavez, but arguably the majority of Venezuelans did. And we saw this strategy down to the last day of his life. Even yesterday, when he was dying, the vice president came out to say that Chavez's historic enemies he meant the U.S. and Venezuelan elites had somehow infected Chavez with cancer.
[Renee Montagne:] The vice president, of course, is in line to succeed him. And one of the big questions now is when Venezuela holds elections, within the next 30 days, is it likely into the future that his brand of Chavism will continue?
[Juan Forero, Byline:] Well, they call it in Venezuela Chavismo, and that's the big question: Is Chavismo going to live? And the vice president, Nicolas Maduro, I think he has the sympathy vote, he has momentum, and he also controls the purse strings, which Chavez also controlled, and that's what you need to win elections in Venezuela. The opposition also lately has been looking kind of weak. They lost a big election in December and they also lost the presidential elections in October. So if I were betting, I'd say that Maduro is probably going to win which would mean six more years of what Chavez called a revolution.
[Renee Montagne:] NPR's Juan Forero, thanks very much.
[Juan Forero, Byline:] Thank you.

[David Greene:] Let's examine a huge challenge for the Obama administration that helped define 2014 and seems unlikely to go away anytime soon. It is finding a way to help Ukraine defend its territory from pro-Russian separatists. The fear has been doing too much could embolden Russia's Vladimir Putin. But the United States is now considering a change in strategy that could mean supplying Ukraine with defensive weapons things like anti-tank missiles. Here's NPR's Michele Keleman.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] Up to now, the U.S. has provided Ukraine with night vision goggles, body armor and other nonlethal aid. But eight former Pentagon and State Department officials say more is needed and soon. Former ambassador to Ukraine Steven Pifer says he and his co-authors are just back from NATO and Ukraine, where they heard about the need for anti-armor weapons.
[Steven Pifer:] The Ukrainian stockpile of such weapons is at least 20 years old. We were told about three-quarters of those weapons simply do not work. And both in NATO and in Ukraine, we heard that they've seen a strong flow of Russian armor tanks and armored personnel carriers from Russia into eastern Ukraine. I think one comment we heard at NATO was and they're not even really bothering to do much to try to hide it anymore.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] Pifer says he believes this is a, quote, "live issue" in the White House now, and officials are seriously considering the recommendations in the report. One concern often raised by administration officials, though, is whether shipping weapons will simply provoke Russian president Vladimir Putin. Former Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who's president of the Brookings Institution, says there's another way to look at this.
[Strobe Talbott:] There is. And we all have to recognize it a danger of some degree of escalation here. But Putin seems to be bent on escalation. His overall strategy is essentially a double game talk across the table and kill on the ground in Ukraine.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] And if the U.S. doesn't up the ante, as Talbott puts it, that will just encourage Putin to keep rolling. He and his co-authors don't think U.S. military assistance will help Ukraine defeat Russia, but they argue it is time to raise the cost for Russian aggression. And they think the timing of the report is key. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki says the U.S. is worried about as she puts it the escalating violence by separatists in Ukraine. And the administration is constantly reviewing its policy.
[Jen Psaki:] Our focus does remain on pursuing a solution through diplomatic means. And we are always evaluating other options that will help create space for a negotiated solution to the crisis.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] Secretary of State John Kerry plans to visit Kiev on Thursday and then go on to a security conference in Munich, where he'll be meeting his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov. Michele Keleman, NPR News, Washington.

[Audie Cornish:] I'm Audie Cornish. Tomorrow, President Barack Obama will lay out his new plan for reducing the federal deficit. His proposal will also include specific recommendations to the bipartisan deficit supercommittee on how to offset the cost of his $447 billion jobs plan. Yesterday, in the president's weekly address, he again promoted his jobs bill and offered a brief preview of how he plans to tackle the debt.
[P:] On Monday, I'll lay out my plan for how we'll do that, how we'll pay for this plan and pay down our debt by following some basic principles: making sure we live within our means and asking everyone to pay their fair share.
[Audie Cornish:] For more, we're joined by Mara Liasson, NPR's national political correspondent. Mara, what do we know about what the president will say tomorrow in the Rose Garden?
[Mara Liasson:] Well, what we know is that he'll offer more than $1.9 trillion in spending cuts and new taxes. We also know that he will include a new higher tax rate for millionaires. This is something that he will call the Buffett rule. That's for Warren Buffett, the billionaire who has famously criticized a tax system that allows him to pay a smaller percentage of his income in federal taxes than his secretary. We know he won't touch Social Security. What we don't know and what we're waiting to find out is what he'll say about Medicare and other entitlement programs. You know, when he and Speaker Boehner negotiated the so-called grand bargain in the spring of course, it didn't work out but they were talking about, among other things, raising the retirement age for Medicare from 65 to 67.
[Audie Cornish:] There was some talk of resurrecting the so-called grand bargain. Any chance that President Obama will bring back some of the things that he and House Speaker John Boehner discussed a few weeks ago during that debt ceiling debate?
[Mara Liasson:] Well, that's what we're waiting to find out. However, Speaker Boehner gave a speech on Thursday and it certainly sounded like he was giving up on the grand bargain.
[Audie Cornish:] It's a very simple equation. Tax increases destroy jobs and the Joint Committee is a jobs committee. Its mission is to reduce the deficit that is threatening job creation in our country. And we should not make its task harder by asking it to do things that will make the environment for job creation in America even worse.
[Mara Liasson:] That was House Speaker John Boehner speaking at the Economic Club of Washington on Thursday. As you can hear, he doesn't want any tax hike of any sort, even though 36 senators are telling the supercommittee that everything should be on the table. The fact of the matter is Republicans think cutting government will fix the economic problem; Democrats think some government support is needed.
[Audie Cornish:] Mara, the president seems to be making two arguments at the same time. On the one hand, he's arguing for short-term stimulus, like infrastructure spending, and then at the same time he wants long-term deficit reduction. What kind of case is that to make?
[Mara Liasson:] Well, it's a hard case to make 'cause they sound contradictory. But it's what most economists and the CBO director, Doug Elmendorf, says you have to do something short-term for the economy, which would mean more spending or tax cuts and then you have to put in place some kind of credible long-term plan to cut the deficit over time. And the analogy that's been given for this is the economy is like a house with the attic on fire that's the current economic crisis and the basement is flooded. That's the long-term deficit. You have to put the fire out first or else the house will burn down. Putting out the fire means the basement is going to get a little more flooded. But at the same time you're putting out the fire, you should be investing in a sump pump. If you invest in some kind of long-range plan to fix that flood...
[Audie Cornish:] I love where this is going. You're going to take water from the basement and bring it up to the attic. [Laughing]
[Mara Liasson:] Something like that. That's right.
[Audie Cornish:] Now, this past week, President Obama hit the road kind of in campaign mode to battleground states Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio. Any signs that any of this is working?
[Mara Liasson:] Not yet. A Bloomberg poll this week showed about 50 percent of Americans thinks the president's job plan won't work. There are many parts of the president's plan that are popular with the public, but it's very hard to make this happen because people now see him as weak and ineffective, unable to get his programs through even if they agree with the substance of them.
[Audie Cornish:] This has just been bad news and more bad news for President Obama, it sounds like.
[Mara Liasson:] This week was a very tough week. The Democrats lost two special elections one of them was in Nevada, a Republican seat that wasn't too surprising but the other one was in New York in a three-to-one Democratic district. Now, the idea that President Obama could be a one-term president has really entered the political bloodstream, and it's having a big psychological effect on Democrats who are very gloomy. And that makes it harder for someone like Mitt Romney to argue that Rick Perry is too conservative to win in 2012. Because right now it looks like, from the Republican point of view, that almost anyone could beat the president.
[Audie Cornish:] Mara Liasson, NPR's national political correspondent. Mara, thanks so much.
[Mara Liasson:] Thank you, Audie.

[Robert Siegel:] Iran says it's expecting more talks with the Europeans about its nuclear activities in the coming weeks. Negotiations would resume sometime after tomorrow's meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. Iran's nuclear program will also be on the agenda at that meeting. Under heavy US pressure in September, the IAEA took a step towards referring the matter to the UN Security Council, which has the power to impose economic sanctions. But for the moment, that action has been put off. Diplomats are exploring a new idea from Russia that would permit nuclear power in Iran but protect against its acquisition of nuclear weapons. NPR's Mike Shuster reports.
[Mike Shuster Reporting:] Russia's idea is novel and diplomatically creative. Moscow is proposing to build a uranium-enrichment facility on Russian territory that would be financed and managed, in part, by Iran. In this way, Iran could be assured of a supply of enriched uranium for nuclear power plants, but the wider world would be assured that Iran was not enriching uranium for nuclear weapons. The proposal has the backing of Great Britain, France and Germany, which have been negotiating with Iran over its nuclear activities for more than a year, and it has the support of the Bush administration. The president's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, praised the idea when President Bush was traveling in Asia last week.
[Mr. Stephen Hadley:] It would give Iran a sense that it would have an assured fuel supply for its civil nuclear power program because it would have management participation and financial participation in the venture, but it would have it offshore in Russia rather than in Iran.
[Shuster:] The proposal would also permit Iran to continue processing uranium, which it is doing now, into a precursor of enriched uranium. The Iranian government restarted this process, which is called conversion, in August after a freeze of more than a year, and it was that step and a breakdown of international negotiations that led to increasing pressure on the IAEA to refer Iran to the UN Security Council. Iran has not responded favorably so far to the Russian proposal, despite the trip to Tehran last week of one of President Vladimir Putin's top advisers. Stephen Hadley said that Iran might need more time to see the wisdom of the idea.
[Mr. Stephen Hadley:] The Iranians, probably not surprisingly, initially have said no; this is something that they want as a sovereign exercise to have on their territory. We think it's an area for further conversation.
[Shuster:] And so for this reason, the US and Europe have put off asking for a referring to the Security Council when the IAEA's 35-nation Board of Governors meets in Vienna tomorrow. This is something of a turnaround for the Bush administration, which has only reluctantly backed the diplomatic effort to deal with Iran's nuclear activities. Jon Wolfsthal, a nuclear policy expert at The Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, says the administration just can't handle another international crisis right now.
[Mr. Jon Wolfsthal:] They have been, for several years, very vocal in their desire to get Iran to the UN Security Council and really to start the punishment side. But at the same time, there are a number of big problems on the Bush administration's plate, and I think they're thankful for the potential respite over Iran. So I think the fact that Iran is not going to be a crisis anytime soon works to the domestic advantage of the administration.
[Shuster:] There still is much concern about Iran's nuclear activities, which were carried out in secret for some 18 years. They were revealed initially by Iranian dissidents in 2002 and by the IAEA's inspectors since then. The Bush administration insists Iran has been running a covert nuclear weapons program. Iran says its nuclear activities are purely civilian in nature. The IAEA has not found clear evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran, but just a few days ago, it revealed that Iran turned over the design of the core of a nuclear weapon, something it says it received from the Pakistani nuclear engineer A.Q. Khan in the 1980s. Iran says it never did anything with the design. The IAEA's director general, Mohamed ElBaradei said in Washington recently that Iran has continued to cooperate with the agency's inspectors.
[Mr. Mohamed Elbaradei:] We are making progress, not with extent, the speed I would like to see, but in fairness, we are also getting access. A couple of days ago, we went to a military facility, Fars, which is a good sign. I've been telling the Iranians, `The ball is in your court. You have been caught red-handed.'
[Shuster:] That cooperation is tentative, though. Just a few days ago, the conservative Iranian parliament adopted legislation that requires the expulsion of IAEA inspectors if the agency refers Iran to the Security Council. Mike Shuster, NPR News.

[Renee Montagne:] Awaiting the white smoke from the Sistine Chapel are many of the 75 million Catholics in the U.S., and the question comes up, what do American Catholics want to see in the next pope? The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life explored that question in recent surveys. Here with the findings is Pew senior researcher Greg Smith. Good morning.
[Greg Smith:] Good morning.
[Renee Montagne:] Now, a new pope, of course, is all about a certain amount of change at the top. Let's start with talking about what Catholics in this country want to see in the way of change with this new pope.
[Greg Smith:] Well, it's very interesting. When you ask Catholics about their hopes and aspirations for the next pope, we certainly see a desire and an openness to change in certain ways. But it's accompanied by an appreciation for the church's traditions at the same time. Most Catholics tell us, for example, that it would be good if the next pope allows priests to get married. And six in 10 Catholics tell us it would be good if the next pope comes from the developing world from Africa or Asia or Latin America. But at the same time, when we ask Catholics directly, do you think the next pope should move the church in new directions or maintain the church's traditional positions, Catholics are about evenly divided.
[Renee Montagne:] Well, it's not likely that the next pope will make changes on some very key issues in the church, like contraception and its view of homosexuality, but does that not mean a big split will remain between the views of the church and the views of many lay Catholics in this country?
[Greg Smith:] Well, we certainly do see a divide between the expressed opinions of Catholics in the United States and the official positions of the hierarchy. For example, when it comes to contraception, three-quarters of Catholics tell us that using birth control is either morally acceptable or not a moral issue. Just 15 percent of Catholics say that using birth control is morally problematic. See the same kind of thing when it comes to issues related to homosexuality. Catholics in the United States increasingly tell us, for example, that they think it's OK to allow gay and lesbian couples to get married, obviously something that runs counter to the official positions of the church.
[Renee Montagne:] Does that mean, though, that American Catholics have gotten comfortable with having positions that differ quite dramatically from church teachings on some very what you might call private in-the-home issues?
[Greg Smith:] Well, I think that's certainly the case. And I should point out that on many of these issues we do see differences between the most religiously observant Catholics those who say they attend Mass at least once a week, and those who attend Mass less often. Regular Mass-attending Catholics tend to be more in line with the positions of the church. But even among those Catholics who tell us they attend Mass regularly, there are considerable numbers who disagree with the church's positions on a variety of issues.
[Renee Montagne:] How heavily do the sex abuse scandals weigh on the minds of American Catholics as this process gets under way?
[Greg Smith:] Well, you know, the sex abuse scandal and the church's handling of the scandal is a real concern for many American Catholics. When we asked Catholics just to tell us in their own words what they think the most important problem facing the Catholic Church today is, the most common response we get relates to the scandal. About one-third of Catholics say that the scandal and the church's response to it is the most important problem facing the church today. And when we ask those Catholics who tell us they want the next pope to head in new directions what they mean by that, there again, a more strict response, a more concerted, a better handling of the sex scandal is one of the things that people mention. So this is a real concern for American Catholics.
[Renee Montagne:] Greg Smith is a senior researcher with the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Thank you very much for joining us.
[Greg Smith:] Thank you for having me.

[Robert Siegel:] Thursday's the day we read from your email and an item on our Memorial Day show brought in a number of letters.
[Melissa Block:] On Monday we heard three remembrances of three servicemen from three different wars, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. They were from family members of the men who died.
[Robert Siegel:] Mary Ellen Krikora of Reno, Nevada writes, "I listened and had an uncommon flood of tears and deep pain for each family member. The pain was compounded by the announcement from my 18-year-old son, Luke, who informed me that he had come across a National Guard recruiter and was thinking he would join. I've been hoping and praying that I can keep him safe just a little longer from his own vulnerability, his own passion. I could only have hoped the same thing that each of these families must have hoped for all of these years, to keep our sons and daughters safe from all harm, safe from their own path."
[Melissa Block:] Michele Norris's conversation with celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain touched a few nerves, specifically this comment from Mr. Bourdain.
[Anthony Bourdain:] The idea of a vegan, you know, being lucky enough to go to Thailand or Vietnam. It just, it's rude. There's so much great stuff and great people in this world who would just be shocked and completely not understand someone who would say to them, oh no, I'm sorry, I don't eat anything that's cooked. I reject your hundreds if not thousands of years of culinary culture. It's an affront.
[Robert Siegel:] Well those words were an affront to many of our vegan listeners.
[Melissa Block:] "Boorish and offensive," writes John Surgala of Amherst, New York. He writes, "I became vegan while fighting cancer over 20 years ago. I'm very happy with my vegan lifestyle and it has served me well. I also travel extensively and love to try exotic food. I've had no problem finding delicious vegan food throughout Southeast Asia or elsewhere."
[Robert Siegel:] Mike Kraft of Fargo, North Dakota adds, "Mr. Bourdain's dismissal of veganism as culturally arrogant and selfishly driven rubbed me raw. I chose to go vegan not as Bourdain assumes, to protect my colon, but as a daily personal protest against animal cruelty and modern meat production practices. Why must it be vegans who assume the defensive posture while Bourdain profits and glories in the bloody, nasty bits of human dietary tradition?"
[Melissa Block:] Finally, the sound that apparently sends teenagers running and sent a number of you to your computers to write. A sound similar to that is being used by shop owners in the U.K. to keep teens away. They apparently don't like frequencies that high. Adults don't really mind, because they can't hear them.
[Robert Siegel:] Well our story reminded listener Doug Wisecoff from Cincinnati of an incident a few years back while he was filling up his car with gas. "As I stood there holding the gas nozzle," he writes, I suddenly realized they were playing a very enjoyable Mozart symphony. "When I went inside the mini-mart to pay for my gas, I complimented the man behind the counter and his choice of music. He laughed and informed me that it was because the students from the high school across the street used to hang out in front of his store being obnoxious, being loud and constantly littering. He tried playing classical music to see if it would influence them to behave better and he found that it actually drove them off instantly."
[Melissa Block:] If our program is driving you away from the radio or bringing you in closer, we'd love to hear from you. You can reach us by going to NPR.org and clicking on Contact Us at the top of the page.

[Steve Inskeep:] It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep.
[Ari Shapiro:] And I'm Ari Shapiro. President Obama introduces the next phase of his economic recovery plan today. This one is aimed at homeowners who are struggling to pay their mortgages. He's promised to devote at least $75 billion to the effort. This comes a day after Mr. Obama signed the massive economic stimulus package into law. NPR's Scott Horsley reports.
[President Barack Obama:] It is great to be back in Denver.
[Scott Horsley:] President Obama traveled to Denver's Museum of Nature and Science to sign the stimulus measure. He recalled that it was in Denver last summer that he accepted his party's nomination for the White House, promising to give every American a chance to improve his life.
[President Barack Obama:] And I'm back today to say that we have begun the difficult work of keeping that promise. We have begun the essential work of keeping the American dream alive in our time, and that's why we're here today.
[Scott Horsley:] Sitting at a wooden desk borrowed from the Colorado governor's mansion, Mr. Obama signed the $787 billion stimulus bill a combination of tax cuts and new government spending he hopes will backfill the deep hole the recession has left in the nation's economy. Mr. Obama says the stimulus is also intended to lay a foundation for new opportunities in healthcare, education and alternative energy. He was introduced at the signing ceremony by Blake Jones, whose small Boulder-based company installs solar panels on homes and businesses.
[Mr. Blake Jones:] We also specialize in designing systems for museums that have good rooftops for presidential tours.
[Scott Horsley:] Jones wasn't laughing a few months ago when business slowed so much he worried about having to lay off half his 55 workers. Now, thanks to the green energy investments in the stimulus bills, Jones is planning to hire more workers to tackle what he calls wrench-ready projects.
[Mr. Blake Jones:] We're just one small business creating one to two dozen jobs. The point I want to stress is that there are thousands of small businesses just like ours that will be doing the same thing.
[Scott Horsley:] Colorado Governor Bill Ritter, whose executive mansion has its own solar panels, says developing alternatives to fossil fuels is only part of the objective.
[Governor Bill Ritter:] It's also about creating new economic opportunities so parents can keep food on the table, so they can send their kids to college, so they can afford healthcare.
[Scott Horsley:] Overall, the Obama administration hopes the stimulus package will save or create some three-and-a-half million jobs over the next two years. Some economists say it'll be hard to meet that target, since the measure was scaled back in order to win a bare minimum of Republican support, and since some major components of the package promise little in the way of job creation. Mr. Obama acknowledges the stimulus is only the beginning of what's needed. His advisers are also working on plans to stabilize the banking system, rewrite financial regulations, and protect homeowners who can't pay their mortgages.
[President Barack Obama:] We must stand the spread of foreclosures and falling home values for all Americans and do everything we can to help responsible homeowners stay in their homes.
[Scott Horsley:] It's that last challenge the president addresses today in Arizona, which has the nation's third-highest foreclosure rate. He's calling for the government to share the cost of restructuring millions of home loans, a measure with a price tag of $75 billion. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs suggested on Air Force One yesterday even people who can pay their mortgage have a stake in seeing this work.
[Mr. Robert Gibbs:] Ten thousand people face foreclosure every day in this country, and it's a problem that not only affects the individual homeowner and their family but oftentimes has a direct impact to home values in the neighborhood that that house or homes are on.
[Scott Horsley:] The president cautioned in Denver yesterday none of these economic fixes will be easy. But with efforts like the stimulus bill, he said, an economic crisis can be turned into an opportunity. Scott Horsley, NPR News, Phoenix.

[Melissa Block:] French authorities announced the arrests of more than 50 people yesterday not for terrorism, but for speech. Among those detained was the controversial French comedian Dieudonne. He's been convicted numerous times before for inciting anti-Semitism. To understand the laws governing free speech in France, I spoke with Aurelien Hamelle, an attorney in Paris. And I asked him what is considered illegal hate speech under French law.
[Aurelien Hamelle:] Well, I guess we could identify three different offenses that could qualify, broadly, as hate speech. One is inducing anyone into violence, hate or discrimination towards a person or a group of persons on account of their origin, race or religion. Then, another offense is actually what we call apologie, meaning defending or justifying certain crimes, certain offenses, among which you will find terrorism, but that's not the only one. And then I would say that another offense falls under the broad category of hate speech, and that is the offense of denying the existence of the Holocaust, which is a specific French offense that a few other countries in Europe actually have.
[Melissa Block:] We've been hearing this week about the comedian the controversial comedian Dieudonne, who's gotten in trouble most recently with a Facebook post. And here's what he posted. I feel like Charlie Coulibaly. In other words, he's mixing Charlie, from the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, and Coulibaly, which is the last name of the killer at the kosher grocery store. How did that cross the line and get him detained?
[Aurelien Hamelle:] Well, it seems that the prosecution department that brings cases and prosecutions on account of hate speech has formed an opinion that by putting these two words, I am Charlie Coulibaly, Dieudonne will have condoned or justified what Mr. Coulibaly did because putting the words together, in a way, means that it brings support to what Mr. Coulibaly may have done or did, actually.
[Melissa Block:] Has humor been a path toward getting around these limits on free speech before? In other words, if someone can show this was humor this was a joke that that could get them in the clear.
[Aurelien Hamelle:] Yes. That's a line of defense that courts do accept. And if they are satisfied that it was humor, then they are likely to enter into an acquittal decision. The reason is actually legally extremely clear when one looks at French decisions. And there's a very consistent and established case law in that respect in France. If no one can take the speech at hand seriously, then it cannot be an offense. And it is only when what is being said or written can be taken seriously that it is likely or it could amount to a hate speech offense.
[Melissa Block:] I gather the satirical weekly that was targeted, Charlie Hebdo, has been at the center of these of a number of these cases before. Has humor been an avenue for them to mount a defense and to avoid prosecution?
[Aurelien Hamelle:] Well, it has been indeed. There is a very clear decision from 2011, which is a recent one, that actually was dealing with caricatures of the pope and certain articles that were clearly offensive to the Catholic religion. And the court decided that even though these may have been clearly very offensive, these could not be taken seriously. Therefore, Charlie Hebdo evaded conviction.
[Melissa Block:] Well, Mr. Hamelle, thanks very much for talking with us today.
[Aurelien Hamelle:] You're welcome.
[Melissa Block:] Attorney Aurelien Hamelle specializes in cases involving freedom of speech. He's a partner with Allen & Overy in Paris.

[Rebecca Roberts:] For a couple of days last week, Italians were treated to a true life reality show which made "Big Brother" look strictly junior varsity. The country's former prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi was forced to grovel publicly to his wife Veronica after she took him to task for his latest sexist remarks. NPR's Silvia Poggioli reports in this letter from Rome that Berlusconi's apology is just the latest blow to Italy's legendary Latin lovers.
[Sylvia Poggioli:] In their 27 years together, Veronica Berlusconi has rarely appeared in public next to her publicity-loving husband, and Italians knew very little about Berlusconi's second wife and mother of three of his five children until last Wednesday. Commentators who usually pontificate on foreign policy crises, global warming and other apocalyptic scenarios filled reams of newsprint and chattered for hours on TV talk shows trying to analyze the social-political implications of Mrs. Berlusconi's letter. The country appeared divided between pro-Silvio and pro-Veronica factions. But in the end, there was general consensus that Silvio Berlusconi, the exuberant 70-year-old who has cultivated a Latin lover image, has been dealt a humiliating blow. Berlusconi, who has boasted about his hair transplant and face lifts, has a history of making remarks widely considered sexist. He caused a diplomatic incident when he bragged about using his playboy skills with Finish president Tarja Halonen. He tried to convince U.S. businessmen to invest in Italy because we have beautiful secretaries. And after several starlets from his TV networks were elected on his Party's slate to parliament, Berlusconi joked about his right to the first night, the medieval custom that the lord of the manor would deflower newly wedded peasant brides. But when he told one of those starlets turned MP at a recent party, if I weren't already married, I'd marry you right away, it was one sexist remark too many for his wife. And when she couldn't get him to apologize in private, she went public. In her letter to la Repubblica, the newspaper Berlusconi detests, she said the comments were damaging to her dignity and can't be reduced to jokes. She said the letter would show her two daughters that a woman should be able to protect her dignity in her relationships with men and show her son he must show respect for women. After consulting his closest aides, Berlusconi issued a syrupy press release. He said he treasures his wife's dignity in his heart and apologized for his odd thoughtless quips. One commentator observed that Veronica Berlusconi, a former actress, has grown over the years into a sophisticated and intellectually curious woman, while Silvio, she said, has remained essentially juvenile. In fact, several observers pointed out the Berlusconi can be heard speaking lovingly more often about his 96-year-old mother than about his wife. This would make Berlusconi a mamone a mama's boy a growing syndrome in Italian society, as sons cling to apron strings and are indulged well into adulthood. More than half of Italian men between the age of 25 and 35 still live with mama. Veronica Berlusconi's letter struck a chord with Italian women. As one commentator said, she has become a feminist idol, even for women who are not feminists, who feel themselves avenged of the machismo and selfishness of their companions. Sylvia Poggioli, NPR News, Rome.

[Audie Cornish:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.
[Melissa Block:] And I'm Melissa Block. NASA's latest and largest rover celebrates its first anniversary on Mars today. One year ago, Curiosity came to a gentle landing in Gale Crater. Ever since, it's been chugging around what appears from orbit to be the mouth of an ancient river system. It's looking for signs that the environment on Mars might once have been suitable for life. NPR's Joe Palca has this report on the rover's first-year accomplishments.
[Joe Palca, Byline:] Curiosity started its first year on Mars with a picture-perfect landing, except for one tiny problem that only turned up when engineers analyzed the data the rover recorded on the way to the surface.
[Adam Steltzner:] We found that we landed more slowly than we anticipated.
[Joe Palca, Byline:] Adam Steltzner led the team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that designed Curiosity's landing system. Steltzner says the error wasn't large.
[Adam Steltzner:] One or two inches a second more slowly than we anticipated but maybe it's a mark of how sharp our pencil was that that's a big deal for us.
[Joe Palca, Byline:] So they were determined to figure out what went wrong. Now they think they have.
[Adam Steltzner:] We've concluded that there was a gravity anomaly where we landed.
[Joe Palca, Byline:] Meaning the tug of gravity at the landing site in Gale Crater was slightly, slightly, slightly smaller than other places around the planet because of the density of the underlying rock. Steltzner says, in retrospect, finding an anomaly isn't all that surprising. He's chagrined the landing team didn't consider the possibility.
[Adam Steltzner:] And that's sort of where pride cometh before a fall, right? We felt that we knew something that clearly we didn't know well enough.
[Joe Palca, Byline:] Scientists aren't complaining about the problem not at all. They've got a new robotic geologist working perfectly on Mars. Ashwin Vasavada is deputy project scientist for Curiosity. He says the rover has found clear signals that a river did once flow at the bottom of Gale Crater. The most compelling data come from a mineral analysis of a rock the rover drilled into.
[Ashwin Vasvada:] The minerals that were present in this drilled sample were the kind that form only in the presence of water. And, in fact, form in the presence of water that's friendly to life.
[Joe Palca, Byline:] That would be water that's not too acidic and contains chemicals that most life forms need to thrive. That's not to say there was life on Mars, it's just conditions don't to rule it out. Although they are pleased with their results, Vasavada admits scientists have had their frustrations with the rover.
[Ashwin Vasvada:] For me, the last year has been a mix. You know, it really has honestly taken us longer to do things than we had hoped.
[Joe Palca, Byline:] That's because Curiosity is an incredibly complicated machine. Learning to operate it on Mars has required patience. And unlike the two smaller rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which were only supposed to last a few months, Curiosity is supposed to last at least two years, so the pressure to do things fast just isn't there.
[Ashwin Vasvada:] But on the other hand, at this point in the mission, we have already accomplished our primary goal of finding a habitable environment on the surface of Mars. And so, from that perspective it was unexpectedly wonderful.
[Joe Palca, Byline:] So how are you going to keep the press interested if you've already found what you're looking for? Come on.
[Ashwin Vasvada:] Yeah, well, we're going to climb a mountain. I mean, that's going to be awesome.
[Joe Palca, Byline:] The mountain is Mount Sharp, about five miles from the landing site. Actually, the rover will only make it to the foothills of Mount Sharp. But Vasavada says scientists are expecting to see to rock formations there that will not only reveal how much water was in Gale Crater but when in Martian history it was there. Joe Palca, NPR News.

[This Is Talk Of The Nation:] SCIENCE FRIDAY. I am Ira Flatow. A bit later in the hour, a mathematical mystery. But first up, a medical mystery. A new book tells the tale of an Italian family suffering from a rare and deadly disease called fatal familial insomnia. Just like it says, it's insomnia, an illness that literally kills its victim by robbing them of the ability to sleep. They die of exhaustion. You know how you say I'm just so tired I could die. These people actually die of exhaustion. The disease is linked by the new science of prions to outbreaks of the neurological disease kuru in Papua New Guinea in the 1950s, and mad cow disease in the UK in the last decade. So we're going to start this hour by talking about the family that could not sleep and the strange protein called the prion. And if you'd like to join our discussion, our number is 1-800-989-8255, 1-800-989-TALK. D.T. Max is a science writer and the author of The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery. He's written for The New York Times and the New Yorker, and he joins us today from our NPR studios in Washington. Welcome to the program.
[Mr. D.t. Max:] Thanks very much.
[Ira Flatow:] This sounds like a really unusual disease. They really die because they can't sleep.
[Mr. Max:] That's essentially right. It's a disease, fatal familial insomnia. The name sort of puts it all on the table. It's a progressive, inherited condition, characterized by eventually a total insomnia leading within about nine months time to death.
[Ira Flatow:] So you're awake you're dying when you're awake because you can't sleep?
[Mr. Max:] Yeah, I think that's one way to look at it. We don't really know. One of the reasons I was drawn to this project to begin with is really the question of why we sleep. And in fact, we still don't really know why we sleep. But paradoxically, we know we have to sleep. And in the case of this family much for the same reasons that we have this paradox I've just laid out this family cannot sleep and they ultimately die and therefore we believe they die from a lack of sleep. There are other causative problems. They lose the ability to regulate their autonomic systems their sweating, and their pupils become these tiny little pinpricks. I mean many things happen to them. It's almost a kind of a plane crash of a disease, and yet they have a complete insomnia that's clearly one of the key symptoms and one of the causes of the death.
[Ira Flatow:] And you say this is probably the worst disease in the world because of people suffering from it are aware they're awake, about what's happening to them.
[Mr. Max:] That's right. I mean I would always be reluctant to rank diseases in terms of horribleness, but I think a case certainly could be made that this disease in many ways one, because of this insomnia and anyone who's ever, you know, suffered insomnia knows just how dreadful a condition it is...
[Ira Flatow:] Right, right.
[Mr. Max:] ...even if the insomnia is simply worries about work tomorrow.
[Ira Flatow:] Sure.
[Mr. Max:] You stay awake and the clock ticks and the clock ticks. But while this disease has much in common with Alzheimer's in terms of some of the things going on physiologically in the brain, what makes it quite different from Alzheimer's is that you is that many, many of the sufferers of the disease have the ability to understand exactly what's going on. And even to be in, you know, routine verbal contact with their loved ones at the end, even though they've had this extraordinary insomnia.
[Ira Flatow:] You say there are about 40 families in the world known to have this disease.
[Mr. Max:] Yeah, that would be a bit of a guess. We have 40 families based on the genomes that we know, and we can extrapolate from that that probably there would be maybe around 200 families worldwide. And I would emphasize that these this disease, which is a mutation, of course that these 200 families would all have developed the mutation probably separately.
[Ira Flatow:] Hmm. And you trace it's interesting in the book you trace the disease through several generations of an Italian family. One of the most memorable cases was a man named Silvano. Tell us about him.
[Mr. Max:] Well, Silvano was a member of the family in the 1980s. And Silvano the disease as far as I could trace it back and I had the assistance of the family in digging through records. In Italy, records are kept these sorts of records are still kept in the parish houses of the churches, because the Catholic church was once responsible for recording births and deaths. And so the way they would assemble the family would assemble information on its ancestors was, you know, you'd have to go into the church, and you'd have to ask for the records. But in Italy, records aren't really freely available. So there's a figure in the book named Ignazio who's a young doctor who marries into the family and who Ignazio's very much responsible for helping to solve the mystery of fatal familial insomnia. Ignazio was an organist. He was an ardent Catholic in the Italian fashion, which means that he really as he used to love to say to me I believe because it's absurd. So Ignazio is also an avid organist and very talented. And Ignazio would go into the church and he would ask the priest could he go and, you know, play the organ. And the priest would say sure, and Ignazio would play for a little while, and then the priest would get bored and go back into the parish house. You know, in Italy, priests have really quite nice parish houses, and they have someone who looks after them, so it's kind of its own life. And then when Ignazio noticed that the priest was no longer listening, he would sneak down into the basement where the parish records were taken were kept and he would take photographs of anyone who had the same last name as his wife's family. So with his help, I was able to trace the disease back to the 1760s, in all probability to a doctor, fascinatingly enough, who probably I doubt he was the first member of the family, but he might well have been. You know, it could also have gone back further. But when you get before the Napoleonic era, you pretty much lose records in Italy because of the devastation of the Napoleonic Wars. In any event, fast-forward to Silvano; we're in the 1980s. And, you know, Italy had become very rich in the period from the end of the Second World War to the 1980s, and Silvano was very much a product of the new Italy. He was a stunningly handsome man who loved to go out at night. I don't think I've ever seen a picture of Silvano not wearing a tuxedo. So this was a man who, from the way I look at things, would probably not have been well-equipped to deal with a devastating disease, just because he was, again, to my mind, a man who very much judged by exteriors. He was a very external man. But he was also the head of the family which in Italy is a very potent post and he had just watched two of his sisters die from this unnamed, familial disease of which clearly had an important insomnia component. So Silvano, in his heart, always knew, I think, that he would get the disease. And one thing we haven't mentioned that we should, is that the disease strikes in your 50s. So you get one reason the disease doesn't burn itself out, the way of many severe genetic mutations, is because you live long enough to reproduce...
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Mr. Max:] ...so it foils that mechanism, so to say, by which most diseases are most really virulent genetic diseases are eliminated. Silvano one day, in the Italian style, was dancing with his mother. And in Italy, you know, young bachelors are always dancing with their mothers, even today. And so he noticed he was sweating, which he knew from his experience with sisters was the first sign of the disease. And so Silvano understood what was happening. He'd always really known, I think, that he was going to get the disease. And then he went and looked in the mirror and he saw that his pupils had become these tiny pinpricks, and he knew for sure what was happening. And rather than just say, OK, I'm going to give up, I'm going to die, he really decided that he was going to throw everything he had, all of his strength, into trying to understand what was killing his family. And so he went to a neurological institute in Bologna, with the help of Ignazio this young man who had married into the family and he basically said to them he sat down with a young neurologist who really just graduated from, you know, graduated shortly before and had done his neurology residency. And the neurologists will tell me, you know, what seems to be the problem? And so Silvano says you know, this is obviously taking place in Italian he says I know how I'm going to die. It's exactly the way that my father died and my two sisters have died, and I can give you all the details. And the neurologist was stunned, because you know, neurologists are trained in the art of euphemism. They don't really have much to offer, but they do their best. And so the neurologist said, you know, please, please, sir, you know, we have cures, we have palliatives. And Silvano said he said, cut the nonsense, I assume when I'm gone you'll want the brain. That was Silvano. He was able to confront what was going to happen with great courage. And through the experience, through the extensive EEGs that were taken of his brain because really nobody had done a proper EEG before on any of these people. EEGs were traditionally done in little snapshots. You know, what the family what you needed to diagnose this family was to leave in an EEG in place for an hour, and then you would see that the brainwaves looked like nothing we had in the literature. And you know, Silvano eventually, he died, and but what had been learned from him, that this disease that insomnia wasn't just a byproduct of this disease, but a key component of the disease. We really owe this to Silvano, although, you know, at that point there was still much, much left to be discovered about the disease. But it was the first step. It was the first step beyond saying we have a familial encephalitis, which was the typical diagnosis, you know...
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Mr. Max:] Or in other eras, for instance, we had they were believed to have Vonaconomo syndrome in the teens, when everyone had Vonaconomo syndrome. I mean they would take on...
[Ira Flatow:] Well...
[Mr. Max:] Sorry.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah, but what you learned through this was that this was actually connected to mad cow disease, which I found, you know, quite interesting.
[Mr. Max:] It's extraordinarily strange. It's like having two people pop up in the same room you didn't know knew each other. It is connected to mad cow, and in fact very, very closely connected to mad cow, because in the period after Silvano's death, Ignazio kept digging and he kept finding other sufferers cousins, second cousins, third cousins. This family had been decimated by fatal familial insomnia, and they weren't in touch in the way most Italian families are in touch. And Ignazio again, it was his wife Leezy who was actually, you know, related to these people, was able to put together this family tree of extraordinary early death and misdiagnosis. Eventually, two other members of the family came down with the disease, and they came down with a slightly different version of the disease. And when neurologists looked at their version, they were able to see on their EEGs that their brainwaves looked rather like the brain waves of a disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD. And CJD, as was known at the time we're now in the mid-'90s is a prion disease. It's in fact what you get when you consume infected beef and come down with the human version of mad cow disease.
[Ira Flatow:] Right, right. Very interesting story, because I want to get into this whole prion connection, and what a fascinating world of medicine we're in when we talk about prions and how spooky and strange they are. And in the time we have left we're going to go take a break let's get back and talk about that, because as you mentioned, Jakob-Creutzfeldt disease and prion diseases, they're all connected, right?
[Mr. Max:] That's right. That's exactly right.
[Ira Flatow:] What makes a prion different than, you know, a regular protein?
[Mr. Max:] Well, a prion is a protein. This is the strange thing about the prion, is the prion is a regular protein, encoded for by a regular gene in the body, which when misformed takes on the properties of a virus and in fact takes on some properties viruses don't have, because people can just come down with prion diseases sporadically. There are in fact and this is extremely rare but it does happen there are people in the United States who just suddenly come down with fatal insomnia, although they don't have any other family members who have it and they wouldn't pass it on in their genes if they reproduced.
[Ira Flatow:] All right. We're going to take we'll come back and talk about how a protein which is not a virus, it's not a bacteria, it has no DNA how does it become infectious and carry a disease from one person to another, or one animal or some organism to another? So this is a medical mystery. We'll talk more about it with my guest, D.T. Max, author of The Family That Couldn't Sleep. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. I'm Ira Flatow. This is TALK OF THE NATION: SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR News. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION: SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. We're talking this hour with D.T. Max, author of The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery. It's out this fall from Random House. Tell us about the prions. I gave them a big I mean they are mysterious and strange, and we hardly know very much about them, and how do they spread diseases?
[Mr. Max:] I think the strangest thing in all of nature, and indeed the final proof that prions exist we can get to that in a minute has not really been achieved. But the basic theory of the prions goes something like this. Proteins are normally normally assume a single state, which is to say when proteins are manufactured in the body, they're manufactured mostly as ribbons, and then they curl up, kind of like kinky hair into a form which is useful for whatever function they happen to serve in the cell. Now, most proteins can be forced into different forms if you try hard enough. Say with heat you can deform a protein. But it will not have it will tend to spring back to its original form to maintain its function. Now, what's odd about prions, although not unique, is that the prion which as I say is a perfectly normal protein whose function we don't know but given the fact that you can find prions right across mammalian and even below that in terms of development you find prions even in certain in frogs it must perform some function or it would not, according to the sort of rules of evolution, have been so well-conserved across all these species. So whatever this prion does, weirdly, unusually, and I think sort of unfortunately, as it turns out, this prion can assume a second stable state, a misformed but stable state. And this and the quality of this stable state that's so of devastating is that the prion in turn is able to cause adjoining prions to also assume the misformed state. What you get is in effect a chain reaction. One way to think about it is a little bit what happens with salt crystals, where if you you can have a single salt crystal as the nucleation point, and then as other salt crystals precipitate, they'll form around that salt crystal or indeed they'll also form around bits of dirt. I don't know if you've ever done this experiment in high school, if you were a high school science wizard. But this is the kind of thing kids are always doing in high school. So essentially it's a kind of a seed-crystal phenomenon, where the first misformed prion functions as a seed crystal, and then adjoining prions misform around it. Now, what's really remarkable about this fact is that it allows for infection without nucleic acid, as you point out. Now, the idea that a protein could cause an infection, for any ordinary biologist, is complete heresy. It's essentially saying that, you know, you saw a dead man walking. I mean it's just not possible. Proteins are not alive, and we all know based partially on observation and partially on sort of Darwinian theory that only living things or things with nucleic acid are interested or have reason to create infections, because infection is a way for a virus or a bacteria to replicate. Well, the prion has no reason to replicate because it's not alive, and yet it too can form, as the theory goes, it too can cause an infection. So for instance, in mad cow disease you have an infected cow, you eat some of that beef, some of the infectious-formed prions go into your digestive system. Eventually, through ways we don't really understand, they work their way up to your brain, where they begin to convert adjoining prions into the infectious form. Unfortunately, infectious prions are not really very useful for bodily functions. In fact, for reasons, again, we don't quite understand, they inhibit or destroy them, and as a result, you get a disease. But you but at no point do you have a nucleic acid.
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Mr. Max:] At no point do you have replication through nucleic acid.
[Ira Flatow:] And what's also fascinating about these prions is how indestructible they are.
[Mr. Max:] They are really extraordinary. A prion the only really reliable way to kill a prion is with bleach. You can't kill it with heat. You can't kill it with radiation. Formalin actually makes prions more virulent. I once went to well, there's a domestic prion disease in the wild in the United States called chronic wasting disease that affects deer and elk. And I once went to one of these stations where they were hauling in deer during a shooting season in Wisconsin, attempting to kind of limit the damage that these you know, that this spread of this chronic waste disease in the wild was extraordinary. And they were trying to kill some of the carriers which turned out to be a fruitless effort, but it was fun for a lot of the hunters because they removed the limits on the number of deer that they...
[Ira Flatow:] The hunt?
[Mr. Max:] Yeah, so they would but so they would bring in, you know, dozens of deer. And anyway, they what was going on was so strange. And nobody could really understand the risks, but every so often and the place stank. It was an open-air trailer out in the woods, and you could smell it for miles away, and there were all these deer. I mean it felt like nature was out of control. There were these deer with their tongues hanging out after they had had their heads cut off, and the bodies were being thrown away, because even though the hunters could take the body home, subject to some sort of protein analysis to see if the deer had been infected, no one wanted to. And anyway, they would every so often this guy, you know, in a hat that said Chronic Wasting Disease Response Team would come by and splash this extraordinarily harsh bleach over everything. And I thought to myself, this is what it takes. I mean this is, you know you can't use any other method. You can't use any conventional antibacterial or antiviral method to control this disease. And I think that's why, although prion diseases are quite rare, ordinarily, they have the ability to kind of swell up in these incredible epidemics and epizootics. I think you see that with mad cow disease in England, where I think 800,000 cattle had to be destroyed or died from mad cow disease, and then 150 humans to date have gotten it from probably from consuming the infected beef.
[Ira Flatow:] Hmm. And so how did you get the connection, or how did they connect the familial insomnia that it was, you know, to a prion, that it was a prion?
[Mr. Max:] Well, basically the way they did it essentially was, okay, they had the information from the brainwaves, which was to say that Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, CJD, as it's more often called, had a very similar EEG signature to the familial disease of this Italian family. And then, you know, at this point we're in the 1990s, and some very good scientists among them Stanley Prusiner, who the Nobel Prize in 1997 had been able to find the gene for the healthy prion. You know, it was an ordinary gene. They had found it. Using the technology of the time, it was possible to find the genes. And then they were fairly, in short order, fairly able to find the mutation on the gene which corresponded to fatal familial insomnia. So after this 200-year-long mystery, the disease, you know, took its place as one of a number of inherited prion diseases, because prions can also, you know, as I say, prions we've talked about infection, we've talked about them occurring sporadically, but of course they also can be passed on. Now, what's particularly devastating about the inherited form of the disease is, of course, that the prions misform on a vast scale in the body probably more or less simultaneously when you reach a certain age. So it's a far it's a sense a farm harsher again, I hate to rank diseases, but the prion diseases, the inherited form, is the most I think the harshest, the most destructive and overwhelming.
[Ira Flatow:] So are you a believer in the prion idea?
[Mr. Max:] Well, that's a very relevant question, because it does almost become kind of like when you get into this world you know, and I spent about four or five years working on this book you really are asked whether you're, you know, dry or wet. Everybody's got a strong opinion, and then there's a kind of middle group who are agnostic, who do the work on prions because they know that the protein must be important in the disease, without absolutely knowing that the protein is, you know, is the disease. I would say, you know and as a writer, as a journalist, you're not in there doing the experiments. You know, you're able to read the papers. You're able to look at the protein gels as they're reproduced, you know, usually fairly poorly in the off-prints that you get a hold of. So I believe that the science is pretty sound. I would be more I would be more far more surprised to find that prions were aided by some sort of quasi-nucleic acid not yet found, not yet understood, than that in fact the theory, you know, probably with some slight, slight fiddling on the edges for just why this happens, you know, some slight adjustment to allow for the fact that it just seems a little bit kind of out of the blue I would think that would be far more likely. And in fact, we've even researchers have even found another disease which spreads the same way. One of the amyloidoses, one of the infectious amyloidoses, can actually be injected into mice and cause amyloidoses. So prions are not absolutely alone in having this ability. You know, and the amyloidoses, again, would not be would be a disease without a nucleic acid.
[Ira Flatow:] Right. I have one question left for you before we have to say goodbye, and that is what about this Italian family? What is happening with them?
[Mr. Max:] Well, I think you know, I think for them, as I try to draw out in the book, the process of coming to terms with this disease has been a long-term one, beginning really with Silvano in the '80s and then going through the '90s when they got a name for the disease and a genetic test, and into the zero-zeroes or whatever decade we're in. The family has now joined forces with a very sophisticated group in Milan, a proteomics group really the foremost organization of its sort in Milan and interestingly, although there are right now a couple of cures I shouldn't say cures there are a couple of palliatives that seem to work fairly well for prion diseases, the best known one being Pentosan, which is actually an ordinary drug that's usually given for bladder infection but which has shown great promise in a young man who got the infectious form of mad cow disease from eating infected beef and lives in Belfast who's now been alive for four or five years with a prion infection. The family didn't choose to go that way. For one thing, these drugs usually have very strong side effects. In the cast of Pentosan, you need a shunt placed in your brain because the drug is too big to get through the blood brainbarrier. And I don't know if it's because they're Italian or because they're just making a good decision or because they are closer to this Milan group, but they've chosen instead to sort of give themselves to some very basic research on what causes prion infections, you know, without, let's say, looking for a quick fix. And a quick fix is very much on their minds because, you know, if the disease routinely strikes in your 40s or 50s, there are a number of members of the families now in their 30s and 40s that must surely be getting up and looking in the mirror and saying, you know, do I look different today?
[Ira Flatow:] Fascinating story, D.T. I want to thank you for taking time to talk about it.
[Mr. Max:] Thank you.
[Ira Flatow:] And I wish you good luck.
[Mr. Max:] Thanks.
[Ira Flatow:] D.T. Max, author of very interesting book, The Family That Couldn't Sleep. D.T. Max. I highly recommend it. Thanks again. He's a science writer in Alexandria, Virginia.

[Noel King:] The Senate passed a criminal justice overhaul last night.
[David Greene:] Yeah, this is called the First Step Act, and it passed by a vote of 87-12 after years of negotiating. It aims to reduce some sentences and also to cut down on repeat offenders. And it had the support of conservative and liberal groups concerned about the size of the nation's prison population, which has ballooned to more than 2 million people. This is Florida's Democratic Senator Bill Nelson.
[Bill Nelson:] This country of ours incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. The federal prison population has grown by over 700 percent since 1980.
[David Greene:] Now, we should clarify that this legislation would only apply to federal prisoners, who make up less than 10 percent of the prison population.
[Noel King:] NPR's Ayesha Rascoe has been following this story very closely. Good morning, Ayesha.
[Ayesha Rascoe, Byline:] Good morning.
[Noel King:] So what's in this bill?
[Ayesha Rascoe, Byline:] Well, as you noted, this applies to federal offenses. It would reduce sentences for certain drug crimes, including ending automatic life sentences under this three-strike penalty. It would also allow prisoners who were sentenced before Congress lowered the disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine to petition the court to change their sentence based on the updated law so basically, making a law that passed several years ago retroactive. And it would also provide incentives for prisoners to participate in training and rehabilitation programs that would help prepare them for life after incarceration.
[Noel King:] So there's a lot there. Ayesha, it seems worth noting that there is a long history in this country of talking about overhauling criminal justice.
[Ayesha Rascoe, Byline:] It it has been something that advocates have wanted for a really long time. And there's really been this evolution of thinking over the years about the way we deal with crime. You had advocates on the left. But then you had all these conservative activists, like the Koch brothers and The Heritage Foundation and some evangelicals, come out in favor of changing the way the U.S. deals with prisoners because they argue that giving out these really long sentences for nonviolent drug crimes has led to really big, massive prison massive prison populations and costs a lot of taxpayer dollars but hasn't really cut down on crime. There was some hope that they would be able to do something on this during the Obama administration, especially in that last year. But it just didn't happen. And so there was this agreement between Republicans and Democrats that something needed to be done. But it wasn't clear how we would or how they would get there.
[Noel King:] So how did they get there? What made the difference this time around?
[Ayesha Rascoe, Byline:] So this time, advocates had a supporter in the White House in Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law and adviser. Kushner's father served time in prison, so this was in federal prison. So this was personal for him. And he was able to make the case to the president that addressing the criminal justice system in this way would could be done and still be, quote, "tough on crime." So Trump came out in favor of this bill, and Senate bill in November. And without his support, you probably wouldn't have been able to get those Republicans who were concerned about being painted as soft on crime off of the sidelines and backing the bill.
[Noel King:] So just quickly, is this a win for President Trump?
[Ayesha Rascoe, Byline:] It is a win for President Trump. It's something that he put you know, that he threw his support behind and that he has put pressure on the Senate to vote on this and to get this done.
[Noel King:] NPR's Ayesha Rascoe. Thanks, Ayesha.
[Ayesha Rascoe, Byline:] Thank you.
[Noel King:] Some of the thousands of migrant children detained along the U.S.-Mexico border may get to spend Christmas with their families this year.
[David Greene:] Yeah. Let's remember last week, we reported that government-contracted shelters around the country were holding nearly 15,000 migrant children. We also found that the vetting of sponsor families created this bottleneck that was resulting in crowding at these shelters. Well, now the Trump administration is changing its policies to speed up the release of these children.
[Noel King:] NPR's John Burnett is on the line from Austin, Texas. He's been breaking news on this story. Good morning, John.
[John Burnett, Byline:] Morning, Noel.
[Noel King:] So what exactly is changing now?
[John Burnett, Byline:] Well, the Department of Health and Human Services, which is in charge of the care of the migrant kids, admits that a policy that was supposed to protect these children has just gone too far. The agency had changed the way it vets potential sponsors who stepped forward to receive a migrant child. These sponsors are usually adult family members who already live in the U.S., and the child will go to live with them during the time their asylum case is pending in immigration court. So back in June, HHS started doing intensive background checks on everyone who lives in the household. You know, that could be 13 people.
[Noel King:] Yeah.
[John Burnett, Byline:] ...Required fingerprinting and a criminal background check to see if anybody was a child molester or or worse, and that took weeks and weeks. Meanwhile, the kids were languishing in these growing shelters. And child welfare experts say detention is bad for kids both mentally and physically. So what the changes are, now these child safety officials will go back to just vetting the sponsor and not everybody in the household.
[Noel King:] Making the process a lot easier. You've reported that there are around 15,000 kids in U.S. custody.
[John Burnett, Byline:] Right.
[Noel King:] How many of them will this affect?
[John Burnett, Byline:] Well, I spoke with Lynn Johnson yesterday. She's the HHS assistant secretary of administration for children and families. And she said she's hopeful that 2,000 children who are now in custody could be released in the next four to five days to go join a loved one. These are kids who are waiting to be released after their sponsors have already passed the vetting. It'll certainly take longer for all the rest, and we'll be watching. But Johnson was blunt. She said in an interview the extra vetting hadn't paid off. All it accomplished was to delay the children's release from federal custody.
[Lynn Johnson:] And we're finding that it's not adding anything to the protection or the safety for these children. The children should be home with their parents. The government makes lousy parents.
[Noel King:] Lousy parents. John, last week you reported on a tent city in west Texas that was holding a bunch of these kids. And it sounded like a pretty terrible situation. There was a lot of overcrowding. Everyone agreed it was kind of a mess.
[John Burnett, Byline:] Yeah.
[Noel King:] What's going to happen to the kids there?
[John Burnett, Byline:] Well, that shelter out in Tornillo, Texas, has 2,800 kids. And as I reported, the operators are concerned they're going to run out of bed space any week now.
[Noel King:] Yeah.
[John Burnett, Byline:] A source familiar with the operation of the camp told me their contract runs out in two weeks. He said the nonprofit handles emergency response to hurricanes all over the Gulf South. But this deployment for these kids has exhausted the staff physically and emotionally. Most of these kids are teenage boys from Central America who crossed the Southwest border without a parent. And it was meant just as an emergency shelter, not as a permanent children's residential center out in the desert. And they would like to shut it down as soon as possible.
[Noel King:] All right, so what happens just quickly in the immediate term?
[John Burnett, Byline:] Well, the relaxation of screening of the sponsors goes into effect right now. And the assistant secretary says she's hopeful that the population of kids, which has doubled since March, will now start to drop.
[Lynn Johnson:] I do hope this helps us reduce some of the numbers of children that are being kept in shelters who could be safely at home.
[John Burnett, Byline:] And so some of these migrant kids, at least, should be released to their family by Christmas.
[Noel King:] That's great news for some of those kids. NPR's John Burnett. Thanks so much, John.
[John Burnett, Byline:] My pleasure.
[Noel King:] North Korea is under heavy sanctions. But scientific collaboration may be helping North Korea evade them.
[David Greene:] I mean, just think about this. This is a country, North Korea, that is subject to a global blockade because of its nuclear program. And still, it managed to test a nuclear device last year that was larger than any tested before. And it tested an intercontinental ballistic missile that was capable of reaching the United States. And there's a new study that has been shared exclusively with NPR shedding some light on how North Korea may be developing all this technology.
[Noel King:] NPR's Geoff Brumfiel took a look at that study a close look at that study. He's with me now in studio. Geoff, what did this study find?
[Geoff Brumfiel, Byline:] So basically, this study was looking at scientific collaboration. So scientists all over the world, they collaborate with each other. They write papers. And what this study did was it looked at 1,300 papers with North Korean authors. And the Middlebury Institute of International Studies did that did this, they analyzed those papers. And they found some potentially troubling subject matters.
[Noel King:] Troubling subject matter, like what?
[Geoff Brumfiel, Byline:] So it's important to remember North Korea's under sanctions not just as punishment but because we're actively trying to stop it from developing further weapons technology. So some of these papers are about things like mathematical modeling that could be applied to missiles or special materials that you might use in enriching uranium, things like that. You know, I should say that those are collaborations mainly with Chinese researchers. Western researchers are pretty heavily vetted, typically. So, you know, there are U.S. researchers. But they are put through scrutiny, but not everyone is. So overall, this study found about 100 papers of concern. That's the way they termed it, meaning they need a closer look.
[Noel King:] How has North Korea kind of gotten away with this?
[Geoff Brumfiel, Byline:] Yeah, I mean how are they doing this...
[Noel King:] Right.
[Geoff Brumfiel, Byline:] ...In plain sight, right? So I actually brought one of the papers with me. It's got the very catchy title, "Active Steering Control Strategy For Articulated Vehicles."
[Noel King:] OK.
[Geoff Brumfiel, Byline:] And this is about basically technology for steering trucks. And it's basically allows you to steer multiple wheels in the truck. It feels pretty innocent, reading the paper. There's a lot of math in here that I don't understand. And they claim it's going to, you know, help potentially make trucks safer on the road. But the thing is, this stuff only works on very, very heavy trucks. It's not commercially practical. And so where is it used? It happens to be used on the trucks North Korea wants to carry its big ICBMs. And so it's thought that this might be part of North Korea's effort to learn how to build these trucks because they imported a few from China before they got caught. And they need more.
[Noel King:] So briefly, for all the talk of denuclearization, I mean, we've seen evidence, reports in recent weeks, about North Korea building missile bases, now this. Doesn't look like denuclearization.
[Geoff Brumfiel, Byline:] Well, I mean, I should say right? that there's been talk of denuclearization, but there's not actually a plan.
[Noel King:] Yeah.
[Geoff Brumfiel, Byline:] There's no agreement between the U.S. and North Korea. North Korea wants sanctions lifted somewhat. The U.S. wants denuclearization now. And really, until there is a better agreement, North Korea's going to live its best North Korean life, man. It's going to be out there doing what it needs to do, getting the technologies it needs, evading sanctions. And that's what we should expect.
[Noel King:] NPR's Geoff Brumfiel. Thanks so much, Geoff.
[Geoff Brumfiel, Byline:] Thank you.

[Robert Siegel:] A new paper in the journal Nature describes a grisly massacre that happened about 10,000 years ago in Kenya. It's the earliest known evidence of human warfare. The site was uncovered in 2012, and Cambridge University professor Robert Foley is among the scientists who have been studying the discovery. Welcome to the program.
[Robert Foley:] Thank you very much.
[Robert Siegel:] The site is in northern Kenya. What exactly did your team uncover?
[Robert Foley:] What we found is an area that's about a hundred meters by 20 or 30 meters. And in that area, we found 27 skeletons or partial skeletons or fragments of skeletons. And what we saw at first was just the back of somebody's skull just peeping through the ground. And Marta Lahr, who's the director of the project she exposed the skeleton, and then it became clear that there were other skeletons around. Some of these had clear signs of having died violently.
[Robert Siegel:] Was there any sign of the implements with which they might have met their demise?
[Robert Foley:] Yes. So the traumas we were able to see basically fall into three categories. So one is what you'd think of as a blunt instrument. Were talking, here, probably wooden big wooden, heavy clubs. And these have been used to completely smash the skulls. Then we have some where the clubs may have actually had inserted in them small, little stone blades to make them really more unpleasant. And then the third type were little stone blades or tips probably arrowheads, which were projectiles. And these were actually embedded into one of the skulls so that clearly, we can say, well, they were both clubbed to death and probably shot with projectiles.
[Robert Siegel:] And were these, by the way, all males skeletons, or could you tell?
[Robert Foley:] No, no. It's men and women and children.
[Robert Siegel:] And what are the theories behind what might've produced this result?
[Robert Foley:] Our interpretation that this was the product of some sort of intergroup conflict, you know? Whether you want to call it warfare or not, it is a matter of definition. But it's lethal conflict between two groups. Now, the reason we say that is that the skeletons we found were not buried. I mean, they're not in graves. They haven't been interred. They're lying where they died, and that's an extraordinarily unusual I mean, it's unusable the find something like that. So we're interpreting this as being one group ambushing, attacking, taking by surprise in conflict with another one.
[Robert Siegel:] And how does this find altar our understanding of life 10,000 years ago in Northern Kenya?
[Robert Foley:] Well, the really critical thing is that the people involved were hunter-gatherers, and I think many people in anthropology and archaeology would say that warfare is something that really starts seriously once people have settled down, once they're in permanent settlements, they start to have livestock, they start to have crops. And those are things that need to be defended or they're things that you can steal. What we see here is a hunter-gatherer group also engaging in warfare. So it tells us that the conditions under which human societies will fight each other are broader, are more diverse than previously thought.
[Robert Siegel:] Do you come away from this study or I guess you're still in the midst of it. But do you find yourself thinking that perhaps we humans are more innately aggressive than you might've thought before?
[Robert Foley:] Well, I think the key thing is that we have evidence for it, you know? Thinkers, philosophers, scientists speculated on this forever. So it's always been out there as a possibility. Do I think that we're less pleasant than I did probably not. I mean, I don't think we're specifically violent and aggressive, and nor are we specifically peaceful and all-loving at all. I mean, I think the key thing about human nature is that we have the capacity for both. And our survival depends enormously on being able to cooperate. I mean, that's what makes groups exist. But under certain conditions, we are also very violent and can be aggressive and murderous in our activities. So I think it's wrong to characterize humans as either warlike or peaceful. We're both.
[Robert Siegel:] Professor Foley, thank you very much for talking with us today.
[Robert Foley:] It's a pleasure.
[Robert Siegel:] That's Cambridge University professor Robert Foley on the discovery of the site of the remains of an ancient conflict in Kenya. It's the earliest-known evidence of human warfare.

[Renee Montagne:] President Bush is on the road this holiday Monday, President's Day, touting his energy policy. He's trying to focus national attention on sources of energy and new technologies. But events in Washington and around the world are making it difficult for the President to push his agenda. Joining me now for some analysis is NPR's Cokie Roberts. Good morning.
[Cokie Roberts Reporting:] Good morning, Renee.
[Renee Montagne:] We learned over the weekend that President Bush was involved in convincing the vice president to answer questions about his shooting accident. To what extent has this incident gotten in the way of the president's agenda?
[Roberts:] Oh, I think that probably a good bit. And it was fascinating reporting by Time magazine that said the president actually had to call the vice president in and talk to him very heart-to-heart, telling him that he understood that Mr. Cheney had had a very serious moment, and that it was very upsetting to him, but that he really needed to come clean. It tells you something about the power of the vice president, that the only person who could have that conversation with him was the president. But that seemed to be the reason that the vice president did go on Fox News and tell the story of the hunting accident. And if Time magazine's other question was a poll question, other reporting, and their majority says, they're now satisfied with the vice president's handling of this whole incident. But, a crucial week in an election year is gone, and in this period coming out of the state of the union, when the president has set a new agenda, and when the Republicans are tying to try to get some traction going into the November election, to lose a week like that makes it very, very difficult.
[Renee Montagne:] And Cokie, even as President Bush tries to move forward, members of his own party are forcing him to deal with the past, particularly the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
[Roberts:] Well, and Renee, when you and I talked about this last week, they were just releasing the report in the House of Representatives. Now, this is a report that is all Republicans; a Republican report. And as the week went on, the criticism that was voiced in the report just grew and grew. The administration decided that the answer to this was to send Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff out on all the Sunday talk shows yesterday to defend the handling of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath. And the criticism just continued, even after the secretary went forward, and, again, the criticism coming from Republicans. Democrats, of course, were in there as well, but Republicans saying they're totally unsatisfied with the handling, and of Katrina, and with other Homeland Security aspects. And the whole question of whether FEMA should be under homeland security, or whether FEMA should continue to exist in its current incarnation. All of that is up in the air, and the conversation and the criticism is coming from Republicans, as well as Democrats.
[Renee Montagne:] And added to that, Secretary Chertoff finds himself having to answer fresh criticisms over an Arab company's takeover of operations at U.S. ports.
[Roberts:] This is because a British company sold itself to a Dubai company, which is now in charge of handling operations at major ports. Now, you'd expect Democrat Chuck Schumer to come forward with families from September 11th to criticize this at the port of New York. But you also see the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Peter King, saying terrorist infiltration is possible, and other Republicans saying it's politically tone deaf. What you're seeing here, Renee, is Republicans really worried that they could lose the House of Representatives this year. There was worry that the war in Iraq could go even more sour, and that the lobbying scandal could be a problem for them, and they don't know quite how to fix it.
[Renee Montagne:] Cokie, thanks very much, NPR Political Analyst Cokie Roberts.

[Michel Martin:] We have one more take on this story, in part because Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs' complaint of a physical assault by an official was not the first or the only one like this in recent months. Earlier this month, a news reporter in Alaska filed a police report against a state senator who he says slapped him across the face during an interview. A reporter for Roll Call says he was pinned against the wall by security guards at the FCC when he tried to ask officials a question. Now, those are just two. And if you haven't heard those stories, you might remember the story of Michelle Fields. She was working for the conservative online publication Breitbart News during the campaign last year when she was grabbed by Donald Trump's former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and which left bruises. She wrote about it this week in The New York Times in a piece titled, "Journalism In The Age Of The Body Slam." And she's with us now in our studios in Washington, D.C. Michelle Fields, thanks so much for joining us.
[Michelle Fields:] Thanks for having me.
[Michel Martin:] Can you just describe what it's like in the first kind of minutes or hours after something like this? Like, what goes through your mind?
[Michelle Fields:] Well, immediately I was shocked. But I think what was more shocking was the aftermath. And I think more hurtful was the lying about it, the smearing. And that's sort of what Ben Jacobs went through. When it first happened to him the man said no, that didn't happen. I didn't touch him. And so that's sort of the I think the most surprising part of it. And then the reaction from online, which is basically either they say it didn't happen or they say we deserved it.
[Michel Martin:] You know, you said in your piece for The Times that politics has become entirely situational. And you said that Republicans have put party over civility. You said that had Hillary Clinton's campaign manager grabbed your arm instead of Corey Lewandowski you would not have been abandoned by your friends and mentors at Fox or your employer, by which you meant what?
[Michelle Fields:] Yeah, I do agree and with what I said, which is that it's situational for Ben Jacobs as well. I think if he had been assaulted by a Democrat that would have been a completely different situation. I think he would be sort of a hero in the right-wing world. And if it was in my case, it was a liberal let's say if it was Hillary Clinton's campaign manager I think I would certainly still have my show cashing in on Fox News. I think I'd be going on every single day. I think the fact that it was a Republican changes the whole thing. And I think that's really sad. As conservatives, this doesn't feel like we have principles anymore. Everything's situational.
[Michel Martin:] We did find some examples of Democratic politicians being aggressive toward journalists. I do wonder why you think the circumstances are as you see them now. Is it you think that people on the conservative side are feeling that they are under attack and therefore anything that detracts from their message is to be ignored or dismissed or what and I'm just wondering if you just have a theory of the case, like, why you think things are as they are.
[Michelle Fields:] I think there was a lot of polarization under President Obama. And conservatives were very unhappy with the press then. You know, they feel as though the press leans to the left. And I think to some extent that is true. There are a lot of reporters that are left-leaning. And so they feel like they didn't hold President Obama accountable. So there's this anger. And I think President Trump, during the campaign, he really capitalized on that sentiment. And I think now conservatives no longer just distrust the media. I think they despise the media.
[Michel Martin:] I have to note that you're not working in journalism at the moment. You have helped found, are one of the founders of a consulting firm, JMW Strategies. Did this incident push you out of the field in part?
[Michelle Fields:] Yeah. I needed a break. I'm very disenchanted. It was a hard year. I mean, I grew up sort of as a conservative activist. And then I got into journalism and I just had such a terrible experience. I mean, I know a lot of people say, well, you deserved it. You were naive. You worked for Fox News and Breitbart. Of course they would throw you under the bus. They're terrible people. But I was upset and I still am. And so I just needed a little break. But I still wanted to be in politics, so consulting seemed like the a good thing to do.
[Michel Martin:] That's Michelle Fields. Her op ed in The New York Times is called "Journalism In The Age Of The Body Slam." Right now Michelle was kind enough to stop by our Washington, D.C., studios. Michelle, thanks so much for speaking to us.
[Michelle Fields:] Thank you.

[Steve Inskeep:] It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep.
[Renee Montagne:] And I'm Renee Montagne. The speaker of the House is being grilled over what and when she knew about harsh interrogation. Nancy Pelosi spoke out for the first time since the CIA released a memo last week on classified briefings it gave members of Congress. That document says Pelosi was briefed, in September of 2002, on interrogation techniques used on terror suspect Abu Zubaydah. In the month before that briefing, he'd been waterboarded 83 times. Speaker Pelosi flatly denied she knew of the waterboarding. Of the CIA she said, they mislead us all the time. NPR's David Welna has more.
[David Welna:] First, a little background. The CIA memo that details its 40 briefings to a select group of Democrats and Republicans in Congress was actually requested by Republicans. Those Republicans, like the CIA, had opposed the Obama administration's release last month of four memos from the Bush Justice Department. These four so-called torture memos made a legal argument for the CIA's use of what the agency called enhanced interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, which many regard as torture. The memos released, prompted demands that both the authors of the memos and those who authorized them, be prosecuted. That's when congressional Republicans appealed to the CIA to show Democrats, too, knew about these techniques. The CIA responded with the memo that listed Nancy Pelosi as one of the first members of Congress to be briefed, saying she'd been told about the interrogation techniques already used on Abu Zubaydah. But if Republicans expected that to stifle the speaker, it didn't. Yesterday, Pelosi contradicted the CIA and said she was not told about the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah when she was briefed by the CIA in September of 2002.
[Representative Nancy Pelosi:] They talked about interrogations that they had done and said we want to use enhanced techniques, and we have legal opinions that say that they are okay. We are not using waterboarding. That's the only mention that they were not using it. And we now know that earlier they were. So yes, I am saying that they are misleading that the CIA was misleading the Congress.
[David Welna:] Pelosi says the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah was not the only thing the CIA failed to tell her about.
[Representative Nancy Pelosi:] We now know, what they didn't inform us then, that there were other opinions within the executive branch that concluded that these interrogation techniques were not legal.
[David Welna:] Pelosi says, she only learned that waterboarding had been used five months later, after she had left the intelligence committee. She says she learned about it then from a staff member who'd attended a later briefing.
[Representative Nancy Pelosi:] I was not briefed that. I was only informed that they were briefed but I did not hear the briefing.
[David Welna:] A CIA spokesman responded to Pelosi by saying the language and the memo is quote, "true to the language in the agency's records." House minority leader, John Boehner, who requested the CIA memo, said it's pretty clear that Pelosi was well aware that enhanced interrogation techniques had been used.
[Representative John Boehner:] And it's hard for me to imagine that anyone in our intelligence area would ever mislead a member of Congress.
[David Welna:] Kit Bond, who is now the top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, said Pelosi should have known that the CIA had every intension to use waterboarding.
[Senator Kit Bond:] They don't come in and tell us, well here's a here's a technique that we are not going to use. They come in to tell us these are techniques that were going to be used, or this is what we're going to do.
[David Welna:] For her part, Pelosi called for a truth commission to get to the bottom of the CIA's interrogation program and to explore the chain of command that led to its creation. She accused Republicans of trying to focus all the attention on her and her fellow Democrats.
[Representative Nancy Pelosi:] This is a tactic, a diversionary tactic, to take the spotlight off of those who conceived, developed and implemented these policies which all of us long opposed.
[David Welna:] Meanwhile, the CIA yesterday, declined to release two classified documents Vice President Dick Cheney had asked to be de-classified, documents, he contends, which show the CIA's interrogation methods helped keep the country safe from terrorists. The CIA said it had to withhold the memos due to a pending lawsuit. David Welna, NPR News.

[Alex Chadwick:] Now to health news. A new report on cigarettes say they've got more nicotine. NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates spoke with one of the researchers who did the study.
[Karen Grigsby Bates:] A study released today by the Harvard School of Public Health says that the levels of nicotine in major brands of cigarettes sold in Massachusetts has jumped in recent years. This supports an earlier August 2006 report by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Gregory Connolly is the lead author of the Harvard study and a professor at Harvard's School of Public Health. He recaps the Harvard study's major findings. First, the nicotine level in smoke has risen 11 percent over a seven-year period.
[Professor Gregory Connolly:] Number two, we found that the cause of that is that more nicotine is now appearing in the raw tobacco, which could be either through differences in blending, the addition of nicotine to reconstituted tobacco sheet, use of foreign leaf.
[Karen Grigsby Bates:] Connolly says this indicates cigarette companies are continuing to deceive smokers and health officials.
[Professor Gregory Connolly:] This is information that would tell us that the product has a greater capacity to cause or maintain addiction among consumers.
[Karen Grigsby Bates:] The potential for increased addiction is at this point speculative, as the Harvard figures are for machine testing of nicotine levels. Scientific research indicates humans actually adjust their smoking patterns to get the nicotine they need, taking shorter puffs on stronger cigarettes, and longer drags on ones with lower levels of nicotine. What's worrisome, says Connolly, is a suspicion that tobacco companies are manipulating nicotine levels despite promises not to do that, made when tobacco companies settled with state's attorneys general in 1998. He cites one judge's finding.
[Professor Gregory Connolly:] Judge Kessler, the federal judge who did an investigation on issues of conspiracy and fraud by the tobacco industry, looked at this question very, very carefully do they manipulate nicotine to cause and maintain addiction and concluded yes, they did. Leading tobacco company Phillip Morris says the current levels of nicotine cited in the Massachusetts and Harvard studies are random fluctuations. In a press release, Phillip Morris says, quote, "Data reported to the state from 1997 to 2006 reflect that there are random variations in cigarette nicotine yields, both upwards and downwards, and that variations are not consistent in either directions across reporting years," unquote. Whether tobacco is being manipulated in the years this study covers, Harvard's Connolly says more monitoring is an absolute necessity. The cigarette is probably one of the few consumer products that is exempt from virtually every major health law in the United States of America, including the Food and Drug Administration by, you know, a court decision a few years ago. And it's about time that end. There's too many people dying of lung cancer.
[Karen Grigsby Bates:] Connolly says one solution is increased oversight of the industry by the Food and Drug Administration, something Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts has proposed in pending legislation. Karen Grigsby Bates, NPR News.

[Audie Cornish:] This past week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he doesn't have the votes for a bill to charge companies for carbon pollution.
[Harry Reid:] Many of us want to do a thorough, comprehensive bill that creates jobs, breaks our addiction to foreign oil, and curbs pollution. Unfortunately at this time, we don't have a single Republican to work with in achieving this goal. For me, it's terribly disappointing and it's also very dangerous.
[Audie Cornish:] The only Republican even close to being on board was Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, but he backed off, and the Gulf spill hasn't changed his mind.
[Lindsey Graham:] I don't mind pricing carbon in a smart way. I'm not going to use the oil spill as a reason to do it. I think we should expand domestic exploration. My chances of doing that now are zero because of the oil spill.
[Audie Cornish:] Hello there, David.
[David Welna:] Hi, Audie.
[Audie Cornish:] So earlier, we played that clip of Harry Reid, and he was trying to blame the Republicans for the implosion of the comprehensive climate proposal. But frankly, it seemed like he had a lot more trouble with the Democrats in his own caucus.
[David Welna:] Well, he was right that there are no Republicans right now who are willing to state their support for a comprehensive bill, but there are a number of Democrats as well. It would be very difficult to get to 60, the number you need to overcome a filibuster, without getting those Democrats on board. And right now, it doesn't seem like he's able to do that.
[Audie Cornish:] David, one thing I was hoping you could talk about are all the different factions in the Senate pulling one way or the other way when it comes to climate legislation.
[David Welna:] And it might surprise you, but many of the utilities were actually interested in working with Congress on getting such legislation passed because they wanted the certainty. They wanted to know what to expect, and they also would prefer to work with lawmakers than have the EPA tell them what to do.
[Audie Cornish:] Is part of this evidence that Democrats and President Obama, they've just exhausted their political capital? I mean, did they basically just run out of juice this summer when it came to climate change?
[David Welna:] And so if we have action this year on comprehensive energy legislation that would include some kind of restrictions on carbon emissions, it would probably happen in the lame duck Congress that follows those elections. At that point, those lawmakers would not have to worry about getting slammed at the polls right afterwards, if they cast a vote in favor of carbon restrictions.
[Audie Cornish:] Thanks, David.
[David Welna:] You're welcome, Audie.

[Debbie Elliott:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Debbie Elliott. As lifespans get longer, more and more people end up caring for their aging relatives, an experience which can sometimes be heartbreaking. This week's letter for ethicist Randy Cohen comes from a listener who's elderly father-in-law suffered from Alzheimer's. Martin Dykeman joins us on the line now from Waynesville, North Carolina. Hello there.
[Mr. Martin Dykemen:] Hi. How are you?
[Debbie Elliott:] Good. And Randy, are you with us again? Hello?
[Mr. Randy Cohen:] Hi, Debbie.
[Debbie Elliott:] Mr. Dykeman, I'm sorry to hear that your father-in-law recently passed away.
[Mr. Dykeman:] Yes. And it wasn't too long ago.
[Debbie Elliott:] Now, you told us that your father-in-law would get very upset when you would visit him. Explain to us what the problem was.
[Mr. Dykeman:] The problem was that he would be very emotional when we arrived, and then when it came time to leave, he would be emotional again. He would not want us to leave. He would cling. He would cry. And he would have to be restrained, in fact, by the staff where he was living.
[Debbie Elliott:] And did you feel there was anything you could do to calm him down?
[Mr. Dykeman:] Well, it occurred to me on one of the last visits when we were able to tell him that we would be back the next day, and that was true, we were going to be back the next day, that he was very peaceful when we left. He seemed to accept that. And it gave me the idea of wondering whether this would be an ethical thing to do on occasions when we did not intend to be back the next day.
[Debbie Elliott:] Now, I would think that the nurses in your father-in-law's nursing home have dealt with this kind of problem before. Did they have any advice for you?
[Mr. Dykeman:] We did not raise that question with her, but I did raise it with a former intensive care nurse who happens to be the cantor at our congregation in Asheville, and knowing that she could approach it from both a religious and a medical perspective, I asked her the same question. She said she didn't regard it as an ethical question as much as a practical one. Nine times out of 10, she said, the person who's suffering from dementia will not remember what you told him or her the day before, sometimes even the hour before. But they come and they go and on occasion there will be an occasion when their memory of the previous day or the previous hour will be very clear and then they will know that you made a promise you didn't keep. And she had left us with that thought. We never got to try it out because he became very ill and died soon after.
[Debbie Elliott:] Randy, what's the right thing to do in this situation?
[Mr. Randy Cohen:] Well, you know, Mr. Dykeman is right, that many people do have this concern. I've received many variations on this question at the column and as a result, I've spoken to several physicians about it. I've come to the conclusion that throughout the column for other questions, too that there are many times when a lie is absolutely justified. And two guidelines I find helpful is when you're attempting to benefit another person rather than yourself, and when there's no other way to achieve that end and sadly, I believe the situation with an Alzheimer's sufferer sometimes meets that test. So if a person is no longer lucid and there's no other way to reassure them, I believe it's utterly justified. In fact, it's more than justified. It's admirable. It's an act of true kindness.
[Debbie Elliott:] Now, wouldn't there be the risk that that one time in 10, when the patient was lucid and you lied and they realized it, that that could cause harm?
[Mr. Randy Cohen:] Yes. There's absolutely that risk, but to choose the most ethical solution, we have to look for the most beneficial results. An ethical solution doesn't have to be utterly perfect. Clinging to, I think, what in this case is a false idea of modesty, is going to produce horrible distress and suffering 90 percent of the time. And while there is some risk involved, it's a risk worth taking.
[Debbie Elliott:] Mr. Dykeman?
[Mr. Dykeman:] Well, I'm pleased to hear that because I think that's going to help a lot of other people. We asked friends and associates if they had this problem, and they said, oh yes, in fact we were told that many people are hesitant to visit their relatives because they simply can't cope with it.
[Debbie Elliott:] Martin Dykeman, thank you for writing to the ethicist.
[Mr. Dykeman:] And thank you for answering.
[Debbie Elliott:] If you'd like advice from Randy Cohen, please do write to us. Go to our Web site, NPR.org. Click on Contact Us and select WEEKEND ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Put the word ethics in the subject line and don't forget to include a phone number where we can reach you. Randy, thanks as always.
[Mr. Randy Cohen:] Thank you, Debbie.

[Steve Inskeep:] For all the difficult relations the U.S. has with Iran, the two countries share many ties, including millions of Iranian-Americans. Ryan Seacrest and Bravo make them the focus of a new reality show, called the "Shahs of Sunset." It examines the lavish lifestyles of some in Southern California's Iranian-American community. NPR's Amy Walters reports.
[Amy Walters, Byline:] One of the privileges of being on reality TV means you get to dictate the image of your community, for better or often for worse Italians-Americans partying in New Jersey; housewives from wherever; and now, Persian-Americans from Beverly Hills.
[Unidentified Woman #1:] And I don't like ugly people.
[Unidentified Singer:] [Singing] We love L.A.
[Unidentified Woman #2:] Image is everything in our community. For example, I might spend more money on my handbag than I do on my rent because more people are going to see my purse than they will my crib.
[Reza Farahan:] Hello, we're Persian.
[Amy Walters, Byline:] The Bravo audience is going to love these characters, says president Frances Berwick.
[Frances Berwick:] They lead aspirational lifestyles. They live in nice houses. And they're kind of the Bravo bull's-eye, in many respects.
[Unidentified Singer:] [Singing] Tehrangeles...
[Asa Soltan Rahmati:] Persians call L.A. Tehrangeles because L.A. has the largest population of Persians outside of Iran. That's huge.
[Amy Walters, Byline:] In 1979, the Iranian revolution ended the Shah's reign. Many successful Iranians feared persecution by the new Islamic regime, and their once-tiny community in Southern California grew. The "Shahs of Sunset" tells the story of their children.
[Avid Boustani:] What they show in the show is not representative of the majority of the Iranian-American populace, especially the next generation.
[Amy Walters, Byline:] Avid Boustani's in his 30s, with degrees from MIT and Berkeley. He joins many Iranian-Americans criticizing the show.
[Avid Boustani:] I believe one of them said, we own all the land or all the buildings.
[Unidentified Man:] We don't work in buildings; we own them.
[Avid Boustani:] Who with the right intelligence says something like that?
[Amy Walters, Byline:] They say it on "Shahs of Sunset." Asa Soltan Rahmati is the artsy one on the show. She's heard the criticism, and responds with this Persian proverb.
[Asa Soltan Rahmati:] If the mirror shows your true face, don't break the mirror, break yourself. It's a pretty good reflection of Iranians, especially in L.A., so I don't know why everyone's tripping.
[Reza Farahan:] If people watch the show and think I represent every Persian, they're going to think every Persian is super-fly and loves a lot of gold, but I don't.
[Amy Walters, Byline:] Reza Farahan is dressed in designer everything, finished off with a sizable mustache. He wants to show the world a Middle Eastern man who's gay and happy.
[Reza Farahan:] Someone said something to the effect of, why didn't they find a group of scholars or dentists or doctors? Because it would be boring.
[Amy Walters, Byline:] Boring, the poison pill of reality TV. But the reality? Are Persian-Americans more than just super-fly? Let's ask Younes Nazarian. He arrived in Beverly Hills in 1979. Now he builds businesses, big ones. Heard of Qualcomm?
[Younes Nazarian:] We had students, engineers and doctors; and factories and companies the head of them or second person, third person is Iranian.
[Amy Walters, Byline:] It's a fact. Iranian-Americans make more money than the average American. They're also better educated. As for religion, the majority are divided between Islam and not practicing any religion. Others are Jewish, Christian, Zoroastrian and Baha'ai. Cultural heritage is important to this community. Siamak Gharhemani created the first Iranian film festival, here in Los Angeles.
[Siamak Gharhemani:] At the end of the day, it's great that we're living in a country what allows us to be whatever we want to be, even if it's something that majority of our community is not going to like. But at least I'm not afraid of being imprisoned, being killed or being punished.
[Amy Walters, Byline:] The "Shahs of Sunset" airs Sundays on Bravo. Amy Walters, NPR News.

[David Greene:] In Honduras, they have now declared a winner in the presidential election but not clear if this is going to end the political upheaval or potentially cause more. After a month of uncertainty and deadly protests over allegations of widespread election fraud, the current President Juan Orlando Hernandez has been declared president elect. But his opponent, Salvador Nasralla, has refused to concede. And now the Organization of American States is speaking out against the results. NPR's Carrie Kahn has been following the story. She's in Mexico City. Good morning, Carrie.
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] Good morning, and sorry for the scratchy throat. It's my Honduran souvenir.
[David Greene:] [Laughter] Well, that souvenir, we've had that souvenir elsewhere in the world as well. It's that time of year. So there's an outcome now officially. Are Hondurans going to accept this or where does this story go now?
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] Well, it's difficult to say what's happening now. The OAS gave a long list, a stunning list, of reasons why they felt that the election was poorly executed. They gave it a poor grade. And then as you said, the secretary general of the OAS said it's impossible to say with any certainty who won and that a do-over is necessary. That's just a stunning what's happening right now.
[David Greene:] And the OAS, we should say, is a very credible body. I mean, they're sort of like the U.N. of that region, right? So this is no small thing that they're disputing results.
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] No. They're the premier regional forum for analysis and policymaking for the entire Western Hemisphere, which includes all of Latin America. So this is a big development.
[David Greene:] And what exactly are they saying about this election and how it took place?
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] Well, they gave a lengthy list of irregularities last night. It was very technical, so I won't go into it. But the most stunning irregularities that really stood out to me were they said there was deliberate human intrusions into the computer system that counted the vote. They've said there was intentional elimination of digital traces in the system. And they even pointed to open ballot boxes. And then they asked a Georgetown University professor to analyze the results, and he concluded that there was an extreme statistical improbability that late election returns could have swung so heavily toward the incumbent, who was declared the winner.
[David Greene:] So are they being really careful with this language, basically stepping as close as they can to accusing the president of rigging the election but not quite going that far, just using all these technicalities to raise a lot of doubts here?
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] Definitely but they were very clear in giving this electoral process what they called a poor grade and not giving the Honduran people the democracy that they deserve. So they've spoken strongly about it, but they're backing it up with very technical language.
[David Greene:] Can this body, the OAS, do anything meaningful to change this though?
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] Well, it's unclear what's going to happen now. The current president needs to hand over the powers in the middle of next month. So that's very short term to hold a new election. And Salvador Nasralla has long said, and he told us in an interview in Honduras just last week, that he would not allow for an election to be done over with the current electoral body governing that election. He wants international observers to hold that election. So that would take a lot of time and preparation to pull that off.
[David Greene:] How much fear is there of instability and potentially more protests and violence in that country?
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] Well, overnight, roads were blocked and there were street protests held again. Nasralla, who's on his way to Washington to meet with the OAS and U.S. officials, he's not even in Honduras, he had a stopover in Miami and he went on Facebook from the airport decrying the decision and urging people to stand up and to continue fighting. And then his ally, the former president, Manuel Zelaya, read a statement urging people to the streets. And he also made the stunning declaration where he urged the armed forces and the police to only take orders from Salvador Nasralla and not the current president and not to repress the people.
[David Greene:] Wow, OK, we'll have to see where this goes in Honduras. And NPR's Carrie Kahn in Mexico City, we hope you feel better, Carrie. Thanks.
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] Thank you.

[David Greene:] All right, Steve, so I'm here in California, a state that may no longer exist in its current form if a political movement succeeds.
[Steve Inskeep:] What?
[David Greene:] There's a ballot initiative yeah, right? There's a ballot initiative. It's going to ask voters in November if they want to split this large state into three smaller pieces.
[Steve Inskeep:] OK. There are lots of ballot initiatives in California. They don't all pass, but some are a big deal. Remember Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage once upon a time, or Proposition 64, which legalized marijuana just last year?
[David Greene:] Right. And this split-up-California measure, that was introduced by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper. His argument is the state is just too large to be governed efficiently. This is him on Fox News.
[Tim Draper:] It's not safe here. We have many...
[Tucker Carlson:] Yeah.
[Tim Draper:] ...Homeless people. We have a lot of big problems. The education system is just about the worst...
[Tucker Carlson:] Yeah.
[Tim Draper:] ...In all 50 states.
[Steve Inskeep:] David, is this going to pass?
[David Greene:] No. Probably not. I mean, it got enough signatures to get on the ballot, but polls suggest the minority supports it. Even if it passed, it would still need to be approved by Congress. So I would not rush to throw out your old maps of the United States quite yet.

[Farai Chideya:] A new CD collection called "Blowing the Fuse" could blow your mind.
[Unidentified Woman:] [Singing] Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on. Hey, yeah... It's a 16-disc set of classic rhythm and blues songs from the '40s through 1960. Each CD is packed with more than two-dozen R&B hits. The discs also come with booklets that cover the music's history, with short bios and some great artists photos. Dave Daddy Cool Booth helped compile "Blowing the Fuse." He's a former R&B DJ who now runs Showtime Music Archives, a resource for classic soul material located near Toronto, Canada. Booth combed through stacks of old R&B charts and thousands of records in his basement to put the collection together. He teamed up with the German label Bear Family Records who released the box set. Dave Booth spoke earlier with NPR's Tony Cox.
[Tony Cox:] All right, Dave, let's get started. Let me ask you, question number one, Dave. How long did it take you to put this compilation together?
[Mr. Dave Booth:] Oh, at least a couple of years. The hardest part was taking out songs. Not the ones that went on, but the ones we had to leave off. And I tried not to put more than one release per artist per year, and there were a couple of times when I had to break that rule, one with Fats Domino and the other one was Little Richard because he had two monster hits in one year.
[Tony Cox:] What would you say, Dave, is the connection between each and every song that you selected to be a part of this terrific anthology?
[Mr. Dave Booth:] That's a toughie. How did I choose the tunes? Well, sales was a big influence but not always because some songs were critical for what they led to. Louis Jordan led to Bill Haley and The Comets. Big Boy Crudup, he led to Elvis. Then there was, you know, the power of Little Richard. There was the whole New Orleans sound. I wanted it to be not only a pleasure to listen to but also an educational tool, you know.
[Tony Cox:] It absolutely is that. I put one of these volumes in my CD player and I just couldn't believe what I was listening to. It took me way back to another time and, as a matter of fact, one song in particular caught my attention. I could remember a party that I went to when I heard this song by Ike and Tina Turner.
[Ms. Tina Turner:] [Singing] Oh, there's something on my mind. Won't somebody please, please tell me what's wrong? You're just a fool, you know you're in love. You've got to face it to live in this world. You take the good along with the bad. Sometimes you're happy and sometimes you're sad. One more time. You know you love him, you can't understand why he treats you like he do when he's such a good man.
[Tony Cox:] Man, that was a big ol'hit. I was a little kid now, I'll grant you that. But songs like that really take you back, don't they?
[Mr. Dave Booth:] You know, it was those magic labels. It was a time when we bought records 45 by 45. And you did take them to parties but, you know, you hear I used to listen to WLAC out of Nashville, Tennessee. I used to sit in my car because I could get better reception on my car radio than I could in the house. And I'd sit there with a note pad and write down all the there would be Howlin'Wolf singing "Smoke Stack Lightin", Slim Harpo, "Raining In My Heart." I'd write and then we would send off to Randy's Record Shop in Gallatin, Tennessee, and they would send a package of records up to us.
[Tony Cox:] You know, some of these songs that you have on here are by artists who, you know, maybe they were one-hit wonders, let's say, or perhaps they don't have the name that has survived. Here's one, for example. This was big back in the day, but I don't know how many people really remember Maurice Williams and The Zodiacs.
[Mr. Maurice Williams:] [Singing] Oh, won't you stay just a little bit longer. Please, let me hear you say that you will. Say you will.
[Mr. Dave Booth:] That's one of the shortest singles. I think it is the shortest 45 ever.
[Tony Cox:] Really, it's a minute and 35 seconds long.
[Mr. Dave Booth:] Yeah, yeah, a magic record, though.
[Tony Cox:] Well, you've done a wonderful thing and we want to thank you...
[Mr. Dave Booth:] Thank you.
[Tony Cox:] ...for bringing all these music back. It's a great compilation.
[Mr. Dave Booth:] Well, look forward to the next 10. There are going to be knocked out. You're going to hear Wilson Pickett, Aretha. You're going to hear a lot of the Chicago soul sounds. You're going to be thrilled with the next, and I've been working on those for the past few months. And it's all coming together.
[Tony Cox:] All right. We're done with the interview. I'm going to ask you this question as a former since you're a DJ and you're going to do some new stuff.
[Mr. Dave Booth:] Yeah.
[Tony Cox:] So who were The Contours? This is a quiz. I'm giving you a DJ quiz. Do you know who they are?
[Mr. Dave Booth:] Are you talking about individual members?
[Tony Cox:] No.
[Mr. Dave Booth:] No, because I don't go that...
[Tony Cox:] Touché.
[Mr. Dave Booth:] I don't go that fine, but I mean The Contours were a Motown group. They were actually I think on Gordy. And, you know, "Do You Love Me?" was their big hit but there was "First I Look At The Purse" and "Shake, Sherrie, Shake," and whatever else you need.
[Tony Cox:] I'm convinced.
[Mr. Dave Booth:] A great not as good as Junior Walker and the All Stars.
[The Contours:] [Singing] Watch me now. Hey, work, work it now baby.
[Tony Cox:] Dave, this is wonderful, man. You're in my hall of fame.
[Mr. Dave Booth:] No, problem. Bye.
[The Contours:] [Singing] Do you love me? Do you love me?
[Tony Cox:] That was former disc jockey Dave Daddy Cool Booth. He compiled songs for the "Blowing The Fuse" box set but we wanted to take a longer trip through some of the hits in this collection. So we reached out to Robert Frye, also known as Captain Fly, host of the weekly "Old School House Party" radio show on WPFW in Washington, D.C. Frye had one word to describe "Blowing The Fuse" when he first saw the massive song list.
[Mr. Robert Frye:] Unbelievable. The best of the best. I was somebody had real good taste and then they got to the root of it because some of these artists, you know, like Clyde MacFadden and the other folks, they were considered one-hit artists. But those of us that kind of loved the music know that Clyde, Billy Wood and The Dominos and all of those types, it's almost like it all comes together.
[Tony Cox:] What would you say is the appeal of this music today?
[Mr. Robert Frye:] The music is appealing today because of the times. All of this music, somewhere from the '40s and up, you had to ask someone to dance. You put you extended your hand. You took the lady back to the seat.
[Tony Cox:] Well, you know, let's go back through some these because I have a couple I want to mention to you and get your take on it. But before I do that, you're a disc jockey and, you know, you know the era. What songs, what couple of songs stood out for you as you look through this incredible compilation?
[Mr. Robert Frye:] Oh, man, Jackie Wilson, Clyde MacFadden, Louis Jordan, "Caldonia," the first rapper.
[Mr. Louis Jordan:] [Singing] What she said? She said son keep away from that woman, she ain't no good. Don't bother her. But momma didn't know what Caldonia was putting down. So I'm going down to Caldonia's house and ask her just one more time. Caldonia, Caldonia, what makes your big head so hard?
[Mr. Robert Frye:] Ray Bryant doing "The Madison" and that was way back. Honky-tonk, all those dances, were actual dances where everybody could join in even if you didn't have a partner.
[Tony Cox:] Well, let's listen to a little bit of what did you say? "The Madison," right?
[Mr. Robert Frye:] "The Madison."
[Mr. Ray Bryant:] [Singing] You're lookin'good, a big strong line. When I say hit it, I want you to go two up and two back with a big strong turn and back to the Madison. Get on top.
[Tony Cox:] Well, let's talk about an artist who actually was a big part of this earlier period, and her music has come back and you hear it on television and in movies and in commercials all time. Do you know who I'm talking about?
[Mr. Robert Frye:] Etta James.
[Tony Cox:] Etta James, of course.
[Mr. Robert Frye:] Oh my gracious, "At Last." Any smooth jazz station, they play it five times a day, I feel alive.
[Tony Cox:] But there's an Etta James tune on here that is one that people probably are not as familiar with. Here it is.
[Ms. Etta James:] [Singing] Oh-hoo, oh-hoo, Henry, you ain't moving me. You better feel that boogie beat and get the lead out of your feet. Roll with me, Henry. Roll with me, Henry.
[Mr. Robert Frye:] I'm going to call you a pitcher. I'm going to call you a pitcher. You're throwing me curve balls. This young lady is 14 years old. Her mother said you girls can't go audition for Johnny Otis, the Johnny Otis. What happens, they go in to Modern record label and the rest is history So, you know, it was covered over time, as music would be, but she's unbelievable even now, today.
[Tony Cox:] Absolutely. You know, there's another group of many groups who were mentioned in this compilation. Now, The Temptations obviously, Four Tops, these kinds of groups had big names, the Platters even before them. But this particular group, they were really big and then they kind of disappeared. But their songs, when you hear them, they take you right back. I'm talking about The Drifters and "Save The Last Dance For Me."
[Mr. Robert Frye:] My gracious.
[The Drifters:] [Singing] But don't forget who's taking you home and in who's arms you're gonna be. So, darling save the last dance for me.
[Tony Cox:] Who are the artists would you say, Captain Fly, who have had this may be a really difficult question but who have had in your estimation the biggest impact on R&B music?
[Mr. Robert Frye:] Biggest impact for me would probably be in that range Marvin's in there. Jackie Wilson's in there because, you know, the operatic voice and those things they're single artists. But I think as far as The Temptations. So, you know, the groups passed the test of time as far as the audience appreciation, but the main thing is especially with the [unintelligible] I think they're probably the group for me.
[Tony Cox:] Before I let you go, there is, you know, there were also some songs that came out back during the day that were and they were like novelty songs. The lyrics were just kind of fun. They didn't really mean anything necessarily but they kind of had that catchy beat. You can find your head bouncing to the music. One of the people who's on the compilation who did that, I'd like to get you to respond after we play a little bit of her tune, is LaVern Baker. Now the name of this tune is "Tweedlee Dee."
[Mr. Robert Frye:] What?
[Ms. Lavern Baker:] [Singing] Tweedlee tweedlee tweedlee dee. I'm as happy as can be. Jiminy Cricket, jiminy jack. You make my heart go clickety-clack. Tweedlee tweedlee tweedlee dee.
[Tony Cox:] Now, there's no way people will be talking about, you know, Jiminy Cricket in songs these days, but it was a hit back then.
[Mr. Robert Frye:] Good, clean fun. Funny kind of thing about, you know, around the house and you're listening. And I was born in 19 [unintelligible], so some of those songs, you know, a little before my time. But being actually at home in a house full of music, listening to LaVern Baker, we listened to the song and singing along. Turned on Ed Sullivan and somebody else was singing it.
[Tony Cox:] Oh, yeah that right
[Mr. Robert Frye:] That was my first experience with a cover.
[Tony Cox:] Here's my final thing for you, Captain Fly. This music has survived in some cases 40, 50 years or more, how much longer do you think this kind of sound can survive?
[Mr. Robert Frye:] Well, let me say this in closing. The biggest nation is your imagination. And you being in radio, you know there's some songs or some music or whatever that would invoke some magical times. And I do reunions and all, and there's some eras that the music cannot be played for dance enjoyment. So how do you like that for timeless music?
[Tony Cox:] Absolutely. Captain Fly, thank you so much.
[Mr. Robert Frye:] My honor.
[Unidentified Man:] [Singing] I said hey, hey, hey, yeah...
[Farai Chideya:] That was NPR's Tony Cox speaking with Robert Frye, also known as Captain Fly, host of the weekly the "Old School House Party" radio show on WPFW in Washington, D.C. They discussed "Blowing The Fuse," a 16 CD box set of classic R&B hits now out on Bear Family Records. That's our show for today, and thanks for sharing your time with us. To listen to the show, visit npr.org. NEWS AND NOTES was created by NPR News and the African-American Public Radio Consortium.

[Scott Simon:] Father's Day is Sunday, time to try to honor fathers with something more inventive than just another tie or a new set of BVDs. Ah, but the best we can do for the moment is speak again with A.J. Jacobs. He's the man who's read the Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover and remembers the basic plot. A.J....
[Mr. A.j. Jacobs:] Here I am.
[Scott Simon:] ...we dip once more into the shallow well of your knowledge. Thanks for being with us.
[Mr. Jacobs:] Thanks, as always, I suppose.
[Scott Simon:] Let's start off with the most prolific fathers in history, some of the names that occur to you.
[Mr. Jacobs:] Yes. Well, there's a running competition in the encyclopedia to see which historical figure can sire the most kids, and one of the contenders is Charles II of England, who was called `The Merry Monarch,'with good reason. He sired 14 illegitimate kids and, in fact, legend has it that his doctor was a man named Dr. Condom, who came up with the birth control device specifically for the randy king.
[Scott Simon:] Oh, my word. Ramses II of Egypt?
[Mr. Jacobs:] He's in there, and I think he holds the record with an impressive 110 children. So... [unintelligible].
[Scott Simon:] Father's Day must have been quite a celebration at the old Ramses castle, wasn't it?
[Mr. Jacobs:] Yeah. Got a lot of Old Spice.
[Scott Simon:] I've got to ask you about the-there's a practice called couvade?
[Mr. Jacobs:] Yes. I think it was the strangest ritual I read about in the encyclopedia. It's-while the wife undergoes labor, the husband goes to bed and pretends to give birth himself, so he screams and makes contorted faces. And this ritual was most recently practiced by the Basques of Spain in the early 1900s. So no offense to the Basque men, but it just seems like a desperate cry for attention from the man.
[Scott Simon:] This phrase, `father of the country,'`father of his country,'`father of nuclear physics,'who are some of your favorite `fathers of'from history?
[Mr. Jacobs:] We've got Aaron Dennison, the father of American watchmaking; Sir Richard Griffith, the father of Irish geology; and my favorite is Wilhelm Bleek, the father of Bantu linguistics. Where would we be without him?
[Scott Simon:] As I've so often said to myself. You're a father, aren't you? Pretty...
[Mr. Jacobs:] I am a father.
[Scott Simon:] Pretty new one?
[Mr. Jacobs:] That's right. A year and three months.
[Scott Simon:] And your son is named?
[Mr. Jacobs:] Jasper Jacobs.
[Scott Simon:] Now you know, A.J....
[Mr. Jacobs:] Yes, sir?
[Scott Simon:] ...I'm kind of a new father myself. At this particular point the kids don't really get us the Father's Day gifts, right? It's usually the mothers, and then they just put the name on the card.
[Mr. Jacobs:] I am disillusioned.
[Scott Simon:] I didn't mean to dispel whatever fantasies you had. This is the second Father's Day for both of us, isn't it?
[Mr. Jacobs:] Yes. Happy Father's Day to you.
[Scott Simon:] And happy Father's Day to you. A.J. Jacobs, speaking with us from our New York bureau. He's the father of "The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World" book, soon to be a major motion picture if he ever completes the screenplay. And it's 22 minutes before the hour.

[Ari Shapiro:] It's Infrastructure Week again. Since President Trump came into office, it sometimes feels as though every other week is Infrastructure Week. In some circles, this has become a running joke.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Now, there is an official industry gathering every year and, to be clear, that is what is happening right now.
[Ari Shapiro:] Before now, there have been various White House-declared infrastructure weeks, events and other announcements. And despite the fact that this is one of Trump's big issues on the campaign trail, bigger news has consistently overshadowed these infrastructure-themed events. So let's recap.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Let's recap. In early June 2017, the White House kicked off its own Infrastructure Week.
[President Donald Trump:] And it's so wonderful to speak on the shores of the very magnificent Ohio River. We're here today to talk about rebuilding our nation's infrastructures. Isn't it about time?
[Mary Louise Kelly:] But that week, it was another story that was inescapable.
[Unidentified Reporter #1:] Fired FBI Director James Comey just hours away from his appearance before the Senate Intelligence Committee. It is being called Washington, D.C.'s Super Bowl.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Needless to say, the nation's waterways are not what that week will be remembered for.
[Ari Shapiro:] The White House went back to infrastructure in August.
[President Donald Trump:] Hello, everybody.
[Ari Shapiro:] President Trump spoke at Trump Tower in New York City.
[President Donald Trump:] I just signed a new executive order to dramatically reform the nation's badly broken infrastructure permitting process.
[Ari Shapiro:] But the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville had just happened days earlier.
[Unidentified Reporter #2:] Mr. Trump...
[President Donald Trump:] How about a couple of infrastructure questions?
[Unidentified Reporter #2:] ...Wasn't terrorism that event?
[Mary Louise Kelly:] And this past February, the Trump administration finally unveiled its infrastructure plan. Here's how White House press secretary Sarah Sanders described it at the time.
[Sarah Huckabee Sanders:] As you all saw yesterday, the president unveiled a legislative outline for rebuilding infrastructure in America. To cure decades of neglect, we are committed to quickly building a safe, reliable and modern infrastructure to meet the needs of the American people and to fuel economic growth.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] That announcement was overshadowed by questions like this one from ABC's Cecilia Vega about the abrupt resignation of White House aide Rob Porter.
[Cecilia Vega:] Is the White House still maintaining that John Kelly really had no idea about these allegations of domestic abuse until this story broke?
[Sarah Huckabee Sanders:] I can only give you the best information that I have, and that's my understanding.
[Ari Shapiro:] So now industry leaders are in Washington for their official Infrastructure Week, and NPR's David Schaper is in town covering it. David, good to see in person.
[David Schaper, Byline:] Good to see you, Ari.
[Ari Shapiro:] The industry leaders you're talking to are very aware of this running joke, right?
[David Schaper, Byline:] They are. They're not crazy about it in some ways. Some are saying some of the organizers in particular say that at least it's bringing some attention to the issue and to some of the events that they have going on. In fact, one of the organizers I talked to said that the more that this Infrastructure Week joke goes around, the more people signed up to participate in some of the real Infrastructure Week events, the more groups that got engaged to participate elsewhere around the country, not just here in Washington, D.C. So they do feel like there's a little bit more momentum behind the issue to some degree, but some also worry that the joke kind of lessens the urgency to address real infrastructure need.
[Ari Shapiro:] And, honestly, this is an urgency we've been hearing about for years, long before President Trump. What are some of the biggest needs that the industry leaders you're talking to point to?
[David Schaper, Byline:] Well, the American Society of Civil Engineers rates overall our infrastructure a D-plus and says it will cost $2 trillion more than we have allocated to fix and get everything up to snuff, up to just a passing grade or an average grade level.
[Ari Shapiro:] So we're not even talking about the best airports in the world. We're just talking about a bridge that won't collapse.
[David Schaper, Byline:] Right 55,000 structurally deficient bridges around the country. We have all kinds of crowded airports. Water systems are in bad shape. In fact, there are several boil water orders every day in this country because there's been some contamination in the system. You look at the locks and dams on the Mississippi. We could go on and on. There are all kinds of decrepit conditions, roads that are tearing up tires and trucking companies that go through tires and other equipment more quickly than they used to just because the roads are tearing them up. It's pretty abysmal out there.
[Ari Shapiro:] We've heard President Trump talk about these problems a fair amount. Has the administration actually done much to address them?
[David Schaper, Byline:] Well, they haven't done much. I mean, the president did promise an infrastructure bill within his first 100 days in office. It took over a year for him to introduce an infrastructure funding plan, and that's gone nowhere in Congress just did not have enough federal funding, and it didn't identify a funding source for it at all. There was an omnibus spending bill that included about $20 billion for infrastructure, which was a lot better than many people expected. But to be clear, that was a move that Congress made, and it overrode some of the budget cuts that the president was proposing. When it comes to the White House, though, last week, we learned that there won't be a bill at all this year. Here's press secretary Sarah Sanders.
[Sarah Huckabee Sanders:] We're going to continue to look at ways to improve the nation's infrastructure. But in terms of a specific piece of legislation, I'm not aware that that will happen by the end of the year.
[Ari Shapiro:] So, David, if the prospects of this are essentially dead at least in the short term, what are you hearing from all these people who are in Washington this week?
[David Schaper, Byline:] A lot of frustration. I mean, mayors are upset because they've gone to their taxpayers and raised local taxes to fund infrastructure projects. State leaders have done the same. We're now at 30 or more states that have raised their own gas taxes to better fund infrastructure needs to fix their roads and bridges. But they need federal help. And they've been waiting for a federal infrastructure plan. There's a lot of optimism when President Trump was elected and when he came into office promising all this infrastructure. But the frustration is growing because they are saying that even with all this talk, there's just not a lot of walk from the White House.
[Ari Shapiro:] NPR's David Schaper here in town for yet another Infrastructure Week. Thanks, David.
[David Schaper, Byline:] Thank you, Ari.

[Steve Inskeep:] And I'm Steve Inskeep. Let's go next to Thailand, a country in turmoil. Last night, at least two people were killed and 20 wounded in clashes in the capital city, Bangkok. Protesters have been camped out there since last November. The protesters are backed by the country's wealthy elites, and they are demanding the removal of a democratically-elected government. This chaotic situation worsened last week. That's when Thailand's top court removed the populist Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra for abuse of power. Michael Sullivan is in Bangkok.
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] This is the leader of the anti-government protesters. His name is Suthep Thaugsuban.
[Suthep Thaugsuban:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] For months now, Suthep has been relentless in pursuit of his goal to bring down the democratically-elected government, and replace it with an unelected government of the people, even though the party he comes from hasn't won an election in nearly two decades. Suthep's tactics have included occupying key intersections in the capital for months, and having his supporters prevent people from voting in February's general election, all of which have led him to formally charged with insurrection. Michael Montesano is a longtime Thai watcher at Singapore's Institute for Southeast Asian Studies.
[Michael Montesano:] Under normal circumstances, virtually anywhere else in the world, Suthep would have long since been arrested and thrown in jail.
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] But, in fact, Suthep is holding court in the prime minister's compound, which he and his supporters occupied a few days back.
[Suthep Thaugsuban:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] The police did nothing to stop him. His supporters now sit in the middle of a normally busy street, under huge awnings to shield them from the heat. There's plenty of free food and drink and regular entertainment. A lot of the crowd, if not most, has been bussed in, some say rented. Suthep's real backers, the money, are from a different social strata captured in this memorable "Vice" video last month, of two young rich men in a hot car called "Driving Ferraris with the Thai Royalists." It's a fight that's been going on ever since Yingluck's brother Thaksin Shinawatra became prime minister and harnessed the political power of Thailand's rural and urban poor with populist schemes that got him elected repeatedly, then eventually deposed in a 2006 coup for abuse of power, a coup engineered by the elite who saw him as a threat. The coup didn't accomplish all that much. Parties loyal to Thaksin have won every election since. And every time, it seems the royalist-friendly Constitutional Court finds a way to get rid of him, one famously for hosting a cooking show while prime minister. Thaksin's sister Yingluck, the latest victim, removed last week for illegally replacing her National Security Chief. But that's still not enough for Suthep and his supporters. They have rejected the idea of new elections. And they want the Thaksin family and their associates eradicated from Thai politics forever too corrupt, they say, to stay. Thais don't agree on a lot of things these days, except that the system is broken, so broken, said respected academic Likhit Dhiravegin during a recent talk show, that there's no telling what's right or wrong anymore.
[Likhit Dhiravegin:] [Through translator] Anything can be done in Thailand. See a cat, and say it's a dog. See a dog, and say it's a hen. You can issue laws retroactively. There are no rules and law.
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] No rules, no law, and a coup-prone army that this time seems unwilling to step in, and there does not appear to be anyone in the middle that both sides trust. Michael Montesano puts most of the blame on Suthep and his supporters.
[Michael Montesano:] Given their refusal to allow an outcome via the normal means which would be holding an election and given the agenda that they seem to have for so-called political reform, there's precious little space for compromise
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] Little space for compromise, a tanking economy and more and more talk of a possible civil war. For NPR News, I'm Michael Sullivan, in Bangkok.

[Scott Simon:] Nearly two-dozen states are watching for new cases of a rare kind of meningitis, caused by fungal contamination in injections for back pain. Officials say the shots were custom made by a Massachusetts pharmacy that shipped about 17,000 doses to states from New York to California. While the disease cannot spread from person-to-person, at least five people have died and dozens more are sick. The outbreak first showed up in Tennessee as we hear from Daniel Potter of member station WPLN.
[Daniel Potter, Byline:] A clinic at St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville received about two thousand of the contaminated shots, and unknowingly gave them to hundreds of patients. Now, dozens of people have been coming in every day worried they have meningitis.
[Dr. Robert Latham:] That's the thing that keeps me awake at night.
[Daniel Potter, Byline:] Chief of medicine Robert Latham says it can take weeks for affected people to get sick, which is partly why it took so long to find the problem. And treatment is slow-going.
[Latham:] Right now, we're having people who have very, very slowly improving headaches, other altered symptoms, leg pain, bladder weakness. This is very slowly improving. Many of them are so early into it they really can't tell that they're any much better yet.
[Daniel Potter, Byline:] The New England Compounding Center, which prepared the shots, should've had better safeguards, says William Schaffner. He's the chairman of preventative medicine at Vanderbilt, and says sloppy work invites contamination.
[William Schaffner:] It must have been egregious, if the Food and Drug Administration can look at an unopened vial of material and with their naked eye see elements of the fungus in the pharmaceutical product in the steroid. I mean, that's not subtle. That's horrendous.
[Daniel Potter, Byline:] The FDA notes oversight of the compounding pharmacy fell to the state in this case Massachusetts in what Schaffner calls a regulatory gap. He says closing that gap should be a priority, though right now treatment comes first. Relatively few of the people who have gotten the tainted shots actually develop meningitis.
[William Schaffner:] It appears at the moment to be really quite low down around 1 percent or perhaps even less. Boy, is that fortunate. But it remains to be determined.
[Tonya Snyder:] So, right now I'm just going to work underneath a biohazard hood here.
[Daniel Potter, Byline:] That's Tonya Snyder, a medical technologist in the Vanderbilt microbiology lab. The hood works kind of like a fan over a stove, sucking spores out of the air. Snyder has grown some of the fungus from one patient's spinal fluid, and shows me the sample.
[Tonya Snyder:] So, I've got it underneath the microscope here. And what you'll see are things that kind of look almost like flowers.
[Daniel Potter, Byline:] Snyder will be busy for a while. She'll be working to culture samples from potential meningitis cases for six weeks. For NPR News, I'm Daniel Potter in Nashville.
[Scott Simon:] This is NPR News.

[Melissa Block:] If you're wondering what the car of the future will look like, well, Sheryl Connelly is too. In fact she's doing a lot more than wondering. She is Ford Motor Company's manager of global consumer trends and futuring that's right, futuring. Connelly spoke with me earlier today from the Detroit Auto Show. One of the things she's been thinking about is the sharp decline in the number of 16-year-olds with driver's licenses, and she mentioned some statistics from the Department of Transportation.
[Sheryl Connelly:] They showed a study that in 1978, 50 percent of 16-year-olds had their license, and in 2008 that number was down to 30 percent. So only 3 out of every 10 16-year-old's getting the license does raise an eyebrow or two, and so we have to ask ourselves why. And, fundamentally, you can't deny the economics, so when I was a teenager I got my driver's education through the local high school...
[Melissa Block:] Me too.
[Sheryl Connelly:] And it was free. But today, you know, if you're a parent, you know, it can cost several hundred dollars, but I probably the biggest focus is technology. So you, you know, when you think about the millennials, their parents are baby boomers. The traditional baby boomer bought their first car at 16 and saw that getting their driver's license is a rite of passage to becoming an adult. And today I'd argue that the cellphone does that for our kids. And so we have to recognize that for companies, like Ford, to reach that younger consumer it's not going to be about aspiration or status symbol. It's going to be about a lifestyle accessory, a toolbox on wheels that allows them to stay connected to the things that are most important to them.
[Melissa Block:] Doesn't that cut across all the studies, though, that show that distracted driving is a huge problem, and, if anything, car makers should be pressured to provide fewer distractions in the car?
[Sheryl Connelly:] Sure, I mean, that is an extraordinary challenge today. So Ford's response to that has been to make sure that we build platforms that keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road. We have just bought announced an app called Life360 that will tell, like, your social circle when you get in the car not to text you. And then when you stop the car and you park and shut it off it'll tell you that you're now ready to receive text messages and to engage. We also have a do not disturb button that basically lets that car become a sanctuary.
[Melissa Block:] As somebody who is paying attention to trends, and thinking about environmental trends in particular, I'd be curious to hear how climate change factors into the work you do and how a company like Ford has to think about cars as a driver of climate change.
[Sheryl Connelly:] We actually see mobility as a fundamental human right and just putting more and more vehicles on the road may not serve people in the way that we hope. And so we have to think about multi-modes of transportation. We have to think about sharing economy. We are partnered with Zipcar to understand that some people treasure access more than ownership.
[Melissa Block:] What about besides cars putting Ford in a position to be involved with other kinds of transportation rapid transit, things like that?
[Sheryl Connelly:] Sure, so we explore all of those things. I mean, Zipcar is one arena that we kind of look at, but there are other sharing experiments that we have going on in different countries around the world. And we recently announced last month 25 experiments on mobility that we're using to try to understand where this is going. Of course, autonomous driving vehicles is something that's top of mind for consumers out there. And the real benefits of autonomous driving vehicles outside of even just distracted driving could mean things like, you know, road fatalities or accidents in general could be mitigated. These vehicles have so many computers and sensors that innovation feels like it's within reach.
[Melissa Block:] Well, Sheryl Connelly, thanks for talking with us about the future of the car.
[Sheryl Connelly:] Oh, it's been my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
[Melissa Block:] Sheryl Connelly is the in-house futurist for the Ford Motor Company. She spoke with us from the Detroit Auto Show.

[Rachel Martin:] If you're the type of beer drinker who prefers imports to domestics, listen up. Your import may not be what it seems. Take Becks. This beer was brewed in Germany for more than 140 years. But for the past three years, Anheuser-Busch has been making it in St. Louis. And as NPR's Jason Margolis reports, the company wound up in court.
[Jason Margolis, Byline:] The class-action lawsuit boiled down to a basic question. Was Anheuser-Busch deceiving its customers? I put that to Erik Gordon who teaches at the University of Michigan's business and law schools. We went to a liquor store on State Street in Ann Arbor.
[Erik Gordon:] Here's a carton of Becks beer. Let's see what it says on the side. Well, in big letters, German quality, brewed under the German Purity Law of 1516. That would lead one to possibly believe this is German beer.
[Jason Margolis, Byline:] InBev, the Belgian-Brazilian beer maker, bought Anheuser-Busch in 2008. It began brewing some Becks in St. Louis to reduce shipping costs and improve freshness. But there's no made in the USA on the carton. Gordon looks to the bottles.
[Erik Gordon:] Somewhere on here, it's going to say that it's actually made in the USA, but I can't actually find it.
[Jason Margolis, Byline:] Eventually, Gordon finds tiny white letters against a silver background that read, product of USA. Anheuser-Busch argues that's sufficient. The company sent a two-sentence e-mail saying, our labeling, packaging and marketing of Becks have always been truthful, transparent and in compliance with all legal requirements. Duncan Williams can't speak to legal requirements, but as the head brewer at the Old German bar in Ann Arbor, he can speak about Becks' claims that it's brewed the German way.
[Duncan Williams:] Is it potentially disingenuous? Yes. OK, what does brewed in the German style mean? Is the kettle fired, or is it maybe powered by steam?
[Jason Margolis, Byline:] He's unequivocal, though, about Becks' use of North American barley malt.
[Duncan Williams:] It's much, much different. The climate and everything it's grown in is much, much different.
[Jason Margolis, Byline:] Now, could you and I taste that difference questionable. Still, beer drinkers pay more for imports. Six packs of Becks retail for about two bucks more than comparable domestics.
[Tucker Ronzetti:] They shouldn't have to pay that price premium. The consumer should be fully informed and pay a fair price.
[Jason Margolis, Byline:] Tucker Ronzetti is the lead attorney in the class-action suit. Thanks to his efforts, Becks drinkers can soon recoup $12 from Anheuser-Busch $50 with receipts. The total payout isn't yet known. The four law firms in the case could take home 3.5 million. Ronzetti defends that.
[Tucker Ronzetti:] We're doing our best to keep corporations honest. And frankly, it's a huge risk big, national litigation against a powerful, multinational firm. I mean, we could easily lose the case.
[Jason Margolis, Byline:] Erik Gordon at the University of Michigan says he's no fan of big payouts to attorneys, but class actions serve a function.
[Erik Gordon:] The idea of a class action is that it protects consumers. Otherwise, you could have somebody, you know, doing small amounts of conning over millions of people, none of whom will ever stop it.
[Jason Margolis, Byline:] The new settlement requires Anheuser-Busch to label Becks clearly as American-made, or they can go back to only brewing it in Germany. Jason Margolis, NPR News.

[Robert Siegel:] It's time now for All Tech Considered. Google, Facebook, Twitter many of the most popular services on the Internet are free of charge,but we do pay for them. We pay with our personal data. These companies gather as much information as they can about us. And they sort it, dissect it and study it. And they use their knowledge about us to target us with advertising. In recent weeks on All Tech, we've heard differing opinions about this dominant internet business model. Some like Omri Ben Shahar, a law professor at the University of Chicago, defend it as a bargain.
[Omri Ben Shahar:] For many people the bargain is a great bargain. They don't really care that much about hypothetical dignitary effect of having their information stored by someone. And at the same time, they like very much that they don't have to pay.
[Robert Siegel:] And we've heard an apology from a tech guru had who had a hand in creating this business model Ethan Zuckerman wrote the code for the original pop-up ad.
[Ethan Zuckerman:] If you want to start a new advertising-based web business, you have to somehow demonstrate you're going to find out even more about your user than Facebook does.
[Robert Siegel:] Zuckerman who's now at MIT has some regrets.
[Ethan Zuckerman:] And we need some commendation of new business models and probably a certain amount of regulation to protect our online behavior and identities to really get us out of what looks like an increasingly complicated trap.
[Robert Siegel:] Well, we're going to hear now about some new businesses that are trying to do things differently. They're trying to capitalize on privacy as a selling point. Steve Henn of NPR's Planet Money team joins us now. Hi, Steve.
[Steve Henn, Byline:] Hi.
[Robert Siegel:] Steve Henn, Ethan Zuckerman says free is hard to compete with, but I gather you say there are some alternatives to the pay with your data model out there.
[Steve Henn, Byline:] Well, we're beginning to see some crop up. One is called Open Whisper Systems. This is a nonprofit company started by a hacker who goes by the name Moxie Marlinspike, and its building opened source encryption tools for messaging and phone calls. What's interesting about what Open Whisper Systems is doing is that they're giving the code away to other companies for free, and they already have millions of adopters. There are also for-profit businesses that are betting that security and privacy will sell. Silent Circle offers a fee-based text messaging system. There's a company that makes something called the Blackphone which is a secure Android phone, and Wicker which offers more secure-base text messaging and the ability to delete and wipe old messages. All of these businesses have been able to raise money from large investors including someone prominent ones.
[Robert Siegel:] So there are investors, but does investment translate into consumers?
[Steve Henn, Byline:] Well, you know that's interesting and there hasn't been a big consumer market for privacy in the past. But that may be beginning to change, and what all of the businesses I just mentioned are doing they're targeting people who handle lots of sensitive information Wall Street bankers, executives. And I think that generally people who have very sensitive information are more receptive to the pitch that privacy and security are worth paying for. But what I think is really fascinating is how this attitude is beginning to trickle into the consumer market. Here's Tim Cook speaking on Charlie Rose a couple of weeks ago. Cook, of course, is Apple CEO.
[Tim Cook:] We try not to collect data. So we're not reading your e-mail. We're not reading your iMessage. If the government laid a subpoena on us to get your iMessages, we can't provide it. It's encrypted, and we don't have the key.
[Robert Siegel:] So the challenge to companies out there is to make the consumers value that security, that privacy so much that they'll be willing to pay for it.
[Steve Henn, Byline:] Right and this is actually a pitch to consumers that Apple is making aggressively right now. A week after Tim Cook spoke on Charlie Rose, Apple announced that its new operating system for iPhones and iPads would encrypt all the data on your phone or device at rest. So if police or someone else served Apple with a warrant to open a locked phone, they wouldn't be able anything off it. Now secure researchers I've spoken to have pointed out that Apple actually does have public keys for Imessages, and theoretically at least, it could decrypt those messages. Apple denies it does that, but others have found ways to get data off blocked iPhones. Still the thing is Apple systems are really getting better and the company is aggressively competing on privacy. And it's forcing other companies to compete as well. Just a few hours after Apple made its announcement about encrypting data on phones, Google's Android said it would do the same thing. So Google is apparently worried people will choose other products based on privacy which is interesting. When Google competes on privacy, you know something has changed.
[Robert Siegel:] Thank you, Steve.
[Steve Henn, Byline:] Thank you.
[Robert Siegel:] That's Steve Henn of NPR's Planet Money team.

[Robert Siegel:] Police are searching for more members of what appears to be an ISIS-trained cell behind last week's attacks here. Their investigation is increasingly shifting to Belgium, to a largely North African neighborhood called Molenbeek just outside of Brussels. NPR counterterrorism correspondent Dina Temple-Raston is with me in Paris, and she has the latest in the investigation. Dina, what are we learning?
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] Well, police have cast a wide net to identify the men who were behind the attacks. They've been searching for days for a 26-year-old French national who has been living in Belgium. His name is Saleh Abdeslam, and there's an international arrest warrant out for him. You know, ironically, he was stopped by police near the Belgian border hours after the attack. But at the time, they hadn't yet identified the attackers or put together that in fact his brother had been one of the suicide bombers who detonated a vest inside a cafe in Paris.
[Robert Siegel:] Now, earlier today, police said that they had a new suspect they're searching for. Do we have any idea how big this plot really is?
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] Well, so far, this has involved the seven attackers who died, Abdeslam, this other suspect that's nine so far. And then sources told NPR that they believe the plot is wider than that. It could involve more than a dozen people. But again, this is early days and they're still piecing this all together.
[Robert Siegel:] Dina, let's talk about this Belgian connection. This neighborhood of Molenbeek, it's come up in terrorism cases before, hasn't it?
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] Molenbeek is a well-known haven for extremists in Europe. It has a huge North African population and the unemployment there is very high. Now, the area has been linked to at least four terrorist attacks in just the past two years. Back in January, the gunmen who murdered shoppers in a kosher supermarket just two days after the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, he bought his weapons in Molenbeek. In 2014, the man who shot up a Jewish museum in Belgium, he bought his guns there, too. And then if you remember that shooting on the high-speed train this summer in August, the man who was tackled by some Americans when his gun jammed, he was from Molenbeek, too. So a source close to the investigation told me that it's well-known throughout Europe that if you're looking for a gun or you're looking for explosives, Molenbeek is one of the places you go.
[Robert Siegel:] Dina, France has been on a heightened security footing since January. And yet, the attackers clearly were able to get lots of guns and explosives into France. What went wrong?
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] Well, from a distance, this may seem like a massive intelligence failure until you realize that with the open borders in Europe, driving weapons from Brussels to Paris is a little like driving illegal guns from Virginia to, like, New York. People don't have to go through border crossings anymore. I mean, we do that when we fly into airports and we see the people with EU passports standing in those much shorter lines. But if you're driving, the way you'd know you passed into France from Belgium is a big sign that says Bienvenue a la France, welcome to France, not some border guard. And criminals and terrorists are taking advantage of that.
[Robert Siegel:] Just in the last few weeks, we've seen ISIS take responsibility for the downing of a Russian civilian plane near Sharm el-Sheikh, then the twin bombings in Lebanon, then a day later these attacks in Paris. President Obama said before this Paris attack that ISIS was contained in Syria and Iraq. How did ISIS get here?
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] Well, I know this seems like something unpredictable, but what we're actually seeing is the progression of a terrorist organization. They almost all start out with a regional focus. Al-Qaida had the Russians in Afghanistan, Al Shabaab was focused on getting Ethiopians out of Somalia, and ISIS was focused on Syria and Iraq. But as they get more powerful, they look outward to take on other challenges. It's almost as if there are successive graduations. Elementary-level terrorist organizations focus on small, local problems. They graduate to more complicated regional issues and then they begin to have broader aspirations. So it's almost a natural progression. That's why counterterrorism officials say they're always concerned about regional terrorist organizations because inevitably, as they develop, they turn their sights on the West.
[Robert Siegel:] That's NPR's Dina Temple-Raston with me in Paris. Dina, thanks.
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Ailsa Chang:] Now to the story of an important meeting that did not happen. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was supposed to be in New York today for a meeting with officials from North Korea. On the agenda was planning the next summit. But the North Koreans did not come. The State Department blames a scheduling issue. And as NPR's Michele Kelemen reports, it's the latest sign of just how difficult this nuclear diplomacy is.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] When President Trump met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore in June, they vowed to improve relations and work toward the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. U.S. officials said North Korea could move quickly to denuclearize. Trump now says he's not in a rush.
[President Donald Trump:] There's no rush whatsoever. You know, before I got here, they were dealing with this for over 70 years and I guess on the nuclear front for 25 years. That's a long time. I've been there. I probably left Singapore four or five months ago. And we made more progress in that four or five months than they've made in 70 years, and nobody else could have done what I've done.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] As long as North Korea isn't launching missiles or conducting nuclear tests, the president says his policy is working. Behind the scenes, it hasn't been easy. The North Koreans have yet to start working-level talks with the State Department's point person, Stephen Biegun. And they canceled plans to travel to New York. That could be a North Korean bargaining tactic or a sign of real problems, says Joel Wit, who runs the 38 North project at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank.
[Joel Wit:] The North Koreans know very well what the U.S. opening position is, and basically the U.S. opening position is, you denuclearize, and then we will do something for you. In other words, you go first, and then we will follow. And that's completely unacceptable to the North Koreans.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] They want a step-by-step approach which includes sanctions relief. China and Russia seem to agree and are pushing for that in the U.N. Security Council. Wit says the Trump administration is beginning to look isolated.
[Joel Wit:] The administration talks constantly about maintaining maximum pressure, but in reality, there is no maximum pressure without support certainly from China and Russia and maybe even from South Korea. They're starting to have second thoughts about sanctions as well.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] President Trump told reporters Wednesday he's open to sanctions relief.
[President Donald Trump:] Now, I'd love to take the sanctions off, but they have to be responsive, too. It's a two-way street.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] The president often sounds more upbeat in public, once describing a letter he received from Kim Jong Un as a piece of art. So the North Koreans may prefer to work around lower-level administration officials, says Frank Aum of the U.S. Institute of Peace.
[Frank Aum:] They think it's easier to deal with Trump directly rather than his staff, who seem to be a little more hesitant about making concessions. So maybe they feel like if they go to Trump directly, they'll get more concessions.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] At some point, Aum says the North Koreans have to start working-level talks if only to plan for the next Trump-Kim summit expected early next year. At the moment, Aum says, the U.S. and North Korea are stuck on two key issues.
[Frank Aum:] Pace and price you know, who's going to move first, and what is each side willing to concede?
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] Both sides have taken some confidence-building steps. The U.S. suspended military exercises with South Korea. Aum, who used to work at the Pentagon, says that's a risk worth taking if it leads to real diplomacy. But eventually, he warns, U.S. military readiness will take a hit, so the Trump administration can't let the North Koreans stall too long. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department.

[Michele Norris:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
[Robert Siegel:] And I'm Robert Siegel. There've been several developments today surrounding China's crackdown on protests in Tibet. Those demonstrations began last week on the anniversary of a 1959 uprising against Chinese rule. It started peacefully in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, and then grew violent and spread to other towns. China's state-run news agency said today that police shot and wounded four protesters in a town in Sichuan province early in the week. It claimed the police acted in self-defense. The Dalai Lama, who heads Tibet's government in exile in Dharamsala, India, offered today to meet face to face with Chinese leaders, but only if there's a real concrete development. Meanwhile, armed police and troops are moving into far-flung towns and villages in Tibetan areas of China to reassert control. Time magazine Beijing bureau Chief Simon Elegant is just back from one of those areas. It's the Chinese town of Li Tang in Sichuan province where nine out of 10 people are ethnic Tibetan.
[Mr. Simon Elegant:] This town is a historically very important center of Tibetan nationalism. Two Dalai Lamas were born there. It's a center of resistance in 1956. It's also the highest town in the world. It's some 15,500 feet above sea level, which is higher than anything, any mountain in the continental U.S. We got there and we managed to get in, but when we did get in, we were dropped to the edge of town and told that we couldn't drive in because cars are banned. All the shops are closed, schools are closed, people are not on the streets...
[Robert Siegel:] But when you say that everything was closed, that the shops were closed, for example...
[Mr. Simon Elegant:] Yeah.
[Robert Siegel:] ...they're closed by the police? Or they're closed by...
[Mr. Simon Elegant:] Yes.
[Robert Siegel:] ...the owners in protest? What was going on?
[Mr. Simon Elegant:] No, no, literally there was an order that no one for three days no one would open a shop. The local TV channel, for example, just had a ban on all programming and were just cycling one announcement saying, don't associate with lawbreakers, the evil splittist Dalai Lama clique, you know, don't listen to them. Anybody who does will be arrested, and so and so forth. So it was in total lockdown, the place. And when we got up in the morning at 8, you know, normally a bustling time, all you saw on the street was street sweepers and dogs.
[Robert Siegel:] And did the people whom you managed to speak with there these were ethnic Tibetans, did they first of all, were they generally sympathetic with the protests in Tibet and elsewhere?
[Mr. Simon Elegant:] They were very frightened people. They were petrified people mostly. And they just didn't mostly want to deal with us. We did go into the main monastery; the police had not been in there yet. We did talk to the monks, generally they were they gave us fairly anodyne answers to our questions. But we did figure out the reason for that, which was that basically the crackdown was coming. And when we left, we saw nothing but Chinese military vehicles and trucks, ambulances, field kitchens, paddy wagons, everything. They were taking an entire army in there. We must have seen enough trucks to probably transfer 10,000 people, so they were bringing an entire force fully armed. We saw these guys sitting in the back, you know, the kids sitting at the back with their assault rifles, they were moving in.
[Robert Siegel:] When ethnic Tibetans there talk about the protests of this week or their situation more generally, do they seem to have an agenda that is in any way more modest, say, than outright independence from China? I mean, is there a reform agenda that ethnic Tibetans would like to see adopted, that might improve their life in China or is it simply, we're Tibetan and we'd like to be more in control of the life of Tibet?
[Mr. Simon Elegant:] No, I think, and I've seen this across the border, in many places that I've seen. I think ordinary people the people who are the participants in this -especially the younger people. You know, a lot of these people are kids obviously, relatively young, in their teens and 20s, they're very unhappy. And the reason is they don't see any future for themselves. They see their culture being extinguished. And these people have just generally said to us, listen, we just want to be left alone to worship. They just have to stop controlling us so closely.
[Robert Siegel:] Worship is an important dimension of all of this.
[Mr. Simon Elegant:] Enormously...
[Robert Siegel:] Yeah.
[Mr. Simon Elegant:] ...important, yes.
[Robert Siegel:] Simon Elegant, Beijing bureau chief for Time magazine. Thanks a lot for talking with us.
[Mr. Simon Elegant:] Thank you very much. I enjoyed it.

[Rachel Martin:] Organizers said tens of thousands of people took part in the Colorado GOP caucuses, and some of them were still voting late into the night. NPR's Carrie Kahn dropped in on several caucus sites around the Silver State.
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] At the Sun City Anthem retirement community in Henderson, Nevada, a few dozen volunteers were up early and getting the clubhouse ready for the caucuses.
[Unidentified Woman #1:] Who is 1712?
[Unidentified Woman #2:] Do we have 1712?
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] There are a lot of precincts to set up in the rooms around the clubhouse, with its stunning views looking over the golf course and the Vegas strip. Gay Macdonald and her husband Chuck showed up around 7 A.M. to help. Both wore black slacks and white dress shirts like the rest of the volunteers. They moved here from Los Angeles, and Chuck says he loves it. He says there's about 7,100 homes in the retirement community and he says everyone is as conservative as he is.
[Chuck Macdonald:] This is great for me because California was overwhelmingly Democrat, and my original home where I grew up in New York City was overwhelmingly Democrat. At least here I can work and have a fighting chance to succeed.
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] Nevada was supposed to be one of the first four states to weigh in on this year's Republican nomination, but Florida stole its place in line and its thunder. All four major candidates still in the race came to Nevada to campaign but not as much as locals had hoped for. Chuck Macdonald says he went for Gingrich. His wife Gay still hadn't made up her mind.
[Chuck Macdonald:] I like all of them. I...
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] Wait. So, you're about ready to open the caucus site and you still don't know who you're going to vote for.
[Chuck Macdonald:] Well, because I think Mitt Romney will win anyway, I'm going to do a protest vote for Santorum because he's the one who doesn't have any baggage.
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] Within the hour, the place was packed. One precinct room was so full it had to move out into the lobby. Precinct Captain Ellen Brught struggled to be heard.
[Ellen Brught:] OK. Can everybody hear me right here? OK. First of all, I want to welcome all of you. So glad you all came. Very important election this year, and that's why you're here I'm sure.
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] Party officials say they were happy with the turnout. Further upstate in South Reno, about 700 people packed into Galena High School. In one of the precincts, Nick Landis stood up and gave his best appeal for Ron Paul.
[Nick Landis:] I support Congressman Ron Paul for president because it gives me hope for America's future. He promotes maximum individual freedom in limited federal government. Exactly what the...
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] The rules varied from county to county on how long you could make a speech and even when the caucus site opened. Clark County took the unusual step of opening one site after sundown to accommodate Seventh Day Adventists and Orthodox Jews who can't vote on the Sabbath. By 6 o'clock last night, hundreds have lined up for the late caucus at the Adelson Education Center. This school is named after the casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, who, together with his family, has contributed more $11 million to a pro-Gingrich superPAC. Adelson insists he did not influence the decision to have a special site. Tina Drago says she's glad it was there or she wouldn't have been able to vote. She's an Orthodox Jew. But Drago said she felt back about all the people who couldn't vote in the morning just because of work.
[Tina Drago:] It's a 24-hour town, and Saturdays are a huge day. Now, that's what they should have thought about was that nothing is quiet on a Saturday.
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] In fact, people showed up to vote at the site and said they were unable to caucus in the morning. Many were Ron Paul supporters. Several said they had received a phone call urging them to come out. But all participants found they had to sign a declaration that they were voting after sundown for religious reasons. Those who were admitted all signed and when all the votes were tallied, Ron Paul won the late caucus handily. Carrie Kahn, NPR News, Las Vegas.

[Farai Chideya:] From NPR News, this is NEWS & NOTES. I'm Farai Chideya. Do you remember the last time you voted? The issues that made you turn out to the polls? Well, since today is Election Day, millions of Americans get a chance to have their say. But what issues do voters care about the most? Iraq? Gas prices? National security? For answers, we turn to folks who know a thing or two about the mind of the voter. Kellyanne Conway is CEO and president of The Polling Company, headquartered in Washington. Kellyanne, after so long, it's great to have you on.
[Ms. Kellyanne Conway:] Farai, I was so thrilled to be invited on your show. I can't even tell you. And it's my first election as a New York voter.
[Farai Chideya:] All right, and congratulations on your babies.
[Ms. Kellyanne Conway:] Thank you. Yes, I had twins. They just turned two, a boy and a girl. Thank you.
[Farai Chideya:] And Ron Walters, who is a stalwart for NEWS & NOTES, professor of political science at the University of Maryland, regular guest on our Political Corner. It's great to have you on, too.
[Professor Ron Walters:] Well, Farai, it's good to be with you. This is quite a busy day, and so there's lots of talk about.
[Farai Chideya:] Absolutely. So before I get to both of you, I wanted to play a little bit of tape from an interview we conducted with two voters. One is a 36-year-old African-American woman who lives in L.A. The other is a 30-year-old white male who lives in Decatur, Illinois. So let's take a listen to what motivates them.
[Mr. James Wrigley:] My name is James Wrigley. I live in Decatur, Illinois. I am a police officer. I am married with two children. I wouldn't really say I'm affiliated with one party, but I lean more to the conservative side as opposed to liberal. Security is the main issue for me, especially in my career. You know, after 911, you had pretty much everybody on both sides of the aisle voting for the Patriot Act. But then, when it's about to expire, you have people on the left who no longer is supporting it. Well, what changed in, you know, the four or five years that we no longer need it.
[Ms. Mona Holmes:] My name is Mona Holmes. I live in Los Angeles, California. And I'm co-founder and editor in chief of an online magazine called Shejay.net. I am definitely registered as a Democrat. The issues that come to the forefront of my mind are definitely Iraq, education and the economy. I feel as if our presence in Iraq is hindering our national security than helping it. I think that my senator could have taken a harder line in opposing the war, and if there's anything that I can do to communicate that to her, I'll do it.
[Mr. James Wrigley:] Iraq really isn't that big of an issue to me. I mean because, well, I mean number one, we shouldn't pull out until the job is done. Has there been mistakes in Iraq? Yes, but I don't think that means that we need to leave. I think it would be a major mistake. I'm not giving anybody a free pass. You know, mistakes were made. I still feel that the right decision was made to invade Iraq. However, the end game wasn't very well thought out.
[Ms. Mona Holmes:] You know, I've live in the second in the city with the second largest school district. What I see of the school system here is it's kind of terrible. And I just don't see I see wealthier districts getting better funds, better teachers. My father is a math teacher, actually, for junior high. As a teacher, he comes home pretty stressed from his day, and I know that a lot of it has to do with the funding that's taking place within his district but also within the state of California.
[Farai Chideya:] Kellyanne, I want to start with you. We heard about national security, two different views on the war in Iraq, and education. Do these track with the issues that you find in your polling?
[Ms. Kellyanne Conway:] These are very typical concerns. And among women you find that education, healthcare, prescription drugs tend to have a little bit more primacy in their voting decisions than among men. There's real difference between 2006 and 2004 that we're hearing from voters all across the country. And I believe this is reflected in what at least the woman you spoke with said, Farai, is that in 2004, you had many more national security war on terror voters than you did Iraq voters. Two short years later, you have many more Iraq voters than you do war on terror voters. And even in the most recent ABC poll released this weekend, it tracked very closely with what myself and other private pollsters are finding, which is 31 percent of the people surveyed said Iraq would be the number one issue driving them to the polls, 11 percent said war on terror. And then I think there's frustration among many people right, left and center that some of these so-called second-tier issues have been punted to the back burner in favor of the economy and Iraq. And you have many people out there saying, look, even if the politicians decided to forego some meaningful reform on prescription drugs, healthcare, education and certainly immigration until next Congress, it doesn't mean that I, the voter, are not going to take those concerns and those grievances into the ballot box with me. I think those issues can be a surprise in some races. Iraq is on the ballot in every single race today. But in some of these other contests the second-tier issues, mired in single digits as they are, can spell the difference between victory and defeat for some of this closer elections.
[Farai Chideya:] And, Ron, you know, there are so many different ways that we can talk about ourselves demographically. There's gender, which Kellyanne just spoke about. Then there's race. There's geography. In some regions immigration I'm sure is a huge issue; and in some places it's not. What are you finding out maybe in regards to ethnicity or other factors and how they're breaking down by people's voting attitudes?
[Professor Ron Walters:] Well, when you look at the overall picture, it's very interesting because political scientists like to look at the wrong track, right track. And right now 60 percent of the American people say we are on the wrong track. And then when you ask a question why and I'm looking at the last Washington PostABC News poll they say Iraq again, as Ms. Conway said. The second-tier issue here was the economy, and that's interesting because African-Americans, Hispanics looking at immigration issues, the economy is playing out very strongly in those communities. In a state like Ohio that gets to be very critical because, although Iraq is again the number one issue in that race, people have moved I think largely because of the state of Ohio's economy. And the fact that jobs are being outsourced and you've had the auto industry, a secondary tertiary industries in Ohio to the auto industry collapsing. And so there'a lot of pain in that state, and I think that tracks in a lot of places where, despite what looks to be a booming economy, there are a lot of these communities have not benefited from it. And the middle class, lower-income classes are now beginning to vote with their feet.
[Farai Chideya:] Kellyanne and then Ron, both of you. How does issue-based voting affect people's behavior? Are people more likely to vote against something than for something they believe in, or do people care less about issues than politicians? How does that work? Kellyanne and then Ron.
[Ms. Kellyanne Conway:] Yes, it's very typical that the primary motivating factor to get people to the polls is out of frustration, angst, anger, fear. And it's much easier to say I'm against something because I fear that it could happen or it could continue in this case, and therefore I need to feel energized and engaged about that issue. Asking people to go out and just pull a lever or push a button as a way to say, atta'boy, keep on going, is far less compelling to people. Then why bother waiting in line? Why bother taking time away from your sleep, your family, your work or your peace of mind on some random Tuesday in November. So this is why negative campaigning exists; there's a market for it, frankly. This is why parties out of power and challengers sometimes often have a cash disadvantage and a name recognition disadvantage, but often have advantages with respect to being able to say, look, you, the voters, demand and deserve change and reform. And you should shake yourself out of this status and that is very natural to Americans and pull a lever, push a button as a way to express that change.
[Professor Ron Walters:] Well, yes. Well, since 911 and Ms. Conway talked about fear -I think that that's been the critical dimension in American politics. Because the politics of fear has been the stuff of which, particularly the Republican Party, has sort of focused this campaigning. That has been important in security issues, has been important also to women because they are the largest part of the electorate. And so to the extent that they have changed their mind with respect to the priority of Iraq as opposed to security and [unintelligible] privileged Iraq, that shift has been like a seismic quake in the electoral system. And so what it means is that the politics of fear here is less and less an issue when it comes to American security than it was before.
[Farai Chideya:] Briefly both of you. Kellyanne, what issues help Republicans the most? And, Ron, what issues help Democrats the most do you think?
[Ms. Kellyanne Conway:] Security definitely is an issue. But I think the Republican Party could have done a slightly better job in recognizing that security is also kitchen table economics security and health security and freedom from fear as well as it is national security and homeland security. But the other issue that seems to help Republicans, in most places anyway, is this matter of affordability. You do hear Americans, even though every leading economic indicator would show that this economy is doing well, people are nervous out there. They've overextended their personal debt in their households; they believe they got a right to buy three lattes a day for five bucks a pop, and they think that the economy's not going well if they can't do that. But there are people out there who do feel economically squeezed who are talking about affordability. And I think that's why the president in his 10-city tour this last weekend did talk an awful lot about the economic agenda and reminded people that it's a risk to vote for people who are currently not in charge, because the affordability that you question long term may be that much more compromised if people come into office and raise taxes who are a little bit more profligate with spending.
[Farai Chideya:] I have to give the last word to Ron.
[Professor Ron Walters:] Well, Nancy Pelosi wrote out a campaign agenda for the Democrats in the House. And one of the issues of course had to do with environment, another, health, obviously the economy. Strikingly, public opinion polls are saying that Democrats now are more favored people are more confident that they can deal with taxes. So these are some of the issues that they have rolled out. And this governing agenda is okay except that African-Americans have a slightly different one, Katrina is on there, jobs, low-income wages, minimum wage, some of these other things which have to do with the bottom half of the economy that they want fixed. So, yes, the Democrats do have sort of a weak governing agenda going in. But their objective really is to tee these things up as the governing party in the House for the 2008 elections.
[Farai Chideya:] All right. Well, that's a great place to leave it because this is in some ways a staging ground for 2008. Ron Walters is a professor of political science at the University of Maryland. And Kellyanne Conway is CEO and president of The Polling Company. Thank you both so much.
[Ms. Kellyanne Conway:] Thank you.
[Professor Ron Walters:] Thank you.
[Farai Chideya:] Coming up, this Election Day Republicans and Democrats are ready to watch the ballot box. And are workplaces war zones? We'll discuss these topics and more on our Roundtable next.

[Robert Siegel:] Storyteller Kevin Kling sometimes finds himself in trouble. And sometimes when he's in trouble, he says a prayer for help. After a life-changing motorcycle accident six years ago, Kevin's prayers changed.
[Kevin Kling:] When I was a kid, I prayed to get things. I remember there was a squirrel monkey for sale in the back of Spiderman comics for 9.99, and I wanted that squirrel monkey so bad. And not sea monkeys. Sea monkeys are a rip-off. Squirrel monkey. Earlier, I'd bribed my brother to ask my dad how much he loved me. Do you love Kevin a lot? Nine ninety-nine? You love him 9.99? He's not getting that squirrel monkey. So I prayed to God to ask Jesus to tell Santa about that squirrel monkey, hoping with all my heart that one of the three would take my case. Later in life, my prayers shifted. I'm on the Mediterranean Sea, on a boat between Athens, Greece and the island of Eos, hanging on to a ladder for dear life. I stowed away. I stowed away because while on Eos, I discovered I only had $25 and I still wanted to see Italy and Ireland. So I bought a fake ticket for a dollar and got on board. Once out to sea, I sat down next to a French guy, and I told him, hey, man, I stowed away. He said man, you are in big trouble. They haven't even collected the tickets yet. He said, when they find you, they are going to take you below. He said, this happened to a friend of mine. They beat him with a bar of soap and a sock because it didn't show the bruises.
[I Said The Typical Reply:] no they won't. I'm an American.
[Kevin Kling:] He said, they're going to love you. And sure enough, an hour later, ticket takers came, and I knew I was busted. So I hid behind these barrell- looking depth charged things. But a steward saw my shoes and blew a whistle. It was cat and mouse around the ship. Then I see the ladder hanging over the side. I climb down the sides and I'm hanging on over the water looking for any land I can swim to, and I prayed for the first time for the first time in years I said God, please get me out of this. Get me out of this and I'll never do anything this stupid again as long as I live. And I'm Wild Russian boar hunting in Texas. Wild Russian boar were introduced to Texas to provide big game hunting. They weigh 500, 600 pounds with 6-inch tusks, and they eat meat in the middle of the night, which is you. So when they come to eat you in the night, you shoot them. I'm what's called the light man. I hold a flashlight and search for a boar. I asked the guy Mario, Mario, aren't they going to come for the guy with the light? He says, yeah. So I decided right then and there if I see a boar, I'm going the shine the light on Mario. Hoo there's a big one. Mario decides it's a good time to drink really a lot right out of the bottle. And then he decides to play this game called scare the Yankee. So he takes out his Bowie knife and starts sliding it up my leg showing me how it's going to feel when a boar gores me. All of a sudden, we look up and there's a cow standing there, a cow. Mario says, my property my cow. He takes out his six shooter and blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, blam. The cow looks at Mario, turns and walks away. Oh, great. I'm the light man. Mario finishes the bottle and topples over, laying there out cold, laying on his gun. I'm standing there in the dark, waiting for a boar, and I pray to God, God, please get me out of this. Get me out of this and I'll never do anything stupid again as long as I live. And I'm in Mardi Gras. All right, you get the idea. Five years ago, I'm in a motorcycle accident, and my prayers changed yet again. I remember walking down the hall from rehab. I've been through many surgeries. And I'm in the hospital, a little over six weeks. And each day, I would ride the elevator to the ground floor and try and take a walk. I could go maybe half a block, but it felt really good to be in the sun. 911 had happened the week before. And as our country was entering trauma, I was living one. I already knew it that you can't cure trauma. But hopefully, in time, you can heal from it. But it does take time. I was on the elevator when I saw this guy who'd been in the trauma ward when I was. I couldn't believe he was there and walking. When he arrived, he was barely alive internal injuries, all four limbs in traction. And now, there he was, making his way into the sunshine. I wondered how he found the strength, so I said, man, how did you do it? You were even worse than I was. And he said, because they don't let you smoke in a hospital. And true to his word, when we got outside, he pounded a heater. After my walk, my girlfriend Mary and I went into the gift shop, and she asked if I wanted an apple. She said they looked really good. Now, I hadn't tasted food in over a month, and I had no taste. I lost a lot of weight because food had no appeal. So I said no, but she persisted. Come on. Try it. So finally, I said all right. And I took a bite. And for some reason, that was the day flavor returned, and that powerful sweetness rushed from that apple. Oh, it was incredible. I started to cry, cry for the first time in years. The tears flowed and as the anesthesia and antibiotics flushed through my tears, it burned my eyes. And between the sweetness of that apple and the burning for my tears, it felt so good to be alive. I blurted out, thank you, thank you, thank you,, thank you for this life. And that's when my prayers shifted, again, to giving thanks. And I don't know whether good things happen more because I was saying thank you, or I was just noticing them more. But blessings started to emerge from the curses. For one thing, I get to see people at their best everyday. Sometimes, I need help. And people are incredible, literally right there to lend a hand. And nobody looks better than when they're helping someone. As we count our blessings, I take a moment to pray to God to ask Jesus, to tell Santa, if there's one thing I want, it's to say thank you, thank you, thank you or a squirrel monkey.
[Robert Siegel:] Kevin Kling tells stories and gives thanks from his home in Minnesota.
[Michele Norris:] You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.

[Farai Chideya:] Former Liberian President Charles Taylor was arrested last week and charged with 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Taylor was brought before the special court for Sierra Leone on Monday. His case is unique in that he's charged with crimes that he allegedly committed in several African countries. This leaves African officials, as well as the international community, in uncharted territory. As commentator Jeremy Levitt explains, Charles Taylor's case may mark a new trend in international law.
[Jeremy Levitt Reporting:] Since the recent death of Slobodan Milosevic, who was being prosecuted for war crimes and other atrocities before the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, international attention has switched to Taylor. In 2003, while still President of Liberia, Charles Taylor was indicted by the U.N.-backed Sierra Leone special court for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Sierra Leone, not Liberia, between 1996 and 2002-including acts of terrorism, unlawful killings, sexual and physical violence, forced enlistment and abduction of child soldiers, forced labor, and looting. The bulk of his victims were women and children. Taylor has been identified by the international community as a key figure in Sierra Leone's blood diamonds trade, and is said to have given and economic haven to al-Qaida. Last week, while waiting extradition from Nigeria to Sierra Leone, the warlord escaped only to be later arrested by Nigerian border guards while trying cross into Cameroon. Taylor was immediately extradited to Sierra Leone to face his indictment. His arrest and extradition to Sierra Leone by another African nation, Nigeria, sends a very strong message to Africa's warlords, rebels, and beyond: that impunity and international atrocities is no longer acceptable. And it sends an equally strong signal to the international community that Africa's serious about finding African solutions to African problems. Taylor's capture and extradition was celebrated by most Liberians, except for a small group of loyalists. And Sierra Leonians seem to be less concerned about Taylor's imminent prosecution, and more troubled by the potentially destabilizing effect his presence brings. Taylor's presence in Sierra Leone does pose a credible security threat to the country and perhaps the region. His enlisted network of killers, thugs, thieves, smugglers, and shady businessmen remains intact. Since Taylor's presence in Sierra Leone threatens the entire West African region, the United Nations Security Council is currently considering a resolution that would move his trial to the Hague, the world's judicial capitol. If Taylor's trial is held in the Netherlands, one questions whether he should also face charges in the newly founded, Hague-based international criminal court for committing atrocities in Liberia. Liberians are certainly eager for him to be held accountable for destroying the country and butchering its people.
[One Thing Is Certain:] Taylor's alleged crimes in Sierra Leone are minor when compared to the major atrocities he committed in Liberia. With Milosevic's death, Taylor's trial will likely be the most important international criminal prosecution in the 21st century. African judges, lawyers, plaintiffs, and defendants will not only make history, but also shape international criminal prosecutions for the foreseeable future. While he is currently the subject of an international criminal witch-hunt, we should not underestimate Taylor's ability to escape, or overestimate the strength of the special courts case against him. Either way, until he's held accountable for committing atrocities against Liberians, any sanction against Taylor, although tasty, will be half-baked.

[Renee Montagne:] A bid by the Bush administration to seal an alliance with India by providing nuclear materials and technology has been approved by the Senate. Critics say the deal sets a dangerous precedent by rewarding a nuclear power that's refused to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Still, many Senate Democrats joined Republicans in backing the agreement, as NPR's David Welna reports.
[David Welna:] In last night's debate, some senators saw the India nuclear accord as another major foreign policy blunder, but there were others who said the U.S. has to make the best of an undeniable fact.
[Richard Lugar:] India has nuclear weapons, has stated its intent to keep them.
[David Welna:] That's Richard Lugar, the outgoing Republican chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. Lugar readily conceded the so-called United StatesIndia Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act does not require India to stop producing the fissile materials used in nuclear bombs. Instead, India is simply urged to do so.
[Richard Lugar:] We make it the policy of the United States, quote, "to achieve as quickly as possible a cessation of the production by India and Pakistan of fissile materials for nuclear weapons and other nuclear explosive devices," end of quote.
[David Welna:] And Virginia Republican George Allen called the deal with India good business.
[George Allen:] U.S. companies will benefit from increased jobs and economic opportunities in the India energy market. Cooperation from this will also ensue, I believe, in clean coal technology and also bio fuels.
[David Welna:] In order for the U.S. to supply India with nuclear materials and technology, a series of conditions in the 1954 Atomic Energy Act will have to be waived. But Joseph Biden, the Democrat who'll soon chair the Foreign Relations Committee, dismissed concerns that doing so might undermine efforts to get Iran, North Korea and other nations to comply with nuclear safeguards.
[Joseph Biden:] This is a single case. India, unlike Pakistan and other countries, has acted responsibly; it has not proliferated weapons. It does not doesn't have an A.Q. Khan. It is not comparable to Iran or Pakistan, will have no impact on the relationship of those two countries.
[David Welna:] Other Democrats sharply disagreed, including North Dakota's Byron Dorgan.
[Byron Dorgan:] I fail to see how undermining decades of effort at non-proliferation and our providing a green light to India to produce new nuclear weapons, additional nuclear weapons, makes this a safer world. Quite the contrary, I think it is dangerous. I think this agreement is a horrible mistake.
[David Welna:] New Mexico Democrat Jeff Bingaman noted that India first exploded a nuclear bomb in 1974, built with technology provided for peaceful purposes by the U.S. He said in this deal, India allows international inspections of only some civilian installations.
[Jeff Bingaman:] Many of the facilities that raise the greatest proliferation concerns, including the fast breeder reactor program and its uranium enrichment plants and its spent fuel reprocessing facilities, are placed beyond the reach of any international safeguards. India will be free to use these facilities to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons without any international inspection or control.
[David Welna:] All attempts to amend the bill failed, and Democrats like incoming intelligence committee chair Jay Rockefeller guaranteed its passage.
[Jay Rockefeller:] I want that relationship with India. It's totally crucial to us in terms of its intrinsic value. Also as a counterbalance to China. And secondly, I don't think the Indians are going to mess up on this.
[David Welna:] The Senate bill must now be reconciled with the version the House passed in July. David Welna, NPR News, the Capitol.

[Alex Chadwick:] More now on Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath. Joanne Silberner is with us, NPR's science reporter. Joanne, what are the immediate health concerns about the storm now? JOANNE SILBERNER reporting Well, they've already been deaths from people being exposed to carbon monoxide. That comes out of generators, if you run a generator in an area that's not ventilated. Those are completely preventable deaths. There are the issues-you know, broken bones from people battered about by these floodwaters, there have been some electrocutions from people coming too near downed power wires. So there are the immediate emergency issues that come up in a storm like this. There are reports of dead bodies floating in the water in New Orleans and people not really able to do anything about that at the moment, New Orleans and elsewhere. What kind of a hazard is it to have dead bodies lying around?
[Silberner:] It's mostly an emotional hazard. I mean, this comes up in disasters everywhere. With earthquakes and volcanoes, you get a lot of dead bodies; there's a rush to get them into the ground. But actually, public healthwise, they generally don't spread disease. First of all, they're not really moving anywhere. Second of all, if they don't carry a disease in the first place-if the person didn't have cholera, didn't have typhoid-there's really no hazard from them. The hazard really is emotional.
[Alex Chadwick:] Is there any danger of typhoid or cholera breaking out?
[Silberner:] Theoretically, yes, but in reality, probably not much. Again, it's not there. So it has to be there in order to spread. These are bacterial diseases, and if the bacteria aren't there in the beginning, they're not going to spread.
[Alex Chadwick:] This is hot and humid. It's the South. It's the end of August, a difficult time. What about that?
[Silberner:] Definite problems there. First of all, people who don't have electricity being exposed to high heat and humidity in a very stressful time. Mosquitoes are-you've got a lot of standing water around; this is where they breed. There's concern about West Nile, any other mosquito-borne disease. Also, snakes. You know, snakes go around in the water. So for the rescuers, they're going to be dealing with that, as well.
[Alex Chadwick:] What about people with chronic conditions, diabetes, say?
[Silberner:] That's a real problem. The issue there is that if they're on insulin that's refrigerated, they've lost their power, they've lost their insulin. It's hard to find any fresh supplies. The drugstores are closed; transportation is down. This was definitely seen in other hurricanes-Hurricane Andrew, for example-people going into, you know, an insulin coma. They go into shock, they don't have their insulin and there's nowhere for them to get it and there's no hospital for them to go to. And, in fact, with other disease, as well-again, with Andrew, they had cases of, you know, kids who spiked a higher fever and needed immediate medical care and couldn't get it. And also, people on portable oxygen, you know, any of these chronic diseases where you have supplies that need replenishing. There was already a death from a men with lung cancer. He was on oxygen, but it ran out. You know, if you've got a one-week supply or a three-day supply, it's going to run out, there's nowhere to get fresh supplies.
[Alex Chadwick:] Joanne Silberner covers health issues for NPR. Joanne, thank you.
[Silberner:] Thank you, Alex.

[Linda Wertheimer:] This week, Ed Viesturs became the first American to scale all 14 of the world's tallest peaks. It's climbing season in the Himalayas, the best time of year for scaling the mountains, or at least looking at them. It is a strange and unfortunate coincidence that Tibet, a nation that is home to Mt. Everest, is also home to a population that is slowly going blind. Disease, UV rays and environmental stressors have made Tibetans particularly vulnerable to blindness. The most recent survey of Tibet found that 30,000 people in a population of 2.6 million have lost all or most of their sight. But despite the widespread affliction, Tibetans who are blind face ridicule or worse at home. Many are believed to be possessed by demons or retarded; only a few are climbing out of this life of hopelessness to brave a mountain. From Lhasa, Stefani Jackenthal reports.
[Stefani Jackenthal Reporting:] Imagine hiking up a narrow rocky ridge line 400 feet above a rushing glacial stream. The footing is so tight you have to step heel to toe. The high altitude air is so thin that your pace is as slow as your coordination. Your only guides are two trekking poles, a bell and a companion's voice you follow along the sheer cliff.
[Unidentified Woman #1:] OK, step big here.
[Jackenthal:] Now imagine you're trekking to the peak of a 23,000-foot Himalayan mountain and you're blind.
[Unidentified Woman #1:] Step big up here. OK. So stay to the right; it drops off steep left.
[Jackenthal:] Last October, six Tibetan teen-agers set out to do just that. Their undertaking wasn't really to conquer a mountain so much as it was to build self-confidence. Every step up would be a testament to what purpose and perseverance can accomplish, as important for the blind to experience as for the sighted to witness with their own eyes.
[Kyla:] I want to show other people-there's a lot of Tibetan people-they think that we, the blind people, cannot do anything. I want to show them we can do something, you know.
[Jackenthal:] That's Kyla, an 18-year-old massage therapist who's been blind since birth. She and the other five teen-agers on the expedition are students at Braille Without Borders, a Lhasa-based training center for the blind. Each kid had an English-speaking guide; I was Kyla's.
[Kyla:] I want to go to Panmundovich. My parents, they always say, `Oh, no, you cannot. You'll fall down,'or something like that.
[Jackenthal:] Despite living in the mountain mecca of the world, none of the kids had ever been in the mountains. They were in luck. American Erik Weihenmayer, the first and only blind person to summit Mt. Everest, would lead the team. The goal? To summit Lhapka Ri, a 23,100-foot peak on the north side of Everest. The project was fittingly enough called Climbing Blind.
[Mr. Erik Weihenmayer:] Climbing is one of these things that has a way of just ingraining itself into your character. It gives you confidence, it gives you skill. It's the greatest thing to be able to teach yourself skills and systems and then survive in this environment that's so inhospitable to anyone, not just to blind people.
[Jackenthal:] Erik Weihenmayer went blind when he was 13 years old from a congenital degenerative retinal disease.
[Mr. Erik Weihenmayer:] If these kids can have a success on a high mountain in Tibet, what a statement it's going to make. It's just going to continue to push that social change further and faster.
[Jackenthal:] In May, we did some early training with the kids and took them on a four-day practice hike. We returned five months later for the big climb. First stop? The place where the idea first germinated: Braille Without Borders in Lhasa.
[Ms. Sabriye Tenberken:] When I found out that they can climb a mountain and then they can master a rock like that, then I guess they can even do even better in life. I hope, at least.
[Jackenthal:] Sabriye Tenberken founded the organization seven years ago. Now she and partner Paul Kronenberg run the vocational center Braille Without Borders in downtown Lhasa. Tenberken has been blind since 13. After hearing about Weihenmayer's 2001 summit of Everest, she invited him to the center. She and Kronenberg will make the journey with us to Lhapka Ri.
[Unidentified Woman #2:] Maybe he don't understand.
[Unidentified Man #1:] I don't know.
[Jackenthal:] We left the Snow Leopard Guest House in Qomolangma nature preserve on a brisk, bright October morning. Altitude: 14,000 feet. Anyone in Tibet wanting to climb Everest, the world's sixth-highest peak, begins here. Kyla and I rambled along the rocky path under bright morning sunshine. Stepping up. Stepping up.
[Kyla:] OK.
[Jackenthal:] So now it's 10:15. We're getting a little bit later of a start than we expected, but we're heading up right now. We're heading up right into a nice little saddle of the ridge. She treks closely behind me, feeling the rocky terrain with her poles, following my footsteps and listening for my bear bell and direction. That night, we camped near a rushing glacial stream. The endless black sky was painted with bright blinking starlight; the temperature dropped below 20 degrees Fahrenheit.
[Kienzen:] [Singing in foreign language]
[Jackenthal:] That's Kienzen singing. He's 16 years old and studying to be a teacher. Like many Tibetans, Kienzen's family heated their home with yak dung which doesn't burn properly at high altitudes. The soot infected his eyes and he lost his sight. He and the other teen-agers had no real sense of the potential danger ahead.
[Kienzen:] I think it is not dangerous.
[Jackenthal:] It was up to the guides to keep them on track.
[Unidentified Man #2:] No, no. We can't go anywhere with a crazy kid this morning.
[Jackenthal:] Along the way, Buddhist nuns at the Rongbuk monastery blessed us and prayed that our hike up to Everest base camp and beyond would be safe.
[Group Of Nuns:] [Chanting in foreign language]
[Group Of People:] [Singing in foreign language]
[Jackenthal:] We finally arrived at Everest's base camp. I'm standing looking at Mt. Everest just behind a running stream that's coming down the glacier stream off of Everest. It's this big rock field, and it's sort of barren. During our two rest days in the shadow of Everest, we had to learn to breathe all over again at 17,000 feet. As we repacked our gear and waited for 60 yaks to arrive, the teen were feisty and fired up to go higher. They were in a hurry. We cleared British Camp, then Inchun camp, then Chaing Si camp at 19,900 feet. Soon, we'd be at the glacier on Lhapka Pi.
[Mr. Jeff Evans:] They were super fired up just to nuke it.
[Jackenthal:] Jeff Evans is the team's medic.
[Mr. Jeff Evans:] They were just ready to go, and that's a combination of being a teen-ager as well as being on such an adventure. But just within any, you know, mountaineering experience and adventure, we really have to kind of pace ourselves and allow our bodies to get used to being up high.
[Jackenthal:] The next day, we got our first peek at Lhapka Ri as we approached Advanced Base Camp's 21,000-foot blustery site. Weihenmayer was pleased.
[Mr. Erik Weihenmayer:] The whole team made it; pretty impressive.
[Jackenthal:] But Sabriye Tenberken sensed trouble was on the way.
[Ms. Sabriye Tenberken:] We saw the kids this morning and some of the kids had headache, one had nausea, one didn't want to eat, you know. So for us, it's always: `Shall we risk it? Shall we really go up there? Shall we really risk the kids' lives or just the kids' fun?'
[Jackenthal:] Exhaustion, an incoming snowstorm and a bevy of assorted concerns got the better of us. Weihenmayer and the team decided against continuing to Lhapka Ri. We refocused our sights on Rombuk glacier, 2,100 feet shy of Lhapka Ri's peak.
[Mr. Erik Weihenmayer:] And I didn't want to be like a Captain Bly, you know, just like pushing miserable blind Tibetan kids to the summit of some peak. At 21,000 feet, they had worked extremely hard.
[Jackenthal:] Later that day, Kyla, who was giggling and singing upon arrival, developed acute mountain sickness, with a splitting headache, nausea, difficulty breathing and no appetite.
[Kyla:] And I wake up-Oh! It hurt. All the body's very cold and freezing foot, very hot and then start to headache and it's really strong.
[Jackenthal:] Oh.
[Kyla:] Oh, my gosh. I never have headache like this. Ow!
[Jackenthal:] Are you all right? The pain stabbing her left eye became so severe during the night, I pulled on my thick down jacket and trudged to Jeff Evans' tent for ibuprofen and a steroid called steccajohn that shrinks the brain's swelling. This was just a temporary solution. Kyla needed to go down the mountain the next day to avoid a life-threatening situation. Evans stopped by our tent the next morning to check on Kyla and break the bad news.
[Mr. Jeff Evans:] Kyla?
[Kyla:] Yeah?
[Mr. Jeff Evans:] This medicine has made you feel better. And if you didn't have this medicine in you right now you would feel bad, like last night.
[Kyla:] Mm-hmm.
[Mr. Jeff Evans:] Remember? So the best thing for us to do is to have you go down, down to base camp, and wait for a couple of days for us. Because up here when you're this high, you don't get better; you get worse. And I can help you with medicine only up to a certain point, but then if the medicine stops working, then we're in trouble.
[Jackenthal:] Kyla wasn't alone heading down the mountain. Sixteen-year-old Sonam Bongso was combatting a relentless headache, and 19-year-old Tashi was vomiting. OK. Bye, you guys. Thanks.
[Unidentified Man #3:] Sonam, bye-bye.
[Jackenthal:] Sonam, you all set? You ready to roll?
[Unidentified Man #3:] Sonam, stop crying and put a smile on your...
[Jackenthal:] That left three kids and three guides plus Weihenmayer, Tenberken and Kronenberg at Advanced Base Camp, also known as ABC. It would take us two days to descend to base camp, a drop from 21,000 to 17,000 feet down slippery, snowy, rocky trails. It's 8:30, and we've just arrived and tucked into tents. I'm sitting between Sonam Bonso and Kyla, who are just exhausted and sleeping. The Sherpas will bring us some dinner. They've tried to... Meanwhile, Weihenmayer and his team were waiting out a screaming snowstorm.
[Mr. Erik Weihenmayer:] ...wanted to come down and I said, `Please, just hang on for one more day. Let's get a nice day and let's get across that icefall onto the glacier.'
[Jackenthal:] And the next day, under clear skies, they did it. They got on Rombuk glacier, wriggling across ice humps and sheer snow bridges, navigating shallow hidden holes and scores of pinnacles. We rendezvoused in nearby Shigatse two days later.
[Mr. Erik Weihenmayer:] When we ultimately were able to step foot on to that glacier, I felt like every single kid had given everything they could, and that's all I ask for.
[Jackenthal:] Do you think the kids who made it to the glacier realized that that was the climax of the trip?
[Mr. Erik Weihenmayer:] Well, a summit can be anything, you know. It could be a rock at 17,000 feet, or it could be the summit of Mt. Everest, you know. I mean, my definition of a summit is getting as high as you can and giving it everything you have.
[Jackenthal:] Out of the high mountains, Kyla's spirits gained new heights.
[Kyla:] I think it's good to experience for me.
[Jackenthal:] What do your parents think now?
[Kyla:] And now they think, `Wow, blind people can do a lot.'Yeah.
[Jackenthal:] It was time to go home. We turned our bus toward Lhasa and hit the bumpy road.
[Group Of People:] [Singing] You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when sky is blue.
[Jackenthal:] For NPR News, I'm Stefani Jackenthal.
[Group Of People:] [Singing] So please don't take my sunshine away. You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are blue. You don't know, dear, how much I love you. So please don't take my sunshine away. You are my sunshine, my only sunshine...
[Linda Wertheimer:] This is WEEKEND EDITION. Scott Simon is back next week. I'm Linda Wertheimer.

[Steve Inskeep:] Welcome to the program.
[M:] Thank you.
[Steve Inskeep:] What are some of the things that Suharto allegedly did?
[M:] Well, he has a long record of completely curtailing basic freedoms of association, expression, assembly and so on, basic civil rights. He has been accused of at least encouraging and endorsing, if not actually ordering, the killings of suspected members of the Indonesian Communist Party, and there are an estimated maybe 500,000 people who were killed in the purges that followed an attempted coup. He's accused of authorizing and indeed supporting the invasion of East Timor in 1975, which led to, by some estimates, over 100,000 deaths. And...
[Steve Inskeep:] There were massacres in East Timor going years after that invasion until the country was given its independence, right?
[M:] And I think that there are a range of other kinds of human rights violations that Suharto is accused of, but I also think it's important to keep in balance that there are many people who see his period of rule as a time of stability and prosperity.
[Steve Inskeep:] Maybe that leads to our next question. How did he manage to die outside of prison?
[M:] He was seen as someone who was effectively untouchable, and it's not completely clear why, except that many of the people who took positions of power following his resignation were people who had grown up under the new order, as his tenure is called, and people who benefited from his rule. So there was a reluctance to actually see him brought to account.
[Steve Inskeep:] Are there people in Indonesia who remember him fondly the way that people in the former Soviet Union remember Soviet times fondly now?
[M:] So among ordinary people on the street there actually is a lot of remembrance of that as one of the good times, the period when they were doing well, better than the present.
[Steve Inskeep:] You mentioned non-Muslims. This is a majority Muslim country, one of the largest countries in the world. Did he leave behind a basically stable country?
[M:] So as Indonesia struggles with democracy now, they're having to deal with that legacy on a day-to-day basis, just very weak institutions and no tradition of democratic rule.
[Steve Inskeep:] Sidney Jones of the International Crisis Group. Thanks very much.
[M:] You're welcome.

[Robert Siegel:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
[Melissa Block:] And I'm Melissa Block. This spring, professional baseball is coming to Israel. Soccer and basketball are still the big sports there, but organizers of the new Israel Baseball League hope they can get people excited about their sport. NPR's Eric Westervelt reports.
[Unidentified Man #1:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Eric Westervelt:] The Boston bagel baron who brought the world frozen pre-filled holeless bagels is now working tirelessly to bring baseball to the Holy Land. Fifty-four-year-old Larry Baras founded and runs SJR Food of Boston. He's finding that building a new league from scratch can be as tough as building a better bagel.
[Mr. Larry Baras:] Yeah, I'm fine, like, during the day. And I can see all the progress, and know where we are and what has to get done. It's when I wake up at 2:00 in the morning and I wonder what in the world am I doing.
[Eric Westervelt:] In the Israel Baseball League or IBL, falafel will sell alongside hot dogs and burgers, all kosher, of course, no cheese. No games will be played on Fridays or Saturdays to respect the Jewish Sabbath and there is no Hebrew word for baseball bat. Yet the bagel magnate remains positive about bringing professional-level baseball to this land of skepticism and soccer despite big struggles to secure the fields, players and more. He's upbeat in spite of frustrated efforts to get Israeli corporate sponsors and has many run-ins with Israel's notoriously capricious and stubborn bureaucracy and business culture.
[Mr. Larry Baras:] It's more than a show-me attitude. I think it borders on hostility. I think the first word in Israel that they learn is not mommy or daddy, I think it's no. Because I am finding that every time I run into something here, the answer first is no, and then they want me to clarify the question. Nonetheless, it's a wonderful place. Hello. Everything okay?
[Eric Westervelt:] Baras fields another phone call as he watches young players warm up in the rough Israeli equivalent of Little League. In June, the opening game happens here at this field at the Baptist village outside Tel Aviv. A chapel steeple is visible over the centerfield fence.
[Unidentified Man #2:] Play ball.
[Unidentified Man #3:] Yo, play ball. Batter up.
[Eric Westervelt:] Few of the players here will actually get to play ball in the IBL. Most in the new league will be foreigners. More than 175 Israelis tried out, but only a dozen made the cut. Jeff Mor is one of the chosen 12. Mor is taking time off from his job as a diamond dealer to play for his hometown team, the Bet Shemesh Blue Sox, where he's already becoming something of a local hero.
[Mr. Jeff Mor:] Kids are looking at me like, you know, some kind of idol. It's pretty cool.
[Eric Westervelt:] That's great.
[Mr. Jeff Mor:] They cheer, when I'm pitching or I'm hitting, we want Mor. We want Mor.
[Eric Westervelt:] Mor is 36 years old. Most of the rest of the players are in their 20s. They hail from nine different countries including Japan, Venezuela, the U.S., and those baseball powerhouses, Ukraine and Belgium. Many washed out of other semi-pro leagues or played college ball. Others were long shots trying to catch a dream. The oldest player to make the new league, and perhaps an inspiration to aging baby-boomers everywhere, 51-year-old Scott Cantor from suburban New York. Israeli pitcher Jeff Mor will be making the somewhat improbable leap from softball back to hardball.
[Mr. Scott Cantor:] I know I'm one of the older players in the league. I mean I've kept up my baseball skills, played on the national softball team in the last six years. In softball, I played shortstop.
[Eric Westervelt:] You're making a switch from a softball shortstop to a starting fastball-hardball pitcher? A lot of people look, it's going to be tough too for everybody.
[Mr. Scott Cantor:] I'm not worried. I'm excited about it. You know, intimidated maybe a little bit, but totally excited and juiced up for it.
[Unidentified Man #4:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Eric Westervelt:] But it's not clear many Israelis are all that juiced for a new baseball league. Despite strong ties with the U.S., Israelis like to do things their own way. American cultural and business stalwarts don't always take root here. Israelis warmly embraced basketball and McDonald's, but told Starbucks and Taco Bell to take a hike. Larry Baras, the bagel-baron-turned-baseball-czar, insists he's not trying to force this iconic American game on Israel, but simply offering a fun diversion from the anxieties of conflict.
[Mr. Larry Baras:] There is a love-hate relationship that Israelis have with things American and the hate part comes in when they feel that we're trying to impose something upon them. So we have to let them know that this is truly something that we're bringing to the country just out of an act of goodwill. I think it's the kind of pace and sport that actually Israel craves and needs, whether they realize it or not.
[Eric Westervelt:] But Baras and the IBL have made some adjustments to that pace that some die-hard fans would consider baseball blasphemy. In an effort to enliven the game's pace, what some consider the slow rhythmic splendor of the sport, IBL games will last just seven, not nine innings. And there will be no extra innings. Instead, tie games will be broken with a winner-take-all home run derby. And to emphasize a family-friendly feel, IBL games will offer upbeat entertainment between most every inning. You go to a carnival and a baseball game might break out. Larry Baras.
[Mr. Larry Baras:] Balloon hats and face painting. We're going to have speed-dating night. Play hooky from workday...
[Eric Westervelt:] But on this night, at this nonprofessional, anyone-can-play-league game, the focus is on baseball. And pitcher Jeff Mor, the Israeli softball and potential baseball standout, is having a rough time of it on the mound.
[Unidentified Man #5:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Eric Westervelt:] Teenagers, some wearing blue jeans and ill-fitting helmets, smack Mor's fastballs across the outfield. But Mor says he views this as a kind of spring training and remains realistic, yet upbeat about the new league.
[Mr. Jeff Mor:] It's going to be a tough sell, especially the first year, you know? But if it breaks through after a few years, then it could be something, you know, very, very popular in the future.
[Unidentified Man #6:] They're running the base...
[Eric Westervelt:] For now, anyway, Jewish-American and Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax politely declined, but on June 24, someone will throw out the first pitch to start the Israel Baseball League's opening game. Eric Westervelt, NPR News, Petah Tikva, Israel.
[Unidentified Man #7:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Unidentified Man #8:] Go fish.
[Unidentified Man #9:] [Foreign language spoken]

[Scott Simon:] Today is Spain's Christmas lottery drawing. It's considered the world's jackpot with prizes worth more than three billion U.S. dollars. The six and a half million dollar grand prize is nicknamed El Gordo the fat one. It's usually shared among hundreds of friends and neighbors who go in on tickets together. And as Lauren Frayer reports from Madrid, the Christmas lottery brings a little cheer amid Spain's dismal economy.
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] It's an unseasonably warm winter day in Madrid. School's out, and there are no fewer than three Santas available for photos in the city's Puerta del Sol square. Sure, it's Christmas, but it's also lottery season in Spain.
[Unidentified Man:] [Singing in Spanish]
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] A lottery ticket salesman breaks out in flamenco song. Days like this, you could almost forget about the economy.
[Adriana Paniagua:] You believe in something, and if you win, it's very happy.
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] Adriana Paniagua is 23 and unemployed, but still spent more than fifty dollars on the Christmas lottery. That's the norm. It's a tradition.
[Adriana Paniagua:] My grandparents and my parents and every year we bought some lottery. Some years more, some years less, but every year.
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] Children from a Catholic school originally for orphans sing the winning numbers every year on live TV.
[Children:] [Singing in Spanish]
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] Ticket sales have been up ever since the economic crisis hit. Gonzalo Garland at Madrid's IE Business School says consumption normally goes down when people are earning less. But that's not the case with the lottery. Spaniards are willing to cut back on many other things, but not this one.
[Gonzalo Garland:] They will spend less on presents for the family, and all the other things. But the hope and the dream associated with spending a little extra on the lottery gives them some reward in a way. From an economic point of view, we'll say that's a utility. We call it utility. But there's some pleasure on, at least dreaming on what you would do if you would win the lottery.
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] In line to buy last-minute lottery tickets is Eduardo Alban, 21, who works at a call center to put himself through school.
[Eduardo Alban:] I'm going to spend on two one for me, and other for my mother. She say me, buy me one, buy me one.
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] If they win, he says they'll pay off the mortgage and buy new cell phones. Does he think that's likely, I ask?
[Eduardo Alban:] Well, with hope, yes.
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] For NPR News, I'm Lauren Frayer in Madrid.
[Scott Simon:] This is NPR News.

[Scott Simon:] I'm Scott Simon. A monthly gathering at Jerusalem's Western Wall has become a battleground for Jewish women seeking to challenge Orthodox rules for praying there. The women have been donning prayer shawls and head coverings usually reserved for Jewish males and conducting non-Orthodox services at the wall. They say their battle is part of a greater struggle to challenge the traditional institutions that control all religious issues in the Jewish state. Sheera Frenkel reports from Jerusalem.
[Sheera Frenkel:] The monthly prayer service held by this group of Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall nearly always begins peacefully. Heads turn to the unusual sound of dozens of women united in Hebrew prayers, and several people try to hush them. But unlike the nearby religious women who mumble prayers quietly, these women are here to be heard. Quickly, though, the scene turns ugly. Several women approach the group and demand that they lower their voices. Then they shout over them, saying that they want to protect the ears of nearby men from the voices of immodest women. One elderly man looms over the crowd, above a divide meant to separate the men and women's sections here.
[Unidentified Man:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Sheera Frenkel:] He's shouting at them not to expect to change the Jewish faith, that they aren't real Jews, that they are degrading the memory of the Holocaust. Some of the women look shaken by his accusations, but they continue to pray. It's the sort of insults they hear every month.
[Sharon Oshalme:] We are totally shaking their world up. I want to practice my religion freely. It's not just their Kotel or their Jerusalem. But it's hard when someone that yells at you you're not Jewish, you're not belong here, the Holocaust happened because of you. Last time they called me Nazi, Reform and lesbian. That was, like, the three curses.
[Sheera Frenkel:] That's Sharon Oshalme. The 25-year-old has been coming here to pray in recent months despite the harassment. She says that the struggle goes farther than their rights to pray at the wall, and she uses the Hebrew word rabinut to describe the rabbinic authorities.
[Sharon Oshalme:] Israel is controlled by the rabinut, and there's no separation between church and state. There's no freedom of religion. So I have to practice my religion in closed doors.
[Sheera Frenkel:] Since 1988, when Women of the Wall was established by mainly American Jews, the shifting group of people arrive at the Western Wall at the early hours of the first day of each Jewish month to fight for their right to pray at one of Judaism's most iconic holy sites. While Orthodox pray at the wall daily, women and men are separated, and only men can read from the Torah. Women of the Wall are fighting for their right to hold Reform or Conservative services, in which anyone, man or woman, can read from the Torah and stand together as they pray, and their weapons are those most often identified with the Orthodox a kippah, a head covering, tallit, prayer shawl, and Torah, or Pentateuch. These are the very items that can and do land these women in jail. In November of last year, 28-year-old Nofrat Frenkel was arrested for openly wearing a tallit at the Western Wall. So now she wears it wrapped around her shoulders, like a scarf. This week Anat Hoffman, the executive director of the group, was arrested as she tried to carry a Torah from the wall to a platform that has been built to the south of the wall for non-Orthodox services. Police have not yet charged her or released details of why she was arrested. Leslie Sachs, a coordinator for Women of the Wall, explains that it's hard for Israelis, men and women alike, to understand why Women of the Wall insist on challenging the norms.
[Leslie Sachs:] When you grow up in a country where there's true pluralism, one recognizes when your rights, in this case our rights as women, are impaired, and they are so aware of it. Women who grow up in Israel sometimes think that this is a the natural way, this is the right way.
[Sheera Frenkel:] Yet more and more young Israelis are joining. Hoffman's arrest this week drew many to the group's Facebook site, where they were surprised to hear that her arrest was not the first. Frenkel, the girl arrested for wearing her tallit, is an Orthodox-born Israeli. [Through translator] Here in Israel, the Western Wall has become a place that is so religious, so extreme, that the average person doesn't feel like it could belong to them too. She continues by saying that she only hopes that one day her daughters or other women in her family won't have to search for a way to practice Judaism in the state of Israel. For NPR News, I'm Sheera Frenkel in Jerusalem.

[Audie Cornish:] Another major point of tension between the U.S. and Afghanistan is the prison at Guantanamo Bay. The offshore detention facility turns 10 years old today and it still holds some 170 captives, some of whom are said to be staging protests inside the prison this week. It's been nearly three years since President Obama's executive order aimed to close it. But the prison is not only open, it's due for some pricey upgrades. Miami Herald Reporter Carol Rosenberg has reported extensively on Guantanamo and she joins me now to talk about it. Welcome, Carol.
[Carol Rosenberg:] Thank you.
[Audie Cornish:] Now, Congress has been, of course, the most effective foe to the Obama administration's plan to close the facility obviously using the power of the purse to prevent transfers, to prevent the opening of civilian prisons to this population on U.S. soil. But what are some of the other reasons that it's so hard to close Guantanamo Bay?
[Carol Rosenberg:] International affairs. I mean, many of the men that they'd like to send away need to go to Yemen, which was the ancestral birthplace of bin Laden, and where a lot of people left to join al-Qaida or train in Afghanistan. These are people that the Obama administration, and the Bush administration before them, have concluded should go back to Yemen to rehabilitation and to monitoring. But, as we know, this is not a stable country. There is a big al-Qaida franchise there. And there's concern about sending them back to that country without monitoring, and the instability. And the other thing is, Europe has taken a number of men from Guantanamo, resettled them, given them new starts. And the unwillingness of the United States to resettle some of the people themselves, I'm told, is a problem. You know, Europe has said we've done our part, we think that the Americans have not done theirs. And that between Congress's limitations and unwillingness to even settle them on U.S. soil or set up a prison inside the U.S., Europe is less inclined to take and help resettle some of the men who both the Bush administration and the Obama administration have agreed shouldn't be there at all.
[Audie Cornish:] Many Americans and you're talking about the rest of the world associate Gitmo with those early images we know of prisoners in orange suits and goggles and shackled. How has the look and feel of Gitmo changed over the last decade?
[Carol Rosenberg:] Oh, it's a completely different place from those first images. You know, at the beginning, the prisoners were in open air cells and those orange jumpsuits. And their guards, the Marines, were in tents in the mud just up the road. And everybody is in buildings now. Most of the detainees are in penitentiary-style buildings. The ones that we've seen are being held in things that look like prisons in the United States. They've got cell doors and they've got three meals a day coming in. And they actually have satellite TV. And the guards are watching them through usually one-way glass or from behind barricades. And so, it's become far more institutionalized.
[Audie Cornish:] And, as you've reported, that comes at an extremely high cost.
[Carol Rosenberg:] Yeah, the Obama administration finally put a price tag on this. We've been asking for years and they told Congress, as part of their debate over with Congress about how to try and hold people that it costs $800,000 a head, a year to keep a detainee at Guantanamo.
[Audie Cornish:] Carol, you've written about the developments people should watch as the prison goes into the next decade. And can you talk about maybe the top three things people should pay attention to when it comes to Guantánamo?
[Carol Rosenberg:] Well, first thing everyone should watch for is the death penalty trials. They're going to have initial appearances this year with the five men who supposedly plotted the 911 attacks. And we have the USS Cole bombing trial. These are the first capital trials at military commissions. And there's going to be a lot of attention to just how fair and how those trials proceed. And then, another big question is whether the transfers will resume. The last two men to leave Guantanamo this year have both died. And the U.S. has not been able to send people to resettlement in other countries. There is under new legislation, there's an expectation that the transfers will resume, and that some of the 89 men they don't want there will start to leave. And then there's, I think, just a general issue of tension. You know, it's 10 years old, detainees are complaining through their lawyers that it's harder to be a prisoner there these days and that the guards are being pretty tough on them. That there had been a liberalization of what you were allowed to keep and what you're allowed to do, and that there is a new kind of tough doctrine in the prisons. And the lawyers say that the detainees are pretty unhappy right now. And I think it's just a general sense of futility. And we really have to watch the tensions and make sure see what's going on in terms of conflict between guards and prisoners in the new decade.
[Audie Cornish:] Carol Rosenberg, she's reporter for the Miami Herald. Thanks so much for talking with us, Carol.
[Carol Rosenberg:] Thank you.

[Greene:] NPR's business news starts with French banks under pressure. European markets were jolted today by the downgrade of a couple of Europe's biggest financial institutions. Moody's Investors Service lowered the long term credit ratings of two French banks, in part because of their exposure to Greece's weak economy. From Paris, Eleanor Beardsley sent this report.
[Eleanor Beardsley:] France is at the heart of the eurozone crisis because its banks are some of the most heavily exposed to Greek debt. So, as fears of a Greek default grow, so do worries over those banks holding Greek assets. Despite efforts by the French government and bankers to reassure markets, Moody's downgraded, by one notch, the credit ratings of banks Societe Generale and Credit Agricole. Both banks hold significant Greek assets and have retail banking subsidiaries in Greece. A third major French bank, BNP Parisbas, was spared but is on a watch list. French officials immediately tried to minimize the effects of the downgrade.
[Christian Noyer Is Head:] [French language spoken]
[Eleanor Beardsley:] Other officials went on the air to assure French deposit holders that their accounts were safe. Jim Hertling is with Bloomberg News in Paris. He says the downgrades will make it harder for the banks to get short term financing from other institutions.
[Jim Hertling:] Investors are very nervous. They are concerned there will be a negative feedback loop between sovereign debt and banks holdings and bank assets. In the post Lehman Brothers world, investor's tolerance and appetite for risk is zero.
[Eleanor Beardsley:] Hertling says ultimately, the French government will have to step in to boost its banks capital and assure their liquidity. For NPR news, I'm Eleanor Beardsley in Paris.

[Mary Louise Kelly:] In Saudi Arabia, women are traditionally barred from driving, but some women are trying to change that. Among them, Manal al-Sharif. She's 32, and she was arrested this past weekend after posting videos of herself on YouTube driving a car. Even so, she's urging other Saudi women to take to the wheel. There's a national protest scheduled for June 17. Well, to find out more, we've called Khaled Al-Maeena. He's editor of the Arab News in Jeddah. Welcome to the program.
[Mr. Khaled Al-maeena:] Thank you.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] So tell me, what is her current status?
[Mr. Khaled Al-maeena:] Well, she is now in detention since the weekend. She was taken in for driving. But another day later they took her and her lawyer had said that there was some charges which included violating public law. We don't know what it is. There's no law against driving per se in Saudi Arabia.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] And I understand that Manal al-Sharif has actually made that a key part of her campaign. She talked about it. We have a clip of her speaking. This is her speaking on CNN.
[Ms. Manal Al-sharif:] We are not against the law. We're not protesting. We're not doing anything that's breaking the law. We made this clear. And we are all Saudis who started this thing and we love our country.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Now, clearly Saudi authorities would not agree with that if they've arrested her twice in the past week.
[Mr. Khaled Al-maeena:] Yes. I do agree with what she said. There is no law and people are now looking it is an economic dictate, if I may say, so for women to drive. Having a driver and paying him 300 to 400 dollars a month coming in from an Asian country is a burden on many Saudi families. And people are openly saying so. And there are women who are divorced. Manal is a single [unintelligible] and she has kids. And there are so many other ladies who are widowed. So these people need to have access to be mobile.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Well, you said she is finding some support among Saudi women. How much of a difference is that likely to make? Do you see this campaign actually gaining any traction?
[Mr. Khaled Al-maeena:] Well, I think that there has been a negative effect with her arrest. And there is a counter campaign against it by certain elements in society. There are hardline conservative elements who are against participation and women. Now, this goes against the grain of what the government is saying. The government has already said and the king and the crown prince are on record as saying that they're all for women's emancipation. The king's daughter heads a major health organization. And these are not, by the way, cosmetic organizations. These are real organizations like anywhere in the United States or Europe.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Well, do you think given all of the changes that we're seeing in the Arab world this spring, does this strike you as a moment where women might actually be able to affect some change? I mean, as you know, when this has been tried before, the Saudi government has tamped down pretty hard on efforts to lift the ban on women driving.
[Mr. Khaled Al-maeena:] Yes, but this is 2011. The Saudi Arabia of 2000 is not the Saudi Arabia of today. I think women want to be in charge of themselves. They do not like to be sort of manhandled, if I may use that expression. So I really believe that those who want to drive should be allowed. And those who don't want to drive, it's up to them.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] What comes next for Manal al-Sharif? Is she planning, do you know, to take part in this protest scheduled for next month?
[Mr. Khaled Al-maeena:] I don't know what will happen to the next month. But today also I read that two other women went and drove. So I'm sure that more and more women will take up to the wheel, as they say, and do something. And I hope that she will not be deterred by this detention, because she has not done anything wrong.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] All right. Well, thanks very much.
[Mr. Khaled Al-maeena:] Thank you.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] That's Khaled al-Maeena. He's editor of the Arab News in Jeddah, and he's been bringing us up to speed on the case of Manal al-Sharif, who was arrested this past weekend for driving in Saudi Arabia.

[Ed Gordon:] From NPR News, this is NEWS & NOTES. I'm Ed Gordon. Nearly two weeks after her return, runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks is still in the headlines. Other missing women like Lori Hacking and Laci Peterson also captured the national spotlight. But not all such cases receive national coverage. NPR's Allison Keyes reports on one African-American woman who disappeared nearly a year ago in South Carolina and has received little attention. ALLISON KEYES reporting Twenty-four-year-old Tamika Huston lived in a small white frame house on Harvard Drive in Spartanburg. In her pictures, the nutmeg-colored woman's eyes sparkle and her smiles are wide and friendly. No one has seen her since last May 24th. Tamika's aunt, Rebkah Howard, says not knowing what happened to her has been difficult to bear.
[Ms. Rebkah Howard:] I miss her so much. She's just such a wonderful, warm person and her absence from our lives has just left an incredible void. We miss her terribly.
[Keyes:] Tamika lived alone in the house she owned and had just quit a job as a waitress. She was also known to jump in her car and visit relatives spread along the Eastern seaboard, so Howard didn't worry at first when Tamika's ex-boyfriend called to say that no one had seen her around.
[Ms. Rebkah Howard:] I just assumed, `Oh, well, you know, I know I haven't spoken to her in a couple weeks, but almost certainly her mom did.'And once it became apparent by the next day that no one had heard from her, we became very alarmed.
[Keyes:] Spartanburg Public Safety Department Lieutenant Steve Lamb led the team of investigators who went to Tamika's house after the family reported her missing on June 12th.
[Lieutenant Steve Lamb:] Our investigators actually made forced entry into the residence. Tamika was not there. She had a dog who'd just had puppies. We felt like the dog had been by itself for several days, possibly several weeks.
[Keyes:] On June 20th, Tamika's 1991 black Honda was found abandoned, and police had received a 911 call just before Tamika vanished that investigators thought might be connected to the case.
[Unidentified Man #1:] My brother just came to my house and told me that he killed his girlfriend and put her in Cleveland Park Lake.
[Keyes:] A search of the lake found nothing. Then in January, police got a tip that led them to execute a search warrant at an apartment complex in Spartanburg. Again, Lieutenant Lamb.
[Lieutenant Steve Lamb:] We did find blood in that apartment, and that DNA did match back to Tamika.
[Keyes:] Lamb says the person who lived there during that period was dating Tamika around the time she disappeared. He is in custody right now on a parole violation unrelated to this case, but so far, no charges have been filed. Lamb says police consider him to be a person of interest and are continuing their investigation.
[Unidentified Man #2:] See you.
[Unidentified Woman:] Bye.
[Keyes:] At RJ's Grill, a diner a few blocks away from Tamika's house, two waitresses said they talk about the case all the time. Twenty-nine-year-old Suzanne Davis noticed that runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks got much more attention from the media than Tamika's case has. She thinks money is the reason why.
[Ms. Suzanne Davis:] The runaway bride was from a rich family, from a well-to-do neighborhood, and this girl is just from a-just regular neighborhood. I mean, I guess her family's not well-to-do enough.
[Keyes:] Standing outside the Southside Barber Shop, Mike says he thinks Tamika's case didn't get wall-to-wall national coverage because she isn't white.
[Mike:] We took one little affluent white girl and here we go again, folks. They make her important, and that's what the media's telling us. But Tamika Huston, a little pretty black girl right here in town, hard-working, she's missing. She could be dead. No one knows.
[Ms. Kelly Jolkowski:] I think that we all know that the coverage is not balanced.
[Keyes:] Kelly Jolkowski founded the Omaha, Nebraska-based Project Jason Web site after her own son vanished in 2001. Tamika's face and bio are among those featured, and Jolkowski has been supporting her family. She says she knows not all missing-person cases can get coverage, but she also thinks the media ignores some cases, like that of her son.
[Ms. Kelly Jolkowski:] I've never seen, in national coverage, a male, and I have never seen a minority. So that is some of what we're out there doing is we're fighting for these people.
[Keyes:] Howard, Tamika's aunt, works in public relations and says she knew how important it would be to get her niece's name and face out there as quickly as possible. But getting national coverage, she says, was an uphill battle. Only BET and "America's Most Wanted" have joined Spartanburg's media in covering the case. Howard thinks the issue is both race and class.
[Ms. Rebkah Howard:] I don't think it's a conscious effort on behalf of network producers and executives to exclude certain people. I just think that the bottom line, television news is a business and I think that they have found a formula that works for them, and that formula is young, attractive, white, middle- to upper-class missing woman.
[Keyes:] Howard says now the family is beginning to hear from national media organizations. But she thinks if Tamika's case had gotten attention earlier, perhaps the family would have been spared a year-long ordeal. Allison Keyes, NPR News.

[Ari Shapiro:] The biggest news story from 25 years ago is about to get new life. The HBO movie "Confirmation" premiering Saturday revisits the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Our own Nina Totenberg broke the story of Anita Hill's sexual harassment claims against Thomas and your first warning here that some of this may not be suitable for all ears. Nina's here to tell us the story of what happened behind the scenes while this controversy was raging. Hi, Nina.
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] Hey, Ari.
[Ari Shapiro:] Briefly set the scene. What led to the extraordinarily public scandal of these confirmation hearings, these confrontations between Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas?
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] Well, she didn't want to disclose what allegedly had happened to her, but she was contacted by Democratic staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee. And then the committee really didn't want to know, and so there it lay until a bunch of things occurred. And I found out about it and went with the story.
[Ari Shapiro:] And so she granted you an interview which aired on NPR, and then she testified publicly. We're going to hear a clip of that testimony which we should warn listeners involves some graphic sexual descriptions.
[Anita Hill:] After a brief discussion of work, he would turn the conversation to a discussion of sexual matters. His conversations were very vivid. He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes.
[Ari Shapiro:] So Nina, this went on for a while, and during that period, what happened to you as a reporter who broke this story?
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] Well, you would think it would be great. And I suppose in hindsight, it did do a fair amount for my career, but at the time, it was just awful. Clarence Thomas was pilloried. Anita Hill was pilloried, and I was pilloried because I was the messenger.
[Ari Shapiro:] What did that mean in specific terms?
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] I mean, Republican senators took to the floor and just trashed me, and sympathetic reporters to them trashed me. And every little iota of my life got exposed to the public, and I wasn't, after all, running or applying for anything. And in the end, I was subpoenaed to testify by a special prosecutor named by the Senate, and I refused to testify. And there was the possibility of my going to jail until finally, in a moment of unusual wisdom, the Senate decided not to cite me for contempt.
[Ari Shapiro:] When I was your intern 15 years ago, you told me a story about literally burning your telephone records in the fireplace.
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] It wasn't my telephone records. I burned my notes. The night that it was clear to me that it was going to be a legal preceding, I burned my notes.
[Ari Shapiro:] You said you would come into work every morning. Your voicemail box would be full, totally full.
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] Yeah. And I think my voicemail box at that time the number 36 sticks in my brain, that it would hold 36 voicemails. So when I would leave, there would be none, and when I would come in in the morning, it would be full, completely full people writing the kinds of things that they write in comments now that I never read because they're just would upset me too much.
[Ari Shapiro:] And as you say, Anita Hill was also viciously personally attacked. Clarence Thomas was viciously personally attacked. But I suppose the upshot of all this is how much the event changed the workplace. All over the United States today there are policies in place that exist in large part just because of this event.
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] Totally because of this. The number of sexual harassment claims doubled over the next year or so. Up until this point, most professional women in varying degrees had been sexually harassed. Some had been actually attacked, some simply profoundly embarrassed, whatever. But women didn't talk about this for a reason that may seem odd to the millenial generation. We were embarrassed to talk about it. So these hearings were, in some ways, a revelation to women across the country that they weren't the only ones. And it may have been the reason that they had to have the hearing because they couldn't sweep it under the rug. And the telephones were exploding, and the fax machines on Capitol Hill were vaporizing because in those days we didn't have email like we have today.
[Ari Shapiro:] [Laughter].
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] [Laughter] And it wasn't as easy to ignore. And they had have a second round of hearings to investigate this. Unfortunately they did it about four days, and so there was no hope of ever finding out what the truth was.
[Ari Shapiro:] When you started covering Washington in the 1970s, you were one of the very few women doing hard news reporting at the Supreme Court, the Capitol Hill, the White House. Do you think in some way that helped you get this story because of experiences and perspective you had that others might not have?
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] Well, I'm not sure of that, actually. I actually don't think that's true. I just think I saw a story. And when I started down this road, I wasn't really sure what it was all about. I just I saw that something odd was going on among the committee members at the time that they voted on the Thomas nomination in committee. And I just started shaking the trees, and suddenly big, fat fruit started falling out of it.
[Ari Shapiro:] In the form of an affidavit.
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] Yes well, no. The affidavit I had to really work very hard to get. When I first called Anita Hill, she wouldn't talk to me unless I had the affidavit. I think she thought I wouldn't get the affidavit, but of course, as we all know, I'm a very stubborn person, so I got the affidavit.
[Ari Shapiro:] [Laughter] As some of us know better than others. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg [LAUGHTER], thanks, as always.
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] Thanks, Ari.
[Ari Shapiro:] And in the NPR Politics Podcast, Nina gives her take on the HBO movie "Confirmation" plus many more details from 1991.

[Michel Martin:] Let's stick with this subject for a few more minutes in the Barbershop. That's where we invite interesting people to talk about what's on their minds. Joining us here in Washington, D.C., is Puneet Ahluwalia. He is active with the Republican Party in Northern Virginia, and he served on President Trump's Asian Pacific Advisory Committee. Puneet, thanks for coming in again.
[Puneet Ahluwalia:] Good to be back.
[Michel Martin:] Also with us, Jennifer Rubin. She's a columnist with The Washington Post and writes the conservative Right Turn blog. Jennifer, thank you so much for coming by once again.
[Jennifer Rubin:] Nice to be here.
[Michel Martin:] And, last but not least, Corey Ealons. He served in the Obama administration as director of specialty media. Welcome back to you, as well.
[Corey Ealons:] Good to be here, as always.
[Michel Martin:] So we were just talking about that race in Pennsylvania's 18th congressional district, but let's set the table and bring in the Texas primaries earlier in the week, where Democrats managed to double their turnout in Texas compared to the 2014 primaries. Jennifer, I'm going to start with you on this 'cause you wrote earlier this week that it seems as though Democrats have the chance to pick up plenty of House seats and even make safe GOP Senate incumbents sweat. Now, normally the party that holds the White House loses seats in the midterm. But I take it you think this is even a different animal. Why is that?
[Jennifer Rubin:] Well, I think everything is sort of breaking the Democrats' way. They have a president in the White House, Republicans have a president in the White House, is very unpopular right now. You have some mass movements that are playing to the strengths of Democrats women's, gun safety, the dreamers issue. And I think you have a sense among Democrats that they've gotten not only their people riled up, but that there are a lot of Republicans, independents, who are really having second, third and fourth thoughts about this president, and that they would like Congress, a Congress there to check this executive. So I think those factors, combined with a very good recruitment year for Democrats they were able to field candidates in almost every race, which they don't always do, and raise a lot of money. They are going to do very well, and I think the question is how well will they do.
[Michel Martin:] Corey, are you feeling the wind beneath your wings as a Democrat?
[Corey Ealons:] I am always cautiously optimistic when it comes to these things.
[Michel Martin:] But here's the thing. In some of these races, there are actually too many Democrats running. I mean, some of these races are very crowded, and some people are thinking that people, you know, the party's kind of cannibalizing itself. And other people are worried a little bit about, you know, I don't know if damaging is the right word, but, these kind of intense primary fights where people are trying to sort out their ideological differences.
[Corey Ealons:] I think ultimately the primary process gives us a chance to find and identify the best candidate to win. And that's what it's all about ultimately. We're talking about Pennsylvania 20, we're talking about Texas. The Texas piece is interesting because the last time we saw this level of turnout from Democrats in Texas was back in 2002. It was right after 911. And that was about patriotism, right? That level of participation. Democrats ultimately went on to lose all the statewide races that year. The thing that's different this time around, though, is that you've seen exactly what Democrats have been betting on for the past 15 years, which is this tremendous growth in black and brown people being born in that state and now registering to vote. And as a result of that, that plus the turnout that we've seen in Texas this week is really what gives Democrats a lot of excitement about the fact that we will do well not just there, and the wave that everybody has been talking about could potentially be a tsunami.
[Michel Martin:] What about you, Puneet? Are you sweating?
[Puneet Ahluwalia:] We always work hard and make sure everybody get out to vote and we win every election possible. And I feel that we have, as Republicans, have a lot to show what President Trump has done in the last one year, especially the tax incentive which has put money in people's pocket. In the end, it's the economy. And people feel happy in that they can take care of the family.
[Michel Martin:] Well, what about this argument here looking back again at the Pennsylvania race? There's an argument that Rick Saccone was basically, you know, he's saying that he's going to be Trump's wingman. And people are saying that's just the wrong strategy in the current environment. And you contrast that with a guy who's a former Marine, prosecutor, charismatic, you know, dynamic. And so people look at that and think running on Trump's coattails isn't going to cut it.
[Puneet Ahluwalia:] Well, I think Rick has his own record. He served the state almost 10 years. He's got a great record of 18 years being in the United States Air Force. So he has his own record, also. But people have to also see the win which President Trump has brought in regards to what he's doing in terms of steel and aluminum, getting the tariffs, bringing in jobs back, manufacturing, the bonuses people are getting. So there's a lot of things which he's taking on from President Trump and trying to make sure that people that Rick can take advantage of that.
[Michel Martin:] But, Jennifer, I have to ask you about this because other people were saying that these tariffs now, obviously, we've been talking about this for days now. And we've been presenting all different sides of this argument so I just want to be clear not just on this program but on others. But one of the reasons that a number of economists and a lot of Republicans are opposed to these tariffs is they say this this is a tax on consumers. This is going to raise consumer prices, and it's going to basically wipe out the benefits any benefits that people got from tax reform. What's your take on that?
[Jennifer Rubin:] It's everything that Republicans used to be against. It's big government. It's government choosing winners and losers. It's a tax on consumers. And it is going to hurt growth. We have many more people employed in industries that use steel and aluminum than we do and people in industries that actually produce the steel and aluminum. And I think what you saw was a very rare moment when Republicans in Congress actually stood up on their hind legs and stood up to the president. We are now in the process of trying to see what exemptions and what exceptions can be worked out. But I think this was not a good moment, economically speaking, for the president or for the Republican Party or for the country. And the real question is whether whatever good has been accomplished by a strong economy coming into the Trump administration tax cut, other growth whether that's going to be undone to some degree if we wind up in a really full-scale trade war.
[Michel Martin:] Well, we'll find out in time for the November midterms. We're actually going to find out.
[Puneet Ahluwalia:] I see American jobs. That's what I look at, bottom line, is that...
[Michel Martin:] But whose jobs?
[Puneet Ahluwalia:] American jobs.
[Michel Martin:] But doing what? I mean, we've been talking to people well, anyway. You know what? It's going to sort itself out. We're going to keep talking about it because you know what? I have one other story I wanted to talk to you about. It's been all over the news, and it was not about the weather.
[Unidentified Journalist #1:] The two people who the president of the United States seems to fear the most are Vladimir Putin and Stormy Daniels.
[Unidentified Journalist #2:] Another twist in the Stormy Daniels saga.
[Unidentified Journalist #3:] It's time to take Stormy Daniels seriously.
[Michel Martin:] So they are talking about the actress who goes by Stormy Daniels. Her real name is Stephanie Clifford. She claims to have had an affair with President Trump. She says she was paid six figures to be quiet about it. She was in the news again because she's suing the president to try to avoid this nondisclosure agreement that she signed. And there was also this information that the president's lawyer says he actually paid this fee himself. I've yet to hear a lawyer say that he's ever done this for anyone ever. Maybe a fruit basket at Christmas to say thank you for your business, but a six-figure payment? Never heard of that. But beyond that, I just want to know, what's the what here? And, Jennifer, you seem to think this is a big deal. You said this could be a calamity. Why?
[Jennifer Rubin:] I think the question is how many Stormys are out there, and do they all have nondisclosure agreements? This in a very classic national security sense it's an opportunity for blackmail. If there are people out there who know bad things about the president and have had to have been shushed, do those people then have leverage over him? Now, Stormy Daniels probably doesn't want anything from the federal government. She probably wants her moment of fame, and she's certainly getting that. But who else has such information? Do the Russians have sensitive information? Are there other individuals in the country who have such information? And frankly, the American people elected a big black box because we really don't know what's out there and what's in there. And just as a side note it shows you how bad things are when this is a side note if, in fact, Michael Cohen made that payment really by himself, that's an illegal campaign donation. And if Trump actually made it, it was an unreported campaign donation. So there's a little bit of campaign funniness that's going on there that's going to have to be looked at.
[Michel Martin:] Corey, what about you? Is there any there there as far as you're concerned?
[Corey Ealons:] There's absolutely some there there. And Jennifer is exactly right. This is a very serious issue. The one thing we learned this week for sure though is that Stormy Daniels has better lawyers than Donald Trump. And that's really amazing when you think about that.
[Michel Martin:] And why do you say that?
[Corey Ealons:] I say that because the president is now in the perilous position of potentially having to testify and give a deposition on this issue because of the case that's being brought by her lawyers. This is not something that they had to do. They are perfectly at their disposal to say, you know what? Go ahead and talk. It's totally fine. But because of Trump's demeanor, they're going to fight this all the way. And that's a real challenge. A couple of other really quick points here. The thing that's chasing Trump in this particular situation is the same thing that's chasing him in the Mueller situation, which is the old questio what did he know and when did he know it? And that comes down to, did he know the payment was made by Michael Cohen? Did he sign off on that? That same question is going to continue to dog him on this. And then the final point, we know that Trump likes to scream to the rafters about how there is no collusion, no collusion. He has been mysteriously and conspicuously quiet on this issue. It's the rare case in which he is actually taking his counsel's advice.
[Michel Martin:] As I just said because I'm thinking for the people who dislike the president for all the reasons they dislike the president, I can't see that this would change their opinion. I think the real question is for people who have supported him. And so, Puneet, I'm going to give you the last word on this as the Trump supporter here.
[Puneet Ahluwalia:] It's another witch hunt on President Trump.
[Michel Martin:] Witch hunt by whom?
[Puneet Ahluwalia:] By the left and the media. And the focus here should be...
[Michel Martin:] She's not in the media, last I checked. I don't I haven't seen her at any journalistic meetings.
[Puneet Ahluwalia:] But again, but still, the focus here is to be keeping the country safe, creating jobs and basically making sure of that.
[Michel Martin:] Do you think this is true or not true? I guess do you care is the question.
[Puneet Ahluwalia:] Again, at the same time, I do care about my country. At the same time, I do care about the values and the moral values which are important. And President Trump has done what he promised on the campaign trail, and that's what we should focus on rather than getting and look at what she wants. You think somebody is a billionaire and she will settle for $130,000? That's kind of unimaginable to think about. And somebody will do this deal, and she'll take the deal. So it's again another...
[Michel Martin:] But the president's lawyer's is acknowledging that he did pay the money. The question is, does that matter?
[Puneet Ahluwalia:] Again, as you said earlier, there will be facts steadily coming out. The story will take its own thing. But at the same time, it's another juicy tidbit for a lot of people to eat up on. In the meantime, let's focus on important issues which cure the American people. That's what I look at.
[Michel Martin:] That's Puneet Ahluwalia. He is a lobbyist. He works with the Republican Party in Northern Virginia. Corey Ealons, a former communications staffer staffer with the Obama administration, now with VOX Global. And Jennifer Rubin, she writes the conservative Right Turn blog for The Washington Post. Thank you all so much for being here with us.
[Corey Ealons:] Thank you.
[Jennifer Rubin:] Thank you.
[Puneet Ahluwalia:] Thank you, Michel.

[Neal Conan:] After a few more days of escalating hoopla, the Super Bowl between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots kicks off on Sunday evening, but whether you've got a small financial interest in the game or if you're just waiting for the ads, there are stories on the field in Indianapolis the Brady legacy, salsa dancer Victor Cruz, hometown boy Mathias Kiwanuka, and of course the medical epic of the high-ankle sprain. What story will you follow in Super Bowl XLVI?
[Our Phone Number:] 800-989-8255. Email: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation at our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. NPR correspondent Mike Pesca joins us now from member station WFYI in super city. Mike, nice to have you back.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Hello.
[Neal Conan:] And my friends in Boston tell me there is only one story, and that is revenge.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Revenge, yes, because the Giants had that amazing victory after the 2007 season, the 2008 Super Bowl, which ruined the Patriots' perfect season Eli Manning escaping the clutches of the Patriots blitz late, throwing it up in the air, a catch off a receiver's helmet and the rest, including a Plaxico Burress touchdown, is history. The Patriots, revenge? I mean, has any team been more successful in the last decade? If that's what it takes to get you going, so be it.
[Neal Conan:] It is odd, however, the Patriots, 12-point favorites in that game back four years ago, but even in this game installed as the favorites. They had a much better regular season than the New York Giants, but favored just by three points. And almost everybody says, wait a minute, the Giants are going to win this.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Yeah. People there really is a bandwagon at least two out of every three, maybe three out of every four people who I talked to are making the case to me that the Giants are better and momentum is what matters. And they say things like, well, you know, you've got to realize the Giants have won five straight. Wow, that really is impressive. I'm sure the Patriots, who've won 10 straight, are certainly quite impressed with the half as long winning streak that the Giants have put together. I think the reason why, it would seem that a team who has won four more games in the regular season than the other should be much a much bigger favorite. People look at the personnel the teams that they have now, and the Giants were every team suffers injuries, but the Giants have gotten their defense rather healthy. And when their defensive line is as healthy as it is, which includes Mathias Kiwanuka and Jason Pierre-Paul and Justin Tuck, they really can pressure the quarterback. The reason they won in 2008 was that they sacked Brady five times. Another, they're different teams. There are different circumstances. It's not going to be a replay of the 2008 game, but there are some fundamental truths in football. And even if Brady is this great field general and even if he knows how to handle the blitz, if you constantly put pressure on any quarterback, it's going to derail an offense as awesome as the Patriots was and the Patriots is.
[Neal Conan:] And these are the two most generous defenses ever to appear in a Super Bowl, which almost guarantees the game is going to be, what, nine to six.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Yeah, right. It will all be decided by a safety and a drop kick. I think that the generosity of the defense is the amount of yards, the number of yards allowed. It's a rubric that people want to get away from, because these days a turnover seems to matter much more than the number of yards that you give up. And a team can give up tons of yards heck, the Patriots did and still be fairly OK in what would seem to be the much bigger deal, which is giving up points. The Patriots were terrible in yardage, but they were 15th in giving up points, and that's not that bad. And like the Giants, they are a little healthier too. They have Brandon Spikes, who's a very good defender, Patrick Chung. Those are a couple of their defenders who were hurt during the year. They'll play in the Super Bowl. But their secondary, the guys who have to defend the awesome receivers of the Giants, is a really weak secondary. And when you have Julian Edelman, a guy who was a quarterback in college, converted to a receiver in the pros, and Bill Belichick, the Patriots' coach, said, you know, we're so hurting in secondary, Julian, go play defense on a few plays, you're admitting that you're very vulnerable to the pass attack of any team, let alone the Giants.
[Neal Conan:] And that pass attack led by the most unlikely of stars, and that is Victor Cruz, who grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, almost in the shadows of the old Meadowlands Stadium, went to that football factory Massachusetts, and then was not drafted by anybody.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Yeah. And he, by the way, while growing up in the Meadowlands, did he root for the Jets and the Giants? No, Cowboys fan.
[Neal Conan:] Cowboys fan, yeah.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Yeah, yeah.
[Neal Conan:] Traitor.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] But he he's great. Hakeem Nicks, another wide receiver for the Giants, really great. And it is kind of funny. The Giants, you know, Amani Toomer was a great receiver for them. Plaxico Burress was a great receiver. How come they keep having all these different great receivers over the last decade? Maybe it has something to do with the guy throwing the ball. And this year, we all, as football fans, finally realized that Eli Manning is a good-to-great quarterback. And you can debate how good is he, is he great, is he and I'll be doing a story on this the idea of elitism, which on the campaign trail, you can't endorse. Very bad.
[Neal Conan:] When you're in NFL.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Yes. In the NFL, you want to be called an elite quarterback. Bottom line, it doesn't matter. You could say there's two, three or four quarterbacks better than Eli, but there is no question that Eli Manning can win a Super Bowl, has won a Super Bowl, and is a very real danger, if you're a Patriots fan, to win the Super Bowl again.
[Neal Conan:] Mike Pesca with us, from Indianapolis. So what's story are you going to be following in the Super Bowl? Give us a call: 800-989-8255. Email: talk@npr.org. And we'll start with Rich, and Rich on the line with us from Prescott in Arizona.
[Rich:] Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I'll be following the Manning brothers' storyline, being that this is going to be Eli's second shot at a Super Bowl championship and, hopefully, his second victory. And then he'll have one over his brother, Peyton, who will probably be watching the game in his hometown of Indianapolis.
[Neal Conan:] Well, his hometown is New Orleans, but he plays for the Indianapolis Colts except maybe not next year, Mike.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Yeah. And he didn't play for them this year because he was out at all year with a neck injury. And everything that Jim Irsay, the owner of the Colts, has to do is decide on that which is unknowable, which is what will Eli I'm sorry what will Peyton Manning's health be? And he has a $28 million bonus, and I think $7 million in salary. So we're talking about not just a huge chunk of change out of Mr. Irsay's very deep pockets, but with the NFL salary cap situation, if you make a mistake and you commit all that money to a player who's unhealthy, as Irsay himself says, then maybe it could be the case that the Colts' fans who are now clamoring for Peyton's return might say, you, idiot, Mr. Irsay. You soaked this money into a hurt player. Irsay's in a tough, tough situation. He genuinely loves well, I don't know if he loves Peyton Manning as a person. I think he does. He professes as much. He definitely loves having that guy as his quarterback because he is spectacular. I don't know if he can sign Peyton Manning again. Reading through his comments he's given a number of interviews it would seem hard that he has enough information for him to commit 30-plus million dollars to an injured neck and an injured player like that.
[Neal Conan:] Especially when, through their incompetence, the Colts have the number-one pick in the draft next year. And there's a quarterback from Stanford with the felicitous name of Andrew Luck lying out there, who everybody says is going to be, well, the next Peyton Manning. So they may be rebuilding. Mike Rich, thanks very much for the call. Appreciate it.
[Rich:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Let's see if we can go next to this is Reese, and Reese with us from Laramie in Wyoming.
[Reese:] Thanks for taking my call, Neal. I appreciate it. I'm actually following a tale of two taverns, Foley's Pub and McGreevy's bar in New York City and Boston, respectively. They've taken up a bet because Foley's Pub said they wouldn't serve Sam Adams during the Super Bowl. The loser is going to donate the earnings from all the shepherd's pies sold from the Super Bowl to opening day in baseball. And the loser will have to tend bar at the winner's establishment in the winner's jersey.
[Neal Conan:] So this is back to the vengeance. Well, it's back to the New York-Boston rivalry and, Mike Pesca, this certainly supersedes even the Super Bowl.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] This is this reminds me of the high jinks that those guys at Cheers and Gary's Olde Towne Tavern used to pull on each other. But so Sam Adams is off tap. What about Brooklyn Lager? What New York beer is getting punished up there in Boston?
[Reese:] Yeah. See, that's the problem. There is no real good counterpunch or anything like that. So...
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Right, right, right.
[Reese:] ...you know what? Put your money where your mouth is.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] There's no quid pro suds, so they have to go with the shepherd's pie. I get it.
[Neal Conan:] Reese, thanks very much for the call.
[Reese:] Thanks, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] Here's an email from Robin: I will be following Jean Pierre-Paul. He is a machine. As the saying goes, defense, wins championships. So this, of course, the defensive end, I guess.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Yeah.
[Neal Conan:] He rotates to various positions, but the defensive and from Haiti, originally.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Right, Jason Pierre-Paul. He can do, I think, 17 back flips in a row. He's an amazing specimen of physicality. When he played in college he only played a year of college at USF South Florida, and so people said, well, he looks pretty good. He has these very long arms, but I don't know how high we should take this guy. He seems like he's going to be a great defensive end. Because he doesn't have enough college experience, a few teams passed on him. The Giants took him, and especially maybe he wouldn't have flourished with some other teams. But playing with the other guys on the line, Pierre-Paul is an exciting athletic defender. He seems to block, bat down about three passes a game. And that general notion about defense winning championships, I think that's out the window. I really think it's a cliche. But this was supposed to be the year where it got stood on its head and laughed at like never before, where the Packers and the Patriots were on this destination to play each other with the worst defenses in the NFL. And I think the post-season showed that for different reasons and I will be exploring this in a story coming up this week for several reasons...
[Neal Conan:] A forthcoming story, ding, ding, ding, coming up later.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Right. Maybe not today, but stay tuned to your local check your local time and channel. But I'm going to be exploring the idea that defense seemed to kick in a bit more in the playoffs, and maybe we cannot totally throw the idea out that we could win, despite defense. Even though the Patriots and the Giants didn't have good defenses during the year, they certainly showed moments of very good defense. And without those moments, they wouldn't be in this game.
[Neal Conan:] Mike Pesca, NPR national correspondent, with us from the site of the Super Bowl in Indianapolis. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News. Stephanie in Arlington, Massachusetts, writes: I'll be following the Gronk story. Will Rob Gronkowski play with that upper ankle sprain? And I have seen otherwise, I'm sure perfectly sane physicians quoted in the newspapers saying, well, I saw that young man's terrible injury on TV. I don't think he'll be able to play next year, either.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Right. I don't know what it is about getting called by a football reporter that makes a physician totally ignore the Hippocratic Oath, but yes. Although I haven't seen an MRI or an X-ray, not only will I diagnose him, I am going to give him I'm going to prescribe some pills that, if he wants to call me, he can take. The Gronkowski injury is the only actual news. You know, what is new? The health of his ankle is new, and we've gone through a few injuries in the past Super Bowls. They get magnified like you wouldn't believe. Pouncey, the center on the Steelers, that was an injury where he couldn't play. A couple of years ago, Dwight Freeney, the pass rusher on the Colts, also was suffering a ligament injury. I think that's probably the more instructive case, because Freeney did play, and I'd be shock if Gronkowski didn't play at all. First of all, after he got hurt against the Ravens, he did show up and play a few more plays at that game. Now, you have adrenaline, and that just because you can play on the day you got hurt doesn't mean you'll be able to play two weeks from now. But he's very important to the offense. He's very motivated to play. He's walking without a boot. You saw him do some light jogging. I'd be shock if he didn't play. The question is: How good will he be? Dwight Freeney got sack in the first half of his Super Bowl. But by the second half, it really tightened up, and we could see something like that. Gronkowski is so important to the Patriots' offense. He had the greatest season a tight end has ever had. He averaged more than a touchdown catch a game. But that could be good or bad. Obviously, the Patriots want him. And I've seen statistical models that show without Gronkowski, they are much, much less likely to win. They will be putting up fewer yards. However, if you're the Giants, you might go into the game planning for Gronkowski to be a focus of the offense. And if he's not, then you have to adjust your game plan. Turns out, the Giants' Tom Coughlin, the coach of Giants, perhaps his greatest strength is the ability to adjust his game plan. So all of that plays into the chess and psychology of this game, as well.
[Neal Conan:] Let's go next to Gayle, Gayle with us from South Hampton in New York.
[Gayle:] Hi. The story I'll be following is Mark Herzlich.
[Neal Conan:] Ah, the young man who survived cancer, was told he would not be able to walk, and then not only walk off the plane, but is going to play in the Super Bowl.
[Gayle:] Absolutely. Dreams come true.
[Neal Conan:] Dreams come true. And that's another aspect of this game. Yes, Mark Herzlich, who plays a young player for the Giants. But there's also we mentioned Mathias Kiwanuka, who grew up in Indianapolis, went to high school, I think, just about 10 miles away from the stadium...
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Yep, Cathedral High School, yeah.
[Neal Conan:] ...but whose father comes from Uganda and was a victim of Idi Amin.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Yeah. His grandfather was the first president of Uganda, actually. And the weirdest thing of all is that, in last year's Super Bowl, the defensive player on the NFC team, Charles Peprah, his grandfather was once the head of state of Ghana so, two consecutive Super Bowls where the grandson of an African head of state is playing. Kiwanuka, to honor his father, is has a big back tattoo of the seal of Uganda. And if you've never seen the seal of Uganda, it is quite detailed. There is a crane on the right. There is a shield in the middle, and there is a Kob which is a kind of gazelle on the left. So I haven't actually seen the tattoo. I just I'm desperate for him to show it to me. Perhaps in a victorious mood in the locker room, I could get a glimpse of the seal of Uganda on his back.
[Neal Conan:] Dave from Portland writes: I enjoy the Super Bowl because the golf course is empty, and that is a rarity on any Sunday in this country. So there are other opportunities. And this from Guillaume, who writes: I'll be following the infamous commercials. There will be those, Mike, who wait for the players to go away so they can watch, what, Matthew Broderick recreate Ferris Bueller.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Yes. I hear the NFL itself has hired someone to act as Gale Sayers to emphasize player safety. What are they getting, three-and-a-half million dollars per spot? And one of the reasons is not only are a lot of people watching, people are paying attention to the commercials although I think, from my professional perspective as a sports commentator, I could say: Aren't we a little over the talking-and-dancing animals? I think that that has lost it appeal. I would zig where everyone else is zagging, and I would use, perhaps, real animals doing animal things to sell my product. Of course, for three-and-a-half million dollars, you might want the cute factor of the talking polar bear, chimp, et cetera.
[Neal Conan:] Which story will obviously, it'll be a player who plays a critical role in the game. And there's always the David Tyree factor, as we referred to earlier, the player who made the miraculous catch against the helmet, whose ghost the Patriots will try to exercise on Sunday. But will there be one story that you would like to be able to report on Monday morning?
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] I think that Victor Cruz, as you said, will probably have a good game. And the fact that this guy was undrafted and has brought salsa moves to the NFL really is just phenomenal. And whoever wins, it's always a referendum on the greatness of the quarterback, but it'll be it's a descent bar debate. You would debate, hey, is Eli really better than Peyton? I don't think so.
[Neal Conan:] No.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] But if Brady wins, you have that debate. Maybe Belichick really is the greatest coach in NFL history. Maybe Brady really is the greatest quarterback.
[Neal Conan:] Mike Pesca, national correspondent with NPR, with us today from WFYI. Mike, enjoy the game.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] I will, and you're welcome.
[Neal Conan:] Tomorrow, it's TALK OF THE NATION: SCIENCE FRIDAY. Join them for the psychology of disgust: why we're grossed up by stinky feet, but not by stinky cheese. We'll see you again on Monday, when the game's going to be decided by then. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News.

[Robert Siegel:] Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is another part of Asia, central Asia. She's getting assurances that the US will have access to military bases in that region. The issue has been a sensitive one ever since Uzbekistan ordered US troops out of a base that's been used in operations in Afghanistan. NPR's Michele Kelemen is traveling with the secretary.
[Michele Kelemen Reporting:] Secretary of State Rice started her tour of central Asia at the Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan. It's been an important logistical base for the US-led war in Afghanistan, and Rice wanted to make sure the US continues to have access to it. She won a pledge from Kyrgyzstan's new president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, that the US can stay as long as military operations in Afghanistan continue. Speaking through an interpreter, Bakiyev said Kyrgyzstan and the US would decide the future of the base together.
[President Kurmanbek Bakiyev:] [Through Translator] That is the term of presence is directly tailored to the improvement of the situation in Afghanistan.
[Kelemen:] Kyrgyzstan has been under pressure from others in the neighborhood, including China and Russia, to give the US a timetable to leave. The US officials say they were pleased to get Kyrgyzstan's commitment in writing. In return, US officials say they will review how the payments are made. Some here have alleged that much of the money went to the son of Kyrgyzstan's ousted president, Askar Akayev. The ouster of Akayev six months ago, the so-called Tulip Revolution, was also a key topic during the secretary's one-day stay. Secretary Rice reached out to democracy activists and members of a constitutional reform council, even trying out a bit of her Russian.
[Secretary Condoleezza Rice:] [Russian spoken]
[Kelemen:] Apologizing that her Russian was rusty, she switched to English to make her case for democratic change in the former Soviet republic. She hailed the recent presidential vote as the most free and fair elections in the region's history.
[Secretary Condoleezza Rice:] I came here to Kyrgyzstan so that you might know that you will have a steady friend in the United States who believes, too, in democratic values and that as those democratic values take root here in Kyrgyzstan, relations between the United States and Kyrgyzstan will only grow.
[Kelemen:] Even among the handpicked crowd listening to Rice, many had their doubts about where the country's democratic revolution is heading. Some described it as a mere coup. And Balat Bakijoyev, a businessman and member of the constitutional council, said he's having trouble seeing much of a difference in leadership styles between the ousted leader and the newly elected Bakiyev.
[Mr. Balat Bakijoyev:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Kelemen:] `Today I don't see any big difference,'he says, `though I hoped there would be.'An earnest young democratic activist, Edil Baisalov, though, said he's not ready to give up on the Tulip Revolution or the new president. Baisalov heads the Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society and was pleased to hear Secretary Rice push for constitutional reforms that would weaken the presidency.
[Mr. Edil Baisalov:] We know that power corrupts, right? And we have this absolute power here that can corrupt anybody. But we need to build such a system where there is not one person who, you know, wields the democracy. Democracy takes people.
[Kelemen:] Kyrgyzstan, he says, is in a difficult neighborhood and needs US support. Rice plans to push her democracy agenda in other former Soviet republics, in Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, but first she plans to visit Afghanistan and possibly Pakistan in the wake of last weekend's devastating earthquake. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. ROBERT SIEGEL, host From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
[Michele Norris:] And I'm Michele Norris with the story of a major record label as it faces a fast-changing music business. After being absorbed by a giant media conglomerate and spun off again, Warner Bros. is now the third-largest record label. And as NPR's Neda Ulaby reports, it's looking at the digital domain as a key to its future.
[Michele Kelemen Reporting:] A band called The Sun has just released its debut album entirely on DVD.
[Ulaby:] "Blame It on the Youth" is comprised of 14 music videos. You can't buy it on CD. Warner Music expects you to play it on your computer.
[The Sun:] [Singing] I stopped to think about the bad times that I've had. But the smile on my face... [unintelligible].
[Ulaby:] The band was signed three years ago. The musicians became frustrated by how long it was taking for their album to come out, so they amused themselves by making videos with a friend in their hometown of Columbus, Ohio. Warner was impressed by how many they produced on a small budget, so the band proposed making one for each song.
[Mr. Sam Brown:] And they decided that they thought it was a good idea and they found more money for us to finish up the videos so we could get them done in time for this fall release.
[Ulaby:] Sam Brown is The Sun's drummer. He also writes some of the band's songs.
[Mr. Sam Brown:] Being on a major label you have access to, you know, a little bit more money than you would if you were just making videos on your own. So it definitely made it possible for us to, you know, make 14 videos.
[Ulaby:] Brown says those 14 videos cost about $50,000. That's a fraction of what it might take to make one video for a star. The Sun's DVD was a cheap experiment for Warner Music at a time when the company is trying to reinvent itself. The label began in the late 1950s as a way for a major Hollywood studio to showcase the musical aspirations of stars like Tab Hunter.
[Mr. Tab Hunter:] [Singing] Jealous heart, oh, jealous heart, stop beating.
[Ulaby:] It took a while for Warner Bros. Records to hit its stride, but by the 1970s Warner had built a reputation as the most artist-friendly of the big labels, and its roster ranged from Frank Zappa and Jimi Hendrix to James Taylor and Fleetwood Mac.
[Fleetwood Mac:] [Singing] All your life you've never seen a woman taken by the wind.
[Ulaby:] By the 1980s Warner had absorbed such well-respected labels as Atlantic, Elektra, Asylum and Sire. Its artists included R.E.M., Madonna and Prince. Warner executives Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker were among the most powerful in the business. Then Warner Communications merged with Time Incorporated in 1989, which merged again about a decade later with AOL. A wave of consolidation overtook the music industry. After the dust settled, two labels, Universal and Sony BMG, controlled the majority of domestic music sales. So last year AOL Time Warner spun off its once vaunted music division.
[Mr. Aram Sinnreich:] They were basically dead weight inside of the Time Warner corporate edifice.
[Ulaby:] Aram Sinnreich co-founded Radar Research, a firm that analyzes media and technology. He says Warner's new owners, a group of investors led by Seagram's heir Edgar Bronfman Jr., faced a challenge.
[Mr. Aram Sinnreich:] He's a young guy with new ideas and a big ego and wants to run a record label, and that's part of what motivated him, but actually does care about music as a product, even though he comes from a liquor background, gets together his friends and buys the label off of this fat-cat corporate entity. They slice costs. They fire a bunch of people. They fire a bunch of artists, terminate their contract, cut it down to like just bare nothing, start to stabilize the blood flow. And then they announce all these digital initiatives and are really trying to kind of reinvent what a record label is. I mean, that's the arc of the music industry right there in that story.
[Ulaby:] Warner Music made a public stock offering last spring and paid off its investors. This upset some of the label's artists. The band Linkin Park accused the company of putting money before music.
[Mr. Bishop Cheen:] That's to be expected.
[Ulaby:] Bishop Cheen is an analyst with Wachovia.
[Mr. Bishop Cheen:] Name an industry where there's not a lot of friction, where there's a lot of dollars.
[Ulaby:] And Warner Music is spending them in the digital domain. The company has announced a deal with MTV to put videos on cell phones. It's launched a wireless streaming music subscription service, and it recently named a top executive to handle digital legal affairs. Those are the choppy waters of copyright and proprietary technology that have caused the music industry to founder online. Warner Music also lured a legendary record executive out of retirement who bluntly questions the industry's approach to matters such as file sharing.
[Mr. Jac Holzman:] I understand that you don't want people stealing your music, but at the same time I think we could have recognized that the Internet was an important force and used it ethically and to great effect.
[Ulaby:] Jac Holzman founded Elektra Records in 1950 as an independent folk music label. He went on to launch the careers of Judy Collins and The Doors. Now at 74 years of age, he's launching a new online only e-label for Warner Music.
[Mr. Jac Holzman:] When I started to design the e-label, I tried to block out all of my past experience. But there were certain lessons from the past that became very clear to me: the frequency of interaction between an artist and their fan base by continual release of records, keeping the costs low, having a methodology of releasing that would let us use our medium to introduce our material to people.
[Ulaby:] Cordless Records won't feature big names from the Warner catalog.
[Jihad Jerry And The Evildoers:] [Singing] You're 35, two kids, [unintelligible] but I don't care.
[Ulaby:] Jihad Jerry and The Evildoers is fronted by a founding member of the band Devo. Cordless will concentrate on newer artists, releasing their music in what Holzman calls clusters of three songs. And when it comes to certain industry norms long despised by musicians, Holzman promises change.
[Mr. Jac Holzman:] The fundamentals of the Cordless agreement is that the total contract length if we exercise all of our options and if the clusters are delivered on time is 21 months. The artists own their masters and if they publish with WarnerChappell, they own their copyrights.
[Ulaby:] Another convention Cordless may challenge is the industry's wisdom on hits. Analyst Bishop Cheen.
[Mr. Bishop Cheen:] This is a business where you can leverage an entire label off of one hit.
[Ulaby:] But that's been less true so far with online music. Jac Holzman says he's not even thinking about hits.
[Mr. Jac Holzman:] There is no hit model. There's only good music, and if it catches on, maybe it becomes a hit. But I don't know what a hit is for an e-label. I don't know what those metrics mean yet. We will find out over time.
[Ulaby:] Warner Music's CEO, Edgar Bronfman Jr., told a recent conference the industry's paradigms are changing. Digital revenues now account for 6 percent of his company's business. And in the wake of several fights with artists over royalties, Bronfman hinted support for a new open standard for managing digital rights, one that foregoes royalties altogether. Neda Ulaby, NPR News.
[Robert Siegel:] You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.

[Renee Montagne:] California was one of the first states to institute term limits. Now it's on the leading edge of a new trend. In tomorrow's primary, three wives, one husband, and two brothers are running for a seat in the state assembly held by family members. From member station KPCC, Tamara Keith reports from Sacramento.
[Tamara Keith Reporting:] When termed-out Democratic assemblywoman Judy Chu went searching for a successor, she looked no further than the man she's been married to for 26 years.
[Ms. Judy Chu:] I really could not think of anybody who would be more qualified for that seat.
[Keith:] Now, she admits she may be a little biased, but Chu insists that her husband, Mike Eng, a city councilman and attorney, stands on his own as a strong candidate for the state legislature. But when spouses or siblings run for a relative's seat, they enjoy certain benefits, almost like the benefits of incumbency connections in the community and with campaign donors, and the most priceless political asset of all: name recognition. The unstated campaign message? If you liked the assembly member, then you'll love his wife, or her husband, or brother. But Mike Eng, who does not share a last name with his assemblywoman wife, has had to work harder to get his name out there.
[Mr. Mike Eng:] What I like to tell people is get to know Mike Eng, and you'll find that Mike Eng is a different person from Judy Chu. And if you think that Mike Eng is a worthy successor to Judy Chu, then vote for Mike Eng because of Mike Eng, not because Mike Eng happens to be married to Judy Chu.
[Keith:] On Tuesday's ballot, voters in California will likely recognize the surnames of Dianne Harman, Renee Chavez, and Laura Canciamilla. Those three are all running for their husband's assembly seats. Dianne's husband Tom is running for a seat in the state's senate. And if the Harmans both win, they'll become the second bicameral couple in Sacramento. The first are a pair of petite blond Republicans who can often be seen visiting each other during floor sessions.
[State Representative Sharon Runner:] Sharon Runner, a State Assemblywoman in the 36th District. And I'm Senator George Runner, from the 17th District.
[Keith:] Sharon and George Runner met in high school. They have two kids, and years ago opened a large religious school together in the high desert. When George was about to be forced out of the state assembly by term limits in 2002, Sharon Runner ran for and won his seat. But she says a good last name isn't a guarantee. State Rep. RUNNER: You really have to work hard and know your community and your constituency. So it's not a given. It's not just because you have the same last name, doesn't mean you're going to win. Of course, spouses ending up in each others' political offices is nothing new. But, says George Runner, before term limits, it used to happen as the result of an untimely tragedy.
[State Representative Sharon Runner:] In the past, what would happen is a person would run, they'd get elected, and then often, you know, there might be a death of that spouse while they're in the office, and it would be very typical for the spouse then to run for that seat and get elected. We've got lots of examples of that. So, I guess in one sense, you get death by term limits, so it's really a natural extension of that.
[Keith:] Well, not so natural, says Jack Pitney, a professor of politics and government at Claremont McKenna College.
[Professor Jack Pitney:] The creators of term limits were also supporters of family values, but this isn't necessarily the version of family values they were thinking of in the context of term limits.
[Keith:] Pitney says the phenomenon of family succession was not part of the equation when California voters approved term limits in 1990.
[Professor Jack Pitney:] If you're really intent on injecting new blood into the system, it really runs counter to the spirit of term limits. I think people were looking to reach outside the legislative family, so to speak, but instead, it is a case where term limits are all in the family.
[Keith:] But this trend may not be all bad. Many government watchers argue that California's strict term limits have diluted the institutional memory and experience of the state's legislature. Pitney says having relatives take each others' seats creates a kind of continuity that simply isn't permissible under the rules of term limits. For NPR News, I'm Tamara Keith, in Sacramento.

[Scott Simon:] A big political weekend in presidential politics, and it began Thursday night with the sixth Republican debate. On Sunday, it will be the three Democrats who are running for president. Yes, there are three. NPR's senior Washington editor and correspondent Ron Elving joins us. Ron, thanks for being with us.
[Ron Elving, Byline:] Good to be with you, Scott.
[Scott Simon:] So who came out of that debate looking strong as we look ahead to Iowa?
[Ron Elving, Byline:] Two people in particular, Trump and Cruz, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Trump is no longer the dominating personality that he was, but he's still the name leading in national polls and in most of the early states. Cruz, though, is the central figure in this particular debate if only because he was the object of most of the attacks from the other candidates. And he is masterful at slipping the punch, changing the subject, turning the criticism back onto others.
[Scott Simon:] What about all the time he had to spend, though, going back and forth about whether he's even eligible to run for president?
[Ron Elving, Byline:] Certainly not helpful. It's a big distraction, a speed bump, if you will, for his campaign. But his footwork, even on this, is remarkable, also on that story in The New York Times about his taking loans from a couple of big Wall Street banks to finance his Senate campaign and then portraying it somewhat differently in popular press. He's pretty good at making all that sort of seem not that important, and it doesn't seem to be bothering his followers.
[Scott Simon:] However, did Ted Cruz, an acclaimed debater, open the door for Donald Trump to have his best moment when Senator Cruz seemed to take a swipe at New York City?
[Ron Elving, Byline:] The moderators asked about this idea of New York values, which Ted Cruz has been using to identify himself with people in places like Iowa and New Hampshire where New York City may not be that popular. And he refined that to say not a lot of conservatives come out of Manhattan in this particular debate. But as you say, Donald Trump then came to the defense of New York. It was an uncharacteristic moment for Trump. It was clearly not planned or rehearsed. You could see his face show the thoughts coming into his mind. And he got almost emotional talking about how New Yorkers responded after 911, how they suffered, the smell of death in the air. And it was moving, and that's not what we always expect from Donald Trump and quite sincere.
[Scott Simon:] Yeah, I also thought all Senator Cruz could do was just kind of nod his head.
[Ron Elving, Byline:] A rare moment of silence from Ted Cruz.
[Scott Simon:] Who else do you think scored well?
[Ron Elving, Byline:] Marco Rubio always does well in these debates. It's as though this is really the focal point of his campaign. He always has prepared things to say that he gets off very spontaneously, a flurry of attacks on Ted Cruz, a flurry of attacks on Chris Christie, who did the best he could to cope with those and was certainly also a strong figure on the debate stage. Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Ben Carson, you know, they were there but they're far behind and they're fading fast.
[Scott Simon:] It seems like conservatives are on the rise in the Republican Party from one end to the other.
[Ron Elving, Byline:] You know, Scott, this week, a watershed poll in The Wall Street Journal with NBC News, it shows that if you narrow the field of Republican candidates to just the top few, Trump and Cruz together have 70 percent of the vote. So look, when the primaries are this dominated by the kind of voters we saw in the midterms of 2010 and 2014, you're going to get a conservative nominee. And we'll be looking for a vice presidential running mate who would balance the ticket a little bit to the left. You know, if you have to go all the way back to Ronald Reagan in 1980 to find that situation, usually the Republicans are looking for someone who would please or at least appease their right wing when it comes to a running mate. But this year, it's going to be going back the other way. The shoe is on the other foot.
[Scott Simon:] In your estimation, is the birthplace issue serious?
[Ron Elving, Byline:] These are muddy waters. It's just not like the Obama birther issue. That was a question of biography. Was he born in Hawaii or not? Get the birth certificate out there, the whole business kind of came to a halt. This is different because we're talking about different legal interpretations of what the Constitution meant by natural born citizen. So the lawsuits are already beginning to be filed.
[Scott Simon:] Yeah, and is there a new level of intensity on the Democratic side?
[Ron Elving, Byline:] There is indeed. Bernie Sanders is close in Iowa and he's leading in New Hampshire. Not so much because his numbers have come way up but because Hillary Clinton's numbers have come down. It's much like eight years ago when she was far ahead, but then Barack Obama crept up behind her and overtook her. This time, her numbers have actually come down even more precipitously in this last month before we get close to Iowa and New Hampshire.
[Scott Simon:] NPR's Ron Elving, thanks so much.
[Ron Elving, Byline:] Thank you, Scott.

[Alex Chadwick:] The avian flu virus has claimed another victim. Authorities in Thailand say a 48-year-old man became the 67th person known to be killed by the virus. And it's no longer confined to Southeast Asia. Yesterday Russia announced the flu virus has just been found 123 miles south of Moscow in birds there. Politicians and pandemic experts across the world are now worried about handling not only the virus, but the fear and panic that might follow the outbreak of a pandemic. Ira Flatow, host of NPR's "Science Friday" and regular Thursday contributor to DAY TO DAY, joins us. Ira, a Spanish official is quoted on a Spanish radio station as saying that the threat of the pandemic has been overblown, calls it, quote, "science fiction," implying that we're being driven by fear rather than rationality. Is fear driving this crisis?
[Ira Flatow:] Well, it is true so far that no pandemic has broken out. There are no real cases of flu actually being spread from people to people, which would signal that it has entered its most dangerous phase, so in a sense, that official is right. But waiting around for that to happen, and most virologists say it is just a matter of time until it does happen, is very shortsighted. Remember, there were 50 million deaths from bird flu in 1918, certainly a sobering number. And I might point out that the Spanish government itself has bought six to 10 million doses of Tamiflu. You know, one of the problems not yet fully addressed is how to deal with the grim realities of public reaction when a pandemic does break out.
[Alex Chadwick:] And I think we all are-have in mind the chaos that we saw after Hurricane Katrina.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah, and we're talking about this magnified in a much bigger way. Katrina exposed the challenges you face from a disaster when you're not prepared for it, things like how do you mobilize all those organizations that need to work together, the doctors, the police, the hospitals. How would the medical infrastructure hold up to the onslaught? You know, they have all never been fully tested to deal with a pandemic that is projected to kill up to two million to three million Americans alone.
[Alex Chadwick:] President Bush has talked about the possibility of calling up the military to handle any quarantine. That would be one of the first actions, quarantine, yes?
[Ira Flatow:] Yes, and in addition, you would expect that once the pandemic starts, governments around the world are going to be getting very protective and start closing off their borders; no people, no commerce may be permitted to cross the borders, perhaps for weeks or months at a time. And look what the mad cow disease, for example, did to the beef industry. What would it do to the poultry industry once this pandemic starts, not to mention just the food? How do you handle the people being quarantined? People are going to be afraid to leave their homes. They're not going to go to work. They're not going to go to school. There are going to be millions of people like this. Businesses are going to close down. How do you handle the panic? And of course, in the worst-case scenario, how do you handle the millions of dead people, literally? It sounds morbid, but it is. We saw that awful tragedy in New Orleans. Imagine that being multiplied by a thousand or two.
[Alex Chadwick:] Ira, let me go back to something you said earlier. When you said that scientists say this is not a matter of if but when the outbreak of a pandemic, are you speaking of this bird flu, or that eventually some pandemic will afflict us?
[Ira Flatow:] Some bird flu pandemic will afflict us. This is not the first time that this strain has showed up, or a bird flu has shown up. And if we look at history back into 1918, we've just discovered a few weeks ago that that was a bird flu that became virulent in the population of people. It was spread by people to people. So when people talk about this, when scientists talk about this, they don't talk about this as if it's going to happen sometime, they just say it's a matter of time.
[Alex Chadwick:] Ira Flatow, host of "Science Friday," regular Thursday contributor to DAY TO DAY. Thank you, Ira.
[Ira Flatow:] You're welcome.
[Alex Chadwick:] Stay with us on DAY TO DAY from NPR News.

[Michel Martin:] These are tumultuous and intense days in the #MeToo movement, the global grassroots effort to address sexual misconduct by powerful men. This summer, The New Yorker raised questions about the complaints that caused former Minnesota Senator Al Franken to resign, suggesting some elements of the complaints were false or overblown, and there had been a rush to judgment. Last week, writer Emily Yoffe wrote a lengthy piece for Reason magazine raising questions about accusations that cost a former Los Angeles Times correspondent his job, noting that the reporter, Jonathan Kaiman, was struggling with thoughts of suicide. Her piece prompted several angry responses from other journalists accusing Yoffe of shaming and undermining women. It's in that context that we wanted to talk about some of the issues that are emerging in this increasingly passionate debate about whether the #MeToo movement has gotten off track or perhaps not gone far enough, so we've called two writers who've taken this on. Caitlin Flanagan wrote for The Atlantic about the comic Aziz Ansari. Caitlin, thank you for joining us.
[Caitlin Flanagan:] Thanks for having me.
[Michel Martin:] Anna North is a writer for Vox who critiqued Flanagan's piece among others, and I thank you so much for joining us once again.
[Anna North:] Thanks for having me.
[Michel Martin:] Caitlin, I'm going to start with you because you wrote a piece last year entitled "The Humiliation Of Aziz Ansari." And it kind of described a lengthy piece that had been posted that described an encounter that a young woman had with Aziz Ansari. And you've written about #MeToo since then. What concerns you about what you're seeing?
[Caitlin Flanagan:] Well, the #MeToo movement you know, it came at us from zero to 100, which is often the way that powerful social movements operate. You know, there's oppression that lasts and lasts and lasts, and traditional techniques to overcome it don't work. And then suddenly, there'll be one thing that happens that you know, in this case, the Harvey Weinstein case where there's just this explosion. We can't take it anymore, and we're going to fix this problem by any means necessary. So, on the one hand, I was astounded by how many really terrible things men whom I've had professional dealings with as a journalist were credibly accused of and lost their jobs over. And at the same time, you could see standing to the side that there was a lot of collateral damage that was going on and that when things slowed down, there'd be a reckoning. You know, if #MeToo was a reckoning, this moment as well is a reckoning. There are a lot of women who say it doesn't matter. If a few men get hurt in this reckoning, that's OK. And there are other people who say, you don't solve injustice with further injustice. And in that case of Aziz Ansari, I thought that was a really scurrilous thing that that website did to post that piece about him.
[Michel Martin:] And just as briefly as you can, because you wrote a lengthy piece about it what exactly did you consider scurrilous about it?
[Caitlin Flanagan:] Well, there was a young woman who had met him, and they went out to dinner, and they had a sexual encounter. And at one point, she said, I don't feel comfortable. And by her own very self-serving account, he immediately said, I never want you to feel uncomfortable. Let's put our clothes on. And to me, that's the sexual revolution. That's what a lot of women worked hard to gain for young women the right to do that. And if just the fact of saying I don't feel comfortable if she wants something even more than that to be sort of perceived or mind-read by a sexual partner, I thought that was opportunistic. I thought it was vengeful. And I thought that what was really going on is that she wanted something from him that had to do with a very different thing from being sexual partners. She wanted affection. She wanted to matter. And that's not necessarily part of a casual sexual encounter. So I thought there was a bit of a grift that was beginning to work its way into the movement. And I thought we're all going to end up having to account for this. And ultimately, it's going to undermine the movement.
[Michel Martin:] OK.
[Caitlin Flanagan:] And I think, to a significant extent, it has.
[Michel Martin:] Anna North, let's go to you now because the title of your piece for Vox says a lot, too. Your piece says, #MeToo's latest critics say they want to help the movement. Why are they shaming women? What's your take on the criticism of the movement, and what concerns you about that?
[Anna North:] I think that at this point in #MeToo you know, we're two years into the sort of latest, most public phase you know, it's been, as Caitlin said, you know, these two years of many very public allegations. And I do think it's a really great time to think about what consequences are appropriate, how do we do investigations correctly? I do think it's a great time to think about what justice looks like and how to really serve that for all parties involved in these kinds of things. But the concern I have is that a lot of the conversations that I've seen around what does justice look like seem to sort of treat it as a zero-sum game where if we say we're concerned about maybe someone faced consequences that were too severe, maybe we don't like the way the investigation went, then it seems to go so quickly to shaming the women who came forward. So women who had allegations against this man who has worked at the LA Times they came forward. They said certain things. And we can say, you know, we think, well, how should the LA Times have handled this, or how should we handle this as a public responding to these allegations? But what I really don't want to see is saying, well, women have to be quiet. They shouldn't be allowed to talk about what happened between them and men or their experiences or the way that they felt violated. I think the really, really strong thing about #MeToo is that women finally felt like they could come out and say certain things publicly that they've been holding back for a really long time. And I just wouldn't want to go backwards and not have that happen anymore.
[Michel Martin:] Maybe the question becomes down to this whole argument of believe women. What does that mean in this context? Does it mean that women are never to be questioned? Like, what standard of due process and factual investigation apply?
[Anna North:] I think the most appropriate way to understand that phrase is not that you believe everyone without question but really that you listen. I think what's not OK is to say women shouldn't be talking about this.
[Michel Martin:] Caitlin?
[Caitlin Flanagan:] Well, you know, I've had a lot of conversations and with colleagues that are whom I respect very much at the Atlantic about this phrase, believe all women. And I said, I really don't understand it. You know, are we people who just don't lie ever about a sexual encounter? And my colleague explained, just as Anna is, that it's more about listening to women, which I completely understand. But I think language matters, and it's a terribly imprecise term. People who use the phrase I think they should perhaps change to what Anna's saying in terms of listen to all women.
[Michel Martin:] I just want to be really clear we're not talking about friends talking to friends or friends talking to private individuals. You're talking about people who are bringing these encounters into the public sphere and demanding a public response. This is the gray area we're talking about here. Anna?
[Anna North:] I think it makes sense for us to be serious in the way that we interrogate these things. And, of course, we would say, you know, you can't bring a false complaint. But what I don't want to do is say women shouldn't be speaking publicly if what they say is true. Instead, I think we can look at how we're responding. Something I've been doing a lot of reporting on recently is restorative justice. You know, it doesn't speak necessarily to punish but is about, how do we repair the harm that was done? And I think this is something that has a lot of promise you know, getting people together, saying, OK. This person feels that they were harmed. What was the harm? How do we make it better? And that's, you know, not necessarily always about someone losing their job. It could be something completely different. So I think there is really an opportunity for all of us to come together and figure out, you know, how to not have this always be about punishment. In some cases, I think there can be a restorative solution.
[Michel Martin:] I still feel like we're talking past each other here because we're not talking about things that I mean, the Jonathan Kaiman case is not something that took place in an office. These are two adults of equal stature. He had no control over these women's careers. We're talking about private encounters between two consenting adults where they have very different views about what happened. Caitlin, you have any final thoughts?
[Caitlin Flanagan:] You want to know what I really think about that?
[Michel Martin:] Yes, I do.
[Caitlin Flanagan:] Listen when you're in a private sexual encounter outside of work, and you're in this world that a lot of women fought hard to make where you can have private sexual encounters with men and not be shamed, and when the real problem really comes down to you both had too much to drink or he wasn't very nice to you afterwards. He didn't follow up. He didn't call you. You perceived something later. That is an unfortunate and emotionally painful thing that is part of having a free sexual life, and it usually hits women more hard than it hits men. But that should have no place and no role in any kind of public sphere. And to turn around your pain, your hurt, your hurt feelings about it and to claim that you are now a victim of some kind of abuse I think that's a grift because you're stealing from women who fought so hard to tell the truth about sexual assault, and there's long-range consequences. And in the heat of a movement, no one wants to think about long-range consequences. You know, we don't really have any impartial reporters on this because all of us who are women, at some time or another, something bad probably happened to us. So we've all had an experience, and it's there. It can be very hard to keep those experiences out of how we perceive the story or listen to the story. But I think that a lot of good has been done by the movement, and a lot of damage has been done by the movement. The good outweighs the damage so far. But I don't want to see even in the much smaller sphere the idea that women can have free, consensual sexual relationships with men without strings, and that their hurt feelings can somehow be transubstantiated into an assault story. I think that's ugly.
[Michel Martin:] That was Caitlin Flanagan, contributing editor at The Atlantic, and Anna North, senior reporter with Vox. Thank you both so much for talking to us.
[Caitlin Flanagan:] Thank you.
[Anna North:] Thank you.

[Ed Gordon:] This NEWS & NOTES. I'm Ed Gordon. On today's roundtable, a lot of Bush backlash. Joining us today to discuss these topics and more from our headquarters in Washington, D.C., Republican strategist Tara Setmayer. From our New York bureau, Michael Meyers, executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, and George Curry joins us. He's editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association News Service. He joins us from Maryland today. All right, folks, one of the things we wanted to talk about was what a lot of people saw late Friday, and that is Michael Brown, former FEMA chief, before Congress, defending his position, suggesting that he was being scapegoated, that he wasn't going to take it. Here's an exchange between Mr. Brown and Senator Norm Coleman. Let's take a listen.
[Senator Norm Coleman:] I'm not sure you got it. I got to tell you the record, not FEMA's, but the record reflects that you didn't get it, or you didn't in writing or someway make commands that would people to do what has to be done until way after it should've been done.
[Mr. Michael Brown:] Senator, with all due respect, what do you want me to say? I have admitted to mistakes, publicly. I've admitted to mistakes in hearings. What more, Senator Coleman, do you want from me?
[Ed Gordon:] The Senator went on to say, a little bit of candor would be good. Michael Meyers, when you hear someone start with, with all due respect, you know you're going to have some trouble. Michael Brown was feisty, to say the least. His suggestion is he's not going to go down with the ship. He's trying to, obviously, save some of his reputation. The contentious hearings that we saw on Friday, what do you make of all of this?
[Mr. Michael Meyers:] Well, without making reference to the other headlines today, this is truly the gang that could not shoot straight. This is the gang that can't talk straight on and but for Senator Susan Collins' parliamentary maneuver to make sure that executive privilege was not invoked, we would not have had that candor, there would be no candor from Brownie-I call him Brownie. Look, Brownie up until recently, according to President Bush did a heck of a job. Now, I didn't know what heck of a job meant, but we do know that in a world of instant communications, there were massive communications failures, failure to read emails, failure to heed messages, failure of coordination, failure of competence, but I must tell you, this guy is beginning to sound like a scapegoat because I have to ask myself, when I was listening to the testimony, what more do you want from me? What more do you want from Brownie? He's admitted that he made big, big mistakes. Nobody else has admitted that.
[Ed Gordon:] George Curry?
[Mr. George Curry:] Well, I mean, first of all, I want to say that he's testifying only because of what Susan Collins did. I mean, he went to the White House, went to Harriet Myers, trying to get executive clemency, and they said, No-which what that did was open the door, which means...
[Mr. Michael Meyers:] Executive privilege.
[Mr. George Curry:] Excuse me. So all that did was open that door so that he could share communication, conversation and everything else. So the White House kind of left him out there on his own on this. But the bottom line on this is he has a serious credibility problem, and before he was always saying it was all the state and now it's local and now, all of sudden, it's all the feds. I mean, who's going to believe this character?
[Ms. Tara Setmayer:] Well, I mean...
[Ed Gordon:] Tara SETMAYER, it does seem to be an issue of believability when you talk about Michael Brown here.
[Ms. Tara Setmayer:] Well, sure, and I think that-I'm not going to defend Michael Brown or what he did or what happened during those days because obviously he has an amount of culpability here that goes without saying, but it is true, these hearings, nothing new was really revealed. It was just a regurgitation of just pointing the finger and trying to put blame on someone for what was a series of serious missteps, and I think what did come out of this hearing, though, was the fact that the restructuring of FEMA under the Department of Homeland Security was obviously a huge mistake, and these are issues that we need to, we really need to consider because I think everyone wants, does not want a repeat of what happened here when the next natural disaster or terrorist attack hits. There is an expression in Latin: pergamentum init, pergamentum exit, garbage in, garbage out, and I think that that's what has taken place with this level of bureaucracy. You don't fix an agency like this by replacing the parts. You fix it by improving the design, and I think that's we need to do...
[Ed Gordon:] Now, Tara, we may not have seen much come out of the hearings, but what we are seeing in terms of the week that just passed, if you take a look at Lewis Scooter Libby, who is suggesting and of course, Mr. Libby has been indicted on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice-who is now suggesting that his superiors ordered him to leak to the press evidence to support the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed and sought weapons of mass destruction. We know that the White House has said that that has not been the case. Of course, Mr. Libby, former chief of staff here to Vice President Dick Cheney. When you take a look at that, when you take a look at Mr. Brown suggesting that, hey, we alerted the White House. We didn't get the kickback in the time that we needed, we're starting to see, perhaps even more than I've ever seen before, people who have been left out, distanced by the White House saying, wait a minute. We're not taking this. Let me tell you what really went on.
[Mr. George Curry:] Well, but the problem with that, though, is that the emails show that he was consumed by how he looked, his clothing and all these other tangential matters. I mean, so it's just not a matter of him saying, the White House's not doing this and that, he's basically...
[Ed Gordon:] No, I understand that.
[Mr. George Curry:] They'll indict him. They'll indict him.
[Ed Gordon:] I understand that, but I'm saying that juxtaposed to Scooter Libby's suggesting that, hey, I didn't do this on my own, that this, in fact, was sent down from above. When you juxtapose those, you start to look at a White House who is, at best, suggesting that they didn't know all of what their folks were doing.
[Mr. Michael Meyers:] Absolutely. You're getting a very defensive posturing here, and in government scandals, what people want to know, the press and public at large want to know, is what did you know? When did you know it? At least we know with respect to Michael Brown's testimony, we know that FEMA knew and Homeland Security knew long before we thought they knew. We also know from Scooter Libby that people, just like Michael Brown-I agree with you, Ed-that Libby looks, to me, at least-aside from the charges of perjury-he's beginning to paint himself as a fall guy, and I can't get very hepped up about this fall guy situation because of this White House, and the White House policies and its posturing-and because I'm fearing, down the road, if there are convictions, if there are convictions, there are also going to be pardons.
[Ms. Tara Setmayer:] [Unintelligible]
[Mr. George Curry:] Well, it's beyond Libby, though, that way. It's beyond Libby because this is the way Washington operates.
[Ms. Tara Setmayer:] Yes.
[Mr. George Curry:] See this White House said it was punishing, that they would punish anybody who leaked, but at the same time, they're engaged in selective leaking. That's how the game is played in Washington, and that's part of the play, and there is no way I think Scooter Libby would have leaked or could have leaked that without the Vice President knowing it.
[Ed Gordon:] And Tara, while we know that this is the way the game is played in Washington, what does become problematic is while you're playing the game that all of these cards start to fall at the same time.
[Ms. Tara Setmayer:] Right, and that's the point that I was going to make before George made it before me, that this is really no different than any other White House. This is the political posturing, maneuvering that takes place everyday. Not saying that if they broke the law that...
[Ed Gordon:] But Tara, this administration suggested that they weren't going to play the game as every other administration did. I mean, that was a big calling card for this President.
[Ms. Tara Setmayer:] Sure, and...
[Mr. Michael Meyers:] Right, and let's not paint so broadly about every other White House.
[Ed Gordon:] Go ahead, Tara. Go ahead, Tara.
[Ms. Tara Setmayer:] But at the same time, when you're dealing... It's very difficult in a day to day... I think that may have been a certain amount naivety involved in that and a certain amount of campaign themes that sound popular and an unrealistic promise because no matter what you do, and as admirable as that may have been, we see that that's unavoidable to certain degrees. There's so many layers involved here that it's almost unavoidable for issues like this to take place. It happens in every administration. But we need to also remember, though, that what Scooter Libby was accused of was as nothing to do with what the original charges, what the original investigation was about. He has not been charged with disclosing Valerie Plame's identity, and wasn't that what the outrage about this entire investigation was initially about? And that's [unintelligible]...
[Ed Gordon:] Well, that depends on which side of the fence you sit, Michael Meyers, because while that was the case for the press, the outrage from the administration was dog-gone-it, who's making these leaks, and when we find out, they will pay.
[Mr. Michael Meyers:] Well, you got to remember, the prosecutor-how long had this thing started? The guy is charged-Libby is charged not only with perjury, with corruption of justice, impeding justice, the pursuit of justice, so that brings his credibility on the line, and I must tell you that when you have an administration in the White House, that just continues with the scandals of misleading the public, misleading the press, misleading us-including with so-called classified information about the weapons of mass destruction, and then having a war in Iraq, which now seems to me to be unjustified; misleading us with respect to who is being spied on in terms of surveillance. We have a crisis of confidence, and unfortunately, we do not have the opposition party that is capable or competent enough to bring out the real deal or a bi-partisan outrage that would bring about remedies to this kind of misconduct-and that means impeachment. That's a bipartisan remedy.
[Ed Gordon:] George, I'm sure-that's a pretty strong word there, Michael Meyers. George, I'm sure that we will be accused...
[Mr. Michael Meyers:] Because I'm sick of these scandals.
[Ed Gordon:] ...of piling on, but I would simply say to those who are readying themselves at their keyboard, that we're just taking what's in the headlines over the course of the last couple of days. Here is yet another finger pointed back at the White House. This from, and albeit all from people who are in trouble. Jack Abramoff suggesting that, hey, this president met him at least a dozen times and this is a quote from a memo that was, a correspondence that was released, this is from Jack Abramoff, The guy saw me in almost a dozen settings and joked with me about a bunch of things, including details of my kids. Perhaps he has forgotten everything, who knows.
[Mr. George Curry:] Well, I mean the White House has been really curious in terms of not wanting the pictures released, but "Time Magazine" has them this week, I understand. I don't know why they're that defensive if they have nothing to hide. I mean, I suspect, considering this guy's influence, I suspect he obviously had some contacts with the White House and probably more than the administration want to admit and that he was a real power broker.
[Ms. Tara Setmayer:] I can speak, I can speak to...
[Ed Gordon:] All right, Tara, let's go to what you suggested earlier, the idea that this is the way the game is played. You and I both know when you give the kind of money Jack Abramoff has given, when you go more than once, more than twice, but at least a dozen times, which the White House doesn't deny, you know at some point the President or his handlers remember this guy. The money was too big.
[Ms. Tara Setmayer:] Absolutely and I actually worked for Jack Abramoff in college and he was a different guy then. And it saddens me to see what this has turned into and, it's a shame. But anyway, as far as the president's reaction to this, I think that it was unwise for the president to come out and for the White House to come out and speak so adamantly and say, well I have no idea, I never met him, because we all know that that was obviously the case. I think that they were looking in the future. The reason why they didn't release those photographs is because we all know this is a seriously important mid-term election and those pictures would be plastered all over the place and used as campaign material. So the White House wants to avoid that. And the picture that Time Magazine has is one that's rather obscure with Jack Abramoff in the background. They have to have a circle around his face so you can see who it is...
[Ed Gordon:] Yeah.
[Ms. Tara Setmayer:] ...and to use that. Again, this is the way things are in this town. What Jack Abramoff has done, again, I've said this many times in this program, is just shown the uglier side of the power money influence in the White House and that is on both sides of the aisle.
[Mr. Michael Meyers:] Well, I don't know Jack Abramoff and he's never given me any money and I'm pretty sure I never met him. I'm less concerned about the small, little pictures that the press may have as opposed to the big picture: the big picture of scandal, the big picture of the overwhelming power and corruptive influence of money, on both sides of the Congress and on both sides, both Democrats and Republicans. I'm really concerned about the big picture and it's getting to be the point of a Canadian situation. You can have Congress really change now because people are sick and tired of this corruption, the scandal and the perception of corruption. At the same time, one could actually meet someone 1,200 times and not know them. I remember when Ronald Regan had a cabinet member he didn't even recognize. So, it's not the little picture, it's the big picture I'm concerned about.
[Ms. Tara Setmayer:] And also in this situation, they need to be fair because we know that Harry Reed, the Democrat majority leader in the Senate, he got $68,000.00 from Jack. He's written four letters on behalf of Indian tribes and things that Jack and his clients worked with, but yet, that is an aside. There's an asterisk next to that, we don't talk about that as much.
[Ed Gordon:] Well, but the point here, Tara...
[Mr. Michael Meyers:] I talk about it.
[Ed Gordon:] ...is not the idea. I mean, we all know that both sides of the aisle are littered with the dead body of lobbyists who've tried to sell their ideas and push their points. The reality here though is, George Curry, whether or not you can see the White House as being up and up. Wouldn't it have been enough for the president to suggest that, look, yes, I know the guy, but I know him just in the sense of glad handing...
[Mr. George Curry:] Mm hmmm.
[Ed Gordon:] ...never had any real conversation, never met him on White House grounds, outside of public functions, et cetera, et cetera.
[Mr. George Curry:] Yes, that would have been a wiser choice, but let's be clear here: Abramoff was primarily, he did give money to Democrats, but primarily, and that's not to say it doesn't happen on both sides, but primarily most of the money went to GOP, it mostly went to Republicans, particularly in leadership positions.
[Mr. Meyer:] They're the ones in power.
[Ms. Tara Setmayer:] Because they were, that's right they were the ones, the authority...
[Mr. George Curry:] Hold on, let me finish, because they can influence things. And so that's what the case has been here and so the White House is extremely, I think, they're vulnerable here because nobody wants to be tarnished by it yet you have the leaders who actually one, I think, on the Republican side who actually leased an apartment from him. I mean, this thing is just slimy on both sides and it just, I don't think there's any real prospect they're going to clean it up.
[Ed Gordon:] Tara, let me ask you as a Republican strategist, rough week? And I mean that in the true sense. I mean you've got to figure that people, you know, after last week are looking at what do we do? What's to spend? Where do we take it?
[Ms. Tara Setmayer:] Yes, this was, we've had better weeks...
[Mr. George Curry:] [Unintelligible]?
[Ms. Tara Setmayer:] ...but there's never a dull moment, we've had better weeks, but this, but nothing...
[Mr. Meyer:] It was a rough week for Democrats too.
[Ms. Tara Setmayer:] ...but nothing that happened this week isn't something that we aren't able to come out of. Again, the American public has a very short memory and I'm just thankful that these incidents aren't taking place in the fall.
[Ed Gordon:] You know, Michael, is that part of the issue? What Tara just suggested here to some degree with a little fun and flippant nature, but the idea that politicians do bank on the fact that Americans have a short memory when it becomes political?
[Mr. Meyer:] Yes, everybody thinks on short memory, believe me. But the problem is that Democrats are not so far capitalizing on these scandals. I mean, to some extent they are involved in it, implicated and stained by the scandal, but they are also the gang that can't shoot straight. They are so inept...
[Ms. Tara Setmayer:] But it could also be that the American people don't care.
[Mr. Meyer:] They are so incompetent, they can't even make parliamentary maneuver, after being in power for so many years in Congress, why don't they know the parliamentary tricks so that they can stop the Congress and stop the Alito situation from being confirmed. But they can't get their act together because they disagree with each other. So, the elections are up in the air again, once again.
[Ed Gordon:] Right.
[Mr. George Curry:] Well they can't stop Alito because they didn't have votes. I mean, let's start there. And you basically have both parties in opposition. You've got Democrats who said I'm accustomed to governing and I don't know how to be the opposition party. You have Republicans saying we're used to throwing flames at the opposition party...
[Ed Gordon:] Yeah.
[Mr. George Curry:] ...we don't know how to govern.
[Ed Gordon:] Yes.
[Mr. Meyer:] Incompetent.
[Ed Gordon:] Well, the beat goes on.
[Mr. Meyer:] Yes, sir.
[Ed Gordon:] George, Michael, Tara, thank you so much, greatly appreciate it. We were going to get to a Kobe Bryant story that we'll move over to tomorrow. Kobe has returned as a pitchman. We'll talk about that on tomorrow's ROUNDTABLE. Next up on NEWS AND NOTES an historic town settled by free blacks is trying to protect its heritage from big developers and a one-woman dynamo puts it all on the page. That's coming up. You're listening to NEWS AND NOTES from NPR News. I'm Ed Gordon. Next time on NEWS AND NOTES: finding your family tree. A new documentary researches the genealogy of prominent African Americans and retraces black ancestors. I'll be joined by the host and producer of the series, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates. That's next time on NEWS AND NOTES from NPR News.

[Ira Flatow:] And now for our Video Pick of the Week. Flora's still here and positioned perfectly to take us on a safari.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] We're still on safari.
[Ira Flatow:] We're still on safari.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] The safari continues, this time to slightly larger organisms. See if you can see with your naked eye, and maybe in your own backyard. These guys are glow-in-the-dark I have you already, don't I?
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] Millipedes which, I didn't know let me can I tell you the story of how this came about?
[Ira Flatow:] Sure.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] This is one of these really I one of my favorite types of videos, because it came from one of our listeners.
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] Chris Lavin wrote me an email a few weeks ago and said, Flora, I was walking home, and I stumbled upon something amazing. And I click the video link, and there's this bright, glowing blue millipede, and then she told her sons, who were teenagers, and they collected, like, dozens of them. So the next video, there's many of them in a bowl.
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] And she said, you know, I really want to know what's going on. And, you know, we run with so many scientists here on SCIENCE FRIDAY.
[Ira Flatow:] Right. Of course. That's it. This is the challenge for us.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] So we found the world expert on glowing millipedes, Paul Marek.
[Ira Flatow:] There has to be one, right?
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] Of course. This is science.
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] So he's at the University of Arizona. He's an entomologist. And I asked him to take a look at this video. And indeed, they are millipedes, and apparently, there's this whole family of millipedes that will fluoresce. So that means under UV light, they'll, you know, turn a color, like the black light in your house.
[Ira Flatow:] Right, they glow.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] So they glow. But even more amazing, I thought, was that there are also millipedes only in these certain mountain ranges in California that will bioluminesce. So they'll spontaneously generate their own light through a chemical reaction in their body. You don't need the UV light, in other words, like a firefly...
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] ...or these deep-sea creatures. And he has a lot of video of these guys. And the big mystery is, you know, why are they doing this, because...
[Ira Flatow:] Got to be some advantage, right?
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] There has to be some well, that's the thought, at least for the bi-luminescence millipedes. So they have this amazing study that's totally worth looking at on our website. It includes millipedes on leashes...
[Ira Flatow:] It's a millipede on a leash. Now, you've seen dogs, cats, a ferret, maybe, something. You've never seen a millipede...
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] I had never seen a millipede on a leash.
[Ira Flatow:] ...on a leash. And they actually left them on the leashes so they wouldn't go away some place. They needed them to stay there, right?
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] That's right.
[Ira Flatow:] And why do they have so many legs, a millipede?
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] Well, Ira, it's funny you should ask. We have the answer for you.
[Paul Marek:] The idea is that they added all these legs onto their body in order to be better burrowers. They live under logs and in decaying vegetation. And by being able to truck through the soil, it seems to have had an advantage in their evolutionary history. And it's pretty noticeable, because all of these millipedes have many legs. And the leggiest one actually has 750.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] I you know, I always thought it was 1,000.
[Paul Marek:] Oh, yeah. It's actually so a millipede actually misnomer.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow. This is New York. So for you, it's 750.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] Right. Anyway, go check it out on our website, sciencefriday.com.
[Ira Flatow:] It's up there on the Video Pick of the Week, up there on the left side, the glowing millipedes. Thank you, Flora.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] Thanks, Ira.

[Ed Gordon:] Churches across the country have opened their doors and their purse strings to offer shelter, food and supplies to hurricane survivors. This week, FEMA announced it's going to reimburse those religious organizations that provide aid. Commentator John McCann is glad to see the Bush administration stand behind its pledge to support faith-based communities, but, he says, there's still a lot of work to do.
[John Mc Cann:] President Bush has been pro-church and faith-friendly ever since he took office, often touting how the Lord helped him put down that liquor bottle. Now in the wake of the recent hurricanes that caused so much destruction down there in the Gulf Coast, I'm prepared to hold my president's feet to the fire on one of his pledges: his pledge to give the faith community a higher profile in matters of government-and not just in times of crises, like the one we face now in the aftermath of the hurricanes. I'm talking about turning churches into welfare agencies that care for people in poverty. And why not? Church folk know how to come through in the clutch. For the skeptics out there, I'm right there with you, wary of gold-toothed pastors and-I don't know-10-button suits with coats so long they drape their matching gator-skin shoes. Don't forget the matching the sweat rag, too, hey, man. But for better or for worse, I'll take my chances with the church handing out charitable gifts, especially when you consider that a long-venerated organization like the American Red Cross isn't beyond reproach either. If you'll recall, back in 2001, after the terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center, there was a scandal about how the Red Cross money you gave for September 11th relief wasn't getting to the victims. A congressional probe ensued that ultimately ended with the Red Cross president resigning. So all I'm saying is give the church a shot. I mean, any organization that can turn sales from chicken dinners into sparkling family life centers deserves at least that. Now, church folk, if Uncle Sam comes calling, will you answer? No time for shuckin'and jivin', amen? No time for fights about women wearing pants in the sanctuary or the color of the choir robes. It'll be the hour of truth, the opportunity for the church to be the church. Now let me tell you something that's real because-amen-the truth will set you free. See, if the church was being the church all this time, let me submit to you that a lot of those poor folks in New Orleans wouldn't have died because of Hurricane Katrina because there would have been no poor folks. Read your Bible, over there in the book of Acts, where Brother Luke writes about the early church and how the believers had everything in common. Like this: If you and I were church members back in the Bible days and if I knew you had a need, I'd sell some of my land so you could feed your family. You'd do the same for me. Now if the church had kept on doing that, the poor brothers and sisters trapped in New Orleans probably would have had a car to flee the city, or at least cab fare to make it out. But somewhere along the way we got hooked on New Deal legislation and welfare. And that New Deal became a raw deal as the church sat idly by eating more chicken than it was selling, buying bigger suits to compensate, content with looking out for the next pair of gators instead of looking after each other. Will the church be the church? Eh, I don't know. Depends on how you respond to that single mother having a hard time with all them kids. Depends on whether you're storing up treasures in heaven or if you want it all for yourself here on Earth.
[Ed Gordon:] John McCann is a columnist for The Herald-Sun newspaper in Durham, North Carolina. This is NPR News.

[Ari Shapiro:] Each day, nearly 100 people die from heroin and other opioid-related overdoses in the U.S. President Trump campaigned on a promise to address the problem. Now advocates and lawmakers say they're getting mixed messages from the Trump administration. NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith reports.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] As a candidate, Trump frequently visited New Hampshire, a swing state that had been ravaged by opioids.
[President Donald Trump:] We have a problem here. We have millions and millions of people in our country that are badly addicted and that will die soon.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] In a campaign that was heavy on platitudes and light on policy, a speech Trump gave in mid-October in Portsmouth, N.H., stood out for its level of detail about how he would deal with the problem.
[President Donald Trump:] I would dramatically expand access to treatment slots and end Medicaid policies that obstruct inpatient treatment. You've got to do this.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] On another occasion right before the election, Trump sat down with New Hampshire families, law enforcement and advocates. Jessica Nickel, president of the Addiction Policy Forum was there.
[Jessica Nickel:] You know, he shared about his brother's story and sort of how this impacted his family. And he had some great points that we were pleased that he focused so much on prevention and the need for a comprehensive response.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Trump's brother was an alcoholic and died young. The candidate told everyone there he'd invite them to the White House if he won. Of course, he did win, and now people who were encouraged by Trump's words on the campaign trail are looking for action. Senator Rob Portman is a Republican from Ohio. He's the co-author of major opioid legislation that passed last year.
[Rob Portman:] We've used some of his comments from the campaign to say to the folks in his administration, you know, at Department of Justice, at HHS, let's implement these things. This is what he said in the campaign. And we all know this is a crisis.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Portman is happy with some recent administration moves and deeply concerned about others. A leaked budget document called for a 94 percent cut to the White House Office of Drug Control Policy, known as the drug czar. The office coordinates drug policy across federal agencies. The document also called for the elimination of two drug-related grant programs, one of which Portman helped create.
[Rob Portman:] The crisis is getting worse, and people are talking about cutting the funding for things that have been proven to work. It doesn't make any sense.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] A White House spokesman wouldn't comment on the specifics of the budget document but said the White House's commitment to fighting the problem goes beyond this one office. Democratic Senator from Minnesota Amy Klobuchar says the office and its grant programs help local governments.
[Amy Klobuchar:] You need a lot of coordination, and you need the police, especially in rural areas, and sheriffs. They just can't do it alone in a small department.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] The president has yet to nominate a drug czar, and the office has had two acting director since Trump took office. And then there's the matter of health policy. The bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act that passed the House earlier this month would phase out Medicaid expansion, which covers a significant share of addiction treatment. Here's New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan, a Democrat.
[Maggie Hassan:] On the one hand, they're talking about how much they care about this issue. And on the other hand, they're proposing measures that would undermine our efforts to save lives and really roll us backward.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] This is something Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price heard recently as he traveled to hard-hit states on a listening tour. In West Virginia, 50,000 people who have challenges related to addiction receive coverage through Medicaid expansion. The state's Health and Human Resources Secretary Bill Crouch spoke at a press conference standing next to Price about what losing Medicaid expansion could mean.
[Bill Crouch:] It's a grave concern. Our crisis right now is difficult to deal with. If we have an additional 50,000 individuals with no coverage, no way to get treatment, we think our problem is going to be light years more difficult.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Price defended the bill.
[Tom Price:] We don't believe 50,000 people will lose coverage. What our goal is, is to make certain that anybody that transitions from one program to another continues to have coverage, that the rug isn't pulled out from anybody, that nobody falls through the cracks.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] That's one of many promises the Trump administration has made recently. Advocates and lawmakers alike are watching, ready to push the president to do what they think is right when it comes to tackling the opioid crisis. Tamara Keith, NPR News.

[Audie Cornish:] The longstanding mystery surrounding the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat deepened this week. A Swiss laboratory analysis of Arafat's remains showed enough radioactive polonium to support the theory that he was poisoned. But today, the Palestinian Authority revealed the results of a separate, Russian analysis; and that report did not support the theory that he died of polonium poisoning. NPR's Emily Harris reports from Jerusalem.
[Emily Harris, Byline:] Despite the Russian lab findings, Palestinian officials insist that Arafat was murdered nine years ago. Tawfik Tirawi leads the official Palestinian investigation into Arafat's death. Today, he vowed to find those responsible and bring them to justice.
[Tawfik Tirawi:] [Through translator] The crime has different facets. It's not enough to know just the perpetrator of the act. We have to understand the tool that led to the killing.
[Emily Harris, Byline:] Tirawi repeated Palestinian accusations that Israel was behind Arafat's death. Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor repeated the government's denial.
[Yigal Palmor:] Israel did not kill Arafat and, you know, enough with this Palestinian nonsense. They keep making these groundless accusations without the minimum proof of anything. No, Israel did not kill Yasser Arafat period.
[Emily Harris, Byline:] Journalist Matthew Kalman has covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for 15 years. Israeli denials, he says, do nothing to sway Palestinian public opinion.
[Matthew Kalman:] The problem with the Israelis is that they sound exactly the same when they're denying something because they should be denying it, and when they're denying something and they're not telling the truth.
[Emily Harris, Byline:] But Kalman's own investigations for a book he co-authored this year, "The Murder of Yasser Arafat," indicate that Israel was not involved.
[Matthew Kalman:] Our research behind the scenes with the people who basically would've carried out this assassination had it been Israeli policy, suggests that they didn't do it.
[Emily Harris, Byline:] Many ordinary Palestinians say they don't know who killed their longtime leader, but they'd really like to. Fruit peddlers on bicycles hawk tangerines on a balmy evening in Gaza City. People relaxing in a park talk more about the worsening electricity shortage than the latest twist in the Arafat story. But Tagari Hamda says she wants the mystery of his death solved.
[Tagari Hamda:] [Through translator] Arafat is the symbol of the Palestinian state. That's why the people who were behind his death should be discovered. For sure, Israel was involved. But I want to know if others were, too.
[Emily Harris, Byline:] Fifty miles away, in the West Bank, on the recently built Arafat Square in Ramallah, car parts salesman Mohammed AbdulRahmin is doing a little shopping. Who killed Arafat? Pick anyone, he says.
[Mohammed Abdulrahmin:] [Through translator] It was in many people's interest to kill Arafat. Some hoped to gain power after his death. Maybe there's also an international interest in his death.
[Emily Harris, Byline:] Israeli? Palestinian? American?
[Mohammed Abdulrahmin:] [Through translator] Maybe all of those, plus all of them together.
[Emily Harris, Byline:] The Palestinian committee investigating Arafat's death is waiting for one more lab report from France, where Arafat died in a military hospital. Journalist Matthew Kalman isn't sure how far the Palestinian investigators will be willing to go.
[Matthew Kalman:] When Tawfik Tirawi, who's heading the official Palestinian investigation, says that the aim is find the tool and by that, he means the person who delivered this deadly dose to Arafat then the only direction that leads him is directly back into the central circle surrounding Yasser Arafat, and many of those people are still in position today.
[Emily Harris, Byline:] At least one Palestinian walking on Arafat Square this morning hopes officials follow all leads, wherever they go.
[Unidentified Man:] For the truth. It's important for the truth.
[Emily Harris, Byline:] Emily Harris, NPR News, Jerusalem.
[Melissa Block:] This is NPR.

[Michele Norris:] From NPR NEWS, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
[Robert Siegel:] And I'm Robert Siegel. The public relations campaign over the Air Force's new tanker contract soared to a new level this week. Northrop Grumman and EADS won the $40-billion bid a month ago, but they are still beating back the deal's critics. Rival Boeing says the joint U.S.-European contract will lead to a loss of American jobs. Well, in Mobile, Alabama, where the plane is to be built, that argument has irritated local officials. Alabama Public Radio's Brett Tannehill reports.
[Brett Tannehill:] The city of Mobile was founded as an international port 300 years ago. Now, it's caught in the middle of an international controversy over the Air Force's new air tanker contract.
[Unidentified Man #1:] The contract will bring thousands of new jobs and hundreds of new vendor opportunities to the Gulf Coast and Deep South, from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Panama City, Florida, and north to Huntsville, Alabama.
[Brett Tannehill:] This radio ad is part of a publicity campaign that also includes highway billboards and full-page newspaper ads. The effort is to counter Boeing claims that if it loses the contract, America loses jobs to Europe. Mobile Mayor Sam Jones says that's just not true. Mayor SAMUEL L. JONES [Mobile, Alabama]: When we first heard all of that, it sounds as if someone was saying that Mobile, Alabama is not a part of the United States. They were saying buy American built by American. I can assure you that the people here are Americans, so we had to first get passed that. The growth of international business in Mobile is easy to find. More than 30 companies from nearly two dozen countries have or are establishing operations. At the Alabama State Docks, a $300-million container terminal expansion is now underway. Here in one of the dock's holding areas, cargo movers with their giant crab-like claws shuffle boxcar-sized containers back and forth. This port combined with the city's extensive rail and air facilities is a big reason Mobile landed the Air Force contract. State port authority director Jimmy Lyons says Alabama has a string of international successes. That includes the Mercedes Benz manufacturing plants near Tuscaloosa and Mobile's new ThyssenKrupp Steel plant.
[Mr. Jimmy Lyons:] I think anybody, nationally, that's not recognizing that Alabama is going to be a growing force, would be someone who's capable of ignoring an elephant in a room.
[Brett Tannehill:] Lyons expects the Northrop contracts to also spark additional aviation production in Mobile as EADS will also assemble plants for commercial interests.
[Mr. Jimmy Lyons:] Therefore, there's going to be a net increase in the jobs, probably more than what Boeing would ever generate. And those aircraft will be American-made aircrafts. It'll be somebody else's technology, but that's fine.
[Brett Tannehill:] The contract will create 1,500 new jobs in Mobile; supporting industries could bring another 5,000 jobs statewide. Some of those companies will literally move in next door to the tanker assembly plant at the Brookley Industrial Complex. Director Marc Pelham says he's already filled in calls from business centers who want to get involved.
[Mr. Marc Pelham:] I used to have to bring a map to show people where Mobile was — I'm serious — especially outside the United States. I don't have to do that anymore.
[Brett Tannehill:] As the lobbying intensifies on Capitol Hill over whether the Air Force contract was awarded fairly, officials in Mobile are busy preparing and hoping for the assembly plant's eventual arrival. If the project stays on track, the first Alabama-built tanker is expected to fly by 2011. For NPR News, I'm Brett Tannehill.

[Steve Inskeep:] So much is happening that it's easy to miss the news of up to 1 million people in Chinese prison camps.
[Rachel Martin:] The United Nations delivered that news recently. China has sent up to 1 million Uighurs and other Muslim minorities to mass internment camps. That's a population roughly equal to the entire state of Montana or of Rhode Island, taken into custody. They're required to swear loyalty to China's president and renounce their faith.
[Steve Inskeep:] The Chinese government denies all this, we should say. Although they acknowledged that some Islamic extremists have been detained. Some U.S. lawmakers say they want sanctions against Chinese officials. One of those lawmakers is Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.
[Marco Rubio:] If I told you that somewhere on this planet over a million people have been incarcerated, and have had to undergo what they sort of efforts to strip them of their identity, their faith. That in pursuit of that goal, they have intimidated family members living within the United States and all over the world with threats about what would happened to their family back home if they didn't return. You would say, that's an outrage.
[Steve Inskeep:] How are people in the United States being intimidated?
[Marco Rubio:] Well, they'll go to a family member that's here. And they'll tell them that we know where your brother, your sister, your children, your husband, someone you love, we know where they are. And they arrest them until you agree to return, especially if you're out there as a journalist speaking or reporting about this. We had a lady give testimony at the joint commission that we have with the House on China, and talked about how her family members, including her parents, were jailed for an extended period of time because she was speaking out about the conditions on the ground.
[Steve Inskeep:] The Chinese government says, of course, they're trying to fight terrorism in a majority Muslim part of the country. Has the United States lost some credibility in criticizing China on that issue because of the way that President Trump has spoken about Muslims and policies he's pursued?
[Marco Rubio:] I think the president's policies have been largely geared towards banning entry from countries who don't have visa systems that can be verified, but...
[Steve Inskeep:] He started calling for a ban of all Muslim entry into the United States.
[Marco Rubio:] Well, but in the end, I mean, I think you're talking about in degree and scale here. It's not even comparable. No one here is being re-educated, jailed or forced to recant or change their faith. There is a big difference between rhetoric that we may or may not like and not agree with, versus the jailing of human beings and forcing them to abandon their identity.
[Steve Inskeep:] What leverage does the United States have to push China to change its behavior toward its own people?
[Marco Rubio:] Well, we know two things. No. 1, China doesn't like international condemnation. And we have a very loud voice on the global stage, and we should use it. And the other action that we can take is to implement global Magnitsky.
[Steve Inskeep:] Let's remind people. The Magnitsky Act allows the United States to sanction individuals suspected of human rights violations.
[Marco Rubio:] Human rights violations, correct. And we should use that tool to name and sanction individuals responsible for the implementation of this policy in that region.
[Steve Inskeep:] Does the United States have less leverage over China than it might otherwise because more than 20 years ago, the U.S. got China into the World Trade Organization? We do a lot of business with them. They can always look at the United States and say, hey, we're making money. You're making money. Shut up.
[Marco Rubio:] Yeah. I think there was a huge mistake made. And not so much just that, but there was a perception that prosperity would lead to a political opening. That has proven to be a catastrophic miscalculation. China has assumed all of the benefits of being involved in the global trade, and economic order, and even political order, but none of the responsibilities of it. And it's gone basically unchallenged for the better part of 20 years in that regard.
[Steve Inskeep:] Is it harder for you to get heard when you talk about those principles, given that there is a president who is so much louder who talks about power and talks about human rights in a very different way if he addresses them at all?
[Marco Rubio:] Well, somewhat. I mean, obviously
[Steve Inskeep:] Just likes authoritarians, doesn't seem concerned with freedom of the press.
[Marco Rubio:] Well, look. It would always be great to have a president who uses the pulpit and the megaphone of that office to highlight human rights. And Reagan did. Reagan did that quite often. In fact, he always linked human rights to the broader challenge of communism. But I also don't want to overlook the work that Sam Brownback is doing, and the work many people in the State Department are doing every day to highlight these issues. And I also want to recognize that human rights is a tough issue in the daily life of Americans to really make a priority. Because while Americans are the most compassionate people in the world, there are millions of Americans who have a job. But that job doesn't pay what it once did compared to today's cost of living. So it's not that people don't care. I think they do that at a human level. But at a practical, political level, human rights has never been a top issue in this country either the focus of politicians or the focus of the media.
[Steve Inskeep:] Senator Rubio, thanks very much.
[Marco Rubio:] Thank you.
[Steve Inskeep:] It's been a pleasure talking with you.
[Marco Rubio:] Thanks.

[Madeleine Brand:] The latest involves the notorious Ugandan rebel group, the Lord's Resistance Army. Members of the group brutally murdered some 200 people there last week, mainly women and children. Meanwhile, millions of dollars in mineral wealth is disappearing from the country. NPR's Gwen Thompkins reports.
[Gwen Thompkins:] This is a true story, by the way, and this is how millions of dollars worth of Congo's mineral wealth leave the country every month. Prosper Hamuli is a researcher for the Pole Institute, a think tank in the provincial capital of Goma. He has seen ore vanish from government records between the Goma airport and the border a distance of less than two miles. So one day, he asked the government a French version of riddle me this.
[Prosper Hamuli:] [Through translator] Between Goma Airport to the border, is there a phenomenon that makes minerals disappear?
[Gwen Thompkins:] Naturally speaking, the eastern provinces are about as rich as rich can be. There's also no shortage of cheap labor willing to scratch minerals out of the earth, but researchers say that more than 20 government agencies latch onto anything leaving the mines like ants at a picnic- exacting taxes, fees, and bribes worth up to 100 percent of the value of the ore being exported. Aloys Tegera co-wrote the Pole Institute's report on how mining traders work here. Speaking in his office during a driving rainstorm, he says the process is all wet.
[Aloys Tegera:] The whole bureaucracy is really amazing. You have an army of state services around them, each one wanting to take from them. In the end, these guys you have to be tough to do it.
[Gwen Thompkins:] There's also a long chain of gun-wielding parasites for whom the mines are both the ends and the means to survival. The Congolese army, a Tutsi-led rebel force, Hutu fighters with ties to the genocide in Rwanda, and various other militias leech from the mines. They tax the poor diggers. They tax truck shipments at checkpoints. Sometimes they take over the whole operation. So if exporters want to stay in business, they've got to pay nearly everyone in sight to look the other way. Tegera says smuggling is more cost effective.
[Aloys Tegera:] Really, when you start studying it deeply, what happens? You tend to be sympathetic to these guys.
[Gwen Thompkins:] But not everyone makes out in a war economy. In Goma at a drafty little warehouse owned by a company called MHI, white sacks line one side of the room. They're encasing what looks like dark gray sand with some shiny bits sparkling off the light. This is treated coltan ready for export. Dani Embomenza Mwangachuhu runs this place.
[Dani Embomenza Mwangachuchu:] [Through translator] We think that if the war stops, and we begin then doing a good mining, we think that, in four years, we can have a good money.
[Gwen Thompkins:] I'm so sorry. I didn't realized it was that bad.
[Dani Embomenza Mwangachuchu:] [French spoken]
[Gwen Thompkins:] The funny thing is, people in North Kivu haven't always been so heavily dependent on mining. Cassiterite prices, for example, only began to boom about seven years ago. Before that, Aloys Tegera says the province's main exports were cattle, farm produce, and timber. He says people here have not only lost their peace of mind over minerals, they've lost their identity, too.
[Aloys Tegera:] So we are not miners. We are farmers. This is what we are.
[Gwen Thompkins:] Transparency in mining may never happen, but experts say that Congo can't begin to have an honest trade until the war ends and worldwide demand for cheap smuggled minerals subsides. So in the meantime, North Kivu's multi-million-dollar magic trick continues. Now you see the ore; now you don't. Gwen Thompkins, NPR News, Goma.

[Steve Inskeep:] It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep. Serbia held parliamentary elections yesterday. Western governments had hoped that six years after the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic, that Serb voters would reject ultra nationalism. That didn't happen. NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports from Belgrade.
[Sylvia Poggioli:] In the days leading up to the vote, American and European officials made urgent appeals to Serbs to vote for the democratic parties. But the results showed that the radicals whose leader, Vojislav Seselj, is in prison in the Hague awaiting trial at the War Crimes Tribunal can still count on a bedrock of support from nearly one-third of the electorate. Nevertheless, political commentator Braca Grubacic believes there's little chance the radicals can come to power.
[Mr. Braca Grubacic:] Because simply their coalition capacity is very low, and nobody wants to go with them. They're [unintelligible] the president who is indicted in the Hague.
[Sylvia Poggioli:] The pro-Western democratic party of President Boris Tadic came in second with 23 percent, a large gain from the 2003 elections, but not enough to govern alone. The more conservative party of outgoing Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica came in third with 16 percent. Tadic and Kostunica were allies in the battle to ouster Milosevic in 2000, but they've since become bitter rivals. Kostunica is known to want to hold on to the premiership, and in order to do so, he could dangle the threat of joining forces with the radicals. So Kostunica could become the king maker in what are likely to be long, drawn-out and difficult negotiations. Whatever government coalition is formed, it will have to deal with painful economic reforms and the difficult issues of cooperation with the War Crimes Tribunal and the disputed province of Kosovo. Serbia will try to resume talks with the European Union, which were suspended eight months ago because of the failure of the Kostunica government to capture and deliver former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic to the War Crimes Tribunal, where he's charged with genocide. And the issue of Kosovo is even more complicated. The province the overwhelming majority of whose population is ethnic Albanian is still seen by Serbs as the cradle of their nation. Western governments had hoped a progressive reformist Serbian government would not raise objections to an imminent U.N. plan to grant Kosovo some form of independence. Commentator Grubacic says this would have been the perfect solution for the West.
[Mr. Braca Grubacic:] Unfortunately, this didn't happen the way they expected. They had too much of a wishful thinking and huge expectations. And I do think that the Kosovo politics of Serbian government will not be changed.
[Sylvia Poggioli:] U.N. Envoy Martti Ahtisaari is expected to make his Kosovo independence proposal public at the end of this week. But even before the Serb election results were known, Kosovo had become the object of a new international dispute. Russian President Vladimir Putin has sided with Belgrade, threatening to use Russia's U.N. Security Council veto power to block any Kosovo plan objectionable to the Serbs. China has made similar threats. And even the Western front is showing signs of disagreement. Several EU members such as Spain, Greece, Romania and Italy have expressed concern that a Kosovo secession could be a dangerous precedent for other independence-minded regions in Europe and elsewhere. Vladeta Jankovic, adviser to Prime Minister Kostunica, says Serbia is also worried an independent Kosovo could unleash a domino effect throughout the Balkans.
[Dr. Vladeta Jankovic:] What could happened in Western Macedonia, which is populated by 85 percent of Albanians? What be happen in southern Serbia, where you have against huge proportion of Albanian population in the so-called [unintelligible] Valley? What will happen in eastern Montenegro, where you have majority Albanian municipalities? Finally, what about northwestern Greece?
[Sylvia Poggioli:] Jankovic says the principles of the U.N. Charter territorial sovereignty and inviolability of borders must be respected. But, he adds, Belgrade is willing to grant full autonomy to Kosovo.
[Dr. Vladeta Jankovic:] What we want is Albanians to have full power in Kosovo. Everything short of membership in the United Nations and their military, they must not have the [unintelligible]. They will have complete self rule with minimal, reasonable guarantees for Serbian remaining Serbian population for their physical safety, and, you know, for your basic human rights.
[Sylvia Poggioli:] Stability in the Balkans is the major concern of European Union leaders. Many of them have suggested a continued round of negotiations to try to bring Serbs and ethnic Albanians to a compromised solution. At the same time, the Kosovo issue now has repercussions beyond the Balkans. It's creating new tensions between the West and Russia. And its solution maybe found among leaders in Washington, Brussels and Moscow. Sylvia Poggioli, NPR News, Belgrade.

[Debbie Elliott:] One other sticking point in relations is Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The Jewish population there grew by more than 5 percent last year. Despite an Israeli promise not to expand Jewish settlements, construction in many settlements is continuing. NPR's Linda Gradstein reports from the West Bank.
[Linda Gradstein:] Outside the supermarket, Osnat Fema, a mother of six, says this settlement doesn't feel any different than an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood inside Israel, which is less than three miles away. She says the only difference is that housing prices are significantly cheaper.
[Osnat Fema:] [Through translator] It's a city of Torah and a good place to raise our children in a religious environment. Also, buying apartments here is cheaper, and that's important. Families have a lot of children, and most of the men don't work but study Torah all day, so the money is important.
[Linda Gradstein:] Drora Edkus, who tracks settlements for Peace Now, says that most of the new construction is in settlements that are relatively close to the Israeli border on the western side of the barrier that Israel is building in and around the West Bank.
[Drora Edkus:] Once the barrier is constructed, so people tend to see it as a future promise that this settlement will remain also in Israel, and therefore it's accelerated this process.
[Linda Gradstein:] Bethlehem's Palestinian mayor, Hana Nasir, says settlements around Bethlehem and the barrier are strangling the city. He says the ongoing settlement expansion threatens any future peace deal with Israel.
[Hana Nasir:] These settlements now, they are dozens, and they are cutting the West Bank into bits and pieces, and there is no more any chance for a viable Palestinian state would be created in the future.
[Linda Gradstein:] Settler spokesman Yusrael Maidad says settlers believe that all of the West Bank should remain under Jewish control.
[Yusrael Maidad:] We see the historical pattern of increasing the Jewish population there, of ensuring Israel's security by doing so, by trying to make sure that our second and third generation continue to live there, by drawing in additional sectors of Israel's population, and actually making that piece of territory as much of Israel as physically possible.
[Linda Gradstein:] That contradicts the U.S.-backed road map to peace, which Israel and the Palestinians accepted four years ago. The road map calls on Israel to end settlement expansion, and on Palestinians to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure. Israeli officials interpret that to mean that natural growth or building houses for children who've grown up in the settlement is allowed. Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev says Israel has not violated its commitments.
[Mark Regev:] One, we are not building new settlements. Two, we're not taking over Arab-controlled land for the purpose of constructing, for building new settlements or for expanding existing ones. Three, we're not outwardly expanding existing settlements. They're the three principles.
[Linda Gradstein:] Uri Dromi at the Israel Democracy Institute says with the election of the Islamist Hamas to run the Palestinian government, Israeli plans of a West Bank pullout have become more complicated. He says Israel is also facing more urgent issues.
[Uri Dromi:] The public agenda in Israel, the public discourse, is so saturated with burning issues corruption, stability of the government, the Iranian threat, Hezbollah, Hamas people are too overwhelmed with these problems to worry about the long-range demographic or settlement issue.
[Linda Gradstein:] But, says Dromi, in any future peace deal with the Palestinians Israel will eventually have to dismantle many of the settlements, and building new homes there every year will only make that process more difficult. Linda Gradstein, NPR News, Modi'in Illit on the West Bank.

[Neal Conan:] I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Shock and outrage over the death of Trayvon Martin continue to reverberate. The unarmed teenager was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer who claims self-defense. Details remain unclear, but the tragedy ignited a nationwide movement of rallies and memorials and demands that the gunman, George Zimmerman, face charges. The incident has also re-energized the conversation around race in America. Over the past year, our colleague, Michele Norris, has asked people to encapsulate their thoughts on race in six words. In the past weeks, she's received a flood of these race cards. She'll share some in just a few minutes. And if you'd like to contribute, send us six words. The email address is talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. Go to npr.org and click on TALK OF THE NATION. If you have questions about the project, our phone number is 800-989-8255. Later in the program, careers derailed by disease. Former baseball phenom Ben Petrick joins us. But we begin with NPR correspondent Kathy Lohr. She's been covering the Trayvon Martin story and joins us by phone from Sanford, Florida. Nice of you to be with us.
[Kathy Lohr, Byline:] Glad to be here.
[Neal Conan:] The Sanford City Commission today voted no confidence in the police chief, but as I understand it, that doesn't mean he's out of a job, at least not yet.
[Kathy Lohr, Byline:] Not yet. Actually, the vote came last night, when city commissioners and the mayor issued this vote of no confidence against Chief Lee. There's just been such a public outcry over this case and, you know, people say there's just too many questions about how the investigation was conducted. So, but as I understand it, it's the city manager that ultimately has the final say in whether the police chief would stay or go, and he's saying that he's sticking with him until the investigation is concluded.
[Neal Conan:] We do hear news that there's going to be a news conference shortly. Do we know any reason why?
[Kathy Lohr, Byline:] Well, they're not saying any details, but it makes sense to think that it might have something to do with the police chief. We don't know yet. We'll find out more shortly.
[Neal Conan:] All right, that's the local investigation. The Justice Department says it's going to investigate as well, or participate in the investigation. What's their role?
[Kathy Lohr, Byline:] Yeah, they announced that they were going to launch a civil rights investigation here after this public outcry, that, you know, people, the family, civil rights leaders are claiming that there has been discrimination in how this case was handled, whether this could be a hate crime. You know, Trayvon's parents are meeting today with federal officials, and the FBI is looking into the case. So there's a whole lot of law enforcement officials that are looking into this, and then also there's a grand jury that's actually set to hear evidence next month, April 10.
[Neal Conan:] And the state, how is the state of Florida participating?
[Kathy Lohr, Byline:] You know, all of this came sort of after this public outcry, but the state has and the federal government both announced at the same time that they were running their own investigation. So the local police department turned over its investigation, everything it has to the state. The state, the grand jury will then decide whether to move forward.
[Neal Conan:] In the meantime, there are any number of protests, as we mentioned, around the country, but there in Sanford as well.
[Kathy Lohr, Byline:] There have been a lot of people coming to Sanford in the past week. The NAACP national and regional leaders were here. They held a rally on Tuesday evening. Reverend Al Sharpton is on his way for a rally tonight, and in fact there are so many people expected here that they moved the rally from a church to a public park. And from what I'm understanding, I'm hearing that people are coming from Atlanta. There are busloads that are coming from other Florida cities, including Daytona Beach in Orlando. So there's expected now to be thousands here this evening. Also there were rallies in New York, and there have been rallies in Miami and prayer vigils, now almost all over the country.
[Neal Conan:] And what about the shooter in this case, George Zimmerman? He's said to be in hiding.
[Kathy Lohr, Byline:] That is what has been said. He has not been in fact, it's said that he moved out of the neighborhood where he lived, that he's had death threats. It's not clear where he is. It's not clear whether or not charges will be brought. It's interesting there's a petition online at change.org to have Zimmerman prosecuted. That petition had about 600,000 signatures two days ago, and now over a million people have signed that petition.
[Neal Conan:] And amidst all this amidst all this pressure, it's going to be difficult to impossible to be deliberative about this.
[Kathy Lohr, Byline:] I mean, you know, the police department and other people are saying wait and see what the investigation holds. They're saying, you know, they wouldn't necessarily just arrest Zimmerman on the spot, that they didn't have enough evidence, that he of course used the state's Stand Your Ground law and said that, you know, he was acting in self-defense. The parents and others claim that 911 calls show that that's not true, but you know, people are saying wait until we get all the evidence. So it'll be interesting to see how it develops.
[Neal Conan:] Difficult when things are this emotional to ask people to wait.
[Kathy Lohr, Byline:] It is, and people don't want to wait. Everybody here is angry. I want to tell you that I've talked to people in the black community, the white community, the Hispanic community. Everybody tells me they're angry about how this case was handled. A lot of people are calling for Zimmerman to be arrested and prosecuted. And at the same time, I think people here that are not in the civil rights movement are a bit overwhelmed that so many people are sort of descending on their town, but they're supportive, as far as I can see so far, of whatever happens that justice is done in this case.
[Neal Conan:] Kathy Lohr, thanks very much for your time.
[Kathy Lohr, Byline:] My pleasure.
[Neal Conan:] NPR correspondent Kathy Lohr joined us by phone from Sanford, Florida, where she's covering the latest developments in the Trayvon Martin story. Our colleague Michele Norris founded the Race Card Project over a year ago. That encourages people to share their thoughts and experiences on race, if they can do it in six words. And she joins us here in Studio 3A. Nice to have you back on the program.
[Michele Norris, Byline:] Great to be here, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] And race is so complicated. How did you decide it might be better to try to get people to crystallize their thoughts like this?
[Michele Norris, Byline:] Well, I wrote a book about my family's complex racial legacy, a family memoir, and I knew that when I went out to talk about it, I'd be asking people to engage in a conversation about race. And I know that it's something for people that it's hard for people to do. And so I thought: Why don't I lubricate the conversation, make it a little bit easier by quite literally playing the race card, by giving people a postcard and asking them to distill their thoughts, experiences, hopes, dreams, observations about race, but they could only do it in one sentence. And then I thought if I only give them one sentence, that they might try to turn a paragraph into a sentence, that it might be Faulknerian, so to take that sentence and distill it to just six words. And I was surprised at how many people took the bait. I originally printed up about 200 of these cards, and about 30 percent came back. People wrote down their six words and mailed them back. And from there I thought, well, let's just keep rolling with this and see what happens. And I've been surprised and amazed at how many people really do put a lot of thought into this and send them in by mail, via Twitter and via the website.
[Neal Conan:] And how many have you gotten over the past couple of weeks?
[Michele Norris, Byline:] Well, several. I don't have a number, but I can tell you hundreds have come in in the past couple of weeks, and not surprising because America has been pulled into this roiling conversation about race and identity and how we see ourselves and how we see each other and all of the sort of labels and assumptions that are attached to that. So as the Trayvon Martin case really picked up more and more attention, I really started to see a lot of these submissions come in.
[Neal Conan:] Specifically about the case or more broadly?
[Michele Norris, Byline:] Well, specifically about the case but also just more broadly on the subject of race. I mean, there are several that came in that were specific to the case, like defines you, like it or not; the children are watching us; white neighborhood made me subconscious racist; 57 years later another Emmett Till. But then others like, you know, we aren't all strong black women; or a construction box a construction, a box, not me. So they weren't directly about Trayvon Martin, but they were sort of to the, you know, the issue attached to that, race and identity. And also several people just writing and saying how do I talk about this, you know, noting that they want to have this conversation. And maybe that's why so many people come to it, because it's sort of a safe space. It's hard to talk to your co-workers about this. Sometimes it's even hard to talk to members of your family about this, and this is a place where people can express themselves. But also the thing that I really appreciate about it is I post them on a website. And so you can scroll through the wall and in doing so sort of eavesdrop on the conversation about race that you generally don't hear.
[Neal Conan:] Since we mentioned this project yesterday in connection with the Trayvon Martin case, here on TALK OF THE NATION, I think we've gotten over 100 just in the past 24 hours, and if you'd like to contribute, our email address is 800 that's the phone number, obviously. The email address is talk@npr.org. You can also go to our website, npr.org, and click on TALK OF THE NATION. The phone number is 800-989-8255. Email is talk@npr.org. What surprised you, Michele?
[Michele Norris, Byline:] Several things surprised me. First of all, I was surprised that people do this, that people would write down six words and then send them in. And then I was continually surprised by how it would pull you inside aspects of the conversation that were not sort of aboveboard, not well-understood, under-appreciated or sometimes under-wrapped. And then I was surprised, and as a communicator pleased to see that people would then start talking to each other. You know, the woman who said not all of us are strong black women, not all are strong black women, a lot of people started to tweet immediately about that. And there was this conversation with a woman in Sri Lanka and a woman in the U.K. and several women who were Spellman graduates in Atlanta, and they were all talking about what that meant to them, that for some, they said, the strong black woman trope had become a euphemism for treat them any way you want because they will survive. And someone else said when people say I'm strong and resilient, it makes me sound like a weed instead of a flower. And so this conversation with all these people in different, you know, ports of this country, but even across overseas was something that we were all able to eavesdrop on.
[And In Another Case, Someone Wrote:] Money in hand, not on counter.
[Neal Conan:] Let's see if we can get Sandra on the line, Sandra's on the line with us from East Lansing, Michigan.
[Sandra:] Hi.
[Neal Conan:] Hi.
[Sandra:] Well, I do have the my six words here.
[Neal Conan:] Go ahead.
[Sandra:] My six words are: Stop seeing black boys are predators. And I must say that it was it came about because I heard you talking about it on the show yesterday, but this is something that I think about quite a bit. You know, I do have sons, and when the Trayvon story came up, it brought back some of my own concerns about these kind of random acts that and a lot of young men are less likely to come forward, you know, out of fear of being embarrassed. Maybe they don't even say anything to their parents. But I had an incident with one of my sons that he did talk to me about. He was walking down the street one night, and he's in his 20s, and an elderly white man walks quickly up to him, raises his hands in the air and says, I give. And my son just turned around and just rapidly went in the other direction. He was terrified. But this man was very frightened by my son, who is African-American.
[Neal Conan:] Stop seeing white boys black boys as predators. Sandra, thanks very much for the call.
[Sandra:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking with Michel Norris about race cards, expressions, thoughts on race in six words, 800-989-8255. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan. Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till, nothing changes. Shoot first, ask questions later, maybe. Black youth guilty until proven innocent. Ignorance, fear create prejudice and bigotry. Just a few of the six-word race cards that have come in since the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Our colleague Michele Norris began the Race Card Project in 2010, asking people to encapsulate their thoughts on race in six words. In the past week, she's received a flood of these race cards. If you'd like to contribute, send us six words. Email talk@npr.org. On Twitter you can find us @TOTN, and you can join the conversation at our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. If you have questions about the project, 800-989-8255. Email talk@npr.org. And joining us now is Joe Ereson, a student at Truman State University. Nice to have you with us today.
[Joe Ereson:] Oh, thank you.
[Neal Conan:] And you contributed a race card?
[Joe Ereson:] I did. I submitted mine last weekend.
[Neal Conan:] And what did it say?
[Joe Ereson:] My six words were: White neighborhood made me subconscious racist.
[Neal Conan:] And how did that work out?
[Joe Ereson:] Well, I realized, sort of I guess in retrospect, I'd been seeing Ms. Norris' tweets for a while, and I finally decided that I wanted to submit something. And I realized that the negative stereotypes of racism in St. Louis, Missouri, where I grew up, had an effect on me in my encounter with people I didn't know randomly on the street.
[Neal Conan:] And so white neighborhood made me a subconscious racist.
[Joe Ereson:] Yeah, I grew up in a pretty sterilized, homogenous community, in a suburb of St. Louis. I went to pretty much all-white Catholic elementary school, and then I went to a largely white Catholic high school. So I really had no day-to-day encounters with anyone of a different race for a long time. And I guess my lack of encounters, there are a lot of stereotypes in St. Louis, the news and the violence. People always are saying that, you know, St. Louis is the most dangerous city in America. And I guess those allowed me to formulate, I guess, realize that I had a lot of subconscious racism in the way I looked at random people on the street.
[Neal Conan:] Thinking about it, where do you think you learned it?
[Joe Ereson:] I don't know. I think it was just like the stereotype, the you know, like the news and the violence and just a lack of encounters with people from a variety of different cultures different than myself. I just didn't really have that.
[Neal Conan:] Michele, it's unusual to hear that.
[Michele Norris, Byline:] It is unusual, and I have to tell you, Joe, thanks so much for submitting and for being a part of this conversation. When I posted your six words, some people contacted me, and they were really uncomfortable about that. You know, why are you putting that kind of thing out there? And one of the reasons that I do is because fear on the table is something we can deal with, you know, as opposed to fear that's sort of hidden in people's minds and in people's hearts. And as you talk about your six words, and as I think about the six words that Sandra sent in stop seeing black boys as predators I think of another submission from someone else whose six words were: Always putting other people at ease a black man who's aware that when he goes into an elevator or when he walks into a room that people see him and they're uncomfortable and so he has certain things that he does to try to put them at ease, and the burden of having to carry that around, you know, to have to be genial and jolly whether you feel that way or not, to try to make sure that everyone doesn't see you as a threat or a predator.
[Neal Conan:] Joe Ereson, after crystallizing your thoughts like that, has that changed you?
[Joe Ereson:] I don't know. I would point to one experience that sort of made me aware of this. In my high school senior year, I took a class called African-American voices, and it just a lot of it seemed like a comfortable, non-threatening environment to talk about our feelings. And then I just I never really would have, I guess, thought of it as, like, conscious racism, but I realized, wow, that is just so that I think this is just so preposterous and terrible and unwarranted. It's just absolutely unwarranted, and I don't know why I think it. And unfortunately, I think it's instinct, and I think it's something that a lot of people identify with, and I'm basing that and so all these people from, like, my neighborhood, a lot of people, of my friends, have agreed with that.
[Michele Norris, Byline:] Joe, before you sent in those six words, had you ever said this out loud? Had you ever expressed it in any way or shared it with someone?
[Joe Ereson:] Yeah, in that class we had talked about it, and I just sort of realized, wow, like, for example, I was, you know, like at the mall or something, and you're anxious to walk by alone by a group of black teens enjoying themselves, having a good time, as I'd probably do the same thing with my friends. And like I said, it's just absolutely unwarranted that I would think of something like that.
[Michele Norris, Byline:] How do you combat something like that? How do you address it if it's, you know, something that's learned or ingrained or something that you pick up?
[Joe Ereson:] I just I had to keep telling myself how absolutely unwarranted it is, and you've got to think, I guess, in the other person's shoes, as cliche as that sounds. You know, I probably I want to hang out there, just everybody wants to hang out at the same spot, you know? It's not like they're doing anything wrong for being there.
[Neal Conan:] And if this was in part a product of a growing up in a mostly white context, do you seek out more mixed situations now?
[Joe Ereson:] Yeah, I love putting myself in different situations with a variety of different people, regardless of their race, you know, sexual orientation or whatnot, just talking to people and learning from them so that you can develop or see what they think, and just you're a better person because of it. And if you're talking about it, you're headed in the right direction.
[Neal Conan:] Joe, thanks very much for the call, appreciate it.
[Joe Ereson:] OK, thank you.
[Neal Conan:] And thanks again for the contribution to the project. Want to read some of the correction, we've now had over 200 six-word entries since we first announced this. This from Joanna, much along the same lines: Embarrassed that I'm frightened by black boys. It's interesting. This from Stacey: Gay doesn't make me less black.
[Michele Norris, Byline:] Now, that is touching on, you know, another of those very difficult conversations that people perhaps don't want to talk about.
[Neal Conan:] Let's go next to Nancy, Nancy with us from Framingham in Massachusetts.
[Nancy:] Yes, and I've lived in Framingham for 50 years, and the demographics of my town have changed drastically over that period. Today my six boys would be racial profiling in my own town. There are arrests every week in the local paper of, frankly, Hispanic people or people of Brazilian descent who are in large part now presently residents of my town of Framingham, Massachusetts, west of Boston. So there is racial profiling in my town, and I want to say that between 1954 and 1956, when I was a fourth and fifth-grader, I lived in Sanford, Florida.
[Neal Conan:] Ah. OK, Nancy, thanks very much for the call, appreciate it.
[Nancy:] You're welcome.
[Neal Conan:] And that's interesting. Immediately it's broadened out to gay community and to Nancy writing about the Hispanics and Brazilians in her much-changed town of Framingham.
[Michele Norris, Byline:] And what she sees every night when she turns on the news and the questions about what that how it affects the way that she lives her life, where she decides to go or not go or how she reacts to people that she sees on the street.
[Neal Conan:] This is Brig in Kalama, Washington: On race, get over it, everybody.
[Michele Norris, Byline:] I hear a lot of that. I have to tell you I hear a lot of that, people who say I'm tired of this conversation, why are we still having this conversation. A lot of people who question whether race is even a you know, if it's biologically correct for us to even talk about people of different races. And yet this is this conversation that seems to be in the air. It's sort of like the weather. It's there all the time. Sometimes it kicks up, and it's more of a tornado or...
[Neal Conan:] Or as Heather says in six words, it's never going to go away. Let's see if we can go next to Leslie, Leslie with us from Southfield in Michigan.
[Leslie:] Yes, hi. I was thinking about the six words, and I finally got: It defines me, but it doesn't define me.
[Neal Conan:] What do you mean by that?
[Leslie:] Well, first off, I mean I admit it, and that in a way, it defines me. But I'm also Jewish, and that really defines me. And I have felt prejudice's sting because I am Jewish. I have been called names. I have been threatened. I've even been fired because I'm Jewish. And that more than anything else defines me.
[Neal Conan:] It's interesting, though, the way you phrase it it defines me but doesn't define me in a sense recognizes that there is this other context, the African-Americanwhite context, that is also there too.
[Leslie:] Right, I mean, there are I live in Detroit, and there's a lot of black culture, and I grew up during Motown and the riots, and there are black families on our street. My daughter used to play with a bunch of boys down the street. She doesn't obviously she grew up at the age she's at the age where, you know, boys and girls don't like each other. But, you know, I come in contact with them every day, and they're just people who have the same needs, wants, desires that I do.
[Neal Conan:] Michele?
[Michele Norris, Byline:] You know, sometimes it feels like this is a two-sided coin, and sometimes it feels like it's sort of like a hexagon on the table, that there's more than two sides to this question, because you say it defines you, but it doesn't define you, but there's a larger question that affects that applies to people, whether they're black or white or Asian or South Asian or native or Latino or, you know, of any stripe or certainly biracial is do you define yourself or do other peoples get to other people get to define you?
[Neal Conan:] Mm-hmm.
[Michele Norris, Byline:] You know, do people define you the way that you see yourself because I think I heard you say that at one point you've been called names, and you've been fired. You know, is that a question of someone else choosing how to define you despite how you choose to define yourself?
[Leslie:] I refuse to let the world set my agenda. I refuse, you know, after 911, I refuse to let my the fears of the world prevent me from living my life.
[Michele Norris, Byline:] I think Neal and I are in here counting fingers.
[Neal Conan:] Counting... I refuse to let the world set my agenda it's one or two over but...
[Michele Norris, Byline:] Yeah. Refuse to let world set agenda.
[Neal Conan:] There you go. Leslie, you've come up with two. Thanks very much.
[Leslie:] Bye.
[Neal Conan:] Here's an email from Margaret in California. Thank you, Michele, for conceiving of this beautiful project. My six words: biological construction social reality collective wound.
[Michele Norris, Byline:] You know, the word construct and construction, if you do sort of a word cloud or a wordle based on all of the submissions, again, something that's surprise me, that word comes up again and again and again this idea that it's something that we have made up or that we have, you know, created in our minds or it's, you know, manufactured in some way, as opposed to something that is real or that, you know, that we control what it is, as opposed to it being something up there that controls us.
[Neal Conan:] Interesting. This is from Gary: Stop blaming whites, stop committing crimes. He goes on to write: As a police officer, most black people talk to me like they want a fight before I even talk to them. They know nothing about me. My Latino partners always called Uncle Tom. I give respect when I get respect. Why do so many blacks hate me because I'm white? It's the same question many black people ask, but it won't be fixed by blaming only whites.
[Michele Norris, Byline:] And where is he writing from?
[Neal Conan:] It doesn't say.
[Michele Norris, Byline:] But wherever he is, it's sort of makes you wonder if they're having that conversation in that community. Is the police officer does the police officer have a chance to have that conversation with members of the community to actually engage and, again, put this on the table and do exactly what he's talking about talk about it?
[Neal Conan:] And meet people outside the context of I'm the arresting officer. You're the alleged perpetrator. There's a lot of friction there from the get-go.
[Michele Norris, Byline:] Right. I suspect he'd probably hear from people of color who say here's why we're afraid. Here's why we're angry.
[Neal Conan:] Five hundred eighty-three emails, we can't count the tweets. Michele Norris is with us. We're talking about race cards. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. Let's see we go next to this is Andrea. Andrea with us from Esmont in Virginia.
[Andrea:] Yes. Hi. My six words are can I walk in your neighborhood. And that clearly relates to this incident in Florida. And it relates to me in my work. I'm a home health physical therapist, and what I do all day is walk in and out of very different types of neighborhoods. I'm very aware of how I feel when I walk as these neighborhoods change. So, for example, if I'm walking into a clearly a low socioeconomic neighborhood, I feel like my employee badge and my computer are sort of my protection.
[Neal Conan:] Your protection?
[Andrea:] Yes. So, you know, I clearly don't come from your neighborhood. I don't have family here. But I need to be here to help somebody for my work. And so, I'm aware that I feel vulnerable. And I see those things as, you know, will this person someone will know if something happens to her. So I guess I feel like I get maybe a little more respect. So I'm very aware of that. And I don't like it, but it's what it is.
[Michele Norris, Byline:] Do you brandish your computer excuse me. This is Michele.
[Neal Conan:] That's OK.
[Michele Norris, Byline:] Or your badge in some way to let people know this is who I am, this is why I'm here?
[Andrea:] I wear yeah. I'm supposed to wear it. And I wear it on the outer most piece of my clothing. So if it's winter, it's on my winter coat. If not it's what people will see it, absolutely.
[Neal Conan:] Andrea, thanks very much for the call.
[Andrea:] Sure.
[Neal Conan:] Here's one from Jerry in Fresno. My entry into The Race Card Project: white skin let me win. Why?
[Michele Norris, Byline:] I, you know, sometimes, you're left to wonder, what does that mean? I wish he was here with us... ...so he could explain.
[Neal Conan:] We have Mohammad on the line calling us from Kom in Iran.
[Mohammad:] Hello?
[Neal Conan:] Hi. You're on the air. Go ahead, please. What are your six words?
[Mohammad:] Thank you for calling taking my call. I'm calling from Iran, and I've always wanted to call this radio because I'm learning a lot of things from NPR. I wanted to appreciate it.
[Neal Conan:] Well, thank you very much.
[Mohammad:] And my six words about racism are: everybody has some sort of racism.
[Neal Conan:] I think that's a kind of truism, Mohammad. How do you experience it in your life?
[Mohammad:] You know, in Iran, we are suffering from racism, as well. Like people from Afghanistan, a lot of people are living in my country, and other peoples really look down on them. And, you know, in just words, they say that we don't have racism, but when it comes to reactions, it's totally a different story, you know, about marriage. For example, if an Afghan boy proposes to the girl, then they would say they would reject this proposal, you know. So I would say everybody has some sort of racism in their blood but maybe this is a this is not unraveled here yet.
[Neal Conan:] Mohammad, thank you very much for the call. Don't wait so long to call next time, OK?
[Mohammad:] OK. I swear I'll call a lot and thank you for taking my call.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks very much. Michele, we're going to forward all of these contributions to you. And as you put them up on your website, you go through them.
[Michele Norris, Byline:] I do. I do.
[Neal Conan:] Cumulatively, what do you learn?
[Michele Norris, Byline:] Well, you know, it's been an education for me that is as valuable as anything I've learned in a classroom or, frankly, in a radio studio. I've learned many things. They draw you it's almost like being pulled into the aspects of the conversation that you never get to hear unless you're actually at the table. I've learned that, you know, a lot of people are struggling with how they identify themselves. I've learned that the conversation about biracialism and multiculturalism is very much alive. We sort of treat it as a side dish to the larger conversation about race. But at this point in America, it's kind of the main course. And I've learned, as Mohammad suggested, that all over the world, they may not call it racism, maybe it's bias, maybe it's tribalism. But a lot of people and a lot of places are wrestling with this.
[Neal Conan:] Six hundred fifty-five race cards at last count and still counting. Michele Norris, thank you so much. It's really been interesting.
[Michele Norris, Byline:] Thank you, Neal.

[Melissa Block:] Now your comments on yesterday's program. First off, politics and religion, sort of.
[Robert Siegel:] Some of you objected to a statement by Stuart Stevens in my interview with him. He's a Republican media strategist, and I asked him what he thought of the show the Democrats were putting on in Denver.
[Mr. Stuart Stevens:] It sort of has the passion of a Unitarian wedding. It seems like they're trying to be nice to a lot of different people who are going to vote for them anyway.
[Melissa Block:] Uh oh, well Tim Weatherall of Charlottesville, Virginia, had his own Unitarian wedding with, as he says, plenty of passion, variety, fun and substance, just like this convention.
[He Continues:] Perhaps Mr. Stevens does not realize that he paid Democrats and Unitarians a compliment.
[Robert Siegel:] And we heard from Ann Summers, who is the membership chairperson for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Briarcliff, Croatan and Ossining, New York.
[Melissa Block:] She writes: I'm used to hearing that we are too open-minded, too liberal and not dogmatic enough, but passionless? Never. She invites Mr. Stevens to witness that enthusiasm by stopping by a service this Sunday.
[Robert Siegel:] Finally, a note on text-messaging. Susan Farver of Woody Creek, Colorado, heard my conversation about the Obama campaign's use of mass texting at rallies, and she tells us this: I tried to text my daughter tonight about Obama's speech, but when I used the usual iTap shorthand, I couldn't pull up either Obama or Barack without spelling it out letter by letter. Here's an opportunity for the Obama campaign.
[Melissa Block:] Well, don't text us your comments, but please do write to us. Go to npr.org, and click on contact us at the top of the page.
[Robert Siegel:] This is NPR, National Public Radio.

[Ari Shapiro:] Now we're going to talk about "The Long, Necessary History Of Whiny Black Protesters At College." That is the title of a new piece by NPR's Gene Demby for our Code Switch blog. He's been thinking about the issue of political correctness on college campuses. This issue has gotten people talking for months as protests have taken hold at schools across the country. Hey Gene.
[Gene Demby, Byline:] Hey Ari.
[Ari Shapiro:] OK, as we begin, I want to play a piece of tape from our program last month. This is New York magazine political columnist, Jonathan Chait, who you actually mention in the piece...
[Gene Demby, Byline:] Yeah.
[Ari Shapiro:] ...And here he's talking about the definition of what is political correctness. He argues it's been stretched too far.
[Jonathan Chait:] I would define political correctness as a new ideology that is completely intolerant of dissent on issues relating to race and gender. So it's an illiberal kind of politics that does not grant any political legitimacy to criticism on identity issues.
[Ari Shapiro:] This critique comes from many more people than just Jonathan Chait.
[Gene Demby, Byline:] Absolutely.
[Ari Shapiro:] There are a lot of people out there calling these protestors whiny, entitled, coddled. What is your take on this?
[Gene Demby, Byline:] So again, we should remember that whenever student protest movements pop up, that's what older people say. They say that the students on campus are sort of are entitled. They're asking for too much, especially black student protesters. What was really fascinating writing this story was we realized how much the language that black student protesters were using back in, like, the '60s that sounded almost identical to the language that black student protesters are using today.
[Ari Shapiro:] You talk about seeking safe space...
[Gene Demby, Byline:] Right.
[Ari Shapiro:] ...even if they didn't use that term, funding for minority programs...
[Gene Demby, Byline:] Right.
[Ari Shapiro:] ...Diversity of faculty the same things people have been requesting for decades.
[Gene Demby, Byline:] Absolutely. One difference I think and I think this is the one of the things that trips up older people is the focus on things like micro-aggressions, which are sort of smaller, more mundane, tossed-off statements that people feel is antagonizing.
[Ari Shapiro:] One of the things you point out in this piece is that a lot of the older people making these criticisms are themselves black and went through the same kinds of experiences that these students today are complaining about. Is this just an attitude of, it made me tougher, I endured it, you should be able to do the same?
[Gene Demby, Byline:] A lot of it is that. I mean, a lot of people feel like, I've survived these things. I developed these calluses. And the stuff that you are going through is stuff that will only get more complicated when you leave college campuses. So you have to learn to navigate these things. Of course, that sort of ignores that what kids are trying to do is actually fix these things. A friend of mine runs the black alumni group at a big mid-western college. And what she says is that there's a really thin line between telling people that, hey, you're going to have to learn to navigate this stuff, navigate racial slights, navigate racism. But there's a thin line between telling someone you have to navigate that stuff and that racism is a thing you have to tolerate.
[Ari Shapiro:] There's an interesting point you make in this piece that because of demographics, you say these kinds of clashes on college campuses right now are inevitable. Explain what you mean by that.
[Gene Demby, Byline:] So Americans remain really broadly segregated, right? We know that American high schools high schools that are producing these college students are really, really segregated, increasingly segregated. But we also know that over the last 25, 30 years, according to Pew, the number of black and Latino students at American colleges have skyrocketed. So what you're having is, for the first time, people are living in shared spaces, and probably for the only time in their lives if you think about it. They're living in shared spaces, and so they're trying to fight over the rules of that shared space. They're trying to lay out the rules of engagement in these spaces. But they're 19-year-olds, so sometimes that's going to be heavy-handed and sometimes it's going to be ham-handed and sometimes it's going to be ill-conceived. But what they're trying to do is to make diversity work in a real way and not in just an abstract way.
[Ari Shapiro:] And you also point that this is a group of students who grew up in the context of the Occupy movement. They're now at school in the moment that Blacks Lives Matter protests are happening across the country. This is hardly existing in a vacuum.
[Gene Demby, Byline:] Yeah, there's a larger sort of generational momentum around this kind of activism. People are shouting out each other's movements. They feel like they're a part of these things. And so a lot of these protests, what's fascinating about them is they're becoming national news. Because of the existence of social media, there's so many ways for people to sort of broadcast these things. And what you're doing when you do something like talk about micro-aggressions on your college campus is you're trying to set up like, hey, these are the things that I would hope that you would not say to me, right? Or, these are the ways I would hope you would engage me that are more respectful. And if those things are contested, it should be expected. I mean, because we're talking about people who are working these things out in real life. It's going to be messy. Diversity is messy necessarily, but that's what is happening.
[Ari Shapiro:] Gene Demby's latest piece for NPR's Code Switch blog is "The Long, Necessary History Of Whiny Black Protesters At College." Thanks Gene.
[Gene Demby, Byline:] Thank you, Ari.

[Melissa Block:] World financial markets have both jumped and slumped in reaction to China's unveiling of a nearly $600 billion stimulus package. China insists the package, which is made up mostly of infrastructure projects, is the most efficient way to keep its economy growing. But as NPR's Anthony Kuhn reports from Beijing, some observers think the key to real growth is not government investment, but fundamental economic reform.
[Anthony Kuhn:] As soon as Beijing announced the stimulus package in November, Ch'ung-ch'ing, a city on the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, joined other local governments in submitting lists of projects for funding. Ch'ung-ch'ing got $34 billion, more than many locales. Some observers think that Ch'ung-ch'ing's Communist Party Secretary Bo Xilai's clout and connections had something to do with it. Bo is the son of a party elder. But Ch'ung-ch'ing's mayor, Wang Hongju, denied such speculation at this month's session of the national parliament.
[Mayor Wang Hongju:] [Through Translator] We did not get our money by lobbying government ministries. Under the central government's plans for fixed asset investment, western areas such as Ch'ung-ch'ing get more money. There's a formula for this. It's not about personal connections.
[Anthony Kuhn:] Ch'ung-ch'ing's economy is dominated by big state-owned companies, which are mostly deep in debt. Critics believe that Beijing is using stimulus funds to bail out these state-owned companies and buy the loyalty of the bureaucrats who run them. Yen Yi Min is a Shanghai-based lawyer.
[Mr. Yen Yi Min:] [Through Translator] There's no doubt that the aim of this fiscal stimulus is stability. But the aim should not be the stability of the bureaucrat's income. So it's imperative that the government be transparent and allow oversight in the use of the stimulus money.
[Anthony Kuhn:] Yen has filed a Freedom of Information Act request. He wants to know where the central government will get the money for the stimulus, what projects it will fund and at what cost. The government rejected the request. But at his annual press conference this month, Premier Wen Jiabao seemed to acknowledge public concerns about Beijing's spending programs.
[Premier Wen Jiabao:] [Through Translator] These programs are also going to be fully debated and evaluated. The whole process will be transparent and whole process will be subject to supervision.
[Anthony Kuhn:] Wen argued that besides infrastructure spending, Beijing's plan also includes funding for environmental protection, affordable housing, and long-range restructuring of Chinese industries. The problem, Yen says, is that China's economic growth relies too much on infrastructure spending and too little on consumption. He also recalls that a decade ago, China's massive fiscal stimulus helped it survive the Asian financial crisis. But it also bred widespread graft and waste. Bao Yujun is head of the China Private Enterprises Research Association. He worries that the same thing may happen this time.
[Mr. Bao Yujun:] [Through translator] We're just afraid that the government ministries will take the stimulus money and circulate it among themselves or even engage in corruption. But if the process is transparent and bidding for projects is competitive, then it'll be okay.
[Anthony Kuhn:] But, Bao says, private companies complain to him that they're mostly vying for scraps at the table of powerful government monopolies. Take electricity, for example. Bao says the government plans to invest nearly $147 billion over the next three years to upgrade China's power grid. That includes $8 billion just for electricity meters.
[Mr. Bao Yujun:] [Through translator] To those private companies that manufacture meters, it looks like a big piece of cake, but getting a piece of it is very tough because the state grid company has its own meter companies. You can't get in on the action without a lot of connections.
[Anthony Kuhn:] Bao argues that China must level the playing field for private firms, which provide some 80 percent of China's jobs. He says China still has tremendous potential for consumption and growth. Millions of rural residents remain to be urbanized. More than $2 trillion in household savings sit idle, but unleashing this potential, he says, requires reforms to break up powerful commercial and bureaucratic monopolies. What Bao worries is that government bailouts may actually just strengthen those monopolies. Anthony Kuhn, NPR News, Beijing.

[Farai Chideya:] And now for a different perspective, I'm joined by Bill Tucker. He's a professor of psychology at Rutgers University, also the author of "The Intelligence Controversy: A Guide to the Debates." Welcome.
[Dr. Bill Tucker:] Hi. Nice to be with you.
[Farai Chideya:] So we just discussed with Professor Rushton the issue of whether or not there should be a debate or even a consensus over race and intelligence. Frame this for us in terms of how race and intelligence became linked at what point in history and how that whole debate has unfolded politically.
[Dr. Bill Tucker:] Well, there's a lengthy history of research on race and intelligence, and, invariably, the scientists who work on this do not contribute anything of true scientific value. But these studies wind up then being used in the political arena to support particular points of view. And so, for example, even the Pioneer Fund was begun by that is, its founder and its first president were involved in an attempt to repatriate all blacks back to Africa. Both these men were also ardent supporters of the Third Reich. Then during the '60s, the members of the Pioneer board were particularly active in the campaign to stop the Civil Rights Movement, to overturn the Brown decision, to prevent passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and, generally, to argue against political equality for people of color. And, in fact, one of the members of the board, R who's still a member of the board, R. Travis Osbourne, was one of the persons who testified in the attempt to overturn the Brown decision that because blacks were putatively less intelligent than whites, integrated education was not possible.
[Farai Chideya:] So does the fact that there has been a political debate around this negate the research by different people, including Professor Rushton, who say there is a link?
[Dr. Bill Tucker:] Well, in evaluating this research, there are a number of things to keep in mind. First of all, we have no precise, biological definition of race. These are social constructions. And then it's becoming more and more true as time goes on and different populations are beginning to intermingle, we are approaching what demographers call the beginning of the blend which will essentially eliminate all the old racial categories that we're used to invoking. The second thing is that although Professor Rushton says that, yes, we know what intelligence is, many people argue that there is no clear definition of intelligence, and that what are called intelligence tests tap at best a very small segment of cognitive abilities. Is it possible there are differences between some of these socially constructed groups? Well, anything is possible. But the available evidence would not lead me to that conclusion.
[Farai Chideya:] Why don't you talk to us a little bit about this issue of brain size and intelligence? Do you see any link? Or what is the he says that it's absolutely incontrovertible that there is a link. What's your research or what does research that you've looked at tell you?
[Dr. Bill Tucker:] Well, there are many criticisms of the studies on brain size and intelligence. But quite apart from the scientific issues, I think that there are some obvious practical facts that would suggest that this link is not as firm as Rushton claims it is. For example, one of the individuals who is usually proclaimed as one of the most intelligent persons of the 20th century, Albert Einstein, left his brain to science. It was studied. It is slightly below average for his size. Now, actually, one has to adjust for body size in these studies, and it's slightly below average. So to suggest that brain size is linked to intelligence when one of the most intelligent persons ever had a below-average brain size would suggest that there are serious doubts about this work.
[Farai Chideya:] Overall, what's the importance of this right now? Why this debate has been framed by some as beyond the pale, we shouldn't even discuss it. Do you think, first of all, that it is a distraction to discuss it, something that's really important for us to revisit?
[Dr. Bill Tucker:] In my opinion, it is a distraction to discuss it. If I could, just let me tell you about an incident that occurred 38 years ago in 1969. Although an anecdote, of course, is not data, it, nevertheless, can be quite instructive. At that time, someone from the same point of view, that is who believed that blacks were genetically lesser intelligent that whites, was, nevertheless, looking for a black intellectual to serve on a particular editorial advisory board, and he wrote to certain individuals, again, who share that point of view, and he asked if they could suggest somebody. Well, one person that he wrote to was Dwight J. Ingle, a well-known physiologist, who believed that blacks were less intelligent. And at that time, in 1969, Ingle replied that he did not know of a single, quote, "Negro," who deserved to be a full professor at a first-class university. Another person who responded to that request was Jensen, who, of course, is still working with Rushton on this issue. And Jensen named someone that he found likeable, but not really intellectually trustworthy and implied that, really, there weren't any major black intellectuals who could fill such a position. Well, today, 38 years later, there are numerous intellectuals who happen to be black. There are hundreds, if not thousands of them, who are full professors at major universities. And I think we need to concentrate more on increasing the kind of opportunity that allowed the emergence of these people rather than arguing that, in fact, they are genetically incapable of achieving such accomplishments.
[Farai Chideya:] All right. Well, professor, thank you so much.
[Dr. Bill Tucker:] My pleasure.
[Farai Chideya:] Bill Tucker is a professor of psychology at Rutgers University. He's also the author of "The Intelligence Controversy: A Guide to the Debates." And we should be clear that the foundation, the Pioneer foundation funded studies that went into the book. Bill Tucker joined us from Audio Post in Philadelphia.

[Liane Hansen:] President Bush has conceded that the firing of eight U.S. attorneys was handled badly and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the man at the center of this political crisis, agreed. But NPR's senior news analyst, Daniel Schorr, says he's still waiting to hear someone accept responsibility.
[Daniel Schorr:] It's become almost a parlor game to spot the many uses of the passive voice by President Bush and his aides. The latest, although assuredly not the last, was Attorney General Alberto Gonzales: "mistakes were made" in connection with the firing of eight U.S. attorneys that the White House had wanted fired. The Bush administration is not the first to invent responsibility from nowhere when things go wrong. President Reagan used a tense that you might call the passive imperative "mistakes were made" when the Iran-Contra scandal blew up. President Clinton referred to a series of very bad mistakes when the American Air Force bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. But for the Bush administration, "mistakes were made" doesn't begin to cover the enormity of the disasters for which Mr. Bush has ducked any real responsibility. One was not so much a malfeasance as a catastrophic nonfeasance. That was the bungling response to Hurricane Katrina, to which the inept action of federal agencies peopled with political appointees made a great contribution. The other was Iraq. Just to say Iraq is to evoke images of death and destruction, but President Bush, deploying his "mistakes were made," announced a surge of American troop reinforcements and a new strategy. The president has yet to make any real apology for plunging America into this war in the first place. He never did produce the weapons of mass destruction that were supposed to be the reason for an invasion that is now costing thousands of lives and billions of dollars. I don't want to end this commentary on a despairing note, and so let me recall the New York mayor of my youth, Fiorello LaGuardia little flower to many of us. A domestic relations judge whom LaGuardia had appointed, Herbert O'Brien by name, was stirring controversy over race relations in New York. When the mayor was later reminded during a congressional hearing that he had named O'Brien to the bench, he responded, Senator, I have made a lot of good appointments, and I think I am good, but when I make a mistake, it's a beaut. Where's LaGuardia when we need him? This is Daniel Schorr.

[David Greene:] As we have been looking back on the political career of John McCain, we have heard a great deal about bipartisanship, especially around one issue. This is Senator McCain at a campaign rally in Michigan in 2000.
[John Mccain:] We have to have campaign finance reform. We have to do away with this soft money. And let me tell you why because young Americans young Americans are being alienated from the process.
[David Greene:] Campaign finance reform was a central issue for John McCain, and he finally achieved his objective in 2002 when the McCain-Feingold Act passed. But since then, the Supreme Court has taken large chunks out of that law. With this checkered history of attempts to limit money in political campaigns, we wanted to take your questions about campaign finance reform and put them to commentator Cokie Roberts, who joins us each week to talk about how the government works. Hi, Cokie.
[Cokie Roberts, Byline:] Hi, David.
[David Greene:] So let's get right to our first question which, I think really gets to the why and how of these laws.
[Rachel Kahler:] This is Rachel Kahler from Blaine, Minn. Why were campaign finance laws put in place? Probably the better question is how they managed to get passed in the first place.
[David Greene:] Take it, Cokie.
[Cokie Roberts, Byline:] Well, the very first law I know of does, in fact, pre-date the country. It was passed by the Virginia House of Burgesses in the 1750s.
[David Greene:] Wow.
[Cokie Roberts, Byline:] And it stipulated that no money, meat, drink, entertainment, et cetera, be provided to a voter in exchange for an expected vote. And it came in direct response to what his fellow legislators saw as a not-quite-right event staged by George Washington, who had thrown a big party for prospective voters and won after losing his bid two years earlier. That's how most of these laws come into play, David, the result of some sort of scandal in the most recent campaigns.
[David Greene:] OK. Well, our next listener wants to know some more about those laws.
[Chris Billiau:] This is Chris Billiau from Thetford, Vt. I think campaign finance law is so complicated that maybe a brief history of the laws from the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to the present might help put current issues into context.
[David Greene:] Oh, Cokie just give us a brief history from 1971...
[Cokie Roberts, Byline:] Brief history well...
[David Greene:] ...Why don't you [LAUGHTER]?
[Cokie Roberts, Byline:] ...Even before '71, in the 19th century, candidates were prohibited from soliciting government workers. Then, corporate contributions to candidates were made illegal in 1907, followed by the Federal Corrupt Practices Act in 1910. And then what became something of a pattern, the Supreme Court struck down that law. But Congress kept at it with the Republican majority outlawing contributions by labor unions. And then, finally, the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act providing spending limits on TV ads, federal financing for campaigns and then eventually, after the Watergate scandals, creating the enforcement arm, the Federal Elections Commission.
[David Greene:] And let me guess the Supreme Court overturned that.
[Cokie Roberts, Byline:] Yes, at least parts of it. And everybody found loopholes. So when McCain-Feingold was passed, it was a big day. The Supreme Court initially upheld that law but subsequently overturned provisions of it with rulings like Citizens United allowing corporations and unions back into the money game.
[David Greene:] All right. And that sort of brings us to today. And actually, our last question comes from a listener who wants to know about a pretty current campaign issue, and that's foreign money.
[Tom Chelston:] This is Tom Chelston from Colorado. And I wondered, has any other politician been investigated or prosecuted for taking campaign cash or assistance from a foreign government?
[Cokie Roberts, Byline:] Yes, it's happened over and over. Most notably, the Democratic National Committee and foreign contributors had to pay a more than $700,000 fine for violations in 1996. And then in the last campaign, Bernie Sanders had to pay $14,500 because kids who had a stipend from the Australian Labor Party volunteered in his campaign. Foreign money is still the area where the law is clear, David. It's illegal.
[David Greene:] There you have it. Commentator Cokie Roberts, thanks as always.
[Cokie Roberts, Byline:] Good to talk to you.

[Sarah Mccammon:] Israel holds elections on Tuesday, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the ultimate political survivor, now faces one of the toughest elections of his career. NPR's Daniel Estrin reports that even if Netanyahu is reelection, he's expected to be weaker than he was before.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Benjamin Netanyahu has been in office for over a decade, and including a term in the '90s, he's Israel's longest-serving prime minister. But his survivor's luck may be running out, and his campaign is pulling out all the stops. In this video, his party warns of terror attacks if he's not re-elected.
[Unidentified Person:] [Speaking Hebrew].
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] He appealed to right-wing voters by promising to annex a long swath of the West Bank and apply Israeli sovereignty over occupied land that's at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Then he flew to Russia for his 13th meeting with Vladimir Putin. He's been campaigning on his close ties to two fellow right-wing leaders.
[Unidentified Musical Artist:] [Singing in Hebrew].
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] The chorus of this campaign music video is come on, Putin. Come on, Trump. Come to us to Jerusalem. And large posters on Netanyahu's party headquarters in downtown Tel Aviv feature the Israeli leader with Putin and Trump. I spoke to people walking by.
[Yael Heffler:] Putin is kind of a dictator, Donald Trump kind of a joke.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Yael Heffler used to vote for Netanyahu's party.
[Yael Heffler:] I keep talking about it with my mother. She votes Netanyahu, and she's just saying, OK. So who else? Who can lead this country? You know, she's right to some extent because it's hard to see other politician in his stature. But we need to try, right? After all, this is to try to change.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Many swing voters want change but can't point to a better candidate than Netanyahu. Anshel Pfeffer, a biographer of Netanyahu, says he's had staying power because he convinced Israelis that the country can be prosperous without needing to make peace with the Palestinians.
[Anshel Pfeffer:] He said, no. We can have it all. We can have our cake and eat it. No need to make any concessions to the Palestinians. No need to retreat from the West Bank. Netanyahu proved that Israel can achieve prosperity, can have a decade of uninterrupted growth, and all this without making one concession to the Palestinians.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Netanyahu's other secret to survival, he says...
[Anshel Pfeffer:] He has literally no limits. He will break every rule of politics to survive and to stay ahead.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Netanyahu won a narrow victory during the last elections in April but failed to secure a majority in parliament. So he did something unprecedented instead of following the norm and letting another party try to form the government, he forced new elections so he'd get a second chance.
[Aviv Bushinsky:] It's battle of his life.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Aviv Bushinsky is a former adviser to Netanyahu. He thinks Netanyahu will finish first in the race but struggle to form a right-wing majority of 61 seats out of 120 in Parliament. Maybe he'd convince a few centrists to break away from the opposition and join his government or form a national unity government between his right-wing party and the main centrist party, led by former general Benny Gantz.
[Bushinksy:] If he won't be able to form a 61 seats government, it will be dependent on others. I can't say that his days are numbered, but no doubt Netanyahu will not end up as a strong politician, Israeli politician as he is now.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] I meet Yinon Melamed below the posters of Netanyahu with Putin and Trump.
[Yinon Melamed:] I'm proud. I'm proud that we know how to connect with all the leaders in the world.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Do you think he's going to stay prime minister for very much longer?
[Yinon Melamed:] This is the last round, I think.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] And then there's another test by the end of the year. Israel's attorney general is expected to decide whether to indict Netanyahu for corruption. Netanyahu says he's innocent, and the case won't even go to a trial. He could stay in office even if it does. First, though, he's got to do what he couldn't do six months ago win an election and form a new government. Daniel Estrin, NPR News, Tel Aviv.

[Melissa Block:] This weekend in Seattle some 1,300 firefighters will load up with about 70 pounds of gear a piece, and they'll each set out to climb 69 flights of stairs 1,311 steps up to the observation deck of the Columbia Center downtown. It's the 16th annual Scott Firefighter Stairclimb to benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. And the defending champion is 27-year-old Brent Molsberry, who volunteers with the Chukanut Fire Department near Bellingham, Washington. Mr. Molsberry, you're going for a repeat?
[Mr. Brent Molsberry:] I would definitely like that.
[Melissa Block:] And I gather it would actually be a five-peat for you. You've won this thing four times before.
[Mr. Brent Molsberry:] That's correct.
[Melissa Block:] Well, what's your secret?
[Mr. Brent Molsberry:] Well, I figure the sooner I get up, the sooner the pain will stop.
[Melissa Block:] And your time last year to climb all 69 flights was 11 minutes 17 seconds.
[Mr. Brent Molsberry:] Yeah.
[Melissa Block:] Personal best?
[Mr. Brent Molsberry:] I was actually a couple of seconds slower than the year before.
[Melissa Block:] That sounds awfully fast. I'm trying to imagine 69 flights.
[Mr. Brent Molsberry:] It's a long race.
[Melissa Block:] Give us a picture here. You're climbing, wearing full bunker gear, mask, all that stuff.
[Mr. Brent Molsberry:] That's correct.
[Melissa Block:] And how does the breathing part go?
[Mr. Brent Molsberry:] We breathe through a mask and have a compressed air bottle on our back. So it's sort of like a scuba system, except you're not underwater so it's just an S-C-B-A, which is self-contained breathing apparatus.
[Melissa Block:] Does it feel like 11 minutes when you're doing it?
[Mr. Brent Molsberry:] No, it feels a lot longer.
[Melissa Block:] Really?
[Mr. Brent Molsberry:] Yeah. It seems to drag on. You start getting a little tired. You look at the floor number and you're like, oh great. I'm only on floor 10.
[Melissa Block:] Oh, you're watching as your going up. You're watching...
[Mr. Brent Molsberry:] Yeah. You can see the numbers, and so you can kind of try to distract yourself by trying to do math as you're going up, try to figure out how many floors you have left.
[Melissa Block:] Is this climb anything close to what you have to do as a firefighter?
[Mr. Brent Molsberry:] Well, my department is a we're just kind of a rural home tier department. We don't have anything that's quite that large, by any means. But city structure firefighters, they have to go up large skyscrapers, so that part is somewhat correct.
[Melissa Block:] Does anybody get sick doing this?
[Mr. Brent Molsberry:] Yeah. It definitely happens. They have paramedics and volunteers every about 10 floors or so. And everybody going up is a fire fighters, so they, you know, if somebody is having trouble in front of you, they definitely, you know, everybody helps each other out.
[Melissa Block:] Well, I guess, your competitors would have to be hoping that you wouldn't be there this year, but you are going to be there. So maybe they just have to hope you're going to have a bad day.
[Mr. Brent Molsberry:] Which could definitely happen.
[Melissa Block:] What does it depend on?
[Mr. Brent Molsberry:] It depends on how you feel and, you know, how your pacing goes. There was one year where I maybe went a little too hard, and I kind of I guess overheated. Don't really remember the last 10 floors and kind of staggered across the finish and then collapsed, and ended up having to go to the emergency room.
[Melissa Block:] Wow.
[Mr. Brent Molsberry:] IVs put in me because I was super dehydrated.
[Melissa Block:] What is it like as you're heading up to the last, I don't know, 10 or so flights of stairs?
[Mr. Brent Molsberry:] Relief. Very excited to get done, because at that point your air bottle is getting pretty low, so it's getting even harder to bring the air out of it. You tend to get you're really hot by that point as well, so you just can't wait to cross the finish line and take all that gear off and start breathing regular air again.
[Melissa Block:] Mr. Molsberry, once you're all done, how do you get back down?
[Mr. Brent Molsberry:] We do get to take the elevator, thankfully.
[Melissa Block:] You do?
[Mr. Brent Molsberry:] It's a great feeling when you get to climb to that elevator.
[Melissa Block:] Well, Brent Molsberry, best of all to you on Sunday.
[Mr. Brent Molsberry:] Thank you very much.
[Melissa Block:] And let us know how you do.
[Mr. Brent Molsberry:] I will do that. Brent Molsberry will defend his title as the reigning champ of the Scott Firefighter Stairclimb. He volunteers with the Chukanut Fire Department, near Bellingham, Washington.
[Michele Norris:] I'm Michele Norris.
[Melissa Block:] And I'm Melissa Block. You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.

[Scott Simon:] And time now for sports. It's the showdown in L.A. tomorrow east meets west the NBA All-Star game. The Lakers' Kobe Bryant will face Kevin Garnett of Boston. Think they're going to compete for the championship in June? Join us for our mid-season checkup, Howard Bryant. Good morning, Howard.
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] Good morning, Scott. How are you?
[Scott Simon:] I'm fine, thanks. So, what teams are in a good position going into the second half?
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] Well, obviously, the San Antonio Spurs are the best team in basketball in terms of record. They are absolutely the, the surprise of the year. And nobody seems to think that that team, with its age, was going to be able to compete with the Lakers and the Celtics, and the new look Miami Heat. But they have come out of the gate with Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili and Richard Jefferson and Tony Parker, and they've been great. The question is whether or not anybody can beat the Los Angeles Lakers four times in post-season, as they are the two-time defending champions. I think for the first time in a long time, you've got four or five legitimate teams that I don't think anyone would be surprised if they won the championship. You've got Boston. You've got Miami, Los Angeles, and San Antonio, and the Dallas Mavericks who are another surprise this year who have been playing great basketball, and they've beaten the Celtics twice this year. So finally, you've got some real parity in the NBA. Of course, my preference is always Celtics-Lakers. I like when the dynasties go at it. But I think that it's going to be a really, really good second half of the year.
[Scott Simon:] Well, let me ask about the Lakers, cause they lost to the rampaging Cleveland Cavaliers on Wednesday. Not a lot of teams have. They're loaded with talent, but are they missing some vital life essence, if you please, this year?
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] Well, I think it depends on if you believe the Zen Master, Phil Jackson, in that when you've won a championship back-to-back years, it's really difficult to remain motivated. The NBA season is far too long. It goes on forever and so do the playoffs. The playoffs last two months. And so I think the Lakers are a little bored right now. And I think that Phil Jackson is playing a dangerous game, although he really doesn't have much of a choice, in that he believes that this championship team is going to turn it on once April and May roll around and then you'll see the Lakers in championship form. However, as we've seen, many, many times it's very, very difficult to be a lackluster team and then suddenly decide to be good when you want to be. But they do have that much talent. And they also have Kobe Bryant who is the best player in the game. So let's face it, I still think they're fine. I'll believe it when I see it that somebody can beat them four times.
[Scott Simon:] Let me ask you quickly about two young players who are gathering attention this year. I've been following Derrick Rose since he was a star at Simeon Academy in Chicago. And put that little stuff about altering his grade transcript aside...
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] Okay.
[Scott Simon:] ...he sure helped bring the Chicago Bulls back.
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] Terrific. He is a terrific, terrific basketball player and he went number one after leaving Memphis. And he's been he's on an MVP pace this year. He's clearly the engine that's turned that team around. The Chicago Bulls, hey, let's face it. We're talking about Boston, and Miami, and the Lakers, and everyone else. I don't think anybody wants to play Chicago four times, if you have to play them in the playoffs because of their talent and because he presents such a great match-up problem. It would not surprise me if he wins the MVP this year.
[Scott Simon:] And there is a rookie name Blake Griffin who's playing for the Los Angeles Clippers.
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] Yeah. And believe it or not, the Clippers are actually worth watching all because of him. And I got to admit, Scott, you don't hear this very often: I was dead wrong about Blake Griffin when he came out of Oklahoma. I didn't think he was going to be as athletic and as quick and as powerful, and as good a player as he's been this year. A really amazing talent if you like athleticism, if you like watching a guy play with that type of just the verticality that he has. He's been amazing this year. I never thought he was going to be this good.
[Scott Simon:] Yeah. Well, and you're in Scottsdale for spring training, right? Ten seconds anything to say about the spring?
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] Oh yes, and it's just for you. I was with the Cubs yesterday and they're all talking about this being the year. So get that parade ready in October.
[Scott Simon:] Good, we have to book State Street already. Howard Bryant, senior writer for ESPN.com, ESPN the Magazine, and ESPN the chalupa, thanks so much.
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] My pleasure.
[Scott Simon:] And you're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.

[David Greene:] Michael Brown's death in Ferguson sparked a new conversation about policing in America. Our colleague Martin Kaste covers law enforcement. He's been looking at whether that conversation has remained just that, a conversation, or whether there's been real change.
[Martin Kaste, Byline:] I think you can point to one concrete verifiable change, and that's the embrace of body cameras. Before Ferguson, adoption had started. It was rolling along, but there was still a lot of skepticism. But after Ferguson, a lot of that skepticism changed, especially on the part of officers. When their departments don't buy them, they often buy them themselves. They buy their own personal body cameras. And it's because when they looked at Ferguson, they started to worry about what would happen if there was an incident and there wasn't video to prove their side. And they started feeling vulnerable not having the cameras. And departments, as we've all seen, feel a lot of pressure to adopt them. So I'd say that is probably the most immediate effect of Ferguson.
[David Greene:] What about actual techniques that police use? And I guess, specifically, I mean, when they decide to use deadly force.
[Martin Kaste, Byline:] Well, you're hearing a lot of talk at the command level from the chiefs about the need for change, about the need to build legitimacy, to be guardians not warriors. These are a lot of the phrases you hear. They're very popular. LAPD right now in Los Angeles, they're right in the middle of a big crash course for all 10,000 of their officers, learning some of these new concepts. And you hear a lot of that talk, and it's coming out of the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, which was this effort that came out after Ferguson to think through new strategies for changing the way police work in the United States. So, you know, from the top down, you're hearing a lot of interest in changing the mentality of policing. But it should be said that all of this change really is still voluntary. And there are 18,000 police agencies give or take in this country. And it's a very decentralized system. And there's not necessarily a unified push for a new standard here.
[David Greene:] Yeah. At the local level, Martin, you hear so many police chiefs and community activists talking about the importance of trust and building trust between a police department and a community. I mean, do you hear that kind of talk from police officers themselves as something they really are striving for right now?
[Martin Kaste, Byline:] You know, when you talk to officers off the record, not so much. I mean, this varies a lot. Police officers are just as diverse as the agencies that they work for. But when I talk to them off the record over a drink or something like that, there's a lot of skepticism. And one of the reasons they're sort of feeling under siege right now is first of all, from the legal point of view, they're worried that now prosecutors may go after them for political reasons because of this new change in the air whenever they make what they believe to be an honest mistake in use of force. And there's also this sense that they're in danger on the street. The statistics don't bear this out. They aren't being shot more since Ferguson. But there's still this sense that they've got to be tactically ready. And there's very little interest, in a lot of the officers I've talked to, in, say, dialing back their use of SWAT teams on drug raids, that kind of thing. I was talking about this with Peter Kraska, who's a professor who's been tracking this process of what he calls the militarization of the police. And he put it this way.
[Peter Kraska:] They're digging in their heels with this notion that they actually are policing a very dangerous society, a well-armed society, and armored personnel carriers, for example, are a reasonable reaction.
[David Greene:] Martin, that doesn't make it sound like we're getting closer to communities coming together.
[Martin Kaste, Byline:] Well, it's a very diverse group of officers across the country. You hear a lot of different points of view. A lot of them have embraced the idea that there should be a different mentality. And as Peter Kraska said, you know, where we are right now took years to get to. And he thinks it'll take more than just one year to change the way American police officers think.
[David Greene:] That was NPR's Martin Kaste speaking to us about policing in America nearly a year after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.

[Rachel Martin:] We're going to focus now on a pivotal hub in the Arab world. Just an hour's flight from Tehran and resting on the Persian Gulf, Dubai is a place full of contradictions. Kissing in public can get you deported. And there's no free press. But the beaches are full of bikini-clad tourists. And shopping malls sell everything from Victoria Secret lingerie to the traditional, long, black abayas that cover women from head to toe. NPR's Deborah Amos joins us now from Dubai on what has become a new kind of holiday, right, Deb? Can you explain?
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] Well, we have the same, as you have in the West, Black Friday. We have a city here that has a large, international population. Dubai also boasts the biggest of just about everything. They have the tallest building, the highest fountain, the most expensive hamburger and the largest malls with some 80 million shoppers a year. Now this prosperity comes with keen concern about stability. So human rights groups criticize the emirates when it comes to free speech, workers' rights or any kind of dissent here. But the shopping model that works in the West works here. But online shopping has also become a factor. So this huge, sales day is used to drive online sales.
[Rachel Martin:] So you mean they have their equivalent of Cyber Monday.
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] All of this is just taking off because Internet penetration across the region hit 20 percent. I visited the largest online seller. It's called souq.com. That's kind of the Amazon in the region. They market in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. Now they rebranded Black Friday to White Friday because they say Friday is a day of prayer. And it's a family day. So White Friday was a better name. Same idea prices drop by 70 percent. There's about 10 million online customers, a potential market of 180 million.
[Rachel Martin:] So switching gears a little bit. Dubai is this interesting place because of its commercial connections to the west. But it's also really important because of its political alliances, right? I mean, it's very close to Iran. Is it difficult, Deb, then for Dubai to manage this tug of the East against the pull it feels toward the West?
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] Well, Dubai has this historical trading relationship with Iran. It's historic. You can see it on the Dubai Creek where there are ships going back and forth. And even today, they're bringing satellite dishes. They're bringing electronics. So that relationship has lasted a long time. There's a very large Iranian community of business people in this city. So that is the connection. They acutely felt the sanctions against Iran that were put in place by Western powers because of Iran's nuclear program. And so they have been hoping that sanctions will be lifted because they want to position themselves as the Hong Kong for Iran. They have been a cheerleader to lift those sanctions.
[Rachel Martin:] That was NPR's Deborah Amos joining us from Dubai. Thanks so much, Deb.
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] Thank you.

[Madeleine Brand:] While China's President is here in the U.S., he's missing a huge dust storm that's choking Beijing. The storm is spreading, reaching into South Korea and Japan. There are health warnings that people should not go outside.
[Alex Chadwick:] In Beijing we've reached Dermot O'Gorman, he's with the World Wildlife Fund. Dermot, thank you for being with us, and how does this storm appear?
[Mr. Dermot O'gorman:] Well, Beijing has really woke up to find the city covered in a film of dust and sand for the last couple of days. Cars, the plants, the pavements were all covered in this dust. You could even see your footprints as you walked along the pavement. I mean it was that thick.
[Alex Chadwick:] I read a piece from a Chinese newspaper that said it estimates there are 300,000 tons of dust and sand just in Beijing from this storm?
[Mr. O'gorman:] I certainly wouldn't be surprised. It's like driving home in the afternoon was like traveling in a fog except it was brown from all the sand and dust. The car headlights lit up as the-with all the dust particles in the air. It was-it was really quite thick.
[Alex Chadwick:] Do you taste it and smell it?
[Mr. O'gorman:] You can, you can certainly taste it. In fact, you find everybody in offices and stuff like clearing their throat the whole time and coughing because it's-the dust is just finding its way into everywhere. A lot of, a lot of people on the street, particularly cyclists, are wearing sort of facemasks to keep the-the dust out.
[Alex Chadwick:] Now, these storms are a regular feature, they come down from the dry northern plain, but they're much worse this year than they have been in many many years. Is this do you think, a sign that China's environmental problems are worsening?
[Mr. O'gorman:] Well, the Chinese government has spent a lot of effort over the last few years to try and put plantations into some areas in the northwest to try and stabilize the areas where this dust is coming from. I think the problem originates from the unsustainable land-use practices. I think the question is whether things like climate change are going to make these occurrences more regular or worse.
[Alex Chadwick:] Dermot, I have seen pictures of the traffic in China and read that Beijing is just really congested and quite a mess. Are there fewer people on the streets, are people actually staying home? Kids staying home from school?
[Mr. O'gorman:] Certainly the-there's less people on the streets. Taxi drivers have sort of reported better business, because people don't want to stand in bus queues to, to get on, to get on the bus. But it-you know Beijing has a thousand new cars hit the, hit the road every, every day so, you know, traffic in Beijing is, is bad and getting worse so-but, I think, a lot of, a lot of-I certainly saw no children out in the last couple of days playing in, in parks and stuff like that because of the dust.
[Alex Chadwick:] Any idea when this is going to end?
[Mr. O'gorman:] Well, today was, today was a little better, and, but tonight we've got some strong winds coming in from the northwest again, so we may wake up to find some more dust if-dust has covered the city tomorrow.
[Alex Chadwick:] Dermot O'Gorman, country representative for the World Wildlife Fund in China, he's based in Beijing. Dermot thanks.
[Mr. O'gorman:] My pleasure, Alex.

[Steve Inskeep:] Being disabled does not have to be a disadvantage. That's the old saying anyway. And some people in Cincinnati want to live up to it. Their group is called May We Help. Handymen, technicians and engineers volunteer to make devices that help people with disabilities do things that others take for granted. Cheri Lawson of member station WNKU introduces us to one of the members.
[Cheri Lawson, Byline:] Bill Sand loves to spend time in his basement. He calls it his man cave, but there's no big screen TV, sound system or beer cooler here. Just power tools and whatever else he needs to build things.
[Bill Sand:] So these will go through the planer a few more times.
[Cheri Lawson, Byline:] This 66-year-old is like a lot of guys who tinker. But here's where Bill's a bit different. He designs and builds devices for people with disabilities and he does it for free.
[Bill Sand:] These are gifts that are special, that are life-changing.
[Cheri Lawson, Byline:] Here in his home workshop, Bill has made a custom scooter for a little girl who can't walk, and cello stands for sisters, even though they don't have arms. Twelve-year-old Inga and 10-year-old Ylena Elena Petry of Pennsylvania play with their feet. Their mom, Jennifer, says the girls used to prop their instruments on pillows on the floor. But that didn't really work out.
[Jennifer Petry:] We needed something to keep the cellos steady.
[Cheri Lawson, Byline:] Inga uses her toes for everything, from eating to texting.
[Jennifer Petry:] When my mom told me that we were going to get something so that my cello wouldn't wobble, I was really happy because I'd be able to play it better.
[Cheri Lawson, Byline:] The Petrys are just one of the families Bill has helped pursue their dreams. He's made several one-of-a-kind devices for nine-year-old Ireland Reed. She has a rare genetic condition called Miller's Syndrome. She needs a special walker just to stand. Bill has become a regular visitor to Ireland's home in suburban Cincinnati.
[Bill Sand:] Hello, Amy.
[Amy Reid:] Hello. How are you?
[Bill Sand:] Good.
[Amy Reid:] Ireland, it's Bill.
[Cheri Lawson, Byline:] Ireland is excited to see Bill, and she rolls over to him on the scooter he made for her. The family calls it her shamrock express. It's given her mobility she'd never had before. Ireland's mom, Amy, calls Bill a godsend.
[Amy Reid:] It's like, how do you know? Bill, how do you know what we need when we don't even know what we need?
[Cheri Lawson, Byline:] During this visit, Amy says Ireland is having trouble writing with her partially formed hand. Bill crouches so he can watch carefully as the child tries to hold a pencil. He puts his hand gently around hers, thinking about what he can do to help.
[Bill Sand:] Ireland, I just want your hand. You just put your hand like this.
[Cheri Lawson, Byline:] He brainstorms with Amy about what he might come up with but says even a simple solution might take five or six tries.
[Bill Sand:] I'm thinking of something that'll glide real easy, that her hand is actually sitting on. Kind of like a mouse.
[Amy Reid:] We can't thank him enough. I can't find the words to really tell you how it's helped us and helped Ireland.
[Cheri Lawson, Byline:] Bill Sand has done dozens of projects for families like the Reeds and Petrys. Jennifer Petry says the mahogany cello stands Bill crafted for her kids are not only practical but beautiful.
[Jennifer Petry:] Just so beautiful. And I thought these are cello stands that my girls can get on stage with and not be ashamed.
[Bill Sand:] I get to be Santa all year round. You know, every time I do a project, it's like Christmas all over.
[Cheri Lawson, Byline:] The group May We Help is hoping to expand beyond its roots in the Midwest. They're talking about setting up a chapter in Florida and hope it will be the start to help millions of children and adults to pursue their passions despite their disabilities. For NPR News, I'm Cheri Lawson in Cincinnati.

[Madeleine Brand:] In Peru, there's an animal in the high plains of the Andes called the vicuna. It's sort of like a llama but even softer. It produces some of the finest wool in the world. A vicuna coat can cost $10,000 or more. Vicunas were almost hunted into extinction until the Peruvian government cracked down on poaching nearly 10 years ago, but the poaching is back. Independent producer Reese Erlich reports.
[Reese Erlich Reporting:] Here in an open field at 12,000 feet in Peru's high plains, it took a half-hour walk to spot a herd of wild vicuna.
[Erlich:] The deerlike animals have elongated necks and white, furry chests, but these close relatives of the alpaca and llama quickly scampered off, wary of human contact. We head back to a village where residents are living from these elusive animals.
[Unidentified Singer:] [Singing in foreign language]
[Erlich:] It's market day here in Tupala, a small village some five miles southeast of Lima. Once a year, residents here herd the vicunas into corrals and shave their wool. Until the mid-1990s, poachers would shoot the vicunas rather than go through the laborious herding process. Adam Cruz, a supervisor with CONACS, the Peruvian government agency protecting vicunas, says the government crackdown on poaching with a new law.
[Mr. Adam Cruz:] [Through Translator] Before 1996, there was indiscriminate killing of vicunas, but after that, community security guards were formed. Villages formed their own self-defense organizations. This all helped reduce the amount of poaching.
[Erlich:] The law mandates that vicunas can only be sheared by local communities. Indigenous amaras here sell the fiber for $200 a pound, a huge amount of money for these impoverished villagers, but those prices also attract poachers. Wilder Trejo, president of CONACS, says poaching has steadily increased since 2003, the result of worsening poverty. The latest figures indicate 600 vicunas were killed out of a total population of 161,000.
[Mr. Wilder Trejo:] [Through Translator] Some villages aren't able to round up enough vicuna. They can't earn enough money. For this reason, some turn to poaching.
[Erlich:] And the poachers are better armed than 10 years ago, says Eulario Mayta, president of a local vicuna villagers association.
[Mr. Eulario Mayta:] [Through Translator] Years ago, the poachers used telescopic sights. The poachers are local people. They're not foreigners. We suspect some people, but it's hard to catch them.
[Erlich:] The poachers kill the vicuna, strip off the skin, leave the carcasses and sell the fiber on the black market in Peru or in nearby Bolivia. CONACS'President Trejo says the upper echelons of the smugglers are very sophisticated.
[Mr. Wilder Trejo:] [Through Translator] It's similar to the organization of drug traffickers. Every dead vicuna is worth almost a hundred dollars. This Mafia is very organized. They move everything to the border with Bolivia.
[Erlich:] In Tupala Village, a sudden rain storm drives people temporarily indoors. CONACS supervisor Cruz says that the justice system doesn't really deter poachers. He says while the law calls for jail sentences of up to 10 years, poachers rarely serve any time.
[Mr. Adam Cruz:] [Through Translator] In reality, like with the rest of the government, the law is not effective in the poorest communities. When someone is caught or someone is charged, they are released from the police stations either through bribes or outside influence.
[Erlich:] Vicuna association President Mayta says local villages are in the best position to stop poaching because they have a community interest in maintaining the vicuna herds.
[Mr. Eulario Mayta:] [Through Translator] In order to stop the poaching, we need better arms for our security committees. We need binoculars in order to identify the poachers. We need good vehicles to go after them.
[Erlich:] Mayta says a combination of better local security and community pressure should significantly reduce poaching. That's how the herds were repopulated in the 1990s, and he's confident Peru can do it again. For NPR News, I'm Reese Erlich.

[Scott Simon:] President Trump is making his pitch for the new Republican health care bill personally with members of Congress. NPR's White House correspondent Tamara Keith reports.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] President Trump is inviting so many members of Congress over to the White House they might want to consider setting up a shuttle from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other. Take Tuesday he met with two Republican senators and had lunch with one more, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham. You might remember during that contentious Republican primary Trump read Graham's cellphone number out loud at a rally that was carried live on TV.
[President Donald Trump:] I wrote the number down. I don't know if it's the right number. Let's try it 202...
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] It was the right number. Graham got swamped with calls and had to change it. After his White House lunch, Graham said it went so well he gave the president his new number.
[Lindsey Graham:] Yeah.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] So how was the call last night?
[Lindsey Graham:] So far so good.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] He has called you already on it.
[Lindsey Graham:] He has.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Do you feel like he is wooing senators and members of Congress in a new way?
[Lindsey Graham:] I think he's doing a good job of trying to get to know people personally.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] After the lunch that day, Trump met with nearly two dozen members of the House GOP Whip Team, the members of Congress tasked with getting their colleagues to vote for the health care bill. Oklahoma Republican Tom Cole was there and says the president clearly enjoys chatting with members of Congress.
[Tom Cole:] You know, he's very good at it. I think actually it's the part of the job he may like the most.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] There were apples set out on the tables as the representatives introduced themselves. Cole says when it was New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik's turn, Trump knew exactly who she was.
[Tom Cole:] It got to her and he said youngest woman ever elected to Congress. And then he goes, none of the rest of us can say anything like that, and the whole place burst out laughing. So he was, like, really engaging.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Cole says this kind of thing can make lawmakers giddy and put them in the mood to help the president. Mark Meadows is a Republican congressman from North Carolina and chairman of the Conservative Freedom Caucus.
[Mark Meadows:] Any time that you're with the president of the United States, you feel like you're with a guy that you've known for years.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Meadows met with Trump on Thursday, and he's going back to the White House next week with a coveted invite to the bowling alley.
[Mark Meadows:] You know, I'm not a bowler. I'm going over next Tuesday for pizza and policy is what I'm calling at the bowling alley. How about that?
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] And here's the thing about Meadows and his Freedom Caucus colleagues Trump won in their districts big league, but they don't like this health care bill. If the roughly 40 members of the Freedom Caucus stick together and vote against it, the bill will fail.
[Mark Meadows:] I think he understands that if it was personality driven, most the Freedom Caucus would already be with him. Hopefully he knows that it has nothing to do with respect or admiration that we have for the president as much as it is just real policy concerns.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] During the Obama presidency, there was a regular complaint that he didn't spend enough time personally courting members of Congress. Trump is clearly going in the opposite direction. And Senator Graham welcomes the change.
[Lindsey Graham:] It's not just the fact that you meet. It's that you're fact you're listening. I think he's a darn good listener. The thing about him is when you're in the room, he puts full attention on you. That's a really good quality.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] But passing bills is about getting votes. And the charm offensive for this health care bill will be the first big test of the persuasive powers of President Trump. Tamara Keith, NPR News, Washington.

[David Greene:] Good morning, I'm David Greene. It's been a tough week for Latvian tennis player Ernests Gulbis. Yesterday, he was knocked out of competition at Wimbledon. And Monday at a press conference, he was asked about the idea of getting rid of umpires, letting players referee their own games. He gave a lengthy answer before realizing he had misheard the question.
[Ernests Gulbis:] Get rid of umpires?
[Unidentified Man:] Yes, get rid of...
[Ernests Gulbis:] My God, I thought vampires.
[David Greene:] Yes, I think we'd all like to get rid of vampires. It's MORNING EDITION.

[Scott Simon:] Claire Messud's "The Burning Girl" is a novel about two girls, Cassie and Julia, who make each other who they are. Cassie's the bold one who looks for rules to break. Julia is the voice of caution and conscience who'd like a little of Cassie's daring. We had one mind, as Julia recall, and could roam its limits together. They grow apart in middle school. Cassie hangs out with the more conspicuously popular crowd. Julia's hurt but becomes aware that Cassie is on the verge of disaster. Julia may be the one person to help pull her back. "The Burning Girl" is the latest novel from Claire Messud, author of "The Emperor's Children" and other acclaimed novels. She's also taught creative writing and special programs at many colleges and joins us from New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
[Claire Messud:] Thanks, Scott, for having me.
[Scott Simon:] What's the special intensity of being BFFs as youngsters?
[Claire Messud:] [Laughter] You know, I think it's an almost ineffable experience. And maybe that's why I wanted to try to write about it. When you're a kid, and someone is your best friend, you almost don't need words. It's almost like puppies in a frolicking in a garden or something. You don't articulate stuff. You just live it. And one of the things I fear that happens is you get move into adolescence is a sort of self-consciousness and self-awareness that makes that unthinking intimacy less possible.
[Scott Simon:] Because you're thinking?
[Claire Messud:] Because you're thinking, because you're aware of yourself in a way. And you're aware of other people and that each of us is different from each other that we're not all the same.
[Scott Simon:] One of the many lines that that I treasure is when Julia recalls, laughter was the point of so many things we did together.
[Claire Messud:] [Laughter] Well, it's certainly true. I remember laughing so hard as a kid.
[Scott Simon:] Yes.
[Claire Messud:] That I remember a friend literally falling off a chair [LAUGHTER]...
[Scott Simon:] Yeah.
[Claire Messud:] ...Laughing so hard. And we do laugh as grown-ups, of course, but less.
[Scott Simon:] Cassie grows up believing she has a guardian angel.
[Claire Messud:] Yes. Yes. She believes her father, whom she's never known, who she believes died soon after she was born so she never knew him. And but she believes he's always with her.
[Scott Simon:] Yeah. And is it fair to say that she gets a little bit obsessed in terms of trying to establish her father's identity, if I can I put it that way?
[Claire Messud:] Yes, absolutely. And I think, you know, for me, one of the things that the novel that I was trying to write about is one thing is that we all need stories to make sense of our lives. And we need stories about who we are and where we come from and how we fit in. And family stories are very important in our sense of identity. Even if we turn our backs on what our family is and rebel against it, we have a story about what our family is. And so for Cassie, having that sense of her identity involves having an understanding of her father and who he is. And as she finds her identity shifting in adolescence, she needs all the more to pin something down. But attached to that another thing I want to write about is how much we make up. You know, we think that, as kids you know, that kids make up stories and live in a sort of fictional place but that as grown-ups, we tell the truth and live in fact. But, of course, the reality is we take the facts that we know, and then we fill in all the blanks. And what we fill them in with is invented. And that's true in all our relationships all the time, to a greater or lesser extent.
[Scott Simon:] Yeah. You're such a widely admired novelist. But may I ask, did a publisher or an agent say to you, look, this is too mature a story for the YA audience, but it's hard to get adults to read about middle schoolers, so what demographic are you going for here anyway?
[Claire Messud:] My answer to that would be, I'm going for all readers. I actually when I was growing up, and maybe when you were growing up, too, YA was not a category that existed. There were books about young people. There were books about older people. And there were children's books that were frankly written for children. But, otherwise, books were just for people. This is a book that is as much for a parent as a child, is as much for a teenager as a grandmother or a grandfather. It's a book about what it's like to be alive and be human, I hope. For me, at least, and for the people everyone around me that I know these years are so formative and so central to who we become and how we interact with other people as adults in the world that to see them as something only of interest to teenagers or adolescents themselves I think that's just missing so much of reality. I often say to friends I say, you know, if you're when you're dealing with somebody and finding it hard, just think of them in middle school. Just think, you know?
[Scott Simon:] Ah. Ah.
[Claire Messud:] And if you just actually picture somebody in middle school, and you sort of project back to their 12 or 13-year-old self, so much about people's behavior is explained.
[Scott Simon:] Without giving the story away, I was still left thinking at the end. No matter what happens, Cassie and Julia will always be important to each other.
[Claire Messud:] Yes.
[Scott Simon:] Might be years before they recognize it again but they'll always be important to each other.
[Claire Messud:] Yes. I'm glad you felt that. And I think that relationships of that intensity, whatever they are and however they end they define us and shape us and mark us. And those people remain important to us even if we never see them or speak to them again. And that's true, obviously, with romantic relationships, too. You know, you might feel it's not possible to stay in touch with somebody you used to love passionately. But whatever time you spent together was formative and is with you always.
[Scott Simon:] Claire Messud her novel, "The Burning Girl." Thank you so much for being with us.
[Claire Messud:] Thank you so much, Scott.

[Michel Martin:] I'm Michel Martin. Let's start with President Obama's historic trip to Cuba. It begins tonight. This is the first visit of a sitting U.S. president to the island in more than 80 years. Obama's visit comes after two years of meetings, some secret, between the two former Cold War foes. But it is the high point of the president's plan to reset relations with Cuba and its long-time communist leaders. NPR's Carrie Kahn is covering the visit in Havana, and she's with us now. Hi, Carrie.
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] Hi, Michel.
[Michel Martin:] So have you had a chance to talk with Cubans about the visit? What are they saying?
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] Everybody here is very, very excited. Overall, that's what you hear, just extremely excited that he's coming. And expectations are very high for President Obama, too, but it depends who you talk to also within the community, especially those opposed to the regime outwardly opposed to the regime here. Some think it is a very poor decision by the president to come here at this time. They feel like he's rewarding the Castro regime with a presidential visit. But overall, most people are very excited.
[Michel Martin:] Let's talk a little bit about opposition leaders, particularly people who are concerned with human rights. Have they improved since the U.S. and Cuba have started to restore diplomatic relations? And is the president going to meet with dissidents and other people who oppose the regime?
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] He has scheduled on his agenda to meet with dissidents. And I have talked with a few of them, so it's confirmed that they're going. And he's also going to speaking with civil society. But if you asked the dissident community here and the opposition people in the opposition if things have improved since the restoration of U.S.-Cuba ties, overall they say no. I spoke with one dissident who is sort a human rights activist who is the unofficial keeper of the number of political prisoners in detentions here, and he says since June of last year, there are 20 more political prisoners in Cuban prisons. He's also said there's been an incredible increase in short-term detentions, and those are for people that are actively protesting and demonstrating against the regime here. But for others that are active in civil society, and they will also be talking with President Obama like the Afro-Cuban groups, LGBT groups and the Catholic Church they do say that there is a bit of an opening and they you could feel it in the streets. I can walk up to anybody now in the last couple of months and they talk openly about the situation here in Cuba.
[Michel Martin:] Are there one or two major concerns that Cubans would like to tell President Obama about and hear him address when he's there?
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] Overall, if you talk to Cubans in the street, the major concern is the economic conditions on the island. You know, Cubans on average make a state salary of about $20 a month, and they get food rations, and everybody just is scraping to get by. They say you can't get by on that amount of money and those rations that they're getting. That's what everybody's talking about, is the economic situation. They want an improvement. They like what President Obama has done to sort of punch holes in the U.S. embargo against Cuba, which is allowing for a budding private sector here. Some estimates put that private sector now at about 25 percent of the economy, and that has been growing quite quickly in the last about five years. And then there's people that are getting remittances from abroad, from family in Miami and other places in the world and the United States. And the Obama administration has also allowed for an unlimited amount of remittances, and so that's really helped a lot of the poor and this burgeoning middle class here in Cuba, but it's also created also an income gap here in Cuba that has never really happened before. But that's an income gap nowhere near others in Latin America. But tensions are slowly growing, and it's become a concern of the Castro regime.
[Michel Martin:] That NPR's Carrie Kahn, who's in Havana. Carrie, thank you.
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Robert Siegel:] Over the past week, much has been said about President Obama's Middle East speech and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's sharp response to it at the White House. And much has also been said about the speeches the two men gave to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or AIPAC, the big pro-Israel lobby. One important domestic audience for all of these speeches is the American Jewish community. It's not only very supportive of Israel, it's also very supportive of the Democratic party. In 2008, according to the national exit poll, Jews voted for Barack Obama over John McCain by a margin of 78 percent to 21 percent. So how has the tension between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu played with American Jews? We've called upon Ron Kampeas, Washington bureau chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, who's written about just that. Hi.
[Mr. Ron Kampeas:] Hi, how are you?
[Robert Siegel:] And what have you found out?
[Mr. Ron Kampeas:] We have yet to see how it's played with American Jews. We won't really know until they vote. Of course, American Jews take a lot more than just Israel to the polls. In fact, if you look at the polling, they often rank Israel as the 8th most important factor. They rank the health care, economy above all. And so I think in those terms, I think the President Obama, the Democratic party is still very strong with the Jewish voters. The issue is how it's played with Jewish donors to the Democratic party and there, there has been some concern. There's sort of three levels of Jewish donorship to the Democratic party. There are Jews that donate just because overall they favor the party and then on the right, there are Jews who only donate because of Israel. And in the middle there are Jews who take a whole bunch of things into consideration. And we'll see. We're just gonna have to see within the next few months how that if that affects those groups on the right and in the middle.
[Robert Siegel:] President Obama stated an assumption underlying his administration's approach to the Middle East, which is that the present situation is unsustainable. He said Israel can't remain a Jewish democratic state while ruling over a large number of Palestinians who are not citizens of any place, actually, and who are growing in numbers. Do you get the sense that American Jews share the view that the present situation is unsustainable or that compared to 10 years ago it's pretty good?
[Mr. Ron Kampeas:] No, I think they share the view that's it's unsustainable. Their problem is that they don't see a viable partner on the other side with the Palestinians. They're very concerned about, for instance, the recent pact that the Palestinian Authority signed with Hamas, the unity pact.
[Robert Siegel:] And is the degree of difference that we've seen between Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu, do you think it's substantial enough that Republicans who are eager to peel away some votes from the Democrats in 2012 might actually have something to work with?
[Mr. Ron Kampeas:] I think they might have something to work with. I mean, you saw what happened in 2000, George Bush got 19 percent of the Jewish vote. And he managed to get that up to 24, 25 percent. But what I think is more typical of that kind of swing voter is Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York. He said that he would have voted against Obama until he saw the Paul Ryan budget. And that's bringing him back to vote for President Obama. So it shows how those domestic issues do get into the equation.
[Robert Siegel:] What did you make of some of the speakers after President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu? The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, for example, gave a speech that many took as rebuking President Obama for his stand on borders.
[Mr. Ron Kampeas:] I have to say that, you know, there's been a perception, it's been reported that congressional Democrats are trying to distance themselves from President Obama. I don't think that that's absolutely the case. You haven't seen it in the House leadership, for instance, even among Jewish Democrats in the House, like Howard Berman. They've been very supportive of President Obama. Senator Reid has a different row to hoe. He's defending 23 seats in the next election and he's only challenging 10 seats. That's very, very tough. And so, from his perspective, he's going to be irritated at President Obama having handed the Republicans a wedge issue, which they say they're going to run with.
[Robert Siegel:] Ron Kampeas, thank you very much for talking with us.
[Mr. Ron Kampeas:] Thank you.
[Robert Siegel:] Ron Kampeas is Washington bureau chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

[Neal Conan:] This morning at the White House, President Obama laid out his plan to reduce the federal deficit by an additional $3 trillion over the next 10 years. The plan calls for reduced spending for benefit programs, including Medicare and Medicaid. But about a third of it consists of new revenues, higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans and the president drew a line in the sand.
[President Barack Obama:] I will veto any bill that changes benefits for those who rely on Medicare but does not raise serious revenues by asking the wealthiest Americans or biggest corporations to pay their fair share. We are not going to have a one-sided deal that hurts the folks who are most vulnerable.
[Neal Conan:] The proposal to raise taxes on millionaires, the so-called Buffett tax, emerged late last week, and Republicans in Congress declared that it would not be approved. Yesterday, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan appeared on "Fox News Sunday."
[Representative Paul Ryan:] Class warfare, Chris, may make for really good politics, but it makes for rotten economics. We don't need a system that seeks to divide people. We don't need a system that seeks to prey on people's fear, envy and anxiety. We need a system that creates jobs and innovation, and removes these barriers for entrepreneurs to go out and rehire people. I'm afraid these kinds of tax increases don't work.
[Neal Conan:] NPR senior Washington editor Ron Elving joins us here in Studio 3A. Always good to have you on the program, Ron.
[Ron Elving:] Good to be with you, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] And during the debate a month or so ago, the Republicans are saying Mr. President, where is your plan? Here's his plan.
[Ron Elving:] Yes. This would appear to be a plan, and it certainly has some big numbers in it; we are getting increasingly comfortable in using the trillion figure. And in this case, the president is also putting forward some pretty robust proposals with respect to revenues. That was what had Congressman Ryan so upset yesterday and a number of other Republicans as well. And he is also saying something we have not heard from him before, which is no more bargaining that winds up being one sided. This will not be a one-sided deal. I will veto anything that Congress sends me if it cuts Medicare benefits but does not have serious revenues. So game on.
[Neal Conan:] Game on. I think it was last week that the speaker of the House of Representatives said any proposal that has new taxes on it is dead in the water.
[Ron Elving:] So both sides, both the speaker and the president have said we can't have politics in which one side says my way or the highway, but then, of course, immediately after saying that, the speaker said but, of course, there can't be any tax changes. That would mean higher taxes for anybody and at least not for any of the people that they're trying to protect in the income tax structure. We can get into payroll taxes maybe, but the income tax structure cannot produce more revenue coming out of the pockets of the relatively affluent because only the relatively affluent pay significant income taxes at this point, in our country. And the president then comes back a few days later and says, well, I believe in bargaining, and I believe in compromise. And I have shown myself willing. But I will veto any bill that does not meet these specific criteria. Sounds like my way or the highway from both directions. And what we have seen thus far in this budget year is that whichever side is most intransigent, most unwilling to compromise seems to prevail.
[Neal Conan:] Well, this next step is the so-called supercommittee. This is six Republicans and six Democrats, three from each House, chosen by the party leader in that particular body, so hewing pretty closely to the leader's line for the most part. And they are tasked to come up with well, the president's proposal goes well beyond what they are assigned to come up with.
[Ron Elving:] That's right. What the president was talking about this morning was two things. First of all, it was pay-fors, if you will, that's the new Washingtonese for putting up the money for whatever it is you want to do. The jobs bill that the president had proposed in that speech that he made to Congress earlier this month. This is an attempt to spend something like $450 billion to juice the economy in such ways that more hiring would take place, more Americans would get back to work. Everybody is in favor of that, but not everyone is in favor of having the federal government spend that money in that fashion to get that done. Some of that is payroll tax decreases. Some of that is something that ought to be appealing to Republicans, although we're not sure just how committed they are to that particular kind of tax cut. And that was the first part of what the president needed to come up with money for this morning. The rest of it is approximately $3 trillion that he is proposing that the new committee, the supercommittee, the committee of 12, whatever we're going to wind up calling these people, should aim for in coming up their deficit reductions. Now, they're only actually required to come up with about half of that, so whether or not they're going to have the ambition to double their task and make their life that much more difficult, we'll have to see.
[Neal Conan:] Yet a lot of economists and, indeed, the rating services said that 4 trillion totally figure and that's what the president is talking about that's really what's needed.
[Ron Elving:] Yes. And, really, the bigger you can get the number the better. The president, this morning, used the figure $4.4 trillion and, you know, we really are throwing around some large boxcar numbers. Now, we're not talking billions, you know.
[Neal Conan:] There's that T word.
[Ron Elving:] $4.4 trillion included the $1.2 trillion from the Budget Control Act that was that nasty piece of legislation that everyone hated that the Congress passed in the first week of August so that they could get out of town and raise the debt ceiling so that the United States did not default on its obligations. So we're really talking about big numbers now. And when the president adds in what was done back in August, plus what is a widely anticipated draw down in the cost of defense because of the Iraq withdrawal, and one hopes down the road less cost in Afghanistan, and savings from lower interest costs, if we're borrowing less money the president's numbers this morning included almost half a trillion, $430 billion in lower interest costs, that, of course, is a hopeful thing. We don't know for certain that interest costs will go down.
[And Then The Tough Parts:] about $600 billion in savings in mandatory spending, which translates primarily little more than half to savings in the federal health care programs, that's Medicare and Medicaid. Now, the president didn't raise the Medicare or didn't propose raising the Medicare age as some people have proposed, but he is looking to save a lot of money in Medicare and Medicaid, and that's going to hurt. There are going to be a lot of folks who are severely disadvantaged by that kind of spending reduction. So the president is putting that on the table, and he is saying, I've got to get something back now from the other side, from the people who don't want to give on revenues.
[Neal Conan:] And he has taken Social Security off the table.
[Ron Elving:] There is nothing proposed in this today's plan from the president that affects Social Security. But, look, Social Security and, frankly, the rest of Medicare is really on the table in the larger sense as bait for the Republicans. If you really want to reform these entitlement programs along the lines of what, say, Congressman Paul Ryan who was on TV yesterday has proposed doing, if you really want to reduce the costs of these programs substantially over the coming decades, not just the next few years, then you've got to meet us half way. You've got to really want to restructure the entire tax system to make it fairer, to make it more productive so that we can have a balanced approach to reducing the deficit long term.
[Neal Conan:] Now, there are two shorter-term time periods that we need to look. The first is between now and Thanksgiving. The supercommittee is assigned to make its proposal to Congress by then. It has to come up with a plan by then or, there's an or else, we will be sequestered. We will go through a process called sequestration. Like the debt ceiling, this is a term that we're going to come to know.
[Ron Elving:] I'm afraid it is. It's an ugly word, perhaps, but it is one that also connotes a rather ugly process, which is the across the board sequestering, that is the withdrawal of legal authority for spending a lot of money, a very large amount of money that would then have to be equally divided between defense and nondefense spending. That is a scary prospect for many Republicans as well as many Democrats because the Defense Department is already being squeezed. There's already a trillion dollars in what the president was talking about this morning that assumes lower spending by the Pentagon. If you go back in for another $500 billion later on this year and say, well, you know, that's sequestration, tough. You can't argue with it. That, too, is going to truly make a difference. It's really going to make the Pentagon feel it. And, of course, there'll be enormous political pushback. There'll be enormous political pain associated with that as there would be with these cuts to Medicare and Medicaid that the president is talking about. This is real stuff. This is going to affect real people, and they're going to be vocal about it.
[Neal Conan:] And so that's the first time period. The next one, isn't this the argument that we're going to be hearing between now and November of 2012?
[Ron Elving:] That's right. The big date that hovers over all of this is November of 2012. Everyone is thinking ahead to what the next election is going to produce. Will it be a 2008-type election or 2010-type election? We had very different electorates in those two years. They were in quite different moods, and they elected entirely different people. So if we have another 2008 election and the president could be re-elected and could possibly improve his standing in Congress, that would give tremendous impetus to the kinds of solutions that he has been proposing. If, on the other hand, the Republicans are going to continue to gain seats in Congress, take over the Senate, as many people expect them to do now just on the numbers of exposed seats, vulnerable seats, and if the president is defeated by any of the candidates we're looking at on the Republican side, then you would have a strong movement in the opposite direction of the kind of policies that we hear from Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell or the other Republican leaders in Congress today.
[Neal Conan:] It's interesting. We see opinion polls which say the balance approach to cutting the deficit, in other words, including some revenues in there is supported by a pretty big majority of the American people, raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, those making over $250,000 a year, much less millionaires, that is supported by big majorities too. Yet, we also see in the Republican presidential debate question, how many of you would if the deal was for $1 in revenue increases and $10 in spending cuts, would you take that deal? And everybody said, I will vote no.
[Ron Elving:] That's right. It has become absolutely necessary for any Republican presidential candidate to say that they do not favor any kind of tax increase even if you give them the bait of a 10-1, which is, of course, totally fanciful. It would never be that great.
[Neal Conan:] The president's proposed about...
[Ron Elving:] Two or three ratio of two or three to one for cuts over revenue increases. But what the point that's being made when you say 10-1, 20-1, 100-1, is that they're just not willing to consider the one. They're not willing to consider any kind of a tax increase as a political proposition as candidates for the Republican nomination. Now, down the road, a couple of years from now, maybe less, if one of them is actually president of the United States and a deal like that comes along, it's entirely possible he or she might take it.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking with NPR senior Washington editor Ron Elving. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. Now, let's get a couple of callers in on reaction to the president's proposal and the political conundrum that we find ourselves in with lines drawn now in the sand by leaders in both parties. Jerry joins us, Jerry from Cookeville, Tennessee.
[Jerry:] Hi, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] Hi, Jerry.
[Jerry:] Yeah. Well, you know, the president's speech, it's just the same thing over and over and over again. He had two years to do this if he wanted to do this. He knew he couldn't do it with even a Democratic Senate and House with super majorities. This is nothing but a way to try to shore up his base. And, frankly, I find it quite disgusting when they call it the Buffett law. How come Mr. Buffett spends millions of dollars for tax attorneys so he can keep his own money? I mean, this president, the stuff he says, it's just it's unbelievable. He thinks he's vanquished an enemy when he won. It's not like he won an election, he has vanquished the enemy. And he is doing everything he can to redistribute the wealth like he said he was going to do. It's disgusting.
[Neal Conan:] Redistribute wealth, in other words: take it from the rich, give it to the poor.
[Jerry:] Well, take it from anybody who seems to be paying taxes. I mean, there's 47 percent of the people in this country don't pay taxes. So what about their fair share? Is it just on the backs of the people who pay taxes?
[Neal Conan:] All right, Jerry. Thanks very much for the call. This is interesting, Ron, because at the same time, taxes as a percentage of gross national product are at the lowest point they've been since 1950. People don't feel under-taxed, but the government, in fact, is as many economists would say underfunded.
[Ron Elving:] There are a number of things here that are basic and that we're going to hear again and again over the months of this political debate. This 47 percent figure, that's a reference to the federal income tax. And as I mentioned earlier in my discussion with you a few minutes ago, almost half of the people in the country don't pay the federal income tax. What they do pay is the payroll taxes that support Social Security and Medicare, and they do pay state taxes of all kinds. And the state taxes tend to be quite regressive because they tend to fall more heavily on those who have less income. So the 47 percent refers to the federal income tax and that does not mean that those people pay no taxes. On the other hand, it does mean that the federal income tax system has been getting more progressive as it applies to the lowest incomes. Where it has not been getting more progressive is in how it applies to the highest incomes. And that's why you do get a pretty good percentage of people saying: It seems to me that with all the tax cuts we have had for the affluent in recent years, in the 1980s and then, of course, 2001, 2003, which blew a big, big hole in the Bush budgets in the last 10 years, there could be some adjustment at that end of the income scale.
[Neal Conan:] Let's now get to Brian, Brian with us from Portland.
[Brian:] Hi. Thank you for taking my call.
[Neal Conan:] Sure.
[Brian:] Yeah. I just wanted to disagree with Mr. Elving's comment that those both sides are being intransigent. When the Republicans say absolutely no to any tax increases, that's intransigent. And if Obama were to say absolutely no to any spending decreases, that would be intransigent. Obama is extending an even-handed approach, that's not intransigent. He's just being a little firmer in the way he's phrasing it, but he's not the he's not being intransigent.
[Neal Conan:] Well, the president would like people to believe he's believing reasonable so would Speaker Boehner, Ron.
[Ron Elving:] The speaker would, I supposed, see himself as being reasonable as well, but there's a slight difference between what I was saying about the two parties both wanting to have the approach that they want to make and then the president issuing a veto threat which, of course, is one form of insisting on his own way. The intransigent word that I used was with reference to those who have prevailed this year. And those who have prevailed this year have, generally speaking, on all these budget negotiations been Republicans. They have essentially said, we're not going to budge on the debt ceiling. We're going to risk that the United States would actually default. And, in fact, a number of their leading voices, people like Michele Bachmann, people who were running for president, said that they would accept a default on U.S. debt. So that's a form of intransigence. That's when I used that word.
[Neal Conan:] Any reasonable belief that even facing sequestration and those military budgets they're going to budge now?
[Ron Elving:] It does not appear so. I think that sequestration is better than an even bet. I hope that that's not true, and I hope they can work out something that's more ambitious and that addresses the problems more creatively.
[Neal Conan:] Ron Elving, thanks very much for your time.
[Ron Elving:] Thank you, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] NPR's senior Washington editor Ron Elving. Tomorrow, we'll broadcast from National Geographic headquarters here in Washington and talk about the mystery of the teenage brain. Scientists think they've finally figured it out. I'm pretty curious as to what they have to say. Join us then. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

[Rachel Martin:] Today, tourists in Washington, D.C., no longer need to be disappointed by the limited museum offerings as of late. Thanks to the end of the government shutdown, the Smithsonian Institution reopens its museums, along with the National Zoo. It all happens this morning. As NPR's Rebecca Ellis reports, getting it all up and running was no easy task.
[Rebecca Ellis, Byline:] The Smithsonian museums are springing back to life. With the end of the shutdown, the National Museum of Natural History's 500 furloughed staff members all came back to work Monday, but many arrived to find things a little out of whack.
[Unidentified Person:] Neither are amphibians and reptiles over here uh-huh.
[Rebecca Ellis, Byline:] Some of the museum's videos wouldn't play properly because the software had become outdated. The museum's project manager, Siobhan Starrs, says the fluid that preserves the dead squid had turned.
[Siobhan Starrs:] So you can see looking in there it looks kind of cloudy.
[Rebecca Ellis, Byline:] And the Easter Island sculpture was not yet ready for its debut.
[Siobhan Starrs:] We had moved this beautiful Easter Island head that a lot of people recognize as Dumb Dumb from the movies.
[Rebecca Ellis, Byline:] The figure's look-alike had a starring role in "Night At The Museum" as a talking sculpture desperate for some chewing gum.
[Brad Garrett:] [As Easter Island Head] You new Dumb Dumb. You give me gum gum.
[Rebecca Ellis, Byline:] Yesterday afternoon, staff was securing the head in its new location near the entrance, ready to greet visitors. Last Friday, when it was clear the shutdown was coming to an end, the Smithsonian Institution sprang into action. They promised to open everything by Tuesday. This meant a hectic Monday for Siobhan Starrs.
[Siobhan Starrs:] Imagine you had to shut your home down for 38 days and then all of a sudden open the doors.
[Rebecca Ellis, Byline:] Except, she points out, it's not a home. It's a 300,000-square-foot building that's over a century old. And it's not just a few guests coming through.
[Siobhan Starrs:] And your home is going to open and welcome over 50,000 visitors, potentially, the first day you open the door.
[Rebecca Ellis, Byline:] Most Smithsonian museums spent the day scurrying to get their exhibits presentable for the crowds. At the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, director Melissa Chiu says staff spent much of the day lugging water around for an installation that displays people's pulses in ripples.
[Melissa Chiu:] We drained it, and now we have to fill it all up again [LAUGHTER].
[Rebecca Ellis, Byline:] In Manhattan, the Cooper Hewitt's head of exhibitions, Yvonne Gomez, finally got into the building to see how the museum's exhibit on color had fared in her absence. She'd been worried about leaving out a bunch of rare books, like a 1704 treatise by Isaac Newton on prisms.
[Yvonne Gomez:] We had four hours to shut down indefinitely.
[Rebecca Ellis, Byline:] The books were fine. There was just a lot of dust.
[Yvonne Gomez:] We did a very deep cleaning of mainly dusting no bugs or anything like that.
[Rebecca Ellis, Byline:] By today, she says, it should be sparkling.
[Yvonne Gomez:] We're excited to be open to the public. This is our mission.
[Rebecca Ellis, Byline:] Siobhan Starrs says she can't wait to hear the footsteps echoing through the entrance of the Natural History Museum.
[Siobhan Starrs:] It was a dark kind of cold, quiet space. It felt very lonely. We miss our visitors.
[Rebecca Ellis, Byline:] The museum's director, Kirk Johnson, was on site through the shutdown, and he says it was just like the movies.
[Kirk Johnson:] I was here every day. It was a big night at the museum and a big day at the museum. I was the only person on the entire third floor.
[Rebecca Ellis, Byline:] He's really looking forward to having some company.
[Kirk Johnson:] We'll be very happy to see a huge crowd at 10 a.m.
[Rebecca Ellis, Byline:] He'll be downstairs to greet visitors personally. Rebecca Ellis, NPR News.

[Joe Palca:] Did you know that 250,000 people fall asleep at the wheel every day? A quarter of a million people? Why can't we get enough sleep to stay awake during a life-and-death activity? Well, a new poll by the National Sleep Foundation suggests one of the things keeping us up at night may be our smartphones, our laptops, our TVs, all that technology in the bedroom keeping us mentally engaged until later in the evening. Got to finish that episode, right? And those devices may be impacting the chemistry of our brains, too, by exposing to the bright lights of those screens at nighttime, sort of pressing the reset switch on our sleep cycle. The question is what to do about it, how to get more sleep, especially as you age, and your brain isn't as easily lulled into a nice snooze. And what about a midday siesta? Well, those were questions that were raised in this poll, but there's also an interesting question that we're going to start with, and that is why skipping sleep may give you a more optimistic outlook on life. And that's from an article that appears in this week's Journal of Neuroscience. The other is Scott Huettel. He's an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, sorry. It's somewhere out there. And he joins us by phone. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Huettel.
[Dr. Scott Huettel:] Thank you for having me.
[Joe Palca:] So you were looking at a particular behavior in sleep-deprived people. What were you looking at?
[Dr. Scott Huettel:] Well, our participants come to the laboratory either after a normal night's sleep or after a night in which we've kept them up, and so they're not able to sleep normally. And what we do is, we put them into an MRI scanner, and we monitor brain activation while they make a series of choices in an economic gambling game. You can roughly think of it as chances where they can place their bets to win money or lose money. And what we found was that people changed their preferences. They changed the way in which they approached the decision problem, such as they're more likely to weigh the positive outcomes heavily. They're more likely to bet on good outcomes. And they actually downplay the chances of negative outcomes. They're basically they're less loss-averse and more gain-seeking.
[Joe Palca:] I see okay, go ahead, I'm sorry.
[Dr. Scott Huettel:] And what we found that was sort of striking, was that the brain regions that we know from previous research actually shaped this gain-seeking or loss-minimizing behavior are respectively amplified. People's brain regions are more responsive to gains. And the normal loss aversion response is actually pretty much abolished.
[Joe Palca:] Really. So how is this related I mean, what is it about missing sleep that's going to have this kind of effect on these centers in the brain?
[Dr. Scott Huettel:] Well, one thing we know it's not, is it's not actually people just becoming less attentive because we can independently measure how attentive people are or how likely they are to sort of have lapses of attention. And that actually isn't predictive of how their behavior changed. What we found is there's indications they're becoming a little myopic. That is, they're narrowing down on a smaller set of possible outcomes and not thinking as broadly about the decision problem.
[Joe Palca:] If you'd like to talk to us about sleep deprivation and some of the things it causes, you can call us at 800-989-8255. That's 800-989-TALK. We're talking with Dr. Scott Huettel. He's an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. So I'm guessing that there's some real-world implications of this finding. You must have thought about those.
[Dr. Scott Huettel:] Yeah, one of the ones that's most, perhaps disconcerting, is to think about think about a doctor who has to make, of course, many types of decisions that often involve weighing, say, potential good outcomes and potential bad outcomes. Now, we naturally think that when doctors are sleep-deprived, we can do things that ameliorate their attentional deficits. So for example, they can take stimulants like caffeine, or they can just spend a little more time when they're making difficult decisions. And what our results suggest is that, in fact, those may help improve their attention, but that wouldn't be sufficient for getting rid of this optimism bias, where they would be more heavily weighing the good information and less attentive to the bad information.
[Joe Palca:] I'd like to welcome another guest onto the show, right now. He's Dr. Charles Czeisler, the Baldino Professor of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston. He's also chief of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital there. And Dr. Czeisler was one of the authors of this new or the description of this new poll that was done by the Sleep Federation. Welcome to the show, Dr. Czeisler.
[Dr. Charles Czeisler:] Hi, Joe, thank you.
[Joe Palca:] So how big a problem we've just been talking about sleep deprivation. I know it's something that you've thought a lot. How big a problem is sleep deprivation in the American public from this poll that you've just completed?
[Dr. Charles Czeisler:] It's a huge problem. And most Americans report that they don't get enough sleep at night. They don't feel refreshed in the morning. And they report a variety of negative outcomes, including adverse effects on mood, adverse effects on family life, social life, school, work, performance. And 66 percent of drivers under 30 admit to driving drowsy, 50 percent within the past month. As you mentioned, 250,000 people a day fall asleep at the wheel in the United States. It's a pervasive problem.
[Joe Palca:] I see. And it's interesting. Now, we've just been hearing from Dr. Huettel about this notion that you'd be more risk-seeking if you're sleep deprived, and I'm just wondering if that could be linked to drivers being more aggressive or more likely to try to cut you know, get in front of somebody with a slim margin because they're in this sleep-deprived state.
[Dr. Charles Czeisler:] Yes, we know that people become fast and sloppy when they are sleep deprived so that instead of trying to preserve accuracy by slowing down, they'll keep going just as fast, even though they have make more mistakes.
[Joe Palca:] Well, if you have questions about not getting enough sleep or even about getting too much sleep, call us at 800-989-8255. And let's go to our first call now, and go to Hogan in Sacramento. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY. You're on the air.
[Hogan:] Hello. Yeah, I had a quick question about sleep. I'm a 27-year-old who cares for his 92-year-old grandfather, who's recently his health has deteriorated. And what this has meant is that my sleep has been incredibly drastically affected, where maybe I'm getting six to seven hours of sleep, tops. But more severely than that, my sleep is just constantly interrupted. Like maybe I'm getting up every hour, sometimes several times in an hour. And I've heard differing things about the effect of lack of REM sleep on your functioning. And I was just curious about any results of the studies or just generally your knowledge about what the lack of REM sleep does to you.
[Joe Palca:] Dr. Czeisler, maybe you want to tackle that one?
[Dr. Charles Czeisler:] Well, first of all, the many interruptions of sleep that you're experiencing, as you do this important work for your grandfather, is going to affect your daytime performance. It's going to increase the risk of having lapses of attention and falling asleep, for example, at the wheel or being impaired in your work. Interruptions of sleep, in and of themselves, can adversely affect the restorative value of sleep, even if you get the same amount of sleep. And the loss of rapid eye movement sleep can adversely affect your ability to solve problems, for example. It seems that during rapid eye movement sleep, we're integrating the experiences that we've had during the day and helping to solve problems and understand the way the world works in a way that we don't get from other stages of sleep or from trying to analyze the problem when we're awake.
[Joe Palca:] Okay, let's take another call now and go to let's see. We've got Tyson in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Tyson, welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
[Tyson:] Hi, thanks for taking my call.
[Joe Palca:] You bet.
[Tyson:] I was just in a psychology course, and they were talking about how an alternative therapy to depression is by skipping a night of sleep and how apparently that's one of the most effective ways to, like, instantly get rid of depression, which seems kind of related, right the idea that we would become more positive with less sleep.
[Joe Palca:] Interesting question. Dr. Huettel, what do you make of that?
[Dr. Scott Huettel:] So I think that our results would be consistent with that, in that what we effectively show is that after sleep deprivation, some of the brain regions that are most important for responding to positive outcomes become more responsive. And similarly, those regions that are more important for dealing with negative, aversive or risky outcomes are less responsive. One thing, of course, to emphasize is that these are not panaceas in that there's many, as just was mentioned, many negative consequences that would probably have long-term effects on somebody's ability to do their job or interact with others that would probably, if this was repeated, counteract any immediate positive effects.
[Joe Palca:] So if you're seriously sleep deprived, is it best to, like, catch a short nap, or do you really need to stop and get eight hours of sleep, Dr. Huettel?
[Dr. Scott Huettel:] Well, I think that my understanding is that these both will help. One of the key things that is shown, is that there is levels of deprivation, and different individuals have different tolerances. So we know that after extended deprivation, essentially everyone's affected, but the individual variation of how much sleep is necessary means that some people may have may better benefit from either of those two options.
[Joe Palca:] Dr. Czeisler, is that your take on this, as well?
[Dr. Charles Czeisler:] Yes, and I think it's important to recognize, in terms of the effect on sleep loss on mood, that whereas there's a euphoria associated with acute sleep deprivation, as has just been described, and people sometimes feel punchy or slap-happy after they have been sleep deprived, and it can transiently be effective in reversing depressed mood, that chronic sleep loss has opposite effect. And people become burned out and have actually a higher risk for depression when they're chronically sleep-deprived.
[Joe Palca:] Okay. Interesting. Let's go now to Dee in Gainesville. Dee, are you there in Gainesville, Florida?
[Dee:] Yeah, I am. Hi.
[Joe Palca:] Hi. How are you? Give us your question.
[Dee:] All right. My question is how much is too much sleep? I go through having, like, maybe eight or nine hours of sleep a night to, like, maybe five. I mean, is there a limit to how much I should sleep to be able to function correctly during the day? I don't know...
[Joe Palca:] I'm not sure...
[Dee:] ...what is...
[Joe Palca:] I'm not sure it is 100 percent appropriate. But how old are you? I think that might relate to the answer to the question.
[Dee:] I'm 20 years old.
[Joe Palca:] Okay. Apologies for being ageist, but it does play a role in this answer, Dr. Czeisler.
[Dee:] No problem.
[Dr. Charles Czeisler:] Well, it does turn out that a lot of us, particularly when you describe that you're getting four, five hours a night of sleep per night on some nights, you begin to build up a sleep deficiency. And as that sleep deficiency builds, then you need a time to, sort of, recover that lost sleep. And there was an interesting experiment done a number of years ago at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda by Dr. Tom Wehr in which he had people spend 14 hours a day or a night in bed for a month. In the first week, they were sleeping 12, 12 and a half hours per night. And then it gradually dropped down, the next week, 10 or 11 hours and so on. Until finally, after they paid back this enormous sleep deficiency of about 32 hours, they finally settled down to about 8.2 to 8.3 hours of sleep per night.
[Dee:] That's interesting.
[Joe Palca:] It is. This whole business about I have to say, my son, who's 16, managed to oversleep by six and a half hours the other week. And so I'm completely stunned at his ability both I don't know when he went to bed. So maybe he was up until four in the morning. But six and half hours oversleeping was pretty remarkable to me.
[Dr. Charles Czeisler:] As we get older, we can't do that anymore so...
[Joe Palca:] Why is that? Why is it harder to sleep longer when you get older?
[Dr. Charles Czeisler:] Well, the depth of sleep is we don't sleep as deeply when we get older, and we have many fewer many more interruptions of sleep. We also have a much higher prevalence of sleep disorders. But setting the disorders aside, even when we study healthy, older people who do not have a sleep disorder, there's a much narrower window within the daily cycle at which they can maintain a consolidated bout of sleep. So it just we we just can't sleep in until 2 o'clock in the afternoon typically when we're 70.
[Joe Palca:] We're talking about sleep, sleep hygiene, sleep disorders, sleeping too much. I'm Joe Palca. And this is TALK OF THE NATION from SCIENCE FRIDAY. Anyway, let's take another call now and go to Todd in oops, sorry -Tony in Ann Arbor, Michigan. How are you?
[Tony:] Hi. I'm doing very well.
[Joe Palca:] Great.
[Tony:] How are you?
[Joe Palca:] I'm well. So what's your question?
[Tony:] I had a question about is there any consideration to the role of pharmaceuticals meant to help sleep disorders as they're advertised on TV? I guess, they're supposed to work great. I don't know if I can say any of the products, but I'm sure we're aware of them. Do they affect the dream cycle? And do they, in process, keep affecting sleep deprivation or being able to come back and sleep normally?
[Joe Palca:] Okay. Dr. Czeisler, I guess that's one for you.
[Dr. Charles Czeisler:] You know, many pharmaceutical products change the structure of sleep. So they may diminish the amount of deep, slow wave sleep, but increase the amount the total duration of sleep, or some hasten the ability to fall asleep, but don't actually result in an increase in the total sleep duration. So there are different types of products. Some of the over-the-counter products might, you know, help us to fall asleep for a couple of days. But then we build up tolerance to them and they no longer are effective, or we would have to have higher and higher doses to be effective. So there are a variety of different products out there but none that I know of that really induce the same kind of sleep that one would get, you know, for example, when you're 18 years old.
[Joe Palca:] Dr. Huettel, you said earlier we were talking earlier about whether there are any things you can do, pharmaceutical agents are there any agents that people who are sleep-deprived can do that will right them and keep them on the right course, or is really the only thing a night a good night sleep or at least a certain amount of sleep?
[Dr. Scott Huettel:] Well, I think that the different agents are going to have different affects, so that one common thing that many of us do is to take stimulants. And a stimulant has the wonderful feature of speeding up some behaviors and speeding up the brain mechanisms that underlie those behaviors. Now, what that may end up doing is raise arousal levels and make you more effective to function in some circumstances. But as a number of studies recently, including ours, have shown that what that made, in fact, do is not change all behaviors. It can help you with, perhaps, keeping you awake and alert in some situations. But things like reasoning abilities, higher cognition and decision-making may be left unaffected.
[Joe Palca:] So I mean, is the bottom line here for you, in terms of functioning appropriately, get the right amount of sleep? Is that what you're saying, Dr. Huettel?
[Dr. Scott Huettel:] Yeah, I think so. And that what we want to do is not only get the right amount of sleep but recognize that when we aren't able to do that because of the pressures on modern life, to understand that we can't just solve the problem by taking a stimulant or by just giving yourself a little more time to make a decision. We're going we want to recognize that sleep deprivation has these pretty subtle effects that can change our cognition.
[Joe Palca:] I see. Well, thank you very much, Dr. Huettel, for joining us and explaining about your study. That was a very interesting issue. And certainly -as we are talking about this, it's certainly one that people in Las Vegas are probably counting on to get people to behave a little less rationally than they might otherwise when they're gambling in the middle of the night and probably have been up for a while.
[Dr. Scott Huettel:] Right, right. And, of course, there's lots of other ways they can take our money as well.
[Joe Palca:] Okay. That's Dr. Scott Huettel. He's an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. And, Dr. Czeisler, you're going to stay with us and talk some more about this sleep study that was just completed. This is like the 20th year the study has been conducted, right?
[Dr. Charles Czeisler:] That's correct. The National Sleep Foundation has been doing -conducting this poll for 20 consecutive years. And this particular poll is focused on the technologies that have invaded the bedroom and are responsible for a lot of the sleep loss that Americans experience.
[Joe Palca:] Okay. Well, we'll deconstruct that when we come back from this short break. We're talking with Dr. Charles Czeisler about sleep and sleeping and sleeping too much and not sleeping enough. So stay with us. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Joe Palca. We're talking this hour about groggy Americans and what we can do to rest a little easier with at night. My guest is Charles Czeisler. He's the Baldino professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston. He's also chief of the division of sleep medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital there. And we were talking about this poll of American sleep. And this year's poll focused on devices that we sometimes bring into the bedroom. What are we talking about? What kind of devices are we talking about here?
[Dr. Charles Czeisler:] Well, the TV was the first device that invaded the bedroom. And 80 percent of Americans report that they watch TV in the hour before going to sleep. And we know, for example, that teenagers with a TV in the bedroom spend eight and a half hours a day on recreational media of one sort or another, and those without a TV in the bedroom spend five and a half hours a day. So it's taking an extra three hours a day in those kids who have a TV in the bedroom. And it's not just TVs anymore. That's how it started. And now people are bringing their cell phones. Four out of 10 Americans are bringing their cell phone into the bedroom. In fact, three out of four teenagers bring the cell phone with them to the bedroom. And many people keep it up during the night. So 25 percent of Americans leave the cell phones on all night. And about 20 percent of Americans under 30 are awoken at least a few nights a week by cell phone ringing, text messages, email coming through their cell phones. So we've gone to we've brought things to another level. People are playing video games before going to bed. One out of five Americans are, you know, all hyped up on online gaming or some sort of Internet or other type of computer game in the hour before sleep. And a lot of these technologies have exposure to light associated with them, or the lights are on in the room as they're happening. And we know that that suppresses the release of the sleep-promoting hormone, melatonin, and shifts its release to a later hour, not just tonight, but the next night. So it's making it more difficult to fall asleep today, as well as tomorrow and the next day, because of the light exposure that is resetting our internal clock.
[Joe Palca:] And so is the message here don't do that?
[Dr. Charles Czeisler:] Well, I mean if only 35 percent of Americans report that they are getting enough sleep at night. They recognize that it's having bad effects and that they're not getting enough. 70 percent say their work schedules allow them to get enough sleep and their school schedules, but they more than half of them aren't getting that sleep that they could get. And so then, when we look at why, it seems that the invasion of these technologies into the bedroom, they're so engaging and enticing that they, sort of, lock us in and get us going on some type of interactive activity or watching an exciting program, five surfing 500 different cable channels. And the next thing you know, it's 2 o'clock in the morning.
[Joe Palca:] Yep. There you go. Okay. Let's take a call now from Chris in Columbia, Maryland. Chris, welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
[Chris:] Hey, how are you doing?
[Joe Palca:] I'm good.
[Chris:] Yeah. I was calling about I'm actually a combat veteran. I've been deployed two times to Iraq and once to Afghanistan. I just returned from Afghanistan in December, which was a pretty rough tour. But my question was I know you're talking about sleep deprivation and some symptoms. I know one or -there's been times when I was in Afghanistan that I went days literally without sleep or maybe an hour here, an hour there. And some of my symptoms were like I actually started hyper-vigilance and seeing things that weren't there, like I mean like crazy stuff, like a pink elephant or something. I'm like, whoa, whoa, what was that, you know, like when I kind of dozed off. And I'm wondering if, through your studies, have you seen symptoms like that from people who have been deprived over days at a time or people only got, you know, a couple of hours over two or three days?
[Joe Palca:] Oh, Chris, thanks for that call. What do you think of that, Dr. Czeisler?
[Dr. Charles Czeisler:] Well, that can occur as our, sort of, dreaming stages begin to occur when we're awake, and we have more difficultly separating out the difference between what's happening in the here and now and what's happening -that might be happening if we were asleep. So it does appear that part of the brain can begin to initiate sleep while another part of the brain is still awake. And if you're driving a car and that happens, that might lead to a phenomenon that we call automatic behavior, in which you begin to forget or not remember how you got from point A to point B on the expressway. Or suddenly, you're trying to get into a house, and then you realize that it's not yours. These are the sorts of things that can happen when we are when sleep pressure is high enough.
[Joe Palca:] Interesting. Well, thanks for that call, Chris. Let's take another call now and go to Lee in Savannah, Georgia. Lee, welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY. You're on the air.
[Lee:] Yes. My son, he started getting severe headaches when he was nine years old, and he is 13 now. He's been through all kinds of tests and all. And one of the symptoms from his headaches is he cannot sleep at night. He's been through several sleep studies. They found, you know, this problem, that problem, and we've had a couple of surgeries such as tonsils and things like that. Nothing has seemed to help his headache.
[Conan:] Let me see if Dr. Czeisler has any suggestions about that. I mean, it sounds like it's not a sleep-related problem so much as a medical problem that's affecting sleep.
[Dr. Charles Czeisler:] Yeah. It's hard to know without a bit more information. But sometimes sleep disordered breathing or sleep apnea, which can sometimes happen with large tonsils, can lead to morning headaches. They wouldn't typically last all day, and sleep deprivation itself can be associated with an increased risk of headaches. But it sounds like the situation you were describing, the headaches may be the primary issue which are themselves interfering with sleep.
[Joe Palca:] Right. Right. So what, I mean, is this as you said, this study has been going on for 20 years. What's changed over the last 20 years about American sleep habits? Is it mostly these new electronic devices in the bedroom?
[Dr. Charles Czeisler:] Well, Americans are sleeping less and less. And there has and we know that the consequences of this chronic under-sleeping are on many different aspects of health and performance. So as sleep duration at night has been decreasing, we know that one of the physiological consequences of that is a change in the hormones that regulate appetite and regulate the metabolism of sugar. So we become less sensitive to insulin when we're chronically sleep deprived, and the hormones that regulate appetite are changed in a way that makes us crave more food and particularly carbohydrate-rich foods. So as sleep duration has declined, there has been a concurrent increase in the waistline of Americans, as they have gained more and more weight. And there's now research suggesting that there may be a causal link between this reduction in sleep duration and the increase in weight gain, and of course that then increases the risk of illnesses like diabetes and sleep apnea, and so on. So besides those kinds of effects, chronic sleep deficiency increases the risk of adverse effects on the cardiovascular system. So blood pressure goes up when we don't get enough sleep, daytime blood pressure, as well as the risk of calcification of the coronary arteries increases in people who are not getting enough sleep. Even the immune system is adversely affected, so that people who chronically get an inadequate amount of sleep, for example, only have half the antibody response to a flu shot in the first week. And also, if they get exposed to the virus that causes the common cold, they'll be at several times greater risk of actually catching a cold.
[Joe Palca:] I'm sorry, but as we as you were talking about this, it just occurred to me that somebody somewhere is going to come up with the sleep diet, which is going to be, you know, an extra eight hours of sleep a day to lose weight rapidly. I hope that doesn't happen.
[Dr. Charles Czeisler:] Well, the as a way of preventing weight gain, I think that that would be getting enough sleep could be the easiest way to begin to lose weight.
[Joe Palca:] There you go. That one would probably go down easy. Okay. Let's take another call now and go to Chris in Evansville, Illinois. Chris, welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY. You're on the air.
[Chris:] Thank you very much. I'm enjoying the subject. It's just funny your guest mentioned about diabetes. My wife and I actually for six years [unintelligible] almost never got a full night's sleep because our oldest son is diabetic, so we're constantly getting up in the middle of the night to check him. But we were also finding that we weren't getting enough sleep because we had a, you know, TV in the bedroom, and of course with satellite, you know, so many channels to choose from. And after we realized, you know [unintelligible] don't have enough energy or anything, we finally disconnected the satellite box in the TV in our bedroom, and the shows that we would normally stay up watching, we actually started to DVR them and...
[Joe Palca:] You mean record them, yeah.
[Chris:] Yes. And watch them much earlier and set ourselves you know, kind of like you would do with your children, set ourselves a bedtime so that we could, even though it's interrupted, still get a lot more sleep. So we kind of disconnected the technology, so to speak, that was keeping us from sleeping as much as we could.
[Joe Palca:] No, I like that because you're using technology to overcome technology. So that's good.
[Chris:] [Unintelligible]
[Joe Palca:] It's very good. Chris, thanks for that. Is that does that strike you as a good plan, Dr. Czeisler?
[Dr. Charles Czeisler:] It does. In fact, I set my own cell phone to have a bedtime alarm in the evening so that it begins to alert me that it's time to wind things down and get ready for bed. And I find that to be very helpful. The what the caller described is actually it has been studied that the parents of children who have either a medical condition or some other condition that disturbs the child's sleep and therefore disturbs the parents' sleep, that those parents are at greater risks for medical problems as well as mental health problems in having to cope with the sleep interruption that's associated with raising such kids.
[Joe Palca:] I see. So just I mean, what are the rules? One of the best people -everybody says, oh, I just wish I could get a good night's sleep. I just wish -I mean, is there a few straightforward things that people could do that would really help?
[Dr. Charles Czeisler:] You know, there are some simple tips. First of all, having a cool, dark, quiet place to sleep; secondly, setting aside an adequate amount of time for sleep. So it takes eight to nine hours in bed to get enough sleep for the average adult. Teenagers need at least nine to 10 hours of sleep. So you got to figure out when you have to get up in the morning. They're getting up between six and 7 o'clock in the morning. So you've got to work backwards and say, okay, I've got to go to bed nine to 10 hours before that in order to get enough sleep; and then trying to have a regular schedule. So some people, you know, on the weekends they're up till 2:00, 3 o'clock in the morning, and then they're trying to go to bed at 10 o'clock at night on weeknights. So that's like traveling back and forth from London back to the East Coast every time you want to try to go to bed on a weeknight, and that's going to make it much more difficult to fall asleep at night. And people are going be tossing and turning and thinking they can't fall asleep because they're going to work the next day. It's actually because they're trying to make a trip that's equivalent to flying to London, and then they're suffering from social jetlag, as we call it.
[Joe Palca:] Social jetlag, I like that.
[Dr. Charles Czeisler:] And so having a regular schedule will improve sleep and then getting all this technology out of the bedroom, as the last caller has described, so that I mean, you'll find that these shows and games and so on are less enticing the next day when you have plenty of other things to do than they are in the evening. And so if you can actually get them out of the bedroom and not bring amazingly, about a quarter of people or a third of the people are now using their cell phone as an alarm clock.
[Joe Palca:] Hmm.
[Dr. Charles Czeisler:] And they're not necessarily switching into alarm clock-only mode. So now they are tied to having a cell phone there in order to get up in time for their morning and that begins to create a vicious cycle. Just get the cell phone, the charger, the video games, the laptops, all these things out of the bedroom so that it can be a sanctuary for sleep.
[Joe Palca:] It sounds like a plan. Well, thanks for joining us on this topic, Dr. Czeisler. You know it's one that's close to my heart.
[Dr. Charles Czeisler:] Thank you, Joe.
[Joe Palca:] Charles Czeisler is the Baldino Professor of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston. He's also a chief of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital there. I'm Joe Palca. And this is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR.

[Farai Chideya:] It's time again for your letters, and here with me is producer Christopher Johnson. Hey, Christopher.
[Christopher Johnson:] Hey, Farai.
[Farai Chideya:] What have we got?
[Christopher Johnson:] Well, Cal Lauper from Dallas wrote in about our interview with Delaware Senator Joseph Biden. Now Biden is a Democrat running for the White House. And Lauper said, the interview really made me see a side of Biden I didn't know. Ms. Chideya seemed to genuinely welcome the senator. However, her closing joke, lecturing the senator about the word articulate and touching hair was in questionable taste. Okay, Farai, so here's some of that conversation you had with Biden.
[Senator Joseph Biden:] Younger African-Americans who may not have known Joe Biden might think that, God almighty, this guy is just, you know, dissing other black leaders. That's simply not the case.
[Farai Chideya:] Well, I will tell you. On the campaign trail, never touch a black person's hair without asking first and never use the word articulate. But I think you figured the second part out. That's unsolicited advice.
[Senator Joseph Biden:] I never touched anybody's hair on the campaign trail. I don't have much myself.
[Christopher Johnson:] Okay, Farai. Defend yourself.
[Farai Chideya:] Well I think that Senator Joseph Biden, having been in the Senate for 34 years, has dealt with a lot worse than this. I think it's a great joke within the context of the black community and I'm sure the senator can take it. If not, he can write us a letter too.
[Christopher Johnson:] On Tuesday, we highlighted how the Innocence Project used DNA testing to exonerate 200 wrongfully convicted U.S. prisoners. James Lang of Miami Shores, Florida, wrote in to say this: good program segment, but missing a key statistic. The 200 wrongfuls are what percent of all cases with DNA evidence?
[Farai Chideya:] Well, James, that is a tough one. All that we know is that the 200 exonerations are one-tenth of all the exonerations by the Innocence Project. But the issue you're asking about is tough to track, given the uneven state of DNA evidence and its preservation.
[Christopher Johnson:] Okay, let's go a little lighter now. On Monday, comedian Darryl Littleton told us why there are no black shock jocks.
[Ms. Darryl Littleton:] There are no black shock jocks, and for good reason. Black people don't play that. Put the wrong person's name on your grill and your show will be gone. Not because of ratings, but because they can't find your loose-lipped carcass.
[Christopher Johnson:] Urging Littleton to get his facts straight, Kenneth Laddie of Queens, New York, wrote to say: I guess he didn't hear the distinctive plane crash sound effect that got a black DJ fired from the New York hip-hop station, Hot 97. And he also didn't hear a popular DJ threatening another DJ's family. This is the work of shock jock Star, also known as Troi Torain.
[Farai Chideya:] Now Kenneth, as you know, Troi Torain is no longer on the air. That is consistent with Littleton's commentary. You can check it out at npr.orgNEWS & NOTES. And a number of you wrote to say that you enjoyed our obit of Dakota Staton despite a big booboo. Let's let Louise Alamayo speak for the group. He wrote: I was saddened to hear the news of Ms. Staton's passing, but it wasn't helped by the fact that your story of same ended with the singing of Nancy Wilson and not Dakota Staton. Nancy is wonderful and I'm sure she loved the singing of Dakota, but it strikes me as disrespectful that you made this mistake. If possible, please try to correct it.
[Christopher Johnson:] And yes, Dakota Staton did record "Someone to Watch Over Me." That was back in 1959. But iTunes has posted Nancy Wilson's version under Dakota's name at the site. NPR's music library has already written iTunes about that one. We tried to find Staton singing "Someone to Watch Over Me," but it's hard. So sorry, Louise, but here's the best we could do. Dakota again singing "The Late Late Show."
[Ms. Dakota Staton:] [Singing] Gee, it's cozy in the park tonight when you cuddle up and hold me tight. Stars above they seem to know we are putting on the late, late show.
[Christopher Johnson:] And that's it for Letters today, but don't let that stop you from writing or calling.
[Farai Chideya:] You can leave a voicemail for us at 202-408-3330. That's 202-408-3330. And to e-mail just log on to npr.org and click on Contact Us. It helps a lot if you tell us where you're writing from and how we should say your name. So until we meet again, that's Letters. Thanks, Christopher.
[Christopher Johnson:] No problem, Farai.

[Farai Chideya:] Drinking is a huge part of the holidays. There's eggnog at Christmas, champagne at New Year's, martini at company parties. It's no surprise then that this time of year can be extra hard for people who have problems with alcohol. But those who have to muster up holiday spirit without the spirits have also learned valuable lessons about how to approach the holidays.
[Lisa G:] The holidays were tough, because there's a lot of expectations and a lot of the way you want things to be, and the reality is is that's just not the way they are.
[Jonathan:] Usually, I was filled with fear and decided, you know, that in order to make the holiday perfect, I had to get everything arranged just so, and that always was a disaster. My name's Jonathan, and I'm a recovering alcoholic. I've been sober since June 23rd, 1999.
[Jeff N:] My name is Jeff N. I'm an alcoholic. I've been sober since September of 1996.
[Lisa G:] My name is Lisa G. I'm an alcoholic, and my sobriety birth date is August 9th, 2003. I come from a background of active alcoholism, and that's what we did together as a family through the holidays is we drank together.
[Jeff N:] I come from a family where there was alcoholism, and I saw, you know, the Christmas lights come falling off the tree and things thrown. And, you know, I never wanted to be like my old man, but in my own way, I ended up being exactly like him.
[Lisa G:] We had a family that liked to say what they felt when they were drinking, and it wasn't always very nice.
[Jonathan:] I married someone who had a large extended family, whose basic principle was holidays are an event where everybody has to be together for, you know, days on end. And for an active alcoholic, that's like hell on Earth.
[Lisa G:] It would start out good and it would start out, you know, everybody's having a couple of drinks, and it's all good. And then it escalates, and because none of us can stop-and I should speak for myself-it would get sad and disappointing and...
[Jonathan:] I ended up getting drunk, you know, Christmas Eve and staying drunk probably through the whole Christmas holiday. And the other leading-up holidays probably weren't much better than that; kickoff time was usually Thanksgiving.
[Jeff N:] I would go out and I would spend a whole lot of money buying a whole lot of gifts, and I realize now that my motive in that was a lot of guilt for the way that I participated in their lives throughout the other 364 days of the year.
[Lisa G:] The good news is is that since I've been sober, I know really what the holidays mean for me and what really the gift of giving is. Being available for 12 step calls, it really feels good doing it and it has nothing to do with gift giving and all of that. It's just about being somewhere where you might be able to help somebody out.
[Jonathan:] You know, I plan to have a good time, but if things don't go my way, then I don't have a meltdown. And so I can step away from the event and try and add to instead of take away from. It's behavior that I never would have exhibited in the past.
[Farai Chideya:] Voices of recovering alcoholics, brought to us by producer Andrew Haig. DAY TO DAY returns in a moment. I'm Farai Chideya.

[Linda Wertheimer:] I'm Linda Wertheimer. The 2012 election, despite the best efforts of both campaigns, appears to be an extremely close race. So, every vote counts. As tens of thousands more men and women are expected home from Afghanistan, the battle for the vet vote is warming up. Next week, both presidential candidates will address war veterans at their national convention in Reno, Nevada. For more on what veterans want to hear from the two men who want to be president, I'm joined by Tom Tarantino, an Iraq Army vet and a legislative director at Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. Welcome.
[Tom Tarantino:] Thanks for having me, Linda.
[Linda Wertheimer:] And by Genevieve Chase, who is the founder and executive director of American Women Veterans and a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Ms. Chase, welcome to you.
[Genevieve Chase:] Thank you. Thanks for having me.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Now, Tom, could I start with you. Have the veterans of American wars, do you think, traditionally been served well by their governments?
[Tom Tarantino:] Well, it's gotten a lot better, I would say, over the past decade. But traditionally, you know, veterans issues tend to fall by the wayside. And I think our biggest fear nowadays, since there is such a divide between the civilian population and the military population is that, you know, things like veteran unemployment, things like making sure that the GI Bill isn't being taken advantage of by predatory schools, things like the alarming suicide rate and the lack of mental health care are going to get pushed to second- and third-tier issues. And I think it's, you know, it's really important that the American public understands that veterans' and military issues aren't niche issues. They're issues that affect, despite being such a small population, affects everyone's lives. It affects the entire country. Because veterans don't go home to small military communities. They come home and we are spread out all over the country.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Genevieve, from your conversations with veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, do they feel that they have been well treated?
[Genevieve Chase:] I think for the most part, veterans understand that the Veterans Administration is doing as much as they can. Unfortunately, it really isn't enough. You know, veterans who have immediate needs and issues that need to be addressed rather quickly. And with the backlog at the VA and not being able to get appointments when they need them, you know, they sort of feel like somebody's dropping the ball somewhere in the government and in American society. And so, you know, I was speaking to a veteran who served 20 years and retired who did five deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan and, you know, he knows that he needs some assistance. And when I asked him had he been to the VA, he said yes, but it takes so long to get an appointment. So, it was disheartening for me as an advocate. You know, I testified a couple of years ago about the Veterans Affairs system and medical care and mental health care. It's disheartening to see that we're still hearing that from our vets.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Tom, can I just ask about the downturn in the economy and veterans. Do you think they were hit harder?
[Tom Tarantino:] I think that, you know, they were definitely hit harder. And I think this actually tend to happen when the economy turns down. You know, veterans tend to feel a little bit more, I think especially in this generation, because this is the first generations of business leaders in this country that's largely never served in the military. Previous generations, the chances are the guy hiring you toted a machine gun around for a few years in his 20s and they were able to understand that hiring a vet is an investment because they had a cultural connection.
[Linda Wertheimer:] But presumably they also understood that there was some sort of, I don't know, responsibility owed to veterans.
[Tom Tarantino:] Well, yes. There is a responsibility that we have to veterans, but really in terms of the business case for hiring a vet, veterans are an investment. You know, we've spent billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-hours training people. And so what we need to do is be able to translate to a civilian employment community what these skills mean. What does being a platoon leader, a platoon sergeant, a squad leader mean? As well as translating the hard skills, so people like truck drivers and medics and welders can actually continue to do their job in the civilian world. Or, if they want to change careers, they got to make sure that the GI Bill is there for them and robust so that they can get the retraining they need.
[Linda Wertheimer:] You know, I'm wondering if the returning veterans are paying any attention to this political campaign listening to political speeches, listening to candidates. Well, I wonder if they think any of this is important to them. What do you think, Genevieve?
[Genevieve Chase:] I think that it's a huge discussion just in the veteran community. You know, even personally on my Facebook or on Twitter or among groups of veterans when you get us together, politics is a very important issue. we're very in touch and in tune and concerned with the way our country is going, specifically because we serve, you know, in the United States military and our commander in chief happens to be the president of the United States. So, you know, it is important to veterans.
[Linda Wertheimer:] What do vets want to hear from these presidential candidates? What would move your folks to sign up with one candidate or the other, Tom?
[Tom Tarantino:] I think veterans want to hear specifics. We don't want to hear platitudes and we don't hear, like, sweeping statements of thanks. I mean, everybody's got a yellow ribbon on their car. We don't know a yellow ribbon on Air Force One. What we need is specifics. You know, how are we going to transfer into a 21st century VA? And if we are doing it already, how has that progressed? How are we going to make sure that the GI Bill is protected? How are we going to make sure that veterans, when they come home, are able to find jobs? What are their plans? What do they want to do? And what do they see as a vision in outcomes for the next four years?
[Linda Wertheimer:] Genevieve, many of the veterans are very young people, and traditionally in this country young people don't always vote. What do you think are the chances that the returning vets your represent will be out there voting?
[Genevieve Chase:] I think in what I understand about the election process and in past elections, women tend to vote quite a bit. And, you know, it's something among our community in just in general as Americans, but specifically as military people that it's our one opportunity to affect some kind of change other than what we're doing through service. And, you know, when I was Afghanistan in 2006, there were some very contentious elections going on, and a lot of us were worried about being able to vote. Every unit has a voting assistance officer in the military. So, it's significant and it's important to us. And to go back and touch on a little bit what Tom was saying, absolutely, we want details and specifics. We are so tired of people saying in general broad-sweeping statements, like Tom said, you know, that we should support veterans. We want to know how you're going to do that. You know, either one of the candidates and actually it should be both of them should sit down and say, look, these are the biggest issues and how do you think we should fix them, and let's go from there. Rather than getting up and talking to us and about us, they need to be asking us. They need to be having these conversations. They need to be learning about what the actual real issues are.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Genevieve Chase, she is the founder and executive director of American Women Veterans. Tom Tarantino is legislative director at Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. Thanks very much for your time.
[Genevieve Chase:] Thank you.
[Tom Tarantino:] Thanks for having me.

[Michele Norris:] Soldiers heading to Afghanistan or Iraq later this summer got some good news today. President Bush announced that duty tour links will drop from 15 to 12 months. The new tours begin August 1st. The president also endorsed a pause in U.S. troop reductions from Iraq this summer. NPR's Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman reports.
[Tom Bowman:] All week, Congress has heard about soldiers in an overstressed Army.
[General Richard Cody:] We have asked them to run a marathon and they have.
[Tom Bowman:] General Richard Cody is the Army's number two officer testifying yesterday.
[General Richard Cody:] That marathon has become an enduring relay, and our soldiers continue to run and at the double time. Does this exhaust the body and mind of those in the race and those who were ever present on the sidelines, cheering them on? Yes. Has it broken the will of a soldier? No.
[Tom Bowman:] Part of that exhaustion has been the 15-month tour that has been in effect of the past year. It was a morale killer for the soldiers. Soldiers talked about hitting a wall after serving a year in Iraq. Longer deployment sometimes meant missing two Thanksgivings and Christmases. Now, that the so-called surge in troops is ending, President Bush was able to return to what was a traditional tour.
[President George W. Bush:] These changes will be effective for those deploying after August 1st. We'll also ensure that Army units will have at least a year home for every year in the field.
[Tom Bowman:] That's a year in the United States, not necessarily home. Because units have to train to get ready to head back to Iraq, it's more like nine or ten months with their families. And the president cautioned that because tour lengths are coming down, it doesn't mean the American military's job in Iraq is over.
[Pres. Bush:] Our work in Iraq will still demand sacrifices from our whole nation, especially our military, for some time to come.
[Tom Bowman:] How much time is uncertain. The president today also endorsed General Petraeus' call for a 45-day pause in troop productions after July. That means come summer, there will still be about 140,000 troops in Iraq down from the current 160,000.
[Pres. Bush:] General Petraeus says he'll need time to consolidate his forces and assess how this reduced American presence will affect conditions on the ground before making measured recommendations on further reductions. And I told him he'll have all the time he needs.
[Tom Bowman:] That's not going to sit well with some members of Congress, particularly Democrats, who had been pushing for a decision on greater cutbacks soon after the pause ends in mid-September. Democratic Senator Carl Levin, who chairs the Armed Services Committee, pushed Petraeus on a withdrawal timetable on Tuesday.
[Senator Carl Levin:] Are you giving us any ideas to how long that would take? You say overtime.
[General David Petraeus:] Sir, if...
[Senator Carl Levin:] Could that be a month...
[General David Petraeus:] If...
[Senator Carl Levin:] Could that be two months?
[General David Petraeus:] Sir, it could be less than that. It could be...
[Senator Carl Levin:] Could it be more than that?
[General David Petraeus:] It could be more than that. Again...
[Senator Carl Levin:] Or...
[General David Petraeus:] ...it's when the conditions or that we can make a recommendation for further reductions.
[Tom Bowman:] Soldiers may now be facing a shorter tour length, but those large concentrations of troops mean they will continue to face repeated deployments to Iraq. Army leaders worry about the health of the force -how long they can keep this pace. Suicides are up, recruiting is a challenge, some of the best captains and sergeants are leaving. Captain James Crenshaw know some captains who have had enough because of the demands of what the Army calls high up-tempo.
[Captain James Crenshaw:] I know of some that have left, and they left in part because of the high up-tempo, but there also a lot who have stayed as well.
[Tom Bowman:] Crenshaw is among those staying. In August, he'll head to Iraq for his second tour, leaving behind his wife and two daughters. He spoke with NPR recently at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
[Captain James Crenshaw:] A lot more people have done a lot more rotations than I have, so I have to kind of suck it up more or less. But there are some folks who have reached their third or forth rotation who may not feel they want to suck it up.
[Tom Bowman:] Crenshaw will not be serving as much time on this rotation. Since he's leaving in August, he'll serve a year-long tour. Not so lucky are soldiers in the 3rd Infantry Division at nearby Fort Stewart, Georgia. They'll be leaving for Iraq in July. Their tours will still be 15 months. Tom Bowman, NPR News, Washington.

[Sheilah Kast:] As Hurricane Dennis has cut its way across the Caribbean and into the Gulf of Mexico, residents along the Gulf Coast in Florida, Alabama and Mississippi have been preparing to evacuate their homes and head inland to safer ground. As NPR's Ari Shapiro reports from Mobile, Alabama, it's a familiar process for the millions of people who suffered through four brutal hurricanes last year.
[Ari Shapiro Reporting:] Less than a year ago, the parking lot of the B&H Food Store in Mobile was the scene of near violence. People fought over handouts of water and ice after Hurricane Ivan cut power to hundreds of thousands along the Gulf Coast.
[Unidentified Women:] I'm not...
[Unidentified Man:] You've already been here.
[Unidentified Woman:] ...in the line. I don't want no...
[Unidentified Man:] You done got your...
[Unidentified Women:] ...damn ice!
[Shapiro:] Yesterday, people at B&H were tense with fears that Hurricane Dennis could recreate that scene.
[Mr. Thomas Cain:] Oh, yeah. We had-I think it was 18 people arrested for rioting out there.
[Shapiro:] Thomas Cain owns the B&H Food Store. He donated the water and ice last year.
[Mr. Cain:] And I don't know if I'll do that again because of the problems that created.
[Shapiro:] The store is now humming with people buying batteries, canned meats and bread. Others, like Yolanda Fleeton, are shopping with comfort food in mind.
[Ms. Yolanda Fleeton:] Well, I got me some collard greens and smoked neck bones. I'm going to do some cooking, because I have a gas stove in case we lose power. So-because we'll get tired of eating all those canned goods and everything.
[Shapiro:] Last year, Barbie Hopkins was one of the people waiting in line outside this store for free water and ice. She left the parking lot before the riots began.
[Ms. Barbie Hopkins:] I'm going to give up because we've been out here for an hour. Some people has been out here for three hours and the truck still has not arrived.
[Shapiro:] She lost power for seven days last year. This year, she says, you will not find her at the B&H if she loses power again.
[Ms. Barbie Hopkins:] I doubt it. Now I might come by just to say hi. I'll do that. But as far as to stand in line, I don't think so.
[Shapiro:] While others are glued to the television or stuck in evacuation traffic, Hopkins is in her white house with green shutters leaning over her sewing table. She's a self-employed tailor and she has to make a suit for a client, hurricane or no.
[Ms. Barbie Hopkins:] So this has to go to Louisiana tomorrow, so it's not like I really have time to plan. So, you know, we just going to pray, too.
[Shapiro:] Hopkins lives in a part of Mobile called Down the Bay. Her neighborhood is right by the water, below sea level, prone to flood. She's been asked to evacuate, but has decided not to.
[Ms. Barbie Hopkins:] And I have two young men that lives across the street. They're going to be checking on me. They went to school with my son, so they're like-they came over to the-and said, `Are you going to leave?'I was like, `No.'`We're not leaving, either.'So I was like, `OK.'So I talked to the lady next door-she's an elderly lady-and she said she didn't feel like she needed to go anywhere. She says she trusts God and she just believe that everything is going to be OK.
[Shapiro:] Well more than a million people in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida have been told to evacuate in preparation for the storm. Florida Governor Jeb Bush said those who remain in the path of Dennis should be especially careful after the storm has passed.
[Governor Jeb Bush:] I know that there's a curiosity factor; sometimes people want to go out and see what the storm is like. And after the storm has left the region there's a tendency to want to leave and to go out. More deaths occur after a storm goes through a community than when the storm hits.
[Shapiro:] FEMA crews and other emergency responders are preparing to mobilize once again, even though recovery efforts from last year's storms are not yet complete. There are still thousands living in temporary housing from the four back-to-back hurricanes that struck Florida and the Gulf Coast in 2004. But the storms last year came at the end of the summer. This year, the hurricane season has only just begun. Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Mobile, Alabama.

[Debbie Elliott:] The GOP Senate candidate in Florida has had her share of troubles. There was her comment that people should elect only Christians and there was her $2800 dinner with a defense lobbyist now under investigation. NPR's David Welna reports she's now all but shunned by the Republican establishment.
[David Welna:] When I got to a Republican fundraiser in Tampa, I noticed a familiar face working the crowd. It was Katherine Harris, the woman who played such a key role some would call it notorious as Florida's secretary of state in the 2000 election recount. She's now the Republican nominee to challenge Democratic Senator Bill Nelson. Now a lot of Republicans are not very happy to have Harris running. Polls show her lagging 30 points behind Nelson. If Harris was worried, she was not letting on.
[Representative Katherine Harris:] I'm happy to be campaigning today. I'm out all over the state as I am every day and I'm thrilled the president's here in support of [unintelligible].
[David Welna:] Earlier, flying down to Florida on Air Force One, I'd asked White House spokeswoman Dana Perino whether the president would be meeting with Harris. She said she knew of no specific meeting planned. Harris had a more positive spin. You know, President Bush is going to be here momentarily.
[Representative Katherine Harris:] Yeah, we're looking forward to it.
[David Welna:] And have you been in contact with the White House about this visit?
[Representative Katherine Harris:] Yes, we have. We were invited, and pleased to be here and looking forward to being at the next event that they asked us to come as well.
[David Welna:] That next event was a GOP reception in Orlando, which Harris also planned to attend, but she was pointedly not invited to travel there with the President on Air Force One. Upon hearing this, Bill March, a reporter covering the fundraiser for the Tampa Tribune, simply shook his head.
[Mr. Bill March:] People involved in politics in Florida say they've never seen anything like it. The Harris campaign now has its fourth campaign manager, its fourth field director and its fourth press spokesperson.
[David Welna:] And when I asked Trey Traviesa, GOP state representative from Tampa, about Harris's senate bid, he chose his words carefully.
[Mr. Tray Traviasa:] It's certainly been a tumultuous run for her, but at the end of the day we need that seat in Republican hands.
[David Welna:] You think she's the person to get that for you?
[Mr. Tray Traviasa:] She's the nominee.
[Unidentified Man:] Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States.
[David Welna:] Harris was not invited on stage with the President, though he did at one point acknowledge her presence.
[President George W. Bush:] I'm proud to be here with Congresswoman Katherine Harris, running for the United States Senate.
[David Welna:] Afterward, as she stood along the [unintelligible], the president briefly shook Harris's hand before quickly moving on. Congresswoman, what did the President say to you?
[Representative Katherine Harris:] He just wished me good luck.
[David Welna:] Were you pleased that he mentioned you?
[Representative Katherine Harris:] Oh, thrilled. Very grateful. Thank you.
[David Welna:] Later I described the fleeting encounter to White House spokeswoman Perino. And he spent about two seconds talking to her.
[Ms. Perino:] And you question is?
[David Welna:] She's the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate.
[Ms. Perino:] You're correct, she is.
[David Welna:] That much the White House was willing to acknowledge. David Welna, NPR News.

[Alex Cohen:] I'm Alex Cohen. We've seen bailouts for the auto industry and for the banks. Well now, it looks like it's the art world's turn. A few weeks ago on the show, we heard from billionaire Eli Broad, who offered $30 million in assistance to L.A.'s struggling Museum of Contemporary Art, known as MOCA. As NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates reports, MOCA has decided to accept Broad's bailout.
[Karen Grigsby Bates:] In its three-decade history, MOCA has become one of the most highly regarded museums in the country. Tens of thousands have streamed through MOCA's rose marble building to see exhibitions by Richard Serra, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Takashi Murakami. But while the museum's artistic vision was sure, its finances were anything but. After months of rumors about its financial collapse, MOCA's trustees announced that the museum was receiving a critically necessary infusion of cash from arts patron Eli Broad. As the museum announced the deal, Broad said the survival of MOCA was central to his vision of a city center for 21st century L.A.
[Mr. Eli Broad:] Because I can think of no other city in world history or today that has become great without a vibrant center.
[Karen Grigsby Bates:] MOCA is an important part of a downtown renaissance that includes Walt Disney Concert Hall, another Broad beneficiary, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, and the most expensive public school devoted to the arts ever built. 15 million dollars of Broad's grant will match the donor contributions dollar for dollar. The second 15 million, given over five years, will allow the museum to continue to mount important exhibitions like the current one featuring French sculptor Louise Bourgeois. Part of the negotiations for MOCA involve a regime change. Jeremy Strick, who guided the museum for nine years, stepped down. The board appointed Charles Young, former chancellor of UCLA and an avid collector of contemporary art, to ease MOCA into solvency.
[Young Said The Board Had Five Goals:] to keep the museum's current headquarters, to maintain its independence, to make its collections even more widely available to the viewing public, to make sure the quality of those collections remains high, and to restore MOCA's financial health. Young says that may involve some painful cuts.
[Mr. Charles Young:] In an organization like this, a huge amount of expenditures are for staff and personnel. So it'd be awfully hard to see how substantial reductions couldn't be made without eliminating some positions.
[Karen Grigsby Bates:] Something the banking and auto industries have already learned. Karen Grigsby Bates, NPR News.

[Neal Conan:] You may not have noticed that New York City apartment owners and the Service Employees International Union came to an agreement last week which averted what would have been the first doorman strike in nearly 20 years. Across the city, thousands of men and women adorned in anachronistic splendor, sort the mail, screen visitors, take in dry cleaning and escort tenants through what New York writer Fran Lebowitz once described as the outdoors, that space between the entrance to the apartment building and the rear seat of a taxi cab. But do we really need doormen or is this an unnecessary throwback to servile times? If you've lived in a doorman building, if you've worked as one, give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation at our website. That's at npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION. James Collins wrote an op-ed for The New York Times this week in defense of the doorman. He's also the author of the novel, "Beginner's Greek" and joins us now from a studio in Charlottesville, Virginia. Thanks very much for coming in.
[Mr. James Collins:] Thank you, Neal, for having me.
[Neal Conan:] Are there a lot of doormen in buildings in Charlottesville?
[Mr. James Collins:] No. They're virtually unknown in all of Virginia, I think.
[Neal Conan:] And this is pretty much well, I was going to say in New York but probably a Northeastern phenomenon.
[Mr. James Collins:] Well, I think actually it really is a New York phenomenon that's- it's really essential to the fabric of New York City where I grew up, even though I'm living now in Virginia. And the research shows that they really don't have doormen in that many other cities in the country or around the world. So it's really a New York phenomenon.
[Neal Conan:] And why do you think they survive there? Just as a tradition? And they cost the apartment owners money, as we just learned.
[Mr. James Collins:] Well, I think New Yorkers become very dependent upon them. You know, you can't get your Chinese food yourself downstairs. You have to have someone come up, I mean, get it take it with take it to you. And, it is partially just tradition and just inertia, you know. They've been there since the very earliest apartment buildings and they've just kept on going. And it's just [unintelligible] kind of a neediness and demandingness of New Yorkers, too, I think, that make them persist.
[Neal Conan:] Well, it can't simply be inertia. I mean, for many years, of course, there are those high-rise apartment buildings had elevator operators who did pretty much of the same task...
[Mr. James Collins:] Right.
[Neal Conan:] ...and automation made them unnecessary. And despite all those ancillary things they also did, they're all gone.
[Mr. James Collins:] Well, that was sort of the point of my piece. I was trying to I was reading the stories about it and there's always a great deal of drama and terror when this happens every three or four years when there's a threat of a doorman strike and all everyone is going crazy because they're worried about what how they're going to get their mail and how they're going to get dry cleaning and it's going to be a disaster because New Yorkers depend on the doorman so much. And I read a lot about their duties and what they do and why they're -how important they are in the security and bringing up the Chinese food and all that stuff. And I realized that, really, all those duties could be performed in different ways. You don't really need a guy in a vest and white gloves and a hat looking like a colonel in the Russian army...
[Neal Conan:] Mm-hmm.
[Mr. James Collins:] ...you know, bringing your Chinese food to you. And so I was thinking about what the other purposes of the doorman really were.
[Neal Conan:] And aside from collecting your dry cleaning, what are they?
[Mr. James Collins:] Well, they do a lot of different things. But to me, as I [unintelligible] try to say, all those duties could really be done by somebody else. The big number one task is security. Well, if you ever lived in doorman building and you've gotten to know your doorman, you know that they aren't really necessarily the guys you want next to you when you're...
[Neal Conan:] Very few studied as ninjas. Yeah.
[Mr. James Collins:] No, exactly. They aren't going to be on the SWAT team. And so, security is always the one mentioned, but there really is not that could be done by security guards, could be by other much better ways. And there's sorting of mail and there's getting packages and all these things, which really are functions that could be handled in different ways. And what I just try to say in the piece was that, that's not why people are attached to their doormen. They are attached to their doormen because they are kind of a middle person between the outside and the inside, between home and the street. That has sort of disappeared, in a way. You don't have the, as I mentioned, the postman or the cop who you know and you talk to anymore and it really is buildings are sort of small towns and the doormen sort of become the kind of small town shopkeeper or policeman who knows everybody, who talks to people, who has the sort of role of keeping the community together. And people become very attached to this sort of human contact with these people who were not at your home and not at your job, and the kind of, you know, this person who we sort of lost in the world, you know, someone who's sort of outside our regular lives, but who we know and see regularly, have a face-to-face relationship with.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking with James Collins about the purpose and reason-to-be of the doorman. 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org, if you've lived in a doorman building or if you've worked as one. We'll start with Kenneth. And Kenneth with us on the line from Tulsa, Oklahoma.
[Kevin:] Yeah, this is Kevin.
[Neal Conan:] Kevin, go ahead please.
[Kevin:] Yeah, my point was I live in Manhattan for quite a while and we had a doorman over at 34th and 3rd. But, you know, all they really seem to care about was their Christmas bonus that you gave them. I mean, I just the newer buildings that they are opening up in Manhattan don't have doormen. In certain cases, they have just keypad entry. And I just really never understood. Now I'm a Midwest boy and I was out there for several years, but never understood what the purpose was besides just to create another job.
[Neal Conan:] Did you exchange any banter with your doorman in the morning, looks like rain, that sort of thing?
[Kevin:] Well, we chatted, you know, but at the time, he was doing something else rather than open the door. And, you know, being a Midwest boy, I didn't really see the need for somebody to do that, hail me a cab, I can do that kind of stuff myself. If the mailman came in, he'd get the mail. You know, I just never really saw the use for it. Now I had good relationships with them, but it wasn't money that I paid. I mean, I guess I did, sort of, in rent.
[Neal Conan:] In rent. And as you mentioned, every year at Christmas.
[Kevin:] Every year at Christmas the hand was out. Just I mean, you know, that's just a part of New York culture, but I just never you don't see it in Chicago and many places. You don't see them in a lot of other large cities.
[Neal Conan:] Thomas excuse me James Collins was pointing that out. It's pretty much a New York phenomenon. And, well, you know, it's hard to argue with Kenneth. Some doormen don't do a lot.
[Mr. James Collins:] Well, it's true. And did your Kenneth, did you doorman open the door for you? Or did he not did he neglect to even do that?
[Kevin:] Well, when he was there, sometimes...
[Mr. James Collins:] So he didn't always open the door for you. Well, that's a very poor doorman who doesn't actually...
[Kevin:] It wasn't like I needed it.
[Neal Conan:] Well, he did when he was there, but he was not always directly at the door, but...
[Mr. James Collins:] All right. Well, it's a very poor doorman who doesn't actually even...
[Neal Conan:] Open the door.
[Mr. James Collins:] ...open the door. That's pretty poor. But I think, you know, in New York, it started with- in the early days when the first fancy apartment buildings were going up. And it was a it's really -they looked at hotels, fancy luxury hotels, and they had doormen dressed up in uniforms and people would in Grant Houses, had servers dressed up in uniforms, they would be porters or doormen. And so I think they just adapted that to the apartment house and it became a status item and you couldn't build you couldn't you needed a doorman as a status item for your new building, even if it was serving people who weren't necessarily expecting that level of luxury.
[Neal Conan:] Kenneth, thanks very much for the call.
[Kevin:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Bye-bye. And it'd be interesting, I've always wanted to do -somebody do a study on the clothing worn by the doormen, which ranges, as you said, from the Russian colonel's uniform to what looks like a, you know, somebody who's in livery to a, you know, an English queen. It really covers the waterfront. Here's an email from Steve in Beaver Dam, Arizona. I lived in a doorman building on Central Park West for many years and also have an apartment in a concierge building in Boston and can attest that the life with a doorman is much better than life with a mere concierge.
[Mr. James Collins:] Well, the concierge is a obviously, that's the how they do it in France. And they are famously irascible. And so maybe it is better with a nice affable doorman than an irascible concierge.
[Neal Conan:] And the fundamental difference between the two is the concierge sits behind a desk inside.
[Mr. James Collins:] Right. Yes, and probably lives in the building, whereas the doorman actually all live in far away.
[Neal Conan:] In Queens, you would guess.
[Mr. James Collins:] Yeah, exactly. Right.
[Neal Conan:] Let's go next to Liza. Liza with us from Phoenix.
[Liza:] Hi there.
[Neal Conan:] Hi, Liza.
[Liza:] So I lived in Chicago in the financial district and I lived in a large building with a doorman. And I thought it was really great.
[Neal Conan:] And in what capacities did the doorman help you?
[Liza:] Well, the building, it had a retail section and it was four buildings, so it was pretty large. So it was good when I first moved there to sort of go to the doorman and get you know, find out where to get the best Greek food or where I could get delivery service. And I was a single woman and I felt really I just have that sense of security that even if I came home late that someone was there that would sort of like I wasn't just alone.
[Neal Conan:] So it was a combination of, well, security, as you suggest and a local search engine.
[Liza:] Basically, yeah.
[Mr. James Collins:] But that's what a lot of people say is that they you know, the door what doormen say is they always look they're looking out for the young kids who are going staying out late and they always tell them, you know, hey, be careful out there, you know? And they know who's coming in, they know who's coming up, they know what food you drink you eat, what you drink, you know if you're ordering too many bottles of vodka from the local liquor store. They know a lot about the tenants. And that comes through. And they do have sort of paternalistic, you know, feeling towards the tenants. Protecting them, doing things for them, looking out for them. And so it's that I think is really more why [unintelligible] people value them and the fact that they get, you know, get the dry cleaning, which millions and millions and millions of New Yorkers manage on their own to get their dry cleaning.
[Neal Conan:] Liza, thanks very much for the call. Appreciate it.
[Liza:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Bye-bye. Here's an email we have from Anna in Battle Lake, Michigan excuse me Minnesota. Hear Battle I want to say Battle Creek. This is how many New York-based crime dramas would be without key eyewitnesses in their case if there were no more doormen? The writers would have to come up with new plot devices.
[Mr. James Collins:] Mm-hmm. Well, it's true. Although the doormen the security argument is a little undercut by the fact that the doorman tend to be in the most safe neighborhoods. So they're in real life, yes, there aren't that many they aren't witness to that many shootings.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking with James Collins about an op-ed piece he wrote for The New York Times called "Why Doormen?" He's also the author of the novel "Beginner's Greek." You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And let's go next to Eric. Eric calling from Elizabeth in Colorado.
[Eric:] Hi, there. You know, first, I want to say this whole conversation puts me in mind of the old Sid Caesar gag where he's getting dressed and it looks like he's being dressed as a general going for battle and he's actually a doorman in a New York City... ...high-rise. I don't know if you've seen that. But...
[Neal Conan:] Oh, yes. Now, that you mentioned it, you bring it to mind. Yeah.
[Eric:] One of his best gags. But you know, I was lucky enough for a short time to attend Christ Church at Oxford in England, Christ Church College. And one of the things that you're that anyone who's attended an Oxford College, at least most of them, are familiar with is the porter. And there are usually one or two porters and they kind of work shifts. And they have a very paternalistic attitude, obviously, because we're talking about college students.
[Neal Conan:] Mm-hmm.
[Eric:] But do a great deal, the porters do. They're extremely busy. I suppose same argument could be had as to whether they're worth the pay. But they do a lot. They're really kind of front door organizers. And you know, all of these same arguments come up, and I wonder if you're familiar with the phenomenon of the porter at an Oxford or a Cambridge college and whether you see any similarities. Certainly, the servile kind of throwback is there, but if there's any sort of practical similarities between the two.
[Mr. James Collins:] Well, I don't know much about them. I certainly know that they exist. And I've had friends who've talked about their scouts or whatever, I think they're sometimes called. And it is similar. And obviously, the doorman is some Americanized, very watered-down, democratized version of a kind of servant like that. Although they're not really in a servant relationship anymore but certainly, it's some -it's some vestige of having someone who would wake you up, take care of you, open the door for you. And the servants of that have, you know, disappeared before you know, present at all points of people's lives in the past.
[Neal Conan:] Eric, do the porters wear those great uniforms?
[Eric:] No. Actually, there are traditionally, they're sort of dressed in black suits, waistcoats and black ties and a jacket. If it gets too hot, they might remove the jacket. But they're in a sort of the porters are in a sort of a front door kind of capacity at the college. At the front gate, you need to check in with the porter. You can't just walk on to a campus, certainly not at Christ Church or Corpus or schools like that colleges like that. And then you'd have to check in, they would know who's coming, who's going. If you're visiting and you're just going to be there in temporary housing, they might help you arrange transportation in and out. They might help, sort of, you know, here's -okay, I'm bringing luggage, I don't know where to go right now and they'll help you with that sort of thing.
[Neal Conan:] Okay.
[Eric:] And also the mail and that sort of thing. But they're extremely helpful, especially for outsiders.
[Neal Conan:] All right, Eric. Thanks very much for the call. Appreciate it.
[Eric:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Here's an email from Eric in St. Paul. I worked as an elevator operator at The Majestic on 72nd in Central Park West in the mid-'90s. If you don't know, it's a great building. The elevator was automatic, so my job was to know which floor everyone lived on so I could press the correct button for them. I also delivered the mail, packages and morning paper. Many residents were extremely particular about their morning paper delivery. I'm sad to hear the elevator operator might have vanished. That job gave me a strange window into the lives of the very wealthy. I was surprised to learn they were quite human. Some of the time. Let's go next to Nancy. Nancy with us from Little Rock.
[Nancy:] Hi. I guess I'm going to talk about something I haven't heard anybody address and that's the fancy factor. I happen to own and operate businesses in Little Rock, Arkansas, but am a native of Chicago. I keep a condominium there with a doorman. And I will tell you by the time I get there and the cab pulls up to the building, the doorman comes out to the cab, opens the door, says, welcome home, helps me with my luggage, all of the amenities that have already been mentioned, the packaging, the door-holding. It's for a single woman traveling, to have somebody there open the door for you, welcome you home, know that they're the eyes and ears of the building, I consider the doormen in my building completely invaluable.
[Neal Conan:] And you never miss him quite so much as when you arrive after midnight some night in the rain with a whole bunch of packages and luggage and of course the doorman is off-duty.
[Nancy:] That has never happened to me. [Unintelligible] 24 hours. I will tell you one amusing story that happened. I had just gotten out of the cab. The driver had taken my bags out of the trunk and set them on the sidewalk. I turned around to pay the driver, the cab took off. I turned around, my bags were gone. I had that horrible New York feeling that somebody had just made off with all of my luggage. And I heard laughter coming from the door, and there was the doorman who had already moved my bags into the building and on the elevator and watched me panic on the street. So...
[Neal Conan:] Nancy, thanks very much for that. We appreciate it.
[Nancy:] You're welcome. Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Bye-bye. We'll end with this email from Dorothy who mentioned, a few years ago a doorman was featured on StoryCorps. He'd been on the job for years and found joy and tried to bring a few moments of light to the people he serviced. I wrote down his final comment and consider it inspirational: Be such a man and live such a life that if every man lived a life like yours, this would be God's paradise. That's quite an elegy for the doorman. James Collins, thanks very much for your time today.
[Mr. James Collins:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] James Collins is the author of "Beginner's Greek: A Novel," also wrote the op-ed "Why Doormen?" in The New York Times, published on April 25th. And you can find a link to that at our Web page at npr.org. He joined us from a studio in Charlottesville. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.

[Renee Montagne:] And political conservatives hope a new comedy show's ideas will stick on television screens.
[Unidentified Man:] And now, "The Half-Hour News Hour" with [Unintelligible] and Jennifer Lang.
[Renee Montagne:] That, which you're listening to, is the conservative alternative to Comedy Central's left of center "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report," which now dominate political satire on television. "The Half-Hour News Hour" debuted on the FOX News channel last night. "The Half-Hour," right of center satire, mixes political and entertainment news with conservative opinion. The show follows a format similar to that of "The Daily Show."
[Unidentified Man:] Tonight's top story, the spelling reports that she would staff her White House with longtime cronies and political appointees, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton vowed that if she becomes president, she will surround herself with a diverse multi-ethnic, multi-generational group of angry lesbians.
[Renee Montagne:] FOX News Channel paired up with the co-creator of the hit series "24" to get the pilot off the ground. The producer says the show was all about timing. Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" hit it big during a time when the Republicans were a majority in the government. With Democrats dominating, both the House and Senate, FOX says, the time is right for a shift in satire to the right.

[Jacki Lyden:] And more on the final frontier. A familiar figure here at NPR recently got to indulge his passion for space travel. This week on Science Out of the Box, he takes us way out of the box. For over a decade, NPR listeners have gotten their updates on NASA from reporter Pat Duggins. He's covered nearly a hundred space shuttle missions but always at a distance. Recently, though, Pat stepped aboard a parabolic flight. That's a jet plane that repeatedly flies in figure eights, which creates a feeling of weightlessness. Pat zipped up his flight suit to bring us this audio postcard.
[Pat Duggins:] Getting ready to go weightless takes more preparation than your average space story. My recorder has to be stashed inside my blue flight suit with the microphone cable snaking out like a space-age catheter. I'm at the Kennedy Space Center with about 30 public school teachers. We look like we have the same tailor since we're all in matching blue coveralls. There's not an astronaut in the bunch and there's no NASA insignia on our suits. Instead, the logo of the Zero-G company is stitched on. That's a Florida-based business that takes up paying customers to experience weightlessness. The teachers get to fly free today, thanks to a grant from an aerospace company. Before we take off, we all have to get past Chaz Wendling. He's our coach on this flight.
[Mr. Chaz Wendling:] Hi. No swimming, and what we call swimming is moving your feet, okay? If I see you swimming, I'm going to grab you, okay? And I hate to do that, because it kind of ruins your experience a little bit. But for safety reasons, I don't want anybody to get kicked in the head. It's happened to me, not too fun. Not too fun.
[Pat Duggins:] Wendling has one other job as well. One out of every three astronauts gets space motion sickness, and that can get pretty severe.
[Mr. Chaz Wendling:] Want to give you your meds right now, okay? Everybody gets one.
[Pat Duggins:] Well, I couldn't help but notice that the inside of my flight suit's equipped with an air sickness bag, so if not one then the other?
[Mr. Chaz Wendling:] No, actually, that's just in the rare occasion that somebody experiences motion discomfort. Most of the time, we don't have we never have an issue with that.
[Pat Duggins:] With the briefings behind us, we all climb aboard Zero-G's Boeing 727 jet called G-Force-One. The rear third of the plane has seats such as you'd find on a regular airliner in the coach section. That's kind of disappointing for a $3,000 flight. The front section between us and the cockpit is hollowed out and lined with white padding from floor to ceiling. That's where the action takes place. Weightless or not, this is still considered to be a passenger flight, so FAA rules apply.
[Unidentified Man:] [Unintelligible] to demonstrate the operation of your seatbelt. To close, insert the flat metal end into the buckle. The length may be adjusted by pulling the strap.
[Pat Duggins:] After taking off from the Kennedy Space Center and heading out over the Gulf of Mexico, we leave our seats to go forward to the padded half of the plane to lie down. The pilot then takes us on a steep climb, which increases the feel of gravity and makes us feel riveted to the floor. Next comes a steep dive, and that's when the floating begins. A Zero-G staffer gives us a warning that our first round of total weightlessness called Zero Number One is coming.
[Unidentified Man:] Time to call for Zero Number One.
[Pat Duggins:] I'm starting to feel the pressure of gravity, which should go away in just a second. And here we go. We're up off the going toward the ceiling. Oh my goodness gracious. Everybody's floating around the cabin here toward the top, down toward the bottom.
[Unidentified Man:] Right there, coming up.
[Pat Duggins:] That second warning means gravity is coming back fast, so we all quickly lie back down to avoid falling on each other. We repeat the drill 15 times. At one point, I wind next up to teacher Rita Caplin. She's holding onto a hollow plastic ring with a ball that can roll round and round inside.
[Ms. Rita Caplin:] This is a cat toy with a ball attached they run around with. We're going to see what happens to the ball and how this thing floats.
[Unidentified Man:] On the [unintelligible] for Zero Seven.
[Pat Duggins:] And up toward the ceiling and whoa, down toward the floor. Once again, we're all bouncing around inside the plane. We've all reverted to teenagers on the amusement park ride of all time. Hello, here we go. Woo. Despite Chaz's earlier assurances, three of the passengers are now strapped back in their seats, air sickness bags in hand. We may not all have the right stuff, but those eight minutes of weightlessness were about what astronaut Alan Shepard experienced in 1961 as America's first man in space. For NPR News, I'm Pat Duggins at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
[Jacki Lyden:] Wow, that sounded like fun. Pat's new book is called, "The Final Countdown: NASA and the End of the Space Shuttle Program."

[Debbie Elliott:] Democratic presidential hopefuls Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton sparred on the subject of Iraq today as they campaigned in Iowa and New Hampshire. Obama said Clinton didn't have a specific plan to get U.S. troops out. Clinton said she would force Iraqis to take charge of their own security. While the Democrats denounced the war, one Republican contender has praise for President Bush's leadership. Addressing California Republicans in Sacramento this weekend, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani recalled another Republican president, a Californian.
[Mr. Rudolph Giuliani:] The great moral issue of Ronald Reagan's time was defeating communism. The great moral issue of our time is defeating terrorism. And it's bigger it's bigger than just that. It isn't just defeating terrorism and winning the war on terror. This is to win the world for a set of ideas that are American but they're not just ours; they're ideas that I believe come from God. That's what our founding fathers told us. That's where they come from.
[Elliot:] Rudy Giuliani has yet to declare officially that he's seeking the Republican nomination for president, although in his speech in California he did speak about the type of president he would like to be. Here to talk about Rudy Giuliani's chances is Byron York, White House correspondent for the National Review. Welcome. Thanks for coming in.
[Mr. Byron York:] Good to be here.
[Debbie Elliott:] Clearly, Rudy Giuliani, who led New Yorkers after the 911 attacks, has the credentials when it comes to fighting terrorism. But what about his support for President Bush and his Iraq strategy?
[Mr. Byron York:] You know, with Giuliani, I mean what's interesting is this is his big appeal to the Republican primary audience, is national security; and you know, on other issues, Giuliani is kind of dividing the Republican electorate quite a bit.
[Debbie Elliott:] Other issues?
[Mr. Byron York:] Well, he's quite famously liberal on the social issues. He is he's pro-choice, he's pro-gay rights...
[Debbie Elliott:] Abortion, gun control...
[Mr. Byron York:] And he's pro-gun control. So the kind of receptions like he got in Sacramento on Saturday and like he gets all around the country do not necessarily translate into votes.
[Debbie Elliott:] What about his message? How is he trying to reach those voters and make them comfortable with his positions on social issues?
[Mr. Byron York:] Well, on the social issues, what he tells them is, he strongly supports appointing strict constructionists for the Supreme Court, the message being that I would support judges who might vote to overturn Roe if it came to that.
[Debbie Elliott:] You know, when you look at Republican primary voters, what percentage of them really are making that final decision based on those social conservative value kind of issues?
[Mr. Byron York:] You know, we're not entirely sure, and the question now is whether the times that we're in has something to do with that, whether these social issues are going to be as big a deal in 2008 as they were in 2000, when we were basically dealing with peace and prosperity, and the big question in the presidential race was what are we going to do with this fabulous surplus that we have.
[Debbie Elliott:] What about other issues? Are there issues that he talks about other than terrorism that appeal to the type of voter who is going to be voting in the Republican primary?
[Mr. Byron York:] Absolutely, and I think you're seeing now more attention to his record in New York, especially on crime and welfare, which a number of Democrats in New York find controversial and a number of Republicans find great. And there's one other thing about him. The thing about voters is that they seem to want an executive to head the executive branch. That's why governors have done better, and in terms of projecting the image of the man in charge, I think Giuliani's pretty much unparalleled.
[Debbie Elliott:] Byron York is White House correspondent for the National Review. Thanks for coming in.
[Mr. Byron York:] It's good to be here.
[Debbie Elliott:] You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.

[Renee Montagne:] We turn now to the continuing fallout from the release of the man convicted in the Lockerbie bombing. Abdel Baset al-Megrahi is a former Libyan intelligence agent who was freed from a Scottish prison last week on compassionate grounds after doctors said he had cancer and less than three months to live. Al-Megrahi was the only person convicted in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jet that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people on board. Eleven more were killed on the ground. The most passionate and angry opposition to that release came from the U.S. To discuss developments in Britain, we turn to NPR's Rob Gifford in London. Good morning.
[Rob Gifford:] Morning, Renee.
[Renee Montagne:] The response from the British public was much more tempered, at least initially, before the big homecoming back in Libya. Why was that? Why are the British not as angry as the Americans?
[Rob Gifford:] Well, for a start, of course, more Americans died on Flight 103 than British people. That's a very simple answer. I think a more complex answer is that there are people here, relatives of those British people who died, who have really spent the last 20 years looking into what happened and researching it and trying to find out whether al-Megrahi really did this and whether Libya was behind it. These are not just cranks. There are, of course, a lot of cranks and conspiracy theorists on the Internet, but one particular middle-class, middle-aged doctor called Jim Swire who lost his daughter in the disaster has spent years researching this.
[Renee Montagne:] But without going into great detail, generally speaking, what is the issue that people believe the problem the hole is in the case?
[Rob Gifford:] What some of these relatives have found and what has filtered through very much into the British mind is that the evidence against Mr. al-Megrahi was not water tight, that there were all sorts of holes in it in the chain of where he supposedly got the bomb and how he got it onto Flight 103. And that is what has sewn seeds of doubt in the British mind, which perhaps explains why British people do not feel quite so angry as American people.
[Renee Montagne:] And, of course, al-Megrahi continues to claim that he's innocent.
[Rob Gifford:] He does. And he released a letter after he himself was released last Thursday, continuing to claim his innocence. One of the things that had to happen before he could be released, though, was that he had to drop his appeal in the Scottish court. So he was decrying the fact that he would never be able to prove his innocence because he had to drop that appeal.
[Renee Montagne:] But then, Rob, there are many Britons that think that Megrahi is, in fact, guilty.
[Rob Gifford:] Oh, absolutely. There are many people here who think he should have died in Scottish jail.
[Renee Montagne:] There are also people in Britain who are angry because they think that this release was really all about oil, not about compassion.
[Rob Gifford:] That's right. There are plenty of people here, both politicians and members of the general public, who believe that this was simply a trade for oil and not just members of the general public, people who know Libya, people behind the scenes who've dealt with Libya say Colonel Gaddafi has come in from the cold. He wants to engage with the West. He wants foreign investment. And certainly, British companies want to get into Libyan oil fields. And Gaddafi has made it quite clear that if British companies want to get into Libya, they will have to the British government will have to release al-Megrahi. And many people believe that is, in fact, the deal that has been done, although the British government has completely denied this.
[Renee Montagne:] Rob, thanks very much.
[Rob Gifford:] Thanks very much, Renee.
[Renee Montagne:] We've been speaking with NPR's Rob Gifford in London.

[Madeleine Brand:] Coming up, a profile of the queen of hip-hop soul, Mary J. Blige. I'm Madeleine Brand.
[Alex Chadwick:] I'm Alex Chadwick. First, if you're buying Mary J. Blige through the iTunes music store or other big online sellers, the songs come with an invisible piracy shield called Digital Rights Management DRM. This is a software lock so you can't copy the song and pass it on. Now, this from Steve Jobs of Apple: free the music, get rid of DRM, he says in a post yesterday at the Apple site. It's getting a lot of attention in the dig world. DAY TO DAY tech contributor Xeni Jardin is here. Xeni, why does Steve Jobs say get rid of DRM?
[Xeni Jardin:] Well, the argument is that without DRM, there would be less consumer confusion, because there wouldn't be these different competing sets of locks. And Apple could sell more music and the record companies could sell more music, and in theory, everybody would be happy.
[Alex Chadwick:] There are different locks, and they do complicate things. So, for instance, you can't buy a song from another site and put it on your iPod because the locks don't work.
[Xeni Jardin:] It's becoming increasingly frustrating for consumers, and actually, Apple's received a lot of criticism over the fact that their proprietary DRM scheme it's called FairPlay they won't open that up to other developers so that they can develop things around that.
[Alex Chadwick:] Okay. Well, he's Steve Jobs and Apple is far and away the biggest online music seller through iTunes. How has the record industry responded to this? What are they saying to him?
[Xeni Jardin:] Well, you know, yesterday was kind of a big day of shock for both the anti-DRM advocates and the record labels. One response that I read from a spokesperson from EMI one of the big four labels you know, they're acknowledging that DRM creates confusion for consumers. And look, they're in the business of selling as many songs as possible. It seems like everybody is beginning to catch on more and more to the idea that this could be good for business, but nobody wants to be the first out of the gate to take that risk.
[Alex Chadwick:] But isn't the whole DRM thing isn't that to protect these music sellers from having people copy their artists' songs and pass them on? I mean, isn't this basically how they make money? Why would they ever give this up?
[Xeni Jardin:] Well, the counter-argument that Jobs put forth is that most music that's sold I mean, when you're talking about both online and offline is still sold on CDs, and CDs aren't DRM protected. You know, a lot of the music that people are listening to on their iPods are ripped from CDs that they've bought. And then the issue is just when you make a purchase, you ought to be able to enjoy that song on any device, in any situation that you want that music consumers aren't by default thieves.
[Alex Chadwick:] But that's exactly it. The industry is afraid they are thieves, or they would be thieves if they could be. This whole DRM thing has come up precisely to stop people from buying a song once for 99 cents and then e-mailing it to all their friends.
[Xeni Jardin:] Well, it really does require a shift in the way you think about online music sales. But already, some companies are making money selling DRM-free music. For instance, Yahoo has been offering some tracks from big artists I mean, Norah Jones, Jessica Simpson as MP3s. No digital rights protection there. Also, a company called eMusic has some 2 million MP3s in their catalog that you can buy DRM-free. And, you know, independent artists who embrace MP3's, open formats, like, for instance, the Barenaked Ladies. They'd say we're delighted, and let us know when we can start selling our music through iTunes without copy protection. So a lot of artists feel differently about this than the heads of the labels might.
[Alex Chadwick:] How would my life as a music buyer as a music listener be different if this happen?
[Xeni Jardin:] You'd be able to buy a song. You could play it on your Zune. You could play it on your iPod. You could share that with a friend the way that you might loan a vinyl record or a CD to them, to listen to a song that meant something to you.
[Alex Chadwick:] Tell me this. If Mr. Jobs is so enamored of getting rid of this digital locks, Apple is about to release its new software called Leopard next month.
[Xeni Jardin:] Right.
[Alex Chadwick:] Is Mr. Jobs going to allow me to buy one copy of this software and then have anyone who wants to copy it?
[Xeni Jardin:] That would be a question for Steve Jobs. This essay was just called thoughts on music, not thoughts on the next edition of our software. But, you know, a lot of the critics of this essay yesterday said, hey. You're putting the onus on the music providers. Look, if you made the choice to force this issue, the content providers would be forced to comply, so it's going to be a chicken-and-egg situation. It'll be interesting to see what happens next.
[Alex Chadwick:] Xeni Jardin, DAY TO DAY's regular tech contributor, also co-editor of the blog, Boing Boing, and that is at BoingBoing.net. Xeni, thanks again.
[Xeni Jardin:] Thank you, Alex.
[Madeleine Brand:] And you can find all of Xeni's reports as a podcast on iTunes or on our Web site, npr.org.

[Linda Wertheimer:] This week's attack was the third major terrorist incident in France in the last 18 months. The country is still in a state of emergency, which has now been extended by 90 days. For more on the mood in France, we're joined by Sophie Peder. She is the Paris bureau chief for The Economist. She's in Paris. Charlie Hebdo, the coordinated attacks in Paris and now Nice Sophie Peder, what is the mood in France like right now?
[Sophie Peder:] I think the country just feels battered by, you know, these extraordinary events that have come every almost every sort of six months or so. You know, each time they think it's as bad as it can possibly get, and then there's another one. And each time, it feels like an assault on French life. You know, there was the attack on a football stadium, there was an attack on the streets, the cafes the cafe Comptoir and concert hall last November, and now on Bastille Day, which is the French national independence day, the way. And it was, you know, people out there having fun in the south of France. So it's this sort of sense that, you know, what it goes to the very heart of what France is all about you know, enjoying life, going out, celebrating, having a festive time. But that's been that's been under assault. I suppose that the large question now is, you know, how, going forward, do you actually get used to this or start considering this normal? This is a question that the French are really having to grapple with. You know, what is normality now? Is it constantly living in fear, or is it constantly worrying about going out? Or are you going to be defiant and keep going like before?
[Linda Wertheimer:] And do it. Yeah. The attack in Nice was carried out by a Tunisian citizen. The other attacks were carried out by French citizens of foreign descent. How does this how is this playing politically for President Hollande?
[Sophie Peder:] Well, it's very difficult. I mean, for him, personally, after the previous two terrorist attacks, he actually got a bit of a boost in the polls because he's come across as very sort of dignified. And he has had a very sort of solemn and responsible reaction, and that's actually helped him politically. But the great difficulty is that, you know, any president over time starts becoming weakened if he can't guarantee the security of his country. And although it's an extremely difficult problem that they're having to deal with you know, the number of people who are living in France, with French citizenship or not, but who are considered either you know, they're being watched for potential terrorist activity or they're considered on the verge of radicalization is if the scale is such, it's almost impossible for the intelligence services to keep an eye on every one of them. And these people have themselves become more and more clever at sort of keeping under the radar screen. So I think that really, over time, weaken Hollande's standing. At the same time, the National Front is the extremist party in France. It's nationalist. It's anti-immigration. It's anti-Islamification. [Unintelligible] All of these terrorist attacks play into her hands because, you know, she can conflate in the mind the idea of immigration and terrorism. And that goes down with public opinion at times when people are very nervous. So she plays with those fears, and she [unintelligible] and does well out of it.
[Linda Wertheimer:] You're talking about Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front.
[Sophie Peder:] Yes. Sorry. Sorry. [Unintelligible]. The National Front under Marine Le Pen exactly.
[Linda Wertheimer:] France has been under a state of emergency that's now been extended. Do you think that do you think do you think that the people of France believe that there is any security solution to this on this ongoing threat? Is it just President Hollande sounded so discouraged about it, though, right after the Nice attack.
[Sophie Peder:] It is it's incredibly difficult. I mean, right at the beginning when the state of emergency was forced into place that was last November it looked like an appropriate solution because there were individuals that the police were wanting to sort of either put under house arrest, or they wanted to raid the premises, pick up documents and check them out. But as time has gone on, the usefulness of the state of emergency has really been brought into question because is it just to make people feel more secure because they feel that there is a sort of security solution? Or is it actually useful in practical terms? I think there was a parliamentary committee which was reported a few weeks ago. And I think that their confusion was very sensible that to say that actually after a while, you know, it's more to do with reassuring the public than it is with actually using the powers that the state of emergency grants in any sort of productive way. I think now you're dealing with public anxiety the management of public anxiety as much as you are with the use of the powers that the state of emergency brings and allows you to do.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Sophie Peder she is the bureau the Paris bureau chief of The Economist. Thank you very much for doing this.

[Steve Inskeep:] On Fridays, the business report focuses on your money, and this morning the question of how much you're going to have to pay to borrow some. Here are some things the Federal Reserve is pondering as it considers whether to raise interest rates at the end of this month. The U.S. economy is slowing down, and the U.S. inflation rate is creeping up. To find out why and what that means, we turn to David Wessel, Deputy Washington bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, regular guest here. David, good morning.
[Mr. David Wessell:] Good morning.
[Steve Inskeep:] So how is the economy doing?
[Mr. David Wessell:] Well, the economy is, as you said, slowing down. We had a lousy fourth quarter, partly due to Katrina. Then we had this incredible surge of growth in the first quarter, more than 5 percent. And the quarter that ends at the end of June looks like about a 3 percent quarter. But a lot of economists think it might be as little as 2 and a half percent. So the question is, is the economy slowing to some safe speed, or is it slowing so much that we're about to see the unemployment rate start to turn up again?
[Steve Inskeep:] Well, if people are worried that the economy is slowing down too much, why would the Fed even think about raising interest rates, which is something you do to slow down the economy?
[Mr. David Wessell:] I think their current thinking is this: that their most important job is to prevent inflation from getting out of bed. It hasn't been an issue for the past couple of years. Alan Greenspan is gone, and the new leadership doesn't want inflation to raise out of bed on its watch.
[Steve Inskeep:] Let's be brutally frank about this. Are you saying that Ben Bernanke, the new Fed Chairman, would have to consider his own credibility more important than the short-term health of the economy?
[Mr. David Wessell:] I think Ben Bernanke would say that the long-term health of the economy depends on him establishing his credibility as an inflation fighter, and if they don't get the inflation fears out of the system right now, the risk is that he'll have to raise rates even higher in the future and risk a recession. But we are paying a price for the fact that there was a transition at the Federal Reserve to a new guy who's stumbled a little bit in some of his rhetoric, and as a result is forced to establish his anti-inflation credibility by raising rates a little higher than perhaps Alan Greenspan would have in the same circumstance.
[Steve Inskeep:] Just to keep things in perspective here, what's the inflation rate right now?
[Mr. David Wessell:] The inflation rate right now is roughly around 3 percent. If you include food and energy, it's a little bit higher. If you take food and energy out it's a little bit lower. The problem right now is not today's inflation rate. What the Fed is saying is, we don't want to do anything right now that gets people to think that inflation's going to get worse. So they're saying if we're tough now, maybe we can kill it before it infects the system.
[Steve Inskeep:] Is there a risk of looking in the rearview mirror here and attacking inflation that has already happened in the recent past and isn't happening now?
[Mr. David Wessell:] Absolutely. I mean, I was talking to some Fed officials at a conference last week and they expressed concern just about that fact, that they knew that inflation was going to pick up now. It was inevitable because of what happened to oil prices and the fact that the economy is a little bit stronger and they want to make sure that it doesn't get built into what they call inflation expectations. Recently, since they began talking tough about inflation, these surveys of inflation expectations or the market measures of inflation expectations, have sort of improved a little bit, and the Fed has to decide, well, have we done enough with our rhetoric, or do we have to raise interest rates once or twice more to convince people that we're really not going to let it get out of control?
[Steve Inskeep:] David Wessell of the Wall Street Journal, thanks very much.
[Mr. David Wessell:] A pleasure.

[Wade Goodwyn:] I'm Wade Goodwyn. Rachel Martin is away. Syrians and the world have spent the last week bracing for a U.S. attack on Damascus that seemed to be imminent. Now, President Obama has surprised everyone by pushing the pause button and by announcing yesterday in the Rose Garden that he will go to Congress for approval. NPR's Ari Shapiro reports from the White House.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] Day by day, President Obama and his aides have been building the case for a strike on Syria. American warships moved closer to the Syrian coast as the president moved closer to a decision. Yesterday afternoon, Obama definitively announced he has made up his mind.
[President Barack Obama:] I'm confident that we can hold the Assad regime accountable for their use of chemical weapons, deter this kind of behavior and degrade their capacity to carry it out.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] That was hardly a surprise. But what came next was a dramatic twist.
[President Barack Obama:] I've long believed that our power is rooted not just in our military might, but in our example is a government of the people, by the people and for the people. And that's why I've made a second decision. I will seek authorization for the use of force from the American people's representatives in Congress.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] It's a political gamble for the president. Not one week ago in London, the House of Commons shot down British Prime Minister David Cameron's bid for similar approval. For Cameron, it was a humiliating defeat. White House aides say they're confident Obama can avoid that fate. The president used his Rose Garden speech to lay out parts of the case.
[President Barack Obama:] Here's my question for every member of Congress and every member of the global community: What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price?
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] Senior administration officials say this idea took shape less than 24 hours before the president made the announcement. And they say it came from Obama alone. The entire administration had been on the march towards a strike. Then, on Friday, the President had his daily wrap-up meeting with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough. They walked laps around the South Lawn of the White House. And the president told McDonough if Congress wants to be consulted, they should do more than consult. They should have to go on the record for or against military action. After 45 minutes, the walk ended and Obama called his national security team into the Oval Office. The speech took shape late Friday night. And on Saturday, Obama informed Congress of his plans before heading into the Rose Garden.
[President Barack Obama:] So, this morning I spoke with all four Congressional leaders, and they agreed to schedule a debate and a vote as soon as Congress comes back into session.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] Congress does not return from vacation until September 9th. And so, President Obama says, he relied on this important assurance from military leaders.
[President Barack Obama:] Our capacity to execute this mission is not time-sensitive. It will be effective tomorrow, or next week or one month from now.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] As he spoke, you could hear faint chants in the background. About 100 protesters marched in front of the White House with signs that said: Hands off Syria, and Bombing Syria doesn't protect people, it kills people.
[Crowd:] [Chanting] Hands off Syria. Obama, hands off Syria, Obama.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] Retiree Debbie Hamrahand does not believe President Obama's assurances that this will be a short intervention.
[Debbie Hamrahand:] Why would we want to go into this very chaotic situation? We don't know who's who and what's what, and by just lobbing a few cruise missiles into something doesn't mean that could even be the end of it. It's the start of something.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] In the Rose Garden, Obama said he appreciates that people are tired of war. That's one reason he wants the blessing of the people's representatives in Congress.
[President Barack Obama:] We all know there are no easy options. But I wasn't elected to avoid hard decisions, and neither were the members of the House and the Senate.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] The president also plans to make the case internationally. This week he leaves for the G20 summit, where he'll lobby America's allies abroad to climb aboard. Ari Shapiro, NPR News, the White House.

[Steve Inskeep:] Nigella Lawson is with us once again. Her latest cooking show is called "At My Table." It's on the BBC. And her new book has the same name. It's a celebration of home cooking, according to the subtitle. Nigella Lawson, welcome back.
[Nigella Lawson:] Lovely to be here.
[Steve Inskeep:] Oh, my goodness, so you're talking about home cooking.
[Nigella Lawson:] Yes.
[Steve Inskeep:] I'm thinking about, you know, my own kitchen, and some of the people at the table are going to be kids, and they want nothing with any flavor whatsoever. But you're going to tell me something interesting, I guess, about home cooking.
[Nigella Lawson:] [Laughter] Well, I've slightly gone through the bits you know, I've gone through the years when I couldn't put green bits in food, and everything would be looked at with suspicion as if I was trying to poison them. But I think there is a time for the sort of foods that I think frankly get ignored a lot in the Instagram age. You know, I've got a recipe for chicken and barley where everything is a very unphotogenic beige, and it tastes wonderful. And that is something that, you know, you can give to suspicious children, and they will love it.
[Steve Inskeep:] Oh, my goodness, You're right. Just don't worry about the garnish and go with it.
[Nigella Lawson:] Yes. God, I wouldn't dream of putting parsley on it if I were giving it to small children.
[Steve Inskeep:] [Laughter].
[Nigella Lawson:] You know, I wouldn't risk offending their sensibilities, but I think home cooking for me is such a sort of creative arena because, yes, it takes in the sort of food we've, you know, loved for ages, the sort of shepherd's pie, meat loaf kind of cooking, which makes us feel like we could be cozily in our grandma's kitchen.
[Steve Inskeep:] Yeah.
[Nigella Lawson:] But I think actually there is something quite creative and anarchic about home cooking.
[Steve Inskeep:] Because you said anarchic there, I also wonder when it's not TV, when it's just at home, does your kitchen get phenomenally messy while you're cooking?
[Nigella Lawson:] No, it doesn't. I don't suppose I mean, I mean anarchic much more in the sense of not being constrained always by the original recipe.
[Steve Inskeep:] Right.
[Nigella Lawson:] I think that you do need to know how to make something the first time, and I think I want to write recipes that people then can fiddle with in their own way in their kitchen, I think.
[Steve Inskeep:] So I'm looking here in the book at a picture of meatballs with orzo and...
[Nigella Lawson:] Oh, yes.
[Steve Inskeep:] ...I'm ready to eat this right now. What's going on here?
[Nigella Lawson:] Oh, good and also your children will.
[Steve Inskeep:] Oh, I was thinking that too, yeah.
[Nigella Lawson:] So I thought I well, how about if I just rolled some, you know, ground beef with spices or if I roll those into small meatballs, cooked them in some tomato quite watery because later, once the meatballs have gone in, I add the orzo pasta, and they cook in the same tomato sauce. And then what you have is this wonderful one-pot meal, incredibly comforting but with a lot of flavor.
[Steve Inskeep:] Wow.
[Nigella Lawson:] I'm glad you've chosen something your children will eat.
[Steve Inskeep:] [Laughter] I will...
[Nigella Lawson:] They'll eat the herbs in the meatball mixture, though.
[Steve Inskeep:] If they don't see them or suspect them...
[Nigella Lawson:] Yes.
[Steve Inskeep:] ...They might. Let's get a tiny bit more adventurous. I'm not sure, but you'll tell me Turkish eggs. That sounds more adventurous.
[Nigella Lawson:] OK. Steve, I'm going to change your life with these eggs. If I said to anyone, look, there's this really fabulous dish, and you have poached eggs with a butter sauce on top of yogurt, you'd think, has she lost her mind? That doesn't sound right. But the point is it's so good altogether. So you to the Greek yogurt, you just put some sea salt flakes and you mince in some garlic. I then melt some butter in a pan, and then I add just a spoonful of extra virgin olive oil. And then there's some wonderful Turkish red pepper flakes, and you add some of that, and the whole thing just suddenly bubbles up a fiery orange. Set that to one side, poach your eggs, and then so you've got the room temperature garlicky yogurt in a little bowl, and then you put the poached egg on top, and then you put the fiery orange butter over the top of that and some fresh dill, sourdough toast or something rustic, dip in and eat, and you're in heaven.
[Steve Inskeep:] I feel like I can see this just from the description. Let's get even more ambitious, if we can. Can you go to something even a little more sophisticated that you could still see an ordinary person making at home?
[Nigella Lawson:] Well, yes, I will. I'm going to take you to my beef and eggplant fatteh, which actually uses much the same technique. It's like a refined Middle Eastern form of nachos. So you have some pita bread. I use scissors to cut that into triangles and put them in the oven to toast, remove them. And I make a sauce. This time, I add to the Greek yogurt some tahini, lots of lemon juice, bit you know, two gloves of garlic. And I warm that so it gets slightly aerated and the chill leaves it. And then I make a meat sauce when I've chopped up the eggplant to very small cubes. And I cook those, you know, with onion, add some ground beef and ground cumin, ground coriander. And it's so wonderful for everyone sitting around a table and snatching bits and picking in bits. It's quite messy, but I love that. And, you know, it is in a way for a lot of people, a very unfamiliar way of eating. It's in itself, we all know what ground meat is, and the pita chips we know, but together, it's different. It's a different thing to eat.
[Steve Inskeep:] When you say it's a different way of eating, are you eating this without cutlery? You're dipping the chips basically into the beef.
[Nigella Lawson:] Yes, yes, but you're not really dipping them because they're slightly underneath anyway a bit like when you do nachos.
[Steve Inskeep:] So I want to mention this as kind of an aside, but we were recently doing some reporting in the Middle East, and we were in Yemen and ate a number of meals where there is there's no silverware.
[Nigella Lawson:] Yes.
[Steve Inskeep:] And you just break off a hunk of lamb with your hand or whatever you do, and it completely changes the experience to have that kind of tactile contact with the food when you're not the chef, when it's all over your hands and you're the person eating it.
[Nigella Lawson:] Yes, yes. I mean, I would like to calm people to know that this isn't you know, it's not quite as outgoing to the next level...
[Steve Inskeep:] Not quite as adventurous as that, but still.
[Nigella Lawson:] ...As taking a hunk of meat. But I think actually, it creates a more intimate atmosphere when sharing the food as well. It's not just about how you experience the food. It's how you experience the company as well. And that is what cooking is about.
[Steve Inskeep:] The new book by Nigella Lawson is "At My Table: A Celebration Of Home Cooking." It's great to talk with you again. Thank you very much.
[Nigella Lawson:] And you. OK, then.

[Steve Inskeep:] And I'm Steve Inskeep. Congressman Anthony Weiner could become a victim of redistricting. Normally when a state redraws the boundaries for congressional districts, politicians do this for partisan ends. One party will shape the map to make it impossible for somebody in the other party to keep his job. But since Congressman Weiner admitted sending lewd photos of himself, some of his fellow Democrats could be the ones who obliterate his district. New York will lose two congressional seats next year. As NPR's Brian Naylor reports, one could be Weiner's.
[Brian Naylor:] The math is pretty simple. New York's population failed to grow as fast as the rest of the nation's did over the past ten years. So the state will go from its current 29 seats in the House of Representatives to 27. It will be up to New York governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, and a panel of state lawmakers of both parties to determine just which of those seats go. It's widely expected that they will draw up new district boundaries that sacrifice one Republican seat upstate and one Democratic seat downstate. David Wasserman closely follows redistricting as House editor of the Cook Political Report.
[Mr. David Wasserman:] In the end this will be decided by a couple of people in a closed-off room in Albany. That's the reality of the situation and that's why a lot of members of Congress are hiring lobbyists to make sure that their districts aren't the ones that are carved up in this process.
[Brian Naylor:] Before his recent texting-related troubles, Anthony Weiner's district was not expected to be the one carved up. Covering parts of Brooklyn and Queens, it was reliably Democratic, although Wasserman says with a large number of Orthodox Jews a bit more conservative than others in the city. But Democratic political consultant Hank Sheinkopf says Weiner's new political vulnerability changes the equation.
[Mr. Hank Sheinkopf:] Politics is still blood sport and the weakest link tends to be punished and in this case Anthony Weiner is the weakest link. It is probably easier to move the seat east and to apportion it to other incumbents in the area that may be one solution. But we won't know until the lines are out.
[Brian Naylor:] The lines of the new districts most likely won't be out until early next year. Before Weiner's texting behavior was revealed, it was thought that two adjacent congressional seats held by Democrats might be combined. Democratic Assemblyman John McEneny is his party's leader on redistricting. Speaking from the Assembly chamber in Albany, McEneny says it's too soon to count anyone's district in or out just now.
[State Assemblyman John Mceneny:] Even if you could wipe out one individual there's a lot of other people who would like to inherit that seat. So it's a political thing that's very much a variable and it's never as simple as people think.
[Brian Naylor:] And analysts say it's also too early to count Weiner out. If he decides to stay in Congress despite the wishes of party leaders, it's not out of the question his constituents would reelect him, says David Wasserman.
[Mr. David Wasserman:] In Washington just about everyone is calling for his head. In New York we see and hear polls that show him with some solid support back home and that's certainly encouraging in his mind. But, you know, we're going to have to wait and see over the next couple of weeks. I think it's very early to jump to conclusions over the future of his district before we know about the future of Congressman Weiner.
[Brian Naylor:] Should Weiner bow to pressure and step down, there would be a special election to fill out the remainder of his term. The winner would presumably have little sway over the future of the 9th district. Brian Naylor, NPR News, Washington.

[Alex Chadwick:] Coming up: former Playmate Anna Nicole Smith gets her day in court, and it's the U.S. Supreme Court. Dahlia Lithwick saw all. She joins us, as she does every Tuesday. Dahlia, welcome back, and first, there is an abortion ruling from the court this morning. This is a case about protestors and abortion clinics. What happened?
[Ms. Dahlia Ms. Lithwick:] That's right, Alex. The Supreme Court finally put to rest a decade's old dispute over whether anti-abortion protestors can actually be prosecuted. This was a novel theory, prosecuted under federal racketeering law, and this case has been bouncing around for decades. In an 8-0 decision, with Justice Sam Alito not participating, the Supreme Court said that protests, abortion protests, even those including threats of violence, are simply not what was contemplated by the federal racketeering statutes.
[Alex Chadwick:] All right. We'll leave that decision aside, and now, onto Anna Nicole Smith. Here's the lead from the Associated Press today, written by Gina Holland, quote, Dressed in all black, former stripper turned weight loss promoter Anna Nicole Smith fought her way through a throng of photographers and autograph-seekers Tuesday, on her way to a Supreme Court showdown. Geez, you don't get much better than that, Dahlia.
[Ms. Lithwick:] It's such a wonderful clash of two worlds, Alex. On the one hand, you have this sort of larger-than-life soap opera character that is Anna Nicole Smith, and the whole soap opera that is her whole life, coming against this sort of very grey, pedestrian legal world of the Supreme Court. You really couldn't ask for a better juxtaposition of two totally different universes.
[Alex Chadwick:] Okay. Well, there is a case here, and it's something about her late husband's estate. How does this get to the Supreme Court?
[Ms. Lithwick:] It's a little bit complicated facts, but imagine you're on Guiding Light. Anna Nicole Smith was a 26 year old stripper. She married a Texas oil tycoon who was 89. He died 14 months later, and then, essentially, we've had four courts in ten years of infighting between Anna Nicole Smith and her deceased husband's heir, trying to determine whether or not she should inherit half of his estate, which we're talking about millions and millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars. There was one action in a Texas State probate court that essentially looked at his will, and found that she had been cut off. There was another action in a federal court, a California bankruptcy court, that said quite the opposite, that in fact, her late husband had intended to gift her $449 million, and that through acts of fraud, the heir had kept that money from her, so we essentially have a states' rights case, where we have the State of Texas saying, we get to decide this matter, and we have the federal government, in the person of the California Bankruptcy Court, saying, no, we get to decide this matter, and the Supreme Court stepped in to make a decision.
[Alex Chadwick:] You know, you make it sound more like the Young and the Rustlers. Any sense, from what was going on, on how the court might go?
[Ms. Lithwick:] An interesting morning, Alex. The court was really very, very hard on E. Pierce Marshall-that is the heir of Anna Nicole's late husband, I guess, her son by some stretch, even though he's much older than her-very hard on his attorney. He kept saying over and over again that no, this is the jurisdiction of the Texas courts. This is a state law matter. There is no place for federal laws, certainly no place for a federal bankruptcy judge to come in and upset the apple cart. The justices did not seem persuaded, and most notably, her knight gallant today was Justice Stephen Brier, who was very, very offended by what he saw as the shenanigans of her deceased husband's heir, and the ways he kept her from inheriting, and he really did seem to think very, very clearly that Anna Nicole was mistreated, and that she deserves to have a little bit of respect from the judiciary.
[Alex Chadwick:] Dahlia, did you think that the justices saw this as, in its kind of broad, almost comic social context?
[Ms. Lithwick:] No. One of the great beauties of the Supreme Court, I think, is its ability to take even the most larger-than-life technicolor psychodrama, and flatten it out into black and white, arid, dusty issues, and today, where everyone else in this country saw a flamboyant, busty blonde fighting for her day in court, the Supreme Court managed to completely vacuum out all of that social meaning, and turn it into a dry, probate matter.
[Alex Chadwick:] Opinion and analysis from Dahlia Lithwick, covering the courts in all their color for the online magazine Slate, and for DAY TO DAY. Dahlia, thank you again.
[Ms. Lithwick:] Always a pleasure.

[Ari Shapiro:] Syrian government forces are moving deep into a part of the city of Aleppo that has been controlled by rebels for years. There are tens of thousands of people still living there possibly more who could get caught in the crossfire. NPR's Alice Fordham joins us from the Syrian capital of Damascus. Alice, what can you tell us about the situation in Aleppo right now?
[Alice Fordham, Byline:] Well, as you say, Ari, the people there are trapped in a shrinking opposition enclave. We have to remember that for the last four years or so, rebel forces have held that eastern side of the city of Aleppo. At one point, there were hundreds of thousands of civilians living under opposition control. Tens of thousands of people have already fled this most recent offensive by the regime and its allies. Those who are left NPR has been able to reach some of them. They are terrified that they could be killed in an intense bombardment from the Syrian army and from their allies. This is the last urban area, really, still held by rebel forces, so if it is retaken by government forces, then it could be really a pivotal moment in this war.
[Ari Shapiro:] What about cease fire negotiations? Is anything likely?
[Alice Fordham, Byline:] Well, there have been discussions on an international level. It's been discussed in the United Nations Security Council, but that initiative was vetoed by Russia and China. There's also been talks between American diplomats who have generally sided with opposition forces and Russians who have sided with President Bashar al-Assad. And the United Nations is called to be able to evacuate civilians, to be able to get much-needed aid into that opposition area. So these talks are ongoing, but as yet, it's not clear whether they're going to result in aid being delivered or any civilians being evacuated. There have been a lot of broken promises in the past, so we're watching to see what happens.
[Ari Shapiro:] You are more than 200 miles away in the capital of Damascus. What do people there make of this latest news?
[Alice Fordham, Byline:] Well, the people that I have been able to speak to here generally are quite close to the government, to even to the president in some cases. And they are receiving this news joyfully. They don't see it as the crushing of an opposition with many civilians involved. They see it as defeating terrorists who are holding on to this part of the city of Aleppo. And they say that any civilians there are being forced to be there by the rebel forces. So they see this also as a turning point in the war, but as a turning point towards victory, really, for their side and the forces of good, as they see it.
[Ari Shapiro:] We've seen so many images of horrible devastation in Aleppo. Does Damascus feel like a city at war? What's the environment there?
[Alice Fordham, Byline:] Well, you know, central Damascus actually has been remarkably insulated from the war that has engulfed so much of the rest of Syria. And actually being back here, it's remarkable how intact the city center is. There are parks. The roads and the sidewalks are in good shape. It feels like a city that is thriving. People are out late at night at shops and cafes. Now, I know from the reporting that I have done that there are places very close to the city in some case, you know, really suburbs on the edge of the city itself that have been at war for years and years. But right in the middle of Damascus, it feels very far away from that.
[Ari Shapiro:] NPR's Alice Fordham, thanks a lot.
[Alice Fordham, Byline:] Thanks for having me, Ari.

[Steve Inskeep:] But some people you'll hear, and this report are asking what, if anything, is next. Here's NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg.
[Nina Totenberg:] Democrats are frankly suspicious. Here, for example, is California Senator Dianne Feinstein talking about public corruption cases and the firing of U.S. attorneys.
[Dianne Feinstein:] When you have five out of seven involved in cases involving political corruption, and in the middle of those cases, they are moved out this is staggering.
[Nina Totenberg:] Could government organizations see a potential link to the Abramoff investigation. Democracy 21 president, Fred Wertheimer, has been prodding the government about Abramoff for years.
[Fred Wertheimer:] This case was about illegally buying influence with members of Congress. So far, only one member of Congress has been charged and convicted. We need to ultimately see what the Public Integrity Section does with other members of Congress.
[Nina Totenberg:] So why are cooperating witnesses waiting for long periods before being brought in to talk? Keeney replies with a twinkle.
[Jack Keeney:] We have a lot of cooperating witnesses. That's all I can say.
[Nina Totenberg:] Some former Public Integrity lawyers have privately voiced worry about the statute of limitations running out on the Abramoff investigation. Former section chief, Andrew Lourie, notes that Abramoff's illegal activities began long before he pleaded guilty, less than a year and a half ago, and that the statute of limitations is five years from the date of a crime.
[Andrew Lourie:] That is what it is.
[Nina Totenberg:] But Deputy Assistant Attorney General Keeney is confident.
[Jack Keeney:] We won't let the statute run on any case that we can make. We will finish, though, on time.
[Nina Totenberg:] There has been considerable turnover in the Public Integrity Section in the last few years. In the last year alone, there have been five separate section chiefs. But that seems to have been a product of personal circumstance as much as anything else. Andrew Lourie, for example, a 16-year Justice Department veteran, left to go back to Florida where his home is, and where he now heads the U.S. attorney's branch office in West Palm Beach. All of the people to head the section in the last year, he says, had worked on Abramoff.
[Andrew Lourie:] I really think it was a seamless, sort of, transition.
[Nina Totenberg:] Lourie and Keeney both say that Fisher, who's a Bush administration political appointee, has never intervened in a politically sensitive case in an unprofessional manner. Jack Keeney.
[Jack Keeney:] Abramoff has been a sensational the investigation's been sensational, and in my judgment it is not over. I don't know what the criticism is.
[Nina Totenberg:] Veteran Jack Keeney says Fisher is incredibly smart and diligent, but he concedes that she does personally study everything about politically sensitive cases, perhaps more than her predecessors.
[Jack Keeney:] She gets into the weeds pretty much with respect to sensitive cases.
[Nina Totenberg:] That is as it should be, says former section chief, Lourie.
[Andrew Lourie:] These are some of the most important public corruption cases handled by any United States prosecutor in the history of the United States.
[Nina Totenberg:] Not so, says Chip Burrus, the FBI's assistant director for Criminal Investigations, who works closely with Fisher and calls her a dynamic leader.
[Chip Burrus:] These are big cases with big issues and complicated legal theories. If we bring an honest services type of a case, you know, she's the one that's responsible for that. And if we get a series of bad rulings that, because of some facts that we've been a little risky on, that has an impact not only for Abramoff, but for every other corruption case that we have around the country.
[Nina Totenberg:] Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
[Steve Inskeep:] This is NPR News.

[Michele Norris:] To learn a little bit more about the Quds Force that President Bush referred to so often in his press conference, we turn now to Karim Sadjadpour. He's an analyst on Iran for the International Crisis Group. And he's spent a lot of time studying the influence of Iran in Iraq. And Karim Sadjadpour joins us now in the studio. So glad that you're with us.
[Mr. Karim Sadjadpour:] My pleasure, Michele.
[Michele Norris:] First, Karim, tell us about this branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard known as the Quds Force. Who are they and what are their responsibilities?
[Mr. Karim Sadjadpour:] The Quds Force Quds in Persian or in Arabic means Jerusalem. And it's a very elite branch of the Revolutionary Guards. We don't know exactly how many they are in number, but I think we're talking about hundreds, not thousands. Revolutionary Guards altogether are about 150,000 troops. And they're a very elite branch, I think they have military activities that would compare to something like the Navy Seals, very elitely trained. On the other hand, they're also conducting intelligence operations that maybe are akin to more along the lines of the CIA, or the FBI. And the Quds Forces in Iraq are not just operating in terms of the military power and flexing their muscles in that sense, but they're also operating a lot under the scenes, behind the scenes in terms of intelligence, buying support in Iraq, conducting kind of social capital experiments, funding mosques, funding clinics, things like that. So they're very much a versatile force in Iraq.
[Michele Norris:] Almost sounds like you mentioned the Navy Seals. Almost sounds a bit like the CIA if you were trying to think of an American equivalent.
[Mr. Karim Sadjadpour:] Well, they're a combination of a lot of these things, because they I think they are trained militarily, but at the same time they're trained to conduct these intelligence operations as well. So I think something akin to an elite fighting force which also has this intelligence sound to it as well.
[Michele Norris:] There is also the question of control. We heard the president today say it's not clear exactly who picked up the phone and told them to do what they did. And some U.S. intelligence officials say that the Quds Force would not be doing this kind of thing unless they had approval from top leaders in Tehran. Does that make sense to you?
[Mr. Karim Sadjadpour:] What's an extent that does make sense? I mean if we look at the Iranian Constitution similar to the U.S. Constitution, the president of the United States is commander in chief of the U.S. military. Similarly in Iran, the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, has constitutional jurisdiction over the Revolutionary Guards. And the Quds Forces are a branch of the Revolutionary Guards, so hierarchically if you look at it, the Quds Forces ultimately do not report to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. But also, we have to be clear that this is a very dysfunctional regime in Tehran. You have many different types of personalities, many different types of institutions. It's not a dictatorship like Saddam Hussein's Iraq was, where you have one person who's ruling by decree. Iran the way decisions are made in Iran is very much a consensus building process, so there's an element of dysfunctionality that different institutions of the regime are conducting.
[Michele Norris:] If Iran does want to exercise broad influence throughout the region, where else is the Quds Forces are operating right now?
[Mr. Karim Sadjadpour:] Well, in Lebanon, as well. There's been a lot of accusations in the past that Quds Forces has trained Hezbollah. This was an accusation that the Israelis made during the Lebanon war in the summer of 2006. And there's also, you know, concern that Iran has these Quds Forces and Revolutionary Guards well placed in some of the Shiite communities throughout the Persian Gulf. So for example, Saudi Arabia is a very, you know, key country, and the bulk of Saudi Arabia's energy reserves are in the eastern province. And the eastern province happens to have a Shiite majority population. And there is a concern, for example, that if Saudi Arabia somehow complicit in taking on Iran, if Saudi Arabia joins the United States in confronting Iran's nuclear posture, that Iran have capability to really make life difficult in Saudi's eastern province through these Quds Forces collaborating with local Shiite Saudi population.
[Michele Norris:] Karim, thanks so much for coming in to talk to us.
[Mr. Karim Sadjadpour:] Thank you, Michele.
[Michele Norris:] Karim Sadjadpour is an analyst on Iran for the International Crisis Group.

[Melissa Block:] The man likely to be China's next leader has vanished, at least from the public eye. He hasn't made an appearance for 10 days and his conspicuous absence has unleashed a wave of rumor and speculation. Our Beijing correspondent, Louisa Lim, reports on the mysterious case of the missing politician.
[Louisa Lim, Byline:] It all started with Hillary Clinton. Last Wednesday, she was supposed to meet Vice Premier Xi Jinping but that was canceled. He then missed an important military meeting; then his photo call with the Danish prime minister was called off. On China's excitable Internet, the rumors are flying, from backache caused by football to a mild heart attack, all the way to assassination attempts. Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei was today asked if Xi was still alive.
[Hong Lei:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Louisa Lim, Byline:] I hope you can ask more serious questions, was his terse response.
[Unidentified Man:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Louisa Lim, Byline:] China's state-run media issued reports about Xi's visit to the party school. But it turns out that happened early last week. Steve Tsang, from the University of Nottingham, says it's possible Xi hasn't appeared because he's not in a fit state to do so.
[Steve Tsang:] The most likely scenario would be that Xi Jinping is suffering from a medical condition which make it impossible for the Communist Party to parade him on television. But because the party does not enjoy very strong credibility in terms of telling the truth, anything short of seeing him on television is not likely to be convincing enough.
[Louisa Lim, Byline:] The party's credibility has been dented by scandals, including the sensational murder trial of the wife of Bo Xilai, an ambitious politician. She was found guilty of murdering a British citizen. But her husband's fate is still in limbo. Andrew J. Nathan, from Columbia University, conjectures that may be keeping Xi Jinping busy.
[Andrew Nathan:] A theory I have is that Xi Jinping is busy working out, figuring out, negotiating a solution to the Bo Xilai case.
[Louisa Lim, Byline:] One senior politician was on show today, China's premier at the World Economic Forum's annual Meeting of the New Champions in the city of Tianjin. In his speech, Wen Jiabao mentioned he was about to leave government after 45 years of service. He didn't mention his successors. He focused on the future of the economy.
[Wen Jiabo:] [Through translator] The giant ship of the Chinese economy will sail ahead fast and reach the shore of a brighter future.
[Louisa Lim, Byline:] But the economy is starting to feel the impact of the political tensions. According to a new survey by the ManpowerGroup, the forecast for employment growth in China is slowing faster than anywhere else in Asia. David Arkless from Manpower says uncertainty surrounding the power transition can't be discounted.
[David Arkless:] Political changes of that size and import really reflect on business sentiment. So I think Chinese companies and foreign companies here are adopting, in the third and fourth quarter, somewhat more of a cautious approach.
[Louisa Lim, Byline:] And so, the whole country is poised in wait-and-see mode. Whether Xi is sidelined by a power struggle, an illness or other reasons, the continuing lack of information is proving damaging in itself. Louisa Lim NPR News, Tianjin.

[Scott Simon:] Earlier today, China launched an historic space mission carrying that country's first female astronaut and a couple of male astronauts into space. The Shenzhou-9 spacecraft is on a 13-day trip. The mission is considered an important step toward China's goal of building a space station. We're joined now in our studios by Dean Cheng. He's a research fellow at the Asia Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation. Mr. Cheng, thanks for being with us.
[Dean Cheng:] Thank you for having me.
[Scott Simon:] So what's the great leap upward here, if I can put it that way?
[Dean Cheng:] Well, the great leap upward is basically reflecting China's sustained effort at space exploration. The Chinese space program is over 50 years old. It's always enjoyed support from the top Chinese leadership and we've watched it progress from first hesitant efforts to put satellites up to China now having the world's third navigation satellite system, weather satellites, and of course a manned space program.
[Scott Simon:] And a three person crew, as we mentioned, and certainly the first Chinese woman to go into space, 33-year-old Liu Yang. Help us understand the significance of her being up there.
[Dean Cheng:] Well, as with the Soviets, the early inclusion of a woman in the manned effort is the reflection of political importance associated with space. Mao, of course, is said to have said that women hold up half of the sky and now there's a Chinese woman up in the sky. But really, the larger point here is it's a reflection of the political support that China's space program has from the highest levels.
[Scott Simon:] Then help us understand how this mission fits in to the plans of Chinese leadership.
[Dean Cheng:] Well, this particular mission is very important because it really shows it is going to the opportunity for the Chinese to engage in manned docking maneuvers. And manned docking maneuvers are an essential part if you're going to build a space station. The Chinese have said that they want to do that by 2020. If they are going to put a man on the moon, which the latest space white paper shows that they're starting the studies to do that. Any kind of sustained presence in space requires the ability to do docking. And so that's a key part of this mission. The other of course is that this is 13 days so you're going to have a lot of exposure to microgravity. And, again, this is China's first really extended mission beyond a one or two day affair.
[Scott Simon:] And what does this mean to the people of China? Are people following it?
[Dean Cheng:] Absolutely. China's space program is something that is a source of national pride. It's the sort of thing that we probably haven't seen since the 1960s. One of the spring water brands has on its later the official water of the Shenzhou space program. It's a little bit like Tang.
[Scott Simon:] I was just going to ask about Tang, which I haven't seen for a while. But, yeah.
[Dean Cheng:] So. No, but it's not just that. There are advertisements at bus stands in Beijing for companies making sprockets and gears, that their products are a part of the Shenzhou program. The manned program in particular is essentially a statement of quality control. We are reliable enough that our astronauts depend on our products.
[Scott Simon:] Yeah.
[Dean Cheng:] It's obviously good enough for your factory, your cars, your plants.
[Scott Simon:] And, briefly, any dissident voices? As is it must be said we get any time there's attention in the space program of the United States saying, look, we have our own problems on Earth. Why should we [unintelligible]?
[Dean Cheng:] Absolutely. There is, given particularly the disparities of wealth and other things, there are Chinese, particularly from poorer provinces and representing the billion or so who are much less advantaged in China, who are asking the real question. This is costing a lot of money. It is diverting a lot of human talents, engineers and the like. What are the Chinese people getting out of this?
[Scott Simon:] Well, Mr. Cheng, very good to talk to you. Thanks for coming in.
[Dean Cheng:] Thank you.
[Scott Simon:] Dean Cheng is a research fellow at the Asia Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation. And you're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.

[Renee Montagne:] Republican John McCain was in Kenner, Louisiana last night. He called Obama a formidable opponent, but he said he's the one with a record to run on. NPR's Pam Fessler reports.
[Pam Fessler:] The hundreds of people who came to hear John McCain speak at the Pontchartrain Center just outside of New Orleans knew that this wasn't just another event in a long primary season. The evening felt like a celebration, now that McCain's fall campaign target had finally come into focus.
[Senator John Mc Cain:] You know, I have a few years on my opponent... ...so I'm surprised that a young man has bought in to so many failed ideas.
[Pam Fessler:] And that clearly will be McCain's mantra in the months to come: Obama young, McCain experienced. The Republican said it was his opponent who looked to the past to solve the nation's problems, wanting to dust off old tired big government policies of the '60s and '70s.
[Senator John Mc Cain:] Like others before him, he seems to think government is the answer to every problem, that government should take our resources and make our decisions for us.
[Pam Fessler:] McCain said he wants smaller government and less spending. In fact, he said many of the government's policies and institutions have failed, not the least of which was the response to Hurricane Katrina, an especially sore point in this still-battered region. McCain knows one of his most serious challenges in the general election is separating himself from the current administration.
[Senator John Mc Cain:] Now, you'll hear from my opponent's campaign in every speech, in every interview, every press release, that I'm running for President Bush's third term. You'll hear every policy of the president is described as the Bush-McCain policy.
[Pam Fessler:] McCain said it's just not true, that he's opposed the Bush administration on a number of policies, such as the treatment of detainees. Just look at my record, he told the crowd, adding in another swipe at Obama, the country didn't just get to know him yesterday, as they're now getting to know Obama.
[Senator John Mc Cain:] He's an impressive man who makes a great first impression, but he hasn't been willing to make the tough calls, to challenge his party, to risk criticism from his supporters, to bring real change to Washington. I have.
[Pam Fessler:] Still, outside, McCain supporter Steve Bunker of Kenner says he's a little worried that his candidate's up against such a dynamic opponent.
[Mr. Steve Bunker:] I think it's going to be tough because everybody wants to jump on the bandwagon for Obama. I think it's going to be tough on him. He's not the flashy shooting star, you know? But a shooting star burns out.
[Pam Fessler:] If the crowd last night was any indication, McCain might pick up support from Hillary Clinton fans who are now looking elsewhere. New Orleans resident Vanessa Stubb said she'd considered Clinton, but there's no way she'll vote for Obama after his minister made what she considers racially divisive remarks.
[Ms. Vanessa Stubb:] With the recent Barack Obama and his church problems, I completely went from a liberal Democrat to a conservative Republican. And I'm very proud to say that I'm going to vote for John McCain this year.
[Pam Fessler:] And for others like Stubbs, McCain made a point last night of praising Clinton. He said she deserves a lot more appreciation than she sometimes received. Pam Fessler, NPR News, New Orleans.

[Guy Raz:] We're back with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. And a quick update now from the Winter Olympics. NPR's Howard Berkes is with us from Whistler. That's where many of the skiing events are supposed to take place. Hi, Howard.
[Howard Berkes:] Hi, Guy.
[Guy Raz:] So what's going on with the weather?
[Howard Berkes:] Well, yeah, the weather. As you said, the skiing events were supposed to have begun by now, but it's been nothing but heavy rain, fog, some snow but not very much to speak of, dark and cloudy and dismal. I think we could call these the gloomy games so far in terms of the weather, except right now, I'm standing outside at Whistler, near the downhill venue, and I can see something very strange in the sky. It's blue. There's also this white light that we haven't seen for a while. People here are looking up in awe and wonder at the fact that it looks like it might actually be clearing, and race officials are actually very excited. They think that they'll be able to get the first downhill event off tomorrow. That's the men's downhill. And Lindsey Vonn this weather has been great for American Lindsey Vonn, who was injured. She had a serious shin injury. She needed some time to heal and to rest up, and she's had that because her events have been delayed. Her first race is Wednesday, and it looks like it'll get off as well if this weather holds.
[Guy Raz:] Mm. That's good news. Quickly, Howard, the events that are going on, Americans were set to win medals going into the final event of the Nordic combined. That's the 10K cross-country race. How are they doing?
[Howard Berkes:] Well, saying they were set to win medals would be a very optimistic way to put it because an American has never won a medal in that event. But in fact, just a few moments ago, Johnny Spillane finished second in the 10-kilometer cross-country ski. Silver medal for an American, that's the first medal in Nordic combined ever. We've never won a medal in that sport. Todd Lodwick, his colleague, finished fourth. You know, Americans are not known for being good at cross-country skiing in the Olympics. There's only been one medal in the history of the Winter Olympics for an American. There's some hope that a medal here might, you know, change that, might attract more young people to the sport and to competing in the sport. So this is very big news for cross-country skiing in the United States.
[Guy Raz:] NPR's Howard Berkes in Whistler. Thanks so much.
[Howard Berkes:] You're welcome.

[Melissa Block:] Writer Kevin Powers enlisted in the army at age 17 and served in Iraq in 2004 and 2005. He now lives in Austin, Texas, where he's been studying poetry at the University of Texas. And he's just published his first book, a novel called "The Yellow Birds." Alan Cheuse has our review.
[Alan Cheuse, Byline:] How to tell a true war story? That question, once posed by Tim O'Brien, comes to mind when you read "The Yellow Birds." Kevin Powers chooses to tell his story by throwing sequential narrative to the Iraqi desert winds. This moody, petulant, often darkly beautiful and shell-shocked account of a young recruit on the ground in Iraq, moves us back and forth between the war and the main character, machine gunner John Bartle's return to his Southern country home. As Bartle tells the story of his tour of duty, we swing back and forth between bursts of gunfire taking out Iraqi insurgents to bursts of lyrical prose, language usually best given over to meditation that delivers to the reader a deep sense of the emotions engendered by war. Powers writes beautifully about light, about the keening of Iraqi women in mourning around their campfires. Wind whips up through the jaws nearby, he writes, and courses over the creek bed. And I can hear it then. I was not sure if it really came from the women around the campfires, if they pulled their hair crying in mourning or not. But I heard it and even now it seems wrong not to listen.Powers himself keens about the panoply of odors in the streets of Tal Afar in Nineveh Province. About death the death of enemy soldiers, the death of a comrade, the fear of his own demise as mortars fall all around him. How to tell a true war story if you're more a poet than a novelist? Tell it as a poet would. Tell it as Kevin Powers does. Tell it as a poem.
[Melissa Block:] That's Alan Cheuse reviewing the new novel, "The Yellow Birds" by Kevin Powers.

[Ari Shapiro:] From NPR News, this is WEEKEND EDITION. I'm Ari Shapiro. Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is in Iraq this morning. He's part of a congressional delegation that's meeting with Iraqi and U.S. officials. This comes a day after the U.N. released its latest assessment on Iraqi human rights. Beneath the diplomatic language, the group was clearly frustrated by the Iraqi government's lack of progress. We have several reports this morning on the state of affairs in Iraq, beginning with NPR's Dina Temple-Raston in Baghdad.
[Dina Temple-raston:] At a news conference in Baghdad, the U.N. chief in Iraq, Staffan de Mistura, tried to accentuate the positive while sending the clear message that the Iraqi government still had much to do.
[Mr. Staffan De Mistura:] There have been some improvement on the economic situation. There have been some improvement even on the laws which came out. But this is not enough.
[Dina Temple-raston:] De Mistura said that the al-Maliki government had been given a narrow window of opportunity. The lull in violence in Iraq at the end of last year was supposed to provide the Maliki government with an opportunity to get things done. The U.N. is clearly concerned that there is a still long list of issues left unresolved. Four point four million refugees and internally displaced Iraqis have received little relief. There are still enormous delays in reviewing Iraqi detainee cases. Even at the most basic level of counting civilian casualties, de Mistura said the Maliki government needed to step up.
[Mr. Staffan De Mistura:] It would be good if we could have access to the ministry of health's public available data about mortality statistics, because it does help all of us to be able to confront a reality on the ground in terms of the figures and the impacts. And so far, this is not yet the case.
[Dina Temple-raston:] Violence in Iraq is picking up. Thirteen U.S. soldiers have been killed in the past week alone. Two weeks ago, a coordinated bomb attack in Baghdad's Karradah neighborhood killed 68 people one of the worst attacks in months. And now, officials are looking with growing concern to the events in the city of Kut, about a hundred miles southeast of Baghdad. Rogue elements of the Mahdi Army are ignoring Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's seven-month-old ceasefire order. Intense fighting between Iraqi security forces and Mahdi fighters there raises the concern that the wider ceasefire might not hold. Dina Temple-Raston, NPR News, Baghdad.

[Alex Chadwick:] Farmer have a huge interest in changes to immigration law. All but the smallest farms depend on immigrants, legal and illegal. This week, hundreds of California farmers are lobbying Congress to pass some kind of guest worker program, because they can't find enough help to work their fields. From member station KQED, Sasha Khokha reports.
[Sasha Khokha Reporting:] It's a chilly morning, just outside the tiny, central California town of Yettem, in the shadow of the Sierra Mountains. Workers climb on tall, metal ladders to pick navel oranges and load them into heavy, canvas bags strapped to their shoulders. These crews are stretched thin this season, working six and seven day a week, so fruit doesn't rot on the trees. John Stern is a manager for Labeau Brothers Packing House.
[Mr. John Stern:] Normally, we have 40 to 50 people at this time of year, and I think our biggest crew is only about 25 people right now, so it's tough. It's real tough.
[Khokha:] And farmers say it will get tougher, as peaches and grapes ripen, and the competition for workers heats up. Over the past few years, labor contractors like Francisco Arrera say it's like a war when recruiters fight for workers at peak harvest season. The competition has become so fierce that workers use their cell phones to call friends in nearby fields and sometimes leave if they hear about a better paying job up the road. University of California economist Phil Martin says farmers are feeling squeeze because of increased order enforcement. Farm workers who used to cross back and forth to Mexico each season are now building more permanent lives in the U.S.
[Professor Phil Martin:] The total number of people coming illegally hasn't changed very much. By the same token, you make it harder to cross the border, and once you get in, you have a different time horizon, and you're going to stay longer. That makes you more likely to seek and find nonfarm jobs as well.
[Khokha:] In construction, workers can sometimes earn double what they made in the fields. Twenty-two-year-old Maguerito, he didn't want to give his last name, arrived from Mexico last year. He spent just one season picking grapes before picking up a hammer instead.
[Mr. Maguerito:] [Through translator] It's more stable. In the fields, when it rains, there's no work. Sometimes, you go a month or two without work. Here, there's work all the time.
[Khokha:] But back in the fields, there is work to be done, too, and fewer hands to pick the crops. Labor contractor Steve Scoroni's crews harvest lettuce for some of the largest bagged-salad producers in the U.S. He's in Washington to tell politicians a farm worker labor shortage could spell a major crises for American agriculture.
[Mr. Steve Scoroni:] Our politicians are so disconnected from the reality of who's doing the work out there. I'm talking about, you know, who's picking the lettuce, who's washing the dishes in the fancy hotels our politicians eat and sleep in. People in the United States don't want to do this work.
[Khokha:] Scoroni says if he can't find workers to pick the crops in California, then he'll have to take his business elsewhere. Next week, he plans to start harvesting lettuce in Mexico. Other farmers are ploughing under their grapes and planting almonds, which require less labor. Researchers are looking into more ways to mechanize harvesting. Back in the Yettem orange grove, a Mexican farm worker named Rovolto says he knows of only way to ensure that workers already here stay in the field.
[Mr. Rovolto:] [Through Translater] If they want more people, they need to pay people more. If they don't pay enough, then people will go where they'll make more.
[Khokha:] Farmers say raising wages would put the price of an orange out of reach for most consumers who are used to a cheap, plentiful food supply. For NPR News, I'm Sasha Khokha.

[Robert Siegel:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel. Buying a house may be out of the question for many Americans in today's economic doldrums, but a new set of dishes, well, that could be an entirely different matter. At the International Home and Housewares Show in Chicago, thousands of items from kitchen classics to new hi-tech gadgets are on display. We asked NPR's Cheryl Corley to do a little browsing.
[Cheryl Corley:] The housewares show was this huge global market with exhibitors from more than 35 countries. There are thousands of retail store buyers and more than 13 miles of aisles filled with everything imaginable.
[Mr. Steve Johnson:] Probably the most important new item is called half time turkey.
[Cheryl Corley:] Steve Johnson, the president of M.E. Heuck, shows off a couple of flat aluminum devices, the end of one has a fanned out turkey tail, the other, a turkey's head.
[Mr. Steve Johnson:] You put it inside the turkey, you know, the head end goes into the head and the tail end goes into the tail and it transmits the heat inside the turkey. So it actually will cause the turkey to cook in about half the time that a normal turkey would cook.
[Cheryl Corley:] The head of the International Housewares Association, Phil Brandl, says about 10,000 new items are on display this year. Some entirely new, others are old standbys with a facelift, think brightly-colored pots and pans, for example. And with a rocky economy, Brandl says...
[Mr. Phil Brandle:] Consumers are spending more time in their homes, and they're doing little fix-up projects that may have been put off for a while.
[Cheryl Corley:] And cooking more. In tough times, there are a few things that are key for housewares: innovation, sustainability and design. Adam Cornell works for Catskill Craftsmen.
[Mr. Adam Cornell:] People are still interested in buying things, but they want to be wowed.
[Cheryl Corley:] Cornell says his company sells cutting boards with a different look. There's one shaped like a guitar on display, another like a piano.
[Mr. Adam Cornell:] This gives a little novelty to the kitchen. People are tired of the old rectangle cutting boards and so now they can have something a little novel to look at, as well as being functional. I think they really enjoy it and appreciate it.
[Cheryl Corley:] The housewares show's most prominent design theme is color bold and bright. At the Alice Supply Company booth, co-owner Maria Barnes shows off a dazzling collection of toolboxes, garden hoses and kitchen brooms and dustpans. They're bright orange, lime or rainbow-colored. Even the lowly bathroom plunger looks festive. No closets for these items.
[Unidentified Woman #1:] I actually have four toilet plungers hanging in my bathroom on the wall, like, in a row.
[Unidentified Woman #2:] This is a rainbow-colored the stem to the plunger is rainbow-colored. The plunger itself is really bright, bright green.
[Unidentified Woman #1:] Right, yeah. And I mean it's like a piece of art. Would you, I mean, come on, right?
[Cheryl Corley:] Now, what's art, what's beauty, all in the eye of the holder, right? More innovation down another aisle at the inventor's review.
[Ms. Leily Kaddissi:] Do you have this problem residue inside your toothbrush holder?
[Cheryl Corley:] Leily Kaddissi calls her invention the Hygienic ResidueFREE Toothbrush Holder. A cup with a small flat surface on two sides with indentations, a place for toothbrushes to lay with the brushes facing down over a sink to drain.
[Ms. Leily Kaddissi:] So it's a very hygienic design. It prevents this germ and bacteria build-up.
[Cheryl Corley:] An entire section of the housewares show is devoted to sustainable products or packaging.
[Ms. Carrie Parker:] This is the Bissell hard floor cleaner. It uses water. It turns into super-heated steam to clean all hard floor surfaces, including your sealed hardwood.
[Cheryl Corley:] That's Carrie Parker demonstrating the Bissell steam mop. She picks up all sorts of sticky spills using just steam created from tap water.
[Ms. Carrie Parker:] No waste, nothing going to the landfill, no chemicals to wash down the sink, it's a super eco-friendly way to clean your floors.
[Cheryl Corley:] Plenty of testimonials and hope at the International Home and Houseware Show. Cheryl Corley, NPR News, Chicago.

[Melissa Block:] So Adam Nelson's Olympics are about to begin. For swimmer Cullen Jones, the games are over and he's still glowing. His one event was the men's 4-by-100 meter freestyle relay in Beijing on Sunday night. The U.S. beat out the favored French team by the tiniest of margins, to set a new world record and take the gold. And with that medal, Cullen Jones became only the second African-American swimmer ever to win Olympic gold. Jones swam the third leg of that race. When he spoke with me today from the media center in Beijing, he talked about watching the anchor swimmer, Jason Lezak, swim those dramatic final 50 meters.
[Mr. Cullen Jones:] I got out of the pool and I was shaking because I was just screaming at the top of my lungs, cheering Jason on to try to will him to the wall.
[Melissa Block:] You know, it's interesting because in that last leg, the last 50 meters that Jason Lezak is swimming, your teammates, Michael Phelps and Garrett Weber-Gale, were at the side of the pool going nuts. And I was looking for you; you were nowhere to be found. What happened?
[Mr. Cullen Jones:] It's really funny that you say that, because there have been a few Web sites that have been actually trying to find me in the footage. Where is Cullen Jones? I actually climbed out of the ladder off the side of pool. I was watching so intently that I couldn't move. I actually held my breath for the last 25 meters of Jason swimming in. And when he got to the wall, I definitely jumped up and almost fell back into the pool.
[Melissa Block:] When you got out of the pool, your mother was there at the Water Cube. Did you look for her in the stands? Could you find her?
[Mr. Cullen Jones:] I had no idea where she was. I was screaming my head off when we finished. I was just so excited and so tired I had no idea where my mother was. And what was actually really funny was I told myself I wasn't going to cry on the podium. I was like, no, no, that's not going to happen. But then, Jason said, oh yeah, your mom is sitting next to my wife and they're both crying. And when I looked at her, that was it, I just started tearing up.
[Melissa Block:] You've talked a lot about your mom. And in fact there's an ad that's been running through the games for Johnson & Johnson. It's a tribute to your mother, who you call your number one cheerleader, Debra Jones. Let's listen to the end of this ad.
[Mr. Cullen Jones:] I knew that no matter what I did at any race, the loudest person in the stands was going to be you. Now I'm going to the Olympic Games, and it's all thanks to you. I still hear you sometimes, especially in my head, screaming: go, Cullen, go, go! Thanks, Mom.
[Melissa Block:] Cullen Jones, this ad gets me every time.
[Mr. Cullen Jones:] Oh, well, thank you. They aired that commercial right after the ceremony of us getting the medal, and I think they had meant to do that. I got a lot of messages on my e-mail, saying, did they plan that, because I just started crying right after? And I couldn't [unintelligible].
[Melissa Block:] Let's go back to how this swimming thing all started for you. And it could have ended badly. This is at a water park when you were five years old.
[Mr. Cullen Jones:] I was five years old and we were at Dorney Park in Pennsylvania. And there was a huge inner tube ride, and at the bottom of the ride was a pool of water. And I ended up flipping upside down. And I was clenching on to the inner tube and was upside down, and passed out. And the life guard and my dad had to come in save me and give me resuscitation. But when I woke up, I was like, yeah, all right, what's the next ride we're getting on? My mom still kind of cringes when I tell the story.
[Melissa Block:] You started swimming though you started taking lessons very soon after that.
[Mr. Cullen Jones:] The next week, actually, my mom had me in lessons. She was very protective of me because I was an only child, and she wanted me to make sure that I was going to be okay in and outside of the water. And that's exactly why it's so dear to me now that I'm in a position where I can help out and try to get kids to understand, maybe not to fill my shoes or find the next Michael Phelps, but get someone to help the drowning rate and just get kids to understand the importance of being around water and in water.
[Melissa Block:] And you've talked about this a lot that the drowning rate for black children is far higher than it is for white children.
[Mr. Cullen Jones:] Yes. Minorities are three times more likely to drown. And it's anywhere it's in the ocean or the pool. It's just so dear to me because I could have easily been in the same situation. And it never deterred me, and I think that's why people think it's so ironic that I ended up being a gold medalist.
[Melissa Block:] Well, Cullen Jones, congratulations on your gold. And thanks so much for talking with us.
[Mr. Cullen Jones:] Oh, thank you. Thanks for having me. It's been great.
[Melissa Block:] Cullen Jones, gold medalist with the 4-by-100 meter relay team at the Beijing Games. He'll kick off a diversity tour in the fall, promoting water safety to minority children with clinics and swim meets. And he says he'll be back in the pool, training hard, with his eye on winning four gold medals in 2012.

[Liane Hansen:] As part of our infrastructure series, next we're going to take a look at California. The state recently made some big investments in its infrastructure system, focusing on transportation. Dale Bonner is the secretary of the state's Business, Transportation and Housing Agency and oversees a $20 billion budget. He joins us from Los Angeles. Thank you for your time.
[Mr. Dale Bonner:] Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to be with you.
[Liane Hansen:] What kind of infrastructure challenges are you facing in California?
[Mr. Dale Bonner:] Well, you name it. You know, I think I would sum it up this way. California is a state today of roughly 38 million people, and we are expecting to be at about, approximately 60 million in the next 20, 30 years. And we are living on an infrastructure that was designed for about half of our current population. So that tells you, number one, we're very far behind as it is in building out an infrastructure to support our current population. And we've got this massive challenge to build out quickly enough to support the growth that we know is coming. And we're doing this, of course, at a time when we're also trying to clean up the air and the environment. And so it's almost a perfect storm, if you will, of challenges.
[Liane Hansen:] What kind of cost are we talking about, I mean, in total, do you think?
[Mr. Dale Bonner:] Well, in transportation alone, we're proposing to spend about $107 billion over the next 10 years to address our highest needs. We know we'll need significant additional investment beyond that. So it's going to be a tremendous investment in California over the next 10 years.
[Liane Hansen:] Give us an example of a top priority now, where some of this money will go.
[Mr. Dale Bonner:] Our top priorities right now include, of course, maintaining our existing system. There were some studies showing that the average California driver spends about $700 a year on auto repairs just because of, you know, running over potholes and other kinds of things along the way. Beyond that, we are investing significant dollars in reducing congestion levels at some of the key chokepoints throughout the state. You may know that the California ports both in Long Beach and L.A. and Oakland, we bring in almost 40 percent of the containerized goods that come into the United States from China and other places around the world. And that's a tremendous burden on our transportation system because when those ships come in and unload the cargo, they're put onto trains and also these 18-wheeler trucks that are also sharing the same freeways and roadways that our commuters are sharing.
[Liane Hansen:] Has the downturn in the economy and the rising price of gas made this a more pressing issue?
[Mr. Dale Bonner:] Absolutely. You know, we have the challenge that many other jurisdictions have, namely that a large part of the way in which we fund transportation relies upon the gas tax, both state and federal. So at a time like now when more people are looking for either ways to reduce their need to drive or looking for alternative modes of transportation, what that does if you have fewer people driving or making shorter trips, that's something we encourage and we'd like to see on the one hand. But on the short term, it creates challenges in our transportation funding.
[Liane Hansen:] Dale Bonner is the secretary of California's Business, Transportation and Housing Agency, and we reached him in Los Angeles. Thank you very much.
[Mr. Dale Bonner:] Thank you very much.

[Ailsa Chang:] The outskirts of Moscow are starting to smell. That's because Russia doesn't recycle. All trash, whether it's household waste, glass, plastic, paper or metal, still goes into the same bin. That has led to mountains of garbage just outside Moscow's city limits. Last summer, Russian President Vladimir Putin personally intervened to stop one monster dump from taking over a suburb. As NPR's Moscow correspondent Lucian Kim found out, that only made things worse for neighboring areas.
[Lucian Kim, Byline:] The cry for help came to the Kuchino landfill just east of Moscow during President Putin's annual call-in show in June. On national TV, a desperate resident named Yelena Mikhailenko begged Putin to do something about the enormous garbage dump next to her house, the size of more than 100 football fields and counting.
[Yelena Mikhailenko:] [Speaking Russian].
[Lucian Kim, Byline:] "We don't know what to do," she said, "so you're our last hope." A week later, Putin ordered the Kuchino dump closed, and the very next day its gates shut forever. Today Kuchino is the domain of a pack of stray dogs and an Austrian entrepreneur named Oliver Kayser. His company has drilled wells into the dump to collect and burn off the noxious gases produced inside the 200-foot-high landfill. A few steps from the flare, you can detect the unmistakable smell of rotten eggs. That's hydrogen sulfide leaking from the ground beneath your feet. Eventually, Kayser's company hopes to use the gas to generate electricity. But for now, they've at least reduced the smell.
[Oliver Kayser:] We have less complains than before. Before we had about 50, 100 complaints a day. Now there are maybe two or three. They should build a park afterwards, an attraction park or something, because you have really nice view.
[Lucian Kim, Byline:] Kayser wants the Kuchino landfill to be a model for the rest of Russia of how to mitigate the environmental effects of garbage dumps. But there's a problem. Since this dump closed, neighboring landfills have been getting even more garbage. People living near those dumps have taken to the streets in protest.
[Unidentified Protesters:] [Chanting in Russian].
[Lucian Kim, Byline:] At this rally in July, people shouted down a local official with cries of shame, shame. Yelena Gavrilova is a schoolteacher who attended that protest. When she and her husband built a house in the village of Torbeyevo more than 20 years ago, there was no garbage dump. Now there's an enormous landfill.
[Yelena Gavrilova:] [Through interpreter] We went to the prosecutors, the governor and our local officials. Either you move us out or close the dump. The answer I got was, thanks for your civic engagement.
[Lucian Kim, Byline:] That's not to say the Russian government doesn't want to catch up with European countries in managing its trash. But the plans for a national garbage separation system won't go into effect for another 10 years, and the first waste incinerators have yet to be built outside Moscow. Local politician Irina Astakhova says people are afraid the incinerators will cause new environmental problems.
[Irina Astakhova:] [Speaking Russian].
[Lucian Kim, Byline:] "Unfortunately, as we build capitalism in Russia," she says, "everything is geared to maximizing profits. The environment takes last place." Lucian Kim, NPR News, Moscow.

[Farai Chideya:] The nation's oldest black newspaper, The Philadelphia Tribune, recently scored seven honors at the 67th Annual National Newspaper Publishers Association Merit Awards. For more, we've got Robert W. Bogle, the paper's president, publisher, and chief executive officer. Mr. Bogle, welcome.
[Mr. Robert W. Bogle:] Thank you for having me.
[Farai Chideya:] Let's talk a little bit about this specific award, the A. Philip Randolph Messenger Award, and the AIDS-HIV coverage. There has been sometimes a tendency in our Africa-American media to say, well we don't want to address things head on. Other times, there have been huge amounts of social challenge and social justice on behalf of the community by African-American newspapers. Do you ever get caught up in that tension between painting a good picture of the community, and dealing with the hard issues?
[Mr. Bogle:] Every day. And sometimes, trying to resolve issues, you have to frequently bring out the worse. But the only way I believe that we're going to resolve this issue about AIDS and the virus itself, it's [unintelligible] we have to go and talk about the very serious and devastating effects that it has on our community and any community.
[Farai Chideya:] When you really think about your city, Philadelphia, and all of the wonderful things about it and all of the challenges that it, like any city faces, how would you describe it to someone who's never been there?
[Mr. Bogle:] Well, I think this is the greatest city in America. Bear in mind that I take an enormous amount of pride in the fact that this is the birthplace of this nation, of this place called America. This is where it began, right here in Philadelphia.
[Farai Chideya:] Do you think, this is something that we find as part of our job at NEWS & NOTES, which is an African-American and African diaspora program, but we have listeners of all races. Do you find that you can serve both an African-American audience and what's called a general interest audience at the same time?
[Mr. Bogle:] Well, frankly, we read them and we have 300 years of history books about non-African-Americans. They read very little about us from us and know very little about us, except when somebody tells them and what they will see or hear. So we are forced frequently to have interest in what they're doing because, frankly, they still have a major influence in what happens in this region.
[Farai Chideya:] What does your paper do to try to foster some sense of empowerment, and knowledge, forward movement so people can begin to craft lives that are important not just for themselves and their families, but to the whole city?
[Mr. Bogle:] What we attempt to do is to expose opportunities wherever they may be and then the most important thing is to ensure that we have an educational system or attempt to ensure this educational system we have is inclusive and is seriously preparing tomorrow's leaders, tomorrow's participants, tomorrow's citizens, so that they in fact can be more engaged and involved and kind of and compete in a way that makes them a part of the system.
[Farai Chideya:] Well, Mr. Bogle, we wish you another century and more of for your newspaper and thank you for speaking with us.
[Mr. Bogle:] Thank you.
[Farai Chideya:] Robert W. Bogle is president, publisher and CEO of The Philadelphia Tribune; he joined us from the studios of Audiopost in Philadelphia.

[Guy Raz:] Voters in four states go to the polls on Tuesday to choose their party nominees for this November's midterm election. And in three of them Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Arkansas the so-called establishment candidates for the U.S. Senate are struggling. We're told by pundits and analysts that voters want change this year, that the mood is decidedly anti-incumbent and anti-Washington. So what explains it?
[Dr. Rand Paul:] I've been saying for months that there's a Tea Party tidal wave coming, and it's going to sweep a lot of incumbents from office.
[Guy Raz:] That's Rand Paul. He's the son of Congressman Ron Paul. He leads the polls in Kentucky's Republican Senate race. So what evidence is there to back his claims? Well, there's clearly anger and there's a lot of uncertainty, but can that all be attributed to one political force? We begin this hour with a look at those key races and the challenges facing Senate candidates who are backed by their respective parties. First to Kentucky, where Republican Trey Grayson, who has the support of the state's other senator, Mitch McConnell, is trailing Rand Paul. And Paul has never held elected office. Ronnie Ellis covers state politics for CNHI News Service. And he's in Louisville. Welcome.
[Mr. Ronnie Ellis:] Thank you. Thank you for having me.
[Guy Raz:] Let's start with Rand Paul. He is not the Republican establishment's candidate, but he does have the backing of Sarah Palin and people who identify with the Tea Party movement. What has he tapped into that seems to have resonated with voters in Kentucky?
[Mr. Ronnie Ellis:] He has tapped into both the Tea Party movement and the anti-Barack Obama, federal stimulus spending, growing debt of a conservative state that's registered Democratic but is probably Republican in sentiment these days.
[Guy Raz:] Grayson received the endorsement of Kentucky's Right to Life party, arguably more conservative than Rand Paul. Rand Paul sort of associated more with the libertarian wing.
[Mr. Ronnie Ellis:] That's certainly the case that Grayson's trying to make, that he is the traditional fiscal conservative and social conservative preferred by the Kentucky Republican Party. Rand Paul has indicated that he's 100 percent pro-life and, of course, is now running what is probably an effective ad for him by Dr. James Dobson, the Focus on the Family founder, who initially endorsed Trey Grayson and then withdrew it and switched to Paul, claiming that he had been misled by senior GOP figures.
[Guy Raz:] Ronnie, conventional wisdom sort of assumed that Trey Grayson would receive the nomination early on. You've been covering this story for a while. Can you remember the turning point when it started to become clear that Rand Paul might possibly get this nomination?
[Mr. Ronnie Ellis:] You know, at one time, Trey Grayson was seen as the ideal candidate because he'd won two statewide races, including one in which the incumbent Republican governor was swept out of office. And he was seen as someone who could appeal across party lines. Well, that was occurring at the time that Obama was riding his popularity into the White House. But the ground has shifted 180 degrees, and Paul has tapped into that. And all of a sudden, what appeared to be the ideal candidate in one atmosphere is now at a distinct disadvantage in a totally different atmosphere.
[Guy Raz:] Ronnie, on the Democratic side, a pretty tight race for the nomination between Lieutenant Governor Daniel Mongiardo and the Attorney General Jack Conway. Now, the last time, as you know, Kentucky voters elected a Democrat to the Senate was in 1992, when Wendell Ford won re-election. What are the chances a Democrat might defeat the Republican nominee in November?
[Mr. Ronnie Ellis:] The Democrats think that chance is pretty good, especially if Paul is the Republican nominee. I think it's an uphill climb for either of them. It will be a competitive race this fall.
[Guy Raz:] That's Ronnie Ellis. He covers Kentucky politics for the CNHI News Service. He joined me from member station WFPL in Louisville. Ronnie, thanks so much.
[Mr. Ronnie Ellis:] Thank you for having me.

[Alex Chadwick:] From NPR News, it's DAY TO DAY. A remembrance now for the late publisher of the largest Vietnamese newspaper to be produced outside that country. Yen Ngoc Do was 65 years old when he died last week in Orange County, California. Here's DAY TO DAY'S Karen Grigsby Bates.
[Karen Grigsby Bates Reporting:] Mourning in Little Saigon, a thriving community of Vietnamese immigrants in Orange County, began as soon as the news of Yen Do's death was announced. Not long afterwards, mourning also began across the ocean in what had been Saigon 30 years ago. Yen Do's newspaper, the Nguoi Viet Daily News, was the bridge that kept these two communities connected. Like a lot of Vietnamese now living in Orange County, Do and his family fled Saigon when it fell to the communists. Three years later, he and some friends began a newspaper in his home.
[Mr. Jeff Brody:] Yen started Nguoi Viet in his garage and he was the entire newspaper. He did everything.
[Bates:] Jeff Brody teaches communications at Cal State University Fullerton. He and Do were long time colleagues and friends. Everything, Brody says, including writing, editing, serving as the paper's ad salesman, and its typesetter.
[Mr. Jeff Brody:] He even inked in the accent marks on Vietnamese. Because there was no Vietnamese software or no Vietnamese typewriters around, so he had to ink in the accent marks by hand.
[Bates:] Anh Do is now editor of Nguoi Viet. She says she grew up helping her father bundle the newspapers that would be sent to refugee communities around the world. Anh Do says her father thought it was critical that the new arrivals adjust to life in their adopted homeland.
[Ms. Anh Do:] In the beginning it was practicality. He saw that his fellow refugees did not know the basics: what goes on at a PTA meeting, how to apply for a home loan, what do you do when you need to take the driver's test. And so he wanted to go out and do all of these things and write about it and share what he learned.
[Bates:] As it matured, Jeff Brody says Nguoi Viet covered political news that might otherwise have fallen through the cracks.
[Mr. Jeff Brody:] He also was providing news of the homeland that you couldn't find in the mainstream press. So when Vietnam in 1979 had a border war with China, Yen covered that in depth.
[Bates:] Do believed that his paper and his community were parts of a whole. Although the paper was quite profitable, Do himself was not a rich man says Jeff Brody.
[Mr. Jeff Brody:] He gave ownership of the paper to the coworkers, to the editors, to the writers, to the artists, and he gave away his shares in the newspaper. And as a result, Nguoi Viet is owned primarily by the staff. This is like unheard of in a mainstream American newspaper.
[Bates:] So is the availability of the paper's community room to almost anyone in the community that needs it. Nguoi Viet's community room is wide open by Anh Do's mandate. Anh Do says, in the beginning, her father envisioned the room as a way to draw news into the paper from the myriad communities it serves.
[Ms. Anh Do:] They continue to flock there every weekend in my memory.
[Bates:] Today and tomorrow, Vietnamese Americans and others will be flocking to pay their pay their last respects. Anh Do thinks her father, by all reports a man who shied away from calling attention to himself, would be bemused at all the ceremonies surrounding his death.
[Ms. Anh Do:] He's a man who still only has two ties permanently knotted because they're easier to slip on. And the pomp and circumstance can be overwhelming, but I like to see it as he's reuniting people in Little Saigon once again.
[Bates:] Karen Grigsby Bates, NPR News, Los Angeles.
[Alex Chadwick:] DAY TO DAY returns in just a moment.

[Steve Inskeep:] Just in case you can't live without it, here's your update on the latest news from Mel Gibson. Late last week, the actor screened his new film Apocalypto for a few audiences in Oklahoma and in Texas. At one event, Gibson made a comment slamming the war in Iraq. In doing so, the star generated yet another cycle of publicity this time, one that might help his latest movie. NPR's Kim Masters reports.
[Kim Masters:] Mel Gibson doesn't appear in Apocalypto, set for release on December 8th, but he co-wrote and directed it. Set in the final days of the Mayan civilization, the film tells the tale of a young man who flees those who have marked him for sacrifice. It is in a Mayan language and subtitled throughout. Until the past several days, the film had been kept under wraps, as has Gibson himself. Other than issuing statements of apology, the star hasn't granted any interviews since his notorious drunk driving arrest and anti-Semitic outburst in July. But Saturday night, after showing the movie at a film festival in Austin, Texas, Gibson participated in a question and answer session. There, he is reported to have drawn parallels between the decline of the Mayans and the current situation in the United States. Alluding to his film's portrayal of human sacrifice, Gibson asked, what's human sacrifice? If not sending a bunch of guys off to Iraq for no reason.
[Mr. Paul Dergarabedian:] Mel is a one-man publicity machine.
[Kim Masters:] Paul Dergarabedian is a box-office analyst with Exhibitor Relations.
[Mr. Paul Dergarabedian:] You know, you would think that after all the controversy that happened recently with the DUI stop, that he would shy away from making any other kind of public comments that are controversial.
[Kim Masters:] But, Dergarabedian says, Gibson is once again stirring controversy and attracting attention. And while it might seem that slamming the war in Iraq could inflame conservative Christians who made Gibson's last movie, the Passion of the Christ, into a global phenomenon Dergarabedian doesn't think that matters.
[Mr. Paul Dergarabedian:] Expecting the Christian audience who came out for Passion to come out for any movie is kind of a stretch, because the movie, itself, will still have to have appeal to them. I don't know that, necessarily, they're going to say, well Mel brought us Passion of the Christ, now we're going to go see Apocalypto.
[Kim Masters:] Most Hollywood observers would expect a period movie in an ancient language to have its troubles at the box office. But Gibson's latest moves might, in fact, raise Apocalypto's profile and its grosses. Matt Dentler programmed the Fantastic Fest in Austin, along with Harry Knowles, founder of the film geek Web site, AintitCool news.com. Dentler admits that he'd hesitate to criticize Apocalypto since Gibson favored Dentler's fledgling film festival with a screening. But he calls the movie a crackling adventure comparing it with Gibson's 1995 Oscar-winning film about Scotland in the 13th century.
[Mr. Matt Dentler:] It really has a great chance of appealing to the same audiences that went for Braveheart in a big way.
[Kim Masters:] Dentler did say Apocalypto was a bit long at more than two hours. But it's a work-in-progress and Gibson plans to make trims. He also said some in the audience commentated on the extreme violence. Politically, Dentler said the film did seem to allude to contemporary issues though that portion amounted to only a small part of a two-hour plus picture. Disney is releasing the film, though Gibson paid for it as he did for the Passion of the Christ. And he will certainly decide how best to publicize it. At one time the studio harbored Oscar hopes for Apocalypto. By now, those seem to have faded. Kim Masters, NPR News, Los Angeles.

[Liane Hansen:] Hurricane Beta, the 23rd named storm of the season, hit the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua this morning as a Category 2 hurricane with sustained winds of about 110 miles per hour. It has since weakened and become a Category 1 storm. Reporter Lorenda Reddekopp is on the line from Managua. Lorenda, what have you been hearing about this hurricane and the effects it's having?
[Ms. Lorenda Reddekopp:] Well, the communities right nearby where the storm hit which is basically central Nicaragua right on the coast there about in the middle, they're out of communication right now, but there were government officials who did manage to speak with people from there very early in the morning and they said that the communities there are flooded, there are houses that are completely destroyed and the figure that the journalists were given is that there are 13,000 people who are considered at risk.
[Liane Hansen:] Now is this a sparse population or is it a heavily populated area?
[Ms. Lorenda Reddekopp:] I would say it's sparse. There are communities around there that may have up to 2,000 people or 3,000 people, but it's not large cities by any means and it's also difficult to get to the area. There aren't highways to get there. You have to get there by boat. I understand there may be some kind of dirt road to get there as well. And from the nearest city where they're talking about sending aid, I'm told that it's around five hours by boat.
[Liane Hansen:] Reporter Lorenda Reddekopp in Managua, Nicaragua. Lorenda, thanks a lot.
[Ms. Lorenda Reddekopp:] Thank you.

[Ari Shapiro:] Democrats take over the House of Representatives next week, and they're promising to make climate change a bigger issue. Since the midterms, environmental activists have held rallies on Capitol Hill to push for action, and two bipartisan bills were recently introduced to create a carbon tax to address climate change. NPR's Jeff Brady joins us now. Hi, Jeff.
[Jeff Brady, Byline:] Hi, Ari.
[Ari Shapiro:] Let's start with those two bills. People have talked for years about a carbon tax. How would these new proposals work?
[Jeff Brady, Byline:] You can think of them sort of like sin taxes on cigarettes or alcohol. And the basic idea is to put a price on emitting carbon dioxide. CO2 of course it's the main greenhouse gas contributing to climate change. But this carbon tax idea it's been around for a long time. Nothing has really gotten any traction. Talking about increasing taxes you know, that's always hard. And the proposal in Congress now that also would raise gasoline prices quite a bit, probably more than a dollar a gallon over the first decade that it's in place. It also would increase utility bills for a lot of people. Backers of the proposal try to address this by returning the tens of billions of dollars the government would collect to taxpayers in dividend checks.
[Ari Shapiro:] A string of reports lately have warned that unless carbon dioxide emissions are quickly reduced, the effects of climate change are going to get much worse pretty soon. What effect would these proposals have on that trajectory?
[Jeff Brady, Byline:] The folks at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy have a preliminary analysis out. And if the bill in Congress now became law soon, the U.S. likely would reduce its carbon emissions even more than what the country committed to in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. And that makes sense to me because when gas gets up around $4 a gallon, people start buying smaller cars and driving less.
[Ari Shapiro:] What has the response from fossil fuel companies been to this?
[Jeff Brady, Byline:] You know, some big oil companies actually support a price on carbon to address climate change, and that's mostly because they prefer, you know, a market-based solution instead of stricter regulations, which could be coming to address climate change. So companies like ExxonMobil and Conoco they've recently pledged to spend several million dollars to back a different carbon tax plan than what's in Congress now. That one likely will be introduced in the coming year. It's less aggressive on the CO2 reductions, and it includes some provisions that environmental groups certainly don't like. One of those would exempt fossil fuel companies from being sued over climate change. A big utility company called Exelon is also backing that plan. The company has a lot of nuclear power plants which don't produce the carbon emissions that fossil fuel plants do, so they would stand to gain from a carbon tax.
[Ari Shapiro:] And what do newly empowered Democrats want when they talk about addressing climate change in the next couple years?
[Jeff Brady, Byline:] Well, they are not talking about carbon taxes, but we are hearing from especially from young activists asking lawmakers to sign this Green New Deal, and that focuses a lot more on wholesale reforms to the country's energy system, things like mandating a hundred percent renewable energy by a certain time.
[Ari Shapiro:] President Trump questions climate science, and Republicans in the Senate will have more power next year than they did last year. Is there any chance of environmental climate change legislation passing in the next two years in any form?
[Jeff Brady, Byline:] Probably not, but supporters imagine that, you know, the lay of the land might change after the 2020 election, and they want to start a conversation now hoping that by then it'll be easier to get something signed into law. And in the meantime, Democrats say they'll push to address climate change through legislation on infrastructure, and that's something President Trump has talked a lot about.
[Ari Shapiro:] NPR's Jeff Brady, thanks a lot.
[Jeff Brady, Byline:] Thank you, Ari.

[Audie Cornish:] It started off as a sincere, open invitation from a proud father come to his daughter's quinceanera, or 15th birthday party. But then he put it on the internet. It went viral, and it became the butt of many jokes in Mexico. As of now, more than a million people say they will be there for his daughter Rubi's coming-of-age celebration. But as NPR's Carrie Kahn reports, it may be the family that has the last laugh.
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] It was a simple invitation from a humble family deep in Mexico's heartland.
[Crescencio Ibarra:] [Speaking Spanish].
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] "Hi, how's it going?" starts Rubi Ibarra's dad, wearing jeans and a black cowboy hat, standing with his wife wrapped in a pink shawl, their smiling daughter in the middle. In the short video uploaded to Rubi's Facebook page, Dad finishes with an innocent flourish all are invited. Cue the internet.
[Gael Garcia Bernal:] [Speaking Spanish]. [Speaking Spanish].
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] The jokes have been nonstop, poking fun at Pop's wide open invite, customary in small towns and pueblos, like this video by Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal. There are memes galore, too, like all the world's stadiums packed with Rubi's guests and one with Donald Trump peering over a border wall begging for an invite. Rubi has made nonstop TV appearances.
[Crescencio Ibarra:] [Speaking Spanish].
[Unidentified Woman #1:] [Speaking Spanish].
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] And there's plenty of product placements, too. One airline discounted tickets to her home state of San Luis Potosi. Designers sent free dresses. Multi-tiered cakes have been promised. And Spotify uploaded a Rubi quince playlist chock-full of dance favorites. This is the biggest thing to hit Rubi's town, Villa de Guadalupe, with more cattle than the 140 residents, says Mayor Raul Castillo Mendoza.
[Raul Castillo Mendoza:] [Speaking Spanish].
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] "It's put us on the map, for sure," says Castillo. The local hotel with maximum capacity 15 is booked. He's called on neighboring towns to help with security his force only has two patrol cars. I asked Castillo why he thinks Rubi's bash has gained so much attention, thinking maybe Mexicans just need some good light news given the plunge in the peso and the rise in violence.
[Raul Castillo Mendoza:] [Speaking Spanish].
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] "Nah," he says, after some pondering, "most are coming for the 10,000-peso prize for the amateur horse race, the party's big event," he says. And that gets a laugh further south in Mexico's mega-capital where Rubi's quince is talk of the town, radio and TV. At the huge Jamaica Flower Mart, vendor Daniel Hernandez prepares arrangements for an upcoming wedding.
[Daniel Hernandez:] [Speaking Spanish].
[Carrie Kahn, Byline:] "I think it's something the government is pulling off to distract us from all their corruption and lies," says Hernandez. "Besides," he adds to his argument, "it's not really time for quinceaneras. It's wedding season, with people full of their Christmas bonuses and vacation time." Regardless, the party is going ahead as planned on December 26. Rubi's uncle has cleared a nearby field and is setting up tents. They're going for around 250 pesos a night. It's extra, though, if you need an inflatable mattress and sleeping bag. Carrie Kahn, NPR News, Mexico City.

[Scott Simon:] Engineers have deployed robots to the Gulf of Mexico to prepare the sea floor for a 98-ton chamber they hope will contain the ruptured undersea well that's spewing millions of gallons of oil. In Eunice, Louisiana yesterday, family and friends remembered Keith Blair Manuel. He was one of 11 victims of that oil rig explosion that led to the spill in the gulf, and the last to be eulogized. NPR's Larry Abramson visited Eunice and has this report.
[Larry Abramson:] Parents L.D. and Geneva Manuel are sitting in lawn chairs in the backyard of their home in Eunice, gathering their thoughts on the day before they say goodbye to their son, whom they call Blair. They're taking a break from the nonstop news coverage of the oil spill. Geneva Manuel says it's painful to hear the media focus completely on the threat to the environment.
[Ms. Geneva Manuel:] It's not that I'm insensitive to animals or anything else. This is just a time where I don't want to see a dove being cleaned by Dawn liquid when my son is not there.
[Larry Abramson:] In the hallway of their home, the Manuels have a wall of condolence cards they've received. There's a newspaper clipping showing the horrific fire that followed the explosion. The oil platform eventually sank. L.D. is still haunted by the question: What were his son's final moments like? His body was never recovered.
[Mr. L.d. Manuel:] We're going to a burial. What are we going to bury? A memory. No body only a memory.
[Larry Abramson:] The Manuels had to come up with a substitute. At a local funeral home the next day, family and friends dropped mementos into a memory box. Outside, a bus arrives full of officials from MI Swaco, the company Blair Manuel worked for. He didn't work for BP. MI Swaco is one of the countless contractors who do specialized tasks. Blair Manuel was what's known as a mud engineer. Rocco Olivier, a longtime colleague, says he believes his friend was working close to the place where the explosion originated.
[Mr. Rocco Olivier:] That's what we're hoping, that he was very close to where it happened.
[Larry Abramson:] And why do you hope that?
[Mr. Rocco Olivier:] Because it would've been instant. The explosion was so massive, I'm sure it killed everybody instantly.
[Larry Abramson:] Olivier says the company will take care of the family. Some of the other families have filed lawsuits. The Manuels have not yet decided about that. Blair Manuel was 56 years old, a divorced father of three grown daughters. He was about to be married again in July. He also left behind many friends. Hundreds gathered Friday for a Mass at St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church in Eunice. A special Gospel passage was chosen for Blair. It was the story of how Jesus appeared to the Apostles after the resurrection and filled their empty fishing nets.
[Unidentified Man #1:] Blair was such an outdoorsman. He loved fishing and hunting. His hunting buddies called him Grow Bebe, which means big baby.
[Unidentified Man #2:] [Singing] Hallelujah, hallelujah...
[Larry Abramson:] BP faces a lot of questions about safety, about how the rescue of the survivors was handled, but there was no bitterness in this crowd. Many people across this state depend on oil and gas drilling for their daily bread. Blair Manuel's memory box was buried in a local cemetery. His parents would like to see another memorial. They'd like the companies involved in this explosion to bring all 11 families out on a boat to see their final resting place. Larry Abramson, NPR News.

[Renee Montagne:] This next moderate we'll be hearing from is staying a Republican. But Florida Governor Charlie Crist is contemplating a different sort of switch. He's expected to announce whether he'll remain governor or run for the Senate in 2010. Republican Senator Mel Martinez is retiring, and Crist is interested in the job. Although he's very popular in Florida, there are signs that Crist could face significant challenges if he runs for the Senate. From Miami, NPR's Greg Allen reports.
[Greg Allen:] Some recent polls give Charlie Crist nearly a 70 percent approval rating among voters in Florida. Crist has done it by reaching across party lines, working with Democrats on voting on environmental issues. He's also developed a reputation as something of a populist, standing up against insurance companies who wanted rate hikes being one example. Those actions rankled many conservative Republicans. And then in February, Governor Crist appeared with President Obama in Fort Myers, campaigning for passage of the stimulus package.
[Governor Charlie Crist:] This issue of helping our country is about helping our country. This is not about partisan politics. This is about rising above that, helping America and reigniting our economy.
[Greg Allen:] Sid Dinerstein, chairman of the Palm Beach County Republican Party, says that appearance sent a chilling message to the Republican base in Florida. And he says the recent switch of Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter from the Republican to the Democratic Party raises additional questions.
[Mr. Sid Dinerstein:] We Republican voters all of a sudden are looking at our senators or Senate candidates and are saying, is this going to be the guy who turns on the base on a key issue as Arlen Specter has done so many times?
[Greg Allen:] If Charlie Crist decides to seek a second term as governor, most analysts consider him a shoe-in. But at the same time, the consensus among political observers in Florida is that he's going to run for the Senate. If he does, he'll also have to deal with conservative groups from outside Florida. In recent races nationwide, one well-funded group, the Club for Growth, has been active in targeting moderate Republicans, supporting conservative candidates in the primary. Andrew Roth is Club for Growth vice president.
[Mr. Andrew Roth:] From what we've seen so far of his record, we're not very impressed. He supported Obama's stimulus package. He's also -was very hostile to the insurance industry in Florida, driving them out of the state. So right now we're very concerned about his record.
[Greg Allen:] And of course Crist would also face challenges from Democrats. Last week, the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee released its first TV ad of the year and it was aimed at Charlie Crist.
[Unidentified Man:] Christ enjoys being governor when he attends basketball games and Super Bowl activities, and when he takes over 60 days off with no schedule. But now, the job's getting tough, and Christ wants out, leaving Floridians with a mess.
[Greg Allen:] Barack Obama carried Florida in November. And Democrats are hoping that momentum will carry over into next year's Senate race. One of the Democrats running, Congressman Kendrick Meek, is an African-American from South Florida who already has $2 million in the bank. On the Republican side, if he runs for the Senate, Crist will face at least one conservative challenger in the primary, former State House Speaker Marco Rubio, who just announced he's entering the race. And Palm Beach County GOP chair, Sid Dinerstein, says several top Republican officeholders now have their eyes on the governor's mansion.
[Mr. Sid Dinerstein:] It concerns me because if he runs for the Senate, every seat of power in the state then is up for grabs, meaning that we could, on a really bad day, have a Democratic governor, a Democratic attorney general. And of course the governor would go to the Senate, but he would be a moderate Republican.
[Greg Allen:] Ideological purity aside, Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida, says for Republicans, there's still that perennial political question.
[Professor Susan Macmanus:] Do you wan to win, or do you not? And Crist is very popular right now, and I think that's one of those questions that Republicans are going to have to ask themselves.
[Greg Allen:] Whether Crist runs or not, Florida's Senate contest next year is likely to be one of the most closely watched and expensive races in the nation, with each candidate expected to spend as much as $30 million. Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.

[Neal Conan:] I'm Neal Conan, in Washington. After a two-year battle in court, lawyers in Portland, Oregon, said last hour that they'd release hundreds of confidential files kept by the Boy Scouts of America, on men they suspected of sexual abuse. The files went public online, within the last few minutes. The Boy Scouts began keeping what they called "perversion files" more than a hundred years ago, designed to keep track of men who'd been kicked out so that they couldn't just join another troop. A series of reports by the Los Angeles Times on an overlapping, but separate, set of files shows that too often, it didn't work out that way; that some serial abusers slipped through the cracks, that others were given a second chance, that some crimes are covered up and others, never reported to the police. A statement from the Boy Scouts of America reads, in part, "In certain cases, our response to these incidents, and our efforts to protect youth, were plainly insufficient, inappropriate or wrong." The statement offered an apology and stated that today, "scouting is relentlessly focused on prevention of child abuse." We want to hear from scouts and leaders. How has the situation changed 800-989-8255; email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Later in the program, former White House Iran aide Gary Sick reviews the new hostage-crisis movie, "Argo." But first, the perversion files. Jason Felch is an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He's been following this story for a year now, and joins us from a studio at the newspaper. Good of you to be with us today.
[Jason Felch:] Hi, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] And these perversion files if somebody goes online and looks at these that are now available, what's he going to see; what do they look like?
[Jason Felch:] Well, they are often, detailed accounts and often, incomplete accounts of allegations of sexual abuse that emerged over a long span of time; in the case of the files being released today, many years ago. What's inside of the files varies considerably. But you see, often, handwritten accounts by young men, describing their sexual abuse by troop leaders. You see, sometimes, court records or police reports substantiating those allegations. And you see a lot of back-and-forth between local scouting officials and the scouting officials at the national headquarters, about what to do about these allegations.
[Neal Conan:] And obviously, that information varies in every case. Again, you have a separate, but overlapping, set of files going back how far back?
[Jason Felch:] Our files go from 1970 to 1991; and include about half of the files that are being released today, in Oregon.
[Neal Conan:] And the files being released today, in Oregon, are from what, 1965 to 1984.
[Jason Felch:] That's correct.
[Neal Conan:] So as well, tell us about a story that you focused on. Your first piece centered on the case of a man named Richard Turley.
[Jason Felch:] Yeah, Richard Turley was involved in the scouting organization in Canada, and he came down to Southern California in the early 1970s. He kidnapped a young boy in San Diego; was committed to a mental hospital, and was released about 18 months later. And it's then that he got involved in two scout camps here, in Southern California. While at the second scout camp, he allegedly molested three young scouts one night. Boy Scout officials were immediately notified. And they told Turley to leave town and created a perversion file on him. They documented the abuse; they had a statement from one of the fathers of the victims, describing what had happened. But these allegations were not reported to police. As a consequence, they never knew that Turley had recently been committed, as a pedophile, to a mental hospital; and they let him leave town. Richard Turley went back to Canada and continued to abuse boys until he was eventually convicted, in the mid-1990s.
[Neal Conan:] And there are, sadly, too many of these stories. But put it in perspective. Some experts hired by the Boy Scouts, to go through these files said there were more than a million volunteers and troop leaders. This involves just a small fraction of that.
[Jason Felch:] Well, that's certainly true, and I think we don't really know the full scope of sexual abuse in the Boy Scouts of America. What's clear, from these files, is that these are the cases in which allegations in which sexual abuse was brought to the attention of Boy Scout officials, and these allegations made their way up to the national office. What we really don't know and nobody knows is, how often was sexual abuse not reported? From other experts, we know that one in six boys, in America, is sexually abused before he turns age 16, and so the amount of reporting, however, is far, far smaller than that. Sexual abuse in particular, of boys is one of the most often one of the least-reported crimes that experts know about because of the amount of shame usually involved; and because of the practices of the molesters, in seducing or grooming their victims before the abuse occurs. So these 5,000 files that we have, in our L.A. Times database, represent a tip of an iceberg whose true size we just don't know.
[Neal Conan:] And again, if people want to examine that database, they can go to your website and take a look at it.
[Jason Felch:] That's right, latimes.comboyscouts has both our coverage and our database. Anybody who's been involved in scouting over the years, can go and look up to see if allegations were ever raised about their troop.
[Neal Conan:] And this involves there's a link to that site at our website npr.org; click on TALK OF THE NATION. This involves every state in the union.
[Jason Felch:] That's correct, every state in the union. We did some statistical analysis of the cases that we were able to review; some 5,000 cases that we had information on. And it's not a complete portrait, but what we could tell was that about a third of the men who were expelled from scouting, on allegations of sexual abuse, were married. That number could be higher; there were a number of cases where it wasn't clear, their marital status. About half of them did not have children in the scouting organization, which would raise questions about why they were involved in Scouts. Most people think that the leaders of Scout troops are usually parents of kids in the program. And we also found that in more than 40 percent of the cases, the men who were accused of molesting scouts, were accused of molesting multiple boys. In other words, the 5,000 cases represent many, many more actual victims in those cases.
[Neal Conan:] And "accused" is another important word. These are allegations. In some cases, yes, these men were tried and convicted. In many others, they were not.
[Jason Felch:] That's true, and it's one of the consequences of not reporting these crimes to the police. We took a close look at 500 cases in which the Boy Scouts were the first to learn about sexual abuse; where they received reports of abuse directly from a child, or from a child's parent, and were faced with the decision about what to do about it. In those 500 cases, 80 percent of them were not reported to authorities. And in about 100 of them, there were explicit signs of scouting officials being involved in cover-ups so misleading parents about the reasons why a man was leaving the troop; overt efforts to help that man cover his tracks. As a result, many of these cases have never been reported to police and certainly, never been heard in court. And one of the noteworthy things about the release today, in Oregon, is about 1,200 men alleged but not ever convicted, are about to be named publicly.
[Neal Conan:] And that's among the reasons the Boy Scouts give for being so reluctant to release these files. As you pointed out in your reporting, other experts have said, if we'd had access to this material this is a treasure trove of allegations of sexual abuse we could have discovered patterns, we could have figured things out long before we did; this is something that would have been incredibly useful.
[Jason Felch:] Yeah, the experts we spoke to said that really, awareness about this type of molestation which they refer to as "acquaintance molestation" really came together in the expert community, and in the general public, in the 1980s. The Boy Scouts have been keeping these files since the 1900s the early 1900s. And so some believe that had this these files been made available publicly to experts, that they might have understood the way these predators operate better. When we analyzed the files, we found very clear evidence of grooming behavior throughout the files. Grooming behavior is the kind of seduction process that child molesters use while recruiting, if you will, their young victims. They allow them to break the rules; they allow them to drive their cars, to drink alcohol, to watch pornography together. This escalates into you know, skinny-dipping and sharing tents together, and that kind of contact; and ultimately, cumulates in abuse. What the grooming process does, experts say, is make sure that when abuse does occur, the boys have been compromised, in a way; and have basically been recruited, and made to feel like accomplices. And that really increases the likelihood that they will not report abuse, when it happens. That's one of the reasons why this is such an under-reported crime.
[Neal Conan:] We want to hear from former scouts, and former scout leaders. How has the institution changed 800-989-8255; email us, talk@npr.org. We'll start with Logan, Logan with us from Salt Lake City.
[Logan:] Hey, hi. How are you? Love the show.
[Neal Conan:] Good, thank you.
[Logan:] Good. Well, yeah, I just wanted to call in because, you know, I had an amazing scoutmaster, growing up. And you know, he had this bus that he painted camouflage colors because we went camping all the time. And he took us once a month, from the time that I was 12 years old until I was 18; went with my brother, and all of our friends. And he was just such an amazing guy that it's so hard when you hear stories like this because I think of how it was such a positive influence in my life, and I really think helped model me. And so it's disappointing to hear about, you know, all these cases that, I think, really kind of dilute people's idea about what Scouts can mean, and what the Boy Scout program is; when it seems especially like, you know, it's such a case-by-case scenario. My scoutmaster, you know, was an incredible guy and had such a positive influence on my life. I feel like it's a real tragedy, to hear about how opposite other people's experiences can be.
[Neal Conan:] And I don't know if you have a son, Logan. But if you did, would you think twice, if he wanted to join the Scouts?
[Logan:] You know, it's I don't have one yet, but it's something that my I mean, my wife and I have talked about everything from sleepovers to Boy Scouts. And I think it's definitely something that we're going to have to look at seriously because it's just so different than it was when I was growing up.
[Neal Conan:] Logan, thanks very much for the call; appreciate it.
[Logan:] Yeah. Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] And Jason Felch, I think a lot of people are having second thoughts because well, this is truly disturbing material. This is such a trusted organization.
[Jason Felch:] The stories in the files are awful, in many ways. And you're right the Boy Scouts of America is a very trusted institution. And I think that adds to some of the pain of these revelations. In a way, the Boy Scouts were proactive in, you know really, going back to the 1900s, the early 1900s, in creating these files as a way to try to keep these men out. And because other organizations haven't been keeping such files and those files haven't been made public we don't know how abuse rates compare, in the Boy Scouts, to other organizations. We do know that there are unique opportunities that the Boy Scouts offers and to access children. And because of that, they have a unique responsibility to protect children.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking about today's release of thousands of pages of documents from what the Scouts dubbed the perversion files. We want to hear from scouts and leaders. How has the institution changed 800-989-8255; email talk@npr.org. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News. This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan. We're talking about the thousands of documents made public earlier this hour, that detail decades of allegations of sexual abuse in the Boy Scouts; what the Scouts themselves call the perversion files. The Oregon Supreme Court ordered today's release, a batch of documents that covers a period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. The Portland lawyers who posted them held a news conference in the last hour, and pressed the Boy Scouts of America to release all files to date. Our focus today is on the lessons to be learned from these listings of allegations of abuse. We want to hear from scouts and leaders. How has the institution changed 800-989-8255; email talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Our guest is Jason Felch, an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times; who began reporting on another, overlapping group of these files, a year ago. We've posted a link to his series of investigative stories, at npr.org. And let's go next to this is Keith [ph. And Keith, with us from Roseburg in Oregon.
[Keith:] Hello there.
[Neal Conan:] Hi, you're on the air; go ahead, please.
[Keith:] Oh, thank you. Well, I am an Eagle Scout; I got my Eagle back in 1985. Three of my brothers are Eagle Scouts, and I had a very positive scouting experience. Honestly...
[Neal Conan:] And?
[Keith:] ...I...
[Neal Conan:] Go ahead.
[Keith:] OK, I was going to say that I believe that the time has come, though, for a RICO investigation of Boy Scouts because I believe they've been complicit in criminal behavior. And their continued discrimination about against gay and lesbians, and against atheists, has demonstrated that this organization is of the 20th century, and not of the current era. The Girl Scouts, comparatively, have been much more welcoming, much more inclusive.
[Neal Conan:] RICO of course, Racketeering in Corrupt Organizations, a federal statute designed to combat organized crime. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: RICO is an acronym for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.] Jason Felch, any indication that any criminal charges might result from the release of these files?
[Jason Felch:] Well, I think racketeering might go a bit far, frankly. But there is plenty of evidence in the files that explicits documented allegations of sexual abuse were not reported to law enforcement. Some of those failures-to-report likely happened after state laws required reporting of sexual abuse. It varies considerably, state by state, when that happened. So what legal experts tell us is that the age of these files most of these files are from 20 or 30, or even 40 years ago would probably bar any criminal action being taken. There is a small possibility of criminal action being taken against the alleged molesters. A handful of states do allow sexual abuse crimes to be reported well after the fact. I think, far more likely, is civil litigation against the Boy Scouts of America. There's already been repeated waves of civil litigation, over the years, against the Boy Scouts because of alleged mishandling of sexual abuse. I think what's going to happen, as people all around the country learn about these cases you're going to see men who perhaps did undergo sexual abuse while in the Boy Scouts, be triggered by this event, by this media attention to this; and start to come to terms with something that happened to them long ago. This has been seen, time and again, with victims of sexual abuse; that it's often, only years later that they really face what happened to them in their childhood. And in some cases, that will lead to lawsuits.
[Neal Conan:] As Keith noted, the Boy Scouts of America discriminate against homosexuals; that's their right, as a private organization. I wonder, though in the files, did they also keep track of alleged or openly gay scoutmasters? Did they sometimes conflate homosexuality with sexual abuse?
[Jason Felch:] Yeah, you see that repeatedly, in the files. Men preying on young boys is often described, in the files, as "showing homosexual tendencies." The experts tell us that there really is a distinction between pedophilia and homosexuality, obviously; and but I think the conflation of those two by the Boy Scouts in the '60s, '70s and '80s, reflected a misunderstanding in those years, about the nature of these tendencies. The Boy Scouts have excluded homosexuals for years, and have included and banned homosexuals from participating in the organization. By and large, adult homosexuals engaged in homosexuality with other adult men, were not included in these so-called perversion files. For the most part, the perversion files include allegations of men abusing boys. And again, experts make a clear distinction between that and homosexuality.
[Neal Conan:] Polly Dunn is a child psychologist; the director of the Auburn University Psychological Services Center. Earlier this summer, she wrote a piece for her blog, childpsychmom.com, about the tough questions that parents might want to ask caregivers about sexual abuse; questions like, are all of your employees and volunteers trained on how to prevent and respond to child sexual abuse? Do you conduct background checks on all of your employees and volunteers? Polly Dunn joins us now from her office in Auburn, Alabama. Nice to have you with us today.
[Polly Dunn:] Thank you, it's glad I'm glad to be here.
[Neal Conan:] And I understand, you're a mother of four, yourself. I wonder do you ask these questions?
[Polly Dunn:] Sometimes, I do; I've tried to ask them. And sometimes, it's kind of uncomfortable to say these things. And so I have definitely tried to do it, when I can.
[Neal Conan:] And as you say, it's sometimes uncomfortable not just for you, but the person getting the questions.
[Polly Dunn:] Absolutely. What I found is that if you ask if you ask people about what their one-adult-one-child interactions are allowed with their group, then they end up being kind of OK with it. The question is not so scary as if you say, what are your policies about sexual abuse? If you just ask them, can my child be left alone with an adult? And they'll tell you yes or no, pretty easily.
[Neal Conan:] And, you know, that's one thing as you say, uncomfortable enough when you're dealing with an organization like the YMCA or the Boy Scouts, or something like that. Babysitter?
[Polly Dunn:] Oh, yes, I've absolutely asked a babysitter. Of course, you're going to be one-adult-one child potentially, if you only have one child when you hire a babysitter. But you can have the opportunity to kind of drop in on the babysitter; do a background check. You can also just ask your child questions like, what did you do while you were with the babysitter? What kind of activities did you participate in? And if they can't really answer you clearly, then there's a problem there. You want to ask them more questions about what happened during their time alone.
[Neal Conan:] And you can put up one of those cameras, if you're concerned, as well as long as it's in your own home. But outside the home, that's where you want to say, is there a written policy? And if not, why not.
[Polly Dunn:] Yeah, you always want to ask. Anywhere your child is going where you're not there, you want to know what types of policies they have that keep your children safe. Background checks are really important for all employees, and volunteers, of youth-serving organizations. I mean, everybody needs to be trained on how to prevent and respond to child sexual abuse so that if something does happen, they know what to do. But the more important thing is keeping people preventing child sexual abuse. And they can do that if they keep these one-adult-and-one-child interactions to a minimum.
[Neal Conan:] And it's interesting you also pointed out in the piece, this doesn't have to be an accusatory you know, interrogation. It can open a dialogue. If a place doesn't have a written policy, they might want to seriously think about writing one.
[Polly Dunn:] Absolutely. I mean, I have found that when I've asked questions, sometimes people do not have a policy at all, and they haven't really even thought about it; but that after we've asked the question, parents have talked to the teachers or the caregivers that they end up deciding to implement a policy. I mean, it's important in this day and age especially after what has happened at Penn State for all youth-serving organizations to have some sort of policy; that they know what to do, in the event of child sexual abuse.
[Neal Conan:] And...
[Jason Felch:] Neal, if I may?
[Neal Conan:] Go ahead, please, Jason Felch.
[Jason Felch:] The Boy Scouts has had such a policy since 1987 barring one-on-one contact between scout leaders and youth and discouraged that behavior long before that. What we found was that there's a big difference between having a written policy at the national office of an organization; and how that policy is enforced, and carried out, on the ground particularly an organization like the Boy Scouts, which is run by some 3 by some million volunteers, all across the country. So I think another important question to ask is not just, what is the policy, but how do you know if the policy is being followed?
[Neal Conan:] And is there any way to track that, Polly Dunn?
[Polly Dunn:] Absolutely. You can check in on what types of things are going on with the organizations that your child participate in. For example, if your child was at a youth group or at their daycare, you can notice; you can ask other parents if they've seen instances where there have been one-adult-one-child interactions. And I think if you ask the questions not necessarily about what's the written policy of the national organization; but you could even ask the question that says, how do you implement your national policy at the local level?
[Neal Conan:] And would you recommend, Polly Dunn, if these files are now available; and there is that database available, for anybody to look at at the Los Angeles Times, of the files they've had a look at where there's information available, go look. Go see if your local organization has ever been involved in something like this.
[Polly Dunn:] I would. I would also do the checks that you can do for sexual offenders in your community. That's been available for a long time, online. You can just check for any sexual offender in your particular community.
[Neal Conan:] Polly Dunn, thanks very much for your time today.
[Polly Dunn:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Polly Dunn, a child psychologist, director of the Auburn University Psychological Services Center; with us from a studio there, at the university. You can find a link to her blog post "Tough Questions For Caregivers About Child Sexual Abuse," at our website. Again, that's npr.org; click on TALK OF THE NATION. And Barry is on the line. Barry, with us from Paw Paw, Wiscon Paw Paw, Michigan; excuse me.
[Barry:] Yeah. Hi. How are you doing? A longtime listener, love the show.
[Neal Conan:] Thank you.
[Barry:] I've been in Scouts for probably, 15 years. And one of the things, I'll say, that's been good in Scouts is their youth protection, and the training that they've done. When I first started out, you know, we didn't know anything what was going on. And their youth protection is meant to help protect the adult leader as well as the individual. You should never, ever, ever have one-on-one contact. There should always be two adults and one youth, or one youth or yeah or two youths and one adult. I mean, it should always be that way. And the one thing that I've noticed outside of the scouting organization, is sometimes high school coaches will want will take their a kid home from school. And with through my Scout training, I'll go, man, dude, you are messing up. That's one thing I've really liked about Scouts.
[Neal Conan:] But as far as you can see your experience, this policy of never having a one-on-one, that's adhered to; and that's how you're trained.
[Barry:] That isn't there's a written law, as far as how a troop should operate. And we have canceled campouts because we have not had two adults on a campout. I mean, that is rule number one that they teach new youth leaders and the youth, because when you open up the Scout book, there's a manual on the rules that you should have when they're with adults.
[Neal Conan:] Barry, thanks very much for your time.
[Barry:] Yeah. Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Here's an email that we have from Andy. He writes: I think it's very important to note the impact that this kind of behavior has on scouting not only to the unfortunate victims of molestation, but to their kids and grandkids. My father was allegedly molested in the 1950s, by his scout leader in Wichita. He has now, after 50 years, come and attributed much of his subsequent alcoholic and abusive behavior to the molestation. He's left the country, become estranged from his family, and has been no part of the lives of two of his grandkids. The problem is documented, and the 5,000 cases are tragic. But it needs to be recognized that the extent of the tragedy this exposes, is only skin deep. And Jason Felch, that's an important point. These cases reverberate through time.
[Jason Felch:] It's chilling, when you speak to victims of sexual abuse not just in the Boy Scouts, but elsewhere just how deep an impact one, terrible incident on one night, as a 10-year-old how that can reverberate through a young person's life, into their adulthood. One gentleman I spoke with, who had gone through this and did not want to revisit it, told me that he was afraid that talking about this would open a Pandora's box in his life. This is something that really has an altering alters the course of young people's lives, when it happens to them, and should not be dismissed lightly. One of the things that we see one of the disturbing patterns that we saw in the files, time and again, was men who were victims of sexual abuse in the Boy Scouts who, as they grew up, became assistant scoutmasters to the men who had abused them, and went on to participate in abuse themselves; victims who themselves became molesters, repeating the behavior that they learned. This is not uncommon. And it's a terrible consequence one of the many terrible consequences of sexual abuse.
[Neal Conan:] Jason Felch, an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News. As we mentioned, at a news conference in the past hour, lawyers in Portland who obtained the release of these documents, were speaking with reporters. Lawyer Kelly Clark argued today that far too little has changed within the Boy Scouts organization.
[Kelly Clark:] One of the questions we have for the Boy Scouts is, if the programs are so good, the policies are so well-improved, then why is it still happening? We will post the links to these stories later today. And you can see for yourself, it is still happening. It is still happening.
[Neal Conan:] And Jason Felch, obviously, you've been reporting on files from some years ago. Any indication that Kelly Clark, the lawyer there, is correct; that it's still happening?
[Jason Felch:] Well, we know it's still happening, both from news clips I mean, if you follow the news on this, you'll see that with some regularity, there are reports of men involved in scouting, being arrested for molestation or for or child pornography, or related charges. Our data in our database ends at 2005. But what we saw is that in 2002, 2003, 2004, the Boy Scouts were creating about a hundred new perversion files a year; expelling men who had been accused of sexual molestation. We don't know how that rate, if you will, has changed, since 2005. The Boy Scouts continue to open perversion files, when they have reasonable suspicion of men involved in sexual abuse. But they haven't made that information public. And so one of the things that the Oregon attorneys called for today, was for the Boy Scouts to be more transparent in general, about their more recent handling of sexual abuse. And...
[Neal Conan:] And I wanted to play that cut of tape again. This is Kelly Clark, the lawyer in Portland, who said these kinds of files must all be made public, even though allegations are just allegations.
[Kelly Clark:] Child abuse thrives in secrecy. And organizations need to be able to see what mistakes other organizations made, that I would hope, for example, that in addition to turning these files over to law enforcement, that they would release them to the public. There is no reason not to. One of the things you will hear from the Scouts I don't know if Scouts Canada says it, but Scouts America says it that we don't want these files made public because we want to be able to assure people of their confidentiality, so they will continue to report into the system. And the problem with that argument is that they never told anybody about the system. They tried to keep the very existence of the perversion files confidential.
[Neal Conan:] And people can say they're trying to protect the organization. They're trying to cover up some percentage and we don't know what percentage but some percentage of these allegations are going to be false, incorrect.
[Jason Felch:] That's true. And to be honest, many of these cases were not thoroughly investigated. So oftentimes, what you'll see is a young boy coming forward, his parents coming forward; approaching the scouts and saying, my son was molested by Mr. X. And the scouts would quickly remove Mr. X, create the perversion file; sometimes report him to police, sometimes not report him to police. But one thing that didn't happen is there was no thorough investigation within scouting, about how many other boys might have been victimized by this man. And in those cases in the 80 percent of cases that we found where the Scouts did not report it to police, law enforcement was never contacted. So, of course, there's never been a court case. Some of these men might be innocent. The Scouts did have a relatively high bar, however, before they would open a file.
[Neal Conan:] Jason Felch, thanks very much for your time.
[Jason Felch:] Thank you, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] And again, there's a link to Jason Felch's story in the Los Angeles Times, at our website. Go to npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Up next, Gary Sick, a White House adviser on Iran during the hostage crisis, on "Argo" and history. Stay with us TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News.

[Steve Inskeep:] Mardi Gras came to its cheerfully demented end in New Orleans last night. Some people celebrated in costumes made of blue tarps, the kind that have covered roof damage since Hurricane Katrina. They turned the tarps into ball gowns, or nun's habits.
[Renee Montagne:] A parade also ran wound through Biloxi, Mississippi. People took a break from fixing homes to fix parade floats damaged in the storm.
[Steve Inskeep:] The celebrations can make up in advance for what people are about to miss. For many Christians, this day, Ash Wednesday, starts a season of fasting or other acts of penance.

[Linda Wertheimer:] Today in Your Health, just how safe is hormone replacement therapy? But first, Alison Kodjak on a new study showing prescription drug use is on the rise.
[Alison Kodjak, Byline:] Sixty percent of adults take prescription medications. In a study from Harvard's public health school shows that number has been increasing steadily for more than a decade. Lead author Elizabeth Kantor says there are lots of reasons why medication use is growing.
[Elizabeth Kantor:] There's the whole obesity epidemic. There's policy changes and new recommendations coming out and drugs entering the market and exiting the market. And there's so many things happening at once that I think it's really hard to pinpoint exactly what's driving each trend.
[Alison Kodjak, Byline:] The study shows the most widely used drugs treat diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. But an intriguing finding is the spike in the use of antidepressants. The number of people over 40 being treated for depression has doubled in the last decade.
[Walid Gellad:] I would say that's concerning.
[Alison Kodjak, Byline:] Walid Gellad is a professor of medicine and health policy at the University of Pittsburg.
[Walid Gellad:] Some may need to be on the medication, but why are rates so high?
[Alison Kodjak, Byline:] One clue a separate study last week showed suicides and drug overdoses among middle-aged white people are soaring. Overall, Gellad says, the growing use of medications in general may be good news or not.
[Walid Gellad:] If you're on five pills and you need to be and it's improving your life, making you feel better and reducing your risk of heart attacks, you know, that's good. But if everyone is on five medicines because doctors aren't taking the time to talk to them or we're not exercising enough or eating too much salt or whatever it might be, that's a problem.
[Alison Kodjak, Byline:] He says the study is a good base to begin to figure that out. Alison Kodjak, NPR News.

[Steve Inskeep:] And I'm Steve Inskeep. Good morning. All this year's debate and protest over immigration has left one giant question unanswered. The question is whether Congress will actually change immigration law lawmakers are deeply divided. It is possible to imagine a compromise, as we'll here in a moment, but yesterday lawmakers put their differences on display. Senators turned up in Philadelphia to highlight the value of foreign workers, even those who came here illegally. Members of the House went to the opposite coast to make an opposing point. In San Diego, they stressed the need for tighter border security. Our coverage starts with NPR's Carrie Kahn.
[Carrie Kahn Reporting:] California Congressman Ed Royce picked a San Diego border patrol station to hold his Terrorism Subcommittee hearing in hopes of drumming up public support for the House immigration bill. Royce says by building more fences and hiring thousands of agents, the border will be safer.
[Representative Ed Royce:] Immigration reform must be national security reform. Our country has made progress in fighting terrorism since 911, but in some areas we're losing ground, including the most fundamental task of securing our physical borders.
[Kahn:] Republicans highlighted the potential for terrorists coming into the U.S. from Mexico. Sheriff Rick Flores of Webb County, Texas, testified that he and his handful of deputies are outnumbered by drug dealers and smugglers. Congressman Ted Poe of Houston asked him about even greater threats.
[Representative Ted Poe:] Explain why, in your opinion, al-Qaida would set up operation in Mexico and come here.
[Sheriff Rick Flores:] Well, Mr. Poe, it's very easy for these people to go ahead and blend in in Mexico, learn the language, learn the culture, and camouflage themselves as Mexicans crossing the border.
[Representative Ted Poe:] Is it your opinion that that may happen, may even actually be going on?
[Sheriff Rick Flores:] It's probably already happened.
[Kahn:] House Democrats are quick to point to vulnerabilities at the Canadian border, which one Congressional study put at greater risk for terrorist incursions. And on several occasions, Democrats blamed six years of the Bush administration for failing to control the nation's borders. But Republicans pressed on. Newly elected Congressman Brian Bilbray, from San Diego, asked the local head of the border patrol why his agency can't do more to crack down on local gathering spots for illegal immigrants. Border Chief Darryl Griffen said his agents focus on the major hubs like bus stations and airports.
[Chief Patrol Agent Darryl Griffen:] That is our focus.
[Representative Brian Bilbray:] Chief, in my neighborhood, the Home Depot is a major hub. It's a community center.
[Kahn:] The ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, Congressman Brad Sherman from Los Angeles, interrupted.
[Representative Brad Sherman:] Mr. chairman, if I could just comment. Our subcommittee focuses on terrorism, and I doubt there are many terrorists at Home Depot.
[Representative Ed Royce:] We are going to now ask...
[Kahn:] Chairman blasted Republicans for putting on, what he said was, a dog and pony show stacked with sympathetic witnesses. But not all of them helped the cause. Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca told lawmakers that a massive crackdown on illegal immigration might cost more than many Americans are willing to pay.
[Sheriff Lee Baca:] This is not an issue that can be easily dealt with with a simple solution. We don't have enough prisons in America, or enough local jails in America, to incarcerate employers and their workers combined. They're not there.
[Kahn:] While opponents of illegal immigration filled the hearing room and overflowed to a tent outside, immigrant supporters gathered down the street. Mariachi musicians sang of eluding the border patrol. And many spoke in support of the Senate's immigration bill, which would give millions of illegal migrants a chance at U.S. citizenship. Local labor leader, Jerry Butkiewicz, says it's time for real reform.
[Mr. Jerry Butkiewicz:] When people come to this country and they are willing to work hard, and they are willing to pay taxes, and they are willing to abide by our laws, they are willing to contribute to our economy, they have a right to real immigration reform. They have a right to citizenship.
[Kahn:] Activists on both sides of the debate say they will follow the House Republicans to Laredo, Texas, where the next hearing is scheduled to take place tomorrow. Carrie Kahn, NPR News, San Diego.

[Renee Montagne:] Today is Election Day in Israel, and the vote's expected to be close. Opinion polls show a tight race between the conservative Likud Party and the centrist Kadima, but since Israel's war in Gaza last month, support has surged for the ultra-right-wing candidate, Avigdor Lieberman. From Jerusalem, NPR's Eric Westervelt reports.
[Eric Westervelt:] Capitalizing on security concerns, popularity for Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu, or Israel Our Homeland Party, has soared following the Gaza offensive. Lieberman has pledged to get even tougher with militants in Gaza. He supports expanding Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, and he has assailed Israeli Arabs who make up 20 percent of the Israeli population as a treacherous force eroding the Jewish state from within. His slogan no loyalty, no citizenship has resonated with many on the right. Ashqelon area farmer Schmel Hashby...
[Mr. Schmel Hashby:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Eric Westervelt:] Didn't you see during the Gaza war how they were all protesting against us, against the state? And they get social security from us. They get all these benefits. It's outrageous. The strong showing for Lieberman threatens to draw votes away from Likud, which is exactly what the centrist Kadima Party is hoping for. Beverly Jamil runs an electronics store in Ashqelon, a city that was pounded by rockets during the Gaza war, what she calls weeks of hell. Jamil says she's voting for the ruling Kadima Party and says she rejects Lieberman's attempt to gain power by attacking Israeli Arabs.
[Ms. Beverly Jamil:] He's a racist, and I'm not racist. I don't have a problem with the Palestinian people. I have a problem with Hamas. You've got to split the two things up. Hamas are terrorists and the Palestinian civilians are Palestinian civilians; to me it's two completely different kinds of people.
[Eric Westervelt:] Opinion polls show that some 15 to 20 percent of the electorate is still undecided. Taken together, though, the rise of Avigdor Lieberman and sustained support for Likud make it likely the next Israel governing coalition will be dominated by the right wing. Eric Westervelt, NPR News, Jerusalem.

[Tony Cox:] I'm Tony Cox in Washington. Neal Conan is away. As America's foreclosure crisis grinds on, it becomes challenging to wade through the statistics but not forget that behind the numbers are millions of families that had to pack up their clothes and pictures, move out of their homes and start over. Foreclosures are difficult enough for adults, but what about the kids? How are they affected by being uprooted so helplessly? A May 2008 study from First Focus predicted nearly two million children would be affected by foreclosure by the end of 2010. Now, economists predict that the foreclosure crisis will be worse in 2010 than it was in 2009. What happens to the growing number of children caught up in this maelstrom? In a moment, we'll hear three perspectives, starting with USA Today real estate reporter Stephanie Armour, who has been covering the foreclosure story. And later in the hour, NPR senior news analyst Ted Koppel joins us to talk about the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and his view that Americans are not sacrificing enough for a nation at war. But first, we want to hear from the parents who have gone through a foreclosure. What impact did it have on your children? Our number here in Washington is 1-800-989-8255. The email address is talk@npr.org. And you can join the conversation at our website. Just go to npr.org, and click on TALK OF THE NATION. Stephanie Armour joins us now in Studio 3A. Stephanie, welcome.
[Ms. Stephanie Armour:] Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.
[Tony Cox:] This is really a big story that I don't know gets enough attention, and I know that you have...
[Ms. Stephanie Armour:] No, it really doesn't.
[Tony Cox:] Yeah, it really doesn't, and you've been writing about it, very well as a matter of fact, for some time now. Let's begin with this. Give us a sense from what you know of how big an issue, crisis this is, especially for the children.
[Ms. Stephanie Armour:] I think it's actually quite a big issue that really has been significantly overlooked both in terms of the research that's being done but also really in the media, as well. We the most recent study that's been done, in and of itself, is quite old, and it looks at an estimated two million children being affected by the foreclosure crisis. But that study, in and of itself, looks predominately at the subprime loans that were moving into foreclosure. And at this point, we have more prime loans, which are loans made to creditworthy, prime borrowers that are now going into delinquency. In fact, the whole tenor of the foreclosure problem has changed so that the borrowers today that are going into foreclosure are really middle to high income earners that have lost jobs because on unemployment. So this is a whole other demographic group of children, children of these parents that are suddenly losing their homes.
[Tony Cox:] But the result is the same, isn't it, whether you're low income or high income.
[Ms. Stephanie Armour:] Yeah. It definitely is, but the numbers are far beyond the two million number that was reported before. There are far more children now being affected than there were when that study was first done. So the magnitude of the problem has only gotten worse. And what you're seeing is children, especially in the Sun Belt states like Arizona, California, Texas, Nevada, that are losing their homes and in some areas whole communities where schools are losing vast numbers of children, schools themselves being closed because so many children are losing homes and having to leave the communities where they've been.
[Tony Cox:] Are you able to put in perspective for us, Stephanie, whether or not these foreclosures are primarily affecting families, or are they, you know, they could be couples or elderly people, for example. But are we really talking about, in the main, families who are hit by these foreclosures, prime or otherwise?
[Ms. Stephanie Armour:] Yeah, one of the most recent studies that was done was in May by the University of Arkansas, and it was really telling. It did find that the majority of people who were being hit by foreclosures were couples with children, usually with a small number of children. So that was quite telling. There were people who had really bought into the housing bubble, quite frankly, who had kind of bought into the housing property prices that were climbing and climbing and kind of gotten a bit overextended. So these were families with children.
[Tony Cox:] Joining us now to talk more about the impact of foreclosure on children is Kathy Pettit, senior researcher at the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute and director of a project examining the effects of foreclosure on children and schools in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and New York City. She also joins us here in Studio 3A. Kathy, nice to have you.
[Ms. Kathryn L.s. Pettit:] Nice to be here.
[Tony Cox:] Before you give us some of the results of your study, is there a particular reason that the Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and New York City areas were selected for your research?
[Ms. Pettit:] Certainly. The project has been funded by the Open Society Institute, which has their homes in Baltimore and New York, so that was of particular interest. We're also three members of the Neighborhood Indicators Partnership. So we had the data available, as Stephanie allocated, that it's very difficult to figure out the numbers around these, around these problems.
[Tony Cox:] So let's talk about what the problems are, all right, in terms of the children who are impacted by foreclosure. I'm assuming that the biggest thing is being uprooted and having to leave the comfort of your home and your friends and your school.
[Ms. Pettit:] We think that there's three ways that kids are affected by foreclosure. First is just the family turmoil. So even before losing your home, the stress that parents are feeling over their financial difficulties, qualitative work has shown greater levels of anxiety and depression among parents going through this problem. So that can happen even before the move is the move actually occurs. The next one, as you said, is kids have to switch neighborhoods or schools, and that dislocation can affect their educational progress and social development. And finally, I think that this was alluded to, kids living in neighborhoods or schools where this is affected. So their families may not even be in foreclosure, but they are still being impacted by their surrounding area.
[Tony Cox:] Well, that was a question I was going to ask you because kids moving from one place to another is not a new phenomenon.
[Ms. Pettit:] Right.
[Tony Cox:] Is there a quantifiable difference in a child who is moved because of a foreclosure as opposed to just moving from one place to another?
[Ms. Pettit:] We don't have enough information about how foreclosure is different from other moves, but we do know from research that frequent mobility does harm kids' educational progress. So in one study, children with two school changes in two years were half as likely to be as proficient in reading and math.
[Tony Cox:] And it appears from the research that you have done and from the reporting that Stephanie has done that it's about to get worse...
[Ms. Pettit:] Definitely.
[Tony Cox:] ...as we begin a new school year.
[Ms. Pettit:] Right, right. And I think in our study so far, which are three central cities, so it wouldn't necessarily represent some of the Sun Belt areas or the suburban areas, 25 to 40 percent of the foreclosures had public schoolchildren, which is the group we're looking at. But some of these are multi-family buildings that may have dozens of kids in one building that goes under foreclosure.
[Tony Cox:] Is there anything we're identifying what the problem is, and we know that it's not a good thing, but are there any kinds of, I don't know, programs, or is something being done to help these kids manage through this difficult transitional period?
[Ms. Pettit:] So we aren't familiar with any programs that specifically focus on kids in foreclosure, but definitely the number one recommendation we have is to prevent foreclosure, to urge families who are going through this to get help sooner and to seek out counseling, and that would be the biggest impact on the problem.
[Tony Cox:] Are you finding that older children, let's say high school age, middle school, even, who are affected by families who are being foreclosed on, are they being encouraged, forced, required to go and work to help the family?
[Ms. Pettit:] I'm not sure about that.
[Tony Cox:] Stephanie, your research, your reporting has shown that you talked about the Sun Belt and the problems that are there, and Kathy has already just talked about the Northeast and the corridor that is there. Are you finding any place where people are handling this better than others?
[Ms. Stephanie Armour:] That's a good question. Certainly California has grappled with this. They've had some schools that have been back when I was doing my reporting, I remember that there were some schools that were looking at the issue of whether students that were leaving the district because of a foreclosure should be allowed to remain in the school district not necessarily because they were homeless but because of a foreclosure. At this point, I don't know how that was decided, but that was something that was being discussed. I know that a number of the psychologists I talked with in California were very much aware of this issue. Whether there were actual programs being done, I don't recall. But it was certainly something that they were seeing and were talking about with among themselves as this being an issue.
[Tony Cox:] How are you able to identify, and I'll ask both of you to answer this if you can, Stephanie and Kathy as well, how you are able to identify when a child has been displaced because of foreclosure. I mean, they don't have a sign on them that just lets you know. So how do you how is it determined?
[Ms. Stephanie Armour:] That's a very good question, and in fact, in a number of school districts, parents are taking really Herculean measures to try and hide that children are being relocated due to a foreclosure because they don't want their students to be forced to leave the school. In some cases, some of the school districts were actually hiring detectives or putting on their website a phone number that people could call anonymously to report that a child had been relocated out of the district, and the parents were hiding that. So it's not apparent that that's happened, and it's something people were trying to hide.
[Tony Cox:] Is that part of your research, also?
[Ms. Pettit:] Our local schools do have homeless coordinators that are supposed to reach out and identify kids, but as you said, there's a lot of stigma around there. That is one of the local actions that we think could be taken, to have the counseling agencies and the housing and service providers connect with the school officials so that there is less stigma and more communication between these two systems that are helping the families so that the counseling agencies could send out flyers about help to parents through the school system or have a foreclosure prevention fair at the school gym, things like that that could reduce the stigma and let parents know that getting help is the most important thing they can do.
[Tony Cox:] I would think that there's a lot more that could be researched, and I'm assuming that you're going to take up that mantle.
[Ms. Pettit:] Yes, we're only through the first part of our study now, which really just describes how many children, and demographics, where they are, concentrations. But our next part of the study is most interesting. It will look at where the families move, which I think is a question that nobody really has an answer to. Are they able to stay in the same neighborhood, et cetera?
[Tony Cox:] All right, I want to thank you both for coming in. I'd like you to stick around a little bit longer, Kathy. We're going to continue the conversation. Stephanie, thank you for being with us, as well. Stephanie is a real estate reporter for USA Today, and we're talking about foreclosures and how they affect children. If you are a parent, tell us what you're doing to help your children through the crisis. I'm Tony Cox. It's TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Tony Cox. As the foreclosure crisis continues, more and more families are finding themselves displaced. But how are children reacting to being uprooted from their homes due to foreclosure? Parents, if you've dealt with this issue recently or in the past, call us and tell us your story. Our number is 800-989-8255. Our email address is talk@npr.org. And you can join the conversation at our website. Go to npr.org, and click on TALK OF THE NATION. In a few moments, we'll talk with a school administrator who works to ensure homeless children stay in school. Joining us right now again is Kathy Pettit. She is senior researcher at the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute. Nice to have you again.
[Ms. Pettit:] Thank you.
[Tony Cox:] So hold on. Let's take a phone call and see what our listeners are saying. This first one is from Richard in Oakland not Richard, Claudia in Denver, Colorado. Claudia, welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.
[Claudia:] Hi, thank you for having me.
[Tony Cox:] Thank you.
[Claudia:] My story goes back to 1985, when we were in I mean in a crisis here in Denver with foreclosures. What I want to say is is that we could fill in the blanks if you ask me some questions, but it's 25 years later after this experience, with a high school senior, and we weren't allowed to rent the house back for 10 months, until he graduated. The residual effect 25 years later that this foreclosure had on my son and my family is still we're still feeling it. It has not, it's you know, it's not in the it's not right now, up front, but what we went through to try to save the house, I didn't need a loan. I mean, I needed the interest rate to change. What I hear now today or what I read, as far as people seeking to refinance, seeking to stay in their homes, I was one that basically qualified that I could, but HUD had such stringent qualifications or whatever I didn't fall into. We tried to keep the child in the school, which he did get to stay in the school. The school wasn't a problem. But there's HUD signs all over the home. As an adolescent, he had to see the signs that, you know, that HUD took our home.
[Tony Cox:] So Claudia, was it an embarrassment? Is that what you are saying, it was such an embarrassment and a scar on him that 25 years after the fact, he still feels it?
[Claudia:] Embarrassment I don't know because I'm not speaking for him, but I'd say yes.
[Tony Cox:] All right, thank you for that call. I would imagine, Kathy, that that's something that would be not so unusual for children.
[Ms. Pettit:] Yes, definitely, and I think that that's something that parents will need to recognize, as this will affect younger children different than older children. But one study showed that one school change during the high school years reduced the chance of graduating by 50 percent, and more mobility, frequent mobility, did result in increased levels of behavior problems. So you can see how that could last, have long-lasting effects.
[Tony Cox:] This is a perfect segue to our next guest. Joining us from NPR West is Melissa Schoonmaker. She is pupil services and attendance coordinator for the Los Angeles Unified School District, where she is responsible for making sure the district's homeless students stay in school. Melissa, welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.
[Ms. Melissa Schoonmaker:] Thank you for having me.
[Tony Cox:] Did you hear the last caller, Melissa?
[Ms. Melissa Schoonmaker:] Yes, I did.
[Tony Cox:] I imagine, although homelessness is not the same, necessarily, as being foreclosed on, I imagine that those kinds of stories are the very ones that you must deal with on a daily basis in your job.
[Ms. Melissa Schoonmaker:] That is very accurate, and I think the impact on children is incredible. And it runs the gamut from, you know, behavior issues to how they do in school to just how they feel about themselves in their situation, their self-esteem and everything.
[Tony Cox:] What do you do when you're in a position like yours in a school district, a public school district, where you have these children who are displaced, and they need to be educated, and they have no home? What kind of a program, what kind of a support can you offer them and do you offer them?
[Ms. Melissa Schoonmaker:] Yes, our program is based off of, out of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which is part of No Child Left Behind. So every school district has to have a liaison such as myself, and we are charged, the district is charged to removing the barriers to that child's educational success. So we want to make sure that anything that they need to remain in school, to succeed in school, that they have access to. So...
[Tony Cox:] Go on. Finish your answer.
[Ms. Melissa Schoonmaker:] Oh, sorry. So I was going to say for us, we make sure they have backpacks, school supplies, clothing if they need assistance with that, transportation to stay at their school, if that's what they need. And of course we help with school enrollment and then connecting with a variety of resources in the community to address, such as the issues as you have been discussing today.
[Tony Cox:] I want to go to a phone call, but before I do, I have another question for you, Melissa. It's this: How do you prevent these students from being identified as having been displaced because of foreclosure or because of homelessness?
[Ms. Melissa Schoonmaker:] So they're not stigmatized?
[Tony Cox:] Yes.
[Ms. Melissa Schoonmaker:] We have, in our enrollment packets, we have a student residency questionnaire, which goes into every enrollment packet at all of our schools. And you know, Los Angeles Unified is very large. We also ask our schools to share that questionnaire every, you know, once a year, maybe when the emergency cards go out, so that families who have been in this situation can be identified. But we also keep I mean, it is a very confidential situation. So we ask each school to have a liaison that we train at their school site who can connect. We train them, and then they can connect the student to the resources that they need and somebody who can sit down and talk with the parents confidentially about their situation and make sure that if the parent want to share that information with the teacher, that's the person who's sharing it. I mean, obviously, teachers, you know, would benefit from knowing this information, but it is very stigmatizing at times, and so we want to make sure that we take really diligent care with all, with what we've as we work with a family to make sure they're comfortable with the steps that are being taken to help their child.
[Tony Cox:] This is TALK OF THE NATION. We are talking with Melissa Schoonmaker, who is pupil services and attendance coordinator for the L.A. Unified School District. Also joining us, Kathy Pettit, senior researcher at the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute. We are talking about foreclosure and children and the impact that it has on them. If you'd like to join the conversation, you can call us at TALK OF THE NATION, 800-989-8255. The email address, talk@npr.org. Let's go to a caller. Joni is going to join us right now from Schertz, Texas. Joni, welcome to the program.
[Joni:] Oh, thank you. We're in a three-generation family, and we are leaving because of a foreclosure due to a reverse mortgage that we inherited that was so ridden with debt, we just could not handle it, and we did not know about it. Any rate, things that we are doing is that we're going to have to move soon. So we're making sure for the three-and-a-half-year-old child that his bed goes with him, his blankets go with him, his special toys and that where there'll be friends that we can, hopefully we can travel back and see. But it's very hard to find another place because every time they look in the application, oh, you went through foreclosure, well, you don't pay your bills. You know, I explained to them, I even got a letter from the attorney that we didn't know this was coming. How could we be ready for it? So but I'm you know, and we're sitting down last night at a family conference, and we're going to do the same thing for ourselves, take our beds and take some special things.
[Tony Cox:] Joni, thank you very much for the call, and good luck to you. She talked about children, and we've all been discussing them. Let's hear from a person who was a child. I don't think I don't know whether this person is still a child or not, I'm assuming not. This is Edie from Flint, Michigan. Hello. Is it Edie or Eddie?
[Edie:] Edie.
[Tony Cox:] Edie, are well, I'm assuming you're an adult now, and you were going to tell us your story?
[Edie:] Well, I'm only 18. So this is pretty recent. But I did just recently experience the effects of foreclosure on my family and especially on my younger sister, I just, it was upsetting to see the way that it affected her. She had a rough time with school, and it was hard on both of us, the embarrassment of, you know, when people ask why you're moving, you have to, you know, either not answer or explain that it's because of foreclosure. It was hard. It was something that made me feel sad, and it's something that I want to make sure I never experience or cause in my own family in the future.
[Tony Cox:] Edie, how did you, if I can ask this, how did you cope? What did you do to tell yourself, to steel yourself so that you could get through this?
[Edie:] I just, you know, a lot of it was taking my mind off it. A lot of it was being thankful that I've or grateful that I was able to, we were able to find another house, even if it is just a rental. You know, we do have a roof over our heads so and although, I, you know, lost my childhood home and a lot of the memories that came with it, you know, we weren't we didn't have it as bad as some people did but...
[Tony Cox:] Well, we have Melissa Schoonmaker on the air with us, who's a pupil services and attendance coordinator for the L.A. Unified School District. Melissa, maybe we can help Edie. What would you say to her? What can you tell her that would be of help?
[Ms. Melissa Schoonmaker:] Well, I think I mean, I'm sorry that that has occurred for her. I was I hope that I would hope that she would be able to share some of the information with the personnel at the school in a way that they would be able to help advocate for her and provide resources for the family related to, you know, whether it's counseling or assistance with Department of Public Social Services or referrals to foreclosure information. I mean, I would, you know, schools have a variety of resources right at their fingertips. And if we, as a community, collaborate together, we can really work wonders for these families who are going through such a trying time.
[Tony Cox:] Thank you for that, Edie. Thank you, Melissa, for that. Would you want to add something to this, Kathy?
[Ms. Pettit:] I think this just shows how the different paths that this could take. If homeowners have trouble finding a new place because they have damaged credit or renters who are given no notice and don't know their homes are being under foreclosure, if they can be rehoused quickly, then the impacts are much -are likely to be much less than if this could lead to greater housing instability, sleeping with friends or eventually homelessness.
[Tony Cox:] We have an email I'd like to share with you. It comes from Michele in Gloucester, Mass. We have been foreclosed upon recently and have lost our house. My 5-year-old and I moved in with my parents who are not wealthy, so we all chip in. I told her we would be working hard to get our own place, either renting or buying. She was happy living at Grandma's and said why would I want to leave here? So I suppose the point that I'm making with this email, Melissa Schoonmaker, is that extended family becomes very important in a circumstance like this, doesn't it?
[Ms. Melissa Schoonmaker:] Yes, it does. We have a lot of our families who are in transitional situations wind up being doubled or tripled up with friends or relatives. And I think those connections are just phenomenal for them, and such a support to not wind up in a more dire circumstance such as being on the street or in a shelter or living in your car.
[Tony Cox:] You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. All right, let's take another caller. This is John from St. Paul, Minnesota. Hello, John.
[John:] Hello.
[Tony Cox:] Welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.
[John:] Can you hear me?
[Tony Cox:] You're on the air, yeah. I can hear you.
[John:] Yeah, we have a unique situation that happened to us over the last seven years where we actually were foreclosed on. I don't want to go into the story about what it was. We basically take responsibility for that. But what happened to us after that was more of a nightmare because we moved into a rental property. We were served by the sheriff with papers that that was being foreclosed on after six months. Not doing my diligence on the next house, we found out that we were being foreclosed on again. And basically, we moved our children within six years over four or five times. Now, we're sturdy. I mean, we're steady now because we've moved into a contract for deed. Our credit is rebuilding. But one of the things my wife and I both turned in to is our relationship, and secondly to stand in the community we're involved with, and being honest with our kids about what was going on with the whole deal. And so that helped us a lot. Their grades did okay in school. The community helped us a lot. We never we use it as an educational experience with how it happened to us and how we kind of rebuilt. And so, you know, the boys are great. We got kids from all the way from high school down to kindergarten, and it actually just last year, it was kind of neat because our middle child came to us and said, you know, it was an experience, and that's what he chalked it up as.
[Tony Cox:] Well, John, thank...
[John:] So it was like bad [unintelligible].
[Tony Cox:] Thank you for that call. I would think, Kathy Pettit, that what John is describing is something that we haven't really talked much about, and that is the stress between spouses in the household and the kids not seeing that on top of, you know, the losing of their residence.
[Ms. Pettit:] Yes, there was qualitative interviews from the National Council of La Raza that documented just that amongst Latino families in particular, increased spousal arguments and stress in the family, and that's definitely going to affect the kids.
[Tony Cox:] Melissa, I would think also in Los Angeles, because the L.A. Unified School District, which is I don't know somewhere between 600 and 700,000 students, and it's primarily Latino. Are you finding that there are any ways to connect the behavior of students to their ethnic backgrounds? Do different groups respond differently to this?
[Ms. Melissa Schoonmaker:] You know, we haven't really looked at it that way. We've looked at teaching our looking at talking to our teachers about having red flags, you know, possible behaviors they may see and then really looking at, you know, ways to connect the family with the resources that we have at the schools and in the community. So as far as ethnicity, I mean, I couldn't I would feel not just saying, you know, tying it to one specific ethnicity that these things happen or how kids behave in a certain way.
[Tony Cox:] Because you're in California and because we all know about the cash-strapped situation that the state is in, particularly the public school system that you work for, are you finding it more difficult to offer services to students who need them like these when the district is running it needs some services itself?
[Ms. Melissa Schoonmaker:] Yes, but, you know, we have an amazing community relationship, and it just seems that every time one door seems to close, then another door opens for us. And we've made tremendous gains in outreach and partnerships. So for us, it really is a community effort to serve these kids, and I think it's great because we open up a lot of different resources for the families by doing so.
[Tony Cox:] Are you optimistic in terms of your ability then to provide the services that are needed? And this will be my last quick question for you.
[Ms. Melissa Schoonmaker:] I think I have to be. I mean, we have a lot of we have 12,500 kids that we've identified in our district at this time, and, you know, we know that number is going to grow. And so, we always search out ways to meet their needs the best that we can.
[Tony Cox:] My final thing for you, Kathy, is, briefly, are you optimistic also based on the research or are you thinking we're heading down a really dark road here?
[Ms. Pettit:] There are millions of children that are going to be affected in the next couple of years, but so I think that we can if we work to address the problem now, we can prevent some further harm later to the children.
[Tony Cox:] Kathy Pettit is senior researcher at the Metropolitan Housing and Community Policy Center at the Urban Institute and director of a project examining the effects of foreclosure on children and schools in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and New York. Melissa Schoonmaker, pupil services and attendance coordinator for the L.A. Unified School District. Thank you both very much. Coming up, Ted Koppel talks about what he calls the lack of sacrifice Americans are making while the U.S. is engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm Tony Cox. It's TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

[Drew Scanlon:] My name is Drew Scanlon. I'm a video producer, but you may know me better as the blinking guy in the GIF.
[Melissa Block:] Yeah, that guy he's the blonde who raises his eyebrows, tilts his head a bit and blinks several times in what appears to be astonishment. Like, really? Are you sure you want to go there? For example, let's say a guy on Twitter is mansplaining Susan Sontag cue the blinking guy GIF or you say, really can't wait for that next Nickelback album. Bring on the blinking guy. So how did Drew Scanlon become the blinking GIF guy? Well, he tells us he used to review video games on a website where he appeared in livestreams.
[Drew Scanlon:] My co-worker Jeff Gerstmann was playing a game called Starbound, and he made a joke. And that's just the reaction that I made [LAUGHTER].
[Melissa Block:] And so a GIF was born. Scanlon started to see his face all over the Internet.
[Drew Scanlon:] I used to be very surprised like, whoa. All right. That's weird.
[Melissa Block:] Well now, Scanlon has decided it's time to use the GIF for good. So this week, he took to Twitter.
[Drew Scanlon:] Hi, Internet. I'm Drew, and this is my face. If this GIF has ever brought you joy in the past, I humbly ask you to consider making a donation to the National MS Society. It would mean a lot to me and to those I know affected by the disease. Donate at bikingwhiteguy.com.
[Melissa Block:] Two of Scanlon's close friends are diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and this weekend, he is biking from San Francisco to Northern California's wine country to raise money for MS research. Scanlon says he wants to use any memes OK, means possible to raise awareness.
[Drew Scanlon:] I usually don't post the meme myself because it feels to me I don't know. It feels a little uncool. It feels like the band wearing the band's T-shirt a little bit. But I figured if I could somehow find a way to leverage the popularity of the meme for a good cause, that's something that I should try to do.
[Melissa Block:] Scanlon says he has surpassed his initial goal of $10,000. And for those unmoved by his selfless act, Scanlon would say, cue the blinking guy GIF.

[Kelly Mcevers:] The Federal Reserve is edging closer to raising its official interest rate. Exactly when that will happen is still a question. On Capitol Hill today, Fed Chair Janet Yellen didn't give too much away, but she did offer a bit of guidance. NPR's John Ydstie reports.
[John Ydstie, Byline:] Yellen was testifying before the Senate Banking Committee, giving her twice-yearly report to Congress on the U.S. economy and Fed policy. And the Fed's interest rate question loomed over everything. The Fed's benchmark rate has been near zero for more than six years as the Fed has tried to boost the economy and create jobs. And Yellen began her remarks by saying the job market is improving on many dimensions.
[Janet Yellen:] In short, considerable progress has been achieved in the recovery of the labor market. The room for further improvement remains.
[John Ydstie, Byline:] And as long as there is room for improvement, most Fed officials would like to hold off raising rates. During their past two meetings, Fed policymakers have said they will remain patient. And Yellen said that word signals that rates won't be raised until after a couple more meetings. She reiterated that today which suggests the first rate hike is unlikely to happen before June. But Yellen indicated the time for a rate hike is getting closer.
[Janet Yellen:] If economic conditions continue to improve as the committee anticipates, the committee will at some point begin considering an increase in the target range for the federal funds rate on a meeting-by-meeting basis.
[John Ydstie, Byline:] But before that moment, Yellen said the Fed will remove the word patience from its official statement. The deliberate Fed march toward a rate hike got different responses from members of the committee. Democrats generally reacted like Senator Charles Schumer of New York.
[Senator Charles Schumer:] Let me urge you to act with caution before raising rates. While there may be data points, positive signs of economic growth, let me be clear I believe the Fed should remain committed to its current accommodative policy until it sees clear evidence that shows a consistent improvement in wages.
[John Ydstie, Byline:] Yellen agreed she too would like to see improvement in wage growth before raising rates. But some Republicans expressed other concerns.
[Senator Pat Toomey:] Let me share a completely opposing point of view from that of the senator from New York, which will not be a shock.
[John Ydstie, Byline:] This is Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania.
[Senator Pat Toomey:] The financial and economic crisis is over. It's been over for years, at least six or seven years. And yet, we still maintain crisis-level interest rates.
[John Ydstie, Byline:] And, Toomey said, those low Fed rates mean rock-bottom returns for retirees who have savings in CDs, bank accounts and money market funds. He said keeping rates low also risks future inflation and financial stability. Yellen acknowledged those are the risks of waiting too long to raise rates. But she pointed out that right now inflation is below the Fed's 2 percent target and falling, largely because oil prices have plunged. And, Yellen said, raising rates too soon also carries risks.
[Janet Yellen:] We would risk undermining a recovery that is really just taking hold.
[John Ydstie, Byline:] Yellen said the Fed continues to balance those risks as it looks for the right moment to begin raising rates. John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.

[Steve Inskeep:] And I'm Steve Inskeep. The debate over the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo now includes a detailed log of how one detainee was treated. A man considered especially dangerous was interrogated for 50 days, forced to urinate on himself and to wear pictures of naked women around his neck. The log was compiled by interrogators starting in late 2002. They were working at the naval base in Cuba where the US holds hundreds of detainees, and this log, which was obtained by Time magazine, and verified by the Pentagon, describes the way the interrogators tried to get information out of him. Adam Zagorin reported this story for Time. Good morning.
[Mr. Adam Zagorin:] Good morning.
[Steve Inskeep:] So who was this suspect, Mohammed al-Qahtani?
[Mr. Adam Zagorin:] Well, he's the so-called 20th hijacker. And he bears that name because he tried to get into the United States on a commercial flight, landing at Orlando, shortly before 911, in August 2001. He was deported after giving a story that didn't cut the mustard with the immigration officials at the airport. But the United States later determined that Mohamed Atta had been waiting in the parking lot to pick him up and there were various other indications that he was to have been on one of the flights-actually, the flight that went into Pennsylvania and crashed in the countryside was the flight they believe he was supposed to be on.
[Steve Inskeep:] So he didn't get into the country. He was later arrested, captured in Afghanistan. He was taken to Guantanamo. A guy originally from Saudi Arabia-What did the government do to get information out of him?
[Mr. Adam Zagorin:] Well, they used a whole variety of tactics-sleep depravation. Humiliation was quite a big theme. They got him to bark like a dog at one point. They had a female interrogator violate his personal space in a way that the detainee, at least according to the log, found extremely objectionable. He at one point threatened to commit suicide in response to those violations of his personal space. They also engaged him in theological debates, about God's will, the meaning of the Koran and whether he had been carrying out God's will in trying to kill all these people. In other words, they tried to-they used guilt. They showed him videos of the 911 episode, the twin towers, and so forth. They showed him victims of the crime. They asked him to write letters of apology to the victims' families.
[Steve Inskeep:] Was this treatment typical based on the reporting you've done on other prisoners, detainees at Guantanamo?
[Mr. Adam Zagorin:] Well, some of it would have been applied to other detainees that were being interrogated, but, on December 2nd, which was relatively early in his interrogation, Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of Defense, specifically authorized a ratcheting up of the harsh tactics that were going to be used because they were not satisfied that the information he was giving was adequate. They felt he knew more. And that specific authorization was rescinded by Rumsfeld on January 12th, 2003, one day after the log that we obtained ends. So he had a special regime that was cooked up by the Pentagon specifically for him, and, I believe, one other detainee that we know of, who they wanted to apply special pressure to.
[Steve Inskeep:] Is there any record here of beatings or of torture in this particular log?
[Mr. Adam Zagorin:] In this log there's no record of beatings. There's no record here that we can see for certain of physical torture. He does lapse into a quite apparently dangerous medical condition. It's not clear what causes that. His heartbeat goes down quite dramatically at one point in the log. Why or how that happens is not immediately clear. One cause could be dehydration. He's refusing food and water intermittently through the interrogation but it's not absolutely certain.
[Steve Inskeep:] And one other thing, Mr. Zagorin, in your report in Time magazine, you detail a wide range of information that the US military says it ultimately got out of this man through these techniques. How confident can we be that the information this man provided was reliable?
[Mr. Adam Zagorin:] Well, the Pentagon told us that he gave up various important, quote, unquote, "actionable intelligence," which means that they would find out about it and be able to use it in ways that would cause them to take actions that they wouldn't otherwise take. And he did talk about meeting bin Laden, meeting other key al-Qaeda figures, being at a very important, elite al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. If he did, indeed, say and did all these things, one can see that they would be quite useful in all likelihood to the government.
[Steve Inskeep:] Adam Zagorin of Time magazine, thanks very much.
[Mr. Adam Zagorin:] Thank you.

[Scott Simon:] Is Barry Bonds headed to the Baseball Hall of Fame or to prison? Why not both? After the indictment of the career home run, later, on Thursday, neither is really out of the question. Joining us now is Howard Bryant, senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN the Magazine. Howard, thanks for being with us.
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] Hey, Scott. How are you?
[Scott Simon:] Well, better than Barry Bonds, and I don't I ordinarily can't say that. Is his playing career over? A free agent had hoped to sign.
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] I think Barry Bond his career is finish. I think that his career, for the most part, should have been finished last year, if not for the cynical San Francisco Giants' ownership that needed him to break the record in a Giant uniform to earn money for them to continue paying for that ballpark. I think this was the last straw. And I don't see any team taking a risk on him or taking a flyer on him simply because he wants to keep playing. He's going to be a player who's under indictment, who was already a lightning rod in the first place. I think we've seen the last of Barry Bonds in a baseball uniform.
[Scott Simon:] Grand jury says that he lied when he said he didn't knowingly take steroids that were given to him by his personal trainer. So legal experts have noted he's not actually being indicted for taking steroids but for lying to investigators when he said he didn't take them. Is this just a fine legal point but not a real point?
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] No, I think it's very real. This is an investigation that isn't taken lightly by the investigators of by the federal government. I think that when you read the indictment, and I suggest that everybody read the indictment. It's online in PDF form. You can read it in about 10 minutes. It's a 10-page document. It's just Bond's true defiance. And what I took from it was this idea that he really did believe that he was above the law, that he treated these federal investigators as if they were rent-a-cops outside of a high school. It's really fascinating reading. And you can tell how contentious things were and how much the federal government was convinced that he was lying to them.
[Scott Simon:] Quick last question, Howard. Alex Rodriguez agreed to a $275-million 10-year deal with the New York Yankees. Good deal for both sides?
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] Oh, it's a great deal for both sides. It's a great deal because I couldn't for the life of me think of another baseball player at the height of his power especially in the modern era now that would walk away from the New York spotlight with the New York marketing machine and all the power that New York can bring to you. Alex Rodriguez would have been the first. Every other player from Dave Winfields to Ricky Henderson, to Reggie Jackson, to Babe Ruth, all of them left New York against their will. And for Alex Rodriguez to walk away would have been remarkable. Also, he's got a chance now to break Barry Bonds' home-run record in a Yankee uniform. So it's all set up for him. It's set up for the Yankees. At $27 million a year there weren't going to be that many other suitors. He is where he belongs.
[Scott Simon:] Howard Bryant, senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN the Magazine. Thank you.
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] Thank you.
[Scott Simon:] This is NPR News.

[Alex Chadwick:] From basketball to baseball, opening day is Sunday. Here are the sports brothers, Jason and Randy Sklar.
[Mr. Randy Sklar:] Hey, Jay. Remember when opening day actually meant something in baseball? Yeah, I do, Rand. It was in 2005.
[Mr. R. Sklar:] Now opening day is just an afterthought, a post-cursor.
[Mr. J. Sklar:] That's not even a word.
[Mr. R. Sklar:] I don't care. Make no bones about it. No matter what anybody says, opening day 2006 is just an epilogue to the World Baseball Classic. A baseball classic that I might add featured a USA-less...
[Mr. J. Sklar:] Again, not a word.
[Mr. R. Sklar:] Again, don't care. A USA-less semi-final and final. I'm sorry, that's just wrong.
[Mr. J. Sklar:] Well, I agree with you there. Not to get all jingoistic or anything, but baseball is America's national pastime. Now we've come to find out that there are at least four other countries in the world that are better than us at our game.
[Mr. R. Sklar:] It taints this whole 2006 Major League Baseball season.
[Mr. J. Sklar:] In November, after someone wins the World Series and calls themselves the world champion, that proclamation simply will not be true.
[Mr. R. Sklar:] In our minds, if you truly want to call yourselves the world champions, you've got to beat Japan, the World Baseball Classics champions first to earn that title.
[Mr. J. Sklar:] I'd go so far as to say that until we unseat Japan as baseball's true world champion, we are no longer allowed to sell beer and hot dogs in our major league ballparks; instead, only sushi and sake.
[Mr. R. Sklar:] Let's take it one step further. Let's rewrite the lyrics to Take Me Out to the Ballgame to include the line buy me some munagi and salmon roe, I don't care if I ever go home.
[Mr. J. Sklar:] Well, that's all good and well. But first, we need to rename our World Series so that it more accurately represents the scope of the league. And here's where you and I disagree, Rand. I think from now on we should call the World Series the America's Cup. And I think that's ridiculous.
[Mr. R. Sklar:] Why?
[Mr. J. Sklar:] Because you're going to get tons of hate mail from the Dennis Connor fan club. Yachting aficionados everywhere will rise up and blog you into oblivion.
[Mr. R. Sklar:] Well, we'll just put another P and an E at the end of cup and make it different, America's Cuppe.
[Mr. J. Sklar:] You just made it European.
[Mr. R. Sklar:] Fine. What's your suggestion?
[Mr. J. Sklar:] We call it the National Championship.
[Mr. R. Sklar:] Okay. Number one: that's college basketball. Number two: that's college football. And number three: that ignores the entire American League.
[Mr. J. Sklar:] Fine. What about the American National Baseball Tournament Championship?
[Mr. R. Sklar:] Mmm, too terse.
[Mr. J. Sklar:] How about the American National Baseball Tournament Championship and Performance-Enhanced Player Best of Seven Jamboree? Or we could call it the Fall Classic. I like that, too.
[Alex Chadwick:] Sports brothers Randy and Jason Sklar. Their TV show, Cheap Seats, is on ESPN Classics.
[Mr. R. Sklar:] Whatever. You know that we're going to have to watch this entire 2006 season under protest.
[Mr. J. Sklar:] I do.
[Mr. R. Sklar:] Now, can we just talk about something a little less controversial, like Barry Bonds breaking the homerun record?

[Madeleine Brand:] In a few minutes, we prowl the mean LA streets with one of the city's top paparazzi photographers. But first, a piece of service journalism. Timothy Noah is a columnist for our online partner, Slate magazine. He's just published a guide to a song we've probably all heard, but maybe not really listened to, Cole Porter's "You're the Top."
[Mr. Cole Porter:] [Singing] You're the top, you're the Colosseum, you're the top, you're the Louvre museum.
[Timothy Noah Reporting:] That's Cole Porter himself singing the song. It's a love song in which the singer compares the object of his affection to a list of wonderful things. But since it was written in 1934, a lot of the things Porter thought were wonderful are now meaningless to most of us. After hearing the song, my nine-year-old daughter asked me what lines like this meant.
[Mr. Cole Porter:] [Singing] You're a Bendel bonnet, a Shakespeare sonnet, you're Mickey Mouse.
[Noah:] A Shakespeare sonnet I can explain. But a Bendel bonnet? The song's original lyric is filled with such dated references. Thanks to the miracle of Google scholarship, I discovered that a Bendel bonnet is merely a fashionable bonnet named for its designer, Henri Bendel. And I've tracked down almost all the other obscure references as well. So without further adieu, here is an annotated guide to Cole Porter's "You're the Top."
[Mr. Cole Porter:] [Singing] You're the National Gallery, you're Garbo's salary...
[Noah:] After the success of "Flesh and the Devil," Greta Garbo demanded that MGM raise her salary from $600 a week to $5,000 per week. Louis B. Mayer hemmed and hawed, so Garbo sailed to Sweden. Eventually, Mayer gave in, and Garbo sailed back. Five thousand dollars per week comes to $260,000 per year, or the equivalent in today's dollars of $4.6 million per year.
[Mr. Cole Porter:] [Singing] You're the top, you're a Waldorf salad. You're the top, you're a Berlin ballad...
[Noah:] Irving, of course.
[Mr. Cole Porter:] You're the baby grand of a lady and a gent. You're an old Dutch master, you're Mrs. Astor, you're...
[Noah:] Mrs. Astor is the viscountess Nancy Witcher Langhorne Astor, who became the first woman to serve in the British Parliament. An American, she married the great-great-grandson of John Jacob Astor, America's first millionaire. Astor's great-grandson had emigrated to Britain and essentially bought himself a peerage that he passed on to his son. Mrs. Astor famously matched wits with Winston Churchill. She said, `Winston, if I were your wife, I'd put poison in your coffee.'Churchill replied, `Madam, if I were your husband, I'd drink it.'
[Mr. Cole Porter:] [Singing] You're romance, you're the steppes of Russia. You're the pants on a Roxy usher.
[Noah:] The pants on a Roxy usher; the Roxy was a Manhattan movie palace famous for its opulent floor shows and for housing not one, not two, but three pipe organs. Roxy ushers dressed in quasi-military garb and participated in military-style drills.
[Mr. Cole Porter:] [Singing] But if, baby, I'm the bottom, you're the top.
[Noah:] Now there are a few lyrics so obscure they didn't even appear in the recordings we could find, but here are a few. You're a Brewster body. That's a luxury car body built by the carriage maker Brewster. You're a Nathan panning. This one really had me stumped for a while as I searched the Web in vain for somebody Nathan Panning with a capital P. Then I would a version of the lyrics in which the P was lowercase. And, eureka, it all became plain. Panning was a verb, not a surname. George Jean Nathan was a famously severe theater critic for the New York Herald and Journal-American, and his pans really scorched. You're the dam at Boulder. In 1930, President Herbert Hoover had his Interior secretary rename Boulder Dam in Nevada as Hoover Dam to boost his re-election chances in 1932. This crude political ploy didn't work and in 1933 Hoover's successor, Franklin Roosevelt, had his Interior secretary change the name back to Boulder Dam. In 1947, a briefly Republican Congress changed the name one last time back to Hoover Dam. And there's only one lyric for which I could find no good explanation. It goes. `You're a drumstick lipstick.'If you know for sure what that means, you'll find my e-mail address and a complete list of annotations at slate.com. In the meantime, happy 114th birthday, Cole.
[Madeleine Brand:] Timothy Noah is a columnist for our partners at the online magazine Slate. More coming up on DAY TO DAY from NPR News.

[Robert Siegel:] So, the Republicans intend to run on counterterrorism, on painting the Democrats as more concerned with the privacy of phone calls than with thwarting terrorists and as including many candidates want to get out of Iraq, too fast. Donna Brazile is a Democratic political strategist who was campaign manager for Al Gore in 2000. Welcome to the program.
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] Thank you.
[Robert Siegel:] Has Karl Rove pretty well summed up the Democrats in 2006?
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] Absolutely not. Karl Rove is recycling his 2002 and 2004 playbook, where the Republicans were very successful in painting the Democrats as weak on terrorism. A lot has transpired since 2004. First of all, the administration clearly in the eyes of voters has mishandled the situation in Iraq. The majority of American people have not linked the war on terror to the war in Iraq. And as a result of it, Democrats have an opportunity to present the American people with their own alternative plans in terms of Iraq and national security as well as domestic issues that most voters are concerned about. So while the Republicans are trying to do their best right now in making this a referendum on who will make you safe, Democrats will make this a referendum on George Bush and the Republican rubberstamp Congress and what Democrats plan to do to change the status quo.
[Robert Siegel:] George Bush isn't running. George Bush isn't running ever again.
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] He's on the ballot, whether his name appears on the ballot on not. He's on the ballot because the policies reflect the Republican agenda, his policies in Iraq, where clearly the American people have grown very disenchanted with the way things are going. The American people don't trust the Republicans to help improve education, to help improve the economy, to lower energy prices, and as a result George Bush is on the ballot.
[Robert Siegel:] Democrats have been criticized for failing to come up with some coherent theme that describes what it is that they offer that's an alternative to George Bush. What is it? Can you say, in a nutshell, what it is the Democratic Party offers in 2006? Or is it just a negative vote, a protest against Bush policies?
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] Well when you look at the polls, the voters are clearly in the mood for change. And what Democrats must answer this fall is, change to what? What we're saying is that we want to change direction. We want to change direction on the economy. We want to put more money in the hands of the middle class. We want to change direction as it relates to our foreign policy.
[Robert Siegel:] Does that mean more tax cuts?
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] It means that we're going to direct resources to the middle class so that we can take a little bit of this burden off the middle class for, you know, in terms of college tuition, rising gas prices. We want to raise the minimum wage. We want to make sure that the middle class have what they need in order to take care of their families. We want to keep jobs here. We want to stop the outsourcing of jobs. Democrats, when we talk about change, we talk about change in everything from how we treat seniors to what we do in terms of making America safer in this so-called dangerous world.
[Robert Siegel:] The issue that you hear people talk about, it seems nearly anyplace in the country, just ask what's on your mind, people will raise Iraq. Is there a Democratic position on Iraq that is different from the Republican position on the war in Iraq? Or are there just many, many different Democratic positions on Iraq?
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] The Democrats called for a national debate and dialogue on Iraq several months ago. The Republican answer to that call was to schedule a series of votes in which the Democrats came up with basically two positions at the time. John Kerry wanted an immediate time withdrawal, with an immediate date, and of course the majority of Democrats voted for a responsible deployment after certain criteria have been met. First of all, we're not going to abandon Iraq. We understand the American interests now in rebuilding that country. But we also believe that it's time for the Iraqi government to step up in the security forces. We've heard from the interior minister in Iraq, we've heard from the prime minister in Iraq. They're ready to step up. They're ready for our troops to come home.
[Robert Siegel:] Donna Brazile, thank you very much for talking with us.
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] Good to be with you.
[Robert Siegel:] That's Democratic strategist Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore's campaign in 2000.

[Michel Martin:] Now to Zimbabwe, where there are events taking place that couldn't have been imagined just a few months ago. Thousands of protesters marched outside of the Zimbabwe statehouse in the capital Harare this morning. The protesters were there to show their opposition to longtime president Robert Mugabe, an act that would have led to arrests during most of the 37 years that he was in power. Mugabe was placed under house arrest by the military earlier this week, but his motorcade has since been seen moving around the capital. And his apparent removal from power also raises questions about what's next for the country and for the region. For more on this, we've called Kevin Sieff. He's the Africa bureau chief for The Washington Post. He's in Harare, and we reached him via Skype. Kevin Sieff, thanks so much for speaking with us.
[Kevin Sieff:] Sure, happy to be here.
[Michel Martin:] So tell me more about the demonstration today. Who was there, and what did they say about what they were hoping to accomplish by coming out?
[Kevin Sieff:] You know, it was really a remarkable moment to see so many people in the streets of Harare, where as you said, just a few weeks ago, a protest of this size would have been very, very quickly quelled by the police or by the military. And now the city was just full of people demonstrating against President Mugabe. There was a sort of celebratory mood. People are very confident that this is the end. After 37 years, this is the end of Mugabe's rule.
[Michel Martin:] Who exactly is running the country right now?
[Kevin Sieff:] That's a really good question. I mean, at the moment, Robert Mugabe is technically under house arrest. So while the military technically is running some of the major state institutions, Robert Mugabe has still been able to move around town. Yesterday, he presided over a university graduation, which was a pretty bizarre moment because I think most Zimbabweans expected that he was either stuck in his house or maybe involved in negotiations over the future of the country. But there he was wearing a cap and gown, handing caps and trophies to the recent graduates. And so I think today there's a little question at every kind of level of Zimbabwean civil society and the Zimbabwean public over what comes next. These negotiations between Mugabe and the military continue. And, in fact, today, at the demonstration, there was a sort of amazing moment when the military one of the top military commanders came out of his office and greeted the crowd. And within seconds, the entire crowd, thousands of people were silenced just waiting to hear what he had to say. And there was a clear sense that everyone was waiting and hoping that he was going to say Mugabe had stepped down or had agreed to resign. But instead what he said was, we're still working on this. This is going to be a long process. It's not easy. He didn't offer too much clarity.
[Michel Martin:] Is there anybody positioned to serve as successor?
[Kevin Sieff:] Yeah. So that's where things get even more interesting. Basically, a huge number of the people who were at the demonstrations today and the military commanders who were responsible for the coup are all supporting the former vice president who was dismissed earlier this month. His name is Emmerson Mnangagwa. And he's an interesting character. I mean, he's been very close to Mugabe for decades at this point. And while he's well-liked by the military establishment, he's well liked by many Zimbabweans, I mean, he does have a pretty spotty record. He's currently sanctioned by the United States. He's been involved in a number of corruption scandals, some pretty well-documented cases of abuse. So that's where this gets complicated. On one hand, you know, there's this sort of catharsis in Zimbabwe right now, where for the first time in years, people are protesting against Mugabe. But on the other hand, there is concern within lots of groups in this country.
[Michel Martin:] That's Washington Post Africa bureau chief Kevin Sieff speaking to us from Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, via Skype. Kevin, thanks so much for speaking with us.
[Kevin Sieff:] Thank you.

[Farai Chideya:] So you're heading to college. Your grades say Ivy League, but your income says community college. In the past, you might not have been able to raise the funds to attend your dream school. Now if you make the grade, you might not have to worry as much about your finances. Elite schools like Harvard, Yale and Stanford are offering free tuition to students from lower-income families, but what impact will these initiatives have on access and diversity in higher education? In a moment, we'll put that question to Jeff Selingo. He's the editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education. But first, we've got Anthony Berryhill. When he was an undergrad at Stanford University, his financial aid package offered him grants and loans, but that money didn't stretch quite as far as he thought it would. Anthony, thanks for coming on.
[Mr. Anthony Berryhill:] Thank you very much.
[Farai Chideya:] So you are a grad student now at Yale. You have basically just been churning through the best schools in America. And, you know, but let's back it up a little bit. You are from New Orleans, from the Lower Ninth Ward, and you had great grades. You got into Stanford. Were you concerned, once you got accepted, that you wouldn't get a good financial aid package?
[Mr. Anthony Berryhill:] I was initially concerned, and then when I saw the financial aid package, it seemed like a very not just seemed like. It was a very, very good offer. There were relatively few loans. I only had about $7,000 worth over four years. So it was a good deal. The acceptance and the financial aid package came very close to each other. So I wasn't that concerned about the finances, at least before I went to Stanford.
[Farai Chideya:] Now you say before you went to Stanford because even though you got a good package, there were still some tight times. What exactly did you have to deal with?
[Mr. Anthony Berryhill:] Absolutely. I think what I had to deal with were a lot of the hidden costs, the costs that although they are written into a financial aid package for example there are allowances for books and travel, etc. A lot of the very basic things that most people would take for granted were covered. For example, to buy a plane ticket from New Orleans to California is not a cheap proposition, at least about 300, $350. So if you're from a very lower income environment, that can be quite crushing. That's one. Another one was even day-to-day expenses, for example, paying for books, which books at a college book store can cost as much as $100 or even $130, and even more so for course packs. And when I went to Stanford, we didn't have online used book sales services, so it took a lot of ingenuity in order to figure out how to make ends meet.
[Farai Chideya:] So do you think that colleges really need to factor in these -I wouldn't call them exactly hidden costs, but these secondary costs when they really think about what students have to go through?
[Mr. Anthony Berryhill:] I think what's been done recently is very is a huge deal in terms of getting rid of loans and making tuition affordable. In terms of a lot of the secondary costs, I think so. At the very least, I think there should be some kind of dialogue from the financial aid office to talk about a lot of these factors, because when I was going to a financial aid office saying I have these huge costs, you know, these things that are expected out of me in order if I want to even do research, a lot of the rhetoric I got back was just assuming that I would already have the resources or take enough jobs to pay for such things. So I think a good second step post the tuition breaks would be at least having some infrastructure for dealing with those kinds of extra costs that aren't very obvious if you're filling out a FAFSA form or looking at a financial aid package.
[Farai Chideya:] All right, well I want you to stay with us, and I want to bring in Jeff Selingo. He's editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education, and that publication has been looking at some of these financial aid programs from elite universities. How are you doing, Jeff?
[Mr. Jeff Selingo:] I'm pretty good today.
[Farai Chideya:] So give us an update on how things have been unfolding with these elite universities really rolling out the red carpet to students not just from low-income families but from middle-income and even upper-middle-income families.
[Mr. Jeff Selingo:] Well, basically, in December, Harvard announced that they were going to ask families with salaries between $120,000 and $180,000 a year to pay no more than 10 percent of their income. They were also going to eliminate loans for low-income students as well, something that they started doing a couple of years ago. What has happened since then is that basically all of their competitors and other elite, wealthy institutions have followed along with similar financial aid programs. We see this every couple of years, where Harvard comes out with a new financial aid policy, and then all of its competitors and other institutions follow along. So we now have about a dozen to two-dozen institutions out there really offering very good deals to middle-income parents.
[Farai Chideya:] Does this mean in a weird way that if you are able to get into a school like Harvard, like Columbia, that you might get a better deal from them than you would from other schools?
[Mr. Jeff Selingo:] Oh, definitely. And especially, I think, the group that's feeling the heat right now are public universities because, essentially, what this does is put the price of these elite private colleges down to the price of a public university. When you talk about, you know, 10 percent of their income for middle-income families, that really puts the price of Harvard down to the price of UNC Chapel Hill or the University of Virginia or University of Michigan, all very good public colleges, but public colleges that are now really competing also on price with the Harvards of the world.
[Farai Chideya:] And Jeff, do you think this is going to shake up who goes where? I mean, is this going to mean that more lower-income students end up at Harvard, or is it just going to provide a better situation for people who would've gone there anyway?
[Mr. Jeff Selingo:] I think it's going to be much more of the latter. I think that basically, students who would've gone to Harvard and had to pay a lot of money to go there are now going to basically still be able to go there, and they're just going to have to pay a lot less. And, in fact, we might even see more competition to try to get into Harvard now because the price is going to be so much lower than it used to be.
[Farai Chideya:] Anthony, when you think about K through 12 education, it's one you know, in order to get into one of these top-tier schools, you have to be very on-your-game academically, but also part of whether or not you succeed in being qualified has to do with how good your local school systems are. Does this put pressure on local school systems or the whole question of educational access, does it all just end up trickling back down to the K through 12? And how does that impact black students, students of color, students from lower-income families?
[Mr. Anthony Berryhill:] I'm not sure how much the tuition breaks would impose burdens on the local schools. I mean, for example, pre-Katrina New Orleans, I mean, we there were lots of issues in terms of the quality of public school system, etc. And what I do think, though, is that if the goal of the tuition breaks is to get more lower-income black students or even lower-income students period, a lot of the interventions that would have to happen would have to go beyond a financial aid policy. For example, I mean, I went to a Jesuit outreach program. I was able to go to a very good private school in New Orleans, but a lot of people in my neighborhood who didn't go to such a school, they didn't have college counselors, or they didn't have even the familial networks to tell them here's what you need to study for the SAT, or even here's when you should apply for a FAFSA and here's how you can do so. So I think the pressure would come more in terms of helping people who are lower income make up the gap in terms of understanding how to apply for college, what does it really entail and filling in some of those networks for them, which I at this point, I really don't see happening yet.
[Farai Chideya:] Jeff, finally, when you look at the initiatives that are going on on the higher-education level, are there any initiatives that are as bold on issues of diversity as they are on these financial aid issues?
[Mr. Jeff Selingo:] No, not really. I mean, what colleges you know, colleges talk a lot about diversity, and many colleges are doing very well on that front. But most of these policies are aimed squarely at the middle class. And mainly, that's in reaction to pressures from Congress on college costs. And, again, when Congress talks about college costs, they're really talking about the college costs for middle-class families because that makes up their constituents. Those are the constituents they hear from most often. So most of the initiatives are really aimed squarely at the middle class and not necessarily at increasing diversity.
[Farai Chideya:] Well Jeff, Anthony, thank you.
[Mr. Jeff Selingo:] Thank you.
[Mr. Anthony Berryhill:] Thank you.
[Farai Chideya:] Jeffrey Selingo is editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Anthony Berryhill is a graduate student at Yale University.

[Lynn Neary:] I'm Lynn Neary in Washington. here are the headlines from some of the other stories we're following today here at NPR News. Tropical Storm Ernesto's leading edge has drenched southern Florida. Ernesto is expected to make landfall tonight, but forecasters say there's only an outside chance it will strengthen into a hurricane. And Iran's president held a rare news conference today in Tehran. He challenged President Bush to a debate on world affairs. The news conference comes with the U.N. Security Council deadline looming this week for Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment program. Details coming up on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. And tomorrow at this time, Neal Conan will be here with a look at a new generation of military widows. That's tomorrow's TALK OF THE NATION. Today we end with a little music. Since his 2005 debut CD State of Mind, Raul Midon has received glowing reviews for his unique sound combing flamenco and jazz guitar stylings, a rich vocal range, and inspirational lyrics. What makes him truly remarkable is that although he lost his sight shortly after birth, it hasn't held him back from being one of the most sought after musicians in the music industry. Raul Midon joins us now from the studios at NPR West. Welcome to TALK OF THE NATION. Good to have you.
[Mr. Raul Midon:] Thank you. Thank you for having me.
[Lynn Neary:] And if you have any questions for Raul Midon about his career, his countless collaborations, or his current tour, we'd like to hear from you. Our number here in Washington is 800-989-8255. And the e-mail address is And Raul, I'd love to start out with a song, if we could.
[Mr. Raul Midon:] Here's a song called Sunshine [I Can Fly] with an intro which is not on the record. Here it goes. [Singing in foreign language] [Singing] Sunshine when you're with me I can fly. Sunshine when you're with me I can fly. Every day I wonder why peace on earth's so hard to find. Real peace begins inside. In our hearts and in our minds. Hearts and minds begin to see that one and all means you and me. And what we know can set us free, rearrange reality. Reality is what we know. We can change a river's flow. Plant a seed, watch it grow. Build a shelter, build a home. Home is where my heart will stay, even when I'm far away. Makes no difference what they say as long as you will be my sunshine. When you're with me I can fly. Sunshine, when you're with me I can fly. When I'm feeling sad and low and I'm not sure where to go and all the good times that I've known have gone and left me all alone. All alone I'll never be long as you are here with me. You're in everything I see and everything I'm doing. All I do I do for you. You're my sun, you're my moon, every lazy afternoon. You're my inspiration. Inspiration lights the way. Brings a sparkle to each day. Makes the dark clouds go away. So let us let the children play. When you're with me I can fly. Sunshine, when you're with me I can fly. Mm-hmm, Sunshine. Oh yeah, mm-hmmm. Sunshine, when you're with me I can fly. Sunshine, when you're with me I can fly. Music is the reason why people laugh, people cry, sing and dance and clap their hands. It's how the whole world understands, understands that we are one. Makes no difference what you've done or where you live under the sun. We are only human only human yes, it's true. Still the mystery is you, and the sky so clear and blue makes every day feel so brand new brand new day throughout the world for all the little boys and girls. If everybody lends a hand, we can live together. When you're with me I can fly. Sunshine, when you're with me I can fly. Sunshine.
[Lynn Neary:] Raul Midon singing Sunshine and playing the guitar and doing a little percussive there as well. And that's something I wanted to ask you about, because I know you've said you try you like to integrate everything you know musically into the guitar. You want to make it sound like an orchestra. How do you go about doing that?
[Mr. Raul Midon:] You know, it came about through just always trying to play, you know, what I heard in my head and lots of training. I always find it very amusing that people say are you self-taught, you know? And actually, a friend of mine came up with a good one the other day. Although guitar is not as critical as surgery, but you would never want a self-taught surgeon to do surgery. So, no. I mean, although my style is very different, it came about through lots of wonderful teachers and training that I had: classical guitar teachers, jazz, and Flamenco as well.
[Lynn Neary:] And you started playing drums as a kid, right? Before guitar?
[Mr. Raul Midon:] Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, the first thing I played was I probably just banged on chairs and stuff. But we had bongos and conga drums in the house and rattlers and shakers, and I was doing that from ever since I can remember, really.
[Lynn Neary:] So you still when you're playing guitar, you're also doing a little drumming there on the guitar, I think.
[Mr. Raul Midon:] Yeah. I mean, I have different ways in which I sort of hit the guitar. In this song, you know, I use the sort of index finger, sort of edge of my palm to create this, and then I... ...use my thumb to pull up to create this percussive sound. So it's sort of like playing bass, drums, and chords at the same time, so... And I'm using my left hand to create rhythm as well. I'm sort of what they call hammering down on the strings with my left hand. So it's sort of a complete two-hand approach to playing rhythm and chords. It's not the normal you know, you make the chords with your left hand and you strum with your right hand kind of thing.
[Lynn Neary:] And I hear all kinds of different musical strains in there. There's a little Latin in there and jazz. I mean, you've got a lot of different things going on musically.
[Mr. Raul Midon:] We always had a lot of wonderful music in our house, and my father has I mean, we live out in a very small town in New Mexico. I mean, I don't live there anymore, but that's where I grew up, and it was sort of an oasis of music. We had Latin music, Cuban music, jazz. Probably the thing that we have least of there is pop music, which, you know, is easy to come to. It's everywhere. But my father has, you know, John Cage records and, you know, contemporary, classical, jazz all kinds of music. And we listened to it from when we were very young, so...
[Lynn Neary:] We're talking with singersongwriterguitarist Raul Midon. And if you'd like to join the conversation, the number is 800-989-8255. We're going to take a call now from Marion in St. Louis. Hello.
[Marion:] Hi. I was enjoying listening to your music, and I have a relative that is a young child that is blind, and I was curious I have always been told that he can't study guitar because his fingertips are so important to his learning Braille, and I was wondering what you might suggest someone would look for in a teacher to teach a blind child music.
[Mr. Raul Midon:] First of all, that is completely inaccurate.
[Marion:] Okay, well that's good to hear. That didn't make sense to me, I don't...
[Mr. Raul Midon:] Completely inaccurate. Yeah. I mean, you know, I learned Braille as a little kid and I play guitar, and I never thought that it desensitized my fingers in any way. That's somebody that came up with a theory that they thought it sounded pretty cool, but it's not really true. As far as a blind teaching a blind child, you know, really I think the thing that needs to happen at first is probably just somebody that's willing to, you know, put your fingers on the chords and teach you so when you're beginning, you know, somebody that's willing to say, okay. You know, put your, you know, your first finger on the second fret, fourth string. You know, put your second finger on the third fret, third string, or whatever and willing to sort of do that kind of thing as opposed to, you know, if you can see you can just look at what your teacher is doing. So but one of the other things that's important as you progress is really making sure that you train your ears. As a blind person, it's even more important to have great ears so that your inability to sight-read music doesn't really block you from advancing.
[Lynn Neary:] All right. Thanks so much for your call, Marion.
[Marion:] Mm-hmm.
[Lynn Neary:] And I know I read that you said when you were a kid that you heard music in everything.
[Mr. Raul Midon:] Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, these sort of artificial barriers that we set up our minds you don't have as a kid, you know, so I would hear the windshield wipers... You know, and I would create a little... In my head to the thing, you know, so...
[Lynn Neary:] That's great.
[Mr. Raul Midon:] So that was certainly and there is music in everything. I mean, there's music in the way people speak. There's, you know, some people are very sing-songy in the way they speak.
[Lynn Neary:] I want to hear some more music. First I just want to remind our listeners that you are listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And then Raul, I'm wondering if we can hear another song.
[Mr. Raul Midon:] Yes. This is a song that actually was kind of written about being blind, in a way. When I first moved to New York City about four years ago, I was struck by how noisy the city is. And I live pretty far up in the sky, and it's quiet when you close the windows, but it's pretty noisy. And when I went back to the little town that I was born in, I realized that it was such a wonderful thing to have come from there before going to New York City in a way. Because although there is many things in New York City, it doesn't have everything. You know, you don't hear crickets at night at least not where I am in the middle of Manhattan. And so I just wrote this song about the picture in my mind of where I live. And I realize that really, the picture that I have is my own picture, and I also realize that almost everything a big element of what I know is in my imagination because I've never seen it. And so this song is called It's All In Your Mind. [Singing] Stand with me on the riverbank where the cool wind brushes our face. You are welcome to do nothing at all in the lonesome of this sheltered space. Through my eyes you can see the world. Well, you might be surprised what you'll find. A cool wind and a warm touch and a moment that is all in your mind. And if you find a reason to change your point of view, might be the time and season for doing what you've always wanted to do. Put my thoughts on a single page, but the paper didn't have any lines for painting pictures of magic and light and a moment that is all in your mind. Oh, it's all in your mind. And it's all in your mind. Oh, it's all in your mind. And if you find a reason to change your point of view, might be the time and season for doing what you've always wanted to do, what you always wanted. I thought to call you the other day, but I figured that you don't have the time for painting pictures of magic and light and a moment that is all in our minds. It's a moment that is all in your mind. Oh, it's a moment that is all in your mind. And it might be that it's all in your mind.
[Lynn Neary:] Raul Midon, that was wonderful. Thanks so much.
[Mr. Raul Midon:] Thank you for having me.
[Lynn Neary:] Raul Midon's CD is called State of Mind, and you can hear more of his music at our Web site. Just go to the TALK OF THE NATION page at npr.org. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Lynn Neary.
[Mr. Raul Midon:] [Singing] Make a little difference in this world. I know that, I know that, I know, know, know that we're going to make it [unintelligible]. You can, I can, she can, he can, we can make. Talk about I'm talking about how we can all make a little difference in this world, everybody going to make a little bit of difference in this world, everybody going to make it.

[Madeleine Brand:] The new James Bond movie is among the films covered in this week's digest of what the critics are saying. It's compiled as always by the online magazine Slate. Here is Mark Jordan Legan with Summary Judgment.
[Mr. Mark Jordan Legan:] Before any of you go grab a fast food cheeseburger today, you may want to check out Fast Food Nation. Opening in limited release, this dramatization of the bestselling non-fiction book, takes us into the frightening world where the quick, deep fried, All-American meal is assembled. Greg Kinnear and Ethan Hawke star.
[Unidentified Man:] [As character] Couple of his grad students decided to culture some patties from a bunch of fast food chains. They got a hold of a couple of big ones. And the fecal coliform counts were just off the charts.
[Mr. Mark Jordan Legan:] The nation's critics wonder if you want fries with that? Just like fast food itself, some love it, others don't. The Hollywood Reporter finds Fast Food Nation punchless. But the Christian Science Monitor calls it a sensitive and humane piece of work. And Rolling Stone bubbles, it's less an exposé of junk food culture than a human drama, sprinkled with sly provoking wit. And for those of you who wished March of the Penguins had some dance numbers, you should love Happy Feet. This wide-release, computer animated, family comedy comes from the same creative team that brought us Babe, and focuses on a tone deaf, tap dancing penguin who is determined to be himself no matter what anyone else thinks. Hugh Jackman, Robin Williams, and Nicole Kidman provide some of the vocal talent.
[Mr. Robin Williams:] [As Lovelace] This, Ramon, is my sacred talisman. Bestowed on me by the mystic of the age during my epic journal of enlightenment.
[Mr. Mark Jordan Legan:] The critics feel like dancing along with this frozen treat. Terrific fun, shouts the Hollywood Reporter. The Chicago Tribune raves, It's craftsmanship and ambitions put it a continent ahead of nearly every other animated feature of the last couple years. And Variety thinks Happy Feet is one of the very best directed animated films on record. The attention to detail is phenomenal. The humor, ample. And we close with the long awaited return of Bond, James Bond, in the wide-released Casino Royale. Based on the very first Bond novel Ian Fleming ever wrote, the story examines the dark, rough beginnings of this famous secret agent. Daniel Craig stars.
[Ms. Judi Dench:] [As M]: Thanks to your over-developed trigger finger, we have no idea who hired him or why. And how the hell did you find out where I lived?
[Mr. Daniel Craig:] [As James Bond]: Same way I found out your name. I thought M was a randomly assigned letter. I had no idea it stood for...
[Ms. Judi Dench:] [As M]: Utter one more syllable and I'll have you killed. I knew it was too early to promote you.
[Mr. Mark Jordan Legan:] The critics rave about Casino Royale and praise the much-debated casting choice of Daniel Craig. The New York Daily News cuts right to the chase and declares, Daniel Craig is the best Bond since Sean Connery. The Seattle Post Intelligencer cheers, Flat out one of the best Bond movies ever. And Rolling Stone adds, Craig gives us James Bond in the fascinating act of inventing himself. This you do not want to miss. Now, much was made of the worldwide casting search for the next Bond and the studio truly did search everywhere. They even looked here at NPR, but Alex Chadwick wanted script approval. And apparently I was out of the running because they insisted 007 shouldn't be addicted to barbecue potato chips and get winded after taking a flight of stairs. I mean Bond being in shape is so old school.
[Chadwick:] Mark Jordan Legan is a writer living in Los Angeles.

[Madeleine Brand:] First though, in Africa a developing crisis is threatening political stability in Chad and neighboring countries there. Today the government of Chad broke off diplomatic relations with Sudan. President Idriss Deby blames Sudan for supporting rebels who want to overthrow his government. And the Central African Republic will now close its border with Sudan in solidarity with Chad. Today's actions further endanger Sudanese refugees from Darfur who have fled to Chad and may now be expelled. We spoke earlier with NPR's Ofeibia Quist-Arcton. Ofeibia, President Deby insists everything's under control, that he beat back the rebels who were advancing on the capital. Is that accurate? OFEIBIA QUIST-ARCTON reporting We're told today that N'Djamena, the capital, is quiet today, and it seems that the rebels have decided to fall back. Whether it is a tactical move or not, we're not quite sure. The rebels have been moving towards N'Djamena for the past six months, and that is when many of President Idriss Deby's top army officers decided to desert and join the rebel camp. They say they will not stop until they have driven the president out of office. He, by the way, is intending to run in elections on the 3rd of May, which he says will go ahead. And what do his former generals complain of?
[Quist-arcton:] Inept government, corrupt government. In the past three years, Chad, which is a huge, landlocked, mainly desert country, have started producing oil. You have these army officers and the political opposition, by the way, in Chad saying the oil resources are not being properly used. When Chad began pumping oil, or just before, its project was underwritten by the World Bank, and by this conglomerate, including Exxon Mobile, and for the first time almost anywhere in the world it was said that some of the money would be used now, some would be used for key areas, such as health and education, and some would be put in a special fund for future generations of Chadians. Last year, the government rescinded on that agreement, and a lot of people say that put it on collision course, not only with the international community, but also with people within Chad who say they are misusing those funds.
[Madeleine Brand:] Deby has accused Sudan of being behind this rebellion. Is that true? And if so, why would Sudan want to overthrow Chad's government?
[Quist-arcton:] Sudan has denied it, but many analysts say there are all indications that A, Sudan has not only supported these rebels but has backed them, of course, with the weapons that they needed to fight the government. And you have Sudan on the other hand accusing Chad of backing Sudanese rebels in Darfur, the troubled region in the West, where we have seen tens of thousands of people killed and millions more displaced, and some of the refugees you spoke about in your introduction coming across the border into Chad. So you have these tit for tat allegations, and now, of course, Chad saying enough is enough. The international community has not listened to us. We've been accusing Sudan and saying that Sudan is trying to destabilize our country. Now they have backed rebels. Nothing has happened. We're going to not only throw out there diplomats, but much worse, the refugees who have become victims of violence across the border. So really it is becoming a cycle of violence in this Central African region.
[Madeleine Brand:] Well, where would those Sudanese refugees go if Deby does oust them? Where could they possibility go?
[Quist-arcton:] This is the question. Back across the border there is still fighting in Darfur. You have the U.S. that has called the violence in Darfur, which has pitted rebels against government troops and pro-government allies, known as the Janjaweed Militia, who have apparently committed atrocities that go from rape-rape of women, rape of children, killings; are these refugees going to be sent back into what could be, if not certain death, certainly into camps that are so full of displaced people who are already leaving, leading a horrific life, is this what President Deby is saying? I think really this is a case of brinksmanship. He's saying not only to the U.S. and France, a former colonial power, and the United Nations and the African Union, who has peacekeepers in Darfur, deal with this situation, otherwise we will give you work to do with these refugees.
[Madeleine Brand:] NPR's Ofeibia Quist-Arcton, thank you.
[Quist-arcton:] Pleasure.

[Rachel Martin:] British Prime Minister Theresa May has warned that rejecting her Brexit plan would be a disaster for British democracy and that if Parliament defeats her Brexit deal tomorrow, the U.K. may not leave the EU at all.
[Prime Minister Theresa May:] People's faith in the democratic process and their politicians would suffer catastrophic harm. We all have a duty to implement the result of the referendum.
[Rachel Martin:] All this comes on the eve of what will be one of the biggest votes in the British Parliament in decades. NPR's Frank Langfitt joins us now from London. Good morning, Frank.
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] Hey. Good morning, Rachel.
[Rachel Martin:] What did Theresa May say in this speech today that she has not said in the many times that she has made her case for her Brexit plan?
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] [Laughter] She has made it many times. What she suggested is if Parliament doesn't back her Brexit withdrawal agreement, which sets out the terms for how the United Kingdom would leave the European Union the end of March, that members of Parliament are likely to torpedo the Brexit process and try to stop the U.K. from leaving the EU. That, of course, would, from her perspective and many perspectives here, defy the democratic decision of the British people, which they took in 2016.
[Rachel Martin:] I mean, this is fascinating right? because up until now, she had been making an economic argument that if you don't buy my Brexit plan, there will be a so-called hard Brexit, and that's going to be devastating for the economy. Now she's saying it's going to undermine Britain's entire democracy, so...
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] Yeah, exactly.
[Rachel Martin:] ...Is she just ramping up rhetoric...
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] She well...
[Rachel Martin:] ...Or was she understating the threat?
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] Well, I think she's raising the stakes because she looks she could be heading for a very big defeat here. And so what she wants to do is impress on her Brexiteer colleagues in her own party that if they don't back her, they face the worst scenario that they've thought about, which would be actually being stuck inside the European Union. It's the last thing that they want. And she spoke about this earlier today. Here's how she described it.
[Prime Minister Theresa May:] It's now my judgment that the more likely outcome is a paralysis in Parliament that risks there being no Brexit. That makes it even more important that MPs consider very carefully how they will vote tomorrow night.
[Rachel Martin:] Frank, can you walk through if we can skip...
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] Sure.
[Rachel Martin:] ...A couple steps here, what happens if they don't support her plan? What happens if there's another referendum?
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] There's a whole range of possibilities. It's uncertain, and there's a lot of risk here. So if it gets voted down tomorrow night, the Parliament has given Prime Minister May 3 days to come back with a Plan B. She may go to Brussels on Wednesday, try to get more concessions on the deal. But people are skeptical that she's going to get anything that's going to win over members even of her own party. The opposition Labour Party, they see an opportunity here. They would like to call a vote of no confidence in the prime minister's government. And what they're aiming to do is trigger a general election, where they hope their head, Jeremy Corbyn, would end up in No. 10 Downing Street, knocking off the prime minister and pushing the Conservative Party out of power. Now, the other thing is Parliament could move to take control of the Brexit process. And that could mean everything from trying to come up with a new deal with the EU that's unlikely trying to delay Brexit a little more likely. And then the thing she's most concerned about and talking about today is the idea that there could be a second referendum with an option to stay inside the European Union.
[Rachel Martin:] Do you think people's minds have changed through this? I mean, if they were to have a second referendum, would the outcome be any different?
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] That's a great question. So I would've said six months ago no, but we've seen some drift, so I think it might be closer to a 5248 to stay in the EU, but that may not be enough. And then at all if you had a second referendum, you talk to people who even voted to remain in the EU who actually would agree with what the prime minister said today and said, you know something? I really want to, you know, stay in the EU but not at the cost of the integrity of British democracy. And so you could still see, even if it went to a second referendum, there's no guarantee that remain would win.
[Rachel Martin:] You've covered this since the very beginning, since that first Brexit vote in 2016. How are you watching this unfold? What are you thinking about?
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] I think there are some really interesting lessons for democracies. One is that this is an incredibly complex issue. And to take it to, you know, the voters, basically untangling 40 years of economic integration, is asking a lot of voters. The second thing is if you're going to do something like this, you need a plan. And it's very clear the government of the United Kingdom did not have a plan for dealing with this, which is one of the reasons we find ourselves in a pretty chaotic situation here in London.
[Rachel Martin:] NPR's Frank Langfitt for us this morning from London. Thanks so much, Frank.
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] Happy to do it, Rachel.

[Rebecca Roberts:] On the eve of his inauguration almost a year ago, three of President-elect Barack Obama's advisers shared some startling news. There was credible evidence that a group of extremists planned to cross the Canadian border and stage a terrorist attack on Inauguration Day. Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, writes about that incident in the forthcoming issue of The Times magazine. He also takes a close look at how the Obama administration has waged its war on terror as compared to policy under President George W. Bush. In just a minute, we'll speak with Peter Baker. If you have a question for him about the war on terror under President Obama, our number is 800-989-8255. Our email address is talk@npr.org. And you can join the conversation at our Web site. Go to npr.org and click on TALK OF THE NATION. You can also find a link to Peter Baker's piece, "Inside Obama's War on Terrorism." Peter Baker joins us now from a studio here in Washington. Welcome back to TALK OF THE NATION.
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
[Rebecca Roberts:] So let's start where you start in the magazine piece, with that scene the night before President Obama's inauguration. What happened?
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Well, the president-elect was getting ready to leave Blair House, where he was staying during the transition, to go to a bipartisan dinner at the Washington Hilton. And he was getting into his limousine and three advisers join him for the ride: John Brennan, who we've all seen now a lot in the last two weeks, who would become his chief counterterrorism adviser, and Denis McDonough and Mark Lippert, who are his foreign policy advisers, and they were out of breath because they have been running across the city. They couldn't find a cab in this sort of pre-inaugural craziness that Washington was enveloped at the time. And they wanted to brief him on the ride to his next event, to tell him the latest about a plot that the intelligence agencies of the United States had detected to potentially disrupt and attack the inauguration itself the next day. And I found it a really interesting moment because here is the first president to be sworn into office, to take over the White House in the post 911 sort of age of terrorism. And even as he's doing that, even at the very birth of his presidency, you know, terrorism or the threat of terrorism is sort of shadowing, you know, even that moment of celebration and jubilation.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Well, also there's all the logistical questions about who is responsible. Is it the transition team? Is it the outgoing administration? I mean, do you have any sense of who knew what when?
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Well, it was one of those remarkable moments of collaboration between the Bush team and the Obama team. For all of the partisan, you know, back and forth that we've seen over this last year and we had seen during that election, the Bush team and the Obama team got along pretty well. And, in fact, they met in the Situation Room in this same timeframe in the hours and days leading up to the inauguration. One side of the room was Obama's team: Hillary Clinton and Jim Jones, the national security adviser, on the other side was the outgoing team, Condoleezza Rice, Steve Hadley, and all of those guys talking together about what it means to take over White House at this moment, talking about this plot in particular. What would happen if these reports were true? In fact, Hillary Clinton, you know, ever the political figure, put her finger right on the point of it: What are we going to do if a bomb goes off some place on the mall in Washington? Is the Secret Service simply going to whisk Barack Obama off the stage? That's the first thing that people are going to see of their new president? She said, I don't think so. She understood that even beyond the specifics of an attack, just that very symbolism of a new president being, you know, whisked off the stage would be a devastating symbol to the rest of the world.
[Rebecca Roberts:] And so, what ultimately happened with that threat and how did the incoming administration choose to respond?
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Well, ultimately, it turned out to be what they call a poisoned pen. I mean, they went out and did a lot of rounding up of people and talking to people and checking all of the intelligent traps that they can do. And what they concluded was that it was what they call a poisoned pen, where one group of radicals understands that a rival group in this case, if Somalis were supposedly going to be in the United States and sort of rats them out, puts out bad information out there in the hopes that the Americans will end up, you know, rounding them up. So, you know, that, too, is a lesson for any new president who's taking over in the murky world of terrorism today. One of the biggest challenges for any president, any government, is figuring out what's real and what's not, what's a genuine threat and what's sort of vapors in the wind. And we've seen that again in the last two weeks in which we've reexamined how we missed the signs leading up to the attempted attack by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on the Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day.
[Rebecca Roberts:] And in addition to all the symbolism of this being on the eve of the Inauguration, all of that, do you have a sense that it became clear to the president-elect that this was now his responsibility? Not only was it him and his family at risk, but he was where the buck stopped.
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Right. Absolutely. Look, it's one thing to intellectually process this idea of terrorism unless you process the idea of being president. But until the moment you're actually in charge, I just don't think it's the same thing. And David Axelrod, who's his senior advisor, told me that the president-elect actually cancelled a practice session for the Inaugural speech the day before the ceremony, and that later, when he that is, David Axelrod learned about this inaugural plot, he, in his mind figured that that must have been due to President-elect Obama thinking about this potential disruption of the Inauguration and what it would mean. And he says, look, it's a very sobering moment. You can understand it all you want coming in, but when it's actually on your shoulders, the responsibility for security of the whole country, that's a very sobering thing.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Then-candidate Barack Obama on the campaign trail used a lot of rhetoric about how he would wage the war on terror differently and how he would change some of what he called the excesses of the Bush administration. What is your sense of how that view was implemented once he became the actual president?
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Sure. I mean, in a lot of ways, Barack Obama ran against the first term of President Bush's administration, but inherited the second term. You know, the war on terror, if we use that phrase, a phrase the president doesn't like, evolved quite significantly from the initial days after 911 through the end of President Bush's administration. By the end of his tenure, by the time he's turning over the reins to President Obama, President Bush, under pressure from the Supreme Court, from Congress, from media disclosures, had already begun to moderate a lot of the things that had been controversial. I mean, we talk a lot about waterboarding, but that hadn't actually been done in several years. You know, there had been the warrantless eavesdropping, surveillance on calls between the United States and foreign countries. Well, that was done in secret, without the consent of Congress. By the time President Bush left, they had worked out a deal with Congress to ratify that and bring everybody on board, including Barack Obama. So when he took over, President Obama found a counterterrorism program and strategy that was much closer to what he could embrace than what he ran against, in effect. And he's continued the evolution that had taken place in the second Bush term. He's continued to shave off some of what he sees as the extremes of the Bush program. But he's also kept a lot of the basics in place. And, in fact, in some cases, like the drone strikes in the Pakistani tribal areas, he's even expanded on it.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Well, you actually quote an expert from the Heritage Foundation in your piece who says that really, this administration and the Bush administration aren't all that different.
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Yeah. He said it's not just Bush light. It's actually Bush. Now, that's not to say that there aren't differences. There are. And there are some decisions that President Obama has made that have been quite controversial, particularly among the conservatives who served in some of the in the Bush administration, particularly, obviously, the Cheney camp. That would be, in particular, the decision to reinvestigate some of the abuses, alleged abuses by CIA officers in interrogating terror suspects a number of years back and the decision to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of 911, to New York to face trial in a civilian court, as opposed to a military commission. But aside from these sort of very big and obviously, there are big differences about Guantanamo, although if you remember correctly, President Bush himself had made it a goal to close Guantanamo. He simply wasn't able to accomplish it in his administration, did release around 500 release or transfer around 500 Guantanamo detainees in the effort to get to a place where Guantanamo might not be needed. So there is more continuity there than some people might like to describe it. At the same time, there's important differences, as well.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Well, let's turn this out to our callers. Do you see differences between the Obama administration's policies in the war on terror and the Bush administration's policies? 800-989-8255 is our phone number. Our email is talk@npr.org. My guest is Peter Baker. He's a White House correspondent for the New York Times. And his New York Times Magazine article, which is upcoming, is called "Inside Obama's War on Terrorism." We have an email from Timothy, who says: Is there any credence to Mr. Cheney's claims that we are less safe under President Obama's watch? Has the intelligence community, in fact, gotten worse?
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Well, you know, that's going to be something we're going to debate for a long time: Are we less safe? I mean, you know, what President Obama would say is that there doesn't have to be a choice between security and maintaining civil liberties and that the things he has done to change the Bush program have not been a big change in terms of endangering the country. He says he'll do what he has to do to protect the country. At the same time, he has said to the intelligence community, look. Some of the things I'm doing here may make your job a little harder, and that's going to have to be the case because we don't follow the same practices and standards that our enemies do, and that we do have to live up to what we consider to be American values. And what Vice President Cheney is talking about, of course, are some of these big issues that do divide this administration from the last one, particularly the idea of enemy combatants versus civilian trials and interrogation. But when Vice President Cheney talks about interrogations again, I mean, the harshest of these techniques that we often debate hadn't actually been used in the last few years. And President Bush himself had closed down or at least emptied the secret overseas CIA prisons, and so forth. So there had been an evolution in both the Bush administration handling of things and the nature and circumstances of the ongoing war on al-Qaida.
[Rebecca Roberts:] You mentioned that the president doesn't like the term the war on terror. How important are those rhetorical changes, do you think?
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Well, I think, that they are important. I mean, they're just language, obviously, just semantics, in some ways, in sort of a silly argument. But, you know, they end up being code for bigger things. President Obama doesn't like the phrase war on terror because he says terror is a tactic, not an enemy. He uses the phrase war on al-Qaida. That lends, you know, ammunition to those who say it. It means he doesn't really take it seriously enough. He doesn't really think we're at war, that he thinks of it as a law enforcement problem, something that he denies, you know, vigorously and he does use the war he does use the word war. He doesn't use the words war on terror. So we get into these sort of linguistic differences, but they're code words, I think, for these broader issues. And I think that a lot of what the complaints about President Obama are have less to do with some of he specific policy decisions he's made and more about people's sense of who he is, you know? Whereas President Bush was sort of a visceral fellow, a from-the-gut leader, as he liked to put it, had a certain Texas bravado and swagger to him, a certain robustness, favoring action and resolute behavior leadership, as he would put it. You have President Obama, who is a more of a cool, cerebral leader, somebody who doesn't seem to get very hot in public sessions, at least and therefore people look at that and say, well, does that mean he really understands that we're at war? And what he and his defenders would say is, yes, of course, we can understand that. It doesn't mean we have to give in to emotionalism, and that doesn't mean that we can't be smart about the way we fight this war.
[Rebecca Roberts:] You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. Going through your piece, you quote people who see President Obama's policy as a continuation of the Bush administration, as Bush light, as potentially dangerous, as finding a balance between civil liberties and security. How come so many people look at the same thing and come across with such different impressions?
[Mr. Peter Baker:] It is a Rorschach test, isn't it? I mean, here's a president who's being denounced on the one side by Vice President Cheney for being weak on terror, and denounced on the other side by the ACLU for being, you know, the second incarnation of Bush. And it's because it is a tough issue. And it does involve a mixture of policy issues and stylistic issues and, you know, rhetoric and tone, all of which lend different impressions. And, you know, President Obama has made a point of talking, you know, in Cairo, for instance, in the Muslim world, you know, setting a new stage, intending to try to undermine what he sees as some of the ingredients that fuel extremism. And, you know, the truth is, President Bush did some of that, as well, but President Obama has a different identity, has a different posture in which he can communicate with the outside world in a way that, by the time he left office, President Bush couldn't. So, you know, a lot of is just tonal. A lot of it are important differences in terms of this policies that people focus on. The ACLU is focused on, for instance, the fact that President Obama has agreed to continue to hold at least some of these terrorists suspects at Guantanamo without trial, without charge, something that, you know, he President Obama himself had objected to prior to becoming president, you know, whereas Vice President Cheney is focused on decisions that went the other direction.
[Rebecca Roberts:] How do you think the thwarted attack on Christmas Day has changed this decision?
[Mr. Peter Baker:] I think it has. I think, that, you know, you saw in the first year all the way up to Christmas, you know, President Obama didn't speak in public a lot about terrorism. He gave some talks from time to time, but it clearly wasn't defining issue. He doesn't want this to consume his presidency the way he believes it did President Bush's. He wants to talk about and focus on health care and the economy and other priorities. And to the extent that terrorism comes up, you know, it's he wants it to be one of, but not the most of vital issues confronting the country. In the last two or three weeks since the Christmas Day plot, he's had to focus a lot more public energy on reassuring the country and making clear that he understood there were screw ups in the way the intelligence was handled and the way the aviation security system worked, and that he was on top of that case. Now he's trying to pivot back to the economy and health care as we move further into January toward his State of the Union and toward final votes on the health care legislation. But, you know, this moment sort of exposed, once again, how fraught this issue is, how emotional it is, how people feel very strongly about it and how dangerous it is, particularly for a Democrat to be perceived as anything other than tough on terrorism.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Well, in addition to at least briefly refocusing the president's priorities, do you think it has changed public perception of his success in that area?
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Well, it's brought that issue more to the fore as something that people are thinking about when they think about him. If we'll see what happens later in the year with his mid-terms. If there continue to be more attempted attacks like this, particularly if there was a successful one, obviously, that will reshape everything overnight. If it turns out that, you know, the rest of the year goes through without a whole lot more public, you know, examples like this, it'll probably, you know, begin to fade again, as it had in the years, frankly, up until this event.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times. He joined us today from a studio here in Washington. His article, "Inside Obama's War on Terrorism," will be in the forthcoming issue of The New York Times Magazine. You can find a link to it at npr.org. Peter Baker, thanks very much.
[Mr. Peter Baker:] Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
[Rebecca Roberts:] And tomorrow, mental illness has become an American export. Journalist Ethan Watters joins us. His book is "Crazy Like Us." This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Rebecca Roberts, in Washington.

[Melissa Block:] The U.N. estimates four million people inside Syria are in need of humanitarian assistance. Add to that up to a million more Syrian refugees who fled to neighboring countries, also in need of help. The U.S. government has pledged tens of millions of dollars in aid, but that hasn't stopped some Syrian-Americans from taking matters into their own hands. Ben Bergman, of member station KPCC, introduces us to some sending aid from Southern California.
[Ben Bergman, Byline:] When Omar Chamma recently traveled to the Syrian-Turkish border, he packed so many bags of food and medical supplies that he incurred $1,600 in baggage fees on American Airlines. He also brought a quarter of a million dollars in donated money to buy more supplies when he arrived. It was his seventh trip in the past year.
[Omar Chamma:] Every time I fly out of Istanbul, I will say, you know, this is my last time I'm not going to go back again. Then I sit down and think about what I've seen. I've seen the desperation in their eyes down there. And every time I come back there, there is nobody there showing up to help them.
[Ben Bergman, Byline:] Chamma isn't a doctor or an aid worker. He's in real estate investment and apparently is apparently quite skillful at raising money. He was born and raised in Damascus before moving to the U.S. to study engineering at Louisiana State University in the "80s. He estimates he's collected more than a million and a half dollars mostly from Syrian friends in Southern California to help refugees. The money has gone to buy blankets, sleeping bags, kids" shoes, medicine, and hundreds of boxes of sutures. That's because Chamma saw refugees rolling up plastic bags to try to bind their wounds.
[Omar Chamma:] They have no bandages. They have no medication. They have no antibiotics. I went to a house one day and there were 55 people living in one two-bedroom home and there's no doctors between them. And most of the people who come through the border, they're civilian injured civilian, from bombing or shooting or burn victims. Not every wife would support their husband going into a war zone.
[Ben Bergman, Byline:] Mavis Benton Chamma serves us coffee and cake in her Orange County home, where an entire room is devoted to storing relief supplies. Her husband says he will keep going to the border as long as Syrians need help.
[Omar Chamma:] Every time he goes I just leave it to God. If it's something is going to happen, at least I know he's doing what he believes in.
[Ben Bergman, Byline:] As hard as it for her and their three children to see their father leave every few weeks, she knows why he has to go.
[Omar Chamma:] I'm from Louisiana. If somebody was invading Louisiana, I'm going to go there.
[Ben Bergman, Byline:] That sense of solidarity has led dozens of other Syrian-Americans to the border. One of them is Sama Wareh, a 29-year-old artist who also lives in Orange County, California. Her parents are from Damascus. And before the war, she visited her cousins in the capital city many times. In November, Wareh backpacked by herself to the same border town Chamma goes to, Reyhanli. She sold her motorcycle and paintings to pay for the trip, and raised thousands of dollars from friends.
[Sama Wareh:] My thinking was that if there are thousands of refugees in Turkey right now, and more are crossing the border every day, there's got to be a lot that are not in the refugee camps, that nobody knows about. So my whole thing was I'm going to go look for those people.
[Ben Bergman, Byline:] She found plenty of people who needed help. She took them grocery shopping, bought them blankets and heaters, and paid their rent. When we met next to the gallery where she works, Wareh was wearing her usual wardrobe that's a cowboy hat covering her hijab, and cowboy boots. They were the same boots she wore on the border. Only then, she slipped in a knife for security. She didn't have to use it and she never crossed over to the Syrian side, because of a promise she made to her parents.
[Sama Wareh:] They were like, please, we're already terrified you're going by yourself just at least don't go into Syria. Everyday people would tell me, I can get you in; I can get you out, it'll be safe. And it was hard to tell them no, I promised my parents I wouldn't do it.
[Ben Bergman, Byline:] Wareh is planning to return to the Syrian-Turkish border later this year. This time, she will make no such promise to her parents. For NPR News, I'm Ben Bergman in Los Angeles.

[David Kestenbaum:] In the year 2000, when this technology was still classified, Douglas Beason agreed to be hit with the invisible rays. It was a clear sunny day in the New Mexico desert, and he was in his underwear. That was the experimental protocol. In fact, the first guy up was going to wear a leopard skin pair.
[Dr. Douglas Beason:] Because this will probably go down to annals of history, they didn't want the first test subject with a leopard-skin underwear.
[David Kestenbaum:] Beason is now the associate lab director for threat reduction at Los Alamos National Laboratory. When his turn came, he stood in the opening of a tent with a bathrobe on, his back toward the ray gun device over a third of a mile away.
[Dr. Douglas Beason:] They had foam laid out in front of you and at back of you so that you could fall or you could leap to the side, because they knew that even testing this over very small parts of your body, that it hurt like heck and that you want to get out of the way. So standing in the tent flap they said, count down in 10 seconds, drop the bathrobe three, two, one and instantly you felt your entire back, your head, your arms, your legs, everything felt like a supercharged oven had just been opened up. I started counting and didn't get past two. And I had to leap to the side.
[David Kestenbaum:] Researchers measured his skin temperature, which had only gone up slightly. He felt okay, but pretty shaken.
[Dr. Douglas Beason:] And then they said now it's time for the next test. And I said, I'm not so sure I want to go back for that next test.
[David Kestenbaum:] What he was feeling was a blast of electromagnetic energy. The wavelengths used are far shorter than FM radio, shorter than the waves that warm food in a microwave oven. The military says they only penetrate 164th of an inch into the skin. The skin does heat up. But Beason says the brain thinks it's worst than it is.
[Dr. Douglas Beason:] That heat is transferred to your nerve endings, that your nerves think that the skin is being heated, and it is just an incredible, incredible experience.
[David Kestenbaum:] The military now had a series of videos typically a grown man stands calmly in a field, then for no apparent reason, he jumps like he's been goosed. You can hear the guy holding the video camera chuckle. The idea of the heat ray is that it provides an alternative to bullets. The military put together another video demonstrating a hypothetical scenario. Some guards are stationed at the entrance to a facility, and an angry crowd approaches the barbed wire fence. Are they carrying explosives? Maybe they're just unhappy citizens. The guards don't want to have to shoot.
[Unidentified Man:] This is your final warning. All individuals need to vacate areas [unintelligible].
[David Kestenbaum:] After three warnings, the crowd does not disperse, so the guards hit a couple of people with the invisible rays, and everyone scatters. The military calls the system Active Denial. Right now they have a version that can fit on a Humvee. The waves come from what looks like a big dish antenna on top. Susan Levine says the device is set up so it can't deliver a dangerous dose. Her title is principal deputy of the Joint Non-Lethal Directorate. She's based on Quantico, Virginia.
[Ms. Susan Levine:] Over the last 12 years that we've done this research, there's been about a total of 10,000 exposures.
[David Kestenbaum:] What's the worst thing that's happened to someone who's been hit with it?
[Ms. Susan Levine:] The worst thing that has happened was early in the laboratory studies there was a setting [unintelligible] laboratory equipment that was held on a little longer than it should have been. It resulted in a second-degree burn about the size, I believe, of a nickel, or a little or a penny. So there was a small blister created. And I think that was like in 1999.
[David Kestenbaum:] Is there any defense against such a terrifying weapon? The military says clothes don't work. But any college student who takes a physics course will learn something called Gauss's Law, which says that no electric field can penetrate a conductor. Would a coating of a tin foil protect you?
[Ms. Susan Levine:] Yeah, I'm not sure. We usually don't go into discussions on things that could be considered as countermeasures.
[David Kestenbaum:] Even then, she says, the device would have already served its purpose. If someone approached the checkpoint clothed in tin foil, you'd know he was up to no good. David Kestenbaum, NPR News.

[Ari Shapiro:] The Trump administration has made it official. It is pulling out of a landmark nuclear arms deal that dates back to the Cold War. The reason, they say, is that Russia was cheating. Russia denies that. But administration officials insist they've given the Russians plenty of time to salvage it. NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] It was 1987 when President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, banning an entire class of weapons. That agreement has been a key to security in Europe. But Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says Russia has been violating it for years now, putting European allies and U.S. forces there at greater risk.
[Mike Pompeo:] It aims to put the United States at a military disadvantage. And it undercuts the chances of moving our bilateral relationship in a better direction.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] He says he given Russia many chances to, quote, "mend its ways." It now has one last opportunity, since it takes six months for the U.S. to formally withdraw from the INF Treaty.
[Mike Pompeo:] If Russia does not return to full and verifiable compliance with the treaty within this six-month period by verifiably destroying its INF-violating missiles, their launchers and associated equipment, the treaty will terminate.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] U.S. officials are not optimistic about the prospects of a last-ditch deal. Russia continues to deny that its missile system violates the treaty. And the U.S. has been raising this for six years, starting with the Obama administration. Tom Countryman was a top nonproliferation expert at the State Department.
[Tom Countryman:] We went an extra mile and an extra mile in terms of raising this with the Russians over a period of many years. But I still believe that there is even an 11th-hour possibility to save the treaty.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] Germany and other European allies are expressing similar hopes. Countryman, now chairman of the board of the Arms Control Association, says the Russian missile threatens European territory.
[Tom Countryman:] And it creates a situation that's analogous to what we saw in the late '70s and early '80s, when Russian deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles caused the U.S. and NATO to respond in kind.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] The INF Treaty, he says, marked an end to those Cold War tensions. He's also worried about the fate of a U.S.-Russian agreement on strategic weapons that expires in 2021.
[Tom Countryman:] If that is allowed to die in the next two years, then there will be, for the first time in more than 40 years, no limits whatsoever on the buildup of nuclear weapons by the two sides.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] Trump administration officials say Russia would be to blame for any new arms race and the U.S. is still, quote, "some time away" from deciding whether to deploy any new weapons systems. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department.

[Steve Inskeep:] If you're still waiting for the government to fix the economy, you can go to Las Vegas looking for a new job while you're waiting. A major new development in Vegas is hiring in a big way. The MGM Mirage is looking to fill 12,000 jobs in its huge CityCenter project. As NPR's Ted Robbins reports, the company expects to be flooded with applications.
[Ted Robbins:] CityCenter is an enormous complex of resorts, condominiums, and retail stores going up on the Las Vegas strip. At roughly $8 billion, it's said to be the most expensive private construction project in U.S. history. MGM Mirage Vice President Alan Feldman says when it opens in December, CityCenter will need a lot of workers.
[M:] Front desk personnel and bell staff and restaurant servers, housekeepers, [unintelligible] house staff, engineering and maintenance personnel, accounting and administrative staff.
[Ted Robbins:] That's even after the project was scaled back. One of the condo components was cancelled, and one of the resorts was postponed. Feldman says having any jobs to offer in a recession makes CityCenter different than Las Vegas resort openings he's seen over the last two decades.
[M:] There's something very profound this time about putting out a call for 12,000 people in the midst of headlines that seem to run every day of, you know, that number and more are being laid off in other places.
[Ted Robbins:] Feldman expects about 100,000 applicants in all. People are being asked to apply online first. Interviews will begin next month starting with workers who were laid off from other MGM Mirage resorts in Vegas over the last year. Ted Robbins, NPR News.

[Guy Raz:] Let's go from national politics now to city politics and a case of shenanigans here in our nation's capital. Back in 2012, Washington, D.C.'s mayor, Adrian Fenty, was defeated in his bid for a second term. Fenty was the youngest mayor ever elected in Washington, and by most accounts, he was among the most successful. But Fenty had also alienated a significant part of the electorate who felt he'd become arrogant and out of touch. So in came Vincent Gray, the man who beat him and who is now the city's mayor. Gray had promised to bring integrity to city government, but in recent weeks, his administration has been mired in scandal. Two former campaign aides have been charged with making illegal payments to a man who also ran for mayor that year, Sulaimon Brown. Sulaimon Brown didn't win many votes, but he mounted an aggressive campaign against the then mayor Adrian Fenty. And shortly after the new mayor, Vincent Gray, was inaugurated, Washington Post reporter Nikita Stewart was looking at the list of the people Gray hired for prominent city jobs, and she noticed something strange.
[Nikita Stewart:] One person I noticed who was on the payroll was Sulaimon Brown, who had been the mayor's opponent. He was a minor mayoral candidate, but he was a thorn in the side of Adrian Fenty...
[Guy Raz:] During the campaign.
[Nikita Stewart:] ...during the campaign. He had a slogan: Vote for any color, Gray or Brown, but just don't vote Fenty.
[Guy Raz:] Wow.
[Nikita Stewart:] It was a line that got the crowds riled up. And it turns out that he, in fact, was being paid by the Gray campaign to attack Fenty verbally at various debates. And then he also said that he was promised a city job. Federal authorities haven't said that yet. But he got a $110,000 job, and it was an important job. It was in the health care finance agency that deals with Medicaid. That's one of the biggest expenditures for the city. He was put in that office as a special assistant.
[Guy Raz:] That's a lot of money, $110,000 a year, for a city job. Was he qualified for that job?
[Nikita Stewart:] The mayor when it first came out in my story that Sulaimon Brown was working for the city he kept telling everyone at press conferences he's qualified for the job. But then when you looked at his resume that he turned in to the city, it was missing dates. He had held a number of jobs as an auditor, but he had short stints at each firm. Also, Sulaimon Brown had an interesting criminal history. We're talking about a restraining order that was never actually filed, but it was somehow on record, an attempted murder charge from years ago in Chicago. And after he was fired for various reasons, he came to me and he told me his story.
[Guy Raz:] Why did Sulaimon Brown come to you?
[Nikita Stewart:] Well, it's weird. During the 2010 election, I would see Sulaimon Brown at debates. We would exchange hellos, but other than that, I really didn't talk to him. And then the day that he was fired from his city job, I had never seen anything like this. The mayor held a press conference to explain what happened because, I mean, it was very chaotic. He was escorted out by security. And the mayor held a press conference, and all of a sudden, Sulaimon Brown walks into the room. And at that moment, I thought, this is strange. And a lot of the media continued to question Gray, and I went and I sat next to Sulaimon Brown and I asked him, are you all right? That was it. And later, he called me and he told me his story.
[Guy Raz:] Is Vincent Gray has he been accused of any wrongdoing?
[Nikita Stewart:] So far, Vince Gray has not been charged. The mayor has said he promised Sulaimon Brown a job interview, not a job, and that it certainly wasn't in exchange for disparaging Adrian Fenty on the campaign trail.
[Guy Raz:] This looks bad for Mayor Vincent Gray.
[Nikita Stewart:] It looks very bad, especially since he gave a lot of people hope in 2010 that they were going to be able to have access to the mayor, that there wasn't going to be what his campaign characterized as cronyism that occurred in the Fenty administration. His campaign slogan was character, integrity, leadership. And now, people are questioning did he, in fact, steal the election, even if he wasn't aware of what happened. And the public is saying if you didn't know, you should've known.
[Guy Raz:] That's Washington Post D.C. political reporter Nikita Stewart. Nikita, thank you so much for walking us through that story.
[Nikita Stewart:] Thank you for having me.

[Lynn Neary:] President Obama's so-called Buffett rule has slammed into a wall of GOP opposition. On the eve of tax day, Senate Republicans voted yesterday to block a measure that would have made mega-investor Warren Buffett and billionaires and millionaires like him pay at least a 30 percent tax rate. Although Buffett endorses such a rule, Senate Republicans call it an election year gimmick. Their Democratic counterparts insist it's all about fairness. NPR's David Welna has our story.
[David Welna, Byline:] Senate Democrats call their bill hiking taxes on some 22,000 millionaires the Paying a Fair Share Act. Chief sponsor Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island readily acknowledged what Republicans have been saying about the Buffett Rule bill, that it's not about lowering the unemployment rate or the price of gasoline.
[Senator Sheldon Whitehouse:] It will not bring world peace. It won't save endangered whales from extinction. It won't cure the common cold. Will do none of those things. It will restore the confidence of middle-class Americans in our tax system by assuring that those at the very top of the income spectrum aren't paying lower rates than regular families do.
[David Welna, Byline:] Maryland Democrat Barbara Mikulski said the Buffett rule was, in a word, about fairness.
[Senator Barbara Mikulski:] You need to pay your fair share. This is what America is all about fairness.
[David Welna, Byline:] Just one Republican, Maine's Susan Collins, added her vote in favor to those of 49 Democrats and one Independent. Their 51 votes, while a majority, were still shy of the 60 votes needed under Senate rules. Arkansas' Mark Pryor was the only Democrat who voted with Republicans to block consideration of the measure. South Dakota Republican John Thune, who is in charge of the Senate GOP's messaging, called the Buffett rule a solution in search of a problem.
[Senator John Thune:] The bill before us would do one thing and one thing only, and that is target higher taxes on a small subset of our population in order to serve a political purpose.
[David Welna, Byline:] And number two Republican Jon Kyl said four out of five taxpayers who'd been affected reporting business income.
[Senator Jon Kyl:] So this is a tax that would disproportionally affect small businesses and other job creators.
[David Welna, Byline:] Democrats rejected Kyl's assertion. According to the U.S. Treasury, they said, barely 3 percent of small businesses would pay any more taxes under the Buffett rule. But the chef GOP complaint was that this was all part of the campaign to re-elect President Obama. Mitch McConnell leads the Senate Republicans.
[Senator Mitch Mcconnell:] President Obama looked at the options in front of him, sat down with his political advisers and said you know what? Let's go with a poll-tested tax increase on investment and job creation that won't fix anything and won't pass anyway.
[David Welna, Byline:] It may be true that bringing up the Buffett rule was less about passing it than it was about getting Republicans on thee record voting against it. Democrats feel certain they have a winning issue with the Buffett rule. A CNN poll released yesterday found 72 percent overall backed the Buffett rule, including a 53 percent majority of Republicans. Steven Greene, who teaches political science at North Carolina State University says...
[Steven Greene:] A lot of politics is not trying to change minds, it's trying to make the debate about issues where the public agrees with you, and I think this is a classic example of that.
[David Welna, Byline:] A new online ad out from MoveOn.org ties the Buffett rule to presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who is against it.
[Unidentified Man:] When the wealthiest 1 percent pay a fair tax rate like the rest of us, it keeps the American dream alive for everyone. So tell Mitt Romney, kittens are cute. One percent fat cats who won't pay their fair share? Eh, not so much.
[David Welna, Byline:] The Obama re-election campaign for its part has unveiled a website that let's people calculate their effective tax rate. It then compares that result to the 13.9 percent rate that Mitt Romney paid last year on an income above $20 million. Thinks that's unfair, reads the tagline? Apply the Buffett rule. David Welna, NPR News, the Capitol.
[Lynn Neary:] You're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News.

[Alex Chadwick:] John, it's Alex here. Let me ask you about money and the month of January, because there are new reports out today on campaign fundraising. They show both Democrats ahead of Senator McCain, though he was really just starting to pick up a head of steam in January, and among the Democrats Senator Obama raising three times as much as Senator Clinton did in January.
[Mr. John Dickerson:] The numbers on the Democratic side are very interesting, and they tell the story of the larger narrative that we've seen, which is that Senator Obama has done well, he's raised more money, and he's managed it more wisely, and Senator Clinton has a lot of debt. She ended January with $7.6 million in debt, which doesn't include the $5 million personal loan she gave herself. There's certainly grumbling among Democratic strategists not aligned with either campaign about how the money flies out of the Clinton campaign and exactly where it all goes, and I suspect when we look back on this campaign, someone will write a very smart story about the way in which resources were allocated in the Clinton campaign.
[Alex Chadwick:] There's a CNN-sponsored debate in Texas tonight for the Democrats. What are you expecting?
[Mr. John Dickerson:] Well, I'm expecting some fireworks. Hillary Clinton is in a tough spot right now, and these debates have been something her campaign has been pointing us all towards for the last couple of weeks. They think she does well in these debates, and she often has come across as the more commanding presence, and she really has to do something to knock Obama off his game and create a moment that's big enough for us all to continue talking about it. So what does a big moment mean? A big moment means something that reinforces an existing doubt about Obama. Those doubts have not surfaced so far. He's won 10 contests in a row, so she's got to really do something that not only reflects well on her but that gives people some reason to pause about Obama.
[Madeleine Brand:] Hey John, what about the math, the delegate math? We're seeing numbers that she has got to win an extraordinary amount of votes in the big states Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania something along the lines of 65 percent to 35 percent to get the amount of delegates that she needs. Is that true?
[Mr. John Dickerson:] Well, there are two kinds of delegates math, as we're all learning. There's the pledged delegates, the delegates that are assigned from the actual voting that goes on in the states, and then there are the superdelegates. As you point out, she would have to do better than anybody ever possibly expects her to do to take a lead in the pledged delegates. But where she may be able to build back her lead is among the superdelegates. But Obama will say, look, I have won among the regular folk in the land, and you should follow the inspiration of those regular people who have chosen these pledged delegates. Clinton will argue the opposite case, of course, and will say, look, superdelegates have been given the power to follow their own conscience, and here is the reason they should follow their conscience and not follow the pledged delegate lead that Obama has. It's going to get into a very complicated spin war.
[Alex Chadwick:] John Dickerson, chief political correspondent for Slate.com. John, thank you.
[Mr. John Dickerson:] Thank you.

[Steve Inskeep:] If it's September of an even-numbered year, you can feel sure that everything that happens in Congress is done with the election in mind. Our best understanding about this fall's election is changing day by day. Analysts give Democrats a good chance at breaking Republican control of the House. A few months ago, Republicans seemed very likely to hold on to the Senate, but now the battle for the control of that chamber is growing tighter. To sort out what's happening, we've brought in NPR political editor Ken Rudin. Ken, good morning.
[Ken Rudin:] Good morning, Steve.
[Steve Inskeep:] And NPR national political correspondent Mare Liasson. Good morning to you.
[Mara Liasson:] Good morning, Steve.
[Steve Inskeep:] So what is the roadmap for Democrats, if they have one, to actually win control of the Senate?
[Mara Liasson:] Well, there is a roadmap, Steve. They need six seats net to win control of the Senate, and they have some targets. The pool from which they're fishing for those six seats include very tight competitive races in Missouri, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Ohio and Montana, all held by Republican incumbents. The Democrat is either tied or ahead at this moment.
[Steve Inskeep:] I gotta tell you, at the beginning of the year, when you looked at the political map, you could see that Rick Santorum, the senator in Pennsylvania, was vulnerable, but it was hard to find the second vulnerable Republican. What's changed?
[Mara Liasson:] Oh, there are plenty of vulnerable Republicans now. I talked this week with Senator Chuck Schumer, who's head of the Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee. He said he feels good about where the Democrats are. He certainly is not predicting that they're going to take over control of the Senate. The one race the Democrats are on the defense for is in New Jersey, where the Democratic incumbent is trailing by a couple points with his Republican challenger. But Democrats are also very hopeful about the Virginia race, which didn't look too competitive too long ago.
[Steve Inskeep:] Ken Rudin, is there really a chance that a Democratic Senate candidate can win in the state of Virginia, a very Republican state right now?
[Ken Rudin:] Well, it's not as Republican as it used to be. It used to be a really clear red state. But if you looked at all the votes that were counted in the 2004 presidential race, George Bush only got about 50-51 percent of the vote. If we were talking about George Allen's prospects for a second term a few months ago...
[Steve Inskeep:] The Republican Senator, yeah.
[Ken Rudin:] Exactly. It was a cakewalk. He was actually measuring the drapes for the White House in 2008. But he got himself into a lot of trouble, first with the M word, which was macaca, of course, then the J word: he didn't know how to define whether he was Jewish or not. Actually, Steve you probably know this he would be the first Jewish African-American president ever elected.
[Steve Inskeep:] What do you mean African-American?
[Ken Rudin:] Well, George Allen's mother was born in Tunisia, and the fact that her family was raised Jewish, he would be the first Jewish African-American president. And that's the real shame in this.
[Steve Inskeep:] Tunisia, that's in Africa! That's part of Africa!
[Ken Rudin:] That's absolutely right. By the way, we haven't even mentioned the Democratic nominee, who's running against him, Jim Webb. And this has nothing to do with how Webb is campaigning, and he's not campaigning that well, actually. But the fact is that Allen seems to be imploding.
[Steve Inskeep:] Let me ask you about national politics here. Obviously these races are state by state, but people are trying to nationalize them to some degree. Republicans have felt they have an advantage if people are talking about terrorism. Democrats have felt they have an advantage if people are thinking about Iraq. Who's gaining in that battle?
[Mara Liasson:] I think Iraq is still the top issue in a lot of polls that we've seen around the country. However, terrorism is gaining, and I think you have to give the White House credit for that. They set out very purposely to make terrorism, not Iraq, the main issue of this election. They wanted to kind of shift the focus away from Iraq, where things aren't going well and where the war is unpopular, and back on to the war on terror.
[Ken Rudin:] Let me make the opposite argument. We wouldn't be talking about Mike DeWine in Ohio or Jim Talent in Missouri if there were not an anti-Republican mood based really on President Bush's low numbers, the low approval rating of Congress, and the war in Iraq.
[Steve Inskeep:] Vulnerable Republicans here.
[Ken Rudin:] Right. Because Mike DeWine has really done nothing wrong. Jim Talent has really done nothing wrong that would warrant them being defeated in 2006, and it's really the war and the anti-Republican mood.
[Steve Inskeep:] Have Democrats gained at all as this word of this National Intelligence Estimate has brought the headlines back to Iraq? This is an intelligence document saying that Iraq has actually increased the motivation for terrorists around the world.
[Mara Liasson:] I think that the whole debate over the NIE shows how intensely partisan and politicized every single thing about Iraq and the war on terror is and is going to remain for the next six weeks. And the White House hoped to de-link Iraq from the war on terror, but the NIE just re-linked it in a very negative way for the White House. But look, both sides are using the NIE to bolster their own arguments: either why it's important to stay the course in Iraq or why Iraq is a disaster and we have to do something different.
[Steve Inskeep:] We started by saying Democrats still have a better chance. But would you call them the favorite to win the Senate at this point?
[Ken Rudin:] I say no. I still think that there are certain vulnerable incumbents. Mike DeWine in Ohio, Conrad Burns in Montana, Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania, and Lincoln Chaffee in Rhode Island. They could all go down to defeat. Talent still has a slight lead in Missouri. And also, the Democrats are very nervous about New Jersey. You know...
[Mara Liasson:] It's very hard to see...
[Ken Rudin:] Please, go ahead.
[Mara Liasson:] ...how the Democrats get to six if they can't hang onto New Jersey. It means they have to do a clean sweep of all these other tight races, and that would be a pretty tall order. The big question all along is whether Democrats could kind of ride the anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-incumbent tide to victory, or with the Republicans' very formidable structural advantages, including money, could that be enough to kind of hold back the tide.
[Steve Inskeep:] Mara Liasson, thanks very much.
[Mara Liasson:] Thank you, Steve.
[Steve Inskeep:] Ken Rudin, thank you.
[Ken Rudin:] Thanks, Steve. Can I just say that Ken Rudin is also writes the Political Junkie column on NPR. You can read it. The nine people who already read it read it on npr.org. But thanks, Steve, for mentioning that.

[Michele Norris:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
[Melissa Block:] I'm Melissa Block. Here's NPR's Philip Reeves in London.
[Philip Reeves:] They gathered in London on a somber, damp day to discuss the fate of a desert nation 2,000 miles away. Eleven days have elapsed since the first air strike against Libya. The question today was: What next? Britain's prime minister, David Cameron, opening proceedings with a graphic account of Gadhafi's latest attacks on the city of Misrata.
[Michele Norris:] I have had reports this morning that the city is under attack from both land and from the sea. Gadhafi is using snipers to shoot people down and let them bleed to death in the street. He's cut off food, water and electricity to starve people into submission.
[Philip Reeves:] The conference was an attempt to advertise the coalition's unity and strength. There's been tension within coalition ranks in recent days, especially over the decision to transfer overall command to NATO. Foreign ministers from some 37 countries attended today. The coalition considers support from the Arab world to be crucial. Seven Arab nations were represented, along with the Arab League.
[U:] Gadhafi is a killer.
[Crowd:] Gadhafi is a killer.
[U:] Gadhafi is a murderer.
[Philip Reeves:] Delegates were welcomed by a small crowd of Libyans gathered on London streets to thank them for moving against Gadhafi. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the conference that military measures against Gadhafi were not enough.
[Michele Norris:] All of us have to continue to pressure on and deepen the isolation of the Gadhafi regime. This includes a unified front of political and diplomatic pressure that makes clear to Gadhafi he must go.
[Philip Reeves:] The conference agreed to set up what it called a contact group to work with Libya's rebel opposition groups on a transition to a new form of government after Gadhafi goes. Better days lie ahead for Libya, said Cameron. Although, getting there will be tough.
[Michele Norris:] We should be clear about the scale of the challenge. It will mean looking afresh at our whole engagement with Libya and the wider region.
[Philip Reeves:] Guma El-Gamaty is the council's U.K. coordinator.
[Michele Norris:] The most important thing about this vision is that it's a vision for a Libya which is constitutional, democratic, civil country and the rule of law the rule of law is paramount and pluralism, separation of powers and freedom of thought and speech and expression.
[Philip Reeves:] This vision depends on Gadhafi leaving. So far, it's not clear if he will be forced out. Key members of the coalition have indicated they might be willing to allow Gadhafi to go into exile without facing an international criminal court. El-Gamaty says the Libyan opposition would prefer that not to happen.
[Michele Norris:] The ideal is a fair trial within Libya. Now, he's also facing a potential trial by the International Criminal Court. That is the ideal because these crimes should not go unpunished.
[Philip Reeves:] Richard Dalton, former British ambassador to Libya, says the conference went well.
[Michele Norris:] It's been a great success in the good participation, including key international organizations like the Arab League.
[Philip Reeves:] But Dalton says there's a long way to go.
[Michele Norris:] There are still a number of potential outcomes. I mean, if it's worse, there could be a breakdown of the Libyan state. There could even be a stalemate in which nobody has a clear military advantage. And then there's the more hopeful scenario of increasing successes for the opposition, leading to either a military victory or a negotiated outcome.
[Philip Reeves:] Philip Reeves, NPR News, London.

[Scott Simon:] The future of the state of the U.S. housing market was a primary focus for the White House this week. On Tuesday's State of the Union address, President Obama unveiled a new plan to try to correct the housing downturn. It would allow qualifying homeowners the chance to refinance their mortgages at historically low rates.
[President Barack Obama:] No more red tape, not more runaround from the banks. A small fee on the largest institutions will ensure that it won't add to the deficit. And we'll give those banks that were rescued by taxpayers a chance to repay a deficit of trust.
[Scott Simon:] Mr. Obama said his new plan would save homeowners about $3,000 a year on their mortgages. For more, we're joined by our friend from the business world, Joe Nocera, also a columnist for the New York Times. He joins us from New York. Joe, thanks for being with us.
[Joe Nocera:] Thanks for having me, Scott.
[Scott Simon:] And what exactly is the president proposing? Who would benefit?
[Joe Nocera:] Well, anybody who has a mortgage at a higher rate than the current rate which is pretty much everybody. I mean, we are at historically low rates. And the idea of being able to easily refinance at a lower rate, a get a fixed 30 year at these historic you know, 4 percent or so, would be pretty wonderful. You know, there are the devil is in the details, as it has always been with the administration's housing policies. And it's really hard to know exactly who will qualify and how exactly it will work. But in theory, this is what we need to do to get housing back.
[Scott Simon:] Yeah, and that would free up capital that could be spent elsewhere in the economy.
[Joe Nocera:] Well, exactly. I mean, you lower your mortgage, you have more money every month and you don't feel as constrained. And you don't feel this overhang of mortgage debt, which the country desperately needs to get down anyway. And people will start spending again, yes. Housing leads the country out of a recovery. That is a historic pattern. It has not happened this time because frankly the federal government's been too busy bickering how to fix housing, and so nothing's happened.
[Scott Simon:] The other part of the president's housing proposal is this new investigative unit would focus on abusive lending practices. It would be part of the existing Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, which the administration set up in 2009. How do you peg the chances for success of this new agency?
[Joe Nocera:] Slim, to be honest, Scott. The Justice Department and the various states have done a very, very poor job of prosecuting mortgage fraud. They've only gone after small fries; there's not a single person from Countrywide who's been prosecuted for the millions of fraudulent mortgages that that company made. It's really quite astonishing. So, I'm very skeptical with this new effort will make much of a difference.
[Scott Simon:] The White House, though, says the new unit is going to be chaired, by the way, by Eric Schneiderman, the attorney general of New York. And the White House says this new task force will have more jurisdiction and resources than what they've had, and the Attorney General Eric Holder says subpoenas have already been served.
[Joe Nocera:] Well, let's see. Let's see. Eric Schneiderman is an interesting person to run this. He's been very skeptical of the efforts of the various states to do this big settlement with the banks, which is not yet happened. And he one of the reasons he's skeptical is he says it's not tough enough, it lets the banks off the hook, and so on and so forth. So, there is a possibility that that could make a difference. And secondly, New York has something called the Martin Act, which other states don't have, which is a very powerful tool for prosecuting financial crimes. So, you know, that is the ray of hope. However, given the Department of Justice's track record in failing to prosecute financial fraud and financial crimes since the crisis, you know, I say, you know, as we say, it remains to be seen.
[Scott Simon:] This proposal would require congressional approval. How do you see the chances of that?
[Joe Nocera:] Well, I think the president put it pretty well in the State of the Union address when he said, you know, there are a lot of people who don't think anything's going to happen, and none of these proposals will pass this Congress. I think that's exactly right. So, don't lay your hopes on this one.
[Scott Simon:] New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, joining us from the studios of the Radio Foundation in New York. Joe, thanks so much.
[Joe Nocera:] Thank you, Scott.

[Scott Simon:] This week, The Hollywood Reporter had an affectionate cover interview with Woody Allen. Boy, did it get a backlash. The interview stirred resentment because it didn't focus more directly on allegations from the early 1990s that Woody Allen had sexually abused his young daughter. And it provoked an angry essay from Woody Allen's estranged son about how the media often handles celebrities who are accused of serious transgressions. NPR's media guy David Folkenflik joins us from New York. Thanks for being with us, David.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] Hey. Good to join you, Scott.
[Scott Simon:] Lets remind ourselves what Woody Allen allegedly did.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] Well, what he was accused of doing amid a custody battle with his wife, Mia Farrow, was of abusing his young daughter, Dylan, taking her into the attic and sexually molesting her. This had played out because of there was a scandal that had happened just weeks, months before where Mia Farrow had discovered that Woody Allen had taken nude pictures of her daughter with her former husband, Andre Previn, Soon-Yi.
[Scott Simon:] To whom Mr. Allen's now married, yeah.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] To whom Mr. Allen has now been married for many years. And that tore the family apart. And so it was this sort of twin scandal, a Greek tragedy if you will, that played out at that time and has had these repercussions ever since.
[Scott Simon:] How did The Hollywood Reporter the features editor, Stephen Galloway, handle that part of the story?
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] Well, he walked up to the edge of dealing with the question of Dylan Farrow's allegations and then never acknowledged them. What he did was he focused on the question of the scandal of Woody Allen's involvement with Soon-Yi and really asked him a question or two about how that scandal had affected him and the way in which her involvement in his life had changed him. But The Reporter never really dealt with the question of the abuse allegations themselves.
[Scott Simon:] Yeah, and Ronan Farrow then wrote an angry and I thought quite eloquent opinion piece in The Hollywood Reporter. He, of course, is the son of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow. Outline his arguments for us, if you could.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] He says it's incumbent on the press and on the media not to make it easy for celebrities to have these terribly serious transgressions alleged and be able to skate by on their charm, on their fame, on their accomplishments outside the arena of these allegations. He said, you know, it is precisely the inconvenient moment where you have all these stars and Woody Allen is in South of France because of the debut of his new film. And you have stars like Blake Lively, Jesse Eisenberg and others who are there, Steve Carell. And he says we should be hearing them asked what it's like to work with an alleged child molester and by the way, those are his words, not mine rather than asked, you know, what costumes were you wearing? How did you like your outfits? What was it like to work with this great director? That's his argument. He says it's uncomfortable but these questions need to be asked, otherwise powerful people can get away with terrible things.
[Scott Simon:] How do you feel about that?
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] Well, my God, I mean, if you think about this, Woody Allen was accused of this terrible thing but it was never adjudicated in court. A prosecutor said he thought there was probable cause but never tried it. And the question is one of context. Has Woody Allen ever been asked about it? He has.
[Scott Simon:] He had a press conference years ago. I happened to have covered it.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] Which you covered, that's right.
[Scott Simon:] I remember that, yeah.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] In this case, you know, it was an interview about the new film but also an opportunity to talk about Woody Allen's career. And just as Kobe Bryant as he retired should've been pressed more by sports journalists and by other journalists about the allegations that he had raped a woman in Colorado, so too Woody Allen could have been asked. Even questions like how did you react to reading Dylan Farrow's accusations against you in The New York Times a couple years back? Have you spoken to her? What do you make of that episode? Even a chance for him to explain his own perspective on that. We haven't heard that in this case, particularly from The Hollywood Reporter. My guess is if they could go back and do it again, they would. They seemingly tried to make up for it by letting Ronan Farrow make his case to the public his way.
[Scott Simon:] NPR's David Folkenflik, thanks so much.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] You bet.

[Scott Simon:] Egypt is exhausted but jubilant this morning. The anger that rang out from Cairo's Liberation Square and forced the ouster of a dictator became an all-night explosion of joy that has yet to wind down. We'll report on the reaction of the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak throughout today's program from Alexandria to the world's capitals to a neighborhood in the United States called Little Egypt. First, we go to the still-crowded littered streets of Cairo. NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson joins from Tahrir Square, focal point of the protests. Soraya, what have you seen so far today?
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] Well, there's still a fairly carnival-like atmosphere here in the square, although what's different is that people are cleaning up and packing up and getting ready to leave. We spoke with one of the ElBaradei supporters here this is Mohamed ElBaradei, Nobel Laureate and he's saying the plan is to sort of clean up and allow Tahrir Square to return to normal but with the understanding that they will return if the army does not oversee the transition to democratic reforms that they're looking for.
[Scott Simon:] Well, and this raises the next question. The protestors, in a sense, have tasted power. Do they have a new agenda they want to pursue?
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] Well, there certainly are mixed feelings here. I mean, again, some people are saying it is time to go but then we talked to others who are saying that, no, we better stay because many of the key demands have not been met yet. I mean, the question is what happens with the remnants of the regime who are here? What happens with the military? I mean, how are they going to oversee this transition? And then who comes next? Who are the new political forces that are going to help move this forward to a democracy the way the Egyptian people here in Tahrir and elsewhere seem to want? And a lot of those questions have no answer yet at this point. But the feeling here is that the biggest thing that they wanted, Mr. Mubarak leaving, has been achieved and that they need to allow Egyptians and this country to return to normal. And so we see so many people in the streets and volunteers sweeping. There was a water truck that came through earlier. And we saw trucks carrying out some blankets that had been used night after night in the square here. Completely different scene from what we've seen in the past 18 days.
[Scott Simon:] And anything from the new military government, Soraya?
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] Well, we've been waiting for more communiques to come out on state television. There has been nothing at least that we're aware of thus far. One thing that state television did announce is that the curfew is being moved or being shortened. So, now it's only going to go from midnight to 6 a.m., again, with an attempt to return things to normal. The other thing is that announces of schools are open tomorrow, which is the first time in almost three weeks.
[Scott Simon:] And tell us about the army not just the ones in the new military government but out there on the street and this extraordinary relationship they seem to have with the people of Cairo.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] The still are continuing that. They're sort of standing back overseeing some of this volunteer work that's going on. We did see one officer politely asking somebody with a tent in the street over there watching that they clean that, you know, that they move the tent aside. And I'm not sure if they've complied yet I think they might be in the process of doing it. But they've sort of taken a stand-back role and have not really interfered with what's going on here, waiting to see what the people do. It is important to say though that the police seem to have returned to some neighborhoods, like Heliopolis, which is where the presidential palace is. And so it'll be interesting to see how that relationship unfolds with the people.
[Scott Simon:] NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson joining us from Cairo this morning. Thanks so much, Soraya.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] You're welcome, Scott.

[David Greene:] Officials of 159 countries have taken a big step forward in promoting global trade. This happened over the weekend at World Trade Organization talks in Indonesian.
[Steve Inskeep:] Here's NPR's Jim Zarroli.
[Jim Zarroli, Byline:] The countries attending the WTO meeting agreed to a treaty that they say will lower trade barriers and speed up the passage of goods across borders. Officials say the deal could increase global trade by nearly a trillion dollars over time and also create millions of jobs. Roberto Azevedo is the director general of the WTO.
[Roberto Azevedo:] And so ladies and gentlemen, I'm delighted to say that for the first time in our history, the WTO has truly delivered.
[Jim Zarroli, Byline:] The agreement this weekend is important because it keeps alive a broader series of talks called the Doha Round, which is supposed to help bring about big changes in taxes and regulations. There was considerable skepticism before the meeting. The talks appeared destined to fail after Cuba threatened a veto over the removal of a reference to the U.S. trade embargo. And there was a dispute about whether a ban on agricultural subsidies should apply to developing countries. But the differences were ironed out at the last minute. The agreement now has to be approved by the legislatures of the countries involved. Jim Zarroli

[Michel Martin:] We're going to take a few minutes now to talk about a new report out about a trend among millennials that's gotten a lot of attention. For the first time in more than a hundred years, younger adults those aged 18 to 34 are more likely to be living in their parents homes than with a partner or spouse. In a few minutes, we're going to talk about this in our Barbershop roundtable. We've pulled together a group of millennials who've been thinking about this. But first, let's talk about the study with Kim Parker, director of social trends at the Pew Research Center, and she helped with the report. Kim, thanks so much for joining us.
[Kim Parker:] Thanks so much for having me.
[Michel Martin:] What are some of the factors that are fueling this that are fueling this? I assume there's more than one.
[Kim Parker:] The main driving force is the sort of downward trend in the share of young adults who are married, and part of that is explained by the fact that young adults are marrying later in life. But part of it also has to do with other factors. One is educational attainment. There are different patterns by race and ethnicity, and there are also some economic factors that are really playing into this and particularly affecting young adults who don't have a college degree. Employment among that group is down and wages are down. And those things make it a lot harder for young people to get out and establish their own households.
[Michel Martin:] The fact of the matter is millennials are probably the most diverse demographic in our history right? and so if you come from, say, an immigrant background, it's not considered so terrible to live with your parents. In fact, that's the norm in a lot of cultures. Is that a factor?
[Kim Parker:] We do find the rates of young adults living at home, and also more broadly multigenerational households are more common among new immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities. But when you just look at the patterns of what's been going on with whites, you see a similar uptick in the shared living with parents and a downward trend in the share who are marrying or living with romantic partners.
[Michel Martin:] One more question gender. Do you find that young men or young women are more likely to live with their parents? Is there a difference there?
[Kim Parker:] We do find a difference. Young men are more likely than young women to be living with their parents. This actually became the dominant living arrangement in 2009, so they hit the tipping point a few years back.
[Michel Martin:] Why do we think that is? Do we have any idea why that is?
[Kim Parker:] Overall, employment rates among young men are down significantly in recent decades, and wages have also fallen a lot especially for young men without a college education. But one thing that was really interesting for the young women was that, you know, a few decades ago, like 1960, 1970, young women who were employed were actually more likely to be living at home because they were a lot less likely to marry. But then things changed and married women started entering the workforce in bigger numbers, and then, you know, you see a different pattern.
[Michel Martin:] That's Kim Parker, director of social trends at the Pew Research Center. Kim, thanks so much for speaking with us.
[Kim Parker:] Thank you so much.

[Ari Shapiro:] President Trump's longtime confidante Roger Stone, the white-haired, larger-than-life political consultant, was back in a Washington courtroom today. Stone is not known for being afraid to talk, but today he was uncharacteristically silent. The judge presiding over his case has warned she may impose a gag order. NPR national justice correspondent Carrie Johnson is here now to talk more about it. Hi, Carrie.
[Carrie Johnson, Byline:] Hi, Ari.
[Ari Shapiro:] You were in the courtroom this afternoon. What's the takeaway?
[Carrie Johnson, Byline:] The Judge, Amy Berman Jackson, says she's thinking about a gag order. She's giving both sides a week until next Friday to file court papers setting out their position on the issue. Here's the bottom line. The judge says this is a criminal proceeding, not a PR campaign. And it's her job to protect Roger Stone's right to a fair trial and to protect the lawyers and the witnesses. She says that prosecutors could use any inconsistent statements that Roger Stone makes against him as a weapon at the trial, and Roger Stone has expressed some concern about a gag order in the past because he makes a living through political commentary. But the judge pointed out if she imposes a gag, Stone can still talk about immigration and foreign relations and even New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady if he wants to.
[Ari Shapiro:] [Laughter] Phew, well, OK, before the talk about gag orders, Roger Stone gave a press conference here in D.C. yesterday. What did he have to say?
[Carrie Johnson, Byline:] Roger Stone appeared at a Washington hotel here booked by Infowars, the conspiracy site and radio show. Roger Stone says he's tired since his arrest last week, but he's going to mount a vigorous defense to these seven criminal charges. They include obstruction, witness tampering and making false statements to Congress. Roger Stone says he never intentionally lied to Congress or investigators there, and then he had this to say about the president.
[Roger Stone:] I don't possess any knowledge of any wrongdoing by the president of the United States, including Russian collusion.
[Carrie Johnson, Byline:] Now, of course the indictment against Stone mentions his contacts with WikiLeaks and with senior officials in the Trump campaign. But it does not explicitly name the president, and it does not, at least for now, include conspiracy charges.
[Ari Shapiro:] Carrie, the public interest in the Roger Stone case has been extraordinary, stoked in part by Stone himself. When might a trial actually happen?
[Carrie Johnson, Byline:] Well, the government lawyer the lead government lawyer, Michael Marando, says the evidence in this case is voluminous lots of electronic devices and other evidence the FBI has to review. It's a complex case, so the exchange of material between the government and the defense is going to take a while, and that's going to happen under a protective order to protect those sensitive materials from getting out into the public. Both sides are now due back in court March 14. As for the trial, the judge says she was thinking about July or August. The government said it was thinking more like October. Remember; this judge, Judge Jackson, has been through all of this before. She was getting ready last year for the trial of Roger Stone's former business partner Paul Manafort until he pleaded guilty. So she knows the drill here, and she wants to be in charge of this proceeding.
[Ari Shapiro:] Part of the upshot here I guess is that for all of the talk about whether Mueller is almost done with his investigation, the trials coming out of this investigation are nowhere near done.
[Carrie Johnson, Byline:] Nowhere near done, Ari. And a prosecutor for the special counsel, Jeannie Rhee, said earlier this week that Roger Stone will be tried jointly between the special counsel team and people in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, D.C., perhaps setting the stage for some kind of handoff in the future.
[Ari Shapiro:] That's NPR national justice correspondent Carrie Johnson. Thank you, Carrie.
[Carrie Johnson, Byline:] My pleasure.

[Alex Cohen:] And I'm Alex Cohen. In the film "Inkheart," characters leap off the page quite literally and into the modern world. In a few minutes, a conversation with the villain of the film, actor Andy Serkis.
[Madeleine Brand:] First, let's try to figure out who the villain is in this next story. The easy answer would be cruise-ship companies, which want to dock in one of Florida's oldest fishing communities. The fishermen who rely on the shrimp in those waters are furious. NPR's Greg Allen has more.
[Greg Allen:] Mayport's a small village, just 70 houses or so, and it doesn't look like much, mostly one-story bungalows, a ferry, a lighthouse and a waterfront. But it has history. French explorer Jean Ribault landed here in 1562, three years before the Spanish founded St. Augustine 40 miles to the south. It also has tradition. Some families have operated shrimp boats here for nine generations or more. It's a prime location, where the St. John's River meets the Atlantic. That's why the U.S. Navy built a base here and why Jacksonville's Port Authority, Jack's Port, now has its sights set on the sleepy fishing village.
[Ms. Michelle Baldwin:] That's the St. John's River. And from where this fence starts, all the way down to where it ends, at the other end is the property, that Jack's Port has acquired.
[Greg Allen:] The head of Mayport's civic association, Michelle Baldwin, is walking along the village's waterfront. Over the past several months, the port authority has bought up most of it. Docks and businesses, here for generations, were suddenly torn down. What once had been a thriving waterfront is now vacant land.
[Ms. Michelle Baldwin:] This is where Matt Rawlins' field dock and ice house was. And then right here was the net shop, where they fixed and made all the nets for the boats.
[Greg Allen:] There's little question that Mayport is a village that's seen better days. A decade ago, the town drew up a redevelopment plan that was slow to get off the ground. Nine million dollars was spent on sidewalks, new sewers and lighting. But village residents weren't the only people making plans for Mayport. Jacksonville's port authority identified the village as a prime location for a proposed terminal for cruise ships. The authority's current cruise terminal is several miles down the St. John's River. To get there, cruise ships must sail underneath a suspension bridge. Jack's Ports spokesperson Nancy Ruben says if Jacksonville is serious about developing its cruise industry, the port will have to be moved to the other side of the bridge.
[Ms. Nancy Rubin:] The newer ships are taller. For whatever reason the infrastructure, the wow factor, the climbing, hiking structures that they put up whatever it is, they are taller. To continue to reap the benefits of cruise revenue, to continue to grow the port for the people of Jacksonville, we will need to move east of that bridge.
[Greg Allen:] [Unintelligible] leave that much slack in it, right there. On Mayport's waterfront, Will Allen guides his 73-foot trawler, the Miss Lorraina, into the dock. He's 85 years old and has been shrimping in Mayport for 60 years. He's one of the lucky ones. The port authority says it will provide dock space for his boat and three others once the cruise port is complete. But shrimpers say that leaves at least 20 other boats with no place to go. Well, it's going to be kind of rough, all right, for the fishermen. And this has already changed. I guess, there only one fish house now, right? [unintelligible] at the top, that's the one of the roughest thing. It is what we got around Mayport. They tell you if you wanted to move then you are in trouble. The proposed cruise terminal as planned would be much smaller than cruise ports elsewhere in Florida, big enough for just one ship at a time. Sitting on the front porch of her home, Michelle Baldwin says even so, the terminal and cruise ships will tower over the village. She points to where they'll be, just across a narrow, two-lane road.
[Ms. Michelle Baldwin:] There's never, ever, ever been a cruise terminal that has been built in a residential area. There are cruise terminals that have had residential areas built close to them, but never 60 feet from the front door.
[Greg Allen:] Mayport residents sought help from Jacksonville's city council, so far with little success. Councilmen Art Graham chairs the land use and zoning committee.
[Mr. Art Graham:] I guess the big question comes down to is, if we want to have a cruise ship terminal here or not. And the residents you got to look at is not the residents that live within, you know, a hundred yards of the place, it's all the residents in Duval County.
[Greg Allen:] Mayport residents now have most of their hopes riding on a lawsuit. They've gone to court, saying plans for the cruise port violate environmental rules and a special designation that protects Mayport as working waterfront. Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.

[Alex Cohen:] And I'm Alex Cohen. In a few minutes, Illinois governor Rob Blagojevich is staying put for now. There are moves to force him out. We'll have the latest.
[Madeleine Brand:] But first, California is talking a big step to clean up its air. Regulators approved a plan to cut the state's greenhouse gases back to 1990 levels over the next 12 years.
[Alex Cohen:] It's the country's first comprehensive plan to deal with the issue, and it could affect nearly every industry in the state. Among the changes, new limits on diesel exhaust from trucks and buses on California roads. David Gorn of member station KQED reports on the reaction to these new restrictions.
[David Gorn:] It is 3:00 in the morning in the industrial outskirts of Hayward... East of San Francisco Bay, and the nearby freeways are empty. But here at Road Star Trucking, business is cranking up.
[Unidentified Man:] Ready to go.
[David Gorn:] Trucks are loaded up early in this yard so they can get to stores across Northern California before they open.
[Unidentified Man:] Thank you, sir.
[David Gorn:] This is Bob Ramarino's company. He's also head of the California Trucking Association, and he says his industry is now in big trouble.
[Mr. Bob Ramarino:] I've characterized it as a watershed turn of events. It's going to fundamentally change the way that trucking operates in the state of California.
[David Gorn:] That fundamental change is a requirement for all diesel trucks and buses traveling California's roads to meet new diesel emission standards by 2014. Out-of-state trucks are mostly long haulers and tend to be newer trucks, so they're not as affected by the regulation. However, older vehicles that is, all pre-2010 vehicles must be retrofitted with filters that dramatically reduce emissions of soot and other pollutants at a cost of anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000 per truck. The grand total of the bill to the trucking industry? It's expected to top $5.5 billion. But the cost of not setting tougher standards for diesel... Could be even higher.
[Dr. Thomas Daley:] This is one of the most toxic substances known to humanity. This particulate matter penetrates the lungs, penetrates the cardiovascular system, heart and blood vessels.
[David Gorn:] Dr. Thomas Daley is chief of pulmonology at Kaiser Permanente in Santa Clara. He's sitting in one of his exam rooms, and says this is where he sees the effects of diesel exhaust firsthand. Kids are at highest risk, he says, and heavy doses of particulate matter from diesel engines are particularly dangerous, he says, to everyone living and working in the urban corridor.
[Dr. Thomas Daley:] The greatest risk is those who are adjacent to freeways. If you look in the state of California, 50 percent of the California population lives within one mile of a freeway. This is all of us.
[David Gorn:] According to the state Air Resources Board, California loses about $40 billion every year in health cost and lost time on the job due to illness attributable to diesel exhaust. Dan Sperling is head of the Institute for Transportation Studies at UC Davis. He's also on the Air Resources Board. He says this transition into cleaner to truck technology will be a bumpy ride for the trucking industry, but only because it's been in the technological slow lane for so long.
[Dr. Dan Sperling:] We've been aggressively regulating cars since 1970, much more so than we have trucks. Trucks really got a buy for almost 20 years while we were intensifying the rules against the cars.
[David Gorn:] The Air Resources Board has set aside $1 billion in state bond funding to help truckers and bus operators by paying for part of the upgrade. Which might not be enough for Bob Ramarino, who runs a fleet of 30 rigs. He says retrofitting his trucks isn't worth the expense because he won't own them long enough to justify paying out that kind of money. Instead, he says, he'll junk the old ones and try to buy new trucks. Ramarino remains hopeful he can pull it off, and really scared he won't.
[Mr. Bob Ramarino:] For 30 trucks, we're looking at about $3 million of investment within five years. That's incomprehensible.
[David Gorn:] About half of the 200,000 vehicles that will need a retrofit, Ramarino says, belong to mom-and-pop operations of just one or two trucks. For those people, he says, in this economic climate, the new requirement might be a tipping point that shuts down their engines. For NPR News, I'm David Gorn.

[Noel King:] Next month, lawmakers are going to start looking for ways to pay for the tax bill they just passed. House Speaker Paul Ryan wants to overhaul federal entitlement programs. He says they cost too much and they make people dependent. Medicaid is one of the programs under review. More than 70 million Americans are enrolled. So I called up Caroline Pearson. She's a senior vice president of Avalere Health, which advises companies on health care policy. And I asked her, who exactly is enrolled in Medicaid?
[Caroline Pearson:] I would think about them in three main groups. The biggest group about half of the program is actually low-income children. Medicaid pays for about half of the births in this country. So that's the biggest cohort.
[Noel King:] Wow.
[Caroline Pearson:] The other two groups are seniors and people with disabilities. So Medicaid actually pays for the costs of coverage for about 1 in 5 Medicare beneficiaries our nation's seniors as well as people who have very serious health conditions. And then the last group is other low-income adults who simply can't afford other sources of insurance.
[Noel King:] All right. With any entitlement program, there are always going to be complaints that the people on it should go out and get jobs, they should work, they're abusing the system. Is there evidence that a lot of people are, quote, unquote, "taking advantage of Medicaid"?
[Caroline Pearson:] That's not the case. In fact, most of the research suggests people who are able to be working and are on Medicaid are doing so, and the people who are on Medicaid and not working generally aren't able to do so either because they're kids or, as I said, they've got disabilities and aren't in a health state where they can really go to work on a daily basis.
[Noel King:] OK, so a lot at stake for people here, and I wonder, if there are cuts to Medicaid, could recipients just get subsidized insurance through Obamacare?
[Caroline Pearson:] Unfortunately, no. Medicaid is really the safety-net system that we have for the lowest-income Americans. Obamacare doesn't cover anyone below the poverty level, so for our poorest individuals in the country, Medicaid is really the only option.
[Noel King:] Have you had any conversations of note with either hospitals or insurance providers? Are people concerned that this is really something that might happen or is it like, nah, that's just politics?
[Caroline Pearson:] Hospitals and other health care providers are some of the most concerned stakeholders about Medicaid. They are the people that have to provide coverage when sick people show up in their emergency rooms, and so they would much rather get paid in a rational way and be able to take good care of those people throughout the year, not just when they are very sick. And then the health insurers certainly want to get more people buying into the system on a regular basis rather than just paying for them in emergency situations only.
[Noel King:] What are your clients telling you?
[Caroline Pearson:] Well, I think Medicaid survived some big hits this year. The Affordable Care Act repeal-and-replace efforts tried to remove big chunks of Medicaid, and that was one of the things that really brought those bills down. But I think next year's efforts are really going to turn to trying to control spending, so the question is, can you cover very sick populations and very needy populations for less money? And I think that's something we're going to need to wrestle with in 2018.
[Noel King:] What are you keeping an eye on in this week and in the week ahead?
[Caroline Pearson:] Well, we're looking at how Congress is going to move forward with efforts on entitlement reform and then what role the states are going to play. The states are co-funders of this program, and so the governors tend to have a strong voice in saying what is feasible in terms of reforming Medicaid and what isn't.
[Noel King:] Because they'd be picking up the slack. If Medicaid nationally is cut, it will be states that pay for it.
[Caroline Pearson:] Right. When the federal government cuts its spending, states are left holding the bag, and so the governors get very worried about that situation.
[Noel King:] Caroline Pearson is a senior vice president of Avalere Health. We spoke to her via Skype. Caroline, thank you so much.
[Caroline Pearson:] Thanks for having me.

[Mr. Robert George:] I think it's a, it's a little bit of the, it's more of the latter. Obviously, you know, the papers belong to the King family. And fortunately, I mean, I think this is, you know, this is an issue that has come up in a number of different ways over the last few years as to whether the King family is has really been the best legacy bearer's really of the King legacy that is to say the written legacy, the intellectual legacy because now seem to be in a situation where his intellectual property is going to be is being auctioned off and the family, obviously, is going to benefit, but arguably, history might be better if all of it was, you know, kept together.
[Chideya:] Marcelo, you're at New York University. The auctioneers at Sotheby's say that they hope that a institution, like a major university, or the Smithsonian, will go ahead and buy the collection all as a piece. If not, I suppose it would have to be broken up. Tell us how universities think about acquiring these collections.
[Professor Marcelo Suarez-orozco:] Well, I think that usually a set of criteria are put in place. And clearly if there ever was an archive that fit that criteria, it would be the papers of the Reverend Martin Luther King. This is a national treasure. This is arguably the most important archive certainly one of the most important archives of the 20th century. Surely the most important archive of the second half of the 20th century. And the fear here, is that this will be privatized, that this will be purchased by an individual, who will have no responsibility to have these papers of historic national, international, global relevance, available for study, for research. There are great historical there is great humanistic there is great scientific value of these papers. And these are really papers that should be purchased, either by a major research university, by the Library of Congress, and made, in perpetuity, available for the future generations to study, to examine, to reflect upon, one of the great developments of the 20th century. It's really a function of the incentives here, that universities, that private collections, will have in moving on to purchase. The estate is valued at perhaps between 15 and $30 million, so this is a major opportunity.
[Chideya:] Callie, you know, at Stanford there's something called the King Papers Project, which is run by Claiborne Carson. And then you have the King Center, and you have various other civil rights museums you know, a museum in Birmingham, other museums that would be logical homes for this. Do you think that the King family, just on a moral level, should have donated the papers to and organization, or group, or institution, that already had a track record in this? Or do you think they have every right to benefit from the life of a man who gave of himself to others, and they may not have fared as well economically because he spent all his time giving to others?
[Ms. Callie Crossley:] Well, they have the obviously have every right to give the papers or to sell the papers, as they will. And remember now, for most of them, he was not really around for their lives. So in a large way, this is his legacy to them. Now, having said that, I can speak now as a documentary filmmaker, and one who was specifically involved in looking at those papers and understanding their value working alongside Dr. Claiborne Carson, for the Eyes on the Prize documentary series. So it was really important for us to be able to look at the volume of material in order to put together the historical record. And I can tell you, personally, that there was lots of archival material not stored well sort of haphazardly in Mrs. Coretta Scott King's home and all over the place that those of us, who were scholars light, that would be me as a documentary filmmaker, and other scholars for real, were concerned about and still have yet to see. So it becomes a real important issue for those scholars to be able to read that material, to see that material, and to answer some questions that are probably can be answered by what's there. But I can tell you, there's a lot that has yet to be seen. I would hope that this could be purchased by the Library of Congress or some or Stanford would step up. For God's sake, they have an endowment to do that, if need be. And what I fear is that some private collector will purchase it. I think about Michael Jackson's buying The Beatles all of The Beatles recordings. And yes, he didn't break them up in some, you know, small pieces. But at the same time, I mean, he can do with it as he will. It would be, it would be, I think, an imperative on for one of these institutions that has so far had some part of the archive, to go ahead and try to put together the funding to get the rest. I mean, there is a lot of material that has yet to be seen by a lot of people.
[Chideya:] Marcelo?
[Professor Marcelo Suarez-orozco:] I think the key, the three key issues here, Farai, have to do with, A, keeping the materials intact, in other words, keeping the collection a single entity for historical and research value; to keep the archive properly organized, properly digitized whenever possible, to keep the materials in an orderly space in perpetuity; and three, that there is access to scholars from throughout the world, who are who will be studying the legacy in the generations ahead. So these are really the three key issues that we need to be thinking about as the auction proceeds.
[Chideya:] Well, I want to turn to another issue having to do with race and the legacy of discrimination. There was an online study by The Washington Post, in conjunction with a Stanford researcher. It found that Americans are more willing to support extended government aid to white victims of Katrina, than to African-Americans and Latinos. Overall, the penalty for being black and a Katrina victim amounted to about $1,000. Callie, is this a surprise?
[Ms. Callie Crossley:] No, it's not a surprise. And you know, I have two minds about it. On the one hand, it's very sobering, and it's depressing because there it is again. On the other hand, any time there can be objective measurements, which, you know, destroy folks arguments that people are paranoid and somehow have racism in the forefront of their brains every day. I mean, this is an objective measurement, and there you have it. It's real, folks. Now, whether or not people exaggerate that in other instances, is another situation. But in instances where there is systemic and institutionalized racism, these kinds of important objective measurements can't be done enough, as far as I'm concerned. And it's very sad to see the result of this. FARAI CHIDEYA host: Now, Marcelo...
[Professor Marcelo Suarez-orozco:] It's not surprising. In a way, that explains why nobody really paid the political price for the debacle, for the man-made disaster in New Orleans.
[Mr. Robert George:] Well, one of the reasons why that happened was because typically with the political equation, you had everybody finger-pointing. You know, the feds said it was the local folks' fault. And the local folks said it was the feds' fault. You know, putting that aside, I would say that that this is actually one reason why it is, frankly, better to create a structure, whether you want to look at it from the government government donations donations to the government or donations to private charities, allowing those to be the arbiters, if you will, of assistance to aid. So you're not going to get these situations where, you know, private individuals are going to say, well, you know, I'll help that group, but I won't I don't necessarily want to help this group. So, I mean, in that sense, it's a better structure, if money is going to, say, Red Cross and other private organizations, it can take this and then just bring the aid to whoever needs it, regardless of race.
[Ms. Callie Crossley:] But, Robert, isn't every organization simply made up of people? And people come into organizations with their own pride and prejudice. And so there's no insurance that any institution is going to have better ethics than the individual's running it, who are just human.
[Mr. Robert George:] Well, I think that I mean, I think that's true. I think it is tragic, but it is also, in some sense, human nature that, you know, individuals may have a greater empathy for those who look more like them. And, that is the thing is, though, how one gets around something like that is the real difficult nut to crack. And this kind of a study, while it does give a certain light into human nature, it doesn't really point one in the direction of how to address that. What I thought was interesting is that one of the studies suggested that the amount of money that people were willing to give to, say, the white victim versus the black victim, was about the same. But the amount of time that they were willing to give that money was about a month shorter. So, I mean, I think that's, you know what that says I'm not sure, but it's an interesting it's kind of an interesting side note to this.
[Chideya:] It is. And I want to move on to one more topic. I know that we could go on this one, but New York State legislators are considering a bill to let law enforcement to profile suspected terrorists according to race. Now, a civil rights advocate voiced opposition, saying its anathema to the principles of equality. But State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, of Brooklyn, said, quote, "suicide bombers and terrorists fit a very specific intelligence profile, and race and ethnicity is very much a part of that profile." Marcelo, we, as a nation, have gone back and forth on whether or not law enforcement should be able to use race and ethnicity in order to examine people. Is this just making visible what already happens, that law enforcement and most people do use race and ethnicity to make judgments? Or does this set a dangerous precedent if it passes? Prof. SUÁREZ-OROZCO: Well, it's clear that multiple criteria go into the making of these profiles. And certainly we now know ethnicity, immigration status, race, religion, increasingly have become part of the formula. I think that what is important to keep in mind is that the best work, in terms of investigating possible criminal activities, is really is the hard work of investigating specific leads, of developing specific evidence, that fundamentally has to go beyond these abstract statistical profiles. It's very, very tedious. It's very, very hard work. And that's the work that generates the best results, in terms of preventing crime, in terms of preventing terrorist activities. So I'm concerned whenever these statistical models are developed that are very abstract and that, in many ways, may distract from the hard work of developing the evidence, which really focuses on specific acts, specific leads, specific data, rather than on these racially constructed abstracts. Callie, you know, there was a very interesting situation that I was made aware of by a friend of mine, where her brother, who, like she, is Sri Lankan, was profiled as Chechen when he lived in Russia. He spoke fluent Russian, and he looked he was darker than most Russians, so they said, oh, you're a Chechen, and you're a terrorist. So not only is there a question of racial profiling, but its like, well, do get the racial profiling right? People look a lot of different ways that may or may not be what they are. So, you know, in that sense, what does that mean?
[Ms. Callie Crossley:] What it means is that it allows people to play out the kind of biases that we have just demonstrated in the earlier story are often unconscious. I don't think that, you know, law enforcement people are trying, most of them, to, you know, just assign negative characteristics to certain groups of people because of race or ethnicity, but this is very dangerous when you start talking about terrorism. We're seeing it play out all the time at airports. In fact, Essence magazine's latest article has an interesting story about a woman who travels back and forth to a Scandinavian county, and they assume that since she's traveling alone that she must be a terrorist, or a drug carrier, rather. So, I mean, this stuff is happening all the time, and to give actual legal sanction to it, whether or not it's being practiced informally, at least now in the state that it's in it can be brought to light; it can be fought against. If it's legally sanctioned, then there it is. I mean, what do you say when you are constantly brought before folks and it's unfair and you've been profiled for doing nothing except looking the way you are. And somebody else has decided that looking the way you are makes you a terrorist.
[Mr. Robert George:] Well, the...
[Chideya:] Robert?
[Mr. Robert George:] Yeah, well, the it's funny. I mean, you've got kind of two extremes that are going on right now. Because at the same time you do have these almost chaotic situations at airports where they try to, you know, go out of their way to show that they're being random, and so they are, to use the cliché, they're picking up, you know, these old, you know, white ladies, you know, in their 70s, and, you know, you know, checking to see if they're terrorists when it's anybody using common sense could indicate that they're not. However, the flip side of that is, though and I have to wonder why such a law like this would work, really, is because we're just starting to see, in places like Canada and some other places, are homegrown terrorists who are not necessarily looking like your may not be looking like your typical Middle east you know, Middle Eastern one who, quote, "fits the profile." So I think it is incumbent upon law enforcement agencies to look more beyond just race and ethnicity. Don't exclude race and ethnicity, because it's going to be a factor in many of these cases, but also recognizing that the terrorist down the street, you know, may be just be somebody wearing, you know, regular jeans, and so forth, and quote, "looking like," you know, you know a blond white kid who happens to have decided to become a, you know, become a suicide bomber.
[Chideya:] All right. We're going to have to leave it there. In New York, Robert George, editorial writer, New York Post. At member station WBUR, in Boston, Callie Crossley. And Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, co-Director, Immigration Studies at NYU.
[Ms. Callie Crossley:] Thank you.
[Mr. Robert George:] Thank you. Prof. SUÁREZ-OROZCO: Thank you.
[Chideya:] Next on NEWS & NOTES, one author takes on childhood obesity. And gospel singer Andrae Crouch is back with a new CD. After four decades of making heavenly music, he's still going strong.
[Mr. Andrae Crouch:] [Singing]...you believe it, every day...
[Chideya:] You're listening to NEWS AND NOTES, from NPR News.

[Debbie Elliott:] Commentator Christian Bauman made the transition from solider to civilian and remembers it was not easy.
[Christian Bauman Reporting:] I got out of the Army in 1995 after a four-year enlistment that took me to Somalia and Haiti. The Army offered classes on networking and resume writing and job interview skills, but like most former grunts, I wasn't headed for corporate America. Back in my hometown, I scoured the want ads and found an opening for a records clerk at a local hospital. They agreed to see me the next day. I figured no other institution could approach the slow, blood-thick, papered bureaucracy of the United States Army. They gave the Army a run for their money at Hunterdon Medical Center, though, sure enough. In the bowels of the records room, the dark tools of clerkdom were laid out on a long worktable like little bureaucrats neat in a line; two-hole punch, three-hole punch, standard stapler, industrial stapler, staple remover, white-out, highlighter, and at the very end of the table, business end up, an electric paper shredder. A clear progression across the table, a progression in the life of paperwork. Punch it, staple it, fold it, file it, unfile it, rework it, throw it out. The paraphernalia of this profession made me uneasier than even my army rifle had. The workplace tour and job interview were conducted by a pale hospital administrator in a gray suit. Toward the end of the interview, this man paused, squinted at me, then said, It can get pretty tense in here, you know, a lot of pressure. I'm wondering if you'll be able to handle that kind of pressure. One year prior to this, I'd been in a foreign country with a rifle in my hand, the second of two wars in two years. I'd had people above and below who counted on me, friends who without hesitation would have given their life to save mine. I'd lived days without sleep, weeks without a shower or hot meal. Now I looked around the dusty records room of this hospital and at this administrator in his gray suit. The Army had paid a basic but living wage with 100 percent healthcare for my family. This job would pay me nine bucks an hour, with a third of that gone if I wanted benefits. I wanted to answer this man's question by standing up and walking out, never to return. I wanted to walk all the way back to Virginia, where there was a platoon of guys who knew what I was worth. Truth is, though, when you have a family to support, what you're worth is often not the point. I didn't walk out. Instead, I just looked down and said simply, I think I'll be able to handle this job okay.
[Debbie Elliott:] Writer Christian Bauman's new novel Voodoo Lounge is set during the American occupation of Haiti in 1994. He lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

[Michel Martin:] We're going to spend a few minutes talking about current issues in education, something we're going to do from time to time this summer when educators tend to have a bit more room in their schedules. We'll start with a lawsuit against the U.S. Education Department filed by the attorneys general from 18 states and the District of Columbia over something called the Borrower Defense Rules. Those were put into place by the Obama administration to allow students who borrowed federal money to have those loans forgiven if they attended a school that misled them or broke the law. The rules were supposed to go into effect July 1, but the Trump administration delayed them, hence the lawsuit. Karl Racine of Washington, D.C., is one of the attorneys general suing the Department of Education and Secretary Betsy DeVos. And he's here with us now in our studios in Washington, D.C., to tell us more about that. Thank you for doing that.
[Karl Racine:] Terrific to be here.
[Michel Martin:] So let's note that all the attorneys general suing over this rule are Democrats. Why did you decide that the district should join this effort?
[Karl Racine:] Well, the district had a stake in this because we have many of our residents who have attended and been saddled with debt as a result of their attending these for-profit colleges.
[Michel Martin:] So I think a lot of people are aware that the Obama administration pushed to offer this relief because of this wave of for-profit colleges that collapsed, leaving, you know, students with debts but no degree. Now the, secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, has argued that the goal is right but that the rule itself is wrong, that it's too confusing. And she also suggested that it might be opening the door to a lot of taxpayer relief, which may or may not be merited and, in essence, saying this administration deserves to take another look at it. What do you say to that?
[Karl Racine:] Well, what I say to that is, first, on the merits, I think that she's wrong. I think the Borrower Defense Rule has, as its purpose, the protection of people who were misled into taking these humongous loans for for-profit schools that didn't deliver what was promised. And what was promised was a meaningful education and a almost guarantee of employment. So the Obama rule provided an opportunity for vulnerable people we're talking about veterans, a lot of working parents, a lot of minority students who really sought opportunities to get a leg up in society and were essentially shammed. What the secretary has done is unlawful. She stayed the rule, meaning that the rule was to be effective July 1. And by doing so, she failed to adhere to the basic requirements of how to properly go about doing that.
[Michel Martin:] That was going to be my question, which is, what are the grounds for the suit?
[Karl Racine:] So the suit is essentially based on something called the Administrative Procedures Act. What that act does is it provides rules as to how rules should be established and rules as to how rules should be abolished, reversed or rewritten. The Obama rule, in fact, took two years before it was established. Well, in no time, Secretary DeVos decided to essentially eliminate that rule.
[Michel Martin:] So you're saying she's exceeded her authority. She doesn't have the authority to unilaterally change a rule or delay a rule that has gone through appropriate processes. Is that the gist of it?
[Karl Racine:] That's exactly right. What she has to do is allow people an opportunity to comment, transparently state why she's making the change and then have some time pass before the new rule is, in fact, implemented.
[Michel Martin:] So let me just note in the time that we have left that this is one of two lawsuits that the district's participating in against the Trump administration that D.C. is also suing the president along with Maryland for violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, in essence preventing officials from accepting foreign gifts or titles. And this is related to the fact that the Trump Hotel is, you know, up and running. So I'm curious about how you see your role as attorney general right now.
[Karl Racine:] So the role that Democratic attorney generals are playing and I'll note that Republican attorney generals played this same role during the Obama administration. And so by bringing suit, we're taking the matter to a federal court to decide whether or not the president is violating that clause.
[Michel Martin:] This is a jurisdiction in which the federal government plays a heavy hand in District affairs. And, you know, there's this old saying that if you sleep next to the bear, you don't poke the bear.
[Karl Racine:] Right. There's no doubt that we had to consider the risk of vindictive action on the part of the president or the Republican Congress. At the end of the day, we determined that our need to invoke a reasonable check and balance to ensure that the president is not violating the Constitution was worth the risk.
[Michel Martin:] That's Karl Racine. He's the attorney general for Washington, D.C. He was nice enough to join us in our studios in Washington. Thank you so much for joining us.
[Karl Racine:] Thank you, Ms. Martin.
[Michel Martin:] And I want to mention that we called the Department of Education. They sent us a statement. Here it is in part quote, "with this ideologically-driven suit, the state attorneys general are saying to regulate first and ask the legal questions later," unquote.

[Robert Siegel:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
[Melissa Block:] And I'm Melissa Block. On the Gulf Coast today, there are some more signs of communities taking steps toward normalcy. There are also investigations under way, and more details about the disaster are emerging. Just ahead in this segment of the program, a conversation with Louisiana's attorney general and a report on job seekers in Mississippi. But we begin with New Orleans. Federal officials on the scene have begun to scale back the military's presence, saying they'll move two Navy ships from the region. And three suburbs officially invited their residents to return home. NPR's Martin Kaste has more.
[Martin Kaste Reporting:] The situation in New Orleans has turned a corner. As Mayor Ray Nagin put it yesterday, the city is `out of a nuclear crisis mode and into a normal day-to-day crisis mode.'Coast Guard Vice Admiral Thad Allen, FEMA's point man in southern Louisiana, says the time has come to start moving out some of the equipment and manpower that were moved into New Orleans after the storm.
[Vice Admiral Thad Allen:] There are some DOD assets that are employed in the response part of this operation that are no longer needed, and the Department of Defense is going to redeploy those assets.
[Kaste:] Rescuers are no longer under the same sense of urgency, and federal authorities are now focused on protecting private property and the ongoing task of recovering bodies from the receding floodwaters. Vice Admiral Allen. Vice Adm. ALLEN: We express our deepest sympathy to the families that have lost loved ones as a result of this storm, and we want to ensure everybody that we are exercising the strictest protocols in the process that we use to take the remains that are discovered and how they are handled. In the city's western suburbs, things are moving ahead even faster. For the past few days, Jefferson Parish has been trying to jump start its economy, clearing streets and inviting businesses to bring in their employees. The towns of Gretna, Westwego and Jean Lafitte suffered minimal or no flooding, though the winds took a severe toll on power lines and roofs. Now community leaders say it's time for families to start moving in. Ronnie Harris is the mayor of Gretna.
[Mayor Ronnie Harris:] We are pleased to be the first to be open in Jefferson Parish. Sure, it's a happy day, but it's not a joyful day, not yet. We have a lot of work to do.
[Kaste:] Authorities in the reopened suburbs say they'll enforce a strict nighttime curfew, and people will have to bring in their groceries from the outside. In Jean Lafitte, food will be distributed from City Hall. The school district for the western suburbs plans to start classes in early October, even though only about half the district's schools are usable right now. Downtown New Orleans may also reopen soon. Mayor Nagin says he'll consider reopening the central business district and maybe the French Quarter as soon as next week if environmental tests show that the air and water are safe enough. If so, the downtown may end up as a lonely island of life surrounded by a ghost town. Most of New Orleans' residential neighborhoods were flooded, and they'll take much longer to reopen. The city certainly won't be very welcoming to families for the foreseeable future. The New Orleans school system said today that it's run out of money and can no longer pay the teachers who've been scattered around the country, along with the children, most of whom are now enrolling in new schools far from home. Martin Kaste, NPR News, Baton Rouge.

[Steve Inskeep:] It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep. Good morning. Renee Montagne is on vacation. Last night, U.S. forces rolled into the east side of the Iraqi city of Ramadi. It's the capital of Anbar Province and it's one of the most violent cities in Iraq. Insurgents have been more persistent in Ramadi than almost anywhere else in the country. Over the weekend, the American troops quickly tried to make their presence felt. That sound captured by NPR's Philip Reeves, who was embedded with the U.S. military during the operation over the weekend. He spent last night in the city. Philip, welcome to the program. PHILIP REEVES reporting Thank you. What actually happened last night?
[Reeves:] Well, U.S. forces went in sizeable numbers into Malad on the east side of Ramadi. Now that's an area which has been under the control of insurgents for some time now. It's considered one of the worst areas in the city by the U.S. military, and their soldiers there have been repeatedly attacked and have suffered some casualties there, particularly by IEDs -roadside bombs. And the sound that you just heard, actually, was the sound of an AC-130 aircraft hovering in the night above the city of Ramadi last night, firing artillery down on a road traffic circle to try to clear that road traffic circle of IEDs. They were trying to hit the wires which they believe detonate these roadside bombs to make it safe for their infantrymen to get into the town and to start searching houses.
[Steve Inskeep:] So how did Iraqis respond as these planes flew overhead firing and as troops moved in?
[Reeves:] It was extremely eerie, Steve. I was with a company, Charlie Company, 1st of the 506, and we were on the ground moving from house to house. It was very quiet. There was no response from the insurgents, although the soldiers do expect more response during these daylight hours, which have now begun. And I should add that they're still in there, there are still operations going on in there. It was dark and it was silent and deserted. I saw practically no one on the streets. But during the house-to-house searches, of course, it has to be said that the Iraqis did not welcome U.S. troops coming into their house in the night.
[Steve Inskeep:] Philip, was there some suggestion that maybe the insurgents knew the Americans were coming and stepped out of the way, at least for a few hours?
[Reeves:] Well, you know, it's not clear. They have said that Iraqi security forces are infiltrated, so information might get to insurgents. But the U.S. military also has spoken about this operation in the sense that they've made it clear, several days ago, that they're trying to get control of this town and to set up bases inside Ramadi in which they can put Iraqi security forces. They sealed off the south on Sunday, and now they're getting into the bad side of town for them, the east side. That's the purpose of the operation and they've never made much secret of that over the last 48 hours. So the insurgents must have been expecting something.
[Steve Inskeep:] How does the size of this operation compare with the operation in Fallujah a year and a half ago?
[Reeves:] Well, they've been stressing the U.S. military that it is smaller than that. I think they're keen to make it clear that they're not coming in to sort of storm the city, not least, because reports have been circulating that such an operation was underway, and with them there've been rumors that people have from Ramadi been deserting en masse. The U.S. military says that isn't true, several thousand people may have left, or have left, they say, but not an en masse departure and they're obviously keen to avoid that. Their plan, you have to remember now, is to get the Iraqi security forces, which, at this stage, are clearly not ready to take control of security in this country, to get them into the city and try to establish first the army there and then to transfer, over time, control to the police.
[Steve Inskeep:] Okay, thanks very much. That's NPR's Philip Reeves who's been embedded with U.S. troops in Ramadi, where the U.S. and its Iraqi allies have been very active in the last couple of days.

[Steve Inskeep:] Let's talk a little more now about the effort to refill the federal highway trust fund, which is expected to run out of cash later this summer. A short-term fix passed the house earlier this week, and the Senate is said to consider a similar measure that's the short term. Then there's the question of the longer-term. One possible solution from the White House would let states collect tolls on interstate highways. They've been prohibited from doing that for decades. Here's NPR's Brian Naylor.
[Brian Naylor, Byline:] It's a weekday morning, and cars and trucks stream past toll booth number 10 on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. It's on the western end of the 4.3-mile-long span that crosses the Chesapeake Near Annapolis, Maryland. Nancy Althoff is the toll shift supervisor. Althoff has been collecting tolls here since 1969. Most of the time, she says, she enjoys her work, but there are mornings when it's stressful when traffic is backed up or drivers are unhappy with the toll.
[Nancy Althoff:] Last year when the toll went up in July, people were kind of upset because it had just gone up in what? November of the year before, and they were kind of upset. And I think actually some people thought it was going to go up in July of this year.
[Brian Naylor, Byline:] Drivers around the country might find themselves upset if the administration's proposal to allow states to toll interstate highways goes through. The administration says the new tolls could raise some $87 billion to pay for the upkeep of interstates, but the proposal is facing some barriers of its own. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: We state that the Obama administration says new tolls could raise $87 billion to pay for upkeep of interstates. That $87 billion would actually be raised by proposed corporate tax changes, and DOT says it has not estimated how much would be raised by possible tolls.] The Alliance for Toll-Free Interstates includes corporations such as McDonald's, UPS and FedEx. It says the plan would amount to double taxation and hit low-wage workers especially hard. Julian Walker is the group's spokesman.
[Julian Walker:] The minimum wage is $7.25. If you put a four dollar toll on that road, that could cause a worker going to and from work to work essentially an extra hour just to pay for the commuting costs.
[Brian Naylor, Byline:] He says putting tolls on interstates would divert traffic onto other roads less equipped to handle high traffic volumes and amount to double taxation because the roads have already been paid for. But the International Bridge Tunnel and Turnpike Association, which represents companies that collect tolls, has a different view. Patrick Jones, the group's CEO, says it's like paying off a mortgage.
[Patrick Jones:] And even though you own the house free and clear, that doesn't remove you of the responsibility to maintain and proper upkeep of the house. The same is true of a highway and the interstate highway system. The states own the right-of-way. They put the initial pavement down there, but in many cases, the pavement has worn away. There's potholes. There's rutting, etcetera. And it needs to be replaced.
[Brian Naylor, Byline:] Jones says most states would probably use electronic toll collection systems, but so far, the idea of allowing states to impose tolls on interstate highways has gotten little traction in Congress. Transportation analyst Robert Puentes of the Brookings Institution says it's best viewed as part of a larger solution.
[Robert Puentes:] Tolling on the interstates is not going to be the silver bullet solution for fixing our transportation challenges. Overall, it's certainly going to help, and again, if it's used for maintenance of an existing roadway, that's certainly going to help certain states and cities and metropolitan areas. But if we're looking for systemic changes and systemic fixes to the larger system, it's going to take something like a gasoline tax.
[Brian Naylor, Byline:] But raising the gas tax is almost certainly not going to happen this year either, which is why lawmakers are looking at a patchwork of smaller fixes to put the problem off until after election day and leave it to the next Congress to solve. Brian Naylor, NPR News, Washington.

[Robert Siegel:] Donald Trump repeatedly criticized Syrian refugees when he was running for president. During his second debate with Hillary Clinton, he said they were definitely in many cases ISIS-aligned, and he called them a great Trojan horse. Well, NPR's Deborah Amos now introduces us to a Marine veteran who has taken up the cause of those refugees and a father and daughter who fled Syria for the U.S. a couple of years ago not knowing that they'd be part of this intense political debate.
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] Mohammed and Lulu no last names because of family back home now when Mohammed and his 17-year-old daughter give public talks, Mohammed has a killer opening line. He's been telling American audiences, I'm Syrian; you're supposed to be afraid of me.
[Mohammed:] [Laughter] They laugh mostly because they knew that I'm, like, a usual guy like them. I have children. I love my children. So this is why they laugh when I tell them that I am the one that you should be afraid of.
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] He was a software manager in Damascus, a consultant for Yahoo who often visited the U.S. In 2011, Mohammed sided with what started as a peaceful revolt against a repressive regime, a high crime, he says, often punished by torture and death.
[Mohammed:] And when I knew that the regime there knew about what I'm doing, I know that I should flee out of Syria.
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] Lulu, were you worried for your father? You must have known he was doing that.
[Lulu:] I did not know, actually. He kept it very secret.
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] Detention came not in Syria but when they landed in America in 2014. Immigration officials sent them to a detention center in rural Pennsylvania where they would stay for more than five months. They got caught up in a controversial Obama administration program meant to discourage asylum seekers from Central America, mostly mothers and children, in a facility called a family detention center.
[Mohammed:] Which is, like, something very horrible, actually, to know that there's something called family detention center.
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] Lulu, what was it like to be in jail with your dad?
[Lulu:] It was surreal. From one side, it was good that I was with my dad, you know, that I wasn't put in some juvie, you know, detention center. But still it was horrible.
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] A week after their release May 2015, Mohammed and Lulu returned to the Pennsylvania center part of a demonstration led by immigration lawyers and advocates to protest against the policy and the place. They were featured in a video produced by Human Rights First, an advocacy group in Washington.
[Unidentified Woman:] What do you think the hardest thing was?
[Mohammed:] The hardest thing is that we did not know when we are going to go out.
[Lulu:] Yeah, the feeling that you were trapped...
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] Since then, they've jumped headlong into American culture high School for Lulu for Mohammed, a high-tech job in New York. And they've become refugee stars.
[Scott Cooper:] I think Mohammed is an exceptional spokesman because he immediately is someone that we can all relate to. It was him trying to take care of his family is the reason that he left Syria.
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] Scott Cooper is the Marine veteran in the partnership. At Human Rights First, he launched Veterans for American Ideals last year to advocate for military interpreters and Syrian refugees. His conviction comes from tours in Iraq, Afghanistan and Bosnia where he saw what happens to civilians caught in the crossfire. He says his mission is more urgent now that the next president threatens to halt the Syrian refugee program. Cooper and 30 vets plan to visit Washington and lobby lawmakers. Do you think this is a hard argument in a time of terrorism?
[Scott Cooper:] There's two points I'd make. Those that wear the uniform care a great deal about our national security.
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] His second point most Americans have never met a refugee.
[Scott Cooper:] Putting a face to that helps people understand a bit more who these people are and that they are not in fact a threat and that they are thoroughly vetted and screened.
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] Cooper promotes Mohammed and Lulu's public talks.
[Mohammed:] It's, like, very refreshing to know that there is some veterans who are thinking in a very the right way [LAUGHTER] about immigration.
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] The news is always on in this tidy New Jersey apartment. Mohammed says he thought he knew America on his business trips here. He was shocked by the election threatening America's traditional open door, he says.
[Mohammed:] One of the greatest thing that United States has offered the world is her immigration policy. And now there's some people who are trying to kill what makes America great in the first place.
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] He's made it to safety with Lulu, but his wife and younger daughter are still in Syria.
[Lulu:] I don't think he can be fully happy with half of our family still back home, you know?
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] Approval to get them to America, he believes, is now stalled by the campaign of fear. Deborah Amos, NPR News, Woodbridge, N.J.

[Renee Montagne:] After the worst terror attack in Turkey's modern history a bombing that killed scores of protesters that country is gripped by grief and calls for revenge. Turkey is preparing for parliamentary elections in two weeks, but shock and anger have consumed the country. The government blames the Islamic State for the bombings, but not everybody agrees, as NPR's Peter Kenyon reports.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] The ruling AK Party, along with others, announced it will suspend its political rallies out of respect for the 97 victims of the deadly suicide bombing. But that gesture didn't appear to be buying much goodwill for the government at funerals for some of the victims.
[Unidentified Crowd:] [Chanting in foreign language].
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] Since the attack, chants of Murderer Erdogan, referring to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have been heard at rallies and funerals across Turkey. At one funeral in Istanbul, 26-year-old Arzu Ceylan accused the government of a massive intelligence failure.
[Arzu Ceylan:] [Through interpreter] Whoever actually carried out this crime, I think the government bears responsibility for not protecting its citizens, whether it was the intelligence services, the PKK or left-wing radicals.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] Standing nearby, 40-year-old Ece Tokgoz says it doesn't make sense that the Kurdish militants from the PKK, or Kurdistan Workers' Party, were behind the attack. It could, she says, possibly have been ISIS.
[Ece Tokgoz:] [Through interpreter] The PKK just declared a cease-fire from now until the elections. And I don't think they would hit a mainly Kurdish peace rally anyway. There are cells of ISIS in our country, we're told, they could have been used by cynical forces in Turkey.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] Officials are suggesting ISIS was to blame. The government says it's closing in on identifying at least one of the bombers, and a number of people with suspected ties to ISIS have been arrested across the country. None of those detained has been linked to Saturday's bombing. If it was ISIS, this would be the farthest into Turkey's heartland the Islamist group has reached. Previous attacks have been down near the Syrian border, including two bombings before the last elections in June. Details of the investigation are being closely held, but Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus says the bombers each detonated about 11 pounds of TNT packed with metal balls. That tracks closely with an earlier bombing near the border that killed 33 people. The government accused ISIS in that attack as well, but to date, no solid evidence has emerged to back that up.
[Unidentified Crowd:] [Chanting in foreign language].
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] At one funeral Monday, mourners chanted their desire for peace. But the chance competed with calls for revenge. Fifty-year-old Ali San says revenge will only make things worse.
[Ali San:] [Through interpreter] We'll be stronger than ever for our demands for peace. We will honor the memory of our dead family and friends and insist on peace. There is no other way. Turkey cannot survive these horrors for long.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] That sense of anxiety for the country's future is running strong, as our fears for more violence between now and November 1 elections. Many Turks are wondering if any party can bring calm and a semblance of unity to this country. Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Istanbul.

[Robert Siegel:] A South Dakota ad campaign has ruffled feathers in Chicago. Next month at O'Hare International Airport, ads will be going up that encourage businesses to move to South Dakota. The ads Prepare your Business for Take Off and, Our Economy is First Class play on air travel, but not in the way the South Dakota governor staff had originally wanted. NPR's David Schaper reports that the original ads proposed by the state evidently rubbed Chicago's mayor, Rahm Emanuel, the wrong way.
[David Schaper, Byline:] I'm standing near one of the TSA security checkpoints at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, where dozens of people are lined up some of them with a little bit of dread in their eyes -waiting for the somewhat uncomfortable security screening. So the state of South Dakota thought this would be a good place to hang up banner ads touting the relatively easy-going nature of its business climate.
[Pat Costello:] You know, No Government Pat-Downs, Keep your Change in your Pockets, We're Hands-Off when it comes to Business.
[David Schaper, Byline:] Pat Costello is the Commissioner of the South Dakota Governor's Office of Economic Development.
[Pat Costello:] We're trying to kind of compare the ease of doing business in South Dakota with some of the, you know, hassles maybe coming through the check-in areas of the TSA and stuff, and it was really kind of a lighthearted deal.
[David Schaper, Byline:] But the city of Chicago didn't think so. It rejected the ads. Spokespeople for the city's Department of Aviation and for Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel did not return numerous calls and emails seeking an explanation. Although Costello says the city suggested the comparisons with security pat-downs may have been against TSA rules. But as for the other ads, such as one saying keep your profits?
[Pat Costello:] Repeatedly, time after time, we're told that they weren't acceptable and that at one point, that the mayor's office wasn't going to allow any states to advertise in the airport there.
[David Schaper, Byline:] It was a response that Costello says proved South Dakota's point that doing business in Chicago is overly-burdensome and the regulatory environment is heavy-handed.
[Pat Costello:] How ironic that here we're trying to spend money in Chicago, in Illinois, and we're having a tough time on really, what I think most people would consider pretty lighthearted, fun, whimsical types of phrases.
[David Schaper, Byline:] So South Dakota officials got their message across in another way taking out full-page ads in Chicago's newspapers showing the banner ads that the city rejected under boldface type that says this is the ad Rahm Emanuel didn't want you to see. The more innocuous South Dakota ads were eventually approved by the city. They'll go up in the airport after the first of the year. David Schaper, NPR News, Chicago.

[Robert Siegel:] Well, so much for the sounds of John McCain's week. The sounds of Barack Obama's week were a little different. That's right. He was on vacation, a family vacation, in Hawaii. In fact, John McCain was also off the campaign trail today. He just had breakfast with oil-man-turned-wind-energy-advocate T. Boone Pickens. For some review and analysis of the past week and what comes next in the campaign, I'm joined now by political observers Ruth Marcus, columnist for the Washington Post, and Matthew Continetti, associate editor of the Weekly Standard. Hi, welcome to the both of you.
[Ms. Ruth Marcus:] Hi.
[Mr. Matthew Continetti:] Thank you.
[Robert Siegel:] Let's start with Russia and Georgia. Do we think that the events there actually, Ruth, have altered the U.S. political debate, and if so, is it really so much to Senator McCain's advantage as he seems to think?
[Ms. Ruth Marcus:] Well, I think they may turn out to alter the political debate, and I think it is largely, but not entirely, to Senator McCain's advantage. On the plus side for Senator McCain, I think any time foreign policy comes up outside of increased bloodshed in Iraq, it's to Senator McCain's advantage. It underscores his experience. I think also that his in this situation, his first reaction on Georgia, his first statement turned out to be more prescient and more correct than either Senator Obama's or President Bush's, who were much more even-handed in their calling on both sides to stand down. I do think he runs a few risks. The first is seeming too bellicose. The American people had not heard of South Ossetia, I think it's safe to say, before last week. They're not really eager to get into an entanglement there. Will McCain's stance scare them off? Second, has Senator McCain been too interventionist? He's on the phone with President Saakashvili several times a day. He's sending his own emissaries there. That gets a little bit dicey. One could imagine if Senator Obama did that, that there would be a large hue and cry. And finally, the lobbyists. You know, three problems but still probably on balance better for him.
[Robert Siegel:] Do you agree, Matt?
[Mr. Matthew Continetti:] With parts of that. To me, this past week has been a mirror image of a few weeks ago with Barack Obama's international trip. That week, you had Obama being president, traveling to different countries, meeting with foreign leaders, meeting with General Petraeus, while John McCain was getting into trouble in grocery stores here on the campaign trail. This week, John McCain is being assertive. I totally agree with Ruth in that I think the real value of his statements in the beginning of the week were to prod the Bush administration to make a more active approach to this international crisis. Obama's on vacation. How it turns out politically, however, the race is still tied, the way it's been all summer, so...
[Robert Siegel:] Next topic, running mates. Your colleague at the Weekly Standard, Stephen Hayes, had a John McCain interview during which the Republican candidate floated the possibility of a pro-choice running mate like, say, Tom Ridge, the former Pennsylvania governor and secretary of homeland security. Do you think that McCain has sufficiently endeared himself to conservative Republicans that he can go moderate with a vice president?
[Mr. Matthew Continetti:] Well, when you look at the polls, Robert, you see that McCain is drawing more support from Republicans than Obama is drawing from Democrats. However, there's no question there's a huge enthusiasm gap among those Republicans compared with the Democrats for Obama, and of course there are just fewer Republicans. So I think McCain still does have a problem with his base that may be, you know, kind of exacerbated if he chooses a pro-choice candidate. However, he's also looking for those Hillary supporters you know, single women, women in general, white women in the suburbs who may find this choice of a pro-choice candidate for VP kind of unorthodox and something that they might like to see.
[Robert Siegel:] Ruth, thoughts on running mates either for McCain, or for Obama, for that matter?
[Ms. Ruth Marcus:] Well, Senator McCain first. I do think that there has been this flirtation with the possibility of Governor Ridge, with the possibility of Senator Lieberman. I think if I might use a very mixed metaphor, picking Senator Lieberman would be something of a Hail Mary pass. For Senator McCain. And you know, I think Senator McCain has actually the second-mover advantage, if you will, on this. He will likely follow.
[Robert Siegel:] He can wait for Obama to pick his.
[Ms. Ruth Marcus:] He can wait for Senator Obama. So he's got the luxury of sitting back, seeing who Senator Obama picks, adjusting his strategy accordingly. I think there's two schools of thought on the Republican side. One is it's time for the Hail Mary pass. We need to get the women. We need to reinforce his brand as a maverick. You know, forget the Republican brand. The other one is do no harm. Let's nail things down. Let's cement, say, Michigan and make a lot of raise a lot of money, and that would lead to Governor Romney.
[Robert Siegel:] Governor Romney. Matt, what do you think about the Democratic running mate?
[Mr. Matthew Continetti:] There I think Obama is going to play it safe. You know, he spent this summer has been in some ways Obama's moment to kind of, you know, get the left angry at him, and he did it with voting, for example, the FISA compromise legislation earlier this summer. Now there's a Facebook group now against Evan Bayh, the senator from Indiana that's tens of thousands of supporters, Obama supporters, strong. They don't want him to pick this reasonably centrist, somewhat hawkish even, senator, a centrist Democrat. If he did, I think it would anger the left, but these days Obama may want that as he tries to reassure the center.
[Ms. Ruth Marcus:] I think that to be very crass about it, and I got in trouble for saying that somewhere the other day, but the problems in Russia and Georgia are up arrows, if you will, for Senator Bayh and also Senator Biden. They reinforce, I think...
[Robert Siegel:] Have someone who voted, say, pro-war on Iraq.
[Ms. Ruth Marcus:] Not just pro-war, but somebody with extensive experience in foreign policy, and Senator Biden also brings to that appeal to older voters, which is another place where Senator Obama has fallen short. On the other hand, Senator Bayh, I saw him in Indiana with Obama the other day, and they looked pretty good together.
[Robert Siegel:] Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post, Matt Continetti of the Weekly Standard, thanks to both of you.
[Mr. Matthew Continetti:] Thank you.
[Ms. Ruth Marcus:] Thank you.

[Robert Siegel:] Israel's prime minister, outgoing president and president-elect have all explicitly drawn a moral equivalence between the murders of kidnapped Israeli teenagers and the murder of Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir. That sentiment is not unanimous. An Israeli association of terror victims rejected the idea. The group said that while the vast majority of Israelis opposed the murder of Abu Khdeir, the Palestinian authority financially supports those who kill Jews and glorifies them. Some Israeli commentators have compared the killing of Abu Khdeir to the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish zealot a moment for intense national self scrutiny. Joining us from outside Tel Aviv is Ari Shavit, author of the book "My Promised Land" and senior correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Welcome to the program once again.
[Ari Shavit:] Pleasure to be with you, Robert.
[Robert Siegel:] How would you describe the reactions of Israelis to these recent events?
[Ari Shavit:] Well let me, if I may, put in context. What we have seen here is two strategic terror attacks. One, the barbaric Palestinian murder of three Israeli youngsters, and then the barbaric Jewish terror of burning to death this young Palestinian. Definitely, for Israelis, this was shocking. It's the lowest we've been into for as one can remember. And yet but now we have to look at what is unfolding as we speak. July 7th, God forbid, may be the tipping point because we had five years of calm relatively calm. Abbas and Netanyahu never reached peace, but they did not have war. We did not deteriorate into major scale violence. The collapse of the peace process two months ago and the fact that old peace process was not replaced by a new concept put a very dangerous vacuum on the ground. The terrorist both policies and Israelis moved into that vacuum on the ground. The terrorists, both Palestinians and Israelis, moved into that vacuum. And what we have seen on July 7th is the firing of 70 or 80 rockets from Gaza to Israel, which might create a very dangerous situation because so far, the Israeli government has been restrained. While it has not been pursuing peace aggressively, it has not also went it did not go for violence. Right now, the danger that could be next is the Israeli reaction to this firing of rockets will lead to more firing of rockets is a very imminent one. And, therefore, in the coming, you know, hours days it's really, really a critical situation. I did not think that we were in such a dramatic situation in this country for years.
[Robert Siegel:] Yeah.
[Ari Shavit:] And the danger is really the failure of the moderates on both sides to restrain the extremists is allowing the extremists to lead us into something which much might turn into a very, very violent situation.
[Robert Siegel:] Are these events having political consequences in Israel? Are they...
[Ari Shavit:] Absolutely.
[Robert Siegel:] Yes.
[Ari Shavit:] What you see that again, they both you know, Abbas is there who is heroic in fighting terror on the Palestinian side is very much exposed. He's becoming weaker because of that. And Netanyahu, again, to every to your listeners surprise, was again being very, very conservative very hawkish but, again, was not trigger-happy none of the kind of all kind of Israeli Rambo attitude. He's now being dragged into violence because his right-wing partners in the coalition are putting a lot of pressure on him. And because of the Hamas provocation of today, he probably will not have the ability to stop more Israeli action.
[Robert Siegel:] No.
[Ari Shavit:] And with Hamas having great firepower, it can even hit Tel Aviv and, God forbid, can kill civilians. So far we were lucky that civilians were not killed by rockets. That might have dramatic consequences, so it's really, I would say, a very tricky moment. And I really pray and plea that in this very last moment, moderate people on both sides and America will find a way to prevent this escalation which might have very dramatic consequences.
[Robert Siegel:] Ari Shavit, author of "My Promised Land," thanks for talking with us.
[Ari Shavit:] Thank you.

[Steve Inskeep:] The president-elect took questions from reporters yesterday and offered a way to manage his worldwide business conflicts of interest, which we discuss elsewhere this morning. He also took questions about Russia and so much more. But the question he refused to take suggests his edgy relationship with the citizens who work as reporters. NPR's David Folkenflik reports.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] It had been months since Trump took questions from reporters at a press conference, and there were so many questions to ask. Reports surfaced this week that intelligence officials had briefed President Obama and Trump on unverified allegations that Russian agents may have videotaped the president-elect participating in salacious sexual activity and that his associates may have had legally questionable contacts with the Russian government. Major Garrett is White House correspondent for CBS News.
[Major Garrett:] He has to, it seems to me, deal with that and if possible, dispel it in his own words and not via Twitter account and not by quoting the Russians, by saying what he knows, what he believes and what he represents about himself, his campaign and the Russian government.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] Trump greeted the reporters gathered in the marbled atrium of Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan with a smile. His transition staffers, family and corporate employees cheered him on.
[Donald Trump:] Thank you very much. It's very familiar territory, news conferences, because we used to give them on a almost daily basis. I think we probably, maybe won the nomination because of news conferences, and it's good to be with you.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] Trump actually praised news organizations that showed restraint on the allegations and suggested the frequency of his presidential press conferences might depend on what coverage he received.
[Donald Trump:] We stopped giving them because we were getting quite a bit of inaccurate news.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] BuzzFeed had published the full dossier on the Russian allegations, saying that readers deserve to know what information senior government officials had.
[Donald Trump:] I think it's a disgrace that information that was false and fake and never happened got released to the public. As far as BuzzFeed, which is a failing pile of garbage, writing it, I think they're going to suffer the consequences. They already are.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] BuzzFeed did carefully note that many of the allegations were unverified and that there were errors. But it reported that U.S. intelligence officials, by and large, trusted the source, said to be a retired British intelligence officer researching Trump for his American political rivals. Some news executives said BuzzFeed's decisions set the bar for publication too low. At the press conference, Trump made no distinction between BuzzFeed's reporting and that of CNN.
[Donald Trump:] Go ahead. Go ahead. No, not you. Not you. Your organization's terrible.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] CNN's Jim Acosta sought to be recognized. CNN had reported on the nature of the dossier and the briefings, but withheld details that the network said it could not verify.
[Donald Trump:] Don't be rude. No, I'm not going to give you a I am not going to give you a question. You are fake news.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] Unwelcome news became fake news in Trump's rhetoric.
[Olivia Nuzzi:] I think the stakes are higher for us in the press, right?
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] Olivia Nuzzi covers Trump for The Daily Beast.
[Olivia Nuzzi:] Trump has gotten away with not talking to us since he got elected. And when he does talk to us, he doesn't say anything very accurate. He doesn't generally answer our questions. So we have a lot more that we need from him than he needs from us at this point.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] When a reporter asked about his ongoing refusal to release his past tax documents, Trump replied that the public didn't care, only the press did. After all, Trump said, I won. David Folkenflik, NPR News, New York.

[Tony Cox:] For a recap of this week's news from inside the Beltway, we go now to NPR's senior correspondent Juan Williams in our Political Corner. Juan?
[Juan Williams:] Thanks, Tony. I'm joined by Donna Brazile, former campaign manager for Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore in 2000. Ms. Brazile now runs her own political consulting firm in Washington. She also writes columns and she's a professor. She's too much. And she joins me here at our NPR D.C. studios. Also with us, gratefully, Robert Traynham. He's a political strategist for the Republican Party on Capitol Hill. Robert joins us via phone today from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he's out on the campaign trail. Robert, Donna, thanks for joining us on Political Corner.
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] Thank you, Juan.
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] Thank you, Juan.
[Juan Williams:] Let's start this session of Political Corner with a conversation about Deval Patrick, former activist in the Justice Department, now running for the Democratic he's won the Democratic nomination for governor of Massachusetts. Donna Brazile, how will Deval Patrick do?
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] Well first of all, earlier this summer, Deval Patrick, who was the deputy attorney general under Bill Clinton, he won the Democratic convention. And many people thought, well, the race was over with. Well, his opponents managed to spend millions of dollars in negative ads and negative flyers and mail, and yet he came out in top winning over 50 percent of the vote. He will now face the lieutenant governor Kerry Healey, who Governor Mitt Romney has anointed as his successor. I think Deval, with the ability to rally Democrats it is a blue state after all I think Deval Patrick has a great chance to becoming the second elected African-American governor in our history.
[Juan Williams:] But, Donna, in fact though, Mitt Romney, a Republican, has been the governor. It's a blue state, but gosh, they keep electing Republican governors.
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] Absolutely. That's because often Democrats nominate candidates that are out of touch and out of synch with voters. Deval Patrick has had a terrific he ran not only a terrific campaign but he has a terrific résumé. This is a guy who grew up in poverty, you know, basically a self-made person. While serving in the Clinton administration he investigated hate crimes and abortion clinic violence. He enforced all of the anti-discrimination laws. He has a great chance in that blue state, in the Bay State, of winning the election this fall.
[Juan Williams:] Robert Traynham, do you think that in fact Massachusetts residents are ready to turn over the governor's seat to a Democrat?
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] As you know, Mr. Kerry and Mr. Kennedy have represented that state for a very long time. Very hardcore, liberal Democrats. However, if you take a look at the governor's seat you have Ms. Swift, you have Mr. Weld and you also have Mr. Romney that have been at the top for almost 15 years now. So Massachusetts-ites often vote Democratic, obviously, when they are voting for someone for the office of senator. But when it comes to the gubernatorial race they often tend to go more with a Republican nod simply to have that check there. Now there's no question about it that Mr. Deval is a very, very impressive person on paper. He seems like he's a very charismatic individual and he probably will get a lot of votes. But if I had to call the race right now I would still say, based on the trending of that state when it comes to gubernatorial races, it still probably will go to Ms. Healey.
[Juan Williams:] When you say trending, you're looking at polls?
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] Well, it's not only polling data but it's also voting behavior over the past 15 years. And again, for the past 15, almost 20 years now folks in the Bay State have always gone with a Republican, a moderate Republican I might add, as their chief executive.
[Juan Williams:] Well, tell me a little bit about the opponent, Robert.
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] Well, Ms. Healey, as Donna said, is the lieutenant governor of the state. She has a very, very moderate voting record. In fact, you know, she pretty much embraces civil unions for gay couples. She also embraces an increase of the minimum wage. She also embraces, you know, cleaning up the environmental stuff up in Massachusetts. As you know, Massachusetts is a border state with the Atlantic Ocean. So there's no question about it that she probably will eek out a win basically because she is the "incumbent," and also too because she's a very charismatic individual in her own right. And because she has the endorsement of Mr. Romney. I'm almost positive that she's going to eek this out.
[Juan Williams:] Donna Brazile, you have a woman. She'd be the first female governor of the state, I believe.
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] No, Jane Swift was...
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] That's not accurate. Jane Swift.
[Juan Williams:] Jane Swift, okay. So she'd be the second female governor of the state. But basically here you have a white woman versus a black man.
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] Oh look, there's no question that Deval Patrick will not only I think best this candidate in debates. But he has, as Robert put it, he has charisma. This is a guy who really did not have all the money, didn't have all of the Democratic endorsements. But he ran a phenomenal grassroot back-to-the-basics campaign. People are excited about him. And this is the second opportunity I think the state of Massachusetts will be able to make history. Years ago, of course, when they voted the first African-American post-Reconstruction to the United States Senate. This will be an opportunity again for the Bay State to put an African-American not just in the governor's office but also to send a message to the country that the times have really changed. Juan, looking across the country this political season we only have a couple more primaries but we now have three African-Americans running for governor this year. And this is a very historic year for I call it for black men in politics. In Ohio, of course, Ken Blackwell. He's struggling to retain, you know, some semblance of campaign momentum. In Pennsylvania, Lynn Swann, and then of course now Deval Patrick in Maryland. But we also have three...
[Juan Williams:] No, in Massachusetts.
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] In Massachusetts, I'm sorry. In Maryland, we have Anthony Brown as lieutenant governor candidate running on a ticket with a Democrat, Martin O'Malley. In New York, we have Dave Paterson running on a ticket with Eliot Spitzer. And now in Florida we have Daryl Jones, you know, a former Air Force captain, running on the ticket for lieutenant governor with Jim Davis. So this is a great year for black males in politics.
[Juan Williams:] You mentioned that...
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] You know, I agree with that...
[Juan Williams:] Go ahead, Robert.
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] I agree with that. And also she very conveniently forgot to mention Mr. Steele of Maryland who is running ahead in the polls. I mean, look, there's no question about it that for black America this is a great year. Because win or lose, Republican or Democrat, there will be more African-Americans at the table when decisions are made, which is obviously an important thing for all people of color. So this is a great year for black Americans.
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] I didn't forget to mention Michael Steele. I just forgot to mention the United States Senate candidates, and that's of course Michael Steele and Harold Ford of Tennessee.
[Juan Williams:] One last thing, Donna, before you go. You mentioned debates, and you seem to feel that Deval Patrick will win in debates. Why did you say that?
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] Because I think Massachusetts is one of those states. I mean this guy is so brilliant. He understands not just local issues and state issues. And he can talk about cleaning up the bay, he can talk about the Big Dig. But he can also talk about national issues and national trends. And I think for Massachusetts this is a historic opportunity for the voters up there. And Deval Patrick, you know, ran a grassroot campaign, talked about local issues, but more importantly he represents the future of that state.
[Juan Williams:] And, Robert, you know, lots of people might think, gee, you know, especially Boston, there's a strong history of racist behavior. Is that going to work against Deval Patrick?
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] Well, there's no question about it that Boston has always been a very segregated town. I mean even Ed Brooke, the former senator from Massachusetts who was a Republican who represented Massachusetts in the Senate I believe from 1968 to '78, has often said that that was always a thorn in his side. There's no question about it that I think, unfortunately, racism still exists in that town. And Mr. Deval probably will have an uphill battle in terms of trying to change people's minds and opinions about African-Americans in general, particularly with folks that may be a little bit older than him.
[Juan Williams:] All right. Robert Traynham, Republican political activist. He joins us by phone today from Pennsylvania, where he's on the campaign trail. And, Donna Brazile, campaign manager for Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore in 2000. Now a professor, political consultant and widespread, loved guru. Donna, Robert, thanks for joining us on Political Corner today.
[Ms. Donna Brazile:] Thank you, Juan.
[Mr. Robert Traynham:] Thank you, Juan.
[Juan Williams:] Back to you, Tony.
[Tony Cox:] Thanks, Juan. Join us every Thursday for Juan Williams and his Washington insider right here on Political Corner.

[Renee Montagne:] Donald Trump was in New Mexico last night, ahead of that state's primary a rally that attracted protesters whose rock throwing got this reaction from police.
[Donald Trump:] Bring them home to mom. Go home to mommy. Go home to mommy.
[Renee Montagne:] OK. Of course, that wasn't the police. That was Donald Trump himself. There was rock throwing. Police objected to that. Inside, candidate Trump matched the anger outside, attacking Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren in a state that's seen as a bellwether for the Latino vote. Gabriel Sanchez teaches political science at the University of New Mexico.
[Gabriel Sanchez:] A lot of folks don't realize that over 40 percent of eligible voters here in New Mexico are Hispanic voters. And so I think candidates realize if they can do well out here, they can send a message that they can do well with Hispanic or Latino voters overall.
[Renee Montagne:] Sanchez spoke to us about how Latino voters there are responding to the candidates.
[Gabriel Sanchez:] The first thing to note is that, like all Hispanic voters, there's a lot of diversity within the New Mexico Hispanic population. Overall, I would say that Hillary Clinton definitely has done the best. She and her husband have always had strong connections in New Mexico. And she's polling very well against Bernie Sanders, as well as Trump in the general, if we get that far. But when you look within the population, there's a pocket particularly of young Hispanics, just like you see overall nationally, that are really gravitated towards Bernie Sanders. And so him being out here this week generating a lot of energy leads to a lot of speculation about what might happen in the primary not so much whether Bernie can pull it out, but if he'll continue to show some weaknesses for the Hillary campaign among that particular subgroup of Latinos.
[Renee Montagne:] Well, you know, there is nothing monolithic about America's Hispanic or Latino population. But one thing about New Mexico many Hispanic people have been there for generations. And they pride themselves as being descended directly from Spain. So how does that work out politically?
[Gabriel Sanchez:] You know, that's a good point. You know, you have a lot of families like my own here in New Mexico that trace their ancestry back to the 14 or 1500s to this territory. What we typically see is that the Spanish identifiers tend to be slightly more moderate to conservative than those who identify as Mexican. However, in this election cycle, largely because the immigration debate has been perceived by most Hispanics as anti-Hispanic in nature, you're actually seeing a major movement here in New Mexico among all Hispanics towards a Democratic Party.
[Renee Montagne:] Well, let's talk, then, about Donald Trump. He was just in New Mexico. How is he being regarded?
[Gabriel Sanchez:] You know, Donald Trump generated a lot of enthusiasm. There's a lot of folks that show up to his rallies to support him but also almost the same number of folks that show up to protest. You know, you see a lot of Hispanic voters motivated to vote in this election cycle primarily to stop or prevent Trump from being able to win. And I think a lot of that is the baggage from the statements that he made around Mexican immigrants. So we've been tracking this for a long time at Latino Decisions. Over half of the Latino eligible voting population here in New Mexico who say they know somebody who is undocumented personally, either a member of their family or a friend you know, those kinds of statements it's not about policy to them. I think it's personal. And it touches on this general trend that a lot of Latinos we see don't necessarily think about immigration politics and policy as their forefront issue. But when they think about it as challenging their identity and who they are, it really motivates them, you know, to not only vote, but take a closer look at not only Trump, but the overall Republican Party.
[Renee Montagne:] Now, I gather New Mexico's Republican governor, Susana Martinez she condemned Donald Trump over those comments about Mexican immigrants. What about now? So many Republicans are getting behind Donald Trump as a candidate. What do you think about her?
[Gabriel Sanchez:] You know, Governor Susana Martinez is very interesting when we think about the national political landscape. You know, she has two qualities, demographically, that Donald Trump desperately needs. You know, looking at his weaknesses it's with women and Hispanic voters. And she happens to have both in her personal characteristics. So long story short of it is in my opinion, Donald Trump needs Governor Martinez a lot more than she needs him. Keep in mind, also, that earlier in the primary season, she endorsed formally Marco Rubio, who is obviously a huge opposition to Donald Trump. So you've heard a lot of national pundits and experts really hone in on Governor Martinez as being a possible running mate for Donald Trump for the reasons that I just laid out. You know, at this point, I'd have to say that it would be difficult in my view for the governor early on in the season to have really sharp words about his comments around immigration and Mexican immigrants and then move 180 degrees towards him as a formal running mate. So, you know, in this election cycle, the one thing that I've learned is you never say never because we're essentially breaking new ground every week. But I would be pretty surprised if that were to happen.
[Renee Montagne:] Well, thank you very much for joining us.
[Gabriel Sanchez:] Thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure.
[Renee Montagne:] Gabriel Sanchez teaches political science at the University of New Mexico. And he is with Latino Decisions, a survey focused on the Latino population.

[Melissa Block:] Pope Francis concludes his two-day visit to Ireland today, leading Sunday Mass in a Dublin park. He told Catholics that he begs the Lord's forgiveness for sexual abuse committed by priests, as well as the sense of betrayal felt by many of the faithful. Yesterday, the pope met with Irish victims of clergy sexual abuse. The failure of the church to address those crimes, the pope said, is a source of pain and shame and rightful outrage. Darren McGavin is one of the many survivors of sexual abuse by an Irish priest. As a child, he was raped repeatedly by Father Tony Walsh, now considered one of the most notorious child sexual abusers in the Irish priesthood. He's in prison now thanks to Mr. McGavin's testimony. Darren McGavin says he's not satisfied by anything he's heard from Pope Francis.
[Darren Mcgavin:] No, none whatsoever. The any of the apologies that he's given we've already heard here. And there are no there's no actions whatsoever.
[Melissa Block:] You say no actions. What actions would you want to see?
[Darren Mcgavin:] Well, first of all, if he's as sincere and shameful as he says that he is, I think that the only way for him to take the shame away from himself would be to settle an independent institution or organization funded by the church view to handing over all and any relevant files about allegations of clerical sexual abuse. And by openly allowing these files to be given and that those who held back from disclosing to him the Irish bishops and cardinals that have covered up the abuse so that the priest could be moved on to other states and other communities that they be held accountable.
[Melissa Block:] Have you heard anything about the meeting with Pope Francis this weekend with some of the child sexual abuse survivors? Do you know how that went?
[Darren Mcgavin:] I heard nothing whatsoever. I wasn't informed about it. I wasn't invited in any capacity.
[Melissa Block:] Mr. McGavin, do you still consider yourself a Catholic?
[Darren Mcgavin:] Certainly not.
[Melissa Block:] No?
[Darren Mcgavin:] I was only a baby when I was baptized, so I hadn't got a say on the religion. So I asked the archbishop to get in contact with the Vatican with a view to being excommunicated, a letter to that extent and, also, a letter of apology, which I haven't received yet.
[Melissa Block:] Would there be anything that this pope or any other pope could say that might convince you to turn back to the church?
[Darren Mcgavin:] Nothing that he would say would make me turn back to the church, but his actions might. I just want to add, as well, to your listeners that I'm not anti-Catholic. I'm not anti-priest. I'm not anti-faith. I'm just anti-pedophile, anti-predator and anti-cover-upper. So for any listeners out there that have got faith in God, I would urge them to stand strong to that and forget about me and forget the other survivors. We will fight in our own battles. Or, through their own prayer, maybe they can get through to God, who can get through to the pope to do the right thing.
[Melissa Block:] That's Darren McGavin speaking with us on Skype from Dublin. He is a survivor of child sexual abuse by an Irish priest. Mr. McGavin, thank you so much for talking with us.
[Darren Mcgavin:] You're very welcome. And thank you for having me.

[Audie Cornish:] When it comes to online shopping, it's common practice to compare prices. But what if that information wasn't available and you were being charged more simply because of where you live? That's what one Silicon Valley company argues is happening to U.S. farmers when they buy seed and fertilizer. Harvest Public Media's Madelyn Beck reports on ways that the company is trying to disrupt that practice.
[Madelyn Beck, Byline:] Aaron Phipps grows 2,100 acres of corn and soybeans on a farm in eastern Illinois near the Indiana border. He buys a lot of seed and fertilizer, but finding out if he's getting the best price is a challenge.
[Aaron Phipps:] We've got no point of reference when we go into negotiate with suppliers to say, hey, this is where the markets at. We had no clue.
[Madelyn Beck, Byline:] So Phipps joined Farmers Business Network, a Silicon Valley startup now with nearly 8,000 farmers who pay around $500 a year to join. They then share information on things like invoices for seed and fertilizer and crop performance. In return, they get to see an aggregation of everyone else's data, and that can show who's being overcharged. FBN found that entire regions of the country are paying more for the exact same seeds. For example, farmers in Illinois paid about $23 more per acre for corn seeds than Nebraska farmers. FBN estimates that cost them an extra $260 million just last year. Receipts showed that farmers in central Illinois and northern Indiana, where farms are extremely productive, are paying the most. FBN's Matt Meisner says that's a problem for neighboring farms there that aren't as productive.
[Matt Meisner:] You know, we expected there'd differences. I think we were surprised at the magnitude and the impact that it has on growers.
[Madelyn Beck, Byline:] The startup blames practices by big seed companies like Syngenta, Corteva and Bayer, which merged with Monsanto last year. While none responded directly when asked to explain about the price disparities, Bayer did highlight its high-performing seed traits and technical services it offers beyond seeds and chemicals. It stated, quote, "Farmers understand not only the bottom line but also the return on investment they get when purchasing a bag of seed." Chad Hart teaches ag economics at Iowa State University. He says there are a lot of reasons the seed companies charge more in certain areas.
[Chad Hart:] One of the biggest ones has to do with the just call it basic supply and demand.
[Madelyn Beck, Byline:] A high demand can fetch a higher price especially when farmers don't know what other people are being charged. Hart says it's unlikely that seed price transparency will immediately change how farmers buy their seed in part because of brand loyalty and shipping costs. But he says as more farmers have incentive to shop around, seed companies will probably begin to change how they price the product.
[Chad Hart:] So I think you'll see adjustment on both ends.
[Madelyn Beck, Byline:] Meanwhile, some farmers are challenging seed markets by joining farm co-ops. They help them pool their buying power. But the purchasing power of a few hundred farms is easily dwarfed by multinational seed companies' vast distribution of power. Add to that the many headwinds that farmers are facing, like trade uncertainty and labor shortages. Increasingly, some are just buying cheaper seeds with fewer special traits that keep pests away and help keep plants healthy. The Farmers Business Network is now selling those cheaper seeds even as it collects data on the prices of more specialized ones. Illinois farmer Aaron Phipps says he trusts the Silicon Valley startup to give him good price data and thinks transparency will lead to changes.
[Aaron Phipps:] Now that we've seen what can be done, I think the genie is out of the bottle, and you can't stuff this toothpaste back in the tube.
[Madelyn Beck, Byline:] Once you show someone there's a better deal out there, it can change the way they buy what they need. For NPR News, I'm Madelyn Beck.
[Audie Cornish:] That story comes to us from Harvest Public Media, a reporting collaboration from the Midwest and Plains states.

[Neal Conan:] And domestic icon Martha Stewart created a bit of a stir last week. In an interview for ABC's �Nightline,� she trashed TV cooking star Rachel Ray.
[Ms. Martha Stewart:] She professed that she cannot bake. She just did a new cookbook which is just a re-edit of a lot of her old recipes. And that's not good enough for me. I mean, I really want to write a book that is a unique and lasting thing, something that will really fulfill a need in someone's library. So, she's different. She's more of an entertainer than she is with a bubbly personality than she is a teacher like me.
[Neal Conan:] Stewart's target then won kudos for what many described as a most graceful comeback. Why would it make me mad, Rachel Ray said. Her skill set is far beyond mine. That's simply the reality of it. That doesn't mean that what I do isn't important, too. I just think she's being honest. When it comes to producing a beautiful, perfect high-quality meal, I'd rather eat Martha's than mine too. Such a perfectly prepared skewer can satisfy on a lot of levels. If you've issued or received an especially graceful comeback, give us a call. The phone number: 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. You can join the conversation on our Web site. That's at npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION. Joining us now as she does from time to time, Amy Dickinson, who writes the syndicated �Ask Amy� column for the Chicago Tribune, with us from the studios at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Hey, Amy.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] Hi, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] And lots of readers ask you for appropriate comebacks for situations where they feel they've been wronged. Well, why shouldn't we just go for the jugular?
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] Well, and you know one thing I do on my column is I often provide people with little scripts. And the thing about the perfect comeback is it's something you usually think of the next day.
[Neal Conan:] Yeah, or at 3 o'clock in the morning, you wake up�
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] Right.
[Neal Conan:] �bolt up right in bed, that's what I should have said.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] Right. So one little line that sometimes I give to people is, you know what, tomorrow I'm going to think of the perfect thing to say to you.
[Neal Conan:] And save it until tomorrow, or maybe the moment's passed and just savor the thought that you had in your head when you finally did think of it.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] Well, and actually, I think that when a person is assaulted like that�
[Neal Conan:] Mm-hmm.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] �verbally, it's so important when you're receiving that it's pretty shocking but it's really important to stop and think, okay, what do I want out of this encounter? Do I really want to have a fight at the Thanksgiving table or wherever it is? Do I really want to mix it up with this person? In my case, I'm somebody who people come after from time to time publicly and privately�
[Neal Conan:] Mm-hmm.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] �and I most often think, I really don't want to mix it up.
[Neal Conan:] Yeah.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] And so I do, you know, I always counsel people wait, reflect, deflect if you can. And if you need to say something, have it be so open-ended, even a little bit on the kind side, which is certainly what Rachel Ray did, and have it be so open-ended that if you need to come back tomorrow or the day after with a zinger, you're open.
[Neal Conan:] Mm-hmm. I don't know the exact circumstances of when she was asked this and how long she had to respond, but it's possible she may have had the chance to sit down and think about it for a moment before she responded. And if it had been an instant reaction, it might not have been it might have been more jugular.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] Well, and actually I thought of a perfect comeback on Rachel Ray's behalf. Hers was delicious, as we say.
[Neal Conan:] Mm-hmm.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] But a snappy comeback might have been, well, I guess what Martha Stewart said was not a good thing. You know�
[Neal Conan:] Mm-hmm
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] �that's like Martha Stewart's catchphrase.
[Neal Conan:] Uh-huh.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] Because one of the things I sometimes suggest to people, and I've done, is I'll say, wow, that was sort of mean. You know, like you just honestly say, gosh, that was pretty mean.
[Neal Conan:] Yeah.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] You know, you're being, like, out there.
[Neal Conan:] We have this email from Dan in Reno, Nevada. I used to work as a waiter at a fairly nice restaurant in San Diego. One night, while taking an order for a party of eight or so, a man was ordering, give me this, give me that. His wife pointedly said, please, to remind him to use his manners. He said please less than graciously then looked up at me and he said, I bet a lot of people don't say please, do they? No, I said, and a lot of times when they do they don't really mean it. I said it with a smile on my face and a pleasant tone of voice. There was no way he could complain. His wife handled the bill and left me a great tip.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] I love that. I love it. And exactly, that waiter was being very honest. It was such an open-ended remark. He was answering a direct question. It was such an open-ended remark that it could be taken any number of ways and that's perfect.
[Neal Conan:] A lot of us strive for that, you know, great Winston Churchill-type putdown that, you know, you see all the quotes, yes, but I'll be sober in the morning, that sort of thing. And, you know, but a few of us are capable of that style of wit. And if you're going for the rapier and set up with the axe handle instead, it can be pretty devastating.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] Right. And of course, one thing any of us could say was, yes, but you'll be sober in the morning. You know, we sometimes need to really stop and think about the circumstances. And as I say, you have to really think very quickly, what do I want to happen next? Because really, you've had something lobbed at you and how do you want to handle it? Do you want to catch it, do you want to throw it to the ground, do you want to throw it back? You really have a choice.
[Neal Conan:] Let's see if we get a caller in on the conversation. We're with Amy Dickinson, �Ask Amy.� We're talking about gracious comebacks. 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. Keith is on the line calling from Tempe.
[Keith:] Oh, hi, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] Hi, Keith.
[Keith:] Pleasure to be on.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks.
[Keith:] I had a situation at work where I was complaining about a coworker to a friend of mine about how I had given her some paperwork to fill out for me. And it has been like a week ago and I was waiting for her to get back. And I was just really grilling on, you know, about her to a friend of mine. And a friend of hers was in the cube next door and overheard the conversation and kind of filled her in on the whole thing. And I get back to my desk by the time I walked back, all the paperwork is there with a little note that was her telling me what a great worker I am and what a, you know, how hard I work and how great it is to work with me. And it just completely destroyed me because I spent that whole time complaining about her and� �and then I come back with a thank you letter, basically. And so it, you know, I was not expecting that.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] I have to ask, Keith, what did you learn there?
[Keith:] I learned that she's much better at office politics than I am.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] There you go. That's a real �Dilbert� kind of situation when the person in the next cubicle overhears you. But one of the things I spent some time in Tennessee at one point and I loved how people had this very sort of innocuous and very pleasant way of responding to just about anything. They would look at you and say, well, I appreciate you. I mean, what� That's sort of what she was doing. She was saying, regardless, I'm aware, but I appreciate you. And what can we do?
[Keith:] Yeah. It's very had to do that. It's you know, you want to come back with your own, well, you also were late on the job for me and you're in no place to complain. But this completely diffused me. You know, I have nothing to say to that. I just kind of put my head down and walk away, you know? I feel bad and�
[Neal Conan:] Well, as long as you feel bad, that's the important part.
[Keith:] Exactly.
[Neal Conan:] All right. Keith, thanks very much for the call.
[Keith:] Thank you very much.
[Neal Conan:] Here's an email that we have. This is from Sarah in Portland. My favorite retort was from a young lady being harassed on public transportation by a man who continued to refer to her as babe, honey, et cetera. She turned to him and said politely, I don't believe you know me well enough to call me sweetheart. He was simply too dumbfounded to responded and left her alone after that. Well, that's a situation a lot of women find themselves in.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] Oh, yeah. And if and that actually is a lovely response. It also diffused the situation right away. And but what I like, too, is the best comebacks are witnessed by someone else, you know, who then goes on to tell the tale. And I was doing a little research yesterday on comebacks and there are some comebacks that are sort of mythical, sort of like urban legend comebacks, you know?
[Neal Conan:] Oh, give us some examples.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] Well, one of them that seemed to fly around the Internet a lot is was it's nothing more than a dirty joke, which has a perfect comeback within in it.
[Neal Conan:] Mm-hmm.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] And Neal, I'm not going to repeat it.
[Neal Conan:] Okay.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] But, I think of one that I seem to remember witnessing I certainly learned about it. Have you ever heard of this one between Orson Welles and Robert Blake?
[Neal Conan:] No. But�
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] Okay. They were both�
[Neal Conan:] �very different people. Yes.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] I'm going to get it wrong. But they were on a talk show together. I'm thinking it was �The Tonight Show.�
[Neal Conan:] Could have been Dick Cavett in those days. But anyway, yeah.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] It could be. And Robert Blake made a comment, of course, about Orson Welles' weight. He was very, very overweight�
[Neal Conan:] Mm-hmm.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] �certainly most of his life. And Orson Welles thought, he turned around, he looked around, and then he said, well something to the effect of, well, sir, with great effort, I could perhaps be thin, but you will always be very stupid. It was something like that. And that really sticked in my mind as this, like, incredibly sort of sophisticated put-down to what was a very open assault and affront.
[Neal Conan:] That sort of demanded some sort of a comeback of some sort.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] It did. It was just a blanket insult. And I hope that someone will call in with the perfect, you know, the quote there because it really was quite delicious.
[Neal Conan:] Let's get another caller on the line. This is Stephanie. Stephanie with us from Madison, in Wisconsin.
[Stephanie:] Hi there. I'm going to make this fast because my cell phone is losing power. I want to say, I'm a person with a disability which has gotten worse. I've been going blind, basically. And I used to feel that I had to come back with a comeback. And I'm pretty quick witted. And or somebody insulted me, I would brood. If I didn't come back with a comeback, I would brood about it. I have learned, a lot of times the best thing you can do is, A, keep your mouth shut, and you can bring more attention to the behavior by doing that, you know? Just nonverbal, but keep your mouth shut. Or kill them with kindness. And I'm going to hang up and let you respond.
[Neal Conan:] All right, Stephanie. Thanks very much.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] I completely agree. Silence is so, so powerful. And this is something a lot of us learned. I certainly feel like I learned it when I was a parent of a young child. Like when my daughter would do something I didn't like, instead of responding at all, I would just get quiet. And that's a very powerful tool that all of us have if only we can manage it. Another thing is to just say, wow, oh.
[Neal Conan:] Hmm.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] You sure said that.
[Neal Conan:] Or perhaps try to master the withering stare.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] Right.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking�
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] My daughter claims sometimes that she's like, mom, stop yelling at me. I said, I'm not doing anything. She's like, you're yelling with your eyes.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking with Amy Dickinson, who of course writes the syndicated column �Ask Amy� for the Chicago Tribune. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION, coming to you from NPR News. And let's see if we can go next to Jim. Jim with us from Tucson.
[Jim:] Yes.
[Neal Conan:] Hi, Jim.
[Jim:] This is a comeback that I've used many times when I get involved in a political discussion. Somebody veers off on to a tangent that I don't happen to agree with. When they pause, I say, yes, there are people that feel that way. And it stops them every time.
[Neal Conan:] By seeming to put them in the margins.
[Jim:] Yes.
[Neal Conan:] Yeah. And that works every time?
[Jim:] Well, it has for me.
[Neal Conan:] All right. Well, thanks, Jim, very much.
[Jim:] Okay.
[Neal Conan:] Bye-bye. That's an approach, too, that it edges on sarcasm.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] Right. But basically what you're doing is you're reflecting the person's sort of attitude back to them.
[Neal Conan:] Mm-hmm.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] And I think that's very effective. It's but what you're doing is you're just acknowledging. You're saying, well, you said that. I'm still here, you know?
[Neal Conan:] Yeah. Yeah. It's most of us are flummoxed. I mean, you know, we're reduced to playground behavior. I'm rubber and you're glue, you know, that sort of thing.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] Right. And, you know, a lot of stuff is going to happen around the Thanksgiving table tomorrow. And I would just urge people to really take a breath, think about the context and choose to wait. You know, I always tell myself, if I wait now, I can still launch my little grenade later if I choose. And most I mean, 98 percent of the time, I'm glad that I've waited.
[Neal Conan:] Revenge, unlike mashed potatoes, a dish best served cold.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] Right.
[Neal Conan:] Amy, I have to ask you, there is a fairly well-known example of this happening in your professional life. This was shortly after you started writing your column.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] That's true, yes.
[Neal Conan:] The daughter of your predecessor took, well, what could only be described as an open shot at you.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] Yeah. She really came after me, and basically saying, you know, my column replaced Ann Lander's column, and Ann Lander's daughter didn't like that. And she really launched a pretty gratuitous, you know, I guess you'd call it an attack. And I, again, like Rachel Ray, I had a day, you know, I got to think about what I would say in response. I was asked to respond. And I basically said, well, she's a loyal daughter. And good for her, she's very loyal. I mean, that was the best I could do. I think I also said that was a little mean.
[Neal Conan:] Mm-hmm. You did.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] Right. But I felt pretty satisfied in my response. And that's not the only time someone has sort of come after me publicly, and I really learned from that first time because I felt that was quite successful. I felt good about what I'd said. And that's really important, you know, tomorrow, how are you going to feel about what you said?
[Neal Conan:] And you could live with that down the road. It might not have been the very first thought that crossed your mind, though.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] Not the very first, no. But no one will ever know what that was, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] Okay. And we're not going to ask you this on this radio program much. Anyway, as you think about well, let's see if we can get another caller on the line. Let's go to this is Pamela. Pamela with us from Mexico Beach in Florida.
[Pamela:] Good morning, or good afternoon. How are you?
[Neal Conan:] Good afternoon. Very well.
[Pamela:] My best retort was when a fellow actor was making snide comments. And finally she finished and I went, wow, would you like a saucer of milk with that? But it worked. She was stunned and I had an opportunity to make a graceful exit. So�
[Neal Conan:] Oh, well, and always an actor or actresses you have to know when to pivot on the heel and leave.
[Pamela:] That's right. Exit stage left.
[Neal Conan:] There you go. Pamela, thanks very much. Are you appearing in anything at the moment?
[Pamela:] Not at the moment. Thanksgiving, yes. I'm appearing at Thanksgiving.
[Neal Conan:] All right. Well, have a�
[Pamela:] With a turkey and some cranberry sauce.
[Neal Conan:] Well and I'm sure you're going to take the star role.
[Pamela:] Oh, thank you so much. Thank you for letting me talk. Bye-bye.
[Neal Conan:] Okay. Bye-bye. Here's an email we have from Linda. Reporter: Mr. Gandhi, what do you think of Western civilization? Mr. Gandhi: I think it would be a very good idea. There's also the famous football coach who said asked, what did you think of your team's execution, he said, I'm in favor of it.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] But you know, those are both super clever, wonderful, memorable responses to questions. Those weren't really comebacks to insults, which is in a whole other thing, because you when somebody insults you, you're pretty hot, you're pretty excited, yeah.
[Neal Conan:] Mm-hmm. And that's when you get down am not. Amy, thanks so much for being with us. Tomorrow, are you having Thanksgiving with the whole family?
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] I am. We're going to have a really peaceful, lovely, lovely time.
[Neal Conan:] Where none of this is going to be at issue at all, I'm sure.
[Ms. Amy Dickinson:] Not at all.
[Neal Conan:] �Ask Amy� is appears in the syndication for the Chicago Tribune. Its author is Amy Dickinson, a regular guest on TALK OF THE NATION, with us today from the studios at Cornell University.

[Melissa Block:] Butte, Montana is the hometown of daredevil Evel Knievel and that's the launching point for a new novel from Egyptian-American writer Pauls Toutonghi. It's called "Evel Knievel Days." Alan Cheuse has our review.
[Alan Cheuse, Byline:] Butte, Montana and Cairo. That's a lot of territory to embrace in one book, but Pauls Toutonghi has a large wingspan as a writer. His main character is an extroverted young guy with a touch of OCD Khosi Saqr, father from Cairo, and an American mother, and someone never really at home in America. As Khosi describes himself, at birth, my Egyptian blood flared. I was the color of a paper bag. My broad nose jutted from my oblong face. A brace of black hair crowned my head. I looked like a tiny Yasser Arafat. Khosi's parents have long been separated, but when his father returns briefly to Butte, fabled copper capital of the world, to get the mother to agree, finally, to a divorce, Khosi, feeling more than a little unhinged and displaced, sets out after his father returns to Egypt in pursuit of his dad. This leads him to Cairo and a complicated family crisis and, for him, a crisis of body as well as soul. From the streets of poor neighborhoods to the racetracks of the rich and the criminal, from restaurants there's a wonderful Middle Eastern culinary thread you can follow through this novel to hidden courtyards and apartments to hospitals, we travel with him as he tells in a breezy, cheerful, but always intelligent voice the story of his daunting quest to reconnect with his father. And with that voice, Khosi speaks for himself and for millions for everyone trying to put together the pieces of a broken family. At one point, Khosi quotes the great food writer, M.F.K. Fisher, who said that the smell of good bread baking is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight. Can we make an analogy between that sense of delight and reading this novel? I think so.
[Melissa Block:] That's Alan Cheuse with his review of the novel from Pauls Toutonghi titled "Evel Knievel Days."

[Melissa Block:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
[Robert Siegel:] And I'm Robert Siegel. We begin this hour with what appears to be a major breakthrough in the Senate on immigration. The legislation has been stalled, as some senators complained that it did not do enough to secure the border with Mexico. Well, today, a compromise has been struck. It would nearly double the number of border patrol agents at the Mexican border. The deal was sponsored by two GOP senators and as NPR's David Welna reports, it will increase support for the bill among Senate Republicans.
[David Welna, Byline:] It became clear earlier this week that unless more border security measures were added to the sweeping immigration overhaul, backers of the bill could fall far short of the 70 senators they hoped would support it and thus, increase pressure on the GOP-led House to pass it. So two Republican senators who wanted to see the bill pass cobbled together an amendment they hope would get their GOP colleagues on board. One was John Hoeven of North Dakota, who presented the deal on the Senate floor.
[Senator John Hoeven:] We're not done. We must do more to secure the border in this legislation. And that's exactly what we're offering here today. It is a very straightforward way to secure our border and to do so before allowing a pathway to legal permanent residency for those who came here illegally.
[David Welna, Byline:] Using revenues from the immigration bill that the Congressional Budget Office estimates could be close to a trillion dollars over the next two decades, the amendment would add 20,000 border patrol agents to the 21,000 already deployed along the Mexican border. It would also complete 700 miles of fencing. Tennessee Republican Bob Corker is cosponsoring the amendment.
[Senator Bob Corker:] Some people have described this as a border surge. And the fact is that we are investing resources in securing our borders that have never been invested before, a doubling, again, of the border control, $3.2 billion worth of technology that we took from the chief of the border control, the technology that he needs to have 100 percent awareness and to secure our border.
[David Welna, Byline:] All four Democrats and four Republicans in the gang of eight have lined up behind the measure, even though some Democrats doubt more border patrol agents are needed. Gang of eight member and New York Democrat Charles Schumer called the amendment a real breakthrough.
[Senator Charles Schumer:] Anyone who believes that we must strengthen border security has to be very favorably disposed to this amendment. And it solved the riddle of how we deal with border security in a way without allowing somebody in future years who is against citizenship to impede that path.
[David Welna, Byline:] And a Republican in the gang of eight, Arizona's John McCain, readily acknowledged the measure was all about winning more votes for the bill.
[Senator John Mccain:] We know that we need a very large number of Republicans and a very large vote, okay? We were not getting that, okay? And so we asked Senator Corker and Senator Hoeven to look at these issues and see if they could come up with a way that we could get more support and yet, not lose Democrats. And I think they've done a great job.
[David Welna, Byline:] Today, Illinois Republican Mark Kirk, who'd voted against taking up the bill, said he'd changed his mind.
[Senator Mark Kirk:] With the border security amendment, I will be able to support the bill.
[David Welna, Byline:] As many as a dozen more Republicans are now on board with the bill, according to gang of eight Republican Jeff Flake of Arizona.
[Senator Jeff Flake:] Our goal has been 70 votes and this brings us close to 70. I don't know if we'll get all the way there, but it will be close to 70.
[David Welna, Byline:] But the bill's opponents scoffed at the promises to strengthen the southern border. Ted Cruz is a Republican from Texas.
[Senator Ted Cruz:] What I think the American people want is real border security, not an empty fig leaf. And they want border security first, before legalization. If the legalization happens first, the border security never will.
[David Welna, Byline:] The bill's backers hope to pass it by the end of next week. That would shift the focus on getting an immigration bill to the House. David Welna, NPR News, the Capitol.

[Ari Shapiro:] For the first time ever, Pope Francis is in the United States. The pope's chartered Alitalia jet touched down at Joint Base Andrews outside Washington this afternoon. President Obama and Vice President Biden were on hand to greet him.
[Kelly Mcevers:] Washington is the first stop on a U.S. tour that also includes New York City and Philadelphia. Ari talked with NPR White House correspondent Scott Horsley earlier today as the pope arrived.
[Ari Shapiro:] Hi Scott.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Great to be with you Ari.
[Ari Shapiro:] How typical is it for President Obama, let alone, President Obama and his family, to make the trip to Andrews Air Force Base to greet a visiting leader?
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Well, it is certainly unusual, but it's not unprecedented. President Bush also extended a similar welcome when Pope Benedict visited back in 2008, but the fact that Sasha and Malia, the president's daughters, are on hand is a sign of just how much history is being made here. Vice President Biden, a devout Catholic, is here and he's brought along a couple of his grandchildren. And then there are a lot of schoolchildren from various Catholic schools in the Washington area. And the Vatican selected four of those youngsters a first, third, fifth and seventh-grader to greet the pope, and one of the children was set to present the pontiff with some flowers.
[Ari Shapiro:] As we are hearing in the background, the crowds at Andrews cheering for the pope and the president, these people who have been waiting for a very long time to see this leader. On Thursday, the pope plans to address members of Congress, and he is, I think, more popular than virtually [LAUGHTER] any American politician at this point. I hate to sound cynical, but, are any politicians hoping to gain some points from the pope's visit?
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Ride the papal coattails a little bit here? Sure. And before that meeting the address to Congress on Thursday the pope has another big arrival ceremony at the White House tomorrow, where some 15,000 people are expected to assemble on the South Lawn and the neighboring Ellipse. So just another sign of the pope's popularity. But certainly for President Obama, this is an opportunity to align himself with a very popular pope, and one with whom he sees eye to eye on some issues, not all issues, but some issues. Certainly they are both very interested in issues like alleviating poverty, dealing with income inequality, the pope's talked a lot about immigration, which is high on the president's agenda, and, especially, climate change.
[Ari Shapiro:] Despite those issues on which they see eye to eye, this president has at times had strained relations with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, American bishops particularly.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Certainly. And of course there are strong differences too on issues such as abortion and birth control. The president is still locked in legal battles with various Catholic-affiliated organizations that don't like the birth control mandate that's part of Obama's signature health care law. But those are not the issues that the pope, that Pope Francis, has chosen to emphasize. Those are not front burner issues for this pope. And that's why, maybe more so than his predecessor, this is a pope with whom President Obama thinks he can do business. I say that even as the White House is cautioning that their meeting tomorrow will not be a transactional meeting, like, say the meeting with Chinese President Xi will be later this week, but rather, an opportunity for two men who share a lot of similar values to talk about that.
[Ari Shapiro:] Just to describe the scene for a moment, President Obama and his family are walking with the pope and other leaders of the Catholic Church who have just arrived on this chartered Alitalia jet, and there's a crowd of people behind a fence cheering and waving at Andrews. Just briefly, Scott, we understand the pope spoke to reporters on the plane. It doesn't sound like he said much that was terribly surprising. What were the thrust of his comments?
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Well, of course he was on his way from Cuba, and he was asked about the U.S. embargo against Cuba. He said he'd like to see that lifted but doesn't expect to address that directly during his address to Congress. Of course, this pope played an important role in brokering the diplomatic thaw between the U.S. and Cuba, and in fact the Vatican hosted some of the secret negotiations that preceded that historic announcement last December.
[Ari Shapiro:] That's NPR's Scott Horsley. Thanks Scott.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Good to be with you.

[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] One of Lebanon's best-known music groups, Mashrou'Leila, was recently barred from playing at a festival there. Christian leaders called some of the group's lyrics, quote, "blasphemous," and it made international headlines. As activists in Lebanon tell NPR's Ruth Sherlock, Mashrou'Leila is just one of many bands, books and movies that are being censored in the country.
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] Recently, a group of Lebanese bands got together for a protest concert...
[Bassem Deaibess:] This goes to everyone who wants their freedom... ...For the queers... ...For those who are different... ...For those who live alternative lives... ...And those who want just freedom.
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] Bassem Deaibess of the band Blaakyum is used to challenging Lebanon's censors. He's been detained twice and even jailed once for his music.
[Blaakyum:] [Singing unintelligibly.]
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] Hard rock and Metallica, of the type played by Deaibess' band, has been labeled as the work of Satan by religious leaders in Lebanon and its performers accused of being devil worshippers. But at this concert in Beirut, the young crowd was happy to join Deaibess' rebellion. They headbang to the music and fling themselves into a mosh pit near the stage. The event was hastily organized by activists to honor Mashrou'Leila after the popular music group was barred from performing at a festival in Lebanon.
[Blaakyum:] [Singing] I got my chance for freedom. This chance just slipped away.
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] Lebanon is relatively liberal compared to its neighbors in the Middle East. There's a healthy art and film scene, and you can find a range of opinions in the country's media. But Ayman Mhanna, the executive director of the Samir Kassir Foundation, which works to protect these freedoms, says he sees a pattern of growing repression in the country.
[Ayman Mhanna:] It's happening while there is a surge in summoning journalists and bloggers and activists on social media and actually prison sentences against some journalists.
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] He lists films and books that have been barred from publication or cultural events that have been canceled. In some ways, this isn't new. Lebanon's Bureau of Censorship, buried deep in the security department, has been active since the 1940s. Israel is one sensitive topic. In 2017, the hit movie "Wonder Woman" was banned because it features an Israeli actress. But activists like Mhanna say that more and more is being censored on the grounds of religious or sectarian identity. Sometimes the ban comes from the government. Other times, it's from pressure on groups hosting events. Naji Hayek, a member of the Free Patriotic Movement, one of Lebanon's largest Christian political parties, led the effort to get concert organizers to cancel Mashrou'Leila's recent appearance. He sees the Christian minority as being under threat in Lebanon and says censorship is a way of protecting Christian identity.
[Naji Hayek:] When you say you're a Christian of Lebanon, this is not limited to going to church. This is not limited in the way you think or you believe in Jesus Christ. It is also a political contest. It's also a political situation.
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] Gino Raidy, a blogger and member of March, an NGO that tracks censorship, says there's a growing tit-for-tat battle where all sides push government censors to ban anything they see as potentially offensive as a way to assert dominance.
[Gino Raidy:] They've been very emboldened these days all sides whether it's Christian factions or Muslim factions. And the problem is it's a vicious cycle where they learn and feed off from each other. And that's what's making it worse now, honestly.
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] The casualty of all this, he says, is freedom of expression. Ruth Sherlock, NPR News, Beirut.

[Audie Cornish:] Hurricane Sandy made landfall in southern New Jersey and left a path of destruction all the way up the state. Just across the river from New York in Bergen County, water flowed over the top of a levee along the Hackensack River, and then it poured into the town of Moonachie. NPR's Jim Zarroli went there today.
[Jim Zarroli, Byline:] As Hurricane Sandy ripped through the area, Charlie Alta spent a sleepless night worried about tree branches crashing into his house in Ridgefield Park. His house was spared any damage, but his whole town lost power. Today, he went out to look around and was astonished by what he saw.
[Charlie Alta:] Usually on 46th here in Little Ferry, the roads are flooded, but never into all this grassy area. Never. I've never seen it like this.
[Jim Zarroli, Byline:] The town of Moonachie had to be evacuated because of the overflowing levee. Everywhere you look there were downed trees and flooded streets. Water rose up to the front porches of houses. Ferrell McNeil got off the New Jersey Turnpike looking for gasoline and got stranded in four feet of water.
[Ferrell Mcneil:] It's terrible. You make U-turns to go back, you run into a flood. It'd take you to another direction, you run into a flood. The whole area was actually flooded.
[Jim Zarroli, Byline:] McNeil was able to push his car out of the water, but it stalled and he was still there hours later. There were stalled cars everywhere you looked. Garage owner George Duntess did a brisk business towing cars out of the water.
[George Duntess:] Leave it in park and don't touch the brakes.
[Jim Zarroli, Byline:] When I caught up with him, he was pulling a Toyota Sienna out of the water. The driver had been trying to get to work when he took a wrong turn. Duntess towed the van to his garage. A little while later came a stark reminder of just what was at stake with Sandy. Duntess was stopped at a barricade in Hackensack. The police had found a dead man and wanted Duntess to move his car out of the water. The body lay nearby in an office parking lot draped in a sheet. As Duntess drove on he said, no one knew how the man had died.
[George Dunkis:] It could've been an older man, could've had a heart attack because he was scared, you know, being out here all night long in the middle of the night when it goes down to 50 degrees and you're soaking wet, anything could happen.
[Jim Zarroli, Byline:] That seems truer than ever now. By the middle of the day, the water seemed to be receding. But there were still reports of trapped people, people who hadn't heeded the warning to evacuate because they didn't believe Sandy could be so dangerous. Jim Zarroli, NPR News.

[Renee Montagne:] And I'm Renee Montagne. The mayor of one the nation's biggest cities wants to take charge of one of the nation's biggest school districts. Here in Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa says public schools can improve if the mayor becomes accountable for them. The mayor will be pushing for that change in his State of the City speech today, following cities like Chicago, Boston and Cleveland. If he fails, Villaraigosa says all of the rest of his agenda, from economic development to public safety, won't amount to much. It's an enormously difficult task, even for a popular mayor with considerable political capital, as Claudio Sanchez reports. CLAUDIO SANCHEZ reporting When Mayor Villaraigosa unveils his vision for the future of Los Angeles at a public school today, he's likely to revisit the promise he's made repeatedly to public school parents since his election 10 months ago.
[Mr. Antonio Villaraigosa:] When you hear me talk about mayoral control, I'm not looking for more power. I'm looking for accountability to you.
[Sanchez:] At this event a few days ago at a privately run charter school that Villaraigosa helped create for mostly low-income, immigrant students, he told nearly 400 parents, I will rescue your children from a public school system mired in complacency.
[Mr. Antonio Villaraigosa:] I'm tired. I'm tired of those who would say [Foreign Language Spoken] you know. Oh they can't learn English. They can't graduate from high school. They can't go on to college. They can't go on to city hall and be the mayor of Los Angeles, 'cause that's what they said to me and people like me a generation ago. And we're here to say, [Foreign Language Spoken].
[Sanchez:] Enough, Villaraigosa shouts, punching the air with his fist. This is Villaraigosa at his best; defiant, connecting with frustrated parents like Mary Narjera. She makes her way to the podium, shaking, teary-eyed, embittered by her son's experience in a bad school.
[Ms. Mary Narjera:] I felt that the system had abandoned him. He had failed. He had failed across the board. I was scared. I am a single parent and I was scared. I thought I was losing my son to the system. So I just think that Mayor Villaraigosa, he needs to know that we really, really need his support to get many, many more schools like this open.
[Sanchez:] Villaraigosa embraces Narjera; then waves into the crowd, gleaming in his trademark, dark-blue suit, white shirt and shiny, lime-green tie. Several women known as Las Promotores chant their approval. But as Villaraigosa leaves this adoring crowd, he knows he's on a collision course with the city's elected school board, the powerful teacher's union and the massive bureaucracy that runs the Los Angeles unified school district; the second largest in the nation with nearly 730,000 students spread out over 700 square miles. All that Villaraigosa's opponents know about his plan, though, is through stump speeches like today's. When he agreed to an interview with NPR, he declined to discuss specifics. He was anxious, however, to say that it's his critics, not him, who call his plan a takeover.
[Mr. Antonio Villaraigosa:] The term I use more often than not is the term accountability; mayoral oversight for the purpose of ensuring accountability and success in our schools. A takeover sounds more like, you know, a power grab.
[Sanchez:] The mayor's critics say that's exactly what it is; a power grab. And it's been sold to parents based on a lie.
[Mr. Aj Duffy:] A lie that says this is a failing school district. Don't tell me this is a failing school system.
[Sanchez:] AJ Duffy is president of the United Teachers of Los Angeles. The union opposes mayoral control of the schools, because, as Duffy puts it, it would be replacing one bloated bureaucracy with another. What the mayor really wants is control of the school district's $7 billion budget, says Duffy. He is, after all, a politician.
[Mr. Aj Duffy:] And politicians do things-let me be kind, for what they consider to be the greater good of the greater whole. If a time comes where he needs money for the city to fix infrastructure and he can find it in the school budget, he'll take it.
[Sanchez:] Villaraigosa scoffs at the idea. He says there are laws that prevent him from raiding the city school budget. But in the end, he says, it doesn't matter what people think of his motives. Los Angeles is facing an educational meltdown. Only 13 percent of the city's students read at grade level. No more than 11 percent are at grade level in math. Over 80 percent of the students in the system, says Villaraigosa, are trapped in schools that the district, itself, has identified as failing. And worse, the dropout rate is over 50 percent.
[Mr. Roy Romer:] He's wrong.
[Sanchez:] Los Angeles School Superintendent Roy Romer is a former governor of Colorado, who came to Los Angeles six years ago with his own plan to overhaul the school system.
[Mr. Roy Romer:] Now, we're a long ways from being perfect at this system. But let me show you something that's really critical.
[Sanchez:] Romer spreads out several binders with spreadsheets and bar graphs on a big table in his downtown office.
[Mr. Roy Romer:] And I know we're on mic, but I need to just show you the graph. No other urban district in California has made the academic gains that we have made.
[Sanchez:] The data show that math and reading scores in Los Angeles elementary schools have shot up three years in a row; faster than the state average and higher than most cities in California. As for the city's dropout rate, Romer argues it's not 50 percent, as the mayor says. It's half that.
[Mr. Roy Romer:] Our dropout rate is less than New York. It's less than Chicago. The mayor doesn't represent it that way, but that's the fact.
[Sanchez:] And finally, Romer argues, if the school system was as bad as Villaraigosa claims, the residents of Los Angeles would not have approved four straight bond issues worth $19 billion to help build 150 new schools.
[Mr. Roy Romer:] We're not trying to get into an argument with the mayor. But for him to come at us and say, you know, you're a failure; you're complacent; it's simply not true. He should not be trashing this district.
[Mr. Antonio Villaraigosa:] Look, I'm not here to bash or trash the superintendent.
[Sanchez:] Again, Mayor Villaraigosa.
[Mr. Antonio Villaraigosa:] What I am here to do is to speak out for these parents. I think you saw me a few minutes ago. You saw the way their parents and the students respond to me; because they know that for a generation I've spoken out on their behalf. They know I believe in them. And I believe in the power of transforming our schools.
[Sanchez:] How tough will Mayor Villaraigosa's fight for control of the Los Angeles Public School System be? In a meeting with editors and reporters at the L.A. Times last week, Villaraigosa said it's going to be an absolute war. Claudio Sanchez, NPR News.

[Michel Martin:] Now it's time for the Barbershop, where we gather some interesting folks to talk about what's in the news and what's on their minds. Joining us here in D.C. for a shapeup this weekend are Jolene Ivey. She's a public relations professional. She's a former member of the Maryland House of Delegates. Good to have you back again, Jolene.
[Jolene Ivey:] It's great to see you, Michel.
[Michel Martin:] And Farajii Muhammad is the host of Listen Up! That's a radio show on member station WEAA in Baltimore. He's also director of the youth organization Peace by Piece. Welcome back, Farajii.
[Farajii Muhammad, Byline:] Thank you, Michel.
[Michel Martin:] And from NPR West, Doyin Richards, staff writer for upworthy.com and also founder of a blog about fatherhood called daddydoinwork.com. Doyin, it's good to have you back as well.
[Doyin Richards:] Oh, thanks Michel.
[Michel Martin:] So let's talk about something that's buzzing on the campaign trail. This is on the Democratic side. Earlier this week, former president Bill Clinton went out on the campaign trail for Hillary Clinton no surprise there. But he had the experience that a lot of people have had this year. He was heckled by Black Lives Matter protesters who were criticizing his tough-on-crime measures back from the 1990s. Now, you might've heard that Hillary Clinton has also been taken to task for some of those policies. We've talked about that before. Now, we've talked about how Donald Trump responds to protesters a couple of times on this program. But Bill Clinton is a little different. So this is a little a bit of what he said.
[Bill Clinton:] I don't know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out onto the street to murder other African-American children maybe you thought they were good citizens, she didn't. She didn't. You are defending the people who killed the lives you say matter. Tell the truth.
[Michel Martin:] You know, this actually went on for some few minutes. And it was kind of I don't know, Jolene Ivey, what would you say, like, a little bit of a political science lecturer mixed with kind of...
[Jolene Ivey:] Yeah, just...
[Michel Martin:] ...Elder schooling the young ones kind of tone there. But I'm curious what you thought of that because as a person herself who's run for office, has won elected office, I'm interested in what you think about how he responded.
[Jolene Ivey:] Well, I kind of understand where he was coming from just because I'm old enough to remember the times he was talking about. So I kind of remember how people felt then, and people were outraged at what was going on with the crack epidemic, with the crime that we were having. And heck, Bernie Sanders of all people voted for that bill.
[Michel Martin:] So what is it that people are upset about because I heard a lot of people cheering?
[Jolene Ivey:] I think that black people were definitely will be like whoa, hang on for a minute, especially younger people. And that's really the group of people that she's having the most trouble with. Hillary is good with older people because we remember the good times the Clintons did have, and we still want to support them. But younger people aren't remembering those days, and something like this just creates more division. And I don't think it helps her.
[Michel Martin:] Farajii, what do you think about this?
[Farajii Muhammad, Byline:] A couple of things happened. One is that, you know, in the midst of those comments, he mentioned that Biden suggested to him that he should put harsher penalties in the legislation if he wanted to get it across the Republicans. But then he also said black leaders approach him and said, you know, we need some real help with this without getting any full details or context on this. So it was as if black leaders became complicit in Bill Clinton locking up many more black men. And I could not foresee that that being the help that they wanted to give the addressing the problem...
[Michel Martin:] But isn't that true though? I mean, members of the Black Caucus, some significant...
[Farajii Muhammad, Byline:] There were some folks...
[Michel Martin:] ...Prominent members of the Black Caucus...
[Farajii Muhammad, Byline:] Yes.
[Michel Martin:] ...Supported those policies? That is true, isn't it?
[Farajii Muhammad, Byline:] They supported the policies, but I don't think they truly understood the ramifications of it. And here's the thing, the...
[Michel Martin:] So they get a pass but he doesn't?
[Farajii Muhammad, Byline:] No, he doesn't. No, nobody gets a pass, actually. But the thing is is that the president Bill Clinton was in a position to do much more than just pass legislation.
[Michel Martin:] I take it that you support that you agree with the protesters who have been criticizing him extension and by extension Hillary Clinton.
[Farajii Muhammad, Byline:] I think so, yeah. I mean, I would agree with the protesters because they're forcing him to take responsibility. And he didn't that answer that he gave was not a sufficient explanation as to why those policies were established.
[Michel Martin:] Doyin, what do you think about this?
[Doyin Richards:] [Laughter] My thing is we have to come down to one simple thing accountability. I actually agree with what President Clinton said because when you really look deep into it, if you don't want to do the time, don't do the crime. So I have no problem with cats getting locked up for doing stuff that's wrong, that's against the law. So when we look at what he said, did he say anything that was inherently wrong? I really don't think so.
[Michel Martin:] So let's move on because Doyin was just in Washington, D.C., a few days ago. He did not come by to see us; I'm just saying. Don't know why...
[Doyin Richards:] I know.
[Michel Martin:] ...But he was at the White House...
[Farajii Muhammad, Byline:] That's messed up, Doyin.
[Michel Martin:] I know, right?
[Doyin Richards:] I know.
[Michel Martin:] He was at the White House for an interesting summit, and I want to talk about that a bit. The idea was to open up a dialogue about tackling gender stereotypes perpetuated by toys and television shows marketed to children. And Doyin, do you want to tell us some of the surprising thing that you learned at the summit? I was following your tweets, and some of it was, I have to say, kind of hair-raising some of the statistics that you were bringing out.
[Doyin Richards:] So basically, one stat was 6 out of 10 girls will stop doing what they love based on their body image or their perceived body image. And you can't be it if you can't see it. So we have to make sure I see 5-year-old and 6-year-old girls measuring their waistlines. Like, oh, I'm not I'm getting fat or I'm chubby. And it's like we need to change the narrative on what it is to be successful. It's not looks. It's not being sexy. We have to see more women as coders, as pilots, as surgeons so they can be like you know what? I can do that, too, and stop the noise about what it looks like. Dudes don't care about what they look like. Go to the beach, go to the pool. You'll see more dad bods shirtless dad bods than you'll ever want to see, you know what I mean? They're walking around proudly oh, yo, I got this. Check me out.
[Jolene Ivey:] Right.
[Doyin Richards:] They don't care.
[Jolene Ivey:] And they think they're the man, too.
[Doyin Richards:] They think they're the man. But there's women who even no matter what their body type is will cover up and feel like they're not good enough. We have to change that. We have to change the narrative.
[Michel Martin:] So else about that came out about boys that...
[Doyin Richards:] Yes.
[Michel Martin:] ...Was also of interest to you?
[Doyin Richards:] So a lot of boys y'all a lot of boys are watching porn. So they had a study where they notice that the average 12-year-old boy sees 50 pornographic images a week.
[Michel Martin:] How? I mean, how? I guess are there...
[Doyin Richards:] It's very I mean...
[Jolene Ivey:] Apparently you can find it pretty easily on the Internet. I remember some years ago...
[Farajii Muhammad, Byline:] Are you saying they're downloading porn, or is there just happening to kind of...
[Doyin Richards:] Viewing. It's simple yeah, exposed. You text it, you go online. Your buddy Snapchatting [sp] it.
[Jolene Ivey:] You can print it off the Internet. I've seen it, unfortunately, in my own home. I've walked in and said what the heck is all of this?
[Doyin Richards:] Who's printing stuff nowadays, Jolene?
[Jolene Ivey:] Well, you know, this was a few years ago. This was a few years ago, and it was one of my boys, who will be remain nameless right now. But...
[Michel Martin:] I was going to say because...
[Jolene Ivey:] Seriously, but that's how I caught him because how can you be that dumb?
[Michel Martin:] But how is this any different from back in the day when boys would sneak "Playboys" and "Penthouses?"
[Doyin Richards:] It's more accessible now, Michel.
[Michel Martin:] It's more accessible.
[Doyin Richards:] More yeah, more accessible. I mean, it's so simple. There's Snapchat, there's texting. You can go anywhere and see that kind of stuff.
[Michel Martin:] And what did they say the consequence of this was and why this was brought up at a White House summit. Obviously, people thought that this was really important. And people felt that this was really important because...
[Doyin Richards:] Yeah, the consequence is how are these young boys going to treat women? A lot of times there are studies that they learn everything about sex through pornography. So they think intimacy is what they see in photographic videos. There's no kissing; there's no intimacy. It's just straight up almost a violent act.
[Michel Martin:] Farajii, can you talk about this because I know in addition to being a radio host, you also work with youth in a program. Is this something that's come up? I mean, I know you're really interested in social justice and organizing and things like that. But that but intimacy and those kinds of conversations...
[Farajii Muhammad, Byline:] It's not there. It's just really not there. You know, I often go to a school in Baltimore. And even among high school, middle school students and the thought of a woman's body is more of a commodity more so than someone else.
[Michel Martin:] Do you think it's different from when you were growing up?
[Farajii Muhammad, Byline:] Oh absolutely. It's gotten much more intense. It's very hypersexual. Boys are becoming exposed to sexual situations very early on, and that's distorting how they see each other.
[Michel Martin:] So one more thing we wanted to run by you though before we let you go which is that earlier this week, Bomani Jones filled in on ESPN's "Mike & Mike," wearing Ringgit a T-shirt that looked like you guys can you...
[Farajii Muhammad, Byline:] The Cleveland...
[Michel Martin:] ...Picture the...
[Doyin Richards:] We saw it.
[Michel Martin:] ...Cleveland Indians logo, right?
[Farajii Muhammad, Byline:] Yeah.
[Michel Martin:] But instead of Chief Wahoo which is the mascot figure that a lot of people are very disgusted with the image was replaced with a white guy with a similarly you know, the big teeth and the grin. But instead of the feather, it was replaced with a dollar sign. For some reason, a lot of people didn't find that funny. It caused this big reaction on Twitter. And later, Jones told ESPN's Molly Qerim that he chose the shirt for his TV appearance because it was clean and also because he likes it. But... But I mean...
[Farajii Muhammad, Byline:] No political, like...
[Michel Martin:] And no politics there?
[Jolene Ivey:] And he's a man...
[Farajii Muhammad, Byline:] [Laughter] Exactly [LAUGHTER].
[Jolene Ivey:] ...And that's how men think. I think it was hilarious.
[Michel Martin:] Do you think it was hilarious?
[Jolene Ivey:] I do.
[Michel Martin:] Because...
[Jolene Ivey:] Well, because I agree with him. And I do think he was making a political statement, especially when they told him to cover it up and he just, like, half zipped his jacket so you could still see it. So I appreciate that. He's fighting the power.
[Doyin Richards:] Can you could you imagine what the executives at ESPN were thinking when they saw him roll out with that shirt? They must've been like yo... I don't know y'all. What are we going to do about this brother?
[Farajii Muhammad, Byline:] Like, take it down, take it down. OK, that's good. That's good.
[Jolene Ivey:] Right.
[Michel Martin:] Farajii, what'd you think?
[Farajii Muhammad, Byline:] You know what? This is funny. But, you know, let's be honest, that conversation about the Indians and the Washington Redskins and all of these teams, that's a conversation that should be had. And it shouldn't be, you know, put to the back burner or shouldn't be just doused with money to make it cover it up. We need to actually have those conversations, I mean, just out of respect. And in 2016, if you can't talk about a mascot that describes a group of people in a very offensive way, then we haven't gotten that far at all.
[Michel Martin:] All right, we'll leave it there for now. That's Jolene Ivey. She's a former state lawmaker, former candidate for lieutenant governor, public relations professional here in Washington, D.C., along with Farajii Muhammad, who's host of Listen Up!, a radio show on member station WEAA in Baltimore and from NPR West, Doyin Richards, staff writer for upworthy.com and founder of a blog about fatherhood called daddydoinwork.com. Thanks everybody for being here.
[Jolene Ivey:] Thanks Michel. It was fun.
[Farajii Muhammad, Byline:] Thank you, Michel.
[Doyin Richards:] Thank you, Michel.

[Alex Chadwick:] And this news item today. Inventor Gerry Thomas has died at age 83. You may not recognize his name, but you sure know what he did, changing American culture in way we're still struggling with. A little more than 50 years ago, Gerry Thomas invented the TV dinner. He was working for Swanson & Sons in Omaha. They had tons of frozen turkeys they couldn't sell. Gerry Thomas came up with the idea of a meal featuring turkey frozen in a ready-to-heat aluminum tray. Patrick Kiger writes about pop culture.
[Mr. Patrick Kiger:] Thomas, as the story goes, dreamed up this idea when he was traveling. He was a salesman. He saw the trays from Pan Am, international flights. They had just recently developed a dining tray for the long flights. And he saw that. That made him think of eating rations back on the battlefield in World War II. Eating a small meal like that was difficult because the stuff all got mixed together, and he saw the little compartments on the trays.
[Alex Chadwick:] Before the TV dinner, families actually used to sit around a dinner table eating meals that took Mom hours to produce. Members of the family felt connected, they knew about each other's lives. Almost immediately, Patrick Kiger says, Gerry Thomas was blamed for changing that.
[Mr. Patrick Kiger:] He went through a period where he was getting a lot of hate mail from men basically because they said that we were ruining family life. Men said they would divorce their wives if they served our dinners. They wanted them to fix their meals from scratch. But, you know, he saw that that wasn't going to happen, basically, and that was his response as well. You know, such is life, basically. This is the way the world's going to go.
[Alex Chadwick:] The original TV dinner took about 25 minutes to cook or reheat. It's much less now. And that may be Gerry Thomas' greatest legacy.
[Mr. Patrick Kiger:] The TV dinner was part of the beginning of the, you know, now, I-want-it-now kind of culture in a way. Again, something that he probably didn't really envision happening. But in some ways, it sort of was the beginning of our collective impatience with-you know, we want everything in two minutes; if we can get it in two minutes, we want it in a minute. And then it's going to keep getting smaller and smaller.
[Alex Chadwick:] Writer Patrick Kiger. Gerry Thomas invented the TV dinner for Swanson's. He died in Paradise Valley in Arizona at the age of 83. I'm Alex Chadwick. Stay with us on DAY TO DAY.

[Scott Simon:] President-elect Trump unleashed a series of tweets at automakers this week. He threatened to slap border taxes of up to 35 percent on certain cars made in Mexico and sent in to the U.S. Ford, GM and Toyota have all been targets. Will President Trump have the power to actually do that? NPR's economics correspondent John Ydstie joins us. John, thanks so much for being with us.
[John Ydstie, Byline:] My pleasure.
[Scott Simon:] Let me just read one, as an example. President-elect Trump tweeted, quote, "Toyota Motor said will build a new plant in Baja, Mexico, to build Corolla cars for U.S. No way!" bold face "build plant in U.S. or pay big border tax." Could he actually force the company to do that?
[John Ydstie, Byline:] Well, Scott, you're right to wonder about this because the Constitution couldn't be clearer. Article I Section 8 gives the Congress the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations. So I asked your question to Gary Hufbauer, the venerable trade expert over at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. And he said he thinks members of Congress might be surprised to find out just how much of their power they've ceded to the president.
[Gary Hufbauer:] There are several laws passed over the last century which give the president enormous power to restrict trade.
[Scott Simon:] What are a couple of those laws, John?
[John Ydstie, Byline:] There's one that gives the president a huge amount of power the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917. It says the president has, essentially, unlimited power to restrict trade during time of war.
[Scott Simon:] But, of course, Congress, as it's often pointed out, hasn't declared war since the second world war, even though, of course, U.S. troops have been in combat plenty of times. Does the Congress have to declare war to activate that power?
[John Ydstie, Byline:] Well, no. In fact, in the 1970s, President Richard Nixon used this law to justify temporarily raising tariffs across the board on all products coming into the U.S. He cited the Korean War, an undeclared war and a war that had been over for a couple of decades by the time Nixon levied these tariffs. So according to Hufbauer, President Trump will have the power to slap a 35 percent tariff on the Mexican auto imports or a 45 percent tariff on Chinese imports and could simply cite the conflicts in Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan as justification.
[Scott Simon:] But wouldn't there be some hesitancy to use this law because, I mean, implying that Mexico is our enemy or we're at war with them would, at the least, would not seem to be neighborly. I wonder if there's any other law that could be invoked.
[John Ydstie, Byline:] You know, there are several more generic kinds of trade laws. One is Section 301 of the 1874 Trade Act. It allows presidents to slap tariffs on countries that discriminate against or take unjustified measures against the U.S. In fact, tariffs under that law are currently in effect, including on some fine, imported French cheeses, which you're probably already aware of.
[Scott Simon:] Actually, John, I only eat Wisconsin string cheese.
[John Ydstie, Byline:] [Laughter].
[Scott Simon:] So President Trump would have to decide that Mexico is discriminating against the U.S. to be able to slap tariffs on cars coming across the border from Mexico.
[John Ydstie, Byline:] That's right.
[Scott Simon:] Yeah, but these laws only allow tariffs against countries. Trump singled out Ford, GM and Toyota in his tweets, which are not sovereign nations. Could he slap any kind of tariffs on an individual company?
[John Ydstie, Byline:] Well, Gary Hufbauer says probably not. But he could define the type of car in a detailed way, like a hatchback vehicle weighing 1,800 pounds, to target cars from the companies that he's trying to punish.
[Scott Simon:] So what happens if President Trump follows through and he levies 45 percent tax on goods imported from China?
[John Ydstie, Byline:] Well, I asked that question to Doug Irwin, who's a trade expert at Dartmouth, and he says it's pretty clear from experience that China would retaliate hard.
[Doug Irwin:] They've already done that in the past when we have imposed the anti-dumping duties or special duties on some of their goods. All of a sudden, the Chinese airlines start buying Airbus instead of Boeing. They start buying Argentine soybeans instead of American soybeans. They really shift their product purchases away from the United States in response.
[John Ydstie, Byline:] Scott, Irwin says some limited, targeted tariffs might be successful. But if Trump uses these powers in an undisciplined way, it could spark a trade war and it could hurt the U.S. economy and the global economy.
[Scott Simon:] NPR's John Ydstie, thanks so much for being with us.
[John Ydstie, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Debbie Elliott:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Debbie Elliott. When President Bush announced Harriet Miers as his Supreme Court nominee on Monday morning, the World Wide Web went into action. If you happen to log on to one of the conservative Web sites like confirmthem.com, you saw immediate dismay. As early as 7:16 AM, before the president even made it official, bloggers were posting their reactions to Harriet Miers. By 10 AM, there was a frenzy of postings and cross-postings about what became a controversial nomination for the president. To help us understand what's come to be known as the blogosphere, we turn to Sue MacDonald. She compiles a daily summary of what's happening on the Web for Intelliseek, a company that tracks Weblog or blog activity. Hello, Ms. MacDonald.
[Ms. Sue Macdonald:] Hi. How are you?
[Debbie Elliott:] I'm good. Now can you walk us through your tracking process on your own Web site, how you pay attention to what people are saying?
[Ms. Sue Macdonald:] Sure. We have a blog search engine called BlogPulse.com.
[Debbie Elliott:] OK. Let me pull that up here.
[Ms. Sue Macdonald:] We have an index of about 18 million blogs, and what we do every day is we have some text mining technology that look through all of the posts that are added every day to blogs and they look for certain key words, certain issues. So in that search term box there, we're going to type in Harriet Miers.
[Debbie Elliott:] Harriet.
[Ms. Sue Macdonald:] There you can see whole trail of conversations about Harriet Miers.
[Debbie Elliott:] Let's just look at the top here. It says, `Justice Miers? Not so Supreme Court. Conservatives demoralized over Miers' pick,'what some Christian bloggers are saying about the nomination of Harriet Miers. Is this kind of activity unusual?
[Ms. Sue Macdonald:] You know, it's unusual in the sense that it happened so quickly. Monday alone, we had 3,000 messages that were specifically about Harriet Miers on the blogs and they were frequent. You know, we only see-every once in a while, we'll see huge bursts of activity like this in the blogosphere. When the tsunami hit in December of 2004, there was a huge spike of information because frankly bloggers were some of the first people on the scene. They were there before the news organizations got there. We saw the same thing with Hurricane Katrina. There are certain times when we see issues that will cause spikes like this in the blogosphere, and this was one of them.
[Debbie Elliott:] How does the conservative blogosphere compare with the liberal blogosphere?
[Ms. Sue Macdonald:] Even though their fairly equal in numbers, conservative bloggers tend to do a lot more cross-linking, which means they'll include links to other conservative blogs. So there's always this cross-chatter going back and forth. So the linking pattern back and forth were pretty amazing. And the result of that I think is that they tend to keep reinforcing the message a lot more. Liberal bloggers tend to discuss a lot more issues than just focusing in on a few.
[Debbie Elliott:] Whereas the conservatives hone in on something like a Harriet Miers nomination and stick with it.
[Ms. Sue Macdonald:] Yeah, they'll hone in on Harriet Miers. They'll hone in-they've been active the last couple of months on even Katrina. I mean, they were some of the bloggers that were starting to express doubts with the competence at high levels of the FEMA in the aftermath of Katrina, but they tend to grab issues like that and hang on to them whereas the liberal bloggers, they'll do that to a degree but they tend to be discussing a lot more issues.
[Debbie Elliott:] Now how do you know that the people who seem to be conservative on these blogs aren't really just Democrats who are masquerading and trying to create trouble for Republicans?
[Ms. Sue Macdonald:] Well, you know what? The blogosphere has a pretty good self-correcting mechanism built into it. You know, I think one of the reasons that blogging has become so popular is that people can really say what's on their mind without a lot of the filters that we sometimes sense from mainstream media. So that if you're out there and you're faking it, somebody's going to find out and they're going to out you.
[Debbie Elliott:] Have you been able to measure how influential these blogs are? For example, are there staffers in congressional offices reading these messages, these postings on the Harriet Miers nomination as they happen?
[Ms. Sue Macdonald:] Oh, you can bet they are. I interviewed a blogger last week from Texas. He does a blog called the PinkDome. I guess the Capitol building in Austin has a pink tint to it. And he said there have even been cases where legislators have been giving a speech on the floor of the Capitol building. People have been blogging about their speech. The senator's staff members have been reading the blogs and reacting to what's being blogged about as they're speaking. I think blogs serve a great role in that they keep people honest sometimes. You know, granted they're very opinionated. Sometimes they're not entirely accurate. Sometimes they don't do fact-checking, but I think they really do serve a function because they keep the heat on.
[Debbie Elliott:] An important function in a democracy.
[Ms. Sue Macdonald:] Exactly.
[Debbie Elliott:] Sue MacDonald is a blog analyst for Intelliseek. She spoke to us from her offices in Cincinnati, Ohio. Thanks for speaking with us.
[Ms. Sue Macdonald:] Thank you. Thanks for having me.
[Debbie Elliott:] We turn now to Stephen Dillard. He's one of the contributors to confirmthem.com. He's an attorney in Macon, Georgia. Hello, Mr. Dillard.
[Mr. Stephen Dillard:] Hey, how are you?
[Debbie Elliott:] I'm fine. How are you?
[Mr. Stephen Dillard:] Good.
[Debbie Elliott:] You all seem to be poised at your keyboards on Monday morning.
[Mr. Stephen Dillard:] We have been. It's been an interesting few days.
[Debbie Elliott:] Tell us how confirmthem.com came into being?
[Mr. Stephen Dillard:] Confirmthem is an offshoot of a very popular conservative blog called RedState, kind of set up to kind of be a vehicle to put a conservative voice out there to support the president's nominees.
[Debbie Elliott:] What has your reaction been to the nomination of Harriet Miers?
[Mr. Stephen Dillard:] I'd say on confirmthem it has been mixed. I mean, there are some of our contributors who are for her. There are some that are kind of-have a wait-and-see attitude and there are people like me who have been kind of vocal opponents of her nomination.
[Debbie Elliott:] Did you immediately turn to your computer?
[Mr. Stephen Dillard:] Oh, absolutely. I mean, if you can go back and you look, I mean, I posted something minutes afterwards. I was, you know, probably one of the first people who got out there with a semilengthy post and just-you know, the-I think the sum of it then was it wasn't anything all that eloquent. It was, `Harriet Miers, are you freaking kidding me,'you know? It was, like, `Who is this person?'I mean, of all the people that the president could have chosen, why did he choose Harriet Miers? Where's-you know, I think I even said, `Where's my Scalia? Where's my Thomas?'I mean, that's what he promised, and I think it's safe to say from what little we do know about Harriet Miers right now, she's not another Scalia or a Thomas.
[Debbie Elliott:] How long have you been blogging?
[Mr. Stephen Dillard:] I've been blogging since 2001. So I'm kind of an old guy in the blogosphere. Been around for a while.
[Debbie Elliott:] Where do you find the time to do all of this?
[Mr. Stephen Dillard:] People ask me that. I try to get up in the morning before my children wake up and I try to do a little bit in the morning. Sometimes I eat lunch at my desk and try to just do a little bit during lunch and, you know, do some in the evening after my children and wife have gone to bed. That's the amazing thing about it, is you can just kind of-it just takes a few minutes. You can put it out there, and then all of a sudden if you've got a lot of readers, you can get an instant reaction. You get kind of people who have passion and they put it out there immediately, `This is my, you know, gut feeling. This is my gut reaction to this.'And maybe you end up changing your mind, but that's OK, too. I mean, it's very real. There's something very honest about the blogosphere in that respect. I mean, you really get to kind of see the character of the people who are putting, you know, their voice out there.
[Debbie Elliott:] Is that your main avenue of political speech or do you do other things?
[Mr. Stephen Dillard:] I actually called both of my senators, Saxby Chambliss. So I'm actually on friendly terms with him and also Senator Isakson who I don't know as well. I mean, I call them and spoke to their aides and let them know that I was none too pleased with the choice and I try to be active here locally. The day that Miers was announced, I actually spoke to the Georgia-the Bibb County Women's Republican Party and then they got an earful about me not being happy with the president. So, you know, I...
[Debbie Elliott:] What was their reaction?
[Mr. Stephen Dillard:] You know, it was interesting. Most people approved of what I was saying. I really think at the local level, people, you know, they respect the president, but at the same time, especially in the conservative South here, people understand the impact that the court has.
[Debbie Elliott:] Where does that leave you now politically?
[Mr. Stephen Dillard:] Well, right now I have to tell you, I mean, this is somebody who gave to President Bush's exploratory committee. I mean, I have been a staunch supporter of the president, but I can tell you right now I'm not giving any money to the national Republican Party. I mean, I'll still support people here locally who are Republicans and I may even still vote Republican, but in terms of getting out there and knocking on doors and getting on the radio and TV here in Macon supporting the president, I'm done.
[Debbie Elliott:] Stephen Dillard joined us from his home in Macon, Georgia. He's a contributor to the blog confirmthem.com. Thank you for talking with us, Mr. Dillard.
[Mr. Stephen Dillard:] My pleasure.

[Melissa Block:] A rare criminal probe is underway in the coal fields of West Virginia. As NPR News has been reporting, the FBI is looking into the deadly explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine three weeks ago. It's part of our ongoing investigation into the blast that killed 29 people. The worst coal mine disaster in 40 years. NPR's Howard Berkes reports from Beckley, West Virginia.
[Howard Berkes:] Sources familiar with the investigation tell NPR that there are basically two threats the FBI is exploring. Potential criminal negligence on the part of Massey Energy, the owner of the Upper Big Branch Mine, and possible bribery of employees of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency that inspects mines and enforces regulations. That's all the detail the sources would provide. NPR became aware of FBI involvement this week while working on stories in the Coal River Valley where the Upper Big Branch Mine sits. My colleague, Frank Langfitt, walked up the house of a Massey miner, knocked on the door and was politely told the miner couldn't talk because he was in the middle of an interview with an FBI agent and an inspector from the Mine Safety and Health Administration. That seemed odd because the FBI does not typically get involved in mine disaster investigations, according to three former federal mine safety officials. Typically, they all said, the mine safety agency itself investigates and if it finds evidence of possible criminal violations, it refers that evidence to the U.S. attorney. Tony Oppegard was once a top official at the mine safety agency and was Kentucky's mine safety prosecutor. He told me that an FBI role is extremely rare. Frankly, he told me, he'd never heard of that before. That sent us to people who know about the investigation. The sources are clear the investigation involves the Mine Safety and Health Administration itself, as well as Massey Energy. The agency has not responded to NPR's repeated request for comment, but another federal law enforcement source insists the probe is not about the mine safety agency. The FBI declined to comment and won't confirm or deny the existence of an investigation. Massey Energy says it has no knowledge of criminal wrongdoing and is cooperating with all agencies that are investigating the tragedy. Massey has a long record of safety violations and citations at Upper Big Branch at other mines. The mine safety agency has been generally criticized for not being tough enough in enforcement. Howard Berkes, NPR News, Beckley, West Virginia.

[Debbie Elliott:] The Bush administration is looking ahead, trying to recover from Friday's indictment of White House aide Lewis Libby on perjury and other charges. Its strategy appears to be to change the subject even as the debate heats up over the damage already done. NPR's Don Gonyea reports from the White House.
[Don Gonyea Reporting:] The investigation by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald took nearly two years, and the mood at the White House this weekend is that the news, while certainly not good, could have been worse. Administration officials hope that Libby's resignation Friday and the fact that White House political adviser Karl Rove was not indicted mean they can begin to put the scandal behind them, but that may not be so easy. Democrats are quick to note that Karl Rove remains under investigation, and Democratic Senate Leader Harry Reid said it's also known that Rove, despite White House denials, did talk to reporters about the identity of Valerie Plame. Reid appeared on ABC News' "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."
[Senator Harry Reid:] He should apologize, the vice president should apologize. They should come clean with the American public. I think Karl Rove should step down. Here is a man who the president said if anyone in the administration was involved, out they would go. And this was confirmed by...
[Gonyea:] But over on CBS'"Face the Nation," Republican Senator Lindsey Graham argued that so far the evidence does not implicate Rove.
[Senator Lindsey Graham:] But I think the likelihood of Karl Rove being indicted in the future is virtually zero. I think this will be seen in history and in politics as Mr. Libby giving false information, if proven, and it will not be about an effort by the vice president to disclose a CIA operative. Mr. Libby...
[Gonyea:] Still, Graham agreed with Democrats that the White House should itself investigate the vice president's office, but he downplayed the larger implications of the story. He denied that Libby's alleged actions were part of a broad effort by the administration to discredit a critic of its case for war.
[Senator Lindsey Graham:] To those who dislike the war and those who are for the war, this doesn't prove it one way or the other. This is about a man who is alleged to give false information and false testimony...
[Mr. Bob Schieffer:] Well, let me ask Senator Schumer...
[Gonyea:] That's one view, as the debate goes forward, but there are also those who say you can't separate the leak investigation from the war. Washington Post columnist David Broder on NBC's "Meet the Press" today.
[Mr. David Broder:] The context in which all of this happened is critical. In terms of American opinion, the war in Iraq is a bleeding wound. It continues to sap the credibility of this presidency. You talk to any...
[Gonyea:] Which is why an administration that has refused to talk publicly about the leak investigation is now anxious to talk about anything else. White House officials tell reporters to look for the president to announce a new US Supreme Court nominee as early as tomorrow. That would be a huge story which might, for a few hours at least, bump the Lewis Libby indictment from the top of the news. Don Gonyea, NPR News, the White House.

[Renee Montagne:] Let's talk through scenarios for the future, a future that includes the nuclear deal with Iran. President Obama offered one plausible scenario on NPR last year. He said Iran should seize the chance to normalize relations with the world.
[Barack Obama:] Because if they do, there's incredible talent and resources and sophistication inside of Iran, and it would be a very successful regional power that was also abiding by international norms and international rules. And that would be good for everybody.
[Renee Montagne:] The president says Iran may not change, which is why inspections are designed to limit its nuclear program no matter what. But Israel's leader sees different scenarios, two of them, both bad.
[Benjamin Netanyahu:] Iran has in fact been given two paths to the bomb. One is if they cheat, and they second is if they keep the deal. They win either way.
[Renee Montagne:] Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel says Iran might secretly try to continue nuclear development now or just do it later after parts of the deal expire. Views of the future color many arguments about this deal. So as part of an NPR News special broadcast, our colleague Steve Inskeep asked experts for their scenarios of the future.
[Steve Inskeep:] Each scenario is different. Each highlights different parts of a complicated equation. And to be clear, each is presented here only as a plausible scenario. A full-blown prediction in the Middle East is worthless. We will call one possibility the Brinksmanship Scenario. It comes from a prominent opponent of the deal. He is Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute.
[Frederick Kagan:] The Iranian interest is to continue the deal for as long as possible as long as they're not actually being interfered with in ways that they find unpleasant.
[Steve Inskeep:] Kagan expects things to get unpleasant, and here's why. The United States wants to lift economic sanctions tied to Iran's nuclear program. The United States wants to maintain economic sanctions against Iran on other issues, like support for terrorism. In the Brinksmanship Scenario, that doesn't work.
[Frederick Kagan:] We are going to want to sanction them for a variety of malign activities, including killing, you know, our allies and possibly Americans. And every time we do that, the Iranians are going to threaten to walk away from the deal. And so we're going to be engaged in this constant deal brinkmanship over, is it worth it to us to run the risk to impose the sanctions and the Iranians might walk away, and what would it mean if they walk away? And the Iranians have to calculate, is it worth it to us to walk away and so forth? This is going to be the future of trying to manage this deal.
[Steve Inskeep:] If you're the U.S. president and you're in that position, you're trying to go after Iran on non-nuclear issues, Iran responds, this is not fair; we're walking away from the deal if you're the U.S. president, don't you say, fine, walk away, start enriching uranium again and we'll end up with war and we'll bomb you and we'll win. Why wouldn't the president say that?
[Frederick Kagan:] Well, hang on. That's what a president should say up to the we'll end up with a war. But it should be, yeah, OK, walk, absolutely and we're going to sanction you and we're going to try to snap back the sanctions and we're going to try to do a whole bunch of other stuff and make it as painful for you as possible
[Steve Inskeep:] But in Frederick Kagan's view, a future president won't really have that choice. He says President Obama framed the nuclear deal as a way to avoid war. So if a future president threatens the deal...
[Frederick Kagan:] You will immediately have a chorus of people who are saying, this begins the march to war. It's Iraq all over again. A lot of presidents, potential presidents won't care about that.
[Steve Inskeep:] Well, in this...
[Frederick Kagan:] Some will.
[Steve Inskeep:] Yeah, although in this situation, Iran is walking away from the deal. Iran is being dared to walk away from the deal.
[Frederick Kagan:] And shockingly I'm willing to predict that that's not how it will be played by the defenders of the deal and by the increasing numbers of people who, for economic reasons, will be invested in having the deal continue. And in my view, this deal effectively sacrifices our ability to influence Iran on non-nuclear issues in exchange for whatever you think about the nuclear agreement, and that's a huge mistake. So I want to sanction this IRGC individual who has been in Syria helping the Assad regime gas his own people. I get the word from the Iranians, if you do that, we're going to walk away from the deal. Do I want to fight that fight? I don't know.
[Steve Inskeep:] Kagan argues that Iran is not really that committed to the nuclear deal. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, allowed the negotiations, but has not publicly endorsed the agreement itself. You pointed out that Ayatollah Khamenei's view is, it's stupid to negotiate with the Americans because no matter what you've negotiated, they're going to cheat. It's possible to summarize much of what you've said as the American version of that. No matter what we've negotiated here, the Iranians are going to cheat. I don't mean to suggest, as Obama did, oh, you're just like an Iranian hardliner. I'm not suggesting that. But there is this mutual suspicion here, which I find very interesting. Do you feel that your suspicions are in some way mirrored by the suspicions on the other side?
[Frederick Kagan:] Yeah, look, I'm not insulted by it at all. I mean, I think President Obama put in an incredibly insulting way, as he has put most of his attacks on reasonable critics. But I think the Iranians are right, and we're talking about this. I think that the United States collectively not the United States as embodied in Barack Hussein Obama, but the United States collectively has not signed up to this deal and doesn't really necessarily intend as a nation to abide by it. We have a whole lot of candidates saying they don't intend to abide by it.
[Steve Inskeep:] In Frederick Kagan's Brinksmanship Scenario, the deal only adds to mutual suspicion and distrust. Now let's hear another scenario, the Modest Hope Scenario, which comes from Haleh Esfandiari. She's an Iranian-American scholar who was imprisoned in Iran in 2007. Now in Washington, she sees the Iran agreement as a beginning. She focuses on Hassan Rouhani, the president whose administration made the nuclear deal.
[Haleh Esfandiari:] The ball is in the court of Mr. Rouhani. He has now to deliver his other promises to the people, regardless of what the supreme leader says.
[Steve Inskeep:] Rouhani won election in 2013, promising better relations with the world and also a better life at home.
[Haleh Esfandiari:] People are expecting an improvement in the economy. People are expecting a lowering in the cost of living. People are expecting more access to the outside world, especially the younger generation are expecting access to employment. They hope that there will be a lot of foreign investment as a result, leading to a lot of jobs.
[Steve Inskeep:] The clerics who oversee the government will face pressure to open up the country despite their reluctance. Esfandiari does not expect the forces of change to topple Iran's government. She does expect smaller change.
[Haleh Esfandiari:] The conflict is going to be within the elite, definitely.
[Steve Inskeep:] Within the elite...
[Haleh Esfandiari:] Yes.
[Steve Inskeep:] ...Meaning that the current elite stays in charge of the country. They just argue among themselves...
[Haleh Esfandiari:] Oh, yes.
[Steve Inskeep:] ...Over the precise rules.
[Haleh Esfandiari:] Yeah.
[Steve Inskeep:] In your scenario, if it plays out, will a more democratic society emerge?
[Haleh Esfandiari:] It has to.
[Steve Inskeep:] Will a different Iranian foreign policy emerge?
[Haleh Esfandiari:] It has to. Iran will have to reconsider some of its foreign policy, especially in the region. This does not mean that Iran will give up the support for Hezbollah or its important role in Iraq or in Syria, but it means that it will reach out to the Persian Gulf countries.
[Steve Inskeep:] The Modest Hope Scenario from Haleh Esfandiari at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. And then there's the scenario of a longtime visitor to Iran. The journalist Robin Wright has reported on the country for decades.
[Robin Wright:] The nuclear deal, at the end of the day, is not just about nukes. It's about the future of Iran politically. It's about the future of the revolution.
[Steve Inskeep:] The Islamic Revolution of 1979. That was the year Iranians took American hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. It's been closed ever sense.
[Robin Wright:] I went back to the U.S. Embassy in Iran in May and got a tour of a building that is today a museum, where everything looks exactly as it was when it was captured. The tape for the telex machine and the intercepts machine are in place. The passport equipment, the stamps and so forth are in place. It looks like the whole staff just got up and went out for a coffee break. I was given a tour by a docent who was with one of the branches of the revolutionary guards. And I asked him the question, do you foresee the reopening of this embassy anytime soon? And he said, no.
[Steve Inskeep:] Not in this building, but the man did expect an American presence will return in some form to Tehran. And that leads Robin Wright to what we could call the Cautious Opening Scenario. Wright suspects the nuclear dear may initially cause Iran's ruling clerics to try to clamp down on society and prevent too much change.
[Robin Wright:] But the truth is that what's been unleashed here is a different kind of process. It's the beginning of a healing process. It's that phase that Crane Brinton writes about in "The Anatomy Of Revolution" about the beginning of normalcy, the end of a raging fever. But that doesn't mean it's going to happen soon and that it's not going to be fitful. The revolutionary philosophy hasn't changed. But there is an opening, and it is just that. It is one opening when there need to be a lot more to make a difference.
[Steve Inskeep:] Two nations the United States and Iran share a long and bitter history. There is no scenario in which they escape that history. The question is how they add to it.

[David Greene:] Seventy years ago this week in the New Mexico desert, U.S. Army scientists detonated the very first atomic bomb. To mark that moment, we called up one of the physicists involved. Benjamin Bederson is professor emeritus of physics at New York University. And back in the early 1940s, he was a New York City kid showing lots of promise studying physics in college. All that got put on hold for World War II. Bederson, along with hundreds of other young scientists, was recruited to join the top-secret Manhattan Project, and he soon found himself in Los Alamos, N.M.
[Benjamin Bederson:] We were all young kids in their early 20s with science backgrounds. We lived in barracks. Our bosses were all senior scientists, mostly physicists, many with worldwide reputations. But even the most famous physicists require hands, and we were really the hands of the Manhattan project.
[David Greene:] Bederson's team worked long days, focusing on a key part of the project.
[Benjamin Bederson:] We were assigned to design, develop and test the triggers that would trigger the explosives surrounding the plutonium core that would compress the plutonium and produce a critical reaction.
[David Greene:] Now, by the time of the first test in the New Mexico desert, he'd already shipped off to the South Pacific to ready the bomb that would be dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Bederson says to understand how honored he and the other young scientists felt being part of this project, you have to place yourself in that moment.
[Benjamin Bederson:] There was a furious war going on in both Europe and the South Pacific. I was thrilled with the idea that I was working on a project that might help end the war sooner than anybody had dreamed it could happen.
[David Greene:] The bomb Bederson was working on was dropped with devastating effects on Nagasaki on August 9. And six days later, Japan surrendered. Physicist Benjamin Bederson spoke with us on this 70th anniversary of the first atomic explosion.

[Robert Siegel:] How is it that the method of replacing the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is even in dispute? Well, Georgetown Law professor Adam Levitin says Leandra English is the rightful acting director thanks to the language and legislative history of the Dodd-Frank Act. And Adam Levitin joins us now. Welcome to the program.
[Adam Levitin:] Good afternoon.
[Robert Siegel:] Take us back to the year 2010 when the Dodd-Frank Act wasn't yet law but versions of it had been approved by both houses of Congress both controlled by Democrats at the time. You point out that the House version in fact did apply, the very federal law that the Trump administration has invoked Senate bill didn't. What happened?
[Adam Levitin:] Well, the House as you said, the House bill said that this law called the Federal Vacancies Act would control the succession for the CFPB directorship. The Senate bill had different language. The Senate bill said that upon the absence or unavailability of the director, the deputy director shall emphasis on that word shall become the acting director. These two bills went into conference committee, and we don't know exactly what happened in that sealed room. There was the white smoke and the black smoke. And when it emerged, we had the Senate language being adopted. And that itself is I think a good indication that Congress decided not to apply the Vacancies Act to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
[Robert Siegel:] So first of all, I should ask. I mean, was it clearly intentional that the Senate language was used, or was this just in all of the chaos of writing a big piece of legislation?
[Adam Levitin:] We can't say for sure, but certainly that was the language that they chose. And I think that one can make can learn something by seeing what they chose to reject in this case.
[Robert Siegel:] What would be the logic of doing that? It couldn't have been the intent of the law to say that if the director leaves after a year, he's the one who gets to pick to run the bureau.
[Adam Levitin:] Well, actually that's the default setting actually also under the Vacancies Act. Under the Vacancies Act, the default setting is that the deputy director of an agency steps in as the acting director unless the president does something else. So that itself is not a change. What I think Congress was trying to do here was Congress wanted to force the president to have to send someone up through the nomination process. So the issue in this case is not whether Leandra English can remain indefinitely as the acting director of the CFPB. The president can follow the Constitution and nominate someone to be the director of the CFPB. And that person if they're approved by the Senate, if they're confirmed the Senate will be the director of the CFPB, and that ends the situation. The problem here is that Donald Trump wants to game the system. He doesn't want to have to send someone up through Senate confirmation. And instead. He'd rather have Mick Mulvaney serve simultaneously as OMB director and CFPB director and do that presumably almost indefinitely, probably until the last minute, then nominate someone who would have five years as director running from that date.
[Robert Siegel:] The president has a Justice Department memo saying he has the right to pick the acting director. The general counsel for the bureau itself wrote that it's her legal opinion and I'm quoting "that the president possesses the authority to designate an acting director for the bureau." Is it at least arguable, or are they missing something here?
[Adam Levitin:] I think they are missing something. I think, though, that there is a legal argument here. And this is already in court and will have to be resolved by the courts. Their argument is not that the Vacancies Act applies rather than the Dodd-Frank Act. Instead, they argue that the Vacancies Act exists as an alternative to the Dodd-Frank Act and that the president can pick and choose between these two statutes.
[Robert Siegel:] I read a distinction that was drawn in the Justice Department memo supporting the president's position, which was that those typically exempted bodies are, say, commissions or boards in which there are a number of confirmed nominees, which makes a certain amount of sense. If one of them is not there, then all the others have already been confirmed. They would act up. This isn't the case with this job. Is this one of a kind, being director of this bureau?
[Adam Levitin:] Yes, it is. The CFPB has a different structure than other agencies in the federal government. And that was a very deliberate move by Congress. Congress saw that the existing federal financial regulators, the bank regulators, failed to do their job to protect consumers from abuses in the financial sector that led up to the 2008 financial crisis. Congress saw that and decided that it needed to do something different. It needed to have a different kind of structure that would be less susceptible to political influence by the banks and that would be more responsive to consumers. And that was why this particular structure was created.
[Robert Siegel:] Back to this this dispute today of the two claimants to being the acting director of the bureau, is there any precedent for it that would guide the courts in settling this?
[Adam Levitin:] Oh, I think one has to either look back to, you know, disputes about the pope and the anti-pope or maybe go to "Game Of Thrones" that in modern American history, there's nothing like this.
[Robert Siegel:] Adam Levitin, professor of law at Georgetown University, thanks for talking with us.
[Adam Levitin:] It's been a pleasure.

[Robert Siegel:] What does this agreement say about the state of U.S.-Russia relations more broadly? Joining us now from Brussels is Nicholas Burns, former undersecretary of State and now a professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. Welcome to the program once again.
[Professor Nicholas Burns:] Thank you.
[Robert Siegel:] And in your view, apart from reducing the numbers of warheads, what's important here?
[Professor Nicholas Burns:] Well, you know, I think it's important for President Obama. This is the first concrete, major foreign policy achievement in many months for his administration. It's also good for the world because Russia and the United States possess 96 percent of the nuclear warheads in the world. These are substantial reductions. And hopefully it might lead to an improvement in U.S.-Russian relations. President Obama famously said he wanted to reset relations with Russia after the bitterness and mistrust of the Bush administration. And we had not seen any tangible signs of that progress; perhaps today is a good sign that this might lead to improvements in other areas of the relationship between the two countries.
[Robert Siegel:] Now, imagine we're in Moscow, how would this look to us as Russians, what's achieved here from their standpoint?
[Professor Nicholas Burns:] You know, I think this is important psychologically for the Russian leadership. The Russian leadership, particularly Prime Minister Putin, want to believe that they're still a superpower. In many ways they've been overtaken by China and India and Brazil. But in this realm of nuclear weapons, which of course defined the power of the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War, it allows the Russians to feel that they still have weight in the world. It affirms their importance in the world and I think psychologically we shouldn't underestimate how important this is for the Russian people.
[Robert Siegel:] Nicholas Burns, give us some context here. How would you describe generally the state of U.S.-Russia relations, apart from the strategic arms talks?
[Professor Nicholas Burns:] I think U.S.-Russia relations continue to be in many ways complicated and difficult. There is still mistrust and suspicion left over from the period after the fall of the Soviet Union when many Russians believe I don't happen to agree with this but Russians believe that the United States should not have expanded NATO. And there are, of course, still fears on the American side that Russia might want to dominate its neighbors that are now democratic. So, symbolic events like today's, the announcement of a major accord, sometimes can help to allay that mistrust and suspicion and build for the future. And there's a lot of work that has to be done. The Russians are very important to us for Afghanistan, for our military forces there, for the supply of those forces and the transit of our aircraft. And, of course, Russia is perhaps the country that has the most influence on Iran, as the United States seeks to diminish the threat of a nuclear weapons future from Iran.
[Robert Siegel:] When the Soviet Union was breaking up, the concern wasn't just the big, nuclear arsenal that was under the control of the Soviet Union, but the loose nukes, weapons that some corrupt enterprising general might go sell to another country or conceivably to a non-state actor. What's the thinking today about the security of the Russian arsenal and the threat of loose nukes?
[Professor Nicholas Burns:] Well, there's been an enormous effort made. And, Robert, it's bipartisan for many years, led by former Senator Sam Nunn and Senator Richard Lugar, to have the United States invest in helping the Russian government to destroy stocks of chemical weapons and to make sure that the nuclear weapons and nuclear material they do have is secured so that it can't be stolen and put on the black market. A lot of progress has been made since the early 1990s. I was in the White House between 1990 and 1995. And I can tell you that our greatest concern, as you said at the end of the Cold War was that as a rogue general would establish himself as a warlord someplace in the former Soviet territory, as a nuclear weapons power. And since the great fear now in our time is that a radical terrorist group might get control of weapons of mass destruction, we need to work with Russia on nuclear security, the security of their fissile material and their nuclear warheads.
[Robert Siegel:] Former undersecretary of State, Nicholas Burns, thank you very much for talking with us.
[Professor Nicholas Burns:] Thank you, Robert.

[Robert Siegel:] With the price of oil so high and gasoline at the pump so expensive, many of us are looking for a more fuel-efficient car, and here with some often surprising guidance is Jamie Kitman, the New York bureau chief for Automobile magazine. And Jamie, first off, the big success story of the past year was the Toyota Prius, the hybrid car. You've written that the hybrids are really not so efficient as we might think.
[Mr. Jamie Kitman:] Well, that's not exactly fair to say. I said that just because something is a hybrid, doesn't mean that it's particularly economical. What I was mostly writing about are a new wave of hybrids that are coming that purport to address the gasoline questions and those are larger SUVs that are being built. There's a new Chevy Tahoe, Lexus makes a hybrid SUV, and while they do improve their efficiency, you still have to look at what the real mileage that they get is. The Chevy, for instance, you know, is really, you know, in real world use is likely to get in the low 20s. While that's an improvement over the mid-teens that it might be getting previously, it's still not a particularly economical car.
[Robert Siegel:] But one fact of life about a hybrid is that it gets its real efficiency in city driving when it's using its electric motor, not on the highway when it's using its gas motor.
[Mr. Jamie Kitman:] Well a hybrid can, most hybrids, in fact all hybrids that are on the market now get their best mileage working in stop and go traffic in the city and the suburban shuffle. When you're out on the open interstate going 70 or 80 miles an hour as people are wont to do, covering great distances, that mileage benefit tends to evaporate.
[Robert Siegel:] Well, let's leave the hybrid cars aside now because just over the horizon it seems is coming a new generation of small cars, very energy efficient and most of them from Japan. Which cars are we talking about here?
[Mr. Jamie Kitman:] Soon to hit American shores or already just arriving, the new Honda Fit which is a car that's smaller than a Civic, the Toyota Yeris, which has been a bestseller around the world in previous years but wasn't sold here, the Dodge Caliber which really is kind of a crossover mini-SUV that replaces, it's a direct replacement for the Dodge Neon and the Nissan Versa. We also have the Kia Rio V, the Hyundai Accent, the Chevrolet Avia, which is a which is a rebadged Daewoo from Korea, a new Volkswagen Golf and soon to be a sub-Golf Volkswagen.
[Robert Siegel:] Roughly what kind of mileage do they get per gallon?
[Mr. Jamie Kitman:] Well they tend towards the high 30's.
[Robert Siegel:] City driving or highway driving or?
[Mr. Jamie Kitman:] You know, mostly on the highway, I would say, but even in city driving you can expect, I would say, at the lowest in the high 20s.
[Robert Siegel:] And we should expect to see these cars coming over in large numbers looking for a big share of the American market?
[Mr. Jamie Kitman:] I would say that, you know, it's funny, people talk about them, they were really an afterthought, but I think collectively they'll sell many hundreds of thousands of these. I know Honda's target for the Fit is to sell 50,000.
[Robert Siegel:] Is what's happening here car makers that have been successfully making and selling small cars for Asia have suddenly, because of rising gasoline prices, found the U.S. market to be a target of opportunity because now we might be willing to buy those cars, which they didn't think would sell here before?
[Mr. Jamie Kitman:] Well I think that's certainly true. I think part of that was a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of both Asians, but I notice it particularly among Europeans and this sort of tendency to view America monolithically, that everybody here wants a big car. The Mini Cooper which was relatively pricy, you know, $25,000 some of them cost, but the smallest car on sale in America, kind of broke that cycle and it made people realize, well maybe it's, you know, the American people are more diverse and complicated than we can imagine. Automotive fashion moves in trends like all other fashion and they've certainly spent a lot of time looking at the fashion industry and the style, it had to change. There was always gonna be a pendulum swing back to smaller cars.
[Robert Siegel:] Jamie thanks for talking with us.
[Mr. Jamie Kitman:] Thanks, Robert.
[Robert Siegel:] Jamie Kitman, who is the New York bureau chief for Automobile magazine.

[Farai Chideya:] It is back to the black blogosphere. Over the last few weeks, we've received a pile of letters and emails about our blogging while black segment, so we figured we'd take our net tutorial one step further. To keep me straight, I've reunited with my geek wonder twins. Mario Armstrong is NEWS & NOTES regular tech contributor and Gary Dauphin is the mind behind our News & Views blog. Gary has also worked for AOL Black Voices, africana.com and Black Planet. Welcome again, my techie brothers.
[Gary Dauphin:] Hi, Farai.
[Mario Armstrong:] Thank you. Thank you.
[Farai Chideya:] So this is so exciting. It's like a little black geek section. I want to give some love to our show's blog, News & Views, which you can access by going to npr.orgnewsandnotes and just clicking to the blog at the top. We had been getting amazing love from our listeners and they've been writing in about their own blogs, favorite music. We got this from Amanida. She said, Farai, I am only doing this because you have encouraged me. I have found the beauty of podcasts and listened to your show every day at my desk. It's so insightful and I learn something. Please keep up the awesome work and insightful coverage. That, of course, is just pure love, and thank you for that.
[Mario Armstrong:] Yes.
[Farai Chideya:] But we get other comments that are questions. Willie Neal III wrote: Maybe a show topic could be help for non-techies to navigate through the Internet. Maybe you know of a central site that could help point black folks in the right direction. I want both of you to answer this, but Gary first. Is there a site or are their multiple sites that can teach people things like how to blog?
[Gary Dauphin:] Well, really blogging is one of those things that you learn by doing, and also by reading. So the main thing to do is to go to a site like technorati.com, which is a directory of blogs in general, and do a search for African-American or black, and you'll find literally thousands of blogs done by other black folks about music, movies, politics and so on. And just, you know, find things that you like, find people who are doing things that are stuff that you'd like to do and then imitate it.
[Farai Chideya:] Now, Mario, on a very practical level, talk us through, just briefly, how you would use something like Blogger to create your own blog for free?
[Mario Armstrong:] Okay. So for someone that's really new to this thing, it really can be done in three easy steps. And Gary is dead on it. In order to really do this the right way, you have to just dive in and try it. So the first question that you may need to ask yourself is do you like to write, number one, do you like to read. Because if you don't have an interest in those two things, then probably blogging is not for you.
[Gary Dauphin:] Right.
[Mario Armstrong:] But if you can pass that test, then if you go to, say, a place like Blogger or a place like tightpad.com or wordpress.com, these are all places where you can get a blog for free in essentially three steps. And it works like this, Farai. You basically sign up with a username and a password. Then you give your blog site, whatever it is, a name and then you start posting. You actually type into a little window, a box. It almost looks like a word document that's just on the Internet. And you kind of type in there and you hit a button that says save and publish, and up it goes on your Web site. Now you have to tell everybody that it's there.
[Farai Chideya:] So you are basically saying that you can do this quickly and for free?
[Mario Armstrong:] There should be no hesitation. Folks, do not hesitate. Go to the sites that we're mentioning. It really can be done in three easy steps. There should be no technophobia about setting up a blog. That's why blogging has become so successful, because you don't need to know technical jargon or HTML. That's why so many regular, everyday folks are using it.
[Farai Chideya:] Gary, we were just talking in this conversation about, oh, you have to tell people it's there. One of the best ways to tell people that your blog is there is by blogging about their blogs, and then they blog about your blog blogging about them. Explain this whole kind of round robin.
[Gary Dauphin:] There's a sort of [unintelligible] circle depending on how you look at it of back scratching and self-promotion in the blogging world. I mean, really, bloggers are people who are motivated for some reason or to say, hey, I have these opinions, I have these ideas, come look at me. So one of the best ways to do that is to go to somebody else's blog and comment. Each blog has a field where you can basically respond to things. And by responding you can identify yourself, say I have a blog, or also identify what unique things and opinions you have that you have to share.
[Farai Chideya:] Well, you know, our blog has comments, and that's where we get some of just our best material. And someone recently emailed us and said, hey, we'd like to have a more visible space for comments because and you know what, Gary, did you and I not just talk about this?
[Gary Dauphin:] We did.
[Farai Chideya:] We are going to do it. So if it's not done right away, bear with us. But we want to make sure people know that the commenting is just as important as the first post that gets things started.
[Gary Dauphin:] It's News & Views. And definitely, you know, we provide the news and you provide the views.
[Farai Chideya:] Absolutely. So let me go back to another note from one of our listenersparticipants I don't even want to just use listener because that, you know, once you blog you're part of us. So this is from Toya Smith Marshall, a seasoned blogger. She says, Hi, Farai, I'm a blogger. My blog started as a personal one, a place I could share my thoughts about the world. Now my blog contains information about all the things that interest me most. And now, by the way, she said, I'm a Western grad, that's Western High School in Baltimore, my alma mater. And you know all about this, Mario.
[Mario Armstrong:] Yes, I do, being in Baltimore.
[Farai Chideya:] You're in Baltimore. And she said I believe you spoke at my senior day, and I did. And so it's so exciting also to just like the personal aspect of people just writing in. You know, Western High is an all-girls public school in Baltimore and don't make me sing "Dear Western, We Greet Thee," because my voice is crack.
[Gary Dauphin:] Because we know you'll do it, anyway.
[Farai Chideya:] But it is, you know, it's a whole club in and of itself, but basically Toya is talking about personal blogging. She says she's blogging less personally now, but what about safety? Mario, what should you keep in mind if you're doing a personal blog about putting personal information on the Web?
[Mario Armstrong:] Yeah. There are some things to think about, right? If you're going to do this blogging thing, you have to understand that it is going to put you out there in the Internet, so that means things about you will be searchable, things that you're saying. People could start to develop maybe a sense of your personality or your character or your stance on issues, depending on things. So there are a couple of tips. One is you can use a Web site called invisiblog.net. It's invisiblog.net. And this is basically a free, anonymous blog-hosting site. Now, I have not fully reviewed this site, but I've heard good things about it. But that's one place you can check. Another thing you can do is use pseudonyms when you're signing up. Don't use your real name. Don't use any identifying information when you sign up for your blog to kind of keep your connection, you know, away from it personally so people can't identify it from you. And then one other last place you can look at is the EFF, eff.org. They have some blogging tips on how to do it safely and securely. Maybe you want to blog about something that's going on in your workplace that you think and feel others should know but you don't want to get in trouble for putting that information out there. And they give you tips on how you can do that securely and safely.
[Farai Chideya:] A lot of people have been fired for blogging inappropriately about work.
[Mario Armstrong:] Absolutely. That's what we want to avoid.
[Farai Chideya:] Yeah. And also I just think personally for me, you know, as a woman and as someone who has blogged for 12 years, I am very conscious about, you know, for example, if I were to say, well, I'm going to such and such a club on such and such a date, you know, that would tell people where I am. And it's not like I think I have some crazy, top secret life. But once you if you blog about places that you will be at certain times, if you have people who are in your life who you don't really want in your life, you should be very careful about that as well. Let's move on, Gary, to Lester Spence. He has contributed to the show many times and he runs a blog on black politics and socioeconomics. Is this a popular type of blog in the black blogosphere?
[Gary Dauphin:] Absolutely. I mean, there was a study that came out of Brown a couple of weeks ago that basically looked at a survey of African-American bloggers, and found that black bloggers are incredibly invested in talking about politics, talking about identity, talking about policy, things that affect that African-American community. So definitely there are lots of political bloggers, but and anything else, there are relationship bloggers, there are cooking bloggers, there are music bloggers, photo bloggers, people who talk about their cats. In much the same way that our community represents the entire diversity of, you know, opinions and attitude and so on, the same thing goes for the blogging community.
[Farai Chideya:] I want to move on to yet another comment. And guys, I just have to repeat again it's npr.orgnewsandnotes. And we want to hear from you, because these are all from people who wrote in. You can go there and you can read all of these comments in full because we're just reading snippets. So Ernice, she is a teacher and she has sent us a link to her blog. She says, I've been blogging regularly for two years. I actually had a blog prior to that, but it was part of a class assignment and I was turned off to blogging as a result of that class. Fast-forward one year and I saw a blog used as a communication tool by an instructor with her students. And she got hooked. And so basically I think it's really interesting, also, to think about and Mario, maybe you can give us a quick comment on this, and then Gary as well -blogs that exist for specific purposes. Like I'm going to blog for a class or I'm going to blog for a reunion. Are there any things to think about when you have a blog that is not meant to go on forever?
[Mario Armstrong:] No. I don't think that there's too much to think about. I think you may want to make that known that this isn't a blog that will be around forever. I think one of the things that this points to is openness and transparency in your blog. When you have a blog, you are starting a community, right? You are starting a connectivity, if you will. And it's good to make sure that it's known that, hey, this connection may not always be here. So we want to enjoy it and embrace it while we can, but let's think about how we can expand beyond just me. Maybe I'm the impetus. Maybe I'm the starting point. But we want it to grow beyond just this one physical place online. So I don't have to feel, like, five years from now I still have to keep this blog going.
[Farai Chideya:] Gary, what do you think?
[Gary Dauphin:] Yeah, Mario is absolutely right. I mean, it's the same thing in real life. If I'm visiting a town for a couple of weeks, it's a good idea to let the people know that I'm, you know, the people I meet that I'm not going to be around for a very long. So to the extent that you can be as clear, as open, and as transparent as you can, that's the best policy.
[Farai Chideya:] Well, Gary, that is great advice. And before Mario and I go on to our next tech topic, I want to thank you for joining us and bid you farewell into the blogosphere.
[Gary Dauphin:] Thanks for having me.
[Farai Chideya:] Gary Dauphin is the man behind our blog, News & Views. He's also worked for AOL Black Voices, africana.com and Black Planet. And Mario, don't go anywhere. We will be right with the subject you and I have touched on before free and cheap technology.

[Michel Martin:] And now a story about two people who did find love but not through a dating app. Back in December we told you about a special production of "Fiddler On The Roof" performed in Yiddish, the language the protagonists actually would have spoken at the time the stories it's based on were written. Well, in an example of, yes, life imitating art, the actors playing Hodl and Perchik, two young characters who fall in love in the show, fell in love themselves in real life. Reporter Jeff Lunden heard the news and put together this story.
[Unidentified Actors:] [As characters, singing in Yiddish].
[Stephanie Lynne Mason:] Hi. I'm Stephanie Lynne Mason. I play Hodl.
[Drew Seigla:] My name is Drew Seigla. I play Perchik.
[Jackie Hoffman:] I am Jackie Hoffman. I play Yente the matchmaker. Yente fills a central purpose in the continuation of the community, the shtetl where she sets up matches, arranges marriages so that people can continue to breed and thrive.
[Stephanie Lynne Mason:] [As Hodl, singing in Yiddish]. Hodl is the second eldest daughter of Tevye. We live in a very conservative Orthodox town. And Perchik, who is a revolutionary, comes in. And he kind of [speaking Yiddish] which means turns my world upside down. He breaks the boundary that women and men are allowed to touch, and so he dances with me and introduces me to all these things.
[Drew Seigla:] I get this feeling about her, and I don't know what to do with it because it's something I never felt before. In Act 2, once he realizes he has to go off to Kyiv to fight for the cause, he just doesn't want to leave because he fell in love with her. [As Perchik, speaking Yiddish].
[Stephanie Lynne Mason:] We met three years ago at a mutual friend's birthday party but didn't really see anything of each other until he came in to his audition. And I have to be honest, I didn't recognize him because he had a beard.
[Drew Seigla:] I thought she did because she was so warm and welcoming. Hi.
[Stephanie Lynne Mason:] When we did the scene, I was like, OK, there's some chemistry here. We could work with this. Like, this is good.
[Jackie Hoffman:] From day one, there were sparks with those two.
[Stephanie Lynne Mason:] [As Hodl and Perchik, singing in Yiddish]. Two and a half weeks learning your first role in Yiddish, that's so hard. I just wanted to be supportive for him every step of the way.
[Drew Seigla:] And the connection that Hodl and Perchik have to have, it was nice that she was reaching out. And I wasn't thinking this is going to be what this became. [As Perchik, speaking Yiddish]. We met at Central Park. It was my last time before going on as Perchik.
[Stephanie Lynne Mason:] Yeah. And things shifted, but then later we met at that same bench, and that's where we shared our first kiss. And that's actually where he took me back to propose.
[Unidentified Actors:] [As characters, singing in Yiddish]
[Jackie Hoffman:] So many people want to claim credit for this match. I can proudly claim no credit. But yes, I think Yente would be very pleased with this [speaking Yiddish] with this match.
[Stephanie Lynne Mason:] I mean, it's pretty incredible that we get to share our love with the story that we're telling too but that we get to share the emotions that we're having for each other. [Speaking Yiddish].
[Drew Seigla:] [Speaking Yiddish]. Yeah. It's the last word I sing. Now I have everything [singing in Yiddish]. And it seemed like my destiny. And it really feels like everything has just come to this one moment of destiny between us.
[Michel Martin:] That was Drew Seigla, who plays Perchik, and Stephanie Lynne Mason, who plays Hodl in the off-Broadway "Fiddler On The Roof" production in Yiddish. Now they are engaged in real life. We also heard from Jackie Hoffman, who plays Yente the matchmaker in the show. They shared their stories with reporter Jeff Lunden.

[Renee Montagne:] In Cairo today, security forces seemed to be holding off on their threats to disband the massive sit-ins being staged by supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi. Tens of thousands of Morsi supporters have been camped out for weeks, demanding he be reinstated as president. Any eventual police advance on the protesters could provoke violent clashes and escalate the country's ongoing political crisis. International mediators have been calling on the government, led by the military, to avoid more bloodshed NPR's Peter Kenyon joins us from Cairo. Good morning.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] Good morning, Renee.
[Renee Montagne:] What is happening at the pro-Morsi camps? I mean, I gather protesters have their own barricades in place for whatever might come.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] Yes, they've been there for several weeks now and things have been gradually building up. When we visited one of the camps yesterday, we saw things like stacks of sandbags, a few metal shields, piles of rocks ready to be thrown at approaching police, and lots and lots of gas masks. We also found the prospect of police moving in hasn't dented the defiance of the protesters. Here's what 28-year-old Ahmad Shaheen thinks will happen if the police do move in.
[Ahmad Shaheen:] Many people will be killed by the military troops and the police. But I guess we will stay, even if they kill most of us.
[Renee Montagne:] So they are expecting bloodshed but from what you've seen of the camps, do you think they're really prepared to hold out against a siege for very long?
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] Well, I don't see how they could. I mean, we're talking about tens of thousands of people all dependant on water and food supplies coming in from outside. There are large numbers of women and children there. What the police plan is, we're told, is first to cut off the food and the other supplies; allow people to leave if they want to but not allow anyone or anything to get back in; if that fails, then they may turn to teargas and other methods. The government says it's not planning to use live ammunition but they have, of course, in the past. So concern for civilian life is running very high. And the protesters say, look, if we get moved out of these camps, we're going to go to Tahrir Square or some other public place. They're just simply shifting the clashes in the future, not ending them.
[Renee Montagne:] And international efforts and local efforts to mediate a peaceful resolution, are they getting anywhere?
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] Not so far. There was another call over the weekend from the Grand Sheik of the Al-Azhar mosque. Muslim Brotherhood didn't think much of that, they considered him aligned with the government. International efforts haven't succeeded. One possibility is efforts by prominent Egyptian officials, including interim Vice President Mohamed ElBaradei. They're calling for a longer term, nonviolent approach to the demonstrators. We'll see how they fare.
[Renee Montagne:] Well, though, with this threatened siege, what exactly have the military and the interim government said that they hope to gain? It seems like this would really be a problem for creating a democratic process.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] Well, that is what critics are saying. Their argument is that, we know you want to restore order but if you have a messy, chaotic clearing of the camps, you're simply going to spawn a more clashes, focus more attention on violence and less attention on the political process. The argument goes, what you should be doing is moving ahead with a new constitution and elections. Let the Morsi demonstrators stay where they are. However, whichever way they go, at some point these people who ousted Egypt's first democratically-elected president are going to have to deal with a very large segment of the population that still supports him.
[Renee Montagne:] NPR's Peter Kenyon in Cairo, thanks very much.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] Thanks, Renee.
[Renee Montagne:] This is NPR News.

[Michel Martin:] And now it's time to start your engines. Today car racing fans celebrated a milestone.
[Unidentified Man:] We're honored to have you here on this historic day, the 100th running of the Indianapolis 500-Mile Race.
[Unidentified Crowd:] Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines.
[Michel Martin:] The race was first run at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1911. But it had to take a few years off during the First and Second World Wars. This afternoon, more than 400,000 people gathered at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to watch drivers race to speeds of more than 200 miles per hour. For the first time in 50 years, the race was broadcast live on local Indiana television. Officials decided to lift the media blackout after selling out the entire stadium this year. Donny and Wendy Brown from Danville, Ind., have been coming to the race off and on for about 30 years. They were here Sunday with their four teenage kids. The Browns said there was no way they would stay home and just watch the race on TV.
[Donny Brown:] Oh, you want to be here. You want to be... The atmosphere...
[D. Brown:] Atmosphere, seeing the speed you can't get the speed on the TV. You see it in person.
[W. Brown:] Just to hear the cars and just to feel the chest when they go by you can't replace that.
[D. Brown:] Plus it's a history...
[W. Brown:] It's awesome.
[D. Brown:] ...One-hundredth running? You want to be here.
[Michel Martin:] Rookie driver Alexander Rossi from Nevada City, Calif., won the race just in time before his fuel ran out. He told ABC Television, quote, "I have no idea how we pulled that off."

[Linda Wertheimer:] Out in the Polish countryside by a lake there's a house surrounded by razor wire. Once, according to Polish prosecutors, used as a secret interrogation site by the CIA. It is now the subject of an official probe, the aim of which is to find out how much the Polish government knew about this covert operation on its own soil, and about the methods used to get confessions and intelligence from suspected al-Qaida members who were kept there. Roy Gutman is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author. He is currently the Istanbul bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers. He went to Poland to find out what this probe could uncover. And he joins me now from Turkey. Hello, And that and thank you for taking the time to talk to us.
[Roy Gutman:] Glad to be here.
[Linda Wertheimer:] So, first of all, could you tell us who is leading the investigation and why now?
[Roy Gutman:] It's the Polish prosecutor's office, the equivalent, I guess, of the attorney general in the U.S. The reason they're doing the probe is they had complaints from lawyers representing two detainees at Guantanamo. And the complaints were that Poland had allowed its territory to be used for interrogations that would be illegal in Poland, and are illegal in Poland illegal under international law and illegal also under American law that included waterboarding, threats to the life and limb of the detainees and so on. They were held here for months and months on end. They were spirited into the country and then they were removed from the country illegally without extradition. And the question the prosecutor's trying to find out is exactly who authorized it, what was the procedure used for the authorization, why did they suspend Polish law, did they consult anybody?
[Linda Wertheimer:] Did you try to make it out to this villa where the al-Qaida suspects were interrogated?
[Roy Gutman:] I went as close as they would allow me. You can't even drive through the compound where the villa is located, so I went with my interpreter on foot. And she came out full of guards and told me not to take pictures and also demanded my identity card. The compound in which it was located belongs to the Polish Intelligence Service. It's used as their training school. And the villa is just somewhat apart from the school buildings itself. So, I was able to see the buildings of the school. I couldn't actually see the villa.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Now, who do Polish prosecutors say was interrogated there?
[Roy Gutman:] Well, we know as many as six, maybe even as many as 10 so-called high-value detainees were interrogated there. The ones we know about for certain are Abdul Nashiri, the man who was accused of masterminding the plot to blow up the USS Cole, and Abu Zubaydah, who at one point was thought to be a top aide to Osama bin Laden. But after a long period of investigation, I think they determined that he may have played no key role at all. And the third person who was there was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and he really is apparently the mastermind of 911. It appears if you put a lot of material together from a lot of different sources that this villa and this tiny town in northern Poland may be the place where he was waterboarded 183 times.
[Linda Wertheimer:] So, you've been writing about this in the American press in the McClatchy papers. Has there been a sort of reaction in this country to the Polish prosecutors trying to put people who helped the CIA on trial?
[Roy Gutman:] The prosecutor has put forth some requests to the U.S. government to provide information about the secret flights into Poland, the operation in the villa. You know, exactly what they did to whom and for how long. And so far as we know, the U.S. government has refused to cooperate and provide any information.
[Linda Wertheimer:] What is different in Poland that this was something that the Polish government thought that it could do at one period and now sees as a big mistake? I mean, what changed?
[Roy Gutman:] Well, Poland, it's really a miracle come true as a country. As one who's covered it in the battle days of the Cold War and then at the time of transition to democracy, I can tell you it's really a changed place. And it just seems like a place that's really come into its own. And rule of law and human rights are right at the heart of the new Polish government and certainly all the assertions of the Polish government and civil society there. So, I think that lawyers felt this was a country that could take a case like this and the judiciary is independent enough in Poland to take it on.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Roy Gutman is the Istanbul bureau chief in the McClatchy newspapers and we reached him in Turkey. Mr. Gutman, thank you very much.
[Roy Gutman:] It's a pleasure. Good to talk to you.
[Linda Wertheimer:] You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.

[Mary Louise Kelly:] How does a community heal after an unspeakable act of violence? That question is being asked in El Paso, it's being asked in Dayton, and it's a question the people of Christchurch, New Zealand, have asked after a massacre at two mosques killed 51 people there exactly five months ago today. We wanted to hear how the people of Christchurch are doing now and how some of the changes made in the wake of their mass shootings are playing out. Belinda McCammon from Radio New Zealand joins us from Christchurch. Hi, Belinda.
[Belinda Mccammon:] Hello.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] It's a hard question to generalize about, I know, but how are people in Christchurch doing? To what extent does this past March still hang over life there?
[Belinda Mccammon:] Oh, it hangs completely. You know, I think the best way to describe it is that people are still really trying to find the new normal. Christchurch Cantabrians have already come through a significant changing event for the area in the past 10 years. There was the Canterbury earthquakes in 2011. The city really was just getting on its feet. And of course, the mosque shootings happened and unlike anything that has happened in New Zealand, at all. And Christchurch once again is faced with an unprecedented event. When reports came in of the horrific El Paso shooting, and a news report started coming through that the alleged shooter there had a manifesto that referred to the Christchurch shooting...
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Yeah.
[Belinda Mccammon:] I mean, you know, the heart sinks. It really does.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] I wanted to ask you about the some of the changes that have been made since March. The Parliament in New Zealand voted overwhelmingly to ban most semi-automatic weapons after those attacks. Is there still controversy surrounding that today or does it feel settled?
[Belinda Mccammon:] It feels pretty settled. I mean, in the past week or so, we've had one gun lobby speak up about some of the procedures of how the process of the gun buyback scheme is being handled.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] This is a pro-gun rights organization, or...
[Belinda Mccammon:] Yeah, it is. And to be clear, though, we do not have a gun lobby in New Zealand like you do in America. We do not have the influence of an NRA kind of lobby. And also, we don't have the money in the lobby industry that you do in America. So the gun lobbies and New Zealand are like the Deerstalkers' Association, you know, outdoor clubs.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Yeah.
[Belinda Mccammon:] Hunting and rifle associations. You know, they are they're protecting the very narrow interests of their members, who for the whole part are, you know, law-abiding citizens who enjoy mainly recreational activities with their guns. We...
[Mary Louise Kelly:] And I saw that just as of this past weekend, as of last Sunday, more than 10,000 guns that have now been banned have been handed over to police.
[Belinda Mccammon:] That's right. So the events that are happening are sort of in main areas throughout the country, mainly in stadiums or race courses, so that police can control the flow of people coming in and out. But they've also had people turning up at police stations throughout the country, just voluntarily handing in guns as well. The shootings in Christchurch were so shocking to New Zealanders that people have responded by saying, you know, do we need these guns? And most people have said, I'm not necessarily happy having to give up a gun that I am a law-abiding citizen having, but why do I need it? And given how horrific the event was, people are accepting of what the government has decided.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] You mentioned, Belinda, the reaction there in New Zealand to news of one of our very recent shootings, the one in El Paso, Texas. How closely do people there follow news from here in the U.S. as shooting after shooting plays out here?
[Belinda Mccammon:] The shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso got a lot of coverage here. But I think also there seems to have been in the last of several years in America, in the debate around gun culture and the problems in America with it, about just the seeming inability to get some kind of consensus about what should be done. It seems to, I think, New Zealanders that something needs to be done in America. But the fact that Americans cannot the politicians cannot seem to actually get anything done is quite incredible to us.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] That's Belinda McCammon. She is the South Island bureau chief in Christchurch for Radio New Zealand. Belinda, thanks.
[Belinda Mccammon:] Thank you.

[Andrea Seabrook:] At a White House news conference last month, Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf saw a chance to promote his new biography, and he grabbed the opportunity to dodge a question.
[President Pervez Musharraf:] I would like to I am launching my book on the 25th and I'm honor bound to Simon and Schuster not to comment on the book before that date. So...
[Andrea Seabrook:] The widely broadcast plug seems to have paid off. The book, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir by Pervez Musharraf, ranks number eight on today's New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestselling list. It's also doing well in one of the least likely of markets, in a country where Musharraf and Pakistan are seen by many as the enemy. NPR's South Asian correspondent, Philip Reeves, sent this notebook.
[Philip Reeves:] India is not exactly a fan of Pervez Musharraf, but it is a country which loves books. You can't easily buy the latest computer accessories. You can nearly always find a book shop, a dark, alluring den filled to the gunnels with books arranged in the most higgledy-piggledy fashion. A few days ago, Musharraf's autobiographical memoir, called In the Line of Fire, like the Clint Eastwood movie, arrived on the shelves. It didn't stay there long. Booksellers in two of India's main cities, Calcutta and Mumbai, say it's sold out. And in the capital, New Delhi, bookseller Baraj Berry says clients are snapping it up.
[Mr. Baraj Berry:] It is selling very well. We don't have any copies at all. The very first day, the copies we received we have sold out.
[Philip Reeves:] The general's opus has received plenty of uncomplimentary reviews. But Indians are clearly very curious to know more about their neighbors, a country born painfully from partition and one with which they've had three wars, and still have much unsettled business, particularly over Kashmir. So they're buying the book, much to the disappointment of a young Indian called Mayank Austen Soofi. He writes book reviews on the Internet. He is, unashamedly, a book nut. So keen is he on literature that he says he won't leave his house without a copy of the complete works of Shakespeare tucked under his arm. There are no prizes for guessing why he has that strange middle name which he adopted.
[Mr. Mayank Soofi:] Because my companion, my soul mate, my love life, my everything is Jane Austen. I cannot live without her.
[Philip Reeves:] Mayank has spent all his money amassing a personal library of some 5,000 books. It overflows into the kitchen of his small family home. But you won't find Musharraf's book in it. He's refusing to buy it. And he doesn't want any of his blog site readers to do so either.
[Mr. Mayank Soofi:] I'm just going to boycott the Musharraf book. I'm asking people not to read the book. I don't want that the money should go into Musharraf's pocket.
[Philip Reeves:] His objections are twofold. Firstly, he says Musharraf is not a democrat and that Pakistan deserves better. And wearing his critic's hat, he also says the book's badly written. But Musharraf and his publishers needn't worry: the boycott's backfiring.
[Mr. Mayank Soofi:] I'm very disappointed with the comments of my readers. I really did not want my piece to be read as written by an Indian. It was just my observation as a concerned person.
[Philip Reeves:] His blog readers have been firing off e-mails saying now they're even more determined to buy the book. Philip Reeves, NPR News, Islamabad.

[Ed Gordon:] From NPR News, this is NEWS AND NOTES. I'M Ed Gordon. A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine finds that African Americans are 50% more likely to develop lung cancer from light or moderate smoking than are White and Latino smokers. And lung cancer isn't the only concern. Smoking can cause a number of chronic, even debilitating conditions including emphysema and heart disease. That's why the National Medical Association is fighting smoking in the black community. The Association's president's Dr. Sandra Gadson joined me to discuss the stomping out smoking in the African American community campaign. She says the facts are her weapon of choice in the fight against smoking.
[Ms. Sandra Gadson:] Just as there was a tremendous campaign to get people to smoke and dollars spent on advertisements, then we have to do that same thing to educate people as to the perils of smoking. Because sometimes when individuals smoke, they don't realize the other things that are being caused. They know about lung cancer. I think that's pretty well documented. But there's also cardiovascular disease. There's also strokes. And so it's just so important that we really educate our community as to the need to stop smoking and thus the stomping out smoking campaign. Once this campaign...
[Ed Gordon:] Forgive the interruption and pick up on your point, but we should note that about 45,000 African Americans die from a preventable smoking related disease a year.
[Ms. Sandra Gadson:] Absolutely. And that is unnecessary death, if you will. So it is just imperative that we get the message out. But not only that, the message has to be that there are ways that an individual can stop smoking, that there is actually what's called N.R.T., which is nicotine replacement therapy, and that is in the form of smoking aids like Nicorette gum, Nicoderm, CQ Patch, and Commit Lozenges, which allows your body to reduce, gradually reduce, its craving for nicotine. And if we use those aids in combination with consulting our physician, and also going on the website of quit.com and blackplanet.com for support advice, then we can have a success rate. It's actually been shown that there's a 15 to 30% success rate by using those treatments.
[Ed Gordon:] Let me ask you this as it relates to the lifestyle of many African Americans in this country. When you think about the idea that disproportionately African Americans still suffer through stress related lifestyles, diet habits, drinking habits, smoking habits, how much can really be laid in the lap of the idea that we still have an inability to change the lifestyle that we know?
[Ms. Sandra Gadson:] Well, a lot can be laid at that. But it doesn't mean that we can't do it. We know that we have those issues, but it's just imperative that we start to say, you know, I can do something about this. With smoking, it doesn't relieve stress. Whatever the stress factor was, it's still there when you light that cigarette. It didn't go away. The cigarette didn't make it go away. So all you're really doing is adding another factor to the level of problems that you have. So this is something that we can control in terms of smoking, and that's why it's so imperative. So even though our lifestyles sometimes makes it difficult, it's still a problem that can be solved if we really work hard at it.
[Ed Gordon:] Let me ask you this. Why are we seeing and have seen over the last few years, an upturn in smoking, particularly amongst women. We should note that there are about 1.6 million African Americans who are now under the age of 18 who will become regular smokers on an annual basis. It seems as though there was a good stretch of years where young people did not see this as glamorous and the thing to do. But we're seeing the numbers creep up.
[Ms. Sandra Gadson:] Well, I think some of it is advertisement. I mean, they see the trappings, they see the magazines, the billboards that sort of say, well, you are an adult if you smoke, or you're polished, or you're hip, or you're that type of thing. So you have those modalities that people look at and they want to imitate that, or they think, well, I can look like this person if I smoke a cigarette, or I start smoking it. So they develop it from that point of view. And you're right in terms of women, there is an upsurge, and part of that is that women are in more stressful situations than prior. They're in corporate America, they're in businesses. And so they've sort of gotten into those stress level situations that might create that issue of smoking.
[Gordong:] What else can be done, has to be done, beyond the common sense approach which does not work for a lot of people on a lot of levels, including stopping smoking, quite frankly. What else can be done to really push the idea that you're messing with mortality. You're messing with the ability to further your life, the well-being of your family, all of these things. The common sense approach seems as though you'd turn away from it, but people have not been able to only utilize that.
[Ms. Sandra Gadson:] Mm-hmm. I think it's still continuing to educate the community. Because I think what tends to happen is if you look at it, many of our well known individuals have died from lung cancer. So it sort of sent up a red flag, uh-oh, this is what happened. And so I just think that education is the key. Because not only do you have the issue of lung cancer, look at getting the possibility of emphysema and being dependent on oxygen for the rest of your life, or have an obstructive lung disease and you can't walk a block without being short of breath. So, I just can't over-emphasize the issue of education. That's why we have this stomping out smoking campaign, to educate the community, to make them start to question, to make them to look. Because, you see, one thing, many years ago, there were not these type of aids that were available. People either they went cold turkey, or they went to come counseling here or there, and those weren't very successful. It's actually been shown that with cold turkey, there's about a 7% success rate. So, now we have better modalities, the products are better, they're not as awful tasting, if you will. And do it is easier with the modalities that are available now, in combination with consulting your physician and getting information from websites. That can actually make stomping out smoking a success. Even if you have tried, maybe you've tried five or more times to quit, but it's never too late. Don't get discouraged and just try again.
[Ed Gordon:] All right, doctor. Thank you so much. Good luck with the campaign. And we hope that this will inspire some people to put that lighter and cigarette down.
[Ms. Sandra Gadson:] I hope so.

[Debbie Elliott:] A new era has begun for BET, the Black Entertainment Network founded 25 years ago by entrepreneur Robert Johnson. Johnson left the company in January, five years after selling BET to the media conglomerate Viacom. Johnson left BET in the hands of his former COO, Debra Lee, who is eager to take on the challenges of BET's second chapter. NPR's Lynn Neary reports.
[Lynn Neary Reporting:] When BET rolled out its new programs to the Television Critics Association last month, they did it to the beat of a different drum...
[Neary:] ...the Tiger Marching Band of Grambling State University which will be featured in a new BET program, Season of the Tiger, a reality show that debuts in May.
[Ms. Debra Lee:] So if that doesn't get everyone's attention, nothing will. We thought we'd wake you up first thing this morning...
[Neary:] Debra Lee introduced the band, clearly relishing her role as the new head of BET. She has spent a lot of time in the shadow of Robert Johnson and seems ready to take center stage.
[Ms. Debra Lee:] You know, it's hard to get used to Bob not being around and being able to ask him advice, but it's also nice to not have to worry about being second- guessed. So...
[Neary:] The BET that Debra Lee now runs reaches more than 80 million households and is the leading television network providing African-American programming. In addition to the BET cable network, there are three digital networks, and its website bet.com is the number one Internet portal for African-Americans. BET is also one of a number of networks owned by Viacom.
[Mr. Ken Smikle:] Viacom and its resources pretty much ensure that BET is going to be around probably forever.
[Neary:] Ken Smikle is president of Target Market News, a research company specializing in the African-American market. Viacom wanted BET, says Smikle, because BET can deliver a lucrative share of the TV audience.
[Mr. Ken Smikle:] The African-American audience is a very competitive space simply because it's been ignored for so long, and this is the opportunity that's left because for discrimination and economic reasons the industry has not paid the kind of attention that it is now.
[Neary:] When Viacom first bought BET, some media observers wondered whether a white-owned media conglomerate would truly give an African-American network full autonomy. Lee says BET asked for and has received guarantees that their individuality will be respected.
[Ms. Debra Lee:] The promise of cable was that you can have niche networks with different voices, and even though we're now part of a bigger company, it's still important for us to have our own voice. So there's no one at Viacom telling me what to put on the air or questioning why I put something on the air. So if we have Louis Farrakhan on, not everyone in the world is going to agree with Louis Farrakhan, but it should be our decision based on our audience.
[Neary:] With the financial backing of Viacom, BET now hopes to become the number one destination for all viewers interested in African-American programming. But even as BET starts to think about ways to expand its audience, it still has to deliver what Debra Lee calls its sweet spot, the 18-to-34-year-old viewers who are the networks core audience and are much loved by advertisers, so it's not surprising that one of BET's three new programs is a reality show based on the life of the hip-hop artist Lil'Kim.
[Unidentified Announcer:] BET takes you behind the scenes to experience the real- life drama of hip-hop's queen bee, the notorious K-I-M.
[Neary:] Videos and hip-hop are the lifeblood of BET, and Reginald Hudlin, BET's new President of Entertainment, says that won't change anytime soon.
[Mr. Reginald Hudlin:] This shop did not come with a magic wand. It's not about transforming all the programming overnight, nor do we want to. Over the next several years, we're going to be phasing in more and more original programming as we find the right shows for us, we find the right producers to execute those shows, and we feather them into our schedule.
[Neary:] Hudlin is well aware of the criticism of BET's dependence on sexy videos of hip-hop music for its programming, but the network's financial success has been built on that programming, which Hudlin points out is not so unlike MTV. Besides, Hudlin says, some people may never like what they see on BET.
[Mr. Reginald Hudlin:] I don't expect that criticism to go away anytime soon regardless of the programming that is on the channel. But, you know, here's the other thing. A lot of people don't like black youth culture. A lot of people don't like black youth. So when they go, I hate that hippity-hoppity stuff, what the, you know, hey, you may have issues that we can't address.
[Neary:] But in its effort to attract younger viewers, BET also lost some viewers who wanted more from the network.
[Mr. George Curry:] I mean, I used to watch the news. It's not there anymore. I used to watch The E Story. It's not there anymore. I used to watch BET Tonight. It's not there anymore. I have nothing to watch on BET so I don't watch it.
[Neary:] George Curry is a journalist who not only watched BET news programs, he also appeared on them occasionally. Like many people in the black community, he was dismayed when BET eliminated its longtime news and public affairs programs. Curry says as BET begins a new chapter, he doesn't care if they still air music videos, as long as they also pay attention to news.
[Mr. George Curry:] Everybody is trying to figure out how to get more eyeballs, of course, but they have not abandoned their news programs, CBS has not abandoned its news, ABC has not, NBC has not. There's question about who should be anchoring and how do you have the right format, but then, its not a question of whether they abandoned the news.
[Neary:] Lee and Hudland say their not abandoning the news, they're just trying to figure out the best way to deliver it to its young, hip audience which has grown up on 24-7 news programming. One of their new programs will be a faith- based public affairs talk show and instead of a nightly news broadcast, BET now has news briefs throughout the day.
[Unidentified Announcer:] This semester, the BET News Department offers one of your favorite courses with a fresh new twist, BET News Briefs bring daily news update profiling the top stories of the day.
[Neary:] But no network expects to build its audience on news. And despite BET's dominance in the African-American market, it has plenty of competition. TV One is a new cable network going after black viewers and no one's exactly sure how the new CW Network, formed from WB and UPN, will affect BET. BET could pick up some of the programs and some audience from UPN which has a lot of show geared to blacks. But the CW also has the potential to take some viewers away from BET. Herman Gray, author of Watching Race, a book on blacks and TV, says it will be interesting to see how BET reacts to the competition.
[Mr. Herman Gray:] They could just as easily give us more of the same. You know, more music programming, more canned syndication. And in that sense, its kind of a low cost, low risk investment in order to appeal to that audience. On the other hand, it is an opportunity to begin to try to synch differently about the kinds of programming possibilities that BET can play in that kind of environment.
[Neary:] Grey hopes BET will use the resources of Viacom to take risks. The kind of risks that put cable networks like HBO on the map. He's encouraged by the hiring of Hudland, who's had a successful career as a director and producer in Hollywood. Gray says Hudland could attract new talent to BET. And that, says Hudland, is exactly what's happening.
[Mr. Hudland:] They've been knocking on the door. They've been banging down the door and delivering great projects because they're excited about this second stage in the life of the channel and they want to be in on the ground floor of the new changes.
[Neary:] And as BET looks to the future, Debra Lee says they're hoping to find that elusive program so prized in the world of television: the watercooler hit. The show that everyone will talk about. Lynn Neary, NPR News, Washington.

[Michel Martin:] We're heading to Europe now where the welcome for asylum seekers is wearing thin. More than a million people sought refuge in the European Union last year, and people continue to try to make their way from the Middle East and Africa. Many in the 28-nation bloc are taking steps to try to keep more people from coming. In Denmark, a controversial bill calling on police to confiscate cash and valuables from arriving asylum-seekers is expected to be passed by the Danish Parliament next week. NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson is in Copenhagen, and she's going to tell us more. Soraya, tell us about the proposed Danish law. Whose idea was this?
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] The center-right government here in Copenhagen is responsible for this measure. As you mentioned, the part that's getting the most attention is about the seizing of cash and valuables, potentially gold or rings that sort of thing from any asylum-seekers who bring with them more than $1,450 or the equivalent thereof. Zachary Whyte, a migration expert at the University of Copenhagen, is one of many Danish critics of this law. He says the seizures aren't about defraying costs but to keep new refugees from coming to Denmark.
[Zachary Whyte:] What we're seeing across Europe is a tendency for a country to sort of shift rather than share responsibility for asylum-seekers, and I think this is precisely what's going on in Denmark.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] Given the fact that it costs about $20,000 or more to care for each of the refugees, Whyte says that what the police collect from newcomers isn't going to defray the cost. But he says what's more alarming is another provision that refugees who are granted asylum will have to wait three years to bring their families over, and they'll only get about a year's worth of a permit, which makes it very difficult for them to gain legal status so they can work and be integrated into Danish society.
[Michel Martin:] What is it that the Danes are so worried about. They've only taken in about 20,000 last year compared to Sweden, which took 160,000. Is there something in particular that is sparking this at this point?
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] Part of it is the bad experiences they've had with some other refugees in the past. They ended up not integrated, or unemployment rates ended up twice that of other Danes. But there's also a lot of concern about the fact that the two larger neighbors, as you've mentioned, Sweden but also Germany, are giving this open-armed welcome to refugees and now are backtracking. And the fear is that Denmark, which is wedged between them, is going to end up with a lot more asylum-seekers because these other two countries won't be taking them.
[Michel Martin:] What is public opinion in Denmark? What are other people saying about this, and are they really envisioning searching people's belongings, taking their wedding rings? What are they saying they're actually going to do?
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] It's very, very split in terms of public opinion. You have people who are just saying this is god-awful and it violated the Geneva Convention with regards to refugees. And then you have others who say, no, this absolutely has to be done because certainly Danes who are on welfare have to if they have more than a certain amount of income or they have a certain amount of assets, they have to pay for their own way. They don't get to have the welfare either. And ideally, what would happen in the eyes of the proponents of this law is for the police to actually check suitcases and that sort of thing as refugees come in. This is something that police object to as well because they're like, how are they going to be able to judge between what's an expensive necklace or what isn't if, in fact, jewelry is going to be taken. The proponents of this law the government says that they're not planning to actually take people's wedding rings, if you will, although, they have not ruled out assets beyond cash that they would look to.
[Michel Martin:] That NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson in Copenhagen. Soraya, thanks so much for talking with us.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] You're welcome, Michel.

[Renee Montagne:] Army tanks and soldiers moved into Cairo's Central Square today, to keep apart the anti and pro Mubarak demonstrators who fought bloody battles last night. The unrest has caused foreign companies, along with the U.N. and the U.S., to get their people out of Egypt. And it's caused some Egyptians to hole up in their own homes. We reached one of them, Medhat Saad, who makes his living as a tour operator. Thank you for joining us.
[Mr. Medhat Saad:] Thank you, ma'am.
[Renee Montagne:] Tell us, please, about your neighborhood and what you and your family are doing in the midst of this upheaval.
[Mr. Medhat Saad:] We are just guarding the whole neighborhood. I mean, it's so dangerous, prisons are all open. We have no idea how. We cannot accuse anybody for the moment, but almost according to the statement of the minister of interior affairs, 17,000 prisoners are on the loose. I mean, who opened it? A governor or somebody else. I cannot personally confirm that, but they are on the loose and they are threatening the whole country. I mean, but mainly Cairo. I mean, we are in great danger.
[Renee Montagne:] I understand that you did participate in early protests. Were you at that point excited about the idea of being able to voice opposition to President Mubarak?
[Mr. Medhat Saad:] Yeah. I'm against him, of course. I mean, we peacefully everybody was asking him to leave. It was a very peaceful demonstration on January 25. Everybody I mean, the whole country actually is asking him to leave, to reform the constitution, to dissolve all the parliament and the city councils. But we've been attacked by the police, you know. And about maybe 200 were killed.
[Renee Montagne:] But at what point did you start feeling that you needed to stay home and protect your family?
[Mr. Medhat Saad:] After the attack. I mean, we've been in the Tahrir Square and we got the news that the prisons are opened and that lots of criminals are attacking people all over. So, we left the site and we came back to protect our houses and our families.
[Renee Montagne:] Are you in a way, you know, holed up there with your wife, your children your two children, in your house?
[Mr. Medhat Saad:] Yeah, they are it's me and my son just watching outside. And my wife and my daughter is just staying at home. But people are watching. And some people are getting out to get some supplies, you know. But still watching all the day, all the night even now.
[Renee Montagne:] So what do you feel, now, about the coming days, the near future for you and your family?
[Mr. Medhat Saad:] I don't know. I started thinking seriously to leave the country actually. It's a hopeless case. I mean, what's coming if this man stays in power it will be a disaster for Egypt. This man should leave. I mean, if they...
[Renee Montagne:] And do you think if Mubarak leaves quickly, that would be a good thing?
[Mr. Medhat Saad:] Of course. Everything will get back to normal. It's just him to leave. I mean, no hatred, no hard feelings against him, but the idea that nobody likes him, nobody wants him except his party, his ruling party. And they are causing all the trouble, you know. I mean, it's total chaos. I mean, to save the country, for the sake of the country, if he really likes this country, he should go. And it will be easy and everything will get back to normal.
[Renee Montagne:] Thank you very much for joining us.
[Mr. Medhat Saad:] You're most welcome.
[Renee Montagne:] Medhat Saad is an Egyptologist and also a tour operator in Cairo.

[Robert Siegel:] And now we are going to hear from someone who not only has good things to say about the Geithner plan, but is eager to put his money where his mouth is. Bill Gross is the co-chief investment officer of Pimco in Newport Beach, California. As of the end of last year, Pimco had more than $700 billion in assets under management. Mr. Gross says he wants to buy into the Geithner plan.
[Mr. Bill Gross:] This is a triple win for the government, for the U.S. taxpayer and for private investors, as well as potentially for the banks that'll be selling these assets. So that it all depends, so to speak, in terms of the clearing price and the amount of loans that are transacted. But it looks like a good program to not only clear bank balance sheets, but to give a shot to the U.S. economy going forward.
[Robert Siegel:] You would look upon these securities that you could buy under this program as being as safe and secure as Treasury bonds, Treasury bills?
[Mr. Bill Gross:] Well, no. They are toxic assets. They are the famous subprimes of the world, but they will be bought at prices of 40, 50 and 60 cents on the dollar to reflect that risk and the potential higher yields going forward.
[Robert Siegel:] Let me ask you about something which you just said. They could go for 40, 50, 60 cents on the dollar, that's a pretty big spread there. How will you figure out whether one of these securities is worth bidding 44 or is worth bidding 60 cents for?
[Mr. Bill Gross:] It all depends on the assumptions for defaults, the assumptions for foreclosures, delinquencies, the geographical location of the loans, lots of things filter into a complicated equation that these old investment models that failed us in the past are being used for in terms of future analysis.
[Robert Siegel:] Are you at all concerned that if Pimco were to buy these securities and discovered that indeed it has gotten such a good price that it made very good money on them over the next couple of years, that the Congress would come back and tax your earnings or tax the bonuses that are paid out of that money?
[Mr. Bill Gross:] No, we're not concerned. We have assurances, public assurances now from Tim Geithner and others that this particular program will not be subject to those provisions.
[Robert Siegel:] One thing I don't understand is this, though. I understand how this would be a win for a fund manager like Pimco, if it became involved. I understand how it could be a win for a bank that could get some toxic securities off its books that have been holding it back, how is it a win for taxpayers if the taxpayers are indeed paying for the difference of what these are said to be worth and what they really might be worth?
[Mr. Bill Gross:] Well, they're not. You know, the taxpayer basically is putting up 85 cents on the dollar, which is a risk. But the taxpayer is also participating 50-50 in terms of any upside profits. And I think that's a big difference, relative to what we've had in the past.
[Robert Siegel:] So that question of the right price is very central here.
[Mr. Bill Gross:] Oh, I think it is. And to that regard there's no reason why a Pimco would pay a too high of a price and subject itself to a 100 percent loss, you know, for its own clients and so the trust would be in the private market that these things clear at the right price going forward at the highest yield possible and that the return comes down to the bottom line for not only for them but for the American taxpayer.
[Robert Siegel:] Since indeed these are toxic assets these are not Treasury, these are not ordinary Treasury bills. Is there any down side at all for Pimco here or you guarantee that you just can't lose a nickel on these things?
[Mr. Bill Gross:] Oh no, there's a 100 percent down side. It's true that the government is putting up 85 cents on the dollar and that the private investor is putting up perhaps five to fifteen percent, but that entire portion is at risk to the extent for instance that a loan goes down from 50 cents to 45 cents or less, then, you know, the potential for a private investor to be entirely wiped out so to speak at least in terms of the market is there.
[Robert Siegel:] You couldn't lose more than 100 percent of what you put in at the beginning, could you?
[Mr. Bill Gross:] No. Private investors are limited to 100 percent. There is a backstop so to speak on the part of the government that provides, of course, a foundation but it doesn't suggest that a private investor is moving into this at a risk free basis. Definitely they can lose 100 percent of their money.
[Robert Siegel:] Bill Gross of Pimco, thank you very much for talking with us.
[Mr. Bill Gross:] You're welcome Robert, thank you.

[Melissa Block:] The shutdown is having an increasingly serious impact on the country's ability to import and export goods. Furloughs at many federal agencies have led to delays in processing forms, carrying out inspections and getting products through Customs. As NPR's Jackie Northam reports, the backlogs are expected to get worse the longer the shutdown goes on.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] Officials with Customs and Border Patrol, having been deemed essential, have remained on duty during the shutdown. But there are more than three dozen other federal agencies that inspect, process or clear goods at the country's ports and borders. And many of those officials have been furloughed. Take the Environmental Protection Agency, which is down to just 10 percent of its workers. The EPA has stopped clearing pesticides for import. Charles Franklin, an environmental lawyer at Akin Gump, and a former federal regulator at the EPA, says this will hurt businesses.
[Charles Franklin:] This is going to be an impact on the chemical industry, first and foremost. But, of course, without those products, that has a cascading impact on all of the other industries. So it has the potential to be a very broad impact.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] Other agencies, such as the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Commerce, also play a role in helping move products that touch every part of our lives whether it be food or clothes, medicine or automobiles. Gary Hufbauer, a trade expert and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, says the shutdown is preventing or severely delaying the movement of goods.
[Gary Hufbauer:] The result is that exports intended for foreign markets are piling up in the warehouses, and likewise for imports. You know, you just stop the shipments. Tell the ships, we don't know when you're going to be able to unload. Of course, it's going to cost some ship owner 10,000 a day or 20,000 a day. It's pretty expensive to bunker these ships.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] Hufbauer says trade is incredibly important and makes up about one-quarter of America's more than $15 trillion economy. He says imports and exports were a strong component of an otherwise lackluster economy over the past few years. This is not lost on those involved in international trade.
[Marianne Rowden:] It's panic. It's panic for them.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] Marianne Rowden, the president of the American Association of Exporters and Importers, says her members are extremely concerned about the impact of the shutdown. She says in the short term, it's costing a lot of money. In the long term, Rowden says if the budget crisis drags on, there's a fear foreign customers will see the U.S. as an unreliable supplier.
[Marianne Rowden:] These companies have competition from China, Europe, all other countries. And the buyers in those other countries will say, you know what, if you can't deliver, we're going to another supplier.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] Rowden says the U.S. economy is much more exposed to global trade than it was during the last government shutdown, in 1995. Jackie Northam, NPR News, Washington.

[Madeleine Brand:] Tonight, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will induct Miles Davis, Black Sabbath, Blondie, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Herb Alpert, and Jerry Moss and the Sex Pistols. But the Sex Pistols will not take the stage at New York's Waldorf Astoria tonight. In a handwritten statement, lead singer Johnnie Lydon, a.k.a. Johnny Rotten, essentially called the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame rubbish. Steve Jones is the Pistols' guitarist, and host of his own radio show here in Los Angeles. Earlier, he stopped by our studios and read from that statement.
[Mr. Steve Jones:] "Next to the Sex Pistols, rock and roll and that hall of fame is a piss stain. Your museum, urine in wine." Ain't I nice to say it?
[Madeleine Brand:] That looks like poetry.
[Mr. Steve Jones:] I tell you, there's a song right here. I should put music to this. It would be good.
[Madeleine Brand:] Yeah. So, tell me why you didn't, you're saying no to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. You're not going to go to the award ceremony.
[Mr. Steve Jones:] A few other people have said it. You know, once you want to be put in a museum, rock and roll is over. You know, it's not voted by fans. It's voted by people who induct you, or others, people who are already in it. I'm not even sure, but whoever voted, I just don't think they could have said no anymore. I don't think they really do want us in there, to be honest with you.
[Madeleine Brand:] You had Johnny Lydon on your show, and he said something along the lines of, well, back when you were playing, and you were the Sex Pistols, the record industry didn't want to have anything to do with you. And so now, you know, why would you want to have anything to do with them?
[Mr. Steve Jones:] Well, when we first started, we were the ones basically calling the shots, because the record industry didn't know what to do with us. They didn't know what it was, because they, it wasn't something you can bottle up, like Green Day, like you can now. Oh, we know where to put that, like every record label wants their next big thing. You know? But, you know, when we got slung off of A&M for causing a ruckus, they thought it was basically an act. Like, we were nice boys in doing this act, you know. But we just was horrible kids, I suppose. It's like our band. It's our music. This is how we're going to do it. Like it or lump it, you know?
[Madeleine Brand:] So you will, in absentia, be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
[Mr. Steve Jones:] As far as I know.
[Madeleine Brand:] Yeah. So you can't really do anything about it. Does that make you...
[Mr. Steve Jones:] You can't loose.
[Madeleine Brand:] Yeah.
[Mr. Steve Jones:] You've got your credibility, and then you get in as well.
[Madeleine Brand:] So, win-win. It's sounds pretty corporate to say that.
[Mr. Steve Jones:] Yeah.
[Madeleine Brand:] Are you touring?
[Mr. Steve Jones:] No.
[Madeleine Brand:] No? I've heard that you might do a reunion tour.
[Mr. Steve Jones:] Well, you never know. It all depends.
[Madeleine Brand:] On?
[Mr. Steve Jones:] The dollar, of course.
[Madeleine Brand:] Do you get a lot of money from residuals?
[Mr. Steve Jones:] I do all right.
[Madeleine Brand:] Yeah? So, from basically one album.
[Mr. Steve Jones:] Yes. Which is another, that's a first, I think, in that hall of fame. I don't think they have anyone in there with one album.
[Madeleine Brand:] Well, congratulations, I guess.
[Mr. Steve Jones:] Yeah.
[Madeleine Brand:] Maybe I shouldn't congratulate. Should I congratulate?
[Mr. Steve Jones:] I don't care. It's all right. It's all right. Whatever's, you know, everyone, we're not making a big deal out of it. I don't want to be like harping on about we're so angry at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. If we don't care, then we don't care. You know what I mean? I shouldn't even be talking to you right now telling you that we don't care, because it's kind of contradictory.
[Madeleine Brand:] Hmm.
[Mr. Steve Jones:] You know what I mean? There's the statement, and that's it, right there.
[Madeleine Brand:] Steve Jones, thank you so much.
[Mr. Steve Jones:] Thank you, love.
[Madeleine Brand:] Steve Jones is the guitarist for the Sex Pistols. The band will be inducted tonight into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. NPR's DAY TO DAY continues.

[Robert Siegel:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel. Novelist Michael Crichton is known for taking on sensational topics, and his latest work of fiction, titled "Next," embraces the subject of genetic technology. Alan Cheuse has a review.
[Alan Cheuse:] Maybe this novel should be titled "Almost," because Crichton's not quite writing about the future. Believe it or not, just about everything he dramatizes in this story of intertwined genetic research projects some gone wrong, some right takes place in the present world. A world in which, as some of his protagonists discover, a university can patent the very genes you carry, and companies hope to brand nature with the same alacrity that they take to putting their names on football stadiums and ballparks. We call this genomic advertising, says a British executive at a presentation, where he tries to sell clients on such possibilities. So, says someone in the audience, this is the black rhino, brought to you by Land Rover? The jaguar brought to you by Jaguar? Says the advertising exec, I shouldn't put it so crudely, but yes. Crichton doesn't put it so crudely, either. He takes the novelist liberties with a lot of his material, but he also polishes with the sheen that only an imaginative writer can bestow. The search for talking birds and monkeys in Indonesia, the travails of a researcher's family when they adopt a humanzee, the half ape, half human product of some DNA experiments gone askew, the perils of a family whose genes a major California University has patented and wants to protect. Crichton creates a series of fascinating dramatic situations that hold a reader's attention right down to the last page of the story. And next, after that, comes an extensive bibliography that Crichton has compiled to demonstrate from where he has taken his ideas, with comments by the novelist that are often more entertaining and enlightening than most trashy thrillers, a stage down on the evolutionary scale from his own.
[Robert Siegel:] The book is "Next" by Michael Crichton. Our reviewer Alan Cheuse teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

[Rachel Martin:] What, if anything, really needs to be done at the southwestern border?
[Steve Inskeep:] That's the question that led to a government shutdown. The question remained unanswered when President Trump gave up and agreed to end the shutdown on Friday. Lawmakers gave themselves three weeks to work out a border security deal. The president's chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told CBS, the fight isn't over.
[Mick Mulvaney:] Keep in mind, he's willing to do whatever it takes to secure the border.
[Steve Inskeep:] The president spoke of another shutdown or declaring a state of emergency to get the money from elsewhere. He is still demanding that Congress pay for a wall, the construction project that he once promised Mexico would pay for. Beyond the symbolism of that demand, there is a whole range of border issues what technology to use, how to manage asylum-seekers and much more.
[Rachel Martin:] All right. We are joined now by NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith. Good morning, Tam.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Good morning.
[Rachel Martin:] So is it fair to say we are exactly where we were before the shutdown began?
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] More or less, except that now America and federal workers and Congress and the president have all lived through the longest government shutdown, partial government shutdown in U.S. history, and it wasn't pretty. And that might affect how everyone views the possibility of another shutdown in the future, a future that is not that far away. You know, the question before the shutdown began was, more or less, what is a wall?
[Rachel Martin:] [Laughter] Right.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] What will President Trump accept? Is it steel bollard? Is it replacing old fence? Is it only new wall? Does it have to be concrete? Can it be steel slats?
[Rachel Martin:] And there's still no agreement on that definition.
[Steve Inskeep:] There really isn't. And there's been a whole lot of fighting about a wall, Nancy Pelosi still saying, have I not been clear? there will be no wall. But there's always been some nuance below the surface of that. Congresswoman from Florida, Democrat Donna Shalala, was on Weekend Edition Sunday yesterday, and here's what she said.
[Donna Shalala:] There always has been flexibility about fencing that needs to be strengthened. This is not a rigid position by the Democrats.
[Rachel Martin:] I mean, in fact, I mean, it's been pointed out several times I'm sure you and I have had this conversation Democrats have funded border security, even in excess of the $5.7 billion that President Trump wants for this wall. So they're on board with putting more money down there. It's just the idea of funding what is President Trump's fundamental campaign promise. They don't want him to have that win.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] They do not want to call it a wall. They do not think that $5.7 billion should be spent on wall alone. President Trump seems to be saying in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, said that he still wants the wall. Asked if he would accept $5.7 billion in the next round of less than $5.7 billion in the next round of negotiations, according to this Wall Street Journal article, he said last night, I doubt it. I have to do it right.
[Steve Inskeep:] Well, let's remember that this is only one of an incredibly broad range of border security issues and, arguably, not even the most important one. There are so many questions how many judges do you have? How many border guards do you have? What are the rules under which they operate? What happens with asylum-seekers? What has made this so intensively difficult is that the president has insisted that the wall is the most important thing, and it has symbolic importance both for him and for Democrats. But even people around the president have complained that there's so much focus on the wall, that it's only the president himself who keeps bringing it back to that.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] And there's this 17-member conference committee of members of Congress, appropriators, people who like to make deals, who are skilled at making deals, who are going to get together and look at these priorities. The question, though, is in the end, if they come up with something, is it something that President Trump will be willing to accept?
[Rachel Martin:] Right. NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith for us this morning. Tamara, thank you. We appreciate it.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] You're welcome.
[Rachel Martin:] So meanwhile, federal workers are finally getting back to work for the first time since the shutdown started. NPR's Brakkton Booker has been talking to some of them here in the Washington area, and Brakkton's in our studio. This has got to be an unsettling time, Brakkton, for these folks.
[Brakkton Booker, Byline:] Yeah, to say the least. You heard Tamara Keith describe the shutdown as not being pretty. I think a lot of federal workers who've gone 35 days without getting paid and 35 days, you know, of working and not really knowing when the next paycheck is coming, it was downright brutal. I mean, some people expressed some excitement about going back to work. But really, it was relief. Some people said that they were depressed because they really didn't know when that next paycheck was coming. I talked to Terry, who is a federal worker who works as a janitor in the Smithsonian here in Washington. She says lawmakers don't have any empathy for her or the rest of the federal workforce. And here's what she had to say.
[Terry:] My thing is I don't like being used. And that's what we feel like. We're being the ones pulled apart and plucked apart and left out to dry when these people that are making these decisions don't have the financial worries that we have.
[Rachel Martin:] Right. A lot of these people, just living paycheck to paycheck. And when those paychecks don't exist, what are they supposed to do? And these are supposed to be stable jobs, right? Like, for generations, working for the federal government was supposed to be the thing that gave you peace of mind.
[Brakkton Booker, Byline:] Right.
[Rachel Martin:] Are these people suggesting it might not be that anymore?
[Brakkton Booker, Byline:] Well, now they're suggesting that perhaps maybe the government is not that stable. And some people are starting to look, or at least have conversations about looking to the private sector, especially those households that have both husband and wife working in the federal government.
[Rachel Martin:] Dual incomes that are tied to...
[Brakkton Booker, Byline:] That are tied to...
[Rachel Martin:] ...Politics.
[Brakkton Booker, Byline:] ...The government. Yes. Exactly. So I spoke with Andrea Jensen. She works for the Department of Energy. Her husband works for the Federal Aviation Administration. And she said, you know, the shutdown really had her thinking, like, maybe it's not a really good idea to have both of them working for the government. Here's what she had to say.
[Andrea Jensen:] Seems like there's more job security in not working for the same agency, or having one person in private industry and one person in the government.
[Brakkton Booker, Byline:] So virtually all the federal workers I spoke to have no confidence that three weeks from now we're not going to be in the same predicament. So people are starting to budget. People are, like, really going to spend money on things that they absolutely have to spend money on and try to squirrel away the rest.
[Steve Inskeep:] I want to note something quite profound that has perhaps happened over the last month or a little bit more. And Tamara Keith alluded to the fact that the pain of this shutdown has to be part of the political calculation as President Trump decides if he wants to shut down the government again in a little less than three weeks here. Federal workers have been portrayed as faceless bureaucrats, as evil elites, as out-of-touch beltway types. But for the last 30 days, we have seen federal workers as people that Americans at large can relate to, people who were caught up in broader problems of income inequality, people who don't have a lot of money in the bank. Americans have related, I think, to this pain, according to surveys, and that is something that lawmakers will have to consider if they think it's going to be a good idea to shut down the government again.
[Rachel Martin:] Speaking of these people, though, Brakkton, just real quick. They're supposed to get backpay, right?
[Brakkton Booker, Byline:] They're supposed to be getting backpay. It could come as early as this week. But, look. Payroll employees were also furloughed. So we're thinking maybe it takes a little time to get the systems back up and running. So maybe by the end of the week, they all...
[Rachel Martin:] The people who send the paychecks out weren't working.
[Brakkton Booker, Byline:] Yes. Absolutely.
[Rachel Martin:] OK. NPR's Brakkton Booker, thanks so much. We appreciate it.
[Brakkton Booker, Byline:] Absolutely.
[Rachel Martin:] OK. So today is another inflection point in the trial of drug kingpin Joaquin El Chapo Guzman.
[Steve Inskeep:] The prosecution rests its case today. Federal prosecutors have presented dozens of witnesses to testify over the past three months, and now it is the defense's turn. Guzman faces 17 counts linked to running the world's largest drug trafficking organization and has already been convicted, of course, of crimes in Mexico.
[Rachel Martin:] All right. We've got Keegan Hamilton on the line. He is U.S. editor for Vice News. He hosts a podcast, called, "Chapo: Kingpin On Trial." So he's been following this real closely. Keegan, thanks for being here.
[Keegan Hamilton:] Good morning. Thanks for having me.
[Rachel Martin:] The prosecution is about to have its last act here. What are you expecting?
[Keegan Hamilton:] So they've got their last cooperating witness on the stand. He was a former bodyguard and hit man for El Chapo. He should finish up sometime this morning, and they'll have two law enforcement witnesses and then that's it. Then it's the defense's turn, at which point they may or may not call their defendant, Joaquin El Chapo Guzman, to testify in his own behalf.
[Rachel Martin:] Do you know what the pros and cons are of having Guzman up there?
[Keegan Hamilton:] Well, the cons are obvious and large. And that is that he opens himself up to cross-examination from the government, when they can ask about basically all of the evidence that's been heard, all of these crimes that he's accused of. Anything that came up in the testimony could potentially be fair game. He can either, you know, open himself up to perjury, which is the least of his problems. The pros for the government is that they he can essentially get the last word. I mean, he's heard, you know, dozens of his former associates get up and testify against him. This would be his chance to tell his side of the story.
[Rachel Martin:] What has it been like watching him through these proceedings?
[Keegan Hamilton:] You know, for the most part, he has been pretty cool and collected. He's, you know, in some cases, staring down the witnesses. He's taking notes, passing it to his attorneys. He's flirting with his wife and the audience of the courtroom. But there have been a couple moments when the testimony was really devastating where he almost hung his head a little bit, and it seemed to sink in that the case was not going as he hoped it would go.
[Rachel Martin:] Can you give us some description of just some of the moments that have stood out? I mean, there have this is an exceptional trial in so many ways. But the jury, just when you think they can't be shocked anymore, they're presented with evidence that does just that.
[Keegan Hamilton:] The end of last week was particularly shocking. You know, we've heard references to murders and violence throughout the trial. But the testimony from his former bodyguard and hit man that, you know, described him as personally committing torture and murder, just some very graphic and gruesome descriptions of people being buried alive, tortured. It really sunk in. You had thousand-yard stares in the eyes of the jury. And I think everybody in the courtroom who thought they'd heard it all was shocked by what they were hearing with that witness.
[Rachel Martin:] That Guzman himself was committing these atrocities?
[Keegan Hamilton:] That he was personally pulling the trigger on at least three murders and was, in some cases, beating rival cartel members who had come into custody of the Sinaloa Cartel. It was pretty disturbing stuff.
[Rachel Martin:] Is there any way he is not convicted on all these counts?
[Keegan Hamilton:] It's hard to see a way. I think the defense, at this point, is hoping for a mistrial or a hung jury or something along those lines that gets him out of this without a full acquittal.
[Rachel Martin:] Keegan Hamilton of Vice News talking about El Chapo's trial. Thank you so much. We appreciate it.
[Keegan Hamilton:] Thanks again.

[Allison Aubrey:] If you're looking for the last-minute gift for that book lover in your life, we have got a handy tool that can help. NPR's Book Concierge on npr.org has more than 300 recommendations from NPR staffers and freelancers. Books editor Petra Mayer joins us now in the studio to walk us through it. Hi there, Petra.
[Petra Mayer, Byline:] Hi, Allison. Thanks for having me.
[Allison Aubrey:] Yeah, sure. So tell us how does the Book Concierge work?
[Petra Mayer, Byline:] It's very simple. Well, you can make it as complicated as you like, actually.
[Allison Aubrey:] OK.
[Petra Mayer, Byline:] It's a giant matrix of more than 300 books. And down the left side of the screen is a list of filters, and there are things like book club ideas, ladies first, science fiction and fantasy, funny stuff, short, long you name it, we've thought of a filter for it. And those filters are stackable, so you can pick more than one. You know, you can click I want a nonfiction book, and I want it to be kind of long because I need to while away the long winter nights. I picked those...
[Allison Aubrey:] Got it.
[Petra Mayer, Byline:] ...Tags at random. But you can that's how you can sort things.
[Allison Aubrey:] I get it. So you can pick your filters. So let's say I want a book for a friend of mine who loves to cook. She also likes mystery novels, and she loves to travel. What do you got for me?
[Petra Mayer, Byline:] So we have just the thing for you. It is called, "Yashim Cooks Istanbul." And it's...
[Allison Aubrey:] "Yashim Cooks Istanbul"?
[Petra Mayer, Byline:] Yeah. It's based on a series of mysteries set in 19th-century Istanbul about an inspector, Yashim. And as he solves mysteries, he cooks. And so the guy who writes the series, you know, I guess he got lots of requests for the recipes because they sound so delicious. And so he ended up doing a cookbook of all the things. So you can cook right along with Yashim as he solves crimes. And they're, like, incredibly, delightfully evocative names like assassin's steak tartare, ladies thighs which I had to look up because I was like, what's that? it's a kind of lamb meatball, apparently, that you deep-fry.
[Allison Aubrey:] OK. I love it. So it's mystery stacked with food...
[Petra Mayer, Byline:] Yeah.
[Allison Aubrey:] ...Lots of intrigue there. I want to challenge you here for a moment.
[Petra Mayer, Byline:] Yeah.
[Allison Aubrey:] I'm looking for a nonfiction book. It's got to be short. And I want it to appeal to the other people in my book group. So if I toggle through and I check you know, book group, nonfiction, short side do you have anything?
[Petra Mayer, Byline:] You will get a real treat. You will get "Alive, Alive Oh!" by Diana Athill. And she is a legendary British author and book editor. She was an editor for something like 50 years, and she worked with pretty much every big name of the 20th century, like everyone from Jack Kerouac to Margaret Atwood. And she also has written a series of really interesting memoirs. I mean, she's had this crazy life and worked with all these famous people. It's a wonderful book club idea, actually, because Diana Athill connects to, sort of, six degrees of separation-style to so many other authors.
[Allison Aubrey:] Sounds wonderful. Petra, what are you finding about how people are using this site? What do they search for the most?
[Petra Mayer, Byline:] The most popular thing people tend to search for every year is staff picks, which is great for us this year because we have way more staff picks than ever. It's lots of fun because you get books that way that kind of aren't the big buzz books. You get the things that tweaked people's individual interests. And in a place like this, people's individual interests are really interesting.
[Allison Aubrey:] I see that there's a category for books on the dark side. Wondering if there's anything that skews the opposite a little more affirmative, uplifting.
[Petra Mayer, Byline:] Huh... You know...
[Allison Aubrey:] Please, tell me there's something.
[Petra Mayer, Byline:] Well, there's plenty of affirmative and uplifting books in the Concierge. But we don't have a specific tag for it unfortunately.
[Allison Aubrey:] People just don't search that way.
[Petra Mayer, Byline:] No, no. But there's a lot of dark books, so we had to kind we felt like we had to kind of set that aside on its own special tag.
[Allison Aubrey:] OK. We'll leave it at that.
[Petra Mayer, Byline:] Yep.
[Allison Aubrey:] NPR's Petra Mayer and the NPR Books team put together our Book Concierge. You can check it out at npr.orgbestbooks. Thanks, Petra.
[Petra Mayer, Byline:] Thank you.

[Rachel Martin:] I'm Rachel Martin. We turn now to the global war against terrorism; a threat that has changed dramatically since 911. There have been ground wars in two countries, hundreds of drone strikes in several others. And today, the threat of terrorism isn't just emanating from al-Qaida, but regional groups like out al-Shabaab in East Africa and the self-proclaimed Islamic State operating in Iraq and Syria. And while these groups vary in membership, ideology and objectives, the one thing that remains constant all these groups need money to survive. And that is where our next guest comes into the picture. His name is Daniel Glaser. He is the assistant secretary for terrorist financing at the U.S. Treasury Department. Mr. Glaser, thanks for being with us.
[Assistant Secretary For Terrorist Financing Daniel Glaser:] Oh, thanks for having me here.
[Rachel Martin:] A couple weeks ago, the Treasury Department announced that the U.S. government and Saudi Arabia were imposing sanctions on a charity group based in Pakistan thought to be funneling money to al-Qaida and other groups. What can you tell us about this charity and how long you had been tracking them?
[Assistant Secretary For Terrorist Financing Daniel Glaser:] Well, this is a charity that we've been tracking for a long time. It's charity a called the Al-Furqan Foundation. And Al-Furqan Foundation is a successor charity to two older charities. And those two charities their operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan were exposed, and then they had to change their name. And they merged, and they changed their name to the Al-Furqan Foundation. And we and Saudis and other countries have been tracking them ever since. And we were able to take action against them just a couple of weeks ago.
[Rachel Martin:] What will those sections do? What can you possibly do to prevent this group from just reconstituting itself changing its name and funneling the money through different means?
[Assistant Secretary For Terrorist Financing Daniel Glaser:] This is why it's so important to work with our partners in the Gulf 'cause so much of the money that goes to that charity comes from the Gulf. So what the designation does is makes it illegal for anybody in the United States and anybody in Saudi Arabia to conduct any sort of business transaction with that entity. And of course, if they have funds that belong to that entity, they would have to be frozen. What's exciting about it is that this demonstrates that Saudi Arabia is fully on board and is going to work with us to make sure that there's no money coming from Saudi Arabia, but also make sure that they work very closely with the other countries in the Gulf.
[Rachel Martin:] Had Saudi Arabia not been aggressive on this front before?
[Assistant Secretary For Terrorist Financing Daniel Glaser:] I think that Saudi Arabia has been a strong partner of ours for a while, but their relationship has been evolving. This is the first time we've ever done a joint designation with Saudi Arabian involving an entity not in Saudi Arabia. And I think what this shows is the increasing awareness of the Saudi authorities of the importance of them taking a global leadership role.
[Rachel Martin:] May I ask you how you traced the money? I mean, it's my understanding many of these organizations use informal banking systems like Hawala, which can make it hard to follow the money, right?
[Assistant Secretary For Terrorist Financing Daniel Glaser:] Right. Well, Hawala is just another word for informal money remittance. And yes, the terrorist financing could go through the formal system like banks. It could go through less well-regulated, formal entities like exchange houses, or it could go through entirely unregulated entities like Hawala, or it could go through the bulk movement of cash. We have to make sure that we're policing, we're patrolling any form of value transfer. That's why it's so important that we work with countries like Saudi Arabia and work with countries like Kuwait and Qatar and Afghanistan and Pakistan, for that matter, to make sure that there's no mechanisms of transfer that are going to be safe and easy for these organizations.
[Rachel Martin:] What's the key to cutting off funding for a group like ISIS?
[Assistant Secretary For Terrorist Financing Daniel Glaser:] Well, ISIS presents a particular challenge because so much of their resources are generated internally. They have the opportunity to rob banks within their territory. They have the opportunity to extort businesses and populations within their territory. And they have the opportunity to profit from commercial activity, whether it's oil cells or other types of commodities. So we need to make sure that they can't use that wealth. We make sure that whatever money they have, they're sort of stuck with inside a territory that they control.
[Rachel Martin:] Is it working?
[Assistant Secretary For Terrorist Financing Daniel Glaser:] Well, it's an ongoing effort. And I'm confident that the international financial system is a hostile environment for them. The challenges that remain ahead for us is to get better information on precisely what mechanisms they're using and where they're using them in order to try to gain access and make sure we keeping those mechanisms ineffective. One of the things that's interesting is as ISIL gains affiliates around the world, that's going to force them to come above ground a little bit on the financial side. And that's going to create targets for us and allow us to try to disrupt that activity.
[Rachel Martin:] Daniel Glaser is the assistant secretary for terrorist financing at the U.S. Treasury Department. Thanks so much for talking with us.
[Assistant Secretary For Terrorist Financing Daniel Glaser:] Oh, thanks for having me.

[David Greene:] What a night it was for U.S. swimmers at the Olympics in Rio. Nineteen-year-old Katie Ledecky and 31-year-old Michael Phelps might be at very different points in their careers. Ledecky is just taking off. Phelps, whose name we've heard for so long his career is beginning to wind down. But both of them dazzled last night, and NPR's Tom Goldman was at the Aquatic Stadium in Rio taking it all in. He's on the line with us. Hey, Tom.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] Good morning, David.
[David Greene:] So I guess the big question was anyone actually in the swimming pool with Katie Ledecky?
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] [Laughter].
[David Greene:] It looked like she was alone on television.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] She was. She was. And we've seen it a lot, you know, throughout the last three or four years. They quickly become a race against the clock. For the better part of this race, she was just out there swimming alone along with that superimposed world record line on the TV screen. And she beat everyone her competitors and the line. She beat her own world record in the 400 by nearly two seconds. And that's the 12th career world record by a 19 year old.
[David Greene:] Wow.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] David, who does that?
[David Greene:] That's crazy.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] I was actually trying to think of a comparable athlete, someone who simply outpaces the competition like this. And I came up with one Secretariat, the great thoroughbred. Remember that Belmont Stakes back in 1973? Secretariat won by a surreal 31 lengths. That's what it's like to watch Katie Ledecky.
[David Greene:] Yeah. Some say Secretariat I mean, the greatest of all time.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] Yeah.
[David Greene:] So she wins the 400-meter freestyle last night. She's 19 years old. You know, we saw her four years ago medal in the Olympics at 15. But she's going to have more races in Rio and then years beyond this.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] Way beyond. The American who took the bronze in this race, Leah Smith a distant bronze said we'll probably be seeing Katie Ledecky in the 2024 Games.
[David Greene:] How old will you and I be by then [LAUGHTER]?
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] I don't want to even think about it.
[David Greene:] I mean, when it's right.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] That's two Olympics away. Swimming aficionados now are probably going to correct me here. But, you know, David, I can't think of a female swimmer as dominant or as potentially dominant. You know, the men have had Michael Phelps, Mark Spitz guys who needed wheelbarrows to hold all their medals.
[David Greene:] Yeah.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] I can't think of a similar woman until now. Katie Ledecky is special. That medal haul is going to come over the coming years. You know, it's just going to get better and better, I think.
[David Greene:] Well, special indeed. Well, let's turn to Michael Phelps now. He was in the really hotly contested 4x100-meter freestyle relay. And...
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] Yeah.
[David Greene:] ...I mean, it was a quite a night for him too.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] It was. You know, if ever an athlete could settle and rest on considerable laurels, it's him. Going into the race, he had 22 total medals, 18 gold, most of all time. But man, he was a man on fire. He swam the second leg. When the starter touched the wall and Phelps dived in, the U.S. was behind. Hundred meters later, U.S. was ahead, and the Americans kept the lead the rest of the way. They beat their archrival France, which won the race four years ago at the London Olympics. And Phelps says he swam the fastest 100 freestyle in his career. That's saying a lot because it's a special career.
[David Greene:] Yeah. It sounds like the atmosphere last night that you were taking in I mean, not a swim even, more like a like a Roman coliseum or something.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] [Laughter] It was amazing. As soon as the teams came onto the pool deck, the crowd started roaring. And I mean roaring. This was a hugely anticipated race because it was wide open. The U.S., France, Australia were considered medal favorites with no real good bet on who'd win. And afterwards, even Phelps talked about the electricity. Here he is.
[Michael Phelps:] I was going to say, when I was on the block, I honestly felt my heart was going to explode out of my chest. Like, I was so hyped tonight and so excited. And to hear the stands as loud it was I mean, that was wild. I don't know if I've ever heard something like that at a meet.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] You know, David, athletes talk about blocking out the noise, the distractions. Well, it sounds like Phelps and his buddies got high octane fuel from that crowd.
[David Greene:] It sure does. All right, NPR's Tom Goldman covering the Olympics for us in Rio. Thanks, Tom.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Melissa Block:] To Arizona now, where Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords spent the day meeting constituents, including some fellow survivors of last year's shooting. This is one of Giffords' last days in office. She caught many off guard yesterday when she announced she's leaving her seat to focus on her recovery. As NPR's Ted Robbins reports, today's events in Tucson began with Giffords completing her fateful "Congress on Your Corner" event.
[Ted Robbins, Byline:] A year later, the "Congress on Your Corner" wasn't held at the Safeway supermarket in Tucson. It was a private event at her district office. Suzie Hileman was one of the 19 people shot. She told the Tucson CBS affiliate how remarkable it was to finally meet Gabby Giffords.
[Suzie Hileman:] When you think that a year ago she was lying on the cold concrete with a bullet in her brain. And today, she walked in under her own steam and said hello, and shook our hands and listened.
[Ted Robbins, Byline:] Giffords spent the entire morning greeting not only those directly affected by the shooting, but dozens of friends and constituents. Gary Thrasher is a rancher who lives near the Mexican border. He's a Republican, but he's been an active backer of the Democrat Giffords because of her support for border security. He drove two hours to see wish Giffords well.
[Gary Thrasher:] Well, I'm happy to see her and I'm glad she's and I told her that she's just the epitome of true grit. And that's about all I can say about her.
[Ted Robbins, Byline:] There were mixed feelings among those I spoke with. Happiness that Gabby Giffords was there greeting them, sadness that she is leaving Congress after having survived so much. Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild.
[Mayor Jonathan Rothchild:] Yeah, you were hoping for one more. You know, Gabby has done so well. And she kept the hope so up that she would return to office, that it's sad to see such a great public servant leave office.
[Ted Robbins, Byline:] Rothschild and others learned only yesterday that Giffords is stepping down. Her office released a two-minute video posted on her Facebook page. Gifford's short sentences are inter-cut with shots of her when she was healthy, as well as images from the last year. By all accounts, Giffords decision to step down was hers. Over the last few weeks, those close to her say she realized that she couldn't be in rehab for her brain injury part-time, while being a part-time congresswoman. She tires easily and her rehab will take years, not months. When her resignation is officially submitted within a week, Arizona's governor will call a special election for a successor to fill out the remainder of her term, though Giffords indicated that she is not through with public life. After attending an event at the Tucson Community Food Bank today, Gabby Giffords is heading to Washington for President Barack Obama's State of the Union address Tuesday. Her husband, Mark Kelly, will sit with Michelle Obama in the first lady's box. Gabrielle Giffords will sit in her seat as a representative one last time. Ted Robbins, NPR News, Tucson.
[Robert Siegel:] You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.

[Guy Raz:] Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. Around Thanksgiving time in 1992, a London art dealer named Philip Mould was invited to rural Vermont to see a private collection. The owner was Earle Newton, and he kept his paintings inside an old, disused church. When Mould walked in, he saw hundreds of portraits scattered about, and one of them, propped against the altar, caught his eye.
[Mr. Philip Mould:] [Reading] It stood out partly because of its quality but also because it did not conform to the politer, better-behaved expressions all around it. An unashamedly porcine image of a middle-aged woman in pink taffeta, she had the unfashionable hint of a smile showing through her bulbous cheeks. Its candor was mesmeric.
[Guy Raz:] That's Philip Mould describing the encounter. At that moment, Mould realized he was staring at a painting by the English master William Hogarth, a painting worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Earle Newton bought it at a country yard sale for $250. It's one of the stories Philip Mould tells in his new book, "The Art Detective." He's a paintings expert for the British version of the "Antiques Roadshow," and Philip Mould joins me from London. Welcome.
[Mr. Philip Mould:] Hi, there.
[Guy Raz:] How did Earle Newton come to own not just that painting by Hogarth but the other masterworks in his collection?
[Mr. Philip Mould:] Earle Newton, professor as we called him, was an extraordinary man. He was an indiscriminate buyer. He would sometimes go into shops and just buy things in quantity. In fact, he once bought 25 oil paintings for about $250. And what he wished to do was just accumulate as much as possible in order to fill his life and his houses that he bought, as well, because he accumulated them. In fact, he accumulated old cars. This man was an indefatigable hoarder and buyer.
[Guy Raz:] You had flown out to Vermont in 1992. This was sort of at the beginning of your career. You didn't know what to expect. First, you thought this was some kind of grand hoax, right? You didn't expect to see anything.
[Mr. Philip Mould:] It was only as I was touching down it was snow-filled Vermont, it was a sort of a black-white night, if you know what I mean I suddenly realized what on Earth am I doing? He then picked me up in this huge, rusting Bentley and took me deep into the wilderness, then, to my amazement found that even though it was the day after Thanksgiving, they had laid out the table and said, we're waiting for you. And I gradually came to the sticky realization, as I looked around the walls, that there were no portraits. There were no paintings. And I thought I might have, well, walked into some sort of, who knows, rather terrifying hoax.
[Guy Raz:] Maybe a Stephen King novel.
[Mr. Philip Mould:] Yeah.
[Guy Raz:] But in fact, it wasn't a hoax, but it took a few days, right? I mean, you were there for about 24 hours before he actually showed you his crown jewel, so to speak.
[Mr. Philip Mould:] Indeed. So I hadn't seen one painting anywhere. The next morning, I got up and crunched my way through the snow to a church across the road. And then he opened the doors. Incidentally, it had a sign outside it saying Museum of the Americas, but no one ever visited it. Anyway, so he opened this door, turned on the lights one by one, and the sight that met my eyes is something I shall never, ever forget because instead of a congregation of people in this disused church, it was a congregation of portraits. And where the altar was, there were full lengths. Where the stations of the cross would have hung, you know, there were middle-sized paintings. It was an assembly of oil-painted faces. Bit by bit, I began to work out beneath all the dirt, beneath all the grime and this is actually one of the art detective's functions in life is to actually look through the layers of accumulated filth and try and work out what treasures might lay beneath. And it took me about an hour to absorb it all, and I realized that I was in probably in the greatest sweets shop I shall ever find.
[Guy Raz:] How much was his collection worth, approximately?
[Mr. Philip Mould:] Adding it all up and he's now left it to Savannah College of Art -his collection must be close to about $10 million.
[Guy Raz:] Ten million dollars. I mean, for somebody in your profession, it's not always easy to make money. People, I think, have an assumption that galleries are always selling their works, but it's actually quite difficult. This trip turned into a gold mine for you. I mean, you actually came back with something quite valuable.
[Mr. Philip Mould:] Indeed, I did. And I have to say it was the last experience I would describe as the pre-computer age because I don't travel anything like as much as I used to. The modern hunter of art and there are many, many out there, sits in front of a screen. I end up buying, I don't know, three or four pictures a week sometimes, sight unseen, in all far-flung parts of the world.
[Guy Raz:] You have identified a Thomas Gainsborough piece just by seeing it on the Internet. And you bought a Gainsborough painting from an eBay sale. First of all, what did you pay for it?
[Mr. Philip Mould:] I think about $170.
[Guy Raz:] And how were you able to identify it as the real thing from a photo online?
[Mr. Philip Mould:] It's a bit like bird watching. You get to sort of recognize the plumage, the colors, the shape, the behavior of the portrait, you know, and the posture and what have you. And here was a painting of a man with a rather unprepossessing looking solid jacket, which didn't quite make sense, but a rather beautiful face. It was rather honeyed in the way that the strokes were applied, and he had a sort of faraway look in his eye. And I thought: hang on, there's only one artist who can do that. That's Thomas Gainsborough. But the jacket looked appalling. Anyway, I bought it, and I got it back into the gallery, and I realized that what had happened was that this was almost certainly a Gainsborough, but at some point in its history, someone had decided to repaint the body to turn it into a different looking man. And so I did something which in some ways I'm rather embarrassed about, actually, because I don't restore my own pictures. I have professionals for doing so. But it was only $180 or whatever, and it was irresistible. It was nighttime. Everyone had gone home. And I took out a bottle of acetone, put the painting on my easel, took out some swabs of cotton wool and bit by bit over the course of two hours, I removed his jacket. And from beneath appeared this most startling form. At one point, incidentally, I got very concerned because I saw pink suddenly coming through, and the jacket was browny-yellow and I thought, oh, no. I've gone too far. The acetone has burnt through into the canvas. But in fact, it was the hand. It was the man's hand, which Gainsborough had very neatly put into his waistcoat. It was like a hatching pupa, actually. And this thing came out, and suddenly, I was looking at, you know, this scruffy little picture bought on eBay for $180, I was looking at a [unintelligible] early Gainsborough, painted just as the artist was getting going in his career in Ipswich in the 1750s.
[Guy Raz:] And what did you end up selling it for?
[Mr. Philip Mould:] The condition was not great. So I unfortunately could only sell it for about $35,000.
[Guy Raz:] That's not a bad return.
[Mr. Philip Mould:] Oh, it's not a bad return. No, no, no. It's a really good return. But the trouble is when you say Gainsborough, you know, it's a bit like saying jackpot. But you know, there is such thing as a cheap Gainsborough, as well as an expensive one.
[Guy Raz:] When so many people have so much access to information now, is it really likely that we'll hear about hidden masterworks, you know, gathering dust in some attic all that much in the future? I mean, do you think those paintings are still out there?
[Mr. Philip Mould:] Yes, there are a lot. And I'll tell you what's going to be happening increasingly now. Our science has massively moved ahead, we all know that, but the science of restoration has, as well, and we can now look into pictures, look through them, look behind them. We can take later paint off. The [unintelligible] photography now has allowed us to be able to compare artists' works so much better. I mean, we can get, like, 1,000 images of some of the greatest artists in front of us, so attribution and the actual exposing of things, who they're by and what they're like, is now much easier. So the type of discoveries that are going to be made and will be made are not so much the things from granny's attic but the things that are hidden from view.
[Guy Raz:] That's Philip Mould, author of "The Art Detective" and the official art advisor to the Houses of Parliament in London. Philip Mould, thank you so much.
[Mr. Philip Mould:] Thank you.

[Audie Cornish:] In Geneva, Secretary of State John Kerry says he and his Russian counterpart have reached a deal on how to try to bring a cease-fire in Syria. Kerry noted the history of failed plans in the Syrian civil war and warned the implementation of this new one is far from guaranteed. But he said the stakes are high.
[John Kerry:] There is emerging now a simple choice between war and peace, between human agony and humanitarian relief, between the continued disintegration of an ancient society and the rebirth of a united and modern nation.
[Audie Cornish:] NPR's Michele Kelemen is in Geneva following these talks and joins us now. And Michelle, Kerry and the Russian foreign minister spoke to reporters. What did they say was in this deal?
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] Well, they spelled out what Kerry's calling a far-reaching approach. He said it could be a turning point. First there's a plan to have a cease fire to begin with the Eid holiday on September 12. Kerry says Russia is also expected to use its influence with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to halt Syrian air attacks on opposition strongholds, attacks that Kerry says are to blame for most of the civilian casualties that we've been seeing. And if all this holds, it's meant to boost prospects for peace talks. A seven-day period of calm will also pave the way for U.S.-Russian military cooperation in going after terrorist groups in Syria, and that's something new here.
[Audie Cornish:] You said if it would hold, and we know there was a major ceasefire deal announced in February. That one collapsed amid violations by the Syrian government and its Russian ally. How will this deal be any different?
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] Well, as Secretary Kerry says, you know, it's a different format that they're having here, and this U.S.-Russian military cooperation is also meant to keep this working in a different direction kind of to give an incentive to Russia at least to stay onboard.
[Audie Cornish:] At the same time there were officials inside the U.S. government, particularly the Pentagon, hesitant about any deal with the Russians. What were their concerns?
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] They've been really leery about sharing intelligence with the Russians and working with the Russians to target an al-Qaida-linked group that operates in some opposition strongholds like Aleppo. Kerry said the arrangement he made here is not built on trust. He says this Joint Implementation Center with the Russians is only going to begin initial discussions after a period of calm. So that's sort of a test to see if the Russians are serious about pushing for a cease-fire and halting Syrian air attacks. Now, there was some last-minute diplomacy on this one. It seems that Secretary Kerry had a hard time getting the go-ahead from the White House. At one point, Russia's foreign minister came into the press room complaining that it was taking too long for Kerry to get that approval. He said that vertical power moves slowly in a democracy. But though he complained about that, he did end up coming and appearing jointly with Secretary Kerry tonight and saying that the Russians are determined to move ahead with this plan.
[Audie Cornish:] Finally, Michelle, for people in that besieged city of Aleppo, what could this deal do for them?
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] Aleppo's really key. Secretary Kerry says if you can bring peace there, then the peace prospects for a diplomatic solution brighten. And if they can't, that's going to be harder to get the opposition to the peace talks. And what really needs to happen, he said, is a pullback from Castello Road. That's a main artery into Aleppo. The U.N. envoy, Staffan de Mistura, who is also here tonight has said that Aleppo is running low on fuel, so breaking this siege is really urgent.
[Audie Cornish:] That's NPR's Michele Kelemen in Geneva. Thank you.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] Thank you, Audie.

[Steve Inskeep:] And I'm Steve Inskeep. In Pakistan this morning, a band of gunmen attacked a police training academy. The academy was in the city of Lahore. The standoff now appears to be over but at great cost, with reports of dozens of people dead and wounded. And this assault bears a striking resemblance to other recent attacks, including one last year in the Indian city of Mumbai. NPR's Anne Garrels is covering this story from Pakistan's capital, Islamabad. And Anne, when I say this there's a resemblance, what I mean is you have another situation here where gunmen seem to storm a building and they're willing to try to hold it under siege.
[Anne Garrels:] Absolutely. They went in dressed in police uniforms. They infiltrated the police academy early in the morning, just as about 700 cadets had gathered for a morning drill. They timed it for sort of maximum effect. The gun battles went on for hours, and it was only after actually, more than seven hours that commandos finally overwhelmed the gunmen in a key building where they'd been holed up. We suddenly saw commandoes on the roof raising their arms in victory. They unleashed more gunfire into the air, but that time, it was in jubilation.
[Steve Inskeep:] And so does this mean that all the gunmen have been captured or killed?
[Anne Garrels:] Well, we still don't know that. The compound's very large. They're searching through the compound. At least one gunman has been captured alive, according to officials, and we still don't know, in fact, how many gunmen may have been involved.
[Steve Inskeep:] Now what do these attacks mean for the Pakistani government, which was already under a lot of pressure?
[Anne Garrels:] It just emphasizes the government's inability to deal with a growing internal threat. And it's not just the Taliban working along the Afghan border. Clearly, other militant groups are hitting urban areas. Commentary today has been highly critical of the government, with analysts, retired generals saying the military and the government needs to look at Pakistan's longstanding support for militant groups, which the intelligence services used to fight India in Kashmir. But now, apparently, these same groups are turning their guns on the state. However, the government today, once again, looked outside Pakistan for the roots of the problem. The president's chief security adviser blamed foreign hands, code words meaning India. You know, stopping the attacks, though, means figuring out and acknowledging who is doing this. Pakistan's authorities have promised a thorough investigation in the past. They promised that again today. But in the past, there have been few results to these investigations.
[Steve Inskeep:] They may be looking outside Pakistan for an enemy to blame, but the United States seem to be looking inside Pakistan, and looking for more from Pakistan's government.
[Anne Garrels:] And a lot of people here say, you know, it's time for Pakistan to realize that the problem isn't just from the outside, it's Pakistan's own problem, but that the government and the military have been slow to shift their thinking.
[Steve Inskeep:] NPR's Anne Garrels is in Islamabad. Anne, thanks very much.
[Anne Garrels:] Thank you.

[Rachel Martin:] Let's get right down to it. After a two-week focus on tariffs, the White House is going to turn its attention back to school safety this week.
[Noel King:] That's right. Last night, senior White House officials laid out some proposals, and they announced a new federal commission that will study school violence. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos will chair the commission. Here she is talking on a conference call with reporters.
[Betsy Devos:] We've had to talk about this topic way too much over the years, and there's been a lot of talk in the past but very little action.
[Rachel Martin:] All right. So what kind of action is the White House promising here? We're going to get the details from NPR White House correspondent Scott Horsley. Good morning, Scott.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Good morning, Rachel.
[Rachel Martin:] What do we know about the administration's plans?
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] There's not a lot of action really. The agenda was rolled out quietly in that conference call last evening. We don't expect a speech or other public event from the president. And he's leaving most of the heavy lifting to the states. Now, Trump is endorsing two pieces of federal legislation. One would improve background checks but not make them universal. The other is designed to help schools spot and intervene with young people early on who might turn violent. Neither of those bills is controversial. The background check measure already had 62 co-sponsors in the Senate, so Trump's not exactly going out on a limb here. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer dismissed this as baby steps. And then there's the commission. Now, ironically, on Saturday night, the president himself had mocked presidential commissions as a tool for politicians who want to avoid action.
[President Donald Trump:] We can't just keep setting up blue-ribbon committees with your wife and your wife and your husband, and they meet, and they have a meal, and they talk, talk, talk, talk.
[Rachel Martin:] But so he's done this before, though, right? There have been commissions on opioids, on voter fraud, a whole range of issues. Nothing really changed, and now he's got another one about school violence. So any reason to believe that this one is going to be any different?
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Not necessarily. The commission does not have any sort of timetable to produce a report, although chairwoman Betsy DeVos says she expects to act with impatience because she says there's no time to waste. Most of what the president's doing here is focused on the states. He has renewed his controversial call to arm teachers and other school staffers as volunteer marshals. He's also endorsing a so-called risk protection orders, which authorize law enforcement to take guns away temporarily from people who are judged through some sort of judicial process to be a danger to themselves. Only a handful of states have a mechanism like that now, and Florida just joined their ranks last week.
[Rachel Martin:] So right after the Parkland shooting, there was all this discussion about raising the federal age limit to buy a gun. And that's something that the president said that he was into. He thought that that might be a good thing to do in this moment. Is he still talking about that?
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] This is one initiative where the president seemed to be willing to break with the National Rifle Association. But in the end, he backed down. The gun lobby opposes a higher age limit. The NRA sued immediately last week after Florida lawmakers decided to do that. Trump did seem sympathetic to the idea, but it was left out of his agenda when it was introduced to reporters last night. White House officials do say that the idea could be considered by this new presidential commission.
[Rachel Martin:] All right. NPR's Scott Horsley for us this morning. Thanks so much, Scott.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] You're welcome.
[Rachel Martin:] We're going to go now to Syria where government tanks have advanced into the rebel-held town of eastern Ghouta.
[Noel King:] That area has been pounded by airstrikes in recent weeks. It's thought that more than a thousand civilians have been killed. So the question now is have those attacks changed the complexion of the war?
[Rachel Martin:] Let's ask NPR's Ruth Sherlock. She's following this story from Beirut. Hey, Ruth.
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] Hey, good morning.
[Rachel Martin:] You've been in touch with folks in eastern Ghouta for weeks now. What are you hearing at this point?
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] Well, this ground offensive has taken massive amounts of territory. They have rushed across kind of agricultural land and have now managed to split this massive enclave, the sprawling suburbs of eastern Ghouta, into three separate ever-shrinking enclaves. And, you know, this has been a thorn in the side of the regime, this area, for a long time. And although a U.N. cease-fire was called asking them to stop this and allow civilians to flee, the offensive is continuing.
[Rachel Martin:] So what does that mean for people who are still just living there just trying to survive? I mean, are they?
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] Yeah. Well, I mean, it's been a terrible situation for a long, long time, and now, it's kind of hard to believe but it's even worse. So they say that more than a thousand people have been killed since the offensive three weeks ago. And I spoke to several people there. And one man told me, you know, we can't even get out of the house to bury the dead. It's too dangerous to go outside. And I reached Deana Lynn, who grew up in Michigan, but she lives there with her husband and eight children. The line's pretty interrupted, but she's telling me that the bombardment is constant, and she says a few moments ago, a bomb landed and her family was hiding in the basement with many other families as they do these days. And they all grabbed towels to put them over their mouths because they feared that this was also a chlorine gas attack, a chemical attack.
[Deana Lynn:] They've made the people fear that they're going to hit us with chemical weapons because they always talk about... ...About chemical weapons. I don't know if you can hear the sounds.
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] Those interruptions are bombings, and that's not an exception. That happened all throughout our conversation.
[Rachel Martin:] Wow. So what now? I mean, what does happen? I mean, the government is making this move. Is there any hope for some kind of solution to the problem?
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] Yeah. That's the real question. You know, there's in the past, these there's been these sort of ends to these sieges where the government has basically said, OK, you can get out, and it sent rebel fighters' families and supporters up to other opposition-held parts of the country. But there are fewer and fewer of those as the government takes territory back. And in fact, Idlib in the north is already swollen with refugees. And I've just spoken to people there. You know, people I spoke to in Ghouta say we don't want to leave our homes. But there are some background negotiations going on. But in the meantime, civilians are kind of trapped in this area. And there's ugliness on this war on both sides. A source told me that one of the rebel groups, Jaysh al-Islam, that's controlling Douma, one of the bigger towns in the area, has also prevented civilians from leaving from this humanitarian corridor that was set up for them to leave. And of course, the bombing is too intense that they can't leave anyway, so they're just sitting there and waiting for the moment to see what happens next.
[Rachel Martin:] All right. NPR's Ruth Sherlock following this from Beirut. Ruth, thanks.
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] Thank you.
[Rachel Martin:] All right. We're going to stay in the region because the U.S. secretary of defense, James Mattis, traveled to the Persian Gulf to the country of Oman over the weekend to shore up U.S. alliances there.
[Noel King:] Yeah. Mattis is meeting today with Oman's leader, Sultan Qaboos bin Said. The two men are expected to talk about the civil war in Oman's neighbor, Yemen. The question is what are U.S. interests there and what message is Mattis bringing?
[Rachel Martin:] NPR's David Welna is traveling with Secretary Mattis. He joins us now. Hey, David.
[David Welna, Byline:] Hi, Rachel.
[Rachel Martin:] All right. Before we get to Oman, remind us what the U.S. position is when it comes to the war in Yemen.
[David Welna, Byline:] Well, you know, there's been a civil war raging in Yemen for three years now, and it's really become kind of a proxy war between Saudi Arabia, which is trying to restore Yemen's overthrown Sunni leader, and Iran, which is backing the Shiite Houthi rebels who occupy much of the country. And the U.S. also has a role there. It's providing logistical and intelligence support to Saudi Arabia's rather dismal but extremely violent battle there. And what Secretary Mattis calls a small number of U.S. Special Forces are in Yemen's eastern region battling ISIS and al-Qaida militants.
[Rachel Martin:] All right. So this is complicated. So Mattis is now in Oman. What does Oman have to do with the war?
[David Welna, Byline:] Well, you know, Oman really is almost the only place in the Arabian Peninsula that's not in some kind of upheaval. A couple of factors might help explain that. One is that this is a Muslim state, but it's neither Sunni nor Shiite. Most of Omanis are Ibadi Muslims, another school of Islam. So they have relations with both Saudi Arabia, which is the dominant Sunni state here, and its archrival Shiite Iran. Omanis like to say they're friends of everyone and enemies of no one. And Oman is also the only member of the Gulf Cooperation Council that's refused to join the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. And then there's Sultan Qaboos who's been in power here nearly half a century. Mattis on the flight over had only praise for him. He clearly wants the sultan's help blocking extremist groups in eastern Yemen and because members of those groups could spill over the border into Oman.
[Rachel Martin:] And Iran, as you mentioned, has a stake in this. And there are reports that it is in a way fueling the conflict I mean, very directly fueling the conflict. What do we know about Iran's influence in this moment?
[David Welna, Byline:] Well, there have been reports that Iran has been smuggling weapons into Yemen and, in fact, smuggling them through Oman, which Oman denies. Secretary Mattis has not publicly accused Oman of anything. The U.S. wants to, I think, keep on very good terms with Oman because it's such a great back channel for the U.S. because it deals with both Iran and Saudi Arabia. But I think that there probably are going to be things said in private here. And I think Secretary Mattis is just reluctant to point a finger at Sultan Qaboos about this.
[Rachel Martin:] But we don't know what happens behind closed doors. All right. NPR's David Welna traveling with the U.S. secretary of defense. Hey, David, thanks.

[Renee Montagne:] It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Renee Montagne.
[Steve Inskeep:] And I'm Steve Inskeep. The city of Timbuktu is free...
[Unidentified Group:] Mali, Mali, Mali, Mali...
[Steve Inskeep:] ...and residents cheered as French and Malian forces entered the city. Those forces swept aside Islamist rebels who'd controlled the place for months. The Islamists rule included amputations and the destroyed ancient tombs. It ended with the burning of a library housing priceless manuscripts. NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton has been talking with the mayor of Timbuktu.
[Mayor Halle Ousmane Cisse:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Ofeibea Quist-arcton, Byline:] The mayor of Timbuktu, Halle Ousmane Cisse, is busy fielding calls of concern and congratulations from all over the world. He tells me that the liberation of Timbuktu a U.N. World Heritage site is bittersweet.
[Mayor Halle Ousmane Cisse:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Ofeibea Quist-arcton, Byline:] Sweet, because he can go home to Timbuktu, but tinged with sadness because of reports that al-Qaida-linked Islamist militants set fire to the Ahmad Baba Institute and other buildings, home to ancient texts dating back as far as the 13th century. The mayor says his colleague called over the weekend with the bad news.
[Mayor Halle Ousmane Cisse:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Ofeibea Quist-arcton, Byline:] The mayor tells me, sorrowfully: These priceless manuscripts are my identity. They're my history. They're documents about Islam, history, geography, botany, poetry. They're close to my heart, and they belong to the whole world.
[Mayor Halle Ousmane Cisse:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Ofeibea Quist-arcton, Byline:] Halle Ousmane Cisse spent almost the entire eight to nine months of rebel occupation in Timbuktu. It was rough, he says. The Islamists treated people badly. He tells me a young man was shot dead in the street over the weekend, simply for saying Vive La France, for France's military intervention in Mali. The mayor says the jihadis these criminals, as he calls them put us through hell.
[Mayor Halle Ousmane Cisse:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Ofeibea Quist-arcton, Byline:] No music, no dancing, no watching television or listening to the news, no freedom. That's no life, he says, adding that the Islamists were trying to impose their warped will on the people of Timbuktu. French and Malian troops met no resistance as they reclaimed control of the city, entering Timbuktu proper yesterday to the delight of residents. It appears many jihadis have melted away in the vast expanse of Sahara Desert sands and dunes. Hunting them down in hostile terrain will fall to Malian, African and likely French forces.
[Unidentified Woman:] Aisha. Aisha.
[Ofeibea Quist-arcton, Byline:] The thousands of people who were forced to flee their historic city on the banks of the River Niger are looking forward to going home. The Hamalek family, from the nomadic Tuareg ethnic group, left Timbuktu in a hurry many months ago. Cradling her four-year-old granddaughter, one of 28 displaced family members, Attina Welat Ahmed yelps with delight when she talks about the liberation of Timbuktu.
[Attina Welat Ahmed:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Ofeibea Quist-arcton, Byline:] She says: We had forgotten how to smile, how to dance, how to sing. Women were frightened. They had to wear veils. Long live the Malian army. Long live France, she says.
[Mayor Halle Ousmane Cisse:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Ofeibea Quist-arcton, Byline:] The mayor agrees. He tells me: When I get to the airport in Timbuktu, I'm going to dance with joy. I'm going to dance the forbidden dance the Islamists banned. I'm going to dance all the way from the airport into town, says Halle Ousmane Cisse. The mayor of Timbuktu says there's nothing as important as freedom. Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, NPR News, Bamako.

[Alex Chadwick:] From the studios of NPR West, this is DAY TO DAY. I'm Alex Chadwick.
[Madeleine Brand:] I'm Madeleine Brand. Coming up, the debate continues over how friendly fire from U.S. pilots killed a British soldier.
[Alex Chadwick:] First, President Bush held his first news conference of 2007 this morning. He told reporters he'd held his first briefing with General David Petraeus. He's the new commander in Iraq. Mr. Bush said the two spoke this morning. And he said he understood how people could become discouraged after seeing the ongoing violence in Baghdad.
[President George W. Bush:] It's disturbing to people. And it's disturbing to the Iraqi people. But it reminds me of how important it is for us to help them succeed. If you think the violence is bad now imagine what it would look like if we don't help them secure the city, the capital city of Baghdad.
[Alex Chadwick:] NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson was watching the president. She joins us now. Mara, welcome back to the show.
[Mara Liasson:] Thank you, Alex. It's nice to be here.
[Alex Chadwick:] And so along with Iraq, the president also talked about Iran and the reports this week about increasing evidence that Iran is supplying a weapons and maybe advisors to the Shiite militias in Iraq, specifically the components of these roadside bombs. And Mr. Bush specifically mentioned what is called the Qods Force. Here he is.
[President Bush:] The Qods Force is a part of the Iranian government. Whether Ahmadinejad ordered the Qods Force to do this, I don't think we know. But we do know that they're there. And I intend to do something about it.
[Alex Chadwick:] So there were these briefings over this last weekend in Baghdad where U.S. military officials said that they had tied senior leaders top leaders in the Iranian government, presumably including President Ahmadinejad to these weapons coming into Iraq. What do we know about this Qods Force?
[Mara Liasson:] Well it's an elite unit inside the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. And it's as the president said it's part of the Iranian government. What we don't know is whether the president of Iran himself ordered them to send these weapons to Iraq. But the Qods Force is part of the Iranian government. It is a kind of elite military unit. That's what we know.
[Alex Chadwick:] So there was quite a lot of back and forth in this press conference because General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had sort of raised questions about whether or not the top tier of the Iranian government was indeed tied to this. The president said, well, we know the weapons are coming in, so there. All this comes as the House is debating the Iraq war. And how about what Mr. Bush had to say on that, Mara?
[Mara Liasson:] Well I thought it was interesting. And I think the president really looked ahead to the next phase of the debate over Iraq. Right now the House is debating this non-binding resolution disapproving his plan to increase troops in Baghdad. And he certainly is against that. But then he said pretty soon we're going to debate a binding piece of legislation. And that's a bill providing emergency funding. And our troops are counting on everyone in Washington, D.C., to support them and make sure they have the resources they need. So he is laying down a marker for the next debate about funding. And the debate that the president wants to have is if you vote against the funding you are not supporting the troops. And there are plenty of Democrats who want to see conditions if not an outright cut put on funding of the war. And that is going to come up when the emergency supplemental gets before Congress. And some Democrats are very wary of going there, too. They don't want to be accused of not supporting the troops. And they're happy to kind of leave the debate at a non-binding resolution expressing disapproval of the president's policy.
[Alex Chadwick:] He also mentioned the votes in the Senate in support of General Petraeus, the new commander in Iraq, saying the Democrats voted for General Petraeus and now they want to vote against the policies and ideas that General Petraeus talked about and said that he was going to go lead. And here's a contradiction for the Democrats. So he talked in political terms as well.
[Mara Liasson:] There's no doubt that this you just saw a preview of the next phase of this debate.
[Alex Chadwick:] Yeah. There were other issues including the relationship that Mr. Bush has with the Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
[Mara Liasson:] Yeah. That was actually a nice moment in this press conference -interesting moment. He was asked, gee, is Putin that just slammed the United States a couple days ago the same man whose soul you looked into and said that you could do business with? And it was interesting because the president did not respond in kind to Putin. He actually said there's a lot that we can work together on. It's a very complicated relationship. We have disagreements but we also have common ground. And he's going to continue to work with Vladimir Putin. But there are many people in the United States in the government and in the Congress who feel the relationship is deteriorating. And clearly the president wasn't willing to go that far today.
[Alex Chadwick:] Mara Liasson, NPR political correspondent, joining us from Washington. Mara, thank you.
[Mara Liasson:] Thank you, Alex.

[Madeleleine Brand:] OK, here's some good news on the jobs front for both men and women. A new survey out today from the employment firm Manpower finds that about a quarter of employers will add jobs this summer. That's for adults, but for teenagers this summer's job market is shaping up to be the weakest in more than 50 years.
[Alex Cohen:] So, how do you get your teenage kids not to spend the entire summer glued to the couch? You're about to get some tips from Michelle Singletary. She's Day to Day's personal finance contributor. Hi, Michelle!
[Michelle Singletary:] Hi!
[Alex Cohen:] So why is the summer job market so hard for teens this year?
[Michelle Singletary:] Lot of things going on right now. We've got a tough economy. We've got a lot of college graduates going into the market. We have people who are losing their jobs and taking jobs that would traditionally go to teens, like in restaurants and retailers. And we have a lot of older people holding on to their jobs and not retiring because they can't afford to retire. And that puts teens at the end of the line when it comes to these types of jobs.
[Alex Cohen:] So you've got a teenager at home, a little bit young for the working world just yet, but what would you say to a teenager who's out there hunting around for a job?
[Michelle Singletary:] If you absolutely need a job, keep looking. You know, obviously the types of jobs that teens tend to go for in retail, fast food, you know, they still need people. And oftentimes you know, listen, you may not get the job at the beginning of the summer, but hold on because in late summer, when some of those college students are going back and perhaps some of those people who lost their jobs are finding permanent positions with more pay, you might be able to still get that job. So don't give up, you may spend a month or month and a half without it, but go back to those retailers and those restaurants and those fast food places to see if they still need someone.
[Alex Cohen:] And now I know parents like having the break from providing allowance. But, you know, is are there reasons maybe not to push your teen towards taking a job?
[Michelle Singletary:] I think it absolutely is. In fact I think too many teens are working and they don't need to work. They're some who absolutely need, they're contributing to their household or they're putting money into their own college fund. But more often than not, what parents do is say you've got to get a job, and then the teens get the job and they spend all the money on clothes and you know videos and iPods and paying their cell phone bills because they don't need a cell phone anyway.
[Alex Cohen:] So it's not going towards the college tuition at all.
[Michelle Singletary:] It is not. It's just disposable income that they're disposing of. And parents are not setting any limits and you know and then the kids get used to the fact that they're using all of their paycheck. That's another bad habit. Because they don't have to pay bills and all, all their income goes through you know this stuff. And when it comes time to get a real job, they're surprised they don't have enough money. And so you know what? You can wait to work. Instead, maybe they can spend the summer volunteering at a charitable organization or you know going back to school and boosting up their math skills or their English skills. We push the teens out into the market too soon, I think for some families.
[Alex Cohen:] But now let's say your kid is working. What tips can parents provide in terms of holding on to that summer money?
[Michelle Singletary:] You know, before they get their job, they need to sit down with them and do a budget. So before they actually work and get that first paycheck I mean, you know, have them draw up a budge where the money is going. And you ought to have some requirements for some of their money. That's right, be a parent. So make them put some of it towards their college fund, if in fact they're headed for college. You know what? Make them put some away, I call it the tax fund, even though they may not have to pay taxes, but to pay for long-term things that they may want. You know, books once they get to college, or maybe they want to get a car, and they can actually pay cash for it, with some of these funds. Don't let them just go out and spend it on movies and stuff. You ought to set some guidelines this is where you should put the money. And look at their budget.
[Alex Cohen:] Day to Day's personal finance contributor Michelle Singletary. Thank you, Michelle!
[Michelle Singletary:] You're welcome.
[Alex Cohen:] Stay with us. NPR's Day to Day continues.

[Mary Louise Kelly:] In front of the House Judiciary Committee today, former special counsel Robert Mueller stuck mostly to the script that is the information contained in his report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and the question of whether President Trump obstructed justice. Questions from Republicans largely focused on the integrity of the investigation. Mueller's answers shed little light, which led to moments such as this from Republican Congressman Tom McClintock of California.
[Tom Mcclintock:] And it's starting to look like, you know, having desperately tried and failed to make a legal case against the president, you made a political case instead. You put it in a paper sack, lit it on fire, dropped it on our porch, rang the doorbell and ran.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] And Congressman McClintock joins me now. Welcome.
[Tom Mcclintock:] Well, thank you.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] That is quite a visual you've painted there, so I want to start by asking, did you find anything of value in today's testimony?
[Tom Mcclintock:] Well, I think it was largely a fizzle. He essentially stuck to what he had written in the report without going into the underlying evidence, which is my great frustration. We're starting to find a number of instances where the report is not fully supported by the evidence or critical details are left out. And a few of the examples I used were Konstantin Kilimnik, for example, who's identified throughout the report as a Manafort associate with ties to Russian intelligence. We've since discovered that Kilimnik was actually a U.S. intelligence source. Mueller knew that at the time, didn't put that in the report.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Although wasn't he working on orders from the Justice Department saying you can't go beyond the report? You're not allowed to comment on certain things that may interfere with open investigations.
[Tom Mcclintock:] He refused to explain why critical details that are in the underlying evidence were not reflected in the report. And that's just one example of many.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] I was curious in that piece of tape we played from your questioning your allegation that he couldn't make a legal case, so he made a political one. Of the many things one might accuse Robert Mueller of, playing partisan politics does not seem to be up there. And if he were, he's a Republican.
[Tom Mcclintock:] It became pretty clear that he was not running the investigation his staff was. And his staff was best described by Gregg Jarrett of Fox as the team of partisans.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Why do you say that's clear that he wasn't running the investigation?
[Tom Mcclintock:] Because he was not able to answer many, many of the questions that were put to him and, in fact, insisted on having his chief of staff there at his side to coach him, which is unprecedented.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] I want to ask just about one of the top line takeaways from this and follow on something you told us when you were on the show back in April. You told us you agreed with President Trump's characterization of the Mueller report as a total exoneration. Today, as you will have heard, Mueller was explicitly asked, did you exonerate the president? He said no. Do you view the report and his testimony as total exoneration of the president?
[Tom Mcclintock:] I think the report is very unreliable because we are discovering that the underlying evidence does not fully support the report.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] So I hear you're saying you still have questions. There are more details that you would like to add to the record here. I'm hearing other Republicans say case closed, end of story. Can we not all move on already? Where does this leave things?
[Tom Mcclintock:] Oh, the case is certainly not closed. Don't forget. You have the inspector general that will be issuing the report very soon on the whole origin of this claim backed up by the Steele dossier that the president was colluding with the Russians. We now know the Steele dossier was a complete fabrication.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] We should note Mueller declined to take questions on that today, so we didn't get any light shed on that today. Go on.
[Tom Mcclintock:] Correct. And right behind that, we have the U.S. attorney's office investigating misconduct in both the intelligence and justice agencies. And we expected that to come out. And it has to because this is the use of the most powerful agencies in the federal government. And if, as is now becoming apparent, they were being used not by the Russian government but by the American government first to influence the 2016 election and having failed that, to then undermine the duly elected president that is a major development in American history. And we have to get on top of it.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Republican Congressman Tom McClintock of California Congressman, thanks so much.
[Tom Mcclintock:] My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

[Robert Siegel:] Not yet that's the call today by the Federal Reserve. Short-term interest rates are going to stay right where they are near zero at least until the Fed meets again next month. Part of the reason for staying put questions facing the global economy, especially China's slowdown. For reaction to the Fed's inaction, we turn to Megan Greene. She's managing director and chief economist at Manulife Asset Management, and she joins us from Boston. Welcome to the program once again.
[Megan Greene:] Thanks.
[Robert Siegel:] First, what do you think about the Fed leaving the rates untouched?
[Megan Greene:] I think it was absolutely the right call and for two of the reasons that Yellen actually cited. One was that there seems to be a lot of slack lesson left in the labor market. And secondly, she's concerned about events happening outside the U.S., and I think that's the right way to look at things.
[Robert Siegel:] You mentioned the labor market. Three years ago, the Fed said it would hold rates near zero until unemployment fell below 6-and-a-half percent. It's now 5.1 percent. What makes the Fed so much more cautious than they thought they would be by this time?
[Megan Greene:] Well, technically, the Fed has ticked off one of its two mandates, which is the unemployment side of things. But it hasn't come anywhere close to achieving its target on the inflation side of its mandate. That's its second mandate. Inflation is around 0.2 percent. That's well below the Fed's target of 2 percent. And even if you strip out lower oil prices, it's still not quite at 2 percent. And I think that Yellen is afraid that as the U.S. dollar continues to get stronger, actually, the U.S.'s biggest import will be deflationary pressures. And also, you know, Yellen has said that she thinks that oil prices are transitory, but oil prices have been low for quite a while now. So at what point does transitory become actually the new normal?
[Robert Siegel:] Megan, you have to explain that a bit more. The Federal Reserve actually wants there to be more inflation than there is right now. Why?
[Megan Greene:] That's right. There's sort of a sweet spot for central banks on inflation. If inflation is too high and prices are rising too quickly, people can't afford to buy things. But if it's too low, then, actually, people will wait to buy things because they can put it off, especially if there's deflation. It will get cheaper in the future, so they might as well wait. And both are bad for the economy. So the Fed would like to see prices rising at about 2 percent year on year.
[Robert Siegel:] They decided at their September meeting to keep things as they are. What's likely to change so much next month that they wouldn't make the same decision obviously?
[Megan Greene:] Well, I don't think anything will change in the next month. In fact, I don't think anything will change in the next few months. I think that probably, we'll continue to see slack in the labor market, and we'll continue to see inflation stubbornly stuck on the floor well into next year. And I think that, you know, people are looking towards the Feds' next meeting October, now for the next hike. I don't think it will happen in October, least of all because there's no press conference scheduled to explain it. And the Fed needs to manage the message really carefully. But I don't think it will happen at the next meeting in December, either. I think the Fed may well have to wait until next year to start hiking. And then you look at the fact that, you know, GDP data's always really bad in the U.S. in the first quarter, so the Fed might have to wait through that. And eventually, there's an election coming, so there are a lot of considerations.
[Robert Siegel:] So for people in the financial sector, today was like NFL draft day for football fans something like that big deal. Who was really thrilled with this, and who's upset about it today?
[Megan Greene:] Well, I think that, you know, borrowers are thrilled with this. Anybody with a mortgage, anybody, you know, having stumped up their house as collateral for a loan is excited about this because they're borrowing costs will continue to be lower. Savers and investors, on the other hand, won't be thrilled about it. The reality is, though, that most of us are both borrowers and savers, actually. So in net, it's hard to say exactly how we all come out.
[Robert Siegel:] Megan Greene, managing director and chief economist at Manulife Asset Management, spoke to us from Boston. Thanks for talking with us.

[Scott Simon:] In this week's speech before Congress, President Trump said that immigration to the United States ought to be merit based. He cited Canada and Australia as examples, and they give preference to immigrants based on their education, employment history and financial means. But would that work against keeping families together or admitting lower skilled workers for the farm and food industry? We're joined now by Jessica Vaughan. She's director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies. Thanks so much for being with us.
[Jessica Vaughan:] Glad to be with you.
[Scott Simon:] And why do you favor merit-based admittance?
[Jessica Vaughan:] Well, there's no question that our current immigration system is out of whack with our national interest. The National Academy of Sciences recently found that our current system is a fiscal drain for taxpayers to the tune of tens of billions of dollars every year and also displaces Americans who have less schooling from the job market. So meanwhile, immigrants who do have education and skills and who are sponsored by employers are not a fiscal drain in the same way. So you know, when you look at our system, we're getting two-thirds of our legal immigrants are coming because they were sponsored by family members and only 15 percent who are sponsored by employers. It's clear that if we were to change that mix by reducing the number of family-based immigrants, as has been proposed in recent legislation and possibly that gives us the opportunity to increase the number of skill-based visas within the overall limits that we have now. That would be much more helpful.
[Scott Simon:] In the interest of time, let me follow up with a couple of points in which you raised. Firstly, of course as you know, there are other studies that show the economic strength that immigrants provide the United States. And the other I'd ask isn't it only humane isn't it one of the features that makes America great to let families be united? Don't we have an investment in that, too?
[Jessica Vaughan:] Well, we do have a very large family-based immigration program. Certainly, nobody is proposing that we, you know, not let people sponsor their spouses. But that's a lot of people. What we're talking about is perhaps getting rid of categories like the one for siblings of U.S. citizens, which is a more extended family reunification program. Not many other countries have that, and that's the one that's most backed up now.
[Scott Simon:] But that's not...
[Jessica Vaughan:] We also have a visa lottery which...
[Scott Simon:] That's not one of the features that makes America what it is?
[Jessica Vaughan:] You know, when you look at the numbers, what the National Academy of Science has found is that there are too many immigrants that we're admitting who are not self-sufficient. And we don't strongly enforce the part of the law that says you need to be to be an immigrant. So there are a number of ways where we could make our immigration policy less of a fiscal drain and serve our national interest better. And I think by cutting the numbers and rebalancing it so more come in because of their skills, that would be something that would strengthen our immigration program and people would be more supportive of it.
[Scott Simon:] I you've made that point. Let me get to one last question, if I could. President Trump cited Canada as a model of merit-based system, but several news organizations and the Canadian Council of disabilities have pointed out that Stephen Hawking wouldn't be permitted to immigrate in Canada under their system because it does not admit handicapped and disabled people. Do you want that for the United States too?
[Jessica Vaughan:] Well, a merit-based system needs to focus on education and skills, but there is also room for immediate family members to come as well. Canada's point system really contributes only about 15 percent of Canada's annual immigration now. It used to be much higher. It's all in, you know, how you set it up. And we need to be more nimble in our immigration system and look at the outcomes of our immigration policy the way Australia does and be ready to change it if it's not meeting our needs, particularly our economic needs.
[Scott Simon:] Jessica, we...
[Jessica Vaughan:] I think that we can do both.
[Scott Simon:] Jessica Vaughn of the Center for Immigration Studies, thanks so much.
[Jessica Vaughan:] Thank you.

[David Greene:] You know, a political moment stands out to me. It was eight years ago at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. I had covered Hillary Clinton's entire campaign. And after her bruising primary battle with Barack Obama, I watched as Hillary Clinton made the announcement. She was dropping out of the race for the Democratic nomination, giving up the chance at that point to become the first woman president.
[Hillary Clinton:] And although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it. And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.
[David Greene:] Next time well, fast-forward to yesterday, and I was walking through a neighborhood in suburban Cleveland, talking to voters ahead of today's Ohio primary. And John and Laura Boris were on their lawn. They told me they remembered that moment. They're both teachers working with disabled students. They voted for Hillary Clinton last time, and they were primed to vote for her again in 2016. But one person complicated that Bernie Sanders.
[Laura Boris:] Eight years ago, I swore I would support Hillary to the ends of the Earth. And if she was going to run, I was going to take time off and I was going to go and support and be so it was really hard for me this year because I think Bernie speaks to everything that John and I believe in as people, as teachers, as humanists, as socialists. You know, I've been accused of being people have called me a socialist like it's a bad thing in the past. But to me, it just means caring about everybody. So I think we had the support Bernie.
[David Greene:] Did you support Hillary in the primary in 2008?
[Laura Boris:] Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah.
[David Greene:] So when she drops out, Barack Obama gets the nomination, you said at that point I am going to vote for her in eight years if she's running.
[Laura Boris:] Yeah, very much [LAUGHTER]. We still might. We still might have that opportunity in November, yes. We don't know that.
[David Greene:] That is John and Laura Boris talking to me in suburban Cleveland.
[Steve Inskeep:] Now, hold that thought for a moment because we're about to talk with a Hillary Clinton supporter here in Tampa. First, NPR's Tamara Keith reports on what the Democratic contenders are saying.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Bernie Sanders is a man running like everything is on the line. Yesterday alone, the Vermont senator made five stops in four states, speaking to his trademark huge crowds in Chicago, St. Louis, Mo., Charlotte, N.C., Youngstown and Akron in Ohio.
[Bernie Sanders:] When people come out to vote in large numbers to reclaim their democracy, we win. When voter turnout is low, we lose. Let's make sure that tomorrow we have a huge voter turnout.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] After Sanders' surprise win in Michigan last week, he's hoping to change the story of the Democratic race by winning in Missouri, Illinois and Ohio. Then it won't matter that Hillary Clinton has a massive delegate lead. Sanders' Midwestern mojo will be the headline tomorrow morning. And at every campaign stop, Sanders is talking about the differences between himself and Clinton, like his long-standing opposition to free trade deals.
[Bernie Sanders:] She supported virtually every one of those major disastrous trade agreements.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Exit polls indicate that in Michigan trade was a winning issue for Sanders. Clinton spoke to this concern at a rally at a union hall in Chicago.
[Hillary Clinton:] I'm going to fight for American labor. I'm going to fight for working people. I'm going to fight for good jobs with rising incomes.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] But among those I spoke to in the crowd, there was a nagging concern. Clinton supporters, like Bruce Nagel with the Bricklayers Union, worried that after Michigan Clinton is in danger of losing Illinois, the state where she grew up.
[Bruce Nagel:] At first, I thought Hillary would carry it with no problem, but I think the party has the weight going right now, and I don't know if it's going to carry over in here.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] In his speeches, Sanders is running hard against Clinton. Meanwhile, Clinton spent much of her day Monday in the Chicago area not mentioning Sanders at all. She was in more intimate settings, trying to shore up support among voters her campaign needs to turn out in a big way to win Illinois and beyond African-Americans, union workers and Latinos. Clinton dropped in on a workshop where people were learning to help immigrants become citizens so they can vote in November.
[Hillary Clinton:] So we especially need you now because I know people are worried and they're afraid by some of what they are hearing.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] Clinton was alluding to Donald Trump's rhetoric about immigration.
[Hillary Clinton:] We have to have a big vote tomorrow that can send a strong message that love trumps hate.
[Tamara Keith, Byline:] But as Clinton tries to demonstrate she's the best candidate to take on Donald Trump, today's results will determine whether she's making that pivot prematurely.
[Steve Inskeep:] That's NPR's Tamara Keith. And we're now joined by Bob Buckhorn. He's a Hillary Clinton supporter, and he's the mayor of Tampa, Fla. Mayor, thanks for the welcome your city's given us the last day or so.
[Bob Buckhorn:] Good morning.
[Steve Inskeep:] Glad you're here. Hard fight for Hillary Clinton in the Midwest, bigger leads in the South what's the difference?
[Bob Buckhorn:] Well, I think it's a 25-year relationship. It's a relationship that's deep, that's solid, that's not transactional. It's not superficial. The Clintons have been a part of Florida's life for a long time, and we recognize that Hillary Clinton, in our estimation, is the best candidate and best prepared.
[Steve Inskeep:] Had the Clintons not had such a relationship with Michigan, where Clinton lost, or Ohio, where it's a tougher fight?
[Bob Buckhorn:] Well, I think the dynamics there are little bit different. I think the electorate here skews a little bit older, a little bit more African-American. Those are constituencies that the Secretary Clinton is well-versed in, that they like her, they admire her. They're going to vote for her today. And perhaps in Michigan it was a little bit of a different dynamic. Obviously, trade is a bigger issue in Michigan. The globalization and the loss of jobs is a bigger issue in Michigan. It's more of a working-class population. The dynamics here in Florida where presidents are picked, particularly here in Tampa, the I-4 corridor, is a very different and more unique environment for her.
[David Greene:] Mayor, it's David Greene in Ohio.
[Bob Buckhorn:] Sure, David.
[David Greene:] I wonder if I could throw a question at you and let you listen to something as you're talking about sort of trade and the importance in the Midwest. I was out yesterday canvassing with a team for Bernie Sanders. And there's a nurse named Deb McKinney and she said that she really holds Hillary Clinton accountable for jobs moving overseas and her support of free trade. And here's what she told me. Let's just listen.
[Deb Mckinney:] My ex-husband worked at a company that was outsourced, and it was the Hoover company that built sweepers. And it pretty much ruined my life [LAUGHTER]. So anybody that wants to vote for trade and sending jobs overseas, I'm just not interested in, and she did, so...
[David Greene:] Did and if this gets too personal tell me...
[Deb Mckinney:] That's fine.
[David Greene:] But did him losing his job sort of contribute to the divorce and...
[Deb Mckinney:] Absolutely, 100 percent, absolutely.
[David Greene:] You know, Mayor, she's telling me her divorce was because of her ex-husband's job moving overseas very personal, trade very important. What does Hillary Clinton say to a voter like her?
[Bob Buckhorn:] Well, I think that's an unfair portrayal of trade in general. I mean, why would we not want to knock down over 18,000 barriers to 40 percent of the world's global economy? I mean, I think opening up trade is a good thing. I think we really ought to be focused on how the economy is changing and how the workforce, the skill set needed to compete in a global economy is changing. I don't know that you could blame trade and opening up opportunities for American jobs and American businesses for that particular situation. So obviously the trade deals, TPP in particular, have been a long time in the works. Senator Clinton has come out in opposition to that. TPP does correct a lot of NAFTA's issues. So I think moving forward trade is a good thing. We just have to make sure that the impact on American workers is a positive thing.
[Steve Inskeep:] I want to ask about something else we've heard from voters here in Florida, Mayor Buckhorn. You mentioned that Secretary Clinton has done well among African-Americans. We've interviewed African-Americans in the last day or so and heard people not only say they support her but they support her more because of Donald Trump. They disapprove of Donald Trump. But at the same time, Donald Trump is doing very well in the Republican primary, as you know. And we have heard in the last day or so from Democrats white Democrats who've said I voted for Obama, but I'm disillusioned, can't do it anymore and a couple of them even said they're going over to Trump. Is there a real danger that the Democrats could lose this state in November?
[Bob Buckhorn:] My sense is no, but we take Donald Trump very seriously. He has unfortunately tapped into a very ugly vein in the body politic. People that are supporting Donald Trump are largely angry and upset and have not received the benefits of the recovery of the Great Recession. I get that. I think Secretary Clinton understands that. But I think supporting a candidate like Donald Trump in his racist and bigoted statements to me is un-American and demeaning to the office of the presidency. But there will be some people for whom that is appealing. That is unfortunate. That is not who we are as Americans. But for some they are so frustrated Washington, D.C., so frustrated with their elected officials that they want to change. And they see in Donald Trump the opportunity to shake up the system. I don't happen to agree with that, and I hope most Americans don't either, but there are some folks out there who do.
[Steve Inskeep:] About 15-20 seconds left. How vital is the Latino vote going to be in November in the state?
[Bob Buckhorn:] In the state of Florida it's going to be critical. Certainly in the I-4 corridor, where we pick presidents, largest percentage of growth is in the Puerto Rican community. The Puerto Rican community tends to vote Democratic. That Central Florida area and the Hispanic vote is going to be absolutely critical.
[Steve Inskeep:] OK, Mayor Buckhorn, thanks very much.
[Bob Buckhorn:] Thanks for having me.
[Steve Inskeep:] Bob Buckhorn is the mayor of Tampa, Fla., and a Hillary Clinton supporter, one of many voices we're hearing as we broadcast from three cities this week. We're in Washington, D.C. We're in Cleveland, Ohio, and we're here in Tampa, Fla.

[Robert Siegel:] Now a story about a snack food that is winning no culinary awards. If you've got school age children, you may be aware of a red menace that is sweeping the nation, Flaming Hot Cheetos. The snacks have become so popular that some schools are banning them. NPR's Luke Burbank visited one such school in Pasadena, California, where for many students, the ban just seems to make the snacks more tempting.
[Luke Burbank:] Rose Ingber is the kind of elementary school principal you wish you'd had. She's friendly but firm. She calls many of her students at Jackson Elementary baby or honey. There's just one thing, though, Rose Ingber will not stand for, junk food.
[Rose Ingber:] I don't think it's good for them. If you look at it, there isn't anything nutritional in there. It's all a lot of chemicals and food coloring.
[Luke Burbank:] That's why last year when she took over as principal at Jackson, she banned the stuff. And she says the crackdown has been mostly successful, but there is one snack that still bedevils her, one snack the kids spend their recesses talking about. The Road Runner to her Wile Coyote, Flaming Hot Cheetos.
[Rose Ingber:] They don't just buy the little single bags. They usually bring the family-size bags. I don't like Red Hot Cheetos at all.
[Luke Burbank:] Her students, however, have a slightly different take on the cheese- flavored corn snacks.
[Robert Siegel:] I like them so much. They're my favorite. When I eat Hot Cheetos, I get crazy. I just love Hot Cheetos. I love them so much.
[Luke Burbank:] Shiton Taylor, Olivia Thomas, David Isaiah and others are huddled around a picnic table on the Jackson playground. They say they love the spiciness, the crunch, the illicit nature of the snacks, even the red powder that invariably ends up all over them and their clothes. What's going on with your pants here?
[Robert Siegel:] Today I ate some Hot Cheetos in the morning and I got some on my hands. And then I licked it so it got red so I wiped them on my pants.
[Luke Burbank:] In asking parents not to send kids to school with the snacks, the Midland, Texas, school district called Hot Cheetos a janitorial nightmare.
[Marcy Pelchat:] We think it's probably the case that when you eat a spicy food and experience a burn, you have a release of these morphine- or opium-like chemicals in the brain.
[Luke Burbank:] Marcy Pelchat is a food preference expert at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. She says when we eat spicy foods, something called our trigeminal nerve is actually irritated. Scientists theorize the body releases endorphins to help us cope with the discomfort.
[Marcy Pelchat:] So you get a little high from release of these chemicals.
[Luke Burbank:] Did you hear that, mothers of America? Pelchat says when you take that high and combine it with kids' huge susceptibility to trends and peer pressure, you've got a recipe for selling lots of Flaming Hot Cheetos, or as the Frito- Lay company likes to refer to them
[Jared Doherty:] Extruded snack. And that's what we call a Cheeto.
[Luke Burbank:] Jared Doherty is a Frito-Lay spokesperson. He says Cheetos are the number one selling extruded cheese-flavored snacks in America. And Flaming Hot Cheetos are definitely their rising star, especially in places like Texas and California.
[Jared Doherty:] The rate that this product has become so popular has been a surprise to some degree. It has grown very quickly along with the trend in the food industry for spicier and bolder flavors.
[Luke Burbank:] Of course at the same time, Americans' taste for spice has been growing, so have their waistlines. Hoping to allay parental fears, Frito-Lay has now introduced the slightly healthier baked Flaming Hot Cheetos. Calories and fat were not big topics of conversation, though, among the fifth graders at Jackson Elementary in Pasadena. School was out and out came their contraband bags of hot Cheetos. There was, however, a less publicized health risk that these kids were well aware of. What would happen to me if I ate this whole bag.
[Unidentified Child #4:] You might have the runs.
[Unidentified Child #5:] Your booty might be burning.
[Luke Burbank:] A side effect bad enough to make even a hungry fifth grader think twice. Luke Burbank, NPR News, Los Angeles.

[Scott Simon:] Republicans hope to keep hold on their majority in Congress in next year's midterm elections. But some major donors of conservative interests are reportedly upset with the failure of the Republican Congress to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act or pass other major legislation. Dan Eberhart is CEO of the Canary, LLC energy company. He has been a major contributor to the Republican National Committee and the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and Scott Walker. He joins us in our studios. Mr. Eberhart, thanks so much for being with us.
[Dan Eberhart:] Thank you for having me, Scott. Good morning.
[Scott Simon:] You've spoken approvingly of Steve Bannon who has notably declared war his word against the Republican establishment. Do you share that feeling?
[Dan Eberhart:] To a large degree, yes, I do.
[Scott Simon:] And why?
[Dan Eberhart:] Well, I think that, you know from my perspective I've worked hard to both, you know, give money that I've earned while working and to help raise money for these folks. And my frustration is particularly focused in the Senate more so than the RNC generally or the House side or the administration. And I feel like the Republicans have raised so much money on Obamacare. And they've told voters over and over again they want to repeal and replace Obamacare or, you know, maybe some kind of major fix. And they've done that so much. They've raised so much money, and they've repeated it so many times to the voters that it's become core to the brand and they've elevated it to that status. And then when they've got the majority in the House, the majority in the Senate and the presidency, and they can't seem to get it done in the Senate. And so I feel like it's a situation where the dog caught the car and there was no plan. And I'm frustrated because I want something to be done. If we're not going to use the majority, what's the point of having the majority?
[Scott Simon:] The dog caught the car. The dog is the Senate?
[Dan Eberhart:] No, the dog is the Republican senators.
[Scott Simon:] Yeah, OK.
[Dan Eberhart:] They caught the car being they've got the majority in all three branches and the ability to govern, and they're largely not.
[Scott Simon:] What about the argument, though, that any politician in any year has to be aware of public opinion polls and that there just didn't seem to be the results of the election being noted, there just didn't seem to be the public support to overturn the Affordable Care Act because people, a lot of Americans, were concerned that they would be left without health care coverage.
[Dan Eberhart:] Sure. Why I think that's a good point. And I do think we have to look at the situation holistically. But I think that, you know, a lot of these people you know, particularly let's take John McCain for instance. You know, one of McCain's commercials said he wasn't, you know, against Obamacare; he was leading the fight in the Senate against Obamacare. And then he, you know, does the kind of dramatic thumbs down, you know, late in the night. I think that the voters expected people the voters expect politicians, you know, whatever their stripe of liberal, you know, conservative, Republican, Democrat or whatever to, you know, if they get the majority when the election happens, to follow through on their campaign promises.
[Scott Simon:] Karl Rove, who is nobody's idea of a left-wing martinet, wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal this week that disdains many of the candidates that Steve Bannon now supports and might be asking for your support. Let me ask you about a couple.
[Dan Eberhart:] Sure.
[Scott Simon:] Kelli Ward we mentioned Arizona, running against Senator Flake there has claimed that jet contrails are really chemicals sprayed by the government for mind or population control and has praised Edward Snowden.
[Dan Eberhart:] Yeah. In that race, I'm supporting Jeff Flake.
[Scott Simon:] OK. In the House, Mr. Bannon has backed former Representative Michael Grimm of Staten Island, who's just coming out of prison. He had to resign in 2015 after pleading guilty to tax fraud. Is he a good candidate?
[Dan Eberhart:] Not really familiar with him so much but I you know, from the surface level stuff, I think we could probably find someone better.
[Scott Simon:] Republicans are now working on a tax plan. If they're able to pass that, would you reconsider some of your some of your disdain for the...
[Dan Eberhart:] Yes, absolutely. But going back to the other thing, you know, I think Steve Bannon has backed a lot of people that I am supportive of, like Hawley in Missouri, like Marsha Blackburn, like potentially what he's looking to do in Wyoming. In several other races, I think he's backing very strong candidates that have a great chance of winning. And I think the Arizona race is, at the very least, a toss-up right now. So sorry, I that's my completion to the earlier question. So your...
[Scott Simon:] Yeah.
[Dan Eberhart:] Your last question was, you know, will I come back into the fold and support McConnell if he gets tax reform done? I think there's a really good chance. I think the country needs tax reform. I think it's been a long time. And I think, to some extent, McConnell and his team can put the toothpaste back in the tube if they win. You know, my analogy for this whole thing is college football.
[Scott Simon:] Yeah.
[Dan Eberhart:] If you know, if you're not winning on Saturday...
[Scott Simon:] Yeah.
[Dan Eberhart:] ...At some point, we're going to need a change of leadership or we need a win.
[Scott Simon:] Dan Eberhart, thanks so much for being with us.
[Dan Eberhart:] Thank you.

[Scott Simon:] The Saudi military said today they shot down a scud missile that Houthi rebels in Yemen fired at the kingdom. Saudi Arabia first launched an air campaign in Yemen at the end of March that was after Houthi rebels, who the Saudis say are Iranian proxies ousted Yemen's government. Some 2,000 people have been killed; more than a million displaced in recent fighting in Yemen. Despite ongoing conflict, efforts towards peace continue. Now the U.N. is trying to get the warring sides in Yemen to the negotiating table in Geneva next weekend but it hasn't been easy. NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric likens this diplomatic push to herding cats.
[Stephane Dujarric:] Talks about talks are complex. It is clear that from our end we want people to come to Geneva without any preconditions. I think we're getting there.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Anne Patterson has also been pushing for this, holding meetings recently in Oman with representatives of the Houthi rebels and traveling to Saudi Arabia to encourage a U.N. peace process. A former ambassador to Yemen, Stephen Seche says he's hoping the Saudis have come to realize the diminishing returns on its air campaign.
[Stephen Seche:] They don't know and I don't think anyone knows how much longer you can continue to pummel Yemen from the air and expect to achieve the goals you've set for yourselves.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] The Saudis have been unable to restore the ousted president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, or get the Houthis to leave territory that they seized. Seche, who's now with the Arab Gulf States Institute, a think tank in Washington, says the only way out of this is to get everyone around the table. But he adds the U.N. has to make sure that the Houthis get a fair hearing and that another former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who he says egged on the Houthis, isn't allowed to be a spoiler.
[Stephen Seche:] There's an ability within Yemen, a culture of tribal mediation, of conflict mediation, on the part of elders and others. So there's a sense that Yemenis can work out their problems. And I've always argued that if they were left to their own devices they probably could cobble together something that wouldn't look like necessarily a success from a Western perspective, but in the Yemeni context, it would allow them to get back to living together and figuring out a way to, in the long term, to resolve their differences.
[Michele Kelemen, Byline:] So the former ambassador thinks U.N. mediators may have better chances in Yemen than they've had in Syria or Libya. Though the U.N. says there should be no preconditions to the talks, U.N. and U.S. officials are urging Saudi Arabia to agree to another humanitarian pause in its air campaign to allow aid workers to reach millions of people in need of assistance. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.

[Madeleine Brand:] For the last week authorities in New Orleans have cajoled, commanded and threatened the city's remaining residents to get them to evacuate with only partial success. Relief officials seem bewildered by people who refuse to leave homes that are storm-damaged, without power and in many cases surrounded by several feet of reeking toxic floodwaters. But writer Jimi Izrael thinks they have a good reason to hang on.
[Jimi Izrael:] Even with dead bodies floating by, chemicals in the water and being asked really, really nicely by the authorities, there were still thousands of people in New Orleans who didn't want to leave. They've been called do-or-die residents, hell-or-high-water holdouts or just plain nuts. Maybe those that remain behind figure it's better to bottom out in the comfort of your own home than to be displaced to a town where there's no guarantee you'll do a lot better. Some say they wanted to protect their houses from looters and maybe the government. According to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, nearly 47 percent of the homes in the region are owner occupied, and it wouldn't surprise me if those were the folks that made up most of the stragglers. Some of the homeowners, particularly the black ones, may not trust the government to protect their rights. With the recent headlines about eminent domain coupled with de facto martial law, I don't blame them for staying put. They have no reason to believe that the same government that took five days to fish them out from this disaster will reinstate their land rights quickly or fairly. America has a history of forced location and gentrification that isn't lost on black folk. Those people could leave homes today, only to return to find the government has given their property to opportunistic developers tomorrow. Paranoid? Maybe but with good reason. There's a chance, however remote, that the hurricane washed away any reliable records of mortgages, deeds and property titles. I think there is legitimate fear among the black population that the only thing they may own outright will be taken from them. Had the mayor found a way to deal with this fear early on, I think he would have found the residents more cooperative while evacuating. It's easy to look at the holdouts as crazy, but, frankly, if my house were the only thing I had left in this world, you'd have to zap me with a TASER to get me out. Sadly, it may have come to that.
[Madeleine Brand:] Jimi Izrael is a columnist for AOL BlackVoices. Complete coverage of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath is at our Web site, npr.org. NPR's DAY TO DAY continues. I'm Madeleine Brand.

[Audie Cornish:] Nevada is now the fifth state where adults can legally purchase marijuana. Sales are booming as tourists catch on. But after they buy it, where can they go? NPR's Nathan Rott reports it's a tricky situation, and some in the pot business are calling for an unprecedented solution.
[Nathan Rott, Byline:] I say Las Vegas. You think... It's unavoidable. For most non-Nevadans, the city is synonymous with the in-your-face entertainment of the Las Vegas Strip. It's casinos and slot machines, big, glitzy hotels and showy stage acts. It's that Vegas that attracts about 40 million tourists every year, and it's that Vegas that isn't entirely sure what to do with this one.
[Xochi Quetzal:] Hello. Welcome to Essence.
[Unidentified Man #1:] How's it going?
[Xochi Quetzal:] How are you guys doing today?
[Nathan Rott, Byline:] Essence Cannabis Dispensary is one of the new recreational marijuana dispensaries in Las Vegas, and it's busy. Resident bud-tender Xochi Quetzal is helping two tourists from Ohio.
[Xochi Quetzal:] Something with edibles?
[Unidentified Man #2:] Yeah.
[Xochi Quetzal:] OK.
[Unidentified Man #2:] I've never done it.
[Nathan Rott, Byline:] Recreational marijuana means that anyone with an ID over the age of 21 is free to purchase the products here. But under current Nevada law, they can only smoke or ingest it at their private residence. Hotel rooms don't count. Casinos won't allow it on their premises because it's still illegal federally, and they'd risk losing their gaming licenses.
[Xochi Quetzal:] You can't just, you know, light up on public streets, you know? You can't just walk out here and just, you know, openly smoke.
[Nathan Rott, Byline:] Or risk a $600 ticket. So if those tourists want to take part in the city's newest state-legal market, they have to be creative buying edibles like those guys from Ohio, scentless vape pens. Or you just straight break the law. Outside of Essence on the north end of the Las Vegas Strip, three women head towards a shuttle van with their purchases in hand. They're visiting from Indiana, staying at the Wynn Resort. And one of the women, Envy Rose, says the hotel makes it pretty clear.
[Envy Rose:] They have it posted on the outside. You can't bring it in.
[Nathan Rott, Byline:] Their rental car company told them they can't smoke in the car either. So, like, what do you do?
[Envy Rose:] Smoke in the rental car anyway and just hope [LAUGHTER] they're not inclined to OK.
[Armen Yemenidjian:] From a business perspective, it's handcuffing us as a business because of that exact issue.
[Nathan Rott, Byline:] Armen Yemenidjian is the owner of Essence.
[Armen Yemenidjian:] Who else can sell a product that no one can use anywhere?
[Nathan Rott, Byline:] This is a question that all of the dispensary owners here are wrestling with, so they're pushing for a solution consumption lounges, Amsterdam-like places where people can smoke, eat, vape or otherwise ingest marijuana without breaking state law. Andrew Jolley is the head of the Nevada Dispensary Association. Here he is inside his own bustling business.
[Andrew Jolley:] I think we should just get real and talk about it the realities of the world we live in. And that is, if you're going to ban cannabis on the strip and in gaming properties, you need to provide a place for people to use it where they don't have to look over their shoulder.
[Nathan Rott, Byline:] This is an issue that's not limited to Las Vegas. Recreational marijuana sales are ongoing in five U.S. states, but none has designated public places for people to consume it. Denver voters approved a plan for social consumption lounges, but none have opened yet. A bill was proposed in Nevada to allow for such lounges in the last legislative session, but that bill failed. Tick Segerblom, a state senator, isn't giving up, though. He believes that the current state law allows local governments to issue consumption lounge licenses, and he's asked for a legal opinion to back him up. Timing is important, Segerblom says. Las Vegas is Sin City.
[Tick Segerblom:] We know how to capitalize on things that other states won't allow.
[Nathan Rott, Byline:] And with more states legalizing recreational marijuana, three including California set to roll out sales in the new year, he believes there's a small window for the city to establish itself as the go-to destination for cannabis consumers nationwide. Nathan Rott, NPR News, Las Vegas.

[Ira Flatow:] Up next, the strangest physicist you probably never heard of. At age 31 in 1933, Paul Dirac won the Nobel Prize. And at the time, he was the youngest person ever to receive that honor. His work figuring out the mathematical equations that describe the universe is right up there with the work of Einstein in terms of its importance and elegance. Ask someone on the street if they've ever heard of Paul Dirac, and the answer probably is, no. The reason? Well, it probably has a lot to do with Dirac himself, by most accounts, a strange man. My next guest has poured over the personal papers and archives of Paul Dirac and stitched them together into a great biography. He joins me now to talk about it. Graham Farmelo, the author of "The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom." He's adjunct professor of physics at Northeastern University, senior research fellow at the Science Museum in London. He joins us from the studios of WBGO in Newark. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Farmelo.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Oh, it's a great pleasure to be here.
[Ira Flatow:] Tell us why you chose such a, you know, a person that no one knows about? Is it because no one knows about him?
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Well, that's part of the reason. Dirac is sometimes called the theoretician's theoretician. And in my misspent youth, I attempted to be a theoretical physicist. And like all the people in that profession, I looked up to Paul Dirac. I mean, he was a hero, as he was to the greats of 20th century physics. And that and knowing that he have this rather opaque life that didn't seem to make any sense, I thought it was a challenge to try to bring the life of this fantastic physicist...
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] ...to not just scientists, but to, you know, to people who are just curious about what would make someone like that tick.
[Ira Flatow:] You know, because when you look, you know, you look you thumb through science books of great scientist of that era...
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Mm-hmm.
[Ira Flatow:] ...you never see pictures of him in groups with people and stuff like that. He's always sort of missing from photos.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Well, I think that's true. He didn't like to be photographed. He was very, very retiring. But, you know, on set pieces, he liked to be in the action. When he went to the first big European meeting when he was a 20-odd-year-old, he made absolutely certain that he was standing right behind Einstein's right shoulder.
[Ira Flatow:] We're talking about Paul Dirac this hour on SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR News. I'm Ira Flatow talking with Graham Farmelo, author of "The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom." Why mystic of the atom?
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Well, he had this faith you could really call it a faith that if you had a beautiful mathematical equation, that it had a truth that you could extract from it. So when he set out his incredibly beautiful equation for the electron, that equation had problems. There's no doubt about it. He knew that. But he had tremendous faith, a mystical faith...
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] ...that if you stuck with that equation and worked at it, it would continue to yield fruit. So he had that kind of mystical approach to theoretical physics.
[Ira Flatow:] So he went from the mathematical side?
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Yeah, very much so.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. He didn't have a theory. He had math and then tried to find a theory to fit the math? Would that be fair?
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Yeah. Well, that's a pretty good way of summarizing it, yeah. I mean, Dirac was very mathematically minded. That is true. But he was actually trained as an engineer.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. Dr. FARMELO He had a very down-to-earth attitude. He wasn't in the game of physics to do just fancy mathematics. He wanted to set out the fundamental laws of nature in the most beautiful possible way in order to agree with experiment. His project was to set out those great laws of physics, just exactly the same as Einstein wanted to do. But he never got the celebrity that Einstein did.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Oh, no. That's absolutely right. He didn't want it. He would actually pose as an ordinary member of the public when officials came looking for him, really. I mean, Heisenberg would actually one of his colleagues in quantum physics would actually lie and say that he's nowhere to be seen, whereas Dirac was actually sitting behind the photographers, right?
[Ira Flatow:] Wow.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] He just didn't want anything to do with it. You know, and part of the reason, you know, that Dirac wasn't famous is he had no great moment where a scientist is suddenly propelled into celebrity. I mean, Einstein had one in 1919. He was famous to his colleagues, but the public knew nothing about him. But then, it was arranged that there would be this great conflict between Einstein and Newton over the bending of starlight. And then overnight, Einstein became a world celebrity.
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Likewise, Hawking with his book you know, he was not famous until his incredibly popular book came out, and then he was propelled onto the stage.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm. So he so did he go lead his whole life unknown, but well-respected among his colleagues?
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Oh, yeah. If I may say, well-respected is an understatement.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] I mean, as I said, people like, you know, Richard Feynman and these have gone on the records saying he was their hero. He was the person they looked up to.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm. If in 1933, he won the Nobel Prize. And as I said before, he was the youngest theoretician to do that. What did he actually win it for?
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] That's right. Well, he won it for his contributions to quantum mechanics. Now, quantum mechanics is the theory of the roughly speaking of the micro world. Newton's theories, that covers bridges and planets and things like that, that doesn't work when you try to use it right down at the atomic level. And quantum mechanics, which is the most revolutionary theory of the 20th century, was developed, discovered by a handful of physicists, one of whom was Paul Dirac. Now, the Nobel Committee were actually quite slow to recognize reward quantum mechanics because there was actually rather little evidence that it was correct, at least in the eyes of the conservatives who were running the Nobel Academy at that time. But Dirac had this fantastic success when he made his prediction of the anti-electron, the antiparticle of the electron. And it was and then it was discovered in America in 1932. And that was such a success that they decided that he should be given the Nobel Prize in 1933.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow. Talking with, well, with Graham Farmelo, author of "The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom." Our number: 1-800-989-8255. And he lived in this era of great discovery in physics, in quantum mechanics. If you'd like to ask our author, Graham Farmelo, a question about Dirac or any other great physicists who were alive at that time -that was some time to be alive back then our number: 1-800-989-8255. Or also, you can tweet us at @scifi, @-S-C-I-F-R-I. We have to take a short break, but stay with us. We'll be right back with "The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom," Graham Farmelo. We'll be right back. You're listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR News. I'm Ira Flatow, talking with Graham Farmelo, author of "The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom." 1-800-989-8255. And Graham, you talk about how Dirac just was like a humorless guy, speaking in monosyllables, a couple of syllables at a time. And he was sort of all the butt of jokes among physicists about, you know, being Dirac-like?
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Mm-hmm.
[Ira Flatow:] And then there is a chapter at the near the end of your book where you explain that you think that Dirac may have been autistic.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Mm-hmm.
[Ira Flatow:] There were symptoms of being that must be very controversial...
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Yeah. Yeah.
[Ira Flatow:] ...for you to come to a conclusion like that.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Yeah. Well, I have to say, I wouldn't say he was humorless. He actually did like jokes, and some of them quite some quite racy jokes. But taken as a whole, if you look at his behavior, and I did -honestly, I did not start out the book thinking that he was autistic. I mean, but when I look back after several years of research and looked at all the evidence, then in my view, you take the definition of autism, the medical definition of autism, and you compare it to every single aspect of his behavior, then I would say the evidence is very compelling that Dirac is or was a classic example of someone who is autistic.
[Ira Flatow:] What kind of evidence are you talking about? Give us an idea.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Well, you look at all the classic symptoms, so to speak: very repetitive behavior, found empathy extremely, extremely difficult, man of extremely few words. I mean, is it Dirac is someone who there was actually a unit called a Dirac, which was one word an hour, which was used in Cambridge. Someone of an extremely narrow range of interests, or at least, it certainly appeared like that in his younger years. Later on, when he was at Florida State University on the faculty there, I mean, he did loosen up, somewhat. But if you go through it systematically...
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] ...it's really I think the evidence is very compelling.
[Ira Flatow:] Hmm. 1-800-989-8255. Bill in California. Hi. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
[Bill:] Hi. Thank you. I just wanted to ask your guest. There's a famous picture of Richard Feynman and Dirac outside of, I think, one of the institutes of physics in France, if he knew what the circumstances were of that picture? And also, if he could comment on Dirac's influence on Feynman, who I think was actually pretty great.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Yeah. Well, I think the picture you're talking about is was taken in Poland. And that was one of the times where Feynman tried to pin Dirac down, something he often wanted to do, because as I said earlier, Dirac was a hero to Feynman. Feynman was working on a theory in photons, electrons, building on Dirac's great work in the mid-1920s. But he found as he Feynman often said to friends extremely difficult to get anything out of Dirac. He was a person of such he was so inward, so to speak...
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] ...so unwilling to open up that Feynman found it virtually hopeless.
[Ira Flatow:] What would what if he were alive today and it may be an unfair question, but I'll ask it anyhow. What do you think he would make of string theory and these other mathematical models? And he loved math. Would he be in favor of something like string theory?
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] I personally obviously it's difficult to talk about somebody who's dead.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. Yeah.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] But, if you ask me.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] I mean, the key thing here, in my opinion, is that what Dirac believed more than anything else, right, is that beauty is the lodestar of fundamental theories of nature, that he really believed that fundamental theories advance from one to the next, each subsequent theory being more beautiful than the one that preceded it. This, to him, and I quote, was like a religion. He said at one point that for him, the beauty of the mathematical equations was more important than the agreement they give with experiment. Very controversial statement. Now, if you look at string theory now, if we take what the great practitioners of that theory are saying at face value, then it appears that, all right. There's no direct experimental evidence for that. That...
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. Yeah.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] ...that's impossible to deny. But it's an enormously rich theory, a generalization of a theory that we know works well and has enormous potential. And Dirac, in my view, would be urging those theories to persist, persist with the with what beauty is telling them, so to speak in and have faith that eventually you will get agreement with experiment.
[Ira Flatow:] Let's go to Darcy in Columbus, Ohio. Hi, Darcy.
[Darcy:] Hi. I was wondering, why wasn't he more recognized for his discovery of the anti-electron and other particles...
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Well...
[Darcy:] ...in modern society?
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Yeah, yeah. I think that's a really good question. Just look at what that discovery is. I mean, Heisenberg, Dirac's friend and competitor, said that the discovery of the anti-electron, the first example of antimatter, was, in Heisenberg's view, perhaps the most important of all the leaps forward in 20th century physics. Just let's get this in perspective a second. Dirac, as I said, predicted on the basis of beautiful mathematics, not on the basis of experiment, that there should exist this stuff called antimatter.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] If you look at the theories of the early universe now, then at the very beginning of the universe, you have half matter, half antimatter. So, by that notion, Dirac conceived half the universe in his head. Unbelievable achievement.
[Ira Flatow:] That was a very Einsteinian sort of thing that...
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Absolutely.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. Yeah.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] I mean, I think it's incredible. But our caller asks, why wasn't he recognized? Well, I think we go back, you know, Dirac didn't want public fame. There was nobody who had the who was an impresario for Dirac, so to speak, who wanted to project him as a great genius. Right? And consequently, with his modesty and what have you, his name never got into the public eye. I will say another thing, too, a very important thing, that although we talk about the discovery of antimatter as being a great drama, it was not seen like that at that time because Dirac's theory was seen as so way out, right, that people didn't actually take much notice of it. And it's only today that we've if you like, we dramatize it in retrospect. So, you know, I think that's a big part of it, too.
[Ira Flatow:] Hmm. Okay, Darcy. Thanks for calling. 1-800-989-8255. You didn't talk much about his upbringing, but there's a part in your book, one night in Tallahassee, he opens up to a friend, another teacher at Florida State, and a strange thing happened. Tell us about that night.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Mm-hmm. Well, he opened up, yes, to Kurt Hofer at FSU, but also to a group of other friends...
[Ira Flatow:] Hmm.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] ...each time giving the same account. I was very, very careful to that's typical of Dirac. Once he found a way of presenting something, he stuck to it, like his lectures and all the rest of it. Dirac's account of his childhood was R-rated. He had a very domineering father, Charles, who was Swiss. And he's and a rather shrinking violet of a mother, Flo.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] And their the father insisted on speaking to his children only in French. And at meal times, they split into two: the father and Paul Dirac, and mother and the other two children, so that Charles and Paul were only talking in French, the others only speaking in English. Most bizarre family setup. In fact, in 1933, a well-informed article says that the young Dirac thought that men spoke French and women spoke English.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] But his father was absolutely ruthless with his son. Any kind of grammatical error and Dirac would be denied his next wish. And according to Paul Dirac, that so frightened, intimated the young Paul that he withdrew into himself and spoke only when spoken to, and very sparingly. I personally don't think that's the right reading of it, but that was how he saw his terrible childhood and how a man like Dirac never said a bad word about anyone, hardly. The one person he loathed was his father.
[Ira Flatow:] Hmm. And that night in Florida State?
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] That's when he opened up to Kurt Hofer. Yeah.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. He just spewed out, just spewed for a couple hours.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Well, he did, absolutely. I mean, absolutely. I...
[Ira Flatow:] You know, it's somebody said, he had nothing to say until then, and then he just opened up.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Yeah. And, you know, he did this. He would say nothing for hours on end, people would find it painful.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] And then, once he had something he wanted to tell...
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] ...to talk about, then he would open up and he would talk for an hour sometime on one occasion, two hours, like with Kurt Hofer, taking in rather like Laurence Olivier declaiming from Shakespeare in perfectly carved sentences...
[Ira Flatow:] Hmm.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] ...that would just that would spell out...
[Ira Flatow:] Wow.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] ...in this case, the pain of his childhood.
[Ira Flatow:] Did he make any predictions about antimatter that we're still trying to test today or look for? Or is is his work still relevant today, or was it too long ago?
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Oh, my goodness gracious. I mean, Dirac is like all really great minds. He's posthumously productive. I mean, the stuff that Dirac did on quantum mechanics, quantum theory, is still an inspiration to physicists today. And incidentally, not just his spirit, the spirit of mathematical beauty. But if you look at the way he treated, for example, his theory of the monopole. In 1931, in the same paper where he predicted the anti-electron, he set out a quantum theory of the single magnetic pole called the magnetic monopole.
[Ira Flatow:] Hmm.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Now, that's not been discovered. But most physicists think that one day it will be discovered. And the geometric theory that he set out on that is extremely influential. In fact, I'll tell you, Ira.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] I was working this summer, I was the director of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study. And I found out just recently that the biggest advance in quantum field theory in the last in the 1990s, right, technically is called the AdsCFT correspondence. Talking to the person that did that, Juan Maldacena, it turned out that the precursor of that paper was written in 1963 by Paul Dirac.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] So I was amazed. It wasn't even in the first edition of my book. I really hadn't realized it. So Dirac is still productive, still his papers can still be read. Often people say, the more you read Dirac...
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] ...the more you understand quantum mechanics.
[Ira Flatow:] All right. A tweet from Steve DH. He wants to know whatever happened to Dirac's graduate students. Are they still out there?
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] He didn't have that many, you know? In fact, he didn't know much about teaching. On one occasion at Cambridge, they were talking about the art of teaching. And after about an hour and a half of saying nothing, Paul Dirac piped up and said: What is supervision?
[Ira Flatow:] That was it?
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] That was it. He had no idea, right? But...
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] ...he, nonetheless, had some very successful graduate students, nearly all of whom, incidentally, were very, very bright. Dirac was a hands-off graduate student. He had people like Harish-Chandra, the great mathematician, one of his students. Dennis Sciama, Stephen Hawking's supervisor, was supervised by Dirac. So, he did have successful students. But I don't think he'd be most...
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] ...people's idea of a successful supervisor.
[Ira Flatow:] Well, did he talk to them mathematically? With the trouble speaking verbally to anybody, did he open up to them verbally, or did he you know, just one who gets to the blackboard and puts the equations or explains the math to them?
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] He wouldn't open up in the same way that you or I would open up. But he did he had the rudiments of supervision in a sense that he knew you had to give your students soluble problems. But the idea of being a support and an enthuser, that was lost on Paul Dirac.
[Ira Flatow:] And put all this together, that's why you're thinking that he might have been autistic.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Well, yes. I mean, as I said, I looked at his whole behavior when making that speculation.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. Yeah.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] And it is a speculation.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. Yeah. We're talking about Paul Dirac with Graham Farmelo, author of "The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom" on SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR News. I'm Ira Flatow. Our number is 1-800-989-8255. Let's see if we can get a phone to a phone call or two in before we have to leave. Ben in Louisville.
[Ben:] Hi. I have a question about the discovery of antimatter. And can you describe what led him to predict its existence before it had been detected?
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Yes. Well, he had this equation, perhaps his most famous contribution to physics, which was the Dirac called the Dirac equation. Now, that equation describes the electron. Now, the reason why it's so special is that it was an arranged marriage between quantum theory and Einstein's special theory of relativity.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] It was it actually combined those two in giving a description of the electron. Now, the equation was a complete triumph, right? Because it explained, for example, why the electron has spin, something that was seen as completely magical. The problem is it did have problems, right? And what Dirac did after a long chain of reasoning was to say that his equation was right if and he deduced this from his mathematics there existed another particle that has the same mass as the electron but the opposite charge. And that was the particle that showed up in the cosmic rays raining down in California on the 2nd of August, 1932, when the great American experimenter Carl Anderson actually saw that first antiparticle.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm. Did he was he able to predict where all these antimatter went to after the Big Bang?
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] No, no. What he did correctly say was that the fundamental property of antimatter is that when you have, say, an electron and anti-electron, when you bring them together, they annihilate each other...
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] ...into radiation. That's the fundamental thing about matter and antimatter.
[Ira Flatow:] One last question from Philip at FSU. Hi, Philip.
[Philip:] Hi. How are you?
[Ira Flatow:] Hi, there.
[Philip:] I wanted to know what was the last thing Paul Dirac was working on, like his last publication or his last science paper.
[Ira Flatow:] Before he died. Yeah.
[Philip:] Yeah.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Well, the last paper he was he wrote was a paper that told people to move on from his theory.
[Ira Flatow:] Hmm.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] He had a theory of photons and electrons. He discovered that way back in 1926. But he thought that theory was fundamentally flawed, and he urged young physicists to be revolutionaries and go beyond that theory. So it's amazingly selfless, in a way. He wasn't trying to back up his own stuff. Rather, he was urging other people to move on and do dramatically new things.
[Ira Flatow:] So he had to tell people, you know, this was my time, now it's your time.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Absolutely.
[Ira Flatow:] Find your own idea.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] That's right. And I must say, what upset him about those theories was the presence of these infinities in the equations that describe these electron-photon interactions. And if you look at string theory today, that is a finite theory. So you could say that Dirac was validated there in that we that his hatred of those infinities is borne out by having a theory now that is finite.
[Ira Flatow:] But he'd have to have 11 dimensions or something like that.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] That's true. But hold on. You know, we may discover these extra dimensions with the Large Hadron Collider, you know?
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. But would that be and that would be satisfying to him, and he would accept that we have these weird 11 dimensions, and that would fit mathematically for him.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Oh, yeah. But ultimately, experiment has to be the thing that has to be followed. But yeah, you can be as mathematically adventurous as you like, as long as your feet are on the ground with experiment.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm. So the theory has to predict an experiment that you can do.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's what Dirac would insist, that you have to be able to compare and that causes a difficulty with string theory.
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] But I don't think it's an insuperable one.
[Ira Flatow:] Oh, you think that these the experiments will find something there, do you think?
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Oh, I don't know. I hope so. We're all looking forward to the Large Hadron Collider, aren't we? Because then we it really will sort out, you know, how good our theories are. It's going to be fantastic.
[Ira Flatow:] I'm hoping they get it fixed and fire it up real soon.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Yeah. Me, too. And, you know, at CERN, there is a Dirac road. I mean, Dirac actually well, he wouldn't go to Switzerland because he hated his Swiss father so much. But he did go back there in the 1970s, and there is a Rue Dirac. And that beam passes through Rue Dirac there.
[Ira Flatow:] That's poetic justice. Thank you very much, Graham, for taking time to be with us.
[Dr. Graham Farmelo:] Hey, it's my pleasure, Ira.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. Graham Farmelo, author of the "The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom." Very easy read, very nice history book, the history of science book about someone you may never have known about before.

[David Greene:] This was already expected to be a very busy fall. In Congress, looks like it might be even busier, maybe even more politically fraught.
[Rachel Martin:] Yep. After the administration's announcement that it's going to end DACA, there were widespread protests around the country yesterday.
[Unidentified Protesters:] [Chanting] Unafraid.
[Unidentified Protester:] [Chanting] Undocumented.
[Unidentified Protesteres:] [Chanting] Unafraid.
[Unidentified Protester:] [Chanting] Undocumented.
[Unidentified Protesteres:] [Chanting] Unafraid.
[Unidentified Protester:] [Chanting] Undocumented.
[Rachel Martin:] The Trump administration says it is now up to Congress the House and the Senate to make a plan to protect the 800,000 immigrants who will be affected when this program comes to a close.
[President Donald Trump:] I have a love for these people. And hopefully, now Congress will be able to help them and do it properly. And I can tell you, in speaking to members of Congress, they want to be able to do something and do it right.
[David Greene:] OK. So how quickly will Congress do something if they're going to do something with DACA? NPR's Domenico Montanaro is here to discuss that with us. Hey, Domenico.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Good morning.
[David Greene:] So is this actually on the congressional agenda now that the president has tossed the ball into Congress' court?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] You know, not exactly and certainly not immediately. I mean, Congress has a jam-packed September. It's got 12 legislative days to get some big important things done. Think about that Hurricane Harvey relief funding, debt limit...
[David Greene:] Maybe Irma now. I mean, that could even add more to...
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Right. Which is now the strongest hurricane to make landfall. And, you know, they need to get that Harvey relief funding through a debt limit increase that's likely to be tied to Hurricane Harvey funding, or at least that's what the administration wants. And they need government funding to avoid a shutdown by the end of the month. So those are all big, big things. You know, after that, a comprehensive tax code overhaul is really the big Republican priority agenda item. And that's something that really you know, it hasn't gotten done in 30 years in Congress expected to take up a lot of time. Republican leaders have not promised any kind of urgency on a DACA fix or even committed to taking it up. You know, Speaker Ryan and Mitch McConnell both issued statements and you know, kind of sympathetic on DACA but more talking about hopes...
[David Greene:] But not making any promises.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] ...Rather than taking it up. Yeah.
[David Greene:] What would doing something about DACA look like? I mean, could Congress actually legalize this program that we saw come into effect under President Obama? What would happen?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] It'd be closer to doing something like the DREAM Act something that had been first introduced in 2002, 15 years ago. So take getting something done in six months that's been talked about for 15 years is kind of difficult to get done. It failed in 2010. Even though Democrats got 55 votes, Republicans filibustered it. So this all comes down to whether Republicans want to buck the most activist portion of their base and have this fight. You know, several Republicans are supportive of passing a DREAM Act that would legalize people in the country illegally who were brought here as children. But again, those hardline members are not onboard. And it's going to be really tough for some of these Republicans to want to go against them.
[David Greene:] Well, then we have tax reform coming up today the president giving a speech in North Dakota. Why North Dakota and what are we going to hear?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Well, this is expected to be a scripted speech, not a rally. He's going to North Dakota for a couple of reasons. One, he wants to highlight what he'll say is an example of what an economy can do when the government doesn't stand in the way. North Dakota has led the way on fracking and rode out the '08 economic downturn, you might remember, with an oil boom. Falling oil prices have kind of put a pause on that boom a bit. But there's a more raw political reason. And that's North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp is actually one of the most vulnerable Democrats in 2018. She's actually going to ride on Air Force One with Trump. And Trump hopes maybe he could get her vote the way he's also tried to target Claire McCaskill, the Democrat from Missouri much more traditional approach from the White House. They're hoping that this can work, and we'll see. Right now Trump is onboard with that.
[David Greene:] NPR's Domenico Montanaro. Thanks as always, Domenico. We appreciate it.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] All right. You're welcome.
[David Greene:] All right, we are all thinking about people in the Caribbean right now. This could be a really scary next few days there.
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah. This morning, they're in the path of the most powerful Atlantic Ocean storm ever recorded. This is called Hurricane Irma. And it's already slammed into the islands of Antigua and Barbuda and is now on course for Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba and possibly southern Florida. Here's Puerto Rico's governor Ricardo Rossello.
[Ricardo Rossello:] You know, we've had a history of hurricanes, but none of them of the magnitude that we're seeing Irma turn out to be.
[Rachel Martin:] That may spell big trouble for the island's infrastructure, especially the power grid there, which is pretty shaky as it is.
[David Greene:] OK. Danica Coto is the Caribbean-based reporter for the Associated Press, and she joins us from San Juan, Puerto Rico on Skype. Thanks for being here.
[Danica Coto:] Good morning. Thank you for having me.
[David Greene:] So most powerful Atlantic storm ever recorded, and it's already hitting some islands. What's the latest?
[Danica Coto:] Sure. The eye of Hurricane Irma passed through the tiny island of Barbuda, which is just northeast of Antigua, shortly before 2 a.m. So the report so far is that the storm ripped off the roof of a local police station. Officers had to flee to a nearby fire station and a community center. And I think there's a lot of concern for the small northeastern Caribbean islands given that churches and schools that are serving as shelters have not been tested by a Category 5 storm of this magnitude.
[David Greene:] And that could be just the beginning, sadly. What is it like on Puerto Rico right now as, I know, people are bracing?
[Danica Coto:] It's pretty quiet for the moment. We had a steady breeze going last night, you know, and some spurts of heavy rain but that has since stopped. Officials say that the winds of Irma will probably start lashing the Puerto Rican island of Culebra, which just lies just northeast of the island around 5 a.m. so probably around now and then that the main island of Puerto Rico will likely start feeling the effects by late morning. The storm is expected to be northeast of Puerto Rico by Wednesday night.
[David Greene:] I just think about you know, Puerto Rico is, of course, a U.S. territory. This storm could head from there maybe to Florida, where people are bracing for this weekend. Are their concerns that the U.S. federal government is just dealing with too much storm relief at this time right now given what happened in the Gulf Coast with Harvey?
[Danica Coto:] Yes. I would say so. You know, some estimate that Harvey relief could amount to between 150 billion to 180 billion. And it's still a bit too early to say what kind of damage Irma could inflict on Puerto Rico as well as, you know, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and elsewhere. And the island's governor has said that they've never seen anything like this storm and that a lot of infrastructure won't be able to withstand that kind of force. And I think the biggest concern is flooding for Puerto Rico. You know, Puerto Rico floods very easily after a brief storm. And now the island faces up to 10 inches of rain.
[David Greene:] All right. Following the most powerful Atlantic ocean storm ever recorded Hurricane Irma, talking there to the AP's Donica Coto on Skype from San Juan. Thanks a lot.
[Danica Coto:] Thank you very much.
[David Greene:] And we have some news this morning on the war against Islamic State fighters in Syria.
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah, David, there are battles taking place against ISIS on several fronts. So the U.S. is supporting forces that are fighting for one city in Syria. The Syrian government is fighting to force ISIS out of yet another city. And then there's this convoy of buses with ISIS fighters and their families aboard that's become sort of an emblem of the militant group's situation these days.
[David Greene:] And NPR's Ruth Sherlock has been following all of this, including this convoy of buses. Ruth, what is it about this this convoy? What why is it seen as representative of something?
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] Hello. Well, it was part of a truce that was designed to end the presence of a group of ISIS fighters that have been existing on the border with Lebanon. And to stop the fighting there, Hezbollah that's the Lebanese militia group and the Syrian government agreed to transport these fighters all the way across Syria to another ISIS held city near Iraq. But that upset the coalition. I mean, they said the U.S. led coalition. They said ISIS should be killed on the battlefield and not allowed to flee on buses. So they bombed the road that led to the area where these people were being taken. And now these 17 buses full of both ISIS fighters and also their families have been stranded in the desert for days. Now that convoy has somewhat broken up. But nobody really knows what will happen to them. And I think the reason it was so important was because it's part of this major debate about, you know, what we should do, whether these truces are acceptable, and also what happens to ISIS fighters in areas where they're losing.
[David Greene:] Wow. So this bus full of ISIS fighters, it really does symbolize what, at times, has been the elephant in the room the fact that you have the United States and the Syrian government on the same side in the fight against ISIS. That's fascinating.
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] Yes.
[David Greene:] So it sounds like there's a key city, also, where ISIS has been on the defensive in eastern Syria. The Syrian military has made some breakthroughs there. Is that right?
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] Yeah, that's right. So that is the city of Deir ez-Zor. And that's where these ISIS fighters in the truce were being taken to. It's one of the last ISIS holdouts. Part of the city has always stayed in government hands. But ISIS has besieged the area. And so these residents had been trying to survive on food drops that had been made by helicopters. ISIS had also besieged this military base for several years on the outskirts of that area. Yesterday, a Syrian regime regiment called the tiger's regiment broke through and freed the soldiers in that base. And now there's this battle that's ongoing to open the road up to the wider besieged area that has 70,000 people or an estimate of 70,000 people in it.
[David Greene:] And what about the ISIS their capital Raqqa? I mean, are they holding onto that?
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] Well, not really. So the U.S. local fighters with U.S. backings have been making big gains there. And it's estimated that about half the city has been taken back from ISIS. But the war isn't over. You know, what really matters in these situations is if you can win the hearts and minds of the local population and make sure that they wouldn't let ISIS back in. That's hard when there are civilian casualties in the fighting. The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights a guy called Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein said that his office documented 151 deaths just in August. And he says civilians are paying an unacceptable price.
[David Greene:] NPR's Ruth Sherlock bringing us up to date on the fight against ISIS in Syria. Ruth, thanks a lot. We appreciate it.
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] Thank you very much.

[Don Gonyea:] All this year, NPR has been looking back at the significant moments in 1968, a turbulent time for the country assassinations, anti-Vietnam War protests, unrest in major cities. The Democratic convention in Chicago in late August of that year was very much a reflection of the times. It was dominated by demonstrations and discord.
[Unidentified Crowd:] [Chanting].
[Don Gonyea:] But the Republican Convention, which came first that summer, was different, opening 50 years ago this weekend. The GOP event nominated Richard Nixon and was mostly quiet and orderly. Republicans wanted to present their party as a picture of a buttoned-down organization.
[Connie Stevens:] [Singing] Stand up, and let's strike the band up.
[Don Gonyea:] And if it was all no more cutting-edge than this Nixon campaign jingle sung by pop star Connie Stevens, all the better.
[Connie Stevens:] [Singing] I said that Nixon's the one.
[Don Gonyea:] In 1968, Richard Nixon arrived in Miami Beach the overwhelming frontrunner, though still short of the needed delegates. Bill Plante was a reporter for CBS News. Now retired, he recalls a background briefing with Nixon just weeks before the convention.
[Bill Plante:] [Reading] This is June 27 of 1968.
[Don Gonyea:] Plante reads from his original typed notes.
[Bill Plante:] And this is probably not a direct quotation, but close. [Reading] So those who are running my delegate operation are very confident now. They believe that we'd win today.
[Don Gonyea:] But Nixon had two big-name challengers Ronald Reagan, the first-term governor of California and the rising conservative star, and Nelson Rockefeller, the three-term governor of New York. Rockefeller was a moderate Republican. Reagan posed the greater threat. The challengers teamed up in a bid to deny Nixon victory and to force a wide-open battle for delegates where one of them could emerge as the nominee. Historian and Reagan biographer Craig Shirley says conventions were different then. Delegates were more empowered than they are today.
[Craig Shirley:] Modern conventions is that somebody runs for president, they win delegates in a state, either winner take all or proportionately, and those delegates are locked up and committed to vote at least on the first, second and often the third ballots for the person to whom they are committed. It wasn't that way in 1968.
[Don Gonyea:] Another example of how different things were Reagan didn't officially declare his candidacy until just before the convention. All year, he'd been coy about his plans. It was will he or won't he as he courted party conservatives and toured the country doing events like this one in Iowa.
[Ronald Reagan:] You know, you have all been so kind, and you've remembered all the things to make me feel good. Which makes me really feel good because there's one thing you could have remembered, and I'm glad you forgot. Here it is 30 years later, and you've forgotten that when I was here before, I was a Democrat.
[Don Gonyea:] So Reagan jumped in at the 11th hour, an early big moment for him on the national stage. But Nixon was organized and ready. And he had the very important support of South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who kept Southern delegates on board.
[Unidentified Person:] South Carolina, home of that great American Strom Thurmond, cast 22 votes for the next president of the United States, Richard Nixon.
[Don Gonyea:] First ballot, Nixon won. In his acceptance speech, the nominee invoked dark themes.
[Richard Nixon:] As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame. We hear sirens in the night. We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad. We see Americans hating each other, fighting each other, killing each other at home.
[Don Gonyea:] Nixon spoke of the need for law and order and lamented the declining respect for the U.S. abroad.
[Richard Nixon:] For five years, hardly a day has gone by when we haven't read or heard a report of the American flag being spit on, an embassy being stoned...
[Don Gonyea:] As candidate and as president, Nixon famously referred to his supporters as the silent majority. In Miami Beach, he spoke of them as the forgotten Americans.
[Richard Nixon:] It is the voice of the great majority of Americans the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters the non-demonstrators.
[Don Gonyea:] This played into his so-called Southern strategy aimed at conservative white voters, including Democrats, in southern states. To Americans watching on TV, the GOP convention was orderly almost to a fault. In November, Nixon won a close election. Here's former CBS reporter Bill Plante.
[Bill Plante:] 1968 was a year when perhaps the kind of plain vanilla or, you know, extremely normal-looking operation like that Republican convention would have been soothing to a lot of people.
[Don Gonyea:] Now, that orderliness for the GOP would not last indefinitely. Let's look at the major players from that convention. Ronald Reagan in 1976, he would challenge Gerald Ford, the sitting president, from his own party. Reagan would lose but went on to win the presidency in 1980. Conservatives led by Reagan would become the force within the GOP with moderate Republicans like Rockefeller a vanishing species. As for Nixon, there's that thing his presidency is best known for Watergate.

[Neal Conan:] The perception remains intact: Hard work and talent can take anyone from the wrong side of the tracks to Park Avenue, from blue collar to white, even all the way to the White House. And it does still happen, but nowhere near as much as you might think. And while almost everyone in America thinks of themselves as middle class, income disparities are wide and getting wider. While wages stagnated for almost everybody in the middle or even went down, the rich got richer these past 30 years. Venezuela and Nicaragua now have more equitable pay than the United States. Over time, the effect of these disparities and the narrowing of the social ladder can corrode faith that life is fair and that the rules make sense. Timothy Noah debunks some of the long-accepted causes of income equality in a 10-part series called "The Great Divergence," for Slate.com, where he's a senior writer. He'll join us in a moment. Later in the program, the growing love of food trucks. But first, income equality. If you're a boss, when was the last time you gave your employees a raise? 800-989-8255 is our telephone number. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. Thats at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. And we begin with Tim Noah, who is back in Studio 3A in Washington. And Tim, sorry I couldn't be there to greet you in person, but thanks very much for coming in.
[Mr. Tim Noah:] Thanks for having me.
[Neal Conan:] And there's not one simple cause, is there?
[Mr. Tim Noah:] No, and no, there isn't. There's a combination of causes, and it's odd. Many of the things that we would immediately think must be causes it turns out aren't.
[Neal Conan:] Such as?
[Mr. Tim Noah:] Such as, well, gender and race. When we think about inequality, the first two things we typically think about are gender and race, because there is a great disparity in incomes between blacks and whites and between men and women. But when I talk about the great divergence, the income inequality trend of the last 30 years, I'm really talking about a growth in inequality. And inequality has not income inequality has not grown between blacks and whites or between men and women these past 30 years. It's actually narrowed between men and women and between blacks and whites, it's stayed about the same, which of course is nothing to brag about. But that means that these two factors don't contribute to the growth in income inequality.
[Neal Conan:] Some people would then argue that there has to be some other factor at play, and that is, well, tax regulations that favor the rich. You're talking 30 years, you're back to the Reagan administration.
[Mr. Tim Noah:] That's right. And the tax factor is, it was one of the more surprising things to me because of all the domestic policies that have changed in the last 30 years, I think taxation has changed the most. When Ronald Reagan came in, the top rate, the top marginal rate, was 70 percent. He dropped it to to up to 50 I'm sorry, it was 50 percent, 50 percent to 30 percent. And it's been that's a fairly dramatic drop, from 50 to 30 percent, and then he even dropped it a little further. But when you look at the effective tax rate, the amount of taxes that people actually paid, yes, that's changed, and it changed the most under Reagan, but it hasn't changed nearly as much as the change in the marginal rates would suggest. So while it has been a contributing factor, it has not been a major contributing factor.
[Neal Conan:] Well, if the middle class has not been pushed from the top, perhaps it's been pulled from the bottom, and that's the large number of immigrants to this country, legal and otherwise, who are willing to work at much lower rates.
[Mr. Tim Noah:] Right, and that too turns out to be not as significant a factor as you might think, at least so far. And that's you know, that's an important caveat. It might be becoming a it might be in the process of becoming a more significant factor. But you know, economists have looked at the question of, you know, the impact of immigration on wages in the United States, and the only area where they've been able to find some impact is at the very bottom, the bottom sort of 10 percent, people who did not graduate high school. Those folks have seen their incomes depressed by about seven percent over the last 30 years. For everybody else, the effect has been negligible.
[Neal Conan:] A couple of other factors people might cite initially as a cause of the growing disparity in the income gap is, well, the decline of organized labor, and that goes hand in hand with the decline of manufacturing in this country.
[Mr. Tim Noah:] Right, and the decline of organized labor is, that's one case where your gut instinct is absolutely correct. The decline of organized labor has had a tremendous impact. You know, if you look back 30 years, we had a much more thriving labor movement in the United States in the private sector. That caveat is important because the labor movement has been very successful in the last 30 years in the public sector. Government workers have unionized at a great rate. But the decline in unionization in the private sector has drastically reduced, and that had a big impact on how much money people bring home.
[Neal Conan:] And the decline in manufacturing in this country, and with it the decline in the influence of labor unions, a lot of people say globalization. A lot of these jobs are being sent overseas.
[Mr. Tim Noah:] That's right, and to the extent that we're talking about trade when we talk about globalization, trade is an interesting case. A lot of economists looked at the question of whether foreign trade was contributing to income inequality in the '90s, and they concluded that it really wasn't. But 10 years later, Paul Krugman, who had been one of those economists, took another look and concluded that while he said he had been right in the '90s, that things were changing so fast that that conclusion was no longer correct in the '00s, because what really happened between the '90s and '00s was that U.S. trade with less-developed countries exploded. And of course the country we most associate with that is China. China is a very low-wage economy that now imports just about everything we buy, and that has had presumably some impact on inequality as well.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking with Timothy Noah, columnist at Slate.com, writing a series called "The Great Divergence," about rising income inequality. And we wanted to talk with bosses today. When was the last time you gave your employees a raise? 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. And this is Hyena, is that right?
[Helena:] It's Helena.
[Neal Conan:] Helena? Helena?
[Helena:] Yes.
[Neal Conan:] Hi, joining us from Kankakee in Illinois. Go ahead, please.
[Helena:] I have a two-part comment-question. First of all, in figuring this income disparity and talking about the stagnation of wages, is the value of an employer-provided health insurance plan added in? Because those have been going up drastically year after year after year, and employees, because they dont pay for them or state them on their income returns, they do not know what the value of that is or how much or how little that has gone up in any given year.
[Neal Conan:] And I know you've got more, so stay with us. But Timothy Noah, is part of the calculation, benefits?
[Mr. Tim Noah:] Yes, I think it probably is. This is not something I went into in my series, but it is certainly true that the cost of that a bigger and bigger portion of workers' income, so to speak, is in health care benefits, and that has, that has been increasing and increasing, and therefore having a depressing effect, relatively speaking, on wages. And that some people have suggested that may also explain why, when we've seen a pretty impressive increase in productivity during the last 10, 15 years, we haven't seen average wages go up.
[Neal Conan:] And Helena, that's an explanation, but the question that we had: Are you an employer?
[Helena:] Yes, I am.
[Neal Conan:] Helena?
[Helena:] Yes.
[Neal Conan:] And how many employees do you have?
[Helena:] I have one employee. I have my own business. I'm self-employed, kitchen and bath designer-remodeler. And of course we've been very much affected by the slowdown that our economy has felt. So yes, I do have one employee, and it has been a couple of years since I've given her a cash raise. However, her she gets time off on a formula, which gives her more time off every year that she works for me. So I think that that works out pretty generously in her favor, and she actually does, I think, prefer that.
[Neal Conan:] So obviously with one employee you can afford to be creative with this kind of thing and work out something that she likes and works for you as well.
[Helena:] Yes.
[Neal Conan:] So not been a couple of years since a cash increase. Has your income gone up in those couple of years?
[Helena:] No, it has not. So as I said, we're in a construction-related field, and the construction industry is an industry that generally does take the brunt of any type of a regime that tries to make a correction within our economy. The last time that something this drastic happened was in the early '80s, and we, in our area here, in Kankakee, Illinois, 40 percent of our construction industry went away and never came back. And so, you know, we're just this is a field where there tends to be a lot of risk-taking. So people go out on a limb. They speculate in housing, and housing is the area that does tend to bear the brunt of any type of slowdown. Plus there are a lot of self-employed people in that particular segment of the economy, and the self-employed do not get unemployment benefits of any kind, and very little other support from the government. So it hurts when the economy goes south.
[Neal Conan:] Helena, thanks very much, and we wish you and your employee good luck and that the whole industry picks up.
[Helena:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] And Timothy Noah, I suspect Helena's not the kind of boss we're talking about when you're saying that there's this enormous income disparity.
[Mr. Tim Noah:] Well, that's right. And you know, another factor we want to take into account here is that while it's true that bosses are paying more that the cost of health insurance has been going up and up, it is also true that companies have more and more been shedding their health insurance obligations. That was one of the arguments President Obama marshaled in pushing for health care reform. So its relationship to income inequality, I think, particularly during the last 10 years, is somewhat complicated.
[Neal Conan:] Is there a class of people who are the very rich? Is it fair to call them a class now?
[Mr. Tim Noah:] Oh, absolutely. I mean there is let me be clear. When we're talking about the inequality trend of the last 30 years, we're really talking about two trends. One of those trends is a growing disparity between people who graduated from college and people who didn't, and a big part of that has to do with educational opportunities. The second part of that involves the very rich, whose incomes have taken off like a rocket.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking with Timothy Noah. We're going to continue discussing the great divergence, what's behind America's growing problem of income unequality and what to do about it. If you're a boss, when was the last time you gave your employees a raise? 800-989-8255. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. This is TALK OF THE NATION. Im Neal Conan in Columbus, Ohio today, at WOSU. Even in an economy that's dragging along, the rich in this country get richer while the poor and the middle class fell flat. The richest one percent now account for nearly a quarter of the income in this country. It's gotten harder to work your way out of poverty and live the American dream. Tim Noah wrote a 10-part series looking at the causes of income equality, debunking some of the myths as well as considering some solutions. He's a columnist at Slate.com, and there's a link to his series at npr.org. Just click on TALK OF THE NATION. If you're a boss, when was the last time you gave your employees a raise? 800-989-8255. Email talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. Thats at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Timothy is at our Studio 3A in Washington, D.C., which is where I usually am. But with us here in Columbus is Jason Seligman, an economist who studies these issues. He served on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisors, now an assistant professor at the John Glenn School of Public Affairs here at the Ohio State University. Nice to have you with us today.
[Professor Jason Seligman:] Thank you for having me.
[Neal Conan:] And this income disparity that Timothy's been writing about, I guess the causes and the solutions are controversial. The facts are not?
[Professor Jason Seligman:] Well, no, the facts are not very controversial. Each year, you can use income tax data from the IRS, as economists like Emmanuel Saez have in the past, or there are a couple of other sources that have been around for a longer period of time, like the historical statistics of the United States that help us to document the disparity in income or the proportion of income, of total national income that's earned by each strata of society, as it were.
[Neal Conan:] And what is the effect, I guess almost the moral effect, if you have a large segment of society, people who believed if you worked hard and played by the rules you would get ahead, your children would do better than you had done, if they see those things slipping away, if they are merely staying in place, some of them falling further behind and worried that their children will not get ahead?
[Professor Jason Seligman:] Well, I think that's a great question because it helps us to think critically and to segregate some of these ideas from one another. First of all, in terms of motivation, I think that the idea that winning pays is a very compelling one, and it helps to motivate people in society. That at any one moment in time is in some sense part of the justification for income inequality, that those that produce more should gain more from what they do.
[Neal Conan:] And provide an incentive for those who are doing less. If I work harder, I can do that.
[Professor Jason Seligman:] Yeah, exactly, yes. But what you're talking about over the course of a lifetime of an adult, say, realizing today that what they were promised yesterday, that the odds are different than they expected them to be, the likelihood that they could actually achieve what they wanted, given the effort that they put out, is very different than what they expected that's a sort of a different dynamic that I think is affecting our society and has over the past 30 years in fits and starts. This idea that you'll do as well as your parents, better than your parents, that you want your children to do better than you have done, and that has always been a part of what made America great in terms of opportunity, that's something that we've been struggling with a little bit recently. And I think that, I think there's a lot of reasons behind that. But income mobility is something that people care about a lot, and it is alive and well in the United States. The likelihood that, say, if you're unemployed and you're in, say, the first earnings quartile that is, you're among the lowest 25 percent paid, you'll move up to the second, third or fourth earnings quartile instead of staying pat when you are re-employed, that's a real phenomenon in this country, and it's got to do with pluck and luck, the old two words there. But expectations have really changed. You take a person like my mother, for example. She was born in 1941. When she was 20 years old, she was in the middle of a new frontier. By 1971, the United States had debased its currency. Bretton Woods had collapsed and there was an international crisis around the United States fiscal policy, more or less. Ten years later, we were recovering from terrible inflation. Ten years after that, we were recovering from a recession. And 10 years after that, we were about to engage in 911. So there's a number of things that have impacted, say, life-cycle expectations that are both within and outside of the control of U.S. government policy, fiscal policy, and even more broadly what we as economists and people in households can plan for in the future.
[Neal Conan:] And Timothy Noah I guess another way of putting that same question to you: Isn't this cyclical? Aren't a lot of comparisons made to, in terms of income disparities, to the 1955, 1960, the immediate post-war period, when there was an anomalous period when incomes were fairly compact?
[Mr. Tim Noah:] Well, I don't know if you'd call it anomalous. For actually, you know, starting in really 1929, through the early '70s, you saw a trend towards greater income equality. Incomes were becoming more equal rather than less. So that was hardly a blip on the screen, and of course for much of that time, particularly the post-World War II era, the economy was extremely prosperous, and that's when we saw some of the most dramatic gains in terms of equality, incomes converging. I think it's no accident that, you know, people get misty-eyed about the Greatest Generation. You know, the years of the 1940s and 1950s are seen as a period when the nation was united with a strong sense of common purpose. You know, I think a lot of that had to do with a greater feeling of equality and that that feeling, in turn, was partly as a result of incomes becoming more equal. I wanted to speak to the mobility, upward mobility issue, because I think that's really important. A lot of people say that income inequality doesn't matter because, you know, because the United States has a lot of social mobility. Yes, there might be dramatic differences between social classes in terms of income, but you can move out of your social class, upward. And that is true, but it is not as true as it used to be. One of the more surprising things I found in researching this piece was that there are several nations in what we think of as class-bound, old-world Europe that have more upward mobility than the United States: France, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Spain. These are all places with greater upward mobility than the United States. The same is true of Canada and Australia. So we are no longer the undisputed champs when it comes to upward mobility.
[Neal Conan:] Let's see if we can get some more callers in on the conversation. We're asking bosses to call in today to tell us the last time they gave their employees a raise, and let's see if we can go to I've clearly done something wrong here. Let's see if we can go to Anthony, Anthony with us from San Antonio. Anthony, are you there? Anthony? All right, let's see if we can go instead, and we're having a little difficulty with our technology here. So we apologize for that. And let's get Anthony, can you hear me? So this is clearly not working, and I apologize for that. Jason Seligman, let me turn back to you.
[Professor Jason Seligman:] Sure.
[Neal Conan:] As we're talking about this difficulties of social mobility, this has all been a characteristic of American society. This has always been something that has been, I think, the definition, at least a strong part of the definition, of the American dream.
[Professor Jason Seligman:] Yeah. I agree with that. There are a couple of dynamics here, though, that are increasingly impinging, I think, on social mobility in this country that are probably fairly global, and then there are probably a few that Tim has insights on that I do not that may explain some of the dynamics between these countries. First of all, when you're growing, there's more opportunity in the expansion for everybody. And so that's a real challenge for us right now, and perhaps in some ways more than for other people or for other nations. But the other thing is that increasingly what is rewarded in the workforce is an educa a group of skills and education and talents that coalesce into a capacity for doing unique, analytical, critical-thinking-type work. And so some of what we're seeing in terms of a lack of mobility and a lack of growth in our country really has to come back to our educational system at some point.
[Neal Conan:] Let's see if we can go back to let's see if we can go to instead Whitney. Whitney's on the line from Tucson, Arizona.
[Whitney:] Hi, Neal, how are you?
[Neal Conan:] I'm well, thank you, except I can't work this computer. But I'm glad we got you on.
[Whitney:] Thank you. My husband and I have a loss-control inspection business. We actually run it in Upstate New York. And we, probably these last five years, have had some of the toughest economic times for our business. We're like a lot of small businesses, barely profitable if at that. But we were able to give our employees all across the board a raise in the last year and primarily because we've started getting rid of hard assets, like we sold the building. We don't have an office anymore. We got rid of a lot of hard supplies, copy machines, things like that. All of our employees now work from home. We're 100 percent virtual. So we've really reduced our expenses, and we were able to give, I think, all of our employees anywhere between $1.50 and $3 raises across the board. So that was, you know and that really is to retain staff that we have and to continue to streamline and cross-train our employees so that not one single person is irreplaceable. We can fit each other. And if someone drops out, we can, you know, we can double for them, and everyone knows how to do everything. So it's been a concerted effort to streamline and cross-train and then retain.
[Neal Conan:] And, Timothy Noah, if you anybody who's studied business will look at what Whitney's just been saying and say these are two things to increase sufficiency and increase productivity and make everything a lot more profitable.
[Mr. Tim Noah:] Yes. I mean, I'd be curious to know how many of these employees are college graduates, because that is easier to do with a workforce of college graduates, I think.
[Neal Conan:] Whitney, what percent of college graduates?
[Whitney:] You know, that's really interesting. I have no idea. I would probably say, if I had to guess, maybe 5 percent of college graduates. They're all very computer savvy. We have a great training program, and they're just very good at what they do. But I would have to say they're probably not college graduates by and by and...
[Neal Conan:] And your business is in upstate New York. This is an employer's market, I would think. There's a lot of unemployment up there.
[Whitney:] Right. But we have had our employee pool probably the same folks for at least the last seven to 10 years. So we don't get a lot of attrition. We do we have hired a couple of people, and then because of our streamlining and increasing our efficiency have decided, oh, I guess we didn't need that person. So that has happened to us a couple of times in the last two years where we have increased our employee base and we didn't need to because we are becoming much more streamlined.
[Neal Conan:] Hmm. So, Tim Noah, this is a recipe for success or at least survival.
[Mr. Tim Noah:] Yes. I mean, it's it sounds very encouraging. In general, over the last 30 years and, you know, I want to emphasize that the series I did for Slate on this is backward looking. It's looking over the past 30 years. Who knows what the future holds? But over the last 30 years, one big problem has been that the education system has not been increasing the number of high school graduates. Throughout the 20th century, we had a number of technological changes that increased the required level of education for workers, starting with the advent of electricity and, you know, going all the way through to the advent of the personal computer. And what characterized the 20th century was every time one of these new technological changes came along and many of them, electricity in particular, were actually much more significant than the advent of personal computer the education system responded by increasing the number of high school graduates. That stopped in the '70s. It declined a bit and then it leveled off. So the real problem that we have had since the late '70s is that the demand for college graduates has increased, and the supply of college graduates has not increased as reflected in the supply of you can't go to college unless you graduate from high school.
[Neal Conan:] Most places.
[Mr. Tim Noah:] Right. So that has bid up the price of people who've gone to college.
[Neal Conan:] Whitney, we wish you and your employees the best of luck. Thanks very much for your call.
[Whitney:] Thank you very much. Have a great day.
[Neal Conan:] You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And we're going to try to get Tom on the air, Tom calling us from Redding in California. Are you there?
[Tom:] Yes, I am. Can you hear me?
[Neal Conan:] Tom? Yes, you're on the air. Go ahead.
[Tom:] All right. Yeah, we have a physical therapy clinic up here. And, you know, it's been very good to our family. And we have eight employees. But my biggest thing is, right now, we haven't been able to give our employees I would say a decent increase in salary because the insurance companies keep reducing what they're paying to us. And we just can't afford to, you know, to share the wealth so to speak. We haven't given ourselves a raise in probably six years. And it's just really, you know, disconcerting that we're providing a service to the public that -it's in the news all the time, but we kept getting slammed with reduction by workers' comp and private insurance. Medicare's got a 20 percent increase coming down the pipe.
[Neal Conan:] I wonder, Tom, are you getting it coming and going? Are your health care costs to your employees going up at the same time the health care companies are paying you less?
[Tom:] Definitely.
[Neal Conan:] There's a Catch-22 for you.
[Tom:] Oh, yeah.
[Neal Conan:] We were talking with Timothy Noah about this earlier. But, Jason Seligman, this is just a classic problem that so many employers are having.
[Professor Jason Seligman:] Sure. Yeah. Well, I think this is one of the great hopes for health care reform, is to reduce this sort of slippage between what people are paying in terms of premiums and the cost that actual service providers are seeing in terms of the value of their service and wage and billable goods. It remains to be seen as to what extent that kind of thing will happen. But I am at least somewhat hopeful. I think this also feeds through, though, even without anything else going on. You've seen this in a lot in the press that a lot of what have increased workers aren't getting raises so much, as they're getting just it's costing employers more and more to pay that part of compensation: the soft wage or the benefit package behind that wage. And I think one of the things that strikes me about that is that workers often have benefits that they aren't of or that they aren't aware of the costs of. And I've personally heard of stories where people going to see doctors or what have you, and they're ironically not they don't feel as entitled as they should to the services, because they sort of don't realize that last month, that they already paid 700 to, say, $1,200 to this for health care.
[Neal Conan:] Tom, thanks very much for the call. And thanks to our guests. You just heard Jason Seligman, an assistant professor in John Glenn School of Public Affairs at the Ohio State University. A lot of thanks also to Timothy Noah, Slate.com columnist. There's a link to his series, "The Great Divergence," at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. When we come back, well, it's the explosion in the food truck. Well, there's an industry we can all be proud of. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

[Steve Inskeep:] It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep.
[Linda Wertheimer:] And I'm Linda Wertheimer. A federal jury has acquitted baseball pitching ace Roger Clemens on all charges. The jury found Clemens not guilty of lying to Congress and of obstructing a congressional investigation into performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg was in the courtroom. She has this report.
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] Seven Cy Young awards, six not guilty verdicts. Those words summarize Roger Clemens career and the aftermath. Inside the courtroom, it was all over quickly on Monday and Clemens emerged, appearing calm as he thanked his family and friends. Only when he referred to his career, did he suddenly lose his composure. For about 30 seconds, he fought back tears and then said
[Unidentified Man #1:] Does it feel better than winning a ballgame?
[Unidentified Man #2:] Do you regret of doing things...
[Roger Clemens:] I put a lot of hard work into that career. And so, again, I appreciate my teammates that came in and all the emails and phone calls from my teammates. So thank y'all very much.
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] Inside the courtroom moments earlier, Clemens family sat grim faced as the jury filed in. His four sons held hands tightly as the foreman read the verdicts in each of the six counts. At the last not guilty, the boys began to weep. Soon the entire family clutched each other in a huddled bear hug. Defense lawyer Rusty Hardin said afterwards that Clemens crime had been that he refused to admit to something he had not done. Clemens has steadfastly denied ever using performance-enhancing drugs, a denial he made under oath to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The committee, which had aggressively pursued its investigation of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, didn't believe him and referred his testimony to the Justice Department, which brought criminal charges against Clemens. The lynchpin of the government's case was the testimony of Clemens' one-time strength coach Brian McNamee, who testified that he repeatedly injected Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone over a three year period. But McNamee's testimony was contradicted on a variety of points by a variety of witnesses, including his estranged wife. And the former head of security for the New York Yankees told the jury that the one-time Yankee strength coach should not be believed, that his credibility was, quote, "zero." The jury of eight women and four men delivered its verdict after deliberating for 10 hours, a relatively short time, given the nine-week length of the trial. Indeed, Clemens' lawyers had told him not expect a verdict on Monday, and he was working out with his sons several miles from the courthouse when word came that the jury had reached a verdict. For Clemens, the verdict was as close to exoneration as a public figure can get in a case like this. And it will likely mean that the pitching star known as the Rocket will one day be admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame. For the Justice Department, though, it was the second time in three weeks that the government has lost a high profile prosecution. Earlier this month, a jury in North Carolina acquitted former senator and vice presidential candidate John Edwards of one felony count and deadlocked on other charges that he had violated federal campaign laws in an effort to hide from the public an extramarital affair and illegitimate child. The Justice Department quickly announced it would not retry Edwards. There had been widespread doubts expressed about bringing charges in both cases. The Edwards case was premised on a legal theory never used before. And critics of the Clemens case wondered aloud about the wisdom of spending considerable government resources on a case with such paltry evidence. The criminal probe of the use of steroids in baseball began in the Bush administration with the prosecution of baseball slugger Barry Bonds. Three years later, he was convicted of just one count of obstruction, and the jury failed to reach a verdict on the other three charges. Bonds was sentenced to just 30 days of house arrest. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.

[Melissa Block:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
[Michele Norris:] And I'm Michele Norris. The Cuban government released new photos of some of Fidel Castro's 80th birthday celebration today. They show him in bed visiting with his brother, Raoul Castro, and shaking the hand of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. In this part of the program, we'll hear about how Cuban Americans are responding to news of Castro's ill health and about how the U.S. is adjusting immigration policy.
[Melissa Block:] The Department of Homeland Security has announced new rules intended to discourage Cubans from smuggling themselves into the U.S. if Fidel Castro dies. The new rules also make it easier for some to come here legally. NPR's Jennifer Ludden reports.
[Jennifer Ludden Reporting:] In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson announced that Cuba under Castro would have special status when it came to immigration.
[President Lyndon Johnson:] I have directed the Departments of State and Justice and Health and Education and Welfare to immediately make all the necessary arrangements to permit those in Cuba who seek freedom to make an orderly entry into the United States of America.
[Ludden:] A new law allowed Cubans to bypass a tangle of rules and quotas to get to the U.S. and, once here, granted them permanent residency after just one year. But a policy designed to shame a dictator has worked pretty well for Castro. Maria de Los Angeles Torres is with the University of Illinois at Chicago and emigrated from Cuba herself as a child.
[Ms. Maria De Los Angeles Torres:] Cuba opens the door whenever they want to either embarrass the United States or get rid of dissidents or when the economic situation is completely in crisis. They also understand immigrants send home money, and immigrants are sort of the oil of the Caribbean.
[Ludden:] In the mid-'90s when Cuba again encouraged bigger waves of migrants to take to the waters, the U.S. came up with a strange twist to its policy. If Cubans made it to dry land, they could stay. But if they were caught in U.S. waters, they'd be sent back. It's called Wet FootDry Foot and it came under heavy fire earlier this year when 15 Cuban migrants were found clinging to a partially collapsed bridge off Florida, the Coast Guard decided that did not constitute dry land and sent them back. Cuban Americans in Miami protested and members of Florida's Congressional delegation urged the administration to review the whole policy. Today, Joanna Gonzales of Homeland Security insisted Wet FootDry Foot stays the same. But there is this crucial difference now, if Cubans are caught trying to sneak into the U.S. by water, they'll forfeit their chance to later come legally.
[Ms. Joanna Gonzales:] We're trying to decrease but really eliminate alien smuggling, especially of Cubans. There's just so many people that unfortunately are lost in the ocean making that voyage.
[Ludden:] And so many more at risk. The number of Cubans intercepted at sea each year has doubled since 2004, another reason for the new policy. And there's another change. Cuba allows some citizens to emigrate to the U.S. in an orderly fashion. The U.S. grants some refugee status and has special programs for others. Now, Gonzales says the overall number allowed in that way will stay the same, about 22,000 a year. But more of them will have to have family members already in the U.S. Analyst Maria Delos Angeles Torres says that's as it should be, since U.S. policy helped divide families, she says it should help reunite them. But Ira Melman, of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, calls it pure politics.
[Mr. Ira Melman:] You have a very powerful Cuban community, especially in Florida. It is a key swing political state. You've got some tight Congressional races going on this year in Florida. So, I think that the administration is really looking at electoral politics more than they're looking at promoting the kind of development of Cuba I think we'd all like to see.
[Ludden:] Some members of Cuba's regime are barred from the U.S. under all circumstances. With Fidel Castro apparently passing from power, Homeland Security says it will work with the State Department and human rights groups to update that watch list. Jennifer Ludden, NPR News. Washington.

[Audie Cornish:] The world of boxing has a new welterweight champion and a serious controversy on its hands.
[Unidentified Announcer:] To the winner, by split decision, and new WBO Welterweight Champion of the World the Desert Storm, Timothy Bradley!
[Audie Cornish:] Timothy Bradley won the World Boxing Organization title, beating superstar Manny Pacquiao. The match went 12 rounds with no knockouts. Pacquiao hasn't lost in seven years, and is a hero in his home country of the Philippines. Here's where the controversy comes in. Ringside statistics show the former champ landed more punches than Bradley a lot more.
[Jim Lampley:] I I have I have no comment. I'm totally confused.
[Emanuel Steward:] I'm as confused as anyone could possibly be.
[Audie Cornish:] That was HBO's Jim Lampley and Emanuel Steward, echoing the sentiments of many who watched the fight. So what happened? To figure it out, we turn to Kevin Iole. He's a sports columnist for Yahoo Sports. He was at the fight. And Kevin, to start, the match had three ringside judges. Two of the three thought Bradley won. So how did they make this call?
[Kevin Iole:] I was very surprised by the scoring. I think all the reporters at ringside had Manny Pacquiao winning. The way that the fights are scored, is round by round. And they somehow thought, in the second half of the fight, that Bradley was landing more punches. And they gave him the scoring edge over Pacquiao in each of those rounds in the second half of the fight.
[Audie Cornish:] Now, the punching statistics are taken by I guess it's something called CompuBox, which showed that Pacquiao landed 253 punches versus Bradley's 159. But quickly, exactly how does CompuBox work? I mean, how technical is it?
[Kevin Iole:] I was actually sitting next to the CompuBox person, so I can tell you exactly. There's two guys. And the first CompuBox person had Pacquiao. The other one had Bradley. And they count total punches, and then they count connected punches. And they have a little box that they punch buttons into. And they are just watching as the fight goes. So it is not always the most accurate gauge, but it just gives you a general sense of what went on in a particular fight.
[Audie Cornish:] And of course, that's not what decides the fight in the end. Right? It's the judges, and it's more or less subjective.
[Kevin Iole:] Right. The judges don't have access to those. And everything in boxing, judging is subjective. In pro boxing, you score the power of the punches as well as the volume of the punches. So in some rounds, you could have one fighter who lands far less. He gets more credit because his punches were harder and doing more damage. And when that happens, the judge will tend to favor that particular person, even if he landed fewer punches than his opponent.
[Audie Cornish:] The boxing promoter for both fighters, Bob Arum, called this decision the death knell for boxing. I don't know if he's overreacting, but what's next for these two fighters?
[Kevin Iole:] Well, I think what's going to happen is, we're going to have to first see if there is an investigation. Bob Arum demanded an investigation by the attorney general of the state of Nevada, Catherine Cortez Masto. And he's doing that to clear his name because a lot of people were blaming him, and saying he somehow rigged the fight. And I doubt there will be an investigation. Once we get past that, I believe the rematch will occur. Bradley himself actually came to the post-fight press conference in a wheelchair because he injured both of his feet during the fight. So Bradley may be out a while, and may not be able to make that November date. But as soon as he's healthy enough to fight, I think we'll see Manny Pacquiao-Timothy Bradley II.
[Audie Cornish:] Kevin Iole is a sports columnist for Yahoo Sports. Kevin, thank you.
[Kevin Iole:] Thank you so much, Audie.

[Melissa Block:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
[Robert Siegel:] And I'm Robert Siegel. In the Mexican city of Cuernavaca, 500 soldiers have been deployed to surround a morgue. It's where the body of one of the most wanted drug kingpins was taken. Arturo Beltran Leyva, was killed in a fire fight late yesterday with the Mexican military. NPR's Jason Beaubien reports from Mexico City.
[Jason Beaubien:] Two hundred soldiers from the Mexican Navy surrounded a luxury condominium complex in Cuernavaca where Arturo Beltran Leyva was reported to be staying. In images captured on local television, soldiers and Beltran Leyva's gunmen exchanged automatic weapons fire for more than two hours. The cornered drug cartel members even launched grenades at the military and two helicopters that hovered overhead. Beltran Leyva known, as the boss of bosses, died in the gun battle along with six of his body guards.
[President Felipe Calderon:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Jason Beaubien:] President Felipe Calderon speaking from the climate conference in Copenhagen hailed the operation as a forceful blow against the Mexican drug cartels. Arturo Beltran Leyva ran what's known as the Beltran Leyva Brothers organization. Arturo was one of the three most wanted men in Mexico. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in an indictment in September accused the Beltran Leyva cartel of moving tons of cocaine and heroin into the United States. Mexican authorities had been in hot pursuit of the boss of bosses. Last week according to prosecutors, Beltran Leyva threw a narco pasada or a narco Christmas party in Cuernavaca. Soldiers and police stormed the party, but Beltran Leyva escaped. Authorities are still holding 26 musicians and 20 alleged prostitutes from that party accusing them of having ties to organized crime.
[President Felipe Calderon:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Jason Beaubien:] As demonstrated in this case, President Calderon said, intelligence is a powerful and effective weapon in the fight against organized crime. And for Calderon this was a much needed victory in this battle. Since Calderon launch his offensive in December of 2006, he has deployed some 50,000 troops against the drug cartels and more than 14,000 people have been killed. The drug war has become increasingly unpopular and even this week, the Mexican Congress has been debating whether the military should be pulled out of the fight. Thus for Calderon, this operation by the Mexican Navy was a rare opportunity to declare that he's making significant inroads against some of the most powerful criminal groups in the hemisphere. Jason Beaubien, NPR News, Mexico City.

[Melissa Block:] The next generation of bomb or drug-detecting technology could be the wasp. Scientists are training wasps to detect specific odors. They train the insects by exposing them to a target odor and then giving them sugar water so they associate the smell with their treat. The researchers have developed a device called the Wasp Hound. The wasps are put inside a plastic cylinder with a vent hole at one end, a fan that pulls air in and a tiny Web camera inside hooked up to a computer to monitor the wasps' reaction. If they detect what they've been trained to smell, they'll converge around the air hole `like pigs to a trough,'says one of the inventors, Joe Lewis, who's a research entomologist. He says the wasps have been trained to pick up a wide range of smells.
[Mr. Joe Lewis:] 24DNT, which is a breakdown product of TNT; cadaverine, which is a chemical that's associated with decaying flesh. For forensic purposes, we've shown that they show odors associated with marijuana. In other words, we have found that they have a very broad sense of detection capabilities; essentially it's unlimited.
[Melissa Block:] How long does it take to train these wasps to detect these new smells?
[Mr. Joe Lewis:] Well, very quickly. You can train them in as short a time as, say, five minutes, because the training protocol is to let them taste sugar water while they smell an odor. And you do that for 10 seconds and repeat it three times with a small break in between, and they've learned it.
[Melissa Block:] Have you ever found a wasp that just really couldn't learn?
[Mr. Joe Lewis:] They all learn. We have found that some are quick learners and respond more aggressively than others.
[Melissa Block:] I guess you're working against one fact of nature here, which is that wasps have a very short life span. You're not going to have these detectors with you for that long.
[Mr. Joe Lewis:] That is true. You know, there are advantages and disadvantages of this compared to, say, a dog. The advantage is that you can produce them by the thousands or more, and you can train them quickly and you can use them in a rather disposable manner. The disadvantage is that they don't live long, a couple of weeks. And we have to deal with shortcoming, but we can produce them very inexpensively and train them very quickly.
[Melissa Block:] Mm-hmm. And you can't rub their bellies.
[Mr. Joe Lewis:] Well, it would be a very tedious process. And you can't carry them around on a leash.
[Melissa Block:] Is there, do you think, some broader lesson here about insects, about the power of smell?
[Mr. Joe Lewis:] Oh, yes. There once was a staying `The deeper the well, the sweeter the honey.'Indeed, there was a time-and let me say, early in my profession that if I had talked about insects having this capability, I would have been laughed out of my profession.
[Melissa Block:] Is that right?
[Mr. Joe Lewis:] But as we move along and find what we're seeing, that learning in this highly sophisticated ability to integrate taste and smell and to quickly link and utilize these type things is a much primitive ability than we had imagined. In their world and on their territory, they are as sophisticated as we are. And they've been around a long, long time.
[Melissa Block:] I'll never look at them quite the same way.
[Mr. Joe Lewis:] Each day, I find that I look at them with much greater respect. In many ways, all these things are rather sacred.
[Melissa Block:] Joe Lewis, thanks very much.
[Mr. Joe Lewis:] Yeah. Well, thank you, Melissa.
[Melissa Block:] Joe Lewis is a research entomologist with the US Department of Agriculture in Tifton, Georgia.
[Robert Siegel:] This is NPR, National Public Radio.

[David Greene:] Let's turn now to Afghanistan. That's where MORNING EDITION's Renee Montagne is reporting at a moment when, as the war winds down, many Afghans are focusing on the future. Renee, good morning.
[Renee Montagne:] Morning, David.
[David Greene:] I understand we're going to hear about one big concern in the country where you are right now, and it's a question that has always loomed over Afghanistan, and that is what the future will be for women.
[Renee Montagne:] Much talked about here, yes, nowadays. I mean, no one wants life for women to go back to how it was under the Taliban who, of course, earned a reputation for treating women horrendously. And, in a moment, we'll hear from a leading advocate for women's rights. But, David, first, let's hear from a man who was part of the Taliban government in the '90s. Wahid Mujdah was in the Taliban's foreign ministry, and he still keeps in contact with former Taliban higher-ups who've fled the country. And at his home here in Kabul, Mujdah told us even they think there's no going back to the kind of government the Taliban imposed before September 11th.
[Wahid Mujdah:] I think during this 10 years inside Afghanistan, you can see a lot of change. Now, it's impossible one group can control Afghanistan. And we agree with all these parties if they accept Sharia, Islamic Sharia in Afghanistan.
[David Greene:] Well, Renee, let's sort that out for a moment. Here's a former Taliban official saying, you know, that one group can't control Afghanistan. But given how the Taliban harshly interpreted Islamic Sharia law, to hear a former Taliban official say he's still committed to Sharia, isn't that alarming to women?
[Renee Montagne:] Yes, it would be alarming, except that, as he pointed out, it would impossible for the Taliban to actually control all of Afghanistan. So, that version, that harsh, harsh Taliban version of the law is not really on the table here when they talk about peace talks. But I will say after talking to that former Taliban official, I sat down in another and you'll hear rather noisy courtyard with Nargis Nehan. She runs the organization Equality for Peace and Democracy. And as she sees it, all sides seem to be using this issue of women's rights for their own purposes.
[Nargis Nehan:] Women's rights is so much criticized in Afghanistan. It was put aside by the international community because when they came to Afghanistan, they say they we are here to help the women of Afghanistan. And now the insurgents, in order to show how powerful they are, they are using women's rights and women's issues as a tool to show that how powerful they are. And the government, reason that the government is so much quiet with regard to women's rights, is to show to the insurgents that the door is open for negotiation. What they really don't understand that women of Afghanistan are not the women of 1990s, that you do whatever you want and you will be quiet. We know how to communicate with the rest of the world, and we do have our own constituencies within Afghanistan not only women, but also men.
[Renee Montagne:] And those constituencies that activist Nargis Nehan speaks of, David, include a new generation of highly educated young women and men, and also a very energetic and emboldened media. Let me give you an example. A couple of months ago, Afghanistan's top religious body, a pretty conservative group, issued an edict. It defined women as secondary to men, and it called for a strict segregation of the sexes. President Karzai briefly endorsed the cleric's recommendations no doubt trying to curry favor, as she says, with militants he wants to strike a peace deal with which led to a huge outcry by women's groups, the international community, and also ridicule in the media. Even though Karzai backed off, Nargis Nehan says telling women not, say, to gather in public places or make their voices heard, that's the kind of challenge women's rights activists face here.
[Nargis Nehan:] When they say you avoid public gatherings, then it's about us. That means that we should limit our societal activities. And then the second then is avoid working in the same office space with men. Excuse me, like, do we have to have, now, two ministries for every sector? One minister of education for men, the other for women? And then they say that co-education is prohibited. That means you're going to have two state universities in each of the provinces, one for girls, one for boys? So you see that they have targeted women. They have recognized this as problem for them, and that's why now they're thinking of how to oppress us.
[Renee Montagne:] Let me ask you: For years, by law, Afghanistan's parliament has had quite a substantial number of women in it, because seats have been set aside by quota. Twenty-five percent?
[Nargis Nehan:] Yes.
[Renee Montagne:] Has that made a difference for women? Some of the women in parliament, people complained, are actually not really there for women's rights. They're there because they are fronting for powerful men.
[Nargis Nehan:] I would say they are right, but I would say that they're also right in case of men. We don't have strong politicians in this country.
[Renee Montagne:] You mean men are fronting for powerful men.
[Nargis Nehan:] Men and women. So it's not that, you know, like you have women as token there. You also have men as token there.
[Renee Montagne:] They're just tokens.
[Nargis Nehan:] They're just tokens. So I think it's not about women's capacity or commitment. It's about political maturity of the country. We really need to go through a generation to be able to produce the right politicians, to be able to find the constituents to help them out so that then they can get to the parliament, and then they would be able to present the constituents there. This is the case for both men and women.
[Renee Montagne:] How important is economic development when it comes to women's rights? The economy already cannot provide enough jobs for a sizeable percentage of the population, especially the young population. How does that fit in to what you're looking ahead to?
[Nargis Nehan:] When it comes to women's right, I would say within the families, it's very important that, you know, like, they have some sort of income, because there are so many examples that you see that women that, actually, they have managed to work somewhere, to generate some income and to make some contribution. The family, their position automatically changes. Their opinion matters, and their decision matters. Their consultation with them happens. They become part of decision-making.
[Renee Montagne:] I think it might important, also, to say that women in Afghanistan are tough. Like, I mean, they're...
[Nargis Nehan:] Very tough.
[Renee Montagne:] ...they do know their own power.
[Nargis Nehan:] Absolutely.
[Renee Montagne:] I think people sometimes think, you know, behind under a burka is a very passive woman, and that's not actually the case.
[Nargis Nehan:] I sometimes can wear a burka to show people that burka is nothing, and it can never violate my rights. This is the problem that actually we really would like encourage the international community to take women's rights beyond burka and Afghanistan. It's more than that. What is really important for us, to be part of transformation. It's really important. And then we need to understand that Afghanistan is a very complicated and a very sensitive country. Because [unintelligible] Islamic country. And, you know, like, the more we get into these things, the more problematic it's going to be.
[Renee Montagne:] Are you concerned about the involvement of Taliban or former Taliban in a future government?
[Nargis Nehan:] Actually, I myself thinking that it's always peace that's ending the war. So we have to turn into a peace process. Concern is definitely there, but not because of the strength of the Taliban, but because of the weakness of our government with regard to women's right and also justice.
[Renee Montagne:] Thank you. Thank you for talking to us.
[Nargis Nehan:] Pleasure.
[Renee Montagne:] And that's Nargis Nehan, an activist here in Kabul for women's rights.
[David Greene:] And you'll be hearing more of Renee Montagne's reporting from Afghanistan tomorrow and next week here on MORNING EDITION, from NPR News.

[Linda Wertheimer:] The holiday retail sales numbers are looking good. A new report shows a surprisingly strong 5.5 percent increase over last year. Clothes, jewelry and luxury items led the way. Here's more from NPR's Wendy Kaufman.
[Wendy Kaufman:] Seattle area resident Joel Argudo and his wife are a retailer's dream. They had been putting money away all year. And then, Argudo, who's a manager at a cargo shipping terminal got a Christmas bonus and a raise. When I caught up with them at a shopping mall yesterday, they said they'd spent a lot more than last year. And what did they buy?
[Mr. Joel Argudo:] Nothing really big except for a TV for our bedroom, but a lot of gift cards, clothes, shoes, toys for the young one, stuff like that.
[Wendy Kaufman:] Another mall visitor Ryan Priest bought clothes for his mother and lots of computer stuff. He bought much of it online, helping to fuel a 15 percent plus increase in online holiday sales.
[Mr. Ryan Priest:] I live in Chicago so just shipping everything online is much easier than trying to pack it all into a suitcase. That way it was all at the door when I get home for the holidays.
[Wendy Kaufman:] Purchases like theirs are added up and analyzed in the latest MasterCard SpendingPulse report, which looks at overall retail sales from early November to Christmas Eve. Michael McNamara of SpendingPulse says Americans spent $584 billion or about $30 billion more than last year.
[Mr. Michael Mc Namara:] The main story this year is growth. From an historical context standpoint, in 2008, retail sales really got knocked down. In 2009 we found our feet, you know, we got some stability underneath us. And then in 2010, we've fairly you know, this is a step forward, this is a step toward growth.
[Wendy Kaufman:] And he says it was healthy growth. There was less discounting than last year, and that should translate to higher retail profits and perhaps more hiring in the coming year. Wendy Kaufman, NPR News, Seattle.

[Linda Wertheimer:] People in Zimbabwe are struggling economically and politically, but that has not dimmed their humor. Comedy is thriving in the southern African country despite the real danger of overstepping the mark and angering longtime leader Robert Mugabe. NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton reports.
[Ofeibea Quist-arcton, Byline:] Whatever the setting live stand-up comedy, in the papers, on the radio, online, on social media, on television or waiting in long lines to try to withdraw hard-to-find cash from ATMs and banks Zimbabweans are laughing at themselves, at life, at their mounting problems and at their leaders, especially their president.
[Victor Tinashe Mpofu:] I watch politics. I love politics a lot. I watch political channels. And they always portray, like, black people in a certain way. They ask questions like...
[Ofeibea Quist-arcton, Byline:] Zimbabwean stand-up comedian Victor Tinashe Mpofu, who goes by the stage name Doc Vikela. He's joking about how he says foreign political shows talk about Africans.
[Victor Tinashe Mpofu:] The one that gets to me is when they say, how was Robert Mugabe as a they can't even say Mugabe how was Robert Mugabe as a baby? He was a baby. So what you're saying is that back in 1920 hey, it's been long '28...
[Ofeibea Quist-arcton, Byline:] At 92, Robert Mugabe is the only leader Zimbabwe has known since the end of white minority rule and independence from Britain in 1980. Recently, Mugabe traveled at short notice, and his departure again spawned speculation the president was gravely ill. Doc Vikela mimicked Mugabe addressing persistent rumors he died.
[Victor Tinashe Mpofu:] [Imitating Robert Mugabe] They always say that I've died, but I arose so many times than Jesus.
[Ofeibea Quist-arcton, Byline:] Once back home in Zimbabwe, Mugabe joked, it's true that I was dead, and now I'm resurrected yet again. Even though Mugabe seems to have a sense of humor, there's a perilously fine line between what is and is not acceptable, says Samm Monro, aka Comrade Fatso.
[Samm Monro:] Welcome to "Zambezi News," where...
[Ofeibea Quist-arcton, Byline:] He's co-creator of a popular satirical current affairs show, "Zambezi News."
[Samm Monro:] As soon as you touch politics here, and if there's a crowd in front of you, the government gets worried. We had police threatening to arrest us as comedians for performing political comedy. So a lot of artists will self-censor their content in order to make a living.
[Ofeibea Quist-arcton, Byline:] But Comrade Fatso says threats of detention won't stop him and many other comedians in Zimbabwe even though a joke can literally be deemed a crime and land you in court or even in prison. Insulting the president can bring a one-year sentence, and boldly speaking out can lead to trouble and a brutal beating, as actor-activist Silvanos Mudzvova found to his cost.
[Silvanos Mudzvova:] And I actually decided to put up a one-man performance. So I just titled the play "Missing Diamonds." It was all about demanding answers about the missing $15 billion.
[Ofeibea Quist-arcton, Byline:] His was not comedy, but a serious skit based on President Mugabe telling Zimbabweans earlier this year that at least $15 billion had been stolen from the diamond-rich region by mining companies. Mudzvova was initially detained in April. He was then abducted late at night in September and his family threatened, he says. The actor was admitted to the hospital, and was still limping with burn marks and bruises on his legs and back, he said, when he spoke to NPR.
[Silvanos Mudzvova:] They came back fully armed. They actually did break down the door at my house. Yeah, the family was inside. I've got three kids. They took me into a vehicle, put a sack on my face so that I couldn't realize where they were.
[Ofeibea Quist-arcton, Byline:] A sack over your head?
[Silvanos Mudzvova:] Yeah, a sack over my head. What I could see is the guns that they were pointing at me, about two. These are big guns. I would actually say they were AK-47s. They started applying electric shocks on me. And then when they started beating me with...
[Ofeibea Quist-arcton, Byline:] Mudzvova says the brutal three-hour interrogation ended only when villagers who had been fishing in a nearby dam were returning home and happened upon his ordeal. His abductors fired shots and took off after, Mudzvova says, injecting him with an unknown substance. But the risks haven't deterred stand-up newcomer Samantha Kureya, aka Gonyeti.
[Samantha Kureya:] [Speaking Shona].
[Ofeibea Quist-arcton, Byline:] Gonyeti's skits are mostly in Zimbabwe's dominant local Shona language. Her stage name means truck because her fans affectionately say she's built like a large, curvaceous truck. Gonyeti says comedy's booming in Zimbabwe.
[Samantha Kureya:] I think I'm the first female comedian, yeah, stand-up comedian. They are supporting their support is coming from all angles. Yeah, they're supporting me. You know, you have to laugh cause laughter heals, you know? You...
[Ofeibea Quist-arcton, Byline:] Laughter heals.
[Samantha Kureya:] Yes, so you need to laugh. You know, they say we as comedians, we are stress syrups [LAUGHTER]. We heal stress. So you have to laugh. The president also laughs [LAUGHTER]. He does, I know [LAUGHTER].
[Ofeibea Quist-arcton, Byline:] And what if President Mugabe doesn't care for your joke? Then who has the last laugh? Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, NPR News, Harare.

[Farai Chideya:] From NPR News, this is NEWS & NOTES. I'm Farai Chideya.
[Representative Steny Hoyer:] Do you approve of the president's proposal to deploy more than 20,000 additional troops in Iraq, or do you not? Thus, this resolution is a clarifying moment for the members to say precisely where they stand on the president's plan.
[Farai Chideya:] That was House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer on the floor of the House this week. Democrats have introduced a non-binding resolution that, if it passes, will criticize the president's latest Iraq plan. But the bill can't stop the proposed troop surge or the funding it requires. Every member, however, gets five minutes to speak his or her mind. That's made for a blustery debate and some very long days. To help us get a handle on exactly what the debate means, we've got Melissa Harris-Lacewell. She's an associate professor of politics in African-American studies at Princeton University. Melissa, given the weather especially, it's great to talk to you again.
[Professor Melissa Harris Lacewell:] Oh, absolutely. Thanks for having me.
[Farai Chideya:] Yes, so let's start why this debate is happening now. A similar resolution stalled in the Senate, is that why the House has jumped into the fray?
[Prof. Harris-lacewell:] Well, I think there are several reasons why it's happening now. There seems to be an enormous amount of anxiety brewing now in Washington not only around the current war in Iraq, but the possibility of escalating hostilities with Iran. And so the House is seeking to somehow try to gain control of the situation. Although this is obviously not something that has teeth from a policy perspective, I think they are hoping through this, you know, analytic opportunity, this chance to take a position, they're hoping to do what presidents often do, which is to use the bully pulpit. In other words, to mobilize public opinion in order to keep the president from moving forward.
[Farai Chideya:] Well, Republicans are none too happy about this resolution. We've got a little bit from Jack Kingston of Georgia.
[Representative. Jack Kingston:] Our job is to pay us real legislation and make real laws. We don't have to vent our frustration. We can change policy. This week's resolution is just a cover your rear end political design to give the legislative branch a chance to say I told you so.
[Farai Chideya:] Now Melissa, does Congressman Kingston have a point?
[Prof. Harris-lacewell:] I suspect there's a little bit of that. But I think what the congressman is missing in a particular analysis is that there was, after all, a midterm election in 2006 which was widely regarded as a referendum on the war in Iraq in which the Democrat won handily. So there, you know, in a democracy, yes, it is the responsibility of the legislative branch in America to make laws. But it's also the responsibility of elected officials to respond to the public opinion that is communicated through elections. And so the administration's unwillingness to respond to the American public's desire to deescalate the war requires that Congress do something to try to once again communicate that to the White House.
[Farai Chideya:] Now you have a situation where part of the Democrat's entry into power was based on opposition to the war by the U.S. public, who felt very strongly, overwhelmingly that we had gone off course. Do Republicans now feel any pressure, you think, to support this non-binding resolution even if it means going against the head of their own party?
[Prof. Harris-lacewell:] Well, there were a few Republicans who are breaking ranks, and, you know, are joining the Democrats. I think there's 11 who were indicating support of the defeat excuse me, indicating support of the Iraq resolution. That said, it kind of depends on whether or not these Republicans are in safe districts. In other words, districts where they're most likely to be re-elected in the next two years as Republicans because they're in the safe, strong Republican districts; or if they are in this districts that are more swing districts where there are voters on both sides. So in that case this is a political calculation.
[Farai Chideya:] So we just heard from a Republican. Now we turn to a Democrat. From the other side of the aisle, it's Congresswoman Maxine Waters, and she's the co-founder of the Out of Iraq Caucus.
[Representative Maxine Waters:] Madam Speaker, I support this resolution hoping this will be a first step in ending this war and reuniting our troops with their families and loved ones. This is a non-binding resolution. The real test with this Congress is going to be whether or not we will continue to fund this war.
[Farai Chideya:] Now Melissa, do you think that the Democrats have the power or the moxie to really cut off funding to the war?
[Prof. Harris-lacewell:] You know, I have to say that given the history of the war in Vietnam, which continues to probably be the central anxiety point for lawmakers around this war. And so you keep saying it every time someone talks about not supporting the war, there's a rush to say but we support the troops. And the problem with cutting off funding is that there's simply no way then to distinguish between the troops and the war. So, I think it is highly unlikely that there is any political elected official who wants to be standing in the position of saying there are troops dying in Iraq and we're unwilling to write the check.
[Farai Chideya:] So it's kind of a linguistic tightrope, isn't it then? Supporting the troops, ending the war, cutting funds. It's really something that seems to be a real puzzle box for any politician of any stripe.
[Prof. Harris-lacewell:] I mean, I think that what the Congress is really trying to do more than anything is to affect the one person who can truly affect what's going on, and that's the president, the White House. It is the White House and its empowerment as the leader of any military operation who is empowered to make these choices. And, by the way, the Congress gave over an enormous amount of power post-911. You know, they were trying to walk away from that now11 to the executive branch. So what they're trying to do right now is to somehow influence the White House. The problem with it is that this is the president who is now in his last two years, who doesn't have to run for re-election, who has no member of his administration running in 2008, and therefore is largely free of the kind of political considerations that congresspersons who are going to be standing for re-election have to consider.
[Farai Chideya:] Well, let's get a little bit of words from the president, who spoke yesterday about the very things you're talking about.
[President George W. Bush:] Soon Congress is going to be able to vote on a piece of legislation that is binding, a bill providing emergency funding for our troops. Our troops are counting on their elected leaders in Washington D.C. to provide them with the support they need to do their mission.
[Farai Chideya:] Melissa, you essentially said that the president doesn't have to be accountable to Congress in some senses because he is at the end or near in the end of his presidency. But he still is someone who has to deal with the public, and the public right now really does not support this war. Is that going to affect his decision-making?
[Prof. Harris-lacewell:] Apparently not. I mean, this president, I was just speaking with a group of students about this in terms of trying to think about what are the electoral strategies that are necessary. And this is a president who has really made his electoral success on saying that in a certain way he doesn't care what the public thinks. Early on, when there was an enormous outcry before the invasion originally, he said very clearly, look, I don't govern by focus groups. And apparently he doesn't even govern by midterm elections. This is a president who's made a decision about the path that he's going to take and, you know, he can simply write out these poor public opinion ratings because they mean very little for his actual power.
[Farai Chideya:] Now that may be true for his power, but he still wants Republicans to keep the White House in 2008. And so jumping to the presidential race, you've got Iraq that has been a weighty issue for Democratic candidates who voted for it, a lot of criticism on the road or questioning of Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. But could Republican frontrunner John McCain also hit a snag for supporting the president's surge plan. In a way, it's, you know, if you do support, that's one thing and a lot of people are going to be angry at you. And if you don't, that's another thing and people are still going to be angry at you. So how does this play out in the 2000 presidential race 2008 presidential race?
[Prof. Harris-lacewell:] Well, I think that we have to remember a couple of things. One, 2008 is much farther away than we might expect. I mean we're ramping up so much and talking so much about the election right now that it seems like everything that's on the table now will be on the table next winter, during the primaries. But that's not true at all. It's highly likely that these questions are going to have moved off the table and something else will have moved forward. And in fact taking a stand that is against sort of the Democrats may be seen very well by the GOP primary voters who have to make a decision for the nomination. McCain also has lots of other weaknesses and so, you know, in many ways, sort of Giuliani is a frontrunner right now. And Giuliani is completely outside of these administrative choices, as is Romney and lots of other Republicans who are running. They're going to be able to say, look, sure, I'm a part of this party. I'm a law and order guy. I'm an anti-terrorist person, but I didn't have anything to do with this war or the administration of this war. And in fact, it's all going to be the Democrats who are in much more weakened positions, because most of them are sitting in the Senate right now and having to make a variety of complicated choices that will have to be explained in ways that don't work well in soundbites. So the Republicans are actually in pretty good shape come '08 because the Bush administration is not running again.
[Farai Chideya:] Well finally and briefly, if this resolution passes, which seems likely, will it make a difference at all?
[Prof. Harris-lacewell:] In terms of George W. Bush's policies, it does not appear that he is going to respond to either public opinion or congressional sort of censure in this way. He's made a decision about going forward as long as there is an unwillingness to pull back the purse strings. I suspect it will make very little difference in anything other than the political world, but probably not in the actual campaign of the war itself.
[Farai Chideya:] Well, Melissa, I have to give you props for joining us today. I know that you had the hustle through the snow on the East Coast, so thanks for joining us again.
[Prof. Harris-lacewell:] And thank you for having me.
[Farai Chideya:] Melissa Harris-Lacewell is an associate professor of politics in African-American Studies at Princeton University. And just ahead, President Bush answers tough questions from reporters. Later, touching up the No Child Left Behind Act and your letters.

[Alex Cohen:] As we just heard, these are challenging times for many charitable funds, some of which could dry up as fewer people offer to give.
[Madeleine Brand:] There is a way to give without feeling an economic pinch, and here to discuss strategies is personal finance expert Michelle Singletary, and Michelle, you recommend charitable giving even in these times?
[Michelle Singletary:] Absolutely. I believe that charitable giving is as important to your budget as your rent or mortgage or car payment. For my husband and I, we tithe, meaning we give 10 percent of our income. That comes out before anything else, before even a mortgage; that's how important it is to us, because if you make it an important item, you won't give it up in hard times. It'll become a part of what you do with your money.
[Madeleine Brand:] And so, how do you discipline yourself to give in times like these?
[Michelle Singletary:] You know, one thing is you know, when I help people, I set up a budget for them, and we tend to fund our budget according to the items as they're listed. So, you know, first thing people usually list is their mortgage or their rent and car payment, utilities and so forth. Unfortunately, charitable giving ends up all the way at the bottom or in the miscellaneous category. And so, when times get hard, you start to cut from the bottom up, like pet grooming and, you know... Things like that. And unfortunately, that's what charitable giving is. But if you move that line item to the top of your budget or near the top to the major things that are important to you, then you won't cut that first. Many charities will allow you to make regular payments on a monthly basis. If you make it like a bill, it won't get cut in hard times.
[Madeleine Brand:] And what if you just don't have any money? Is there another way to be charitable without spending money?
[Michelle Singletary:] You know, before we talked about ways to raise money in your household, and I always tell people, if you absolutely don't have the money, and you're really struggling, look around your house. Look at some things that you can sell, and make it a family thing. Just say, kids, let's all go through the house. Do it once a year. And then gather everything up and sell it, and use that money to give to charity. And remember, giving is a tax deduction, so there is a tax benefit to giving throughout the year, not just at the holiday time.
[Madeleine Brand:] Right. But people have until the end of this year for it to appear on their financial statements.
[Michelle Singletary:] That's right. You have until the year of the year to still give, and it's a great tax deduction. Now remember, the law's changed, so you have to prove that you actually gave the money. Hopefully, you're not lying about something this important. And if you go to the IRS Web site, there's guidelines on making sure you get the proper receipts.
[Madeleine Brand:] And Michelle, there sure are a lot of organizations out there that are asking for donations. And how does one navigate through all that and find the ones that use the money the most wisely?
[Michelle Singletary:] You know, there are a couple resources that I would recommend. Definitely BBB, the Better Business Bureau, has a charitable-giving site where you can go and get a lot of information about how to give to a charity, how to make sure that they are a legitimate charity. There's also Charity Navigator, and if you put both of those in a search engine, you'll go right to those sites, and they will help you choose the right charity. And just be careful, particularly this time of year, and make sure that they're legitimate, and also, that they're using the majority of their funds for their programming and not to raise money. You want to be sure that your dollars are being well-spent.
[Madeleine Brand:] That's Michelle Singletary. She writes "The Color of Money" column for the Washington Post. And you can ask Michelle some questions, if you have any, some personal finance questions. Go to npr.orgdaytoday, click on Contact Us, and put Michelle in the subject line. Thanks, Michelle.
[Michelle Singletary:] You're welcome.
[Madeleine Brand:] Stay with us. NPR's Day to Day continues.

[Ari Shapiro:] Israel might be about to deport an American human rights advocate. He's the local director of Human Rights Watch, and he's accused of advocating for a boycott of Israel. A lower court already has ruled in favor of expelling him. He's appealed to Israel's Supreme Court, which will hear the case tomorrow. NPR's Daniel Estrin reports from Jerusalem.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Human Rights Watch investigates human rights abuses around the world. It's worked in Israel and the Palestinian territories for nearly 30 years. But recently, a right-wing Israeli group petitioned to kick out the group's local director Omar Shakir. He's an American on an Israeli visa to work here. Nitsana Darshan-Leitner of Shurat HaDin, the group that made the petition, said the researcher has advocated a boycott of Israel, even as a college activist.
[Nitsana Darshan-leitner:] Later on, when he came to Israel and he became the head of Human Rights Watch in Israel, he did not halt this activity the opposite.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Last year, while Shakir was the local director of Human Rights Watch, the group called on Airbnb and Booking.com to stop listing rentals in West Bank settlements.
[Nitsana Darshan-leitner:] Whoever calls to boycott Israel, whoever boycotts Israel is an enemy of the state of Israel. They should not have any privilege to come here.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] There's a global campaign to boycott Israel for its treatment of Palestinians, which Israel sees as an attempt to delegitimize its right to exist. A 2017 law bans the entry of foreigners promoting a boycott of the country or its West Bank settlements. Israel says so far, it's used the law to block 16 people from entry, including Democratic Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. Tlaib rejected Israel's conditions for a limited visit to see her family in the West Bank. Omar Shakir of Human Rights Watch told NPR his group is only drawing attention to human rights.
[Omar Shakir:] Human Rights Watch has never called for a boycott of Israel. What we've done as part of our global work on business and human rights is call on companies not to facilitate abuses by operating in settlements. We've done similar work when it comes to the cotton industry in Uzbekistan, when it comes to diamonds in sub-Saharan Africa.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] But an Israeli court said Shakir advocated a boycott and ruled he should be deported. Now he's appealing to Israel's Supreme Court. Shakir's lawyers say if he loses his appeal, he'll be the first person deported from Israel under the 2017 boycott law. Human Rights Watch's executive director is Kenneth Roth.
[Kenneth Roth:] The Israeli government may not like that Human Rights Watch advocates around the illegality of its central enterprise, but that's a completely legitimate position. And so for the government to retaliate by deporting a researcher attempting to do that is really to try to censor what is a mainstream human rights position.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] How the case turns out could set a precedent in the battle between Israel and those criticizing its activity in the occupied West Bank. Daniel Estrin, NPR News, Jerusalem.

[Robert Siegel:] Oil production in this country is surging. Part of the reason is that prices for crude oil are nearly double what they were two years ago. Gasoline prices are up, too. The national average for regular gas is about 15 cents more per gallon than last year. That has drillers feeling optimistic, so they're sending more rigs back out into oil fields. NPR's Jeff Brady reports.
[Jeff Brady, Byline:] All that optimism could lead to a new crude oil production record in the U.S. The key number here is 10 million.
[Tom Kloza:] Well, we haven't seen 10 million barrels a day of U.S. production since November of 1970.
[Jeff Brady, Byline:] Tom Kloza with Oil Price Information Service says that record stood for 47 years, and just about no one thought it would be broken until controversial technologies like hydraulic fracturing brought new life to old oil fields by tapping previously unreachable reserves. Fracking can be expensive. And while prices were low, drilling slowed. Now that they're back up, crews are at work again.
[Tom Kloza:] And it has nothing to do with who is in office.
[Jeff Brady, Byline:] Prices generally determine when oil companies drill, not presidents. A new production record will almost certainly be set during President Trump's term. Kloza predicts it'll happen this spring. Others believe the U.S. might already produce 10 million barrels a day.
[Per Magnus Nysveen:] We think that during December, that mark was actually reached.
[Jeff Brady, Byline:] Per Magnus Nysveen is an oil market analyst with the Norwegian firm Rystad Energy. This disagreement will be settled when official federal production numbers are out at the end of February. After that, Nysveen predicts U.S. crude production will surpass Saudi Arabia and Russia.
[Per Magnus Nysveen:] So if we are at 10 million barrels 1st of January, I think we can be at 11 million barrels by the end of 2018.
[Jeff Brady, Byline:] As production increases, U.S. cars are more fuel-efficient, and overall demand is flat. So it's unlikely there will be any dramatic gas price increases in the near future. Jeff Brady, NPR News.

[Arun Rath:] In a recent piece for Time magazine, Susanna Schrobsdorff discusses an often overlooked challenge for people starting families later in life a variable she calls the grandparent deficit.
[Susanna Schrobsdorff:] I'm one of the first generations of women to have children significantly later than their parents. As our kids are born, we don't have the support of our parents, as we might have if we'd had kids younger. And it's something a lot of us just didn't consider when we were thinking about our biological clocks and our life plans.
[Arun Rath:] And you wrote about how your thinking about this came together a few months ago when you were visiting your father. Can you tell us about that day?
[Susanna Schrobsdorff:] Sure. I was visiting my dad. He's in an assisted living home in Washington, D.C. And my sister brought her daughter, who is in kindergarten, and she was bouncing around the dining room. And there are a lot of older women in their 80s and even 90s and hundreds sitting there, and they were just taken with her. And they kept asking, is this your great-granddaughter, to my dad, who's got dementia and couldn't quite answer. But when we explained that it was the granddaughter, I think that she just looked so young in the context of this place. And I think a generation ago, she would've been a great-granddaughter, but now she's the granddaughter.
[Arun Rath:] You know, you and I are pretty much the same generation, and everything you wrote about felt very familiar to me. My wife and I didn't meet until we were in our 30s. And we actually when we were planning our family, it wasn't just our own ages we took into account. We actually thought about the grandparent factor you're talking about as a reason to get started sooner than later. Do you think a lot more people like us, who are having kids later in life, are having that as part of their planning conversation?
[Susanna Schrobsdorff:] Absolutely. And I think that one thing I thought about is that if my children have children as late as I did, there's a double gap because if they don't have kids until their late 30s, early 40s, I will be in my 80s by the time I have a toddler grandchild. And I kept thinking, well, will I be the babysitter, or will I need the babysitter?
[Arun Rath:] So, Susanna, would you advise your own children, then do you plan to advise them to have kids earlier?
[Susanna Schrobsdorff:] Well, I want them to have everything. I want them to have a great career and go to graduate school and do everything that they want to do the way I did and travel. But I think I might end up being one of those moms who pushes her kids to have grandchildren. In fact, a couple of people wrote in and said, did my mother pay you to write this article?
[Arun Rath:] [Laughter].
[Susanna Schrobsdorff:] And so I think I think my selling point on that is that a lot of people talk about how difficult it is to lean in when you have a new baby or when you're if you have kids, when you're just building your career. I would argue that it is easily as difficult to have little kids, a fully blown, intense career and also be caring for your parents in the way that a lot of us have to care for people with dementia or other physical problems. So my argument is that if you have kids earlier, it can help you.
[Arun Rath:] Right. I mean, it sounds maybe it sounds selfish, but for a lot of people, a lot of families rely on grandparents for support with child care. And the older one is, the harder that gets.
[Susanna Schrobsdorff:] Yeah. Or at least, you could leave your children with your parents for a week and have time with your partner and get a break. Now I think a lot of us are juggling where, you know, I'm calling to get supplies for my dad, or my sister's talking to his aides to change his medication. And so it's another responsibility on the level of a kid.
[Arun Rath:] You know, you're not advocating directly for people to have children younger. And, you know, it's a tricky thing because women are still put upon more than men to make this choice between children and career. And it feels like this is another factor which just makes it harder to be able to balance everything.
[Susanna Schrobsdorff:] Absolutely. I felt bad writing the article because... ...We write a lot of articles about biological clocks and should you freeze your eggs you young woman. And this just, in the calculus of modern life, I've just added a huge, enormously difficult variable. Well, what about your parents, and what do you want them to help take care of your kids? So I would never advocate having kids earlier, but maybe I would advise saying, like, think about this one factor if you have that opportunity. Some of us, you know, we didn't meet our partners until later in life, so it's not even a choice.
[Arun Rath:] Susanna Schrobsdorff is an assistant managing editor at Time. Her piece, "The Grandparent Deficit: Fertility Isn't The Only Biological Clock," ran recently in Time. Susanna, thanks very much.
[Susanna Schrobsdorff:] Thank you.

[Ari Shapiro:] Two years ago, hackers hit the credit bureau Equifax and exposed the data of nearly 150 million people. That's more than half the adult population of the United States. Now some of the people affected by that breach stand to be compensated. Equifax will pay up to $700 million in fines and monetary relief to consumers. We're joined by NPR's Chris Arnold, who has been following today's settlement with state and federal regulators. Hi, Chris.
[Chris Arnold, Byline:] Hey, Ari.
[Ari Shapiro:] So is most of this money actually going to go to people who were affected in some way by the breach?
[Chris Arnold, Byline:] Well, most of it will. It looks like upwards of $400 million will go to those people. We spoke to California's attorney general, Xavier Becerra, who was involved in the settlement along with other state and federal regulators. And here's what he said.
[Xavier Becerra:] We're trying to make sure that anyone who was impacted by this data security breach has a chance to recover their costs. If you lost your privacy, if identity thieves have taken advantage of your private information, you deserve to be compensated by Equifax.
[Chris Arnold, Byline:] Now, people can conceivably get up to as much as $20,000. They got to document the time and what all this cost them. For many people, it'll probably be a lot less. Also, if you spent money and time just signing up for preventive stuff, like credit monitoring or whatever else you had to do, the goal is that you will be compensated for that too. And they'll pay I think it's $25 an hour for up to 20 hours that you had to deal with that.
[Ari Shapiro:] I'm sure many people are asking, how do I get the money? What do they have to do?
[Chris Arnold, Byline:] I'm sure, since there were that many people involved in the breach, yes. There is a website, as there often is equifaxbreachsettlement.com. I'm going to say that again because it's radio equifaxbreachsettlement.com. Assuming the court approves the settlement, people can go there. And they'll tell you what to do. But you have to do this within the next six months to get compensation.
[Ari Shapiro:] Within six months of court approval of the settlement.
[Chris Arnold, Byline:] Right.
[Ari Shapiro:] It's always hard to get a sense of the magnitude of these penalties with huge, huge companies. Is $700 million viewed as a meaningful deterrent for a company as big as Equifax?
[Chris Arnold, Byline:] Well, it depends on who you talk to. But with consumer advocates not so much. We talked to Ed Mierzwinski with the nonprofit consumer advocacy group U.S. PIRG. He says, look. I mean, it's great that people are getting some money back. That's fantastic. But as far as a real effective deterrent...
[Ed Mierzwinski:] I don't think it's a lot of money. I think it's more of, hey, go away money rather than a real penalty or a punishment. And I think that's a calculated bet by Equifax. They went in there and negotiated a parking ticket rather than a punishment.
[Chris Arnold, Byline:] And at least some of the people affected by the breach feel the same way. We spoke with Jessamyn West from Randolph, Vt. Her information was stolen, she says. And here's her reaction that people will be getting some money back.
[Jessamyn West:] I mean, it's garbage, right? Like, money isn't going to solve this problem. Like, what we need is an overhaul of the way bank corporations are allowed to handle our personal information.
[Ari Shapiro:] It's interesting, Chris, that, like, Equifax wasn't the hackers here, right? Equifax got hacked, and yet everybody wants to punish Equifax. There were hearings in Congress when news broke. Lawmakers were outraged. Explain why there was so much anger at the company that, in all likelihood, sees itself as the victim.
[Chris Arnold, Byline:] Sure. You know, first, 150 million people but what Equifax has in its sort of vaults of information is your credit score, which allows you to get a mortgage or a loan. They got your credit card numbers, your Social Security number. You know, and this exposed that they were not doing a good job keeping that safe.
[Ari Shapiro:] And has any policy changed to prevent this from happening in the future?
[Chris Arnold, Byline:] Well, very quickly, there has not been a major overhaul for regulating credit bureaus that may be coming, though. There is some bipartisan support. We should also say Equifax, in a statement, called today's settlement, quote, "a positive step for U.S. consumers."
[Ari Shapiro:] NPR's Chris Arnold, thanks a lot.
[Chris Arnold, Byline:] Thanks, Ari.

[Renee Montagne:] There's also bad news from America's automakers. For the 12th straight month, Ford's sales in the US declined, dropping 11 percent in May. The news from General Motors was only slightly better. Its sales were off 5 percent compared to a year ago. One reason for the trouble, demand for large SUVs has fallen dramatically this year. NPR's Wendy Kaufman reports that high gas prices aren't the only reason sales of SUVs have slumped.
[Wendy Kaufman Reporting:] At the Robinswood ball fields in Bellevue, Washington, about every third vehicle parked is an SUV.
[Kaufman:] And while there are some sport utility enthusiasts here, many SUV owners say they wouldn't buy another one, or if they did, it wouldn't be too big. Bob Kaplan, who's keeping score at his son's Little League game, points to his glistening dark green Ford Expedition. He says it has nearly a hundred thousand miles, and he's looking to get rid of it.
[Mr. Bob Kaplan:] I like the idea of the SUV, but I'm looking at something that's smaller, that's going to be much more gas-efficient. But I still have the same requirements. I mean, I'd still like to get five or six people in a car. I still need to be able to pull my boat. So what I'm looking at right now is a hybrid. Toyota's releasing their hybrid Highlander next month.
[Kaufman:] Sales of traditional large SUVs, which once totaled more than 3.1 million annually, are down more than 13 percent so far this year. But SUV sales at Ford and GM are off more than 20 percent. Ford, which is promoting its own SUV hybrid, cites high gas prices. GM, which is introducing newly designed big SUVs next year, downplays their impact. Company officials say people who spend $35,000 or more on an SUV aren't all that concerned about paying a few dollars more at the gas pump.
[Mr. Bob Kaplan:] I don't buy that at all.
[Kaufman:] Again, Bob Kaplan.
[Mr. Bob Kaplan:] I mean, I think that my kids are learning a lot about recycling, and when we're in the kitchen they're like, `Well, aren't you going to recycle that, Dad?'And then we get in the truck and I'm getting 12 miles a gallon when I could get 25 miles a gallon and do the same thing. And it gets you thinking.
[Kaufman:] High gas prices aren't the only factor hurting sales of big SUVs like the one Kaplan drives. Four of GM's models haven't changed that much in years and it's only natural that sales of these models would taper off. There are demographic changes as well. The SUV-buying baby boomers are aging. George Pipas is Ford's US sales analysis manager.
[Mr. George Pipas:] The boomers, regrettably, are getting older and as they get older, they become empty-nesters. That means that they don't need the size or capability of the vehicle that they once did, and as they get older, they're somewhat less nimble and so the idea of using a stepladder to get into a sport utility vehicle is something that they're increasingly unwilling to do.
[Kaufman:] But they are willing to buy so-called crossover vehicles, smaller, less expensive sport utilities. Built on car platforms, they have a softer ride and get better mileage. Last year, crossover sales doubled to 1.9 million. Tom Libby of J.D. Power, a market research firm, says the shift to the smaller crossovers has hurt the automakers' bottom line.
[Mr. Tom Libby:] The profit margins on those full-sized SUVs are substantial and they are smaller on the crossovers. In general, if you're selling a 25,000 to $30,000 vehicle, your margins are going to be lower than if you're selling a $40,000 vehicle.
[Kaufman:] Both Ford and GM spent a decade focusing their engineering and marketing on the big, highly profitable SUV. Now that the SUV market has changed, Ford and GM are pursuing somewhat different strategies. Ford is making a major move to the crossovers, but GM, which plans 14 crossovers by 2009, is still putting a lot of emphasis on the big sport utility vehicle. Company spokesman Brian Akre notes that GM will bring its redesigned traditional SUVs to market early next year, sooner than originally planned.
[Mr. Brian Akre:] There has been some criticism within the media and among some analysts about why we're pulling those ahead, but we have 60 percent of that market and that still is going to be a big addition to our bottom line.
[Kaufman:] There is yet another challenge for Ford and GM. For years, Japanese vehicles have scored higher than Detroit's in quality. But now, says Tom Libby of J.D. Power, the American automakers have nearly closed the gap. Nonetheless, he says, the perception remains that Ford and GM are not in the same league as the Japanese when it comes to quality. Wendy Kaufman, NPR News, Seattle.
[Renee Montagne:] This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.

[Ira Flatow:] If I try opening a bag of chips in a quiet movie theater, it's like a tiny sack of firecrackers, and everybody's looking at you, you know? Why do the bags have to be so noisy? Well, what if that crinkly plastic made the chips a little bit crunchier? Made you think that they were a little bit crunchier? What if senses other than taste and texture can change the way you feel about food? Here with me now is Marc Abrahams, editor of the "Annals of Improbable Research," to tell us how to use sights and sounds to make your sugar sweeter, your salt saltier and your strawberry mousses, well, moussier, I guess. Well, you get the idea. Hi, Marc. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
[Marc Abrahams:] Hi, Ira. You forgot to say, and make your life livelier.
[Ira Flatow:] Well, I left it for you to say that.
[Marc Abrahams:] OK.
[Ira Flatow:] It's interesting, these papers that you brought with you, or sent to us, about how these are the tricks that people use, and they can actually test out whether they work or not.
[Marc Abrahams:] Yeah. These are things that a lot of good cooks probably know, whether they realized they know them or not. But exactly what these things are are a little fuzzy because everybody's a little different. There are some scientists in England and there are other groups, especially in the Netherlands, that have been running tests for years, and they tend to sound kind of bizarre. They'll prepare some food. They'll give it to different people to eat. And later, the people will realize that something else was changing while they were eating it, something in the atmosphere.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm. And they in one test, they gave people some ice cream that tasted like bacon?
[Marc Abrahams:] Yeah. This is Charles Spence is the main scientist. He's at the University of Oxford. He teamed up with one of the famous chefs in England, and they made something which sounds really crazy, bacon and egg ice cream, which I'm told is really pretty good, tastes like bacon and eggs. And they served bacon and egg ice cream to a bunch of people. And they had them do some sort of rating about how bacony does it taste, or how eggy does it taste? And they would play sounds. And whenever they would play the sound of frying bacon, you know, that crackling sound, people would consistently say that the thing tasted a lot more bacony to them...
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm. And...
[Marc Abrahams:] ...because the sound was different.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. And also, they when they gave people different kinds of spoons, it affected what they thought about the food.
[Marc Abrahams:] Oh, they've done all kinds of things. The spoon is actually a gigantic question, not necessarily important, but gigantic. What the spoon is made of, of course, can change things because somebody else did some tests not that long ago with spoons made of different metals and found out that what a lot of people believe that different metal tastes different to your tongue that for many people that's true. For some people, it's not so true. But they these guys also played with things like what's the shape of the spoon? What's the color of the spoon? How heavy is it? All those things had some effect on people. The more interesting thing to me, at least today, is when people said the taste that actually tasted different because of how it was served or what it was served in it. It was sweeter. It was saltier, whatever. You would think that couldn't change.
[Ira Flatow:] But it did. And one I got about a few seconds here. But one of the more fascinating things, to me, from the study is that people were willing to pay almost 50 percent more for the same wine if it was served under a red light than if was under a white light.
[Marc Abrahams:] Yeah, quite amazing, huh? And things served on different colored plates sometimes tasted sweeter to them.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow. Thank you, Marc. We'll see you again.
[Marc Abrahams:] Thanks, Ira.
[Ira Flatow:] Have a great weekend. Marc Abrahams, editor for the "Annals of Improbable Research" and a regular guest on our show.

[Lakshmi Singh:] We have a story now of a forgotten battle from 80 years ago, a massacre resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic in 1937. The two nations share an island in the Caribbean. Then-Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered soldiers to kill Haitians indiscriminately and then worked to keep it a secret. Marlon Bishop from the NPR program Latino USA visited both countries, where the aftershocks from this tragedy are still being felt.
[Marlon Bishop, Byline:] On October 5, 1937, 10-year-old Francisco Pierre who today is 90 was sitting in his patio in the Dominican Republic, not far from the border with Haiti, when a man passed by his house.
[Francisco Pierre:] [Through interpreter] He yelled out to us, go across to Haiti right now because they are killing people in the village.
[Marlon Bishop, Byline:] They were killing Haitian people and Dominicans of Haitian descent like Francisco. So he and his grandmother loaded up their donkey and began to flee towards the Haitian border. Eventually, they made it to the river that divides the two countries. On the other side, several Haitians were yelling at them to cross quickly.
[Francisco Pierre:] [Through interpreter] They said come, come, come, come. The guards are coming. And if they catch you, they will kill you. But we stood there, immobile. And before we knew it, the Haitians crossed over and grabbed our donkeys and grabbed ahold of our hands and pulled us across.
[Marlon Bishop, Byline:] Francisco barely escaped, but others weren't so lucky. Over the course of about a week, Dominican soldiers executed thousands of Haitians by machete. Estimates of the dead range from a few thousand to 30,000. The man behind the massacre...
[Gilles Lagin:] From the ancient Spanish fortress, built more than 400 years ago, comes the car of Rafael Trujillo Molina, the strongman of the republic.
[Marlon Bishop, Byline:] Rafael Trujillo ran a police state in the DR for 31 years. He was a total narcissist who renamed the capital city after himself and forced merengue orchestras to compose songs in his honor. He was also said to be obsessed with whitening the country and allegedly powdered his face to have a more Spanish appearance. And according to historians, he was fixated on the idea of controlling the border, which people more or less crossed freely at the time. After the massacre, Trujillo denied his government had anything to do with it, claiming that it was just local Dominican farmers rising up against Haitian cattle thieves. Edward Paulino, a historian who studies the border, says that Trujillo proceeded to launch a campaign against Haitians in the Dominican press, painting them as invaders and criminals.
[Edward Paulino:] Trujillo capitalized on this historically but diffuse notion of Haiti as the outsider, as the enemy. And he uses the massacre to crystallize this official doctrine that Hatians are our eternal enemies.
[Marlon Bishop, Byline:] It wasn't until after Trujillo's death over 20 years later that researchers began to put the pieces together of what really happened. While the massacre is acknowledged in the DR today, Paulino says the country hasn't really reckoned with this piece of its history.
[Edward Paulino:] The state has never apologized. It has never officially come out and engaged.
[Marlon Bishop, Byline:] He says there's no monument, no museum, no national day of remembrance.
[Edward Paulino:] And I think you have to talk. There has to be a catharsis.
[Marlon Bishop, Byline:] But not everyone on the island agrees. How many books have you written, by the way?
[Bernardo Vega:] About 52 something like that.
[Marlon Bishop, Byline:] Just a few. Like Bernardo Vega, one of the country's top historians and a former ambassador to the US.
[Bernardo Vega:] So we are very upset at the fact that, time and time again, this issue of a massacre is brought up when it was something that the Dominican people, as a society, were never involved in. I don't think that bringing this up again and again helps Dominican-Haitian relations. Trujillo did so many bad things. Why should we be responsible for it?
[Marlon Bishop, Byline:] Another reason that the massacre isn't talked about much today in the Dominican Republic may be that the anti-Haitianism that Trujillo promoted this idea that Dominicans and Haitians are eternal enemies that idea still has a foothold. But these days, it's colored by another source of tension. High immigration from Haiti in recent years has sparked new waves of anti-Haitian feeling. Driving through Santo Domingo one day, I found a striking example of that feeling, a billboard suggesting that the country build a wall on the Dominican-Haitian border to help keep immigrants out.
[Pelegrin Castillo:] [Foreign language spoken].
[Marlon Bishop, Byline:] That billboard belongs to Pelegrin Castillo, a right-wing politician. And he jokes that maybe Donald Trump got the idea for his wall from him. He says he's been asking for it since the '90s.
[Pelegrin Castillo:] [Speaking foreign language].
[Marlon Bishop, Byline:] He says that building a physical wall is a way to avoid something worse in the future a, quote, "wall of hate and blood." It's an ominous suggestion that the mutual dislike between the countries might lead to violence in the future. But that's only one narrative, says historian Edward Paulino.
[Edward Paulino:] That this one lie and, you know, and one story and one narrative and that said, Dominicans and Haitians have never gotten along. The Dominicans hate Haitians. Well, if you go to the border, it's not just about wars and massacres, but it's also about these two peoples coming together and sometimes making one people.
[Marlon Bishop, Byline:] And that, he believes, is exactly why Dominicans have to talk about Trujillo's massacre to take a good look at Trujillo's story, that Haitians and Dominicans are enemies, and leave it in the past where it belongs. For NPR News, I'm Marlon Bishop.
[Lakshmi Singh:] That story is an excerpt from an hour-long episode of NPR's Latino USA. The full story is available at npr.org.

[Rachel Martin:] The sound of crowds out in the street in Brazil's capital, Brasilia, last night, welcoming the new year in traditional fashion. But 2019 is bringing a change for Brazil. Today, a new president is being sworn into office. His name is Jair Bolsonaro, a retired army captain from the far right. We're joined from Brasilia now by NPR's Philip Reeves. Hey, Phil.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] Hi, how are you doing?
[Rachel Martin:] Doing well, thanks. So this is a huge day for Brazil, also for Latin America more broadly. Can you just give us a sense of how important this moment is?
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] Well, it's extremely important. This is a real moment in history. Latin America's largest nation is installing a populist president, a seven-term congressman with no executive experience, a man who admires Brazil's past dictatorship and has a Cabinet of whom about a third are retired military officers and chosen a foreign minister who's described climate change as a Marxist plot. So this is a moment in history, a turning point.
[Rachel Martin:] What's it like in Brasilia on the Inauguration Day?
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] [Laughter] Well, I'm afraid it's damp and overcast...
[Rachel Martin:] Oh [LAUGHTER].
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] ...Rather disappointingly. Nonetheless, you know, officials here are expecting big crowds for the inauguration of possibly half a million. So there's a huge security operation. But it's also New Year's Day, and Brazilians really celebrated, as you know. And so let's see whether they turn up or how and how many of them decide to carry on partying somewhere else.
[Rachel Martin:] I mean, Bolsonaro had been seen as this very divisive figure, right? During the campaign, hundreds of thousands of Brazilians, especially women, were on the streets urging people not to vote for him. So is that changing?
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] Yes. I mean Bolsonaro was elected in October with a very comfortable margin of some 10 million votes. Polls indicate, though, that since then, he's become even more popular. It seems Brazilians have really high expectations of him. And you often meet people here who say that they don't agree with everything Bolsonaro stands for. But anything's better than the leftist government that ruled for most of the last decade and a half, a period that saw the country's worst ever recession, a massive corruption scandal and an epidemic of violent crime. I was actually out in the streets here when the new year dawned earlier today, talking to people about their new president. And I met Alan Hubner, a computer programmer, and I asked him to tell me why he supports Bolsonaro.
[Alan Hubner:] Security. Yeah, I want to feel safe here, you know?
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] Hubner told me that he's gay, and Bolsonaro, of course, is notorious for making offensive homophobic comments. A lot of LGBT Brazilians are worried about what his presidency might mean for them. And I asked Hubner about that, and he says, in a country where there are tens of thousands of homicide every year, making Brazil safer matters more to him than anything Bolsonaro said in the past.
[Alan Hubner:] People say that he is homophobic. Oh, he's a homophobic. He going to kill gays. I don't believe he going to kill gays. I believe that everybody's getting killed here. It doesn't matter if you're gay, if you're straight, if you're black or white. Everybody's getting killed here.
[Rachel Martin:] I mean, that's going to be a huge issue that Bolsonaro's going to have to deal with, clearly, if people feel that way. But what can you tell us about other policy agenda the other policy agenda items that Bolsonaro is going to focus on?
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] Well, all eyes are going to be on what he does with the environment. He's been talking about withdrawing from the Paris climate change agreement. Bolsonaro is also a big fan of President Trump and used some of his tactics during the election campaign, communicating directly, for example, via Internet. So we're going to see a shift here towards the U.S., and that has regional implications, for example, in the handling of Venezuela. Meanwhile, domestically here in Brazil, Bolsonaro wants to greatly increase the public's access to firearms. That's very controversial. So we'll see what happens there. All right. NPR's Phil Reeves from Brasilia, the capital of Brazil.

[Michele Norris:] In the race for the White House, there have been accusations of inconsistency. Each Democratic campaign has said the other is less than committed to their official positions. Senior News Analyst, Daniel Schorr says, the problem may not be that the candidates are changing their stance on the issues, perhaps, he says, the problem is making campaign promises in the first place.
[Daniel Schorr:] Now and then, a campaign advisor lets the cat out of the bag. Unless it'd be known that the candidate's position for the voters is just that a campaign promise. General Jack Keane who has advised Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton on campaign strategy told The New York Sun that she would not act irresponsibly and order the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. Samantha Power, [unintelligible] foreign policy aide to Senator Barack Obama, told the BBC that his plan to pull troops from Iraq in 16 months was a best case scenario. And that once in office, he would not rely on a plan drafted as a campaign document. And Obama's senior economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee gave assurances to Canadian consular officials that they interpret it to mean, the candidates promise to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement was campaign record. [Unintelligible] you might call it. The conventional practice of having staff can try positions that will appeal to voters tells little about what a new president would do once in office are washed with urgent memos and situation room briefings. The wonderful disappearing campaign promise is not new in American politics. Franklin Roosevelt pledged in 1940 that American boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson promised no wider war in Vietnam. In 1968, Richard Nixon promised peace with honor in Vietnam. And then of course, there was George H.W. Bush and his well-remembered pledge in 1988, read my lips, no new taxes. Berkeley Professor Nelson Polsby has said, think how much worse it would be if we had irresponsible government on top of irresponsible campaigning. And David Wise in his book, "The Politics of Lying," describes the campaign as a mutual con game. He wish candidates tell voters what they want to hear. And so maybe, in the interest of preserving our dignity, if not our sanity, it's time to demand our presidential candidates a moratorium on specific campaign promises. This is Daniel Schorr.

[Arun Rath:] Eight thousand eight hundred and fifty-five according to the FBI, that's the number of Americans killed in gun murders in 2012. Nearly 123,000 were robbed at gun point more than 142,000 assaulted with a firearm. Next week, a group of city prosecutors from around the country will gather in Atlanta to share ideas in the battle against gun violence. I recently spoke with Cyrus Vance, the district attorney of Manhattan, and Mike Feuer the city attorney of Los Angeles the leaders of this new group, Prosecutors Against Gun Violence. Cyrus Vance, welcome to the program.
[Cyrus Vance:] Thanks for having me.
[Arun Rath:] And Mike Feuer, welcome to you as well.
[Mike Feuer:] It's great to be here.
[Arun Rath:] So what inspired you to begin this new group? Was there a particular incident?
[Mike Feuer:] No actually, one of the goals we have is not to be reactive to a specific tragedy of the moment but rather to get ahead of the curve. Prosecutors have a very powerful voice in the justice system and we're very credible in the legislative process. We haven't really galvanized that focus before but this is a chance to do it at a moment when gun violence afflicts every major jurisdiction in the country every day.
[Arun Rath:] And Cyrus Vance, what specifically can prosecutors do better when it comes to gun violence?
[Cyrus Vance:] Well, the beauty of this coalition that we've formed, which brings major city prosecutors from Seattle down to L.A., Boston to Miami, Detroit to Houston, is that we are all dealing with gun violence and its effect on our communities. And each of us has developed strategies to drive violence down. I'm fascinated to know what's going on in Houston. And I can tell you that from Manhattan's perspective, our development of units like the crime strategies units that helps us work as an intelligence-based prosecution office, is something that I think my colleagues will also be interested in learning about.
[Mike Feuer:] We're going to be learning about everything from how to combat the nexus between gangs and guns, how to deal with illegal weapons trafficking, how to do better about grappling with the connection between domestic violence and gun violence and mental health and gun violence.
[Arun Rath:] I mean, that gets to what's probably about the most politically contentious issue there is. Obviously, addressing gun violence overlaps with the issue of gun control. How do you keep your efforts from getting bogged down in this very politically-fraught issue?
[Mike Feuer:] We reflect broad geography and broad ideology. Prosecutors are not elected as Republicans or Democrats typically. We're elected on a nonpartisan basis in our jurisdictions. And I think that we'll be able to find some common ground around both our most effective prosecutorial approaches but also on some short list of objectives policy-wise.
[Cyrus Vance:] I think in our view as Republican and Democratically elected prosecutors from all over the country red states and blue states I think we all on this issue don't look at gun violence as a political issue, we really are looking at it as a public health and safety issue. And no matter what you believe about the Second Amendment, everybody believes that people should not be victimized by gun violence. Now, we're going to talk about how we make that happen in our various communities.
[Arun Rath:] Finally, I wanted to ask, one of the most prominent incidents of gun violence this year was the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. And that exposed there was a real rift that exposed between law enforcement and the people of color in the community there. Do prosecutors have a role to play in healing that rift?
[Mike Feuer:] I can certainly say here in Los Angeles, we do. Our office is very neighborhood-oriented and very community-oriented. And we speak quite candidly about issues of youth, of race and how we can do better at assuring there is confidence in the efficacy and the fairness of the justice system in each of our neighborhoods. Because we know that for us to be effective prosecutors, communities have to want to interact with us, have to report crime, have to team up with us as witnesses and provide the evidence we need to effectively prosecute our cases. That collaboration is very deep. And I'm very proud in Los Angeles, while we still always in every jurisdiction have distance to travel, we've made great strides.
[Cyrus Vance:] Obviously, race and fairness in the justice system is an important issue in every city in America and it certainly is in our city. And I think we invest heavily financially in our preventative programming to keep kids out of trouble for example, in our Manhattan neighborhoods. And in doing that we are binding the aspirations of our office with the futures of our children and their families. And that partnership is essential to have a healthy criminal justice process in any city.
[Arun Rath:] Cyrus Vance is the district attorney for Manhattan. He joined us from our New York bureau. Thanks very much.
[Cyrus Vance:] Thank you.
[Arun Rath:] And Mike Feuer is the city attorney for Los Angeles. He was here with me at NPR West. Thank you.
[Mike Feuer:] Thank you, Arun.

[Guy Raz:] This past week, charges were filed against members of the Florida A&M marching band in the hazing death of a former member. In recent weeks, there have been a string of hazing scandals on campus. In April, five Boston University students were bound and beaten in a fraternity house basement. And Rolling Stone magazine recently profiled a Dartmouth student's humiliating hazing experiences. But as New Hampshire Public Radio's Dan Gorenstein reports now, all of this attention may be a good thing.
[Dan Gorenstein, Byline:] It was an early October night back in 2006. Dartmouth College sophomore Ravital Segal was leaving the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority house. Blindfolded, she and several other pledges were led to a waiting car.
[Ravital Segal:] We started driving, and I was handed a 64-ounce water bottle that was filled with an alcoholic punch and told to chug it. And simultaneously, I was handed vodka shots from the front of the car.
[Dan Gorenstein, Byline:] The 19-year-old was 5'1", 125 pounds.
[Ravital Segal:] My next memory is waking up in the intensive care unit with bruises and cuts on my body. My teeth were broken.
[Dan Gorenstein, Byline:] Segal's blood alcohol level that morning was.399, a breath away from a lethal limit.
[Ravital Segal:] There were three of us in the back of the car. All three of us ended up in the hospital.
[Dan Gorenstein, Byline:] Dartmouth says since 2010, it's sanctioned several student groups for hazing and is set to launch a task force in the coming weeks, but stories like Segal's and worse aren't uncommon. A professor at Franklin College in Indiana has kept a running tab on hazing-related deaths. Since 1970, there's been 112. The accepted definition of hazing is something that humiliates, abuses or endangers a person joining or participating in a group, even if that person consents.
[Dr. Susan Lipkins:] This is happening across the country on a daily basis.
[Dan Gorenstein, Byline:] That's Dr. Susan Lipkins, a psychologist who serves as an expert witness in court cases and speaks on the issue.
[Lipkins:] We've heard of, you know, girls that have been nude, and their bodies are circled, and people write ugly or fat or whatever across them.
[Dan Gorenstein, Byline:] In the last 10 years, Lipkins thinks hazing is getting worse more humiliating, more sexualized, more violent.
[Lipkins:] You see it from year to year, you know, because the kids will tell me, well, last year, I had to eat mealy worms, but this year, I wanted to make it a little bit worse so I added cracked glass.
[Dan Gorenstein, Byline:] There's no definitive data to determine whether hazing is on the rise or even if it's getting more dangerous. What we do know is more than half of students who belong to student groups participated in some kind of hazing ritual. That's according to a 2008 report from the National Collaborative for Hazing Research and Prevention at the University of Maine. Professor Mary Madden says the research also smashed the long-held stereotype that hazing is confined to sports teams and the Greeks.
[Mary Madden:] When your child joins an honor society at their college, you would not really be concerned that they were going to be hazed.
[Dan Gorenstein, Byline:] Yeah. Even honor societies have forced people to carry heavy backpacks. Madden says understanding the breadth of this has made it easier to talk about, it's less taboo. And she says that's helped school administrators take hazing more seriously.
[Mary Madden:] When you would see people and they would ask what you're working on and you would tell them hazing and this is not even 10 years ago for me they would kind of laugh and go, oh, yeah, you know, I heard this story. And they'd relate something they thought was funny. And I don't get that as much anymore.
[Dan Gorenstein, Byline:] Madden says actually, attention focused on bullying has allowed adults to see the risks and harm that comes from hazing. Brian Strahine still remembers the time he and his Delta Upsilon brothers at Cornell put pledges through a grueling spring night. They dressed up, got drunk, swam in the lake, then came back to the house basement. Strahine noticed one particularly ill-looking pledge slumped over the couch.
[Brian Strahine:] He was struggling. And actually, I remember a senior telling me that he was a pre-med major, and he knew how to handle the situation.
[Dan Gorenstein, Byline:] As fraternity president, Strahine overruled the senior and had someone take the sick pledge to the ER. Strahine says he did the best he could to look out for the guys. But even as the hazing continued into the early hours, Strahine didn't put an end to it.
[Brian Strahine:] The whole night, I just felt uncomfortable. I felt sick to my stomach. I was angry.
[Dan Gorenstein, Byline:] To this day, Strahine continues to feel complicit.
[Brian Strahine:] I would give anything to meet with them again and apologize. I would have nothing else to say other than I'm deeply and terribly sorry. And I'm ashamed of the things that I did.
[Dan Gorenstein, Byline:] Strahine, who today speaks on college campuses about his experiences, knows a lot of people revere nights like the one he just described, defining moments when someone believes they became a man. Strahine says he can't relate. For NPR News, I'm Dan Gorenstein in Concord, New Hampshire.

[Ed Gordon:] From NPR News, this is NEWS & NOTES. I'm Ed Gordon. The first Monday of every month, we catch up with the NAACP and the National Urban League to hear what they're working on and to discuss issues in the headlines. We're joined by Marc Morial, the Urban League's President and CEO; and Bruce Gordon, President and CEO of the NAACP. Gentlemen, welcome.
[Mr. Marc Morial:] Great to be with you.
[Ed Gordon:] Good to be with you, Ed. Good to be with you, Marc.
[Mr. Marc Morial:] Great.
[Ed Gordon:] Bruce, let me start with you. You are announcing today a very important initiative that the NAACP is getting behind. Yes, today commemorates the 25th anniversary of the AIDS epidemic in America. We are partnering with the AIDS Institute, the Black AIDS Institute, the Urban League, and other organizations to begin a massive mobilization. Ed, you need to know that today more than half of all Americans are living with HIVAIDS. And millions infected HIVAIDS are African-Americans. Among women, black accounts for two-thirds of new infections. And a recent Center for CDC Controls Studies tell you that they would estimate half of all black, gay, and bisexual men in America, in urban centers, are already infected. We've got a major statistically valid and proven epidemic in our communities, and we are pushing to expand for the proven prevention work that's been available across this country. We need to protect access to treatment, which means we've got to reauthorize the Ryan White CARE Act. And what we've really got to do in our communities, Ed, is we've got to decide and deal with the fact that this stigma we attach to homosexuality is, in the end result, killing our community. We've got to put it to a stop. Bruce, do you believe that stigma is the reason we've seen these numbers not only increase over the last decade or so, but these are numbers that have not been necessarily silent in the black community. It seems as though, as you suggest, we've turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to all of this. I think that the stigma is part of it. I also think that there is a complacency. I think there's something about HIV that causes folks to say, it can't happen to me. They think that they are protected. I feel that what we have failed to do is to step up the one thing that we know can successfully deal with prevention, and that is education. So I think we've got to turn ourselves on to this reality. Deal with the stigma, but more so deal with the fact that this is affecting many different groups in our community. It's not something that is simply associated with homosexuality. Marc, Bruce mentioned that the National Urban League is also on board with this initiative. I know that this has been a topic that you've talked about for some time.
[Mr. Morial:] You know, the I think the important thing is this is I think yet another example where there's good, strong, positive collaboration between the NAACP and the National Urban League and a broad array of civil rights community organizations around a very significant issue. And today's announcement and today's event is about raising awareness and trying to get this issue from sort of being an underground issue to a top shelf issue in our community.
[Ed Gordon:] Awareness is the lack of awareness is the end result of the stigma associated with it, so I hope that the numbers and Bruce just, I think, very aptly outlined the high proportion of new cases that are coming from the African-American community are going to cause people to wake up and become much more aware. And then to take steps on an individual basis, but also for us to continue to pressure the Congress not only to reauthorize the Ryan White Act, but to invest more money. I think we're all concerned about AIDS in Africa, it's at a pandemic proportions there. But we've got to recognize it's not just a problem there; it's a problem in America's urban communities. All right, let's turn our attention now, Marc, to what the Urban League is doing with the Black Executive Exchange Program going on at the 37th Annual Conference in Lake Buena Vista, Florida this week.
[Mr. Marc Morial:] We're going to have one of the largest gatherings. This is a program that's about 30 years old. It's one of our oldest continuously running programs, and what it does is it takes African-American corporate executives and gives them an opportunity to become, if you will, faculty members for a day or two on the colleges of historically black colleges and universities across the nation. And this program has had great growth. It's a simple basic notion, and that is that our young people on college campuses need to have exposure to role models, to people who have achieved success, people like Bruce Gordon, who was highly successful in the corporate arena at Verizon; and Verizon is one of our big participants. So we're going to have a meeting, if you will. It's a conference but it's really a summit meeting down in Florida and what will be we'll have about 300 to 400 corporate executives, mostly African-American, there but we'll also have 75 to 100 student leaders from around the nation. And I think it reflects a need for us to invest more in leadership development and an awareness amongst our young people. So that's the Black Executive Exchange Program. We certainly urge anyone who might be listening who's interested in this type of initiative and supporting it to check out the information that's contained on our website at nul.org.
[Ed Gordon:] Particularly parents who have young people in colleges, when you talk about mentoring and getting a leg up, that is really what you need. Marc, before we go, I also want to talk to you about what you have been involved with on a peripheral, and that is Michael Fletcher's involvement with The Washington Post and the series What Does It Mean To Be a Black Man? You've been extensively quoted and I want to get you and Bruce involved in this. I just did a town hall meeting for Black Enterprise where we focused on the crisis of young black men. We are really, and sometimes we don't like to say it out loud, but really at a crisis point with young black males.
[Mr. Marc Morial:] This is a state of emergency, and I think Black Enterprise, a number of people have and the National Urban League we've championed this cause now for three years in an effort to first raise the awareness. And I think people say, well, what can we do? What are the problems? I think very simply, we've got to raise the profile and recognize that when it comes to the status of our black boys and men, we are going backwards. That's not to say there are not many highly accomplished successful African-American men and young men and mature men here in American society, but that something has gone amiss. When you look at student achievement levels, when you look at high school dropout rates, when you look at the number of African-Americans on college campuses, African-American young men on college campuses, the numbers are not pointing the right direction. So we've pledged, I think, to raise awareness about this issue and to urge organizations across the board to raise awareness. And I'm happy that The Washington Post has decided to do a rather in-depth piece. And I was troubled by the polling information that they reported on, recently, which sort of indicated that African-American men and American society, at large, have a negative view of African-American men. And I think we've got to raise up the Bruce Gordons, the Ed Gordons, the people who have, who are successful need a higher profile in our community so that our young boys and young men understand their options and their proper role models. And a young man without a proper role model is like a vessel without a compass, sometimes with no clear direction. So we there's so much we need to do, but mostly we've got to keep the conversation about this issue alive and raise it in our community to compel people to take action.
[Ed Gordon:] Bruce, much like what we talked about with the AIDS epidemic here, there is a sense sometimes of not knowing how to get started. There's a sense of embarrassment sometimes when we look at these numbers, but we have to go beyond that and really tackle this issue. There's no question about it, and it seems to me that, at the end of the day, one, we've got to accept accountability. We have to roll up our sleeves. This is one of these issues where there's not a silver bullet, but that really requires is people to choose to be involved. Our young men need us touching their lives. We also need to protect them. I was in Panama City this weekend leading a rally regarding Martin Lee Anderson, who was a victim of the boot camp system in Florida 14-years old, was beaten to death by the guards. I raise that issue for two reasons. One, we need to be strong parents to do strong parenting to keep them out of those boot camps in the first place. But secondly, when our young people are abused, we need to come to their aid. And I don't think that there's anything slick and fancy that we need to do. What we need to do is to be involved, to roll up our sleeves, get into our communities, not use the excuse that we're busy people, simply decide and commit to the fact that this is a priority. Our young men are struggling, and we've got to own the solution. I think once we take that on and we're accountable, Ed, then there are any number of things that could be done that would be highly effective. Bruce, real quick for me, with about a minute to go for each of you. First, I want to ask you about the NAACP filing suit against the Omaha School District that, as we've reported on this program a number of times, is trying to re-segregate its school system, led by Ernie Chambers there. I'd like to think that Ernie Chambers is a legislator who has a genuine interest and the best interests of young, black students; but, at the end of the day, the legislation that was passed there is illegal, and it is wrong because it creates three districts that are structured around racial lines black, Hispanic and white and we can't let that happen. What we are -we've filed suit, working with the Legal Defense Fund. We need to get into that community, acknowledge the fact that Omaha has a problem, that the quality of education in the public school system is substandard, but then come up with a solution that's legal and doesn't set us back, in terms of equal access to quality education. We're going to stay on this case, Ed, until we get the right outcome. All right, and looking forward, Marc, the end of next month that's July in Atlanta, Georgia, the 96th annual conference for the Urban League. The theme is building economic power for black Americans.
[Mr. Marc Morial:] Yeah. We're going to be focusing, as we move forward with our new strategy, on jobs, housing, and economic empowerment. And we'll be in Atlanta, in fact, kicking off our conference at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church. It's the first time our conference has been held in Atlanta in many, many years, perhaps two decades or so. And I think it's important because Atlanta is not only the cradle one of the cradles of the civil rights movement, but it has also been a symbol of the new south and the advancement of African-Americans both politically and economically, and the use of, I think, political advancement to try to create a strong economic base. So we're going to be in Atlanta. It's a great meeting our meeting the NAACP's meeting multi-historic organizations. Both our conferences in the summer, and it's about fun, but it's also about great purpose, great discussion, meetings, seminars, and we certainly encourage people to come by to Atlanta late this summer.
[Ed Gordon:] All right.
[Mr. Marc Morial:] Last week of July...
[Ed Gordon:] Last week of July, July 26th through the 29th, Atlanta, Georgia. Marc Morial and Bruce Gordon, thanks so much gentlemen. Thank you.
[Mr. Marc Morial:] Thank you.
[Ed Gordon:] Coming up, a terror plot foiled and same sex marriage, the Constitutional question. We'll discuss these topics and more on our Roundtable.

[Kelly Mcevers:] President Trump is expected to say this week he will not recertify the Iran nuclear deal a deal that gives Tehran sanctions relief in return for limits on its nuclear program. If Trump takes that step, Congress could reimpose economic sanctions. That would effectively end U.S. participation in the agreement. The European countries that co-signed the 2015 deal are watching closely. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports from Paris that they do not plan to follow the U.S.'s lead.
[Ardavan Amir-aslani:] How are you?
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] How are you? Paris lawyer Ardavan Amir-Aslani has just returned from Tehran, where he opened an office last year to facilitate French investment. He says while European companies are nervous about President Trump's threats to decertify the Iran nuclear agreement, he thinks the deal will survive.
[Ardavan Amir-aslani:] The more the U.S. administration adopts an aggressive attitude, a bombastic attitude towards Iran, the more the European countries who are also signatories to the nuclear deal will side with Iran. And this is obvious through the positions that their leaders have adopted recently in relation to comments of the United States president.
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] Amir-Aslani helped negotiate a joint venture deal for French car maker Peugeot Citroen, which, along with Renault, will begin building cars in Iran next year. European plane maker Airbus has also inked deals for more than a hundred civilian aircraft. Erwan Benezet, a journalist covering those industries with newspaper Le Parisien, says French companies are raring to go to Iran.
[Erwan Benezet:] Because it's a speed race, the first companies there will win the market.
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] The White House sees sanctions as a way of choking off cash that Iran uses to support Hezbollah, Hamas, the Syrian regime and to develop its missile program. But Benezet says the momentum can no longer be stopped, and American companies like Boeing will be the big losers if the U.S. quits the Iran nuclear agreement. Benezet says the world has changed, and the U.S. can no longer impose its policies on other nations.
[Erwan Benezet:] So Europe, China, India, whatever could say, OK, that's your decision. We respect it. But since we consider that Iran is playing the game, we'll go there.
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] There is broad support for the nuclear deal across Europe. British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson told Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that Europeans want to continue with the agreement. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has stressed the deal's importance to President Trump. In an interview last month, French President Emmanuel Macron told CNN that North Korea is a very good illustration of why it's important to stay engaged with Iran.
[President Emmanuel Macron:] Because we stopped everything with North Korea years and years ago. We stopped any monitoring, any discussions with them. And as a result, they will probably get nuclear weapon. So my position for Iran, President Trump is to say, look at the situation on North Korea. I don't want to replicate the situation with Iran.
[Delphine O:] [Speaking in French].
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] Delphine O is a new congresswoman from Macron's party. She's also president of the French-Iranian friendship group in Parliament. O says she's worried that the spirit of the deal could be squandered.
[Delphine O:] We managed to build back trust between Iran and the West, a trust that has been lacking for 38 years since the Islamic Revolution. And trust that had been built back is now being eroded, mainly because of the attitude of the U.S.
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] If Trump decertifies the Iran deal, European diplomats will have to try to convince the U.S. Congress not to impose new sanctions. If that effort fails, O says, Europe will look for ways to protect its new business with Iran. Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris.

[Michele Norris:] Back to the president's Supreme Court nominee and the key question: What does Harriet Miers believe? There are some hints in her record from Texas, but many of them are conflicting. She is a staunch Republican, but she's also supported causes dear to Democrats. As an elected official, she preferred to research issues rather than make speeches, and as NPR's John Burnett reports, Harriet Miers has been careful to shield her politics from public view.
[John Burnett Reporting:] Harriet Ellen Miers will not be easy to pigeonhole. As a high-powered Republican corporate lawyer, she embraced legal issues involving society's most powerless defendants. As president of the state Bar of Texas from 1992 to '93, Miers took a special interest in recruiting large law firms, including her own, to do pro bono representation of death-penalty cases. What's more, she's been a longtime supporter of legal services for the poor, says Bill Whitehurst, an Austin lawyer who currently heads the American Bar Association's Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defendants.
[Mr. Bill Whitehurst:] I've worked with her for many years, and I can truly tell you her heart is in the right place on those issues.
[Burnett:] Where the 60-year-old lawyer stands on pressing social issues, such as abortion, gay rights or religious expression, is harder to pin down. As state bar president, she opposed an effort by the American Bar Association to take a stand in support of abortion rights. While some interpret that as her personal opposition to abortion, in Texas it was seen more as a conciliatory move, says John Council, senior reporter with the Texas Lawyer magazine.
[Mr. John Council:] And her only reason in doing that is just that she didn't want to alienate half the bar, which, you know, it's sort of an interesting comment to make about her-is that she was even then trying to stay away from controversial things.
[Burnett:] Her current stance on Roe v. Wade is unknown. In 1989, however, she did buy a $150 ticket to a dinner given by a pro-life group. Since the early 1980s, Miers attended Valley View Christian Church in North Dallas, described by the current minister as a conservative evangelical pro-life church. The Reverend Ron Key is the outgoing pastor and a personal friend of Miers.
[Reverend Ron Key:] Obviously, she is a person of strong faith, but I think that she'll try to do a job and honor the Constitution and do what she thinks is right.
[Burnett:] Harriet Miers grew up in Dallas, attended public high school, worked her way through SMU undergraduate and law school, became the first woman partner at a major Texas law firm, then the first woman to head the Dallas bar and the state bar associations. She served one term on the Dallas City Council and was appointed to chair the Texas Lottery Commission before she came to Washington with President Bush. Friends say she migrated from the Democrat to the Republican Party. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, which researches campaign finances, in 1988 Miers gave $3,000 to Al Gore and other national Democrats. Since then she has given $4,000 to both Bush campaigns and $5,000 to the Bush-Cheney recount fund in 2000. As co-partner at a prestigious Dallas law firm, Miers handled complex commercial litigation. When she was elected to the City Council in 1989, there was suspicion about where her sympathies lay, said Rene Pederson, former editorial page editor at The Dallas Morning News and a personal friend of Miers. She says they have burgers and beer together when she's in town.
[Ms. Rene Pederson:] People thought that she would be-she would vote along the lines of the business establishment, mainly because she came from a big law firm. But she often sided with members of the minority community, and she reached across lines.
[Burnett:] In her run for the City Council 16 years ago, Miers indicated support for full civil rights for homosexuals, although she refused to support a repeal of the state's anti-sodomy law. Said one longtime lawyer friend from Dallas, who's a liberal Democrat, `Harriet's only agenda is to do what's right.'And he added, `I'm as intrigued as anybody else to find out what she believes about the big issues.'John Burnett, NPR News, Austin.

[Robert Siegel:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel. A former congressional aide was sentenced today the latest chapter in the scandal involving former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. William Heaton is the seventh defendant in this investigation to go before a sentencing judge. And as NPR's Peter Overby tells us, today's court appearance was unlike any of the others.
[Peter Overby:] When it sentencing day, the defendants in the Abramoff case, usually, confer grimly with their lawyers or they stare off blankly into the future or maybe the past. William Heaton entered the courtroom with his lawyers and with the prosecutors, too. They shook hands all around. The chief prosecutor, Mary K. Butler, laid her hand on his shoulder. Heaton had a dark tan suit and a culet that wouldn't quite lie down. He's 29 years old now. He was just 23 when he first got in over his head as the top aide to the now incarcerated former Congressman Bob Ney. Heaton is a former congressional page described as the straightest of straight arrows in one of the 53 letters of support received by the judge. Heaton considered Ney his mentor, but the mentoring turned out to include a golf chunk at the Scotland, a gambling excursion in London, and countless trips to Jack Abramoff's D.C. restaurant for free meals and drinks. After a period of agonizing, Heaton began cooperating with prosecutors. He passed documents to the FBI and taped phone calls. Eventually, he wore a wire and chatted up Ney through a two-and-a-half-hour dinner. That helped the government seal its case against the congressman. Ney admitted taking bribes from Abramoff and is now serving two-and-a-half-years in prison. Prosecutors recommended no prison time for Heaton and Federal District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle agreed. She gave him two years probation, community service, and a $5,000 fine. By all accounts, Heaton has been filled with remorse for not standing up to Ney sooner. In court, where no microphones are allowed, he read a long statement of apology, finally telling Huvelle that he stood her, quote, "with the courage I lacked for so many years." His lawyer, John Nassikas, spoke to reporters after the sentencing.
[Mr. John Nassikas:] He remains apologetic for what he has done in letting many people and the public down.
[Peter Overby:] But as congressional scholar John Pitney points out, this case is just an extreme example of a common dynamic on Capitol Hill.
[Prof. John Pitney:] Staffers in Congress don't have a great deal of legal protection. And if you're young ambitious, the temptation is to bite your tongue and do whatever the member tells you.
[Peter Overby:] Usually, it's something like fetching the dry cleaning. But here, Heaton believed at age 23 that he wasn't qualified to be Ney's chief of staff. He twice turned Ney down before finally accepting the job. For his part, Ney once told another cooperating witness that he liked young staffers who didn't think too much about the ethics rules. The Abramoff probe is continuing, although mostly out of the public eye. Since the case became public in late 2005, Abramoff and Ney had been imprisoned. Also facing prison sentences are former Deputy Secretary of the Interior Steven Griles and former Administration Procurement Chief David Safavian. Senator Conrad Burns, a Montana Republican, lost his re-election bid. Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay resigned from Congress. Five lobbyists have pleaded guilty and are cooperating. Two Republican Congressmen, John Doolittle and Tom Feeney, are under investigation. Peter Overby, NPR News Washington.

[Steve Inskeep:] Back in 2009, you may recall, Somali pirates boarded the cargo ship Alabama. The tension between the pirates and the American captain, Richard Phillips, is the basis for a new film in theaters this weekend, and critic Kenneth Turan has our review.
[Kenneth Turan, Byline:] The cargo ship Alabama is headed down the east coast of Africa when Captain Richard Phillips, played by Tom Hanks, sees something no captain in these waters wants to see.
[Tom Hanks:] [as Captain Phillips] I don't like the look of that.
[Kenneth Turan, Byline:] Two small skiffs are suspiciously on his tail.
[Tom Hanks:] [as Captain Phillips] Four pirates on board. Four pirates coming towards us down the main deck. Lock down the bridge. Listen up. We have been boarded by four armed pirates. You know the drill. We stay hidden no matter what.
[Kenneth Turan, Byline:] Because the pirates are armed and the ship is not, the four outlaws are soon in control. That results in an intricate game of cat and mouse between captors and captives, which begins when the pirate leader asserts his authority.
[Unidentified Man:] Look at me.
[Tom Hanks:] [as Captain Phillips] Sure.
[Unidentified Man:] Look at me.
[Tom Hanks:] [as Captain Phillips] Sure.
[Unidentified Man:] I'm the captain now.
[Kenneth Turan, Byline:] Tom Hanks is in his element here as the above-average average man who displays a kind of everyday heroism as he struggles to protect his crew. As good as Hanks has been in the past, there are moments especially when he breaks down emotionally when it's all over that are unlike anything we've seen from him before. Director Paul Greengrass is best known for bringing a sense of propulsive reality to both "The Bourne Supremacy" and "The Bourne Ultimatum," and he's at his best here. The anxiety is so great that I found myself looking at my watch because I wasn't sure how much more of it I could stand. "Captain Phillips" also spends time with the pirates. It gives us a sense of why these impoverished men under the thumb of dangerous warlords do what they do. The exasperated captain says to one of them: There's got to be something other than being a fisherman or kidnapping people. And the Somali replies: Maybe in America. That clash of cultures adds another level of tension to an already disturbing film.
[Steve Inkseep:] Kenneth Turan reviews movies for MORNING EDITION and for the Los Angeles Times.
[Renee Montagne:] You may have picked out a Boston accent from the character played by Tom Hanks. We were wondering what makes a good Boston accent.
[Steve Inskeep:] So we called up the Boston Globe's movie critic Ty Burr who says Boston accents are hard.
[Ty Burr:] It's one of those accents you have to live. You can't get it. So many great actors have come to grief on this accent. I think of Julianne Moore in "30 Rock." Remember that?
[Julianne Moore:] [as Nancy Donovan] You know, you're not from here anymore. It's different here.
[Renee Montagne:] OK, so what is Ty Burr's favorite Boston accent in a movie?
[Ty Burr:] Robert Mitchum in "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," and he doesn't wear it heavily. It's very light. You only hear it in certain words and it feels lived in.
[Robert Mitchum:] [as Eddie Coyle] Count as many as you want. As many as you've got, I've got four more.
[Steve Inskeep:] Ty Burr says Laura Linney also does a good job in "Mystic River," though there are differing opinions on that.
[Renee Montagne:] And the worst?
[Ty Burr:] My personal Hall of Shame would have to include Rob Morrow in "Quiz Show."
[Rob Morrow:] [as Dick Goodwin] That little box in your living room is plugged into something crooked.
[Ty Burr:] Holly Hunter in "Once Around."
[Holly Hunter:] [as Renata Bella] [Unintelligible].
[Ty Burr:] And Kevin Costner in "Thirteen Days."
[Kevin Costner:] [as Kenny O'Donnell] If we're going to have a chance at a political solution we need international pressure.
[Ty Burr:] Trying so hard to do the accent, and that's the problem. The harder you try, the worse it sounds.
[Renee Montagne:] Burr is a native of Brookline, not quite Boston but a stone's throw. And we asked him for a little tip on how to end this segment of the show the Boston way.
[Ty Burr:] If I really want to sell it: This is NPR News. No. No. No. You talk it like you talk it. This is NPR News.
[Steve Inskeep:] OK. As he says, this is NPR News.

[Renee Montagne:] One week ago today, Mitt Romney walked into the first presidential debate as a candidate on the ropes. Now he appears to be in his strongest position yet.
[Steve Inskeep:] Swing states that recently seemed far out of his reach now look like a virtual tie or even in some cases leaning in the Republican's direction. Here's NPR's Ari Shapiro.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] On a cold windy day, Mitt Romney took the stage at a farm in Madison County, Iowa. The barns and silos behind him were plastered with Romney logos and political slogans.
[Mitt Romney:] I come to this place recognizing that, gee, not every John Deere harvester has an R in it like that, but I appreciate that.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] He aimed his message at farmers, arguing that the Obama administration could hurt farmers through tax policies, environmental and labor regulations, and other government programs.
[Mitt Romney:] Let me just also note that, you know, people have been waiting a long time for a farm bill. And the president has to exert the kind of presidential leadership it takes to get the House and the Senate together and actually pass a farm bill.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] Farm policy is personal to many Iowa families, and this week the Romney campaign has stepped up its effort to make their candidate warmer. Part of that effort involves working anecdotes into his stump speech. Yesterday in Iowa he told a new one about accidentally crashing a neighbor's Christmas party a few years ago, where he met a Navy SEAL named Glen Dougherty.
[Mitt Romney:] You could imagine how I felt when I found out that he was one of the two former Navy SEALs killed in Benghazi on September 11. And it touched me, obviously, as I recognize this young man that I thought was so impressive had lost his life in the service of his fellow men and women.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] While Governor Romney was in Iowa, he met with the Des Moines Register editorial board. He said no abortion legislation would be part of his agenda, but then the campaign quickly backpedaled. A spokeswoman said Romney would support legislation, quote, "aimed at providing greater protections for life." The Obama campaign pounced, accusing Romney of lying in order to win women's votes. Ever since Mitt Romney's dominance in last week's debate, national and swing state polls have shown a dramatic jump for him. He's now doing better than at almost any point since the general election began. On the Romney plane, adviser Kevin Madden told reporters the campaign's being careful not to declare premature victory.
[Kevin Madden:] You can't put too much stock in this idea of momentum. I think it's a very elusive thing.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] Still, campaign aides seemed more upbeat than they've been in a long time.
[Kevin Madden:] The clear contrast that we wanted to come out of the first debate has emerged and I think that works to our advantage. And it is going to help us position ourselves to win on Election Day.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] In the evening, Romney held a rally in northern Ohio. He noted that at Obama rallies people chant four more years.
[Mitt Romney:] Today, there are 28 days before the election. I think the right chant ought to be for them four more weeks, four more weeks, all right?
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] Soon enough, the crowd took up the cry.
[Unidentified People:] Four more weeks, four more weeks, four more weeks, four more weeks...
[Mitt Romney:] You got the idea, you got the idea.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] Once again, Romney made it clear that he's going for a broad appeal.
[Mitt Romney:] This is not about one person, it's not about a political party, it's about our country.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] The enthusiasm was obvious from the size of the crowd. With 12,000 people, this was one of Romney's biggest rallies of the entire election.
[Peggy Purcell:] I'm just passionate. I've never been to a rally. I've never done anything political, but I just really believe in him.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] Peggy Purcell is a retired schoolteacher.
[Peggy Purcell:] I feel like there's a resurgence in feeling like Mitt's an OK guy. For whatever reason, it was like bad to be rich. I don't know. I don't get that. But I feel like he is becoming more approachable.
[Ari Shapiro, Byline:] Romney has three consecutive days of campaign events in Ohio. It's a state he virtually has to carry if he hopes to cobble together 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. Ari Shapiro, NPR News, traveling with the Romney campaign.
[Steve Inskeep:] We'll be with you all the way to Election Day and beyond on this local public radio station, which brings you MORNING EDITION. You can also follow us throughout the day on Facebook and Twitter. On Twitter, you can find us @MorningEdition and @NPRInskeep. It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News.

[Steve Inskeep:] And I'm Steve Inskeep in Cincinnati, Ohio, one of the divided states of America. We're hearing voters with very different views this morning. We'll bring them together after this weekend's presidential debate. We met one voter near the end of a cul-de-sac. When we arrived, Linda Caudill had just been talking with a handyman who was working on a roof.
[Linda Caudill:] Hey.
[Steve Inskeep:] Hey there.
[Linda Caudill:] How are you?
[Steve Inskeep:] Hi.
[Linda Caudill:] I got squirrels in my soffit [LAUGHTER]. How are you?
[Steve Inskeep:] Doing OK I'm Steve. Squirrels had been sneaking into her attic. So you got squirrels up in there, huh?
[Linda Caudill:] Yeah. I had a new roof put on last year. And they left an opening.
[Steve Inskeep:] But it is a breathtaking house. She led us through the interior filled with artwork and Civil War memorabilia and floor-to-ceiling windows. It's quiet except for planes overhead.
[Linda Caudill:] When you all flew in, you flew right over my house. And when I travel, I actually can see my pool.
[Steve Inskeep:] We had a talk while sitting on the porch overlooking that pool. Linda Caudill is in her mid-60s and divorced. In this Ohio River city where people live up and down the hillsides and up and down the economic scale, Caudill has done well. She retired after a long career selling insurance. She first applied to do that back in the 1970s.
[Linda Caudill:] Women were still trying to break into the glass ceiling. And they said, we don't have any women agents. And we don't want any.
[Steve Inskeep:] She finally got a chance with Allstate and came to own four branches. She thinks her gender helped that on financial matters, customers found it easier to trust a woman.
[Linda Caudill:] After 20 years, I actually had the largest agency in Greater Cincinnati.
[Steve Inskeep:] So what do you think of the woman who's trying to break the ultimate glass ceiling?
[Linda Caudill:] I have no problem with a woman for president. I just don't want that woman for president.
[Steve Inskeep:] What she's heard about Hillary Clinton is decades' worth of stories some of them on the news, others on the internet suggesting Clinton is one woman who can't be trusted. It's a common view among Republicans, which Caudill has been since voting for Richard Nixon. She owns guns. She's Catholic and opposes abortion. She says she sold her business partly because of the taxes. Do you remember the moment in which you became interested in Donald Trump?
[Linda Caudill:] Yes when he announced that he was going to run last June.
[Steve Inskeep:] His initial speech?
[Linda Caudill:] Yes.
[Steve Inskeep:] The one that people criticized and he lost corporate endorsements because he said things about Mexicans.
[Linda Caudill:] Mhmm.
[Steve Inskeep:] You said?
[Linda Caudill:] I said, this is just what we need. This is exactly what we need. I think a lot of the things that he wants to fix and a lot of the things that I think is wrong with our country starts with that border. We have a terrific heroin problem and especially here in Greater Cincinnati. And I have a nephew who overdosed and almost died due to heroin. And it's coming across the border. We also have illegals coming across the border that are taking jobs, which then puts low-income whites and low-income blacks on welfare.
[Steve Inskeep:] Many studies dismiss the idea that people here illegally reduce the number of jobs available for citizens. But Caudill thinks she's seen evidence right here.
[Linda Caudill:] When I had the roof put on, I think they were all illegals.
[Steve Inskeep:] The roof on this house we're sitting...
[Linda Caudill:] Yeah. When they put the roof on, they were all illegals. I asked the guy who put the roof on, the foreman I asked him if they were illegals. He never did give me an answer. Well, I think they were all illegal to be honest with you.
[Steve Inskeep:] What made you think that in the first place? They were Latino? Were they speaking Spanish?
[Linda Caudill:] They didn't speak English. None of them did.
[Steve Inskeep:] Linda Caudill feels so strongly that, for a time, she volunteered for the Donald Trump campaign. When she attends a Trump rally and she has attended eight she hears a man who addresses her concerns.
[Linda Caudill:] The only people who say anything to me about his tone are when I'm on social media, and I'm talking to liberal people. They will get on me about his tone. Or when I'm at an establishment GOP meeting, the establishment people always want to button him up, you know? the snobbier Republican people. If I'm at a country club fundraiser or something, they will do that. And I always say to them, look, for seven years, you bitched and moaned and groaned and complained. You finally have someone who has your voice, who sticks up against the media, who sticks up against the administration. And now you want him to be quiet? You can't have it both ways.
[Steve Inskeep:] I have talked with Trump supporters who said, I support Trump, but that thing about banning Muslims from traveling to the United States I can't handle that. Or I support Trump, but he's a little extreme sometimes. Or why did he have to mention Rosie O'Donnell in the middle of a presidential debate? I mean, they're people who will say they are disturbed by specific things.
[Linda Caudill:] I think Rosie O'Donnell is a pig. But that's just my opinion [LAUGHTER]. So, I mean, I've seen her on TV. She's awful. She says some of the most god-awful stuff. So I think she gets what she deserves.
[Steve Inskeep:] Linda Caudill says Trump has made hardly any statements that she would change. In fact, she wishes Trump supporters would find the courage to say more. She says many are afraid. To show them they're not alone, she's been joining friends on Cincinnati streets, holding up signs for Donald Trump.
[Linda Caudill:] Listen to the noise. They're all Trump people. They love us today [LAUGHTER]. This is wonderful.
[Steve Inskeep:] When she did this on Wednesday, some people who honked in support also used words.
[Unidentified Man #1:] Hillary sucks.
[Unidentified Man #2:] God bless America. [Expletive] Hillary.
[Steve Inskeep:] We are meeting very different voters in this divided state of Ohio. And on Monday, after the second presidential debate, we'll bring them all back.

[Andrea Seabrook:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Andrea Seabrook. There are about 300 uncommitted superdelegates in the Democratic Party and they may have the final say over which candidate will be the party's presidential nominee. This past week in a series we call the Backroom Primary, NPR has been talking with a few of these superdelegates about their coming decision. Today, NPR's Jeff Brady introduces us to Pat Waak. She chairs the Colorado Democratic Party.
[Jeff Brady:] On Pat Waak's desk is a file folder of letters and even petitions requesting and in some cases demanding that she pick a side in the race for the Democratic nomination. Waak told a breakfast meeting of Democrats north of Denver recently that she's receiving regular calls from big names who support either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.
[Ms. Pat Waak:] So it is a unending loving attention that I am getting. I have never been so popular in my life. And...
[Jeff Brady:] Waak says she recently received a call on a Sunday afternoon from Maggie Williams, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, and another from former Representative Pat Schroeder, also a Clinton supporter.
[Ms. Pat Waak:] These last few are saying, please remain neutral, you know, which is an interesting strategy they're taking right now. I think that they're sort of wanting people not to do these endorsements that have been coming out but wait to see what the rest of the primaries are.
[Jeff Brady:] There's been a steady trickle of superdelegates endorsing Obama recently. Waak says she will not join the list of endorsers on either side. There's a little Colorado Democratic Party history behind her position. Four years back, there was a nasty intra-party fight over claims that the previous chair was favoring one Democrat over another in a Senate primary race. Waak was elected as chair on a promise to not take a position on a race where two Democrats are competing. And there's also the fact that Denver will host the Democrat National Convention this summer.
[Ms. Pat Waak:] It's important for me to convince both candidates that they will be treated fairly here in this state when the convention opens up.
[Jeff Brady:] At some point Pat Waak will have to pick a candidate. Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean has asked delegates to decide by July 1 to avoid a floor fight in Denver. Waak says at least by then all the state's primaries and caucuses will be finished and voters will have expressed their preference before she expresses hers. Jeff Brady, NPR News, Denver.

[Ari Shapiro:] Some of the people hardest hit in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence are migrant farm workers. North Carolina farmers bring in thousands of laborers primarily from Mexico on visas each year, and there are many others without legal immigration status who also work in the fields. From La Grange N.C., NPR's Jason Beaubien reports on the challenges they face and the efforts to help them.
[Melissa Bailey Castillo:] How did we get here. Like...
[Unidentified Person #1:] What happened?
[Melissa Bailey Castillo:] Are we not coming back the same way we went in?
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] Melissa Bailey Castillo is driving her well-worn 2005 Dodge Caravan along narrow roads lined by flooded ditches. She's trying to deliver food and bottled water to some farmworker families who've been calling her for the last three days asking for help. Her 15-year-old son is navigating, but their path keeps getting blocked by rising water.
[Melissa Bailey Castillo:] Did we pass some side roads, guys?
[Unidentified Person #1:] Yeah, this is definitely not where we came from.
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] Castillo works with the Kinston Community Health Center. She says in the wake of Hurricane Florence, many immigrant farm workers are now cut off. She says many of them had no idea how bad a storm like this could be.
[Melissa Bailey Castillo:] Everybody was, like, rushing to the grocery store to buy everything they could. Well, farm workers didn't do that [LAUGHTER]. They had no idea to do that.
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] And now they don't know which roads or stores are open. Castillo says there's been very little information put out in Spanish.
[Melissa Bailey Castillo:] If you turn on the radio, there's not a Spanish media station. Everything is in English.
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] Finally Castillo spots the landmark she's been looking for, a small corner store called La Tienda Lilly. Further up the road, she meets the group of women who've been waiting for her.
[Melissa Bailey Castillo:] [Speaking Spanish].
[Unidentified Person #2:] [Speaking Spanish].
[Melissa Bailey Castillo:] Janet Serrano, whose husband works on a chicken farm, is driving and translating for the women.
[Janet Serrano:] Since I have a license they can't drive. So I'm protecting them from being stopped. And I'm trying to look for food and water myself, you know? And but I thank God we have jobs, but how can we get to a job when we there's no road to get to it?
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] Serrano says the biggest problem right now is that the tap water is bad, and they can't drink it. When you say the water is bad, what's what...
[Janet Serrano:] It comes out very cloudy. Yeah, it's not good.
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] Local officials have told people to boil their water, but Serrano says some people who've been without power for days aren't even getting any water flowing out of their faucets. A bigger issue, she says, is that many of these migrant families are scared of all the government officials in the area. The Department of Homeland Security deployed ICE agents to help with the relief efforts. But when photos of the officers in uniform and their trucks started to spread on social media, Serrano says people were afraid they were carrying out immigration raids.
[Janet Serrano:] Just like when immigration was here in Mount Olive. And they see it on Facebook, and they don't want to come out because of the simple fact that they think they're going to get deported.
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] DHS officials have said they are not carrying out immigration enforcement operations during this crisis, but that message has gotten lost for many undocumented farm workers. Serrano adds that even some legal migrants are worried about going to shelters or seeking other help because they've heard proclamations that using government services could jeopardize their immigration status. Castillo with the health center says that even in the best of times, migrant farm workers are living in the shadows here. And she says during this life-threatening natural disaster, communication with this community is even worse. Jason Beaubien, NPR News, La Grange, N.C.

[Audie Cornish:] And I'm Audie Cornish. We're going to begin this hour in the city of Stockton, in California's Central Valley. Stockton has suffered badly in the housing crisis and tonight, the city council is set to approve a plan that will lead to bankruptcy. Stockton, home to 290,000 people, will become the largest U.S. city to file for bankruptcy. As NPR's Richard Gonzales reports, it's a bitter pill for a city many felt was on the mend.
[Richard Gonzales, Byline:] Monday morning, in Stockton's miracle mile neighborhood, a group of volunteers and teenagers with a summer work program shovel away the brick and cement debris of a crumbling street bench. A few yards away, more teens are painting the street curbs red and fire hydrants yellow. The city of Stockton can't afford to do this work.
[Denise Jefferson:] The city's had to back out of a lot of the maintenance and security that they did before, so we've had to infill.
[Richard Gonzales, Byline:] Denise Jefferson directs Miracle Mile Improvements Association.
[Denise Jefferson:] The city, not only do they not have the money, they don't have the manpower. And they don't have the manpower to oversee doing it as volunteers.
[Richard Gonzales, Byline:] Jefferson is on a crusade to bolster morale in her neighborhood, if not the rest of Stockton, as it hopes to recover from an economic storm. Stockton, about 90 miles east of San Francisco, has always been a hard luck town with more than its share of crime and poverty. A housing boom and, with it, new tax revenues once promised to change that image. But when the economy crashed, the city had one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country. Those tax revenues evaporated, leaving the city unable to cover expenses, including costly municipal union contracts.
[Dwane Milnes:] It's sort of the perfect storm.
[Richard Gonzales, Byline:] That's Dwane Milnes, a former Stockton city manager.
[Dwane Milnes:] You know, variable interest rates on bonds worked the wrong way. Health inflation just drove through the ceiling. Crime rate went up. Can we please have only one of those things happen?
[Richard Gonzales, Byline:] Stockton had little choice but to slash its police force by 25 percent. Firefighters were cut 30 percent. A bank seized a building meant to be a new city hall. There is still a $26 million budget deficit. Inside Stockton's crumbling Renaissance revival-style city hall, Mayor Ann Johnston says bankruptcy is almost inevitable, and that the hardest part has been trying to explain to the public how this happened.
[Mayor Ann Johnston:] We're like a family that is, you know, on the skids, trying to figure out how they're going to keep their house, how they're going to pay their bills.
[Richard Gonzales, Byline:] The plan is to adopt a budget tonight that assumes the city will file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy. The so-called Pendency Plan means the city won't pay many bondholders. It will reduce benefits for past and current employees and it will eventually eliminate a health care plan for retired employees. Dwane Milnes, a former city manager who's also the president of the Association of Retired Employees, says his members know everyone has to take what he calls a haircut. But he says the city's budget plan will exact a severe human cost.
[Dwane Milnes:] I have retirees with brain tumors, really serious type 2 diabetes and their on low incomes and they're going to have to choose between medicine and food.
[Richard Gonzales, Byline:] Back at the Miracle Mile neighborhood, Denise Jefferson says whatever stigma comes with bankruptcy will pass. Meanwhile, she says, there are a lot of people ready to take charge.
[Denise Jefferson:] Instead of just crying and saying, oh, the police won't answer, the garbage isn't being collected, they're saying, I'll pick up the garbage. I'll paint the curbs.
[Richard Gonzales, Byline:] Jefferson says she hopes a bankruptcy plan will prove to be the opening of a hopeful new chapter for Stockton and not just another black eye for this beleaguered city. Richard Gonzales, NPR News.

[Ailsa Chang:] There may have been plenty of great football to watch yesterday as NFL teams jockey for playoff positions, but a whole other football story is on many people's minds today. The broad strokes sound familiar. A star player is involved in a violent, off-the-field altercation. The player is Kansas City Chiefs running back Kareem Hunt. The altercation happened back in February, but a video of the incident emerged for the first time on Friday. It shows Hunt shoving and kicking a young woman. The Chiefs cut Hunt from the team hours later. Then in an ESPN interview, Hunt apologized.
[Kareem Hunt:] Honestly, I just want to let the world know, you know, how sorry I am for my actions. And, you know, it's been a tough time for me, and I'm extremely embarrassed because of that video.
[Ailsa Chang:] Joining me now to talk about Kareem Hunt is NPR sports correspondent Tom Goldman. Hey, Tom.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] Hey, Ailsa.
[Ailsa Chang:] So tell us more about who Kareem Hunt is and what happened here.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] He is one of the best running backs in the NFL. He's only 23, led the League in yards gained last year in his rookie season. And he was a big part of one of the best offenses in the NFL. The incident in February happened in a hallway of a hotel in Cleveland where he was living at the time. The video shows an incident that quickly escalated. He shoves a woman. She comes back at him, hits him in the face. He shoves a man, who falls into the woman and knocks her over. Then while she crouches on the floor, Hunt walks up and kicks her in the leg.
[Ailsa Chang:] OK, so the Chiefs have just now released Hunt, right? But did the team and the NFL did they react at all when this happened back in February? Do they know about it before the video came out?
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] Yeah, they did. The Chiefs talked to him, and he lied to them about what happened, and he admits that. And that's what they based their decision on when they released him last Friday, that he lied and the video showed that he lied. Now, the NFL's involvement from the beginning has become a point of contention. After the infamous domestic violence incident in 2014 involving NFL player Ray Rice knocking out his then-fiancee and it was also seen on videotape the League admitted it bungled things, and it vowed to do a much better, more complete and more aggressive job investigating and punishing incidents like this if they came up in the future. But it appears the NFL has not done so in this case. Here is ESPN's Lisa Salters with Hunt in yesterday's interview.
[Lisa Salters:] Has the NFL ever questioned you about that incident?
[Kareem Hunt:] No, they have not.
[Lisa Salters:] Did they ever ask you to talk about that incident?
[Kareem Hunt:] No, they have not.
[Ailsa Chang:] Well, what does the NFL say about that?
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] I reached out twice to the NFL today to ask them that, and I did not hear back by air time. In a tweet last night, NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said this. The NFL investigation began immediately following the incident in February. Consistent with standard investigatory practices, the NFL continues to pursue a complete understanding of the facts. Now, maybe so, Ailsa, but this looks bad. And it looks like there wasn't enough urgency on the NFL's part to interview the two main people involved.
[Ailsa Chang:] Right.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] I mean, this happened nearly 10 months ago. If the NFL wants us to believe it takes the issue of domestic violence seriously, wouldn't you think it would do all it can up front, get on top of the issue, interview the principal people involved, go to whatever lengths it can to...
[Ailsa Chang:] Yeah.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] ...Get ahold of a video if it exists. The League says it tried but wasn't unable to. So it's left with an awkward situation again.
[Ailsa Chang:] That's NPR sports correspondent Tom Goldman. Thanks, Tom.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Michel Martin:] We've been broadcasting all weekend from the Texas Standard studios at member station KUT in Austin, Texas, where we're experiencing South by Southwest. It's the 30th anniversary of this massive festival and conference that explores music, film and technology. We figured we'd come because frankly, you get a different perspective when you travel, and because some of the people and ideas that will transform the future are here. Now, to that end, we'll start today with Congressman Will Hurd, a Republican who represents the 23rd congressional district. It runs from El Paso to San Antonio. We called him for a Texas perspective on a number of the important national stories that have been percolating while we've been here. And he recently had a transformative experience himself while traveling. I began our conversation by asking him about President Trump's budget proposal, which includes billions of dollars to build a wall between Texas and Mexico. Congressman Hurd opposes that.
[Will Hurd:] I always talk about with a president's budget is a statement of priorities, but it's Congress that funds the government. And so I think almost all Republicans have said the government is going to look a little bit differently than what the president has asked for. But when it comes to border security, there's already physical barriers along the border. I have 820 miles of the international boundary between Texas and Mexico. The Santa Elena Canyon and Big Bend National Park, you have a 6,000-foot cliff on the Mexico side. You have the Rio Grande or the Rio Bravo, as they call it in Mexico. And then you have another 6,000-foot cliff on the U.S. side. That's already a physical barrier. We should be spending some of this money on increasing folks within border patrol. And that's one thing that the president is trying to do. We should be using some of that money to help improve intelligence collection in Mexico and Central America on drug trafficking organizations and human kingpin smugglers. You know, I've spent nine and a half years as an undercover officer in the CIA. Meanwhile, I was in India two years, Pakistan two years, New York two years, Afghanistan a year and a half. I chased al-Qaida all over the world. You know, intelligence is important, and we can stop this problem before it gets to our border. And it's cheaper to do it than building a 30-foot concrete barrier.
[Michel Martin:] I'm glad you mentioned your intelligence background because I want to talk about that next. But just one more question on the whole border question. Do you have any evidence that your colleagues are listening to you?
[Will Hurd:] I do. I've brought members of Congress down to the border and I've taken them into Juarez. And I represent from San Antonio to El Paso. El Paso is one of the safest cities of its size in the country. Juarez is not the murder capital of the world the way it was in 2008 and 2009. And they've seen and they've changed their opinion. They've actually gone back and written op eds talking about how building a wall is probably not the most reasonable way.
[Michel Martin:] Now, I want to draw on your intelligence background. You sit on the House Intelligence Committee. The president still hasn't offered any evidence that the Obama administration wiretapped Mr. Trump's Manhattan office. Your committee has also said that they've found no evidence. What should happen now?
[Will Hurd:] Well, what should happen now is folks across the country should be happy that the government is working. You have Republican leaders in the House and the Senate that deal with intelligence that disagree with the president. And the reality is there is no evidence that suggests any truth to these claims. And the folks in Congress are doing our job and calling balls and strikes.
[Michel Martin:] So let's talk about the hearings. On Monday, the committee will be holding the first public congressional hearings on Russian interference in the U.S. elections. Now, a number of people, including Evan McMullin he's a one-time candidate for president and, like you, a former CIA officer he's criticized these hearings being held, saying that this should go to a bipartisan special committee. His argument is that this makes it easier to limit and control the investigations. And this is a way, he says, that this could be used to minimize the political damage toward a Republican president, potentially, rather than allow the chips to fall where they may. And I'd like to ask how you respond to that.
[Will Hurd:] Well, I disagree with Evan on that. First off, the fact that this hearing is being done publicly, which is rare for the House Intelligence Committee, is a sign of commitment to an open investigation. And we're going to be able to hear the responses from the director of the FBI and the director of the NSA. And this is going to go down in Russian history as the greatest covert action campaign not because of who won the election. That was won fair and square. It's going to go down as the greatest covert action because it created a wedge, whether real or perceived, between the White House, the intelligence community and the American people.
[Michel Martin:] So before we let you go, we understand that you took a road trip with your Democratic colleague, Representative Beto O'Rourke, when the weather forced the cancelation of, you know, thousands of flights. And the two of you decided to drive from your districts in Texas to Washington, D.C. And some legislation came out of it. So do you want to just tell us about it?
[Will Hurd:] Sure. It was a 36-hour trip that we were in the car for 31 hours. About 29 hours were live streams. And we talked about every single issue. And one of the things that we tried to show is that you can disagree without being disagreeable. And I learned about a bill that Beto was working on which would let family members of U.S. citizens who are barred from ever re-entering the United States on a technical issue to go before a federal judge to decide if they can return. And I signed on as a co-sponsor on Friday. And so that was, you know, a tangible example of spending time together, coming to agreement on important issues.
[Michel Martin:] Thirty-one hours in the car together. I would bet you're either really good friends right now or you're probably not going to speak for a couple weeks [LAUGHTER]. So which is it [LAUGHTER]?
[Will Hurd:] Well, I was going through separation anxiety. And after it was over it was you know, it was weird not knowing where he was.
[Michel Martin:] Well, thanks so much for talking with us.
[Will Hurd:] Well, Michel, thanks for having me on. I look forward to doing this again.
[Michel Martin:] Yeah, it wasn't 31 hours, but thanks so much for giving us some time.
[Will Hurd:] [Laughter] Well, if you need me to fly down there and drive you back from Austin, let me know.
[Michel Martin:] Don't tempt me. That's Congressman Will Hurd. He is a Republican who represents the 23rd congressional district in Texas. But we caught up with him in his office in Washington, D.C. Congressman, thanks so much for speaking with us.
[Will Hurd:] My pleasure.

[Robert Siegel:] Finally this hour, a more popular sporting event the National Basketball Association Finals. In Miami last night, the San Antonio Spurs went up one game to zero against the Heat. It was a very close game 92-88 and as NPR's Mike Pesca says, the other numbers that stood out were rebounds and turnovers.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] The allure of sport is all wrapped up in defining the possible; from how fast a man can run, or how high he could fly. But so often in sports, you hear that you can't win if you don't as in, you can't win in football if you don't run the ball. You can't win in baseball if you don't field well. You can't be successful in the NBA without rebounding. All of those assertions have a reassuring certainty about them. All are also wrong. After the loss last night, the Heat's Lebron James made the case that statistically speaking, his team played well. Then, he focused on an odd anomaly.
[Lebron James:] When you look at statistics, you know, we put ourself in a position to win. You know, they shot 41 percent, we out-rebounded them by 9. We had more assists. I was looking at the stat sheet, and it says they had 21 second-chance points. I don't really understand, how is that possible with only six offensive rebounds? I'm very good at math, and the only way you can get a second-chance point is if you get an offensive rebound, right? Am I correct?
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Lebron is good at math. Remember when he counted the number of championships the Heat were going to win together? But in this case, not correct. He failed to account for the fact that a team can score a second-chance point on team rebounds, or after the ball goes out of bounds. So that's a little bit of pickiness. But the general point that the Spurs were successful without offensive rebounding, is a good one. The Spurs were actually the worst offensive rebounding team in the NBA this year. And the Heat were the worst overall rebounding team in the league this year. There are a lot of explanations for both stats; mostly, that their coaches prioritized other parts of the game. The reason that teams can be, and are, so successful without great rebounding is that they excel elsewhere like as Manu Ginobili, of the Spurs, noted, in taking care of the basketball.
[Manu Ginobili:] I think that the most important thing we did offensively, is not turning the ball over. And that's something we talked about. First play of the game turnover, dunk. And that's what they do.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] But after that Dwyane Wade dunk, the Spurs took excellent care of the basketball. The Heat forced only four turnovers for the entire game. That was the fewest number of turnovers a Heat team has forced in 20 years. When told of this fact, Spurs forward Danny Green, who was 6 years old at the time of the last four-turnover game, reacted accordingly.
[Danny Green:] Um, wow.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Some statistics are just numbers that confirm what's apparent. Some are revelatory, and some even obscure the truth. Yes, Lebron James had a triple double. So that's a great night, right? But Lebron James had only 18 points, which is his lowest playoff total in two years. If there were no such thing as statistics, and you wanted to describe his play, you'd say something like: He contributed in a lot of ways, but needed to score a few more baskets down the stretch. Which James all but admitted was the case, as the Heat try to rebound sorry, probably not rebound but certainly, win Game 2 on Sunday. Mike Pesca, NPR News, Miami.

[Mary Louise Kelly:] To another story now the Trump administration is following through with a promised ban on bump stocks. President Trump about this earlier today.
[President Donald Trump:] This morning, we also completed the process to issue a new regulation banning bump stocks.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Bump stocks are the aftermarket gun attachments that let semiautomatic rifles fire much more quickly. They effectively turn rifles into machine guns. The ban gives people 90 days either to destroy their bump stocks or turn them in. NPR's Martin Kaste reports on how this change came about. And a warning this story contains the sound of gunfire.
[Martin Kaste, Byline:] Before October of last year, most people had no idea what a bump stock was. Then came the mass shooting in Las Vegas 58 people killed, hundreds injured, the gunman shooting down into a crowd from his hotel room, shooting with what sounded like a machine gun. Police on the scene assumed it was a machine gun. Only later, when the shooter was dead, did they find his semiautomatic rifles had been outfitted with bump stocks. The thing about stocks and similar devices is that they're basically a novelty. Before Las Vegas, they'd almost never been used in a crime. This is a YouTube video of a gun enthusiast in Louisiana, Jeff LaCroix, showing his daughter how to shoot one. [SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO, "HALEY BUMP FIRING WITH THE STOCK BEFORE THEY TAKE THEM AWAY"
[Jeff Lacroix:] Hold tight right there. OK. Push more pressure. Hold... Oh, my God. [Laughter]. OK. All right. [Laughter].
[Martin Kaste, Byline:] And even LaCroix sees the bump stocks as a rare indulgence. As he says in the video, they're almost too expensive to shoot. [SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO, "HALEY BUMP FIRING WITH THE STOCK BEFORE THEY TAKE THEM AWAY"
[Jeff Lacroix:] We don't shoot this thing much. And I hadn't let you shoot it before is because it costs too much money damn to feed it. You can point $50 worth of rounds down range in about five seconds if you want to or less than that.
[Martin Kaste, Byline:] Bump stocks also make your rifle jump around a lot, making it very inaccurate. And that's because of how they work. The attachment simply harnesses the recoil energy from the gunshot before to pull the trigger again for you, faster than you could do with your finger. It's never been considered a reliable way to fire a rifle. And the attachments have been sold mainly by small aftermarket vendors.
[Lawrence Keane:] Most people in the industry didn't know what they were.
[Martin Kaste, Byline:] That's Lawrence Keane with the industry trade group National Shooting Sports Foundation, commenting last week on this impending ban.
[Lawrence Keane:] It's not something we're concerned about. In particular, we didn't really comment on it. It is such a small, small niche. It's really quite inconsequential to the overall scheme of things for the industry.
[Martin Kaste, Byline:] While the mainstream gun industry has kept its distance from bump stocks, some gun rights activists have rallied to the cause. They worry about a slippery-slope effect. With the spread of 3D printers, it's now easier for people to make their own homemade attachments. And some of the activists worry that the government might eventually just broaden this ban to include any rifle that could be bump fired. The NRA expressed its disappointment that owners of bump stocks will have to turn them in or destroy them. They have 90 days to do so, and there's no amnesty here for people who bought them when they were still allowed by federal regulators. Another group, Gun Owners of America, promised to sue to block the rule from taking effect. Martin Kaste, NPR News.

[Michel Martin:] We're going to start the program today looking at what has been another remarkable week in politics, a week in which President Trump's former campaign chair was convicted in a financial fraud trial and President Trump's longtime lawyer admitted under oath to steering money to two different women at what he said was Mr. Trump's direction, in a manner which amounts to a felony violation of campaign finance law. Yesterday, a top executive of the Trump Organization made a deal with federal prosecutors in exchange for immunity. And all this has President Trump on a Twitter tear, and he's aiming a lot of his anger at Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The president has criticized Mr. Sessions repeatedly in recent months, sometimes in terms that border upon personal insult, all this because of Mr. Sessions' decision to follow Justice Department guidelines and recuse himself from the investigations into Russia's efforts to influence U.S. elections. Earlier this week, the attorney general responded in a rare statement, saying, quote, "while I am Attorney General, the actions of the Department of Justice will not be improperly influenced by political considerations," unquote. Now, in recent months, we've often turned to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to help us understand what events like this might mean, so we're turning to him again for that. He was appointed by President George W. Bush. He is now dean of the law school at Belmont University. He's also a former judge. Your Honor, Dean Gonzales, welcome. Thanks for joining us once again.
[Alberto Gonzales:] Hey. It's good to be with you once again.
[Michel Martin:] So first of all, I just wanted to ask you, what strikes you about this whole exchange between the president and the attorney general, which I know you have called extraordinary? What's extraordinary about it?
[Alberto Gonzales:] Well, what's extraordinary and there are so many ways to describe it remarkable, unprecedented is the fact that you have the head of the executive branch, the president of the United States, being openly critical of one of his Cabinet appointees. It makes one wonder it certainly makes me wonder, well, you know, if you believe the attorney general is not stepping up and doing the job right, then why not make a change? My sense is that this constant criticism of Jeff Sessions, I think, I fear, makes the president look somewhat weak and that, really, if you're so unsatisfied with this performance of his cabinet secretary, then why don't you make a change? There are obviously good reasons why he shouldn't make a change, in my judgment, which leads me to the conclusion then perhaps it would be best if the president did not make such open critical comments about the attorney general for several reasons, two of them being that well, I can think of three. First of all, I think Jeff Sessions, probably more than any other cabinet secretary, has done more to promote the president's policies and priorities in the law enforcement area. Secondly, Jeff Sessions loves this job and is going to stay in this job and has no intention of quitting. And I think he's worried about the future of the department and wants to protect the department. And I think the constant criticism of the attorney general undermines his authority, and I think it hurts the morale of the Department of Justice. I can't help but feel that the rank and file are feeling this criticism, and I think it can be demoralizing. And I think it calls into question the integrity of the entire institution.
[Michel Martin:] I want to turn now to the attorney general's response. It was highly unusual for him to respond in the way that he did to the president. First of all, I have to ask you, can you remember any circumstance in which an attorney general issued a statement directly responding to his boss, essentially the president a criticism of his work? Can you remember anything like that?
[Alberto Gonzales:] No. There may have been private conversations, private criticism by a president and a private response a strong response by an attorney general, but obviously, this is this dialogue is very public. And, you know, Jeff Sessions, to his credit and I really admire the fact that he has done exactly the right thing in response to these tweets and public attacks. He's kept his head down. He's remained silent, and he's focused on the work of the department. I think what finally got him to make a response is the accusation that the department is out of control. I mean, that is a serious allegation.
[Michel Martin:] I was going to ask you about that because you also said that you think these kinds of attacks have an effect on the people who work at the Department of Justice. What kind of I'm just interested in your take on this as a person who, obviously, led the department. You think that these attacks, even though they seem to be directed at the attorney general personally and directly, you think they have an effect on the rank and file. What effect do you think they have? And broadly, the question is, what effect do you think that it has on the public and the administration of justice more broadly? Do you think it does have an effect?
[Alberto Gonzales:] I think it does have an effect. With respect to the rank and file, I think we all want to believe we're working for a cause and we're working for someone that we believe in. And if, in fact, the president of the United States believes that the attorney general is somehow not up to the job, you know, I think that is demoralizing. As to your second point, I think that the constant criticism undermines the perception the American people may have in the Department of Justice. As I've said several times already, you know, when a U.S. attorney stands up in court and says, present, Your Honor, for the United States of America, and everything that that attorney utters in court there cannot be any question whatsoever about the competence and the integrity of that lawyer. And if, in fact, people believe that the Department of Justice has been politicized, even though the criticism is leveled solely at the leadership but, you know, it just filters down I think it does undermine the public's confidence in the entire department. And I think that's a very regrettable situation.
[Michel Martin:] That's Alberto Gonzales. He served as the attorney general of the United States during the George W. Bush administration. He's also a former White House counsel. He's now dean of the Belmont University school of law. Judge Gonzales, thanks so much for talking with us.
[Alberto Gonzales:] Thanks for having me once again.

[Guy Raz:] We're back with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. Tornadoes in the South costs so much destruction in parts of Alabama that rescue teams are still searching for missing people, including, in Tuscaloosa, more than 340 people are now confirmed dead in the southern state. It's the worst natural disaster in the U.S. since Hurricane Katrina. Now, much of the recent attention has rightfully focused on Tuscaloosa, in central Alabama. But the more rural northeast part of the state was also devastated. NPR's Kathy Lohr visited with one family as they struggle to figure out what to do next.
[Kathy Lohr:] This week's storm was a monster. When you stand outside Alan and Jennifer Hamilton's home near Rainsville, Alabama, you can understand why so many people here died.
[Ms. Jennifer Hamilton:] It just rolled and rumbled, and you could hear the vibration and the shaking.
[Kathy Lohr:] When the tornado roared across the state, it pulverized the Hamiltons' brick home, ripped out the stone fireplace and blew up furniture. The family took cover in the laundry room.
[Ms. Jennifer Hamilton:] My son-in-law had laid over my pregnant daughter to protect her. And we had pillows stuffed around her. And my husband kept hollering, hang on, it's almost over. Hang on, it's almost over. So I think that gave us the strength and courage to keep sitting there, although we were about hysterical.
[Kathy Lohr:] Now three days after the tornado hit, Jennifer Hamilton tries to remain calm. Thirty-three people in the county have been confirmed dead, but many say the actual number may be much higher. A trailer park just down the highway was obliterated.
[Ms. Jennifer Hamilton:] There were people walking up from the road who were looked to be injured pretty bad. And I understand that about half a mile down the road from us, they found about 23 people who did not survive. So for us to come out with just a total loss of our house and vehicles, we're okay.
[Unidentified Man #1:] [Unintelligible]
[Ms. Jennifer Hamilton:] Yeah. Hey, Drew. Yeah. They do want that washer and drier.
[Drew:] Who does?
[Ms. Jennifer Hamilton:] Alan wants it.
[Kathy Lohr:] Jennifer and her husband Alan are among those sorting through what's left. Friends with pickup trucks stop by to see if they can haul away anything salvageable.
[Unidentified Man #2:] Hang on a second. Watch out.
[Kathy Lohr:] Some of the men are moving piles of debris and crumbling bricks so they can pry loose an oven and microwave that still might work. Jennifer says the $250,000 home they built five years ago and most of their possessions are just gone.
[Ms. Jennifer Hamilton:] We got some of our shoes and some dishes and a few pictures, and that's probably about all that's going to be salvageable here.
[Kathy Lohr:] The couple is waiting for an insurance adjuster to visit. They were promised someone would stop by. But by late Friday, no one had shown up. Jennifer and Alan say they understand thousands need help. But they were frustrated with the response they got.
[Ms. Jennifer Hamilton:] Yeah, they just said we's in the system. If we needed underwear or something, they'd bring it to us, but that's pretty much it. And we told them that we it wasn't underwear that we needed. We needed a home and we need vehicles, that we've had a total loss.
[Kathy Lohr:] The Hamiltons are staying with family, but it's clear the long, stressful days of working in the sun without shelter and power are wearing on them.
[Ms. Jennifer Hamilton:] We're looking for help. And we're looking for a home. We want, you know, a trailer, a RV or something brought here to that we can have our family in until we can, I mean, you can't just stay with somebody every day of your life.
[Kathy Lohr:] Finally this morning, an insurance agent did stop by. Now they're waiting to see how much of the damage will be covered. Jennifer says she's had moments where she just lost it, but mostly she's tries to remain strong.
[Ms. Jennifer Hamilton:] And I keep reminding myself, and that's where I keep trying to get my inner strength, I look around and I say we may have lost everything, but, you know, we're not having to bury our loved ones at the same time.
[Kathy Lohr:] Jennifer's daughter Nakisha, who's 27, is having her first baby in August. That's another reason this family says it remains hopeful, even as they realize the cleanup here will take months. Kathy Lohr, NPR News.

[Michele Norris:] We've been hearing a lot recently about that magic number 60. That's the number of seats you need for a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. In order to reach 60, Democrats are looking to pick up a seat in what had been a safe Republican district Mississippi. NPR's Debbie Elliott reports.
[Debbie Elliott:] The last time Mississippi elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate was 1982. So you might figure in comeback Republican Roger Wicker would be shoo-in after being appointed last year to fill Trent Lott's seat. Not so he's in a tight race with Democrat Ronnie Musgrove, a former governor who's trying to take advantage of public sentiment.
[Michele Norris:] Many Mississippians feel like the rest of the country. Ninety-one percent of America believes we're headed in the wrong direction. They have seen an administration and a Washington that's not working.
[Debbie Elliott:] At this veterans' event in Jackson, Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia joined the Musgrove campaign. The former Navy secretary brought to Mississippi the message that helped him win in Virginia two years ago that it's time for Reagan Democrats to come home.
[Michele Norris:] I'm proud to have served in the Reagan administration, but I think the answer for the future of the country is in the Democratic party, and you're seeing a transition and a lot of the states here began in Virginia but I think particularly in these hard times, the Democratic party has been the party that's going to take care of the working people.
[Debbie Elliott:] Don't expect the wholesale shift here. Republican John McCain should carry Mississippi in the presidential election, and Wicker showed benefit from his coattails. But because this is a special to fill what's left of Lott's term, the candidates will not be identified by party on the ballot. So Wicker is trying to tie Ronnie Musgrove to national Democrats and highlight the balance of power that's at stake.
[Michele Norris:] This is about whether the Senate will have a veto proof, left-wing majority, a filibuster-proof majority.
[Debbie Elliott:] One of the latest Wicker ads links Musgrove to liberal groups that donate to the Democratic senatorial campaign committee. Characters including actors resembling the 1970s group The Village People line up with briefcases full of cash as a political operative eggs them on.
[U:] Let's go! Ronnie Musgrove has promised to support our liberal Democratic leadership. Let me guess. The largest gay rights group in the country. Your money will help. I'm with the largest pro-abortion group in the country. Is Roger Wicker pro-life? Absolutely. Then we'll support Musgrove. You know Ronnie. He delivers.
[Debbie Elliott:] A Democratic ad tries to counter the image that Musgrove is out of touch with conservative Mississippi values. It follows him to choir practice.
[Michele Norris:] As a Christian, we have a sense of duty, obligation, responsibility and more importantly desire to help people who were in need. It's what the Bible teaches.
[Debbie Elliott:] Musgrove says he's pro-life, pro-gun and anti-gay marriage, but that's not enough for a retired truck driver, Frank Holder, of Florence, Mississippi.
[Michele Norris:] And I am a conservative. I'm also a Christian. Until the Democrats come up with a policy that they're against abortion and gay rights, I'll never vote Democrat.
[Debbie Elliott:] Holder came to hear Roger Wicker at a gathering of Evangelicals at a private college south of Jackson.
[Michele Norris:] It says in Ecclesiastes there's a time to speak and a time to be silent. This is no time for mainstream Mississippians and mainstream Christian Americans to be silent.
[Debbie Elliott:] Wicker is courting the Republican base in a year when who turns out to vote is key. His opponent Ronnie Musgrove is expected to benefit from Democrat Barack Obama's popularity among African-Americans, more than a third of Mississippi's population. Back in downtown Jackson, black voters have the economy on their minds.
[Michele Norris:] We need somebody who's going to give us jobs.
[Debbie Elliott:] Seventy-seven-year-old Frank Dennis runs a shoe repair shop on historic Ferris Street once a bustling African-American business center during segregation. They use an old-fashioned steel shoe jack to nail toe plate onto men's dress shoes. Dennis' Shoes opened 61 years ago.
[Michele Norris:] That was back in the days when you could come to Ferris Street and get a dozen of fresh eggs. You can get a bunch of tender greens with or without roots. You get your carrots and your okra, tomatoes and potatoes [unintelligible] anything you wanted. It's gone.
[Debbie Elliott:] Now much of Ferry Street is desolate its store fronts mostly boarded up or busted out. Frank Dennis says he thinks Democrat Ronnie Musgrove could do something about the struggling economy.
[Michele Norris:] We don't have too many jobs here. The only big job we have here, Musgrove gave it to us and that was a Nissan plant.
[Debbie Elliott:] But even the Canton, Mississippi Auto Plant is feeling the financial squeeze. This week, Nissan said it was downsizing to a four-day work week. The question is which Senate candidate Mississippians think can best deal with the economic fallout. Debbie Elliott, NPR News.

[Neal Conan:] I'm Neal Conan, in Washington. Every day on this program, we try to address the talk of the nation, the most important, the most compelling stories, like landmark Supreme Court decisions, civil war in Syria, climate change, politics and tough times. On our last day, we think it's appropriate for you to set the agenda. Call, tell us: What's the talk of the nation? It might be a big international story you've been following for weeks, or a local news event that has your neighborhood abuzz. We've also invited a few of our favorites here at NPR to join us. And later in the program: What is the best goodbye card you ever got? You can email us on that now: talk@npr.org. And if you want to tell us what's the talk of the nation, our phone number is 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org, and click on TALK OF THE NATION. And let's see if we can get Heather on the line. Heather's with us from Tampa.
[Heather:] Hi, yes. I think one of the most important things that's going on right now is actually the special session in Texas to try to push through abortion restrictions.
[Neal Conan:] And the filibuster the other day by State Senator Wendy Davis.
[Heather:] Right, which is absolutely incredible. She deserves incredible support and just recognition for that effort. I think that was a really wonderful stand for women's rights.
[Neal Conan:] And you know that the governor plans to call another session, I think, as soon as next week, to bring back the bill. And I think the great expectation is that it's going to pass quite easily.
[Heather:] I do know that, and I'm incredibly disappointed in Governor Perry's decision to do that.
[Neal Conan:] I wonder also, there's been some allegations of hypocrisy. Democrats and people on the left have sometimes been impatient with Republican filibusters, particularly in the United States Senate.
[Heather:] Right, and I can understand that, but I think there's a distinction to be made. It's one thing to stand up and actually talk for 11 hours. It's another thing to put through sort of a procedural filibuster that doesn't in any way take any courage. It's essentially a way to just sort of weasel out of having to have a discussion on the topics of debate.
[Neal Conan:] Heather, thanks very much for the call.
[Heather:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] And as it happens, we have NPR senior Washington editor Ron Elving with us here in Studio 42. And Ron, nice to have you back, as always.
[Ron Elving, Byline:] Good to be with you, Neal. You're one of my favorites.
[Neal Conan:] Oh, well, thank you very much for that. And Heather's point, the procedural filibuster, this has become an institution in the United States Senate, where somebody merely has to threaten a filibuster, then all of a sudden you need 60 votes to get anything passed.
[Ron Elving, Byline:] Heather makes a sophisticated distinction here about different kinds of filibusters sophisticated, but one I think we can all relate to, and that is the difference between actually getting up Jimmy Stewart-style and holding the floor for extended periods of time. Wendy Davis did this for, I believe, 11 hours, without the benefit of being able to touch a piece of furniture to lean on, because that was forbidden by the rules, denied a back brace and so on, and forced to make her stand on her feet. And that kind of physical courage I think people do respect. They also see that there's a certain physical limit to it, whereas the kind of virtual filibuster that we have today in the United States Senate is an excuse, really, for people to just put the kibosh on anything that they don't like and put such an incredible penalty in terms of time on trying to deal with it that the Senate will back off. And we see that all the time.
[Neal Conan:] Do we think Rand Paul is going to wear pink sneakers the next time he tries it?
[Ron Elving, Byline:] And I should say Rand Paul is the last guy we've seen get up and do a multi-hour filibuster in the style that Wendy Davis did down in Austin, Texas. He did it as a Republican senator opposed to some of the uses we're seeing of automated equipment, drone, NSA sort of surveillance and issues that have become really quite salient since he did it.
[Neal Conan:] And I have to ask you, the talk of the nation today in Washington, D.C. seems to be in the United States Senate, where it looks as if the immigration bill could pass as soon as today.
[Ron Elving, Byline:] This is a week of historic days. And the historic day in the Senate, with respect to immigration, already today they have invoked cloture, ending a filibuster attempt or at least the threat of a filibuster with 68 votes, more than the 60 that are required to cut off debate. So that makes it quite clear the bill is going to pass. And later on today, the Senate will have its final vote on its immigration overhaul. This is something more or less that's been in the works for a decade or more, back to the last bill of its kind in 1986. It is quite momentous. It could mean a great deal to a great number of Americans and potential, prospective Americans. And it's also going to be a huge controversy when it gets to the House.
[Neal Conan:] Where one of the House members of the leadership, the Republican leadership, said today this bill is dead on arrival.
[Ron Elving, Byline:] As written by the Senate it is, at this stage of the process. The question is: Will the House pass anything at all? If the House passes some kind of an immigration bill of its own, something it likes better, that the Republican majority likes better since the speaker says he won't bring anything else to the floor, then can that bill go to a conference with the Senate? That would produce a conference report. That could come back to the Senate and excuse me, come back to both the Senate and the House and conceivably be passed in a bipartisan fashion by both chambers.
[Neal Conan:] In the meantime, there is no way to avoid those other historic days, where the Voting Rights Act was essentially gutted by the United States Supreme Court, and then yesterday, momentous decisions on gay marriage.
[Ron Elving, Byline:] That's correct. And interestingly, for all those people who watch the Supreme Court particularly those who watch it with some jaundiced eye we heard much the same objection to each of those decisions by those whose ox had been gored. We saw the conservative bloc of justices that is to say Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy all together in voting on the Voting Rights Act. And we saw them all together opposing the move on gay marriage, except for Justice Kennedy, who just 10 years earlier, on the very same day this was the 10th anniversary had written the historic Lawrence case opinion, in which he struck down laws that banned gay sex. That was a big, watershed moment, and at that time, Justice Scalia said that was an overreach and that in 10 years, we'd be looking at legalizing gay marriage. People thought at the time Scalia was being hyperbolic. He was not only being predictive, he was precisely predictive, to the day.
[Neal Conan:] And it's interesting: He also predicted in yesterday's dissent on the Defense of Marriage Act that this is a false front, and we're just setting up for the other shoe to drop and for this majority on the court to ban ban bans on gay marriage, to legalize gay marriage across the board.
[Ron Elving, Byline:] Well, David Boies who was one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs in this case, who were trying to establish a right to marriage for gay couples has said that this really does give them the opportunity to judge laws against gay marriage in those states that have them. I believe it's 31 states have passed bans on gay marriage.
[Neal Conan:] Thirty-eight, I think.
[Ron Elving, Byline:] Well, the different...
[Neal Conan:] Different levels of ban.
[Ron Elving, Byline:] ...different definitions of what's a ban, but an outright ban in 31. And look at those, and put them against the principles that were laid out by the court in this decision yesterday and say, gee, this doesn't seem to pass constitutional muster, according to Justice Kennedy and his other four voters on the liberal side.
[Neal Conan:] And let's get Bambi on the line, Bambi with us from Charleston.
[Bambi:] Hi. Thanks so much for taking my call on the air. So many things in the news. I love the show, will really miss and wish I had weren't so many important things, so we could express sentiments along those lines. But I did want to raise the issue of the change in Voters Rights Act. As a born and raised Southerner, I've had the opportunity to live all over the United States, and thus I garnered my liberal tendencies. I have to say that until these justices stand in a voting line in states such as South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, they are obviously clueless. I have seen voters denied instructions on casting provisional ballots. I've seen African-American voters turned away and told they have to drive to headquarters in the evening which is obviously closed in other to get those provisional instructions. And I have stood forward many times, given instructions myself or reprimanded people who are not allowing valid IDs. It's unreal, just blows my mind. Until they stand in those lines and see black voters turned away, they are clueless as to what's going to happen with this new deal.
[Neal Conan:] Ron, it's interesting: To go back to the opinion there and this was, again, Chief Justice Roberts writing for the majority, saying it's not a question, of course there is still racial discrimination on voting. He said that is a fact. The other question, though, is whether the basis on which this law is being held and he talked about the areas that had been selected for enforcement, that had not been updated for 40 years. And he said this is simply no longer the case if you look at turnout figures, if you look at the number of African-American and minority officials who have been elected.
[Ron Elving, Byline:] That's right. There has been change. No question that there has been change. The question is: Does that mean that the mechanism by which much of that change has been achieved should be removed? Or does it mean that that mechanism should be, in some sense or another, altered? What does it mean? If the change that we have seen in the last 40 years is something that the court approves and Congress approves and Congress reauthorized this law back in 2006, unanimously in the Senate, and almost unanimously in the Senate, 90 percent of the Senate voted...
[Neal Conan:] In the House, you mean.
[Ron Elving, Byline:] In the House, they voted 90 percent for this. So there does seem to be some approval of the change that's taken place, largely because of the Voting Rights Act. So does that mean that we should not need the Voting Rights Act anymore, or does it mean that it's done a good job and it should be retained? That's, I think, an argument that's going to go forward. The other question is: Is it fair to just look at the nine states that were entirely under this particular onus of having to take all their voting laws to the Justice Department? Parts of several other states had to do it, as well. Is it fair to only put them in the penalty box? Or would it make more sense to devise a broader formula? Or possibly just say that all 50 states need to have their voting rights pre-cleared by some authority that keeps the Constitution of the United States in mind?
[Neal Conan:] It was interesting, also, to hear John Lewis of course, the member of Congress from Georgia and the civil rights pioneer to talk about what makes us think that rights given cannot be taken away, take a walk in my shoes. Bambi, thanks very much for the call.
[Bambi:] Thank you. I appreciate you addressing it.
[Neal Conan:] And a couple of emails on that subject. This is from Scott: Today, I can't help thinking about the Supreme Court, which overturned key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 unspeakably sad. And this is from Maroila Mavoila, excuse me. It is amazing to me the Supreme Court could feel race is no longer important in voting issues the same week that TV food icon Paula Deen is under a microscope for being a Southern belle who used racial slurs. How could there be such different views of the state of affairs? We get the point. It's not quite what the court ruled, but we get the point. It's interesting, Ron, as we go ahead, it seems to me the court has already decided it's not going to take up another gay marriage case. It today ruled there were two possibilities on the docket, not next year.
[Ron Elving, Byline:] Not next year, although we will be looking at affirmative action again next year because of a case coming from the state of Michigan. That might give the court an opportunity to weigh in again on an issue that it also ruled on this week, sending an affirmative action plan from the state of Texas back down to an appellate court for another review. There's still some roiling on the court with respect to their attitude towards affirmative action.
[Neal Conan:] Ron Elving, as always, thank you very much.
[Ron Elving, Byline:] And Neal, let me just say the moments I've spent speaking with you on your show have been some of the happiest moments of my working life.
[Neal Conan:] Thank you for that, Ron. We appreciate it.
[Ron Elving, Byline:] Going to miss it.
[Neal Conan:] Senior Washington editor Ron Elving, here with us in Studio 42. When we come back, well, we'll check in with two more NPR reporters, but more of your calls, as well. What's the talk of the nation today? 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News. This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan. Today, for the last time on the program, we're doing well, we're doing what we do. We're talking about you're talking about around your dinner table, in the car with the kids, as you stand in line at the grocery store or check in on Twitter. You may not realize it, but you've always helped set out agenda every day. When we fill up our planning board with the topics we'll cover at 2 PM Eastern Time, your voices rang in our ears. So tell us, one more time, what's the talk of the nation? 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. You can also find us on Twitter. That's @totn. And let's go to Bob, Bob with us from Gainesville.
[Bob:] Thank you, Neal. I find that the Edward Snowden case has certainly been the talk of the nation. But the underlying issues behind this are very much interesting to me and many others, the idea as to whether or not what the government is doing encroaching on our civil liberties and reading into our phone lines and whatnot. Whether or not that is done in the name of security is a very interesting discussion. I feel that we should not trade our liberties for security, and, of course, the precedent for this was 911. Many might fear that we might have another 911 attack11 being the falsified attack that it was, with Building Seven being a building 47 stories tall that fell in freefall speed in a matter of seconds, was not hit by any other airplane...
[Neal Conan:] Ah, I see we have a truther with us.
[Bob:] Yes, well I think that's a very derogatory term, and perhaps on your last show...
[Neal Conan:] It's derogatory because you're talking scientific nonsense. I have to I'm sorry I have to upbraid you I'm sorry to upbraid you. I am sorry to upbraid you. Please, I try to listen with respect to callers, except when they have their facts flat wrong.
[Bob:] Do you think Building Seven is not a very telling incident, sir?
[Neal Conan:] I think it fell for different reasons, and the scientific community agrees with me. Well, more to the point, I agree with them. What do I know about Building Seven? The fact is...
[Bob:] Well, actually, the architects and engineers all are in a consensus of...
[Neal Conan:] No they are not, Bob, and I'm sorry...
[Bob:] Yes, there's a group called Architects and Engineers...
[Neal Conan:] Bob, I'm hanging up on you, because this is nonsense. Thank you. Let's move right along. Paula's on the line with us from Tucson.
[Paula:] Hi. I'm glad to be on the air today. We'll miss you very much. Wendy Johnson is certainly one of my new heroines, but living down here near the border, I wanted to talk a little bit about immigration.
[Neal Conan:] And you're right on the frontline there.
[Paula:] Right on the frontline, and, you know, living around and among many Mexican immigrants and immigrants from Latin America, you get a very different perspective than people in other parts of the country. One of the things that has really surprised me about this whole discussion is no one seems to see how backwards we have it. Even our own senators, McCain and some of our representatives, seem to think that the first thing you need to is quote-unquote "secure the border," when in fact, if we establish a guest-worker program, if we establish a way for people to come here legally, it erodes the very need for any type of resistance to people coming here illegally
[Neal Conan:] I hear what you're saying, but there is an aspect of this in which at least some and perhaps I'm reading between the lines here on the Republican side say in order to get Republican votes, we have to have this element in the bill, otherwise it's not going to get passed. And that important element that many progressives want, the path to citizenship for the 11 million or so already here, that's not going to go anywhere.
[Paula:] Well, I understand that, and I to me, that just points to the dysfunction of our system and the way we do leadership in this country. To put 20,000 more people down here where our border patrol can barely maintain the needs that it has already, and then to build a fence that, quite frankly, you know, I don't think you can build a wall high enough to keep desperate people out of this country. And I think it's time we realized that. And we're also what happens with the border fence? Besides creating an atmosphere of militarization and hostility and suspicion among people, it is destroying a lot of very essential parts of our environment down here. And this is a very delicate ecosystem in the Southwest. So there are so many reasons to not go that direction and so many reasons to start looking at how we can start welcoming people into this country who want to be here, who are contributing, who want to work. And I guess my last point would be to all those well-meaning people in my camp who point to the fact that Mexican laborers are willing to do jobs no one else wants to do, why should a person have to agree to do slave labor to be welcomed into this great country? So that's what I have to say. Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks very much for the call, Paula. Marilyn Geewax, our senior business editor for NPR, is here. And we always love a chance to talk with her. She joins us one last time in Studio 42. Nice to have you with us, Marilyn.
[Marilyn Geewax, Byline:] Hi, Neal, it's great to be with you.
[Neal Conan:] And this time last week, there was something akin to panic setting in, as it was Ben Bernanke saying, well, maybe by even the end of the year, we might be able to start winding down that quantitative easing, stop buying so many bonds and wean the system off those injections of federal money that we've been using for so long. And all of a sudden, the bond market and the stock market went [makes noises].
[Marilyn Geewax, Byline:] And that big bomb is hitting on a lot of people who are trying to buy homes right now. Interest rates, the long-term rates, the ones that you use to buy a home with, 30-year mortgages, they've really risen a lot in the past month. We've seen interest rates on those home mortgages go from about something in the range of three and a three-and-three-quarters of a percent up, to about four-and-a-half percent, even beyond that. Now it's starting to look like it could get up to 5 percent. So if you were thinking about buying a home, maybe all of a sudden, knowing that your monthly mortgage payment is going to be $100 more, maybe $200 more, that's really causing a lot of people to either rush into buying a home before rates go even higher, or maybe start to change their mind and think maybe renting a while longer isn't such a bad idea. So this issue of home affordability is becoming a little bit more of a problem after all this time with low interest rates. So I think that's really been the big fallout from the higher interest rates. Whether or not that's a temporary phenomenon, and maybe it'll just sort of die down, but it could start to derail some of this housing recovery we've seen this year.
[Neal Conan:] And interesting, Mr. Bernanke made this announcement because he said, well, you know, the economy, it's getting better. And I think today, we're even seeing some encouraging employment numbers.
[Marilyn Geewax, Byline:] Oh, it's always so complicated with the economy, because here's the thing: He's saying yes, the reason interest rates are going to start to drift higher is because the economy is actually getting stronger, and that's good. We'd love a stronger economy. But, you know, a big part of the reason why the economy is getting stronger is because the housing market has been gaining. When people buy homes, they also get landscaping services, and they buy furniture, and they do things that create jobs for other people. So how do you manage to start to raise interest rates to keep the economy on more normal footing, to get rates back to something that seems more historically in line? And that is a little bit higher. Five percent is more in line with what's normal for mortgage rates. But if the housing market gets weaker, and maybe we start to backslide again, and the job growth that we've seen in construction starts to ease off, do we get right back into the soup? Do we slide back? You know, Neal, it's been four years exactly. It was in June of 2009 that the economy turned around and began to grow after the big plunge for the recession. So we've had four years of growth, but it's still very weak, and a lot of it is tied to that housing market coming back. So this is a precarious moment.
[Neal Conan:] Are you encouraged broadly about the U.S. economy? Do you think this is steady growth is going to be able to continue?
[Marilyn Geewax, Byline:] It's such a complicated time right now. When I look out across it, there are so many things that are so encouraging in the energy sector, and my goodness, the new technologies that we're coming out with, the new ways of manufacturing, there are just so many exciting things out there, whether it's agricultural or just things that are coming out of the high-tech sector. There's so much to think, boy, this is this could be a real turning point. The economy might really take off. But then I look the other direction, and there's still we've got almost 12 million people long-term unemployed, and the is about half of that, almost. So it's we've got a lot of people looking for work and a lot of baby boomers who lost income and lost wealth during this. People are moving towards retirement, a very large cohort of Americans.
[Neal Conan:] I wish you wouldn't mention that.
[Marilyn Geewax, Byline:] Yeah, right about something like 75, 78 million Americans are steaming towards retirement. And their homes are maybe not back to where they once were in terms of the value. Their retirement savings, after you adjust for inflation, are still depressed. A lot of people lost jobs and took jobs for lower pay. So you've got a big chunk of the population moving towards retirement, not in the kind of shape that they had hoped to be in. And you still have an awful lot of people with no jobs at all, or underemployed, or these long-term unemployed folks. It's it remains a very uneven and very tough economy, and I feel like I wouldn't be surprised if two years from now, the economy's back in a bad recession. And I wouldn't be surprised if two years from now, growth is 4 or 5 percent. It, either way, seems entirely plausible to me.
[Neal Conan:] Marilyn Geewax, as always, thank you very much for your time today. We really do appreciate the time you've spent with us.
[Marilyn Geewax, Byline:] Oh, thank you, Neal. It's always just been a pleasure and an honor to be with you.
[Neal Conan:] NPR's senior business editor Marilyn Geewax, with us here in Studio 42. Here's a couple of emails. The congressional gridlock and animosity is my vote for important topic. That from Joyce. And this is from Corey: I'm looking forward to the nation's strategy to talk about tax reform. It might not be as interesting as immigration reform, yet it might be just as important. And this is from Victor Singing Eagle: Here's something we should be talking about, seeing how native issues frequently get overshadowed by larger issues. I'm not sure precisely what went down, but I read that the Supreme Court made an important ruling on the ICWA, Indian Child Welfare Act. Can help somebody help me understand, as I made I would go out in a limb. This was an adoption case where a child was put up for adoption by an Indian woman. Her father had renounced any interest. The Indian woman put the child up for adoption. She was adopted by a Caucasian couple, I think, in North Carolina, and then her father put in his claim under the ICWA, the Indian Child Welfare Act. He was given custody. The adoptive parents sued. Their case was upheld by the Supreme Court. They can now try to get their custody back. It got sent back to the courts in North Carolina. It's not certain that they will get custody, but as I understand it, it was decided more or less on a technical basis and not on a broad basis. But I will stand corrected if I'm wrong. In the meantime, let's get Claudia on the line, Claudia with us from Denver.
[Claudia:] Hi. Neal, first of all, I want to say that I think this is the best show on NPR, and I am going to miss you so much every day.
[Neal Conan:] Thank you.
[Claudia:] And you're just an extraordinary host. So but I was calling about the wildfires in Colorado, and, I mean, they're just devastating the state, and not only this state, but everything around us. The wildfires have been caused, to such a great extent, by beetle kill, which is caused by the fact that we haven't had cold enough winters to kill off the beetles.
[Neal Conan:] These are bark beetles, and as you suggest, in previous periods, they were killed off by extreme cold during the wintertime. That cold is not as cold as it used to be, and those beetles are killing large swaths of trees, not just in Colorado, but across the West.
[Claudia:] That's absolutely true. And it's I mean, this part of the country is so beautiful and has so many lovely ecosystems. And what we're seeing is so much being burned to the ground. One of the other problems is that people have decided to live, for instance, in the Black Forest area in Colorado Springs. They've decided to build homes there. They really don't understand the environment here, and so they don't do anything to mitigate the chance of fire. You know, they keep all these huge, old trees around their homes...
[Neal Conan:] Because they're beautiful, but they're also tinder.
[Claudia:] Exactly.
[Neal Conan:] Claudia, I can see you're having a little problem with your throat, so we'll let you go.
[Claudia:] Sorry.
[Neal Conan:] Thank you very much for the kind words, and thanks very much for the call.
[Claudia:] Thank you for the show. Bye.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking about, well, what's the talk of the nation? This is TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News. And NPR science correspondent Richard Harris is with us. A perfect introduction, Richard.
[Richard Harris, Byline:] Hello, Neal. Yes.
[Neal Conan:] And it is on a week where we have seen the president of the United States come up with an ambitious policy to reduce carbon emissions. That would, in turn, reduce, we hope, global warming, or at least the speed at which the Earth is warming.
[Richard Harris, Byline:] Yes. Even maybe to a small extent. Obviously, it is a global problem. And if the U.S. gets on board and is very serious about it, it can make some difference. But obviously, you need cooperation from around the world, because we are no longer the leading culprit in emissions of carbon dioxide, but we certainly produce still a huge amount of it, and we're responsible for a lot of the carbon dioxide that's in the air. So it was interesting to see this sort of scattershot approach that the president took to try to sort of say what where can I make an effort? And it is scattershot, because the Congress has basically decided they're not going to act on this. And so the president and his team decided to say: Well, where can we make a difference without needing new laws, without needing Congress to be involved? And so you end up with a sort of spectrum of ideas that he put out.
[Neal Conan:] And a lot of them involved emissions from coal-fired plants, either new ones and those regulations, I think, are now accepted, and it's as we keep hearing, it makes it virtually impossible to build a new coal-fired plant using present technology.
[Richard Harris, Byline:] Right. And those regulations are still in the works. They were proposed and brought back pulled back a little bit, but he called for them to move forward again and be finalized later this year, and then to apply that same standard to power plants that are existing...
[Neal Conan:] Existing, yeah.
[Richard Harris, Byline:] ...power plants. And that's a tricky one, because he didn't specify how much they need to be reined in, but it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, in most cases, to take carbon dioxide from a power plant and reduce it in any significant way. There are some really dirty power plants that you could improve somewhat, but you can't make them as clean as natural gas unless you do something tremendously dramatic, like capture the carbon dioxide and bury it underground. And that's extremely expensive, also.
[Neal Conan:] And then there was the mention of the Keystone XL pipeline, which a lot of people didn't expect. He said we're not going to approve this unless it proves to not have a significant effect on carbon emissions. And some people say, well, it depends on how you look at it.
[Richard Harris, Byline:] Absolutely. That's going to be a very interesting discussion, because that it was the words were ambiguous, and, of course, the Canadians immediately argued, oh, well, this is not going to substantially exacerbate climate change. People who are opposed to the pipeline said: What are you talking about? You'd be tapping into this huge resource of fossil fuels that really ought to stay underground forever. And if you start if you find a way to bring it to the market, you'll inevitably going to affect climate change. So that's going to be very interesting to see how that rhetorical twist gets plays out in the coming weeks and months.
[Neal Conan:] It's so interesting. Richard, thank you for being with us. Often, we have Richard when there's some real disaster going on in the world to explain to us about the oil leaks in the Gulf of Mexico and such things. And this is only a slow-motion crisis, only a slow-motion train wreck. So it's always good to have you on the program.
[Richard Harris, Byline:] It's always a pleasure, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] Let's see, one more email, this from Alicia in Madisonville, Kentucky: I've heard NPR talk about raising minimum wage and the effects that might make. I, along with so many of my peers, are working in minimum wage or slightly above minimum wage jobs. We have bachelor degrees, or higher. We're having such difficulty finding full-time work where we can make a living. Most of us have to take out student loans to get this education. Now we're unable to pay it back. What are we to do? And this from Darren: I can't believe the hunger strike in Guantanamo Bay has been going on since February. The majority of Americans don't seem to know or care that many of the people we are detaining have been cleared of any wrongdoing, yet are being held indefinitely. The recent use of metal-tip feeding tubes for striking detainees to demoralize them makes me ashamed of my country and my president. There are so many people who wrote. There are so many we called. I'm sorry we're not going to be able to get to more of your calls today. And thank you so much for carrying enough to contact us. When we come back after a short break, we're going to be talking with David Ellis Dickerson from Greeting Card Emergency, so email us. What's the best goodbye card you ever got? That's at talk@npr.org, or give us a call: 800-989-8255. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News.

[Rachel Martin:] President Trump's son-in-law is famous for trying to stay in the background, or at least to try to stay away from microphones. This week though, he is the focus of the Russia investigation. President Trump's son-in-law is famous for trying to stay in the background, or at least to try to stay away from microphones. This week though, he is the focus of the Russia investigation.
[Steve Inskeep:] He goes to Congress twice. He goes to Congress twice. Remember, Jared Kushner turned up at a meeting with a Russian lawyer. It was a meeting where Donald Trump Jr. was promised dirt on Hillary Clinton. Remember, Jared Kushner turned up at a meeting with a Russian lawyer. It was a meeting where Donald Trump Jr. was promised dirt on Hillary Clinton. Well, that's likely to be just one of the topics because today Kushner meets the Senate intelligence committee and then tomorrow, the House intelligence committee. Well, that's likely to be just one of the topics because today Kushner meets the Senate intelligence committee and then tomorrow, the House intelligence committee. Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, who's on the House committee, spoke on CBS's "Face The Nation." Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, who's on the House committee, spoke on CBS's "Face The Nation."
[Adam Schiff:] There's a lot we want to know. We certainly want to know about several of the meetings that have been alleged to have taken place. There's a lot we want to know. We certainly want to know about several of the meetings that have been alleged to have taken place.
[Rachel Martin:] NPR's Domenico Montanaro is here with the week look-ahead. Hey, Domenico. NPR's Domenico Montanaro is here with the week look-ahead. Hey, Domenico.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Hey, there. Hey, there.
[Rachel Martin:] All right, so Adam Schiff talking there about that meeting with the Russian lawyer that's gotten Trump Jr. into hot water. Kushner was at that meeting. They're going to want to know about what was the substance of those conversations for sure. Other big questions likely to come up? All right, so Adam Schiff talking there about that meeting with the Russian lawyer that's gotten Trump Jr. into hot water. Kushner was at that meeting. They're going to want to know about what was the substance of those conversations for sure. Other big questions likely to come up?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Yeah, I mean, that meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort and those various Russian nationals is certainly going to be one thing, but there are a lot of other things that are possible here. You know, he Kushner filed an incomplete disclosure that he then amended that left out a big loan that could have ties to Russia. He had a meeting in December with a with a Russian banking official. You know, and he's he likely had a desire to set up a back channel with Russia to be able to communicate with with the president. And... Yeah, I mean, that meeting at Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort and those various Russian nationals is certainly going to be one thing, but there are a lot of other things that are possible here. You know, he Kushner filed an incomplete disclosure that he then amended that left out a big loan that could have ties to Russia. He had a meeting in December with a with a Russian banking official. You know, and he's he likely had a desire to set up a back channel with Russia to be able to communicate with with the president. And...
[Rachel Martin:] He seems to have a history of leaving out things on these disclosure forms. He seems to have a history of leaving out things on these disclosure forms. Didn't he also amend a national security clearance, adding 100 names, at least? Didn't he also amend a national security clearance, adding 100 names, at least?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Yeah, there's that [LAUGHTER], which is you know, they're going to want clarity on a lot of these things. Yeah, there's that [LAUGHTER], which is you know, they're going to want clarity on a lot of these things. And, you know, there is his 666 Fifth Ave. building in Manhattan, in which, you know, he owes still $1.3 billion on that loan that has to be paid back in two years. And, you know, there is his 666 Fifth Ave. building in Manhattan, in which, you know, he owes still $1.3 billion on that loan that has to be paid back in two years. And you have a lot of people in Congress wondering if some of these meetings that he set up, especially with the Russian banking official Sergey Gorkov, was really because he's trying to secure a loan. And you have a lot of people in Congress wondering if some of these meetings that he set up, especially with the Russian banking official Sergey Gorkov, was really because he's trying to secure a loan.
[Rachel Martin:] So back to this Russian the meeting with the Russian lawyer, Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort were supposed to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. They got out of doing that, at least publicly. So back to this Russian the meeting with the Russian lawyer, Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort were supposed to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. They got out of doing that, at least publicly.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Yeah, I mean, they're still meeting Wednesday in a deal struck with the committee. They're only meeting behind closed doors. That's disappointing for those of us who, you know, want to hear everything about this and get more information. The committee says this is a first step and that they reserve the right to compel them to testify publicly at another time. Yeah, I mean, they're still meeting Wednesday in a deal struck with the committee. They're only meeting behind closed doors. That's disappointing for those of us who, you know, want to hear everything about this and get more information. The committee says this is a first step and that they reserve the right to compel them to testify publicly at another time.
[Rachel Martin:] So they'll hand over documents if asked and and perhaps we could see them on camera answering those questions. So they'll hand over documents if asked and and perhaps we could see them on camera answering those questions.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Yeah, I mean, notably they're not under oath behind closed doors, and there's a little bit of a flap over that with Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the judiciary committee, who said, well, you know, anything that's said to Congress would be if someone lies, it would be illegal. But that's a little bit different than being under oath. Yeah, I mean, notably they're not under oath behind closed doors, and there's a little bit of a flap over that with Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the judiciary committee, who said, well, you know, anything that's said to Congress would be if someone lies, it would be illegal. But that's a little bit different than being under oath.
[Rachel Martin:] So, of course, all of this is happening as the White House communication team got a bit of an overhaul. Sean Spicer is out. That had been rumored for months. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is in as the new press secretary. Anthony Scaramucci, longtime Trump loyalist, is now onboard, on staff as the new communications director for the White House. What's that mean to you a sign that the communication strategy up till now hasn't been working? So, of course, all of this is happening as the White House communication team got a bit of an overhaul. Sean Spicer is out. That had been rumored for months. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is in as the new press secretary. Anthony Scaramucci, longtime Trump loyalist, is now onboard, on staff as the new communications director for the White House. What's that mean to you a sign that the communication strategy up till now hasn't been working?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Well, Trump hasn't been thrilled with how the communications staff has been operating, especially when it comes to leaks and the fact that there's so much information that's getting out beyond his control. Well, Trump hasn't been thrilled with how the communications staff has been operating, especially when it comes to leaks and the fact that there's so much information that's getting out beyond his control. Scaramucci was on a bunch of Sunday shows and decided to make that a major topic. He had a little bit of a rougher time, but Scaramucci's a Trump guy. You know, Spicer never was quite the right fit. And now Scaramucci's going to have his work cut out for him. Scaramucci was on a bunch of Sunday shows and decided to make that a major topic. He had a little bit of a rougher time, but Scaramucci's a Trump guy. You know, Spicer never was quite the right fit. And now Scaramucci's going to have his work cut out for him.
[Steve Inskeep:] Different communications team, different face, but still the same president, and he is still his own chief communicator. Scaramucci said one thing over the weekend, noting that at 71, President Trump is not likely to change. And just yesterday, Trump was tweeting again, blaming Republicans for not protecting him. He's still going to be the chief spokesman for himself. Different communications team, different face, but still the same president, and he is still his own chief communicator. Scaramucci said one thing over the weekend, noting that at 71, President Trump is not likely to change. And just yesterday, Trump was tweeting again, blaming Republicans for not protecting him. He's still going to be the chief spokesman for himself.
[Rachel Martin:] Going right to Twitter. OK, NPR's Domenico Montanaro. Thanks so much, Domenico. Going right to Twitter. OK, NPR's Domenico Montanaro. Thanks so much, Domenico.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Thank you, Rachel. Thank you, Rachel.
[Rachel Martin:] The national debate over abortion is unfolding at an abortion clinic in Kentucky today. The national debate over abortion is unfolding at an abortion clinic in Kentucky today.
[Steve Inskeep:] The clinic is the EMW Women's Surgical Center in Louisville. Groups opposed to abortion have been protesting there for days, and this week they hope to shut the place down. A judge has temporarily ordered some members of that group to stay out of a so-called buffer zone around the clinic. An abortion rights supporter with the ACLU said this buffer zone is critical. The clinic is the EMW Women's Surgical Center in Louisville. Groups opposed to abortion have been protesting there for days, and this week they hope to shut the place down. A judge has temporarily ordered some members of that group to stay out of a so-called buffer zone around the clinic. An abortion rights supporter with the ACLU said this buffer zone is critical.
[Unidentified Woman:] Lower-level criminal activities are prosecuted. They don't tend to escalate into the kinds of arsons, bombings and murders that we've too often seen. Lower-level criminal activities are prosecuted. They don't tend to escalate into the kinds of arsons, bombings and murders that we've too often seen.
[Steve Inskeep:] And to be clear, the protests so far have been peaceful. And to be clear, the protests so far have been peaceful.
[Rachel Martin:] We're going to talk now with Lisa Gillespie. She is health and innovation reporter at member station WFPL in Louisville, Ky. Lisa, what can you tell us about the group that is doing the protesting? We're going to talk now with Lisa Gillespie. She is health and innovation reporter at member station WFPL in Louisville, Ky. Lisa, what can you tell us about the group that is doing the protesting?
[Lisa Gillespie, Byline:] Sure, they're named Operation Save America. They used to be Operation Rescue. And they're a fundamentalist Christian group based out of Texas and North Carolina. And their main thing is having abortion basically be gone, you know. And they're focusing on closing down the EMW Women's Surgical Center in Louisville. Sure, they're named Operation Save America. They used to be Operation Rescue. And they're a fundamentalist Christian group based out of Texas and North Carolina. And their main thing is having abortion basically be gone, you know. And they're focusing on closing down the EMW Women's Surgical Center in Louisville.
[Rachel Martin:] Have they had success before in getting clinics shut down? Have they had success before in getting clinics shut down?
[Lisa Gillespie, Byline:] No, they haven't. Although, you know, earlier this year Governor Matt Bevin met with their leaders, and Governor Bevin has talked about how he's unapologetically anti-abortion. And he has used some safety and health excuses to to try to shut down some of these places. And he there was a, you know, abortion clinic in Lexington, Ky., that shut down earlier, and the Planned Parenthood as well, in Louisville, is no longer open. No, they haven't. Although, you know, earlier this year Governor Matt Bevin met with their leaders, and Governor Bevin has talked about how he's unapologetically anti-abortion. And he has used some safety and health excuses to to try to shut down some of these places. And he there was a, you know, abortion clinic in Lexington, Ky., that shut down earlier, and the Planned Parenthood as well, in Louisville, is no longer open.
[Rachel Martin:] And so this is now, to be clear, the last place where if a woman wants to get an abortion, this is the last place she can go in in the state. And so this is now, to be clear, the last place where if a woman wants to get an abortion, this is the last place she can go in in the state.
[Lisa Gillespie, Byline:] Right, yeah. Right, yeah.
[Rachel Martin:] So what happens over the next couple of days? This group is other protests have been happening, but this main fundamentalist Christian group is planning a conference and potentially other protests this week. So what happens over the next couple of days? This group is other protests have been happening, but this main fundamentalist Christian group is planning a conference and potentially other protests this week.
[Lisa Gillespie, Byline:] Right, yeah, that kicks off today. A week-long protest, and the biggest protest, is is expected to happen outside the clinic on Saturday morning. OSA has about over 450 people here. And this morning, there's going to be a hearing on a buffer zone that was put in place over the weekend. Right, yeah, that kicks off today. A week-long protest, and the biggest protest, is is expected to happen outside the clinic on Saturday morning. OSA has about over 450 people here. And this morning, there's going to be a hearing on a buffer zone that was put in place over the weekend.
[Rachel Martin:] Buffer zone we should say, an area where protesters can't go in order to protect staff who might be going into the clinic. Buffer zone we should say, an area where protesters can't go in order to protect staff who might be going into the clinic.
[Lisa Gillespie, Byline:] Right, and they'll be talking about whether that will be temporary or permanent. Right, and they'll be talking about whether that will be temporary or permanent.
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah. Yeah.
[Steve Inskeep:] It's a remarkable moment in history isn't it? where it seems like just about every major issue in this country is being contested all at once. And abortion is certainly one of them. It's a remarkable moment in history isn't it? where it seems like just about every major issue in this country is being contested all at once. And abortion is certainly one of them.
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah, back to the fore Lisa Gillespie, she covers health and innovation for our member station WFPL in Louisville, Ky. Hey, Lisa, thanks so much. Yeah, back to the fore Lisa Gillespie, she covers health and innovation for our member station WFPL in Louisville, Ky. Hey, Lisa, thanks so much.
[Lisa Gillespie, Byline:] Thank you. Thank you.
[Rachel Martin:] Now to a mosque at the center of Jerusalem, which remains a center of tension. To be precise, the dispute is over Israeli security measures after an attack there. Now to a mosque at the center of Jerusalem, which remains a center of tension. To be precise, the dispute is over Israeli security measures after an attack there.
[Unidentified Protesters:] [Chanting in foreign language]. [Chanting in foreign language].
[Steve Inskeep:] We're hearing Palestinians who said prayers in the street last night outside the holy site as they've been doing for a week or so. They've been protesting Israel's insistence that Muslim worshippers enter the site through metal detectors. The dispute involves neighboring Jordan, which is supposed to be involved in decisions about that site. We're hearing Palestinians who said prayers in the street last night outside the holy site as they've been doing for a week or so. They've been protesting Israel's insistence that Muslim worshippers enter the site through metal detectors. The dispute involves neighboring Jordan, which is supposed to be involved in decisions about that site.
[Rachel Martin:] So for the latest on this, we turn now to NPR's Daniel Estrin in Jerusalem. Hey, Daniel. So for the latest on this, we turn now to NPR's Daniel Estrin in Jerusalem. Hey, Daniel.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Hi. Hi.
[Rachel Martin:] So how do we get to this point? I mean, why did these security detectors go up in the first place? So how do we get to this point? I mean, why did these security detectors go up in the first place?
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Well, Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel carried out a deadly shooting there a little bit over a week ago, killing Israeli policemen. Israel put up those metal detectors saying that they're necessary. And but Palestinians say this is just another way of Israel trying to take more control of the site, which is run by Muslim authorities. Well, Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel carried out a deadly shooting there a little bit over a week ago, killing Israeli policemen. Israel put up those metal detectors saying that they're necessary. And but Palestinians say this is just another way of Israel trying to take more control of the site, which is run by Muslim authorities.
[Rachel Martin:] So how is that going over within the general population? I mean, something like this any little issue can can reignite tensions. So how is that going over within the general population? I mean, something like this any little issue can can reignite tensions.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Right, there have been Palestinian protests and prayers for days now. And the crisis has also spilled over now into Jordan. Israel says a Jordanian man stabbed an Israeli Embassy security guard Sunday in the Jordanian capital. The Israeli guard then shot and killed the stabber and another Jordanian. And so now there's a standoff between Israel and Jordan about it. And this is significant because Jordan plays a key role in this whole crisis. Jordan oversees religious affairs at that Jerusalem religious site. Right, there have been Palestinian protests and prayers for days now. And the crisis has also spilled over now into Jordan. Israel says a Jordanian man stabbed an Israeli Embassy security guard Sunday in the Jordanian capital. The Israeli guard then shot and killed the stabber and another Jordanian. And so now there's a standoff between Israel and Jordan about it. And this is significant because Jordan plays a key role in this whole crisis. Jordan oversees religious affairs at that Jerusalem religious site.
[Rachel Martin:] Ah, so it is connected to this mosque and these metal detectors. Ah, so it is connected to this mosque and these metal detectors.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Right, and so now there are efforts to try to resolve the situation. But, you know, Jordan is a key element here. And with this crisis now between Israel and Jordan, it's going to complicate these efforts. Right, and so now there are efforts to try to resolve the situation. But, you know, Jordan is a key element here. And with this crisis now between Israel and Jordan, it's going to complicate these efforts.
[Rachel Martin:] So we haven't heard much about the U.S. in all of this, but the Trump administration has talked an awful lot about trying to achieve Middle East peace where so many other administrations have failed. Do we know if any U.S. officials are weighing in to this particular moment? So we haven't heard much about the U.S. in all of this, but the Trump administration has talked an awful lot about trying to achieve Middle East peace where so many other administrations have failed. Do we know if any U.S. officials are weighing in to this particular moment?
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Yes, Trump's envoy Jason Greenblatt is headed to Israel today to try to reduce tensions. So we will have to see if he has any luck in moderating this crisis that has been going on for now for more than a week. Yes, Trump's envoy Jason Greenblatt is headed to Israel today to try to reduce tensions. So we will have to see if he has any luck in moderating this crisis that has been going on for now for more than a week.
[Rachel Martin:] What's the situation at the mosque right now? Do we know? What's the situation at the mosque right now? Do we know?
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Palestinians continue to hold prayers outside the mosque. And oftentimes, for many days now, these protests or these prayers have become kind of protests and... Palestinians continue to hold prayers outside the mosque. And oftentimes, for many days now, these protests or these prayers have become kind of protests and...
[Rachel Martin:] But the metal detectors are... But the metal detectors are...
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] ...Have been met with clashes by Israeli police. ...Have been met with clashes by Israeli police.
[Rachel Martin:] ...The metal detectors are still up? ...The metal detectors are still up?
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] And the metal detectors are still up. And the metal detectors are still up.
[Rachel Martin:] NPR's Daniel Estrin reporting from Jerusalem this morning. Thanks so much, Daniel. NPR's Daniel Estrin reporting from Jerusalem this morning. Thanks so much, Daniel.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] You're welcome. You're welcome.

[Scott Simon:] Of course, another area of concern is General Motors' announcement this week that the company will layoff about 14,000 workers at five of its North American auto plants, including one in Lordstown, Ohio. Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, spoke with President Trump this week about those cuts and an auto work bill that he's introduced, which would give buyers a discount for cars made in America and reduce tax cuts for auto manufacturers that ship jobs overseas. Senator, thanks very much for being with us
[Sherrod Brown:] Scott, good to be back. Thank you.
[Scott Simon:] Day the cuts were announced, the president said, quote, "Ohio wasn't properly represented by their Democratic senator, Senator Brown, because he didn't get the point across," but it sounds, in your account, like the two of you had a good conversation this week.
[Sherrod Brown:] We did. I didn't reference his finger-pointing because that's sort of what he does. I found it a bit amusing. There's a Ohio has a Republican governor. We have in this country a Republican president. You Republican Senate, Republican House, Republican Supreme Court, and he found the only Democrat he could to [LAUGHTER] point a finger at. But that's sort of his style. We had a good conversation. I pointed out to the president that my legislation would help create domestic demand. But and most and equally importantly, it would take away that tax break that was in the president's tax bill that says to a company, if you produce in the United States, you pay at 21 percent. If you move to Mexico, you get a 50 percent-off coupon, you pay half that rate. We take that away, we use those dollars to encourage people to buy cars and trucks and SUVs made in the United States, it would be a game changer for the auto industry in this country.
[Scott Simon:] Now, Senator, you, a Democrat, have supported the president's steel tariffs, and there are some experts who say that cost GM a billion dollars. You still think they've been a good idea?
[Sherrod Brown:] I do. I do. I think they could have been done better. I would have targeted those companies that are serial cheaters those countries that are serial cheaters China, South Korea, Turkey and work with our allies, which the president really didn't do. But I think you start with this when you love your country, you fight for the people who make it work. And that's the point of better trade policy. And when I hear talk of those tariffs, what I first think is that GM spent literally 10 times that estimate $10 billion on stock buybacks in the last three or four year; 10 times what even those who estimate the tariffs at really high, high numbers. So GM clearly has used these tax cuts not to invest in Lordstown or Hamtramck, not to retool the Lordstown plant. Instead, they use these tax breaks, these tax cuts they've gotten, to increase compensation for executives, and then take that other tax break, that 50 percent-off coupon, and use it to move to start production in Mexico.
[Scott Simon:] It was reported this week that the layoffs GM will undertake is expected to save the company about $6 billion by the end of 2020. So what possible incentive do they have to actually give more jobs to people?
[Sherrod Brown:] Well, they of course, they will say that. But they continue to move production offshore. They it's profitable to move production offshore when they have when you have a NAFTA that hasn't addressed these issues even the updated NAFTA that the president claims might address these and when companies continue to get tax breaks to move offshore. But, again, if you respect the dignity of work in this country, if Washington understood that, you would see a focus on retooling production in the United States. Our the workers in Lordstown were raided by J.D. Power as the most efficient, most effective workers in all of the GM system. And those they know how to work. They've had a plant there for 52 years. Retool that plant, bring the production home, don't send it overseas. And that's why the president said at least he would he said on the phone that he'd support this idea of the American Car, American Jobs Act.
[Scott Simon:] He said that to you?
[Sherrod Brown:] He said that to me three times.
[Scott Simon:] OK. Senator Brown, are you going to work with President Trump on this even though a lot of people are asking you if you're going to run for president?
[Sherrod Brown:] I can work with President Trump on what if when I don't agree with him much, but he says he wants to bring these jobs to Youngstown and to the industrial Midwest. And my message of the dignity of work works in Ohio and Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania. And it's the way you should govern. And when you govern that way, the politics takes care of itself.
[Scott Simon:] Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, thanks so much for being with us, sir.
[Sherrod Brown:] Thank you, Scott.

[Renee Montagne:] Tourism has long been a huge part of Egypt's economy. And that is a problem as tourists are being driven away by a string of violent events there. Just weeks ago, a Russian passenger jet carrying tourists crashed in the Sinai. Russia blames a terrorist bomb. That followed another attack Egyptian airstrikes aimed at militants mistakenly struck and killed Mexican tourists. Now Egypt's tourism minister has started a social media campaign to show a much more charming version of Egypt. With a campaign hashtag, #ThisIsEgypt, it has itself been hijacked by opponents of the government. NPR's Leila Fadel joined us from Cairo.
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] So the tourism minister Hisham Zaazou announced it last week. Egypt's spending about $66 million on advertising and global marketing to bring tourists back because this country needs them for their economy. So he announced this hashtag, and he played this video to launch it. It shows really beautiful scenes of Egypt's landscape the sea, the temples people having fun in a really beautiful place. And the narrator asks people to go take pictures of Egypt, post them with the hashtag #ThisIsEgypt and show the world the Egypt that they see.
[Renee Montagne:] Which, obviously, people did, but also there are other postings. Tell us about those.
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] So in some ways, it's really backfiring. There are those that are posting about beautiful Egypt, and then there's a lot of people who are choosing to use it to show a repressive state. One of those people is Wael Eskander. And he's an Egyptian activist that I spoke to.
[Wael Eskander:] It deceives people by showing an Egypt that does not really exist. I just quickly thought about all the people in jail unjustly and what was happening to them. This is an Egypt of injustice, not an Egypt of beauty.
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] So he's saying that really, it's whitewashing a country that jails journalists and critics of the state. One of those photojournalists, Mahmoud Abu Zeid, has been in jail for more than 850 days. And then there are thousands upon thousands of political prisoners who are jailed for things as simple as wearing a critical T-shirt. And then there's also a lot of reports of heavy abuse inside the prison system with the police here in Egypt.
[Renee Montagne:] This repression clearly is there. But Egypt recently elected a parliament. Is that going to change things?
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] That's right. Now a parliament has been elected. And it's supposed to meet at the end of the month. And it was held by the government as the last step to put Egypt back on the path to democracy. But this election was held in an atmosphere where dissent really isn't tolerated; where there is no real opposition that exists in the political sphere. And turnout was really low. And so many Egyptians don't know if this will really change things.
[Renee Montagne:] So it sounds like this campaign to sell Egypt to the world has really taken on a political form that was not expected or intended by the government.
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] That's right. So Egypt was hoping to have people be attracted to the beautiful places you can visit here. But people are saying, you need to fix the product first. You need to fix the problems in this country, and then it will be easier to sell Egypt to the world.
[Renee Montagne:] Leila, thanks very much.
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] Thank you.
[Renee Montagne:] NPR's Leila Fadel, speaking to us from Cairo.

[Guy Raz:] Now, if you're anything like me, you sometimes wonder if that fancy bottle of water you just paid two bucks for came from a tap in New Jersey. Well, Fiji Water actually comes from an aquifer in Fiji. It's true. The water in that square bottle comes all the way from the South Pacific right to your local 7-Eleven. But this week Fiji Water nearly lost its claim to fame. The military government in that country upped its tax on water extraction from one-third of a Fijian cent to 15 Fijian cents. Now, in response, the American owners of Fiji Water fired all of the employees in Fiji and closed the plant. But that was short lived. The plant is now up and running again and Fiji Water agreed to pay the tax. For more on this strange bottled water drama, we're joined by Charles Fishman. He visited the Fiji Water plant in 2007 for an article he wrote for Fast Company. Charles Fishman, welcome to the program.
[Mr. Charles Fishman:] Happy to be here.
[Guy Raz:] First of all, how important is Fiji Water to Fiji?
[Mr. Charles Fishman:] Fiji Water has turned out to be very, very important to Fiji. It's a small nation. The total GDP of Fiji is just $3.7 billion. Fiji Water is actually the number one export of any kind from the country in dollar value and it's only been around for a little more than a decade.
[Guy Raz:] So, if it's so important, you know, to the economy of the island, why would the company, you know, give in and pay that higher tax?
[Mr. Charles Fishman:] Right. It was an interesting standoff. The owners actually refused to go along with the tax a couple years ago and the government backed down. This time the government immediately threatened to take back Fiji Water's wells and rights to provide the water and offer them to somebody else in the international community who would then sell some version of Fiji water. Fiji Water owns the name. They even own the shape of the bottle in terms of patenting and trademarking. And very quickly Fiji Water came back to the table.
[Guy Raz:] Who owns Fiji Water, by the way?
[Mr. Charles Fishman:] A very wealthy California couple, L.A. couple, Lynda and Stewart Resnick bought the company in 2004. They own Teleflora. They own POM Wonderful. They're among the largest...
[Guy Raz:] That's the pomegranate drink.
[Mr. Charles Fishman:] The pomegranate company. And they're among the largest tree nut farmers in the country. So they're not small. And they actually have turbocharged the marketing of Fiji Water. It was a glamorous brand when they bought it. It's now a universal brand. It's a complicated product. It seems absurd in the stores here in America. It is, frankly, absurd. No one in this country needs water from Fiji. In fact...
[Guy Raz:] I always feel a little bit guilty when I buy it, I got to tell you.
[Mr. Charles Fishman:] Well, and the most remarkable thing is, in Fiji itself, 53 percent of the people who live in Fiji don't have access to clean, safe water. So Americans can easily get clean water from Fiji more simply than Fijians can. The product actually looks a little less silly when you go all the way back to Fiji and meet the people who produce it. They have great jobs and they're learning how to work in the global economy in a factory no different than the Poland Spring factory in Maine, or the Dasani factory in suburban Washington. And so the product itself is a little silly, but what's interesting is that it benefits Fijians in a way that's not silly at all.
[Guy Raz:] That's Charles Fishman. He's a journalist and author of the forthcoming book "The Big Thirst." Charles Fishman, thank you.
[Mr. Charles Fishman:] My pleasure, thanks.

[Renee Montagne:] It's estimated that about 300 languages were spoken in North America when Europeans first arrived. Many have since been lost. David Chanatry has a story about one tribe in upstate New York that's trying to save its ancient language in a most modern way.
[David Chanatry:] It's not easy to confuse Mariah Carey with Ben Stiller, but in this classroom it sometimes happens. Teacher Sherry Bagwynn is using pictures of the two stars to help her students learn how to say man and woman. Bagwynn points to Stiller.
[Ms. Sherry Bagwynn:] [Foreign Language Spoken]
[Unidentified Group:] [Foreign Language Spoken]
[Mr. Shanatri:] The eight students will repeat over and over the phrases for man and woman, just as they'll go over and over other words and phrases they might use in everyday conversation. They're learning language by immersion, no English is spoken only Oneida, or Onyota'aka. If the method seems like what you might get at a commercial language school like Berlitz, it should. This is the Berlitz method, adapted to an indigenous American tongue. Brian Patterson sits on the tribal council of the Oneida Indian Nation. He says the tribe offered weekly language classes for 20 years. But no one really became fluent.
[Mr. Brian Patterson:] You see these ads from time to time and you're like learn Spanish in 30 days, speak French in 30 days. And so, you know, I come from what was that effort all about? Why couldn't we do that to Oneida?
[David Chanatry:] Going outside the tribe for help was a drastic but necessary step. Only a few elders spoke the language that once served an entire people
[Ms. Marilyn Johns:] My name is Marilyn Johns. I'm their clan mother for the Oneida Nation.
[David Chanatry:] Marilyn Johns' parents spoke Oneida but she does not. Her parents were put in a school for Indians and she says they were beaten for speaking the language. It's a common story and not just here. Indian culture, including language, was widely suppressed.
[Ms. Marilyn Johns:] It was the white world that tried to assimilate them into the white world and the language had no part in that white world.
[David Chanatry:] The Oneida words faded with the tribe. Their territory once stretched across much of upstate New York but they were eventually pushed onto a tiny 32-acre reservation about 30 miles east of Syracuse. But first with a bingo hall then a modern casino, nightclub and five golf courses, the Nation, as it's known here, has in recent years transformed itself into a hugely successful business empire. It's now the largest employer in a three-county area and it pours its profits into educating people and recovering its culture. Some of its money has gone to a contract with Berlitz. Like many Indian languages, Oneida had already been written down. Back in the 1930s a young anthropologist named Floyd Lansbury had described the spoken language, associating every discreet sound with a letter or combination of letters from the English alphabet. Some members of the Canadian branch of the tribe still knew this form so Berlitz hired a few, including Ray George, to translate 40 chapters of its curriculum.
[Mr. Ray George:] So that's what we did. I spoke the words, Norma had done the writing and Sherry is the one that done all the typing to get these sent and then it was sent to Berlitz.
[David Chanatry:] And after being trained in the Berlitz's method, Ray George taught the first class last year. Now, the nation is paying those students to teach, and the eight students this year are being paid too $10 hour an hour to start for a 40-hour week of classes. Though learning the language is hard work, Karen Pierce says she's doing it to recover a part of herself.
[Ms. Pierce:] Because I am Oneida and I should know my native background. I should know everything about it. I should know my language. I should know my ceremonies.
[David Chanatry:] Language say ultimately for the Oneida's program to be successful, it must turn out lots of speakers who use the language in everyday life, and it must reach the young. Already the nation has sent instructors to its daycare program and a summer camp, but the society around them speaks English. And like any other kids, Indian youth are influenced by TV and computers and popular English-speaking media. Still, for councilmember Brian Patterson, the classes are an impressive start to regaining a piece of his heritage.
[Mr. Brian Patterson:] They're laughing and joking and it's all in Oneida. Granted, they may be like schoolchildren having conversation, but the point is Oneida is spoken on Oneida land once again by Oneidas.
[David Chanatry:] And one day soon he and many others here believe the Oneida people will once again speak the language of their fathers. For NPR News, I'm David Chanatry.
[Renee Montagne:] You're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News.

[Jennifer Ludden:] I'm Jennifer Ludden, in Washington. Neal Conan is away. Losing a loved one is, simply put, painful. Such separation brings extreme sadness that can feel sometimes too heavy to bear. The Irish writer C.S. Lewis chronicled his suffering and healing after his wife died of cancer at the age of 45. In "A Grief Observed," he reflects: Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. The American Psychiatric Association, or APA, and its diagnostic manual has longed warned doctors away from diagnosing major depression in people who've just lost a loved one. It's known as the bereavement exclusion in the DSM, or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But a proposed change in a draft of the DSM's next edition, due out next year, eliminates that bereavement exclusion, and this has posed many questions in the profession. We'd like to hear from our listeners. If you're a therapist or a psychiatrist who's treated grief, where do you draw the line between grief and depression? Share your experience. Our number is 800-989-8255. Our email address is talk@npr.org, and you can join the conversation at our website. Go to npr.org and click on TALK OF THE NATION. Later in the program, the comedy duo of Key and Peele on race, stereotypes, humor and their new show on Comedy Central. But first, how we treat grief. Tammy Blackard Cook is a licensed clinical social worker who provides therapy and counseling for Aspire Group in Raleigh, North Carolina. In her blog, she's also written about her own grief. Last year, her father died of lung cancer. Tammy Blackard Cook joins us now from member station WUNC in Durham. Welcome. Thanks so much.
[Tammy Blackard Cook:] Hi. Thanks for having me.
[Jennifer Ludden:] And condolences for your loss.
[Tammy Blackard Cook:] Thank you.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Can we just ask you about that first? Tammy, after treating people as a professional, treating people for grief, what did you learn when you went through a grieving process yourself?
[Tammy Blackard Cook:] Oh, so much. I mean, certainly, I've been through grief before, but not, you know, the loss of someone so close to me. You know, it's the first time I'd lost a parent or, you know, sort of that generation. Before that, it had only been grandparents. I guess it sort of confirmed what I'd always assumed, you know, in listening with my clients and sort of hearing their experience and walking with them through their grief. You know, it's just it's incredibly hard, and it is overwhelming. And but it is what it is. You know, you have to accept that grief as part of life and death as part of life. And, you know, I sort of one of the things I say to my clients and I try to follow my own advice is you kind of have to lean into it to kind of make your way through it. But I know in America, a lot of times, we just want to feel better. You know, we try to do things to avoid feeling bad, any sort of negative emotions like grief or sadness or that kind of thing. And, you know, it just doesn't work. People...
[Jennifer Ludden:] Were you more sympathetic to that, though, when you were going through it yourself, in a way?
[Tammy Blackard Cook:] Yes. Yes and no, I guess. I guess that's why we go into being therapists. You know, I feel like I'm pretty attuned to how people feel, and, you know, can really sort of I guess, in some ways, be with them and sort of hold a safe place and I think have some understanding, some, you know, intellectual understanding, but also some other kind of understanding, if that makes sense. And so, like I said, I think it just confirmed what I always had gotten from my clients.
[Jennifer Ludden:] And did it change your treatment of others? I mean, did it change the way you deal with your clients after having gone through the death of your father?
[Tammy Blackard Cook:] For me, no. I can see that it really would with some other folks and some folks I work with. I mean, we sort of talk about that sometimes. They haven't had that sort of firsthand experience with grief. But, I mean, on the other hand, I mean, to be fair, we knew that my dad would probably have a recurrence. That's just the way lung cancer is. And I think for he had it for 10 years, and he was fine. So I think I'd been sort of steeping myself for a long time. And maybe in that 10 years, that had made me a lot more attuned with my clients who were going through something like that.
[Jennifer Ludden:] We're also joined by Dr. Michael Craig Miller. He's been a practicing psychiatrist for more than 30 years. He's the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Mental Health Letter and an assistant professor at the Harvard Medical School, and he joins us from member station WBUR in Boston. Welcome to you.
[Michael Craig Miller:] Thank you very much for having me.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Can I ask you: Where when do you know that a patient's grief has become a major depression? Where do you draw that line?
[Michael Craig Miller:] The reality is that there is no firm line, and it is always a judgment call. Personally, I understand the debate about the bereavement exclusion, but I think our interest as clinicians is often simply to be practical. And my advice often to people who are going through this is that if that you think you may be depressed, then it is probably worth having a conversation with somebody in a position to help. And, again, the there's a variety of needs to classify things, to categorize illnesses. But on the personal level, the labels tend not to matter as much as the practical concern, that people shouldn't feel a sense of shame, if they feel they need some help to get through something, to ask for it either from a family member or from a minister or a rabbi or a primary care doctor or a therapist or a psychiatrist. And everybody's story is unique. Everybody's way of grieving is unique. And so the categories, which are interesting to debate, tend to be less important for the individual going through the loss.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Surely. But as a professional, what are are there signs you look for that distinguish one from the other? Because I don't know that I could. You know, I have not had a person very close to me die. I cannot say I've gone through this kind of grief. But I'm imagining I would be hard pressed to distinguish despair...
[Michael Craig Miller:] You know, you're absolutely right. And this is as difficult for professionals as it is for people who aren't practicing clinicians. You know, the symptoms if you want to call them symptoms, but the description of grieving looks very much like depression. People cry. They feel depressed. They're having trouble sleeping. They may not have an appetite. They may not feel like doing anything. They may not take pleasure in anything. It goes down the list, and it looks very much like what we describe as major depression. And what professionals have done is to try to put an arbitrary timeframe on it. So in the prior version, the current version of the DSM, there's a statement that it should be at least two months, but with those symptoms. But as many have pointed out, those symptoms can continue for six months, for a year, for longer. It depends on the culture. It depends upon your family. It depends upon who you are and how you manage loss, and it you know, so we use the guidelines, and I think that if I mean, again, being practical, if you needed a cutoff, if those symptoms were going on for longer than six months, then you might turn to a family member and say, gee, this may be more complicated than not that losing a parent or a spouse is ever easy, but there's a certain point where the symptoms to persist, and the inability to get out and go to work or live your life after a certain period of time, we have a variety of ways of trying to help people get back into their lives. And, you know, I liked what was said earlier about leaning into it, that the ultimate goal, I think, rather than getting over it is to remake your life in a new form after somebody you've lost has been lost.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right, let's get a call in, here. Brian is in Hickory, North Carolina. Hi there, Brian.
[Brian:] Yes, hello. Thank you for taking my call.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Go right ahead.
[Brian:] Well, when I heard the topic, I just thought maybe I could make this contribution. I've had about 15 years of interacting with folks as a chaplain, both in hospice and in a hospital setting. And whether someone is lost suddenly in an ER or an operation gone wrong or in a hospice setting where you know the death is coming, I find that afterwards, the greatest challenge is just like your speaker just said, that it's trying to help equip or empower the grieving person to reset their life and to continue to live the, quote, "normal life" that they currently have. And I see depression as, you know, if you're trying to distinguish the two, I see depression as showing itself when someone just comes to a dead stop dead stop comes to a complete stop and is unable to do their day-to-day things and just can't take on that necessary task of creating a new life for themselves.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Whereas in your experience, people who are grieving can keep showing up at the office at all? Although isn't that very individual, also?
[Brian:] Oh, absolutely. But I guess again, you know, when I heard that DSM was thinking of taking off this exception, I find that grief is absolutely normal, and it's only appropriate that a person allow the symptoms that are just a part of our humanity to show themselves in great depth. I mean, we have to cry. We have to be silent and quiet for a time. If someone just goes forward without, quote, "showing the symptoms," I don't that, to me, is mental illness. I mean, appropriate health is to stop and acknowledge that something profoundly significant has happened to you.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right, Brian, thanks for the call. Tammy Blackard Cook, you're agreeing there.
[Tammy Blackard Cook:] Yeah. No, I've actually agreed with everything that's been said. Yeah, I think that I get hard-pressed to want to give anybody a diagnosis of major depressive disorder, you know, any time under a year. I mean, I know what the DSM says, and it is an arbitrary, you know, timeline because everything that's been said is true. You know, it is the symptoms of depression are very, very similar to the symptoms of grief, and, you know, there are periods of time especially early, early on, when people do have a hard time functioning. And so, anyway, in my practice, you know, practically which is what I liked what the doctor said, was, you know, I wouldn't necessarily diagnose someone with that early on, and I would probably wait at least a year.
[Jennifer Ludden:] And we're going to continue this conversation in a moment. We're talking about the line between grief and major depression. If you're a therapist or psychiatrist, give us a call: 800-989-8255. Or email us at talk@npr.org. I'm Jennifer Ludden. This is TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Jennifer Ludden. There is an ongoing debate among psychiatrists over what constitutes normal grief and what deserves a diagnosis and treatment as major depression. The argument centers on a proposed change in a draft of the next edition of the DSM, that's the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. We're talking today not about the specifics of that debate but about the process of grief. If you're a therapist or psychiatrist who's treated grief, where do you draw the line between grief and major depression? Share your experience. Our number is 800-989-8255. Our email address is talk@npr.org, and you can join the conversation at our website. Go to npr.org, and click on TALK OF THE NATION. Our guests are Tammy Blackard Cook, a licensed clinical social worker who provides therapy and counseling for Aspire Group in Raleigh, North Carolina; also Dr. Michael Craig Miller, a practicing psychiatrist for more than 30 years. He serves as editor in chief of Harvard Mental Health Letter and is assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. We have an email from Lalane, who writes Lelani rather, who says that the grief over the loss of her mother impacted her daily life in a debilitating way for quite a time. I was offered pharmaceuticals, she writes, but I thought it was something I had to go through and did not want to mask my emotions, memories or thoughts. I was in a fog for four-plus years. Dr. Michael Craig Miller, what about the notion that this is something that we need to go through, you know, the seven stages, right, isn't that what it's supposed to be?
[Michael Craig Miller:] Well, everybody has a different idea about the stages and categorizes them. And I think that, you know, one of the things that we've learned since Dr. Kubler-Ross, years ago, talked about five stages, and other people have come up with seven, that we really don't go through this in a linear way. We don't go through this from one stage to the next without any back and forth. It can take months. It can take years, and I think what the I liked very much what the chaplain caller said earlier about this notion of being stuck or not, of being stopped in your tracks.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Able to function, he talked about, how can they function.
[Michael Craig Miller:] Right, and, you know, I think that loss of this sort is inevitable. We all go through it. It's and it's I mean, you know, there's this old line about turning a crisis into an opportunity, but this is really something different, that we have to, in a way, grow with experiences like this. We learn things about ourselves, and the emailer who talks about being the keeper of memory, I think that one of the reasons one of the people who has been vocal about this complicated bereavement exception is Dr. Arthur Kleinman, who wrote an article in the Lancet recently, where he talks about he quotes this notion of being the keeper of the memories of the person who's lost. He lost a spouse after a long marriage, and so what the writer talks about is being sort of the keeper of the memory of her mother. Another thing it might be worth raising is that if you've been in a care-giving position with an aging parent, then it's much more complicated because the caring for the parent, the caring for the spouse, is part of the structure of your life, and it may actually be harder to move forward in your life if not just the loss of the person but the loss of the structure of day-to-day life. And, you know, if taking care of an aging parent has really provided you with a sense of day-to-day meaning, that's another kind of loss. So these losses are really quite textured and different and depend so much on the circumstances.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Tammy Blackard Cook, taking that maybe as an example, are there can you offer others? Again, what do you look for? You know, how do you distinguish grief and depression?
[Tammy Blackard Cook:] Well, the one point I wanted to raise and I hope this answers your question, but I guess for me in my work day to day, you know, if someone comes in, and they're having a hard time, you know, they lost someone, they're going through grief and that kind of thing, I don't always see my job as necessarily having to switch whatever diagnosis I may have given them when they walked in the door to major depressive disorder in order to say to them, you know, hey, at some point down the road, you know, maybe a few months if things haven't really started to get a little better for them, hey, have you considered medication because certainly we send people to get evaluated for medication all the time. But I don't necessarily think that I have to then change their diagnosis to major depressive disorder. So I may, for an example, I may have diagnosed them with adjustment disorder with depressive symptoms, which seems more, I don't know, right to me because, you know, grief is hard, right.
[And I Like To Give People The Example - Your Emailer Made Me Think Of This As Something I Tell Clients A Lot:] Nobody wants to go on medication, nobody does, right? And sometimes, you know, the thing about medication and I was reading all this stuff last night, and I found it fascinating, but the thing about most of my experience with my clients and the medication is that it doesn't make it better. It doesn't take away your grief. I mean, it makes it better, sorry, but it doesn't take away your grief. You're still very sad. You're still very caught up in it, but it just sort of takes the edge off. And Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote "Eat, Pray, Love," described it, she described it wonderfully. I actually assign this to clients to read about being in she was going through a divorce, so it's a different kind of grief, I guess, but saying that she felt like she was in a bottomless pit. And she really resisted taking medication. I mean, she finally took something, and she said really all it did was give me a bottom to the pit, you know, and so then she could kind of reach out or reach up and start clawing her way out of the pit. And I think that's a really great description of how an antidepressant will work. It's not going to make your life happy and sunny, and everything's fine.
[Jennifer Ludden:] You're not going to stop grieving.
[Tammy Blackard Cook:] No, not at all. And if you do, then something's wrong.
[Michael Craig Miller:] I'm sorry. You know, I would just echo exactly what Ms. Cook was saying about that. Of course, as a psychiatrist, people do sometimes ask for medication, you know. But that's probably more a function of where we sit. But many people who take an antidepressant and again, I certainly understand that one of the goals here is to try to understand the difference between grief and depression, and we're both kind of tip-toeing around that subject because we...
[Jennifer Ludden:] You're not giving us a checklist.
[Michael Craig Miller:] Right, right. Well, you know, the checklists are very limited. And I prefer to think about problem lists. And, you know, sometimes the crying and the feeling stuck and the not functioning becomes intolerable to the person, and at that point, either through psychotherapy using a variety of techniques, trying to understand what might be at the root of being stuck, or looking at the symptoms and saying, you know, look, we can give you some relief or try to give you some relief with this or that. And many people who opt for the medication do say this, that it puts a floor under them. They don't feel like a different person. It's simply easier to take care of the business of life and to become re-engaged. And that, of course, is the ultimately goal. I think ultimately, people do better in their lives when they are able to engage, and, you know, one of the models is that, you know, the work of grief is to try to, you know, work through or manage the giving-up of the person who's lost and to be able to reconnect to other people and other experiences in your life. And, you know, and sometimes the medication can provide a bridge. Now there may be some people who before the loss may have suffered depression, which never came to light before.
[Jennifer Ludden:] So maybe it's a trigger.
[Michael Craig Miller:] So right, or it's a trigger, or the death has become a kind of an opportunity to get help that never was obtained before. So that's the reason that it's difficult to kind of go with a checklist and find exactly the dividing line between grief and depression because ultimately, I imagine Ms. Cook will agree with me, that we're in the business of trying to help people solve problems rather than give them a label. Then the labels can sometimes help us organize the help, but they don't answer important questions.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Let's get another caller on the line here. Mara is in Chico, California. Welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.
[Mara:] Oh, thank you. I'm a clinical psychologist. I've been in a private practice for about 10 years, and I experienced my own clinical depression when I was much younger and did take antidepressants at that time and found them to be very helpful. And then I lost my mother almost 10 years ago, and I never, ever considered taking antidepressants during that time because subjectively it felt completely different. From the outside it might have looked the same. I was sort of catatonic. I couldn't speak. I sat on the couch and watched ridiculous movies over and over and over again. But I didn't want to anesthetize or dull my senses. I wanted to be able to really cry and wail and grieve. And I knew that and that hit me quite hard so that at about three years oh, this is another important point, actually. The only relief I got was in my work, when I was engaging with other people. So with my own patients I felt a great deal of relief. When I was depressed, the opposite was true. I found that it's very hard to be really present with my patients, with the in those three, four years which were the hardest with the grief, I found that that was you know, we were talking about the stuff that really matters and I'm really thoroughly engaging with them. And this one last thing I will say is that everybody's process is different. I'm working with a woman now whose husband died two years ago, and her family wanted her to go on antidepressants. After about nine months, her doctor put her on antidepressants. She really hated it because she couldn't feel anything, so she took the stuff off. And she's going through her process as she goes through her process; it's a very individual thing, and I feel sort of I feel kind of that I have a little bit of an advantage, just as your one of your experts there.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right. Well, thanks so much for the call, Mara.
[Mara:] You're welcome.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Tammy...
[Michael Craig Miller:] You know sorry.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Oh, go right ahead, Dr. Miller.
[Michael Craig Miller:] Ridiculous movies, by the way, I think, are an excellent treatment for all kinds of problems. You know, the caller reminds me not reminds me, because I never forget it. My father passed away about 10 years ago. He died of prostate cancer after about 15 years. And with several months to go, we kind of expected it, so it but you know, when you expect it, it's still painful. And then a few years after that, my younger sister I got a call one August morning from my brother to tell me this was a sister who was a dancer and a yoga instructor and the healthiest person in our family. And I got a call from my brother saying that she had died. And it was completely unexpected and a total and utter shock. And those are very different kinds of experiences to have and exquisitely painful each in their own way. That just underscores, you know, what the caller was saying about how every loss is different, and everybody's path through it is different.
[Jennifer Ludden:] We have a phone an email from Vicky, who writes that she works in hospice bereavement and has encountered this helpful guideline in some of the literature she's read: When a person is grieving, they have ups and downs and they're still able to experience moments of joy. When a person is depressed, there's a heaviness with very little variation and an inability to enjoy anything. Does that ring true, Tammy Blackard Cook?
[Tammy Blackard Cook:] Yeah. Definitely. I like those last two descriptions, the caller and then this. I think I think I read this in one of the Arthur Kleinman articles, but he was talking about how, you know, initially and I was trying to say this before there isn't a whole lot of places to find joy, initially, after a loss. But it seems you know, obviously, you hear time heals all things, and it does. And around six months it seems like there starts to be moments of joy, you know, and it just sort of builds from there. And I like that description, to distinguish between, you know, someone who is truly depressed versus someone who is going through the natural process of grieving.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right.
[Tammy Blackard Cook:] Can I say one other thing I was just thinking about in case it's helpful to people?
[Jennifer Ludden:] Sure thing. Let me just say one thing quickly first.
[Tammy Blackard Cook:] Sure.
[Jennifer Ludden:] You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. Go right ahead.
[Tammy Blackard Cook:] One thing that strikes me is that, you know, a lot of times folks who come in to see us, it's not only that they're grieving and that they feel really, really sad and, you know, lonely and just all sort of all sorts of things, but you know, they're also struggling with, you know, what's wrong with me? So a lot of times, someone will come in, and maybe they're struggling with grief, but they don't come in until, you know, a few months down the road, and they come in because folks are tired well, they will say, you know, I think my friends are tired of listening to me. You know, everybody moves on with your life, or moves on with their life, but your loss is still very, you know, depressing all the time for you, especially in that first year. And so sometimes they come to therapy because they want to talk to somebody that they won't feel like they're burdening. And that question of what's wrong with me, you know, why do I still feel this way, sometimes talk therapy can be, you know, so healing because what we do is sort of say nothing. You know, we sort of create a safe place to say this is normal. We sort of normalize what they're feeling and, you know, give them some education around grief, because we don't like to feel bad.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Let's get one more call in here. Cathy in Portland, Oregon, go right ahead.
[Cathy:] Yeah. Hi. Gosh, what a poignant topic for me these days. My baby died one year ago when I was eight months pregnant.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Oh, I'm so sorry.
[Cathy:] And thanks. When I was discharged from the hospital, they immediately gave me a prescription for an antidepressant, which I was really shocked by, but I never took. I thought, you know, I want to feel everything. I want to go through this process. I know this is horrible, but I just need to I need to feel what's going on. And it's been a struggle. This past year has been really, really hard. But I think I finally went on antidepressants last month because it was getting to the point where I didn't even want to talk to anybody. I didn't want to like the speaker said, I didn't want to burden anybody with my problems. I am I think my friends were burnt out on hearing me. People kind of expected me to go on as normal, and I just really couldn't function. And, you know, there might have been a bit of undiagnosed depression before my loss. I don't know. It certainly runs in my family. So I must say that I think it's a very individual choice. I mean, my counselor wasn't completely neutral about me going on them. You know, she said if it she feels like it would help me. And my primary care physician said, OK, let's have you take them for six months and see how you feel after six months. And, you know, I think I'm on a I don't know. I think I'm on a better course these days.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right. Cathy, well, thank you so much for the phone call.
[Cathy:] Thank you for listening.
[Jennifer Ludden:] And I think we're going to have to leave it there. But this has been interesting and helpful. Our guests have been Tammy Blackard Cook, a therapist for Aspire Group based in Raleigh, North Carolina. She joined us from member station WUNC in Durham. And Dr. Michael Craig Miller is a psychiatrist who's editor-in-chief of the Harvard Mental Health Letter. He joined us from member station WBUR in Boston. Thanks so much to both of you.
[Michael Craig Miller:] Thank you for having me.
[Tammy Blackard Cook:] Thank you.

[David Greene:] The Cambodian government owes the United States about $500 million for a food loan taken out during the Vietnam War. Cambodia says it's not paying. The United States says a loan is a loan. Michael Sullivan has more from Phnom Penh.
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] In early 1970, with the war in Vietnam going badly, President Nixon went on national television to tell the American people about his decision to send U.S. troops into neighboring Cambodia to disrupt North Vietnamese supply lines and deny the enemy sanctuary there.
[Richard Nixon:] This is not an invasion of Cambodia. The areas in which these attacks will be launched are completely occupied and controlled by North Vietnamese.
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] He promised U.S. forces would withdraw soon, and they did. But the U.S. carpet bombing of the Cambodian countryside continued for years, displacing huge numbers of farmers and leaving many civilian dead or wounded, too.
[Prak Narun:] [Speaking Khmer].
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] Sixty-nine-year-old Prak Narun says the Americans would start bombing early around 7 a.m. and again around noon.
[Prak:] [Speaking Khmer].
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] "The Vietnamese soldiers were here," she says, "but they knew when the planes were coming and fled to the forest. So it was only the Khmer villagers who would die," she says, including her sister and her newborn daughter. Human rights activist Ou Virak, founder of Future Forum.
[Ou Virak:] The U.S. destroy part of the country, bomb tens and tens of thousands of tons, destroying pretty much the whole eastern part of the country destroy much of the food supply, the farmland.
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] And that's where the loan from the U.S. comes in. With no way to feed their people, the Cambodian government asked for and received roughly $270 million for badly needed food aid for those fleeing the bombing and the advancing Khmer Rouge. Most of the displaced ended up in Phnom Penh, which fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975.
[Unidentified Man:] Thank you for coming to Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. You've just entered a place of nightmares.
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] That five-year-long nightmare left an estimated 1.7 million people dead. And some say the U.S. bombing and the instability that followed may have helped create that monstrous regime. Ou Virak.
[Ou Virak:] Did it contribute to the rise of the Khmer Rouge? The answer is yes. Was it responsible for the Khmer Rouge taking power in 1975? That's what scholars disagree on.
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] What almost everyone does agree on is that forcing Cambodia to repay the food debt is churlish at best.
[Elizabeth Becker:] This is horrendous.
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] Elizabeth Becker is a former New York Times journalist who witnessed the bombing campaign and wrote the book, "When The War Was Over."
[Elizabeth Becker:] We have not acknowledged the damage we've done to that country, the enormous damage. So the idea that we're now asking them to pay for a small bit of food aid is crazy. That the United States has to acknowledge the in my book, you acknowledge the damage you've done and you make true reparations, which we haven't.
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] Cambodia's authoritarian Prime Minister Hun Sen is having fun with this story, one rekindled after remarks by the U.S. ambassador to local journalists earlier this year questioning the Cambodian government's reluctance to pay.
[Prime Minister Hun Sen:] [Speaking Khmer].
[Michael Sullivan, Byline:] Here's Hun Sen in February telling President Trump not to ask the Cambodian people for money. "You're the ones who bombed us," he said, "why are you asking us to pay?" The U.S. embassy in Phnom Penh declined an interview on tape, but in an email spokesman Jay Raman noted that the U.S. has provided more than a billion dollars in development assistance to Cambodia since the early 1990s. But, Raman added, we lack the legal authority to write off debts for countries that are able but unwilling to pay. Those legal authorities do not change from one administration to the next, absent an action from Congress. For NPR News, I'm Michael Sullivan in Phnom Penh.

[Steve Inskeep:] It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep.
[Don Gonyea:] And I'm Don Gonyea. It is the biggest tax bill to go through Congress in years. It sailed through the Senate but faced a tougher go in the House, with most of the opposition coming from President Obama's fellow Democrats. Still, the House did pass the tax deal just after midnight. The measure extends current tax rates for two more years, continues unemployment benefits, and it set the rate for estate taxes. It now heads to the president's desk. He is expected to sign it into law today. NPR's Andrea Seabrook has been covering this story on Capitol Hill. She joins us now. Good morning, Andrea.
[Andrea Seabrook:] Good morning, Don.
[Don Gonyea:] So a long night. I understand the situation got a bit messy. Democrats had to stop the debate for a time.
[Andrea Seabrook:] Yeah, they did. They were going along and suddenly they realized they didn't have the votes to even support the framework around the debate. And so they kind of pulled everything from the floor, went into recess, worked it all out and brought it back later.
[Don Gonyea:] So Andrea, what was the Democrats' main complaint? Was it the estate tax question?
[Andrea Seabrook:] The estate tax question was where they focused all of their energy. And in fact they tried to bring an amendment to make estate tax rates higher for upper-income Americans. But they also had a lot of other complaints. They wanted higher taxes for the wealthy. They thought that the payroll tax that most people most wage earners would get was starving Social Security. And then, among Democrats, there's this general frustration with the fact that the tax cuts which were passed originally in 2001 and 2003 under President Bush and were meant to be temporary have now been extended even more. Listen to this from Democrat Peter DeFazio or Oregon.
[Representative Peter Defazio:] There is no such thing as a temporary tax cut. I hope the White House is listening. They're about to spring the trap.
[Don Gonyea:] OK. So there's an unhappy Democrat, to say the least. What about the Republicans in the House? Did they support it, like their Senate colleagues did?
[Andrea Seabrook:] Oh, no. No, no. They weren't happy with it either, especially because it doesn't make these tax cuts permanent. It's only a two-year extension of them. A lot of Republicans said: What certainty does that bring to the market? Here's another little bit of sound from the debate. This is from Indiana Republican Mike Pence.
[Representative Mike Pence:] So I rise with a heavy heart today to say that as I look at this short-term tax deal negotiated by the White House, that I have concluded after much study that it's a bad deal for taxpayers. It'll do little to create jobs, and I cannot support it.
[Don Gonyea:] OK. So if so many people on both sides of the aisle hated it, how did this thing pass?
[Andrea Seabrook:] Well, that's sort of the reason it passed. I know it's counter-intuitive, but, you know, genuine compromise, where every side gives a little, at least, is may have worked for one of the first times in that I can remember in the House of Representatives. That's what Florida Republican Ginny Brown-Waite said.
[Representative Ginny Brown-waite:] The bill before us is not the bill that I would've written. It is not the bill that conservative radio talk show hosts or Tea Party constituents would've liked written. And it's not the bill that the New York Times editorial page or the president himself would have written. It's a compromise. This is what a compromise looks like.
[Andrea Seabrook:] And in the end, Don, I think all those lawmakers were thinking in their minds of the much bigger mess that could have been caused by letting the tax rates shoot back up on January 1st and then trying to pass some retroactive tax cut. This way it's done. It's gone. It's on the president's desk, and the new Congress can start fresh in January.
[Don Gonyea:] NPR congressional correspondent Andrea Seabrook up late last night, up early this morning. Thank you.
[Andrea Seabrook:] Thanks, Don.

[Audie Cornish:] And now, a musical lift for all our listeners who were hit maybe a little too hard this week by old man winter. It's a taste of the ALL THINGS CONSIDERED Cabin Fever Playlist. Earlier this month, we asked you to tell us about the songs that make you move and groove despite the cold weather. Here's one of them.
[Robert Siegel:] This, of course, is "Staying Alive" by The BeeGees, one of the hundreds of suggestions for our Cabin Fever Playlist and we are just days away from the public reveal.
[Audie Cornish:] But Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, places unaccustomed to winter weather, we felt your pain this week. You need a pick-me-up. Here, shake your bon-bon. Ricky Martin might make it better.
[Robert Siegel:] So if you were stuck in your car on the interstate...
[Audie Cornish:] And if now that car is stuck in an impound lot because you had to abandon it on the highway...
[Robert Siegel:] And if you're a teenager traumatized by a night sleeping in the gym on those smelly wrestling mats, well, this next song is for you.
[Audie Cornish:] That was Avicii with "Wake Me Up." And we'll have more of our Cabin Fever Playlist next week. You're listening hey, go ahead. You can dance, too. ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.

[Renee Montagne:] NPR's Mike Shuster has the story from Baghdad.
[Mike Shuster:] The targets were mostly police and other Iraqi security forces. In Baghdad, a car bomb behind a police station the first of three in the capital left several nearby buildings crumbling. Fifteen police and civilians were killed. In Kut, a hundred miles southeast of Baghdad, a similar blast, between a police station and a local government council building, left more than 20 dead and nearly 100 wounded. There were similar attacks in Mosul, Kirkuk, Ramadi, Falluja, Mugdadiyah, and several smaller towns. The wave of attacks, which were certainly coordinated, left many in Iraq shaken.
[Abu Salman:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Mike Shuster:] They did the bombings because of the Americans, said Abu Salman, at his butcher shop in the Karada neighborhood of Baghdad. They claim that when the Americans leave, there will be more bombs in Iraq.
[Abu Muhammad:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Mike Shuster:] Abu Muhammad, a construction worker agreed. They do think the Americans are weaker now, so let's do it, he said.
[Abu Salman:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Mike Shuster:] There is little doubt that the attacks yesterday were well-coordinated. And they appear to have been the work of Sunni insurgents. That's the view of Hamid al Kifaey, the former spokesman for the Iraqi governing council.
[Hamid Al Kifaey:] It could be al-Qaida, but al- Qaida is coordinating its efforts with other groups, with other armed groups some groups which probably are remnants of the old regime.
[Mike Shuster:] This particular moment appears to have provided an opportunity for the insurgents, says Hamid al Kifaey.
[Hamid Al Kifaey:] There is a resurgence and it's not helped by the political vacuum. The Americans are leaving. There is some sort of uncertainty in Iraq now. It's six months since the elections, and the government has not been formed.
[Mike Shuster:] Last week, Jeffrey Feltman, assistant secretary of state for the Near East, was in Baghdad. Insurgent attacks were already on the rise, but they had not yet reached yesterday's level. Feltman argued that the current government of Iraq was not going to collapse in the wake of an uptick in insurgent activity.
[Jeffrey Feltman:] You don't see the government crumbling under the pressure. What you see are horrific attacks by any means awful. But you do see a government that despite a political gridlock at the top is functioning, institutions that are certainly working in a far better way than they were working, say, eight years ago.
[Mike Shuster:] Mike Shuster, NPR News, Baghdad.

[Noel King:] OK. Now we have the story of a big and pretty surprising Silicon Valley apology. Yesterday, Tesla reported that over the past three months, its losses doubled, but the company also bragged that it's now making 5,000 of its brand-new, more affordable models every week. But here was the big surprise. Tesla CEO Elon Musk apologized to investors for his behavior repeatedly. Musk has gotten in hot water lately for his aggressive and sometimes offensive rants on social media. NPR's Jasmine Garsd has the story.
[Jasmine Garsd, Byline:] Tesla's May earnings call was infamously bizarre. This is how an irritated Elon Musk responded to one analyst's question.
[Elon Musk:] Next. Boring, bonehead questions are not cool. Next.
[Jasmine Garsd, Byline:] In the days leading up to this year's second financial report, there was a lot of buzz not about the cars, but about Elon Musk. Nobody expected this.
[Elon Musk:] Yeah, I'd like to apologize for, you know, being impolite on the prior call.
[Jasmine Garsd, Byline:] This comes after a turbulent period for Musk in which he went all Kanye West on Twitter, like last year, when a public transportation blogger called his ideas elitist. Musk simply responded, you're an idiot. Investors have not been amused.
[Gene Munster:] By acting like that, it does cause some of those investors to question and may not support them, so it makes it harder for them to raise money.
[Jasmine Garsd, Byline:] Gene Munster works at Loup, a venture capital company that follows Tesla. Munster says investors have reached out to express concern. Public opinion is key to this company's growth.
[Gene Munster:] Tesla doesn't use regular advertising. They use word of mouth. So the point there is that by him alienating some of his referral network, that can actually have a negative impact on sales.
[Jasmine Garsd, Byline:] Will Schenk is a huge Tesla fan. He even recently built a Tesla app. A few months ago, he bought his second one, a Model S
[Will Schenk:] No, I love it. I love it. When I first got it, I would just make up places to drive for really no reason.
[Jasmine Garsd, Byline:] Few companies in the world inspire the fierce loyalty Tesla does. When most owners buy one, they are investing in a vision for the future, a world that runs on electric cars. Schenk, a software company owner, says he bought it because it's just fun, quiet, fast, almost spaceshiplike, but he admits the roughly $160,000 he spent on this car...
[Will Schenk:] I mean, they're just way too expensive. I mean, not everyone is going to spend six figures on a car. I mean, that's, like, a house.
[Jasmine Garsd, Byline:] Tesla is trying to transition from luxury to mass consumption. The widely anticipated Model 3 is Tesla's cheapest car yet. It starts at about $35,000. It's gotten stellar reviews. In yesterday's call, Musk assured investors that Tesla is now able to produce 5,000 a week, which was largely perceived as defensive. There have been widely reported production delays and missed deadlines.
[Edward Niedermeyer:] Unfortunately, I think the fan culture has actually enabled a lot of Tesla's problems.
[Jasmine Garsd, Byline:] Edward Niedermeyer is a car reporter and author of the upcoming book "Ludicrous" about Tesla. He says brand loyalty, adoration of Elon Musk and his inability to accept criticism has stunted the company.
[Edward Niedermeyer:] You know, it would've done the company a lot more good if early customers had been a lot more demanding.
[Jasmine Garsd, Byline:] Niedermeyer says the problem with the company is it's so tied to its founder's personality, and Elon Musk seems to have realized that. Yesterday, he sounded polite and brimming with excitement about the Model 3. He was even critical about the company's production issues. And perhaps most importantly, he did something simple unusual for Elon Musk. He said, I'm sorry.
[Elon Musk:] Nonetheless, there's still no excuse. My apologies for not being polite on the prior call.
[Toni Sacconaghi:] I appreciate that. Thank you.
[Jasmine Garsd, Byline:] As they spoke, Tesla's stock rose in after-hours trading. Jasmine Garsd, NPR News, New York.

[Rachel Martin:] The Major League Baseball season is a grind. It's about six months, 162 games. So now that we're about halfway through, these guys deserve a few days rest, right? They're getting it. Next week, it's the All-Star break, and the brightest stars from the National and American Leagues face off Tuesday night in Miami. This year, the Houston Astros are sending five players to the All-Star Game. That's a lot of players. That's a big deal. It is a historic turnaround. The Astros have had a terrible record for years. They lost 111 games in 2013 alone. This year, they have turned the tables. They are the top team in baseball with the LA Dodgers on their heels. Now I have to confess, I don't watch a whole lot of baseball, so I called Jessica Mendoza to explain. She is a former Olympic softball player and now a broadcaster for ESPN. And she says the Astros managed to turn those rough years into an advantage. In Major League Baseball, the worst teams get first dibs on bright young players in the draft.
[Jessica Mendoza:] So what the Astros were able to do is, because they were bad for so long, they went and got them a Dallas Keuchel, who's their starting pitcher and has been ridiculous Carlos Correa, who is probably the best young shortstop in a huge fleet of young players that have been stars.
[Rachel Martin:] Switching gears a bit, the All-Star game, as we mentioned, is coming up, and the rosters for that game have been announced. This is, like, the best of the best who play each other. So who were some of the other players you mentioned a few that you're watching from the Astros but who are some other players who are having breakout seasons?
[Jessica Mendoza:] Aaron Judge who's on the Yankees. I mean, first of all, he's the biggest player that we've ever seen in the sport. OK? So this guy is 6-foot-7, 280 pounds. We have never had someone this size and weigh this much be able to play the game. But what's impressive about him is the fact that he's been able to adjust his swing and change from where he was last year struggling, not able to make a lot of contact to now being the most powerful home run hitter we've seen since pretty much Babe Ruth.
[Rachel Martin:] All right, you're winning me over. I might have to tune into this thing.
[Jessica Mendoza:] [Laughter].
[Rachel Martin:] But there is a change, though, to how the All-Star Game works this year. In the past, the teams competed for what was a pretty big prize. The team that won the league that won would have home-field advantage in the World Series. That is going away this year, so what are these guys playing for, just pride and glory?
[Jessica Mendoza:] Of course. I mean, you have to remember, too high-level athletes I mean, if you've been around, I mean, pretty much anybody that's competitive [LAUGHTER], you're going to want a win. But I like that they've made this change because you think about it the majority of the players that are on the field aren't going to compete in the World Series. The reason I like the All-Star Game is you see the stars be able to kind of let loose a little bit, you know. Like, it's actually fun. You want to see them compete, but you see them compete every time they're on the field. I like to see them actually joke around with each other, be able to pick each other's brains. I mean, that's the stuff you really get into.
[Rachel Martin:] That's when you want those mics that pick up those conversations...
[Jessica Mendoza:] Right?
[Rachel Martin:] ...That happen between those two players in that moment.
[Jessica Mendoza:] Yes.
[Rachel Martin:] Jessica Mendoza of ESPN, thank you so much.
[Jessica Mendoza:] Thanks, Rachel.

[Steve Inskeep:] Secretary of State John Kerry gave Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, and his backers a deadline yesterday. Kerry said Assad has to step down by August, or there will be repercussions.
[Rachel Martin:] Politicians have been trying for over five years now in various forms to stop the civil war in Syria. But on the ground, the bloodshed has been unrelenting. Jan Egeland knows that all too well. He is the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council and an adviser to the U.N. special envoy for Syria. And he told me the world still doesn't appreciate how grave the situation is in Syria.
[Jan Egeland:] Every single day, a mother sends her children to school. She may fear that they will not come back. A wounded goes to the hospital. The hospital may be bombed. There is no respect for international laws or humanitarian principles.
[Rachel Martin:] Egeland is trying to get humanitarian aid into parts of Syria that haven't received any for years. But the situation in Aleppo has made that almost impossible.
[Jan Egeland:] It couldn't be worse, really. To me, it is the Srebrenica of our day. You will remember the Bosnian town where people were massacred in 1995. And we all said never again. Now it's happening day-in, day-out for years in Aleppo.
[Rachel Martin:] The whole reason that this cease-fire was put in place was to provide an opening for humanitarian assistance. What aid have you been able to get to people in the hardest-hit areas?
[Jan Egeland:] Well, the cessation of hostilities it wasn't a full-fledged cease-fire came into force at the end of February. And it did work, to some extent. The last month, I think we reached 50, 60 percent of the 480,000 in besieged areas. Last year, we reached maybe 3 or 4 percent. So there was progress. That has been unraveling the last days and nights. It has to stop. It cannot continue like this.
[Rachel Martin:] So what has that meant for relief efforts?
[Jan Egeland:] Much of the aid has been paralyzed. Aid worker colleagues have been killed. We have been able to reach people. But it's absolutely horrific in and around Aleppo, in and around the Homs area.
[Rachel Martin:] The cease-fire talks have now moved from Geneva to Moscow. Can you tell us from your vantage point, what is the focus of the negotiations right now?
[Jan Egeland:] Well, there is frantic diplomatic activity at the moment. The Russians and the Americans have a lot of influence on the parties on the ground. So does Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, even European countries. And our hope is to see that we will get convoys through to places that haven't had relief for a long time. But then we need two things access permits from the government, which they deny us in many cases, and we also need all of the parties to respect our security as we go there. What has happened is that even the aid has been hit and, in many places, been possible to go.
[Rachel Martin:] How do you see this ending?
[Jan Egeland:] Well, I see it ending in a political agreement. There is no military solution. But there is not a humanitarian solution either. It's not a question of enough blankets, and then we will end it. It is a political solution where the great powers U.S., Russia the regional powers send one united signal to the ground. Enough. Sit down. Agree on a transition to a government that people can respect and to democratic elections.
[Rachel Martin:] Is this frustrating for you, I mean, when you say you can't send enough blankets, there's not a humanitarian solution and that it remains a political solution that you don't necessarily have control over?
[Jan Egeland:] I mean, it's so frustrating to see that those whom we work day and night to assist are again bleeding to death because of this senseless war where men with arms seem to be willing to fight to the last child and woman. At the same time, it's very fulfilling to see that we can save lives. And we can hold people alive until there is a peaceful settlement.
[Rachel Martin:] Jan Egeland is secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. He's also an adviser to the U.N.'s special envoy on Syria. Thank you so much.
[Jan Egeland:] Thank you.

[Rachel Martin:] We're going to focus now on a country that is showing its discomfort with asylum seekers. Hungary is along the path many refugees and migrants have taken from the Middle East and North Africa to Germany. Some asylum seekers have been staying in refugee camps. And now Hungary has begun moving them into a new camp where people have to live in cramped converted shipping containers. NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson visited one.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] Everything about this camp on the Hungarian side of the border with Serbia feels unwelcoming. Razor wire tops the fences surrounding refurbished shipping containers on what's said to be a 12-acre facility here in the small town of Tompa. It looks more like two. Stern-looking Hungarian guards stop anyone who tries to leave through every exit but one, a gate that feeds directly back into Serbia. That's the country thousands of asylum seekers are trying to leave for Hungary and the EU. But Hungarians are only allowing 10 to enter each day. And those allowed in are forced into this camp and another one close by. One asylum seeker hoping but also dreading to enter Hungary is Iraqi Mooiya Khawaja. We talk through a chainlink border fence.
[Mooiya Khawaja:] Now it's four months I'm in Serbia.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] Do you feel like a prisoner?
[Mooiya Khawaja:] Sure, 100 percent. And after that, we have another prison in Hungary.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] Marta Pardavi is co-chair of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a prominent refugee advocacy group.
[Marta Pardavi:] It's as if Hungary would be interested in having no asylum seekers and migrants coming to Europe altogether.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] EU officials in Brussels are less vocal in their criticism. They fear triggering a backlash from Hungarians, most of whom agree with their government that the mostly Muslim asylum seekers pose a threat to Europe. Interior Minister Sandor Pinter, who organized the tour of the Tompa camp, waved off the international condemnation.
[Sandor Pinter:] [Speaking Hungarian].
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] He says, "it isn't detention just because people walking in the street in front of your house aren't allowed inside."
[Sandor Pinter:] [Speaking Hungarian].
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] We are shown the newly expanded section of the camp, much of which looks staged. Beds look as if they've never been slept in. And the paddles and balls on a ping pong table are still in their plastic wrapping. The residents are nowhere to be seen. An official here says they were taken to another camp to protect their privacy. As we leave the camp, Khawaja beckons me to the fence.
[Mooiya Khawaja:] I have just one message for you. You can give it to another people, too.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] Thank you.
[Mooiya Khawaja:] You're welcome. Bye.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] Bye. It's a letter he wrote about asylum seekers escaping war and suffering only to end up in what amounts to a prison. He asks, is this the European human rights? Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Tompa, Hungary.

[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] The story about Jeffrey Epstein was supposed to be the unsealed documents from a lawsuit revealing shocking details about his crimes. But now investigators are chasing answers in another mystery his apparent suicide in federal custody. NPR's Colin Dwyer has more.
[Colin Dwyer, Byline:] This was not the first major incident involving Jeffrey Epstein since his arrest earlier this summer. Authorities had been investigating a possible suicide attempt last month as well. Bruce Barket is an attorney representing Nicholas Tartaglione, Epstein's cellmate at the time.
[Bruce Barket:] He tried to hang himself, and our client was able to alert the authorities and prevent it.
[Colin Dwyer, Byline:] Now, prison officials have not ruled out the possibility that he was attacked or that he had somehow staged his injuries. But Barket says that in the following days, authorities at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan placed Epstein on suicide watch in a special unit. Jack Donson, a former corrections case manager, says it's standard protocol to do that with at-risk inmates like Epstein; in other words, largely isolating them and removing any objects that could be used for self-harm.
[Jack Donson:] They pretty much are stripped down to their underwear, placed in a special cell, and they really have nothing.
[Colin Dwyer, Byline:] Donson worked for the Federal Bureau of Prisons for more than two decades. Now he's an independent consultant and advocate working on prison reform. He says based on his own experience, it's virtually impossible for an inmate to harm himself while on suicide watch.
[Jack Donson:] My job in that detail was to just sit at the window and have constant supervision of somebody. And you would actually document every 15 minutes, you know, anything that might have happened while you were directly supervising a person like that.
[Colin Dwyer, Byline:] The thing is Epstein was not on suicide watch by the time of his death, according to several media reports. Authorities haven't publicly confirmed one way or the other. And that has plenty of people voicing their doubts, especially given the high-profile nature of this case. Documents released Friday detailed how girls as young as 14 were brought into a sex trafficking ring that operated between at least 2002 to 2005. Those documents and the new investigation have brought renewed scrutiny to the prominent figures in Epstein's circle. His case also led to the resignation of Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta last month. Acosta had come under heavy criticism for the lenient plea deal that he had negotiated for Epstein in 2007 while Acosta was still U.S. attorney in Florida. As for what happens next now that Epstein has died, here's Donson, the former corrections officer.
[Jack Donson:] I do know that there will be an after action review by the Bureau of Prisons, and they will come out and they will draw conclusions on this whole incident.
[Colin Dwyer, Byline:] Attorney General Barr for his part says both the FBI and the inspector general of the Justice Department are opening investigations into the incident. In a statement, he said he was appalled to learn of Epstein's death and that the tough questions it has prompted must be answered. Colin Dwyer, NPR News, New York.

[Michel Martin:] Throughout the program, we're checking in with people we've spoken with before about how they're thinking about this presidential election and how the country moves forward. President-elect Donald Trump has openly clashed with the media and made it clear he didn't believe the polls upon which many media organizations rely. After the election, the nation learned that he was right about that. Many of the polls were off. Farai Chideya has been thinking about how the polls and journalists fell short. Farai is a longtime journalist working in both print and broadcast media. She's also nice enough to fill in for me on occasion. Throughout this election, she's been working as a senior writer for FiveThirtyEight. That's a website that many consider the authority on political polling analysis. Farai, welcome back. Thanks so much for joining us.
[Farai Chideya:] Hey. How are you?
[Michel Martin:] So the morning after the election, you wrote an extensive and really thoughtful Facebook post reflecting upon how you saw the election, how you covered it and saying that you were both right and wrong. Tell us more about that please.
[Farai Chideya:] Yeah. I mean, I had been up most of 48 hours. I did FiveThirtyEight then I was on and off ABC's digital broadcast stream for several hours, did some reporting on the street. And one of the things that I really kept repeating when people asked me to sort of step into a pundit role was Donald Trump can't win without women and people of color. Therefore, he can't win the election. I was right about number one and wrong about number two because white women voted for Donald Trump and enough people of color voted for Donald Trump, so them plus the overwhelming majority of white men added up to a victory in the Electoral College.
[Michel Martin:] You know, I've heard this from so many journalists that the media has a lot to account for in this election.
[Farai Chideya:] Oh, yeah.
[Michel Martin:] And you've heard all kinds of criticism from really across the political spectrum. What's your take on that? How in your view did the media fall short?
[Farai Chideya:] First of all, you can't cover this election from an office chair. The only way to really understand how people think and feel is to talk to them. Media economics no longer favors field reporting. Local newspapers are shutting down. Local TV stations are focused on crime and ratings. If we want better elections, we also need better media. And the Shorenstein Center analyzed media and found that until Super Tuesday, Donald Trump was covered like a celebrity, not a candidate which means that every Republican who wanted to vote for someone besides Donald Trump had the scales weighted against them. They could not read enough about or figure out what was going on in the race because we did not do a good job collectively. I mean, I'm sure across the country there's great journalists doing great work, but in aggregate, we did not serve voters well.
[Michel Martin:] Before we let you go and thanks for talking with us while you're remaining on deadline yourself, can you talk about how what you learned during this election will inform your reporting going forward?
[Farai Chideya:] Well, to be honest and I know this sounds weird I don't know how much more reporting I'm going to do. I've been in this business 26 years. I may not leave, but I'm really focused on looking at the legacy of American media as part of a thriving democracy. And that's my number-one priority. Whatever else I do we'll see.
[Michel Martin:] That's Farai Chideya. She's a senior writer for FiveThirtyEight. That's a website that focuses on politics and polling analysis. She was nice enough to join us from our bureau in New York. Farai Chideya, thanks so much for speaking with us.
[Farai Chideya:] Thanks, Michel. It is always my honor.

[Jennifer Ludden:] I'm Jennifer Ludden, in Washington. Neal Conan is away. Residents of Moore, Oklahoma, are coming to grips with one of the most devastating tornadoes in history. Dozens are dead, and that toll is expected to rise. We'll speak with a meteorologist about forecasting such a disaster when lives are at stake. Also, growing up in Tornado Alley. While the extent of yesterday's damage was stunning, a tornado in May is no surprise in that area. There are familiar warning signs, rituals, perhaps siren fatigue. We'd like to hear from you. If you've lived in Tornado Alley, tell us your story. Our number is 800-989-8255. Our email address, talk@npr.org, and you can join the conversation at our website. Go to npr.org, and click on TALK OF THE NATION. Later in the program, should the U.S. lower its blood alcohol limit for drunk driving? But first to Oklahoma. Joining me now is Michael Cross, state capitol bureau chief at member station KOSU in Oklahoma City. Welcome.
[Michael Cross, Byline:] Hello, Jennifer.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Michael, can you tell us the scene in Moore at this hour?
[Michael Cross, Byline:] Well, at this hour they're still trying to dig out from the devastating tornado that hit less than 24 hours ago. The biggest problem right now is we are now under a thunderstorm warning. We have hail, lightning coming in through the area, which is actually, after the many years that I've been living here, rare. Usually the day after a tornado is very sunny, it's very sometimes it's almost too hot because it usually happens in late May and sometimes in June. But today it's very rainy, which really hampers any efforts to get in there, especially with lightning, with hail, and of course all this debris is now getting wet, and that makes it even harder to dig through. So the rescue efforts are being hampered right now because of storms that are going through the area.
[Jennifer Ludden:] I guess I should ask: Are you in a safe place?
[Michael Cross, Byline:] Yes, I'm actually at the state capitol, where we've actually had to do some cutting back on water and air conditioning because of a water treatment plant lost power. It has been restored, but in the meantime they're asking people to restrict water usage so that they can get the pressure back up.
[Jennifer Ludden:] How so despite these difficulties, the lightning and the rain, what is taking place in Moore? How are people figuring things out today? I mean, I heard someone say they have to actually post street signs so people can recognize where the streets are.
[Michael Cross, Byline:] It's very difficult. The governor took an aerial tour of the devastated area, which is approximately 17 to 20 miles long. So it's in some of the hardest hit areas, there's nothing left of a house except for maybe some steps, and that's basically it. Everything else is just debris. And many areas have no street signs. So we saw this mostly I think most people remember Katrina, when they went by door to door to and they put markings on each one of them, and that's what they're doing. They're just going door to door, and, of course, there's no doors anymore. They're just going to where there should be a house and looking through them. The problem is when you take cover from a tornado, a lot of times you are going into a storm shelter, which is beneath the house, or a basement, which again is beneath the house, or a center closet. So when these tornadoes come through, everything piles up on top of that. So there are people who might be trapped underground, underneath all of this debris, underneath basically what was a house, sometimes a one- or two-story home is not sitting on these people's shelter. So mostly rescue efforts are not only digging through the rubble but listening. They have to hear for the sounds of help. And so they're telling helicopters to stay away. They're telling news crews that have generators going for power, turn them off because sometimes that cry for help is so silent that you really have to listen carefully, and that's what rescue workers are doing right now.
[Jennifer Ludden:] You know, Michael, this question came up: Do does everyone have a basement or a storm cellar? Are there homes that don't have them?
[Michael Cross, Byline:] There are some that don't. A lot of them now most of your new, new homes do, and especially this area was affected by the May 3, 1999, tornado, 14 years ago, and almost every home in the Moore area that has been built since 1999 has come with some kind of a storm shelter. Nowadays...
[Jennifer Ludden:] This is the same area hit, some of the same neighborhoods?
[Michael Cross, Byline:] This is very much the same area. It's a little bit different, but for the most part it's the Moore area that was had been most of it had been rebuilt. Some people, they did interviews on the news of people who had rebuilt their homes since the May 3 tornado of 1999, and that was the home that got hit yesterday afternoon.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right, Michael Cross with member station KOSU in Oklahoma City. Let's get a caller on the line. Stephanie is on the line from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Hi Stephanie.
[Stephanie:] Hi there. I was calling because I've lived in Tulsa basically my whole life and watched the tornado that happened in 1999 with a little bit of apathy, I must confess, until after I saw the aftermath. We're kind of used to running out and standing on our roof, looking at the funnel clouds, not with a lot of fear. I can tell you last night, I started calling storm shelter companies, and I had one installed in my garage this morning.
[Jennifer Ludden:] So apathetic no more.
[Stephanie:] No, I have two small children now, and I can just tell you that it's just changed my entire perspective. I'm going to start crying. I was just watching, and I can't imagine how scared those children were, and we just built our house in November. We kept saying we were going to install an above-ground storm shelter and kept finding other ways to spend that money. And last night I just decided my priorities have got to change, and there's just too much information showing me these storms are getting worse. I want to keep my family safe. So we got one installed first thing today. We were very lucky that we're even able to get our hands on one.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Stephanie, thank you so much.
[Stephanie:] Thank you, and thanks for your coverage.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Michael, Stephanie talked about, you know, growing up in the area but still feeling an apathy.
[Michael Cross, Byline:] Stephanie, I tell you, apathy is one of the biggest problems, especially when you have we have some of the best meteorologists, so let me start there, but they do get very energetic when a storm happens. And sometimes when that storm isn't near you, you tend to make fun of them or drown it out, and you hear the sirens especially because a siren goes off an example, the sirens went off yesterday afternoon for the tornado in Moore, but we were hearing them throughout Oklahoma County, which is a very large county. So some of the areas that weren't even getting rain were getting these tornado warnings, and if you know it's not there, you just don't, you don't think about it. You ignore it. And I think May 3, 1999, did wake a lot of people up. That's why many houses now have these storm shelters. But the one that came through yesterday will also wake people up and make them realize how important it is to listen to the meteorologists, to listen to the stormchasers and especially to take cover when you hear the sirens.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Did you, Michael, have, you know, rituals as a child, where your did your you're longstanding from the area? I mean, did your parents talk to you about this?
[Michael Cross, Byline:] Well yes, and one of our when at my grandparents, we used to go hide in the closet, that's we had a central area. When I have the home I live in now, my wife and I will go into a closet, as well. But I also have to agree with Stephanie. Growing up, we also used to sit on the roof and watch these things come through. There were people out in Moore who were watching this. The thing about a tornado, yes, it was two miles wide, or that's what they're expecting to say it was, but still there's areas where you can clearly see it. So you're standing out watching this, either on a roof or out just watching it, then watching the devastation as it goes by without any danger at all. So we're used to we're used to watching the tornadoes, not necessarily running for cover when they actually happen, but...
[Jennifer Ludden:] Now that can't be what your parents told you to do. I mean, is it just after so many years and the warnings and not being hit, is that what happens, or I don't know, help us understand.
[Michael Cross, Byline:] No, yeah, it is very hard to explain, but, you know, we don't get as frightened of tornados as some people. I've known people who, especially from the East or West Coast, will come to Oklahoma and start going through panic attacks because there's a tornado like two, three, four counties away. And we're like no, everything's fine, don't worry about it. And I'm sure it would be the same thing if I were to go out to California and felt my first earthquake. Of course we've had our share of earthquakes here, too, but it tornadoes just don't really make us as frightened as some people think until you get this one, until you get the one like this one, the one we had in Woodward last year, the one in May 3, 1999, the tornadoes that came through Oklahoma City in 2003. Eventually every year or so you get that wakeup call that goes oh, I need to take this seriously. And like Stephanie a lot of people go OK, I need to get that shelter installed, I need to have a plan and especially with the children. We've got one lawmaker who just came up with a plan for a bill to do a bond issue for storm shelters for schools after what happened to the elementary schools in Oklahoma in Moore.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Let's get another quick call in. John is in Norman, Oklahoma. Hi there, John.
[John:] Hi, I actually am currently in Oklahoma City, and what I had to do to get up here was go south of Norman and west to a different interstate to come up this direction, and I still had to cross the path of where the tornado came from. I moved here about in 2005, and it wasn't until I drove across a bridge, which was about where the tornado really had started to intensify, and I saw the sticks of where trees used to be. And that's when I realized that it and it only got worse from there.
[Jennifer Ludden:] So is this going to change your outlook going forward, John?
[John:] I've always taken it very I've always taken the shelter very seriously. I tend to have a radio on whenever it's, you know, one of those types of days. And I think the problem is, you know, we're getting we're getting a siren we had sirens going off the entire time that was in Moore because it was partly you know, it was very close to the county that I live in. Actually, I believe that Moore is the northern Cleveland County. And so you hear the sirens go off, and it's the same noise for hail as it would be for, you know, a deadly tornado. The only way you're going to know if it's a tornado emergency or just a severe weather warning is by listening to something else other than the sirens.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right, well John, thank you so much for the phone call.
[John:] Thank you.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Michael Cross, any idea, briefly, at this point how long rescue efforts will continue?
[Michael Cross, Byline:] Rescue efforts could take a while, I think for the next couple days, especially when we've got just know we do know that electric crews are coming in from Louisiana and Texas to help try and bring the power back on. I think that's going to help. But of course again, normally these we don't have such bad weather the day after a tornado, and this is the hardest thing right now is dealing with the thunderstorms that are going through the area, the rain, the hail, and of course the lightning. You can't be out there digging through debris out in an area that is now open plains without being worried about being struck by lightning.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right, Michael Cross, member station KOSU, is going to stay with us a few more minutes. We'd like to hear from our listeners. Did you grow up in Tornado Alley, call us, 800-989-8255. Or send us an email, talk@npr.org. I'm Jennifer Ludden. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Jennifer Ludden. On Monday, a tornado roared through Moore, a suburb of Oklahoma City, with winds up to 200 miles an hour. Buildings were flattened, and as many as 24 people are dead, many others missing and wounded. NPR continues to cover this disaster. Michael Cross of member station KOSU is here with us today. And we'd like to hear from our listeners. Do you live in Tornado Alley? What do you do when you hear the tornado sirens? Our number is 800-989-8255, our email address talk@npr.org, and you can join the conversation at our website. Go to npr.org, and click on TALK OF THE NATION.
[We Have An Email From Dan In Oklahoma, Who Writes:] There are hardly any basements in Oklahoma. When you dig more than a foot or two into the ground, there's a bunch of rocks. It's hard to affordably and easily have a basement. And let's take another caller here, Emily is calling from Norman, Oklahoma. Welcome to the show, Emily.
[Emily:] Hi.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Go right ahead.
[Emily:] Well, I'm a senior at Norman High School, I'm actually on my lunch break right now. I just wanted to testify to the support of Oklahomans. It's been really impressive, from the tornado, you know, last night to 8 A.M. today they were able to pull together a truck from alumni, an alumni network at Norman High School, and we're sending out a shipment, you know, at 1 o'clock today to Moore, and it's going to be more shipments throughout the day and tomorrow. But I just thought it was wonderful how fast the response time was of the students and the alumni and just the support of Oklahomans for each other.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Emily, it must be have been frightening to watch. How are you handling, you know, the emotion that comes with such tragedy?
[Emily:] I mean, it was really frightening because I'm supposed to pick up my little brother every day at 3 o'clock. So I was running to get him, and the tornado sirens went off as I was going into the school. And, I mean, I can't explain how I mean, as much as everyone's talking about how they do go off all the time, so in a way I was really blase about, oh, well, I'll go out and get him right now even though I know inclement weather is here. But at the same time, as soon as those go off, your heart still drops no matter how many times you've heard them. And as I was running in to get them, they were screaming, you know, no one can leave, everyone stay in the school. And that part is, you know, really scary. And then coming out and the relief that comes with knowing that it didn't hit you, but then at the same time the tragedy of thinking how close it was. And, you know, it could have as easily been you as it was in Moore, and I mean, it passed right over us and just, you know, you're I'm trying to, you know, deal with being joyous that it didn't hit us and at the same time feeling so, so terrible for what happened in Moore.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Well Emily, thank you so very much for the call, and take care.
[Emily:] Thank you, bye.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Michael Cross, you were there in 1999, the last terrible tornado. So how is it you know, how do people decide is there talk of rebuilding, whether to rebuild? How does that move forward, and what are you hearing this time?
[Michael Cross, Byline:] I don't think there's really necessarily talk on whether to rebuild. I think because not only you have to think about Oklahoma City with Moore as, of course, one of the suburbs, and Midwest City, where in 1999 where it hit, where I was living at the time, and Oklahoma City was also the site of the 1995 bombing. There was never, ever talk of whether or not we should rebuild. It is always now what do we do to rebuild. And Midwest City, Moore that got hit really hard by the May 3rd tornado in 1999, immediately took steps to rebuild. Now it did take a couple of months before everything got back to some semblance of normalcy, although there was still a very large hole that existed where the path of the tornado you could see from Midwest City all the way to Moore where the tornado had gone through for several months, almost a year later. And so that's going to be the problem right now. There's going to be this big path where the tornado has gone through. But talking to the city manager of Moore yesterday, him coming right out and saying we're a resilient people, and we will rebuild, and we will come back even stronger than we were before, it's amazing to see the changes that Moore has gone through since 1999, and now they'll just mark 2013 as a new, a new starting point to grow and become stronger than ever before. The Moore School District is one of the largest growing school districts in the state of Oklahoma. Moore, the suburb of Moore, is one of the largest growing in Oklahoma. So it will rebuild, and it will be stronger.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right, let's get another caller on the line. Karen is in Oklahoma City. Welcome to the program, Karen.
[Karen:] Hi, thank you for taking my call.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Go right ahead.
[Karen:] I was just going to make a comment on how weather-aware that's the catchphrase we use in Oklahoma the university in Norman is. I work in the School of Musical Theater, and I was attending a rehearsal there I guess about eight weeks ago, and the sirens went off. And it turned out to be just a severe thunderstorm, but I mean we packed everything up, directors, students, orchestra, everyone down into the basement. The university, every single building there has a shelter area where you can go, and the students really respect the sirens, I think, there. And it's just great that we have someplace to go, and everyone can feel safe no matter where you on campus.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Karen, thank you so much.
[Karen:] Thank you.
[Michael Cross, Byline:] Jennifer, I do want to say that one the things that Emily had talked about earlier was the giving spirit here in Oklahoma City. We have Kevin Durant, who is our star player for the Oklahoma City Thunder, donated this morning a million dollars to the Red Cross. The Chesapeake and Devon Energies, who also are our two biggest companies in Oklahoma City, all told they have donated, themselves, $4.5 million to these rescue efforts. So people step forward. And then there's all these individual groups, where people will just tweet out by the way, we're taking donations, we're taking donations, so come on by, we're taking donations. People step forward and help in times of crisis. It's just the way Oklahomans work.
[Jennifer Ludden:] So getting through it by getting to coming together.
[Michael Cross, Byline:] Exactly.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Cynthia from Norman, Oklahoma, writes: We have a safe room but will often go outside to look at the sky or the den to check the TV. We have been fortunate, since they all go around us. We often ignore the sirens since they go off for the entire county, and we watch those go by us. We can't live our lives by fear. We've learned to just be aware of the weather. My non-native Okie neighbors have spent more time in our safe room than we have, but my heart bled for Moore, she writes. Let's get another caller here. Danielle is in Woodward, Iowa. Hi, Danielle.
[Danielle:] Hi, thanks for taking my call. We had a tornado at an odd time of year, in November, and the signs were there, and we took steps to protect ourselves. And I teach outside frequently. Half of my college classes are spent outside, and I carry a portable weather radio with me. And I cannot say enough good things about the National Weather Service and how they have become wonderful partners for helping me with field trips and keeping us safe. It's tax money very well spent.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right, well thank you so much for that, Danielle. And let's see if we can get another one here, Mary in Claremore, Oklahoma. Mary, welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.
[Mary:] Thank you for having me. Well, I just wanted to say I guess I'm one of those East Coast people who moved here to Oklahoma and I guess I am a little freaked out. But my husband and I always take precautions when there's severe weather, and I feel a lot of native Oklahomans as well do. It's such a serious situation, and I think our media does a great job here informing the community of the track of the storms and to give us more time to prepare. But I think that I mean we were ready. We do not have a safe room. We have an indoor, you know, a closet in the inside of our house. I wish we had a safe room. But nobody has basements, either. I'm sure there are a few, but very few people have basements in Oklahoma.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right, Mary, thank you so much for the phone call. And Michael Cross, someone Patrick in Traverse City, Michigan, asks: Could you explain what an above-ground shelter is, please?
[Michael Cross, Byline:] Well, they're rare. Above-ground shelter would actually just exactly that. It's a shelter that is not dug into the ground. Those are rare. Most of the times the shelters are dug into underground into like the garage. Now there is above-ground where you can have a shelter in what would sort of be if you think of a safe room for a house. If you can't dig into the ground, then you have a safe room into the center of the house where you can go in, and it will not be picked up or, you know, thrown around like the other rooms in your house, or if it collapses on the safe room, the safe room can still protect you. So that's basically what an above-ground they usually don't happen. Usually it's below-ground because you don't spend that much time in your below-ground shelters. We remember the old '50s of the shelters where your nuclear war shelters, where you had to go in there, and you had to stockpile food and everything. That's not what these are. They are very small because you're only in there for a short amount of time is the idea. Unfortunately for some of these people, you might be down there for a little while longer if, again, this house falls on you, and you're having to be trapped down there. And that's what's going on right now with the rescue efforts, is people are trying to find these people that might have a house sitting on top of their shelter.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right. We are joined now by Paul Douglas. He's a meteorologist and cofounder of WeatherNation TV, and he joins us by phone from Minneapolis. Welcome to the program.
[Paul Douglas:] Thank you, Jennifer. Good to be with you.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Paul, I'd like you to listen with us here to a clip that a lot of people in Moore must have heard yesterday. This is Mike Morgan. He's the chief meteorologist for NBC's Oklahoma City affiliate KFOR. He was live on the air throughout this tornado, and here he is right after a tornado emergency was declared in Moore.
[Mike Morgan:] Tornado emergency for Moore. You folks in Moore, you need to grab whatever it is you need to grab, and you need to go underground. Bottom-line, grab your kids, grab your loved ones, grab your friends, or just get out of the way.
[Jennifer Ludden:] So, Paul Douglas, what do you think when you hear that quite urgent appeal there from one of your fellow meteorologists?
[Paul Douglas:] Yeah. Mike is an old friend of mine, and he did the right thing. I mean, we're meteorologists. We're sort of trained to think clinically, look at the data, make a forecast, leave emotion out of it. And that works 99.9 percent of the time. But a day like yesterday, we're parents. We're human beings, too, believe it or not. And I think he saw the gravity of what was going on. And anytime you hear tornado emergency, that means confirmed, large tornado on the ground threatening an urban area, a heavily developed area. I think one of the issues that we have in this country is a certain degree of tornado fatigue. Seventy percent of all tornado warnings, Jennifer, are false alarms, you know? Nobody wants to get caught with their Doppler down. So any time we see rotation in a thunderstorm, the temptation is to issue the warning. But in the process, we're all kind of bombarded with warnings. You start to tune out. And on a day like yesterday, you need to break through the clutter and the apathy and the cry-wolf syndrome and shape people viscerally and emotionally. And the words that you chose I think any sociologist will tell you the words you choose are critical in conveying that level of risk. At one point, Mike Morgan actually said: If you don't have an underground shelter, this tornado is unsurvivable. Get into your vehicle, try to drive away which you never, ever hear. And yet, that was the magnitude of the tornado threat yesterday. The problem is with tornados, we don't know right away if it's an EF1 or an EF4.
[Jennifer Ludden:] At what point obviously, you weren't there. But, in general, at what point would you realize how big it is? How much time do you have to tell people?
[Paul Douglas:] You usually have maybe five to 15 minutes. The average lead time is 13 minutes from detection to the actual onset of the tornado in a given location. And that's up from about six minutes back in the 1970s. In the case yesterday, it was closer to 17 minutes, so it was better than average. But, you know, the problem becomes, all right, I've got the warning. Now what? And if it's a big one, if it's an EF3, EF4, EF5, unless you have an underground shelter or a safe room concrete, steel-reinforced safe room your odds of survival are very small.
[Jennifer Ludden:] And EF is the shorthand for the system they have for grading the severity of these, right.
[Paul Douglas:] Right. The Enhanced Fujita scale, right. The winds yesterday with the tornado were probably 160 to 200 miles an hour, and I don't think anybody can imagine what that's like. It's like a lawnmower about a mile, a mile-and-a-half wide coming through your neighborhood. With hurricanes, the winds build gradually over many hours. In the case of Sandy, you know, in New York, we went from zero to about 70-mile-an-hour winds over the span of many hours. In the case of a tornado, in the span of less than 30 seconds, you go from zero to 200 miles an hour.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Oh, my.
[Paul Douglas:] It's like a landfill. As one of my college professors at Penn State told me, it's not the tornado that's going to kill you. It's what in the tornado. It's basically an airborne landfill swirling around at, you know, 100 to 200 miles an hour.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Let me remind people that you're listening to TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News. Let's get another caller on the line. Charlie is in Luther, Oklahoma. Hello, Charlie.
[Charlie:] Hi. Thanks for taking my call.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Tell us go right ahead.
[Charlie:] Yes. My comment was is I'm a public defender from Lincoln County, which is about northwest of Moore, about an hour, an hour and a half. And I just wanted to say that yesterday, after the tornado hit, I had debris from Moore raining down on my land.
[Jennifer Ludden:] An hour-and-a-half drive away.
[Charlie:] Yes.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Oh.
[Charlie:] And I found shingles, a whirligig, and also an envelope with a Moore address on it.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Oh, oh, Charlie.
[Charlie:] And I'd also and I also just wanted to tell Mr. Cross that that I listen to him all the time on KOSU. I really appreciate his journalism.
[Michael Cross, Byline:] Thanks, Charlie.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Thank you so much for the phone call. Michael Cross, what are the next things to look out for? What will be happening in the next few days?
[Michael Cross, Byline:] Well, one of the things Charlie had mentioned that debris have fallen in Lincoln County, and he's from Luther. But I there has been talk about some of the debris landing as far as Tulsa, and even as far away as some neighboring states. I do remember in 1999, that there was really a callout for people to bring pictures that they had found, no matter where how far they were. And there was even at that time, of course, just a burgeoning Internet, nothing compared to what we have nowadays, to where people were putting photos on the Internet and letting people see so they could go through them and find old family photos, because there is there are now people that have not only not just no homes, they don't have anything, nothing at all. And so a lot of groups are going to be stepping forward to help provide homes for these people, to rebuild, and that's why FEMA is here. FEMA and Emergency Management will take care of a lot of the needs. But it's the personal items that will be lost forever that now we're going to start seeing the real power, I think, of social media and see the real power of bringing people together to get their items that they might have lost back to them, things that just can't be replaced.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right. Michael Cross is the state capitol bureau chief at member station KOSU in Oklahoma City. Thank you so much for updating us.
[Michael Cross, Byline:] Thank you, Jennifer.
[Jennifer Ludden:] And Paul Douglas, meteorologist and cofounder of WeatherNation TV, spoke to us with us by phone from Minneapolis. Thank you, as well.
[Paul Douglas:] Thank you, Jennifer.
[Jennifer Ludden:] The National Transportation Safety Board says a tougher drunk-driving threshold will reduce traffic deaths. Coming up, we'll have ESPN columnist LZ Granderson to explain why he thinks this is not a good idea. I'm Jennifer Ludden. It's TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News.

[Ira Flatow:] I'm Ira Flatow. Tomorrow is World Toilet Day, and if you have a toilet, that's a cause for celebration, because more than a third of the world's population does not. For 2.6 billion people, going to the bathroom is, well, there is no bathroom to go to. People don't have access to the sanitation and sewer systems that we take for granted here. Without a place to go, people defecate into ditches, waste gets dumped into waterways and diseases spread. The sponsors of World Toilet Day are trying to change that by bringing attention to the problem. And one sponsor, the Gates Foundation, is challenging engineers to build a better toilet, giving them money to do it. It's called the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge. Frank Rijsberman is director of water sanitation and hygiene at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle. Dr. Rijsberman is here with us. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
[Frank Rijsberman:] Thank you. Good morning, Ira.
[Ira Flatow:] Good afternoon to you. Rose George is author of "The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World Of Human Waste And Why It Matters." She joins us from the BBC in Leeds. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
[Rose George:] Thank you.
[Ira Flatow:] Dr. Jim McHale is vice president of engineering at American Standard Brands in Piscataway, New Jersey. You know they make all those bathroom fixtures, including that famous toilet that seems to swallow everything up on YouTube. Thank you for being with us today, Jim.
[Jim Mchale:] Thank you, Ira.
[Ira Flatow:] Let's talk a bit, Dr. Rijsberman. Tell us about World Toilet Day and what the point of it is.
[Frank Rijsberman:] Well, World Toilet Day tries to bring across the same point you just made, that an astonishing third of the world population does not have access to flush toilets. Yes, flush toilets have saved more lives than any other invention, but at the same time, lack of them still causes an incredible number of death among young children from diarrhea.
[Ira Flatow:] With two and a half billion people, that's a big number. How do you even get your arms around it? How do you tackle that problem?
[Frank Rijsberman:] With great difficulty. A lot of people are trying that, in fact, and we are doing things. It's not as if we have to reinvent the toilet before we can start working on that problem, but yes, we do think that particularly for people who live in slums in developing countries, in very high density, low income areas, we don't really have a toilet that works for poor people.
[Ira Flatow:] So you're looking for, actually you said we don't have to reinvent the toilet, but you are actually asking people.
[Frank Rijsberman:] Yes, we are asking people to come up with a toilet that does not flush, you know, clean water down an expensive set of pipes to get into a waste water treatment plant where we're spending even more energy and money to get that waste out again. We'd love for people to have what we sometimes call the cell phone of sanitation, an aspirational product that actually recovers resources from waste. There's a lot of energy in human waste. There is nutrients there, and we'd love to find a way to reuse those directly without relying on flushing your waste down the drain with clean drinking water.
[Ira Flatow:] So you're looking for some really creative engineering and giving money to engineers to design a better toilet.
[Frank Rijsberman:] Yes, indeed.
[Ira Flatow:] And how long is the contest going to go on for?
[Frank Rijsberman:] Well, within a year we'd love for people to show that their crazy ideas have some value and then next year August we hope to have a big fair where people demonstrate all those prototypes. And then we'll have more money to take the best ideas forward into toilets that people can actually use.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm. And so how do you apply for if you're an engineer and you have a crazy idea, how do you get a grant from you folks?
[Frank Rijsberman:] Well, we had several open contests and Daniel Yeh that you are going to talk to later was one of the hundreds of people who sent us those ideas and then we have those reviewed by external experts and we funded a bunch of these, about 26 in April and another 31 that were published just last week.
[Ira Flatow:] Let me bring out Dr. Yeh. Dr. Daniel Yeh is an engineer who was working on one of those toilets. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
[Daniel Yeh:] Hello, Ira. Great to be here.
[Ira Flatow:] Thank you very much. Can you give us an idea what your idea is?
[Daniel Yeh:] Okay. Well, I guess, to start, I need to talk about how we currently treat waste. Typically, in municipal waste water systems, you know, we use what's called activated flush, which is a rather energy intensive way to get rid of the organic material, namely in waste. As Frank said earlier, this is energy intensive and also does not recover energy. So we'd like to do it differently. We'd like to do it using [unintelligible] organisms, which are naturally present. And through the [unintelligible] organisms, you can reroute the organic content or the electrons that are embedded in the organic material into methane. And then, along with that waste, there's nitrogen phosphorus, like Frank mentioned, so the trick now is to have you get to the nitrogen phosphorus in the water safely, and we will be doing this in conjunction with a membrane, an ultra-filtration membrane.
[Ira Flatow:] So the idea is not to just dump the waste. It's to, more or less, recycle it back into something else.
[Daniel Yeh:] It absolutely is. Because if you look at waste, what's waste to us is actually food for microorganisms. And when you really come down to it, it's nothing more than carbon nitrogen phosphorus. But it's just the fact that there's pathogens in there. There's also a social stigma attached to it, so we need to find ways to overcome those.
[Ira Flatow:] And how much time do you think it will take you to come up with a working idea here?
[Daniel Yeh:] We have already built it in the lab and we call that a NEW generator, which means nutrients, energy and water, NEW generator. We have a working prototype in the lab and what we're doing now through the Gates Foundation Grant is to move that into the field for a field demonstration and to ruggedize the unit.
[Ira Flatow:] Is it something that anybody could build, even, you know, in a place that doesn't have a lot of resources?
[Daniel Yeh:] I think you're going to need some resources to build it, but then the challenge is how we're going to make this fit into the existing sanitation cycle and then of course affordability will be an issue. But, you know, I like to always look at it like the USB drive example. You know, when the USB drive first came out many years ago, it was very expensive and, you know, frankly, I don't know how that works. But now you can get one for, what, $5?
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Daniel Yeh:] And so I think if there's a demand, we can create a [unintelligible] market structure, anything can be affordable.
[Ira Flatow:] All right. Good luck to you, Dr. Yeh.
[Daniel Yeh:] Great. Thank you.
[Ira Flatow:] Thank you for taking time with us, Dr. Yeh. Daniel Yeh is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of South Florida in Tampa. We're talking World Toilet Day coming up tomorrow around the world and we're talking about toilet technology. Let me bring on Rose George. She is author of "The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World Of Human Waste And Why It Matters." Why is it so unmentionable, Rose?
[Rose George:] Well, I think actually one of the good things that since I wrote that book, which was in 2008, I think it's become much less unmentionable. And but there is a conversational and societal taboo about this and it's the interesting thing about this taboo is that it's not actually that old. It only goes back 200 or 300 years, which is just about the same time that the flush toilet became the norm and so you had this odor-free device that you could have inside your house, which was unthinkable beforehand. If you'd ever encountered a 17th century privy, you wouldn't want it anywhere near you. So you had this clean and nice, fresh-smelling device. And at this same time, I think, because we could do that, because we could put it behind a closed door, we could also not really think about it and not discuss it. And that's had really quite damaging effects up to the point where, you know, as Frank said in 2011, we're in this ridiculous situation of children dying of the runs, of diarrhea, and surely, you know, we can solve that.
[Ira Flatow:] Do you think that if some toilet designers of 100 years ago were alive today, they could walk up to the modern toilet and say, I can still fix that?
[Rose George:] I think if you took a standard western toilet, yes. I think if you took there are these quite amazing Japanese high tech toilets, and that's a whole different kettle of fish. But I think, yes, if you got hold of Joseph Brown or Alexander Cummings and asked them to fix a toilet, I suspect they'd be able to. I don't think Alexander Graham Bell would be able to get to grips with an iPhone quite as easily.
[Ira Flatow:] Jim McHale, you work on some of the cutting-edge designs in toilet technology for American Standard. What are some of the challenges in toilet design today?
[Jim Mchale:] Well, first, let me say, we are also interested in the work to help developing countries get toilets. And I've been talking with Frank about what we can do to help. But here in the U.S. market, the challenges are more around water conservation, what can be done to change the designs to get toilets to function properly on less water. There's the EPA's water sense initiative that tries to promote the use of what we call ATTs, toilets that function on 20 percent or less water than a typical 1.6 gallon toilet. So we spent a lot of time designing toilets that work on less water, but actually that really flush well and aren't going to cause somebody to have to flush the toilet twice because that really is the nemesis of water conservation is when somebody has to flush twice or three times to really clean the bowl.
[Ira Flatow:] So that's a real engineering challenge, then.
[Jim Mchale:] Absolutely. We use the best available tools and find the best available people to solve that problem just like any other industry would solve their problems.
[Ira Flatow:] 1-800-989-8255 is our number. Talking about engineering toilets on World Toilet Day tomorrow. You can also tweet us @scifri, at S-C-I-F-R-I. Let's go take a call or two before the break. Let's go to Russell in Cincinnati. Hi, Russell.
[Russell:] Hey, how you doing?
[Ira Flatow:] Hey, there.
[Russell:] Hey, I'm sitting here listening to this and I'm thinking to myself why what's the big deal? The [unintelligible] toilet has been around since the '60s, I know that much, and that's a composting toilet. It already exists. And when you drive through all the rest areas and more of the public restrooms that you go into now, they've got toilets and urinals that don't use any water at all. So I'm just...
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah, Frank, good question.
[Russell:] ...it already exists, so why are we trying to find it?
[Ira Flatow:] Frank Rijsberman?
[Frank Rijsberman:] Yes. And indeed, that has been a common reaction. People have been proposing composting toilets to us. And indeed, if you have a mountain cabin here in the U.S. or so, that may very well be a good solution. They've been around a long time. They've been tested in developing countries and they work for some specific conditions, but for those that we're looking at, slums, lots of people sharing toilets, they fill up too quickly, they don't properly function. So we recognize that for some conditions, composting toilets work well and actually we have some grants that make those even better, but for the majority of the conditions we're looking at, it's not a good solution. We want something in fact, the composting toilet is sort of an improved outhouse, if you like. We'd love to get to a toilet, an aspirational product, the cell phone of sanitation, that you and I would also want to have in our house and that doesn't reduce the flush to, say, 1.4, 1.2 gallons per liter, but to zero.
[Ira Flatow:] All right. There it is, the iPhone of toilets. We're gonna come back and talk more with Frank Rijsberman, Rose George, author of "The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World Of Human Waste And Why It Matters," Jim McHale, vice president of engineering at American Standard Brands in Piscataway, New Jersey. Our number, 1-800-989-8255. Maybe you have an idea for the toilet of tomorrow, the iPhone of toilets. We'll be right back after this break. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. We're talking this hour about the toilet of tomorrow, what would be the ultimate toilet, how should it be designed, with Frank Rijsberman, director of water sanitation and hygiene at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Rose George, author of "The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World Of Human Waste And Why It Matters," Jim McHale, vice president of engineering at American Standard Brands in Piscataway. Our number, 1-800-989-8255. Jim, you heard Frank say that the ultimate toilet would have no water in it. Is that something practical for an American consumer, though?
[Jim Mchale:] In the short term, probably in my lifetime, I would say no. It there's very cultural aspects with a toilet as well. People Frank mentioned how people don't like to use composting toilets and a lot of it has to do with the smell. Water has the main function of water is that it reduces the smells during the process, so I really cannot see that happening in the near-term.
[Ira Flatow:] Rose George?
[Rose George:] I think, I mean, it's certainly true that there are cultural aspects to sanitation, which make it extremely tricky to solve or to find a perfect solution across the world, which is probably partly why we're in the situation. But I am more optimistic, I think, possibly than Jim. I mean, one of the lovely anecdotes I was told was from a Norwegian professor who told me that a friend of his, their children, their family had a composting latrine at home, thought that was completely normal. And the day that they went, started kindergarten, were absolutely appalled to find that they had to drop their waste into a load of water and they just didn't like the plop and the splash. So it's I think things can change slowly. I certainly don't think that the composting toilet is a solution in many situations. But the point about sanitation, the trick to solving sanitation which we're now all understanding is that you have to be flexible. One solution is not going to fit someone else, as Frank said. You can't really be imposing sewers in a slum, for example, or composting toilets because nobody's no authority is going to want to install infrastructure in a slum because that would automatically imply that people have land rights. So there's all sorts of political issues. So this issue is really complicated. That makes it fascinating, but it also makes it a huge challenge.
[Ira Flatow:] But composting toilets, they're used in public places. I know around here in New York, the Queens Botanical Garden has a wonderful composting toilet. It looks great and it has no smell. Took a tour of it once myself. There are other places that use it. Perhaps public places are where we might see them blossoming, for lack of a better word. They don't smell at all. You know, it's surprising.
[Frank Rijsberman:] They can work and we are certainly not against composting toilets and we'd love to see them improved further. Normal composting can take up to six months before all the pathogens are really removed from the waste, particularly worm eggs persist very long. So we'd love to have something that is really safe, much quicker than that, which probably involves higher temperatures. But we are certainly not against composting toilets. But as you say, they've been around for a long time and they've had, clearly, if you like, issues to be adopted at a wide scale. We'd love to see something that gives billions of people a new toilet much before Jim passes away. We have to be rather more impatient optimists than that. And we think we can see solutions that will be ready for millions of people more like in three to five years, rather than 20 to 30.
[Ira Flatow:] If I heard what you just said, that if, you know, it's too long to wait for a few months for all these pathogens to settle out, are you saying that you might be able to create a toilet that sort of sterilizes itself?
[Frank Rijsberman:] Yes. We have a lot of other options that are currently being researched. I mean, like Daniel Yeh, we have about 60 of those grants this year and some people propose to use a method that is similar to creating charcoal. It's called creating bio-char. In essence, you heat it up to about 250 degrees, which after 10 minutes is pretty sure to no longer have pathogens. And it creates this bio-char, which is like charcoal, which you can then either put in the soil as a soil improver or in some cases where people cook on charcoal, it could even be cooking fuel.
[Ira Flatow:] So you have to not only create a new kind of toilet, but you need a system for disposal of what's left in the toilet.
[Frank Rijsberman:] That's critical, yes. And actually, we are saying where the current methods all look at this as waste that is costly to remove, we are looking at it as resource recovery, as recycling and that can actually get some money back to people that makes this all affordable.
[Ira Flatow:] So, like we used to throw out newspapers and bottles, which we don't do anymore, we recycle them, somebody might come by somebody might our toilet might be situated maybe with a door on the outside of our home or our building and somebody could come by and just replace it or the removable parts.
[Frank Rijsberman:] Yes. Actually, those kind of cartridge toilets are definitely being researched. We are working with a small NGO called Sanergy that, in Kibera, one of the worst slums in Nairobi in Africa, brings people these little cartridge toilets that actually do fit in their homes and collects them every couple days and then brings them to a neighborhood recycling place where you'd have a machine that creates bio-char, like charcoal, out of human waste. And that actually for us, you'd be able to reduce the cost of treating waste to zero by basically generating revenue out of waste.
[Ira Flatow:] Jim McHale, you have this great video of an American Standard toilet, Standard Brand toilet on the internet that, no matter what you throw down there, from a dozen golf balls to 53 chicken nuggets or 56, is it, everything flushes. And with one flush. What is the engineering miracle there? What did you accomplish? How did you figure out how to do that?
[Jim Mchale:] That's our H2 option siphonic dual flush toilet. The trick to getting toilets to flush that well is all optimization of the internal chambers that you can't see. The water is flowing through different passageways that leads to the tank and eventually winds up in the bowl and down the trapway and down the drain. And as I think I mentioned earlier, we use computational fluid dynamics to understand the flow through those chambers and to reduce turbulence wherever it occurs so that we're not wasting any of the energy in the tank. Any of the energy of the height of water in the tank. Or that's the only potential energy available to remove the waste. So the channels have to be designed perfectly to not waste any of that energy and make it do the work that we need it to do.
[Ira Flatow:] How about the composition of the toilet itself, the porcelain? Is there a special material, coating or something that's on there?
[Jim Mchale:] Well, we the other aspect is there's removing the waste, there's also cleaning the walls of the bowl. And there we've engineered what we call ever-clean antimicrobial glaze. The glaze is the glass coating on a piece of ceramic, what makes it look white and shiny is actually a glass coating. We've engineered that glass coating to be ultra smooth on the nano scale so that material doesn't stick to it. That also helps with the flush because we don't need to use as much water to wash the bowl, so the bowl and we can put more water into powering the flush and moving waste down the drain.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah, 'cause as we said before, that double flush is what wastes a lot of that water.
[Jim Mchale:] Yes, it does. And that's sometimes toilet designers will miss that aspect of it. And you can have a bowl that removes solid waste very effectively, but if it doesn't clean the walls, people are going to they're going to flush it twice.
[Ira Flatow:] You know, the toilet I hate to use the most is the one in airplanes that has that air sucking through the toilet bowl. I think that's really probably 'cause my own it's so loud, it really hurts your ears. I wonder if it breaks OSHA rules or something for sound level in some way. Has anybody thought of using that kind of technology, though, I wouldn't want to use one myself?
[Frank Rijsberman:] Yes, actually. In places where in China, where they don't want to use six liters or 1.4 gallon or so to flush their toilets, the next thing, if you use only the one liter or so that people use to clean themselves, that's not enough to transport the waste, so then you have to have vacuum tubes in apartment buildings. Not necessarily the cheapest option, but that helps like an airplane toilet to move waste with very little water.
[Ira Flatow:] Let's go to Debbie in Layton, Utah. Hi, Debbie.
[Debbie:] Hi.
[Ira Flatow:] Hi there.
[Debbie:] I just have a quick comment. My family and I lived in Shanghai, China, actually, until just a couple years ago and we always thought it was so interesting. You know, the vast majority of toilets, especially in public places, are we call them squatters for, you know, lack of a better term. And even when you could find a Western toilet, we would go in and we would very often see footprints where people had stood on top of the Western toilet because they thought that it was unhygienic to sit on a toilet where someone else had sat. And they didn't know how to use it. And I just wondered if you could comment on the cultural implications of trying to switch, even in a country like China that obviously has the money and the political will to do it, still has not happened. Thank you.
[Ira Flatow:] Thank you. Rose George? Any comment?
[Rose George:] I've heard of that as well. It's pretty common to hear of footprints on the seats. I mean, I'm not sure if Jim from American Standard is going to like this, but ergonomically and biologically, it's actually much better for us to squat anyway. So they're actually I'm not actually against those mysterious footprint leavers on toilet seats. Obviously, hygienically, it may not be the best thing, but if they wipe it afterwards then I don't see that much wrong with it. So I don't see it as a huge cultural barrier. But it is interesting, if you look nearer to China, if you look at Japan, they went from, in about 60 years, from a nation of people who squatted and used pit latrines, essentially, to people sitting on Western seats and using Western-style toilets oh, they're much improved and innovated upon, certainly more advanced in terms of robotic technology and stuff. So it can be done, but it was a massive cultural shift. And it was very difficult, and took about 20 years or so. We just we have all these quirks about our attitude to how we dispose of our own human deposits. I don't like to use the word waste. I avoid it if I can. But we're not rational beings about this, which is what makes it such an interesting topic and endlessly rich.
[Ira Flatow:] Because we know we do use manure from other animals as fertilizer and don't think twice about it. But people would be a little squeamish to use human waste.
[Rose George:] I when I was in a village in India, in [unintelligible], I remember vividly meeting a young woman who I was talking to her about whether she wanted to use a biogas digester, which is an anaerobic digester, which they're very popular China, about 18 million households have them. And there's they're very energy efficient. You just tap off the meter and then you can produce you can use it for cooking gas and use electricity. But in India, there is an attitude towards human waste which is very different. And it's very much seen as a taboo. So she looked absolutely horrified and then immediately stuck her hand in a big bowl of green cow manure and started spreading it all over her wool. So, you know, we are strange creatures.
[Ira Flatow:] Here's a tweet, came in from SCIENCE FRIDAY in Second Life. It says: Why isn't water from showers and washing machines normally reused for flushing toilets? It's even illegal by city building codes. Why we're not drinking it. Why should we not use it. Any thoughts on that?
[Jim Mchale:] That actually is being done in some areas. It's called gray water reuse. People are collecting the water from the sink where you wash your hands or collecting the water from the shower and reusing it to flush the toilets. Actually, I think the Gates Foundation headquarters has toilets and urinals that function like that. A lot of new buildings are putting in systems to handle gray water in that manner. It's an infrastructure challenge, though, you need to put in the system to do it, but it's certainly feasible.
[Rose George:] I think it's so I think it's a regulatory challenge as well. I think a lot of times it's not that it's illegal or legal. It's just that the regulations aren't there. So people you do have a kind of underground gray water recycling community, and that they're not quite sure where they stand. But it makes it just makes perfect sense. There should be more of it.
[Ira Flatow:] I'm Ira Flatow. This SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. Rose, you went to Japan to investigate the toilets there. We have seen pictures of these toilets that cost thousands and thousands of dollars. What's your feeling about this?
[Rose George:] Well, I have to confess I do actually have one, so I feel very happy about it. But it was given to me by Toto, who is the leading brand and I should say without wanting to give them market advantage the second brand is called INAX. Anyway, there are basically three big Japanese plumbing companies who have developed these astonishing toilets. And, of course, you don't need a several thousand dollar toilet. I mean, they are amazing, but what they do do, which is I think the biggest selling point, is that they can clean you. So if you actually think about toilet paper, toilet tissue, it's not we're using something dry to clean the dirtiest parts of our body, whereas we wash everything else. It really doesn't make much sense. Whereas these Japanese toilets, and you can just get a sort of add-on toilet seat, which has an in-built bidet nozzle. And I think hygienically, they are far superior to my toilet in the U.K., for example.
[Ira Flatow:] But then you're using more water.
[Rose George:] You are using a little more water. I haven't looked into the exact statistics of it, but it's not that much. It's because if the nozzle is efficiently designed at the correct angle and trust me, these Japanese companies have spent years and millions of dollars doing the research to put it at an exact angle. I think it's quite efficient. Oh, the other difficulty with these toilets is they do need electricity, so if you're trying to reduce your carbon footprint, then maybe they're not for you.
[Ira Flatow:] Certainly, that's the last thing you're going to worry about if you have one of these toilets, is whether you have enough electricity for it.
[Frank Rijsberman:] The challenge for our toilet inventors then is to come up with a toilet where even Rose would replace her Toto with one of our reinvented toilets. And frankly all our reinvented toilets do use water to clean people, but that takes maybe half a liter or a liter. What we are against is the larger amount of water to transport our waste. And while we really talk about the toilet only now, we are, of course, thinking of the whole system. It's not so much a toilet that is unaffordable. It's the sewers and the wastewater treatment plants that are unaffordable. There are some 2 billion, if you like to call them, toilets out there, they're really latrines and septic tanks, that are not connected to anything. And indeed part of our work is not only to reinvent the toilet, but to link services to those latrines and septic tanks so that they can be safely emptied because today, those toilets are often emptied by hand, by bucket, and then that waste is dumped around the corner in the alley where kids play. So beyond the actual toilet that we sit on, it's really the whole system of sanitation services that interests us. And a lot of the money that we give out and we are, by the way and I can tell you that as a news item, we are announcing a whole new set of grants tomorrow on our blogs, some $48 million worth of new grants. But a lot of that is not for reinventing the toilets as the user interface. It's also for systems that are safe and affordable for people to empty their latrines and to generate energy and nutrients from that waste.
[Ira Flatow:] Allright. Thank you very much, and we'll be watching for that announcement tomorrow. Frank Rijsberman is the director of water sanitation and hygiene at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle. And they have the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge. They have about eight people in the running eight organizations running to is there a prize for that or just you've already given out the money in challenges?
[Frank Rijsberman:] No. Part of the challenge is they'll come and present their prototypes next year, and then the winners will get more money for the best toilet.
[Ira Flatow:] Great. Rose George is author of "The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters," a very good reading book. You know where you might want to read that book. Jim McHale is vice president of engineering at American Standard Brands in Piscataway, New Jersey. Thank you, Jim, for taking time to be with us today.
[Jim Mchale:] It's my pleasure.
[Ira Flatow:] Have all a great weekend. We're going to take a break and we'll be right back. Stay with us. I'm Ira Flatow. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR.

[Susan Stamberg:] I'm Susan Stamberg. Good morning. The first Iowa poll of the 2012 election season has former governor Mitt Romney and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann in a near tie, leading the Republican presidential field. The Des Moines Register surveyed 400 likely Republican caucus-goers and released the poll results late last night. Iowa has the country's first major electoral event. And winning in Iowa can help build the momentum a candidate needs to win the party's nomination. Coming up, the campaign fundraising frenzy. But first, Mara Liasson, NPR's national political correspondent. Good morning.
[Mara Liasson:] Good morning, Susan.
[Susan Stamberg:] In this Des Moines Register poll, Romney won 23 percent of likely Republican caucus-goers; Bachmann got 22 percent. What do you make of that?
[Mara Liasson:] Well, Romney is the national frontrunner and he's been leading in all the polls so maybe there's not too big a surprise there. But Michele Bachmann is the kind of social conservative candidate that does well in Iowa. She's a member of the House of Representatives, she got her start as a conservative Christian activist, she was an advocate for homeschoolers. She turned in a very good performance some people thought an electrifying performance, in the debate in New Hampshire last week. She's going to announce her campaign in Iowa tomorrow. She's a native of Iowa. She was born in Waterloo. And this poll allows her to say that at least for now in Iowa she is the alternative to the frontrunner.
[Susan Stamberg:] And there there's businessman Herman Cain. He had an OK showing. He came in third; got 10 percent. What is the story there?
[Mara Liasson:] Well, I think that Herman Cain is the new different non-politician candidate in that field that's been capturing the imaginations of a lot of Republicans. Ten percent doesn't vault him into the top tier, but it does give a rebuke to all of the other more serious candidates who are underneath him in that poll.
[Susan Stamberg:] Yeah. Former Governor Tim Pawlenty, for instance. He did not perform very well in this poll. He got just 6 percent, behind former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Texas Congressman Ron Paul. What do you think is holding back Pawlenty's campaign?
[Mara Liasson:] Well, that's not clear. But I think that is the biggest news in this poll. Tim Pawlenty, who is the former governor of Minnesota, a neighboring state, he has been spending a tremendous amount of time in Iowa. He clearly isn't catching on yet. He turned in what many Republicans thought was a disappointing performance in the debate in New Hampshire last week. We've also heard that he's having trouble raising money. But this is the biggest challenge for Pawlenty. He has to either win or come a very close second to a candidate like Michele Bachmann if he's going to survive beyond Iowa.
[Susan Stamberg:] And then another former governor, Jon Huntsman of Utah, entered the race this past week and he only got 2 percent. This is a man who once served as U.S. ambassador to China under President Obama. And listen to what he said during his presidential announcement, referring to his former boss.
[Former Governor Jon Huntsman:] He and I have a difference of opinion on how to help a country we both love. But the question each of us wants the voters to answer is who will be the better president, not who's the better American.
[Susan Stamberg:] So, Mara, do you think there's space in this field of candidates for somebody like Jon Huntsman?
[Mara Liasson:] Well, he is the civility candidate. That's the big question, as one of the headlines said in the speech he served tofu instead of red meat to the Republican base. He said he once served as the ambassador to China under President Obama. He actually just served as the ambassador to China. He just came home, and now he's running against his former boss. A lot of Republicans think he's not going to be able to bring the kind of attacks that Republican voters want against the president. But he is banking on the fact that there are enough non-Tea Party voters who want a civil candidate in the party. I think that's a big question mark. He has pretty moderate views at least in the past on civil unions and immigration and global warming. So, he has a long way to go to prove himself.
[Susan Stamberg:] Finally, there is still lots of speculation about Texas Governor Rick Perry. Does he seem any closer to announcing that he's going to go for it?
[Mara Liasson:] Yes, he does, and he's said that he's going to do everything he can to see if it is possible to get into the race at this late date, to see if there's enough money that's not committed yet. He thinks there is room for a Southern conservative Tea Party-backed governor that would be an alternative to Romney. And I think if he does get in, I think he immediately vaults into the top tier, especially given all the candidates who have chosen not to run. There is a big space for a Southern governor who would be an alternative to Romney. And I think if he gets in, at least at the beginning he immediately becomes that candidate.
[Susan Stamberg:] Mara Liasson, NPR's national political correspondent. Thank you so much.
[Mara Liasson:] Thank you, Susan.

[Steve Inskeep:] It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep, good morning. We're tracking two efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons technology this morning. In a moment, we'll find out why the smuggling network started by a Pakistani scientist may still be operating. We begin in Vienna. That's where diplomats from the U.S. and other nations are meeting. They're deciding which incentives to offer and which sanctions to threaten Iran. NPR's Rob Gifford is in Vienna. And, Rob, first these talks come right after the U.S. offered direct talks with Iran under conditions that Iran is rejecting. What's going on here?
[Rob Gifford Reporting:] Well, what's going on is really a follow-up to yesterday's announcement by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice of a change in the Bush Administration's policy towards Iran. She's just arrived here and she's meeting with the foreign ministers of all the other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany. And she's really doing two things: following up, showing that the U.S. is serious, very serious, in wanting to go down a diplomatic route here to solve this and having discussions with the senior diplomats on that issue. But also, very much looking to the Chinese and the Russians, specifically, to talk to them about what to do if Iran refuses as it looks as though it is at the moment, to go along with this, and to freeze its uranium enrichment. And that could lead to the Chinese and the Russians coming on board with some kind of U.N. Security Council sanctions.
[Steve Inskeep:] Why is Iran refusing?
[Gifford:] Well, Iran has said that this is a matter of its own sovereignty, that it maintains the right to develop, enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, which is what it's always said it is for. The foreign minister of Iran has come out this morning and said he welcomes talks. He absolutely welcomes talks with the United States but he rejects the precondition that the U.S. has put on them.
[Steve Inskeep:] We mentioned incentives and sanctions. What exactly is on the table, as the Western countries decide what to do next?
[Gifford:] Well, today is very much a matter of hammering out some of those incentives, disincentives, the carrots and sticks, if you like, of what's going to be put to the Iranians. It's thought that the Europeans themselves will be the ones who will put it to the Iranians later this week, putting things like incentives for supplies of atomic fuel so that Iran would not have to enrich uranium themselves, those kind of issues, and trying desperately to get the Iranians to freeze their own uranium enrichment program.
[Steve Inskeep:] Rob, has there been much talk about what will happen if diplomatic efforts fail?
[Gifford:] Well, that's very much where the Chinese and the Russians come in, because they have been so reluctant to go down any road towards sanctions at the United Nations. And I think that is very much a part of what today's talks will be about. Condoleezza Rice will be talking especially to the Chinese and the Russians to try and persuade them that some kind of strong sanctions must be put in place, because if Iran rejects this, because this is really the last offer from the United States.
[Steve Inskeep:] And when you say last offer, does that mean that military action while it's not imminent at all might be creeping just a little closer?
[Gifford:] It all depends on what Iran does. If they it seems, just in the last 24 hours that the pragmatists have come to the fore in Washington. Perhaps the pragmatists will come to the fore in Tehran and engage with the United States now.
[Steve Inskeep:] Rob, thanks very much.
[Gifford:] Thank you very much, Steve.
[Steve Inskeep:] That's NPR's Rob Gifford in Vienna, where Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is participating in more discussions on Iran's nuclear program.

[David Greene:] Tom, good morning.
[Tom Finn:] Good morning.
[David Greene:] Can you tell us exactly where you are and what you're seeing?
[Tom Finn:] It's really chaotic and gruesome scenes in here. There's blood on the floor and on the walls. And just about five minutes ago a doctor ran into the room clutching a tiny little child who'd been shot in the head. I've just talked to a nurse, who said that the child was in the back of a car and that a stray bullet had come through the car window and hit the child in the head.
[David Greene:] Tom, did the nurse say anything about the hopes for that small child to survive?
[Tom Finn:] And it seems as if the violence is set to continue here. Protestors seem to be undeterred by the violence that took place last night. And there are calls for more marches both in Sanaa and across the country later this afternoon.
[David Greene:] Can you tell us anything about why the security forces might've opened fire on the protestors?
[Tom Finn:] So what happened yesterday was a huge march. And the protestors were running and many of them had [unintelligible] and stones. And many of them seemed to anticipate that the clashes were going to happen yesterday. So I think the security forces were just completely overwhelmed by this number of protestors. And clearly the security forces decided they did want to let the protestors get into the center of Sanaa.
[David Greene:] Tom, you mentioned stalemate. This has been going on for months. There have been stages where it appeared that the president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, was prepared to perhaps leave power. We know he's in exile now in Saudi Arabia. Have we heard anything from him during this fresh violence about potentially stepping down?
[Tom Finn:] The negotiations going on at the elite level with the Gulf monarchies and the U.N. and the U.S. seem very distant from on the ground here in Sanaa. People are saying that President Saleh stepping down and a president's elections are not enough. A lot of the protestors here want his whole family to be removed from power. So you know, there's a lot of demand which has yet to be met here in Yemen.
[David Greene:] Thank you, Tom.
[Tom Finn:] Thank you.

[Kelly Mcevers:] The number has kept growing the people who've had their personal data stolen from government computers. Yesterday, the White House said the data of more than 20 million people was compromised in the breach of the Office of Personnel Management. Today, the head of the agency resigned, and acting replacement was quickly named. Here's NPR's Brian Naylor with more.
[Brian Naylor, Byline:] Katherine Archuleta had been under fire before the latest revelation of the severity of the data breaches at OPM computers. But the news yesterday that 22 million federal employees, most of whom had undergone security background checks, and their family members had their data stolen was the final straw. And after stating she was committed to staying at OPM, Archuleta today bowed to pressure. In her statement, she said she told the president that, in her words, "I believe it is best for me to step aside and allow new leadership to step in." White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, said Obama agreed.
[Josh Earnest:] I think what the president thinks is that it's quite clear that new leadership with a set of skills and experiences that are unique to the urgent challenges that OPM faces are badly needed.
[Brian Naylor, Byline:] Archuleta came to OPM after serving as national political director for Barack Obama's re-election campaign. She was the first Latina to head OPM. As the federal government's HR department, OPM is the keeper of massive databases of federal employees, and the repeated breaches of those databases, believed to have been at the hands of China, seems to have overwhelmed her. Her toughest critic, House Oversight Committee chairman, Jason Chaffetz, called Archuleta's resignation, quote, "the absolute right call." The president named Beth Cobert as OPM's acting director. Cobert comes from a business management, not political, background. Earnest says as deputy director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, Cobert has overseen administration efforts aimed at improving government performance.
[Josh Earnest:] So the president believes that she is, at least on an acting basis, the right person for the job while we search for a permanent replacement for Director Archuleta.
[Brian Naylor, Byline:] Whoever that is will have their work cut out. Among other things, OPM must find someone to provide credit monitoring and ID protection for the tens of millions whose data was stolen and find a way to keep the OPM's computers from being hacked again. Brian Naylor, NPR News, Washington.

[Noah Adams:] It's DAY TO DAY. I'm Noah Adams.
[Deborah Amos:] And I'm Deborah Amos. This week in Detroit, the big three automakers will sit down with the United Auto Workers to haggle over contracts. But a movement is underway in Michigan that could make these negotiations a thing of the past, a potential ballot measure that could make Michigan a right-to-work state. In the second part of our weeklong series on the auto industry, NPR's Celeste Headlee reports that union leaders are preparing for a battle.
[Celeste Headlee:] Before you get excited, let me explain that no one thinks Michigan's legislature will pass a right-to-work statute. And Governor Jennifer Granholm has vowed to veto such a measure in the unlikely event that it ever reached her desk. But State Representative Jack Hoogendyk says that's not the end of it.
[State Representative Jack Hoogendyk:] I have no expectation that you'll see this get to the ballot through the legislative process or that any, you know, bill would be passed that would be signed by the governor. But I do think that there's a very good chance that you may see this issue come up and that the citizens will sign the petitions to put it on the ballot.
[Celeste Headlee:] Hoogendyk represents the City of Kalamazoo in the Michigan State House. He introduced right-to-work legislation in March, and in fact six similar bills had been proposed this year; none have gotten a hearing in committee. So supporters of right-to-work hope to get it on the ballot next year. And union leaders like George McGregor say they're ready.
[Mr. George Mcgregor:] I want to tell you right now, we as UAW and as union members, we will fight any legislature and any politician that comes and try to make Michigan a right-to-work state. We will do all that in our powers not to let that happen.
[Deborah Amos:] McGregor is the president of UAW Local 22. He says he doesn't think Michigan will ever pass a right-to-work law, and many experts agree with him. Bob Ludolph is a partner at Pepper Hamilton, specializing in labor and employment practice.
[Mr. Bob Ludolph:] According to the statistics I've seen, something like nearly half of the people in the state are not in favor of compulsory unionism, so it is possible that that group may be mobilized. However, I think that the union movement is a very strong one in this state and is a political force that would defeat it in the end.
[Celeste Headlee:] Ludolph says polls taken recently aren't necessary reliable, because most people don't understand the legal ramifications of right-to-work legislation.
[Mr. Bob Ludolph:] I don't think that either side of the initiatives understand exactly what that means in terms of what the rights are, the change as a result of that. In fact, there has been very little conversation and a discussion about those issues here. I think that it's more people talking at one another about the issues.
[Celeste Headlee:] In case you don't understand it either, here it is in a nutshell. In a right-to-work state, union membership or the paying of union dues or fees can't be made a condition of employment. There are currently 22 right-to-work states, most of them in the South and the Plains. And Representative Jack Hoogendyk says adding Michigan to that list would be a major victory for the national right-to-work movement. State Rep. HOOGENDYK: This is sort of a watershed state and a place where, you know, the big unions would fight very hard to protect what they have just because of what Michigan symbolizes. And I would imagine that if, in fact, this issue where to go to the ballot, you would see a great deal of resources expended by union interests to protect what they have in Michigan and it would be quite a vigorous campaign. The problem is both sides can cite strong evidence to make their case. According to government statistics, right-to-work states have seen larger growth in personal income, people covered by insurance, and productivity. But overall, personal income is still higher in union states. People are more likely to have health care coverage and production is higher. Bill Black is the legislative and government affairs director for the Michigan Teamsters. He's concerned about the possibility of a right-to-work initiative in Michigan. But he says this may also be an opportunity to remind people of why unions were formed in the first place.
[Mr. Bill Black:] Michigan has a deep heritage in unionism. It's the home of the UAW, home of the Teamsters, home of the modern labor movement. And I think maybe somewhat we all need awakening sometimes of what this is all about and we have it here today.
[Celeste Headlee:] Most experts agree that the current push for right-to-work legislation in Michigan has been fuelled by the struggles of the domestic automakers. They say the success or failure of such a proposal may depend in the end on what happens with the big three and Michigan's economy in the year ahead. Celeste Headlee, NPR News, Detroit.

[Melissa Block:] In 1992, Bob Hattoy became the first openly gay person with AIDS to address a national political convention.
[Mr. Bob Hattoy:] We are part of the American family. And Mr. President, your family has AIDS. And we're dying, and you're doing nothing about it.
[Melissa Block:] That's Bob Hattoy addressing delegates and sending a message to the first President Bush in those remarks at the Democratic National Convention. Bob Hattoy died on Sunday of complications from AIDS. He was 56. He was an outspoken advocate for environmental issues, as well as gay rights. He was an adviser to President Clinton, but was moved out of the White House personnel office to the Interior Department. That was after he went public with criticism of the administration's don't ask, don't tell policy on gays in the military. Dee Dee Myers was press secretary to President Clinton and a long-time friend and colleague of Bob Hattoy. Thanks for being with us.
[Ms. Dee Dee Myers:] Good to be here.
[Melissa Block:] And Dee Dee, tell us what your first impressions when you first met Bob Hattoy.
[Ms. Dee Dee Myers:] Oh, I think like a lot of people, Bob makes a rather strong first impression. I met him back in 1984, when we are both working on the Mondale campaign I as a member of the staff, and he as the regional director of the Sierra Club at that time. And, you know, Bob's great genius was taking something and always reducing it to its sort of utter, irreducible, ridiculous core. And so he was always quick with a quip in meetings. I remember him from very early on always busting up the room. And that went on all over the years in my association with him. He had a real genius for just coming up with just the right line at just the right time. And of course he could never resist the urge to speak the line once it came into his head, and that sometimes got him trouble.
[Melissa Block:] He felt very betrayed by the don't ask, don't tell policy of the Clinton administration. Did you talk to him about that?
[Ms. Dee Dee Myers:] Yeah, in many capacities, as a friend. And of course I was the one who had to take him to the woodshed when he made one of his inevitable clever but all too honest comments to the media, and in particular, when there was some discussion about limiting the roles of gays once they were allowed to serve openly in the military. And of course Bob said something to the effect that that would be like limiting civilian gay and lesbians to being florists and hairdressers. And unlike most people in Washington, Bob didn't do that on an anonymous basis. He put his name on it and it ended up on the front pages of the New York Times, so I had to discipline him. And the problem with disciplining Bob was that he was funny and he would always say, well, it was funny, right? It was funny. And you could never argue with the fact that it was funny, that it was poignant, that it was right on the money, even when it wasn't helpful. And so it was difficult to sort of sit down with your old friend and argue that the comment didn't speak to some greater truth.
[Melissa Block:] What do you think Bob Hattoy's impact was for gay people in politics?
[Ms. Dee Dee Myers:] I think Bob's impact was to give face to gay people with AIDS. AIDS had been talked about at previous conventions, but almost always by people who had obtained AIDS through blood transfusions or other methods that seemed somehow more acceptable. And Bob stepped up and said I'm a gay man with AIDS. And I think he gave a face and a voice to that cause that really had an impact on people who were living with the disease or knew people who are living with the disease. And I think that was a tremendous, tremendous gift and a courageous thing for him to do.
[Melissa Block:] There was this small detail in Bob Hattoy's obituary in the L.A. Times today: He apparently asked friends to preserve his ashes in a Martini shaker.
[Ms. Dee Dee Myers:] I laughed out loud when I read that, because that to me was the essence of Bob. Right until the very end, you know, humorous, laughing, just irrepressible right up until the very end that was Bob.
[Melissa Block:] Dee Dee Myers, former White House press secretary, remembering her long time friend and colleague Bob Hattoy, who died on Sunday. Ms. Myers, thanks very much.
[Ms. Dee Dee Myers:] Thank you, Melissa.

[Debbie Elliott:] Our yearlong series on climate change continues today with a look at issues facing one North African nation. Algeria is the second largest country in Africa, much of it Saharan Desert. Problems of drought and desertification are threatening the country's food supply. And experts fear that changing weather patterns could bring a recurrence of natural disasters, like the flash floods that killed more than 700 people in 2001. NPR's Peter Kenyon reports.
[Peter Kenyon:] After the French conquered Algeria in the 1830s, legions of colonial farmers greatly increased the country's arable land base, turning mosquito-infested swamps into productive farmland. At its peak, colonial Algeria provided for more than 90 percent of its own agricultural needs. Today, Algeria imports more than 60 percent of its grain, in large part, experts say because of the socialist policies of Algeria's post-independence governments. The climate change is also contributing to oblique outlook for Algeria's farmers.
[Mr. Kemal Jumari:] As you know, Algeria is one of the African countries, which is very vulnerable to the climate change and the global warming.
[Peter Kenyon:] Kemal Jumari, deputy minister of environment, is Algeria's point man on climate change. He says farmers are threatened by irregular water supplies and other problems related to global warming. He says salt levels are rising in the soil and despite the country's huge land mass, the spreading desert is adding more pressure to the fertile lands in the north. A one-degree rise in temperature, he says, could accelerate all of these problems. Despite its current worries, Algeria is proud of the fact that it was one of the first African countries to recognize one piece of the changing environment desertification. In a massive project in the 1970s, the Algerian military was converted into a tree-planting army, erecting what became known as the Green Wall in an effort to slow the spreading sands of the Sahara. Moqtar Farhad, a meteorologist with Algerian State Radio, says the Green Wall put Algeria on the climate change map long before many other African countries recognized the problem.
[Mr. Moqtar Farhad:] [Through translator] It was built in the '70s for almost 1,500 kilometers from the Moroccan border to the Tunisian border. So it was one of the biggest to challenge. In fact, it was one of the biggest fields of the environment in the '70s.
[Peter Kenyon:] But as with any early environmental efforts, mistakes were made. Deputy Environment Minister Jumari says planting thousands upon thousands of Aleppo pines did help, but their reliance upon a single species left the Green Wall vulnerable to disease.
[Mr. Jumari:] The most important problem was the [unintelligible] into this Green Wall. It was only one species used and it was the many disease on it. For now, these many efforts and the national plan for reforestation, these many other species of trees, which are planted in the Green Wall.
[Peter Kenyon:] Besides the threat to food and water supplies, people living in some Algeria's neighborhoods are worried that changing weather patterns could bring more extreme weather events. In 2001, more than 700 residents of the poor Bab el-Oued neighborhood perished in a flash flood. Student Whalid Benkharush lives in one of the crumbling shacks built on impossibly steep slopes above Bab el-Oued, which means gate of the riverbed. He says when the floods came, nature returned Bab el-Oued to its origins and all he could do is watched the water destroy everything in its path.
[Mr. Whalid Benkharush:] [Through translator] It took several things the people, the cars, the trucks. People dying, we've seen a lot of people screaming and they've been in the buses, and they're screaming and even with that, I couldn't help them and we've seen them going to die.
[Peter Kenyon:] Down below on the main street at the bottom of the hill, 29-year-old Elias Nowaser says he lost his brother Selene that morning as a wall of water and mud more than 20 feet high roared to the neighborhood on its way to the sea. He says the water had nowhere to go in part because the government had closed the colonial era sewer system after Islamist militants used it to carry out attacks during clashes in the 1990s.
[Mr. Elias Nowaser:] [Through translator] Today's sewer system left by the French, they're huge and terrorists, they go inside, the government's locked them and the whole water has been stopped.
[Peter Kenyon:] Government officials say they've learned the lessons of 2001 and it built new infrastructure in Bab el-Oued and other neighborhoods that are vulnerable to flash floods. But the shinny towns are still lining the hills above Bab el-Oued with no more protection than they had then. And residents are wondering what other surprises North Africa's changing climate may have in store for them. Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Algiers.

[Steve Inskeep:] How does a change in White House personnel affect the prospects for war or peace?
[Rachel Martin:] President Trump fired his national security adviser yesterday. They parted because of their very different views of the world. The president acknowledged these differences from the moment that he hired John Bolton back in 2017. He said Bolton was partial to taking a hard line against U.S. adversaries.
[President Donald Trump:] John Bolton is absolutely a hawk. If it was up to him, he'd take on the whole world at one time, OK? But that doesn't matter because I want both sides.
[Rachel Martin:] The president has wanted to pressure rivals but also cut deals with them.
[Steve Inskeep:] Our White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez has been covering this story. He's in our studios. Good morning. FRANCO ORDOÑEZ, BYLINE: Good morning. What are some of the issues or parts of the world where their differences became apparent? ORDOÑEZ: Well, there were several. I talked with Fernando Cutz, who served as a senior director at the National Security Council until last year. He said Bolton never fully bought into some of the president's key foreign policy issues.
[Fernando Cutz:] North Korea he was against dialogue with Kim Jong Un. On Iran, he was the one advocating for the strike that the president pulled back from in the last minute. And most recently, in Afghanistan, he opposed the talks with the Taliban. So I think you see that you know, that they just weren't meshing.
[Steve Inskeep:] Wow. That's a lot. Let's take those again, one by one. He's against Bolton was against dialogue with Kim Jong Un of North Korea? ORDOÑEZ: Right. I mean, Bolton previously talked about overthrowing the North Korean leaders. Trump, as we know, wanted TV summits. He wanted to meet with Kim Jong Un. And it got so bad, at the last time that they met, Bolton was actually sent on a trip to Mongolia. [Laughter] Go to somewhere else in the world. He was also against the peace initiative, peace talks with the Taliban. ORDOÑEZ: Yeah, that may actually have been the last straw. Trump had invited and as we know, later disinvited the Taliban to come to Camp David to see if a peace deal could be reached in Afghanistan. Bolton argued against this, and the coverage kind of rankled Trump and others. And this is this could have been the thing that really pushed it over the edge. Your analyst also mentioned Iran. ORDOÑEZ: Yeah, Iran was a big one. You know, on one hand, Trump and Bolton were kind of aligned on getting out of the international nuclear deal. But, again, Bolton was more hawkish than Trump was comfortable. Bolton favored a strike on Iran in retaliation for some of the provocations, such as shooting down a drone, but Trump instead canceled that strikes and said he would even be willing to meet with the Iran leaders under no preconditions. So we can easily think of John Bolton as a hawk, as they say somebody who wants take a hard line, someone who's willing to use military force. We can easily think of President Trump as someone who wants to cut deals or make peace. But is it really that simple? Was it that simple all the time? ORDOÑEZ: Not all the time. But look for a long time, Bolton was you know, was always a hard-liner. He pushed for the U.S. invasion of Iraq when he was part of the George Bush administration. Trump, on the other hand, campaigned about getting out of endless wars. Did Bolton ever prevail? ORDOÑEZ: On many issues that were important to him, the answer is basically no. But on some domestic issues, he did. He did help with, you know, President Trump in South Florida on some political issues, pushing for, you know, votes in South Florida with after giving a very fiery speech on Venezuela. Obviously, they agreed on Iran, on the nuclear pact deal, particularly. If he was losing most of the time, though, on substantive issues, does it matter much that he's gone? ORDOÑEZ: Well, I mean, in some cases, maybe not. It is Trump's presidency. But also, this could give, you know, a bit more power to the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who is often at odds on some of these key foreign policy issues, such as foreign such as North Korea. But we'll see who replaces him. And in the end, it really as you say, it's about President Trump. He's the one with the last word. Franco, thanks so much. ORDOÑEZ: Thank you. That's NPR's Franco Ordoñez. A U.S. military court at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, faces criticism from the inside.
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah, it comes from a lawyer who worked there. The United States built a court and a prison on a naval base in Cuba. Construction started after the 911 attacks, which we should note happened 18 years ago today. The prison was supposed to house terror suspects from around the world and, in some cases, put them on trial. NPR has learned the lawyer has filed a federal whistleblower complaint, alleging gross waste of funds and gross mismanagement.
[Steve Inskeep:] The whistleblower spoke with Sacha Pfeiffer of NPR's investigations team, who's in our studio. Good morning.
[Sacha Pfeiffer, Byline:] Good morning.
[Steve Inskeep:] Who's this whistleblower?
[Sacha Pfeiffer, Byline:] His name is Gary Brown. He's a retired Air Force colonel, and he was a career military lawyer. And for from 2017 to 2018, he was legal adviser to the man who used to run Guantanamo's military court.
[Steve Inskeep:] OK, so this is a guy who was inside the system. And what does he say about it?
[Sacha Pfeiffer, Byline:] He said that when he got there, he was very surprised by the lack of progress in about 18 years only one finalized conviction and the expense of the place. I mean, over about 17, 18 years, it's spent $6 billion. He felt like a lot of that was waste. Here's what he has to say about what he saw of spending.
[Gary Brown:] It's a lot of money. Half a billion dollars is a lot of money. And if we're spending that much money year after year, we ought to see some results.
[Steve Inskeep:] That figure he just gave, half a billion dollars, is that an annual spending figure these days?
[Sacha Pfeiffer, Byline:] In some years, the spending has been more than half a billion dollars, correct, on the military court and the prison there, together.
[Steve Inskeep:] Where does that money go?
[Sacha Pfeiffer, Byline:] You know, it's a gigantic operation down there. They have many, many lawyers. They have translators. They have linguists. They have court reporters, investigators, expert witnesses, tons of money spent on travel getting there and back they have to fly to Cuba every time they want a hearing construction, housing, vehicles. It's just a massive amount of money. Taxpayer-funded charter planes that are sometimes not that full because they have to get people down and back very quickly. So it's a giant amount of money, and it's just been going on for almost 20 years.
[Steve Inskeep:] It's almost like they have to have their own airline to service this...
[Sacha Pfeiffer, Byline:] Government charter planes taking people down.
[Steve Inskeep:] ...Prison and court and so forth. But there is another issue, according to your reporting, that actually got this guy fired, he says, that is not just about money although it affects the cost but it's also about a question of life or death. What was it?
[Sacha Pfeiffer, Byline:] Yes. So the issue is that some of these prisoners are facing the death penalty, and Gary Brown believes that it's probably unlikely that prosecutors can get death penalty convictions or that they might be overturned. And he says, all right, then and the other issue here is that even if there are convictions, the appeals process is probably going to take 15 years, he says, and cost another $1.5 billion.
[Steve Inskeep:] Wow.
[Sacha Pfeiffer, Byline:] Now, meanwhile, if they are found not guilty at trial, the government has said, we can keep them locked up indefinitely, anyway. So Gary Brown's point is, basically, why are we doing this? Why don't we take the death penalty off the table, have them plead guilty and return for life in prison, and then we can speed the process up and try to shut the military court down?
[Steve Inskeep:] When he said that, while he was inside the system, what happened to him?
[Sacha Pfeiffer, Byline:] He they did actually start plea negotiations. They were fired, and he believes the reason they were fired is because some government officials believe the death penalty or nothing for these terrorists, these alleged terrorists.
[Steve Inskeep:] Oh, so Brown tried to proceed without the death penalty, and he was effectively overruled and, he says, lost his job.
[Sacha Pfeiffer, Byline:] Correct. I've spoken to lawyers, top lawyers, for all of these six death penalty defendants, and they have said negotiations had been initiated, but then they were fired before they continued.
[Steve Inskeep:] What's the Pentagon say about this complaint?
[Sacha Pfeiffer, Byline:] Not a lot. I asked, for the past month, for someone to speak with me on tape, and they said they couldn't provide me one. The numbers they've given have changed over time. It's hard to get reliable numbers out of them. So they haven't said much.
[Steve Inskeep:] Sacha, thanks so much.
[Sacha Pfeiffer, Byline:] You're welcome.
[Steve Inskeep:] That's NPR's Sacha Pfeiffer. And you can find more on this story at npr.org. Israel's prime minister has sharpened his promise to annex part of the West Bank.
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah, he has made this promise as he seeks reelection. Netanyahu has talked about this before in his campaign; now he's being more specific, though, saying which land Israel would claim first. The promise and resulting criticism come just weeks before Israelis vote actually, next week. Their second election of the year.
[Steve Inskeep:] Benjamin Netanyahu, once again, trying to keep his job. NPR's Daniel Estrin is covering this story. Daniel, good morning.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Good morning to you.
[Steve Inskeep:] So what is the more specific promise?
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Well, he's saying that if he wins reelection and forms a government, Israel would immediately apply sovereignty over a long stretch of the West Bank the Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea area. That's about 30% of the West Bank. And many Israelis will tell you this is a strategic area, important to Israel's security. And Netanyahu says this would establish a permanent eastern border for Israel. And he's saying that with his close ties to Trump, it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something like this.
[Steve Inskeep:] So let's just recall this is land that Israel captured in a war in 1967. The United Nations regards it as occupied land, has had an expectation for a long time that Israel would give it back in some way, subject to negotiations. So what would be the significance if Israel instead said a big chunk of the West Bank not all of it, but a big chunk of it would just be part of Israel?
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Right. Well, I mean, Israel does already occupy the area. But like you say, this would declare that Israel's presence there is permanent. And the possibility of a two-state solution to this conflict having Palestine along Israel is already dwindling, but this plan by Netanyahu could make it even trickier to achieve. You'd have Israeli territory completely surrounding the west of the rest of the West Bank. You'd have tens of thousands of Palestinians inside the area that Netanyahu wants to annex, and they'd need passageways in and out. Very complex. And we're hearing lots of opposition already to this plan. Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the U.N. are objecting. The Palestinian leader is saying if Netanyahu pulls this off, that he would call off all existing agreements with Israel. Now, like you say, if Netanyahu actually does this, it would go against this position of the world, most of the world, that the fate of the West Bank should be decided in peace talks.
[Steve Inskeep:] Would Netanyahu really go through with this last-minute election promise?
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] That's a very good question. It's days now before the last before the election. And last election, last spring, he gave this similar promise to start annexing Jewish settlements in the West Bank. His rivals are saying, Netanyahu, you know, you've been in office for 10 years straight. Why wait with a plan until a week before elections? You are just trying to attract right-wing voters. That's what they're saying. And Netanyahu, according to polls, could once again fail to secure a majority in Parliament. So that could be fatal to his political career, and making this kind of promise is something that could help him.
[Steve Inskeep:] President Trump has been very vocally supportive of Prime Minister Netanyahu. Is the president supportive in this case?
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Very curious, Steve, because the Trump administration didn't reject Netanyahu's announcement; it didn't welcome it, either. And you really have to wonder if Trump would back such a thing. The administration says they're about to present its peace plan after Israeli elections, and perhaps Trump could say, well, here's my peace plan; please hold off, Israel, in any unilateral moves.
[Steve Inskeep:] Daniel, thanks for the update. Really appreciate it.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] You're welcome.
[Steve Inskeep:] That's NPR's Daniel Estrin.

[Madeleine Brand:] And now we go to Blacksburg, Virginia. Police and Virginia Tech officials revealed more details this morning about Seung Hui Cho he's the young man who killed 32 people and himself on Monday. NPR's Larry Abramson is here now. And Larry, we're now learning that Cho, well, he had some history with the Virginia Tech College Police.
[Larry Abramson:] That's right. There were multiple contacts with the police, Madeleine, because he had been stalking women at the university, sending them unwanted instant messages. And in both cases first in November, then in December of 2005 the women who reported these contacts to police said they were unwanted. But in both cases, they chose not to press charges and simply characterize these contacts as annoying. After the second message was received, police were notified, and they also had received information that Cho might be suicidal. So at that point, they took action and Cho was briefly committed to a mental health facility. Now it's not clear whether that was voluntary or involuntary. He was held for an indeterminate amount of time, and then he was released again because nobody thought he was dangerous. And, of course, that turned out to have been terribly, terribly wrong.
[Madeleine Brand:] And the women he stalked, are they among the dead?
[Larry Abramson:] No, they are not. We know that they that police officials said very clearly that they were not among the dead and we don't know who they are. That information is protected at this point under mental health laws.
[Madeleine Brand:] Well, Larry, it sounds like the way in which the police responded to these warnings was very similar to the way his English teacher responded. She spoke out yesterday in the media upon reading his writings.
[Larry Abramson:] That's right. Lucinda Roy was his English teacher, and others at the university who read his essays found them very disturbing, twisted, violent, sort of full of hate. And again, they were concerned enough, and I think this is probably not that common among English teachers to go to the police, go to the counseling service and say I'm really worried about this guy. And we don't know exactly what sort of action was taken, whether there was a record kept. But there was no definitive action taken. There was no effort to expel him from the school, as far as we know, which is an option the officials described -that if they feel that he's violated the tenets of the university, so the teacher did what she thought was right. But again, nobody thought that even though he was clearly a disturbed emotionally disturbed young man, nobody thought at any of those points in time that he would actually kill somebody.
[Madeleine Brand:] Larry, the police have detained a so-called person of interest. Did they reveal anything more about who that person is?
[Larry Abramson:] Just a bit. This is Karl Thornhill, the boyfriend of one of the first shooting victims who was killed in the first dorm early in the morning on Monday. And he was believed to be a suspect in that first shooting at some point. But now the police are saying he is not a person of interest, which basically means they're just talking to him to get information. He's not really a suspect. You'll remember that the police had not directly linked Cho to those first two killings even though that it was the same gun that was used, and it may just be a matter of time before he's linked to that. So he was not held. He's not viewed as the suspect. He's just talking to police at this point.
[Madeleine Brand:] NPR's Larry Abramson in Blacksburg, Virginia. Thank you, Larry.
[Larry Abramson:] You're welcome.
[Madeleine Brand:] Stay with us on DAY TO DAY from NPR News.

[Ari Shapiro:] President Obama and Vice President Biden are in Orlando, a city still coming to grips with Sunday's massacre at a gay nightclub. A gunman there killed 49 people and wounded dozens more.
[Kelly Mcevers:] The president has been meeting with survivors and the families of those who died, and he has just delivered a speech in Orlando. As he said earlier this week, the president is again saying this is a time to reflect on how to end the violence and discrimination against the LGBT community. As soon as we have audio of his comments, we will bring that to you.
[Ari Shapiro:] We're going to hear now from two people who have been watching President Obama respond to mass shootings throughout his two terms. Joining us by Skype is Corey Ealons. He's a senior vice president at VOX Global, a Washington public relations firm. And before that, he served as communications adviser to President Obama. Thanks for being with us.
[Corey Ealons:] Thank you all.
[Kelly Mcevers:] And here with us is NPR White House correspondent Scott Horsley. Hi, Scott.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Kelly, good to be with you.
[Kelly Mcevers:] So there's obviously a lot of symbolism attached to this visit. What is the message that president Obama wants to send?
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Well, it's partly personal. The president said he held and hugged the grieving family members in Orlando today, but it is, as you say, also symbolic. He is sort of standing in for all the people in this country who have been moved by what happened in Orlando and who want to, in some way, show their support for that city and those families that are grieving.
[Ari Shapiro:] And Scott, this is sadly a kind of visit that the president is all too familiar with.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] I have accompanied the president when he's made these kinds of trips many times, you know Aurora, Colo., Newtown, Conn., Charleston, S.C. The list goes on and on. The president has been personally touched by those visit, and he certainly shares the grief of those who've lost loved ones. Also, as a president and a policymaker, he has to think seriously about what we might do as a country to respond to these attacks and make them more difficult. One of the things he said today is that while the motives of the gunman in some of these different mass shootings might be different maybe it's mental illness in one case; maybe it's hate or terrorism in another; maybe it's motives that are known only to that individual the instruments are similar. And he has said repeatedly that one thing for us to think about as a country is how easy it is for people who are bent on this kind of mayhem to get their hands on dangerous weapons.
[Kelly Mcevers:] And Corey Ealons, I want to turn to you. How have you seen the president change over time as he responds to these attacks?
[Corey Ealons:] Well, the first response he had was after the Fort Hood incident. And because that was on a military base, even though it was a tragic incident, he was responding to folks who were serving in the military, so that takes on a very different vibe. You could actually see him physically and mentally begin to shift, emotionally begin to shift when the Sandy Hook incident occurred. I mean, we all remember him standing at that podium, wiping back the tears from his eyes, trying not to cry, trying to collect himself as he was giving his comments from the briefing room in the White House. And then of course just last year in Charleston, he just simply broke down. He just simply decided he could not contain the emotion he felt because he's moved from a period of trying to console the nation and console the families to also being visibly angry about these situations each time they occur. And you saw that again just this week.
[Ari Shapiro:] So Corey, as you describe that progression, you know, it's hard not to notice that these were also different targets, whether you talk about a school, a black church, a gay nightclub. What are you going to be listening for in the president's comments in Orlando today?
[Corey Ealons:] Well, I think today is unique because it is an attack on one community, on the LGBT community. And we know how much tremendous progress we've made in civil rights for that community over the past several years, so I think we're going to hear a specific message for those folks as well and how recognizing how they've come together as a community not just in Orlando but all over the country. We've seen them embrace each other and decide that they're going to do something about this. And I think you're going to see the president acknowledge that today.
[Kelly Mcevers:] And Scott, not only the fact that this was that the LGBT community was the target in this attack the gunman also pledged allegiance during the attack to ISIS. How do you think that colors this visit?
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] Yes, so there's a lot of different cross currents in this particular incident. But the president was very quick to acknowledge that this was a particular community that was targeted. He said on Sunday that this was particularly heartbreaking for our fellow Americans who are gay and lesbian. And in simply recognizing that and describing the LGBT community as our friends and fellow Americans, the president was making a statement about the place that community now has in the American community not always true when gay bars have come under attack in the past. And then you're absolutely right. The fact that this is that the gunman in this case pledged, in the midst of the attack, his allegiance to ISIS adds another wrinkle and certainly provides sort of another boogey man for the country to focus on as we try to wrestle with how to deal with these sorts of attacks.
[Ari Shapiro:] Let's listen to a little bit of the president's remarks from earlier this week. We have that tape.
[Barack Obama:] This is a sobering reminder that attacks on any American regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation is an attack on all of us and on the fundamental values of equality and dignity that define us as a country. No act of hate or terror will ever change who we are or the values that make us Americans.
[Kelly Mcevers:] And Scott, the president also met with law enforcement during this Orlando visit. Again, it's not the first time he's made that a priority, right?
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] That's right. He wanted to express his thanks for the folks who rushed into the club and, in this case, did help to rescue dozens of people who were being held hostage there. We also expect the president to pay tribute to the doctors and nurses who cared for the wounded and the ordinary people the friends who were in the club, perhaps, or the folks who came out to the club later to help their neighbors and their friends. He'll talk about how communities rally at times like this, the outpouring of support we've seen from people who were in the club, around the club, the numerous people in Orlando who stood in the hot sun for hours to donate blood. As the president's motorcade made its way through Orlando today, you could see some of the symbols of that community support large rainbow flags and a sign outside a Harley-Davidson dealer saying simply, pray for Orlando.
[Ari Shapiro:] You know, Corey, you talked about how the president actually feels very emotionally connected to these events, and he also has a role to play as the country's leader when Congress is debating policies surrounding guns and so forth. How does he balance those two roles?
[Corey Ealons:] Well, I mean, that's exactly right. I mean, the first priority in these speeches is to console the families and the communities the local communities and to give them solace. The second point is to console the nation, to give them some sense of hope coming out of tragedies like this. But then the final thing and I think that you're going to hear this today as well more overtly a political message that this is something that we can do. We can fix this if we decide to act in Washington. So I think you're going to hear that overt message coming from the president today as well.
[Ari Shapiro:] That's Corey Ealons, senior vice president at the PR firm VOX Global who was a communications adviser to President Obama earlier in the administration as well as NPR's Scott Horsley. Thanks to you both.
[Scott Horsley, Byline:] You're welcome.
[Corey Ealons:] Thank you, Folks.

[Lynn Neary:] Now, an old, gray-haired plump and double chin that's the way we saw Martha Washington. That's the Martha Washington we've known and loved for centuries. The wife of George Washington and the first First Lady, Martha has been an enigmatic figure, a mere extension of our iconic first president. But earlier this month, The Washington Post reported that historians are giving the First Lady an extreme makeover. Imagine an 18th century American "it" girl, a brunette with delicate, asymmetrical features and from a wealthy family to boot. That was Martha Dandridge. Historian Patricia Brady calls her a foxy first lady and joins us in a moment. What were you taught about Martha Washington? Give us a call. Our number here in Washington is 800-989-8255 and our email address is talk@npr.org. Patricia Brady is a historian and author of "Martha Washington: An American Life" and she joins us from member station WWNO in New Orleans, Louisiana. It's so good to have you with us.
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] Hey, Lynn. It's great to be here.
[Lynn Neary:] How did Martha Washington suddenly become so foxy?
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] Well, I wanted to save her from old-ladyhood, so I had a scientific age-regression done at a anthropology lab, and they took her back to the age of 26, and she's really pretty.
[Lynn Neary:] How...
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] So we had the portrait painted and said, this is what she actually looked like when she was young.
[Lynn Neary:] Well, what has got this what's motivated this sudden sort of attention on Martha Washington, this sort of looking at her again maybe in a sort of revisionist way, historically?
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] I think everybody is looking back at our founding generation and trying to figure out who those people really were. Were they all born 65? Were they all born perfect? Were they all born marble statues? No. So it's time to look at the real people, and I just happened to choose Martha Washington.
[Lynn Neary:] Why do we only have pictures of Martha Washington as this older, plump, gray-haired lady to begin with?
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] She wasn't famous until then. There was one portrait done when she was young, but it was done by a very, very bad artist and so it's hard to tell what she looks like from that.
[Lynn Neary:] And what did you know about her historically that made you think she might have actually been a different kind of person when she was younger? What had you read? What kinds of things did you learn about her?
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] I read some of the letters that they wrote to each other which survived. Not many of them did. But when Washington was becoming commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, he wrote home, to my dearest. My dearest Patsy, he said, please don't be angry. Don't miss me too much. And I thought, golly, that sounds kind of sexy, really. So I wanted to think who was she before they met and before they became famous.
[Lynn Neary:] So tell us a little bit more about the young Martha Washington. First of all, she had been married once already when she met George, right?
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] Correct. She was she first fell in love when she was 17 years old. Her first husband was 20 years older than she was. His father was furious that he wanted to marry her and it was only because she went and talked to the old grouch that he actually gave permission for his son to marry this girl. They had four children and two of them died. Their children were like butterflies. They were their lives were so evanescent. It was hard to keep a child alive in those days. And so she was a widow at 26 with two little kids and didn't yet know what she would do in the world.
[Lynn Neary:] How old was she when she met George?
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] Twenty-six.
[Lynn Neary:] She was 26.
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] He came...
[Lynn Neary:] When she...
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] When she was 26 as a widow and she was 26 when they met. He came calling eight months after her husband died. You know, people in Virginia, in Colonial Virginia married early and often, and it was very weird to remain as a widow or widower, so they started courting way earlier than we would think was really quite proper.
[Lynn Neary:] And she had another suitor as well, though, at the same time, didn't she?
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] Exactly. At exactly the same time a very, very, part of the really upper tier of the colonial society, a very rich man who was a widower himself. He wrote to his brother and he said, oh, she's so beautiful. She's so nice. She's so wonderful. I've been so lonely since my wife died. I hope to rouse a flame in her breast.
[Lynn Neary:] So we know she...
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] Clearly she has sex appeal.
[Lynn Neary:] She had something going for herself there, yeah.
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] Uh huh.
[Lynn Neary:] And something else that I read that interested me about Martha Washington. I don't know exactly when this was in her life but, she read the Bible but she also read Gothic novels?
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] Yes, she did. She was quite a reader. She was very religious. Every morning, she got up and prayed and read her Bible, but she was no prude. Being religious did not mean that she was straight-laced. She read really very odd Gothic novels. We know it because she left them to her granddaughter and her granddaughter wrote, oh I love this book because my grandmother read it so many times.
[Lynn Neary:] Now, why do you think in the end she chose George Washington, by the way?
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] Let's see, her other suitor was 20 years older than she and he had twelve children. George Washington was about her same age. She was five feet tall. He was six foot two and a half. He was, in short, a hunk. He was a magnificent horseman. He was a wonderful athlete. He danced. I think she just fell for him and said, I have a lot of money now, I think I'll please myself. And George Washington was the one who pleased her, and did, for her whole life.
[Lynn Neary:] Well, we are talking about Martha Washington who, it turns out, was a foxy first lady. We're discussing Martha Washington with Patricia Brady. She is an historian and author of "Martha Washington: An American Like" and if you'd like to join our discussion and tell us what you know about our first First Lady and what you've learned about her as you were growing, give us a call at 800-989-8255 or send us an email to talk@npr.org. And we're going to go to Doug now, and he's calling from Eaton Rapids, Michigan. Hi Doug.
[Doug:] Hello, how are you doing today?
[Lynn Neary:] I'm good, thanks.
[Doug:] Good. I just wanted to make a quick comment about how all through school grade school, that is, and secondary school, we don't really learn much about our first ladies and they have such tremendous influence on their husbands. For example, Abigail Adams had such a tremendous influence on John and that's something that we really don't learn about very much and I was wondering what your comments were about Martha and George.
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] One of the things people say that First Lady is the most important un-elected position in the American government, because clearly, you don't elect someone's wife and yet she's the one, as one of our First Ladies said, she's the one who speaks to him last thing in the evening and first thing in the morning. They have tremendous influences and they can be very important. Martha Washington was very close to George. They talked about everything. This was not one of those formal marriages.
[Lynn Neary:] All right. Thanks so much. Thanks for your call, Doug.
[Doug:] Thank you.
[Lynn Neary:] We're taking another call now and we're going to go to a woman named Martha, and she is calling from Tallahassee, Florida. Hi Martha.
[Martha:] Hello!
[Lynn Neary:] Hi. Go ahead.
[Martha:] Well, I was saying, my name is Martha and a long time ago when I was in grade school, they were pictures of Martha Washington in the classroom with gray hair and like plump and a double chin. And boys always made fun of me and they'd call me Martha Washington. So I felt bad. I was just about 10 years old or something and it always stung me.
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] Well, look at the new portrait. This is the new look at Martha.
[Martha:] I'd be very happy to see it, where is it?
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] Well, it's online and at Amazon.
[Martha:] OK, it won't be in portrait gallery in Washington or anything?
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] No, it's at Mount Vernon now. If you visit Mount Vernon, they've purchased it.
[Martha:] Yeah, maybe this summer we'll get down there again.
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] Oh, go to the museum. It's wonderful and they have her wedding slippers on display too. They're purple satin.
[Martha:] Oh, she's very different looking, right?
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] Exactly.
[Martha:] Oh, I'm glad to hear that, that helps me.
[Lynn Neary:] All right. Thanks so much for your call, Martha.
[Martha:] Bye.
[Lynn Neary:] Tell us, I was going to ask you about those wedding slippers. Please describe them for us, because I think you said they were the Manolo Blahnik's of her age [LAUGHTER]?
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] Exactly. Well, she was very wealthy, she and her first husband, and that they liked fabulous clothes, which they ordered from England every year and they came back on the ships. When she married George Washington, she wore a deep goldenrod yellow gown and purple satin slippers with silver lace and with rhinestone buckles. I mean, everything was shiny and glittery and beautiful and not boring.
[Lynn Neary:] Now, I have to ask you, if Martha Washington was so captivating, why then did George Washington apparently seek out another woman at least in his letters, Sally Fairfax. Tell us a little bit about that and how that affected Martha Washington.
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] Well, he didn't seek her out. She was the next door neighbor and the wife of his best friend. In my way of looking at it, she was older than he, two years older, and she was married. And she was one of those women with time on her hands, no children, who like to have a good-looking young man on the string. So he was madly in love with Sally, but it was hopeless. They couldn't get divorced, they couldn't live together. And so, when he found Martha, she still twitched the string a little bit and he wrote the letters that said, but-but-but, you know, of course, I do love you but it's time for it to be over, because he had to get married and start his life. And the funny thing is, I don't think Martha really was jealous at all. Once she got George in her hands and they continued to live next door to the Fairfaxes for another 25 years or so, she never showed a sign of being jealous at all and those two couples were best friends. So, I think he grew out of it when he found a real woman.
[Lynn Neary:] All right. Let's take a call now from Chris. Chris is calling from DeKalb, Illinois. Hi, Chris.
[Chris:] Hi.
[Lynn Neary:] Hi, go ahead.
[Chris:] I just had to say, this conversation rubs me a little the wrong way because I feel like we're, you know, judging the first lady based on whether she was hot or not and that's just such a tired way of, you know, thinking about a woman's worth and why aren't we thinking about what she said and what she did and what she thought rather than whether she looked cute or not.
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] Well, you know, in the book, of course, I talk about those serious things, but it just happens that right now, it's the portrait that gathered attention because everybody is used to thinking of her as old. If when we did the age regression, she had turned out to be quite plain. I would have used that just as well. I just wanted to show what she was really like and what she was like before she became the First Lady. You know, she was up in age, she was 57-58 when she became First Lady, but about the rest of her life? And I don't think it hurts to talk about people's attractiveness and people's interest in clothes. Obviously it's not the most important thing, but it's an important thing.
[Lynn Neary:] All right. Thanks so much for your call, Chris.
[Chris:] Thank you.
[Lynn Neary:] And we are talking with Patricia Brady, she's the author of "Martha Washington: An American Life." And you are listening to Talk of the Nation from NPR News. And of course, Patricia Brady, we still talk about what the First Lady wears though, don't we? There is an interest in this aspect of our First Ladies?
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] Well, there's that sort of the icon thing that we want. We want to know what they wear to the Inauguration Ball, you know, what did Martha Washington wear? Well, she wasn't even there. She didn't come to New York City, which was the capital, until well over a month after Washington was inaugurated. And the ball was really a private affair. The whole idea of an Inaugural Ball and an important inauguration really comes from the era of James and Dolley Madison. With the Washingtons, they were just figuring out what to do, and a ball was not high on the list of what they were thinking about.
[Lynn Neary:] All right. Let's take a call now. We're going to go to Larry in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Hi, Larry.
[Larry:] Hi. How are you today?
[Lynn Neary:] I'm good. Thanks.
[Larry:] I had heard on another NPR program, I believe some while ago that after Martha became First Lady, despite her love of silks and fine fabrics and so on, she dressed very plainly, very commonly in broadcloth and wanted not to look like she and George were set apart from the rest of the people.
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] Actually, that's not really true. And she didn't wear much broadcloth. She did occasionally wear what they called "American" clothes in other words, they were made in New England factories instead of in England. And that was considered quite a step. But she also still wore very beautiful fabrics. If you visit Mount Vernon today you can see pieces of the dresses which her granddaughters cut apart to give as mementos to different friends and admirers. But she always did have after she reached middle aged, she became more tailored and plainer, but her clothes were always made of beautiful fabrics. And she did wear jewels but she didn't wear furs and she didn't wear feathers. So that did set to make her look more staid, more commonplace and not look so Paris Hilton-ish.
[Lynn Neary:] All right. Thanks for your call, Larry.
[Larry:] Thank you.
[Lynn Neary:] And here, we have an email here from Jenny in Lakewood, Ohio. I had to laugh when I heard the topic of today's show. I have a distinct memory of learning about George and Martha Washington in grade school and having to make George and Martha figures. I did mine using dried apples for their heads. Giving both of my figures a distinctive elderly look. It's hard for me to imagine Martha as the hottie that your guest describes because she is forever ingrained in my memory as a small woman with a shriveled-apple complexion.
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] Well, you know that that is actually how people think of her, not the apple but as the Gilbert Stuart portrait. That's the most famous one. And she was old then, that's how she looked at the time.
[Lynn Neary:] When all said and done, do you think that Martha Washington was given fair, has been given fair treatment in American history?
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] I don't think it's a case of fair treatment. I don't think she's really been given much of any treatment. That because she destroyed all, almost all of their letters to each other, 41 years worth of letters, there hasn't been the bulk of correspondence to use as we had with Abigail Adams or Dolley Madison. And so in that sense, she's been an unknown woman, and many writers, particularly male writers about Washington, choose to think of her as very dull, and not having much influence. But I have not found that to be the case as I've really done my research.
[Lynn Neary:] Why did she destroy all the letters?
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] Why did any lady of those times? Because she had given up enough of her private life to the public and she and her husband both had suffered from nasty newspapers, from counterfeit letters and she had no wish at all to have their love letters appear in the national press and be made fun of or even be admired. That was their private business. It wasn't for others to know.
[Lynn Neary:] All right, well, thanks so much for joining us today, Patricia.
[Ms. Patricia Brady:] Thank you. It's been great.
[Lynn Neary:] Patricia Brady is an historian and the author of "Martha Washington: An American Life." She joined us from member station WWNO in New Orleans, Louisiana. Tomorrow, most of us have visions of life after death. Maybe it's one big bureaucracy and God lost control of the work flow. That's one of the tales in David Eagleman's new book. What's your version of the afterlife? Join us tomorrow. This is Talk of the Nation from NPR News. I'm Lynn Neary in Washington.

[Robert Siegel:] This weekend Turkey managed to secure the release of 49 ISIS hostages, mostly Turkish diplomatic workers. Little is known about what kind of deal was made and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan won't release details. Today Secretary of State John Kerry said that Ankara had not committed to the coalition against ISIS because Turkey first needed to deal with that hostage situation. Joining me now to talk more about Turkey's policies toward the Islamic State is Soner Cagaptay, who is with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Welcome to the program.
[Soner Cagaptay:] Good to be here.
[Robert Siegel:] First what do you think? With Turkish hostages free, do you think we'll see a robust Turkish government role against ISIS now?
[Soner Cagaptay:] We'll see increased further Turkish commitment to the front against ISIS, but I think Turkey will probably want to stay in the backdrop, as it has done for a while now, with the Kurds and supporting U.S. operations through logistics and intelligence operations, but not taking part in actual combat and airstrikes.
[Robert Siegel:] OK. Let's talk about Turkey and the Kurds and boy, is this complicated. There are Kurds in Turkey who for years fought against the Turkish government. There are Kurds in Iraq, some of whom took refuge from Saddam Hussein in Turkey and whose autonomous part of Iraq now does a lot of business with Turkey. And as we're now reminded, there are Kurds in Syria who are seeking refuge in Turkey in droves. Are they three different relationships?
[Soner Cagaptay:] To a large extent, all of these relationships the way you've described them have been transformed because of the [unintelligible] and specifically because of what's going on in Syria. If we had this conversation two or three years ago, the question would be, why do Turks and Kurds hate each other? Is Turkey going to invade Kurdistan? Today the question is, do the Kurds want to become part of Turkey? That's a new pivot by the Kurds, driven by the broad insecurity in Iraq and Syria that they're facing, from sectarian warfare, to civil war, to the threat of ISIS. So the Kurds are realizing that Turkey is their best regional defender.
[Robert Siegel:] How does the Turkish government answer the question of, you know, you were presiding over an open border when jihadists and everybody else were streaming through Turkey into Syria and now when people want to go into Syria to defend their brother Kurds against ISIS, suddenly the border is closed. What's their answer to that?
[Soner Cagaptay:] Their answer is that they to the extent that Turkey realizes that it the Kurds have become its best allies and proxies in the region, it still has not come to a full closure with the PKK and so...
[Robert Siegel:] The PKK is the Turkish Kurdish insurgency.
[Soner Cagaptay:] ...Right Turkish Kurdish organization. It feels threatened and it kind of takes a step back and says, wait a minute, slow down. I think this is what we saw over the weekend. Not that this was a Kurdish-controlled entity, but it was a PKK-controlled entity. So the people in Ankara said do we really want to do this? Do we want to have the PKK control a little state across from our borders? They said no and then they so the Kurds on the border protesting on both sides, wanting the border to be opened up. And then they realized that maybe it is in their best interest. Even if this is a PKK-run entity, it is still a Kurdish-run entity, which is much better than an ISIS-run entity.
[Robert Siegel:] It is stunning to think that at this point, guerrillas of the PKK the resistance movement of Kurds from Turkey who have enclaves across the border in Syria that Turkey, who has been fighting these people for decades, now regards them as, in effect, their surrogates and allies in what's going on in Iraq and Syria.
[Soner Cagaptay:] Not only is the Turkish relationship with Syrian and Iraqi Kurds has improved, but also Turkey's own relation with its own Kurds has improved. I think that's the missing part of the puzzle we haven't looked at yet. Turkish Kurds, of course, will always want to obtain some sort of political autonomy from the central government at the same time that the Iraqi and Syrian Kurds will gravitate towards Ankara. I think these are going to be the opposing countervailing trends among Kurds in the region. But overall, they'll be closer to Turkey the Kurds in the region than they are to any other national government.
[Robert Siegel:] Soner Cagaptay, thank you very much for talking with us.
[Soner Cagaptay:] My pleasure.
[Robert Siegel:] That's Soner Cagaptay of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

[Ari Shapiro:] When the U.S. began its air war against ISIS in northern Iraq in the summer of 2014, it gave two reasons. One was to protect American interests. The other was to protect Yazidis, an ancient religious minority. They were facing genocide at the hands of ISIS. So many Yazidis fled to Mount Sinjar, where they ended up trapped and starving. That was nearly four years ago. NPR's Jane Arraf recently went back to Sinjar and found thousands of Yazidis still taking refuge and still desperate for help.
[Navine:] [Speaking foreign language].
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] In a tent on Sinjar Mountain, Navine pulls up the sleeve of her sweater and holds out her arm to show me a crude tattoo. It's the letter N. Her younger brother Arras's arm is inked with an A. Their mother Halo says she made sure the two children were tattooed while she and her children were being held captive by ISIS that way if they were taken from her, they could be identified. They don't want their last names used because they still have relatives missing.
[Halo:] [Through interpreter] We used a nail and ashes. We all made them when we were first kidnapped. We were afraid of being separated.
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] They escaped from ISIS, but now they're afraid to go home. Instead, they and more than 4,000 other Yazidis are living in misery on the mountain where so many fled escaping ISIS four years ago. Navine is 15 now, and Arras is 12. Their father, two older sisters and an older brother are among more than 3,000 Yazidis taken by ISIS who are still missing. For more than two years, while Naveen was held in Raqqa in Syria, along with her mother, brother and a baby sister, she pretended to be paralyzed and mentally ill, so she wouldn't be taken away as a sex slave.
[Navine:] [Through interpreter] It was so difficult. Sometimes they were pulling my hair and saying, you have to walk. You have to talk. But I wouldn't answer them. Even when the airstrikes were hitting very close to us, and everyone was running away, I just stayed where I was lying down.
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] Eventually, relatives raised the money to buy the mother and three children back from ISIS. But they don't have money to repair their damaged home in Sinjar, and they worry that ISIS could come back there. Navine says she wants to learn English. She knows a few phrases.
[Navine:] Hi, how are you? I am fine. Where do you come from? Where do you live?
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] But today there's still no school she can go to. There's no electricity or running water either. Her mother says there's almost no help coming from anyone.
[Halo:] [Through interpreter] Sometimes a organization comes and gives each family a box of food. But it doesn't last long just a few days. They say now it will be more difficult because the roads are closed.
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] The roads are closed because of territorial disputes between the Kurdish and Iraqi governments. Yazidis say neither Iraqis nor Kurdish forces, which retreated when ISIS came, have helped them. The U.S. says it channels aid through the U.N. and other organizations, but hardly any of those organizations are operating here. Outside the mountain is dotted with groups of tents. Some are made of the same pieces of plastic dropped by U.S. organized airlifts in 2014. I walk up one of the paths that terrified Yazidis took four years ago, still dotted with the things they left behind. You can see clothes still thrown on the rocks in the bushes as people abandoned the things they were carrying to go further and further up the mountain. It's a very unforgiving terrain. It's all rocks and sand and almost no water.
[Hadi Ahmed:] Many people died. I saw their bodies on top of the mountain and kids and men and women.
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] That's Hadi Ahmed, who's 29. He shows me the trails the Yazidis took.
[Hadi Ahmed:] Thousands thousands of the people walking.
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] He says most of the houses in their village were destroyed by ISIS explosives and U.S. airstrikes. And they're afraid of the Arab villages surrounding them where some people they've known their whole lives joined ISIS to attack them. At home in his family's tent, Ahmed says, four years later, people feel abandoned. He believes it's because Sinjar doesn't have oil like other areas in Iraq.
[Hadi Ahmed:] We just don't have oil like Kurdistan and Iraqi government. If we have some oil like them, I'm sure that the United States will come to help our people because of our oil.
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] At the base of the mountain, there's the town of Sinjar. Entire neighborhoods have been leveled here. The head of the town says almost 70 percent of buildings have been damaged or destroyed. Only a few thousand of the 50,000 families that lived in Sinjar have returned. They barely have enough money for food.
[Shireen Hassam:] [Speaking foreign language].
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] I go to see Shireen Hassam, a Yazidi mother whose daughter Wargheen died in January. She was 2 and malnourished. There was no specialist in Sinjar, and they didn't have taxi fare to get her to a hospital in another city.
[Shireen Hassam:] [Through interpreter] We tried our best. We were doing whatever the doctor told us. We were borrowing money and doing 4 to 5 tests every few days. We couldnt afford anymore.
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] At Sinjar's hospital, Shireen Kamal is waiting for the rare chance to see a visiting pediatrician. There are holes in the walls from the battle. There's no power. Kamal is holding her daughter Nermeen Jassim. She was born on the mountain on the very day four years ago that the Yazidis fled ISIS. It was a difficult birth, depriving her of oxygen. The child is lovely. She smiles and reaches out to strangers, but it's clear there's something wrong.
[Shireen Kamal:] [Through interpreter] When she was born, there wasn't even anything to wrap her in. It was so difficult for her and also for me. She stayed hungry for a long time. She can't talk. She can't sit. And she can't walk.
[Jane Arraf, Byline:] Nermeen's birthday is also the day the Yazidis mark as the start of the genocide. The world saw the crime that happened to us, Kamal says. Yazidis, still suffering the aftermath of ISIS, believe the world has now turned away. Jane Arraf, NPR News, Sinjar in northern Iraq.

[Alex Chadwick:] Here's a subject for concern in case all those assembled world leaders get bored with World War II nostalgia-North Korea's nuclear weapons. There were reports last week that recent US satellite images show that North Korea may be getting ready to conduct an underground nuclear test. DAY TO DAY's Eric Weiner reports. ERIC WEINER reporting A Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity, says US spy satellites have detected signs of unusual activity at Gilju, a suspected test site in the northeast of the country. That activity includes the digging of a tunnel and construction of a viewing stand. This could mean that North Korea is making preparations for an underground nuclear test, something it has threatened to do. Or it could be an elaborate ruse, designed to ratchet up pressure on the US and its allies in the region. Like nearly everything having to do with North Korea, the facts are murky, the intelligence unreliable. Mark Gwozdecky is a spokesman for the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
[Mr. Mark Gwozdecky:] North Korea's a black hole, not only for us but for all the intelligence agencies trying to gather information there. Certainly we all have access to satellite imagery, but satellite pictures can only tell you so much. It doesn't tell us what they're doing is an actual test site or whether it's an elaborate bluff aimed at trying to extract some leverage at the negotiating table. But unfortunately, they're not at the negotiating table, so it's very difficult to define what's behind all this.
[Weiner:] In fact, North Korea has not been at the negotiating table for nearly a year. That's when talks it was holding with the US and four other nations collapsed. South Korea, one of the participants in those talks, says the diplomatic efforts have reached a critical moment and warn that patience with Pyongyang is wearing thin. But Moon Chung-in, an adviser to the South Korean president, says part of the problem also lies in Washington. US policy on North Korea, he says, can be inconsistent.
[Ms. Moon Chung-in:] North Korea's still confused about American intention and policy in North Korea, and conflicting signals coming from Washington, DC. On the one hand, yes, we want to have a talk with you; on the other hand, you an outpost of tyranny.
[Weiner:] All of these developments-the diplomatic impasse, the possible preparations for a nuclear test and North Korea's recent firing of a short-range missile-add up to a worrisome scenario, analysts say. It's been three months since North Korea declared it has nuclear weapons. Now the head of the UN's nuclear watchdog agency says the reclusive nation may have five or six nuclear weapons. Speaking on CNN, Mohamed Elbaradei says it would be a grave mistake for North Korea to take the next step and conduct an underground nuclear test. Mr. MOHAMED ELBARADEI [International Atomic Energy Agency] It would have disastrous political repercussions. I am not sure how much environmental impact it could have in term of radiological fallout. So I do hope that the North Korean would absolutely reconsider such a reckless, reckless step. Elbaradei urged world leaders to get on the phone immediately and try to dissuade North Korea from conducting such a test, but that may not be as easy as it sounds. North Korea has resisted international pressure for years. One South Korean official compared negotiating with North Korea to wrestling with an eel. Every time you try to grasp it, he says, it slips out of your hands. Eric Weiner, NPR News.

[David Greene:] The massive swath of Boston that has been closed for more than a week is getting closer to reopening. City officials yesterday brought victims of the marathon bombings and their relatives in for a private visit and allowed neighborhood residents back home for the first time in over a week. Businesses also began the process of cleaning up and preparing to reopen. The hardest-hit shops and restaurants remain boarded up. As NPR's Tovia Smith reports, others are hoping to reopen today or tomorrow.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] They fled in a panic last week, and returned yesterday both eager and anxious.
[Alec Michaels:] It's a little shocking. It's a little nerve-wracking.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] Alec Michaels is a waiter at a restaurant called Whiskeys, just a few blocks from the finish line. The bar manager, Matt Yantz, says its big mahogany bar was packed on Monday when one of the bombs exploded close enough that you could feel it.
[Matt Yantz:] You know, people couldn't get out fast enough. People were opening the windows and jumping out the windows on the side of the street.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] Everything was left: open bottles of beer, half-eaten sandwiches, buckets of dirty dishes. Now, cold coffee, old omelets and fruit slices lay spoiled on the bar.
[Matt Yantz:] As you can smell, we have some work to do.
[Becky Calogero:] It smells in here. I can't take it.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] General manager Becky Calogero snaps about 15 employees into action.
[Becky Calogero:] I want the windows opened. I need some cross-ventilation. OK. And then get all this trash down here and help. Can one of you see if they can arrange for extra trash pickup?
[Unidentified City Worker #1:] If anybody if your staff needs anything, just let us know.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] City officials brought health and building inspectors to every building on every block. They also stood ready with trauma counselors, pro bono attorneys and cleanup crews.
[Unidentified City Worker #2:] They can probably power-wash the blood off if you guys need some...
[Kim Rubin:] I think that there's probably more blood on the patio, too.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] At the Charles Mark Hotel, just a few doors away from one of the bombs, employees like Kim Rubin seem to tackle even the most gruesome chore cleaning blood from the floors, tables and counters with a vengeance.
[Kim Rubin:] Just got to do what you have to do, just got to wash it away somehow. We need to get our lives back.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] Another employee called the cleanup "therapy." She fought back tears as she white-knuckled a mop across the floor. It was as if removing the blood that had splattered the bar might also somehow erase the evil that had stained the city. But even as street sweepers scrub the pavement, city officials were determined not to completely wipe out any trace of the tragedy.
[Bernie Lynch:] I think you guys are right. It should go all the way back. Because then, the experience is to come in.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] Parks director Bernie Lynch was setting up a new temporary memorial that would display all the flowers, flags, sneakers and stuffed animals that have been left as tributes over the past week.
[Bernie Lynch:] We all have to reopen, so everyone can come back down here and enjoy. But also, we can't forget what happened.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] To those who lived through it, forgetting seems nearly impossible.
[Becky Calogero:] But I am starting to have dreams about bombs going off, so maybe it's affected me more than I thought it would.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] Back at Whiskeys, manager Becky Calogero says coming back to work has helped her heal more than anything else.
[Becky Calogero:] This is a step. The fact that we're all here, we're ready to go, you know, and there's life, is a good thing.
[Unidentified City Worker #3:] "Life is good"? Life is really good. Are we ready to go?
[Roy Heffernan:] We're ready.
[Becky Calogero:] OK.
[Roy Heffernan:] Thank you.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] Among those lined up to get back to their offices yesterday was the Life is Good clothing company. One of their employees was seriously injured in the attack. That understandably rattled even the company's self-proclaimed chief operating optimist, Roy Heffernan.
[Roy Heffernan:] Are you kidding? Yeah. That took us all down.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] But ultimately, Heffernan says, their credo stands.
[Roy Heffernan:] Our company is not "life is easy." Our company is that "life is good," and we need to all continually on bad days and on good days look for the messages in and around us that can lift each other up.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] The company put one of those messages on a T-shirt in tribute to Boston.
[Roy Heffernan:] It simply says "Nothing's stronger than love." That's it.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] Nearly 2,500 sold in the first two hours, Heffernan says. All the proceeds go to the victims of the bombing. Tovia Smith, NPR News, Boston.

[Audie Cornish:] In Florida, the deadline has passed for the state's 67 counties to submit the results of machine recounts in the tight races for governor and U.S. Senate. The Senate race, where Republican Governor Rick Scott leads incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson by a slim margin, is headed for a hand recount. The governor's race is not. But the new vote counts today were causing some confusion, and legal challenges are ongoing. Here to bring us up to speed is NPR's Asma Khalid. She is at the board of elections office in Palm Beach County. And, Asma, let's start with those two big races for Senate and governor. Where do things stand now?
[Asma Khalid, Byline:] Well, the recount results are officially in. And in the Senate race, there are slightly new raw numbers of votes, but the margin stayed the same. So you have Rick Scott, the Republican, up ahead of Democrat Bill Nelson by.15 percent. So that's going to head into a hand recount. According to Florida law, they're not going to, you know, count all of the ballots. That's not what a manual recount is. Those ballots are they're just going to look at the ones where either no candidate was marked or multiple candidates were marked. And as of now, the deadline to finish that phase of the manual recount is Sunday. So at this point, you know, [LAUGHTER] I would say here you've already got a sense that the manual recount is starting. And there were a bunch of volunteers just filling the parking lot as I walked out to start that job.
[Audie Cornish:] What about the race for governor?
[Asma Khalid, Byline:] In the governor's race, no further recount has been ordered. Republican Ron DeSantis has maintained his lead over Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum, the Democrat. And he is above the threshold that would trigger an automatic hand recount. So DeSantis appears likely headed for a victory, but nothing has been officially declared. And of course, you know, here in Florida, [LAUGHTER] legal challenges could always challenge that. But I think part of why, Audie, things appear a little bit more uncertain is because some of the counting some of the numbers we saw in the raw totals from counties did raise some questions. These recounts didn't exactly match the original counts.
[Audie Cornish:] Right. Reports are that not everyone was able to successfully submit their recounts. What happened?
[Asma Khalid, Byline:] That's right. Here in Palm Beach, they just flat-out did not finish. They've had a bunch of mechanical problems. Their machines broke down on Tuesday. And so they resubmitted their original unofficial results. Those were the ones they submitted last Saturday. And there's a court hearing going on right now this evening over what to do about that. And a federal judge could decide to extend the sort of machine recount, give them a little bit more time. But we're not sure what's going to happen there. And in Hillsborough County that's sort of the Tampa area they also decided not to submit new totals because in their recount, they came up with some 800 fewer votes than the original total. And then, lastly, in Broward County, we just got a note from my colleague Don Gonyea, who's over there, saying they also seem to [LAUGHTER] not have submitted a new number, in part because there was a large discrepancy between the original count and the recount. And so they're trying to figure that out.
[Audie Cornish:] In the meantime, what have you heard from the candidates?
[Asma Khalid, Byline:] Well, immediately we've heard Rick Scott say that it was time for Bill Nelson to just give up. There was a Rick Scott aide out here in Palm Beach County just a little bit ago saying that it he really should concede. I mean, they've made an argument that at this point it is wasting taxpayer dollars to keep dragging this campaign out. On the Nelson side, though, they sued immediately for a hand recount in Palm Beach. And I need to get some additional clarity on that, but it seems like they want an individual hand recount because the machines malfunctioned.
[Audie Cornish:] That's NPR's Asma Khalid in Palm Beach County, Fla. Thank you.
[Asma Khalid, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Melissa Block:] The varsity football season has been canceled for the team from WestfieldBrocton High Schools in western New York State. The unanimous decision came from the Westfield school board, after the death this month of 16-year-old running back Damon Janes. He sustained a severe head injury during a game and died three days later. The Westfield school superintendent said the decision to call off the season will allow this team to remain together and heal in private, away from the bright lights and public eye. Keith McShea has been writing about this for The Buffalo News and he joins me now. And, Keith, talk a bit first about this community. It looks like it's a very tiny community along Lake Erie that's going through just excruciating grief right now.
[Keith Mcshea:] Yeah, it's two communities, two small communities, like you said, on Lake Erie. Westfield and Brocton are about eight miles apart. They field a combined team because they are two small schools and football is obviously a sport where you need a good roster numbers to field a team. And both communities are grieving and, you know, have been grieving over this since the incident two Fridays ago.
[Melissa Block:] Well, let's talk about that game earlier this month and what happened to Damon Janes. He'd ended up suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. What have you heard about what happened on the field?
[Keith Mcshea:] Well, the WestfieldBrocton folks have not commented on, you know, anything regarding the situation, which is understandable considering the scope and the grieving that they're going through. The opposing coach, the opposing team was Portville and I've talked to Coach Gary Swetland about what happened. And Janes, he actually had scored a touchdown earlier in the game, Janes did. And in the third quarter, there was a point where Janes walked off the field. And at some pointBrocton motion to the officials and to the opposing coach and requested medical attention for a player who was down on the sideline. I think shortly thereafter, or a few plays later, the coach came on again and said that this was a serious situation and that the player would have to be taken to the hospital. And at that point, the game was called.
[Melissa Block:] So, if I have this right, Damon Janes took a hard hit, walked off the field and lost consciousness after that. Is that right?
[Keith Mcshea:] Yes, according to the Portville coach that's the way things unfolded that night.
[Melissa Block:] This has to be so devastating for the players and for the coaches and everybody in these communities. The Westfield school superintendent says he spoke with the team about the rest of season, right before he recommended canceling in the end?
[Keith Mcshea:] He did and that was one thing we were interested in finding out from him. And he did, you know, consult with the team and the coaches and administrations from both of the schools involved. The seed that, you know, kind of germinated from the team level, you know, that puts it in perspective that the team might not ready to take the field again.
[Melissa Block:] You know, I have to say I've been taken aback by some of the comments I've been reading online from folks who are really angry about the season being canceled. One writer said this, that the lesson to the team should have been: Face a challenge head on rather than give up, we've become a culture of coddlers. Have you been hearing a lot of that strain of thought, as well?
[Keith Mcshea:] I've seen some of the similar online comments and, you know, to discuss online comments, I think, needs the smallest grain of salt. I think it's somewhat understandable for people to, you know, outside the communities to say that to cancel the season is not a good idea or, you know, they could have rallied behind him and played in tribute to him, and things like that. And I can understand people saying that from the outside, but it's an almost unprecedented situation, certainly for that community, to be dealing with. And like I referenced before, for the superintendent to survey his community and both communities, and then make that decision, I think that's the right thing to do.
[Melissa Block:] Keith McShea covers high school sports for The Buffalo News. Keith, thanks for talking with us.
[Keith Mcshea:] Thank you.

[Ed Gordon:] Emmett Till, over the years, has become synonymous with the racial horrors of the old South. Till was a black teenager who was murdered more than 50 years ago in Mississippi, after allegedly whistling at a white woman. Now, officials in that state are considering whether to bring new charges in the case. Now the decision to pursue new charges is up to a black woman whose generation was profoundly changed by Till's gruesome death. NPR's Audie Cornish reports.
[Audie Cornish Reporting:] Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was beaten, murdered, and killed the same year Joyce Chiles was born in Mississippi. But even though she lived just a few counties over, Till's death and the exploding civil rights movement were worlds away. Chiles grew up on a plantation picking cotton for a white landowner, and going to segregated schools with her three sisters in the town of Itta Bena.
[Ms. Joyce Chiles:] I didn't learn about this case until, maybe Junior High School. I saw the picture of Till in his coffin in the Jet Magazine, and the only thing I could think was how horrible. But it's not one of those things that I grew up thinking about on a daily basis.
[Unidentified Man:] The Board calls the meeting of the Board of Directors...
[Cornish:] Now Joyce Chiles is thinking about the case on a daily basis. As the elected District Attorney for the Delta County where Till was killed, Chiles faces questions from her fellow prosecutors at their state meeting, where she's the only black woman in a sea of white faces. Some, she says, are critical of the on-going investigation into Till's death.
[Ms. Joyce Chiles:] My colleagues from other districts, I have to say, some think that it is a complete waste. And that we won't get enough evidence from the investigation to warrant a conviction; maybe not even an indictment.
[Cornish:] That's because no one was ever convicted of Till's murder. In the summer of 1955, Emmett Till was visiting Mississippi from Chicago. One afternoon he and his friends popped into a general store in the town of Money, Mississippi. It's there that Till allegedly whistled at one of the shopkeepers, a white woman named Carolyn Bryant. Less than a week later, Till was kidnapped, beaten, murdered, and his body dumped into the Tallahatchie River. Bryant's husband, Roy, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were acquitted by an all-white jury. Although they confessed a year later to a national magazine, both men were dead of cancer by the early 1990s, when these kinds of cases were being reopened. District Attorney Chiles says the age of the case is the first hurdle to new charges.
[Ms. Joyce Chiles:] The second problem would be whether or not some of the main participants, other than the two that were tried, are still alive. Third, if there are others who are alive, who participated in the murder of Till, was their participation willing?
[Cornish:] But these days, a public once prone to let sleeping dogs lie has come to expect justice in civil rights era cases. Since 1989, prosecutors around the country have reexamined nearly 30 different killings and have been able to make arrests, and even gotten convictions, in fully two-thirds of those cases.
[Ms. Joyce Chiles:] At the grocery store, at Wal-Mart, someone's always coming up to me, asking me about the Till case.
[Cornish:] And Chiles says her response is always the same.
[Ms. Joyce Chiles:] I don't know if there is anyone. But if there is someone there, and if there's evidence to support a charge, we intend to charge and we intend to prosecute.
[Cornish:] FBI investigators reopened the Till case in 2004, working with Chiles' office, and generated volumes of new research. But while federal civil rights prosecutors are hamstrung by a statute of limitations, there's no such obstacle for murder cases in the state of Mississippi. The decision is on Chiles, whether to bring someone to justice.
[Ms. Joyce Chiles:] Everyone seems to think that there's a lot of pressure on me. I don't feel the pressure. I look at this case, although some say I can't look at this case like I would any other case, I actually do. If it's there, we'll prosecute, and if it's not, we won't.
[Cornish:] There are few places where District Attorney Joyce Chiles can get away from the Emmett Till case. When she can, she goes fishing for catfish and brim on nearby Lake Ferguson. She listens to gospel and visits her sisters. But she carries pages from the Till file nearly everywhere she goes, and several more boxes of FBI research await her at her office each day. Audie Cornish, NPR News.

[Robert Siegel:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
[Audie Cornish:] And I'm Audie Cornish. It's no secret that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has struggled with his weight. However, it was a secret when Christie had weight loss surgery on his stomach earlier this year. The governor confirmed today that he had an operation. Christie insists the decision was motivated by his family, not politics. Christie insists the decision was motivated by his family, not politics. As NPR's Joe Rose reports, not everyone is convinced.
[Joel Rose, Byline:] Chris Christie is not afraid to laugh at himself, as he did during an appearance on the "Late Show with David Letterman," in February.
[David Letterman:] I've made jokes about you, not just one or two, not just ongoing here and there, intermittent, but...
[Joel Rose, Byline:] Cut to Christie eating a doughnut.
[Gov. Chris Christie:] I didn't know this was going to be this long.
[Joel Rose, Byline:] But Christie was not joking around today when he spoke to reporters about his decision to get lap-band stomach surgery three months ago.
[Christie:] I turned 50 years old, and it made me think, you know. It gave I got confronted with, you know, your own mortality as you start to age.
[Joel Rose, Byline:] Christie, who was rumored to weigh somewhere between 300 and 350 pounds before the surgery, says he's lost about 40 pounds. Christie insists he made the decision because of his wife and four kids, not his political ambitions.
[Christie:] It's not a career issue, for me. It is a long-term health issue, for me. And that's the basis upon which I made the decision.
[Joel Rose, Byline:] But political observers suspect that's not the only reason.
[Patrick Murray:] He knows that his weight is going to be an issue. Image has a lot to do with being president.
[Joel Rose, Byline:] Patrick Murray is a pollster at Monmouth University in New Jersey. He says Christie's weight was used against him during his first run for governor, in 2009. And Murray says weight could be an issue again, if Christie seeks the Republican nomination for president in 2016, as he is widely expected to do.
[Patrick Murray:] That is something that the governor realizes that some voters will look at. And so he's taking charge of this situation as best he can right now.
[Joel Rose, Byline:] New Jersey voters interviewed at the Port Authority bus terminal, in Manhattan, seemed glad that the governor is trying to get healthier.
[John Andrioli:] He can't lose it on his own. I can't lose it on my own. He got it done good.
[Joel Rose, Byline:] John Andrioli, of Lyndhurst, N.J., applauds Christie for having the weight-loss surgery, though he thinks Christie could be president without it.
[John Andrioli:] You look at Taft; he was huge. Some of our other presidents were huge. Teddy Roosevelt was huge. They were good presidents. It doesn't have to do with his weight. It's what is in the mind, and what is in his heart, and what he's going to do for the country.
[Joel Rose, Byline:] But William Howard Taft and Teddy Roosevelt didn't have to think about how they looked on TV. Joel Rose, NPR News, New York.

[Audie Cornish:] Now, a review of a collection of poetry by Sophie Cabot Black. It's called "The Exchange." And while Black might not be a household name, critic Tess Taylor says she is a poet's poet, Admired and widely read among her peers. Here's her review of "The Exchange."
[Tess Taylor:] Take it with you on a bus, to a hospital, to wait in line at a bank. You could take "The Exchange" nearly anywhere and have it speak to you. It wouldn't talk about the place you are exactly, but it would talk about places where things become other things; where death becomes life, where waiting becomes impatience, where money becomes an abstraction, and where what we think we know becomes what we can no longer fathom. A great deal of this book about exchanges is about Black losing a dear friend, the poet Jason Schinder, to cancer. But some of it is about prostitution, or about a banking facility in New Jersey that processes investments by algorithm, or the monumental exchange between Abraham and God. Abraham offers his son to God as a sacrifice but God, at the last minute, doesn't require it. So what is traded and how does the transfer take place? In fact, part of the mystery in reading Black's poems is wondering where exactly exchange happens. These poems remind us of the ways we each pass through the stations of a life. In doing this, they capture the wonder of trying to inhabit life's shapes at all. As Black writes in the poem "Afterlife": Ahead a color best called white in a room that appears unlike any other. Everything used to get there will fall away. And to look back is to watch the child lie down on the floor in the exact outline and angle I once was to see what I saw. To take on the precise edge of how it ends is also where it begins. With precision, Black's poems skirt great mysteries.
[Audie Cornish:] Sophie Cabot Black's poetry collection is called the "The Exchange." Our reviewer, Tess Taylor, teaches writing at UC Berkeley. Her poetry collection, "The Forage House," will be published next month.

[Michele Norris:] And now, for something a little sweeter to digest. Now, if you were with us, a few minutes ago, you know that Dorie Greenspan and I just had a session in the kitchen, and we made her mother-in-law's recipe for rugelach. If you're just joining us, this is Dorie Greenspan, cookbook author, the name of her book is "Baking: From My Home to Yours," and she's come to my home to help give me a master class in holiday baking. Well, this is the cookie for me. This is my holiday cookie. And you've done a beautiful job.
[Ms. Dorie Greenspan:] Oh, they smell so good.
[Michele Norris:] They smell delicious. I'm going to put the baking rack out here.
[Ms. Dorie Greenspan:] Good.
[Michele Norris:] Oh, Dorie, that dough is delicious.
[Ms. Dorie Greenspan:] Isn't it good? A little tang from the cream cheese. Now, we're tasting them warm. They're really going to change as they cool, because cooling is really part of baking, because it really gives anything that you bake time for it to come together, gather itself, you know, its texture will change. And so it's fun to taste it now while it's warm, and then you'll see how the dough will change as it gets cooler.
[Michele Norris:] Are we eating them too early?
[Ms. Dorie Greenspan:] We're eating them a little too early but they're good.
[Michele Norris:] How was I to know?
[Ms. Dorie Greenspan:] And it's just
[Michele Norris:] Quality control. Now, we began this up by you were telling me that you, that the recipe is an amended version of your mother-in-law's rugelach. Has she ever tasted this?
[Ms. Dorie Greenspan:] She has, and you know, she's so terrific. She is such a fan. Maybe, she doesn't like the chocolate. I don't know. She always says she loves them.
[Michele Norris:] Good. And that's high praise if someone says you've actually taken a recipe and improved it.
[Ms. Dorie Greenspan:] You know, my mother-in-law gave me the recipe. And I think that this recipe has been changed over the years. I know that her neighbor, Mrs. Strauss made rugelach, and she made them a little bit differently. And I think that that's what family recipes are about. You'd get them. You make them your own. You pass them along to your family.
[Michele Norris:] Well, thank you for passing some ideas for my family as I began this adventure of baking in the holidays. Thank you Dorie.
[Ms. Dorie Greenspan:] I loved it.
[Michele Norris:] It's been wonderful to be here. I'm hugging her on the radio. Dorie Greenspan, her book is called, "Baking: From My Home to Yours." And if you're interested again in the recipe for rugelach or other recipes, you could find that at our Web site NPR.org. Happy baking.
[Ms. Dorie Greenspan:] Happy Holidays.
[Michele Norris:] Mmmm. I need a strong cup of coffee with that.
[Ms. Dorie Greenspan:] I need another cookie.

[Debbie Elliott:] In the `We were wondering'category goes this question: Why are there a gazillion Christmas songs but only one New Year's song? In fact, ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, just announced the most performed holiday songs of the past five years and "Auld Lang Syne" didn't make the list by a long shot. We thought we'd pose the question to one of America's premiere songwriters, Burt Bacharach. Want a venture a guess?
[Mr. Burt Bacharach:] I will. First of all, you've only got one night so it's not a performed song that can amount to anything because you've got such a small window. Christmas songs start getting played, oh, right after Thanksgiving, sometimes before. You know, there's a residual thing. I mean, we've all written Christmas songs. I've written a Christmas song called "The Bell That Couldn't Jingle." I think if you were to say to me, `OK. Write a new song for New Year's Eve,'I would say, `Why? It's a good one.' I think "Auld Lang Syne" works fine. Of course it's not going to be the most performed song. Not even going to be close to being a performed song. You only have this one day and you only have one moment. At the stroke of midnight, it's gone.
[Debbie Elliott:] But still that's like a huge moment. There are parties, resolutions, new starts, redemption. I would think that would all make for a great song.
[Mr. Burt Bacharach:] Well, it is a great song, but it is a small moment in the longevity of a song. You're not going...
[Debbie Elliott:] So even though you're sitting there at a piano right now in the studios of KCRW in Santa Monica, I couldn't possibly ask you to come up with a little ditty for New Year's Eve?
[Mr. Burt Bacharach:] Well, it would probably in the mood that I'm in go to the greatest Christmas song I think. The song that touches my heart the most is "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" and try to put something on there. [Singing] Have yourself a merry-have yourself a happy healthy new year. Keep the thoughts just right. Something like that, you know? Take a great melody, drop in New Year's, you know?
[Debbie Elliott:] Thank you. Happy new year, Burt Bacharach.
[Mr. Burt Bacharach:] Don't you love that-don't you love that melody?
[Debbie Elliott:] I do.
[Mr. Burt Bacharach:] Have yourself a very healthy happy new year. One more time. [Singing] Have yourself a very healthy new year. Keep your thoughts all bright, with hopes for peace and laughter... Yeah, something like that.
[Debbie Elliott:] Burt Bacharach will join us again next Saturday to talk about his new album, a collection of political songs, really.

[Alex Chadwick:] I'm Alex Chadwick.
[Unidentified Woman:] Food contributes a third of the world's greenhouse gases.
[Unidentified Man:] What happens on your plate is how we change the landscape, the atmosphere.
[Unidentified Woman:] What can I do with my food choices?
[Unidentifed Children:] [singing] Food, glorious food.
[Alex Chadwick:] All this week we are taking a look at food's carbon footprint.
[Madeleine Brand:] If you care about food and its environmental impact, than Brooklyn's Urban Rustic grocery store could be the place for you. Its focus is local, traceable and sustainable.
[Alex Chadwick:] This store is the creation of a filmmaker, not a grocer. His name is Aaron Woolf. He made a documentary, "King Corn" about high fructose corn syrup and other corn by-products and it got him into the food business. From member station WNYC in New York, Marianne McCune reports.
[Marianne Mccune:] Filmmaker Aaron Woolf says he was so dismayed by what he learned about the corn industry that he itched to put his camera down and become part of the solution.
[Mr. Aaron Woolf:] What we really want to do is to get people to think about where their food comes from.
[Marianne Mccune:] One of his business partners, Dan Cipriani used to make fast food ads.
[Mr. Dan Cipriani:] You know the glamour shots. The tabletop shots for when you see a close-up of a burger.
[Marianne Mccune:] For years he made hydrogenated oils and high fructose corn syrup look tasty. Now, he's pushing kale and potatoes.
[Mr. Dan Cipriani:] It's like my penance for selling all that bad food for so many years.
[Unidentified Woman #2:] Is that here or to go?
[Marianne Mccune:] At Urban Rustic there are tortillas made by local immigrant women. There's Brooklyn-made soap. Milk made from just north of the city. Meat and veggies from Long Island or New Jersey. And Aaron Woolf posts handwritten notes on each shelf describing where the products come from.
[Mr. Aaron Woolf:] When I was a kid my mom knew the butcher's name, Mr. Oleshevsky, and we would go and we would see the sides of beef in the background, you know, and I think we were aware of what the process was.
[Marianne Mccune:] Now Woolf says most people don't have any connection with their food, so this grocery and cafe are an attempt to reconnect consumers and producers. Woolf says he thought about labeling his products according to their carbon footprint, but in the end, he says he wouldn't want a kiwi from New Zealand just because its footprint might be technically smaller than a New York apple.
[Mr. Aaron Woolf:] I guess I resist this idea of having one simple scale upon which we measure the virtue of our food choices. I think that that kiwi from New Zealand is also lacking a lot of other things that I would want to put into that statistic.
[Marianne Mccune:] Like selling fruit that's cultivated for its flavor and nutrition, not its shelf life. Now, in Santa Cruz, California, where Urban Rustic's cafe manager, April Roman comes from, selling local organic produce is no problem.
[Ms. April Roman:] When I first heard about the market, I was like, great, this is amazing. It's going to be huge. And then people are like, well, that's great, but I just want tomatoes, you know. And so it's difficult because you're like, well, it's December and it's New York and you know, there aren't any.
[Marianne Mccune:] Next winter, Roman says, Urban Rustic will work with local farms that freeze vegetables, so they can sell them when nothing grows. Meanwhile, the cafe tries to nudge customers towards winter produce with sample salads of say, the root vegetables celeriac or black radishes. But, Woolf says his store is not about orthodoxy. There are fruits and vegetables from California and Florida.
[Mr. Aaron Woolf:] There's only so much celeriac you can sell.
[Marianne Mccune:] So, I see behind you Heinz tomato ketchup. Is that a sustainable product?
[Mr. Aaron Woolf:] No, it's not, but I'm going to go get...
[Marianne Mccune:] Woolf defends himself. One of his partners is from Pittsburgh and says the Heinz family foundation does great work there. He picks up the ketchup bottle to read the label.
[Mr. Aaron Woolf:] This may be the, actually, only product in this store that contains high fructose corn syrup.
[Marianne Mccune:] A couple shelves away, customer Mattias Kioda is checking out some herbal bug repellant. He happens to have a master degree in small-scale economic development, but despite his credentials, Kioda says he's not bothered that Urban Rustic makes some compromises.
[Mr. Mattias Kioda:] To be quite honest, the biggest problem we face in sustainable development are the people who hug the trees publicly. Because to win this movement, we have to gain the middle ground. And by appearing as crazy environmental radicals and so forth, we lose that automatically.
[Mr. Aaron Woolf:] I'm not sure we could do everything in the most sustainable version of itself and still be a neighborhood grocery that people could come to...
[Marianne Mccune:] Woolf says Americans should pay more for their food, the rest of the world does. And he wants shoppers who are willing to pay 12 dollars for a large jar of Brooklyn pickles or seven for a chocolate bar, but he doesn't want to become a boutique. Urban Rustic's challenge is to offer a competitively priced egg and cheese sandwich and still use cage-free organic eggs. For NPR News, I'm Marianne McCune, in New York.

[Steve Inskeep:] Puerto Rico's governor says he's quitting just not right now. Ricardo Rossello made that announcement in response to protesters who were expecting a lot more, which explains why they are still planning to protest today. Adrian Florido of NPR's Code Switch team has been in San Juan covering this story. Hey there, Adrian.
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] Good morning, Steve.
[Steve Inskeep:] How did this announcement unfold?
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] Well, yesterday evening, without any advance notice with protesters forming in large numbers outside the governor's mansion, Governor Rossello went onto Facebook Live and, in what seemed to be a very hastily put-together announcement, started speaking to people who were streaming his address all across the island. Let's hear what he said.
[Ricardo Rossello:] [Speaking Spanish].
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] So the governor said that he would not be running for reelection next year, that he would be resigning the presidency of his party and that he would also welcome the opportunity to defend himself in an impeachment process the island's legislature appears to be preparing to initiate. And what, obviously, that meant to people who were listening to his address was that he does not intend to resign as people have been demanding for more than a week now.
[Steve Inskeep:] Yeah. And you mentioned how hastily put-together it seemed not very well-lit; it wasn't a very formal setting; he didn't have an audience. He was just throwing this out there, looking at the camera and talking. But will this quick announcement be enough to satisfy protesters?
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] It doesn't seem like it will be. I walked over to the governor's mansion sort of shortly after his livestream on Facebook ended and talked to people who said, no, they felt even more motivated to keep protesting in order to get the governor to resign immediately.
[Steve Inskeep:] Wow. So what has made the public so upset or some parts of the public so upset with the governor that even saying he's going to step down in a year is not quick enough?
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] Well, you know, when these protests started last week, they started as these protests against the governor motivated, in large part, by these horrible text messages that he had sent to members of his inner circle in which he used all kinds of misogynistic and offensive language to insult opponents, everyday Puerto Ricans. But in the weeks since, they've exploded into these massive demonstrations, these protests have, over people's sort of angers and frustrations with decades of corruption in government here, with the many crises that the island faces economic crises, post-hurricane crises. And while there still is no real sense of where this protest movement that has just sort of exploded sort of in this grassroots way, where it's headed and what people want after the governor steps down, assuming he does, you know, people do know that the first thing they want is for this governor to be gone so that they can start to figure out what comes next.
[Steve Inskeep:] Does he have any significant allies left as he tries to survive his final year-and-a-half or so in office?
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] He doesn't seem to have any significant political allies left. Everybody has sort of abandoned him. Yesterday, he did leave the governor's mansion for in the evening to have a meeting with some of the more prominent mayors across the island. And it seemed like he was trying to sort of shore up political support. But it's not exactly clear what these mayors said to him or whether they told him that it was time to consider leaving office.
[Steve Inskeep:] Although I'm not thinking there was an issue with involving some racist photos and the governor of Virginia a few months ago, and it seemed that everyone there expected him to resign. He just kind of declined to do so. And there he is. Ralph Northam's still in office. Is there any move to impeach the governor or force him out in some way before his term would end?
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] The island's legislature is considering doing that right now. And as the governor said in his statement, he intends to defend himself. But it does seem like this could take a while, given that the legislature is not in session right now.
[Steve Inskeep:] Adrian Florido of NPR's Code Switch team. Adrian, thanks so much.
[Adrian Florido, Byline:] Thanks, Steve.
[Steve Inskeep:] That's NPR's Adrian Florido, who's been quite noted for his coverage of Puerto Rico and is in San Juan.

[Debbie Elliott:] Voters in the Russian republic of Chechnya cast ballots today for a local parliament. The election is supposed to be the final stage of a Kremlin plan to restore order in the breakaway republic, where tens of thousands of people have died in a decade of war. NPR's Gregory Feifer is reporting on the vote and joins me now. Greg, we should be clear it's very difficult for reporters to travel independently in Chechnya, and you've been escorted today by Russian security forces. Are they with you now?
[Gregory Feifer Reporting:] Yes. We're actually in an army base in the city of Grozny. We crossed the border into Chechnya this morning. We were escorted by Russian special forces, heavily armed with high-caliber automatic rifles. We saw two voting stations in the north of the country, which is relatively pro-Moscow. We saw some activity when we arrived, but there were almost no voters when we left. Then we drove south to Grozny, where we saw a voting station amid bombed-out buildings, and that voting station was virtually empty. I think I saw maybe two people actually voting. Most voters whom I spoke with gave virtually the same answers to the questions that I posed them. They all said, `We're for peace and friendship, and we expect that from these elections.'But I did manage to speak to a number of Chechens who said that the process was a joke, that you can't talk about democratic elections in what's essentially a war zone.
[Debbie Elliott:] Did you get the sense that the people that you were speaking with were telling you something because they felt like that's all they could say with the officers there?
[Feifer:] That's absolutely right. People feel very constrained. I actually got four or five winks, people saying that they support the elections and they expect the best and, you know, winking at me that that's really not what they believe at all.
[Debbie Elliott:] We used to hear a lot about the separatist war there in Chechnya, you know, Russian planes bombing cities, rebels attacking Russian soldiers, assassinating local officials even. Is Chechnya any more stable now?
[Feifer:] Well, the Kremlin says it's more stable, certainly. The Kremlin says there's a political process going on and that these elections are part of that process, the final step. And most of the candidates running in this election say that the situation has stabilized. But human rights groups say that that's just an illusion, that it's really an image of a political process presented by the Kremlin to hide an intractable stalemate. Human rights defenders speak of two Chechnyas: One is the Kremlin's image, in which there's rebuilding and a peace process going on; and a second Chechnya, which is the real Chechnya, in which violence continues and there are disappearances and people die almost daily.
[Debbie Elliott:] Do you have the sense that the citizens of Chechnya think that the vote today will in any way change things there?
[Feifer:] Some people say that even if a few independent candidates get elected, it will be beneficial to Chechnya. One of the things that's striking is that the candidates spoke a lot about social and economic programs, programs to get the youth off the streets. But again, human rights groups say that the candidates are afraid to speak about the number-one concern for all Chechens, and that's security. And they say they're afraid to talk about it because they're fearful themselves and that that's just part of the terror that's still very much part of this whole region.
[Debbie Elliott:] NPR's Gregory Feifer, talking with us from Grozny in Chechnya. Thank you.
[Feifer:] My pleasure.

[Renee Montagne:] This week in the U.S. Capitol, the House of Representatives takes up a bill to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That bill includes money to help public health officials monitor and prepare for a flu pandemic. The House will also be working on legislation you might not expect lawmakers to spend so much time on. NPR's Andrea Seabrook has the story.
[Andrea Seabrook:] The House actually does a lot more than you may hear about. Last week Congress took up these resolutions announced by the House clerks.
[Unidentified Man:] House Resolution 348, resolution congratulating the University of North Carolina men's basketball team.
[Unidentified Woman:] Resolution supporting the goals and ideals of National Public Works Week.
[Unidentified Man:] The goals and ideals of National Charter Schools Week...
[Unidentified Woman:] ...Global Youth Service Days...
[Unidentified Man:] ...National Community College Month...
[Unidentified Woman:] ...Motorcycle Safety Awareness Month...
[Andrea Seabrook:] Oh, and don't forget this one.
[Unidentified Woman:] House Resolution 367: resolution of supporting the goals and ideals of National Train Day.
[Andrea Seabrook:] That's right, National Train Day. It was Saturday, by the way.
[Representative Corrine Brown:] But we should celebrate train day every day.
[Andrea Seabrook:] Florida Democrat, Corrine Brown, a sponsor of the National Train Day Resolution. Now lots of lawmakers have favorite causes, usually linked to their districts. But you have to ask, why hold a vote about National Train Day? New York Democrat Louise Slaughter said she knows one reason.
[Representative Louise Slaughter:] Well, I know why we voted on National Train Day, we had to get supplemental budget tomorrow.
[Andrea Seabrook:] Did you get that? The House was voting on Train Day because a committee was considering the Supplemental Funding Bill. Sound like a nonsequitur? Well, it's not. See, the leadership in the House uses those commemorative resolutions to lure lawmakers into Washington, says Slaughter.
[Representative Louise Slaughter:] And it's always been the assumption here, that if you're not having legislative business that everybody will go home, everybody.
[Andrea Seabrook:] And if no one's in Washington, committees can't meet, parties can't caucus, all that business that goes on off the House floor doesn't happen. Of course, not everybody likes this system. Listen to Republican Scott Garrett of New Jersey.
[Representative Scott Garrett:] With all honesty, I would prefer to be back at home, in the district, going to my Rotary Club meeting, my business meeting, my constituent meeting in my office or something like that and then have a few more hours to do that, than to be down here voting on some of these not as important days.
[Andrea Seabrook:] Garrett says a lot of lawmakers get exasperated when they spend more time in a week congratulating sports teams than working on more important bills. Then again, not everyone thinks these resolutions are altogether unimportant. In fact, Oregon Democrat Earl Blumenauer had a change of heart about them.
[Representative Earl Blumenauer:] Before I came here, I was inclined, you know, oh well, this National Pickle Week or whatever, but as I'm here, as I've had a chance myself to offer up some of these elements, you appreciate that this is an important part of the process to a lot of people.
[Andrea Seabrook:] Blumenauer says when big business seems to be all about war and economic meltdown and flu pandemics, it's important for lawmakers to make some elbow room for the smaller things that are a part of American's lives, after all. So perhaps we should put away the snort and wish everyone a happy Train Day. Andrea Seabrook, NPR News, Washington.
[Renee Montagne:] This is NPR News.

[Debbie Elliott:] Rescuers are digging through the rubble in a frantic search for survivors of yesterday's earthquake in Pakistan and India. At least 20,000 are reported dead and more than 40,000 injured, and those numbers are expected to rise. Today, Pakistani President General Pervaiz Musharraf called it the worst disaster in the country's history and appealed to the world for help.
[President Pervaiz Musharraf:] I hope that you realize this hour of crisis to our nation.
[Debbie Elliott:] The quake was centered in the Hindu Kush Mountains, but affected an area spanning more than 700 square miles. The most severe damage is in Kashmir, the region at the center of a political struggle between India and Pakistan. Entire villages have been destroyed. Vivian Tan is with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Islamabad.
[Ms. Vivian Tan:] There's an urgent need for a coordinated response. Road conditions are very, very bad. Landslides and mudslides have cut off access to large parts of the north of the country, and broken infrastructure also makes it hard for trucks or cars to deliver aid to people who need them urgently.
[Debbie Elliott:] Tan says 24 international rescue teams are either in the region or on the way. Reporter Ron Moreau is based in Islamabad with Newsweek magazine. He says in that city, rescuers are trying to reach people inside a collapsed 12-story apartment building.
[Mr. Ron Moreau:] There are probably, they estimate, about a hundred people that are still trapped in the rubble, and it's killed certainly more than a dozen people and injured certainly more than a hundred.
[Debbie Elliott:] I've seen pictures of this building and it looks like there are buildings standing on either side, but the one in the middle is just completely collapsed. Are rescuers able to reach the victims?
[Mr. Ron Moreau:] Yes, they have. I mean, there's even a team from the UK that's come. Then there are, you know, construction cranes trying to lift the concrete slab. But it's a very delicate situation because they're afraid by too much lifting of the slabs they could, you know, collapse that pancaked structure even more and perhaps even kill the people who are still trapped in the holes inside this rubble.
[Debbie Elliott:] Have you been able to get out of Islamabad and see what's happening in other parts of the affected area?
[Mr. Ron Moreau:] Well, I haven't been able to get to the area that was pretty much the epicenter of the earthquake, Muzaffarabad, which is the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir. But I talked to Pakistani officials. Up to 70 percent of the town of Muzaffarabad, which is a town of-I don't know-about 40,000 people, has collapsed. And it's pretty isolated; it's only accessible by helicopter. Most of the roads have been closed by landslides, or the road has just fallen into the Neelum River. And a lot of schoolchildren were killed, also, because children were in school at 9:00 in the morning on Saturday when the earthquake occurred, so hundreds of children, it is believed, died in the-as the schools collapsed right on top of them.
[Debbie Elliott:] How are officials dealing with just getting people help?
[Mr. Ron Moreau:] Well, the only help coming right now to the most badly affected areas is by helicopter. And the Pakistanis have taken-using all of their helicopter assets. In fact, they've even had to take helicopters out of the Afghanistan border region-where they're still fighting local tribal militants who are allied with the Taliban and al-Qaeda-and they brought those helicopters into play to bring relief supplies into the area and evacuate the wounded out. And now the Americans are bringing in Chinook helicopters-they'll start arriving tomorrow-to beef up the amount of helicopters that the Pakistanis have. And, of course, the United States has dozens of Chinook twin-rotor helicopters in Afghanistan, so when those helicopters get in, they'll be able to get, you know, more relief in to the people of the area. But there's a great need, the prime minister says, for medicine, blankets and tents especially, because it's-in this mountainous area, it's getting cold already, and a lot of people are being forced to live outside.
[Debbie Elliott:] India, which has also been affected by the earthquake, was the first to pledge to help Pakistan. Can you tell us what the response has been to that offer?
[Mr. Ron Moreau:] Well, the Pakistani response is basically, `Thank you very much, but we can take care of our own problems,'and I think that's the way it will continue. I think they'll try and work more closely with their-with other allies, whether in the Muslim world or in the West. And also, the Indians kind of have their own hands full in their own area in Kashmir, in the-just across the border.
[Debbie Elliott:] What about the aftershocks? Are there still aftershocks?
[Mr. Ron Moreau:] Oh, yes, indeed. I mean, it's very frightening. I mean, it's frightening enough for people here in Islamabad. There have been certainly more than a dozen, maybe 15 or so aftershocks, and there were even some last night and a couple today. It's bad enough here in the city, but you can imagine the people out in the rural areas. The aftershocks just make them think that the whole thing is going to-their nightmare is going to recur again. And when the aftershocks occur, as the prime minister said today, in that mountainous area, it kicks up great dust clouds which, you know, hamper rescue efforts, also.
[Debbie Elliott:] Where are they taking the wounded when they're able to reach people who've been hurt?
[Mr. Ron Moreau:] Well, that's the problem, because most of the hospitals in the most affected area have been partially or completely destroyed. So they're trying to set up some kind of makeshift medical facilities on the spot. But the helicopters that are going into these areas to bring in relief supplies are bringing the wounded out to the cities, whether it's up to Peshawar in the northwest or down to Islamabad. And the hospital facilities that are on the spot, though, are totally overwhelmed.
[Debbie Elliott:] Ron Moreau is a reporter for Newsweek magazine. He's speaking with us from Islamabad. Thank you very much.
[Mr. Ron Moreau:] Thank you.

[Renee Montagne:] And today at the U.S. Supreme Court, there will be one more judge.
[U:] Judge Alex.
[Renee Montagne:] NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg explains.
[Nina Totenberg:] Judge Alex will not be in costume today, no robe. He's not appearing as a judge, but as a litigant. In case you've never heard of Judge Alex, here's how they introduce him on TV.
[U:] As a trial lawyer he fought for the truth, and as a criminal court judge he commanded authority. Now he returns to preside over America's courtroom Judge Alex.
[Nina Totenberg:] And here's what his show sounds like.
[U:] He says that when he split up with his ex, she split with his ride.
[Renee Montagne:] Were any punches being thrown or anything?
[U:] Yes. A whole lot. A whole lot.
[Nina Totenberg:] Truth be told, the legal facts and questions in this case are horrifically boring. Judge Alex Ferrer and his one-time agent are in a money dispute, and the question is whether state or federal law applies.
[Renee Montagne:] We're done.
[U:] All rise.
[Nina Totenberg:] Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.

[Michele Norris:] Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in Baghdad today. And on her arrival, she got a first hand reminder of the violence there. Her military transport plane was delayed for more than half an hour because of indirect fire from mortars or rockets at Baghdad Airport. Rice went to Baghdad to repeat what senior American military officials have been expressing for weeks, that Iraq's leaders don't have time for endless debate and that the security situation is not being helped by their inaction. Attacks against U.S. forces have claimed the lives of at lest 24 American servicemen since Saturday, 13 of them in Baghdad, an all time high since the start of the war. NPR's Anne Garrels joins me now from the Iraqi capital. Anne, what led to all of this?
[Anne Garrels:] Well, there are almost double the regular number of troops in Baghdad now because of stepped operations. American troops are out of the barracks. They're on the streets in some of the worst neighborhoods of Baghdad. They're searching houses, following up on tips on al-Qaida in Iraq. And they're trying to stem reprisal killings between Shiite and Sunnis. So obviously, the more troops you expose, the higher the likelihood of casualties. And the recent call by the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq encouraging Iraq's Sunnis to eliminate the infidels during the holy month of Ramadan, you know, may be another reason. The military spokesman in Baghdad acknowledged this has been a second particularly bad week, with U.S. authorities documenting a near record number of bomb attacks, including both car bombs and roadside explosives.
[Michele Norris:] The Sunni tribes are reported to be united against al-Qaida. Is there any evidence to support this?
[Anne Garrels:] Yes. Some tribal leaders from Iraq's troubled Anbar Province have now pledged to clean out al-Qaida. They don't like their brand of fundamentalism, they're foreign driven, they're angry about attacks on local Iraqis and some tribal figures. So they have gone after some al-Qaida targets and they provided intelligence to the U.S. and Iraqi forces there. But but, but that doesn't mean an end to the insurgency. Al-Qaida's just one group. There's still support for what Sunnis call the real resistance attacks on Americans. The Sunni tribal leaders are still demanding the U.S. leave Iraq, they don't like the Shiite led government and they basically want to start from zero.
[Michele Norris:] And what about the Shiite side, the continued activity of death squads, the mounting Sunni death toll?
[Anne Garrels:] U.S. senior officials, as you indicated, have repeatedly expressed their frustration with the inability of the Shiite led government to tackle the militias, many of which are related to the Shiite political parties. But like the Sunni armed groups, these are increasingly fragmented, with some beyond easy control. Yet, having said that, the politicians aren't doing much. However, once again, finally under U.S. pressure, the Iraqi interior ministry yesterday suspended an entire Iraqi police brigade on suspicion some members may have permitted or even participated in death squad killings. That's the furthest Iraqi officials have ever come toward tackling the problems of militias thought to be operating within the ranks of its own largely Shiite forces. The final blow came this week when a large scale kidnapping was carried out, largely unhindered by the brigade in its area of operation.
[Michele Norris:] Who was targeted?
[Anne Garrels:] It was like many incidents here. It was a factory, in this case a meat packing factory. Twenty-six workers were picked up at gunpoint, forced into trucks, taken away. So far, 10 bodies have been recovered, all of them Sunnis. So it may have had an economic component, but in the end it certainly had a sectarian component.
[Michele Norris:] Anne, before we let you go, I want to ask you about the reconciliation plan announced by Prime Minister Maliki earlier this week. Has he given any more details?
[Anne Garrels:] No, none, and you know, this isn't really so far much of anything, local committees to arbitrate problems. But they've got no control over security, and U.S. officials are saying it's really going to have to take firm leadership from the top to do anything.
[Michele Norris:] Thank you, Anne.
[Anne Garrels:] Thank you.
[Michele Norris:] That was NPR's Anne Garrels speaking to us from Baghdad.

[Madeleine Brand:] American college graduates are flocking to Korea to teach English. You don't need to have any teaching experience or even know how to speak Korean. You just need to be a native English speaker. But, as Jason Strother reports from Seoul, some American teachers are discovering a racial barrier.
[Mr. Omar Ray:] Good morning.
[Jason Strother:] Omar Ray greets his third-grade class at the Ansan Elementary School. Like thousands of other Americans, the 28-year-old from Philadelphia came to South Korea to teach English, earning money to pay back student loans and experiencing Asian culture firsthand. But three years ago, when Ray received the first response to his resume, he learned that landing a teaching job would not be easy.
[Mr. Omar Ray:] They sent me an email saying they apologized but their boss would not be able to hire an African-American, the instructor saying that parents probably wouldn't like it. Their parents wouldn't approve.
[Jason Strother:] But that didn't stop Ray from applying to another school. And again, he was turned down because of his skin color. He wasn't upset, he says, because he had experienced racism in the States. The only difference was that people in Korea were more upfront about it. Ray soon found a job at a private academy. Many South Korean recruitment ads state only two requirements for English teachers: having a college degree and being a native English speaker. But because photographs must be attached to applications, schools are able to quietly screen out people of color. Other ads are surprisingly blunt. One posted recently on a popular message board stated that only those of Caucasian descent need apply. Jason Cresswell recruits recent college grads to teach in South Korea. He says that it's the students' parents who pressure the schools to hire whites only.
[Mr. Jason Creswell:] The mothers are the ones who kind of dictate what they want, because it's them who are making the decision as to what school they're going to send their kid to. And unfortunately in Korea there's still that idea that the classic American would be blond hair and blue-eyed, and that's what they're hoping for, regardless of whether or not that has any implication to, you know, the quality of the education.
[Jason Strother:] At a playground in Seoul, two mothers keep an eye on their elementary school-aged children. While not wanting to reveal their names, they both agree that the race of an English teacher is important.
[Unidentified Woman #1:] [Through translator] White people are better. We don't have stereotypes, but we just prefer white people, especially Canadians.
[Unidentified Woman #2:] [Through translator] Right, I agree. It's more comfortable. It's important not only for children's feelings, but for parents too.
[Jason Strother:] Koreans' historical experiences with foreigners may contribute to their prejudice, according to Michael Hurt, an ethnic studies Ph.D candidate at Berkeley who is conducting research for his dissertation in Seoul. He comes from a Korean and African-American descent, and writes about his observations on his blog, "Scribblings of the Metropolitician."
[Mr. Michael Hurt:] Because of Korea's history, there's a lot of xenophobia. There is a clearly defined way of looking at the outside world that is ethnocentric. On top of the fact that you have this sort of agrarian society's emphasis on lighter skin as a sign of privilege and darker skin as a sign of, you know, being out in the fields, being a farmer.
[Jason Strother:] Hurt also believes that America pop culture, movie stars and musicians, have contributed to racial stereotyping in South Korea.
[Mr. Michael Hurt:] Well, there is their English, you know, that, you know, blacks kind of speak with an accent. There's this fear of there being like this tinge of Ebonics, you know, not proper English.
[Jason Strother:] Michael Hurt says racial and linguistic bias also applies to Korean-Americans looking for teaching jobs in South Korea.
[Mr. Hurt:] If you're a Korean, you have a Korean face, I can't really imagine you as a foreigner, it doesn't matter whether you're, you know, you're born and raised in the United States and you you're still not American-American.
[Mr. Omar Ray:] How's the weather today?
[Jason Strother:] But back in the classroom, Omar Ray is finishing up the day's lessons. Despite his initial setbacks, he says he likes Korea and has made some good Korean friends. He plans to stay at least two more years.
[Mr. Omar Ray:] It's not perfect. If you're looking to get away from racism, you won't. But if you are confident yourself and you know that things like this don't bother you, it's no problem at all. No big deal.
[Jason Strother:] Ray says that you have to take the good with the bad, and recommends Korea to anyone who wants to come here and teach. For NPR News, I'm Jason Strother in Seoul, South Korea.

[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] And now to Venezuela there were dramatic developments this past week. The supreme court stripped Congress there of its power then, after an international outcry and protests, the government of President Nicolas Maduro backed down, and the Supreme Court rescinded the order. But it's not the end of the crisis in that country. There is runaway inflation, food shortages and violence. And many Venezuelans are fleeing to neighboring countries. Some are women who are taking extreme measures to ensure they can support their families. NPR's Philip Reeves sent this report from Boa Vista in northern Brazil.
[Alessandra:] [Foreign language spoken]. I no speak in English. OK? [Foreign language spoken].
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] This woman calls herself Alessandra. That's not her real name. She doesn't want her identity revealed because she doesn't want her family to know what she has to do these days to support them.
[Alessandra:] [Through interpreter] I hope and I'm trusting God that never, ever, ever will my daughter get to know the things that I'm doing in Brazil to pay for her education.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] These days, Alessandra works here in the red light district of the Brazilian city of Boa Vista. We meet at night on the streets, where she's trying to snag a client along with dozens of other sparsely clad young women drinking beer in nearby bars or wandering the sidewalk. Many of these women are Venezuelan. Alessandra's been working here as a prostitute for four months. She says, in Venezuela, she had a job she loved as assistant to an attorney who helps abused children and families in crisis.
[Alessandra:] [Through interpreter] My job was to visit homes with social workers to study the children's situation and then compile a report and send it to the prosecutor in charge who would decide what to do.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] Now Alessandra is the person at risk of abuse.
[Alessandra:] [Through interpreter] When you work on the streets, it can be very dangerous. I don't take drugs, and I don't hang out with people who take drugs. That way, I avoid a lot of trouble.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] Alessandra says that the main threat to her is...
[Alessandra:] [Through interpreter] Men who want to be violent with women, men who maybe want to rob women.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] These days, Alessandra must forget that she has a diploma in information technology and that she is articulate and intelligent.
[Alessandra:] [Through interpreter] Nine out of 10 men don't look for intelligence in me. This is a part of me that I keep to myself. It allows me to use my psychological skills to get from them what I want rather than the other way round.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] Alessandra is a single mom with two kids. Her son's a toddler. Her daughter is 18 and at college with ambitions to qualify as an orthodontist. Alessandra says it's impossible to support her kids on the wages from her old job. The crash in Venezuela's currency means those are now worth less than $100 a month. She says just to pay for one semester of her daughter's college...
[Alessandra:] [Through interpreter] I would have to work for three months continuously without buying food, without paying rent, without buying medicines or clothes.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] Alessandra says she also has to support her parents in Venezuela. Her father is a retired university professor.
[Alessandra:] [Through interpreter] The pension my dad gets is an obscenity. It really is obscene. He gets $20 a month.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] As a prostitute, she earns 100 times her father's pension. Officials say the meltdown in Venezuela is now driving educated professionals, including teachers and lawyers, into the sex industry. Every month or so, Alessandra goes home to see her kids.
[Alessandra:] [Through interpreter] At home, I never dress like this. I never talk about my clients, and I never take phone calls from my clients where I might end up saying things that my daughter should never hear.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] When the family asks where the money is coming from, Alessandra has her story ready.
[Alessandra:] [Through interpreter] I tell them that in Brazil, I'm working in promotions and in sales.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] Alessandra wishes she could stay home.
[Alessandra:] [Through interpreter] But doing what I want to do doesn't allow my children to live in the way they deserve.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] She believes that if her sacrifice on the streets of Brazil saves her kids from the crisis now destroying so many Venezuelan lives, it will be worth it. Philip Reeves, NPR News, Boa Vista.

[Scott Simon:] Time now for sports. April Madness doesnt have the alliterative allure of March Madness. But Final Four sure does. Semifinals in the mens NCAA tournament tip off in Indianapolis today. The womens teams play on Easter Sunday, and Tiger Woods is set to address a little madness of his own on Monday. Joining us now, our own madman, NPR's Tom Goldman. Morning, Tom.
[Tom Goldman:] Good morning, Scott.
[Scott Simon:] Crazy mad weekend, isn't it?
[Tom Goldman:] You know, its great. You can make a strong case for any of those four mens teams winning, the ones left Butler, Michigan State, Duke, West Virginia and it is the culmination of a crazy tournament in which the top seeds have been ushered out early. The so-called little guys have made their mark, and its whats great about the tournament and why they shouldnt expand the 96 teams, which they probably will.
[Scott Simon:] Well said. Theyd be idiots to do it, but who said theyre not? Listen, let me ask weve heard so much about the players and deservedly so. But let me ask you to concentrate on the coaches for a bit. And this is an interesting quartet of coaches. I would say there is one clear eminence that you look at above the others though.
[Tom Goldman:] Well, there is. You know, certainly, as you say, youve got some good ones gathered in Indianapolis. Tom Izzo, Michigan State. Bob Huggins, West Virginia. But yes, if you want a standard-bearer, its Mike Krzyzewski of Duke. This is his eleventh Final Four, his 75th he has 75 NCAA tournament wins, most of all time. And to get back to the Final Four so many times when its getting harder and harder to maintain dominance in the college game, because the best players pass through on the way to the NBA so it is quite impressive. And Scott, also, hes a very likable and dignified guy, and youd think that would temper all the Duke hatred out there. Thats a tradition, of course, in mens college basketball. Just this week, in fact, the Indianapolis Star newspaper put out some additions, with a picture of Coach K with horns and a target drawn on his forehead...
[Scott Simon:] Ooh...
[Tom Goldman:] ...under the headline: Despising Duke. Now, the paper apologized. Krzyzewski was a bit peeved, and he defended the program. He said: We have great kids who go to school, who graduate. If were despised because we go to school and we want to win, thats your problem.
[Scott Simon:] Yeah. Well, thats well said. And let me ask you about Brad Stevens, who is the newcomer, the coach in Butler. Hes well, he looks like hes 12 years old.
[Tom Goldman:] Yes, but actually 33. He decided to leave a good job at the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly in 2000 to try coaching. He'd been a player, just didnt have basketball out of his system yet, and you know what, its worked pretty well. In the three years hes led Butler, theyve been to the tournament each year. This time theyve taken down a number one seed, a number two seed. Cinderella obviously has some game. And theyve got as good a chance to win this as anyone. And if that happens, Scott, Brad Stevens will become the youngest coach to lead his team to a national title since 31-year-old Branch McCracken led Indiana to the 1940 NCAA title.
[Scott Simon:] Branch McCracken, a great name for all of us. And speaking of Cinderella kicking butt and taking names, womens Final Four is tomorrow in San Antonio, Stanford vs. Oklahoma, Baylor against UConn. Now, UConn, we must say, has a track record of winning by 100 points against almost everybody, but Baylor has a dominant force in Brittney Griner.
[Tom Goldman:] Yeah, absolutely. You know, the womens game doesnt have too many 68 players who block shots like shes flicking flies and who scores and rebounds and does it all with agility...
[Scott Simon:] The mens game doesnt have too many 68 players who do that.
[Tom Goldman:] Yeah, but wait a minute, Scott. The womens game doesnt have anyone like Brittney Griner. She is amazing. Shes only a freshman too. And shes why people are going to tune in tomorrows UConn vs. Baylor semi in droves. Shes why theres suddenly a hint, just a hit, of hesitation in all the talk of might UConns coronation. You know, UConns won 77 going for 77 straight against Baylor tomorrow, which is crazy. Griner could make that very interesting.
[Scott Simon:] And if Brittney Griner thinks somebodys leaning on her, shell go Bill Laimbeer on them, wont she.
[Tom Goldman:] Yes. She not only dunked twice in one game, she punch out an opponent. She got suspended for that. We shouldnt make light of it. But yeah, shes tough and shes good.
[Scott Simon:] Finally, Tiger Wood meets the media on Monday. We only have about 20 seconds to talk about this. Maybe not coincidentally, its the same as the NCAA mens basketball championship. But 20 seconds is about all he wants to talk to the media, isnt it?
[Tom Goldman:] Exactly right. That may be the sum total of the answers he gives. There will be a lot of questions. This is the moment reporters have been waiting for since this sordid scandal broke. Theyll get their chance to answer questions. Will he answer somewhat? But mainly hell look forward to the Masters first round Thursday, his first golf since last November.
[Scott Simon:] NPR's Tom Goldman, thanks so much.
[Tom Goldman:] Youre welcome.

[Ari Shapiro:] Over the last few days, the Democratic candidates for president have not stopped talking about Donald Trump. Even the country's top Democrat had a go at him. NPR's Sam Sanders has been tracking all of the trumping.
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] NPR's Steve Inskeep just had a long, wide-ranging interview with President Barack Obama. At one point, Inskeep gave a laundry list of all the issues facing the country.
[Steve Inskeep, Byline:] Gay marriage, the Black Lives Matter movement, immigration, the question of whether to admit Syrian refugees into the country, the question of whether to admit Muslims into the country all of them, in some sense, touch on that question of who we are.
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] Inskeep asked why that comes up now. The president said that question of who we are it's, quote, "at the center of the American experience." But Obama also said, demographic changes combined with economic stress, it's all been especially hard on blue-collar men.
[Barack Obama:] They're no longer getting the same bargain that they got when they were going to a factory, able to support their families on a single paycheck.
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] He continues.
[Barack Obama:] You combine those things, and it means that there is going to be potential anger, frustration, fear, some of it justified but just misdirected. And you know, I think somebody like Mr. Trump's taking advantage of that. I mean, that's what he's exploiting during the course of his campaign.
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] The president of the United States saying Trump is running on and exploiting fear. Well, he's not alone. The Democratic candidates for president debated this weekend. Former Maryland governor Martin O'Malley didn't actually say Trump's name, but he said Americans should never give up their values and freedoms to this guy.
[O'malley:] Let's never surrender them to the fascist pleas of billionaires with big mouths.
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] Bernie Sanders went even further Sunday on ABC. I think that Donald Trump is a pathological liar. But Hillary Clinton ended up getting the most attention when she said this Saturday night.
[Hillary Clinton:] He is becoming ISIS's best recruiter. They are going to people, showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] There's currently no evidence and such videos exist. And Donald Trump hit back on the "Today" show with Matt Lauer.
[Donald Trump:] I will demand an apology from Hillary. She should apologize. She lies about emails. She lies about Whitewater. She lies about everything. She will be a disaster as president of the United States.
[Matt Lauer:] I will deliver that message. I promise you.
[Sam Sanders, Byline:] See what he did there? He just brought up that decades-old banking controversy. And just like that, Donald Trump may have opened another chapter in another fight. Sam Sanders, NPR News, Washington.

[Steve Inskeep:] Now let's go to Sana'a, the capital of Yemen. As we've heard, it is in control of the Houthi militia, and it is said to be a target of airstrikes by Saudi Arabia and its allies. Jonathan Bartolozzi of the NGO Mercy Corps is in the Yemeni capital. He's on the line. Welcome to the program, sir.
[Jonathan Bartolozzi:] Hi.
[Steve Inskeep:] Can you describe what you've seen and heard over the last 24 hours or so?
[Jonathan Bartolozzi:] Yes. Well, many of us were awoken by sounds of explosions around 2:30 or 3 o'clock in the morning. Explosions in the city are not too rare. And when people discovered what was actually going on, there was a lot of shock. Airstrikes from foreign militaries is not something that Yemen is used to seeing.
[Steve Inskeep:] To the extent you've been able to learn, what was targeted?
[Jonathan Bartolozzi:] Well, it appears as though the targets were mostly military and strategic. Anything that was a military camp, where military equipment or supplies were stored were the main targets. Now, those were not in the deep center of the city, but on the outskirts where most of the military camps are.
[Steve Inskeep:] Now, you're putting this in the past tense. Was this one series of explosions and airstrikes, or has it continued for a while?
[Jonathan Bartolozzi:] So it began at around 2:30 in the morning, and it was constant until around 5. And by 6 o'clock or so, when the sun came up, everything was quiet again. We could hear the birds chirping. Life seemed quite back to normal.
[Steve Inskeep:] Well, now, there's a question. What is normal for Sana'a right now?
[Jonathan Bartolozzi:] Well, people living in Sana'a have learned to live with uncertainty, both from a political perspective but also for their own well-being and their families' . Most recently, we had a lot of embassies shut down. And when this took place, a lot of aid was also suspended and this affected many people's lives. But life goes on on the streets today. Certainly traffic is much less than it would be on a normal day. And people are planning a demonstration today here in Sana'a against the airstrikes and the foreign intervention. But Yemenis are very resilient, and they learn to live with these realities of uncertainty.
[Steve Inskeep:] Well, you mentioned that demonstration against the airstrikes. Do you have a sense of whether this militia has very much popular support, this group that Saudi Arabia and its allies want to get out of there?
[Jonathan Bartolozzi:] Well, this is a big question on many people's minds today. Will the foreign intervention unite Yemen and unite people from different political parties that had began to split further apart? And now having a common enemy perhaps would allow them to come together.
[Steve Inskeep:] Well, it's interesting that you would hear people describing the Saudis as a common enemy since they say they are coming in support of the legitimate government of Yemen.
[Jonathan Bartolozzi:] Yes, well, some people will say that Saudi Arabia is the one thing that all Yemenis will agree on as being an evil for their country. At the same time, Saudi Arabia has supported Yemen financially. And there is this love-hate relationship with Saudi Arabia. It is unclear whether Saudi Arabia was looking to simply push the Houthis and show force so that they could come to the negotiating table or if they actually just want to take them out of the picture completely. And will that mean a prolonged conflict within Yemen? And what will that mean for the average person who is really just trying to provide for his or her family?
[Steve Inskeep:] Jonathan Bartolozzi of the NGO Mercy Corps in Sana'a, Yemen. Thank you very much.
[Jonathan Bartolozzi:] Thank you.

[David Greene:] Good morning. I'm David Greene. Ashley and Jon Sterkel of Nebraska learned the gender of their first baby and had an idea. Mr. Sterkel had been shooting at exploding targets. They figured why not use this skill in a Facebook video?
[Jon Sterkel:] It's a boy.
[David Greene:] Smoke was blue for boy. Residents nearby didn't seem to care. They thought a house had blown up. They called police who issued Mr. Sterkel a ticket for using explosives without a permit. It's MORNING EDITION.

[Farai Chideya:] 'Tis the season for back to school shopping, but these days you might have more to buy than number two pencils. What about computer software? NPR's Tony Cox talked to tech contributor Mario Armstrong about how to be software savvy for back to school.
[Tony Cox:] You know, Mario, when I go to a store that has all of these different kinds of software available and you see the young people in there walking up and down the aisles and you see the parents scratching their heads about what to do and what not to do one of the big questions I think parents have is, what's worth spending the money to help my kid through school? And how do you determine, you know, what's a good value for the amount of money that you have to spend?
[Mario Armstrong:] Great question. And the first place that we overlook is where we're getting our kids education from in the first place: the school, themselves; the teachers, themselves. They know they have filtered, they have tested, they have seen all the hype of some of these marketing engines that these companies put out for products that your kid has to have going back to school. And they know what really works well for what lessons they're teaching, what stage your child may be in. So first and foremost check with the schools themselves and the faculty there. Find out what some of their recommendations are. Secondly, go to the Web. There are many comparison shopping sites. More are being developed. I think of places like MySimon.com and others, where you can kind of do not only just price comparison, but also get feedback and reviews from people who have either bought those products or have used them and tested those products. So use the Web to your favor, as well. And then lastly, you know, go with your gut. Read up on some of this stuff. You need to get engaged a little bit yourself. Go to the store, ask to play with a device, find out what its return policy is, make sure there's no restocking fees that may be tacked on to the back end of something that may not work out as well as you expect. And I think if you're armed with those three steps you should be on your way to making good, sound decisions.
[Tony Cox:] How young do kids get involved with computers now? And as a parent, how long should you let them stay on it, or make them stay on it, as the case may be, on a daily basis doing educational stuff?
[Mario Armstrong:] This is a good question, because as the gadget guru I have a 4-year-old, and gadgets constantly come to the house and we review things. And I was perplexed by that same question: what age is too young? And so from folks that I've talked to that have many more years experience in parenting and have actually done studies or books about this issue, say, you know, as soon as three years old is not too young to start them learning a little bit about the computer, learning about the Internet, and having them point and click on kid-safe Web sites that folks can go out and chose to do interactive games and puzzles and online things that get them acclimated to the technology. Tony, you remember flash cards back in the day, doing match flash cards?
[Tony Cox:] I think I remember that, yeah.
[Mario Armstrong:] You think you remember that? Were you any good at it?
[Tony Cox:] No I wasn't.
[Mario Armstrong:] You weren't? Well, the 21st century style of that is this videogame called Brain Age, which is developed by Nintendo. And that is something that may be a little bit more applicable to, say, middle school-age or high school-age students and higher. Once again, you have to go with your gut as to what you feel is too early, but certainly you have to start introducing your kids to technology. It's not going away, and the more they know about it and can interface with it earlier, the better off they'll be down the road.
[Tony Cox:] How long do you let your 4-year-old stay on the computer?
[Mario Armstrong:] I only do about maybe 10, 15 minutes at a time. And he'll play on things that he's used to watching. Say on PBS, maybe one of his favorite characters. We'll go to that character's Web site, and he'll maybe just point and click and paint on that character. Or we'll do memory-based games where some of his characters are in these upside-down cards and he has to use his memory as he points and clicks and turns over the card to remember where the matches are. Those games usually last about four minutes or so and they're perfect. So a few repetitions of those type of games to the point where you're seeing your kid maybe start to lose interest is probably enough time to get them started.
[Tony Cox:] So for people on a tight budget, especially, where can they find some alternatives to get the right tools for their children's education?
[Mario Armstrong:] This is critical, because we don't want any kid to not feel that they can compete with their peer and have the same technology opportunities afforded to them. The same types of pen and paper that other kids have. So some alternatives to the higher-priced software, especially for schoolwork, you need a word processor. So I would check out a Web site called Writely.com, and that's spelled W-R-I-T-E-L-Y.com. If you're looking for the whole office suite allowing you to do mathematics as well as presentations, as well as database software, as well as word processing take a look at a Web site called OpenOffice.org. These are compatible software, it will work in the mainstream marketplace, so you don't have to worry about that. And they are open source code software made available for people that are on a tight budget or just can't afford, make that, you know, purchase to afford the higher expensive software. But that still keeps your kids in the game, OpenOffice.org and Writely.com.
[Tony Cox:] Well, listen, Mario, thank you very much for the information. It's very helpful, and I'm sure parents who are going through this can use the information that you've given them.
[Mario Armstrong:] Yeah, Tony. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
[Farai Chideya:] That was NPR's Tony Cox talking with News & Notes' tech contributor Mario Armstrong. Armstrong also covers technology for Baltimore-area member stations WYPR and WEAA.

[Steve Inskeep:] Now, President-elect Trump has scorned up to now the U.S. conclusion of Russian hacking. But one of his advisers on intelligence matters offers a subtly different view. Former CIA Director James Woolsey has downplayed the Russian interference a bit. He told us that at least there's no evidence that they compromised voting machines. But Woolsey knows the hack of Democratic Party emails resembles Russia's involvement in other democracies.
[James Woolsey:] They have something called disinformation dezinformatsiya which is an interesting word because it basically means lie. And they have hundreds of thousands of people working on photoshopping photos, rewriting history. They've been doing this for a long time. They spend a lot of time and effort doing it. They do it with European political parties. But this dezinformatsiya stuff is very ugly, and they focus it on lots of different parts of the world.
[Steve Inskeep:] Now, Woolsey knows President Obama and then his successor face a question about the DNC hacks. Do those call for a response from the United States?
[James Woolsey:] I think they may, but we may not, if they do it right if the U.S. government does the response right we may never hear about it because one of the things you want to do is make sure they know you can deal roughly with them when they deal roughly with you. And talking about it, giving speeches about it, is not the best way to proceed. It's a lot more effective and a lot more powerful if you do something very powerful to an adversary and don't say a word.
[Steve Inskeep:] What advice, if you can share it, are you giving to Mr. Trump given that you're a policy adviser to him on this issue?
[James Woolsey:] Well, I shouldn't get into I've worked for four presidents and never said a word about what I said or they said to me [LAUGHTER]. I'm going to keep that record going.
[Steve Inskeep:] Well, OK, let me ask it another way. What if I were president-elect? What would you tell me to do?
[James Woolsey:] I would say go after getting a competitor out there to oil products, such as, let's say, alcohol like methanol with an M so that you can drive down the price of oil and you will see troubled Russia. You will see troubled Iran. You will see troubled Venezuela, a troubled Gulf. A number of countries that that we would like to see run into difficulty and not be as aggressive as they sometimes are would behave very differently. And he has a very fine list of people who understand, I think, these issues about oil. Jim Mattis and I have been email buddies dealing with energy and strategy for some time now, years.
[Steve Inskeep:] I think you're suggesting to me never mind about a tit for tat response for the DNC hack. Just destroy their economy.
[James Woolsey:] Well, I don't want to destroy it. Let's just say we want to make them frown a bit.
[Steve Inskeep:] Director Woolsey, thanks very much, enjoyed talking with you.
[James Woolsey:] Good to be with you.

[Ira Flatow:] Speaking of the brain, it's not uncommon to hear people talk about having an out-of-body experience, where, you know, they view themselves from outside their own body, looking back at themselves. And my next guest says he has found a way of creating just such an experience in people, where people seem to connect to an image and react to it as if it's real but outside their own body. And in further studies, he has people believe that they have an extra third arm through the power of illusions, but it is not just a parlor trick. The research, he says, can help us understand how we perceive ourselves and make sense of the world around us. And I think personally, I think it might lead to some new online social communities. We'll ask him about it. He's Henrik Ehrsson, an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. He's one of the authors of a paper this week in the journal Public Library of Science Online, in which people were made to believe they had a third arm. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY and thank you for your patience.
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] Hello.
[Ira Flatow:] Hi, there.
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] Thank you for inviting me.
[Ira Flatow:] You're welcome. Let's talk about this out-of-body experience. How did you create that for people?
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] Well, we're interested in how the brain creates the experience of the self and the world. So when we were trying to learn more about this, we came up with this idea that, maybe we could change trick the mind into experience being outside one's self. And how do we do that, did you ask?
[Ira Flatow:] Yes.
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] Well, the idea here is, really, that we are trying to manipulate the sensory data the brain gets, manipulate what you see and what you feel. And we touch your body in a certain way.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm. And then you have a camera that people can look through at themselves?
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] Well, there's two key ideas here, really. We first of all, is the visual perspective, from which perspective you see the world.
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] And then it is that what you see and what you feel matches, that there's synchronicity to...
[Ira Flatow:] I see.
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] ...you know, visual information and tactile information. So how does this all work? Look, I'm going to try to explain to you, you know, over the radio here without the aide of visuals. But so the test person wears a set of head-mounted displays.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm.
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] Head-mounted display is two little screens you put in front of the right and left eye. And these two screens, we hook up to two video cameras that we place a couple of meter away from the participant. So the left eye see what the left camera sees. The right eye see what the right camera sees. You can see yourself from the outside, OK?
[Ira Flatow:] Right. Right.
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] Now, that doesn't create an out-of-body illusion or an out-of-body experience. You have to look at yourself...
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] ...you know, from an outside perspective. A little bit like you see yourself in a video screen and a, you know, CCTV camera in a show, for example, you know? Now, here's the second key thing. We then I then move my hand towards the cameras. I touch a point just below the cameras. And every time I do that, we deliver a touch on the person's chest or the person's body, which he or she can't see. Right?
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah.
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] So all you see, you see yourself sitting in the middle of the room from this outside perspective. And you see the scientist's hand coming up towards the cameras. And every time you see that hand coming up towards the cameras, you feel touching your body. Now, this is what happens. Suddenly, you experience that you are there under cameras. You can sense your body there. And all you see yourself and you're perfectly well understand that you're still sitting there in front of the cameras. You can see yourself. It feels like a different person or maybe a mannequin, because your brain have now recomputed or recalculated, you know, your position in that room. And you feel that you're outside of your body and you loss the sense of, you know, self-recognition of, you know, the real physical body.
[Ira Flatow:] So you think it's someone else's body, but you feel part of it.
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] No. You lose the sense of feeling. You don't feel part of it anymore.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm.
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] You see that you are two meters outside of yourself. And the real body that you can see, it feels like someone else. You no longer part of it.
[Ira Flatow:] That's right. And so you can play tricks with it and make you actually feel like you are having an out-of-body experience?
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] Well, we are simulating some key aspects of an out-of-body experience. First of all, that you feel that you're in a different place from your real body. Secondly, you see yourself from this outside perspective. And three, you sort of sense a phantom body. You have some kind of a body illusion that is outside your real body. These are capital these are some...
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah.
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] ...of the key aspects of real out-of-body experience.
[Ira Flatow:] And then in the follow up, you're able to actually put a third arm next to the people and they thought that was part of their own body.
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] Yeah. That was a little bit of a crazy experiment. But we actually have there's a serious idea behind it, because we wanted to understand what are the basic and fundamental constraints of the human body experience. What can we experience at our body? You know, the common assumption is that we have, you know, we have a human body our lives. We have this lifetime of experience of having a human body with two legs, two arms and one head. And this is something that we had in our genes. And we thought, is that the basic limit or can we experience strange body essence, [unintelligible] bodies as our own? And there are actually rare cases of stroke patients that after a stroke a certain part of the brain can experience and extra phantom limb, like they have a third arm, a phantom arm.
[Ira Flatow:] Right, right. And you actually put a third limb next to people and convinced them that that was their third arm.
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] Yeah. We were able to induce this experience of having a third arm in all volunteers within a couple of minutes.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow. A couple of minutes.
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] Yeah.
[Ira Flatow:] And you and I've seen pictures of you like stroking the arm with a brush and people thought that they could feel that?
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] Yeah. We ask people to sit down in front of a table and just put their hand on their table. And next to their real hand, we put a rubber hand, like a realistic prosthetic hand just next to the real hand. And then we stroke the two hands synchronously for a minute or so. And the person can see both hands. And, of course, in the beginning, it's kind of a silly. You can see your hand lying there being stroked. You don't feel anything. But after about 30 seconds or so, most participants have this very, very weird sensation. That they feel touches on both hands. And they actually feel that both the real hand and the rubber hand are sort of both part of their body, like they have a third arm.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow. And how long does that last for?
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] Well...
[Ira Flatow:] I mean, as long as you're stroking as long as they're looking and stroking it. They don't feel like it's missing...
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] As long yeah.
[Ira Flatow:] ...when they get up from the table, they don't have the phantom limb missing.
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] No. When you just stand up and you start moving, the illusion breaks down very quickly.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm. Wow. So where do you go from here with this?
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] Well, we're really interested in developing new, advanced prosthetic limbs. There's a lot of interest in that in Europe and America now. And what we're trying to do is try to help out working the robotics people and in areas to develop artificial limbs that it will feels more like part of your real body.
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] And, you know, less like a tool and more like a real limb. And we think that, you know, one way we can contribute to this development is to use these illusions for something good, to actually sort of trick the brain to accepting these prosthetic limb devices as part of the real body.
[Ira Flatow:] Well, thank you very much for taking time to be with us today. Good luck to you.
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] Oh, thank you. It was great being here.
[Ira Flatow:] You're welcome.
[Dr. Henrik Ehrsson:] Same thing with you.
[Ira Flatow:] Henrik Ehrsson is an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. I'm Ira Flatow. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR.

[Rachel Martin:] A lawyer at the Department of Justice has resigned. She says she can no longer work for this administration. And she is not leaving quietly. Hui Chen is her name, and she was a consultant working in the DOJ's fraud department. Her division prosecutes white-collar crimes, many of which are corporate cases. A couple weeks ago, she posted on social media that, quote, "trying to hold companies to standards that our current administration is not living up to was creating a cognitive dissonance that I could not overcome," end quote.
[Hui Chen:] The reason I left was because the job I signed up for became more difficult because the administration that I worked under is not acting in ways that the DOJ expects the companies to do.
[Rachel Martin:] So you're essentially alleging that the administration isn't being held to the same standards as the corporations that you were investigating for corruption or fraud?
[Hui Chen:] So let me explain that there are numerous lawsuits out there, many of which touch on this. But let me just cite a couple of areas. So if you have a CEO, for example, who's got substantial interests in the business partners of the company. And yet be in a position to continue to do business with these partners and actually negotiate terms with these partners that in itself creates a conflict. Trump's business interests in foreign countries is an example of similar to this type of conflict interest. How does that influence his foreign policy and how he deals with the countries in which he has business interests? That's one area.
[Rachel Martin:] Although the president himself points out frequently that he is not subject to conflict of interest laws, unlike Congress the president is exempted to some degree, and he's right.
[Hui Chen:] I agree. And I think one of things I had said very, very frequently as a compliance professional is, my concern, as a compliance professional, is whether what is happening potentially could hurt the company. And I'm less concerned with the legality of something. A lot of times a company or a person can do something that is perfectly legal yet not ethical.
[Rachel Martin:] Was there a specific moment or incident that led you to make this choice?
[Hui Chen:] It's something that I had begun to contemplate as I watched the new administration begin to take some of the actions. But I think what really culminated into a moment that clarified everything for me was the termination of James Comey, the former FBI director. I will say and that was a moment that was very clear to me [LAUGHTER] that had a company come in to the fraud section to tell a story that we have a CEO who was implicated, potentially, in an internal investigation and we have an investigator who had been told by the CEO to let it go and when he didn't, he was fired, that story would raise serious questions in our minds, sitting across the table from the companies in the fraud section, about the company's compliance program. One of the key factors that we almost always ask is, how do you ensure that your internal investigations are independent?
[Rachel Martin:] So could you have stayed? I mean, it's my understanding your job was actually set to expire in September, your consultancy.
[Hui Chen:] I was offered an option to renew.
[Rachel Martin:] And so you turned that down.
[Hui Chen:] I turned that down, and then I left early.
[Rachel Martin:] That's Hui Chen. We spoke to her over Skype. And we should say we reached out to the Department of Justice. They responded and said they decline to comment.

[Steve Inskeep:] Now, among biotechnology companies there's another trend. Drug companies and entrepreneurs are beginning to develop and market products tailored specifically to the genetic makeup of individual patients. They look at your DNA and come up with a product that works just for you. The idea is to make treatments and dosages more precise and effective. From Seattle, NPR's Wendy Kaufman reports.
[Wendy Kaufman:] Scientist Rishma Joshi is on the front line in a new approach toward medicine and healthcare, one based on a patient's genetic makeup. Seated at a lab bench at Iverson Genetics Diagnostics, Joshi pulls on purple latex gloves and begins to transfer blood samples into test tubes in preparation for analyzing a patient's DNA.
[Rishma Joshi:] We need to get the DNA from the nucleus, so we are breaking open the cell and getting the DNA to float out. And then we're going to spec it and then we run it on different analysis different genetic analysis.
[Wendy Kaufman:] The goal of this particular test is to determine what dose of a potent and widely prescribed anticoagulant, known as warfarin, a patient should get. Because of their genetic makeup, individuals metabolize the drug differently. And if they get too much of the drug for their body they could bleed internally, too little and they could suffer a stroke. Some two million new prescriptions of the drug are issued each year. And initially doctors often have a hard time prescribing the ideal amount. But as Dean Sproles, founder and CEO of Iverson, explains, with DNA testing that should become much easier.
[Dean Sproles:] We can read the results, report the results back to your physician, and the physician is then able to prescribe the accurate dose for warfarin.
[Wendy Kaufman:] Health economist Mark Pauley of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School says the ability to figure out if a drug will work for someone and at what dose couldn't have come at a better time.
[Mark Pauley:] In a way, the timing is good, because the pace of discovery of new drug products has really dropped off quite substantially. So discovering something useful would actually be good news for the health care sector as a whole now.
[Wendy Kaufman:] Still, genetic testing of this sort holds tremendous promise to improve health care. And Raju Kucherlapati, who heads the Center for Genetics and Genomics at Harvard Medical School, says the roughly $2 billion DNA testing industry is poised for growth.
[Raju Kucherlapati:] Within the next ten years or so, it's expected it might go to as much as $15 billion. So in terms of the overall size of the market, it's not huge, but the rate of growth is expected to be very significant.
[Wendy Kaufman:] Wendy Kaufman, NPR News, Seattle.

[Laura Sullivan:] And we'll start today in Libya, where NATO acknowledges it has killed civilians in an airstrike. Libyan officials say nine people were killed when NATO blew up a house in a residential neighborhood this morning. Joining us now from Tripoli is NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson. Soraya, what do you know about the airstrike?
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] Well, it occurred overnight in a neighborhood in northern Tripoli. This neighborhood is known for having anti-Gadhafi residents, or having a large contingent of people living there who don't necessarily agree with the regime. And what seems to have happened is that an explosion occurred and that one building collapsed. There was serious damage to a second building. And journalists were taken there by minders to see the damage not long after it occurred. They also took journalists to see four bodies; two of those were children.
[Laura Sullivan:] What is NATO saying?
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] Well, NATO, in a release just a short while ago, acknowledges that there were civilian casualties caused in a Tripoli strike overnight. NATO says that they were going after a military missile site that was operated by pro-Gadhafi forces, and that it appears one weapon did not strike the intended target. They're describing it as a possible weapons system failure, which may have caused a number of civilian casualties.
[Laura Sullivan:] How is the Libyan government reacting to all this?
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] Well, they're very angry. The foreign minister called for global jihad against the West, although the spokesman for the government, Moussa Ibrahim, quickly clarified that they weren't intending to go after targets in Western capitals or anything like that. This is what he had to say.
[Moussa Ibrahim:] We will never carry out any terrorist attacks against European or western cities or civilians. We will not target any capitals of the West. Our war is against the armies of the West.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] Ibrahim says what the Libyan government means by jihad is for people around the world, Muslims and non-Muslims, to stand up and protest or write letters. But he said Libyan forces would continue to fight on the ground here in Libya. He says that the government also remains opposed to al-Qaida. But of course, the question is anyone who's heeding this call to jihad is not going to necessarily understand these clarifications because that certainly wasn't in the original statement.
[Laura Sullivan:] Yesterday, NATO also acknowledged that it accidentally bombed a rebel convoy just a few days ago. Where does all this leave NATO?
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] Well, it certainly creates problems for the alliance at a time they're trying to get more support from members so that it's not just a few countries that are actually engaged in this campaign in Libya. Certainly with its mission being one described as protecting civilians, this does not bode well for them.
[Laura Sullivan:] That's NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, in Tripoli. Soraya, thanks.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] You're welcome.

[Rachel Martin:] Henry Fonda and James Stewart were two of the greatest stars of Hollywood's golden years. A new biography describes their 50-year friendship and dedication to their craft. Each was an actor before he became a star, their biographer writes, and they both remained actors after they became legends. Here's NPR special correspondent Susan Stamberg.
[Susan Stamberg, Byline:] They met in 1932 in New York, two young theater actors sharing an apartment scratching out a living during the Depression, such different personalities. If Stewart was a curious puppy, biographer Scott Eyman writes, Fonda was a cat contrary, somewhat disgruntled and perfectly content to walk by himself. An odd couple, and they both loved cats, Fonda most.
[Scott Eyman:] A stray showed up at the back door. He would feed it, which of course became three strays, which of course became 12 strays. Because there were so many cats, he couldn't possibly keep them all straight and name each one individually, so he called them all George.
[Susan Stamberg, Byline:] After Fonda and Stewart went to Hollywood in 1935, California cats assembled. The actors roomed together there, too.
[Scott Eyman:] Stewart took to Hollywood immediately. He liked the environment. He liked the sunshine. He liked working at the studios. He had no qualms about being a contract actor at MGM. Fonda bridled. Fonda did not like being told what to do not ever.
[Susan Stamberg, Byline:] Although he was an almost instant movie star, Henry Fonda always preferred theater.
[Scott Eyman:] I suspect because he was a control freak and because when the curtain goes up, essentially the actor is on his own.
[Susan Stamberg, Byline:] Fonda was a man apart, according to biographer Eyman, wary, a perfectionist, hard on others. Stewart was relaxed, easy going, beloved. Actress Kim Novak once wondered, how could he be so nice and survive Hollywood? Both men were shy, tall, skinny, laconic, gorgeous and both looked for virtue in the characters they played.
[Scott Eyman:] They both wanted their work to stand for something.
[Susan Stamberg, Byline:] Endurance and commitment in the case of Fonda's Tom Joad, hero of "The Grapes Of Wrath." Joad is a desperate Depression-era farmer, an Okie who leaves the Dust Bowl to find migrant field work in California.
[Henry Fonda:] [As Tom Joad] I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be everywhere, wherever you can look. Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beating up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready. I'll be there, too.
[Susan Stamberg, Byline:] Jimmy Stewart stood for democracy as an idealistic rookie senator in "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington."
[James Stewart:] [As Jefferson Smith] Liberty is too precious a thing to be buried in books. Men should hold it up in front of them every single day of their lives and say, I'm free to think and to speak. My ancestors couldn't. I can.
[Susan Stamberg, Byline:] In addition to his always-convincing sincerity, Stewart was known for a certain oh gosh way of talking.
[James Stewart:] [As George Bailey] What'd you say just a minute ago, they had to wait and save their money before they even thought of a decent home? Wait? Wait for what?
[Susan Stamberg, Byline:] Did Jimmy Stewart really talk that way in real life?
[Scott Eyman:] Yes, that was absolutely the way he talked.
[Susan Stamberg, Byline:] Hesitant, a little stammer. Biographer Eyman says Stewart drove that way, too, his old Volvo. He could have bought Bentleys, but that wasn't his style. Jimmy Stewart grew up near Pittsburgh. Fonda grew up in Omaha. Stewart was a Republican; Fonda, a liberal Democrat like his daughter Jane. Despite their differences, they were literally BFF's best friends forever. These were lifelong friends and very close, and many people wonder, especially now in the 21st century, were they gay?
[Scott Eyman:] [Laughter].
[Susan Stamberg, Byline:] Around 1939, when Orson Welles came out to LA for a screen test, he kept hearing about these two movie stars.
[Scott Eyman:] He thought it was the hottest affair in Hollywood or they were the two straightest men that ever lived. He said, and then I met them and I realized they were the two straightest man that ever lived. So no, they weren't gay, far from it.
[Susan Stamberg, Byline:] Fonda was married five times. Before he got married for life, Jimmy Stewart had lots of lady friends. Marlene Dietrich and Olivia de Havilland were on his dance card. The actors served in World War II, Fonda in the Navy, Stewart, the Air Force. Both were war heroes. War over, they came back to a very different country.
[Scott Eyman:] Well, the war changed everything. It changed Hollywood, partially because you had millions of people going off to Europe and across the world and the South Pacific and seeing that what really went on in the world didn't resemble what Hollywood had been producing before the war.
[Susan Stamberg, Byline:] As a result, movies got darker. Stories and characters were tougher, harder. Actors had to make huge transitions.
[Scott Eyman:] Stewart went back to MGM and looked at a bunch of his old movies, and he said later that they made me want to vomit.
[Susan Stamberg, Byline:] He thought his characters had been too soft, young, sweet, charming, too acquiescent. So he played a cynical, driven reporter in "Call Northside 777," and he worked with Hitchcock.
[Scott Eyman:] He plays harsh, and he plays obsessed, and he plays ornery.
[Susan Stamberg, Byline:] Henry Fonda made a few films after the war, went back on stage, then did more movies and TV. The friends grew older together. In the 1970s, Fonda's heart began giving him trouble. In 1982, his last year, Fonda was in and out of the hospital. Jimmy Stewart visited him every day. Once, Fonda fell into a deep sleep while his wife and Stewart were nearby talking.
[Scott Eyman:] And suddenly, there was this stirring, and Fonda says, is that you, Stewart? And Stewart said, well, yeah, yeah, yeah, Hank, it's me. And Fonda opened his eyes and said, well, where's my root beer float? And at that point they knew he was going to live because Fonda was very serious about root beer floats.
[Susan Stamberg, Byline:] In the hospital, the friends would sit and talk, never about movies or show business but about their years as young actors in New York, the fun they'd had, the hard times, too. It did them good, that kind of talk. In old age, Scott Eyman writes, when they were together, they were still young.
[Scott Eyman:] And sometimes they wouldn't speak at all. They would just sit there in companionable silence. And it was Stewart doing whatever he could do for his friend.
[Susan Stamberg, Byline:] All their lives, they were men of few words. At the end, their silence spoke volumes. Scott Eyman's book is called "Hank & Jim: The Fifty-Year Friendship Of Henry Fonda And James Stewart." In Washington, I'm Susan Stamberg, NPR News.

[Rachel Martin:] President Trump is drawing criticism from civil rights groups who are upset about his weekend plans. The president is scheduled to be in Jackson, Miss., tomorrow when the state opens a civil rights museum as part of bicentennial events. Mississippi is the setting for a key chapter in the nation's struggle for equality. But the state has been slow to acknowledge the racism and violence in its past. The new museum now tells that difficult story. NPR's Debbie Elliott has a preview.
[Pamela Junior:] OK, everybody, come on in.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] As construction workers put up the last exhibits, Mississippi Civil Rights Museum Director Pamela Junior shows a small group the developing galleries.
[Pamela Junior:] This is the beginning Africans coming over through the transatlantic slave trade.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] We journey through the Emancipation Proclamation and Reconstruction then a turn into a room dominated by a tree, its limbs sprawling overhead.
[Pamela Junior:] This tree here has a lot of symbolism to me because we're walking into some deep times now. And it's not only you see think about the tree in lynching. But you look at the images Jim Crow images that are up as leaves on the limbs of the trees. This is when it starts getting dark. Let's go on in a little bit.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] Junior says visitors will experience cramped and dark spaces as they move through the museum's galleries.
[Pamela Junior:] The movement was very uncomfortable. I want them to feel uncomfortable so they can understand that once they get out of this tunnel, that they're going to come to light. And their challenge is to make Mississippi the best Mississippi that they can.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] Junior says they will encourage visitors to leave the museum and then travel around the state to learn more at key historical sites. And there are plenty Bryant's Grocery, where Emmett Till was fatefully accused of flirting with a white shopkeeper, voting rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer's grave and the Neshoba County memorial to three civil rights workers killed by the Ku Klux Klan during Freedom Summer.
[Hillman Frazier:] Mississippi's ground zero when it comes to civil rights.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] State Senator Hillman Frazier of Jackson was instrumental in getting legislation passed for the new museum and served on the planning committee. It was a long time coming, he says.
[Hillman Frazier:] Folks thought we should forget about that part of history. Don't tell the story. And just don't bring up anything that it's painful. But that's part of our history.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] Civil rights tourism has taken off in other states for instance, in Alabama, where the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery are a big draw. In 2006, Republican Governor Haley Barbour helped push the Mississippi project forward, seeing the economic benefit. But to secure funding from the legislature, Frazier says the civil rights museum was paired with a state history museum, giving lawmakers political cover to approve it.
[Hillman Frazier:] Some just didn't want to vote for a straight-up civil rights museum because of just what they represent. And they just didn't want to bring those issues up.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] State officials reject the idea that the dual museums represent a continuation of the separate but equal doctrine and say they complement one another. Set in downtown Jackson near the state archives, the two buildings are joined by a common lobby. The history museum gives a broad overview.
[Unidentified Man:] The Civil War transformed Mississippi.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] It spans from the Stone Age and Native American cultures through the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 to Hurricane Katrina. The civil rights museum brings a deeper focus to the 30-year period when Mississippi was at the center of the movement. Foot soldiers have donated artifacts, including the family of murdered Hattiesburg NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer. He was targeted for offering to pay the poll tax for African-Americans who wanted to vote. Dahmer was killed in 1966, when the KKK firebombed his home and surrounded it, waiting to shoot to death anyone who tried to escape the burning house.
[Ellie Dahmer:] That was a horrible night.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] Ellie Dahmer is Vernon Dahmer's 92-year-old widow. She says she never thought she'd see it documented in a museum.
[Ellie Dahmer:] We lived it. And some of them died with it. The rest of Mississippi needs to know about it.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] Museum Director Pamela Junior shows the family a photograph of the four oldest sons who returned from the military after their father was killed. They're standing by the remains of the family home.
[Pamela Junior:] You see the brothers, all with uniforms on. And what do I say? I say that his sons were fighting for America. And Mr. Dahmer was here in Mississippi fighting to be an American. This is amazing amazing piece right here amazing.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] Vernon Dahmer Jr. stops to gather himself when he sees the picture.
[Vernon Dahmer Jr:] Yeah, that was a tough day...
[Ellie Dahmer:] Yes, yes.
[V. Dahmer Jr:] ...You know, to have to come home and look at where we were raised and reflect back on the memories of growing up. And it didn't need to happen.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] He's moved by the museum's treatment of Mississippi's brutal past.
[V. Dahmer Jr:] We've come a long way. And it's something that we can all be proud of got a long way to go. So today I'll stand here. And I'm very, very proud and very pleased what I've you been able to see. His brother Dennis Dahmer was 11 at the time.
[Ellie Dahmer:] What they did to send a message to terrorize black folks and people sympathetic to black folks...
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] Despite a confession from one of the klansmen, it was more than 30 years before Mississippi convicted a KKK grand wizard for Dahmer's murder. Ellie Dahmer says progress has been slow. And it's up to white people now to see it through.
[Ellie Dahmer:] If as many as them will stand as the blacks stood in '66, we'll see a change in Mississippi. But you all are going to have to take a stand. We've already stood.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] Now a new controversy has developed after Republican Governor Phil Bryant invited President Trump to the museum's opening. Georgia Congressman John Lewis, a Democrat and civil rights icon, has canceled his plans to participate in Saturday's dedication. Lewis and Mississippi Democratic Congressman Bennie Thompson say it's an insult for Trump to be there, given his response to a white nationalist rallies and other racially divisive comments. Governor Bryant is rejecting calls to revoke the invitation.
[Phil Bryant:] Well, that's just sad. The president of the United States should be able and we're very thankful that he is going to come for this historic occasion.
[Debbie Elliott, Byline:] Bryant says the president will honor Mississippi with his presence. Debbie Elliott, NPR News, Jackson.

[Audie Cornish:] Millions of people were affected by the snowstorm, and it seems each of them has a story to tell. This was the first snow for Marina Toft, a Californian who now lives in Brooklyn. She sent in this recording from the middle of the night Friday as the storm settled in.
[Marina Toft:] I just got woken up by the wind for, I think, the third time tonight. I keep hearing crashing noises. And it's not magical, this is not fun. I do not like snow as much as I thought I did. I have a job interview tomorrow, and I don't know if I'm just being delicate and Californian and people actually go to stuff during things like this, but I don't really want to go outside even to get a job.
[Robert Siegel:] Luckily, Marina Toft didn't have to. Her interview was rescheduled, which made her feel, as she wrote to us, like she won a game of blizzard chicken. Not everybody was afraid of the snow, but many did heed the government's call to stay in on Saturday. For some, like Chris Miller in Washington, D.C., it was a chance to catch up on some important things.
[Chris Miller:] Lots of Netflix, so "Narcos," "Chelsea Does," some other Netflix series. So I didn't feel guilty about it.
[Audie Cornish:] And then Sunday, the forced hibernation was over. The sun came out and so did Steven Johnson.
[Steven Johnson:] I think I met more of my neighbors in the last 24 hours than I met in the last six months. It's been wonderful. We were playing football out in the snow, we've been shoveling, we've been drinking. It's been a good time.
[Robert Siegel:] Others used the opportunity to learn new skills. Alice Meder could have walked around her D.C. neighborhood, but she decided to bike. For a Brazilian, it was a new experience.
[Alice Meder:] It's like running with tennis shoes on ice, so you keep slipping, and then your wheel keeps spinning, and then you keep falling off and on. But when you see the asphalt or a little bit of snow, you get that traction and you think, finally.
[Audie Cornish:] Many more in Washington went for more typical snow day activities sledding, building snowmen, even skiing. Wole Moses planned for a traditional treat.
[Wole Moses:] I think it's my first snowball fight since I was a kid, so I'm really looking forward to letting some of the inner child out of me.
[Robert Siegel:] Whether your inner child came out to play or you went out to play with your children, we hope that you were able to put the shovel down and enjoy the snowy weekend.

[Scott Simon:] This weekend, fisherman and fishing women gather in Astoria, Ore., as they do once a year, to appreciate the compositions of BJ Leiderman, who writes our theme music, and to read and perform their own poetry. Melanie Sevcenko has the story.
[Melanie Sevcenko, Byline:] Moe Bowstern named herself after the front and back end of a ship. She calls herself a fishing woman. And for her, writing poetry comes with the job.
[Moe Bowstern:] Well, I mean, have you ever been fishing?
[Melanie Sevcenko, Byline:] No [LAUGHTER].
[Moe Bowstern:] It's unbelievably boring. And so you just have to think of something else to do.
[Melanie Sevcenko, Byline:] Now retired from commercial fishing, Bowstern is one of dozens of fisherpoets who have been meeting for their annual gathering in a Astoria, Ore. During the last weekend of February, the far-flung fisher people interpret the commercial fishing industry in prose, poetry and song. At FisherPoets, Bowstern is one of the stars.
[Unidentified Person:] Moe Bowstern here she is in the flesh.
[Melanie Sevcenko, Byline:] Bowstern started fishing in Kodiak, Alaska, in the mid-'80s when women on commercial boats were scarce. Her zine shares a name with a popular brand of deck boots, XTRATUF. This piece is called "Things That Will Be Difficult."
[Moe Bowstern:] It will be hard, if you are a man, to understand why your female crewmate, who started out so friendly, is so silent now when you are only trying to help. It will be hard if you are a woman to go...
[Melanie Sevcenko, Byline:] The poetry onstage at FisherPoets touches on what Bowstern calls an incredibly difficult life.
[Moe Bowstern:] Not just because of the rigors of the actual physical experience of the life, but it's just, how can you be a fisherman at a time of climate change? And, like, where are you going to position yourself with resource extraction?
[Melanie Sevcenko, Byline:] That's something John Copp has written about. For 20 years, he ran operations in Bristol Bay in the Bering Sea. Multinational corporations want to mine gold and copper from the area nearby and have been angling to do so for years. His poem "Tsunami" is inspired by his opposition to the proposed Pebble Mine.
[John Copp:] Rich men from foreign lands promise a moon made of copper and gold, seducing politicians in suit and tie.
[Melanie Sevcenko, Byline:] Many commercial fishermen have been against the Pebble Mine because of the damage it could do to the biggest salmon run on the planet. Copp is retired and lives in Oregon now. But he's still inspired to write by the natural beauty of Alaska.
[John Copp:] Alaska has an existential force. So the poetry comes like a bird flying into your backyard and says, hey, you know, check this out.
[Melanie Sevcenko, Byline:] The poets do write about the landscapes and seascapes that are the backdrop of their work. And they do all the styles, 1990s slam style and even old-fashioned lyrical poems that actually rhyme, like this piece from fisherpoet Rich King.
[Rich King:] I can smell the ocean. I can hear the sound. I can feel the blessings of this life that's by the pound.
[Melanie Sevcenko, Byline:] So this weekend, once again, the fisherpoets will do what they've done for more than two decades gather on piers, in cafes and in theaters to perform their poetry for grateful audiences in this seaside town. Bowstern feels lucky that people who've never even been fishing want to hear their stories.
[Moe Bowstern:] We're participating in two traditions that have been going on. Like, storytelling is probably only a little bit older than fishing, you know? So we get to tell stories in our special, weird language. And people just can't get enough of it. This, too, is what it's like to be a woman on a fishing boat. Thank you so much.
[Melanie Sevcenko, Byline:] For NPR News, I'm Melanie Sevcenko in Astoria, Ore.

[Neal Conan:] I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Over the past 25 years, the number and percentage of prisoners held in isolation has exploded at both state and federal penitentiaries. At a Senate subcommittee hearing this, Senator Richard Durbin argued that the dramatic expansion of the use of solitary confinement is a human rights issue we can't ignore. Ever prison has solitary confinement units for prisoners who attack staff or other inmates, who try to escape or cause other kinds of trouble, and then there are supermax prisons, places designed to house the worst of the worst, where inmates are held in isolation 23 hours a day. This week, a lawsuit was filed on behalf of several inmates the ADX Florence supermax in Colorado, the nation's most locked-down federal prison. The suit charges that the mentally ill there are denied drugs and counseling and held in conditions that amount to abuse, cruelty and torture. Several states are now reconsidering the cost of supermax prisons, their impact on inmates, and their effectiveness. If you've been in the penal system on either side of the bars, what don't we understand about solitary confinement and supermax prisons? 800-989-8255 is the phone number. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Later in the program, back to the SilverDocs festival for a new documentary on the oppression of gays in Uganda, "Call Me Kuchu." But first, supermax prisons. We begin with NPR investigative correspondent Laura Sullivan. Nice to have you back on the program.
[Laura Sullivan, Byline:] Thank you so much.
[Neal Conan:] And you went inside a supermax prison in California several years ago, Pelican Bay, and painted a very scary picture of the psych unit. We've posted a link to your full story at our website. But I just wanted to play your description of that unit from your story.
[Laura Sullivan, Byline:] In the psychiatric shoe, one inmate is standing in the middle of his cell, hollering at no one. Another is banging his head against the cell door. The psychiatric shoe is full, all 128 beds. One of out every 10 inmates in segregation is housed here in the psychiatric unit. There's even a waiting list. Here many of the inmates are naked. Some are exposing themselves. The extent of the psychological problems here is laid out on a marker board outside the unit.
[Neal Conan:] And Laura Sullivan, listening to that and seeing that, 24 hours, it's got to be terrifying.
[Laura Sullivan, Byline:] Yeah, and what's interesting is that they this is the world that they see 24 hours a day. Even in the psychiatric ward, there's very little time for them to be allowed for that, even that prerequisite hour and a half outside. This facility in Pelican Bay, you have to picture spokes on a wheel, and in the center of the spoke is a correctional officer who sits behind computers and runs the system with buttons, and he's behind glass. And then down the spokes are just cell after cell after cell, and the inmates are in these eight-by-eight-foot-long cells, just it's all concrete, a stainless steel desk and a chair, and there's very little else in these cells. And the officer will then push a button and allow the inmate out for the hour and a half, what they call outside. Outside is a large concrete box, you could probably fit maybe two cars in it, and it has 20-foot walls, and on the top is a grate. And so if you look straight up, you can see the sky. Maybe if it was high noon, you might get a glimpse of the sun, but really outside there's no balls or anything to do. And then the officer will allow press the button. You will walk back into your cell, and that's that. And you will not speak with the officer, you're not going to interact with anybody. You're going to pass by the other cells, but the doors are made of solid steel, and they have nickel-sized holes in them. So you can really just maybe see the eyes or some figures behind the wall, but you're not interacting with other inmates, you're not interacting with the officers. And then three times a day somebody comes by and slides a food tray through the slot in the door. You don't really talk to that person. And most of the people that I spoke to dozens of the people that were at Pelican Bay, and they hadn't spoke to anybody outside this very narrow space in years, let alone touched anybody.
[Neal Conan:] So there's the shower inside the cell as well.
[Laura Sullivan, Byline:] The shower no, the shower is down the hall. So the officer behind the glass will look down at that spoke of the wheel, push the button. It's that inmate's time to shower three times a week. He walks down to the shower, and then he comes back and goes into his cell. And only one inmate is allowed out of their cell along that spoke at any given time.
[Neal Conan:] So what is the purpose of these kinds of conditions?
[Laura Sullivan, Byline:] So this started, this became very popular across the country in the 1980s and early 1990s. It was to it was a tough-on-crime policy, we're really going to lock up the worst of the worst offenders, and we're going to put them in these isolative units. For some states like California, this became a response to their incredible gang problem. Over 70 percent of the inmates in California they believe are members of a gang. So they said we're going to put anybody that's causing trouble into these solitary confinement cells.
[Neal Conan:] You had another clip from your piece at Pelican Bay. You talked to a couple of members, former members of the Aryan do you ever former? I don't know. But anyway, who just defected from the gang, explaining the kind of pressure that they're under in prison.
[Unidentified Man:] Well, they keep killing people, you're going to do what they tell you do. Out of fear, out of self-preservation. If you're 90 days at the house, and a gang member tells you, you go stab that dude right there, or you should go back in and stab your cellie, you're going to do what you're told because if you don't, you're going to be killed.
[Neal Conan:] So again, there's a link to the full story at our website, npr.org.
[Laura Sullivan, Byline:] And these two inmates said that they were not actually they weren't actually they didn't believe, call themselves racist. It wasn't something that they believed in. It was just, it was a security thing, that when you showed up at prison, you had to take a side, and you just picked your side based on your color. And that's what they did, and they had just recently been let out of solitary confinement, which is very rare, by doing something called debriefing, which means snitching on all of your fellow gang members. This put a bounty on their heads within the prison, and it also put a bounty on the heads of their family members outside the facility. So if you want to come out of solitary confinement they had both been in for five, six years a piece you have to put your family in danger and yourself in danger, and that's really the only way out.
[Neal Conan:] So supermax prisons in part designed to well, you've got to put gang leaders someplace, right?
[Laura Sullivan, Byline:] Exactly, but there are a lot of states that don't have huge gang problems that also use solitary confinement. The interesting thing about California is that California said we did this because the violence rates were so high, we had to lock up the worst of the worst. But if you look at 20 years of solitary confinement in California, the violence rates, they are locking up more people in solitary confinement than they ever have, and the violence rates have continued to go up. So it's not it hasn't had an impact on violence inside the facilities, and their gang problem is worse than it has ever been.
[Neal Conan:] We want to hear from those of you with experience on either side of the bars in solitary confinement and supermax, 800-989-8255. Email is talk@npr.org. We'll start with Paul, and Paul's on the line with us from Grand Rapids.
[Paul:] Hi, I'm a corrections officer who worked at Michigan's supermax prison for the last 12 years now. We've since downgraded from supermax to a sort of more open setting because of these types of lawsuits, and we're, as staff, coming to quickly regret this because our prison system is becoming increasingly violent with increasing amounts of gang assaults. And combined with the public sector basically saying we don't want to pay for these expensive prisons anymore, we're taking more and more services away from the prisoners and the staff, which means we just exacerbate the problem. There have been more gunshots fired by staff members down in the prison yard in the last year than there has been in the last 20 years in the Department of Corrections, and it's getting very dangerous and to the point where we're going to lose a prison at some point.
[Neal Conan:] What does lose you mean in a riot?
[Paul:] Yes, sir. They're cutting the food. They're cutting the services. They're cutting the staff members at each prison. They're downgrading the security level of these prisoners. So a guy who used to be, say, maximum security is now medium security, and they're putting them out on parole faster and faster and faster. What we're running into is now Michigan has four of the most violent cities in North America, and that's because we're not doing what we need to do.
[Neal Conan:] Paul, thanks very much for the call.
[Paul:] By the way, I just wanted to say that I do agree with your speaker that there are some things about this, locking somebody down 23 hours of the day and doing nothing with them, that doesn't work. If we're going to do this, we need to also provide programs and services to them. So it's not like staff members working inside these prisons think that these guys need to be treated like monsters. We understand that they're coming home to our neighborhoods.
[Neal Conan:] And that's, Laura Sullivan, a point. A lot of people think if you're in supermax, you're never coming out.
[Laura Sullivan, Byline:] That you're there forever, but in fact 95 percent of the people that we have incarcerated in our supermax prisons in this country will be walking out into our communities one day, 95 percent of them.
[Neal Conan:] Walter Dickey is a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School. He led the Wisconsin Division of Corrections in the 1980s and joins us by phone from Hawaii. And Walter Dickey, we're glad you were willing to interrupt your vacation to speak with us.
[Walter Dickey:] Glad to be here.
[Neal Conan:] And again, the argument for building these supermax facilities, has that held up?
[Walter Dickey:] Well, you know, I think, first of all, there are no doubt behavioral problems that give rise to the need for close custody or solitary confinement or the like. You know, I think, though, that using terms like worst of the worst, that's a kind of rhetorical as opposed to behavioral description. And I think one of the things that's happened, at least in a lot of states, Wisconsin's one of them, is I think we grossly exaggerated the need for the supermax prison and overbuilt it, and I think, not surprisingly, when you've got empty cells in a crowded prison system, you tend to fill them up. But I don't know that they're necessarily the worst of the worst. You get a whole amalgam of people into these kinds of institutions. Some of them are violent, some of them mentally ill, some of them are difficult to manage for a variety of different reasons, but I think it's unfortunate that the classification systems don't necessarily function the way we'd like to get the people in them that should be and keep out of them the people that shouldn't.
[Neal Conan:] So in other words, if it's a 200-cell prison, and only 180 prisoners are there, they like to keep it efficient, fill up those other 20 cells even if those prisoners don't necessarily wouldn't necessarily qualify for the supermax otherwise.
[Walter Dickey:] I think it has more to do with human nature. If you've got an overcrowded prison system, and one prison has got empty cells, even if it's a supermax prison, classification is going to find a way to use those cells. I don't know that it's necessarily because there's some evil intent, but it's a desire to try to in a sense mitigate the difficulties at the other institutions by making as efficient use as you can of the cells that are available.
[Neal Conan:] Stay with us, if you will. Laura Sullivan will stay with us as well. We're talking about the purpose and price of supermax prisons. In a few moments we'll also talk with the former warden of a supermax facility in Illinois that's set to close. He calls that prison an important part of the state's strategy to reduce violence in an overcrowded system. If you've been in the penal system on either side of the bars, what don't we understand about supermax prisons? Give us a call. I'm Neal Conan. Stay with us. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan. And before we get back to our conversation about supermax prisons and solitary confinement, a correction. During the show yesterday on Latino voters, one of our guests said that President Obama had once claimed he did not have the authority to issue an immigration waiver like the one he announced last week. As many of you wrote to tell us, President Obama meant he could not sign the DREAM Act unless Congress passed it, but he did specifically say he did have the authority to prioritize enforcement. And thanks for the corrections. Right now we're talking with NPR investigative correspondent Laura Sullivan. She's reported a number of stories in supermax prisons. Links to those stories at our website. Also with us, Walter Dickey, now a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, who served as secretary for corrections in the state of Wisconsin in the 1980s, as well as the court-appointed federal monitor for the supermax prison as Boscobel in Wisconsin, a prison that converted to maximum security. If you've been in the penal system on either side of the bars, what don't we understand about solitary confinement and supermax prisons? 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. And Walter Dickey, I wanted to ask you a little bit about the politics of supermax prisons. If they are expensive, if questions are being asked about their efficacy, what's why don't more legislatures vote to close them down?
[Walter Dickey:] Well, you know, first of all, I think the politics of them are difficult. You know, to start with, some of them were built not because we needed them but because political leaders wanted to appear tough on crime, and building a supermax prison was a sign of how tough you were on crime. Once you've got it built, and you're using it, expensive as it may be, there are powerful forces at work that make it hard to close them. You know, among them are the fact that many of them were built in small towns, and they're a prominent employer. The union often is against closing them down. You know, there's a lot of claims made for their effectiveness when there's not necessarily very much empirical proof, but those kinds of claims are made. And if you're a politician running for office, it's too easy to put ads on the television saying that you voted to close the prison that housed the worst of the worst, and a lot of people don't want to be painted in that way, and therefore as a political matter it's awfully difficult to close them once you've started them.
[Neal Conan:] Seven percent of the prisoners in federal penitentiaries, Laura Sullivan, are in supermax. That number is declining in some states, down to 1.4 percent in Mississippi.
[Laura Sullivan, Byline:] Yeah, there are a number of states Virginia, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Mississippi, are all either doing away with one of their supermax prisons or downgrading it or trying to take as many inmates as they can out of it. There's it's the beginning of a movement away from supermax. We're not seeing the sort of rush to build them that we saw 10 years ago or 15 years ago. It's beginning to shift, but it's still at the very beginning.
[Neal Conan:] Let's get another caller in, this is Jack, and Jack's on the line with us from Cleveland.
[Jack:] Hi, yeah, I was in [unintelligible] correctional facility. It was not a supermax facility, but it was a maximum-security facility, and I was placed in what they call segregation, which was very similar to what you guys described. It was I was in there for my own protection because I was in on a bad charge, and I feel like the guards foster a community of violence towards prisoners, and you can't do your time and you can't get out of prison without placing yourself at great risk. And the time I had in segregation was the only safe time I had in my time in jail. I mean, it's punishment, but I mean you need to be able to get out of it alive.
[Neal Conan:] And so in that respect you're grateful, but what kind of an experience was it otherwise?
[Jack:] Otherwise it was basically a constant state of fear. Thankfully, my cellie, the cellies which I did have, I had about three of them, they were OK with me, but the second they would open up the doors for what they call range time, which would happen for about six hours every day, in which I was in the courtyard room without about 30 other inmates, was just absolute fear, because if they would get on you about whatever charge or whatever issue they had with you, or it could not even be about you charges, about the outside world, it could be about some internal politic in that range. And then notes slipped from one range to another range through the access doors could result in you being killed or beaten up severely.
[Neal Conan:] Well, Jack, thanks very much for the call, glad you got out.
[Jack:] Thanks.
[Neal Conan:] And I wanted to ask you, Laura Sullivan, about the lawsuit that was filed on behalf of mentally ill inmates at the federal supermax in Colorado, ADX Florence, earlier this week. And in the past these kinds of lawsuits have not progressed very far in federal court.
[Laura Sullivan, Byline:] No, there have been some lawsuits from inmates who would file on their own behalf, or they would there were a few sporadic lawsuits. They never seem to go very far. But right now you have this lawsuit that you were just talking about in Colorado. You also have a lawsuit in California that has gained a lot of traction. It started off as a lawsuit by a number of inmates who had gone on a hunger strike in Pelican Bay. It has now been picked up by a nonprofit who has filed on their behalf, a very strong lawsuit with lot of experts and documentation, and it's going to be interesting to see how they go, because these lawsuits have gained a lot more traction than we've seen in the past.
[Neal Conan:] Let's see if we can get Leanne on the line, Leanne with us from San Francisco.
[Leanne:] Hi, yes. I was calling just to say that with maximum security, a lot of inmates will actually pretend to be mentally ill just to get in there to it's called oh gosh, I forget what it's called [unintelligible] to up their security level because they are at risk from their fellow inmates. And I think to help reduce that population and I've worked at a number of institutions for a very long time in the state of California is they need to quit overpaying a lot of underworked, lazy officers and redirect that money to programs that actually do go towards rehabilitating inmates. And they say that they do that, but frankly, they don't, and what should really happen too, a lot of times inmates will go in and with the revolving door, the rate of recidivism, it's just it's off the board. And inmates, they'll go in for six months or eight months. They won't let them get into vocational training programs or educational to get their GED or anything like that because they aren't going to be in long enough. And it's just...
[Neal Conan:] And Laura sorry to interrupt, but Laura, I think she's right, those kinds of programs, not just in California, vastly reduced.
[Laura Sullivan, Byline:] The interesting thing that happened, and most experts will point out, that this idea of supermax facilities in California started at the same time that they began eliminating all the rehabilitation programs, all the education, all the extracurricular programs that kept inmates busy. When you took all of that away, you ended up with a pile of inmates with nothing to do all day long, and the gangs took its place. It became the activity. And so then they responded to that with supermax. But the problem was that when the inmates are either trying to come out of supermax or to send them back to regular population, there's no program to help them do that, and there's no programs really in most of California's facilities at this point.
[Neal Conan:] In Illinois this week, Governor Pat Quinn announced the closure of Tamms Correctional Center, the state's only supermax facility. George Welborn, Tamms' first warden, argued in an op-ed in the Newton Press Monitor that the closure could be disastrous. He joins us now by phone from Phoenix. George Welborn, good of you to be with us today.
[George Welborn:] You're more than welcome.
[Neal Conan:] And you wrote in that op-ed piece: Like it or not, Tamms has done exactly what it was intended to do, reduced violence. How does it do that?
[George Welborn:] Well, the Illinois Department of Corrections had an epidemic of violence, late '70s, '80s, and through the early '90s. I worked at the Menard Correctional Center, I was the warden at Menard prior to coming to Tamms, and my last year at Tamms, we were on deadlock for 270 days due basically to gang violence. And at that time we simply did not have a resource to handle the most and we all admit it's a very small proportion of inmates that cause the vast amount of problems. We at that time did not have a mechanism to isolate those relatively few troublemakers. We would send them from one maximum-security prison to another, and they would they were just passing each other on the highway, virtually. Tamms gave up that opportunity, and it has reduced violence. It has reduced staff and inmate assaults, and it certainly we don't see our prisons going on deadlock for 270 days anymore.
[Neal Conan:] Deadlock meaning shutdown, lockdown?
[George Welborn:] Exactly, through violence, yes. You would put the entire two or three thousand inmate population on deadlock because of a few knuckleheads.
[Neal Conan:] And it costs $26 million a year to operate Tamms, as I understand it, and obviously Illinois is in a budget squeeze. Is that the reason it's being closed?
[George Welborn:] Well, that's what it's portrayed at, but I think it's this is a political decision. This is our governor's way to placate his base constituency in Chicago. Like all supermaxes, Tamms has been heavily litigated, and there are many organizations in Chicago who have tried and tried and tried to get Tamms shut down. I think the governor is simply using this as a political process. Yeah, it's going to save $26 million a year, but at what cost? If our maximum-security prisons couldn't handle these type of inmates 10 or 12 years ago, what does the governor think why does he now think that they can?
[Neal Conan:] And what's going to happen to the prisoners who are in Tamms now when it's closed down?
[George Welborn:] They are going to Pontiac Correctional Center and Menard Correctional Center, both of which are terribly overcrowded now. It's a fear among staff at those prisons. It truly is. As I said, Tamms was the mechanism to isolate those people again, those relatively few people who caused the vast amount of problems, staff should be afraid of [unintelligible]. These inmates are dangerous. They're violent. They were violent 10 or 12 years ago. They're violent today.
[Neal Conan:] Walter Dickey, I wanted to bring you back into the conversation. I don't know if you're familiar with the situation in Illinois, but this same kind of principle I'm sure applies in other states.
[Walter Dickey:] Oh, I think it does. And I don't question the judgment that there are violent inmates or dangerous inmates who need to be isolated from the general population from other inmates. I think there definitely are. I think, you know, how many you've got in a particular system is not easy to know, but it's important to try to determine it carefully. And I agree with the warden that separating those inmates from other inmates is important to allow for order and control in the institutions. One thing I'd say is, you know, I think there's great variation amongst the states. Illinois and California are not Wisconsin and are not Kansas, and so this variation in the behavioral problems that are presented in institutions and therefore variations in what numbers of closed custody cells you need and how are those are most widely wisely used. The other thing I'd say, you know, is the point about, you know, they don't have to be brutal and terrible where all that happens is that suffering is inflicted on people. A well-run, professionally run institution, supermax or otherwise shouldn't be engaging in that. I'm not suggesting that Tamms or any other one was. But that doesn't have to be.
[Neal Conan:] And some probably are, and some probably aren't.
[Walter Dickey:] Yeah. I mean, I'd expect so. I, you know, the description of the situation in Pelican Bay is shocking and, I think, very disturbing. And to be sure, we certainly had problems at our supermax in Wisconsin. We had mentally ill prisoners there that shouldn't have been there, and that we tried to get to other places. But there are ways that one can devise to try to create incentives to get out. The people who run the institution should want the people who can function in the general population to get back to the general population and only continue to isolate those who most need it.
[Neal Conan:] That's Walter Dickey, professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, former secretary for corrections for the state of Wisconsin. Also with us is George Welborn, the first warden at Tamms Correctional Center, the Illinois only supermax facility, and NPR investigative reporter Laura Sullivan is with us here in Studio 3A. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And let's see if we can go to this is David. David with us from Salem, Oregon.
[David:] Yes, correct. You sound like Neal Conan.
[Neal Conan:] It is.
[David:] Hi.
[Neal Conan:] Hi.
[David:] Well, I don't know am I on now?
[Neal Conan:] You are.
[David:] Oh, I just want to say my nephew went into a max facility, and he was not in solitary the whole time. But he went in happy-go-lucky, and he came out all my brothers and sisters feel like he's become a zombie. And what little we've been able to get him to speak about is that this is a time of such horrible despair that I believe so strongly that this is an Eighth Amendment violation from hell, and you should do something to repeal get rid of these things all over the country.
[Neal Conan:] Eighth Amendment, of course, bars cruel and unusual punishment. Laura Sullivan, are there any studies done on the psychological effects of supermax conditions?
[Laura Sullivan, Byline:] There's been a lot of work done on this. And study after study after study shows that if you have a psychological condition going into a solitary confinement supermax situation that that condition will be exacerbated by those conditions. And what I saw in Pelican Bay was also that a lot of very psychologically stable people were also having a very difficult time struggling with such unbelievable isolation, to not have human contact in six, seven years. Some of the people in Pelican Bay have been there for almost 30 years. It's hard to understand how you can walk out of that facility and rejoin society 24 hours later.
[Neal Conan:] Let's see if we can get another caller in. This is Austin. Austin is with us from Kansas City.
[Austin:] Hey. How are you guys doing? I just want to comment on a thing. I'm actually we call it SOAR, but it's pretty much like SWAT, special operations and response team in our supermax. And what I just want to touch on is you have all these new kids coming in into prison, into the, you know, supermax, maximum. They want to go to segregation. As soon as they get in, they already know about it. That gains them all kinds of credit inside the prison walls. As soon as they get out, they have much more respect than what they would have if they, you know, just would have been in a normal housing authority.
[Neal Conan:] George Welborn, is that right that some inmates think it's cool to go to supermax?
[George Welborn:] Well, I certainly didn't find that. No, I didn't have we didn't have any inmates in Illinois lining up to go to supermax.
[Neal Conan:] And, Austin, what do you for a during your time, during your day there at the supermax?
[Austin:] I take care of any kind of shakedowns or emergency situations or inmate-on-inmate fights or any your day-to-day serious things.
[Neal Conan:] That's interesting but dangerous work.
[Austin:] Yeah. I mean, it I guess, I'm going to retract my comments to say it's not cool. But if you want to survive and you're 20, 21 years old, that's how you're going to in my opinion, that's how you're going to do it.
[Neal Conan:] All right.
[Austin:] And talking to inmates every day that that's their plan.
[Neal Conan:] All right. Thanks very much for the call...
[Austin:] All right.
[Neal Conan:] ...and be careful, OK?
[Austin:] Yup. Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] And, Laura Sullivan, these lawsuits, the budget pressure on many states and indeed on the federal government too, is there any as we look at the trend, do you think that this is going to be swinging back the other way?
[Laura Sullivan, Byline:] Well, it costs about $60,000 more per inmate per year to put an inmate into solitary confinement or supermax compared to general population. So there's a huge argument that you could spend that money on programs and rehabilitation and education and take an inmate who would have joined a gang or would have caused problems and instead redirect that inmate with that money into something more positive that they could do later on for society when they get out of prison. So that seems to be the direction that we're headed now and but, you know, it depends on the crime trends.
[Neal Conan:] Laura Sullivan, thanks very much for your time today. Our thanks as well to Walter Dickey at the University of Wisconsin and George Welborn, the former warden at Tamms Correctional Center. And, gentlemen, thank you very much for your time today.
[Walter Dickey:] You're welcome.
[George Welborn:] You're welcome.
[Neal Conan:] When we come back, the last in our series of Silverdocs films. Today, the often violent oppression of gays in Uganda. The film is called "Call Me Kuchu." Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] A man who allegedly killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue has been charged. And he's being investigated for hate crimes. The alleged shooter had numerous posts on social media trafficking in conspiracy theories about prominent Jewish figures. And according to law enforcement, he shouted anti-Semitic slurs when he opened fire on the congregation. And while this might be the deadliest attack on a Jewish target, it is not the only recent one. According to our next guest, anti-Semitic attacks have spiked over the past two years. George Selim is senior vice president for programs with the Anti-Defamation League. Thank you so much for joining us in the studio today.
[George Selim:] Good morning, Lulu. Thanks for having me.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] First, my condolences.
[George Selim:] Thank you.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] This is an incredibly painful moment, I know, for the community. Can you tell me your thoughts about what happened?
[George Selim:] Yeah. And just before I do that, I just want to express the most heartfelt and sincere condolences to the Jewish community, not just in the greater Pittsburgh area but really across the globe that is collectively mourning and suffering this morning.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Of course so what is your reaction to this?
[George Selim:] So what we see here is really the result of a very tragic and unfortunate pattern and trend of the rise of extremism and anti-Semitism over the past several years. In calendar year 2017, we saw the largest single increase of anti-Semitic incidents in recent times. We saw nearly a 60 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in 2017 over the previous year, 2016. In addition, we saw nearly a 90 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in K-12 classrooms in schools across the United States.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Before we get to why you think this is happening, when you say anti-Semitic incidents, what are you discussing?
[George Selim:] When we're talking about an anti-Semitic incident at a school, in a classroom, in a K-12, it's everything from the scrawling of a swastika on a bathroom wall to instances in most recently in a Western state, where a student made very callous and cold references related to the death of Jews in the Holocaust as part of a Valentine's Day project. And so it really takes all different shapes and forms. Just three weeks ago here in Northern Virginia, I was at the Jewish Community Center in Fairfax where 19 swastikas were spray-painted on the side of, really, a community center where people come to exercise and hold community-based events. So it really takes all forms.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Why do you think this is happening now?
[George Selim:] I think a couple things. In recent years, there has been a normalization of hate and extremism both online and offline. The normalization of rhetoric and from the highest levels of retweets of individuals like David Duke, from posts and restatements that are associated with white nationalists in this country has almost become normal or part of a global discourse. In addition to that, the political divide in this country has become so toxic and, when combined with the normalization of this type of hate speech and anti-Semitism, has really led to a volatile atmosphere that we've seen play out just in the past week.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Also this week, a bomb was delivered to the home of George Soros, who is also Jewish. We've seen a lot of trafficking of conspiracy theories about him on mainstream conservative TV news, like Fox, even.
[George Selim:] Correct and, in fact, ADL recently released some reporting that goes back and tracks a lot of the conspiracy theories. And they have their roots in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, as well. This is something that we've unfortunately seen play out both in the offline and online spaces. Some of the most vitriolic anti-Semitic attacks against Soros and others have really come out in the past year or two. And it's something that the ADL will remain constant and vigilant in combating on a day in and day out basis.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] We should also say this shooter was also trafficking in these conspiracy theories. He apparently believed that the caravan coming from Central America, which has been repeatedly discussed by the president and others, was being sponsored by Jewish organizations.
[George Selim:] Correct. One of the Jewish organizations that was mentioned in some of his posts was HIAS, an organization that does tremendous work on refugees and asylees, as well as the Anti-Defamation League. I mean, there were several posts and comments in his open-source social media. There were many victims in this case that were in Pittsburgh and beyond. And it's up to us as a global community of citizens and organizations to remain vigilant and push back against all forms of anti-Semitism, discrimination and bigotry. And we're committed to doing so.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] George Selim, senior vice president for programs of the Anti-Defamation League, thank you so much for coming in.
[George Selim:] Thank you.

[Ira Flatow:] You're listening to SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. When you hear the words bisexual, transsexual or even asexual, I'm betting that lizards or deer or dolphin are probably not on your mind. But sexual variety plays a big role in the animal kingdom, and animal mating behaviors are a lot weirder, a lot weirder than you might think. And if you're not convinced now, you might be after watching the videos made by my next guest, model, actress and filmmaker Isabella Rossellini, who has turned biology into art. Her Web series, "Seduce Me" and "Green Porno," they're short films, a series of short films, on the mating and courtship of animals. It's about the birds and the bees and also the spiders, the cuttlefish, the ducks and even bedbugs, yeah. But this isn't your average educational video. In the film, Rossellini is costumed, and she acts out acts as the creatures from across the animal kingdom, and her co-stars are bright paper props and cutouts. The videos have been a huge hit on the Internet. So if you haven't seen them, surf over to the sundancechannel.com, sundancechannel.com, and you can watch them from there. You can also go to our website at sciencefriday.com.
[A Warning:] We'll be talking about some PG-13-level biology here. So if you have any young animals listening, you might want to put them back into their crates. Isabella Rossellini is a writer, director, star of "Seduce Me" and "Green Porno." Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Oh, thank you for having me.
[Ira Flatow:] How many science shows have you been on so far?
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Not too many. We were delighted when my first series came out, "Green Porno," that I was in the same week interviewed by Playboy and Science magazine.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow, wow. That's got to be the first time for that, I'll bet. How did you come up with the idea? I'm sure everybody wants to know that first.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Yes, well, it was a combination I personally always loved animals, and so I always read about animals, especially animal behavior and occasionally took courses on biology and zoology. I live in the country. I'm a bird-watcher, an oyster-raiser. You know, I'll do anything that raise dogs for the blind as a volunteer. So, you know, that has been always an interest in my life. I have collaborated with the Sundance Channel, and Robert Redford, who is at the head of it all, had the idea to make a series of short films specifically for the Internet. Now, we did it three years ago, still this question of what is the life of the internet. It's just a recycling bin of what's in television or things specifically to the Internet will be produced by companies such as the Sundance Channel? So he wanted to re-do the sundancechannel.com just as something different. But he thought that short films and also he reminded me that if you work for the Internet, short small screens are also something to take into consideration. And so that gave me the idea of doing these very colorful costumes.
[Ira Flatow:] Beautiful.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Yes, with because I had a friend, two friends, Rick Gilbert and Andy Byers, who are marvelous artists with paper. And so they created the sort of origami, very complex paper sculptures for my film.
[Ira Flatow:] And you star in them. You produce them. You write them. And just to give our audience a flavor of what we're talking about, so we can talk about them a little bit more, we have a clip from one of your episodes. And before we play it, tell us this one is about the spider. Tell us what's going on in this one?
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Oh, the spiders. They are so when you say spiders, we all have in mind one, but we also know that there are many spiders, and each one of us knows because they've seen small spider, big spider, colorful spider, hairy spiders. There are so many spiders, and their rituals, their mating rituals, their courtship ritual, can be very, very different. But a friend of mine, who is actually a specialist of spider, said you can make a difference between two wide categories: the spiders that don't see very well, in spite of the fact that they have many eyes, would rely very much on smell and vibration; but the ones that see very well, those are the spiders that would be very colorful, and they see beyond the range we see. And so I tried to portray this in the film that now you're going to hear.
[Ira Flatow:] Well, here and it comes across very well, also, but it's such a gorgeous film. Unfortunately, we only have the sound for it. But it's still incredibly beautiful to listen to.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Some spiders don't see very well, like the stegathis leniatis. If the male plays my web well, like a cello, I can be seduced. My web is vibrating. Is it a love message, or did I catch a fly? Oh, it's a serenade. Come on, my little husband. Don't be afraid. I wouldn't eat you. Come on, let's make love.
[Ira Flatow:] And of course, you watch it on the sundancechannel.com, you get to see the beautiful costuming and whatever.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Yes. Most of the time, the female spiders are very big and very aggressive. So the male spider has to have all different sort of strategies not to be taken for a fly or, you know, and eaten.
[Ira Flatow:] And how did you decide which one in the animal kingdom you were going to choose?
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] I think the varieties, you know, that's what I wanted, it was not only to do animals that were only mammals. In fact, I think there's one or two mammals. But I wanted to do animals that are hermaphrodite. There are animals that have both sexes. There are animal that reproduce asexually just by cloning themselves. There are animals, such as fish, that change sex during their life. They are born male, but they will change sex and become female as they grow older or vice versa. And all this seemed very fascinating. So I made these categories of animals, and then according to the science I understood, and according to how beautiful we can portray these animals with our paper sculptures, that was the ultimate decision. But the first sorting out is diversity.
[Ira Flatow:] Right. 1-800-989-8255 is our number, if you'd like to talk to Isabella Rossellini about her animal portrayals on the website at the sundancechannel.com, "Green Porno" and "Seduce Me." One followed the next year, but I guess they wanted to change the name a little bit from year one to year two.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Well, when the Sundance Channel really commissions me groups of seven to 10 films. They are about a minute and a half each. And the first group we did were under the name of "Green Porno" because the Sundance Channel had so many programs about green green house, green food, green transportation. So it was obviously that mine would be called "Green Porno." They were immensely successful on the Internet. We won five Webbies, which is the big award for the Webs.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] And sponsors solicited us. But they couldn't have the name porno. So then we did a whole new series, very similar to "Green Porno," what we called "Seduce Me" but that really concentrated more on the seductive strategies rather than the mating. And this is the new series that is out on the Web right now.
[Ira Flatow:] Did you find that you had to research about these topics?
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Oh yes.
[Ira Flatow:] Who did you consult with, any one group in particular?
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] The first time I did them, anytime I called any scientist, and I would say I'm making a short film called "Green Porno," blink, the phone came down. But the interview that I've done, actually, with the journalist from Science magazine his name is John Bohannon he became a very good fan and friend, and "Seduce Me" I wrote with him. Which was tremendously useful, because I didn't have to do this massive research. I've always had a little bit of the doubt because, I mean, I've taken courses, and I'm an animal lover, but I am not a scientist. So it's wonderful to have the support of two major scientists, John, who is a genetic biologist, and a marine biologist called Claudio Campagna.
[Ira Flatow:] And let's get a flavor of another one. Let's see if we can listen to another one, and this one is the praying mantis. Tell us a little bit about the mating rituals.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] The praying mantis...
[Ira Flatow:] Oh, we don't have the praying mantis one? Tell us anyhow about it.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] I'll tell you because it's terrible. The female, while she's being made love, she eats up the male, a cannibal. It's one of the worst.
[Ira Flatow:] It's tough for men to watch that one. We do have the one, which is in the news a lot, the one about the bedbugs.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Yes, one is a big news because in New York, it's infestated by bedbugs, and Jon Stewart took my little episode and made fun of it but in a very charming and very wonderful way until "Bedbug," my film, went viral on the Net. So it was a big success for us.
[Ira Flatow:] All right, let's listen to a little bit about the bedbug.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Bedbugs have penises like knives. Females don't need any genitals to mate. Zap. Chase me. Mate with me. Seduce me. So strong and sharp.
[Ira Flatow:] Wow. A little risk, you took a little risk on that one.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] You took a little risk, but it is surprising because of all the animals that I've read, especially if there are two sexes, male and female, one way to know which one is male and which one is female is by their sexual characteristic. But the female bedbug doesn't have any genitals at all, and the male penetrates her and leaves his sperm in the wound and she has a blood system, a circulatory system, that would carry the sperm to the ovaries. But she doesn't have an organ to collect the sperm.
[Ira Flatow:] Right. Wow.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] It's extraordinary.
[Ira Flatow:] I would think that these were perfect teaching materials for schools, you know...
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Well, you know...
[Ira Flatow:] ...who want to get their kids just you know, because it has that age to it, and yet it has the educational value.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Well, they were meant to be entertainment.
[Ira Flatow:] They certainly are. Yeah.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] They were meant to be fun. And I'm glad that you say they are fun. But I do also want people to say to laugh and then say, ah, I didn't know that. My son, who is 17, is a big fan and actually appears in some of the film, or has helped me when we created the film, brought them to school. And his science teacher adopted it, and then other science teacher out of that. So I do know about four or five teachers that are using it as material, at least for teenagers in, you know, in high school.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. And do you have another series anticipated?
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Right now we don't have another series anticipating. I'm just finished with this one. But I have collaborated with Sundance so many years. And I'm sure we'll think of something next to do together.
[Ira Flatow:] All right. Let's go Jim in Mountain View, California. Hi, Jim.
[Jim:] Hi. How are you guys doing?
[Ira Flatow:] How are you?
[Jim:] I'm doing fine. Thank you very much.
[Ira Flatow:] Go ahead.
[Jim:] Yes. I just wanted to say, I don't have any questions here. But, you know, I remember when I was 10 years, I was a huge fan of Senora Rossellini's mother, Ingrid Bergman, you know. And then when she passed away, I was I mean, my whole family, they were so sad.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Oh, so sweet.
[Jim:] And we really miss her, miss her very much.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Oh, that is so kind of you.
[Jim:] And when I saw Senora Rossellini for the first time, you know, she exactly reminds us from her mother, you know. I mean, she I dont know. Every time I see her, I see Ingrid, you know. I mean, this is this is incredible.
[Ira Flatow:] All right.
[Jim:] And I just called to say, you know, I dream to someday, somewhere, I could see Senora Rossellini and just shake her hand, kiss her hand, actually, [unintelligible] a huge fan of her.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Thank you so much. You're just so kind.
[Jim:] And I hope everything good for you, happiness.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] For you too. Happy holidays too.
[Ira Flatow:] Thank you. The next best thing is to go to the sundancechannel.com and watch these videos, because she does look just like her mother. I'm sitting here thinking...
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Well, I have to explain. You know, my mom...
[Ira Flatow:] Let me remind everybody that this is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. I'm Ira Flatow with Isabella Rossellini. I'm sorry to have to interrupt you. Go ahead. About your mom, you're going to tell...
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Oh, no. I was just saying, my mom is Ingrid Bergman, an actress that unfortunately died many years ago. But she was very known for films like "Casablanca" or "Notorious." She had a huge career in Hollywood, but she was Swedish. I am half Swedish, half Italian, and delighted that people still remember her and are so attached. And we do look very similar, my mom and I.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. It's true. One of the NPR folks love Italian names. In fact, NPR has I'm not going to say her name because thousands of people will want to hear who she is. There's a reporter in Italy that NPR has. And we have a lot of fun with her name. So I just so you're going to finish up this series and...
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] This series is finished. We've done 28 episodes on animal courtship and animal sex. It could be you know, these films, they were very successful. But they were really thought to be an experiment on format for the Internet. So it's up to Sundance to see if this format has been successful. So far it has been successful. Will they continue? It's all part of the new talk about...
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] ...what is the destiny of the Internet. It seems to be changing every day. And also how to monetize the Internet...
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] ...because we expect everything from the Internet to come in free, and that's one of the problem of producing.
[Ira Flatow:] So why aren't more people doing these short form, small budget films?
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Because the Internet has not found a way to monetize it. So artists, you know [unintelligible] the money because Sundance locates some money to experiment.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] But if you do a film, you get the money back because you sell the ticket. If you do a film for television, you have advertisers or you have cable, so you pay monthly installment.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] The Internet is for free. Of course you pay installment every month to get a signal, but none of this money goes back to the artist. And that's why it's very difficult to create a Web industry...
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] ...that makes film.
[Ira Flatow:] Do you think this is a new business for you? Is this something new...
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] It's a new business for me to be a filmmaker.
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] But in fact, my next project is with Discovery Channel, but it's a much more traditional format, an hour-long special television, which is, again, about animal. It's called "Animal, Distract Me." And they will probably have a component for the Internet. But this was specifically thought out to create a viable business...
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] ...for the Internet.
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm. 1-800-989-8255. Some of you people want to know the Italian name. I'm thinking, of course, of Sylvia Poggioli... ...who is such a popular name on NPR located in Italy for so many years. She gets more mail because of her name. 1-800-989-8255 is our number. Do you did you have any agenda? People want to say, why suddenly are you going to do something like this? Do you have some social message? Do you have an agenda? Or is this just something you found fun to be?
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Well, you know, I think the agenda was to experiment in film. I always loved experimenting in film. And also as an actress I think you can see that I make more independent film...
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] ...whether I work with David Lynch in "Blue Velvet" or Guy Maddin in "The Saddest Music in the World," that my personal taste tends to be on experimental filmmaking. I found that to be creative and...
[Ira Flatow:] So you're a risk taker.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] But I don't see it as risk taking...
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] I find actually that if you have to be very successful and maintain that success, that's very risky, you know, to make a film that it is 80 million, 100 million dollar...
[Ira Flatow:] Mm-hmm.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] ...and really make sure that people like it and that you get the money back, it seems to be a much higher risk than do a small, less expensive film that are experimental. And if they don't go well, it's okay. You know, nobody loses their homes or...
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] ...loses money.
[Ira Flatow:] Well...
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] So I prefer I find it all very light and wonderful to be experimental.
[Ira Flatow:] Well, we wish you great luck, and we thank you for your taking us they're wonderful films.
[Ms. Isabella Rossellini:] Thank you very much.
[Ira Flatow:] And I wish everybody would take a look. Isabella Rossellini, writer, director and star of "Green Porno" and "Seduce Me." That's on the Sundance Channel. Also you can see it at the Sciencefriday.com arts fair. We'll send you over to there. We have to take a break. We'll be right back. Don't go away. I'm Ira Flatow. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR.

[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] We're joined now in the studio by Paul Wolfowitz. He was deputy secretary of defense under George W. Bush, and he is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Welcome, sir, the program.
[Paul Wolfowitz:] Good morning, nice to be here.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] You wrote an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal calling on President Trump to back up his tough talk on Syria with action. How satisfied are you with the U.S. airstrikes he ordered?
[Paul Wolfowitz:] I think it was impressive, some people might say surprisingly impressive. But it was for a brand-new administration, it was to put it all together that quickly and to do it that well, I think, is something to be very pleased as an American. It was limited and proportional, but nevertheless, it was strong and sent a very, very strong message. They did it without U.S. ground troops and with no U.S. military casualties, which is very important. But I think what also may be the most important thing in all of this is that when the U.S. acts decisively, it changes the way everybody thinks. Our enemies suddenly become more cautious or even think about how to cooperate. Our friends become stronger and more willing to support us. I think we saw that many years ago when George H.W. Bush declared that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait would not stand. That sent a message to the whole Middle East that here was a president of the United States who was going to stand up and get something done.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] So you think this sends a message. But what should happen next, if anything, in your view?
[Paul Wolfowitz:] Well, I'm sure they have many ideas. I don't think they need a lot of speculation from me. But what I would say is this, that because of the change in attitudes, which is really very striking, we have, not surprisingly, our European allies stepping up and praising us; our Asian allies, also. Even in Iraq, you have senior political leaders calling for Assad to resign. I think the Russians have started to back away from that ridiculous claim that they were supporting of the Syrians, that this was a rebel poison factory that was attacked.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] So should Bashar al-Assad be removed from office, though? I mean, should this go further?
[Paul Wolfowitz:] Look, we're in early stages. I think what we have are opportunities, opportunities particularly on the diplomatic front. People will do things now that they weren't ready to support before. And I think the goal should be something that ends this humanitarian disaster that is Syria that stems the refugee flow and that...
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] But what exactly, more military action or diplomacy?
[Paul Wolfowitz:] I just finished saying diplomatic action would be the my first preference. The thing is now when you go to diplomacy, people know that you have something behind it. And if diplomacy doesn't work, there are other things that can happen. And I think that's important, and I think look, personally, I believe that if you want to get peace in Syria, you can't leave Assad in power. On the other hand, you have to somehow reassure I'm sure there are millions of Syrians who are afraid of what happens to them if Assad leaves, particularly some of the minorities. So it's going to be, going forward, a very, very complicated and difficult negotiation, but at least we've set a framework where something can happen. I would say in some ways it reminds me of 1995 in Bosnia. After three years of dithering by both U.S. administrations, President Clinton finally took military action that opened the door to a Dayton Agreement. You couldn't have said right after that military action what shape the agreement would take. That's diplomacy. It's unpredictable. But I think it doesn't happen without leverage, and we now have leverage.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] I mean, obviously, we have to bring up Iraq and the aftermath of the Iraq War, which was extremely chaotic. We're still feeling the effects now. If there is more military action, if Assad is removed from power, who would fill that vacuum? It's a very complicated situation in Syria right now.
[Paul Wolfowitz:] Look, if you'd asked who was going to fill the vacuum in Bosnia 20 years ago, no one could have predicted it. I think it's something to be negotiated by Syrians, not put together by the U.S. proconsul. That's certainly not what we're after in Syria. And that vacuum in Syria is part of what created the revival of radical extremists in Iraq. And I think the Iraqis understand that. So that may explain why you have even Iraqi Shia leaders ready to support something different, hopefully recognizing that Iran is not their friend in all of this, that Iran has helped to destabilize Iraq by opening up Syria.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] I'm curious you said on this network about the Iraq War that we went into Iraq because we believed Saddam Hussein was dangerous, not because we believed we needed to go to war to install a democracy in Iraq. Applying that to Syria, is Assad, do you think, dangerous to American interests?
[Paul Wolfowitz:] I do. I think anybody who uses chemical weapons against his own people is dangerous because he may use them against other people. And I think the example of violating not one, not two, but I think by now three different agreements on chemical weapons, if he gets away with that, that's a very, very bad message for the ugly dictator in North Korea, for example, and other people around the world who may think chemical weapons will give them an advantage.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] Former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, thanks so much for coming in.
[Paul Wolfowitz:] Thank you.

[Steve Inskeep:] People in Western capitals are also waiting for al-Qaida to crack. Last month, when the Obama administration killed radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, they heralded a fatal drone attack as a great success for counterterrorism. But there are increasing questions about whether his death will have any real impact on the al-Qaida affiliate to which he belonged. NPR's Jackie Northam reports.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] On September 30, U.S. forces targeted and killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American with Yemeni roots, as he was traveling in a convoy through a mountainous area of eastern Yemen. Awlaki had been on the U.S. capture or kill list for more than a year. Intelligence officials deemed he was working with al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP, one of the deadliest al-Qaida affiliates. Awlaki was a high-profile figure, an influential orator who American officials say had become more involved in the operational side of AQAP. Still, it's unlikely his death will have a major impact on the group's operations, says Jenna Jordan with the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. She's studied about 300 cases of targeted operations against terrorist leaders.
[Jenna Jordan:] What I found is that certain types of organizations tend to be very resilient to having their leaders removed, so, large organizations, particularly older organizations, certain types of organizations. So religious groups and separatist groups tend to be the most resilient, with religious groups really being the most resilient.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] Gabriel Koehler-Derrick, an instructor in the Social Sciences department at West Point, says there is a lot of debate within the terrorism studies field over the so-called decapitation strategy, which says if you remove the leader, the group will collapse. Koehler-Derrick edited a year-long study looking at AQAP and Yemen by the military academy's Center for Combating Terrorism. He says the decapitation strategy applies in Yemen, because the leadership of AQAP is critical to the group's survival.
[Gabriel Koehler-derrick:] We identified AQAP's Yemeni leadership specifically in the report as source of resiliency for the organization. In our estimation, it's really these local leaders who have kept the group from making broader strategic mistakes and avoiding the pitfalls that have proved the undoing of so many other al-Qaida affiliates. So we do place special emphasis on the role of the group's leadership.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] The leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula is Nasir al-Wahayshi, a Yemeni national who's believed to have once served as secretary to Osama bin Laden. The Combating Terrorism Center's report on Yemen and AQAP says al-Wahayshi and his deputy, Abdullah al-Rimi, maintain rigid organizational discipline, and keep up a strong drumbeat against America and the Yemeni government. But Koehler-Derrick says while AQAP's leadership is its strength, it may also be its biggest weakness because it would be hard to replace. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: It is believed that Abdullah al-Rami has been killed and that his brother, Qasim a-Rami, has replaced him as Nasir al-Wahayshi's deputy.]
[Gabriel Koehler-derrick:] There may be somebody else who steps up and is as capable as them. But it seems highly unlikely that they would find somebody of the quality of al-Wahayshi and al-Rimi on such short notice.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] Christopher Boucek, a Yemen expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says while al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula is still capable and determined to launch attacks against the U.S., it's under intense pressure now.
[Christopher Boucek:] That's because the Americans are putting a lot of pressure on Yemen, the AQAP. The Yemenis are being much more proactive. They're being more active in fighting terrorism, and I think the group is feeling the strain and the pressure. And knowing that the Americans can reach out and do these kind of operations has to strike fear into some of these operatives.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] But Boucek warns there is so much that terrorism watchers don't know, because it's difficult to get intelligence from the remote areas of Yemen, where AQAP is based. Jackie Northam, NPR News, Washington.

[Alex Chadwick:] Most of us wish we were better at handling our finances. Some people have the problem of having money to invest but no clear idea of how to go about it. You think maybe a financial expert could help, but how do you find one, who do you turn to? Here to help with this is Michelle Singletary, a regular DAY TO DAY contributor. Michelle, what is the first thing you should do when you are trying to find a financial advisor?
[Michelle Singletary:] This is a case where you really ought to consult friends and family members. If you go to church ask around there. In my case, I actually found my planner because I went to an investment seminar and there was a financial planner there. And I interviewed her loved her to death and she has been my planner for the last several years. I have since recommended her to several people.
[Alex Chadwick:] Wait, you are a financial you're our financial guru you tell me you use a financial planner?
[Michelle Singletary:] I do, because my husband and I got to the point where you know we were doing all the right things you are supposed to, putting money in retirement funds, saving for our kids college. But we wanted to have someone sort of second guess us, in a way, to make sure we were on the right track.
[Alex Chadwick:] Okay, well even you need help with this. Then when you began to talk to this financial advisor, what kind of questions did you ask in order to figure out okay this is the right person for me?
[Michelle Singletary:] You want to ask them about their experience, how long have they been a financial planner? If they have a certain credential, you want to double check that they actually have that credential. Believe it or not people will tell you they are a certified financial planner and they don't have the credential to back it up. So you want to ask them what kind of credentials do you have, what are your qualifications, what services do you offer?
[Alex Chadwick:] What would be a normal fee do you think?
[Michelle Singletary:] It depends on how the planner is paid. There are planners who get paid by a combination of fee and commission, so they may get a commission on some of the products they sale and then you pay them a fee. Or, you can get a planner that is just commission-based, and they earn their money based on the products that you buy. And if you just want someone to look over a plan that you already have, then you want to do a fee only. Depending on what area you live, you can expect to pay a $100 to $200 an hour.
[Alex Chadwick:] Michelle, tell me one piece of advice that you perhaps could recall that you got from your financial planner, and when you heard this piece of advise you said, okay, it's worth whatever I'm paying for this because this person has made me see something new, or made me realize something, or maybe even made me some more money.
[Michelle Singletary:] You know, that is such a great question. For example, I wasn't taking enough risk in 401K plan. I am just risk averse. And I had a lot of money put in bonds, where I should have been more diversified. And she looked at my plan and she said, you know you need to put some more in small Caps that's like companies that are small. And so what she did what she looked at my 401K allocations and rearranged it so that I was more balanced. And I'm telling you since she has done that my 401K plan has earned a lot more because I was being too conservative. Now here is the thing, whatever a planner tells you, you need to do a little research to make sure it is still good for you. Because as good as any planner is, there are not perfect. And so anytime she tells me something, I go back and I do a little research to make sure it is appropriate for me.
[Alex Chadwick:] Michelle Singletary DAY TO DAY'S Personal Finance Expert, her latest book is Your Money and Your Man: How You and Prince Charming Can Spend Well and Live Rich. Michelle, thank you.
[Michelle Singletary:] You're welcome.
[Alex Chadwick:] And dear listeners, if you have a money question Michelle would like to hear it. Go to our Web site, npr.org. Click on the contact us link that is found at the top of every page and please be sure to include Michelle in your subject line. And there is more to come on DAY TO DAY from NPR News.

[Renee Montagne:] The Pentagon has announced that a U.S. airstrike killed one of the leaders of a shadowy al-Qaida cell known as the Khorasan group. The group is made up of about two dozen veteran operatives who were allegedly sent to Syria by the leader of al-Qaida to plan attacks against the West. NPR's Dina Temple-Raston reports that while ISIS is getting most of the headlines these days, al-Qaida appears to be organizing behind the scenes.
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] For years now, some of al-Qaida's most seasoned operatives have been living in Iran. Osama bin Laden sent his family there right after the 911 attacks, and his closest confidants went with them. That is, until recently when al-Qaida's leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri started moving these key people back out onto the battlefield.
[Bruce Hoffman:] It sounds completely counterintuitive, but al-Qaida's been living large.
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] Bruce Hoffman is the head of the National Security Program at Georgetown University.
[Bruce Hoffman:] They're letting, strategically, ISIS take all the heat, galvanize everyone's attention and they are, meanwhile, replenishing their ranks, growing and, I would argue, husbanding their resources for what they see as the next phase of the struggle.
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] One of the people who was supposed to help al-Qaida with that next phase was the Saudi man the Pentagon said it killed in an airstrike in Syria. His name was Sanafi al-Nasr, and he'd been funneling money and recruits to al-Qaida from Iran for more than a decade. He's thought to have shown up in Syria late last year. Zawahiri also enlisted another man who's better known. He's bin Laden's youngest son, Hamza bin Laden. He and Zawahiri appeared together in an audiotape back in August. Georgetown's Hoffman said it was a PR move.
[Bruce Hoffman:] Of course, with Hamza bin Laden, you have the best possible brand you could imagine. You have supposedly bin Laden's chosen heir.
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] A chosen heir whom Zawahiri appears to be grooming for a prominent position in today's or maybe tomorrow's core al-Qaida leadership. Intelligence officials say Zawahiri is also starting to move key people into Afghanistan and Pakistan, among them a former Egyptian army officer named Saif al-Adel.
[Seth Jones:] Saif al-Adel is a very important, strategic figure in al-Qaida.
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] That's Seth Jones. He's the director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the RAND Corporation.
[Seth Jones:] He's got a historical relationship with Ayman al-Zawahiri and he certainly did with Osama bin Laden and is someone whose credentials and charisma would help.
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] Help al-Qaida get back on its feet after a relentless drone campaign that hollowed out its leadership and help the group in its competition with ISIS. So now it appears al-Qaida's leadership is calling on people who are closely identified with the group's heyday, like bin Laden's son and one of its most popular operatives. RAND's Seth Jones says this falls into the group's pattern.
[Seth Jones:] We look at snapshots when we look at al-Qaida. Some years, they're strengthening, and some years, they're weakening. But they have always been able to come back if given the opportunity.
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] Which may explain why the U.S. has been so focused on al-Qaida's Khorasan group in Syria. Five of the group's key members have been killed in the past four months. In addition to this weekend's announced death, which al-Qaida has not yet confirmed, the U.S. said it killed the group's founder in northwestern Syria in July. Days later, an allied airstrike near Aleppo killed a French citizen, an explosives expert, who'd been a key member of the group. The problem, says Georgetown's Bruce Hoffman, is that al-Qaida keeps finding new people to fill those vacancies.
[Bruce Hoffman:] The bottom line is that al-Qaida has just always had a much deeper bench than we've ever imagined, and it has constantly been able to reinvent itself.
[Dina Temple-raston, Byline:] Which is why Hoffman says it still presents a significant threat and could still find a place in a post-ISIS world. Dina Temple-Raston, NPR News.

[Debbie Elliott:] All along the Gulf Coast, thousands of storm victims have moved into tiny white trailer homes provided by FEMA. The big exception is New Orleans. Officials there complain they can't bring people back home because there aren't enough trailers. But as NPR's Martin Kaste reports, that might not be the real problem. MARTIN KASTE reporting Most of the houses in the Lower Ninth Ward are still coated in black muck. Helen Walker is part of a group of residents allowed in just to retrieve personal effects. Despite the bleak landscape, she says she can't wait to move back.
[Ms. Helen Walker:] I've tried to get a trailer. They told me about a month and a half ago that I was going to get a trailer. OK? I didn't get a trailer.
[Kaste:] So far there are only a few hundred occupied FEMA trailers in all of New Orleans, and most of those have been set up for employees of the city and local industries. City Council member Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, who represents part of the Ninth Ward, says the city needs more trailers for the general population and fast.
[Ms. Cynthia Hedge-morrell:] They want to come back. You take someone who's 70, 80 years old and you're telling them, `You got to wait three to five years to come back,'you just killed their spirit.
[Kaste:] Morrell and other council members have been complaining to FEMA for weeks about the lack of trailers, but FEMA spokesman James McIntyre says there is no shortage.
[Mr. James Mc Intyre:] We have more than 12,000 units on hand, and our manufacturers are developing those and delivering them at a rate of more than 500 a day. So we can meet the need.
[Kaste:] The problem, he says, is that the city hasn't prepared enough sites to take the trailers. Too many front yards are still cluttered with debris, and most of the properties still don't have reliable electric and water hookups, or if they do, they haven't been inspected yet. The city has only six electrical inspectors with tens of thousands of properties to go. The bottleneck infuriates local attorney Steven Randeau, who's come to City Hall to plead for more inspectors.
[Mr. Steven Randeau:] As it stands right now, unless the federal government hires private entities from outside of this circle, this city is doomed.
[Kaste:] But his suggestion that the city hire private contractors gets a chilly reception from City Council members, who say New Orleans' own inspectors are on top of the job. Despite all the problems getting individual sites ready, there is another way to bring in more trailers. FEMA has been building group sites, where dozens of trailers can share water and power. But this strategy is also hitting snags, such as Kathleen Fisher, who runs out in front of a moving backhoe to confront the site foreman.
[Ms. Kathleen Fisher:] OK. So this now is-the work is stopping right now.
[Mr. Michael Blanc:] As of right now.
[Ms. Kathleen Fisher:] OK.
[Kaste:] Fisher doesn't like the fact that this trailer site is being built in her neighborhood park, and she's just managed to convince the City Council to stop the project. She explains to the foreman, Michael Blanc, that she's not opposed to trailer parks in theory.
[Ms. Kathleen Fisher:] Well, I hope you all do...
[Mr. Blanc:] That's all I know. I mean...
[Ms. Kathleen Fisher:] I hope you do a lot more work here...
[Mr. Blanc:] I'm just trying to help the people.
[Ms. Kathleen Fisher:] ...but not here.
[Mr. Blanc:] Well, we just trying to help the people, ma'am.
[Ms. Kathleen Fisher:] Good. Me, too. I'm helping my city.
[Kaste:] Twenty orange-vested workers stand beside the utility ditch that they've just dug watching the backhoe fill it back in. Their perplexity is shared by FEMA staff. During the course of one City Council meeting, the FEMA representative was first scolded for not delivering trailers fast enough and then berated for building group trailer sites in city parks, locations that had been OK'd by the mayor's office. The `Not-in-my-backyard'feeling has spread to neighboring communities, too.
[Unidentified Man:] All right.
[Kaste:] Just across the river in Jefferson Parish, FEMA's finishing a site with 181 neat, white trailers. Workers are pouring in concrete for the mailboxes. Contractor Ronnie Frank says he's glad storm victims will soon have real addresses again.
[Mr. Ronnie Frank:] I'm telling you, with the way the mail is running now, it'll be a blessing for them to have one place where they can receive it, you know.
[Kaste:] But just over the fence, Johnny Henderson doesn't like the prospect of so many New Orleanians with addresses so close to his.
[Mr. Johnny Henderson:] I don't know. I mean, I don't have no problem with the good folks who want somewhere to live. But they go some trash, and they going to come over here with their parents or their girlfriends and they going to come over here and they going to bring their low life right over here, too.
[Kaste:] Henderson's view was echoed at a raucous public meeting earlier this week, in which Jefferson Parish residents made it clear that they did not want trailer camps filled with New Orleanians.
[Mr. Johnny Henderson:] Put it where it come from. Clean out their area and put them on their property.
[Kaste:] And Jefferson Parish officials are listening. Parish council member Byron Lee told FEMA to take out half the trailers from the site and to give preference to storm victims from Jefferson Parish. FEMA made no promises in part because picking and choosing residents this way may violate federal housing laws. But it has become clear that some of the greatest obstacles to repopulating New Orleans are homegrown. Martin Kaste, NPR News, New Orleans.
[Debbie Elliott:] You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.

[Scott Simon:] I'm Scott Simon. I wait for this all week. Time for sports. It's Labor Day weekend, the hard courts of Flushing Meadows, the weary outfields across the country. As we head into the final weeks of baseball, we're joined now by our own Howard Bryant from the open fields of New England. Howard, thanks for being with us.
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] How are you, Scott?
[Scott Simon:] Im fine, thanks. Week One of the U.S. Open. Venus Williams and Rafael Nadal powered through their matches last night.
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] Yes.
[Scott Simon:] There were some upsets earlier. Let me ask you. Andy Roddick... But you know, John McEnroe had a temper but he kind of used it to put himself over. Did Andy Roddick lose this match because he didnt know how to control his temper? And of course was down and didnt know how to come back?
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] Well, I think it was more the latter. Roddick was done in that match and then the controversial foot-fault was it my right foot, was it my left foot? It's impossible for me to have a foot-fault on my right foot. Find some people who know how to do their jobs.
[Scott Simon:] Ooh.
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] That actually got him back in the match, believe it or not. He got some fire. He got going. But I think that he was in such trouble early, he couldnt come back, because he did not have a good game. It really is that simple. And if anything, after the foot-fault he began to come back and it just wasnt enough.
[Scott Simon:] Serena Williams is out due to injury, but Venus is in.
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] And she's great. And it's a question we've always been vexed with about whether Americans need other Americans to make the tournament interesting. And Venus is the only one left. Roddick's gone, Serena is not in it, and youve got the young kid, Sam Querrey. But it's Venus's tournament right now, if you're looking for an American to steal the show, and she looked great last night.
[Scott Simon:] I want to get to baseball, cause of course obviously the division races are tightening up, or not in the case like Texas Rangers in the West of the AL, they're kind of on cruise control. And so in the Central Division of the National League, Cincinnati Reds are seven games ahead. Is Pete Rose betting on them?
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] Well, I think the interest I love it. I love the fact that Dusty Baker was left for dead as a manager, and now he comes back and he he has...
[Scott Simon:] Oh, he sure put the Cubs over, didnt he? Yeah. Go ahead.
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] Hey, now. Nobody can help your team, Scott. Dont blame... They're doomed. No, I think what it is with the Reds is that they haven't been to the playoffs since 1995. I think it's a great story, them and the Padres as well. And, of course, the Reds lost to St. Louis. St. Louis can only beat one team and it's Cincinnati. But I'd dont if it's going to be enough for them. I really like that. I think youve got three really good races going. The Padres are trying their very, very best to blow this division after owning it for the summer.
[Scott Simon:] Yeah, but they're just three games ahead of the Giants.
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] Just three games ahead of the Giants. And youve got the lackluster Philadelphia Phillies, two-time defending National League champions, suddenly are only a game out in the National League East against Atlanta. So September is going to be much more fun in the National League. The American League, not so much unless you're just dying to see who wins between the White Sox and the Cubs. Thats the only race going on in the American League.
[Scott Simon:] And did the White Sox do the right thing by picking up Manny Ramirez?
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] Well, I think you've got if you've got a chance to make the playoffs, you take it. And Manny has always been good with in short bursts. You saw what he did with the Dodgers two years ago. And youve Ozzie Guillen in there, youve got veterans there, and I think that it's an explosive mix anyway. When Ozzie is there anything can happen anyway, so Manny just kind of adds to the cauldron.
[Scott Simon:] You know, the Yanks are in the middle of a seven-game winning streak at the moment. But they are let me check -they're just a game and a half ahead of Tampa Bay. In many ways it's been the lower money teams that have been...
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] Absolutely. And I think thats the fun thing. I love dynasties. I love the big boys going and doing what they're supposed to do. But this year youve got a good mix. Youve got Tampa Bay, who I think may be the best team in baseball. And youve got Texas, and youve got San Diego, and youve got Cincinnati. And youve got Atlanta, which has been down for a few years as well. So it's nice to see in a sport where they dont have a salary cap, and a sport where money pretty much rules everything the Red Sox are spending $170 million and it doesnt look they're going to make the playoffs I think it's fun to actually see some teams that aren't spending as much as they spend getting close to the post-season and making a run in October.
[Scott Simon:] Howard Bryant, senior writer for ESPN.com, ESPN the Magazine, ESPN the pompom. Thanks so much.
[Mr. Howard Bryant:] My pleasure.

[Michele Norris:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
[Melissa Block:] And I'm Melissa Block. A couple of weeks ago, we featured a report about an Army base where soldiers seeking help with the psychological consequences of combat in Iraq appear to have been ignored or penalized. But that is not the case everywhere in the American military. Today we have the story of an experimental program in a few California National Guard units. It is designed to detect problems such as posttraumatic stress disorder early by embedding psychologists in Guard units. NPR's John McChesney reports.
[John Mcchesney:] National Guard soldiers in camouflage uniforms are blasting away at popup targets on this rifle range in the tawny hills of Central California. They're here for their weekend drill. But two men stand out in bold relief against the camo-suited crowd because they're wearing civvies, civilian clothing. They are the unit's embedded psychologists here to listen to the soldiers and to observe behavior. Darrel Lions, an avuncular man with a shock of white hair says his embed includes being a player in the weekend drill.
[Mr. Darrel Lions:] I will be firing if we have enough time after the soldiers go through. I hope to fire both on the qual range and down on the popup range.
[John Mcchesney:] Lions is part of an experimental program instituted by the California National Guard.
[Mr. Darrel Lions:] Part of the work really for us as embedded in the National Guard Unit is really to break stigma. So I'm not necessarily going to be direct line dealing with trauma as much as helping that person to have an experience with a mental health professional that allows them then to break through and go get treatment.
[John Mcchesney:] This is the 579th Engineering Battalion. Some of them had a rough time in Iraq. One company suffered three dead and 17 wounded out of 93 soldiers, a casualty rate of one in five. Bob Dizelle is the other embedded psychologist out here for weekend drill.
[Mr. Bob Dizelle:] I've had some real hard stories told to me, and sometimes it starts with just the real innocuous, oh, how you doing? Where you been? And it will quickly kind of evolve into them really doing some processing. I had one guy, I just said, hi, how you doing? And he came and sat down and in about 10 minutes he got the saddest expression in his eyes. And he said, my girlfriend tells me I don't care about anything anymore. He says, sometimes I fake it and I pretend I care but, he said, inside I don't. I don't care about anything anymore.
[John Mcchesney:] Colonel Walter Goodwater is the commander of the 579th. It was his decision to participate in this pilot counseling program. He tells the story of a Sergeant T, an equipment operator who was a master at finding and disarming roadside bombs in Iraq.
[Colonel Walter Goodwater:] But after he got back, he was in his civilian job, he saw something that triggered events in Iraq and he told me, he physically had to get out of the vehicle and he sat down along the edge of the road and just started shaking and sweating. The difference is on a drill weekend, I've got somebody sitting here. There's no one to help him there. So that's the huge difference.
[John Mcchesney:] That huge difference is between active duty troops who report everyday to their unit where their behavior can be observed and Guard troops who are isolated from their units most of the time. Soldiers from the 579th are scattered all across Northern California, from the Oregon border all the way down to San Francisco. Some armories are out in rural areas.
[Colonel Walter Goodwater:] When they go home, any of those trigger events could happen and there's no battle buddy sitting there next to them most of the time. And that's what this embedded program is trying to help, because a soldier can pick the phone up then and call the embedded person that's working with them for some immediate intervention.
[John Mcchesney:] Well, not always. Again, embedded counselor Bob Dizelle.
[Mr. Bob Dizelle:] They don't have my phone number. If they're in a crisis situation and they want to contact me they can do that via the command of the unit.
[John Mcchesney:] But that loss of anonymity could discourage soldiers from coming forward. Seeking psychological counseling can be seen as a career stifling admission of weakness or instability. Try West, the contractor directing the pilot program, insists that they are now permitting more direct contact between soldiers and counselors, bypassing the command structure. So how is the program playing with the rank and file? Well, this is no scientific sample but if the two men we did talk with are typical, then the embed program managers have some work to do.
[Corporal Denver Cortez:] Honestly, I think it's a waste of money.
[John Mcchesney:] Corporal Denver Cortez was in Iraq. He wasn't wounded but he had friends who were. He says the psychologist embed program is awkward and intrusive.
[Corporal Denver Cortez:] Every time we come back to drill, they always want to try to get in your head and talk to you. Tell me what you're feeling, what your feelings are and how does it make you feel? Well, I don't want to keep thinking about it. You know, I'm quite happy discussing it with people that know what I'm talking about. Our embedded counselor, she wasn't in Iraq. Why would I talk to her about stuff that I saw when she can't relate? Staff Sergeant MICHAEL GILMORE [National Guard]: Actually, it's made a lot of people uncomfortable because it's just a civilian walking around watching your psyche as you're training.
[John Mcchesney:] Staff Sergeant Michael Gilmore lost part of his arm from a roadside bomb in Iraq and he's having some readjustment problems, which may be associated with PTSD or post traumatic stress disorder.
[Sergeant Gilmore:] A couple weeks ago, I was at a stoplight and ran the light to stop traffic. That was one of things we used to do overseas was, you know, lead vehicle would run out there and stop traffic through. And I don't know what triggered me. I think my arm was hurting and my brain started triggering back and I come up to the stoplight and right out in the middle of the intersection to stop traffic.
[John Mcchesney:] Sergeant Gilmore remains ambivalent about the embed program. He doesn't believe the embedded counselors are familiar enough with PTSD. He's been in therapy for a while at the Veteran's Administration where he feels confident that they know what they're talking about. But at the same time, he hopes the embedded psychologist will help breakdown the stigma about seeking help. And even skeptic Corporal Cortez tries to be more positive at the end of our interview.
[Corporal Denver Cortez:] Regardless of what my feelings are, as long as this program helps one soldier, it's worth it. It doesn't work for me. It doesn't work for a lot of guys. But if it does help that one soldier that needs it, then it's totally worth the money.
[John Mcchesney:] The Try West pilot effort is funded until next spring. The contractor is applying to the Defense Department to expand the program. John McChesney, NPR News.

[Audie Cornish:] Something intriguing is happening on Mars. Instruments onboard the rover known as Curiosity are seeing bursts of methane entering the Martian atmosphere and then disappearing. NPR's Joe Palca reports.
[Joe Palca, Byline:] Scientists have been eager to search for methane gas on Mars, because although methane can be produced by simple inorganic chemistry, another way you can get methane is for living microbes to make it. The first measurements Curiosity made after it landed in 2012 seemed to indicate there was almost no methane at all in the Martian atmosphere less than one part in a billion. But Chris Webster says when they repeated the measurement in November of 2013, they found almost 10 times that amount.
[Chris Webster:] It was an oh-my-gosh moment.
[Joe Palca, Byline:] Webster is a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Speaking today at a news conference at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, Webster said they repeated the measurement four times to be sure it wasn't a fluke. It wasn't. But when they ran the measurement again two months later, the levels had gone down to what they were to start with. Webster says they don't know where the methane is coming from. It could be leaking from beneath the surface or forming through some complex chemical reaction with the Martian rocks. But there's also a chance that it was formed by something alive or something that was once alive long, long ago. Webster says they've now seen two spikes of methane in the two years the rover's been on Mars. But on the question of whether they'd see another...
[Chris Webster:] We have no idea what lies ahead in terms of the observations.
[Joe Palca, Byline:] Scientists also announced at today's news conference that they've seen preliminary evidence of complex organic molecules, specifically chlorobenzene. Once again, finding complex organic molecules does not prove that there is now or ever was life on Mars. But not finding them at all would be discouraging for those who think that Mars was once a place that could have harbored life. Joe Palca, NPR News.

[David Greene:] Visiting the moon, of course, was the ambitious goal of the late John F. Kennedy. And we'll turn, now, to an earlier 20th century president Franklin D. Roosevelt. He led the U.S. through the Depression and the Second World War, giving the country hope in his radio addresses, the famous Fireside Chats. Now, parts of FDR's life are the focus of a new movie, "Hyde Park on Hudson." Here's film critic Kenneth Turan.
[Kenneth Turan, Byline:] Ronald Reagan liked to half-seriously say he didn't think anybody could be an effective president, if he hadn't been an actor first. Bill Murray plays Franklin D. Roosevelt, and his work beautifully conveys the notion of the chief executive as seductive star performer who counts on his charm to get his way. Murray's Roosevelt dominates every room he's in, with his chipper personality and cat-who's-eaten-the-canary grin. Talking in private to George VI, nicely played by Simon West, Roosevelt works his magic on England's new king.
[Bill Murray:] [as Franklin Roosevelt] You're going to be a very fine king.
[Simon West:] [as George VI] I don't know what to say.
[Bill Murray:] Your father would be very proud.
[Simon West:] I'm not so certain about that.
[Bill Murray:] If I were your father, I'd be proud.
[Kenneth Turan, Byline:] "Hyde Park on Hudson" blends two different stories linked by Roosevelt's magnetic personality; and his vacation White House, in upstate New York. The first story involves FDR's romantic relationship with his distant cousin Daisy, played by Laura Linney. The second, more entertaining story focuses on a crucial state visit paid to Hyde Park in June of 1939, by England's king and queen.
[Laura Linney:] [as Daisy] He's definitely younger than I'd imagined for a king, you know?
[Bill Murray:] [as Franklin Roosevelt] Is he?
[Kenneth Turan, Byline:] FDR and Daisy share first impressions.
[Laura Linney:] [as Daisy] They both seem nervous. That surprised me.
[Bill Murray:] [as Franklin Roosevelt] Without some help from us, Daisy, there soon might not be an England to be king of. So I'd be nervous, too.
[Kenneth Turan, Byline:] The director here is Roger Michell. And though his name is not necessarily on everyone's lips, he's made some of the most entertaining British films of the past 20 years, including "Notting Hill" and "Persuasion." Michell makes literate films, small-scale chamber pieces with a sly sense of humor, that invariably feature fine performances by accomplished actors. Bill Murray's portrayal of the allure of power, goes to the top of the list.
[David Greene:] Film critic Kenneth Turan. You hear him here, on MORNING EDITION. He also reviews movies for the Los Angeles Times.

[Robert Siegel:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel. For the first time in nearly two years, the leaders of Israel and the Palestinians have agreed to talk face to face about peace. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made that announcement earlier today.
[Secretary Hillary Clinton:] I've invited Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Abbas, to meet on September 2nd in Washington, D.C., to relaunch direct negotiations to resolve all final status issues, which we believe can be completed within one year.
[Robert Siegel:] Secretary Clinton shared the staged with the U.S. Special Envoy for Mideast Peace, George Mitchell. He was asked about that one-year timeline and why the administration is confident a settlement can be reached in that time after the 20 months it's taken the two sides to simply get back to the table. And Mitchell responded with a story about the first time he got his house painted.
[Mr. George Mitchell:] It took the painters seemingly forever to prime the building and the walls. I kept asking myself, when are they going to start painting? Paying by the hour and you want some progress. And after this seemingly endless priming, why, they painted it very quickly.
[Robert Siegel:] Well, in the Middle East today, NPR's Lourdes Garcia Navarro did not hear a lot of hope that peace will come quickly.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the invitation to resume direct talks, a statement released by his office reads in part, reaching an agreement is a difficult challenge, but is possible. We are coming to the talks with a genuine desire to reach a peace agreement between the two peoples that will protect Israel's national security interests. In an interview with NPR, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat also said that the guidelines laid out for the direct talks were acceptable.
[Mr. Saeb Erekat:] And I believe the elements contained in the statements can provide for a peace agreement within one year. It's doable. It's time for decisions.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] The Obama administration has invested a lot of capital in these talks succeeding. Both sides describe the negotiations that led to the announcement as torturous. But while Washington would like to tout this as a breakthrough, there is skepticism that these talks will result in a peace deal. Already there are disagreements over the framework of the negotiations. Palestinians want the talks to end within a year. Israel's deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon says that is a recipe for disaster.
[Mr. Danny Ayalon:] We have had so many deadlines that were not met in the last 17 years. And what happens when you have a deadline, each party tends to, I would say, postpone the important, difficult decisions towards the deadline. And then it becomes a crisis and then the deadline is no longer there. And then you build expectations that are then crushed.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] And Palestinians want Israel to renew a moratorium on Jewish building in the occupied West Bank. The so-called settlement freeze is due to expire in mid-September. Saeb Erekat says Netanyahu must act in good faith.
[Mr. Saeb Erekat:] The Israelis have the choice now: settlement or peace. And I really hope that they choose peace.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] Israel says any extension will have to be negotiated. Danny Ayalon also says there should be no preconditions to the talks.
[Mr. Danny Ayalon:] They have to understand that just as Israel is expected to give up land, to give up sovereignty, they will have to do the same and they cannot come with a maximalistic demands.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] Sabri Saidam is the deputy secretary general of the Fatah Revolutionary Council. He says Palestinians are worried that Israel will use the peace talks as a cover for settlement expansion. There have been 17 years of negotiations, he says, which have yielded little. He says many members of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party are against the negotiations because the Palestinian public doesn't believe in them anymore.
[Mr. Sabri Saidam:] There's no leadership that can continue to be in office without rallying the people behind it. And the people so far don't see any success stories that can encourage them to accept going to direct talks. If we don't go to peace talks, then there's negative consequences. If we go to peace talks, then we lose the people.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] There is little appetite for negotiation in Israel as well, says political analyst Mark Heller from Tel Aviv University.
[Dr. Mark Heller:] Israel is doing all right. It's managed to deal, for the most part, with much of the security issue. At least as far as the Palestinians are concerned. And so there's no very strong push to run the risks and to bear the costs of pushing foreign agreement when the status quo is not so intolerable.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News, Jerusalem.

[Ed Gordon:] Yolanda Adams has enjoyed years of success as a gospel singer. The Houston native has a Grammy, an American Music Award and multiplatinum CDs to her credit. Scores of fans relate to the music she describes as joyful.
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] [Singing] I've come through many hard trials, through temptations on every hand...
[Ed Gordon:] Adams joined us recently to discuss her career from singing in the choir to her latest CD, "Day By Day." Yolanda Adams, always good to see you and talk to you. Welcome.
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] Thank you so much for having me.
[Ed Gordon:] Let's talk a little bit about-before we get into the project, I want to talk about the growth of gospel music. When you walked on the stage for the first time, and I mean the stage of gospel music...
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] Right.
[Ed Gordon:] ...could you have even imagined where it would be today?
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] Not at all. Because I was a kid, 16 years old, singing in a choir that was already recording and traveling all over the world. And I did it just because I loved to sing, and I loved gospel music, and I loved God with all my heart, even at a young age. But to know today what gospel music has done for my life and just for the world, in general, I never could have imagined it. [Singing] Jesus is all the world to me.
[Ed Gordon:] You know what's fascinating to me? And this is going to sound strange in one sense, because religion to black folk has been so special...
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] Right.
[Ed Gordon:] ...but there was also a time that if you were a churchgoer or listened to gospel music, that you almost kept that in the house and you didn't praise it as we see growing praise today.
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] Right.
[Ed Gordon:] It's a banner vs. something that you keep hidden away. What do you think has changed?
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] I think more people in the mainstream, folks like Nancy Wilson and Luther Vandross, they have openly expressed their love for God, and when mainstream artists start expressing their love for God openly in their concerts and including gospel songs in their concert, and, you know, people started embracing it. `Well, wait a minute, Luther's cool. And he can love God? OK, yeah. Then that's cool for me, too.'
[Ed Gordon:] How difficult has it been for you to now deal with the celebrity that you have? And when you first attain it, obviously, it's something that you want when you start a career, but it can be intrusive. How do you deal with that?
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] One day at a time. That's all I can say or that's the only way that I can naturally explain it. Of course, my faith has a lot to do with being able to be public without being a public nuisance. I guess, you know, that's a great way to say it. I was brought up by great parents and great grandparents who told me, `Never, ever think that you're better than anyone else or that what you do is so important that the world won't miss you once you're gone,'and I kind of translate that into the stardom thing. How would I want someone who I would approach in a mall or at a restaurant? How would I want them to respond to me? A lot of times they just see you and they're like [gasps] `Yolanda Adams, oh, my goodness. Can I take a picture with you?'You know? And I probably had just stepped out of the gym, you know, sweating and going on, but, you know, the truth is, that person may not ever get a chance to see me up close and personal again, so go on and oblige, you know.
[Ed Gordon:] How much do you bring, in getting into the new project "Day By Day," what Yolanda Adams is feeling at the particular time in her life, to your songs?
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] Once again, my fans trust me, and they trust that what I say is true. And they also know that I'm going to be open and honest with them about the highs, the lows, the joys, the sorrows, but they also know that it all ends in praise, and that at the end of the day I have to go through this, we have to go through this in order to make us better, and in order to get to the next level.
[Ed Gordon:] You work, once again, with two buddies of mine, and two legends in this business, truly, Jimmy Jam...
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] Yes. Yes.
[Ed Gordon:] ...and Terry Lewis, who you have certainly given us classic music through and with. Talk to me, A, about the relationship with the two of them, and talk about some of the new music that they're bringing to you.
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] Great guys. You know them. Loving fathers, loving husbands and great producers. They know how to bring the best out in you. And they strive for excellence every single time we're in the studio. [Singing] I can look at my life and see all the things that he's done to set me free, protecting me from harm.
[Pastor Donnie Mc Clurkin:] [Singing] Can't begin to show how I feel. His presence in my soul, yeah. Can tell he's guiding me, I'll be safe because...
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] We did "Lift Him Up," which features Pastor Donnie McClurkin and Mary Mary, and that was way too much fun. We just had way too much fun. [Singing] I'll give him praise.
[Mary Mary:] [Singing] Lift him up! Each and every day.
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] [Singing] Whoa, whoa, yeah, yeah.
[Mary Mary:] [Singing] We celebrate that day.
[Pastor Donnie Mc Clurkin:] [Singing] Lift him up!
[Mary Mary:] [Singing] In a song of praise, thanking him for everything.
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] And also "Be Blessed," which has been one of the number-one radio hits. [Singing]...said he would be there for you. I want you to be blessed; don't live life in fear.
[Ed Gordon:] How much does the title of the CD speak to, as you just used this language, `day by day,'what you've been living the last few years of your life? Is that part of why you picked that song?
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] That's exactly why we picked the song, and exactly why we picked the title. I let my listener know that it's a process, that once you decide, `Look, God, I want you to lead my life, I want you to, you know, get me around the hard stuff and take me through the hard stuff'-once you do that, it doesn't just start automatically, and you don't just leap like Superman to the next spiritual level. It doesn't work like that. It's a day-by-day journey.
[Ed Gordon:] You have had a part in so many modern-day gospel classics now as you look through your career.
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] Yeah.
[Ed Gordon:] Do you have a favorite?
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] I would have to say that "Open My Heart" was the one that really, for me, signifies, you know, I'm a great writer. [Singing] Alone in a world, it's just me and you. I feel so lost because I don't know what to do.
[Ed Gordon:] When you think about songs that have gone beyond just chart-topping-I think about, you know, "O Happy Day."
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] "O Happy Day," yeah.
[Ed Gordon:] Or some of the Winans' classics, "Tomorrow," "The Question Is."
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] Definitely. "The Question Is." Yes.
[Ed Gordon:] Now that you know that that song will be placed in that list, that has to be gratifying.
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] Oh, definitely. I mean, I'd be, you know, remiss to say that `Oh, no, it's just-you know, God bless you.'No. That feels good. It feels good to know that what that song did-out of my pain came a song that changed the world of gospel. [Singing] I open my heart.
[Ed Gordon:] For the fans of Yolanda Adams, you don't need to know much of anything other than it's in stores and you want to go get it.
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] Yea.
[Ed Gordon:] The CD is "Day By Day."
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] "Day By Day."
[Ed Gordon:] And we should note that you'll be going on tour.
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] I'll be going on tour. It's called the Yolanda Today tour. The twist to this particular tour is that I'm inviting some of my friends from the R&B and pop world to come and sing with me and share a couple of songs, you know. So we're going to have a lot of fun. And I just want people to understand that you don't have to take it so seriously. You know? God is love. He loves everybody. He loves you.
[Ed Gordon:] And just enjoy life...
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] And just enjoy it.
[Ed Gordon:] ...and you will do so by picking up this CD, I promise you, and also do yourself a favor. When Yolanda Today, the tour, comes to your town, go see her.
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] Yeah.
[Ed Gordon:] Yolanda, good to see you.
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] Oh, good to see you, too, Ed. [Singing] Think I'll let it show, never let it go, take everywhere I go. Take my hand. I'm gonna give you spirit in my heart. I'm going to give you spirit in my heart.
[Ed Gordon:] That does it for the program today. To listen to the show, visit npr.org. If you'd like to comment, call us at [202] 408-3330. NEWS & NOTES was created by NPR News and the African-American Public Radio Consortium.
[Ms. Yolanda Adams:] [Singing] Sometimes I feel so inspired and other times I just want to give up, give up. Oh, that's when I feel your presence, giving me confidence and trust, and I know that it came from above. Think I'll let it show, never let it go...
[Ed Gordon:] I'm Ed Gordon. This is NEWS & NOTES.

[Melissa Block:] Today, in cities across Egypt, supporters of the ousted President Mohammed Morsi filled streets and squares. They've been demanding his release from custody and his reinstatement as president. Opponents of Morsi also took to the streets, raising fears of fresh violence. NPR's Leila Fadel paid a visit to the headquarters of the pro-Morsi camp. She sent this report.
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] This is Hall 2 of the Rabaa Al-Adawiya mosque in eastern Cairo. The mosque is at the center of the pro-Morsi movement. Around it in this square is an encampment of tents where his supporters are sleeping, eating and protesting, demanding Morsi's return. He was the winner in Egypt's first free and fair election, they say, he is the country's legitimate leader. In Hall 2 of the mosque where journalists gather, Egypt's former power brokers are everywhere. In one corner there's the youth minister. On the other side, the secretary general of the Muslim Brotherhood's political party. There are so many former kingmakers, it looks like the setting of a high-level government meeting. But now it's the headquarters of a protest movement. In this space, the message is that Morsi's ouster was an affront to democracy and only his return will set the nation back on the right path. Outside, a cleric recites verses of the Quran. Protesters hold up signs saying where's my vote, and soldiers for Morsi, in English, French and other languages. With all the Islamist TV channels shuttered, there is no other outlet for their message.
[Osama Yassin:] [Speaking foreign language]
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] This is Osama Yassin. Until July 3rd, he was the minister of youth in Morsi's government. Now, he is helping coordinate the protest movement.
[Osama Yassin:] [Speaking foreign language]
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] The military takeover came suddenly, he says. It's as if the referee of this game decided to just end it. But Morsi's opponents would say it wasn't so sudden. Their grievances built up over months. The ousted president was criticized for failing to fix the economy or reform the inefficient state bureaucracy. On June 30th, anti-Morsi protesters gathered in Tahrir Square and other parts of the country in numbers that rivaled those of the 2011 revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak. They called on the army to remove Morsi. Some of Morsi's allies say they realized a coup was coming.
[Unidentified Man:] [Speaking foreign language]
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] Mohammed [unintelligible] is a medical doctor and a secretary general of the Muslim Brotherhood's political party. There is an arrest warrant out for him and an order to freeze his assets.
[Unidentified Man:] [Speaking foreign language]
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] I knew it was being arranged, he says, but unfortunately, I wasn't able to convince the president of this. Morsi always believed that with time there could be a gradual change, he says, without revolutionary confrontation. The single biggest mistake the president made, he says, was not aggressively revamping the police force the police force that is now cracking down on Morsi's supporters. I asked him if he's scared to leave the square, if he spends every night here.
[Unidentified Man:] [Speaking foreign language]
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] That's the sort of question you get from the intelligence bureau, he says, with a nervous laugh. But when I asked where the Islamists go from here, his only answer is more protests. Negotiations with the military have led nowhere. The Brotherhood won't budge from its demand for Morsi's reinstatement. In another part of Cairo on this night, Morsi's backers dance in the street, setting off fireworks and blocking traffic. Their leaders always call for peaceful protests, but in less than two weeks, about 60 pro-Morsi demonstrators have been killed, most slain by Egypt's security forces. Morsi supporters insist the security forces are to blame, but the military-backed interim government accuses the protesters of provoking the violence. Meanwhile, a demonization campaign of the movement continues. There are rumors in the local media about outbreaks of scabies and cholera at the protest camp and military aircraft dropped flyers this week urging the protesters to go home. Now, there are fears the military may try to force them out. If that happens, an already unstable Egypt could face even more bloodshed. Leila Fadel, NPR News, Cairo.

[Alex Chadwick:] Here in this country, supporters and opponents of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito are right now pouring over his written records trying to find out more about what kind of a judge and man he is. One kind of record that does not get as much public scrutiny is a nominee's financial disclosure. These are required for people to make when they're federal judges. Henry Blodget is a former securities analyst and a contributor to the online magazine Slate, and he's been going through Judge Alito's financial past to figure out what we can learn from it, and he joins us again now. Henry, what is Judge Alito's net worth?
[Henry Blodgett Reporting:] He is worth, according to the financial statements, approximately $600,000 to $1.2 million, and that is excluding his house, which certainly could be worth a lot in today's market. He is mostly invested in low-cost funds and index funds, which is unusual and we thought very interesting.
[Alex Chadwick:] And what is interesting about that? What is it that you find interesting about his investment record that's public?
[Blodgett:] Well, on Slate we have-we've started this sort of informal series of looking at financial disclosures and looking at them sort of as a psychological window into how people think and make decisions and so forth. And what's unusual here-and it's very different from John Roberts, for example-is that Alito is investing-he's very diversified, which is obviously good, but he's also mostly invested in Vangaurd, which is a low-cost fund provider. And I think one thing that people assume, if they don't actually do the work to look at what makes sense from a mutual fund perspective-they assume that the more a mutual fund costs or the more a company does to research other companies and so forth, the better. But actually, in fact, in the mutual fund world, Wal-Mart prices do not get you Wal-Mart-quality merchandise; they usually get you Saks-quality merchandise. And that's what Vanguard is providing. And Alito, whether it's just a financial adviser telling him that or whether he's figured it out on his own, he is invested in a low-cost fund provider, which is very smart.
[Alex Chadwick:] And you like his tax investment strategy as well.
[Blodgett:] He also discovered that taxes matter. Most people, most casual investors, tend to focus on pretax returns. And we're taught, too, when we read the newspaper and we listen to mutual fund companies, they all focus on pre-tax returns. But, of course, the only thing that really matters is the post-tax return. And so several of Alito's funds are tax-managed or tax-exempt funds, which is another indication that he's really focused on the bottom line.
[Alex Chadwick:] You suggest that his investment strategy might lead you to think this is someone who can resist pressures around him. How is that?
[Blodgett:] I think it's not only resisting pressures, it is the ability to look through and look beyond what is sort of the common wisdom about something like investing. Again, I think a lot of people believe, from listening to the television or reading a newspaper or listening to Wall Street, that the smart investment strategy is to either buy a few mutual funds or go out and research companies and so forth. And, in fact, if you actually look at the facts, it is much smarter to invest in index funds and managed costs and so forth. And that's hidden in any way. A lot of people have said that. But in order to really realize that and act on it, you have to look at the facts and you have to have the discipline to put it in practice. And my conclusion in looking at Alito doing that is that that was a very good sign for a judge, who obviously is going to be bombarded by stories from both sides and has to look through that and find the truth and then rule on it.
[Alex Chadwick:] Maybe he just isn't interested in money.
[Blodgett:] That's possible, but if he is just not interested in money, which, by the way, is a great investment strategy, he has done the right thing with his lack of interest, whereas most people do the wrong thing because they're hearing what other people are saying and sort of acting on that. So whether he's not interested or not, he's doing the right thing.
[Alex Chadwick:] Opinion and analyst from Henry Blodget, who investigates the finances of high-profile federal nominees for the online magazine Slate. Henry, thank you again.
[Blodgett:] Thanks for having me.

[Ira Flatow:] I'm Ira Flatow. Imagine stepping onto the Earth two billion years ago, taking a stroll along the shores of an ancient beach near the northern edge of what today is Lake Superior. You wouldn't see any trees. They didn't hit the scene until, oh, another billion-and-a-half years. What you might see, though, if you had a microscope, were tiny bacteria-like organisms on the shore having a ball eating each other. But it wasn't so much of what you might see in our imaginary stroll. What we're going to be talking about, it's what you might smell, because these microbes may have perfumed the shores of this ancient lake with a recognizable scent of rotten eggs. Mmm. That's according to a paper out this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists. My next guest was one of the authors. Martin Brasier is a professor of palaeobiology at the University of Oxford in England. He joins us by phone. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.
[Martin Brasier:] Hello, nice to be with you.
[Ira Flatow:] You believe that at one time, say, a few billion years ago, the whole Earth may have smelled like rotten eggs?
[Martin Brasier:] No, that's not what we really would be saying in the paper. We were saying that this particular area, there was this particular gas, which we associate with the smell of rotten eggs, hydrogen sulfide, was sufficiently prevalent that it helped to preserve, in fact, some of the earlier signs of fossilized life in these rocks. So it wouldn't have been everywhere, but it would probably have been a little bit more noticeable than it is now.
[Ira Flatow:] Tell us about the rocks you were looking at. What was inside of them?
[Martin Brasier:] Yeah, well, the locality we were looking at is historically rather interesting. It's on the northern short of Lake Superior and it was almost exactly 60 years ago some of the oldest fossils were ever found in it by a Harvard professor, Elso Barghoorn, and an American mineralogist, Stanley Tyler. And they noticed that inside some very glassy rocks from this particular locality, you could see little filaments, tiny little filaments about a thousandth or so of a millimeter across, preserved inside and that they had the appearance of what we would now call blue-green algal cyanobacteria. Well, this signal has been known for quite a while, and there are a range of different types, but we recently re-examined the material and discovered that funny things were happening to this particular assemblage so that the algal remains were being consumed in some way. Some of them were full of holes, some of them much more full of holes than other types, and that in fact there was an association between these patterns and they're being turned into a material called iron sulfide or pyrite. People may know it as fool's good. And this is the product of hydrogen sulfide. It means that there was actually a gas, H2S, smelling like rotten eggs, being produced as the waste product by creatures eating other creatures.
[Ira Flatow:] So when you find pyrite, you're finding the waste product of the creatures?
[Martin Brasier:] Very often that's the case, certainly in surface sediments if they come from a lake or from the sea. They're the waste product. We can test them by looking at various isotopes. So there are different isotopes of sulfur, and there's a specific pattern of the isotopes of sulfur that's characteristic for this particular pathway. And we were able to find that, and not only that but in some examples of the material we looked at we could see little sort of bean-shaped cells, not much more, again, than a micron or a thousandth of a millimeter across, which were sitting on the tissue on the cells of material that was itself being consumed. So we hypothesize anyway that these may be the creatures caught in the act of eating other creatures.
[Ira Flatow:] And so the world was filled at that time with these microscopic creatures, right?
[Martin Brasier:] Yes, these would be very ancient. And we've long suspected that this sort of thing goes back or should go back a long, long way. And people have found the chemical signals, the brassy fool's gold they've found. They've even found the isotopic shifts. But this is, I think, the earliest record where we can see actually turned into this shiny material the fossils themselves. We can see them actually preserved in three dimensions. And it's new techniques that we have now that we can use to analyze these in three dimensions and start to pick out their relationships. And that's one of the exciting things that's happening at the moment.
[Ira Flatow:] Would there be other places around the world where you'd find the same rocks and fossils?
[Martin Brasier:] Yes, I think there probably would be. There are certainly places in Australia and potentially in South Africa where one could look. But the number of places where rocks of this age are preserved or well-preserved is rather few. Most of them have got sort of cooked and baked and shoved up and down by mountain buildings and the like. And so you often have to look inside the interiors of very large and very ancient continents: North America around the margins of Canada; or in Australia, both of which are very ancient continental masses.
[Ira Flatow:] So what happened to the smell? Why doesn't the world smell like rotten eggs today?
[Martin Brasier:] Well, it's true that these bacteria are still active, and of course if you pass a blocked drain or something like that, you can see that smell, and it's exactly the same activity going on. Bacteria are eating other things, eating algae, eating other bacteria. And the reason you don't smell it is because the creatures that were living at the surface, the fossils that we first saw, were producing oxygen by photosynthesis. And that oxygen has now built up to such a level that it destroys the hydrogen sulfide. So it doesn't normally get up into the atmosphere. You don't notice it very much. So that's probably the reason, really there's too much oxygen, or it's being consumed by other kinds of bacteria a little bit further up the food chain.
[Ira Flatow:] Do we humans have similar bacteria living in our guts? We talk a lot about the human biome a lot on this program.
[Martin Brasier:] Yeah, my understanding is that this kind of bacterium is found in the guts of many people and is responsible for sulfurous smells. And it's somewhat unavoidable. They're so widespread that they're practically everywhere, and they're probably in the digestive tract of many of us helping to break down the materials that we've had for dinner. So they're there inside us as well.
[Ira Flatow:] So we're actually carrying around remnants of billions of years ago within our bodies?
[Martin Brasier:] Yeah, I think it's a rather fascinating thought. I'm rather intrigued to follow up other aspects of this. Many of the creatures that were living at the surface of the planet and helping to make it what it was back then are now living inside us, where they're protected from oxygen. So they're living in a kind of space suit. But there they are. They're still around us and inside us.
[Ira Flatow:] We're sort of the zoo that keeps them alive.
[Martin Brasier:] Yeah, that's right. We are a kind of zoo of deep prehistory, and not just us, of course, but pretty well all the other living things around us. Anything that's got a digestive tract and is consuming food matter of some sort is likely to have a very rich flora of bacteria and primitive organisms hopping around.
[Ira Flatow:] If you can find these kinds of primitive organisms, could you find things like evidence of, like, ancient viruses that might have been around?
[Martin Brasier:] Well, that's an interesting question, and people have tried to look. The difference between what we've been finding and the virus is that the virus doesn't have a rigid cell wall to protect it. It just invades other things that have cell walls. So it makes it much harder to see and much harder to fossilize. It's often the cell wall or the protective material around it which goes into the fossil record. But some of my colleagues have thought they have found viral-like structures, sort of polygonal-shaped structures a bit like modern viruses very, very tiny, but have been unable to convince themselves and other people that no other explanation can be brought forward for these things. So that's still very much an open question. But it would be nice if we could, but a little bit hard to really confirm it.
[Ira Flatow:] Now, for folks who are getting out, the weather is getting nice, spring is upon us, tell me about the spot where the fossils came from. Could you go out there and still find that same spot as you walk about?
[Martin Brasier:] Yes, you can. It's actually on a there is a trail out towards this site. It's quite near to Thunder Bay, and it is it's a national park. So obviously it's protected, and collecting is not allowed or anything like that. But you can find the Gunflint Trail. There's a Gunflint Trail in the USA, and there's an equivalent one near to Thunder Bay and near to the town of Schreiber in Ontario. So it would be possible, but it's a very long hike. It's something like a 10-mile hike from where you leave the car. So you would have to be...
[Ira Flatow:] Bring lunch.
[Martin Brasier:] You would have to be very enthusiastic and energetic. And I have met hikers there on that locality, but it's you want very good weather because the rocks are very slippy, and they slope down into Lake Superior, which is not a good piece of water to disappear into.
[Ira Flatow:] How did the first geologists find this spot there? Did they stumble on it? Where they looking for it?
[Martin Brasier:] It's a very interesting question, and Stanley Tyler was hunting for iron. In fact, the deposits which these come from are the rock type from which much of the iron that built up the Detroit car industry comes from. So he was following that, those layers around, and they thought they would possibly find life. And he was the story goes that he was on a fishing expedition and he actually moored his boat on the shoreline there and happened to notice some very interesting glassy-looking rocks, which were rather black in color. And he knew that the black meant that there was organic matter, that it was carbon, a bit like coal, and collected some material, cut it into little slices and then sent it off to his friend in Harvard, who confirmed that there were amazingly beautiful fossils inside. These were the first really good fossils from that far back in time, and when they were first found, nobody knew they were as old two billion years. They were thought to be a few hundreds of millions of years. But now we know they're very ancient.
[Ira Flatow:] Very interesting. Thank you, thank you, Dr. Brasier.
[Martin Brasier:] You're very welcome indeed.
[Ira Flatow:] Quite interesting. Martin Brasier is professor of palaeobiology, University of Oxford in England, and talking with us about going out looking, go looking for those rock formations, maybe this weekend, out there in Canada or in well, around the Detroit area.

[Alex Chadwick:] In the Southwest part of the country, border issues are really a part of daily discussions. I'm joined now by Democratic Congressman Tom Udall. He's been tracking the boycott demonstrations with his six district offices in Northern and Eastern New Mexico. He joins us by phone from Washington. Representative UDALL, welcome.
[Representative Tom Udall:] Thank you, Alex. Good to be with you today.
[Alex Chadwick:] And what have you heard from Santa Fe and other cities around your district about the demonstrations and people coming to work or not coming to work?
[Representative Tom Udall:] I think one of the things I've heard is that the boycott really reminds us that we have millions of people, you know, the estimates are up to 11 or 12 million, who are here working and are part of the fabric of American life. And so the big question in my Congressional district and in the country is what should we do with the 11 or 12 million people, undocumented people, who are here. And that's the question that I think the Congress needs to address.
[Alex Chadwick:] Well, there seems to be actually a debate about what the question is because a lot of people think that the question is how do we close off the border to make sure the problem doesn't get any bigger in the coming years?
[Representative Tom Udall:] Well, there's no doubt that a crucial element of a comprehensive immigration reform system should be border security. So there's no doubt that should be part of it. This 11 or 12 million undocumented here in the United States, we need to deal with that particular issue. We need to look at our very small guest worker program. And we need to look at employer issues in terms of employers violating the law. So I think that's a part of the big overall comprehensive reform that Congress needs to be looking at. And the Senate is coming the closest to that right now.
[Alex Chadwick:] You voted against the Immigration Bill, HR-4437. That was the one back in December that really, I think, sparked all of this debate and a lot of the anger, because it would make felons of illegal immigrants. You're against that. The White House, apparently, thinks that it is going to get some sort of progress, and that Congress is going to help a bit with this. But what about in the House? There's a statement from Roy Blunt, the House majority leader for the Republicans, saying that he doesn't think that the House Republicans are ready to cooperate. What's your sense of the way people are going there?
[Representative Tom Udall:] My sense is that that's correct. The House is stuck on its bill, the majority of the Republican Party is very insistent that their bill that they pass is a good bill, and they want to hang with it. So I think the President has a lot of hard work. Even if he gets a bill out of the Senate, it's more moderate and is along the lines of a comprehensive reform, he has a lot of hard work to bring the House aboard.
[Alex Chadwick:] How do you feel? You're really a supporter of President Bush's stance at this point. That's somewhat of an unusual place for you to be.
[Representative Tom Udall:] Well, the interesting thing is, is that the three members of the House, two Republicans and one Democrat from New Mexico, all voted against the House bill. So there is unity in that sense. I don't know that President Bush has gotten into the kind of detail that I've been talking about today. I would say that he is definitely for a more moderate approach to this than some of the inflammatory rhetoric that we're hearing from the other side.
[Alex Chadwick:] You know, I began by asking you for a brief report from your district offices of how people are reacting to this, the Day Without Immigrants, in New Mexico. Have you heard from constituents? Do you know what's...
[Representative Tom Udall:] Oh. Yes, I have. And first of all, the thing you should know, that in New Mexico, 98 percent of Hispanics in New Mexico are native-born. So we only have two percent in terms of immigrants. So we may be a little different than country than cities and states like California and Los Angeles and some of the other larger entities around the country. But I would call it a mixed bag of what we're hearing. There are some very mad people out there that call my office. When I'm in town hall meetings and circulating throughout the district, there are others that say, you know, this is a problem. It's a big one and we need to deal with it. And so we get sharp reactions, I think, on both sides.
[Alex Chadwick:] Congressman Tom Udall, a Democrat from Santa Fe, New Mexico. Congressman, thank you for being with us on DAY TO DAY.
[Representative Tom Udall:] Alex, it's a real pleasure.
[Alex Chadwick:] Stay with us on DAY TO DAY from NPR News.

[Scott Simon:] College students across the country are ditching heavy textbooks for digital copies. Is that beginning to happen in libraries? Florida's new state university, Florida Polytechnic, won't have a single physical block. It's the first university whose main library is totally digital. We're joined now by Kathryn Miller, the director of libraries at Florida Polytechnic. She's at WFSU in Tallahassee. Thanks very much for being with us.
[Kathryn Miller:] Thank you for having me.
[Scott Simon:] Why'd you decide to go all digital?
[Kathryn Miller:] Well, the objective of Florida Polytechnic is to prepare students for the high-tech workforce. We want to give them hands-on experience with advanced technology. And to do that through the library is a really key way for us to teach our students how to use information and then how to apply that information in a setting similar to what they'll find in the workplace.
[Scott Simon:] You have professional librarians there who might say to a student, you ought to take a look at this or that?
[Kathryn Miller:] Absolutely. And that's one of the great things about being digital. The librarians' time can be dedicated to working with our students in a teaching role. So a large part of my job and my colleagues' jobs includes being in the classroom, working with the students, showing them how to organize their information digitally.
[Scott Simon:] It was irresistible. I thought about a couple of my favorite books Ben Hecht, "A Child Of The Century" and Edwin O'Connor's wonderful novel, "The Last Hurrah." There are no e-editions, at least for the moment. So if a student at Florida Polytechnic wanted to read those books, what would he or she have to do?
[Kathryn Miller:] The student could find that book through our integrated library system. And let's say it was available here at Florida State University. They could request that the book be sent from Florida State to Florida Polytechnic.
[Scott Simon:] So I'm going to guess that you're familiar with libraries that have what we call stacks?
[Kathryn Miller:] Yes.
[Scott Simon:] So what's it like to be in this place?
[Kathryn Miller:] Well, stacks are a great part of so many libraries. But without having the stacks, the request time is right at the user's fingertips.
[Scott Simon:] So what happens when someone of a different generation walks into your library?
[Kathryn Miller:] When the parents and students first came to Poly and they saw no books in our library, the parent's reaction was really of concern. The students, however, their eyes were wide open saying, oh, this is great and this is wonderful. I can bring my tablet and I can work through the library. As we talked to parents, then the parents understood how the library is moving forward, how it's going to contribute to my child's experience at the university. And yes, they can still meet others in the library and have that social aspect that many of us have experienced with libraries.
[Scott Simon:] Kathryn Miller, director of libraries at Florida Polytechnic University. Thanks very much for being with us.
[Kathryn Miller:] Thank you.

[Noah Adams:] And I'm Noah Adams. Few parts of the country have escaped record summer temperatures. Phoenix Arizona hit 111 degrees, Wichita is perspiring at an even 100, and in San Francisco, a heat wave is challenging an old adage about that city's summer weather. From member station KQED Sarah Varney shares the San Franciscan's view of the heat wave.
[Sarah Varney, Reporting:] We haven't seen this much skin during a San Francisco summer, since 1969, or at least since the last gay pride parade. Ten days ten glorious days of fogless skies, jacket-free jaunts, and sheet-twisting, sand blazing sleepless nights. We are utterly unprepared to deal with this weather. After all, Mark Twain is rumored to have aptly observed: the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. My husband Tad owns a single pair of shorts. He reluctantly retrieved them from storage last week. And like most San Franciscan's, we don't own an air conditioner. Our only fan is a dinky space heater that busted and only the fan works now. Our couch is upholstered in wool, our chairs in mohair, our comforter stuffed with down. Even our Himalayan cat is designed for cooler climes. We all just wilt in this weather. At the Java Beach Café, across the street from Ocean Beach, Misha Davis is drunk with heat. She sports a pink mini-skirt and tank top, and looks up at the blue sky through her rhinestone studded glasses.
[Ms. Misha Davis:] I would like to see it stay like this. I rather complain about it being hot than cold, any day. Any day.
[Sarah Varney, Reporting:] Davis lives just down the block and normally her neighborhood would be draped in summer fog, the air so moist drivers turn on windshield wipers and bundled beach walkers brace against the wind.
[Ms. Misha Davis:] It gets inconvenient at times, at home, when it's a little too cold and you don't feel like chucking wood in your fireplace.
[Sarah Varney, Reporting:] In the summer?
[Ms. Misha Davis:] In the summer. If it does get cold. Which it does at nighttime when the dew point hits and it gets really cold and windy. So that's an inconvenience. But I am enjoying the weather and I'm not going to complain as much.
[Mr. Jake Gillis:] Go ahead, go ahead, just do it. Just dump away.
[Sarah Varney, Reporting:] On a sidewalk in the mission district Jake Gillis pours lobster tails, corn on the cob, and chicken legs on to a grill. These warm evenings permit a rare experience in San Francisco: outdoor dining.
[Mr. Gillis:] We haven't been able...
[Unidentified Male:] Smell the summer, Jake. Nine holes.
[Mr. Gillis:] Ricardo's been at the beach. He's our resident beach bum.
[Sarah Varney, Reporting:] Ricardo what are you doing?
[Mr. Ricardo:] I'm doing olive oil on lobster. We feel like we're in Connecticut.
[Unidentified Female:] He met me, he really met me.
[Unidentified Male:] Burning the barbeque.
[Ms. Jeannette Wilmerding:] Uh oh, we're burning the corn.
[Sarah Varney, Reporting:] Block partier Jeannette Wilmerding has other pressing concerns. The longevity of this heat wave poses significant challenges to her wardrobe.
[Ms. Jeannette Wilmerding:] I have like two pairs of shorts and maybe like a skirt. Like hardly any sandals or anything. I just don't wear that kind of stuff when we go out.
[Sarah Varney, Reporting:] Here in San Francisco, turtleneck sweaters and light wool pants are usually in heavy rotation in July as much as January. But rest assured, the heat wave in San Francisco is breaking. Last night I saw a whisper of pink fog slithering under the Golden Gate Bridge. The air smelled cooler and this morning I stuffed a sweater in my bag. Soon the fog will pour down over the hills, race through the streets, through our apartment windows, and we will all settle down for a cold summer's nap. For NPR News, I'm Sarah Varney in San Francisco.

[Alex Chadwick:] From the studios of NPR West, this is Day to Day. I'm Alex Chadwick.
[Alex Cohen:] And I'm Alex Cohen. Will Hillary Clinton supporters give women a bad name at the Democratic Convention? More on that in a moment.
[Alex Chadwick:] First, these men speak and the markets listen. Comments from two of the most powerful players in the financial world who sends stocks higher a welcome change of pace on Wall Street these days. The men we're talking about are Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and billionaire super-investor, financier oracle and all-around wise man Warren Buffet. We're joined now by NPR's own oracle of economic news, John Ydstie. John, welcome back.
[John Ydstie:] Hi, Alex. Thanks.
[Alex Chadwick:] So, let's start with Chairman Bernanke who is speaking at a Federal Reserve conference in Jackson, Wyoming. What did he have to say?
[John Ydstie:] Well, I think his most important remarks on the current state of the economy had to do with inflation, which, as you know over the past 12 months, has reached a 17-year high. And he said that inflation the outlook for inflation remains highly uncertain, but he suggested that there were some hopeful signs in recent declines in the prices of oil and other commodities, which have been the main drivers of inflation. If that continues, it's very good news because the Fed is facing two big threats, high inflation and very slow growth. And if inflation is subsiding, it will allow the Fed to keep interest rates low and fight that other problem, slow growth.
[Alex Chadwick:] What about the general state of the economy and financial crisis in most people's view, I think? Did he say how long this is going to continue?
[John Ydstie:] Well, he said there what he called the financial storm had not yet subsided. But he also said we're no longer facing what you call the gale force winds that began blowing about a year ago. Those winds, of course, blew over the investment bank Bear Stearns, and Bernanke again defended the Fed's putting taxpayer money at risk in its rescue, saying that the toll on the broader economy would have been too great if the Fed hadn't acted. The Fed chairman did not mention the government's effort to prop up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which again have been taking a beating in the stock market this week. Investors just seemed convinced that they'll eventually be taken over by the government and stockholders will be left with nothing, and given their share prices in the market right now, they've got almost nothing.
[Alex Chadwick:] So the other financial heavyweight we mentioned earlier, investor Warren Buffet, he was also talking about Freddie and Fannie today.
[John Ydstie:] Right. Buffet was a big shareholder in Freddie Mac until 2001 when he became disenchanted because he thought they were taking too many risks. And he said today that he thought time had been running out for Freddie and Fannie, and they wouldn't have survived if the government hadn't stepped in a couple of weeks ago. He also said that he had no big bets against the dollar, which may have helped the dollar strengthen in markets today after losing ground during the rest of this week. Buffet also said he thought U.S. stocks were valued better than they have been any time this year, and that helped to drive a rally in the stock market earlier today.
[Alex Chadwick:] John Ydstie, financial news roundup from Washington. John, thank you.
[John Ydstie:] You're welcome, Alex.

[Noah Adams:] Stephen Mihm writes about the counterfeiting in this coming Sunday's New York Times magazine. He spoke earlier with Alex Chadwick, from the studios of Georgia Public Radio in Atlanta.
[Alex Chadwick:] Stephen Mihm, you write that some of these bills are actually better than what we get out of the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, how could that be?
[Stephen Mihm:] So, for example, on the back of the $100.00 counterfeit note, the clock tower of Independence Hall is rendered more finely on the counterfeit than it is on the genuine note.
[Alex Chadwick:] Your story says that these have been in circulation for about 15 years and they are only detectable with very fine equipment, and it took quite a long time to figure out that they indeed come from North Korea. How did they manage to figure that out?
[Stephen Mihm:] The South Korean sources were able to piece that together in conjunction with their counterparts in this country as well.
[Alex Chadwick:] I mean this is it sounds like a weird, kind of off the wall sort of enterprise, but this really matters, this counterfeiting.
[Stephen Mihm:] It's an odd strategy perhaps, but one that they've honed and perfected over the years.
[Alex Chadwick:] Can you see any effect of this counterfeit money on our economy, on the U.S. economy?
[Stephen Mihm:] So it's played a much more important role on a diplomatic level than on an economic level.
[Alex Chadwick:] Stephen Mihm's story on North Korea and the counterfeiting of American currency is in the Sunday New York Times magazine. Stephen Mihm, thank you.
[Stephen Mihm:] Thank you.
[Noah Adams:] More coming up on DAY TO DAY from NPR News.

[Lynn Neary:] Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels didn't invent the suicide bomb, but they pioneered it as a tactic in war. For three decades, the rebels fought for an independent homeland with hundreds of suicide attacks, more than al-Qaida or any other group. All told, more than 70,000 people died in the fighting. Then, earlier this week, the Sri Lankan government declared victory over the Tamil rebels, but the tactic they embraced has spread far beyond Sri Lanka. We'll talk with an expert on suicide attacks in a moment. And if you want to talk with him about how the Tamil Tigers used suicide attacks or the legacy of their tactics, our number here in Washington is 800-989-8255. And our email address is talk@npr.org. Robert Pape joins us now. He's professor of political science at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism. And he joins us from Chicago Public Radio. Welcome to the program, professor.
[Professor Robert Pape:] Good to be here.
[Lynn Neary:] So tell me how the Tamil Tigers came to use suicide attack as a strategy.
[Professor Robert Pape:] Well, in the 1980s, the Tamil Tigers were becoming the lead resistance group or independence movement on the island of Sri Lanka. And at this point in time, there was a little bit of, actually, a crossover between the Tamil Tigers and Hezbollah, that famous suicide terrorist group from Lebanon. And in 1983, there were actually several Tamil Tiger cadre, just a couple, who were training in some Hezbollah terrorist camps right at the moment that there was that spectacular suicide truck bombing of the U.S. Marines in Beirut that killed 241 Marines and that led Ronald Reagan, just a few months later, to pull all the U.S. troops out of Beirut. Well, a few years later, the head of the Tamil Tigers, Prabhakaran, decided to try to model an attack just after the Beirut suicide truck assassination. And in July 1987, the very first Tamil Tiger suicide attack occurred when a person by the name of Captain Miller drove a truck into a barracks of Sinhalese army troops who were sleeping, effectively trying to copy that attack. And that then set off the entire wave that came over the over the next 20-something years.
[Lynn Neary:] Now when you say they copied the attack, was there and you say there was contact between the Tamil Tigers and Hezbollah. Were there -did they received training from Hezbollah, or was it simply a matter of learning about it via the media and then trying to imitate it? How does it...
[Professor Robert Pape:] Yeah. Training is probably a little too much here, because it's really more of the demonstration. And it's when I say copy, I mean, the tactic of a single driver of a truck, a truck that's laden with explosives, that's attacking a camp, an army camp early in the morning, and is essentially attacking a barracks of sleeping soldiers. So that that those are the key features of the Beirut the suicide truck assassination in Beirut in October '83 and exactly the same tactical features of the first Tamil suicide attack. And then after that attack, even though it didn't lead to sort of the same political success, it did lead to a fair bit of martyrdom for Captain Miller. So what Prabhakaran did is he decided to make a tremendous political display in the Tamil homelands of this person who had done the attack named Captain Miller. And a statue was erected. The statue was displayed prominently in Jaffna. That's the key Tamil city in the Jaffna Peninsula in the northern part of Sri Lanka. And that statue and these memorials became a quite important part of the entire, sort of, edifice of martyrdom, so to speak, that became, you know, central to how the Tamil Tigers were trying to wage their war of independence. NEARY: Now, you use the word martyr. Were these bombings tied to any religious beliefs? No. Actually, the Tamil Tigers are a purely secular suicide terrorist group. They're not a group that most of the listeners will have heard too much about because even though they're actually the world leader in suicide terrorism from 1980 to 2003, carrying out more suicide attacks than Hamas or Islamic Jihad, they're not attacking us and they're not attacking our allies. And so, even though they've done really quite tremendously spectacular suicide attacks for instance, in 1993, it's the Tamil Tigers who assassinated with the suicide assassination a sitting president, Premadasa, a president of Sri Lanka. That's the only time that a suicide attack has actually assassinated a sitting president. And then just a few years before that, Rajiv Gandhi, when he was running for prime minister in 1991, a Tamil suicide attacker, this time a woman by the name of Dhanu assassinated him. And so, despite the fact there have been these spectacular attacks, they have been occurring not against us or against our allies, and so many folks won't really have been as familiar with them. But they are not religious. They're not Islamic. They're a Hindu group. They're a Marxist group. They're actually anti-religious. They are building the concept of martyrdom around a secular idea of individuals essentially altruistically sacrificing for the good of the local community.
[Lynn Neary:] We are talking with Robert Pape. He's a professor of political science in the University of Chicago. And we're talking to him about the Tamil Tigers' use of suicide attacks and their legacy. If you have any questions for him about that, our number here in Washington is 800-989-8255. The email address is talk@npr.org. So I'm curious, Professor Pape, how were then the suicide bombers recruited? Because, you know, in the case of militant Islam, you know, we hear, you know, promises of greatness in the afterlife, for instance. So that, you know, so you could almost begin to understand that, you know, people with a certain kind of belief would think, well, if I do this then I'm going to be rewarded in the afterlife. But so what's the recruiting technique if you don't have that kind of even reward to promise?
[Professor Robert Pape:] Right. Well, maybe when we should also have an opportunity to come back and talk about the motives for some of the Hamas suicide attackers as well. But just specifically to answer your question, the critical issue here is that the Tamil Tigers have long been a resistance movement that's been a guerilla resistance movement with thousands and thousands of cadre who have been fighting for the independence of the Tamil regions of the Sri Lankan the island of Sri Lanka. And the Black Tigers, the suicide attackers for the Tamil Tigers, have been recruited essentially as elite members of the ordinary cadre. That is they're essentially promoted from within the ranks of the ordinary Tamil Tigers. A way to think about it is, they're sort of the same relationship our Rangers, you know, have to the Army. In order to get into the Rangers, our elite some of our elite special forces, you have to first be in the Army. And then you have to pass some rather rigorous tests, rigorous tests of skill, rigorous tests of emotional stability. And that's what's happening for the Black Tigers. Those that are -volunteer and then are selected to become Black Tigers, for them, it's actually quite an honor. Now, of course, our Rangers aren't doing suicide attacks. But the Black Tigers are specially an elite unit where they're being selected because they're viewed as having both the skill and strength of nerve in order to not just so much kill themselves. That's really not what the point of the attack is, as much as to kill others. And to attack especially difficult targets such as, as I just mentioned, you know, assassinations of high-level political figures that would be probably pretty difficult to achieve any other way.
[Lynn Neary:] Do they ever use children or women as suicide bombers?
[Professor Robert Pape:] Suicide women actually are quite prominent in the Black Tigers. They're called the Black Tigresses. Of the 273 that we can count and that's what I'm in the business of doing, we kind of carefully count suicide attacks and attackers around the world there had been 273 that we can verify who have actually killed themselves in suicide attacks for the Tamil Tigers. And of those, 46 have been women. And quite a large fraction, about half, have been involved in political assassinations. The youngest of the Tamil Tigers who have been Black Tigers that we can identify has been about 18. Now the Tamil Tigers as group do have cadre who are younger than 18. In fact, there are lots of news reports about how they use children. But I actually don't find much evidence of them truly using, you know, hundreds and hundreds of kids who are 12, 13 years old. But they do, quite often, have folks in their ranks who are 16 and 17 years old, much the way by the way, say, in World War I or World War II, many Western armies were composed of folks who were 17 who went to war early.
[Lynn Neary:] You mentioned that there were you've counted 273 of these kinds of attacks by the Tamil Tigers. What how does that compare to what you know about suicide attacks among other groups?
[Professor Robert Pape:] Oh, well, if we were to count that was 273 attackers. Some of those have been involved in team attacks where they've actually done it as a group. So if you were to count, say, attacks the Tamil Tigers from 1987 to just actually early May of this year, just a few weeks ago May 13th was their last suicide attack have done at least 137 confirmed suicide attacks involving 273 suicide attackers. That compares to, say, Hamas at 117 confirmed suicide attacks during their period, the life of their suicide campaigns by about 147 suicide attackers.
[Lynn Neary:] Robert Pape is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the director of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism. And you're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And we're going to take a call now from Nollynie, I believe it is.
[Nollynie:] Yes.
[Lynn Neary:] In San Jose, California. Go ahead.
[Nollynie:] Yes. My question is, the war is over but the [unintelligible] abuse of the kids being kidnapped from camps, the stories of abuses. So how is the world going to prevent another round of another round of outrage, I mean, another round of...
[Lynn Neary:] The civil war?
[Nollynie:] ...coming up, another round of disenfranchised youth coming up and turning into suicide bombers once again?
[Professor Robert Pape:] I think that's a great question. I think right now there's an awful lot of triumphalism on the part of the victorious side here, saying that the war is over, which seems to give the impression that with Prabhakaran dead, that there is sort of no issue here into the future. But the fact is, Prabhakaran and the Tamil Tigers had tremendous popular support, not so much for Prabhakaran as an individual or even suicide attack, but for the whole issue of Tamil independence because there has just been a tremendous amount of animosity between the Sinhalese who are Buddhists and the Tamils who are Hindus, actually going three decades now. And this has been a sort of a boiling civil war, if you and this is -what we're seeing is the just latest round in that civil war. And I do believe that there are good reasons to explain what happened just in the last few months. But if we look out into the future, the critical issue here is that there are now nearly 300,000 Tamils who are living in refugee camps. That makes up somewhere between a third and a half of everybody on the Jaffna Peninsula. That's a large fraction of that population. And there have been promises by the Sinhalese government to take care of them, to provide food, to provide water and then to help them into the future. But this is a very expensive proposition. This is very far away and very difficult circumstances. And I think that unfortunately, what's really needed here is a rather massive amount of economic aid, reconstruction aid, and not just by the Sinhalese government, by the international community, and I would say in fairly short order. And it's rather difficult this has often been the case in some of these campaigns or some of these conflicts involving suicide attack. And it's often been the case that promises have come and they haven't been fulfilled. And so I think that in this particular case, there are good reasons to worry about a resumption of the conflict, not so much tomorrow, but in six months or a year that could be really quite intense specifically because of the rather harsh brutality that's occurred to many, many Tamil civilians in the last few months.
[Lynn Neary:] All right. Thank you so much for your call. We're gonna take a call now from Greg. And he is calling from Syracuse, New York. Hi, Greg.
[Greg:] Hello. A couple of years ago, the Bush administration tried to characterize suicide bombings as homicide bombings. And there was a very clear sort of disciplined message on their part to get that in the media. It didn't really take hold, and I was wondering what your guest thought about that characterization and if it did take hold elsewhere in the world.
[Professor Robert Pape:] Yes. That was an effort to try to politically delegitimate the concept. And the fact of the matter is, the term suicide attack already effectively delegitimates the concept and is not the way the suicide terrorists groups typically refer to themselves. They often refer to themselves with terms that in their languages refer to not suicide by self-sacrifice or martyrdom. And I think that the other point to say is that trying to change the name once something has sort of become named something after 20 years, even the president of our country, it's just very, very difficult to do. And so, I think that the fact is, in the West, we have, since the suicide truck assassination of those Marines in Beirut, called this a suicide attack by suicide terrorists. And I think that that's probably going to be the name that will stay with us.
[Lynn Neary:] All right. Thanks for your call, Greg. And I would guess that sadly, this is not a tactic that is going to go away anytime soon in terms of modern warfare.
[Professor Robert Pape:] Well, we track suicide terrorism, the global patterns all around the world. And in 2002, there were 50 suicide attacks around the world. In 2008, over 500 suicide attacks around the world. And I'm afraid that suicide terrorism is mainly not so much driven by religion, independent of circumstance, but it's mainly a response to foreign military occupation. And as we've seen, ground forces in Iraq, increases of ground forces in Afghanistan, and then actually threatening parts of Pakistan, we've seen suicide terrorism in those parts of the world exploding.
[Lynn Neary:] Robert Pape, thank you so much for joining us today.
[Professor Robert Pape:] Thanks for having me.
[Lynn Neary:] Robert Pape directs the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism. He's also author of "Dying to Win." And he joined us from Chicago Public Radio.

[Renee Montagne:] There are more people behind bars, here in California, than in any other state. And to deal with an every-growing inmate population, the state may build more prisons. Part of the problem, is that so many California parolees end up back in prison. Judy Campbell of member station KQED reports.
[Judy Campbell Reporting:] California's prisons are bursting at the bars. On average, state prisons are running at almost double capacity. That means inmates sleep in bunks stacked three high, in prison hallways and gyms. Some have even slept outside. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger says if things don't change, a federal court could order the early release of tens of thousands of inmates.
[Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:] We have a crisis in our hands. We cannot continue looking the other way.
[Campbell:] California wasn't supposed to be looking the other way. The Governor promised sweeping prison reform when he came into office, both through his own initiatives, and in response to court orders. Schwarzenegger pledged to offer counseling, education, and job training, to cut recidivism. California's is the highest in the country. He also promised parole reforms, so petty violators don't clog prisons. But reforms have mostly stalled. And last week, the governor offered another way to combat overcrowding; build two new large-scale prisons and several smaller urban lockups. State Senate majority leader Gloria Romero calls it, an about face.
[State Senator Gloria Romero:] He promised rehabilitation. He asserted he would do prison reform. This year, a few months before his re-election, he's suddenly is becoming the Terminator. He's standing up, thumping his chest, and saying we got to build more prisons. And you have to almost think, well, where did that come from?
[Campbell:] The Governor says reforms will still happen. He says new small prisons will be designed to help inmates reintegrate into their communities, and will house women, closer to their families. And he says, reforms cannot take place in the packed prisons.
[Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:] The classrooms where we're supposed to teach, the workshops where we're we supposed to teach them professions, so when they get out they can get jobs, and so on, and connect with the outside all of these things we are taking away, because we're filling them up with double and triple bunking inmates.
[Campbell:] But critics say it will take years to build new prisons. Steve Fama is an attorney with the Prison Law Office, which has frequently sued the state over prison conditions.
[Mr. Steve Fama:] What the governor has done, sort of, as if you had a morbidly obese patient, and decided that the long term solution was simply to buy the patient a bigger pair of pants. It's really, unfortunately, a shallow approach to a complex problem.
[Campbell:] So, what happened to the governor's promise to overhaul one of the nation's most poorly run prison systems? The man who used to head California prisons, Roderick Hickman, says part of the problem was too much expectation and too little support.
[Mr. Roderick Q. Hickman:] We got to remember that California hasn't gone down the path of providing rehabilitation services for almost 20-plus years. And, you know, part of my frustration with the whole process, is that people thought that from July until January, there were going to be massive changes in things, when just two or three fiscal years before that they had taken budget cuts in those areas, that were same areas we were trying to ramp back up.
[Campbell:] And, Hickman says, there are other overwhelming forces. As Secretary, he went head to head with the state's powerful prison guard union. In February he resigned, saying the union had too much power in the governor's office, and were calling too many shots making his job impossible. And last month, the court report said, growing union power signaled the governor's retreat from prison reform, after a strong start. Easy to blame us, says Lance Corcoran, spokesman for the prison guards union. He blames poor management and a lack of political will.
[Mr. Lance Corcoran:] And the reality is this. If we were running the department, wouldn't you think we wouldn't be complaining about it all the time?
[Campbell:] Reformers say the best chance for real change may be after the elections. Perhaps then, someone can take up the biggest taboo in prison overcrowding. That is, whether some of the mandatory long sentences for criminals, are just too long. For NPR News, I'm Judy Campbell in San Francisco.

[Alex Chadwick:] Britain's Home Secretary Charles Clarke met in Brussels today with interior ministers from the other 24 European Union nations. They're discussing what new anti-terrorism measures might be needed to take on the threat of more bombings. Paul Rogers is a professor of peace studies at the University of Bradford, which is not far from Leeds, where the bombing investigation is focused now. Professor Rogers, welcome to DAY TO DAY.
[Professor Paul Rogers:] Hello.
[Alex Chadwick:] Do you know what sort of new anti-terrorism measures these ministers are talking about?
[Professor Paul Rogers:] Much of it is going to be concerned with trying to coordinate the work they do rather better in terms of maintaining records of suspects, in terms of being able to communicate in relation to electronic records. It's very much a feeling that across Europe some countries are better interconnected than others and there needs to be much more scope for closer coordination.
[Alex Chadwick:] Prime Minister Blair speaking in the House of Commons today said that it's going to be necessary to strengthen the process for excluding from the United Kingdom those who incite hatred. Is he talking about fundamentally changing the nature of Britain?
[Professor Paul Rogers:] I think that at the moment the government is rather reeling from the information that's come to light in the last 24 hours or so, that the people responsible for the atrocities last week are people who'd been brought up in Britain and were part of British communities. And there is, therefore, a feeling that while they may have been directly responsible, then there have been others from outside who, so to speak, masterminded the operation. I think it is those kinds of people that Prime Minister Blair is talking about. We don't have yet any detail about any changed legislation. So for the moment, I think this may be a kind of reaction to what has happened as much as anything to reassure people that further steps may be taken to keep out the kinds of people who would incite this kind of behavior.
[Alex Chadwick:] Police are now talking about the high quality of explosives that they've found linked to these bombers at locations in West Yorkshire and down in the south of England. Isn't this material very difficult to get in Britain, and does this suggest international involvement?
[Professor Paul Rogers:] It probably does suggest international involvement. Britain has very strong systems of control within civil industry. There are very strict licenses for acquiring such material, but across Europe, there are both gray and black markets in this kind of material, and a lot of it went almost astray towards the end of the Cold War 10 to 15 years ago. And that actually provides a kind of pool for people to work completely illicitly, but it certainly does mean as you suggest that there is very likely to be some sort of international connection.
[Alex Chadwick:] What do you expect to be happening in your country as you try to grapple with this investigation and with where this investigation has brought you now; that is, to the observation that these are Britons?
[Professor Paul Rogers:] One of the crucial things I think in Britain, particularly in the coming four or five days through the next weekend, will be whether it is possible to avoid major community problems. The city of Leeds, which is close to where I live, and the city of Bradford, more or less next door-they're twin cities-with an even larger Asian origin population, people have worked incredibly hard in the last four or five years to improve community relations. And I think people locally are hoping very much that things will hold together. There is a feeling at present that the few people responsible for the bombings were isolated individuals and that to an extent is at least helping the whole process of preventing violence against the communities from which they come.
[Alex Chadwick:] Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at the University of Bradford in England. Professor Rogers, thank you for being with us.
[Professor Paul Rogers:] Thank you.

[Renee Montagne:] President Obama delivered a warning to Iran yesterday over the fight against ISIS. He said Shiite fighters backed by Iran and now battling ISIS militants in Iraq must respect Iraqi sovereignty. Those remarks came after a White House meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. Here's NPR's Mara Liasson.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] President Obama said it was understandable that Iraq and its neighbor Iran both Shia majority countries would cooperate in the fight against ISIS. But Mr. Obama said any foreign assistance must be under the unified control of the Iraqi government.
[President Barack Obama:] It needs to be help that is not simply coordinated with the Iraqi government but ultimately is answerable to the Iraqi government and is funneled through the chain of command.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] That's what the U.S. is doing, said the president, in order to respect Iraq's sovereignty but also to avoid the impression that the U.S. is moving back into Iraq. There are now about 3,000 American troops in Iraq training and advising Iraqi and Kurdish forces. The president said unified control will also help the Iraq government avoid abuses by Shiite militias involved in retaking Sunni areas from ISIS.
[President Barack Obama:] If there are criminal acts or sectarian retributions that are carried out that ultimately Prime Minister Abadi is able to call those forces to account.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Prime Minister Abadi says his government has zero tolerance for the human rights abuses carried out by Shiite militias engaged in fighting ISIS. He said they were carried out by criminals and outliers who are now being captured and prosecuted. The Oval Office meeting with Abadi was a show of support for a leader the White House believes has been more inclusive of all Iraqi ethnic and religious factions. President Obama has offered Iraq $200 million in humanitarian aid but would not say whether he would give the Iraqis the military equipment they seek, such as Apache helicopters or drones. Mara Liasson, NPR News, the White House.

[Renee Montagne:] Our business news starts today with a report card on retail sales. Holiday shoppers bought a lot of presents this year but it was not a very Merry Christmas for retailers. Sales were up but profits were down. Deep discounts in November led to steeper discounts in December. Kurt Barnard is the president of Barnard's Retail Consulting Group. That's an organization that follows retail trends. He says even the post-Christmas buying binge may be too little too late for companies to reach their sales goals.
[Mr. Kurt Barnard:] This holiday shopping season was an orgy of discounts, price breaks and big sales signs.
[Renee Montagne:] What possessed retailers to put on all these sales in November when they knew full well that December was coming up?
[Mr. Kurt Barnard:] They did not want to run the risk of consumers turned away by high prices. Cause then when December comes around, the high prices will stick in the minds of people and they'll say, well, I can't really too much buy.
[Renee Montagne:] What products were tough sells? I've been reading about coats were not selling well. That's because the temperatures were very high.
[Mr. Kurt Barnard:] That is correct. Who wants to try on heavy winter clothing when the temperature is 60 degrees range?
[Renee Montagne:] And what sold well?
[Mr. Kurt Barnard:] Consumer electronics. You know, Renee, the thing is people did not buy a product, they bought a price.
[Renee Montagne:] How bad is this for retailers? Can they recoup come the winter and the spring?
[Mr. Kurt Barnard:] No they really cannot. In January, spring merchandise begins to move into the store and room has to be made to accommodate the new spring merchandise.
[Renee Montagne:] Good for consumers, I suppose. More sales coming up.
[Mr. Kurt Barnard:] For consumers it is a paradise.
[Renee Montagne:] Thank you very much for talking with us.
[Mr. Kurt Barnard:] You are welcome. Happy New Year.
[Renee Montagne:] Happy New Year to you. Kurt Barnard is president of Barnard's Retail Consulting Group.

[Neal Conan:] And now, The Opinion Page. Does freedom of speech include the right to lie? After he boasted about his Medal of Honor, Xavier Alvarez became one of the first people convicted under the Stolen Valor Act, a law that makes it a crime to falsely claim military decorations. The case goes before the Supreme Court on Wednesday. In an op-ed for The Washington Post over the weekend, Jonathan Turley argued, it can be dangerous to criminalize lies. After all, with the power to punish a lie, comes the power to define the truth, a risky occupation for any government. Well, where do you draw the line on freedom of speech? 800-989-8255. Email: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's @npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION. Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University. He joins us here in Studio 3A. Nice to have you with us again.
[Jonathan Turley:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] And so this claim that, I got the Medal of Honor or the Navy Cross or whatever is, criminalized by Congress because it impugns those who did receive those decorations.
[Jonathan Turley:] It does, and on that we all agree. There's no disagreement as to treating this people as social pariahs. There's no disagreement in the shared anger we all feel when people falsely claim these things. But these fraudulent warriors are not hard to pick out in a crowd. These are a relatively small number of people, if you look at these cases. And they're people like Xavier Alvarez, who's the one in front of the Supreme court, and he claimed to be a 25-year veteran of the Marines, repeatedly wounded. He also claimed, by the way, to be someone who played for the Detroit Red Wings and was married secretly to a Mexican starlet. And a lot of people wondered how a guy like that ended up on the Three Valleys Municipal Water District in Claremont, California. And what they found out is that most everything he said after, I'm Xavier Alvarez, was false. And the question is, is our anger enough at someone like Alvarez to allow the government to criminalize this lie? And it has less to do with the Medal of Honor as it does with government power. The government always starts criminalizing the people we hate the most. But the government's arguing here is something quite sweeping, that lies are simply not protected in the same way that truth is. But, of course, it comes out to who defines the truth? And we haven't done that in the past, and we can find ourselves on a slippery slope when the government starts to point out other lies that should be criminal just because they are lies as opposed to something else. When lies...
[Neal Conan:] Well, wait.
[Jonathan Turley:] Yeah.
[Neal Conan:] If I lie to get a bank loan or to entice somebody into a business deal, that's a crime.
[Jonathan Turley:] It is, because where punishing the lie becomes larceny, or becomes fraud or becomes perjury. We criminalize it because it has a collateral injury. What's different about the Stolen Valor Act of 1985 is it sought to create a criminal code for the other cases. We've always prosecuted these guys who say that they are veterans and raise money and get benefits. We prosecute them in a nanosecond, and everyone applauds the prosecution. This law was actually designed to get the other guys, the ones that didn't ask for anything except adoration.
[Neal Conan:] Yet adoration, respect can contribute to power. You, in fact, wrote about the case of the publisher of a major newspaper in Arizona, a crony of Senator John McCain, of course the senator from that state who was exposed as someone who had made up his entire naval career.
[Jonathan Turley:] Indeed. Darrow Duke Tully said he flew 100 missions over Vietnam, actually crashed a jet in Korea, received enough medals to make a Soviet general blush, and he was found to have been a liar. But, you know, that's a good example of why we don't need the law. He was ridiculed. Everything that he had accomplished in his life was destroyed and most of these people are. They become social pariahs.
[Neal Conan:] When they get caught.
[Jonathan Turley:] True. Most of these guys do get caught, you know, because they it's addictive. You know, they can't stop promoting themselves. One person showed up at a high school reunion wearing a medal, identified him as a commander of the English realm. And so these guys are out of control. But it's true can't some of these guys get by, by claiming a Silver Star? Yes. It probably can happen. But the question for us is more difficult, and that is where do you draw the line here? I mean, you're on a slippery slope. Once you start saying that lies can be crimes for their own right without any other showing by the government, it allows the government to criminalize a great variety of speech. We've had people lie about their military career since the colonial times, you know? General Von Steuben, the great hero...
[Neal Conan:] Hey, he was from hometown, Englewood, New Jersey.
[Jonathan Turley:] Well, you should be ashamed. No, you should be very proud. He actually was a great hero. But he misled and that's putting a nice spin on it his own credentials. He said that he was a lieutenant general in the king of Prussia's service. In fact, he never made higher than a captain. He was mustered out under a cloud of controversy, and he lied.
[Neal Conan:] A grateful nation gave him a house in Englewood. We're not sure he ever lived in it, but we're claiming it anyway. All right. Here's an email we have from Dan in Fairfield, Iowa: I tend to support the Stolen Valor Act. I'm a Vietnam vet. For many years, we kept our mouths shut due to large amounts of criticism by others who never served. When it finally became OK to mention our service, a bunch of creeps came out of the woodwork, claiming to be heroes or evildoers. I met folks claiming to be multiple special multiple tour special forces who didn't know facts any kid who went through basic training would know. We need some those to those who never served, those who never experienced all the events and emotions that war cannot begin to understand the brotherhood and sisterhood of those who have.
[Jonathan Turley:] Well, I find that extremely compelling, right up to the point of making it part of the criminal code. I think we would all support having a system to make it easier to find frauds, and in fact they are easy. I mean, many of these people are tripped up. There was a judge in Illinois who claimed two congressional Medals of Honor.
[Neal Conan:] And wanted a license plate, the Medal of Honor license plate.
[Jonathan Turley:] Yes, he wanted a license plate. You had a sergeant who decided after he retired to make himself a two-star major general. Well, that wasn't hard to check. There's not a lot of them around. So we generally can uncover these people. But it's a mistake, I think, to view this as how do we feel about our heroes, because we shouldn't add constitutional injury to a social insult. We have ways of protecting our heroes, and we've done it very, very well. This is a small number of creepy people, as the listener said. But do you want those creepy people to open a door for the government to start criminalizing lies just 'cause they're lies?
[Neal Conan:] Let's get some callers in on the conversation. 800-989-8255. Where do you draw the line on free speech? Email: talk@npr.org. And Jeff is on the line from Richmond, Missouri.
[Jeff:] Hi, there.
[Neal Conan:] Hi.
[Jeff:] Well, as many of your callers will be, I'm a Vietnam vet with a Purple Heart and a tiny what I call it a Honorable Mention for Valor. I if I fought for anything, fought for free speech, no matter how creepy a creep it is, it has the right to tell all his lies, and we have the right to catch him and just drag him through the mud.
[Neal Conan:] So...
[Jeff:] No matter what a creep he is, I think he has the right to tell his lies. I object to the criminalization of lying.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks very much for the call, Jeff. And are there any circumstances under which you might reconsider?
[Jeff:] You know, you brought up the things like fraud, those count. But just to lie to be glorified, you know, my shrink says people sit in his office and lie to him about being a Navy SEAL, so he's looking at their DD214 on screen, and he knows they were clerk in charge of sox. What you're going to do? Let them go. I mean, let them lie.
[Neal Conan:] There's also...
[Jeff:] No, I wouldn't I would not criminalize lying in the United States of America.
[Neal Conan:] All right. Thanks, Jeff, very much. Appreciate it.
[Jeff:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] There's also the emailer said, the Vietnam vet I'm approached to, you know, as everybody is, on the street often by people, you know, help out a Vietnam vet. If they're much younger than me, this can't have happened unless they serve when they were 12.
[Jonathan Turley:] Right. And those people actually are engaging in a form of fraud. They're not prosecuted because they're panhandlers. But I think your last listener make a powerful point. The better part of valor that we respect in our heroes is not something that's enforced by the criminal code. And we can enforce better the social standard by creating new means to uncover frauds. But what happens, and I think this is by design, is members wanted to align themselves for their heroes, their powerful symbols, but it ignores the fact that what the government is doing here is really not about medals. It's about government power.
[Neal Conan:] There is also then the extension: what do you do about the concept called hate speech? This is used as an exacerbating factor in criminal cases, if it was taught to be a hate crime. Sometimes, it could be prosecuted. You get additional penalties for what some people say is: well, how do you read someone's intent.
[Jonathan Turley:] Well, that's a very good point. And hate speech laws really are continue to be controversial with many civil libertarians. But there is one mitigating aspect there, is that they're often connected to other crimes, and there also have an intent factor, that a jury has to find that they intentionally tried to use that speech essentially as a weapon. You also have the Brandenburg standard, where the Supreme Court says that you could criminalize speech that has poses imminent harm. That is also very controversial, but it's also very narrow. The Supreme Court has kept those standards quite tight, tying them often to clear intent to create injury. What these liars are doing is they're just lying. They're often flawed individuals. And studies have shown that people lie a great deal. It's one of the unfortunate things about our species. But if you start to expand government power to allow them to criminalize that natural, if unfortunate, characteristic of being human, you expand it beyond any definition or limit.
[Neal Conan:] Here's an email from Rita: If Congress is going to legislate lying, perhaps they need to start with themselves and campaign lies. Well, don't hold your breath, Rita. Jonathan Turley is with us. He's a public interest law professor at George Washington University, author of The Washington Post op-ed, "Lying about receiving the Medal of Honor? It's shameful but it shouldn't be a crime." There's a link to that op-ed on our webpage. Go to npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And let's get Brian on the line. Brian with us from Portsmouth in Virginia.
[Brian:] Hi there. I was just calling because this kind of lie and this kind of issue, it shows a deeper problem where it's not about the lie. It's what they're gaining from it. And even the admiration and while your speaker believes it to be something that's not as much of an issue, this is a serious issue. This person is trying to take because even with the Medal of Honor, there are several things that you receive for your children and for yourself for the rest of your life that it's just such a serious issue, and that any lie that can contribute even just admiration to yourself is a very dangerous path to go down.
[Neal Conan:] I think there's a distinction between seeking veterans' benefits or some sort of, you know...
[Brian:] Wait. But even to receive any kind of benefit, even if it's just the, oh, wow, congratulations for being there, that's those are the kinds of things that it's not right to allow others to have. If you're not willing to make those kinds of things that any of those require, whether it'd be for like you had said earlier about trying to get into a business or anything, those it's the same kind of lie that's being presented. And as those are illegal, this should be illegal.
[Jonathan Turley:] Well, you know, it's hard to argue with the basis of the point. I share the anger and I that the listener has. But if you start to say that we'll criminalize it because you're getting these benefits of status, you criminalize every pick-up line used in every bar in history. For every Patrick Henry that said, he regret he only had one life to give for his country, there were a dozen of them in bars, in pubs in Boston saying they're off to join George Washington in the morning. And they all got some benefit from it. That's usually people lie to get some benefit. But we've always drawn this line on tangible benefits. You go out and you get benefits as a Medal of Honor winner, if you start to claim tangible things, we prosecute you in a nanosecond. But I think the problem here is, what's the limiting principle? Yes, we feel very strongly about all these medals, not just the Medal of Honor. But how about, say, you're a former police officer or a former firefighter. Those groups legitimately can say it's wrong to claim what I have accomplished in my life. And you end up on this slippery slope as we begin to list the lies for which you can go to prison.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks for the call, Brian. It is also an extension of the reality that free speech is often uncomfortable speech. It goes back to the march of the Ku Klux Klan to Skokie, Illinois, Nazis to a town which many survivors of the Holocaust lived in. It goes back to the idea that in Germany, if you say, yay, Nazis, that's a crime. That's not a crime in this country. It is not a crime to burn the flag as part of political protest. This is uncomfortable for many people, but it is where the United States has drawn the line.
[Jonathan Turley:] It is, indeed. And we're a standout in the world. We stand out for free speech. And we take with it all of the bad speech. But we believe and we've always believed that speech itself is disinfectant, that we can protect ourselves, that truth tends to rise to the top. And that means that there's a lot of creeps out there that say really creepy things. But this country has always stood squarely on the side of free speech. We've refuse to go down that road. Even though some of our closest allies like France and England have placed significant restrictions on free speech. We have not. And it would be a shame for the world to lose that. We can be justifiably proud that we have embraced this standard, and we've refused to amend it.
[Neal Conan:] Ian in Chapel Hill emails: If lying is outlawed, can we deputize PolitiFact?
[Jonathan Turley:] Now there's an interesting point. But, you know, as a good point in that, we would be better served if we use all of our efforts and maybe some of our anger, to build up ways of disclosing who frauds are. And it's becoming easier on the Internet, you know? People say, I won Silver Star, you go and see who won Silver Star. You do a search of the name. And we could do better at things like that without handing over to the government this sweeping new power.
[Neal Conan:] We always have to recognize the name of Mike Boorda, the admiral who rose to become Chief of Naval Operations who took his own life after it was revealed that he had unfairly claimed a honor to which he was not entitled. And as we look at the scheme of things, an outsider who never served in the military, you say this was a fairly minor thing. Not to him it wasn't, he took his own life.
[Jonathan Turley:] That's right, and not to the military culture. He was a remarkable individual. It's one of the saddest cases I've read because he really did deserve the respect of the entire nation. But he violated this core principle of the military culture. And it shows, by the way, how that's the greatest deterrent, is that we all respect our heroes and even those who lie can't handle the truth when they're disclosed.
[Neal Conan:] Jonathan Turley is Shapiro is it Shapiro or Shapiro?
[Jonathan Turley:] It's actually Shapiro.
[Neal Conan:] Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University. Again, his op-ed, you can take a look at it on our website. Go to npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION. He joined us here in Studio 3A. Tomorrow, a look at the internal politics of China, where communism and capitalism butt heads. Join us to that. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

[Another Door Opens For The Hearing Impaired:] the door of a truck.
[Lynn Neary:] Drivers for UPS won a round in court yesterday when a federal appeals court ruled that the shipping company could not bar the deaf and hearing impaired from driving delivery trucks. The class action suit brought under the Americans with Disabilities Act represented current and former UPS employees passed over for driving jobs or discouraged from applying.

[Rachel Martin:] President Trump has another chance to reimpose sanctions on Iran today. In the past, the president has promised to scrap the Iran nuclear deal and bring back sanctions. Although, so far, he has chosen to keep the status quo. NPR national security correspondent Greg Myre is with us in the studio this morning. Hi, Greg.
[Greg Myre, Byline:] Good morning, Rachel.
[Rachel Martin:] What's going to happen today?
[Greg Myre, Byline:] Well, we got a hint yesterday. The treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, said, I expect new sanctions. That sounds like potentially a big deal...
[Rachel Martin:] Right.
[Greg Myre, Byline:] ...But probably something we've seen from the playbook in the past, which is limited sanctions against the company or a few individuals, sort of a slap on the wrist, the intent being to show that the Trump administration is keeping pressure on Iran but does not want to blow up the entire nuclear deal.
[Rachel Martin:] Got it. So we're expecting the president to again keep the deal in place?
[Greg Myre, Byline:] I don't want to give you a guarantee on that. But we are sort of expecting that he'll, again, decertify the deal, which he did in October. And that's mostly symbolic. And that there's these sanctions, oil and banking sanctions, which have been suspended every few months by President Obama and now President Trump. We expect he will continue to suspend those sanctions. If he reimposed them, that would be a big deal. Iran would complain loudly and the whole deal could unravel.
[Rachel Martin:] Just take a step back and explain why we end up talking about this every few months because there are a couple different obligations that the president has under the original deal, right?
[Greg Myre, Byline:] Yeah, and I think the president is probably wondering about that himself. And you have to go back to the Obama administration. And the Republicans in Congress sort of wanted to hold the president's feet to the fire and make him come out every three or four months and say, OK, is the nuclear deal still working? Is this...
[Rachel Martin:] Make him take ownership over it.
[Greg Myre, Byline:] Absolutely, absolutely. And he had to do that. But now that's carried over to the Trump presidency. And so Trump says, I hate this deal. It's the worst deal ever. Yet every three or four months, he has to come out and make these decisions on it, and he wants to show how much he dislikes it. But the advice he's getting from defense secretary, secretary of state is Iran is still technically in compliance, and it would be a bad idea to blow it up. We don't have the support of the Europeans and others. So very grudgingly he makes this decision every three, four months.
[Rachel Martin:] So this particular decision is happening in the context of these protests that we've seen on the streets of Iran. How's that playing into the decision, if at all?
[Greg Myre, Byline:] Well, it certainly made it a bigger debate right now. And it's reenergized, I think, both sides of the debate. Those who are critical of the nuclear deal say, this is exactly what we were worried about. Iran could still behave badly. It can crack down on protesters. It can fund militant groups around the region. It's not changing Iranian behavior, and they're getting more money from the sanctions relief. So they can you know, they're feeling a little bit better about things. But the supporters of the deal say, this was strictly a deal about the nuclear program and Iran is complying. They have scaled back and frozen their nuclear program. This was the intent. It's working. And even if you did, if you reimpose the sanctions, the Europeans and others are not going to buy back in, so they wouldn't be nearly as effective as they were a few years ago.
[Rachel Martin:] All right, NPR's national security correspondent, Greg Myre. Thanks so much, Greg.
[Greg Myre, Byline:] Thank you, Rachel.

[Audie Cornish:] Daniel Robison reports.
[Daniel Robison:] Chuck Kutcher has lived in the same house for 42 years on hilly farmland in upstate New York. He ran a greenhouse, two floral shops and raised three kids. In the late 1960s, he wasn't the only one new to the neighborhood. Just opening up down the street was the West Valley Nuclear Reprocessing Facility. As the first plant to recycle fuel from the nation's nuclear power plants, Kutcher says it brought the community hope, jobs and promises of safety.
[M:] Well, they'd come to my place and test vegetables. They would test dairy cows. They would test the milk. They would kill some deer and test those.
[Daniel Robison:] While tests on Kutcher's land came back negative, radiation eventually spread off-site due to accidents, lax storage and poor management. When tighter regulations forced the plant to shut down, word of the problems leaked to a scared public and John Chamberlain says waste leaked out of untended storage tanks.
[M:] The waste we had in that tank was a concentrated radioactive material with as many different isotopes in it as you could have found anywhere.
[Daniel Robison:] Now, workers are building a giant water filter underground that's as long as three football fields and as tall as a utility pole. The wall of volcanic rock will purify the contaminated ground water as it passes through.
[M:] I, myself, have an obsession with radioactive waste.
[Daniel Robison:] Shannon Seneca designed the wall. In fact, it's her thesis at the University at Buffalo.
[M:] Strontium really likes to travel with the ground water. Rather than just being one oval-type shape that's moving underground, it actually has, like, fingers pointing in different directions.
[Daniel Robison:] The plant has also cost taxpayers billions of dollars and will continue to do so. Ruth Weiner is with the Sandia National Lab. She says West Valley has always been ahead of its time, but not necessarily had the best timing.
[M:] Nobody really realized in 1966, when West Valley was first started, what all of the associated cleanup problems and, for that matter, cleanup regulations might be.
[Daniel Robison:] For NPR News, I'm Daniel Robison in Buffalo, New York.

[Noah Adams:] The African Union increased the pressure on two rebel factions today to sign on to a peace deal already in place for the Darfur region of Sudan. That agreement is supposed to provide relief to some two million refugees in the region. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Jendayi Frazier helped negotiate the deal between the government and the main rebel group in Darfur. She told our colleague, Madeleine Brand, that first NATO and then the U.N. will have to provide peacekeeping to make this new treaty work.
[Ms. Jendayi Frazier:] Darfur is a region the size of Texas, and so we need at least 14,000 troops, which we'll have to turn to the United Nations to get other countries involved. And so we are definitely looking towards a transition. Normally, it takes the human process from six to nine months at the longest, we hope.
[Madeleine Brand:] With all due respect, this has been a humanitarian crisis. In fact, it's been called a genocide in the making for the last three years. What's taking so long?
[Ms. Jendayi Frazier:] Well, we're not just sitting on our hands. We've been working over the last three years. We've been pursuing a peace agreement, which we achieved. Secondly, we are the largest provider of humanitarian assistance to the people of Darfur. And that includes both financial assistance, and we provide over 86 percent of the food that the World Food Program is providing. And then finally pushing the U.N. Security Counsel for the very purpose of trying to get a resolution passed quickly, so that we can get that U.N. force in place.
[Madeleine Brand:] But meanwhile, daily, the situation on the ground is getting worse and worse. And what do you do right now to alleviate the suffering? I mean, you know, waiting for resolutions to get through could take months.
[Ms. Jendayi Frazier:] Well, President Bush has called for immediately shipping 2,850 metric tons of commodities. He's diverted five ships to the Port of Sudan. And then he's undertaken an emergency purchase of 40,000 metric tons of commodities, for rapid and direct shipment to Sudan. And we have a full diplomatic offense, working with the international community to try to support and assist the people of Darfur. But with this Darfur Peace Agreement, we really have an opportunity to move the process much more rapidly forward, so that we can get that U.N. force up and operating.
[Madeleine Brand:] But what if the Sudanese government says, You know what? No, I'm not going to abide by this. And I don't want them in here. Period.
[Ms. Jendayi Frazier:] We don't expect that to be the case. We fully expect for the government of Sudan to cooperate, because it's in their interest to stop the violence.
[Madeleine Brand:] Well, some have said they have been behind this violence.
[Ms. Jendayi Frazier:] That's true.
[Madeleine Brand:] So how is it in their interest to stop it?
[Ms. Jendayi Frazier:] Because it's completely out of control. And it's undermining their own interest. I think everybody is putting pressure on Sudan. They've now signed the Darfur Peace Agreement, so they've taken on the responsibility for implementation of that agreement. And you need the support and help of the United Nations to do that.
[Madeleine Brand:] Doesn't the U.S. face a bit of a conundrum in the fact that the CIA has an interest in being friendly with the Sudanese government, in that it is a key ally in fighting groups like al-Qaida and other terrorist groups? At the same time, the Sudanese government is accused of perpetuating genocide.
[Ms. Jendayi Frazier:] There is no contradiction there. Not just the CIA but the American people as a whole have an interest in working and pushing governments to not allow al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations to take up safe have in their country. And so that's in America's interest, but just as much in America's interest, the responsibility to not allow genocide to occur in Sudan or anywhere in the world.
[Madeleine Brand:] Ms. Frazier, I want to thank you very much for speaking with us.
[Ms. Jendayi Frazier:] Thank you very much.
[Noah Adams:] Jendayi Frazier is assistant U.S. Secretary of State for African Affairs.

[Renee Montagne:] California is among the states where courts have ruled against executing inmates on death row because of the method of execution. Now a federal judge has declared the death penalty unconstitutional not because of how executions are done but because here in California, they are so rarely carried out. Here's NPR's Ina Jaffe.
[Ina Jaffe, Byline:] There's an old saying in California that a prisoner facing execution is more likely to die of old age first. While there are nearly 750 inmates on death row, the state hasn't put anyone to death since 2006. That's because an earlier court ruling found that California's method of execution was likely to be drawn out and painful, making it cruel and unusual punishment. But that's not the reason that U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney gave yesterday when he ruled against the law, says Loyola University law professor Lara Bazelon. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: We mistakenly refer to Loyola Law School as Loyola University Law School]
[Lara Bazelon:] His finding is that the imposition of the death penalty in California is arbitrary because it happens to so few people because the process is as badly funded as it is.
[Ina Jaffe, Byline:] Bazelon says the judge found that state funding was so inadequate, it had constitutional consequences.
[Lara Bazelon:] It has to do with how long it takes for the person to get an appellate lawyer in the state court once they're convicted. It has a lot to do with how slow the state court process is.
[Ina Jaffe, Byline:] In fact, the prisoner Ernest Dewayne Jones was originally sentenced to death in 1995 for the rape and murder of his girlfriend's mother. Judge Carney noted that since voters reinstated the death penalty in California in 1978, more than 900 people have been sentenced to death but only 13 have been executed. And he found that which inmate is ultimately put to death is based on arbitrary bureaucratic factors rather than the crime committed or the date of sentence. California's death penalty, wrote Carney, has been transformed into a punishment that no rational jury or legislator would ever impose life in prison with a remote possibility of death.
[Matt Cherry:] We're all watching with great interest to see what happens next.
[Ina Jaffe, Byline:] That's Matt Cherry, executive director of Death Penalty Focus, an anti-death penalty organization.
[Matt Cherry:] I feel that it's very hard to respond to this judgment in any way other than accepting that yes, the dental penalty system is broken. So when other lawyers make the same argument on behalf of their clients on death row, it'll be very hard to rule against them.
[Ina Jaffe, Byline:] But some death penalty supporters think Judge Carney got it exactly backwards. Kent Scheidegger is the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation.
[Kent Scheidegger:] The delays that he point out certainly are a travesty, but they're not a violation of the rights of the defendant. They're a violation of the rights of the victim the victim's family.
[Ina Jaffe, Byline:] Judge Cormac Carney was appointed to the bench by former President George W. Bush. His ruling is narrow. It does not find execution itself to be unconstitutional, just California's way of carrying it out. Attorney General Kamala Harris has not set yet whether she will appeal the ruling. The law professor Lara Bazelon expects her to.
[Lara Bazelon:] And if I were them, I would challenge the notion that the process is arbitrary. I think the acceptance of that argument is somewhat novel and that the Ninth Circuit should not adopt the reasoning.
[Ina Jaffe, Byline:] In the meantime, little may actually change in California. The state still does not have a court sanctioned method of execution, and there are no prisoners currently scheduled to die. Ina Jaffe, NPR News.

[Audie Cornish:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.
[Melissa Block:] And Melissa Block. A 16 year-old boy is in custody after a knife attack at a high school near Pittsburgh left at least 20 people injured. Police say among the injured is a school police officer who stopped the attacker with the help of an assistant principal. NPR's Jeff Brady reports the rampage began just before classes were about to start this morning.
[Jeff Brady, Byline:] At Franklin Regional Senior High School, east of Pittsburgh, student Josiah Wages says he was eating breakfast in the cafeteria.
[Josiah Wages:] And me and my friend, just all of the sudden, we heard screaming and people running through the cafeteria. And we were like, that's weird, because we didn't know why and then the fire alarm went off at that point.
[Jeff Brady, Byline:] Police say whoever set off the fire alarm likely saved more people from being injured because students and staff started evacuating the school. They escaped the grisly scene that student Gracey Evans told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette she saw.
[Gracey Evans:] This kid comes down the hallway with two knives in his hand and just stabbing people. And my best friend, he went in front of me to protect me from getting stabbed.
[Jeff Brady, Byline:] Evans says her friend was among the injured, many of them rushed to nearby hospitals. One of the most-severely injured students was a 17-year old senior. Dr. Louis Alarcon, with Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, says the student was immediately taken into surgery.
[Louis Alarcon:] He sustained a single, life-threatening stab wound to the left side of his torso. He arrived with a very low blood pressure and evidence of massive bleeding within his chest and abdomen.
[Jeff Brady, Byline:] Alarcon says the student will need more surgery but fully expects him to survive the injuries. Some of the victims who received less serious injuries already have been released from local hospitals. Meanwhile it's not yet clear what was the motive for the attack. Court documents show the suspect is 16-year-old sophomore Alex Hribal. Police say he was treated for injuries to his hands. Hribal is charged with four counts of attempted homicide and 21 counts of aggravated assault. Westmoreland County District Attorney John Peck says there are still witnesses who need to be interviewed.
[John Peck:] Fortunately we've been aided in this investigation by the FBI and state police, and the local police departments. So we're confronted with an enormous amount of information that we need to obtain from people who are victims and people who are witnesses to these events.
[Jeff Brady, Byline:] As the investigation continues, the high school will be closed for several days. Jeff Brady, NPR News.

[Rachel Martin:] International inspectors have arrived in Iran as part of the negotiated nuclear deal that goes into effect tomorrow. They're monitoring Iran's compliance with an interim agreement designed to try to prevent the country from developing a nuclear weapon. We reached out to Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute. She's also the coauthor of the book "Containing and Deterring a Nuclear Iran." I began by asking her whether she believes this deal contains or deters.
[Danielle Pletka:] I don't think it does enough. It's certainly a step. The question is really whether it's an adequate step, not just for the United States and for the region, but also in exchange for what the Iranians are receiving.
[Rachel Martin:] So, what specifically is the United States surrendering that is too much?
[Danielle Pletka:] I think that probably the biggest loss here is that the sanctions are now going to start rolling back, maybe not in America but certainly in parts of Europe and lots of Asia and Russia. And I think it's the beginning of the end of an effective sanctions regime.
[Rachel Martin:] But while this is an interim deal, this is still an ongoing negotiation. And it's widely believed that the sanctions over the years are what brought Iran to the negotiating table at this point. Is it not appropriate then for all sides to make concessions?
[Danielle Pletka:] Absolutely. I think that if you're going put sanctions on then obviously the carrot that goes with the stick is that you have to be willing to lift the sanctions. And the administration insists that they have done very little to lift sanctions, that in fact the steps backwards are miniscule in comparison to what the Iranians wanted. I would counter that unfortunately what the Iranians have given is also miniscule. What the Iranians have done is they have bought themselves a lot of time in which they can freely work on a variety of aspects of their nuclear weapons program without fear of international censure.
[Rachel Martin:] Six months though, that's not...
[Danielle Pletka:] No.
[Rachel Martin:] ...that's not a long time.
[Danielle Pletka:] First of all, there's a relatively vaguely worded provision that allows the six months to be extended. Maybe a year if you're being lawyerly, probably ad infinitum.
[Rachel Martin:] So, in your opinion can there be a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear challenge?
[Danielle Pletka:] There's a better deal to be had. There was always a better deal to be had.
[Rachel Martin:] What specifically would that have entailed?
[Danielle Pletka:] I think that there are things that are missing from this that are really important. The administration has made a very big concession, probably what, for the Iranians, was one of the most important things, which was that the Iranians insisted that they have a, quote, "right," unquote, to enrichment. The Obama administration insists that they do not have that right. Unfortunately, what this agreement does it envisions not only an interim but also a final status agreement which allows the Iranians to enrich uranium.
[Rachel Martin:] Which they say will be for civilian purposes.
[Danielle Pletka:] Of course. And they've always said that and yet they have not managed to persuade even the Chinese, certainly not the International Atomic Energy Agency, and not the rest of us either.
[Rachel Martin:] If the U.S. cannot work out a diplomatic solution, if this interim deal falters, is military action inevitable?
[Danielle Pletka:] You know, if you would have asked me that last year, I probably would have said yes and in previous years I might have even suggested that American military action is inevitable. I now think that American military action is almost inconceivable. And that leaves the Israelis, many of us who have expected that the Israelis would act on one of their red lines. And, you know, successive prime ministers have given more and more time to international negotiations. So, do I believe military action is inevitable? No. I don't think that anyone who is aware of the history of this could suggest that it's inevitable by any party.
[Rachel Martin:] Danielle Pletka. She is the coauthor of the book "Containing and Deterring a Nuclear Iran." She's also with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. Thanks so much for talking with us.
[Danielle Pletka:] Thank you.

[Ed Gordon:] And then there was one.
[Mr. Donald Trump:] Rebecca, you're outstanding. Randal, you're hired.
[Ed Gordon:] Last week on NBC's "The Apprentice," real estate mogul Donald Trump chose Randal Pinkett as his organization's next apprentice. Pinkett, a 34-year-old CEO, is the first black American to win on the show. Pinkett is a well-qualified hire. The Rhodes scholar holds five academic degrees from top universities, including MIT and Rutgers. The former college track and field champion also runs his own multimillion-dollar management and consulting firm. His win has sparked some controversy, but also an outpouring of praise from black America.
[Mr. Randal Pinkett:] I've been getting incredible e-mails of support from the African-American community, phone calls; I've gotten gifts sent to my home as of recently saying congratulations. So I definitely feel the groundswell of support, and it's been a community that I've been proud to represent, and we all kind of wear that responsibility, and I wore it with pride.
[Ed Gordon:] When you look back now, is there anything that you would have done differently?
[Mr. Randal Pinkett:] You know, I think the only area where I might have made adjustments was in that last boardroom. You know, I stand by the decision that I made when Mr. Trump asked me, do I think that he should also hire Rebecca? And, you know, my answer was: This is about hiring the apprentice.
[Mr. Donald Trump:] I have to ask Randal's opinion. If you were me, would you hire Rebecca also?
[Mr. Randal Pinkett:] Mr. Trump, I firmly believe that this is "The Apprentice," that there is one and only one apprentice, and if you're going to hire someone tonight, it should be one. I might have added to that that I have no objections to her joining the Trump organization, but I felt like the competition and the spirit of the competition was about selecting an apprentice, and that's what my response reflected.
[Ed Gordon:] It has to some degree dimmed the spotlight on your accomplishment. Is it bittersweet in that sense? And did you feel a little put off in the sense that you had to even answer that?
[Mr. Randal Pinkett:] I did feel a little put off in having to answer it. You know, I went 13 weeks-or should I say 12 weeks, six days, 11 hours, 59 minutes and 30 seconds almost unscathed. And then the last 30 seconds really was the only blemish in terms of some people's perception of my participation on the show. And that is disappointing. It is very disappointing, and I honestly don't believe that I should have ever been put in that position, 'cause no previous winner-no previous winner has ever been asked, should their opponent be hired, much less for this competition, where I felt there was a clear-cut winner and a clear-cut loser-runner-up.
[Ed Gordon:] Now I told you this, and I promise you this will, in fact, be the case. This will only last for about five minutes once you do the initial round of interviews, and then you can move on to the important business. How much do you take a look at business today and take a look at the doors that have opened for African-Americans? But today we are still shut out of many opportunities. How do you see that? What would you like to do in terms of having this soapbox to perhaps try to open some of those doors?
[Mr. Randal Pinkett:] Well, you know, I've experienced firsthand the challenges as an African-American business owner. I mean, we're still a fraction of, you know, companies that might be listed on the Forbes or other lists. So we have a lot of room for progress, and I see this as an opportunity for me to take my positioning and take my company to another level and to then be part of the movement to open up doors for other African-American entrepreneurs.
[Ed Gordon:] All right. So talk to us about the family. Obviously this changes your life for those who live and love you.
[Mr. Randal Pinkett:] Mm-hmm. Absolutely. You know, my wife has been my greatest supporter throughout this process. It was her idea for me to apply for the show, in fact. She put the application on my desk and said, `Fill it out.'So she's as excited if not more excited than I am to see me win "The Apprentice," and she and I will, you know, move forward together as a team, take advantage of it.
[Ed Gordon:] Well, you continue to make history, this history, the first black apprentice.
[Mr. Randal Pinkett:] That's right.
[Ed Gordon:] So we're very proud of you.
[Mr. Randal Pinkett:] Thanks, Ed.
[Ed Gordon:] Congratulations and best of luck in the next year.
[Mr. Randal Pinkett:] Thanks, man. It's good to see you again. Thanks.

[Scott Simon:] Let's move now to the world of figure skating. The United States has just named its team of women skaters who will go to the Winter Games in South Korea next month and try to win an individual medal for the first time since 2006. NPR's Tom Goldman is in San Jose, Calif. where I think it's so early, it's probably still December covering the U.S. Figure Skating Championships. Tom, thanks very much for being with us.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] It's always a pleasure, especially today, Scott.
[Scott Simon:] Who's on the team?
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] Well, the women who finished one, two, three in the U.S. championships last night in San Jose. Bradie Tennell, 19 years old she finished first in both the short and long programs in San Jose. And in last night's long program, if you saw it, she was nearly flawless. She landed all 11 jumps cleanly. She looked very polished. Then there's Mirai Nagasu, 24, the old-timer of the group. She finished second last night. She's also going to the Olympics. She's a fan favorite, a powerful jumper and a beautiful, artistic skater, as well. She's one of only two American women ever to complete the difficult triple axel jump in international competition. And I know you know the other one, Scott right?
[Scott Simon:] Yes. Although the last time she did it Tonya Harding, we're talking about, you know...
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] Right.
[Scott Simon:] ...Whose biopic is out now. The last time she did it, she did the triple axel and then hit Nancy Kerrigan on the knee with a wrench or something, right? Isn't that what happened?
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] With another axel, exactly.
[Scott Simon:] Right.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] So yeah. So there you go. And then well, it wasn't Tonya. It was a friend of hers.
[Scott Simon:] It was a friend of hers. Yeah.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] But anyway, 18-year-old Karen Chen is the third. She won last year's U.S. National. She was sick as a dog the day before last night's long program. She says she consulted her sports psychologist, her acupuncturist, other doctors. And she just toughed it out and skated a really nice program, good enough for a third place finish last night. And now she's on the Olympic team, too.
[Scott Simon:] You mentioned Mirai Nagasu. She was passed over four years ago. Do we see this as redemption?
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] I think it is a redemption. You know, it's this kind of quirky, if you will, selection process. We think that it should be the top three from the U.S. championships going filling the three Olympic spots. But in fact, a selection committee decides on the skaters. And it looks at their body of work. It looks at how they've done over the past year in other major competitions. And because of this process, the top three at the Nationals don't always make it. And as you mentioned, Mirai Nagasu in 2014 was passed over. She finished third at the U.S. Nationals but was passed over for Ashley Wagner, who finished fourth. The selection committee thought Wagner had the better resume. Now, Nagasu it is a bit of redemption. Her coach says even non-skating fans knew of Mirai as the poor skater who didn't make the Olympic team in 2014. But in last night's press conference after the competition, Nagasu, you know, admitted she was the one responsible for her failure in 2014. Here she is.
[Mirai Nagasu:] I was a little bit careless over the season and didn't put out the body of work that I needed. And so I didn't want to feel that same way this year, and so I took on the full responsibility of becoming a stronger competitor and person.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] And, Scott, it'll be really interesting to see how she does in South Korea. Right now she's the highest-ranked American woman in the world at No. 6. Even though she missed those 2014 Games, she has Olympic experience. She finished fourth at the Vancouver Olympics in 2010, and she'll be a contender in South Korea, especially if she can get that triple axel cranked up.
[Scott Simon:] NPR's Tom Goldman, thanks so much for being with us.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Robert Siegel:] The year that is ending, like every year, has brought surprises. For example, not too long ago, same-sex marriage was seen as the kind of hot button social issue that even shrewd liberals hedged their bets on. This year, it was celebrated outside the U.S. Supreme Court.
[Edith Windsor:] If I had to survive Thea, what a glorious way to do it and she would be so pleased. Thank you all.
[Robert Siegel:] That was Edith Windsor who took the fight for same-sex marriage to the court and won. That was surprising. So is this: an administration that was returned to office after running a tech-savvy digital age campaign, resumed governing and promptly stumbled badly in the IT department.
[President Barack Obama:] I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me. We've got to work hard to make sure that they know we hear them.
[Robert Siegel:] The White House heard them complaining about the rollout of healthcare.gov. As this is the last Friday political conversation of the year, we're going to consider the surprises of 2013 and first, not so surprising, both David Brooks and E.J. Dionne are vacationing from politics this week. Joining me from New York is Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation. Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
[Katrina Vanden Heuvel:] Thank you, Robert.
[Robert Siegel:] And here in Washington, Ramesh Ponnuru, senior editor of The National Review. Hiya.
[Ramesh Ponnuru:] Hi.
[Robert Siegel:] Let's start with Katrina first. What were a couple of big surprises for you this year, welcome or otherwise?
[Katrina Vanden Heuvel:] Welcome, the election of Bill de Blasio as New York City's mayor, Robert, is a sign of a populist, humane populist resurgence in this country and it's far more than a local story. Bill de Blasio ran the most ambitious populist campaign in modern memory, calling on government to tackle metastasizing inequality, promote opportunity for all and his signature program of a small tax on the wealthiest to invest in pre-K early education will have national resonance and implications. And along with Bill de Blasio, the rise of Elizabeth Warren, Senator Warren, and a cohort in Congress and around the country, pushing to expand the civilizing, humane social programs of this country, like Social Security, insuring banks are not as big and serve the real economy. The second, I would say, is the critical renewal of diplomacy. A resurgence of diplomacy in August, the U.S., averting military strikes against Syria, instead working with the United Nations to dismantle and destroy Syria's chemical weapons. And as part of that, Iran breaking a 34-year freeze, beginning to talk to Iran to avert military action, it is in our national security, I think those were important and positive welcome surprises.
[Robert Siegel:] Let's turn to Ramesh Ponnuru. What was some positive developments in 2013 that were surprising by your lights?
[Ramesh Ponnuru:] Well, I don't know if it was so positive for President Obama, but I had been surprised by the lack of pull he has repeatedly shown with Senate Democrats. In three major tests, he was unable to get them to back him. They didn't support him on the assault weapons ban, which, of course, the Clinton-era Democrats did. They didn't support him on Syria where he was headed for a big defeat before the Russians came in and sort of...
[Robert Siegel:] You mean when he was planning air strikes.
[Ramesh Ponnuru:] When he was planning his air strikes, that's right. And it was basically a Democratic revolt in the Senate that forced him to pull his top pick for the Federal Reserve, Larry Summers, which is something that is usually sort of a pro forma thing, if an administration picks somebody for that position, they can count on their party to support them.
[Robert Siegel:] Katrina, what about that? Is the weakened president the flip side of the same thing you've noticed in the rise of people like Elizabeth Warren in Washington?
[Katrina Vanden Heuvel:] I think the rise of people like Elizabeth Warren have more to do with what's going on outside the beltway. We're in a second term Obama administration. I do think that the rollout of Obamacare was troubling, but I think one needs to step back, certainly, as we enter a new year and understand that it's taken since President Truman, it's taken decades to provide what should be a right, not a privilege, healthcare and security for millions of people like any social program in our history, Robert, Social Security or Medicare. The trajectory of this program will be one of zigs and zags, but I'd like to see more media coverage of what's working in the new year, not to mitigate what isn't, but in the states where it's working and let's look toward reform, not repeal. That's what I think is important.
[Robert Siegel:] Ramesh, where do you see us standing on the Affordable Care Act? Do you think we're going to see or were you surprised by the contentiousness of it all over the past year?
[Ramesh Ponnuru:] Well, when you pass a major piece of legislation over the kind of opposition that this piece of legislation had from all Republicans and some Democrats, it's bound to continue to be contentious. The question now is whether they've really turned a corner, as a lot of Democrats are hoping. I suspect they haven't. If you look back at the end of September, Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of Health and Human Services, said that success looks like at least 7 million people signing up for the exchanges by the end of March. I do not believe that is going to happen. I don't believe anything close to that is going to happen. And by Secretary Sebelius' own standards, this is going to be a failure.
[Robert Siegel:] I'd like you to ask you to on this show, we usually follow the rule that it's hard enough to get right things that have happened so far, but so we try to stay away from the future. But I'm just curious. Since it is almost the end of the year, Katrina, when you think ahead to what might be a truly surprising development or to you a refreshing development on the level with, say, the rise of democratic populism or the rise of diplomacy as you've described it, what do you think might unfold that might toss conventional wisdom on its ear next year.
[Katrina Vanden Heuvel:] You know what I'd love to see, Robert? I'd love to see a politics that isn't about left or right but is about right and wrong. And in that context, January 8 is the 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty speech. What we can do as one of the richest nations in the world for the children who live in poverty, to create jobs, to create opportunities for millions of people, to use government for the common good, I'd like to see that. Maybe I'm being idealistic, but in the context of what we've been living through, we need to see a way forward, and I think there are millions of people in this country, and I see it in even in best days in Washington, or in cities and states around this country where there are transpartisan alliances made on issues that will improve the conditions of people's lives, and to me that's what politics in the end is all about.
[Robert Siegel:] Ramesh, do you think politics will be like that next year or something more familiar?
[Ramesh Ponnuru:] I suspect it's not going to be like that in 2014, and I think if anything, we're probably going to see things heat up because we've got the midterm elections coming up in November. I do think, though, that we could see some surprises. And one thing following up on the success of same-sex marriage across this country, I wouldn't be surprised, but I think a lot of other people will be, if we start to see more of a campaign for the legal recognition of polygamous unions. We've already seen one court case out of Utah on that, and I suspect there will be others.
[Robert Siegel:] Do you think this will be largely efforts by the Mormons or by Muslim immigrants to the U.S.? Where do you expect the push to come from for polygamy?
[Ramesh Ponnuru:] I expect that those groups and also less religious polyamorous communities are all going to be in favor of this, and there are going to be other people saying, what harm does it cause?
[Robert Siegel:] Well, I promise I won't hold either of you to your forecasts for 2014, and thanks to both of you for finding time to talk with us on this last Friday political talk of ours this year.
[Katrina Vanden Heuvel:] Thank you, Robert.
[Ramesh Ponnuru:] Thanks.
[Robert Siegel:] That's Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation in New York, and Ramesh Ponnuru, senior editor for The National Review in Washington.

[Robert Siegel:] Just a few weeks ago, Britain's ruling Conservative Party looked headed for a landslide victory over its rival, the Labour Party, in upcoming national elections. Well, now there's a twist nobody saw coming. Labour has cut the Conservatives' , commonly known as the Tories, lead by more than half in recent polls, and Prime Minister Theresa May is flailing. NPR's Frank Langfitt explains from London.
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] Last month, the Labour Party unveiled its signature campaign poster at a small gathering. Campaign coordinator Ian Lavery hit on the party's populist themes.
[Ian Lavery:] Ordinary people are suffering greatly whilst those at the top are receiving huge tax cuts.
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] But that day, British journalists didn't focus on Labour's message but on the fact that the party's leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was a no-show.
[Unidentified Man:] Where's he gone? We were expecting Mr. Corbyn.
[Ian Lavery:] He was meant to be here, but that's things happened, and Mr. Corbyn is dealing with internal [unintelligible].
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] Political analysts suspected one of Corbyn's many opponents inside his own party had leaked Labour's electoral platform to sabotage him. The moment seemed just another sign that Labour was heading for its worst defeat since the 1930s and that Theresa May was on a roll. Two weeks earlier, she exuded confidence as she ripped into Corbyn in their final debate in the House of Commons.
[Prime Minister Theresa May:] Unable to defend our country, determined to raise tax on ordinary workers, no plan to manage our economy even his own supporters know he's not fit to run this country.
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] Today, the race looks completely different. Labour has momentum. It's within eight percentage points of the Tories ahead of Thursday's vote. And earlier this week, Corbyn showed up for a national debate on the BBC...
[Jeremy Corbyn:] Our schools are underfunded. Our hospitals are overcrowded. Our students are saddled with debt. There's a growing housing crisis.
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] ...While Prime Minister Theresa May didn't show up at all, drawing sharp criticism from voters and rival politicians, such as Tim Farron, leader of the Liberal Democrats.
[Tim Farron:] Good leaders don't run away from a debate. Theresa May undoubtedly should be here. Without a whatever we discussed this evening, her absence is undoubtedly the shadow that hangs over this election. How dare you call a general election then run away from the debate?
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] What's gone wrong for the Tories? Political observers say Theresa May took her party's early 20-point lead for granted.
[David Cowling:] I think the message for her is hubris, hubris, hubris.
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] David Cowling's a political researcher at King's College London. May has never run a national campaign before, and Cowling says the inexperience showed.
[David Cowling:] The conservatives arrogantly I think sped towards what they thought was a great victory and hit a brick wall, namely that Mrs. May doesn't do human all that well.
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] Uncertainty reigns as the United Kingdom prepares to leave the European Union, so May responded with her campaign mantra strong and stable leadership. But she repeated it so often, it became a YouTube mash-up.
[Prime Minister Theresa May:] Strong and stable, strong and stable, strong and stable, strong and stable, strong and stable, strong and stable, strong and stable, strong and stable.
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] May also drew fire when she proposed that the government clawback health care costs without a cap from the estates of people needing long-term care. Children of Alzheimer's patients worried family homes would be liquidated.
[Thomas Raines:] This was then branded as a dementia tax. Now that's about as bad publicity as you could hope for.
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] Thomas Raines is an analyst at Chatham House, the London think tank.
[Thomas Raines:] This proposal has gone down absolutely horribly amongst the Conservatives' core electorate.
[Frank Langfitt, Byline:] May was forced to reverse course, although she continues to insist she hasn't. Like most political observers, Raines still thinks the Tories will win but not by the margins May once dreamed of, meaning she could head into crucial Brexit negotiations with the European Union later this month not from the position of strength that she'd planned but from one of relative weakness. Frank Langfitt, NPR News, London.

[Steve Inskeep:] A British infant with a rare genetic disorder has made international headlines because his story touches a sensitive question, should parents be the ones who have the final say in treating critically ill children? Or should doctors? In the U.K., a law says that doctors can challenge parents if they're not acting in the best interests of the child. NPR's Joanna Kakissis reports from London.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] Charlie Gard is just 11 months old. He's suffering from mitochondrial depletion syndrome, which has left him brain damaged and unable to breathe on his own. His parents have raised money through crowdfunding to take Charlie to the U.S. for an experimental treatment. But his doctors have refused to discharge him. Speaking to the program "Good Morning Britain" earlier this month, his mother, Connie Yates, explained why she's challenging the doctors.
[Connie Yates:] You know, he's our own flesh and blood. And we don't have a say in his life whatsoever. And, you know, we're not bad parents. And we're there for him all the time. Like, we're completely devoted to him.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] Charlie's doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London say they worry the experimental treatment, which has not even undergone clinical trials, could make the baby suffer. His condition is usually fatal, and there's no known cure. They say his life support should be shut off so he can die peacefully. When parents do not agree with a doctor's decision, it goes to the courts.
[Raanan Gillon:] And the court has to decide, on the basis of what's in the best interests of the child, what to do about it.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] That's Raanan Gillon, an emeritus professor of medical ethics at Imperial College in London.
[Raanan Gillon:] So then the question is, is it sufficiently harmful here to keep the child alive that it would count, as it were, as child abuse so that the right of the parents to make these decisions should be withdrawn?
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] For example, he says, the courts have sided with doctors in the cases of parents who are Jehovah's Witnesses and refuse lifesaving blood transfusions for their children on religious grounds. But for one parent who watched her own child suffer from a fatal disease, Charlie's case is much harder to judge.
[Sacha Langton-gilks:] You feel guilty if you don't do the treatment. Oh, my God you know, they die. And you think, I should have done it. I didn't fight hard enough. I'm a terrible parent.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] That's Sacha Langton-Gilks, speaking via Skype from her home in southwestern England. Her son David died of brain cancer at 16. He asked her to end treatment after it blistered his body and burned his throat, all while the cancer spread. But Charlie is too young to express what he wants, she says, leaving the decision to his parents.
[Sacha Langton-gilks:] You're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't. It's, you know, impossible.
[Unidentified Protesters:] [Chanting] The world is watching.
[Unidentified Woman:] [Chanting] Save Charlie Gard.
[Unidentified Protesters:] [Chanting] Save Charlie Gard...
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] Charlie's case has resonated deeply. Supporters have protested at Buckingham Palace. Pope Francis and President Trump have both offered their help. Charlie's parents are pinning their last hopes on a neurologist from Columbia University in New York who has tried the experimental therapy on a few patients. He's flown to the U.K. to examine Charlie.

[Renee Montagne:] In Iraq, the political deadlock continues. Today, the country's largest Sunni-Arab block in parliament reaffirmed its opposition to Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari remaining in office. Kurdish political leaders are also opposed to Jaafari, leaving the Shiite majority little choice but to select a new candidate in order to break the months-long log jam. NPR's Jamie Tarabay joins me now from Baghdad. Hello.
[Jamie Tarabay:] Good morning, Renee.
[Renee Montagne:] Is this political crisis in Iraq any closer to resolution?
[Jamie Tarabay:] But yesterday, the acting speaker of parliament said he would call on the assembly to convene in the next few days. So if this happens, this issue of al-Jaafari as the Prime Minister may be resolved soon.
[Renee Montagne:] And Egypt jumped in to the fray over the weekend. President Hosni Mubarak spoke about the situation in Iraq, and he accused the country's Shiites of loyalty to Iran. He also suggested a civil war had almost started. What's been the reaction there in Baghdad?
[Jamie Tarabay:] It really hit a nerve here, because all of the leaders are trying to maintain a sense of unity. Having someone like Mubarak come out and say that Iran is an influence, you know, it's only confirming suspicions by the Sunni politicians that Tehran is interfering in its politics. And it hasn't really helped the situation here at all.
[Renee Montagne:] What can you tell us about that?
[Jamie Tarabay:] The report also confirms that there is a religious and ethnic divide growing across the country, and it realizes a lot of fears as well, you know, the growing influence of Iran in many areas in the South, the militias that are gaining influence and that are functioning relatively unchecked, and that violence in areas where ethnicities are mixed is uncontrolled and is just running rampant in places. It doesn't just include Baghdad. We're talking about places like Mosul in the North and in Kirkuk.
[Renee Montagne:] NPR's Jamie Tarabay in Baghdad.

[Ari Shapiro:] The 401 [k] is the most common tool Americans use to save money for retirement, far more than pensions. Congress created the savings plan some 35 years ago. Now some of the 401 [k] 's earliest backers say they oversold it. Timothy Martin writes about this in today's Wall Street Journal. He spoke with us from an airport, which explains the background noise you'll hear. I asked him to describe how the creators envisioned the 401 [k].
[Timothy Martin:] These people talked about a three-legged stool, that you'd have Social Security we've still got that you'd have a traditional company pension, which provide a set payout for life as a percentage of your sort of final years of salary, and then you would have this thing called the 401 [k] that would supplement both the pension and the Social Security. And, you know, it just might be there to either buttress a pension or for vacations, paying for grandchildren's college education, that type of stuff. They did not vision a world where the 401 [k] would supplant the pension. And...
[Ari Shapiro:] Well, how did it happen that 401 [k] s became the alternative to the pension rather than one leg of a three-legged stool?
[Timothy Martin:] The 401 [k] s came at this moment when pensions to companies and employers were becoming increasingly complicated and expensive. It was just much easier to shift to a 401 [k]. You know, the upshot for workers was just as companies wanted to give up pensions, workers who had pensions would see their friends with 401 [k] accounts and see how much money they were making every year you know, 15, 20 percent plus, if not more and sort of saying, like, well, I wish I could get in on that. And...
[Ari Shapiro:] So it sounds like there was no one bad guy. It was a convergence of events where companies wanted to get rid of pensions, workers thought that 401 [k] s would do better than pensions. Everybody got on this boat and set sail kind of altogether.
[Timothy Martin:] No one predicted that the 401 [k] would sort of underperform or underserve, you know, a mass range of workers. I don't think anyone would've signed on. You know, one sort of mistaken perception heading in these people all thought Americans would see it in their best interest to save as much as they could for retirement. And what we've learned in recent decades is that more people are willing to spend, or want to spend, rather than save.
[Ari Shapiro:] One of the things that really struck me about this article is this is not just retirees or HR managers saying gee, the 401 [k] isn't really working as a retirement tool. It is the people who pushed the 401 [k]. It is the people who said to Congress and said to corporations, this is the tool of the future, this is the answer to your problems now saying, we oversold it.
[Timothy Martin:] Yeah. You know, for a lot of these people, they thought it would either sit aside a pension or it would be used with far more robust market returns and willingness by workers to sock away. They had much different visions of what this could become or would become than reality.
[Ari Shapiro:] Your story ends with a human resources executive who was an early champion of 401 [k] s now saying the very program that he championed has not created enough for him to be able to retire on.
[Timothy Martin:] Yeah, that would be Herbert Whitehouse. He's also unlike a lot of Americans. He's not living off of bologna sandwiches. I mean, he's very, very well off. I did sort of discuss with him would he be in a better position to retire if he had a traditional pension and he stayed at Johnson & Johnson, the company he was at in the early '80s, for 30, 40 years? And yeah, he said he would be in a much, you know, comfortable spot. And the basic difference being he wouldn't be exposed to market risk, the economy tanking and stocks falling. He'd get a set payout for life from his company. And that's something that the 401 [k] did away with. You could potentially gain more, but you could also potentially lose more.
[Ari Shapiro:] If there's somebody listening to our conversation right now who, like many Americans, has no pension, does have a 401 [k], thinks they've been responsible preparing for retirement, but now here's a 401 [k] might not be all it's cracked up to be, what advice would you have for them?
[Timothy Martin:] I think as we sort of see some of the situations with baby boomers in particular, with this first wave of 401 [k] perhaps have not the retirements that they would have expected, I think that will inform subsequent generations about prioritizing saving more rather than spending and just sort of having a multi-decade view of how much people actually need.
[Ari Shapiro:] That's Timothy Martin of The Wall Street Journal speaking with us via Skype from an airport lounge, which explains some of the background noise. Mr. Martin, thanks very much.
[Timothy Martin:] Thank you.

[Rachel Martin:] Flooding in the south of France has killed at least 11 people. Heavy rain transformed rivers into raging torrents that wiped out roads and bridges, even swept people from their houses in the middle of the night. Here's NPR's Eleanor Beardsley.
[Unidentified Reporter:] [Speaking French].
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] Flying in a helicopter over the Aude River in southeastern France, a reporter from BFMTV points out villages, roads and fields underwater. You can see cars and trucks floating like toys in a bath. During the night Sunday to Monday, three months of rain fell in only a couple hours, catching people off guard when most had already gone to bed. An 88-year-old nun was swept from her ground-floor room when the floodwaters crashed through the convent's front door. Her furniture was carried out onto a veranda. The nun's body was later found in the trees outside.
[Elise Broquante:] [Speaking French].
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] Ninety-nine-year-old Elise Broquante was spared such a fate because her bedroom is on the second floor. She spoke on French television.
[Elise Broquante:] [Speaking French].
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] "I wanted to come downstairs. But water was coming up the staircase, so I just went back to bed" she said. "What else could I do?"
[Elise Broquante:] [Speaking French].
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] Broquante says never in her life has she seen flooding like this. The French prime minister visited the devastated villages Monday. President Emmanuel Macron heads down today. As the waters and fear recede, anger is rising. "We weren't given any warning," says this group of people meeting with a local mayor. "You couldn't have maybe given us a heads up at 2 a.m. that we needed to evacuate?" Bouts of heavy rain in areas of higher elevation surrounding the Mediterranean Sea are a regular fall phenomenon. The downpours are caused by hot, moist air pushed up from the Mediterranean and meeting colder air from the north. But the frequency and intensity of these rains is increasing. Eric Menassi is the mayor of Trebes, which lost six people. He says they did everything they could.
[Eric Menassi:] [Speaking French].
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] "The rainfall was three times what was predicted" he says. "And the sudden violence of these floodwaters was terrifying. We are dealing with extreme situations brought on by climate change," says Menassi. "And no one can be sufficiently prepared." Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris.

[Ed Gordon:] On today's Roundtable: Tensions rise in Italy over the CIA; a Lincoln Memorial video causes controversy; and the push behind Live8. Joining us to talk about all of this, from our New York bureau, is Robert George, editorial writer at the New York Post; at member station WDUQ in Pittsburgh, Bev Smith, host of "The Bev Smith Show" on the American Urban Radio Network; and, in Nashville, Jeff Obafemi Carr, founder and artistic director of the Amun Ra Theatre. He's at Spotland Productions in Nashville. All right, folks. Thanks for joining us. Now this is something that actually came to light last week and now it is not going away; in fact, more trouble. A judge in Milan, Italy, issued arrest warrants for 13 US intelligence operatives on kidnapping charges, I should note. Now we are seeing that the CIA agents allegedly kidnapped a radical Egyptian cleric from the streets of Milan and transported him to Egypt for interrogation and torture, it's said. Now we're seeing denials-denials from the Italian intelligence services, who are suggesting they knew nothing about it, while CIA officials are saying, in fact, they had contacted and got the consent of Italian intelligence services before all of this went on. Robert George, one of the things that all of these agents must be harkening for are the days of the cloak that many of these folks worked under for years and years. We would not have heard anything about this, first and foremost, years ago. More so, what do you think of the charges, first?
[Mr. Robert George:] I wouldn't-I'm, in a sense, going to kind of reserve judgment. I certainly wouldn't be surprised if it's going-if, A, that it occurred. I'm certainly not surprised that the-if there was communication between the US intelligence agencies and the Italian agencies and I'm also, of course, not surprised at the Italians-that the Italians are denying it, because, as you said, I mean, these kind of things have gone on for years, and probably even-and following some of the reforms in the late 1970s, early 1980s, these things went on and we ne-and it was sort of a `hear no evil, see no evil.'It's part of sometimes the ugly but necessary aspects of fighting terrorism and fighting for certain US interests.
[Ed Gordon:] Bev, the idea that we are hearing about alleged-we should underline that-torture and interrogation from one foreign country to another-again, something that has followed in whispers the CIA around for a long time-but the fact that we're hearing more and seeing more of this in the daylight, does that speak to a new world, a new outlook on how intelligence is carried on, in general?
[Ms. Bev Smith:] I don't only think that it speaks to a new outlook on how intelligence is carried on in general; I think it speaks to a new kind of relationship between America and countries that used to be the allies. What's so interesting about this particular story is that the Italian central government, which would be like the Bush administration, was not a part of the investigation, that a private, acting independently, Italian investigation showed that the United States allegedly, I'll use your politically correct word, did the kidnapping. We've been kidnapping people all along and sending them to places that torture them. This is not new. We did the same thing to a Canadian citizen. So I'm looking for this to put front and center what the United States has been involved in. Now other countries do it, too, but I'm worried about our country. We should not forget that we kidnapped Noriega-Does anyone remember him?-that we held in prison for a very long time Marcos. So we have a history of doing this. I'd like to see how we get out of this one and what it says to other countries. We've been doing the same thing in those countries. Maybe their independent investigators will step forward also.
[Ed Gordon:] Jeff, it seems to me-and we don't ofttimes like to admit this-but the United States is, in fact, the world police. But I am seeing more and more countries stand up against the giant and push back, far more than I've ever seen in years past. What does this say, if anything?
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] Yeah, and I agree with you, Ed. I think now that the world that we live in today, everybody feels as if they have their own right to be self-determining, and the-even if that means standing up against the United States. And there are a couple of points that we can make here about `the Italian job,'so to speak. Number one is that we, as a general public, never really know what's really going on, period, nor do we fully ever-I don't think we're ever gonna fully understand, especially in the post-911 world, of what the CIA calls `extraordinary renditions,'where US operatives shuttle suspects, and, in this case, an abductee, to third-party countries. The second point is what scares me about this is that the US argument is that they don't send abductees to countries where they're likely to be tortured. Now they aren't denying they snatch people off the streets. That's OK. The third point is that the Italians aren't playing on this one. They've issued the indictment for the 13. They want to extradite the Americans. Now how is that for turnabout? How often does that happen? We all know that the US may even openly laugh at Italy for having that much nerve, and I think that that's gonna deepen the growing divide between the US and the rest of the world.
[Ed Gordon:] What does this speak to, Robert George, in terms of the CIA, in and of itself-again, perhaps some years ago the most powerful agency, and I'm also talking about in juxtaposition to any presidential administration you might put it next to-but it does seem to have been tarnished over the last few years.
[Mr. Robert George:] Well, it has, and the CIA-I mean, both the CIA and the FBI came out-came down with a whole wall of criticism following 911 because of clear failures there. In fact, some people see the CIA as kind of the `loser'-quote, unquote-in a lot of the intelligence juggling that's-intelligence overhauls that have been-have happened in the last-in the last few months. And I would say that it-I mean, I think it's true, that the CIA in itself is trying to find out what its new role is, and we're gonna see how this case plays out because if-it looks now as if the-Italy and other somewhat friendly countries to us aren't going to, in a sense, respect the role of the CIA, it's gonna-it'll end up being another black eye towards the organization.
[Ed Gordon:] We saw...
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Well...
[Ed Gordon:] Go ahead, Bev. Real quick for me.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Well, I think it's also interesting the denial. As I mentioned earlier, we've been involved in kidnapping before. So let's take the gloves off and talk about who we are. If this happened-if-and I believe it did-and if the government-CIA-is picking out people-and they've done that; they've done that all over the world before-then I'd like to see this one come straight out in the public because let us trace who ordered it. The CIA doesn't operate in a vacuum. Who ordered this? Did it come directly from the CIA heads or did it come from higher-ups in the Bush administration? Let's go all the way with this one so we, as Americans, can find out what is happening so that we...
[Mr. Robert George:] And it should also be pointed out, though, that sometimes this is a very-it's a very ugly business, the idea of intelligence, and in some cases, they need to do extra means to protect the United States, which is the point.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] But kidnapping an Egyptian citizen, if they did it, and I believe they did, and sending that citizen to be tortured, pinpointing-you know, we call it `driving while black'if we're a black American. Pinpointing people on the basis of what you think, we have to be very careful about that. After all, gentlemen, aren't we the ones that keep talking about democracy? Aren't we in a war because of it? So if we're behaving this way, how can we set an example?-which is exactly why a lot of us are against the war in Iraq. We talk one thing, or as the Indians used to say, the Native Americans, `White man speaks with forked tongue.'You talk one way and do another.
[Ed Gordon:] Or as Cameo says, `Speaking out of the side of your neck.'But, you know, let me ask this, though, Jeff...
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Hello!
[Ed Gordon:] ...real quick, and then we're gonna move on to something else.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] Go ahead. Yeah.
[Ed Gordon:] The president spoke very plainly and very clearly last week and reiterated what he said immediately after 911, and that's `It's a new ball game.'And we are not...
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] Yeah.
[Ed Gordon:] ...going to wait for people to attack us again. Is there any leniency here, if in fact the CIA-and we'll never know this; they're not gonna come out and say-but if they assume that this person that they abducted was part of a plan to again design something like that, are we now suggesting that this is just post-911?
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Oh, jeez, you said the president spoke clearly.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] Yeah, I think it's post-911. It's-he spoke clearly.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] I don't think the president...
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] It's a dual-edged sword. Yeah, I don't think...
[Ms. Bev Smith:] That's right.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] It's almost oxymoronic, sometimes. I think when you talk about political figures on either side, to say that they spoke clearly, I'm sure that's...
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Clearly, yes.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] ...kind of tough to define, but really, I do think that in post-911 days we run a dual danger. On one hand, you want security, and you want to be able to find threats and eliminate them before they actually manifest, but on the other hand, who is in charge of determining who exactly is a threat? And that's what scares me. And the point that I was making earlier comes up again, and that's not that we-he-we weren't denying that people get snatched up. The denial was we don't send them where people get tortured. But we know that there...
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Well...
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] ...are all kinds of reports of people being tortured, even in the camps at Guantanamo Bay. So I think that...
[Ed Gordon:] All right.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] ...we have to really look at the fact that they can come and get you. Big Brother is very real in the day we live in and we won't ever know what's fully going on because thing-the answer that always comes out is `This is a matter of national security.'
[Ed Gordon:] All right. Let me move us on to another subject before one of you gets snatched up as you leave the studios. Let's move our attention to the Live8 concerts, which were designed to raise consciousness about African poverty. One of the interesting points-and we should say that this was an offshoot of the 1985 Live Aid concerts that brought attention to famine at that point in Africa and the poor conditions, and it was the baby and brainchild of Bob Geldof, the organizer of that event, as well as the driving force behind this one. Here's the interesting point. Initially there were criticisms that the Live Aid concerts weren't, quote, "black enough," that we're helping Africa out, yet most of the acts were white. There was some criticism about the same here, though people like Russell Simmons, Chris Tucker, Destiny's Child, Alicia Keys all performed and were part of this year's event. Here's the interesting point, though. There is criticism now that not enough is being done by the black community to raise attention to the plight of Africa. In particular, they're pointing to black artists in this way: Why wait for Bob Geldof to bring attention to this and to raise the consciousness level through these concerts? Why aren't black artists doing more?
[Mr. Robert George:] That...
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Well, that's a very good question. That's an excellent question. But when we look at the history of Africa and who has always petitioned for the right, we find that, with rare exception-and the rare exception is the late Leon Sullivan, or, in New Jersey, a very fine African-American congressman, or Danny Davis and others. But, really and truly, the issue of what is right and wrong in Africa has always been championed by whites. Now the question is: Should we be pointing a finger just at the hip-hop generation, as I've been doing on my show, about getting involved in issues of concern for African-Americans, or should we be pointing the finger across the board? You do not hear a cry from the civil rights people at all about comparing what is happening and the dilemma of AIDS and HIV on the continent and here in the United States, connecting the dots. So I am not surprised that whites have been involved because they've always been involved.
[Mr. Robert George:] Yeah, but...
[Ms. Bev Smith:] But I am surprised that we're picking alone on the hip-hop generation because the criticism can be spread around.
[Mr. Robert George:] Yeah, and it-I mean, it's-and it's interesting because, I mean, at least-I guess in the early to mid-'80s you did have a few African-Americans involved when the issue was South Africa and ending apartheid and so forth. But it is unfortunately true that when-now that the issues have changed and we know, pardon the pun, it's not quite black and white as it was before, and it focuses on issues such as debt and economics and so forth, unfortunately, African-Americans haven't, at least from the celebrity side, been as involved as they should have been.
[Ed Gordon:] Hey, Jeff, broaden this, if you will. Take it outside of the plight and problems of Africa, and include the idea of the plight and problems of the downtrodden and others here, people of color, in this country, and take it outside of the celebrity world and just, if you will, use a monolith of the black community, in general. There are complaints and cries, usually whispers around the barbecue or the kitchen table-we don't like to necessarily always air the dirty laundry in public-that African-Americans just aren't doing enough to correct their blight. It's part of what Bill Cosby has either been applauded or chastised for.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] Yeah, I think activism is something that definitely needs to take place and that's everywhere from what Bev referenced as the civil rights community group down to the hip-hop community and beyond. All of us, in general, need to stop being victims of what I call the Pied Piper paradigm. I mean, it's popular now to have Africa as a cause. Bono, to his credit, with U2, has put time, money and clout into activism against AIDS in Africa. The resulting fallout, though, mostly because of the media attention that comes from seeing a white guy speak out for Africa, is the support of this Pied Piper paradigm, where black artists sadly continue to follow the leader. Wherever it's popular, we follow, and we need to be more self-determining. I'm glad our artists are helping now. I believe that we're called on to move in directions of activism that we initiate, though, as a community. The danger of being led...
[Ms. Bev Smith:] But you know what, gentlemen? I think that this is a little bit-if I can go a little deeper... [Singing] A little bit deeper now. I see this-there's a real-the issue that I see is that we as Africans in America have had a real hard difficult time because of racism-Oh, I said the word-because of racism-in identifying with people who look like us, who come from Africa. Some of us still have a problem in 2005-Can I get an `Amen'?-saying we're Africans in America, or African-America. So I think that this is just deeper than AIDS and HIV and the problem of forgiving the debt. I think this is the real issue of how we identify ourselves. And on college campuses, if you talk to African students from Sacramento to the state of Washington, Seattle, where there's a large contingency, to Denver, Colorado, where I met Nigerians-if you talk to them, they say, `Black people don't come and talk to us. They view us as the enemy.'If you talk to those from the Caribbean who are in New York-Robert, you know this.
[Mr. Robert George:] Yeah.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Same identical thing. We African-Americans have a problem stretching our hand to people who look like us because of racism.
[Mr. Robert George:] Yeah.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] And that needs to be put on the table, and you're right, Ed, it's an uncomfortable issue. We don't like to talk about disliking the color of our skin.
[Ed Gordon:] Robert, 30 seconds.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] Yeah, we...
[Mr. Robert George:] Well, I was just going to say that the other irony is that the other group that's becoming more involved in African issues are white Christian conservatives here in America, and it's...
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] Indeed.
[Mr. Robert George:] ...a shame that...
[Ms. Bev Smith:] Scary.
[Mr. Robert George:] ...you know, that black-African-Americans aren't even, you know, being involved even more so than them.
[Ed Gordon:] Jeff, real quick for me.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] Yeah, indeed, that's something that I encounter all the time from ministerial perspective and also from a community perspective, and that is that it's becoming popular in very, very conservative white Southern Baptist congregations here in the South to now support Africa. And something about that doesn't seem to jive for me.
[Ed Gordon:] All right.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] There's also an added mission element, but we'd have to talk about that at another point.
[Ms. Bev Smith:] That'll take another show.
[Mr. Jeff Obafemi Carr:] That is another show, yeah, at least.
[Ed Gordon:] In fact, that is the case. Robert George, Bev Smith, Jeff Obafemi Carr, thank you very much. Greatly appreciate it. And where else but this Roundtable will you hear the plight of the CIA and a quote from Cameo at the same time? All right. Take a break here. You're listening to NEWS & NOTES from NPR News.

[Neal Conan:] I'm Neal Conan in Washington. The recession and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico hit New Orleans hard, and that was after Katrina. The population has yet to return to pre-hurricane levels. Some houses lie empty, some properties abandoned, and the city continues to suffer from crime and unemployment. But New Orleans does know how to throw a party. The Big Easy hosted nine million visitors in 2012 alone and events like the Super Bowl, the NCAA championship games, Mardi Gras and most recently Jazz Fest. This year's lineup included big names like Billy Joel, Patti Smith and of course local favorites. The fairgrounds were packed. Music, food and nightlife are a big part of the city's recovery. Call, tell us, what's your postcard from New Orleans? 800-989-8255 is our phone number. Email talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. Go to npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Later in the program, China's accused again of Internet hacks, this time by the Pentagon. But first we continue our series and look ahead today with Gwen Thompkins, who has joined us from time to time from her native New Orleans, and she returned from work here at NPR in Washington and then a stint as our East Africa correspondent. She's at the studios of member station WWNO, and Gwen, always good to have you on the program.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] Hi Neal, it's so nice to hear your voice, actually. It is. You know, I've talked to you in so many different places around the world, you know, from the jungles of Congo to, like, my house like right after Katrina and, you know, right before the hurricane last year, Hurricane Isaac. I feel like, I don't know, we go way back.
[Neal Conan:] We do go way back. We also of course knew each other when you were an editor here on Scott Simon's show on Saturday mornings. But I have to ask you: How is your neighborhood doing and New Orleans?
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] New Orleans is doing all right, actually. The neighborhood's doing all right. The last time you and I spoke in my neighborhood, it was completely barren. I had just gone in after the water retreated from my house, I got nine feet of water in my neighborhood, Pontchartrain Park. And I told you I could run buck naked down the street, and nobody would ever seen me because there really wasn't anybody around. I mean, there weren't even birds. But now we've got birds, we've got trees, we've got bushes, we've got flowers. We don't have as many neighbors as we used to have, and I think that that's true of the whole city, but people are coming back, and people are moving in, new people every day. And one of the big draws, of course, of the new people coming in is this very nice young man who's sitting next to me.
[Neal Conan:] We'll talk to him in just a minute, but you go ahead.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] I'm so excited. So yeah, we have we have a lot of people coming in and moving in, in large part drawn to New Orleans for opportunity, believe it or not, you know, particularly in the arts. And, you know, I'm hearing about musicians who are moving in, producers, engineers as well. And, you know, I think that this is still a period of optimism. Even though the city is experiencing the economic downturn just like every other city in the United States, I mean, small businesses are having a really hard time. You know, musicians, let's face it, are having a really hard time in this town and in others. So, you know, it's you have to take the growth never happens nothing ever moves forward in one straight line, you know. You know, it's some areas spurred, and some areas sputtered. And, you know, right now I guess for the city, the big issue is to really find a way to help small businesses and to, you know, I mean, and to encourage the local economy. In the meantime, you know, as you said in your intro, I mean, we are, you know, we are really betting everything we have, it seems, on our tourism industry and the ability to mount these extraordinary, spectacular, national and international events, you know, the Super Bowl, these NCAA championships, as you say, Mardi Gras and now, you know, the Jazz Festival, which is just a delightful two weeks in our lives. You know, and during I mean last year alone, it's believed that 450,000 people came to the Jazz Festival, came to the fairgrounds here in New Orleans. And a lot most of those people are from out of town. I mean, the ticket price is pretty high. They're the ones who can afford it, you know. But when you think about it, that is the population of Miami. It's like Miami came to your house for dinner. OK, you're like hello Miami, you know, hello Minneapolis. You know, this is how big the crowd, you know, the crowd. And I think this year really was no different even though there was a lot of rain during that first weekend. People came and danced in the rain and danced in the mud and, you know, pulled out their mud fashions, you know, their boots and, you know, shrimp boots, and there are all sorts of things that looked like they could float and sail through mud. And I mean, Dave Matthews, for instance, I mean the man played in a downpour. It was amazing, you know, and, you know, Patti Smith, you know, it was really extraordinary, as well as local acts, you know, like Hurray for the Riff Raff. They played in the rain, and they played in the morning, and very few people in New Orleans, at least born in New Orleans, want to get out in the morning and see some music. And that place was packed, you know, with Hurray for the Riff Raff fans.
[Neal Conan:] Well, Gwen Thompkins mentioned the nice young man sitting next to her. He's Troy Andrews, better known to many as Trombone Shorty, of course a musician and New Orleans neighbor. He's there at WWNO, as well. Good to have you back on TALK OF THE NATION.
[Troy Andrews:] Hey, thank you for having me.
[Neal Conan:] And before we get to Jazz Fest and to the future of the music scene there and that cultural bet that Gwen Thompkins talked about, as a musician, what is your experience of New Orleans like after the recession, after the oil spill and course still after Katrina?
[Troy Andrews:] Well, to me I think the music is the heartbeat. So a lot of people like to get away from things like that, and they'll come support the music. If it's a second liner in the street, they'll scrape up $5, $10 to come in the club. The music is the heartbeat. So and people are very supportive of us and want to make sure that the music stays alive. And like you said, New Orleans throws a big party, and the music leads the party. So it's been OK for me because I've been traveling around the world more than I've been home. So whenever I come, I try to help out some of the local musicians that's up and coming. I'll give them an opportunity to play in front of my fans that fly down from around the world to see us in town. And it's been comfortable me. So it gets harder at times, but we all stick together and reach out to one another, and if someone has a gig in town, and we might add some different people from other bands to our band, just so we can all make sure that everyone in the music community is OK.
[Neal Conan:] That's a brotherhood and a sisterhood.
[Troy Andrews:] Yeah, definitely.
[Neal Conan:] Well, let's get some callers in on the conversation. If New Orleans has bet its future on its culture, music, its food, its events, what's your postcard from your visit to New Orleans? 800-989-8255. Email talk@npr.org. Morgan's with us from Virginia.
[Morgan:] Hello, how are you?
[Neal Conan:] Good, thanks.
[Morgan:] So I just drove back yesterday, all day, 14 hours, from New Orleans all the way back to Virginia. I had a wonderful time. I came in on Thursday night for the second weekend of Jazz Fest, saw Maroon 5, saw you, Trombone Shorty. Shorty, you were so awesome Saturday, it was or on Sunday, excuse me. It was fantastic. The weather was beautiful. I've never been to a Jazz Fest in more beautiful weather, by the way. It's always either 90 degrees or raining, and it was neither this weekend. It was great. Let's see, I lived I lived in New Orleans for four years while I was in the Navy. I was stationed over on the West Bank, in Algiers, and sometimes I worked over on East Bank on Dauphine Street. The city is really coming back. I love driving through mid-city, Tulane Avenue has absolutely exploded. There are buildings going up everywhere. You've got the new cancer research center, you've got the new VA hospital being built. Tulane Avenue is exploding. It's just it's wonderful. And of course I always love going to Parkway and getting a great, true, pulled roast beef and fried shrimp po'boy. I mean, the food, the music truly is the heartbeat. It was just a wonderful, wonderful weekend. So...
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] Morgan, come back.
[Morgan:] I know. I want to move back so bad, so bad. I just finished massage school, and my fiance is an engineer, and I would love to move back to the city. I absolutely love it down there. It's just such an amazing city, and rain or shine or, you know, death and destruction and winds and hurricanes and oil and terrible, terrible things, and people go out, and they dance, and they sing, and they do not stop. I have never experienced anything like it anywhere else I've ever been, so...
[Neal Conan:] Morgan, it sounds like you had a terrible time.
[Morgan:] It was awful, God, oh jeez Louise, it was terrible, never going back. No, I try and go back every year.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks very much for the call.
[Morgan:] All right, have a good day.
[Neal Conan:] Appreciate it, glad you made it home safely. And Gwen, she mentioned that Trombone Shorty played Sunday, on the last day of Jazz Fest, and that is emblematic of a change.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] That's a huge change in this town. I mean, you know, the Jazz Festival has been going on since 1970, and there have been three main acts that have finished the festival. One was Professor Longhair, who unfortunately died in 1980. Then came The Radiators, who broke up last year. And then thirdly was the Neville Brothers. And the Neville Brothers, you know what I mean, have been the draw of Sunday evening on the last Sunday evening of the festival for, I don't know, 30 years, let's say, and maybe 40, I can't add. What we lack in mathematical ability we make up with in charm. But the thing is but Trombone Shorty took over the stages that the Neville Brothers usually play on Sunday, and I'm telling you I'm not this was not just about outside people, tourists coming in and saying I've got to hear Trombone Shorty. This was about New Orleaneans coming out and seeing one of their own and seeing a man who I'm telling you when he walks down the street, everybody notices. They may not run up to him because we're cool like that, you know, in New Orleans, but everybody knows when Trombone Shorty walks in because he is beloved here and for good reason because I'm telling you, he deserves that stage for the next 30 years.
[Neal Conan:] What was it like for you, Troy, to succeed to that post?
[Troy Andrews:] Oh, it was very emotional, you know. I grew up playing the Neville Brothers. Cyril Neville is like my uncle, and he's invited me on that stage many years since I was maybe 12 years old and up until last year. So for me to be able to take it over, it was a dream come true, and I'm just happy that I was able to do it. It's really I still can't believe it yet. You know, everybody keep telling me about it, but it hasn't hit me yet. You know, I walked out onstage, and I'm like uh-oh, it's finally here. And I'm like I don't know what to feel or think, but I just went out there and tried to do my best and represent the great city of New Orleans and carry on the tradition. But, you know, it's still emotional to me that I was able to do that, and I'm just happy that we were able to do it.
[Neal Conan:] Troy Andrews, aka Trombone Shorty; and Gwen Thompkins with us from WWNO, our member station in New Orleans. We want to hear your postcard from that city, 800-989-8255. Email talk@npr.org. Stay with us. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan. Today we're looking ahead at what's coming up for New Orleans with Troy "Trombone Shorty" Andrews and Gwen Thompkins. Gwen used to report and edit for NPR. For the better part of a year, she's been hosting "Music Inside Out" for member station WWNO in her hometown. Here's a little a taste from an interview she did with singer-songwriter John Boutte about tackling songs normally sung by female artists.
[Unidentified Woman:] [Singing] And I can make it seem better for a while.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] So John Boutte, what do you hear when you hear her singing that song?
[John Boutte:] I hear crying, you know, trying to say that she is somebody, you know. And it's just a very emotional song, and...
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] You have tears in your eyes. I do, too, don't be ashamed.
[John Boutte:] No, I don't.
[Neal Conan:] Gwen Thompkins with John Bouttee on "Music Inside Out." You can find a link to Gwen's show at our website. Go to npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION. If you've visited New Orleans, we want to hear from you. What's your postcard from your trip, your essential New Orleans experience? 800-989-8255. Email is talk@npr.org. Ellen in Mission Hills, Kansas, sent us an email. Just returned from the second Jazz Fest weekend late last night. I have to tell you that last Thursday, while I was waiting in line to get on my flight for Louis Armstrong Airfield, I picked out of the crowd a man in shorts and sandals carrying his aluminum folding a chair, not wrapped in its holder, just folded up, and he was wearing a sport coat over his T-shirt. I tapped him on the shoulder and said Jazz Fest and Commanders, am I right? And he smiled the way we do when we're on our way back to New Orleans, and he said check and check. It was a mud fest of nothing but good times. Everyone was nice to everyone else, and Irma Thomas brought several people to several thousand people to complete silence when she spoke of overcoming her bout with cancer, then sang Dylan's "Forever Young" on the always best day of Jazz Fest, local Sunday bliss. I love New Orleans, consider myself not a tourist but a regular out-of-towner, a phrase I did not make up but borrowed. So that is that's another great experience, and...
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] Wow, that's great.
[Troy Andrews:] That's great, yeah.
[Neal Conan:] Troy Andrews, you noted when you mentioned earlier you spent a lot of time out of New Orleans these days. What is it like coming home?
[Troy Andrews:] It's great, you know. My entire city keeps up with me wherever I am around the world. And they just want to make sure that I'm doing OK, and I'm continuing to grow as a person. And it's just a beautiful thing to be able to come back to the city and play and also come back to my family. And it's always really exciting. You know, we're on the road, I do at least 200 dates a year or close to it. So when we come back home, it's always a big homecoming, and everybody's trying to see what we're doing, and the love that we get, you know, I don't think we can match that anywhere in the world. But it's just great, you know, to be able to play around and come back home. And it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and I'm just very grateful for the support that I get from my city.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] It's true, I mean, Neal, it's you know, people should I'm sure most people already know this, but, I mean, Troy Andrews is not just Troy Andrews. Troy Andrews represents a family tradition in this town that, I mean, goes far back to the beginnings of New Orleans R&B. I mean, he is descended from Jessie Hill, I mean, the great R&B artist, you know...
[Troy Andrews:] "Ooh Poo Pah Doo."
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] "Ooh Poo Pah Doo," exactly, Jessie Hill. And, you know, this whole town is sort of populated by familial dynasties and clans. You know, when I was in Somalia many years ago, people, you know, were trying to explain to me about the clan situation there and how, you know, I mean, everything's worked out by the family clans. And I thought, hell, I left New Orleans for this? I mean because they're like the Marsalises, they're the [unintelligible], you know. There are the Jordans, you know what I mean.
[Troy Andrews:] The Nevilles.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] The Nevilles of course, you know, yeah, the 13th Ward.
[Troy Andrews:] Yeah, definitely.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] Exactly, and so all of these families are representing the best of New Orleans, and they do so generationally. And so Troy has cousins who are here and, you know, siblings here who are really, you know what I mean, carrying on the tradition even when he is away, and that's what's so exciting, you know. That's what's so exciting. And the truth is I really want him to come on my show. So, you know, I'm sorry you played the clip of our show when our guest was crying, John Boutte, because I don't want him to get scared and think I'm going to try to make him cry on my...
[Neal Conan:] Well, we'll play another clip from your show, and this one might be a little more inviting. You interviewed the drummer Shannon Powell and talking about he's an old-timer and talking about, well, he gets so tired of life on the road. Trombone Shorty would know nothing about this, that in fact he brings his own hot plates.
[Shannon Powell:] If you know how to cook, you know, you bring a little hot plate on the road. I had two of them.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] Wow.
[Shannon Powell:] I like to travel with my pots and my drum case and my travel case, and I've been known to get out, put out of many hotels.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] Really? With your hot plate?
[Shannon Powell:] Yeah, for cooking, yeah.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] You're cooking, and you're cooking.
[Shannon Powell:] Yeah, the maid would smell it in the hallway, and she'd be like what's going on in there. I said nothing, I said I just come from the store. She said no, you're cooking in there.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] Nailed you, [unintelligible].
[Neal Conan:] That's Shannon Powell on...
[Troy Andrews:] I'll have to try that.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] Yeah, he smothered chicken. He made potato salad on the road. Who makes potato salad in a hotel room? Where he can find the ice?
[Neal Conan:] Well, Gwen Thompkins has a good time, as you can hear, on her new show "Inside Out."
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] We're "Music Inside Out."
[Neal Conan:] "Music Inside," and I was going to ask you, Gwen, you were talking a little bit about some of the reporting you did in East Africa. You're now spending a lot of time on music. These are what is it like making that transition?
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] You know, it's not as difficult as you might think, you know, because in a way, you know, you can look at music as just, you know what I mean, you know, shaking your groove thing or moving your backfield or whatever, keeping your backfield in motion. But then you can also look at it as, you know, I mean, song by song, sometimes lyric by lyric, music tells the story of a culture, and it tells the story of how we live and what we care about and what we want others to know about us. And when I was, you know, traveling and reporting for NPR, I mean, that's exactly what we were trying to get at, you know. And, you know, there are certain places where you would go, for instance, you know, northern Uganda, some places in Somalia, some places in Darfur, for instance, some places in Congo, where people did not feel at liberty to say exactly what had gone on with them or what had happened to them or to point fingers because they were usually pointing fingers to the person who was sitting right next to them. You know, their neighbors were oftentimes doing terrible things to them. And so what they would do is they would write a song about it. And sometimes they would just sing you the song. And that really was going to be the only record of what had transpired, you know, that was of, you know, of major significance to the future of a culture, the future of a nation, the future of a region. And so when I look at the songs that come out of Louisiana, for instance, I mean, they I mean, when you piece them together, I mean it's like tatting lace. I mean, you are really you come away with a real picture of what the people here are about. And I have to say I've been everywhere I've been a lot of places, I should say, and there are I don't think I've ever seen a place that has as many truly interesting people as there are here in New Orleans and here in Louisiana. Don't you agree, Troy?
[Troy Andrews:] I agree, yeah. Shannon Powell is one of them.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] Get him to cook for you.
[Troy Andrews:] Yeah because I can't cook.
[Neal Conan:] Not even on a hot plate in a hotel room?
[Troy Andrews:] No.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] It's and the truth is people get more interesting when they come. You know, it's not just the native folks. But look, Billy Joel showed up here last week, right. He checked into the Monteleone Hotel. He went downstairs immediately, went to the bar, played three songs, OK, left the bar, went on Bourbon Street and sang doo-wop. I mean, how often do you see that happening, you know what I mean, around the country, you know, where a guy, you know what I mean, is so excited to be here. And the thing is, you know, people always ask that question, oh, you've got all these big acts who are coming down to New Orleans, you know, Billy Joel and Patti Smith and Fleetwood Mac. What do they have to do with New Orleans music? But the truth of the matter is I have never met an artist who cared about categories, you know what I mean, who said I am this kind of musician, or I am that kind of musician. All artists are talking to one another, and all artists that I know of, you know what I mean, whether they're from here or not, acknowledge that this really is the source of American music right here.
[Troy Andrews:] Definitely, yeah, [unintelligible]. I'm sorry.
[Neal Conan:] Here's an email from excuse me Nancy in Fairbanks. My favorite memory of New Orleans as a Red Cross disaster relief volunteer after Katrina was the way everyone, young, old, male, female, white, black, called me baby. The last day of my tour, I was serving food to an elderly woman who said thank you, baby. My response was, I'm sure going to be missed being called baby.
[Troy Andrews:] Oh.
[Neal Conan:] Let's see if we can get Daisy on the line. Daisy's with us from Charlottesville in Virginia.
[Daisy:] Hi, there.
[Neal Conan:] Hi, Daisy. Go ahead, please. What's your postcard from New Orleans?
[Daisy:] Well, I just wanted to share. I was there on November of last year for a conference and my husband came with me. We went down to Frenchmen Street, and it was like nothing we've ever experienced. My husband's not from the U.S., so he by far had a very unique experience. And I think what struck us most was being able to see so many different extremely talented musicians sharing their sound with anyone for free all night long.
[Troy Andrews:] Yup, all night.
[Daisy:] And so we saw salsa, reggae, blues, country. It was all there. We just walked across the street from one to the other, no cover charge. We danced our hearts out, and it was like 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning. It was still going. There was nothing happening. It wasn't an event, weekend or week or anything like that. It's just going all the time, and that is nowhere else in this country. I mean, it's distilled. It's, you know, potent. It's amazing. It's just a really beautiful experience and something, I think, we will treasure. And we were, you know, caught very much off-guard with having that experience there. So...
[Neal Conan:] And goes someway to explain Gwen's comments about New Orleanians not getting up early in the morning, necessarily.
[Daisy:] No. And, well, really...
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] That's true.
[Daisy:] ...we're already up. So...
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] Early is relative.
[Daisy:] I also wanted to say for Troy, we saw him open for Dave Matthews here in Charlottesville. I actually have a signature on a white leather jacket. So very glad to hear about him and that he's still going on and putting that music out there.
[Troy Andrews:] Thank you very much.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks very much for the call.
[Daisy:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] And go ahead.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] Neal, well, I was going to say, Neal, you and I have hung out on Frenchmen Street, OK? So you know what we're talking about. You know what I mean?
[Neal Conan:] And, fortunately, it was after the show, so getting up late the next morning was not so much of a problem.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] And true. But you were eyeballing some girl who had legs up to Arkansas.
[Neal Conan:] I think she meant to be eyeballed, yes. We're talking with the irrepressible Gwen Thompkins and Trombone Shorty Troy Andrews at our member station in New Orleans, WWNO, as we continue our series of conversations, "Looking Ahead." You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And, Troy Andrews, I have to ask you, of course, there's that family tradition where music is handed down, but you've also started a foundation to support music education to hand down New Orleans music.
[Troy Andrews:] Yes. Yeah.
[Neal Conan:] Can you tell us a little bit about it?
[Troy Andrews:] Well, I started a foundation, Trombone Shorty Academy, to just basically help out some of the younger kids that's interested in music here because I visit schools a lot when I'm in town and just go play with the band, donate some instruments. And I didn't really know that these youngsters really knew who I was, and when I walked in, they were really excited, as if someone like Lil Wayne or someone came in. So I was like, wow, I have a young audience that I didn't even know about, and I think that I can help them through music, let them know that after school, after you finish marching band, that you can actually have a career at doing it. And I just wanted to help some of the youngsters that's interested in music some of the things that my family passed to me and the rest of the New Orleans musicians, some of the older guys that taught me things. I just wanted to be able to capture that and pass that along to some of the younger musicians because we don't have a lot of the old cats around. The neighborhoods are not the same anymore to where you could just go to someone's house and you have a hundred musicians over there and you can just go get a lesson or play with the band, play in the street or whatever you want to do. So I just wanted to give that experience to the kids that's coming up and also give them some fundamental things to practice and just have them catch up, 'cause we have a lot of kids that can play in the street but sometime they miss the whole fundamental thing, and that hinders them later on in life because they won't be able to play other styles of music. And by me having the best of both worlds, being able to play on the street with some of the brass bands marching and going to NOCCA with some of the great teachers I had over there, they wanted me to focus on fundamental. So I just wanted to be able to get all that in one spot for the kids and, you know, hopefully save some lives.
[Neal Conan:] Because that's what it's about. It's...
[Troy Andrews:] Yes.
[Neal Conan:] Yeah.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] Terrific work. Terrific.
[Neal Conan:] It's not just learning to read play scales and then read music. It's just part of it. Let's get Molly on the line. Molly's with us from Washington, Illinois.
[Molly:] Hello.
[Neal Conan:] Now you're on the air. Go ahead, please.
[Molly:] Hi. My I wanted to tell you about the time my husband and I were in New Orleans for the first time. It was in March, it just a few months before Katrina. And we walked down Bourbon Street that first night as you do, but and all the noise and the smells and the sounds of Bourbon Street, the sights, but we kept going. And it was kind of a cool misty night, and we kept going past Bourbon Street, and we kept going further into the neighborhood, and it became very quiet. It was kind of misty, and the gaslights were hanging in front of the houses. The cars you know, streets were deserted of cars, and it was like walking back in time 150 years. It was the most amazing transported experience I've ever had.
[Troy Andrews:] Wow.
[Molly:] Just we walked past a church, and there was a choir practicing in the basement. You could hear that in the background. It was like a movie, and it would...
[Troy Andrews:] Wow.
[Molly:] ...stick in my mind forever as my image of New Orleans.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] That's a great image.
[Neal Conan:] It is, yeah. I could see the Spanish moss now.
[Molly:] Yeah, exactly. It was ghosts walking by, you know? It was just, just amazing. We both talk about it in hushed tones to this day.
[Neal Conan:] Well, Molly...
[Troy Andrews:] Wow.
[Neal Conan:] ...thanks very much. Appreciate that picture.
[Molly:] Thank you. It's a lovely city. I've been there twice. I'm going back this summer.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] Oh, good.
[Troy Andrews:] Thank you. Thank you.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] Oh, boy.
[Neal Conan:] Here's an email from Karen in Grand Rapids: Via Facebook, I befriended a couple of dozen brass bandies who convene to celebrate major events Mardi Gras Day, Bastille Day, the night before Easter, the Paradise Tumblers host open call pick-up band events for anyone who plays an instrument. Through them, I've fallen in with two MG parade marching bands, posed with tourists and acted as a local wayfaring helper, and I'm from Michigan.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] That's pretty great.
[Neal Conan:] Yeah.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] Yeah, I mean, that draws you out, I have to say. It really does, you know? And I mean, it sounds maybe it sounds a bit trite but I mean, you can really be down, down, down in your soul and, you know, not feeling like anything is working for you and then all of a sudden you'll here a tuba or you'll a horn or something and then you realize just outside your house there is a brass band walking by and you realize you can join the parade or you can stay home. And, you know, and the logical choice is to join the parade and I tell you, you'll never regret it. You'll never regret it.
[Neal Conan:] Gwen, thanks very much. We never regret having you on the program.
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] What about how cool a segue was that?
[Gwen Thompkins, Byline:] Sweet.
[Neal Conan:] Gwen Thompkins, the host of WWNO's Music Inside Out, a New Orleans native. And again, you could go to our website and get a link to her program. Go to npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION. Troy Andrews, thank you again for being with us.
[Troy Andrews:] Thank you for having me.
[Neal Conan:] Trombone Shorty and Gwen Thompkins with us from WWNO in New Orleans. When we come back, China's on top of the list when investigators look into big time hacking these days. An explanation. Stay with us. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

[Renee Montagne:] And now a look at the evolving media Russian style. Last summer, Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev joined the tweeting masses with his own Twitter page, called Kremlin Russia. And almost immediately another Twitter feed appeared: Kermlin Russia. It's a satirical version whose faux presidential tweets are actually the work of two young Russians dubbed Masha and Sasha. With 58,000 followers and growing, it's a bit of a sensation on the Russian language Web. Julia Ioffe, the Moscow correspondent for Foreign Policy magazine, wrote about Kermlin Russia for the latest issue. Good morning.
[Ms. Julia Ioffe:] Good morning, Renee.
[Renee Montagne:] So which lines have you been finding the funniest?
[Ms. Julia Ioffe:] The ones that just state the most simply just how greedy government officials are. For example, when a list surfaced in a Russian newspaper of all of the bureaucrat's children who have at age 22 these very profitable businesses, Kermlin tweeted something like: Local governors need to have more children so that we can have more successful young entrepreneurs.
[Renee Montagne:] When you imagine him sitting writing, Dmitry Medvedev, sitting in his office writing this, well, it adds to the absurdity but it adds to the fun.
[Ms. Julia Ioffe:] Absolutely. Medvedev's character is a little absurd. And I think the reason that a lot of these tweets are funny is that they are so blunt and that really echoes a kind of brazenness with which everything is done the brazenness with which government funds just disappear. Recently they've discovered that the one kilometer of roads, which they're building in preparation for the 2014 Olympics, it's the most expensive in the world.
[Renee Montagne:] And there's actually a tweet.
[Ms. Julia Ioffe:] Yes. It goes something along the lines of: In order to save 327 billion rubles, we've decided to move the Olympics to Vancouver, where everything is already ready.
[Renee Montagne:] You write that this Twitter feed is continuing a long tradition in Russia.
[Ms. Julia Ioffe:] That's right. The most recent example of this is something called anekdoty. They are short can jokes that were just kind of launched into society and were repeated over and over and over again. It was a way of sharing information and analysis when the media was completely controlled by the then-Soviet state.
[Renee Montagne:] So a joke one of the jokes would be what?
[Ms. Julia Ioffe:] For example, you know, when Brezhnev was still in power, he and the ruling class they were the octogenarians, they were extremely old so one of the jokes was asking why one bureaucrat would go to meet foreign leaders at the airport, whereas one would wait at the Kremlin for them. And the answer was, well, this one operates on battery power and the other one plugs into the wall.
[Renee Montagne:] I do see similarities. Let me just ask you kind of a straightforward question. Tweeting is often jaunty and light and certainly ironic. How much influence do you think it's really having?
[Ms. Julia Ioffe:] It has a lot of influence because it's become a steam valve for a lot the people who are the most active thinkers and readers and followers of the news, who follow the details of government corruption and ineptitude and who are deeply frustrated by it. There's a concept in Russian literature called laughing through tears. It's a very necessary comic relief, because usually the system is very inert and very difficult to change, even by the people who ostensibly matter.
[Renee Montagne:] Julia Ioffe is the Moscow correspondent for Foreign Policy magazine. Her article on the Twitter feed Kermlin Russia is in the latest issue. Thank you very much for joining us.
[Ms. Julia Ioffe:] Oh, thank you, Renee.
[Renee Montagne:] The Kremlin won't say whether Medvedev follows the faux Twitter feed. But Masha and Sasha are certain he's aware of it and possibly influenced. The Russian president recently changed his Twitter account from Kremlin Russia to Medvedev Russia. You're listening to MORNING EDITION from NPR News.

[Alex Chadwick:] Coming up, a new mix of old sounds from north Africa, the music of Maghreb. First, this: President Bush held a short-notice news conference today to call on Congress to follow his leadership and to counter reports that his second-term presidency has been losing momentum. Mr. Bush's poll numbers are at a low point for his presidency. Several of his initiatives are stalled or slowed on Capitol Hill. And the conflict in Iraq has become more violent. But the president didn't flinch on any of these issues speaking to reporters today. Joining us is NPR's senior Washington editor, Ron Elving. Ron, welcome back to the show. And what about this news conference?
[Ron Elving:] Well, the president has begun to do one of these each month, usually towards the end of the month, after having been very low-visibility for press conferences in his first term. But he likes to come out and get his message across the best way he can, so he was highlighting good news on the economy, pretty good news on the job front, good news on consumer confidence. Gas prices are a little lower, although he didn't mention gas prices this morning. And he had four things he wanted Congress to do, things like Social Security, which we've been hearing about, and a trade agreement and lower spending, and he also wants the energy bill passed. And the odds are stacked against him on three or four of those issues, but the president wanted to press ahead, wanted to tell them that this was still what he expected and what the American people expected them to do.
[Alex Chadwick:] There were 20 questions over a course of about 50 minutes, one on the situation in Iraq. Here's how Mr. Bush responded.
[President George W. Bush:] I believe the Iraqi government's gonna be plenty capable of dealing with them. And our job is to help train them so that they can. I was heartened to see the Iraqi government announce 40,000 Iraqi troops are well-trained enough to help secure Baghdad. That was a very positive sign.
[Alex Chadwick:] Ron, is that how people in Congress are going to be looking at the news from Iraq this week?
[Ron Elving:] There's a lot of uneasiness in Congress about Iraq. Announcing that you have 40,000 troops well-trained enough to deal with the situation is one thing, but having them actually deal with it is another. And what we've seen is a month of May that was one of the bloodiest since the war began. The death rate is up sharply: over 70 Americans in recent weeks; hundreds and hundreds of Iraqis. The latest blow, of course, to United States prestige with respect to creating democracy and freedom in the Middle East is this report from the Amnesty International people calling our anti-terror prisons like Guantanamo Bay `a new Gulag.'
[Alex Chadwick:] Very, very sharp reaction from Mr. Bush on that.
[Ron Elving:] He said it was absurd. That was the word he used. He said anyone who would say such things would have to be someone who hated America. And he said that we had investigated all complaints made about our treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and other facilities and that our investigations had been completely transparent. So the president really had absolutely no use for this report, and Dick Cheney has had dismissive terms for it in recent hours as well.
[Alex Chadwick:] OK. Speaking of hope, the president said he's hoping to get up-or-down votes for his judicial nominees. He said he hoped he would-although he was not quite sure what to make of that bipartisan agreement that we spoke about last week on filibusters that are ended in all but, quote, "extraordinary circumstances." Here's Mr. Bush.
[Pres. Bush:] I'll put a best face on it, and that is that since they're moving forward with Judge Owen, for example, and others, that extraordinary circumstances means just that, really extraordinary. I don't know what that means. I guess we're about to find out.
[Alex Chadwick:] How about that, Ron? Are we?
[Ron Elving:] Well, the president did get Priscilla Owen confirmed, and he'll get a couple of his other nominees to the appellate bench confirmed. But after that, the Democrats expect that it's one case at a time. A filibuster is still an option for them; it's still very much on the table, and that that would apply to a choice for chief justice of the Supreme Court. We may be doing that this summer. The president made clear that he had not changed his means of choosing a nominee to the Supreme Court. He will have some discussions with Congress and will listen to their opinions, but then he plans to make his own decision. No change there.
[Alex Chadwick:] How about John Bolton's nomination for UN ambassador, also a question?
[Ron Elving:] The president stands by Bolton, and he also said today he would not release the documents that the Democrats have said are their price for an up-or-down vote on Bolton. So that one's at an impasse, and we'll see who blinks first.
[Alex Chadwick:] OK. And over and over again today, he kept saying, `Social Security, Social Security.'
[Ron Elving:] Absolutely. One of the four things right at the top of the speech, the president said, `I'm still pressing ahead on Social Security. I'm like water cutting through a rock. If I have enough time, I'm gonna cut right through that rock.'
[Alex Chadwick:] NPR's senior Washington editor, Ron Elving. He's also the author of the political column Watching Washington. It runs every Monday on our Web site, npr.org. Ron, thanks again.
[Ron Elving:] Thank you, Alex.

[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Who else was at the meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer promising damaging details on Hillary Clinton's campaign? The latest revelation is that a Russian-American lobbyist and a former Red Army officer was among those present. If you're keeping count, the number of attendees is now up to eight. But the central question remains. Was taking the meeting a crime? Certainly, some people seem to think so.
[Robert Bauer:] This is highly suggestive of a potential violation of the law.
[Jake Tapper:] This is evidence of willingness to commit collusion.
[Richard Painter:] Come very close, if not crossing the line, with respect to treason.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Those are snippets from TV interviews this week on PBS and cable news. And to unpack all this, we're joined by George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley. Thanks for being here this morning.
[Jonathan Turley:] Thanks, Lulu.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Just to be clear, Jonathan, you were not at the meeting with Donald Trump Jr. because the list keeps on expanding just to be clear [LAUGHTER].
[Jonathan Turley:] Yes. I actually feel quite insulted. Everyone else was.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Invited, and you weren't. All right. As we heard there, there have been a lot of accusations thrown around. Is there one that has merit?
[Jonathan Turley:] Well, this is a very difficult case because people we're living sort of the age of rage. People are enraged by this meeting, and there's legitimate reason for that. But the meeting itself does not constitute any clear prima facie case of a crime. There is no per se crime of collusion. Now, there's no question that...
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] It's not a legal term, collusion.
[Jonathan Turley:] No. And so if you're using collusion to mean conspiracy, then there are crimes that deal with conspiracy. But it's conspiracy to commit what? is the tough question. Now, what's clear is that, in terms of collusion, Donald Trump Jr. appears to have been willing to collude. He just wasn't successful. It's like going to a no-tell motel with intent of being an adulterer and not finding someone there. It doesn't make you necessarily a better person. You're just a really bad adulterer. And in this case, there was a clear message in the email that said, the Russian government wants to give you information to help in the election. It is breathtaking that anyone would take that meeting and not call the FBI, not send surrogates. Now, there is a question, however, of whether this was a bait and switch. You know, it doesn't really look like a Russian intelligence operation sort of curious to all the high-level meetings.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Bait and switch you mean that somehow they were trying to lure him in, and then we're going to give him something else.
[Jonathan Turley:] Yeah. The lawyer involved has one principal cause and one principal client, to try to get rid of this Russian ban on adoption. It was part of sanctions.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Right.
[Jonathan Turley:] And so the argument, actually, that's now being embraced by the White House is that, essentially, they were, like, click-bait chumps. You know, they someone knew how to get a meeting. They went there to get this information, and it turned out to be something different.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] OK. But there is an aspect of this meeting that has been called problematic and that, you know, relates to campaign finance law. Don Jr. could have run afoul of a law that says campaigns cannot get contributions of value from foreign governments. Can that law be applied to this case? Just briefly.
[Jonathan Turley:] It could. But the problem people have to be very careful. That could drive a stake through the heart of the First Amendment. If you start to treat the exchange of information as if it's like campaign finance money, it could go it would be basically without any limiting principle. You could have a foreign NGO, an environmental group, giving information to a campaign, a foreign professor.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Right.
[Jonathan Turley:] It would really expand the federal election laws to go deeply into political speech. And people have to be very careful. They're so eager to find a crime here that they're not considering the implications.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] All right. The Trump side is saying this is business as usual in D.C. People in this town are always meeting with foreign dignitaries and officials. So where is the line between a lobbyist and a, quote, "foreign agent?" What's the line between getting a tip from someone who happens to be a foreigner and breaking the law?
[Jonathan Turley:] First of all, there's nothing usual about this. I've been in this town a long time. So have you. There's a lot of opposition research that goes on. But I think few people in this town would've taken this meeting. It's a seriously problematic meeting from the outset. Now, having said that, the line between a lobbyist and a foreign agent certainly, foreign agent is there to represent directly a national interest of a foreign government. It does seem to me that there are violations of a law called FARA, which is the Foreign Agent Registration Act. Now, FARA is rarely prosecuted. And that's going to be part of the problem here. It's viewed as a fairly minor criminal violation. And, you know, what it gets you is fairly limited. It's usually handled administratively.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] All right. Just briefly yes or no. Do you think a crime was committed from what we know now?
[Jonathan Turley:] I don't. And this talk about treason is perfectly bizarre.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Jonathan Turley is a professor of public interest law at George Washington University. Thanks for talking with us today.
[Jonathan Turley:] Thank you, Lulu.

[Melissa Block:] From NPR News, this is All Things Considered. I'm Melissa Block.
[Michele Norris:] And I'm Michele Norris. If you thought the December after a presidential election would be quiet, think again. Today, the White House agreed to provide General Motors and Chrysler with $17.4 billion in aid. And in Chicago, President-elect Barack Obama continues to announce his Cabinet choices at a rapid pace. And the Rod Blagojevich corruption scandal is not going away.
[Governor Rod Blagojevich:] I will fight. I will fight. I will fight until I take my last breath. I have done nothing wrong.
[Melissa Block:] Today, Blagojevich, the Democratic governor of Illinois, made his first official statement after his arrest last week. He's charged with, among many things, trying to sell Barack Obama's Senate seat to the highest bidder.
[Governor Rod Blagojevich:] Now, I know there are some powerful forces arrayed against me. It's kind of lonely right now. But I have on my side the most powerful ally there is, and it's the truth.
[Melissa Block:] Just over a mile away in Chicago, Mr. Obama announced four more people he's chosen to help lead his administration. They are Congresswoman Hilda Solis of California for the Labor Department, Congressman Ray LaHood for Transportation, he's a Republican from Illinois. Also, the former Dallas mayor Ron Kirk as trade representative and to head the Small Business Administration, a venture capitalist, Karen Mills.
[Michele Norris:] Well, there's a lot to talk about on the political front and so we turn to our regular political commentators, E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and David Brooks of the New York Times. Good to talk to both of you. Mr. E.J. DIONNE, Jr. [Op-ed Columnist, Washington Post]: Good to be with you.
[Mr. David Brooks:] Good to be with you.
[Michele Norris:] We'll get to the transition in just a minute. But first, that piece of Chicago that seems to be sticking to the bottom of the president-elect's shoe as he tries to walk to Washington, the Blagojevich story. Has his team managed the story very well, David?
[Mr. David Brooks:] I'd say moderately well. One of the things they should have done is they should have been more open, or at least dropped broader hints about how broad the contacts were. As far as I can see, there's absolutely no evidence they did anything corrupt. But I think they by dribbling things out by not answering questions even, I think, as fully as they could have, they've dragged the story on, kept their involvement. It was perfectly obvious there was going to be some connection between Obama's Chicago crew and Blagojevich's Chicago crew. They could have been a little more open. I don't think they've made the transition from the campaign, where they can control the message, to the presidency, where they lack that control.
[Michele Norris:] E.J., was it a mistake to say that we don't think that any member of this team has had contact with the governor of Illinois?
[Mr. Dionne:] Well, I basically agree with what David said. I don't think they've made any catastrophic errors here. I think they got a handle on it when they came out and said we put together this report, we're not releasing it now because Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, asked us not to and Fitzgerald backed them up on that. So, I think they got a handle on it finally and I think the evidence is that from Blagojevich's own mouth that the Obama folks weren't playing ball with him the way he wanted them to play ball with him, but they could have handled the beginning better. But I don't think there's any thing fatal here.
[Michele Norris:] Well, you know, in saying, I'm confident that no representative of mine would have any part of any deals related to the seat, which is what the president-elect said, would it have been better to say, of course we speak to the governor about this, this is an important decision that he asked to make?
[Mr. Dionne:] Well, both of those are true at the same time. In other words, they can say they didn't make any deals because they apparently didn't. But yeah, I think they should have just been more open and said sure, we had conservations with the governor. There're also a lot of these politicians had to deal with Blagojevich, he was the governor. He was a Democratic governor.
[Michele Norris:] Let's get to the transition. President-elect Obama has nearly completed choosing the top level of his administration. What pictures are you getting so far in this administration and its priorities, David?
[Mr. David Brooks:] First of all, I have to give him A. I think it's just been an outstanding job from start to finish. The first group of people were experienced Clinton hands, people we knew. The second group of people, which he's really been announcing last week, are more his age, more local reformers Arne Duncan in Chicago, the housing guy from New York, Ron Kirk from Dallas so, sort of his age, his cohort, but local reformers from around the country, less Washington-centric, less Harvard Law-centric. And that's actually a decent balance of actual practitioners who've actually done reform at the local level.
[Michele Norris:] Practitioners are you saying pragmatic choices here?
[Mr. Dionne:] I am. I think Arne Duncan, the education secretary, is particularly fascinating because on the one hand, he's somebody who is widely seen by reformers as a reformer, yet he gets along with the unions. He was able to deal with the unions. A lot of folks were trying to put Obama in the box, saying either you're going to be a reformer or and if you are, you've got to be anti-union. He turned that down. I agree with what David said and I also think in these later appointments, you're seeing, you know, a more progressive face. Hilda Solis at the Labor Department is a strong friend of unions, the environmental picks were definitely pro-environmental. And Ray LaHood, as a Republican, is fascinating. He was sort of the founder of this civility project. It didn't go very far because nobody wanted to be civil, but it's very much the kind of mood that Obama says he's trying to create.
[Michele Norris:] Which one of these picks to you most signals the fact that this is a brand new day in Washington?
[Mr. David Brooks:] Let's go with Duncan and let's stick with education.
[Michele Norris:] Mm hmm. Do you agree?
[Mr. David Brooks:] I don't agree with E.J. You know, I think there are choices to be made. There are choices to be Malcolm Gladwell had a piece in The New Yorker saying if you fire the bottom six percent of teachers, you make tremendous gains. So the question is, do we have an education secretary who believes you should fire those bottom six percent? In Washington, Michelle Rhee believes so. In New York, Joel Klein believes so. A lot of unions don't believe so and it actually is going to take some confrontation to get that kind of reform made and the reformers, like Klein, like Rhee, think Duncan's the kind of guy.
[Michele Norris:] So, you're saying that Duncan is important, but not for the same reasons that E.J. thinks he's important?
[Mr. David Brooks:] Right. I think, you know, I think he's much more politically savvy and more mellow than some of the other reformers, like Michelle Rhee, who's not a mellow person. So, stylistically, he's much more acceptable. But I think Obama chose him because he's a real reformer and he's going to be a little confrontational sometimes.
[Michele Norris:] Your thoughts both of you on the way he laid out this transition. We seem to see a press conference everyday. Is part of this just the rapid pace that they're making these picks or is there also an effort to help him look presidential on the public side before he actually assumes the office?
[Mr. Dionne:] Well, I think clearly the latter. I mean he has looked like someone in control, much, in the sense, more so than President Bush has been able to look in this period, partly because he's been able to sort of talk about one decision after another. And he's been able to make news at these press conferences, and not only with the people he made he named, but usually on some policy that he is going to promote and particularly on what he plans to do about the economy.
[Michele Norris:] You know, it's interesting, I think last time that we had a transition with a Democrat heading into the White House was Bill Clinton and so much of the narrative at that time revolved around his personal story, him coming from the South, him coming from Arkansas, the stories about his running and his appetites and his interests and policy seemed to take a back seat in that case.
[Mr. David Brooks:] Here, I think what we have is the Democratic establishment and really the smartest aspects of it. What strikes me most and most good and bad is the debate culture. The Bush White House was not exactly a debate culture. The Obama White House, it's a debate culture, it's an argument culture. You look at the economic team, he's got Larry Summers, he's got Christina Romer, Austin Goolsbee, Tim Geithner at Treasury, all people with exactly, basically, the same skills with the same credentials doing the same job. Franklin Roosevelt did this, he assigned three or four people to the same job. It's going to take a lot of discipline to keep them all together.
[Michele Norris:] Very, very quickly, E.J., because we don't have a lot of time. The criticism that Obama's facing for choosing Pastor Rick Warren to deliver his invocation, is that justified?
[Mr. Dionne:] I think that there are things that Rick Warren said about gays as people that Warren should apologize for. But I think the notion that Obama is reaching out to white evangelicals and including those who are against gay marriage Obama himself has said he's against gay marriage. So I think the idea of Rick Warren is good, but some of the more offensive things he said about gays he would do well to apologize for.
[Michele Norris:] It's E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and David Brooks of the New York Times. Thanks to both of you.
[Mr. Dionne:] Thank you.
[Mr. David Brooks:] Thank you.

[Renee Montagne:] In Kenya a drought is wiping out livestock herds in the Eastern part of the country, and that's leaving nomadic herders destitute. The Masai are among one of region's most prominent cattle herding tribes, and now Masai parents have started marrying off their young daughters in an effort to get dowries of cattle to replenish their herds. NPR's Jason Beaubien reports.
[Jason Beaubien Reporting:] Sophia Toti was eight years old when her father announced that he was going to give her in marriage. The family had lost most of their cattle to drought and her father planned to swap Toti for a plot of pasture and two cows.
[Ms. Sophia Toti:] I decided to run away. My mother helped me. She gave me some money and she told me you just go.
[Beaubien:] She fled to a Masai girls' rescue center at a boarding school in the town of Cajado, that was four years ago. This year as the region is being hit by the worst drought in decades, staff at the center say even more Masai are trying to marry off their daughters early, including Toti's 10 year old sister.
[Ms. Sophia Toti:] Some two weeks ago my sister ran my little sister ran away just because of that. She's here with me now.
[Beaubien:] Priscilla Nangarai, who founded the rescue center in Cajado says this year's drought has been devastating to the Masai. The center is about an hour east of Nairobi. Many families here have lost all or most their livestock, this in a culture where cattle not only provides meat and milk, but also a predominate symbol of wealth. Nangarai, who is Masai herself, says traditionally, after the onset of puberty, Masai girls are circumcised and then their fathers arrange a marriage for them. But she says this year families aren't even waiting until the girls are in their early teens.
[Ms. Priscilla Nangatai:] But now you find that the girls I have now are between nine and eleven years. That is not tradition at all, but the drought forced the parents to do that just to sustain their families.
[Beaubien:] Legally in Kenya girls must be 18 years old to get married. But Nangarai says nobody bothers to try to enforce this law with the Masai. The current drought is affecting people across the entire Horn of African. The U.N.'s World Food Program expects six million people in the region to need food aid to survive this coming year. The majority of those people are livestock herders. Hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions, of cows, donkeys, goats, sheep, and even camels have perished because their pasture's completely dried up. The seasonal rains have started again in this part of Central Kenya. The scrubby hills are green, but the rains have come too late for many of Masai who lost large parts of their herds. Maryiamo Cassani lives in a mud and stick hut on the plains outside Cajado. Sitting under a thorn tree with a traditional Masai red blanket wrapped around her shoulders, she says even before the drought she had very little.
[Ms. Mariyamo Cassani:] [Foreign spoken]
[Beaubien:] I used to have four cows and eight goats, she says, but they all died earlier this year. The cattle had been the dowry she received for her only two daughters. Now she says her daughters are gone and so are the cows. She survives now by making charcoal.
[Ms. Mariyamo Cassani:] [Foreign spoken]
[Beaubien:] I cut some trees and burned them to make charcoal, she says, then I sell it in town to get some money to buy food. Cassani says she is hoping her two sons can get jobs in town, so that eventually her family will be able to buy more cattle and slowly rebuild the family's herd. Jason Beaubien, NPR News.

[Ed Gordon:] Leonard Pitts figured out how to be a good father even without a role model. But how about those who take on the commitment of fatherhood for other men's children? Commentator S. Pearl Sharp found these to be among the most extraordinary dads.
[Ms. S. Pearl Sharp:] I'm out of Father's Day cards. That is to say, all of the fathers and extended family uncles who helped shaped me have made their ascension. But I am blessed to know some black men who made daring choices about fatherhood. I call them the step-up dads, because they stepped up to the plate and took on the children that other children had abandoned.
[Ed Gordon:] A Peter Bailey, the esteemed journalist and lecturer, came out of the Malcolm X wing of the black liberation movement back in the 1960s. He was an associate editor of Ebony Magazine when he received a request to do an article on 4-year-old Reggie, an orphan who had spent his entire life at the New York Foundling Hospital. If Reggie was not adopted within a few months, before turning 5, he would most likely stay in institutions until he was 18. People are wary of adopting children older than toddlers. Caught up in his story, Peter began his own search for a couple he would take Reggie. When he couldn't find one, the story took an unexpected turn.
[Mr. Peter Bailey:] Being a single adoptive parent was as far from my If you had asked me, would I be president of the United States or a single adoptive father first, I probably would have said president of the United States. That's how far it was from my consciousness. And stepping up to the plate is one of the things that Brother Malcolm used to speak frequently about. And here was a test.
[Ms. Sharp:] Peter Bailey is the first black man that I knew to do a single parent adoption. This was especially significant 35 years ago, when a single parent adoption by someone other than a family member was almost unheard of, even for women. After Peter and Reggie had been a family for three years, they made a joint decision to adopt another boy. Bailey's first son turned 40 this spring. And the two sons have given Peter six grandsons. One of my favorite griots, writer Arthur Flowers was leaving Los Angeles headed to New York to focus on his literary career when an elder came to visit him. Young Flowers, she said, you need to go home. Your family is in trouble. You don't ignore a message that comes to you like that, and once back in Memphis, Arthur found that his sister was unable to function and his mother was trying to handle his sister's four rambunctious boys, stair-stepping at 5, 4, 3 and 2. Arthur unpacked for a moment and stayed for four years. I admit, adoption was something I always meant to do, but I let being single and surviving in the unstable entertainment industry get in the way. With my freelance schedule and erratic finances, how can I ever adopt? So, no one was more shocked than me when the word came out that Taurean had adopted twin boys. Wait, you're not talking about crazy, fast stepping Taurean, are you? The party boy? He did what? Yeah, actor Taurean Blacque, who was playing Detective Neal Washington on the hit TV series Hill Street Blues had been asked to be the spokesperson for the county of Los Angeles Adoption Services. But Blacque felt he could not ask others to do something he had not done. So he decided to look into the adoption thing and was told he was not eligible. Why? Because he was male and black and single, never mind that he had already raised two healthy sons of his own. Now, you know what happens when the system tells a brother he can't do something. He pulls a gun. Just kidding. Taurean adopted the twins and then two more. Then there were five, all from one addicted mother, and there was Taurean, buying baby clothes and diapers as fast as he could. And, what? Seven come 11? He looked like the Pied Piper of Hollywood, dancing out of town. Yes, Blacque walked away from Hollywood and moved home to Atlanta to raise these 11 children. In 1989, this father who had been told he was not eligible to adopt was appointed by the first President Bush as a national spokesperson for adoptive services. So this is my shout out in this Father's Day season when the brothers mostly get bad press and department store sales in their name. This moment is for the men who did more than handle their business. They took on the weight of raising some other man's children. This is for the step-up dads: I saw you, I noticed. Thank you.
[Ed Gordon:] That was S. Pearl Sharp, a writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She's saluting single dads of adoptive kids for Father's Day, which, of course, is this Sunday. And in tribute to dads, we close today's show with Horace Silver's jazz classic, Song for my Father.

[Ed Gordon:] From NPR News, this is NEWS & NOTES. I'm Ed Gordon. He's been called one of the most respected figures in modern US cinema. Actor Morgan Freeman, best known for his performances in "Driving Miss Daisy," "The Shawshank Redemption" and the mystery thriller "Seven," won his first Oscar earlier this year for best supporting actor for his role in "Million Dollar Baby." The 67-year-old actor's latest film "Unleashed" opens in theaters around the country today. But the publicity for the new project is an ongoing endeavor.
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] It's like a campaign. You're up in the morning and you're talking, talking, talking, talking, talking, and you're going to do this-I'm going to do this now for the next couple of months.
[Ed Gordon:] And if it's the down part of the job, all things being said, it ain't so bad.
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] All being-things-what you said-it ain't so bad, no. Sitting here talking to you, I mean, how bad can it be, you know?
[Ed Gordon:] Well, we'll see. Give it a couple of minutes, Morgan. Give it a couple of minutes. Let's talk about the new project and that's "Unleashed." It's billed as an action-drama. It's got Jet Li in it. Some people might be surprised. Though if they look at the scope of your work, they shouldn't be surprised. But why'd you decide to take on this?
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] It's a very human story and a very interesting character to play in a unique situation. I'm a black man with a white daughter, living in Scotland, because my daughter's going to the conservatory there in Glasgow, and we meet this young-I think he's playing Vietnamese in this-and we meet this young, very damaged soul and take him in and we become family. To me, it was like really metaphorical, you know. And I notice I'm going up like my granddaughter does, who's in college, when she talks.
[Ed Gordon:] Let me ask you something. At this point in time in your life, does every character you have have to speak to you?
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] Yes. Ed, I have to be into it. I have to be able to feel that, yes, I know this person, and I don't have to strain to reach for any of the dynamics or emotional points that this character represents. [As Sam] Anyway, I've been thinking, you've been cooped up in here for weeks now. Wouldn't you like to get some fresh air, stretch your legs? It's nice outside.
[Mr. Jet Li:] It's nice in here.
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] [As Sam] Ahh. You're afraid that if you go out, you won't be able to come back in? We'll come back, promise.
[Ed Gordon:] What was it about this character, Sam, that spoke to you?
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] Sam's very human, very deep feeling. He was not written as a blind person, and I remember thinking at some point or other, because, you know, you go over and over the script trying to find what it is in it that you need in order to make it to work. And I thought, boy, he needs to be blind. And I called Luc Besson, the producer, and said, `I want to play him blind,'and he said, `Oh, wow,'and he thought about it for a couple of weeks, and he said, `I think it's a great idea.'
[Ed Gordon:] Do you often lend that kind of poetic license to the people you play...
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] In...
[Ed Gordon:] ...find nuances in those characters?
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] Well, yeah, you have to. That's your job as the actor, to understand the human part of the character, to make it real. I was thumbing through and I came across an old Woody Allen movie, and he talks almost as if it's not written, and I think a lot of his stuff is just suggested and then he goes with it, and every few words was `you know.'Now when you write stuff, you don't write `you know.'
[Ed Gordon:] Right.
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] But when you talk, people will say, `Uh, and, you know,'and...
[Ed Gordon:] You know. Truly. When I was doing research for this, I came across an article and you said in the article, `I'm just hitting my real stride.'You really believe that or was that good to say at the time? I mean, do you really feel that?
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] No, yes.
[Ed Gordon:] Yeah.
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] Yes. In life, it doesn't really matter about your age. It has to do with your stride. Truly, it is it. You know, when I was in my 50s, I felt really powerful, really strong, really in good, vigorous, robust health and everything, and now I'm approaching 70 and I think I'm beginning to, like, sort of even flow.
[Ed Gordon:] But for you, for you as an individual, that the fame that you now have, you attained it at a relatively late age.
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] Long, slow pace. Yeah. At this level, yeah, late age, which is good, which was for me, I'm a firm believer that things happen as they should. The universe unfolds just as it's supposed to, you know. So for whatever reasons, my life going along the way it has, it's a good thing.
[Ed Gordon:] Broadway.
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] [Singing] Broadway, Broadway, everybody's happy. Yes.
[Ed Gordon:] 1967, your debut with Pearl Bailey in "Hello, Dolly!"
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] Yes.
[Ed Gordon:] I suspect now that you look back on your career, that must have been the highlight for you.
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] It was. It was. It was. And a training ground like no other. I worked on that show for 11 months with Pearl, and in that 11 months, what I watched every show was a total professional, hundred and ten percent every time out.
[Ed Gordon:] Is that something that you will continue to do throughout your career...
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] No, I don't think so. I...
[Ed Gordon:] ...want to get back to it?
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] No. I...
[Ed Gordon:] No.
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] No, no, no. I spent 20 years on the stage trying to get into movies, and so every play was going to send me to the coast.
[Ed Gordon:] Right.
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] So now I'm in the movies, I'm quite content.
[Ed Gordon:] I know, though, one of the ways that you give back and people can reach out and see and touch is the love you have for the blues and wanting to keep it alive. Now you do a lot to make that happen. One of the things that I know you're involved in is a festival.
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] Well, I have a blues club in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and we hold Clarksdale up as being the ground zero for the blues. You know, that's the fable of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads there.
[Mr. Robert Johnson:] [Singing] Now two and two is four, four and two is six. You gonna keep on monkeyin'round here friend-boy, you gonna get your business all in a trick. But I'm cryin', baby. Honey, don't you want to go...
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] And there, we have maybe three or four festivals right around that area from the King Biscuit in Arkansas right on into Clarksdale, and they go on mostly in the summer and around September. And also, what we have to give thanks for is the fact that now there is a music trail that people have discovered and are using, and they start in Nashville. They go to Memphis, Clarksdale and New Orleans, or they'll start in New Orleans and go the...
[Ed Gordon:] Work their way back, yeah.
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] ...work their way back. And we are actually still considered the center of that, you know, and people come from everywhere. It's amazing.
[Ed Gordon:] Morgan, I'm curious. You talk about people coming from everywhere, and one of the things that I've noted in my years of interviewing, when I talk to musicians about the blues and about jazz, American jazz, some African-American musicians are disappointed in that we have, to a great degree, let that legacy go. When you go to many blues clubs, when you go to many jazz clubs, ofttimes that audience will be white or European. Are you disappointed that African-Americans are not holding on to a legacy that really is ours?
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] Well, no. I think it does behoove us, not just African-Americans but Americans, because it is America's own music. You go from the blues all the way up into rock "n'roll, and I spoke to a jazz musician in Los Angeles just last week, just saying hello, and he said, `How is your blues club going?'and I said, `It's going wonderfully well.'He said, `You know, no blues, no jazz." The fact that the music does evolve-we have to accept that. What we need to hold on to is just what you said, however, the knowledge that this is important music, and the blues is actually our classic music.
[Ed Gordon:] I told you off-mike, I'll tell you in front of everyone, congratulations. I've not seen you obviously since the Oscars, but so well-deserved.
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] Well, thank you so much. It's wonderful to hear from so many people that they think it was well-deserved.
[Ed Gordon:] I'm curious, watching it, and I have been to the event and watching it on TV, and often you don't always get the energy in the theater by watching it on TV, but it seemed to me almost palpable when your name was called, the applause and the genuine, I think, outpouring of gratitude. Did you feel that from your peers?
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] Oh, yeah, that's one of the things that I feel like I'm blessed with, that I'm well-thought-of, and, you know, you can take that with you throughout life if you know you're well-thought-of.
[Ed Gordon:] Do you consider yourself, whatever this phrase means, an actor's actor?
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] Yes. I think all of us who feel that we draw from each other, that's what that term means to me. Onstage, I get from you, and if I get from you, I can give to you, you know. So acting is about trust, really.
[Ed Gordon:] You said during the acceptance speech for the Oscar, `I want to thank everybody and anybody who ever had anything...
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] ...ever had anything at all to do with the making of this picture, but I especially want to thank Clint Eastwood for giving me the opportunity to work with him again and to work with Hilary Swank. This was a labor of love.
[Mr. Clint Eastwood:] You have big holes in your socks.
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] Oh, they're not that big.
[Mr. Clint Eastwood:] Didn't I give you money for some new ones?
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] These are my sleeping socks. My feet like a little air at night.
[Mr. Clint Eastwood:] How come you're wearing them in the daytime then?
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] Because my daytime socks got too many holes in them.
[Ed Gordon:] It seems again, in just standing from afar, there was a genuine friendship and respect that you have with and for Clint Eastwood.
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] Yeah. Professionally, he's a gem. He's a polished diamond. He makes work easy and fun. He's a class act, you know, and an enormous amount of talent.
[Ed Gordon:] Well, perhaps that's why you like him so much, because he mirrors exactly what you are: a class act, a man with an enormous amount of talent. Morgan Freeman, congratulations once again on the Oscar. Well-deserved, long time coming. Always a pleasure to talk to you.
[Mr. Morgan Freeman:] It's my pleasure, indeed.
[Ed Gordon:] Morgan Freeman's new movie "Unleashed" opens in theaters today. Coming up, the military announces widespread base closings across the country. What will it mean? And speed and death in Los Angeles caught on tape. This is NPR News.

[Ira Flatow:] Up first, a look at some new research on HPV infections, human papillomavirus. It's actually a group of viruses, and more than 100 types. And some of these types HPV 16, for example have been linked to cancer and other diseases. HPV can cause cervical cancer, and some types of oral cancer might also be caused by a strain of HPV, which makes new research just released so disturbing. About half of the men in the U.S., Mexico and Brazil about half the men are infected with some form of HPV, says a newly released paper in the Lancet, and that's what we're going to be talking about this hour. Our number is 1-800-989-8255. You can tweet us, @scifri, @-S-C-I-F-R-I. Dr. Maura Gillison is a professor and the Jeg Coughlin Chair of Cancer Research at the Ohio State University in Columbus. Thanks for talking with us today, Dr. Gillison.
[Dr. Maura Gillison:] Good afternoon. Thanks for having me on the show.
[Ira Flatow:] You're welcome. Anna Giuliano is program leader in cancer epidemiology at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute in Tampa, Florida. I should point out that Dr. Giuliano has received grant money from the Merck Pharmaceutical Company to study HPV, and Merck, of course, makes the HPV vaccine Gardasil. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Giuliano.
[Dr. Anna Giuliano:] Thank you very much.
[Ira Flatow:] Dr. Gillison, let's start out with some definitions. What is HPV? It's not just one virus, right?
[Dr. Maura Gillison:] That's true. HPV is a group of viruses. There are approximately 100 of them that infect humans. Some of the types cause very simple things, like the common wart on the hand or the plantar wart on the foot. But most of the cancer-causing types that we're talking about infect, largely, the genital mucosa and the oral cavity.
[Ira Flatow:] And let's talk about these viruses that do that, cervical -there's a cervical cancer, and other genital cancers in men.
[Dr. Maura Gillison:] That's true. There are several types that are associated with cervical cancer. The most common one is HPV-16 and HPV-18. And those are both included in the currently available HPV vaccines. HPV is associated with several cancers that occur in both men and women. In women, it's cervical cancer, vulvar, vaginal, anal cancer and oral cancer. And in men it's penile cancer, anal cancer and oral cancer.
[Ira Flatow:] And what is the link between HPV and oral cancer? How close is that link?
[Dr. Maura Gillison:] Well, it was declared by the World Health Organization in 2007 that HPV-16 is a cause of oropharynx cancer. Oropharynx cancer is cancer that arises from the back of the mouth or upper part of the throat, most commonly from the tonsil. So in the HPV field, in the head and neck field, it is now established as a cause.
[Ira Flatow:] And Dr. Giuliano, you published a paper that looked at the rates of HPV infection in men, and you looked at the genital infection, correct?
[Dr. Anna Giuliano:] That's correct. So we were actually detecting 37 different types of HPV occurring that could occur in men at the external genital skin. And we followed men prospectively so we could actually look at the rate at which men acquire these new infections, and the rate at which these infections are cleared.
[Ira Flatow:] And was that a surprising rate: 50 percent of men, Mexico, Brazil, the U.S.?
[Dr. Anna Giuliano:] Actually, it wasn't surprising. We had done some smaller studies earlier on in other parts of the United States, and had found very similar prevalence estimates. And in fact, in looking at estimates from other countries around the world, you see, using the same method for detecting HPV, very similar, high levels of HPV prevalence in men at the external genital skin.
[But We Have To Remember:] That is a summary measure of all HPV types that were detected.
[Ira Flatow:] That's my question. So that doesn't say that all those HPV types cause the cancer.
[Dr. Anna Giuliano:] Exactly. And in fact, the evidence that we have is that we can say that one type in particular, and that's HPV-16, is the cause of all of the cancers that Dr. Gillison has just listed for you, that occur in men. We have very little evidence for other types of HPV causing cancer in men.
[Ira Flatow:] Dr. Gillison, is it possible that if you have an HPV genital infection, that you can spread it, or it can be spread to your mouth or to someone else's?
[Dr. Maura Gillison:] HPV is a very unusual virus in that it doesn't spread through the bloodstream. So you are correct that a genital infection is considered a distinct infection from an oral infection. Right now, the principal risk factor for acquiring an oral infection appears to be oral sex, but we can't exclude that you could transmit the infection finger to mouth or even mouth to mouth.
[Ira Flatow:] You're saying you cannot exclude that possibility? No, we can't right now. Are the incidents of these cancers and the infection rates, are they going up for men and women?
[Dr. Maura Gillison:] Well, we know for cervical cancer because cervical cancer screening is extraordinarily effective that for the last several decades, incidence rates for cervical cancer have been going down in the U.S. However, there are cancers for which there is no effective or widely utilized screening program that are caused by HPV, that are going up over time, over the last several decades. These would include vulvar cancer, anal cancer and oral cancer. For anal cancers, the increase is in men and women. For vulvar cancer, obviously just in women. And for oral cancers, the rate is largely increasing among men. For instance, since 2000, in the United States, there's been about a 5 percent increase per year among men, and a 10 percent increase in men who are white and under the age of 60.
[Ira Flatow:] Is this from having multiple sexual partners?
[Dr. Maura Gillison:] We suspect that what is happening is that as a result of the sexual revolution, HPV infection is more common. It only takes sexual contact with one infected partner to acquire an HPV infection. However, the higher the number of partners you've had, the higher the probability that you've been exposed to someone with an infection.
[Ira Flatow:] Would condoms be helpful to stop the spread here?
[Dr. Maura Gillison:] Consistent use of condoms has been shown to reduce, but not eliminate, infection transmission.
[Ira Flatow:] And so what is the take-home message for everybody listening to this, saying: What do I do? What should I do? How do I protect myself? How should I be careful? I'll ask both of you. Dr. Gillison? Dr. Giuliano?
[Dr. Maura Gillison:] After you, Anna.
[Dr. Anna Giuliano:] OK. Well, I think it's really important to reiterate what Dr. Gillison has just said about screening. We have had very effective cancer-screening programs for the prevention of cervical cancer. So we know that screening can work when we have something available to screen. The problem that we have for the cancers that are affecting men that are caused by HPV is that we do not have a screening method that we can offer. So we can't prevent those cancers via screening the way we have so effectively with cervical cancer. So that leaves us with, essentially, primary prevention which is, how can we prevent infection with HPV? Now, you touched on one method, which is condom use. And as Dr. Gillison said, it's imperfect. We've published, and others have published, that you get partial protection from condoms, but condom use is important for a variety of reasons. So it's something that we would still strongly promote. The other is, there is evidence that male circumcision can reduce HPV infection, both in the male as well as transmission to the female partner. And then the third is, you know, the classic primary prevention through vaccination. And we now have, in the United States, a licensed vaccine against HPV that is available for both males and females.
[Ira Flatow:] There's a tweet that came in that says: Please clarify if the HPV study made a distinction between straight and homosexual males, as they have vastly different sexual habits.
[Dr. Anna Giuliano:] So in our publication, we assessed both sex with the same-sex partner as well as with a female.
[Ira Flatow:] And so it's...
[Dr. Anna Giuliano:] And what we find is an increased risk for HPV infections -so acquiring a new infection with increasing number of partners. In the case of men who have sex with men, it's increasing number of male sexual partners, and in the case of men who have sex with women, it's higher risk with an increase in the number of female sex partners.
[Ira Flatow:] The fact that this is spreading between men and women is does the vaccine work in boys as well as girls?
[Dr. Maura Gillison:] Well, I'd like to clarify something about the vaccine. We have evidence that the HPV vaccine is effective in preventing anal, genital lesions in women by the HPV types that are included in the HPV vaccine. Anna just published, also, a beautiful paper in the New England Journal looking at the effectiveness of the vaccine in preventing largely external, genital warts in boys and men, and it was also found to be about 90 percent effective. With regard to oral HPV and oral HPV infection and cancer or any pre-malignant lesions for HPV-related head and neck cancer, we have absolutely no data. So we can't say that the vaccine has any potential utility in preventing oral infections that lead to cancer because the studies have not been done.
[Ira Flatow:] So you're confident of the cancers, but not the oral ones.
[Dr. Maura Gillison:] Correct.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. And just to reiterate my question before because the audience, I'm sure, is going to be interested are you, then, recommending that boys get the vaccine also?
[Dr. Maura Gillison:] Certainly, there's a permissive recommendation that parents and pediatricians talk about vaccinating boys, largely to prevent genital warts. I'm advocating, actually, trying to study the use of the vaccine as to whether or not it prevents oral infection.
[Dr. Anna Giuliano:] If I can add to that: So there is FDA licensure now for several end points in men. So FDA has licensed the vaccine for the use of the prevention of genital warts in both males and females, as well as anal infection and anal cancer in both males and females. So we're seeing, as more research is being conducted, we're really seeing an expansion of the utility of this vaccine for both males and females. And Maura is completely correct. We need to see the efficacy of this vaccine in preventing oral infections and oral disease.
[Ira Flatow:] All right, we're going to have to stop it there. Thank you, doctors, for taking time to be with us.
[Dr. Maura Gillison:] Thank you, and I just wanted to disclose that I, as Anna, have I have received funding from Merck.
[Ira Flatow:] OK. Thank you for that. Anna Giuliano and Maura Gillison, cancer researchers. Stay with us. We'll be right back after this break.

[Rachel Martin:] So Republicans couldn't quite pull off repeal and replace.
[Steve Inskeep:] Now President Trump will try a tactic that he once criticized executive action in the face of inaction by Congress. The president signs an executive order today. It would let groups of people band together to buy health coverage. You know, trade groups, or chambers of commerce or groups of small business owners could buy coverage, which would not face as many restrictions under the Affordable Care Act.
[President Donald Trump:] They'll be able to buy. They'll be able to cross state lines. And they will get great, competitive health care, and it will cost the United States nothing.
[Steve Inskeep:] That's the president, of course, previewing his plan. Proponents say association health plans, as they're called, could be cheaper, although they may also cover less. And analysts warn, they may draw younger, healthier people out of the wider insurance market.
[Rachel Martin:] All right, what happens now let's ask NPR's Domenico Montanaro. So Domenico, President Trump couldn't get Obamacare repealed through Congress, so he's taken things into his own hands. Is that what's happening here?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] In part, yes. I mean, ironically, the president is taking a tack that conservatives criticized former President Obama for you know, acting unilaterally after Congress fails to do so. You know, what he's going to sign is something conservatives have wanted to do for a long time, going back more than a decade. Bills like this have been talked about. The House passed a version of it in 2005. It's aimed at putting pressure on Congress to do more and especially to make Democrats stand up and take notice because this really could undercut the individual markets in place currently under Obamacare.
[Rachel Martin:] So and this is what critics are pointing to. They're saying that the reason why Obamacare is having problems is that President Trump keeps undercutting it. So what does this mean for consumers?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] You know, for most people it's not going to affect them, obviously, because most people will still get health insurance through their employers. For small businesses and associations, it may have an impact, but not for a little while, probably, because the details and timing are not yet clear when this would take effect. Health experts also say that when this plan does take effect, by allowing these health these association health plans to go into effect, this banding together is unlikely by itself to have a huge impact on lowering premiums for those small businesses. That's because, already, people are basically buying in a large-group market on each state exchange. You know, the only way for this to really reduce premiums is if you reduce the quality of coverage. In other words, you exclude and you would wind up because of that excluding sick people or taking away, you know, some of those essential health benefits. And if you do that, you know, that's kind of like going to a car dealership and, you know, you take away the seat belts, the rearview mirror, the mirrors on the side no headlights, no air bags. Sure, it's still a...
[Rachel Martin:] Not so safe.
[Steve Inskeep:] [Laughter].
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] It's still sure, it's still a car, but do you want to drive it?
[Rachel Martin:] Not so much. So I mean, the health markets have been so unstable just trying to figure out where health care policy is going. What does this latest move mean for the broader market?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Well, again, it could undercut the Obamacare markets because you would wind up drawing away those younger, healthier people to get this car with no sideview mirrors and be able to you know, and it would wind up raising those premiums and prices for sicker people. That's what health policy experts point to.
[Rachel Martin:] All right, to be continued NPR's Domenico Montanaro. Thanks, Domenico.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] You're welcome.
[Rachel Martin:] More grim news today out of California's wine country.
[Steve Inskeep:] Wildfires keep spreading north of San Francisco Bay. And as we've heard, the fires are spreading quickly, driven by winds at times reaching hurricane force. People keep thinking they're safe, thinking they have time to evacuate and then finding out, they don't. As of early this morning, 23 people were confirmed killed among them, elderly people who could not easily move.
[Rachel Martin:] All right, NPR's Nate Rott has been covering all this from Santa Rosa. He is on the line now. Nate, what's going on where you are?
[Nathan Rott, Byline:] Well, the most recent forecasts have been calling for 20- to 30-mile-per-hour winds tonight, so that is not a good situation. Bear in mind, that's a far cry from, like, the 70-plus-mile-per-hour winds that Steve was referring to that we saw in the area on Sunday night, Monday morning. And that's when these fires really blew up, just incinerating neighborhoods and homes. But, I mean, 20- to 35-mile-per-hour winds isn't something to shake your head out put your head out the window of your car moving 30 miles per hour, and imagine a fire getting pushed at that speed, and you'll realize that it's not really a good situation for anyone. And it's not just that the fires are going to get pushed faster they're going to burn hotter with that going on. The embers will get picked up and carried by those winds out in front of the blaze, jumping roads, buildings, any sort of fire block that might exist. And things are so dry here that any embers that start in a new place are likely to start fires. And when a fire's moving like that, there's not really a whole lot that firefighters can do. From what we can tell tonight bear in mind, it's still early here those winds have been blowing maybe not as hard as predicted, but they're blowing. And you can feel them outside, and the fires have been spreading. How much and where is a little harder to know at this point.
[Rachel Martin:] So as Steve noted, I mean, these fires are moving so quickly that people just don't even have time to think about it. They just got to get out of their houses. There are new evacuation orders, I understand, being put into place. Are residents heeding those?
[Nathan Rott, Byline:] Yeah, I've been getting texts all night for new evacuation orders in different parts of the area. And we're talking about three counties here a huge area. And for the most part, yes, I think people are heeding those warnings. I'm in a hotel right now that's filled with evacuees. Yesterday, I spent a lot of time driving around north of the town of Sonoma in an area that was under mandatory evacuation. Police have been driving around there, telling people on a loudspeaker that it was time to go. And it was a really tragic scene people stuffing their cars with belongings, doing last-minute checks to make sure they have everything they want. And there's only so much a person can fit in a car, so it's kind of hard to watch. That said, there were some people who were not leaving, who plan to ride out the fires. One man I talked to was hosing down the roof of his home and his neighbor's home as other people were leaving. His name was is Toby Butispock, and he and his wife he his wife and kids had left, and he said he was going to stay at the home. I asked him if there was, like, a trigger point where he would say, OK, that's enough, I got to go. And here's what he said.
[Toby Butispock:] When I can't see or breathe, I'll be crawling out of here [LAUGHTER].
[Nathan Rott, Byline:] Might that be too late, though, if you're crawling out of here, you can't see?
[Toby Butispock:] I guess I'll take that chance.
[Rachel Martin:] Wow.
[Steve Inskeep:] I want to...
[Nathan Rott, Byline:] It's a hard thing to hear, right?
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah.
[Steve Inskeep:] Yeah. I want to introduce a term that may be new to a lot of people wildland-urban interface. It's the phrase that...
[Nathan Rott, Byline:] The WUI.
[Steve Inskeep:] Yeah, the WUI. You know the term. It's the phrase they use for neighborhoods basically built in nature, built around forests or grasslands, which, of course, burn very quickly. And there're millions of Californians, many millions of Americans in such areas, and this is part of American life now.
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah, all right, well here's...
[Nathan Rott, Byline:] Yeah, I mean, you're describing Northern California.
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah, and as we watch these flames continue NPR's Nate Rott, covering it all for us. Thanks so much, Nate.
[Nathan Rott, Byline:] Yeah.
[Rachel Martin:] We keep learning more about how the Harvey Weinstein scandal came to light.
[Steve Inskeep:] Or, more precisely, how it did not The New York Times broke the story about the Hollywood producer who's settled numerous claims of sexual harassment. And then the journalist Ronan Farrow published a version of the same story, which he said he'd been reporting for a long time. He took the story to NBC News, his employer at that time, and he says, NBC did not run it, so he took it elsewhere.
[Ronan Farrow:] I had walked into the door at The New Yorker with a an explosively reportable piece that should've been public earlier. And immediately, obviously, The New Yorker recognized that, and it is not accurate to say that it was not reportable. In fact, there were multiple determinations that it was reportable at NBC.
[Steve Inskeep:] Reportable but not reported so why not?
[Rachel Martin:] Indeed. OK, NPR's David Folkenflik covers media. He's on the line. David, why didn't NBC run this piece?
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] Well, it's the mystery that's currently haunting the halls of 30 Rock, you know, today and all week. President Noah Oppenheim told staff who've are gotten pretty restive on this question yesterday that it kind of wasn't soup yet, that what he brought to them earlier this year wasn't sufficient to make the case of a pattern of behavior by Harvey Weinstein. But he had obtained audio the really compelling stuff that, in some ways, formed the part of the heart of the story that The New Yorker ran audio done by the New York Police Department. It was part of a sting by a woman who said that Weinstein had sexually assaulted her the night before. And he essentially acknowledges fondling, groping her against her will in that audiotape. NBC says, you know, we wanted them to do more. It wasn't there. The question that really persists is, let's say Ronan Farrow didn't have enough to prove the pattern. Why not stick with it? NBC's a big news organization. Sometimes stories take more reporting. Why didn't they wait for it?
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah, give him the reporting resources. Yeah.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] You bet.
[Rachel Martin:] What's the answer to that?
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] The answer to that, you know, coming from people inside NBC to CNN, to The Huffington Post, in particular, to others what we're hearing as well is that NBC blanched, that it blinked, that, you know, it said at a certain point it didn't...
[Rachel Martin:] Because it was Harvey Weinstein.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] It's not clear. You know, Ronan Farrow at one point said on the air that he'd been threatened with a lawsuit by Harvey Weinstein as he pursued these allegations. NBC didn't seem to fully embrace this story. And I think it's worth noting think back a year when the Access Hollywood tapes came out, you know, in which Donald Trump boasted to Billy Bush that he had essentially grabbed women in a sexual way against their will, that he could get away with it because he was famous. NBC had those tapes, but they surfaced in The Washington Post. And that is something that some journalists inside NBC say it was because of excessive caution. NBC will tell you that's the story, in this case, wasn't ready yet and that they weren't willing to go forward with something ready, but they encouraged him to publish it at a print organization that might be able to develop it with him in full. But I got to tell you, a lot of people inside the greater NBC world including Rachel Maddow, who had posed that question the answer to which we just heard you know, are asking why that wasn't on NBC itself.
[Rachel Martin:] Right. NPR's David Folkenflik he covers media for us. Thanks so much this morning, David.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] You bet.

[Michel Martin:] To Alabama we're in the midst of the scandal surrounding Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. Alabama's Republican governor, Kay Ivey, has largely ducked out of public view. Kyle Gassiott of Troy Public Radio went looking for her.
[Kyle Gassiott, Byline:] The last time Kay Ivey said anything about Alabama's special Senate election was two weeks ago. After pardoning a Thanksgiving turkey, Ivey told reporters she still believed Moore's accusers, but...
[Kay Ivey:] At the same time, the United States Senate needs to have, in my opinion, a majority of Republican votes to carry the day and when they have to consider other major decisions.
[Kyle Gassiott, Byline:] Ever since then, Ivey's been avoiding awkward questions.
[Unidentified Woman:] Now will the attendees for National Hospice Month please come forward?
[Kyle Gassiott, Byline:] Earlier this week, she signed official state proclamations and posed for pictures with the public. Breaking with her normal practice, she didn't make public remarks or speak with the press. And her office has canceled all media events for the week saying she's too busy. That same day, outside the state capitol in Montgomery, organizers of a rally against Roy Moore put out an empty chair with a sign that read, reserved for Kay Ivey.
[Ambrosia Starling:] Governor, your seat's waiting for you.
[Kyle Gassiott, Byline:] Drag queen Ambrosia Starling is one of Moore's most vocal critics in Alabama.
[Ambrosia Starling:] We waiting for you to change your mind. We waiting for you to stand up and be a decent woman like you claim to be. We may be waiting for a while.
[Kyle Gassiott, Byline:] Ivey's retreat from the spotlight doesn't surprise Meredith Cummings. She's a columnist with al.com.
[Meredith Cummings:] Well, I think if I were Governor Ivey, I would probably lie low, too.
[Kyle Gassiott, Byline:] Cummings says it's probably a politically wise decision to avoid getting further sucked into the race, but she also thinks it's problematic.
[Meredith Cummings:] How am I going to explain this to my daughter that you don't value women because that is what the message she's sending when she says she believes the women that have come forward, but she's going to vote for a man who has accused them anyway.
[Kyle Gassiott, Byline:] Cummings says she was happy when Ivey became Alabama's second female governor earlier this year. That happened after the previous governor resigned due to a sex scandal. But now Cummings says she won't be voting for Ivey when she runs for a full term in 2018. For NPR News, I'm Kyle Gassiott in Montgomery, Ala.

[Robert Siegel:] Innovation and originality are close cousins. We think of creative innovators as people with new ideas, but to read Malcolm Gladwell on the subject is to be reminded of a distinction. An innovator may not be the one with the new idea but the one with a new take on an old idea. Xerox PARC, Apple and the Truth About Innovation" appears in the May 16th issue of The New Yorker. And he joins us from New York. Welcome to the program once again.
[M:] Thank you.
[Robert Siegel:] You deal with a fabled and you would say somewhat misunderstood event in the history of Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs sees a mouse. What happened?
[M:] And over the course of the '70s, they essentially invent virtually everything that we associate with the personal computer the desktop computer, the mouse, windows, the ethernet, the laser printer. Everything comes out of there.
[A:] And he also sees the fact that they had icons on the screen and they would click on icons on the screen with the mouse, and they would open and close windows. And he's never seen this approach to computing before. And he drives back to Apple, this little tiny start-up company...
[Robert Siegel:] Mm-hmm.
[M:] ...and he says: Stop what you're doing, this is the way to do a personal computer. And the result of that is the Macintosh.
[Robert Siegel:] Right. The rest is folklore now.
[M:] Yeah.
[Robert Siegel:] He had a deal, actually. He wasn't stealing something from them. He...
[M:] No, he was yeah, he gave them they invited him in in exchange for the right to invest in Apple Computer.
[Robert Siegel:] So the folkloric moral of this story is that the nimble, future-oriented Apple picks the pocket of the hide-bound dinosaur Xerox. And you say that's an extreme reading of what happened.
[M:] Yeah, that's the way this story has been told a hundred times. I mean, it's a staple myth of Silicon Valley. And it's very often told in a way to suggest that Jobs is the thief in the night and Xerox is the hapless dupe. And I think that's an uncharitable and inaccurate reading of that narrative.
[Robert Siegel:] And we should say here that Steve Jobs came away from looking at a very expensive and somewhat clunky mouse...
[M:] Yes.
[Robert Siegel:] ...and saying we've got to make one that works better and that's much, much, much cheaper.
[M:] Yeah, so when the mouse that Jobs sees and so inspires his curiosity costs about three or four hundred dollars to make; was this sort of big, clunky thing with three buttons on it, and didn't work very well. Because, you know, it only works in a kind of pristine environment when you were rolling it on the right kind of surface.
[A:] And, you know, the notion that's why I so object to the notion that he stole the idea from Xerox PARC. He didn't. He understood that it had to change in a dramatic way before it could be commercially viable.
[Robert Siegel:] Now you invoke an analogy here, in terms of innovation, as to how the revolution in military affairs took place. And you talk about three different militaries that took part in a revolutionary development of drones and AWACS and a variety of things. The Soviet military that thought it up, the U.S. military that built it, the Israeli military that used it all.
[M:] I mean, modern technological revolutions are so complex that one party can only ever master or innovate in one sort of specific area. So, we shouldn't think about revolutions having an inventor. We should only think of them as having inventors.
[Robert Siegel:] So those three roles in the development of the modern arsenal would roughly have analogies in industry here.
[M:] You don't want to be first, right? You want to be second or third. You don't want to be Facebook is not the first in social media. They're the third, right? Similarly, you know, if you look at Steve Jobs' history, he's never been first.
[Robert Siegel:] Mm-hmm.
[M:] So, it's a very, you know maybe we're wrong in you know, we go around thinking the innovator is the person who's first to kind of conceive of something. And maybe the innovation process continues down the line to the second and the third and the fourth entrant into a field.
[Robert Siegel:] Well, Malcolm Gladwell, thanks a lot for talking with us.
[M:] Thank you so much.
[Robert Siegel:] And Malcolm Gladwell's article in the May 16th issue of The New Yorker magazine is called "Creation Myth: Xerox PARC, Apple and the Truth About Innovation." This is NPR News.

[Renee Montagne:] Meanwhile, mortgage rates for 30-year fixed loans have fallen to 5.29 percent. That's created a mortgage boomlet. NPR's Yuki Noguchi has more.
[Yuki Noguchi:] This holiday shopping season, the hot item is mortgage rates.
[Keith Gumbinger:] We reckon that to be approaching 50-year lows for conforming 30-year fixed rate mortgage money.
[Yuki Noguchi:] So says Keith Gumbinger. He's vice president of HSH Associates, a mortgage analytics company. He says refinancing applications tripled the week of Thanksgiving.
[Keith Gumbinger:] The industry is frankly unprepared for it.
[Yuki Noguchi:] After all, mortgage-related employment has dropped by nearly a third since its peak in 2006. So some companies, including Bank of America, have shifted their workforce to help with the crush. Others have hired back some workers part-time, but not everyone will be locking in at these lower rates.
[Keith Gumbinger:] For certain audiences, this is a historic kind of opportunity. For others, they simply shrug their shoulders and turn away.
[Yuki Noguchi:] Those who are turning away include people whose homes are worth less than their loan amounts; They can't refinance. Also the rate on jumbo loans, which are loans over $417,000, remains over six percent. Another group is also absent so far from this recent boom, home buyers. But that could change, says Orawin Velz, vice president of economic forecasting for the Mortgage Bankers Association.
[Orawin Velz:] You have home prices declining, and you have mortgage rates that are declining as well. So there will be some people that could see very attractive affordability.
[Yuki Noguchi:] But don't look for an uptake in home sales to start happening, she says, until after the after-Christmas sales. Yuki Noguchi, NPR News.

[Robert Siegel:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel in Washington.
[Madeleine Brand:] And Im Madeleine Brand in California. President Obama took his job's message from last night's State of the Union address on the road today. He traveled to Florida to announce $8 billion in federal money for high-speed rail. Its all part of his push to create jobs by greening the U.S. economy. Mr. Obama was joined by Vice President Biden at a town hall in Tampa. The event was designed to allow the president to speak directly to Americans and to address their worries about the economy. NPR's Don Gonyea reports from Tampa.
[Don Gonyea:] This trip and others the president has taken recently seem designed to convey a sense that Mr. Obama not only understands but that he remains committed to doing the things he talked about during the campaign, back when Mr. Obama seemed to have the Midas touch when it came to communication, before he had to govern. When Mr. Obama took the stage today, he acknowledged his slumping poll numbers as he struggled to get health care legislation passed and seeing the jobs picture remain bleak.
[President Barack Obama:] I make no apology for trying to fix stuff that's hard... ...because I'll be honest with you. I'll be honest with you. Joe and I are both pretty smart politicians. We've been at this a while. The easiest way to keep your poll numbers high is to say nothing and to do nothing that offends anybody.
[Don Gonyea:] And as he did last night during his State of the Union address, the president insisted he wants to work with Republicans who are willing to work with him.
[President Barack Obama:] I want the Republicans off the sidelines. I want them working with us to solve problems facing working families, not to score points. I want a partnership. What we cant do, though here is what Im not opened to: I dont want gridlock on issue after issue after issue...
[Pres. Obama:] ...when there are so many urgent problems to solve.
[Don Gonyea:] Then came questions from the audience. As is often the case with town halls, they are unpredictable. If the White House's topic of the day was high-speed rail and the economy, questions came from the audience on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, on same-sex marriage, and on ways to help convicted felons readjust to society. His toughest question on the economy came from a small business owner frustrated that he cant get a loan.
[Unidentified Man:] And I speak for all businesses in the United States. We are tired of dealing with things. And I dont understand, and this is my question for you is that why cant you use the SBA just like you lent directly to Wall Street, you lent directly to the automakers, you lent directly to the banks, why cant the government make small businesses available directly to us?
[Don Gonyea:] The president said the government is giving more money to the Small Business Administration to make loans more easy to get. And he said fees and red tape have been waived.
[President Barack Obama:] The challenge that we got is that even SBA loans are generally run not by the SBA. The SBA essentially works with local banks, community banks, neighborhood banks to process the loan and essentially the SBA underwrites the loan.
[Don Gonyea:] The questioner's frustration was evident. He shook his head as the president spoke.
[Pres. Obama:] But, well, I am absolutely sympathetic to what you're saying because I'm hearing it everywhere I go.
[Don Gonyea:] The president was warmly received here in Tampa except for the large knot of Tea Party protesters his motorcade passed through on his way to the sports complex where the town hall was held. He ended the event with a call for greater civility in Washington. But he acknowledged too that he doesnt expect that to happen overnight. Don Gonyea, NPR News, Tampa.

[David Greene:] And I'm David Greene. Let's begin this morning with Syria. There has been a little bit of movement on the diplomatic front. Over the weekend, one of the main Syrian opposition leaders held informal talks with the government's main backers Russia and Iran. These talks were held on the sidelines of a security conference in Germany. It is not clear whether this creates an opening for a political settlement that could end the bloodshed in country. NPR's Kelly McEvers joins us from Beirut. Kelly, Good morning.
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] Hello, David.
[David Greene:] So what is the significance of the opposition in Syria talking to Russia and Iran?
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] I think it's important to say from the outset that right now we're talking about words and gestures. There hasn't been any real concrete action to come out of this.
[David Greene:] Mm-hmm.
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] But it is a pretty big deal. Up till now the main opposition groups in Syria have refused to talk to the Syrian regime and have declined invitations from Russia and Iran to have official talks. But this past week a man named Moaz Khatib, who heads the main Syrian opposition group, the National Coalition, he said that he would be willing to talk to members of the Syrian regime. That seemed to open the door for conversations with Iran and Russia. He spoke to the foreign ministers of both countries and I think their thinking was, OK, if you're willing to sit down and talk to the regime, we're willing to sit down and try and hammer something out with you as well. That may go a long way, it may not.
[David Greene:] And do Syrians seem to think that it could go a long way or are they just seeing this as not that significant?
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] The big question the first big question is whether Khatib's own coalition will back him in this endeavor. So far they've been very critical. There was emergency meetings late night over the weekend. Khatib returned to Cairo last night where he and the coalition are based. I'm sure he's going to face some harsh criticism from them. Up to now he said he was speaking personally, not on behalf of the whole coalition, so we'll see how that goes. Inside Syria, I think people are mixed. You know, some people are really tired. They want an end to this madness. It's been almost two years 60,000 people dead. One activist and journalist who we know in Aleppo a city that's seen a lot of fighting in recent months he said sure, come and have a dialogue with the widows, with the hungry, with the bones of the children who are crumbling from cold. Another leading activist group made it plain in a statement that they released, you know, yes, we can have a dialogue with this regime, but as long as that dialogue doesn't leave the regime in power. This regime is killing its own people and it has to go.
[David Greene:] You bring up some of these awful stories that we've heard. And we spoke to you last week about the massacre. It was dozens of bodies turning up in a canal in the city of Aleppo. We didn't know much more about that. Have we learned more about that massacre?
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] Yeah. Usually we journalists can't go and verify when these massacres happen and there have been too many of them so far. But there were Western journalists in Aleppo and they were able to verify that more than 100 people were killed. Their families said that almost all of them had been in government-controlled areas when they went missing that they were going to do regular business and then when they found them again they found them dead. So the implication is that it was the government behind this killing.
[David Greene:] Wow. Kelly, before I let you go, the defense minister from Israel seemed to acknowledge now that Israel launched an air strike in Syria last week. Is that significant?
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] It is, because up to this point Israel hadn't acknowledged the strike, although American officials had, and of course the Syrian government acknowledged it. Defense Minister Ehud Barak didn't acknowledge it outright, but he said the strike was proof, quote, "that when we say something we mean it." You know, officials have said that the strike was targeting anti-aircraft weapons that were allegedly on their way here to Israel's enemy, Hezbollah. They also said the target was a research center used to make missiles to carry chemical weapons. You know, Israel and the U.S. have said the use of chemical weapons and sophisticated weapons is a red line for them, so it's clear that Israel was making good on its threat. The question is whether this was just a warning sign or whether this conflict is now going regional.
[David Greene:] All right. NPR's Kelly McEvers covering the conflict for us from Beirut. Thanks, Kelly.
[Kelly Mcevers, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Steve Inskeep:] It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
[David Greene:] And I'm David Greene. We are reminded this morning of how difficult the transitions have been in the countries of the Arab Spring. Egypt has had a coup. Serious bloody civil war carries on. And in Libya, two men now claim to be the rightful prime minister. One is a businessman elected by parliament earlier this month with the backing of Islamists. The other is his predecessor, the former defense minister who's refused to hand over power. And meanwhile, a renegade general has gathered armed supporters and is attacking the city of Benghazi. In short, it is political chaos, and there's a risk that this could turn into a civil war. NPR's Leila Fadel has been following the situation from Cairo, and we have her on the line. Leila, good morning.
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] Good morning.
[David Greene:] So let's just step back. Now, we are three years since the uprising that toppled dictator Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Why is this political system so broken? Where are these divisions coming from?
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] Well, this is a country that had basically zero state institutions when Gaddafi was ousted. What did exist were the revolutionaries, or the rebels that fought Gaddafi a bunch of militias born out of this revolt and those guys are still armed. But these militias are divided by ideology, by tribe, by region. And there's been infighting ever since, with no one group having enough power to take control of Libya, and a weak central government that can't control these men at all and also needs them to protect the state.
[David Greene:] Well, earlier this week, things got so bad that the United States urged its citizens to leave the country. What exactly prompted that?
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] Well, I think there's a fear of prolonged violence. On May 16, this rogue general, Khalifa Haftar, began a battle. He says it's against extremists, and it is against these really long time Islamist militias in the East that are established there. Some 70 people were killed. There were aerial bombardments this week, and I think that sort of prompted the United States to pull their citizens out. Chris Stevens, the U.S. ambassador was killed in 2012 in Benghazi,and I think they're worried about losing other people in Libya.
[David Greene:] I think about a renegade general, a military man trying to take control and be his own strongman. I mean, does he see himself as sort of a return to the style of Gaddafi in a way?
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] You know, it's a possibility. He says he doesn't want power. He just wants to cleanse Libya. You know, this is a man that came back to Libya in 2011. He really wanted to be a part of the new state institution but was quickly marginalized. And now there is a sense of desperation among people in Libya looking for a man who they can rally behind, and maybe that is Haftar right now.
[David Greene:] You have done reporting a Libya earlier this year. I mean, what is life like for people these days?
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] Basically, it isn't safe. There aren't police. There isn't an army that people can depend on. They have to depend on themselves, and everybody has guns. So there's fear of kidnapping, of armed robberies, of kidnapping for ransom. And so a lot of people who have the means want to get out until things settle down and until there is some type of security.
[David Greene:] Is there hope I mean, a feeling that this will, you know, lead during a difficult transition to some sort of positive end or are people feeling that this has just gone downhill since Gaddafi left?
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] Well, there's definitely a security vacuum and people don't feel safe. But unlike Egypt, where revolutionaries say they have been fighting a deep state, the institutions that they couldn't dismantle, in Libya, people are starting from scratch. They have an opportunity to build something completely new. The fear is that maybe they won't get the chance because of the security problems.
[David Greene:] All right, NPR's Leila Fadel joining us from Cairo. Leila, thanks as always.
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] Thank you.

[Renee Montagne:] In the past two days on this program, we've looked into how the Chinese government uses modern technology to monitor its population, to a point where it could be called a surveillance state. Now there's some evidence that surveillance extends well beyond China's borders. The New York Times says that for the past four months, its computer system has been systematically hacked, and it is accusing the Chinese government of being behind it. The New York Times says the hacking was tied into the paper's investigation into how the family of Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao accumulated billions of dollars in business deals. Nicole Perlroth reports on cyber-security for the New York Times, including on this particular story, and she joined on the line. Good morning.
[Nicole Perlroth:] Good morning.
[Renee Montagne:] So when did the Times and how did the Times realize it was being hacked?
[Nicole Perlroth:] Sure. So, leading up to the publication of that story, our security team actually asked AT&T which monitors our network to look out for some unusual activity. And on October 25th, the same day we published, we heard back from them that they had seen behavior on our network consistent with other attacks they had seen perpetrated by the Chinese military.
[Renee Montagne:] Well, what was the hacker's goal?
[Nicole Perlroth:] It was very clear from the start that they were after David Barbosa's email correspondence. David was the Shanghai bureau chief who wrote the investigation into Mr. Wen's relatives. And his sources for the story, ironically enough, were actually publically available documents. There wasn't anyone that actually came and dumped a bunch of documents on his lawn or anything that the Chinese government would have found in his email account that would have been helpful. But it was very clear from the beginning that they were after David's email correspondence.
[Renee Montagne:] So, in a sense, you might say they didn't get much, because there wasn't much for them to get.
[Nicole Perlroth:] That's correct.
[Renee Montagne:] Now, aside from the fact that you're saying those who were targeted were your China journalists, what is the evidence that these attackers come from China, have anything to do with China itself or are connected to the Chinese government?
[Nicole Perlroth:] Sure. So, the malware that they had used was previously seen in hundreds of other attacks. And the command and control centers they used were known to have been used by the Chinese military in previous attacks.
[Renee Montagne:] What has China said about these accusations?
[Nicole Perlroth:] They've denied them. They said, you know, we have laws in place that prevent this from happening, and to accuse the Chinese military is I think the quote was, quote-unquote, "unprofessional."
[Renee Montagne:] Nicole Perlroth, you report on cyber-security for the New York Times, and you knew that this hacking was going on.
[Nicole Perlroth:] Yes. It's an interesting spot to be in, to be covering this, and I'll tell you why. You know, since I started covering cyber-security, there are a number of companies that have come out in the last year that I've been on this beat that have accused China of breaking into their systems. So Lockheed Martin says it's regularly targeted. Northrop Grumman says it's attacked on a daily basis. And, of course, no company wants to come forward and voluntarily say, hey, we were hacked by China. Here's how it happened. Here's how it took. Because they're probably scared what it will do for their stock price or their reputations. And in this case, you know, what was interesting that it was my own employer that had been hacked. And we felt that it was very important to come out with this and say this was how easy it is for them to break into any U.S. company, and here's how they're doing it.
[Renee Montagne:] Nicole Perlroth reports in cyber-security for the New York Times. She was speaking to us from San Francisco. Thanks very much.
[Nicole Perlroth:] Thanks, Renee.

[Renee Montagne:] And there will be traditional favorites on the table when families sit down to Christmas dinner everywhere. NPR's Julie McCarthy recently traveled to Caracas, and has this report on how the holidays in Venezuela come wrapped in a banana leaf.
[Julie Mccarthy:] No Venezuela Christmas would be complete without the hallaca.
[Unidentified Woman #1:] [Speaking foreign language]
[Julie Mccarthy:] I know.
[Unidentified Woman #2:] [Speaking foreign language]
[Unidentified Woman #3:] [Speaking foreign language]
[Julie Mccarthy:] While many homes prepare their own, special hallaca makers start taking orders early from what is Venezuela's signature holiday dish. This Christmas delicacy that can take days to prepare looks like a green-colored package tied up with string. The wrapping is the banana or plantain leaf, encasing what could be called a turbo-charged tamale. A spacious open-air room atop a three-story house, houses the kitchen of the veritable queen of hallacas in Caracas. Senora Carmen de Purroy shares a picturesque street, lined with other cooks who cater to Venezuela's Christmas craving. Chopping and cutting, an assembly line of workers, mostly women, sits around a vast wooden table where Senora Carmen presides.
[Carmen De Purroy:] [Through translator] It's very hard work. Some of us get up at two in the morning to start preparing. And the women here come highly recommended. They know the job of making hallaca. And the men here, well, they're family. And it's because we make quality, that we can sell quantity.
[Julie Mccarthy:] A kerchief covers Carmen's hair, swollen feet dangle from a stool, an apron drapes her plump frame. The matriarch of this beehive-busy kitchen sweeps her hand across the table, groaning under the weight of ingredients, and ticks off a list that would impress gourmet or gourmand alike.
[Carmen De Purroy:] [Speaking foreign language]
[Julie Mccarthy:] Garlic cloves, green onions, cilantro, celery, tuna, capers, raisins, red peppers, olives and wine. Add hen, or beef, or pork or all three, she says to make a stew. Leave them out for vegetarian hallaca, increasingly popular among her health-conscious clientele, Carmen says. The aroma of steaming poultry fills this Christmas kitchen. Brimming vats of hens female birds are tastier, Carmen claims bubble and churn the base for the stew. Maize, by the burlap bagsful, become the golden, reddish dough that's rolled flat and filled with spoonfuls of the stew. The doughy rectangles are bundled into a carefully cut and secured banana leaf. Carmen rents a separate house where a team of men prepares the leaves. A little bit Spanish, a little bit African, a little bit indigenous the hallaca is an icon of Venezuela's multi-cultural history. Zanina Ramboa, a local expert on folklore, says there are two theories on when the hallaca started.
[Zanina Ramboa:] [Speaking foreign language]
[Julie Mccarthy:] Some say it's indigenous. Some say it's African. But the belief is, she says, that during colonial times, the slaves gathered up the leftovers from the great feasts that European landowners held during this time of year, which were full of imported goods like tuna. They wrapped them up in dough and cooked them, she says. Carmen prefers to believe the hallaca started with the indigenous of Venezuela. She packs visitors off for the sample of what turns out to be a heavenly combination of savory and sweet, with just a hint of heat. The secret to her recipe skill and love, she says. And a doctor's advice after her triple bypass surgery.
[Carmen De Purroy:] [Speaking foreign language]
[Julie Mccarthy:] Keep working, he told me she says. So this, in her 45th year of making hallacas, Senora Carmen expects to sell some 6,000 of them this season rising in the middle of the night to prepare the gastronomic delight that will grace tables across Caracas this Christmas. Julie McCarthy, NPR News.

[Rachel Martin:] Now, to what has become a complicated diplomatic ritual. This week, the United States, along with representatives from Europe, China, Russia and Iran will sit down for talks about that country's nuclear program. The impasse over Iran's nuclear ambitions has dragged on for 10 years now. But so far, this decade-long negotiation has yielded little for the West. And despite crippling international sanctions, Iran's nuclear power continues to grow.
[Karim Sadjadpour:] Ten years ago, what was at stake was preventing Iran from enriching uranium. Now, that's a train which has already left the tracks. Now what is being negotiated is the percentage of enriched uranium which Iran should be allowed to enrich to and to stockpile.
[Rachel Martin:] Karim Sadjadpour is an expert on Iran and a senior associate on the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I began by asking him about the effects of Western sanctions on Iran's people and its government.
[Karim Sadjadpour:] The sanctions have certainly had an impact on people's standard of living unemployment, rampant inflation, underemployment. But my sense when it comes to sanctions, my sense is that sanctions tend to accentuate people's existing political disposition. Meaning, if you're an opponent of the Iranian government and your life has been made worse off because of sanctions, you have one more reason to dislike the government. And if you're supportive of the Iranian government, you have one more reason to dislike the United States and so-called imperial powers. But I don't think that sanctions really get people to change teams.
[Rachel Martin:] But isn't the whole intention of the sanctions to motivate some kind of grassroots movement so the public puts pressure on the regime to change its policies? You're saying that's futile.
[Karim Sadjadpour:] Well, I'll tell you the challenge in dealing with Iran is that the person who is steering Iran's nuclear ship, Ali Khamenei, hasn't left Iran since 1989. He doesn't meet with Western officials, and increasingly he's purged his own system from critics and naysayers. And they surrounded themselves with sycophants. And so far it's not clear whether Khamenei fully appreciates the situation that Iran is in.
[Rachel Martin:] It has been 10 years, these talks have been going on for 10 years. So, where is the opportunity for some kind of deal on all of this?
[Karim Sadjadpour:] Well, for years now we've been saying that the status quo is unsustainable. If a deal isn't reached, it's going to deteriorate into some type of military conflagration. I don't think the Obama administration is at all interested in going to war against Iran. I think the Israelis are very reluctant. They would like the United States to do something, and I don't think that Iran is going to give the U.S. reason to go to war.
[Rachel Martin:] So, do you think that this is actually success, a kind of success, just Iran's not going to give, the U.S. isn't going to give and they both know it, and success is just Iran not going to war?
[Karim Sadjadpour:] I actually think that's right. I think Iran is one of many U.S. foreign policy challenges which isn't going to be solved. We're not going to find a resolution to our conflict with Iran until there's a different system of government there. But what dialogue, what negotiations helps to do, is to manage the conflict and to prevent what is now a cold conflict from deteriorating into a hot one. So, I think that in itself is indeed some type of success. Because we're preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, we're preventing military conflict from breaking out. But there's not going to be a scenario by which, you know, Ayatollah Khamenei comes to Washington to the Rose Garden and signs off Iran's nuclear ambitions. And I think the Obama administration understands that. Their ambitions in the second term aren't to resolve this foreign policy conflict but merely to manage and contain it.
[Rachel Martin:] Karim Sadjadpour is a leading researcher on Iran with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Karim, thanks for taking the time.
[Karim Sadjadpour:] Anytime, Rachel. Thank you.

[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] It's a red carpet day for television. The 69th primetime Emmy Awards are tonight. But we have awards of our own. Our TV critic, Eric Deggans, has voted on the shows he thinks deserve awards. So now we present the Deggys.
[Eric Deggans, Byline:] After years of watching the Emmys and throwing stuff at my TV when they got winners wrong, I had an idea why not create my own awards? And the Deggys were born. Now, I've only picked out a few of the most competitive categories to talk about here, starting with a big one Best Comedy Series. There's seven nominees, including "Blackish" and "Modern Family" on ABC, "Veep" on HBO. But the Deggy goes to... ...FX's "Atlanta." Now, "Atlanta" gets the Deggy because it's a great example of what's working on TV comedy now. It's a sharply written, authentic story, this time about the lives of young black men from creator and star Donald Glover. He pokes at issues like policing in communities of color, classism and cultural fetishism in ways that make you think before you even realize you're thinking. Here, Glover is trying to convince his cousin and his whacked-out best friend to let him manage his cousin's budding rap career. But the conversation takes a surreal, really funny turn.
[Donald Glover:] [As Earnest Marks] I'm not asking for money.
[Brian Tyree Henry:] [As Paper Boi] You should be. Ain't you homeless?
[Donald Glover:] [As Earnest Marks] Not real homeless. Not using a rat as a phone or something.
[Brian Tyree Henry:] [As Paper Boi] Don't be racist, man. That make you schizophrenic. That don't make you homeless.
[Lakeith Stanfield:] [As Darius] No. If you could use a rat as a phone, man, that would be genius. I mean, there's like five rats for every one person in New York alone. Yeah, man, I mean, it'd be messy but worth it.
[Eric Deggans, Byline:] "Veep" will probably win this category. The Emmy Academy loves the show. And let's face it. The Trump administration shenanigans are making it look more like a documentary every day. Next up, Best Drama Series. The seven nominees here include HBO's "Westworld", "The Crown" and "Stranger Things" on Netflix and "This Is Us" on NBC. But I'm giving the Deggy to... ...Hulu's "The Handmaid's Tale." There's lots of competition here. But "The Handmaid's Tale" deftly updated the classic dystopian novel about women forced to serve as breeders for an American theocracy. It spoke directly to modern day misogyny and the oppression of women. And star Elisabeth Moss was mesmerizing as one of the handmaids describing the room where she's kept.
[Elisabeth Moss:] [As Offred] A window with white curtains. And the glass is shatterproof. But it isn't running away they're afraid of. A handmaid wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes the ones you can open in yourself given a cutting edge. My name is Offred. I had another name, but it's forbidden now. So many things are forbidden now.
[Eric Deggans, Byline:] Some cynics say "Westworld" will win just because it has the most Emmy nominations of any TV drama. But I'm thinking it will be "This Is Us," which is a huge network TV hit. Let's look at a really interesting category Best Supporting Actress in a drama. We've got six nominees here from Chrissy Metz in "This Is Us" to Ann Dowd in "The Handmaid's Tale" and Uzo Aduba in Netflix's "Orange Is The New Black." But I'm giving the Deggy to... ...Chrissy Metz and Ann Dowd. Hey, it's my contest so I make the rules. I really couldn't choose between Dowd's vicious headmistress on "The Handmaid's Tale" or Metz'tortured sibling on NBC's family drama "This Is Us." And I think Metz might actually win this one tonight. OK, last category Best Supporting Actor in a drama. Seven amazing actors are up for this one, including John Lithgow from "The Crown" and Jeffrey Wright from "Westworld." But I'm giving my Deggy to... ...Michael McKean from AMC's "Better Call Saul." OK, this is kind of a trick answer because McKean wasn't even nominated. But he was amazing as Chuck McGill, a brilliantly dysfunctional lawyer and older brother to the main character on the show, Bob Odenkirk's Jimmy McGill. Now here, Chuck is telling Jimmy why he's convinced that his brother will always be a crooked lawyer and a toxic person.
[Michael Mckean:] [As Chuck McGill] Jimmy, this is what you do. You hurt people over and over. And then there's this show of remorse.
[Bob Odenkirk:] [As Jimmy McGill] It's not a show.
[Michael Mckean:] [As Chuck McGill] I know you don't think it's a show. If you're not going to change your behavior and you won't...
[Bob Odenkirk:] [As Jimmy McGill] I could...
[Michael Mckean:] [As Chuck McGill]...Why not just skip the whole exercise? In the end, you're going to hurt everyone around you. So stop apologizing and accept it. Frankly, I'd have more respect for you if you did.
[Eric Deggans, Byline:] I'm expecting John Lithgow, who brilliantly played Winston Churchill on "The Crown," to take this prize. We'll find out who the Emmy Academy chose tonight. But my Deggy awards told you about the coolest shows and performers in a fraction of the time you'll spend watching that show. You're welcome. I'm Eric Deggans.

[Tamara Keith:] And now I'm feeling hungry, maybe for a breakfast burrito. It would have to be a really good one, though. I can't settle for a subpar tortilla stuffed with dried out beans and rice. If only there were a burrito correspondent who could give me some tips. Well, NPR doesn't have anyone staffing that important beat so we'll have to borrow Anna Maria Barry-Jester. She's traveling the country for the website FiveThirtyEight, eating her way through a definitive burrito bracket. Anna Maria Barry-Jester joins us now from San Francisco. Welcome to the program.
[Anna Maria Barry-jester:] Thank you. Thanks for having me.
[Tamara Keith:] How many burritos have you eaten to-date for this project?
[Anna Maria Barry-jester:] Well, 64 in the bracket, but there've been some extracurricular burritos as well so probably closer to 80.
[Tamara Keith:] Are you sick of burritos yet?
[Anna Maria Barry-jester:] [Laughing] You would think, but its this weird sort of a the more I get to know them, the more they become different objects with such different ingredients that I love them more with each passing day.
[Tamara Keith:] [Laughing] So I have a burrito specimen here with me in the studio. And I'm going to unwrap...
[Anna Maria Barry-jester:] Is it in wax paper or tinfoil?
[Tamara Keith:] It is in both tinfoil and wax paper.
[Anna Maria Barry-jester:] Oh, that's a good technique. You know, in San Francisco, they're really into the tinfoil wrapped, but a lot of people don't like that because it keeps the moisture in. It can get a little bit gooey or moist in unpleasant ways. So some people use wax paper but then, you know, the opposite can happen it can dry out if you'll used tinfoil.
[Tamara Keith:] OK, so I understand that you have a scoring system. So walk me through this burrito. Let's dissect this thing.
[Anna Maria Barry-jester:] OK, so I rate it on five criteria. The first category is the tortilla.
[Tamara Keith:] OK.
[Anna Maria Barry-jester:] I mean, obviously something that's been freshly made, usually in-house is kind of the golden standard. The second category is the main proteins, and so it's the quality of the meat and the flavor and the texture. And the third category is the other ingredients.
[Tamara Keith:] So that's like salsa or guacamole.
[Anna Maria Barry-jester:] Exactly, and rice and beans. If it's Korean, maybe it's kimchi. And then the fourth category is the overall flavor profile. Usually, you want something with some sweet, some heat, salt you know, how it all combines together as one object. And then there's the presentation so that's partly how it's rolled, and then also how all the textures come together.
[Tamara Keith:] You are a photographer so you've been taking pictures of each of your burrito contenders, but you've been taking a controversial approach to photographing the burrito. Can you describe that?
[Anna Maria Barry-jester:] It's not the most attractive view of a burrito and I've definitely gotten some feedback that people are horrified that I would do this to a burrito. But I'm taking the burrito and sort of filleting it cutting it in half down the middle and then opening it up so you can see if there is a lot of rice the colors in that kind of thing. So I think it adds another layer of information.
[Tamara Keith:] Anna Maria Barry-Jester, burrito corresponded for the FiveThirtyEight blog. Happy eating and buena suerte.
[Anna Maria Barry-jester:] Muchas Gracias.

[Michel Martin:] There once was a handsome president and his gorgeous top aide who helped him get elected and then fell in love with him and slept with him and then went on to start a powerhouse firm filled with shadowy former intelligence operatives who helped elect people and kill people and never mind. I can't keep up either. So by now, you've likely figured out we're talking about "Scandal," the hit ABC show created by producer Shonda Rhimes and starring Kerry Washington. The show's final episode aired Thursday night after seven seasons but not before launching a thousand think pieces about the significance of an African-American woman as the lead and a morally ambiguous one at that. With all the wild plot twists, though, it's easy to forget that "Scandal" was based on a real person Judy Smith, the show's co-executive producer. Smith was an aide to President George H.W. Bush. After leaving the White House, she became a, quote, crisis manager helping clients out of embarrassing, scandalous situations. Judy Smith stopped by our studio yesterday, and she said she thinks "Scandal" was a success in part because it filled a void.
[Judy Smith:] And I think that void was filled by a woman. And these are the things that were important to me about the show that the woman had to be a strong character. She had to be a strong woman, good at what she does and comfortable with that.
[Michel Martin:] So remind us of how this started. You were a deputy press secretary serving in the administration of George H.W. Bush, and you'd already left, and you were in private practice. And you had a lot of high-profile clients. And, in the spirit of full disclosure, I want to mention that you did work with my husband on a number of cases some years ago. So how did this all start? Was it that just you had this idea and you pitched it to...
[Judy Smith:] No.
[Michel Martin:] ...Shonda Rhimes, who...
[Judy Smith:] I actually had a book agent and an agent as well. And they had said that, you know, you should talk to someone about a TV show. And they had set up meetings with a few folks, including Shonda. And I think what was supposed to be a 15-minute meeting turned out to be a hour-and-a-half meeting, and by the time we got to the parking lot, she called and said, I want this show.
[Michel Martin:] Is it true that, at one point, you called former President Bush to say there's this...
[Judy Smith:] There's this thing where [LAUGHTER]...
[Michel Martin:] It's made-up. This is fiction. Because...
[Judy Smith:] Right.
[Michel Martin:] ...Just for the sake of clarity, you never had an affair with the president.
[Judy Smith:] No. No. No. No.
[Michel Martin:] You never did any of that. You never killed anybody.
[Judy Smith:] No. We should...
[Michel Martin:] You never tortured anybody.
[Judy Smith:] No. Absolutely no.
[Michel Martin:] No. None of that.
[Judy Smith:] There's a long list. No sleeping with the president, moving dead body from crime scenes. My father didn't run a undercover operation. But probably, like any good crisis communicator, you want to try to control the narrative. And so when Shonda and I were talking about the show, she had said, well, I'm thinking about, you know, a relationship with the president. And I said, well, you know, I have a relationship with him. You know, we'd I'd talk to him on a regular basis. And she said, no. You're not really understanding. And finally, I started to understand. I said, oh, let me call him first. And so I picked up the phone and called him. And his chief of staff had said, no, he knows about the show. He's so proud of you. He's so excited. He can't wait to watch it. I'm thinking, oh, no. I'm in trouble. And so I said, well, tell him to call me. I just need a few minutes. And I was on a conference call, so he left a message and said, love you. You are the one that left me. Give me a call. This is the former leader of the free world. And so I called him up. I said, see, this is exactly why I'm calling you right now because you need some talking points here. We cannot joke about this. And he said, you remember? I'm, like, no. There's nothing to remember. Absolutely not.
[Michel Martin:] That's Judy Smith, the co-executive producer of "Scandal," which aired its final episode Thursday night. She's also the chair of Judy Smith and Company, and she was kind enough to join us here in our studios in Washington, D.C. Judy Smith, thank you so much for speaking with us. Congratulations.
[Judy Smith:] Thank you.

[Michel Martin:] Mississippi isn't the only state where critics hope to use the threat of boycotts to oppose new laws they see as discriminatory toward LGBT people. North Carolina also passed a law recently barring cities from enacting laws banning discrimination based on sexual orientation and requiring people in public buildings and public schools to use the bathroom corresponding to their gender at birth. In response, PayPal canceled a planned $3.6 million expansion in North Carolina, which PayPal CEO Dan Schulman said was meant as a clear and unambiguous response to the law. And that got us thinking about how executives go about making decisions in response to social issues. So we called Bill Oesterle. He's the co-founder of Angie's List, a subscription-based online review company. Last year, when he was still serving as CEO of the company, he announced plans to stop a planned expansion of company headquarters in Indianapolis to protest Indiana's religious liberties law that's similar to the one we just heard about in Mississippi. And I asked Bill Oesterle what made him decide to take that stand in Indiana.
[Bill Oesterle:] In our case, it was a little bit different in that we were headquartered here already in Indianapolis. And the largest challenge that we had over the 20 years that I ran the company was to recruit and retain the very best talent that we possibly could. At a specific case, my chief financial officer that I had recruited from Chicago a world-class executive I recruited him and his partner. Within months, this bill came up, so it was a direct impact to the company on the talent that we were trying to bring in. And that also is critically important to the entire state of Indiana.
[Michel Martin:] For those who don't know your background, I do want to mention that you are a longtime politically active Republican. You're very close to former governor of Indiana Mitch Daniels. This is not a position that people generally associate with active Republicans of using, you know, economic boycott as a tool of getting attention. They generally associate that tool with people who don't have a lot of economic power, frankly. And I just wonder how you respond to those who say that they consider it in fact, I think the phrase was used economic terrorism.
[Bill Oesterle:] I wouldn't call what we were doing a boycott. We were going to engage in a partnership with the state. They were going to provide us some funding and tax breaks for us to build what would have been a $50 million headquarters in a bad neighborhood. In exchange for that, we were going to have to agree to hiring targets. And for us, it was a simple, straightforward argument. We're going to be responsible for hiring that many people, we can't do it if the state is going to make it hard for us. I am a Republican, and I think businesses in Indiana are typically Republican supporters. And I think that made a meaningful difference. We were willing to stand up and highlight the division in the Republican Party.
[Michel Martin:] So after the stance that your business took, Indiana did quickly pass a kind of a clarification to say that the religious freedom law could not be used as a defense against discrimination. Did that get the job done in your view?
[Bill Oesterle:] As a company, we took the position that it was not sufficient. We were pushing for a full repeal of the law or for passage of complete non-discrimination protection in our civil rights code. That didn't happen. However, many of the cities around Indianapolis have passed local ordinances protecting LGBT people. That law would have overridden those. That was fixed.
[Michel Martin:] So do you feel you did the right thing?
[Bill Oesterle:] Yes, there's no question. I would do it again. We were the first ones. You know, Mississippi and North Carolina and Georgia, they don't get this excuse. Indiana was the first state to get one of these kind of disguised Religious Freedom Restoration Act bills. And so we didn't understand it that well. In hindsight, we would have paid closer attention and gotten on it earlier so we didn't end up on a national stage.
[Michel Martin:] That was Bill Oesterle, former CEO and co-founder of the subscription-based online review company Angie's List.

[Melissa Block:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
[Robert Siegel:] And I'm Robert Siegel. The new assessment by the nation's combined intelligence services paints a grim picture of the state of Iraq today, and the challenges the U.S. faces there. The report of the 16 agencies the report's known as the National Intelligence Estimate also says Iraqi forces there will need substantial help for some time to come. The White House insists the documents supports its plan of adding troops in Iraq. We'll talk about that and the debate in Congress with our political observers in just a few minutes. First, NPR's Don Gonyea reports from the White House.
[Don Gonyea:] The report is classified, but portions of it made public today, described Iraq's growing sectarian polarization the persistent weakness of Iraqi Security Forces, and an increased in insurgent violence and political extremism. It goes on to say that unless there is progress in reversing these trends in the next year or year and a half, the deterioration of overall security will continue, producing more scenes like the very bloody and violent period of the latter part of last year. At the White House, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley said the report should not cast doubts on the president's plan to raise troop levels.
[Mr. Stephen Hadley:] But I would say explains why the president concluded that a new approach, a new strategy, was required, explains a number of the elements of that strategy and generally supports it. That is to say that the policy is design to deal with the challenges that are reflected in this intelligence.
[Don Gonyea:] And Hadley warned that Iraqi security forces would not survived a withdrawal of U.S. forces resulting in a breakdown of order, massive civilian casualties and population displacement. And he said al-Qaida would attempt to use parts of the country as a base from which it would launch attacks both in and outside Iraq. Hadley was questioned about the report's use of the term civil war, a description the White House continues to reject. The intelligence estimates says the term civil war does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict, but that it is an accurate description of some elements of the war. Here's Hadley responding.
[Mr. Stephen Hadley:] The intelligence community judges the term civil war does not adequately capture the complexities of the conflict in Iraq. And what we're doing is saying if you're going to run a policy and if you're going to explain to the American people, we need to get across the complexities of the situation we face in Iraq and what is our strategy to deal with that.
[Don Gonyea:] But if the White House still rejects the term, the American public does not. An LA TimesBloomberg news poll two weeks ago shows that nearly seven in 10 considered the current situation in Iraq a civil war. Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi said today the report makes clear that more U.S. troops are not the answer. She says it's up to Iraqi leaders to find political and diplomatic means to end the violence. Senate majority leader Harry Reid said he saw no case for the president's buildup in today's intelligence report. Next week, the U.S. Senate is expected to consider resolutions opposing the troop increase, but debates starting Monday, that's the same day the president will be asking Congress for another $100 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan in this fiscal year and another $145 billion for next year. Don Gonyea, NPR News, the White House.

[Madeleine Brand:] And I'm Madeleine Brand. Compton, California is a small city with a big reputation. Just ten square miles perched on the southeast edge of Los Angeles, Compton is home to some 57 active gangs.
[Noah Adams:] That are seemingly getting more active. Last year the murder rate jumped by more than 70 percent. Investigators say almost all the killings were gang related. In the first of two reports, NPR's Luke Burbank looks at some of the reasons why gang life is so entrenched in Compton.
[Luke Burbank Reporting:] Alex Vasquez actually comes off as a pretty nice guy. The 28-year-old with a shaved head wears a wry smile and an oversized hooded sweatshirt as he stands in front of the modest Compton duplex he and his family call home. Really, the only thing that tips you off about his scarier side is a habit he has, one you'll see a lot of if you spend any time in Compton, of jerking his head around reflexively to scope out any car that even starts to come down his street.
[Mr. Alex Vasquez:] Yeah, it's a reflex. Yeah, because you're waiting for somebody to start pulling out a gun or you want to wait for somebody, especially here in Compton, you don't know. It might be some little youngster that probably just he's like trying to make a name for himself, let's go hit them.
[Burbank:] Vasquez knows what he's talking about. For the last 20 years he's been a member of Compton Barrio Trace, the gang that runs this particular neighborhood. Doing the math you realize that means he was eight years old when he joined. Since then he's been in and out of prison, just finishing two years on drug and weapons charges. Vasquez says growing up in this part of Compton pretty much guarantees people will mess with you. Many kids join a gang just so somebody has their back.
[Mr. Alex Vasquez:] If anybody sees you coming out of a block they're figuring, you know what, you're a gang member or you're from their gang. You've got to be from, even though if you're not, you might as well get in so you can have somebody protect you, you know.
[Burbank:] Nobody claims to know definitively why the murder rate spiked last year, but a few things stick out. For one, a large number of O.G's, original hardcore gang members, have been getting out of prison after serving 10 to 15 year sentences. There's also more racial tension between Compton's black and Latino gangs than ever before. And some people are wondering if the L.A. County Sheriff's Department is doing it's job policing the city. Captain Mike Ford runs the department's gang unit.
[Captain Mike Ford:] It's an affront to us when the crime goes up that much. It makes us wonder what's going on. Are we doing our job or are we not doing our job?
[Burbank:] Compton used to have its own police department, but it was disbanded back in 2001, supposedly because the Sheriff's Department could do the job more cheaply. Some former Compton P.D. members like Bobby Ladd say Sheriff's Department personnel don't know enough about the gang scene in Compton because they get rotated all over the county.
[Mr. Bobby Ladd:] And they don't know where they're going to get assigned. They could be in Compton one year. The next week they can be in Lakewood. We didn't have that luxury. We were stuck in Compton.
[Burbank:] Ladd spent 18 years as an investigator there and says he knew just about every gang member in the city by name. It's that sort of familiarity he says the Sheriff's Department lacks because it's a county wide agency.
[Mr. Bobby Ladd:] I mean, intel is 85 percent of solving the crimes in a city like Compton because most of the crimes are gang related. If you don't know the players and you don't the people that you're dealing with, then you're not going to solve the crime.
[Captain Mike Ford:] Are there people who are assigned to Compton that that's not their first choice? Of course there are.
[Burbank:] Captain Mike Ford concedes there's more turnover in the Sheriff's Department than there was when Compton had its own police. But, he says, in some ways that's actually a good thing.
[Captain Mike Ford:] The advantage we have over a municipal police department is if we get somebody who's burned out and wants to move on we do have options for him, so we can bring somebody in who is reenergized and invigorated and wants to work hard.
[Burbank:] But a look at the numbers from 2005 tell a different story. While violent crime fell overall in the L.A. area, it actually increased on average in the jurisdictions handled by the Sheriff's Department. Hoping to get control of the situation in Compton, the department has stepped up patrols and doubled its number of gang investigators.
[Mr. Carlos Herrera:] This is known as the 720s, because the address is 720 East Compton.
[Burbank:] Guys like Carlos Herrera and Joe Gonzalez.
[Mr. Joe Gonzalez:] Hello, little guys.
[Unidentified Male #1:] Hi.
[Mr. Joe Gonzalez:] How are you doing?
[Unidentified Male #2:] Fine.
[Mr. Joe Gonzalez:] All right.
[Burbank:] Each night they roll through Compton in their unmarked gray car, chewing their tobacco and navigating a honeycomb of gang activity. Each block belongs to a different crew, Tortilla Flats, Treetop Piru, Nutty Block.
[Mr. Carlos Herrera:] What's up, fellas? Is that your car? Registered to you and everything?
[Unidentified Male #3:] Yup, and that's my car.
[Mr. Carlos Herrera:] Man, you're rolling. You got a driver's license and everything?
[Unidentified Male #3:] Yeah, I got it.
[Mr. Carlos Herrera:] It's all good, all valid?
[Burbank:] Herrera slides up to a car full of slouching teenagers. They're members of the Palmer Block Crips.
[Mr. Carlos Herrera:] You guys here about the last shooting up here?
[Unidentified Male #3:] I heard the shooting.
[Mr. Carlos Herrera:] Did you hear it from here? Sounded like what? From the Fifth or what?
[Burbank:] It's his job to watch Palmer Block, a black gang from Central Compton, while his partner, Gonzales, is assigned to keep tabs on Compton Barrio 155, a Latino gang. Palmer Block and 155 are serious rivals. Racial tension has grown so high that even locking guys up hasn't contained it. Last month a series of racially charged brawls put California prisons on lockdown. Officials say the beefs started out on the streets of places like Compton. Midway through their shift Herrera and Gonzales have pulled over a young gang member with an outstanding warrant. He's cuffed and sitting by the side of the car when a frantic call explodes across the radio. Two members of the 183 gang are shooting at deputies who tried to pull them over on a simple traffic stop. As a convoy of red and blue lights race toward the scene a sheriff's helicopter tracks the suspects from overhead. The gang members are firing at everyone, deputies on the ground, the helicopter. In the mayhem they blast their way into a house where a family of five has just gone to bed for the night. Suddenly a woman runs out of the house in her nightgown. She's dazed.
[Unidentified Female:] They upstairs, my husband and my brother is upstairs. My parents in downstairs. They're in that room right there.
[Unidentified Male:] That one right there?
[Unidentified Female:] That one right there. They're in that room right there. I just ran.
[Burbank:] The SWAT team and hostage negotiators are called in. It takes hours, but amazingly they manage to talk the two suspects into coming out of the house unarmed. Most importantly, the family is okay. The good news is that these particular gang members, who were trying not to get caught for parole violations, are now behind bars. The bad news is that there are hundreds more like them still on the streets.
[Mr. Mike Baca:] You're not going to get rid of the problem unless you offer alternatives. That just goes without saying.
[Burbank:] Mike Baca is a Compton paramedic who spends most of his free time trying to get gang members out of the life. He says what they really need are jobs.
[Mr. Mike Baca:] I've seen this done before, where you get guys who are selling crack or you see them selling weed, they'll take that job that pays them 6.75 an hour. Believe it or not. Because they don't have to look over their back.
[Burbank:] Alex Vasquez, the long time member of Compton Barrio Tres, actually has a job these days, but he says he still gang bangs. I asked him if he thought that lifestyle would eventually get him killed.
[Mr. Alex Vasquez:] Well, if I keep living here, yeah. Somebody's going to gun me down, maybe they're going to gun me down for something I did a while back.
[Burbank:] Most of us would be on the next bus out of town if we thought it would keep us alive, but not Vasquez. With a look of resignation he sets his eyes on a huge palm tree where his gang's logo, the number three, is spray painted.
[Mr. Alex Vasquez:] You can be anywhere, somebody's going to shoot you. That's the way I look at it. If it's going to happen, it's going to happen. You never know. Especially here in Compton. You don't know.
[Burbank:] One thing that does seem clear, Compton's gangs are having no trouble finding new recruits, including Alex Vasquez's younger brother who was just jumped in as a member of Compton Barrio Tres. Luke Burbank, NPR News, Los Angeles.
[Madeleine Brand:] Tomorrow, in the second part of his series, Luke reports on how Compton's reputation as a gang haven has affected civic life there.

[Robert Siegel:] Conservative talk radio host Neal Boortz announced this morning that he is retiring after more than 40 years on the air.
[Unidentified Man:] Flying high for decades, Boortz is reaching for the rip cord. But until he's on final approach, the oratorical aerobatics continue. It's the Boortz Happy Ending.
[Robert Siegel:] Boortz has been broadcasting since Richard Nixon was president. And he says he's giving up his nationally syndicated program on WSB Radio in Atlanta because it's too restrictive. NPR's Kathy Lohr has the story.
[Kathy Lohr, Byline:] Neal Boortz, who calls himself The Talkmaster, says he got off the bus in Atlanta in 1967 and did whatever he could to make a living while he was trying to get a job on the radio. He was a jewelry buyer, an insurance salesman; he loaded trucks and wrote speeches for former Georgia Governor Lester Maddox.
[Neal Boortz:] All this time, I'm just trying to get into radio anything. I'll be a reporter. I'll be a cameraman for a TV station. Everybody told me, you don't have any experience. I mean, you don't know what you are doing. Get out of here.
[Kathy Lohr, Byline:] Then a local radio host committed suicide in 1969 and Boortz says he camped out at the station early the next morning to talk to the general manager.
[Neal Boortz:] Well, OK, you can do it for a couple of weeks until we get a replacement in here for that show. So, they put me on that afternoon 90 minutes. And two weeks later, they moved me to the morning show, and then that was it.
[Kathy Lohr, Byline:] Four decades later, Boortz says he's ready to call it quits.
[Neal Boortz:] It's just been a total and absolute joy. Now, I'm going to miss everything associated with doing a talk radio show.
[Kathy Lohr, Byline:] About six million listeners a week tune into the Neal Boortz Show. He's a conservative yet independent voice. Boortz is a libertarian, and during the most recent Republican campaign for president has urged his listeners not to focus on social issues, including abortion and gay marriage. He is not a shock jock, but he attacks controversial issues head on. On a program last year, Boortz spoke with Herman Cain about disparaging comments being made about the former GOP presidential candidate.
[Neal Boortz:] They called you a monkey, Herman. You're the monkey in the window.
[Herman Cain:] Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, I'm free at last.
[Neal Boortz:] OK. Now, let me ask you something.
[Herman Cain:] Yes.
[Neal Boortz:] Are you a runaway slave?
[Herman Cain:] If you consider leaving the Democrat plantation, yes.
[Michael Harrison:] He is a force that has influence within politics and public policy, but he's also entertaining and funny.
[Kathy Lohr, Byline:] Michael Harrison is publisher of Talkers Magazine.
[Michael Harrison:] Although he may agree with Limbaugh and Hannity and some of the other big names in conservative talk radio, he is in no way a follower. He has always gone his own direction. He's very independent and quite unique.
[Kathy Lohr, Byline:] Perhaps not a complete surprise. Herman Cain, who has had a nightly talk show on the same radio station, will take over Boortz's morning slot on January 21st. That's inauguration day. Here's how Boortz put it.
[Neal Boortz:] If it's Barack Obama, then I'm going to disappear into the mountains somewhere and come out after he has completely destroyed this country. If it is Mitt Romney, then we're all going to leave the air well, we're going to start drinking, we'll start drinking as the show begins. And...
[Kathy Lohr, Byline:] He's calling his announcement the Boortz happy ending. Today, comedian Jeff Foxworthy was among those who called in to lament the end of an era.
[Jeff Foxworthy:] Man, are we going to miss you. It's just not going to be the same on the radio.
[Neal Boortz:] Well, you're so kind and so kind to call.
[Kathy Lohr, Byline:] Boortz says after he retires, he plans to spend eight months on what he calls the Boortz bus traveling with his wife. Kathy Lohr, NPR News, Atlanta.
[Robert Siegel:] This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.

[David Greene:] Good morning. I'm David Greene. Remember this woman?
[Unidentified Woman:] Where's the beef?
[David Greene:] Wendy's commercial, 1984 and it's sort of like the question members of city council are asking in a German city. Where's the sausage? There's a festival in April, and the environmental group running it has made it all vegetarian sacrilege to some Germans. Council members want the region's famous pork sausage sold as well. A politician supporting the festival admits the veggie theme has been a kick in the guts. It's MORNING EDITION.

[Robert Siegel:] Congressman Steve King continues to face criticism, including from members of his own party. Yesterday the Iowa Republican tweeted support for far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who has called for banning the Quran. King tweeted, quote, "we can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies." Iowa Public Radio's Clay Masters reports on the fallout.
[Clay Masters, Byline:] Steve King has a long history being critical of immigration, and he represents a district where 95 percent of the residents are born in the United States. This morning, appearing on CNN's "New Day," King did not back away from his comments.
[Steve King:] I'd like to see an America that's just so homogenous that it we look a lot the same from that perspective. I think there's been far too much focus on race, especially in the last eight years.
[Clay Masters, Byline:] Meanwhile, David Duke, the former KKK grand wizard, is praising King on social media. These kinds of comments are nothing new for the Republican congressmen. This morning, a familiar ritual played out at Republican Governor Terry Branstad's weekly Monday morning press conference.
[Terry Branstad:] Well, you know, Steve King is Steve King. So we all know that.
[Clay Masters, Byline:] Branstad and many of Iowa's top Republicans regularly have to distance themselves from King's racially charged comments. He's spoken disparagingly of Mexican immigrants and Muslims. And in the opening days of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last summer, King was on an MSNBC panel discussing the racial makeup of his party. He told anchor Chris Hayes the whole old, white male business is a little tired.
[Steve King:] Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization...
[Chris Hayes:] Than white people?
[Steve King:] ...Than Western civilization itself that's rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America?
[Clay Masters, Byline:] One Republican who has not criticized King yet President Trump. When asked about King's remarks at the daily White House press briefing, Spokesman Sean Spicer said...
[Sean Spicer:] I will definitely touch base with the president on that and get back to you on that.
[Clay Masters, Byline:] King has a following with grassroots activists, and when he calls, Republicans come. The congressman held the opening GOP event for the first in the nation Iowa caucuses in 2015. Nearly every presidential hopeful at the time, including President Trump, accepted his invitation to speak. At today's press conference, Branstad tried to walk the line.
[Terry Branstad:] He, from time to time, says things that we just don't agree with, and we've always, you know, been honest about that. We've worked with him on a lot of things, and some of the things that he says we just think are wrong and we disagree with.
[Clay Masters, Byline:] Branstad is waiting to be confirmed as President Trump's ambassador to China. That will make his lieutenant governor, Kim Reynolds, the next to lead Iowa. She followed Branstad's lead.
[Kim Reynolds:] I don't believe it's reflective of Iowans or Iowa values, so I we disagree. I strongly disagree, and I do not believe that that is reflective of Iowans throughout the state.
[Clay Masters, Byline:] King has represented a safely Republican district for 14 years and was re-elected last year with 61 percent of the vote. So don't expect controversies like these to end anytime soon. For NPR News, I'm Clay Masters in Des Moines.

[Alex Chadwick:] And I'm Alex Chadwick. Coming up, how a 1911 piano ditty composed by a future U.S. vice president keeps hitting the top of the charts over and over again.
[Madeleine Brand:] But first, new information is out today on the CIA's secret rendition of terror suspects. That's when a suspect is scooped and sent to another country for questioning. But there have been concerns about whether the CIA is sending people to countries that practice torture. There are also questions about secret detention sites, those so-called black sites in Eastern Europe or Central Asia where suspects were held. Amnesty International has a new report out today that addresses those suspicions. And Amnesty official Eric Olson joins me now to tell us more about this report. And Mr. Olson, what's new in your report?
[Mr. Eric Olson:] We've had an extraordinary opportunity to interview extensively three Yemeni nationals who were basically disappeared by the U.S. government. They were snatched off the streets of Jordan, and one off the streets of Tanzania, turned over to U.S. officials, and then held for 18 months by the U.S. in various detention facilities in Europe. They were held in deplorable situations. And this is a real view inside this rendition program that the United States has.
[Madeleine Brand:] You said they were held in sites in Europe.
[Mr. Eric Olson:] Yeah, well, it's been, you know, difficult to know for certain where they were being held, because the detainers, you know, use extraordinary means to keep them out of public sight. But, based on the information they provided us, the length of their travel, the conditions under which they were detained, we've been able to determine that they were probably held for a time in Afghanistan, and then moved on to a black site run by the CIA in some part of Europe.
[Madeleine Brand:] Do they know who detained them in the first place?
[Mr. Eric Olson:] The first two were detained in Jordan by Jordan officials, and then quickly turned over to the United States. The third gentleman was detained in Tanzania, Dar Es Salaam, and then it was the United States that started to transport them to other detention facilities, and they ultimately ended up in a site that is considered a black site. It's not registered. The Red Cross does not have access to that site. And the conditions there are very difficult.
[Madeleine Brand:] You say in your report that two of the detainees, they allege that they were tortured.
[Mr. Eric Olson:] Well, they were all held in long-term solitary confinement, which, by international standards, in and of itself can be considered cruel and inhumane treatment. Two of them were in a facility where they were chained to a ring on the floor permanently. Some of them were made to stand for long periods of time, all of which is prohibited under international treaty and treaties that the United States itself has signed and ratified.
[Madeleine Brand:] The Council of Europe-that's the continent's top human rights watch dog-released its report on these so-called black sites last month, and it found no evidence of secret prisons in Europe.
[Mr. Eric Olson:] The Council of Europe is still investigating. That was not a conclusive, final report. There's still much that needs to be uncovered. Our own analysis-based on the information we've gathered both from former prisoners and our analysis of flight data information-is that there have been literally thousands of flights that the CIA has carried out into parts of Europe where we believe people are being held in these so-called black sites. Off the books, inaccessible to outside observers, and where there have been numerous reports of use of torture and inhumane treatment.
[Madeleine Brand:] And has the CIA responded at all to your allegations and to your report?
[Mr. Eric Olson:] No, they've given no response. We've asked for their-for information from them about these flights, and they have refused to respond in any way. The only reason we know that this is going on is the reports from the prisoners themselves and an acknowledgement by former CIA Director Tenet that there is indeed a renditions program.
[Madeleine Brand:] And how many prisoners do you believe are being held this way?
[Mr. Eric Olson:] Well, obviously, it's hard to know with certainty, because these are black sites when the U.S. does not acknowledge or give us a list of prisoners. But based on the information we have, we believe it could be in the hundreds.
[Madeleine Brand:] And these three Yemeni men you spoke with, they are now free?
[Mr. Eric Olson:] They are now released, and I think that's an important thing to remember. The U.S. detained them and shipped them to these sites but never charged them with any crime, never charged them with anything terror related, even though, presumably, that was the basis of their detention. So, our concern is, of course that these men lost years of their lives and have never been charged with anything.
[Madeleine Brand:] Eric Olson is acting director of government relations at Amnesty International. The group has a new report out today on the CIA's alleged secret prisons. Eric Olson, thank you very much.
[Mr. Eric Olson:] You're welcome.
[Madeleine Brand:] And a CIA spokesman told DAY TO DAY that the agency has declined comment on the Amnesty International report.

[Michele Norris:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris. Some famous names in the retail world are disappearing-among them Foley's, Kaufmann's, Hecht's, Robinsons-May and Filene's. Those regional chains are being converted to Macy's. It's part of Federated Department Stores $17-billion acquisition of May Department Stores. As Martha Bebinger reports from member station WBUR, many Boston shoppers are sad to see Filene's go.
[Martha Bebinger Reporting:] Bells accompany shoppers and workers on their lunch break at an intersection in downtown Boston, where Filene's and Macy's have faced off for years. Lisa Pochey juggled shopping bags outside Filene's.
[Ms. Lisa Pochey:] My grandmother used to shop here many years ago. My aunt used to come to Filene's, I come to Filene's, my mother. It's really just too bad. I'm really sad about it. It's really sort of a monument I say. In Italy, that's what they would call it, a historical monument.
[Bebinger:] Filene's started in Boston as a women's clothing store in 1890. The store's founder, William Filene, immigrated from Prussia. The company expanded across New England. Filene's in Boston became a legend in part for Filene's Basement, where bargain-priced designer clothes occasionally sparked fights. The Basement has since become an independent chain not affected by this merger. But Filene's reputation remains, says shopper Willie Jones of Boston.
[Mr. Willie Jones:] I'm originally from Virginia. And, like, Filene's was one of the first landmark places that I actually visited. And the thing about it is you can talk to people from all over the United States; it's known nationwide.
[Bebinger:] But the reputation is apparently not broad enough to expand nationwide. Federated plans to convert 10 regional chains, including Filene's, Foley's, Hecht's and Kaufmann's to Macy's. Spokesman Jim Sluzewski says the intent of the merger is to give Macy's a stronger national presence.
[Mr. Jim Sluzewski:] To build the national brand, to be able to have the presence of a national brand, national advertising and marketing, etc., it's important that stores across the country be operated under the same nameplate.
[Bebinger:] Analysts say the merger is a response to pressures department stores are facing from Wal-Mart and other big-box discount retailers. Boston Mayor Tom Menino is trying to lure one of those big-box chains to what is expected to be a vacant, full-block, multistory building at the intersection that now includes Filene's and Macy's.
[Mayor Tom Menino:] There are a lot of retailers who are interested because, you know, more people go through Downtown Crossing in a day than at any of the other malls we have in the city of Boston.
[Bebinger:] As word that Filene's will be no more spreads, so does the gloom. Polly Higgins is a flight attendant stopping by Filene's during her 24-hour layover in Boston.
[Ms. Polly Higgins:] I just heard yesterday. And we said we had to put some of our flight attendants on suicide watch because when they find out, they're going to just be so upset.
[Bebinger:] Higgins remembers her favorite bargain, a black-sequined, halter top cocktail dress.
[Ms. Polly Higgins:] I just happen to have a picture of it right here.
[Bebinger:] Oh, the little black dress.
[Ms. Polly Higgins:] Thirty-four dollars. Can't beat it. We love this place. Every time we're here, we come down and spend money. It's fun. My husband'll be happy.
[Bebinger:] Federated and May expect to complete the merger after state and federal regulators finish their review sometime this fall. For NPR News, I'm Martha Bebinger in Boston.

[Daniel Schorr:] As with the CIA leak, so with the NSA leak: The process diverts attention from the substance.
[Robert Siegel:] NPR senior news analyst Daniel Schorr.
[Daniel Schorr:] In the case of the CIA leak, the substance was that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson had pinned the Bush administration to the wall on its allegations of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The process has been the subject of a two-year investigation by a special counsel, in which one person has so far been indicted. The issue is: Who leaked the information about Wilson and his CIA wife to whom and whether the White House intended to cover up the leak? In the case of the NSA, the substance of the matter is the legality, perhaps the constitutionality, of the president's action in ordering, without the required warrants from the secret court, electronic monitoring by the National Security Agency of specified persons who may or may not be abroad. Last Saturday on short notice the president replaced his regular radio talk and appeared live to defend his wiretap orders as an anti-terrorist measure and to announce that he had every intention of continuing the practice. Thus he was bypassing the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act setting up the secret courts. The administration, meanwhile, sought to change the subject of the leak of the information to The New York Times. At his news conference on Monday, Mr. Bush said, rather dramatically, that a two-minute telephone conversation between someone linked to al-Qaeda in the United States and an operative overseas could lead directly to the loss of thousands of lives. Mr. Bush said he expected the Justice Department to proceed with a full investigation of the leak. He said, `We're at war, and we must protect America's secrets.'Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said, `A very valuable tool has been compromised.' As to the practice of wiretapping without warrant, that could figure in a long-delayed battle with Congress over the limits of untrammeled executive power. Chairman Arlen Specter promises to hold Senate Judiciary Committee hearings early in the new year. This is Daniel Schorr.

[Ari Shapiro:] This Thanksgiving, protesters are still camped out in North Dakota just a few miles from the Standing Rock Reservation. Demonstrations against the Dakota Access Pipeline have been going on for months. Tanaya Winder has been to Standing Rock and supports the protests. She's a member of the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe, and she's also a poet and storyteller. We caught up with her earlier today while she was traveling to Nevada to be with her family this Thanksgiving Day. And we asked her to tell us what's been on her mind.
[Tanaya Winder:] The story that I was told in school just about the Pilgrims and the Indians coming together to celebrate, even though I didn't really know the history then because I was too young, just something about it just didn't feel right. It's almost like a make-believe story wrapped in a pretty bow. Granted, like, as children, maybe one doesn't want to tell the entire story just because of the harsh realities and that systemic violence, but part of indigenous history includes Native Americans being forcibly removed to reservations, and from then a lot of children were taken. My grandmother was taken to a boarding school in Nevada Stewart Indian School. You know, as a child, I can't imagine what it was like to have been taken from a home, so I'm always thinking about those things on this day when I'm heading to spend time with my family and my cousins and my younger relatives as well. As what's happening with Standing Rock now, it's been in the hearts and on minds of indigenous people throughout the country since the beginning when it first started. And it's something that to think, like, is this really happening, you know? And I see people who are non-native, white people, in these, like, police uniforms with their, like, guns and weapons and shooting rubber bullets and shooting projectiles at people. That's the dark side. That's the opposite of what days like today are supposed to stand for. I'm always the kind of person who tries to find the silver lining. I'm trying to think about, like, the love that's shown now at Standing Rock. There are allies there who are helping, and that to me is something, like, to be thankful for. On Thanksgiving, we're given this cookie cutter model of what an Indian is and what it should mean. And people are OK with sitting down at their tables with that narrative and then not really wanting to believe the truth of what's happening to Native Americans in real life today.
[Ari Shapiro:] That's Tanaya Winder of the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe with her observations on this Thanksgiving Day.

[Madeleine Brand:] Britain, France and Germany warned Iran today not to resume its nuclear activities, saying such a move would bring negotiations on the issue to an end. Iran's government said yesterday that it plans to break the UN's seals on one of its nuclear plants and resume the production of uranium gas. In response, the International Atomic Energy Agency said it would inspect the seals once they're removed. So what exactly is a UN seal? Daniel Engber, who writes Slate's Explainer column, is here to tell us.
[Daniel Engber Reporting:] A UN seal is a tamper-proof tag placed on doors, containers, file cabinets and other sensitive parts of a nuclear facility. The IAEA, which monitors about 900 nuclear facilities worldwide, uses around 26,000 seals per year to ensure that equipment has not been used, moved or otherwise manipulated. There are several types of seals. To close a site for 24 hours, an inspector might wrap the door handles with an improved adhesive seal. This type of seal is the simplest and quickest to apply. It looks something like the sticky bracelet you'd get at a rock show. The most commonly used seal comprises a pair of metal disks, each about the size of a quarter, attacked to a thin piece of wire. The wire on a metallic seal might be run through a handle or latch, just as you might use a cable lock to secure a laptop. The ends are then pinched between the metal disks, one of which is embossed with IAEA and a special identification number. The wire isn't meant to prevent entry. It's just sturdy enough to withstand accidental bumps and tugs. But broken seals can't be reinstalled without a new pair of disks, and they're very difficult to counterfeit. Once the metal coins are removed at the Isfahan plant, IAEA officials will take them back to agency headquarters to verify their authenticity. For materials that need to be safeguarded and checked for extended periods, the agency uses more sophisticated contraptions. In a fiber-optic seal, strands of fiber-optic wire are pressed together in a clear plastic case when they're installed and cut in an irregular pattern. Unlike the metallic seal, the fiber-optic device doesn't need to be broken to be checked for tampering. Inspectors can simply take a digital photograph to examine the cut ends. The IAEA also uses an electronic seal that detects breaks using a beam of light that circulates every quarter of a second. Any interruption of that pattern gets stored online and inspectors can review evidence of tampering by downloading this information.
[Madeleine Brand:] That Explainer from Slate's Daniel Engber. Stay with us on DAY TO DAY from NPR News.

[Jennifer Ludden:] I'm Jennifer Ludden in Washington. Neal Conan is away. America is more conservative than it was a year ago. That's what a new Gallup poll says. The poll found that Americans are moving to the right on issues from government regulation to immigration to abortion. The percentage of Americans who believe that government regulations of firearms should stay the same or become less strict is at record high. GOP victories in Virginia and New Jersey earlier this week seem to support the study's conclusion that Americans are more conservative. But some analysts that while there's an ideological shift in America, it's not necessarily a swing to the right. Later in the hour, we'll celebrate the birth of the Internet, 40 years ago last week, with a look at emoticons. But first: conservative America. We want to hear from independents and conservatives in our audience. Why do you call yourself conservative? Does it come down to your stance on a particular issue? Is there some broader ideological reason? Call us here in Washington. Our number is 800-989-8255. Our Email address is talk@npr.org. And you can also join the conversation at our Web site, go to npr.org and click on TALK OF THE NATION. Ron Elving, NPR's senior Washington editor is joining us here in Studio 3A. Welcome, Ron.
[Ron Elving:] Good to with you, Jennifer.
[Jennifer Ludden:] So Ron, is America becoming more conservative?
[Ron Elving:] America is expressing a more conservative mood. I don't think there's any question about that. But I think this can be easily overstated if you don't look at the numbers themselves and if you don't look at the numbers over a bit of a stretch of time. For example, 2008, in November, approximately one year ago when we had the election that elected Barack Obama president, the numbers in this poll were essentially 37 percent conservative, 37 percent moderate and 22 percent liberal. That was the Gallup poll. And now just in the past week or so, we've seen the Gallup poll ask those same questions again as they have been doing for about 20 years, rather large sample rolling sample through the year. And the numbers had moved one point with respect to moderates. And up three points among conservatives, which I don't think is terribly hard to credit if you've been watching the country over the last year, if you consider what the mood of the country was last fall and if you consider the mood to be today. The country was unhappy a year ago, it's unhappy today. And of course, the administration has changed, so people are pushing back against the administration and that means pushing back from the right.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Now didn't the poll find or when this movement, the three-point bump in conservatives where is that coming from?
[Ron Elving:] It's coming from people who consider themselves independent voters, in the main, and a few conservatives who consider themselves Republicans. That is to say, a few people who consider themselves Republicans and went from considering themselves moderate Republicans to considering themselves conservative Republicans. The number among liberals, among people who are independent or moderate and shifted into or away from the liberal column, was two points.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Okay, so, you're now bowled over by this but, you know, it's very interesting that when you look at issues, specific issues, the numbers did go up, you know, it looks, substantially you know, several percentage points five, six percentage points, more people favoring a decrease in immigration. More Americans considering themselves pro-life, you know, pro gun control or, sorry, less gun control or keep it as it is. What does that mean?
[Ron Elving:] I think that there was a great deal of concern last winter on the part of gun rights advocates, Second Amendment advocates, that there was going to be a major move made against gun rights in America. And in fact, what we've seen in the last year, is a continuation of a long time trend, really since the year 2000, that Congress has moved to bolster gun owners' rights and away from gun control. That was going on through all the Bush years. It continued after the Democrats took over Congress in 2006, and for example, in recent months, we've seen the Congress liberalize the freedom to carry firearms in national parks. That's been the biggest change that's been made with respect to gun owners' rights. But there was a tremendous publicity and campaign conducted last winter to suggest to people that their guns were, in some sense or another, under threat. A lot of people went out and bought guns, sales were reaching all-time highs last winter. And that energy has continued and people have felt, that in some sense, their rights are threatened although it would appear, at least from the facts, that there is more threat in some of the campaigns that they're listening to than there actually is from Congress, where there seems to be no impulse toward gun control at all.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Okay. Now, this week, we had elections, the big headline-grabbers were Governorships in Virginia and New Jersey. And it seemed a good day for Republicans. I mean, is this something that you see as bolstering the poll, here, or is this a different story?
[Ron Elving:] Well, I think they're both part of the same story. To a large degree, a country that remains unhappy, much it has been in the last several years, has a new government to be unhappy with. Now, the name you never heard mentioned on Tuesday, sensibly enough, was George W. Bush. George W. Bush has largely disappeared from the American political discourse. He's kept a very low profile and there is nothing to push back against in a presidency that's now a year in memory, or almost a year in memory. So now, if you are unemployed, or if you're worried about unemployment and the country's unemployment rate continues to rise; and if you're worried about economic uncertainty and people haven't forgotten the near collapse of our financial system a little over a year ago And if you're just troubled by the entire change dynamic, whether it's technological or economic or social; you see everything seemingly changing; you notice that the work place has reached the point where half the people who have jobs in America are women that's quite different from 30-40-50 years ago -where some of the main issues on the ballot are the permission of gay marriage these are not the issues of 30-40 years ago. This represents considerable social change. And many people are discomforted by it or they are downright against it. And they are energized, in this era, not only by people who make it their business to energize them, but by the political dynamics of the day.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Let's bring another voice into the conversation. David Weigel is a reporter for the Washington Independent. He covers the conservative movement and the Republican Party. And today he joins us from the studios of member station, WXXI, in Rochester, New York. Welcome to you.
[Mr. David Weigel:] Thank you. Thank you for having me.
[Jennifer Ludden:] So, do you believe America is becoming more conservative?
[Mr. David Weigel:] I think America is becoming more populist. And right now, because Democrats are on every lever of the federal government except for the courts, I suppose it's a reaction, again there is a bit of reaction against what's perceived as liberalism. That poll we saw, I mean, I think that reflects the way Americans have all have felt about these issues for a very long time. But otherwise, I don't think you've seen much of a movement towards what in our you know, our political context, you call conservatism, you've seen anti-corporate populism. I think if you walk around at a tea party event or talk to people who are angry at a town hall, they have complaints about how much money is being shoveled over to banks and the corporations and the car companies, and how they want to keep their health care, including their Medicare. That neither of those are conservatives in the in, you know, the very Goldwater-Ronald Reagan sense.
[Jennifer Ludden:] So you call it populism?
[Mr. David Weigel:] I think so. And I I'm call you know, I in your I'm in New York now because I was covering this election upstate the New York 23 special election�
[Jennifer Ludden:] Right.
[Mr. David Weigel:] �which was a three-way battle between a Democrat, a liberal Republican and a Conservative Party candidate, and the National Republican Party pushed the liberal candidate out of the race. So it was down to a Democrat, down to a Conservative Party candidate whose message was actually all about bringing jobs to the district, giving the fort whatever it needed, getting government off our back but nothing really not so much you know, he talked about less debt. That's something Ross Perot talked about, and I think it's tough to pin him down as a conservative. And in the end, this is a district that has not gone Democrat since I want to get the president I think yes, it was Ulysses Grant was president. That's the last time you had a guy with a D behind his name.
[Jennifer Ludden:] A very long time.
[Mr. David Weigel:] And Democrats, with a huge swing, picked up the district. Now, the Democrat talked about jobs. The Conservative talked about jobs. They weren't talking so much about ideology. They weren't talking about social issues in any real sense. So that's what I see. I see economic angst manifesting as a populist backlash, and in some places, that's going to be against Republicans, some places against Democrats.
[Jennifer Ludden:] And when you look at this Gallup Poll with people, you know, more likely to be anti-abortion and less for gun control, and more for keeping out immigrants and so forth, does that how do you read that?
[Mr. David Weigel:] Oh, I think that's economic angst. I mean, this is all very connected to the country being, not just in a recession since last year, but being in a period of increasing discrepancy in wages, gap between the rich and the poor, wages being pretty flat even during the, you know, GDP growth of the Bush years. I mean, you've had alienation, economic alienation for a long time, and I mean, that I mean, it's very easy to see the links between economic alienation and worry about jobs and increasing the anti-immigration sentiment. That rhetoric is always tied together. It was tied together when Pat Buchanan ran for president, both well, he ran three times but both times he ran as a Republican, that was the tie he made. And I it's actually been off the back burner now just because it's so you know, for all of those anti-immigration sentiments, it's been a terrible issue for Republicans. Republicans have been wiped out in the Southwest and in parts of Texas. I mean, I think almost every part of the border, congressional district who's on the border of Mexico is represented by a Democrat now. So it's not something when you put the pedal to it, voters stick to. It's just that they're they want to have a little bit of security back, and for the economy to be going again for them, for them to be able to job that lasts. So, you know�
[Jennifer Ludden:] Ron Elving, what about this, less maybe ideological shift, that it's really economic distress we're seeing?
[Ron Elving:] I believe that. I also believe in what David was saying regarding populism. I think there is a great rejection of Washingtonism, if you will, the sense that the federal government is going to hold your fate in its hands in one way or another. Some people want to have the government do more, quote-unquote �the government.� People are generally uneasy about the prospect, though, of some kind of federal, centralized government taking over things. So anytime you use a verb construction like should the government take over something that's going to be received very negatively, and I don't think that's a huge change from the way America has been for a very long time. But right now, the way the issues are being framed, as David says, is by the Democratic Party and to some degree by its more liberal elements. People are seeing, in this Gallup Poll, Barack Obama governing more as a liberal than a moderate. Many of them are unhappy about that. That's part of the shift to feeling more conservative. And many people feel that the Democrats who run Congress, Nancy Pelosi, some of the Democrats in the Senate, are too liberal, and so they're reacting against that.
[Jennifer Ludden:] We're talking about conservatives this hour. Why do you call yourself conservative? Is it about your stance on issues, or a broader ideological reason, or the economy? We're taking your calls at 800-989-8255, email us at talk@npr.org. I'm Jennifer Ludden. It's TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Jennifer Ludden in Washington. After Republican gubernatorial wins in New Jersey and Virginia and a Gallup Poll suggesting more Americans identify themselves as conservatives, is there a sea change? We're talking with NPR's senior Washington editor, Ron Elving, and with David Weigel, he's a reporter for the Washington Independent. We also want to hear from you conservatives, independents what you call yourselves and why? Does it come down to your stance on an issue or a broader ideological reason? Give us a call at 800-989-8255, or email us at talk@npr.org, and you can join the conversation at our Web site. Go to npr.org, and click on TALK OF THE NATION. Let's get a call from a listener here. Lauren is in West Bloomfield, Michigan. Hi Lauren.
[Lauren:] Good afternoon.
[Jennifer Ludden:] What's on your mind?
[Lauren:] Well, I think that right now, we need to clarify what conservative means. In my opinion, whether the government's local or, you know, the national government, I believe that government, when it's conservative, is doing less or just doing basic things like the defense, and infrastructure, and protecting our citizens; and I think when the government gets too involved in businesses and pushes back too far in the other direction is when conservatism becomes something that everyone says that they are.
[Jennifer Ludden:] So are you do you think of yourself as a conservative now?
[Lauren:] Well, I'm more of an independent, but I do lean conservative. I don't think the government should be doing as much as it's doing right now.
[Jennifer Ludden:] So are you talking about, like, the stimulus bill or propping up Wall Street? What's concerning you?
[Lauren:] The stimulus bill and propping up Wall Street. The stimulus they went very much too far in a direction that I don't consider conservative at all. And it started with Bush, and I don't think it was very conservative of the Bush administration to get involved in a war that I don't see any justification for. I mean, that seems like extremism to me, and a huge waste of the taxpayers' money.
[Jennifer Ludden:] So Ron Elving, Lauren is suggesting it's really kind of semantics, and the meaning of conservative really switches with the times.
[Ron Elving:] We do have a problem with whether we're capitalizing conservative and talking about some kind of an ideology or whether we're just talking about the adjective, to be conservative, to be cautious, perhaps, to be careful, to conserve what the past has given us, what the traditional values of our country are. I think a lot of people�
[Lauren:] �conservatism in government than represented by leaders who don't do more than they should, don't get involved in our bedrooms and in our in things that they don't belong involved in.
[Ron Elving:] Lauren, may I ask: How do you feel about the word libertarian? Some people would say what you're describing is a more libertarian kind of attitude.
[Lauren:] Well, perhaps it is. Perhaps it is, but you know, I guess it's kind of hard to peg someone like me. I like some aspects of conservatism, libertarianism, and that's what probably makes me an independent.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Okay, Lauren, thanks for calling.
[Lauren:] Thank you.
[Jennifer Ludden:] We have an email here from Steve in Beaver Dam, Arizona. He says: You've got the paradigm backwards. The country's not moving rightward. If anything, it's moving leftward. The Virginia voting results illustrate this clearly. The reason the Republican won in that race is because young people, minorities and liberals, greatly disappointed by the unmet promises of change under Barack Obama, failed to show up to vote in droves. The disappointed Democratic base didn't show up, but the Republicans did in ordinary numbers, and thus the Republican won. If the Democrats continue to ignore their base, they're taking the wrong lesson and do so at their own peril. David Weigel, what do you make of that?
[Mr. David Weigel:] I think there's a lot to that. Creigh Deeds, who's the Democrat who just got walloped in that election, was the more conservative of the three Democrats who went for the nomination, and it seemed as though the campaign made a decision that because it would to get these Obama voters to turn out, they were going to go after more-conservative voters. And as I think we can all agree, it failed. But the Republican who won, Bob McDonnell, is very conservative, and the one time he dipped in the polls is when it was pointed out he wrote a graduate thesis when he was in his 30s he went back to Pat Robertson's law school to write this with extremely conservative views on gays, on the role of women, on marriage, things like that. He dipped a bit. He responded just with a campaign of how to bring jobs to the area, building transportation up in Northern Virginia. And then, you know, building transportation, I think the last caller might say that's one thing that government shouldn't be obsessing over where to build trains and where to open up highways, but that's what this Republican was saying. So I think Virginia has been a tough nut to crack for Republicans the last few years. They cracked it, not by talking about conservatism, just by talking about getting government running. Liberals blew it by not talking to their base. I think there's a lot there.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Ron Elving?
[Ron Elving:] I think President Obama has disappointed many liberals, but if you look at the numbers and polls of course are always suspect, it's only one way of measuring of how the public feels but if you look at the polls from the people who voted on Tuesday, and if you look at the Gallup and some of the other large polls, they seem to show more people are surprised and disappointed that Barack Obama is not more moderate or more centrist. They think he has moved to the left. Now, of course, people on the left do not feel that way, but people who are more in the middle or people who lean conservative but voted for Obama and there were people who did that those people are seeing him as moving in the opposite direction.
[Jennifer Ludden:] And this is probably what the Gallup Poll picked up on, that group of people right there.
[Ron Elving:] Very much so. That's a very big part of this Gallup Poll.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right, well David Weigel, thank you so much for joining us.
[Mr. David Weigel:] Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
[Jennifer Ludden:] David Weigel, a reporter for the Washington Independent. He follows Republican politics and joined us from member station WXXI in Rochester, New York. Let's take another phone call from a listener. Casey is in Oakland, California. Hi, Casey.
[Casey:] Hi, how are you?
[Jennifer Ludden:] Good. What tell us what your question is.
[Casey:] Well, I guess I have more of a statement than a question.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right.
[Casey:] What changed me to become an active conservative, if you want to call it that, or libertarian, if you want to call it that, was Ron Paul's actual campaign made me cured my apathy, so to speak, and got me interested in all of that. And I think that's what a large portion of the conservative movement, it's kind of what started the tea parties movement, and it moved to some degree away from that. And if you go on the GOP's own Web site, the Ron Paul forum is the largest forum on there, with, like, 400 members last time I checked, and I just don't hear that mentioned a lot. And I think that, in that, we will not support just Republican candidates, we're looking for candidates with real conservative values.
[Jennifer Ludden:] So were you were you hoping that the conservative candidate in that upstate New York district would have won this past Tuesday, then? Were you disappointed when he did not?
[Casey:] I'm not as familiar with that campaign, but I am familiar with Peter Schiff and Ron Paul's Senate campaign. They're both doing incredibly well, and Rand Paul, Ron Paul's son, has out-fundraised the incumbent Republican to date, I think his name is Trey Grayson.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right, well, Casey, thank you so much for calling.
[Casey:] You're welcome.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Let's get one more caller in before moving on. We've got David in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Hi, David.
[David:] Hi. You know, one of your guests started to touch on something, or one of the callers, and that is to differentiate between the types of conservatives. I'm a registered independent and have been for about eight years, and of course, my gripe with the Republican Party is they are too exclusive, and my gripe with the Democratic Party is they're too inclusive, trying to include too many people. But the type of the way I describe myself excuse me is as a social conservative, but I'm very progressive on a lot of other issues. And so I find myself at odds with a lot of my I'm a born-again Christian a lot of my Christian conservative friends, when it comes to a lot of other issues besides the social issues, then I don't think I'm the only one. I was really encouraged to hear that there were more registered independents last election that Republicans. Is that true? And why do we not differentiate between the types of conservatives? We have I mean, there are neocons, there are fiscal conservatives, there are and some of them overlap, I understand.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Well, David, I'm curious if you shifted in the past year. Now, we're talking, you know, in the past year have you felt differently about some issue and maybe kind of weighed in differently that you did a year ago?
[Mr. David Weigel:] Well, here's a perfect example, and that it's a fiscal responsibility. I believe that when we're in the kind of situation we're in economically, that it is up to the government to get the economy going. And when the economy does get going and people are capable of saving, then they're the ones that should be saving and not spending, and the government should cut back on its spending when the economy is going better.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right. David, thanks for calling.
[Mr. David Weigel:] Okay, you bet.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Let's bring in another perspective now. We have Sophia Nelson on the phone. She's a political analyst and blogger. She contributes to theroot.com and BET, and she's joining us from her home in Virginia. Hi, Sophia.
[Ms. Sophia Nelson:] Hi. How are you today?
[Jennifer Ludden:] Good. What do you see happening in conservative America these days?
[Ms. Sophia Nelson:] Are you asking me conservative America or conservative politics? Because I think those are different.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Okay. We'll start with one and tell us.
[Ms. Sophia Nelson:] Well, for example, when I think of conservative America, if you will, I think of the teabaggers and I think of people protesting against health care because they don't agree with the government coming in to have a public option, et cetera, et cetera, or they feel like they're being taxed too much, the deficits are out of control. I see that as fundamental conservative values, core values, if you will. And if I go into conservative politics, I think of the race in New York in the 23rd district, where the conservative candidate there was able to gain a lot of ground in less than 30 days and be able to effectively take the moderate Republican out of the running. She got a lot of pressure. Sarah Palin was there. Others were there campaigning for him. And you know, you saw the result, which I think is an interesting one.
[Jennifer Ludden:] The person lost.
[Ms. Sophia Nelson:] Yeah, first Democrat in a hundred years, I think it was or something like that, if I have my facts straight. So interesting.
[Jennifer Ludden:] So they overshot. So I mean, do you what lesson do you think they're going to take out of that?
[Ms. Sophia Nelson:] Well, I think, frankly, the New York race is an anomaly. I'm not sure you can read a whole lot into that other than it was a Republican district. Ms. Scozzafava, I think, was not a great candidate. You never drop out when you're, what, a few days away from the general election, when you're the, you know, the standard-bearer on one of the two parties that's kind of crazy. And no matter what the pressure, she should have stayed in the race. And I think the result would have been the same, ultimately. But I think that that's not a race I would look at a whole lot. The races I'm interested in and intrigued by are the ones here in Virginia and in New Jersey, because Bob McDonnell is about as conservative as it gets.
[Jennifer Ludden:] He's the Republican candidate who's now going to be governor of Virginia.
[Ms. Sophia Nelson:] Right. And he did not run as a conservative though, at all. He did not talk about social issues. He didn't talk about being opposed to gay marriage. He didn't talk about being pro-life. He didn't talk about guns. He didn't talk about any of those social issue that tend to be hot button issues. And he ran instead as a fiscal conservative who's going to bring jobs, lessen taxes, get government off your back, all things that people feel very good about when an economy is in freefall and people are losing jobs and homes, et cetera. They want to talk pocketbook issues and transportation. So I think that McDonnell figured out very early on that he needed to go to the center in order to win Virginia back, and he really walloped Deeds. I mean, something like 16 points. It was a huge�
[Jennifer Ludden:] Right.
[Ms. Sophia Nelson:] �blowout. And same in New Jersey. Chris Christie was a moderate and only moderates win in New Jersey. You have Tom Kean and Christie Todd Whitman, who I worked for, as two examples of Republicans that win in that state. Conservative Republicans do not win in that state. They just don't. Too many independents, too many moderate voters.
[Jennifer Ludden:] So Ron Elving, I guess Sophia says, you know, Republican Party shouldn't feel overly optimistic about this week's selections.
[Ron Elving:] Oh, I think that she sees the optimistic side of what Republicans should see in what happened on Tuesday, which is that the very conservative candidate, very conservative viewpoint on all issues across the board can prevail if it is carefully presented, if it's marketed correctly, if it's run to the center, or if it's run to wherever that state lives. Now, Virginia has moved from being a red state to being a purple state with several races in a row having gone Democratic. We've probably reached a natural extent of that particular trend and we're probably going to see a little bit more of a Republican period in Virginia for a least a little while. And then we'll see how people feel about that after a few years and whether that holds up. But I think her remarks about New Jersey are exactly correct. That's what wins there, especially if you've got a governor who is personally unpopular, under 40 percent approval, has 10 percent unemployment, the highest property tax rates in the country, and bad corruption.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Oh yeah, there was all that.
[Ms. Sophia Nelson:] You know, this reminds me of 1993 all over again. And I was in law school at the time. And Haley Barbour was chairman of RNC and I was interning there, and I remember '93 and I remember when Christie Todd Whitman ran. And you remember, she almost defeated Bill Bradley in '90 and then she road out the anti-tax Florio sentiment for three years to take her to the governorship. That's how angry people were about what was going on in the Florio administration. And then here in Virginia, George Allen won in a resounding victory and he was not at all supposed to win that race. Mary Sue Terry, I think, was his opponent and the Democrats were you know, it had a lock on the governorships here and, you know, George Allen broke it wide open. And I think that the danger for the Democratic Party is, they honestly have to stop being on the defense and take a hard look at this. While I agree these are local races, what both Republican candidates did was they figured out the center and the independents were the place to be. I don't know if polling told them, I don't know if common sense told them. But we know that the president has lost as much as 10 points from poling I've seen over the last number of months with independent voters in the wake of the health care and the, you know, the town hall meetings and everything that went on. And I think that you're going to have Blue Dog Democrats, conservative Democrats, if you will, particularly in some of these states like Arkansas, Indiana, where you've Blanche Lincoln up. You've got Evan Bayh up. I think you're going to see some real concern on the part of those Democrats to try to pass health care now. So I think that this election had huge implications. But the lesson that I'd like the Republicans to learn is not to say, oh, we need to be we need to go to the, quote-unquote "right" and we need to be exclusive. They need to look at the McDonnell model in particular because he's extremely conservative I mean, very conservative, if you look at his record�
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right.
[Ms. Sophia Nelson:] �truthfully and otherwise. And he just didn't run that way.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Let me just jump in to say you're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. We have time for one quick call out now. Let's go to Jack in Nashville, Tennessee. Hi, Jack.
[Jack:] Hello. I think you're missing the problem altogether.
[Jennifer Ludden:] That's why we asked you.
[Jack:] � [unintelligible] more conservative is because the American public is under assault. We're heading towards 10 percent unemployment. We're facing seven million foreclosures seven million more houses in foreclosure. And what's going on? Wall Street, the same people who committed criminal fraud, are paying out the biggest bonuses, in some cases, they've ever paid out. And so the Democrats are the problem and the Republicans are the problem. And reason people are conservative is that they're afraid. We almost had a Great Depression and nothing is being done to remedy that situation. The exact same things that were going on before Lehman Brothers collapsed are going on right now.
[Jennifer Ludden:] All right. Jack, thank you very much for calling. Ron Elving, a lot of frustration and anger out there.
[Ron Elving:] Yes. And as I mentioned earlier, people are going to push back against whoever is in power. And as long as that anxiety remains, that pushback is going to get stronger.
[Jennifer Ludden:] Ron Elving is NPR's senior Washington editor. And we were also joined by Sophia Nelson, a political analyst and blogger for theroot.com and BET.

[From Pensions To Presidents:] After Barack Obama is sworn in next week, he and his family will spend their first night in the White House. But how, exactly, will the president-elect get all his belongings into his new home? Here's our senior producer Steve Proffitt with a Slate Explainer.
[Steve Proffitt:] Like most of us who relocate, the president-elect has to hire a moving company. He's personally responsible for getting his furniture, clothes and personal effects from Chicago to a White House storage facility in Maryland. The Secret Service provides an escort for the moving vehicles, and screens all the items before they enter the facility. But Obama has to cover the transportation costs, either with personal funds or with money raised for his campaign or his transition. The incoming president's stuff is then transferred to the White House grounds, ready to be unpacked in a whirlwind of activity on Inauguration Day. The move starts at 10:30 in the morning. That's when the sitting president and the first lady have a traditional tea with the president-elect before heading over to Capitol Hill for the swearing in. Once they leave, the 93-person staff shifts into hyper-drive. Operations personnel has only six hours to move the furniture and unpack the boxes while the housekeeping staff prepares the bedrooms. And just to make it interesting, in that same six hours, the same staff is moving the ex-president out. The Bushes' belongings are loaded into vans, and then transferred to military cargo planes that carry everything to the now former president's new residence in Dallas. With only two elevators in the official residence, choreography is critical. Our advice to both the incoming and outgoing presidents? Slip a toothbrush in your pocket.
[Alex Cohen:] That Explainer, read by NPR's Steve Proffitt and compiled by Slate's Christopher Beam. And now a little reminder: We've been asking you, our listeners, about plans for the inauguration. What are your plans? Are you going to Washington, D.C.? Are you skipping work or school and staying home to watch? Write in and let us know. Go to our Web site, it's npr.org, and click on Contact Us. Stay with us on Day to Day from NPR News.

[Neal Conan:] And now, the Opinion Page. Thank you and goodbye, the words on the final front page of the most widely read newspaper in the English language. Britain's Sunday tabloid News of the World died yesterday after 168 years, a victim of self-inflicted wounds. A slow developing scandal finally reached critical mass last week and James Murdoch, the son of News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch, shut the newspaper down. It turns out that people hired by the paper hacked into the cell phones of celebrities, newsmakers, a young murder victim and British soldiers killed in Afghanistan. But how far is too far for an exclusive? In a piece on the op-ed page of The Washington Post, Howard Kurtz argues that American news outlets are not immune to tabloid tactics. We want to hear from those of you who read the tabloid press. What keeps you interested? Our phone number is 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION. Howard Kurtz joins us now on the phone. He's the Washington bureau chief of Newsweek and The Daily Beast. You can read his opinion piece on our website. Howard Kurtz, nice to have you on the program again.
[Howard Kurtz:] Thanks very much, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] And you wrote: The illegal phone hacking is just an extreme example of a news business that increasingly pushes the ethical envelope. How so?
[Howard Kurtz:] Well, I just detect a lot of clucking among the Americans about those crazy Brits and the things that they do with the tabloids in London. And by the way, your listeners probably know this scandal just got a lot whole worse with the revelation that another Murdoch tabloid in London, The Sun, apparently accessed medical records, legal records and other confidential information from former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. So this is now more than just a News of the World story. But, you know, having covered the media beat for many years, you know, I have seen all kinds of unethical or questionable behavior by American outlets. And even in the phone hacking area, News of the World was not the first to get there. The Cincinnati Enquirer, as I write, had to pay $10 million and publish a front page apology to Chiquita after illegally and improperly accessing some voicemail messages from that company.
[Neal Conan:] That was some years ago when $10 million was still $10 million.
[Howard Kurtz:] That's right, a lot of money in 1998.
[Neal Conan:] And as you point out well, for example, the John Edwards case was made public prominently by the National Enquirer, one of our own domestic scandal sheets, which paid for its sources but, nevertheless, broke a huge story.
[Howard Kurtz:] Yeah. That's probably an example of, you know, good reporting by a tabloid. Although, personally, I am not in favor of and don't think that mainstream organizations should pay sources of information in doing reporting. You know, everything that the Enquirer reported about John Edwards, which he had denied he denied the affair, he denied the child was his all turned out to be right as we now know. But, you know, this paying for information is not just the province, the exclusive province of the National Enquirers of the world. The television networks all do the same thing. Now, of course, they will deny it, Neal. They will say, no, we would never pay for information. We pay for photos. We pay for videos. You know, that's why you had ABC paying $200,000 to Casey Anthony a couple of years back, it was about a month before she was indicted for the murder of her daughter. Of course, she acquitted last week in a very controversial verdict. But, you know, it's basically just a way around the prohibition by saying, we're not paying the source potentially for an interview. We are buying photos.
[Neal Conan:] And this can blow up in people's faces too. As you pointed out in the piece, a large payment offered to a woman who was injecting her child with Botox until the story turned out to be a hoax.
[Howard Kurtz:] Yes, but only after she went on "Good Morning America" and told a pretty large American audience about this alleged Botox Botoxing of her young daughter.
[Neal Conan:] I had not heard that used as a verb before.
[Howard Kurtz:] Well, there's always a first.
[Neal Conan:] There's always a first time. The competition for the juicy story, is this the by-product of a, well, one media outlet wants to get ahead of the other? If you're TMZ, you want to beat everybody else. Or is this something that we should all bear some responsibility for?
[Howard Kurtz:] Well, you know, there's always been competition going back to the early days of newspapers, so I don't think that lets any of us in the news business off the hook. And I do think the public plays a role here. And one of the points I tried to make in this Washington Post piece, Neal, is that when News of the World conducted that sting against Sarah Ferguson where one of the reporters famously impersonated a fake sheikh and there was a hidden camera video and, of course, you know, she was appeared to be selling access to her ex-husband, Prince Andrew, you know, I wrote about it at the time and said, this is an outrageous example of lying and deception. Certainly, it didn't make Fergie look good, but nor did I think it made The News of the World look good. I don't think there were three people in America or even in Britain that particularly cared about the lying and deception involved. It was all, you know, let's have a good laugh at how far Fergie has fallen. I think what made this scandal different and what prompted Murdoch to close News of the World yesterday and has now given rise to all kinds of outrage in Britain and investigations that are going to be a headache for the Murdoch empire for some time to come is that suddenly it was no longer celebrities or a couple of rich athletes who are having their phones hacked by News of the World, either journalists or private investigators. Suddenly, it was ordinary people, ordinary blue-collar readers who's who had been victims of the 2005 London terror bombing, or whose sons had died in Iraq or Afghanistan, or famously or infamously I should say in one case hacking into the phone of a 13-year-old girl who was missing, later found murdered. That hits some kind of nerve in Britain, whereas before it was just kind of seen as, you know, tabloids going a little over the top. And now, I would say, you know, there's no when you have the prime minister, David Cameron, giving a speech and addressing his own relationships with people in the Murdoch empire and those of other politicians, there's no other story in Britain right now. It is a huge scandal.
[Neal Conan:] And we want to hear from those of you who read the tabloid press. What keeps you interested? 800-989-8255. Email: talk@npr.org. And we're going to get to that in just a minute. But there are some news aspects to this, Howard Kurtz, that we do need to address. As you say, there had been considerable speculation in Britain that upon closure of News of the World, the other tabloid owned by the Murdoch empire, The Sun, would start publishing its Sunday edition not so very far down the road. Again, that's thrown into question now about these new allegations.
[Howard Kurtz:] Yeah. You know, it was kind of a shrewd bit of damage control on Rupert Murdoch's part to close the paper because it had become such a toxic symbol of corrupt journalism. That what better thing to do other than unless you have to be one of the 280 people who work there than to just make it go away as a brand and then say, you know, you're moving on. But if this scandal now spreads to The Sun and perhaps other parts of the Murdoch empire, that's going to be a significant problem for him, perhaps here in the U.S. as well. And in pointing out that the networks pay for, you know, family photos of the people in trouble, ABC also bought those some pictures from one of the women who was involved in the texting with former Congressman Anthony Weiner. And in pointing out some of the plagiarism and fabrication scandals in American media outlets, I'm not trying to say that any of that is in the category of what happened to News of the World. I say News of the World is an extreme example. But it is a slippery slope. And as we as our culture turns more and more tabloid, as even once respectable organizations at least online now publish all kinds of stuff because it appeared at Radar or TMZ, et cetera, you know, I just think now the culture of American journalism is changing as well and not necessarily what I would consider a good direction.
[Neal Conan:] And the other aspect of this that may have some significance down the road, the Murdoch effort to finish up buying the remainder, which it did not already have, of the British pay-TV broadcaster BSkyB looked like that was going ahead until last week. And now, looks like that's severely on hold.
[Howard Kurtz:] And I think that is a major part of the motivation for Murdoch deciding to close the tabloid is that he did, you know, did not want to jeopardize this $12 billion takeover of British Sky Broadcasting, which he wants to make a little bit more like Fox News. And, you know, it already had been controversial, but it was only supposed to be considered strictly on competitive grounds with that acquisition put too much influence in the hands of one man, one company in Britain. Now, of course, it becomes a huge political football. It's already been slowed down by the British government. It's hard to see that getting the green light from British authorities anytime soon.
[Neal Conan:] If you read the tabloid press, what do you get out of it? 800-989-8255. Email: talk@npr.org. Layton is on the line, calling us from DeBary in Florida.
[Layton:] Thanks for taking my call.
[Neal Conan:] Sure. Go ahead, please.
[Layton:] I got hooked on tabloids back in the late '80s when I lived in London. And I used to go to cocktail parties, and people would mention things about Prince Charles and his unfaithfulness to Lady Diana. I started reading The Sun, also watched other tabloids there. Then, when I came back to the States, I began to realize that tabloids were always ahead of the curve. And what would be showing up in The New York Times three and four years down the road had appeared in my local supermarket about three years before. And I started seeing it as sort of a gossipy, but at the same time someway factual way of seeing what was going on behind the scene.
[Howard Kurtz:] Well, tabloids can be ahead of the curve, but a lot tabloid stories don't pan out. I mean, look, I enjoy tabloids. They're very entertaining. I lived in New York, and still, today, I like reading the New York Post, also of course owned by Rupert Murdoch. But the New York Post, a couple of weeks ago, just to take one example, ran an incredibly thinly-sourced story in the DSK case, the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case, accusing the maid, the accuser, who major news organizations have not named, of being a hooker on the side. Now, I don't know if that's true. If that turns out to be true, it ends up in The New York Times, then your point will be proven. But I don't think that the New York Post proved that story, so, yes, it's great titillation, great gossip, sometimes ahead of mainstream news organizations, but sometimes the stories simply don't pan out.
[Neal Conan:] We may find out if it's true with the libel trial, charges brought but, I'm sorry, Layton, you were going to say?
[Layton:] Well, no, I just think the classic story for me was that Prince Charles was doing everything to undermine Princess Diana. And you would go and talk to people that were sort of in their circles, and you would find out little things and then it would turn up in the tabloids, but you never heard that in the mainstream press. I don't think The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Times ever mentioned anything until the deed was already done.
[Neal Conan:] Sunday Times, also as it happens, owned by Rupert Murdoch...
[Howard Kurtz:] Yes, indeed.
[Neal Conan:] ...but different kind of newspaper.
[Layton:] That's right.
[Neal Conan:] Layton, thanks very much for the phone call. Appreciate it.
[Layton:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Bye-bye. We're talking with Howard Kurtz, who is, among other things, the host of CNN's "Reliable Sources," about his piece that ran in the op-ed page of his former newspaper, The Washington Post. He is the Washington bureau chief of Newsweek and The Daily Beast. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And let's go next to this is Jay, and Jay is on the line from San Francisco.
[Jay:] Hi. I'm actually a reader of The Sun and The News of the World, and I read it primarily for the sports coverage, especially for the English Premier League and for the cricket. [Unintelligible] in various papers, like the red tops, including the [unintelligible] really cover sports really well in the U.K. So isn't The News of the World a loss now getting replaced by The Sun on Sunday, or a Sunday Sun in a couple of month's time, and everyone will move on?
[Neal Conan:] But you read them online now?
[Jay:] Yeah.
[Neal Conan:] And it's the same kind of thing. I mean, their character is no different online than it is in print?
[Jay:] I'm [unintelligible] have the print copies since living in the U.S. for 13 years [unintelligible] them online.
[Neal Conan:] A little hard to compare. But for the sports coverage and I have to say, I'm a fan of the New York a lot of New York area professional sports teams, and I read the New York Post and The Daily News for the same reason.
[Jay:] Yeah. I mean, if you want to know what's going on for your sports coverage, it's either for the U.K. or even for European sports, you really have to read, you know, a British newspaper or the BBC website or watch a Fox soccer network, which is also owned by Murdoch. But in my view, there's more going on behind this than just the scandal with the newspapers. It really is about future media, and I think which is what Murdoch is looking at, hence why he wants to get his deal done to acquire the assets of BSkyB.
[Neal Conan:] All right. Thanks very much for the call, Jay. Appreciate it.
[Jay:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] And, Howard Kurtz, I think there was one wag who once said that after the first six pages, things in the New York Post are not necessarily untrue.
[Howard Kurtz:] Right. You know, a lot of people in New York, and I when I was very young delivered the New York Post, you know, read it from the back because that's where this [unintelligible] section starts. But, you know, the interesting one of the interesting things here, Neal, that also has a parallel for those of us in the States is the cozy and sometimes symbiotic relationship between the Murdoch papers in Britain and politicians. You know, I've mentioned earlier Prime Minister Cameron, he's a friend of Rebekah Brooks, who's the former editor of The News of the World and now runs the British division of Murdoch's News Corps. He, of course, hired I should say Prime Minister Cameron hired the former editor of The News of the World Andy Coulson, who was arrested on Friday in the same scandal. And, you know, I've watched the New York Post, and, you know, Murdoch is famous for making his views felt within his news organizations. He's certainly a hands-on activist owner. I've watched New York Post go after the Clintons relentlessly. And then, when Hillary Clinton ran for the Senate in 2000, there was sort of rapprochement and the coverage toward Hillary turned more positive. Both Tony Blair and David Cameron sought and received the endorsement of Murdoch papers in Britain. So one of the reasons that politicians have been reluctant on both sides of the Atlantic to cross Murdoch is because his the support of his papers can be very valuable. And The New York Times had a great piece yesterday about a couple of British critics of the Murdoch empire who then found themselves the object of relentless unflattering coverage. So it can be risky to take on one of those Murdoch properties.
[Neal Conan:] As another critic also mentioned some years ago, the Murdoch papers do not endorse, they campaign.
[Howard Kurtz:] They don't have to endorse.
[Neal Conan:] Let's go next to this is Mustafa, Mustafa with us from Berkeley.
[Mustafa:] Hi. I just want to add one comment. Given that I read both the American tabloids and the European tabloids, I think that the liability of what they put there, the Europeans have tabloids [unintelligible] inform in way. While here, I find them a little bit like most of a political party of another one by making things up. And this is what the regulations for, like, The New York Times, if you do something, they're more liable of what they put there. With tabloids here, they can say that this congressman or this senator or something they can make a lie about it, and they can cause a lot of harm for the person just to serve the other party.
[Neal Conan:] OK.
[Mustafa:] While in Europe, they cannot do that. There is a huge liability, and the case in point what just happened in England. That's my point.
[Neal Conan:] OK. Mustafa's point, at least in part, Howard Kurtz, is the libels laws in Britain are very different from those here.
[Howard Kurtz:] They are much stricter and they cause the papers there or any media property there to be much more cautious about what they say, particularly about public figures. Whereas, it's much more difficult to bring a successful libel suit even if the facts are wrong against a public figure in the Untied States of America. And yet, despite that, you know, the London tabloids seem to play much more fast and loose and be racier in terms of what they publish. But they are careful when it comes to the famous people because of those very strict libel laws.
[Neal Conan:] Howard Kurtz, thanks very much for your time today.
[Howard Kurtz:] Good to talk to you.
[Neal Conan:] Howard Kurtz is Washington bureau chief of Newsweek and The Daily Beast. You can find a link to his opinion piece on our website. Go to npr.org, click on TALK OF THE NATION. Tomorrow, when gay marriage passed in New York state, supporters called that just the beginning. Opponents say that when states put it on the ballot, voters reject gay marriage every single time. We'll talk about the tactics of gay marriage state-by-state next TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan, NPR News in Washington.

[Renee Montagne:] Google has taken another step towards its goal of organizing the world's information. The giant search engine is inviting users to send information of all kinds to a new database. NPR's Scott Horsley reports.
[Scott Horsley Reporting:] Type `Mama Stamberg's cranberry relish'into the Google search engine and you'll get more than 2,000 listings. But search for my mom's pumpkin pie recipe, and you'll come up empty. There's lots of information that Google cannot search, yet, especially if it's not on a Web site. The new service Google Base hopes to change that. Users can upload their own information, including recipes, address books and classified ads.
[Mr. Danny Sullivan:] Anybody who had a classified ad probably would want the traffic from Google coming to them.
[Horsley:] Editor Danny Sullivan of the trade journal Search Engine Watch, says users might find a classified ad through Google they'd never find in a newspaper. That's why CareerBuilder.com, for example, is feeding its job listings into the Google Base. The risk down the line is that Google could decide to cut out the middleman and solicit its own classified ads. Sullivan says the search engine is so popular and so profitable, it can rattle whole industries almost by accident.
[Mr. Danny Sullivan:] Google is doing things very much in the way that Microsoft did things with Windows, where products you used to pay for, they give away for free. Google is improving things for their customers but they're basically giving away a product that they're underwriting through ads that these other players don't have the ability to do it.
[Horsley:] People and businesses who have information have to decide whether it's better to play along with Google, an answer that Sullivan and others are still searching for. Scott Horsley, NPR News.
[Renee Montagne:] This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.
[Steve Inskeep:] And I'm Steve Inskeep.

[Linda Wertheimer:] It's WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Linda Wertheimer. This has been a momentous week in Egypt. On Monday, the Egyptian army warned the country's first freely elected president, Mohamed Morsi, that if he did not resolve differences with the millions in the street protesting his government, he would be removed. On Wednesday, the army made good on that threat. Morsi was arrested and the army installed a judge as interim president. And yesterday, supporters of now-former President Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood turned out in force to call for Morsi's return to power. This morning, Egypt is cleaning up from clashes overnight between pro- and anti-Morsi demonstrators, clashes that killed at least 30 people. Joining me from Cairo are NPR's Leila Fadel and Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson. I wonder if the two of you could tell us more about what happened overnight. Soraya?
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] Well, there were mass clashes that were going on this divided Egypt that we're seeing really played out on the streets. At the same time, we saw the arrest of Khairat el-Shater, who was actually or he is a very senior leader in the Muslim Brotherhood from which, of course, President Morsi hails. Along with that, the new interim president appointed a new intelligence chief and also dissolved the upper house of parliament, which, of course is dominated by Islamists.
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] Also, if I could just add to that this is Leila the Muslim Brotherhood yesterday declared an open sit-in. They said they will not leave the streets until this president comes back. And so it became very clear yesterday that this will not end overnight, that this is something that the Muslim Brotherhood and their supporters and the supporters of the president are going to stay in the streets for, and even as their leadership has said sacrifice their lives for.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Now, both of you you were in different locations throughout the day. Leila, you were with the Morsi supporters, the deposed president, and Soraya, you were with those who supported the military coup. I assume those two gatherings were different.
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] Yes. I was with, as you mentioned, the supporters of the president, supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, and they said that they really feel that in this case the army, which is supposed to serve all of Egypt, has chosen sides among the people, has chosen the side of those who oppose Morsi. Of course, in that space, nobody mentioned the many missteps that the president took. They just said legitimately the only president of Egypt is the president that was elected fairly and freely and should stay in power.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Soraya?
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] Well, we saw actually Tahrir Square, which, of course, has been the epicenter of these demonstrations and expressions of outrage, was actually at its emptiest. We don't see that many anti-Morsi supporters out there, although those who were there were quite angry and chanting against the Muslim Brotherhood.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Leila, you mentioned the concerns about mistakes that Morsi had made, things that Morsi had done that brought all these people into the street. Could you just give us a quick review of what went wrong for President Morsi?
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] Right. In order to be elected as president, of course, he reached out to a much larger base than just the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood from which he hails. And over the past year, he really stripped off any support outside that core base of Muslim Brotherhood supporters. And he did that by supporting repressive laws that were being discussed to pass. And every time people rejected this type of leadership, the Muslim Brotherhood, this president, they would say, well, he was elected so he's allowed to do this four years, and people became frustrated. And so really it was such a shock on June 30th to see millions of people, actually more people than we saw in January 2011, come down to the streets against him.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Do you have a sense that there were people out there calling for Morsi's ouster who were his supporters originally? Do you think there are many people who changed their minds and turned against him?
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] We did speak to some people who voted for him, who believed in him and then decided, you know, this is not a president they want anymore. This is a president that has really polarized the nation, has not been able to speak beyond his base to all Egyptians. The biggest complaint about the president from people who oppose him now is that he was not the president of all of Egypt. He was only looking out to that small base of the Muslim Brotherhood. And in his final days, that rhetoric that was aimed more at the political Islamists grew. And he spoke at a rally where radical clerics were speaking with sectarian language that were talking about holy war. And that, according to a lot of analysts we've spoken to and a lot of people in the street, really scared Egyptians.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Soraya, let me ask you this. Egypt has an interim president now. He's appointed some people, he's beginning to form a government, parliament has been dissolved. Who's in charge? What comes next? Do you have any idea?
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] Well, at this stage, there's been a promise of a new technocratic government, of early elections and that, you know, there's no date set for any of that. And it's really important to note that the winners of what's been happening the last few days are not necessarily the Egyptian people, certainly not the youth that led to this groundswell that went out and actually were able to topple a sitting president. The winners are, in one sense, the deposed president, who's now being portrayed as a martyr. I mean, he's a winner on one side and the other side is the military, which all their sins of the past you know, the violence against other protesters in the past you know, they get a clean slate for that. And so it seems that there's still a long way to go before this democracy is actually going to be a functioning democracy the way we understand it.
[Linda Wertheimer:] That was NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, joined by Leila Fadel from Cairo. Thank you both for your reporting and thank you for this morning.
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] Thank you.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] Thanks.

[Robert Siegel:] Apple's new mapping software for the iPhone has become an embarrassment for the company. It misplaced major landmarks and erased entire towns. So, today, Apple's CEO Tim Cook issued a public apology, saying the company was doing everything it could to make maps better. NPR's Steve Henn reports.
[Steve Henn, Byline:] The last time there was a big brouhaha in the tech press about a problem with an Apple product, Steve Jobs cut short his family vacation in Hawaii, flew back to Cupertino, California and called a press conference. When reporters walked into the room they were greeted with this video.
[Unidentified Man:] [singing] Let's all sing this song. It goes like this if you don't want an iPhone 4, don't buy it. If you bought one and you don't like it, bring it back.
[Steve Henn, Byline:] The problem with the iPhone 4 was if you held it the wrong way, the antenna stopped working and it would drop your call. But the most interesting thing about that press conference was watching Steve Jobs use the force of his personality to beat surly reporters back into line. Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs.
[Merrie Spaeth:] Tim Cook has got to be his own person, he's got to have his own style.
[Steve Henn, Byline:] Merrie Spaeth is an expert in crisis communications.
[Merrie Spaeth:] He would be a complete flop if he tried to emulate in any way the persona that Steve Jobs had.
[Steve Henn, Byline:] And Spaeth says Cook's apology for the Apple Maps debacle, which he posted on Apple's website, wasn't bad.
[Merrie Spaeth:] I think the apology strikes the right note. I'd give it good marks for that. The issue now is how do they fix it.
[Steve Henn, Byline:] To be fair, when Apple had its antennae issues, the fix was relatively simple you could slap on a case. Michael Gartenberg at Gartner Research says fixing Maps may take some more time.
[Michael Gartenberg:] Software inherently gets better over time. No software is ever shipped complete. No software ever ships bug free.
[Steve Henn, Byline:] And because the amount of information in a global mapping program is so immense, even if Apple's programmers are 99.9 percent perfect, they could still end up with tens of thousands of mistakes to clean up. Steve Henn, NPR News, Silicon Valley.

[Farai Chideya:] It's Friday, and time once again for sports with the intrepid William C. Rhoden, sports columnist for The New York Times. He spoke with NPR's Tony Cox about the wild week in college and professional football.
[Tony Cox:] What a week for college football; there's a game on every night. So let's start with Notre Dame, Wednesday night's game. Nine bowl games, nine losses. How do the Irish keep getting into the post season?
[Mr. William Rhoden:] Well, you know, I mean, because, you know, as they say, they travel well. You know, they sell tickets. They've got this brand. But it's getting ridiculous, man. I mean, really. And we've spent all the week talking always is Charlie Weis going to come to Norte Dame I mean to the New York Giants and he's Parcells' disciple. I mean, even throughout the game, well, you know, Belichick and all this kind of stuff. And I said you know what, I hope they lose 62 to nothing. It was close.
[Tony Cox:] It was close to that. Now the other thing the other story line, obviously, out of that game was Brady Quinn. Runner up for the Heisman and presumed by some to be the number one pick going into the NFL Draft in the spring where the Raiders are at the top of the list. But we was outplayed last night by the quarterback for LSU.
[Mr. William Rhoden:] If Brady Quinn is the number one draft choice, where is the brother from LSU? Is he like, yeah, is he like number one-A? It was just a stunning mismatch. I mean remember last year at the championship game we saw Vince Young and Matt Leinart duel. And clearly Young came out of the thing ahead, but it was kind of even. I mean, like maybe you say Young was like maybe just a head above. But this was just so such a dramatic difference. You probably could have seen the game go on for another seven hours.
[Tony Cox:] That's true. And let me ask you about the another game earlier in the week. Because obviously USC and Michigan and there are some talking about USC now being the presumed pre-season favorite number one for next year were you surprised by that game that the Trojans handled Michigan in the way that they did?
[Mr. William Rhoden:] Not really. You know, but you'll never know about these games. USC is pretty good and there were always questions about Michigan's defensive secondary. And Dwayne Jarrett is just an outstanding wide receiver. I was not surprised by that. What I was stunned by was Boise State and Oklahoma.
[Tony Cox:] I was coming to that. Because that was the game of the week, wasn't it?
[Mr. William Rhoden:] Man, that might be the game of the year. I mean that was, you know, we talk about the glut of games and that sort of stuff, and here you watch a game like this. But, you know, that was an important game for all the mid-majors, you know, because Boise State and a lot of schools they represent had been locked out. You know, the big boys the Oklahomas, the Norte Dames, the Michigans you know, had their own private party. And Boise State, I think that we'll look back and when there are finally is a playoff in college football, we'll look at that game as the shot that was heard around the world.
[Tony Cox:] Yes. But at the same time, though, Bill Rhoden, even though Boise State had an impressive win over Oklahoma and they're 13 and 0, people are still going to say wink, wink. You know, they cannot be considered for the national championship.
[Mr. William Rhoden:] Well, I mean what do they have to do? They're 13 and 0, they handled Oklahoma. I mean the game shouldn't have been that close. You know, now you can say well, there are seniors but I just think it cries out for a tournament, you know.
[Tony Cox:] Well, maybe you're right. But now is this too much college football?
[Mr. William Rhoden:] Yes. I mean it's coming out of my ears, Tony. You know, I mean it's too because the games don't really mean there's one game that mean something.
[Tony Cox:] You're talking about the national championship game.
[Mr. William Rhoden:] That's the game we're going to watch Monday.
[Tony Cox:] Right. Ohio State...
[Mr. William Rhoden:] It's Ohio State and Florida.
[Tony Cox:] ...and Florida.
[Mr. William Rhoden:] That's the only game that means anything in college football until they get a tournament. You know, and I think that Florida is going to win.
[Tony Cox:] All right. Well we'll have to wait and see how that comes about because it won't be long. In the meantime, let's talk about the NFL. There have been some things in the news this week. Well, I guess we'll have to start in South Florida with Nick Saban kicking the Miami Dolphins to the curb to go to Tuscaloosa to take over the head-coaching job at Alabama.
[Mr. William Rhoden:] And everybody, you know, Tony, everybody is giving this guy grief and he is dishonest and all that. You know, I got to say, man, that this is a system under which we are free. This is a free enterprise system. You know, Saban is getting a ton of money to coach at Alabama.
[Tony Cox:] Is it $32 million?
[Mr. William Rhoden:] Yes, tons of money. And they felt that he was worth it. Of course, the reason he gets so much is because they don't pay the players, but that's another show.
[Tony Cox:] OK. That's true. That's true.
[Mr. William Rhoden:] But I don't really have a problem with that, Tony. I mean I've got a bigger problem, in fact: That no once again, no African-American coaches have been mentioned at all in this conversation. But the fact that he is leaving Miami to go there I mean because listen, if you lose again, if he lost again in Miami, they'd have no problem at all with firing him.
[Tony Cox:] Let's skip the script a little bit and talk about college coaches who may be considering going into the NFL where there are now openings already in Arizona, for example, in Atlanta, for example. And Pete Carroll keeps popping up and his boy, Matt Leinart, is the quarterback at Arizona. So what's the story there?
[Mr. William Rhoden:] Well, this is what I think. College coaches, whether it's in the college ranks going to the NBA or college coaches do not do well in the pros; they just don't. It's been proven time and time again.
[Tony Cox:] Well, Pete Carroll was OK as a pro-coach.
[Mr. William Rhoden:] Yeah. He wasn't what he is now. Trust me.
[Tony Cox:] Well no, that's true.
[Mr. William Rhoden:] And he will not be. I think Pete's got a nice situation in Los Angeles. He should just stay there, have a nice time, you know. What did Booker T. Washington, pass down your buckets...
[Tony Cox:] And stay where you are.
[Mr. William Rhoden:] ...and stay where you are.
[Tony Cox:] Finally thing, Pittsburgh. Cowher, the coach, has been given just a few days to give up the information one way or the other if he is going to retire or stick around. What do you think is going to happen?
[Mr. William Rhoden:] I think he is gone. And the general consensus is that he is gone. And he'll probably, you know, be [unintelligible] in North Carolina. And we'll probably see him coaching somewhere end of the year. It could be in college, you know. It could be at North Carolina State. You know, but I think he's gone, and that it is going to be very intriguing. What are they going to do now? It's a model franchise of stability. So, you know, what's very interesting, Tony, is that the Rooney Rule which mandates that NFL teams do a wide search, including minority candidates, it's going to be very interesting to see if they practice what they preach and actually hire a minority candidate.
[Tony Cox:] To replace Bill Cowher in Pittsburgh.
[Mr. William Rhoden:] To replace Bill Cowher.
[Tony Cox:] Thank you, Bill.
[Mr. William Rhoden:] Hey, Tony, it's always my pleasure.
[Farai Chideya:] William C. Rhoden is an author and sports columnist for The New York Times. He spoke with NPR's Tony Cox.

[Neal Conan:] And now, the Opinion Page. Despite the arrival of some U.N. monitors, the news from Syria continues to be grim. Today, news of deadly explosions at two intelligence facilities, the government blames on suicide bombers. Elsewhere, the brutal crackdown that's killed so many continues. In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Fouad Ajami argued the United States has abdicated its responsibility in Syria and for its people. Suspicions that the U.S. doesn't really want to see the fall of the Assad regime have taken hold in the region, he wrote, and there's enough outrage and resources in the region to bring down the regime in Damascus if and when an American decision to do so is made. But he added: Everyone is waiting on Washington's green light and its leadership. So should the U.S. take the lead in Syria? 800-989-8255. Email: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and joins us now on the phone from his home in New York. Nice to talk with you again.
[Fouad Ajami:] Thank you very much, Neal. Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] I should clarify: You're not calling for an American invasion in fact, no U.S. troops on the ground at all but to establish a no-fly, no-drive zone on the border with Turkey. How would that change things?
[Fouad Ajami:] Absolutely. I think it's the Obama administration has been very, very successful in depicting the choice in Syria as either boots-on-the-ground or total abdication. No one in the region, not even the Syrians I met with, not even the Syrians I met with in the refugee camps because I went to the Syria-Turkey border and went to the refugee camps and was treated to tales of grief and tales of loss. Not even these people are calling for American intervention. What everyone is calling for is American leadership and American commitment. And that zone, if you will, the a corridor in a humanitarian zone on the Syria-Turkey border to which the defectors could come, a no-fly, no-drive zone would completely alter the terms of power between the regime and its opponents.
[Neal Conan:] It would provide, presumably, the opponents a place to organize and train and develop the kind of leadership that evolved in Libya.
[Fouad Ajami:] Well, exactly. I mean, we keep saying that, you know, this has become the mantra in Washington, where they keep saying Syria is not Libya. Well, even Libya, at the time, was not Libya, if you will. And we keep saying that Homs is not Benghazi. But, in fact, what we know about Libya, the death squads, Moammar Gadhafi was on his way to Benghazi to liquidate the revolution. And it was only American and French and British intervention that rescued the Libyans and gave them a chance. The same is needed for the Syrians, and even more so, because Syria, if anything, is much more strategic than Libya. And the spillover effects in the region from the bloodbath in Syria, the sectarian spillover, if you will, into Turkey, into Lebanon, into Jordan is enormous.
[Neal Conan:] The humanitarian corridor, as you call it, a safe haven for people fleeing the regime, this would have to be protected by military force.
[Fouad Ajami:] Absolutely. And we have to secure that no-fly, no-drive zone. We should be under no illusions about this. But, again, as people who know this very well when I was in Antakya, by the way, on the Syria-Turkey border, I saw Senator McCain and Senator Lieberman arrived. They literally were on the same flight from Istanbul. And someone like Senator McCain, who knows this very well, he basically concedes that some armed power has to be used to secure that no-fly, no-drive zone. But it could be done with ease. We actually ended up making the Syrian army into this mighty army, and we've made the Syrian air force into a mighty instrument. And we basically say that the Syrian skies cannot be violated. And we can't enforce that no-fly zone, but we can with great ease. What's missing is the will. That's what the Turks will tell you. That's what the Arabs will tell you. And that's what the Syrian leaders in Istanbul will reiterate to you anytime.
[Neal Conan:] Why don't the Turks do it? Their government has been rebuffed, lied to.
[Fouad Ajami:] Yes.
[Neal Conan:] They are harboring the Syrian National Free Syrian Army. Why don't they do it?
[Fouad Ajami:] You know, Neal, that's a very good question. I think they can do it, but they won't do it. This is the world in which we live. It's used to American power and American leadership. This was the same question that was asked 20 years ago when the Bosnians were being slaughtered like sheep. People said, what about Europe? This is Europe's backyard. You know, they didn't do it. They waited for Richard Holbrooke to convince Bill Clinton to go into the Bosnia horror. Why didn't the Europeans take the lead on Kosovo four years later? They didn't. Again, took American leadership. Why didn't the Europeans take on the Taliban? Again, they didn't. We do live in this world where American moral and strategic leadership is essential. And even in Libya where the French and the British took the lead, in the end, in the end American power and American ammunitions and American intelligence had to do the rest of the job.
[Neal Conan:] And it did take quite awhile, first, to take down the air defense system and then to, well, enforce effectively become the air force of the rebels. Is that what you're calling for here?
[Fouad Ajami:] Well, I think that's about right, and I think we have to be very clear about this. Again, if we go back to this you know, at the to these seminal interventions, in Bosnia, again, we did the work, and Kosovo, again, we did the work. And in Libya, the heavy lifting at the end of the day, after the British and the French started this, all this had to be done by the United States. There is some American there is some burden for responsibility. This is the price that comes with leadership in the world of nations. The other day, at the Holocaust Museum, President Obama talked about establishing what you call an Atrocity Prevention Board. That was really pathetic. It was such an escape of moral responsibility, as though slaughters and massacres are like the storms, we can anticipate them and we can have a weather center that would tell us that they're coming. We don't need an Atrocity Prevention Board. We need a recognition that Bashar al-Assad is slaughtering civilians, that Bashar al-Assad is burying is his opponents alive, that Bashar al-Assad is a liar and a murderer and that this regime is making a mockery out of the United Nations' monitors. And there was one placard which summed it all in Syria, which said: The butcher kills, the observers observe, and the people go on with the revolution. There is no substitute for American leadership. This journey to the U.N. and this dispatching of these U.N. monitors is completely for naught. One other thing we'll get some callers in on the conversation and that is that this would almost certainly have to be done without the sanction of the United Nations Security Council. Russia and China have vetoed any effort to, well, actions considerably short of establishing a no-fly zone. Absolutely. And we can again, we have to be very clear and very honest about this, and our secretary of state could consult with her husband, former President Bill Clinton. In Bosnia, he never went to the United Nations. In Kosovo, he never went to the United Nations. You go to the United Nations Security Council when you don't want the job done. You go there in the full knowledge that you're going to meet a Russian veto and a Chinese veto. Any model U.N. team and any American high school would tell you that if we're going to the United Nations Security Council, we're going to be rebuffed.
[Neal Conan:] Let's get some callers in on the conversation, and we'll start with Farkish, and Farkish is with us from Houston.
[Farkish:] Yes, please. I don't know, with all the powers that the United States has, there is one power that U.N. cannot limit and that's the purchasing power. If the U.S. brings one-sided sanctions against Syria and ban any country, any company dealing with Syria the same way we are doing it against the Iranians very successfully, I might add if you bring sanctions against Syria, that government will collapse in matter of days. Why don't we bring sanctions against Syria? There is no requirement for the United Nations to for the Security Council to approve that kind of [unintelligible]. There is no limit on U.S. power on purchases, on putting ban on any trade with Syria.
[Neal Conan:] Well, to ban trade with Syria, that requires a blockade, which is an act of war. Fouad Ajami?
[Fouad Ajami:] Well, I appreciate the instinct, but let's remember, Syria is a closed economy in many ways and, basically, sanctions have been imposed on Syria in all the way that count. The Syrian economy right now is sanctioned out. The Syrians can't sell their oil. The Syrians had, you know, some not huge amounts of petroleum, but respectable amount of petroleum. That has been choked off. And the Syrian is the Syrian regiment is selling its gold reserve in the markets of Dubai. So there is economic pressure. There are sanctions being imposed on Syria, but I don't think the sanctions will do the job because this regime is very different. It doesn't really have major trade with the outside world. It's really about mass murder and about the power of the Assad family and the Assad dynasty.
[Neal Conan:] The Russians and the Venezuelans have sent vessels to provide refined products to Syria to Syrian ports. Would you block those ships? Well, absolutely, we have to do so. I mean, in fact, what's really interesting, what's depressing, Neal, about is this. The friends of Syria are either democracies and the Arab states and so on, seemed they seemed to function with their hand tied behind their backs. The friends of the Syrian regime, the Russians, the Iranians, Hezbollah, Hugo Chavez, they're all in. They're determined to rescue the Syrian regime because they understand what the stakes are. This is a fight between democracy and autocracy, between democracy and dictatorship, and they are determined to see this Bashar al-Assad regime survive. Here's an email from Dan: Absolutely not. America should not take the lead in that country to remove its dictator. It probably should not even take a supportive role if that means doing anything more than pressing for U.N. sanctions. The Arab world should use some of their money, stop hiding behind their religion and remove a man who's violated every humanitarian law on the planet. And you say that well, we know that some of the Arab states, the UAE and Qatar and Saudi Arabia have talked openly about providing arms to the opposition.
[Fouad Ajami:] Well, Neal, that's it. I mean, the Arabs are committed. They just don't have the capability and the willpower, and absent American leadership they're not going to take the lead. And there is one thing that the other day became obvious and became clear, and the State Department and the Defense Department, our State Department and Defense Department did not challenge it. We know for sure that the Libyans, that the Libyan rebels have crates of weapons they have wanted to supply to the Syrian rebellion, and the United States discouraged this. The United States, in fact, not only does it not arm the rebels, it also discourages others from arming them, and the excuse is we don't want to throw weapons into this tinderbox because it will increase the killing. This is, again, the logic we witness in the Balkans, in Bosnia two decades ago when we said we cannot send arms because this will turn this will worsen the killing fields. Well, this is kind of morally equivalence between the killer and the victim. The regime has all the weapons it needs to do the job, to do the killing job. It's the people, the civilians who have taken up arms to defend their homes, to defend their honor, to defend their liberty, who really are the ones who are who need the weapons.
[Neal Conan:] Fouad Ajami, on the Opinion Page this week. His op-ed, "America's Syria Abdication," appeared in The Wall Street Journal. There's a link to it on our website. Go to npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION, and you're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. This is Jim. Jim with us from Portland.
[Jim:] Yes. Hi. How are you doing?
[Neal Conan:] Good. Thanks.
[Jim:] Yeah. I'm originally from Syria, and I live in the U.S. now. And I'm not saying we should invade to take care of the regime, but we need to support the opposition because without support, the revolution will not succeed. And it's very simple really to do it. The best way to do it is to establish safe zones and along the border with Jordan and with Turkey, and the opposition, they need weapons to defend themselves. This regime will not hesitate to kill hundreds of thousands of people, and they are willing to do whatever it takes to stay in power. And it's really our moral obligation to help the people of Syria, and I'm speaking from experience. You guys have no idea how far this regime will go to stay in power. And the people of Syria now, they are determined to get rid of the regime, but it will be shame on us just to stand by and watch it happening because when the revolution succeeds, the people will remember who helped them and who did not help them.
[Neal Conan:] All right.
[Jim:] And I think that the situation is more complicated by the position of Syria geographically next to Israel because maybe the U.S. is afraid the whole region will be destabilized. I don't think to so. The whole region will not destabilized, and the people of Syria now they really want democracy.
[Neal Conan:] All right, Jim, thanks.
[Jim:] And this is a just one more thing. This is a golden chance. If we miss this chance, Iran and the regime in Syria will be much stronger, and we will lose Syria just like we lost Iraq to Iran. Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Jim, thanks very much for the call. And there are concerns, Fouad Ajami, that an open civil war in Syria will invite a larger regional conflict, perhaps along those sectarian lines you were talking about. It's the Alawite regime, an offshoot of Shia Islam backed by friends in Lebanon and Iran and, indeed, in Iraq too.
[Fouad Ajami:] Well, that is a big, big concern and, in fact, that is really the cautionary tale, if you will. That is the message to the Obama administration, to do more, to intervene, to spare the region the consequences of a deeper conflict. And basically, the people who speak against intervention are always speaking of the complicated borders of Syria. My plea for intervention is about precisely these borders because these borders are so sensitive because Syria has these amazing borders, the borders with Israel, with Lebanon, with Jordan, with Turkey and with Iraq is very important to, in many ways, come to the rescue of the Syrian population before the country is degraded and before the country is so radicalized.
[Neal Conan:] Let's see. We get one more caller in, and let's go to this is Dustin. Dustin with us from San Antonio.
[Dustin:] Hi. How are you today?
[Neal Conan:] Fine, thanks. I've just left you a few seconds. I apologize for that, Dustin.
[Dustin:] No, that's OK. I just wanted to say the gentleman referred to American morality. I think it's useful to think of American morality in terms of foreign intervention with what Chalmers Johnson referred to as the base world military hegemony. These euphemisms for war actions such as no-fly zone, sanctions, more obligation and interventions, really obfuscate the issue that America would be that they're calling for, you know, murderous intervention in yet another country. I think Americans probably had enough of that.
[Neal Conan:] All right, Dustin. Thanks very much for the phone call. And Fouad Ajami, thanks, as always, for your time.
[Fouad Ajami:] Thank you very much, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] Fouad Ajami is senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, with us from his home in New York. And again, there's a link to his op-ed in The Wall Street Journal at our website. Go to npr.org and click on TALK OF THE NATION. Tomorrow, the latest in a series of very public political crises in China. Rob Gifford of The Economist will join us. We hope you will, too. This is TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan, in Washington.

[Steve Inskeep:] And I'm Steve Inskeep.
[The Secretary General Of Nato Faces A Challenge:] coordinating an alliance of 28 countries, many of which are engaged in the war in Afghanistan. The secretary general visited President Obama yesterday. And on his way to the White House, Anders Fogh Rasmussen stopped by our studios. Here is a way that the strategic debate is understood by some outsiders. Tell me if this is correct. It's perceived that many of the NATO allies, when it comes to Afghanistan, want to get out a little faster and contribute less, whereas General David Petraeus, the new American commander, would like the NATO allies to take their time and contribute more. Is that a fair way to think of it?
[Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen:] No, I don't think it's a fair description. Actually, we have seen an increase in the number of troops during the last six, seven months. And we have seen an increase in the number of participants in the international alliance in Afghanistan.
[Steve Inskeep:] You mean the number of countries who are sending some troops? Sec. Gen. RASMUSSEN: Yeah. But obviously everybody would like to see conditions fulfilled so that our troops eventually can go home. Although this is one of the reasons that that perception arises. You were perceived as wanting this year, 2010, to have some portions of Afghanistan turned over to Afghan security forces, some province in the north and the northwest. It appears that General Petraeus is indicating while that might be nice, it's simply not possible. Sec. Gen. RASMUSSEN: Yeah, but I do believe that we can make an announcement at the NATO summit in November that a transition to lead Afghan responsibility is about to start. When exactly, in which month, I don't know. But I would expect a gradual transition process to start in 2011. And we have endorsed President Karzai's ambition that Afghan security forces should take lead responsibility all over Afghanistan by the end of 2014. You told us when you spoke to this program in February, earlier this year, that one of your goals was to send more NATO trainers to help Afghan forces be prepared to take over. Do you think that NATO has done enough? Sec. Gen. RASMUSSEN: Yes. We have really seen progress. We have increased the number of trainers. I also have to say that we will still need more. But we have seen progress. And actually, we are ahead of schedule when it comes to the buildup of Afghan security forces. We have set the goal to reach a level of 300,000 Afghan soldiers and police by October next year. And we're already now ahead of schedule. So our training mission has so far been a great success. Although not too many days ago on this program we heard from Lieutenant General William Caldwell, who's leading the training effort. And the quote from General Caldwell was: We're still not getting NATO to generate and deploy forces in the numbers that we need. Consequently the United States has been forced to send more trainers than they ever anticipated doing. Sec. Gen. RASMUSSEN: Yeah. And this is also a reason why we are now putting a lot of pressure on all allies and partners to provide resources for our training mission, because trainers are the tickets to transition. So it's correct that NATO has not sent enough trainers yet? Sec. Gen. RASMUSSEN: We have still some shortfalls. But as I told you, despite some shortfalls, we are ahead of schedule when it comes to the buildup of Afghan security forces. But there's no reason to hide that we need more trainers. Have you found occasions in which you think the United States and its allies may be working at cross-purposes in Afghanistan simply because it's so complicated? I'll give you an example of what I mean. We've had reporting in recent weeks of Americans working with and putting on the payroll Afghans who are friendly to the United States, who can provide information, who can provide force, who can be helpful, but are also believed to be corrupt. Is that sort of thing counterproductive? Sec. Gen. RASMUSSEN: Yes, indeed. I don't know about these cases in detail. But once we see examples of corruption, it is, of course, undermining the general support for our presence in Afghanistan and we have to fight such things determinedly. Can you reassure people that you think that a positive outcome can be brought about in a country where the situation is so complicated, so complex? Sec. Gen. RASMUSSEN: We will prevail. Militarily we have clearly the upper hand. But I think right from the outset we have underestimated the real challenge. And in particular we didn't realize until a very late stage in this operation that it takes more than just military action. We have to reinforce the interaction between our military operations and a civilian development. A lot has been done, but it is nearly endless what could be done and what should be done. What's an example of something that must be done, that's in that endless list. An example of something also that maybe would be very nice to do, but that NATO should not be involved in because there just isn't time, there are not resources? Sec. Gen. RASMUSSEN: One area in which I would like to see much more progress is the fight against corruption. Another area where we could and should do more is the fight against drugs. A focal point should be to provide farmers with alternative crops that are more profitable than opium. Because you have farmers for whom that's their entire living at this time. Sec. Gen. RASMUSSEN: Yes. And it's a source of financing of terrorism in Afghanistan. But I think, in general, we should get our benchmarks right, for instance, when it comes to our assessment of democracy in Afghanistan. Afghanistan has got a democratic constitution, but we also have to realize that in a foreseeable future, the standards of Afghan democracy cannot and will not live up 100 percent to what we would expect in one of the Western countries. Secretary general, thanks very much. Sec. Gen. RASMUSSEN: You're welcome. Anders Fogh Rasmussen is Secretary General of NATO.

[Alex Chadwick:] It's wildfire season out West. Three fires are burning now in the southern part of California. Last week, a fire outside Los Angeles went through nearly 25,000 acres, but only three homes were lost and nobody was injured. It was luck, experts say, but also a lot of planning that's making California a model for the nation. NPR's Carrie Kahn reports.
[Carrie Kahn Reporting:] It was about three in the morning last Thursday when sheriff deputies pounded on the door of Bob Rosenzweig's Ventura County home.
[Mr. Bob Rosenzweig:] And they said, `You've got about 15 minutes and you need to get out.'So immediately, you know, you pack up what you can. We got our dog and our wedding album and left and headed off to my parents' in Tarzana.
[Kahn:] Rosenzweig was one of hundreds of residents evacuated over 48 hours last week as the wildfires spread over two counties and through dozens of densely packed suburban subdivisions. By the time he was retelling his story to a reporter later that day, Rosenzweig and his family and the dog were already back home.
[Mr. Bob Rosenzweig:] What's amazing is how these firefighters, with how close it is to our home, can protect the homes-it's shocking to me how they do it.
[Kahn:] Residents weren't the only ones commending firefighters' quick control of the blaze. Politicians lined up at press conferences to congratulate officials. Even the media piled on the praise. Los Angeles County Fire Chief P. Michael Freeman says a lot went right in fighting the fire. Foremost, the winds died down and cooler weather prevailed. But he says from the evacuations to setting up a unified command, everyone followed the plans. Chief P. MICHAEL FREEMAN [Fire Chief, Los Angeles County Fire Department]: That means that we come together at a common point, we make joint decisions, and we develop one plan of action, and then we executed in a unified way. Executing disaster plans has become California's forte, says Eric Lamoureux of the state's Office of Emergency Services, so much so that federal planners are now using California's standardized emergency system as the model for the nation. Lamoureux says the key to the system's success is getting all emergency personnel trained exactly the same way.
[Mr. Eric Lamoureux:] No matter what community they've come from, they can integrate into an emergency and they're speaking with the same terminology that the commanders of the incident are using. They operate with the same operating systems and same understanding of how to deal with that particular emergency.
[Kahn:] In California, that means taking care of the basics, like making sure emergency responders from different agencies can always talk to each other, something that was a major problem in New Orleans dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. LA County Fire Chief Freeman says every year without fail he's dealing with another California natural disaster and getting another chance to learn from his mistakes. He says first responders in other parts of the country have to find ways to practice.
[Chief Freeman:] To attempt to teach and to train first responders in various agencies in incident command without some realistic practical exercise, to me, is like trying to teach somebody how to ride a bike by reading a book.
[Kahn:] Even with all its practice, California doesn't have a perfect record. The response to a major fire in San Diego two years ago, a blaze that claimed more than 2,000 houses and 14 lives, was found severely lacking. That disaster was claimed on scarce resources and bad communication, two missteps that officials say were not repeated during last week's fire. Carrie Kahn, NPR News, Los Angeles.
[Alex Chadwick:] DAY TO DAY continues just ahead. Stay with us. I'm Alex Chadwick.

[Linda Wertheimer:] NPR's Mara Liasson joins us now to talk about what's likely to happen today and in the days ahead. Mara, we're waiting today to see if leaders will actually come up with something before the markets open. What do you think the chances are?
[Mara Liasson:] Well, at this point I guess only a fool would predict the chances of that. But I can tell you the latest plan they're working on. Speaker Boehner is talking about a two-stage plan, a first round of cuts maybe spending cuts, maybe one or one and a half trillion dollars that would raise the debt ceiling for six months, till the end of this year. Then yet another bipartisan commission would be created to produce the bigger savings, as much as $3 trillion, by doing some of the same things that the president and the speaker had talked about overhauling the tax code, restructuring Social Security and Medicare. The problem is the Democrats don't want a six-month debt ceiling increase and it's still hard to see how you get anything through the House when so many Republicans have promised not to raise the debt ceiling under almost any circumstances. And if Boehner can't get 218 Republicans to vote for it, what will he have to give Nancy Pelosi to get some Democratic votes? This is the same math problem we've had all along.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Can you explain what the Republicans are talking about when they say that the president is insisting on tax increases?
[Mara Liasson:] The deal that Boehner rejected on Friday didn't have an upfront tax hikes. What it had was an enforcement mechanism, a trigger, that said if Congress was unable to finish tax reform, that is lowering individual and corporate rates by getting rid of loopholes, then there would be across-the-board spending cuts and tax increases of about $1.2 trillion about 800 of which would come from letting the Bush tax cuts for upper income earners expire. So, these were hypothetical future tax increases that would happen only if Congress failed to follow through on the tax reform part of the deal.
[Linda Wertheimer:] But the Democratic president has the Democrats are just about as mad at the president as the Republicans are. I mean, who's caused this thing to unravel?
[Mara Liasson:] Well, I think you have to say in the end it was taxes and the inability of House Republicans to vote for revenue increases no matter how contingent. You're right there is no doubt the president was facing heat from his Democrats for moving so far to the right on deep spending cuts upfront, with no immediate tax hikes, for agreeing to changes in Medicare and Social Security. But in the end, I think he could have brought them along if he could have gotten the commitment from the Republicans on revenues. And even though the speaker says the deal fell apart because the president came back and said I need $1.2 trillion in taxes instead of 800 billion that's an extra $400 billion he said scuttled the deal there's still no indication the Republicans could have gotten even $800 billion in future hypothetical tax revenues through the House. This is why Boehner and Cantor have walked away from this deal three times now.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Do you have any sense of the political fallout at this moment? Does anybody come out looking better than anyone else or are the American people just pretty much disgusted with the entire legislative branch?
[Mara Liasson:] Well, for the moment I think the president may have a slight political edge, but that will be fleeting. Yes, he gets to say he was more reasonable, he was willing to make painful concessions for Democrats, he can try to paint the Republicans as a party who spurned a great opportunity. They couldn't say yes to cut the deficit because of their ideological commitment to no new taxes, but if there's a default or a downgrade in the credit rating of U.S. debt, the resulting damage to the economy will hurt the president the most. His reelection depends on the economy and what voters think about his stewardship of the economy, and he will have presided over a dysfunctional government.
[Linda Wertheimer:] So, is there anything that the leaders could come up with that would cause the markets not to react negatively? I mean, are we just sort of barreling down the road toward that without any possibility of averting it?
[Mara Liasson:] Well, that's a good question. It certainly feels like that. That's what Washington feels like today, you know, waiting for disaster to happen. Up until now, the markets have brushed off the prospect of default but now it looks more real to them. Also, don't forget, last week the markets responded positively, really positively, to the reports that the speaker and the president were close to a deal. So, you have to assume that the news that the deal has fallen apart will cause the opposite reaction tonight when the markets open in Asia and tomorrow morning in the U.S. And this isn't just avoiding default, by the way. Standard and Poor's have said that if the Congress and the president can't come up with a long-term deficit-reduction deal, within three months they'll downgrade the credit rating even if immediate default is averted in the short term.
[Linda Wertheimer:] NPR's political correspondent Mara Liasson. Thank you.
[Mara Liasson:] Thank you, Linda.

[Bruce Riedel:] The Afghan Taliban, with whom we have indirectly negotiated Mr. Bergdahl's release, is a close ally of al-Qaida and has been for the last 15 years.
[Arun Rath:] That's Bruce Riedel, director of the Brookings Intelligence project. Riedel worked for the CIA for nearly 30 years and served as an advisor on South Asia and the Middle East for the last four presidents, including President Obama. I asked him about the strength of al-Qaida in Afghanistan today.
[Bruce Riedel:] The al-Qaida apparatus infrastructure in Afghanistan and Pakistan and it is one infrastructure has been badly damaged over the last five years, particularly by drone operations. But it has not been destroyed. And as drone operations become less and less frequent, and as American forces depart Afghanistan, we are likely to see a resurgence, a resurrection, a revival of al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That is not an argument for keeping 100,000 American soldiers in Afghanistan or even 10,000 soldiers in Afghanistan. It is an argument for trying to retain, as best we can, some unilateral counterterrorism capabilities in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future.
[Arun Rath:] Can we say, when it comes to that region, how strong al-Qaida is now compared to where they were? You know, the president says that they're decimated, that they're basically shadow of what they used to be.
[Bruce Riedel:] You know, I'm not disagreeing with the president's characterization. I wouldn't use the word decimated. I would use the word they've been severely degraded. In Pakistan, al-Qaida has deep roots. It's been in that country for the better part of two decades. It has close connections, not just with the Afghan Taliban, but with a host of other terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group that attacked Mumbai in November of 2008. So the likelihood is that once the pressure comes off of al-Qaida in Pakistan no matter how severely decimated it is today, there will be some level of resurgence and regrowth. And we have to plan a strategy for dealing with that over the long term.
[Arun Rath:] You know, obviously this is not just a problem for South Asia. There are threats coming from places like Syria, from conflicts in Africa. In terms of the global threat, how dangerous do you think al-Qaida is to America now?
[Bruce Riedel:] Al-Qaida has evolved and metastasized. I call what we face now al-Qaida 3.0 or the third generation of al-Qaida. It's not just an organization. In many ways, what's more important is an ideology, a narrative. al-Qaida-ism if you like. Al-Qaida-ism is thriving today from North Africa all the way across the Arabian Peninsula and increasingly into sub-Saharan Africa. Boko Haram, for example, is not formally a member of the al-Qaida global jihadist network. But Boko Haram is very much an offshoot of al-Qaida-ism in it's own Nigerian context. And you see deep connections between Boko Haram and al-Qaida core in Pakistan that go back years and years and years. In that sense, al-Qaida-ism is thriving today. It is a very serious and difficult problem, which we are going to be dealing with for the foreseeable future.
[Arun Rath:] Bruce Riedel is the director of the intelligence project at the Brookings Institution. Bruce, thanks very much.
[Bruce Riedel:] My pleasure. Thank you for having me on the program.

[Renee Montagne:] Time now for business news. London commuters warily returned to the city's transportation system following yesterday's terrorist bombings. The normally packed double-decker buses carried far fewer passengers than normal, as was the case with subway trains. NPR's Jim Zarroli reports from London.
[Jim Zarroli Reporting:] Almost as soon as the bombs went off yesterday, police shut down the city's underground rail system, and buses were barred from the West End and the financial district, leaving workers with no easy way to get out of the city. The express train from Heathrow Airport to Paddington station stopped running. Andy Trotter of the British Transport Police urged people early on to think about alternative ways of getting home.
[Mr. Andy Trotter:] Obviously, we don't want a great rush out of central London, but it's going to be a very difficult evening to get people away. But I know that everyone will be working together to try and get people home as best we can.
[Zarroli:] That wasn't easy. With public transportation virtually shut down, taxis were at a premium, but even if you could get one, some roads were closed. A lot of people responded by simply walking home. Malcolm Rakstraw, who manages a pharmacy near Piccadilly Circus, sent his employees home early in the afternoon. Then he began looking for his wife, who works in a store in a railroad station.
[Mr. Malcolm Rakstraw:] Obviously, the phones were so red hot, you couldn't get through, so all the mobile networks were down, so we couldn't communicate, and that was probably the worst thing. It took me at least four or five hours before I could confirm my wife was OK, because she'd been evacuated, working in the station.
[Zarroli:] After he found her, Rakstraw walked home to south London, a journey that took two hours. Much of the rest of the city closed down, too. While the financial markets stayed open, London's theaters went dark en masse, something that hasn't happened since the death of the princess of Wales. By this morning, the subway was running again, though the King's Cross station remained closed. The buses were running as well, and many companies set up shuttles and car services to get people to work. Commuters were urged not to drive into the city, but some, like Steve Miles, decided not to risk it.
[Mr. Steve Miles:] I decided to get a lift this morning. I'm a bit reluctant to get the train and even the bus after what happened. That way [unintelligible] the West End every day.
[Zarroli:] A lot of other people stayed home. David Presswell was unloading frozen food from a truck in front of a hotel on Regent Street. He said there was some traffic on the roads leading into the city, but the center of London was a different story.
[Mr. David Presswell:] Eerie, very eerie, very lonely and sort of no one about at the moment. I was driving up here and there's no one walking on the streets, but I've only just got into London, but that's going through the other parts.
[Zarroli:] With the news of the bombings reverberating throughout the world, some people worried that tourists would be scared away. Kevin Sapone, a taxi driver of 16 years, says he thinks there may be a drop-off for a few weeks, especially among American tourists. He says after 911, US visitors probably react more fearfully to attacks like this. Sapone says Londoners who had to contend for so long with IRA bombings have learned to take it in stride.
[Mr. Kevin Sapone:] Can't let these people keep you indoors, stop you doing the things that you do naturally. Otherwise, they're the winners at the end of the day and, you know-and I figure as Londoners, we've seen this, so we just carry on working, get on with your life.
[Zarroli:] Throughout the city, a lot of people echoed that sentiment. With summer getting into full swing, there was a kind of determination to press on. Officials said ceremonies to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II would go on as planned this weekend. But for a while at least, city officials warn that security measures would probably be a lot tighter. Jim Zarroli, NPR News, London.

[Farai Chideya:] From NPR News, this is NEWS & NOTES. I'm Farai Chideya. Overdraft protection on debit cards sounds like a good thing. But when plastic replaces cold, hard cash, those fees and overdraft charges can add up fast. It's costing Americans around $2 billion a year, and that is no small change. For more, we've got Bill Spriggs, professor and chair of economics at Howard University. And we're in D.C. together. Thanks for coming on.
[Dr. Bill Spriggs:] Yeah. Good to see you in person.
[Farai Chideya:] I know. Likewise. So what was the initial purpose of overdraft protection?
[Dr. Bill Spriggs:] Well it was to avoid the embarrassment of going to buy something as simple as a soda and getting rejected and having the clerk look at you in a funny way. So the banks honor your card even though there isn't enough money in the account. However, what most people don't realize is that is just like bouncing a check. So it's a huge fee and then because it's not a check, it's not unusual for people to go and maybe fill up the tank that's another $30 fee and then maybe go around the corner, and that's another fee. People are using their cards now maybe to find a place some money.
[Farai Chideya:] And so if you're not aware of what's going on, you can rack up, what, a couple of hundred dollars in fees before you know it?
[Dr. Bill Spriggs:] Very easily because they're doing it for each transaction. So their treating that as if you bounced four or five checks, not as if there was one incident.
[Farai Chideya:] So who charges these fees? Is it the bank, the store, both?
[Dr. Bill Spriggs:] Well, the bank is charging it. The store is not in the same position as it would be in with the bounced checks. So from the store's perspective, you're good. But from the bank's perspective, they are punishing you the same way they would if you wrote a bounced check.
[Farai Chideya:] The obvious wisdom is, okay, check your bank balance regularly, but any other wisdom in order to avoid these charges?
[Dr. Bill Spriggs:] Well, sometimes people can do it without understanding all of the ramifications. There are still some cards where you can have a hold put on place if, for instance, you go to fill up a gas tank. The gas stations some gas stations will still do this but put a lock for, say, 50 or $60 assuming that you're going to fill up the tank, come inside, get a coffee, get donuts, pick up the newspaper, and then leave. So you may have had $40 in your checking account, and you figured, I'm just putting $15 of gas in so I should be okay. But that $40 hole means that when you then go to get the coffee and the donut, now you just bounced your account.
[Farai Chideya:] Wow. Now, is there any discussion of regulating these fees?
[Dr. Bill Spriggs:] Well, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney I used to work for her by the way has a piece of legislation to at least warn you and let you say, okay, if I'm going to run into this problem, I'd rather have the charge denied or you might have the $6 in your pocket. You're just used to pulling out that card as opposed to pulling out the $6. So at least if you had the warning and you knew about it. And when you look at it, this is really more onerous than payday loans because you're being charged a huge fee for a very small amount of money in many instances.
[Farai Chideya:] Let me turn to another big issue. The U.S., Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan are the countries that make up the majority of the world's economic might. And so they get together as the G7 last week, they did in Washington. The U.S. housing market seems to be on their radar.
[Dr. Bill Spriggs:] It's making them very nervous because a lot of banks and some countries began using the U.S. mortgage market as an alternative to hold U.S. treasury notes. Many people got used to the paper that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with U.S. mortgages assuming these are pretty sure bets. They weren't as familiar with mortgages that included subprimes. So now that those are going south, they're very nervous. And in the U.S., the problem is the dollar has already started to fall, meaning these countries who are trading partners don't like a falling dollar because that makes U.S. exports much more competitive and makes their exports much less competitive. So they're very upset about that and then these pressures on people wanting to get rid of paper that they're holding in U.S. mortgages is going to put even more pressure to lower the dollar. So they're very nervous.
[Farai Chideya:] So it sounds like, in a way, you would think that a country would be happy that their currency would be strong and others would be weak, but that's not necessarily the case here.
[Dr. Bill Spriggs:] Not in this case. I mean, everyone knew that the dollar was overvalued because we want such a huge trade deficit and we have a current account deficit. We owe the world tons of money. And when you're in that position then you're going to have a weak currency. It's really remarkable that the dollar has held up this long. But, yeah, they have been benefitting in Europe because the dollar was very strong and their products were very competitive to the U.S. when we had that strong dollar.
[Farai Chideya:] Now, what does the U.S. need to do to boost its economic image overseas and, of course, image is in everything? Is it a question of marketing the U.S. to the world? Or is it a question of structural changes like how we carry debt? What would make things different?
[Dr. Bill Spriggs:] Well, the nervousness now is that people will totally back away from the dollar and not want to invest in the U.S. because this lack of credibility on the mortgage market is making them nervous about other U.S. investments. So that's why you hear this big talk about if the U.S. is still strong and sound and this is a good place to invest. But it's a little bit more than marketing that's going to have to get people confident about our practices in loaning money. And so we'll have to wait and see whether the world gets too nervous about this.
[Farai Chideya:] What about the housing market? Just judging from what's been going on recently, have we seen the worst or are things going to continue to pop up in terms of mortgage defaults and all that?
[Dr. Bill Spriggs:] They're going to get worse because the bulk of the loans were made in 2006 and they have these 2-year adjustable rates. So 2008 is when they will adjust. And so we're going to see a much worse market in 2008. That's why everybody is nervous.
[Farai Chideya:] Well, Bill, let's move on to the stock market. Last Friday marked the 20th anniversary of what's called Black Monday. In 1987, the Dow Jones' industrial average dipped a whopping 504 points. But I want you to put this in context. Was this bigger, not just in numerical terms, but impact on the stock market crash of 1927?
[Dr. Bill Spriggs:] Well the one of '27 ended up unraveling our whole financial system. The Federal Reserve, at the time well, the Central Bank didn't exist in the same way. But the government didn't know how to respond. And it wasn't clear that they responded correctly. They seemed to want to restrict credit after that. So we learned a lot of lessons from that crash, as a result to that when this crash took place in '08. a lot of liquidity was pumped into the market. The Federal Reserve made sure that money was quite available to bail people out and keep the market functioning.
[Farai Chideya:] So you used the word liquidity. That means that the government makes sure there's money available?
[Dr. Bill Spriggs:] That there's money available, because when people lose a lot of money, the money has just disappeared. And so if they don't pump money back into the system, then there's no way to loan money and there's no way for companies to continue to function. So this was a big lesson learned form the crash of the in the '20s. In the '80s, we avoided that and we've avoided that crash of the '80s in the future because we don't let the computers won the trading in the same way they did in the '80s. And in the 80's, the computers have gotten ahead of us, they were making automatic trades. And once the market started to fall, they had kicked in with all these trades that took place faster than the market could absorb.
[Farai Chideya:] So these computers were set to say, sell, sell, sell, is that correct?
[Dr. Bill Spriggs:] They were set to say, sell, sell, sell, and many firms were doing what was an investment maneuver to protect themselves, a kind of insurance. They would bet the market would also fall so they could make money in case the market fell to ensure themselves against that happening. And so some of the sell orders were because now people are actually making money on the market going down.
[Farai Chideya:] So when you think about markets falling, someone always has to make some money. When markets fell in '87, when you had this recent bauble, are there any people who were in position to actually make a little cash?
[Dr. Bill Spriggs:] The folks who are betting that the market is going to fall actually make money. There are various ways that investors do that. They buy short, which means that they actually borrowthe stocks. And then when the price falls, they buy it back at a lower price. And then you can take options as a way to bet that the market may be falling. So, yeah, there are people who make money either way.
[Farai Chideya:] And what about the international picture? We just talked a bit about the G7. When the U.S. stock market has trouble, who is affected abroad?
[Dr. Bill Spriggs:] A lot of people are affected abroad because the fear of the U.S. going into a recession affects their economy. So you look at the exports from Asia, most of them come to the United States. So if we go on to a slow down, that means a slow down for them. And our major trading partners in Europe get nervous because we will stop buying things that they make as well. So everyone gets nervous when the U.S. goes into a recession.
[Farai Chideya:] When you think about people, the baby boomers, the first boomer and I kind of put that in air quotes just went in and tapped into Social Security because there's a whole spectrum of people of different ages. But there's no question that the baby boom generation is going to really tax Social Security. A lot of people have their investment accounts for their retirement. When the stock market takes a dip, should people panic? What should people do?
[Dr. Bill Spriggs:] They need to hold it for the long run. Even if you have bought back in '87 when the market taint, at this point, you would be way ahead of where you were then. So you have to think the long run. If you're about to retire, that's when you understand the market volatility can really hit you because in '87, it would have been a whole two or three percentage point differences just on the issue of one day whether you bought or sold around that Black Friday. So it's a big concern if you're going to retire in the short run. But if you're in your 40s or in your 30s, then you should be thinking long run.
[Farai Chideya:] And when you think about this whole issue of how people have hidden stocks, I guess, that they don't follow on the day-to-day but that are in mutual funds, what do people really need to know? How much do they need to know?
[Dr. Bill Spriggs:] Well, trying to beat the market by getting in and out of your mutual fund is not really a wise thing to do if you have the long run ahead of you if you are in your 30s and 40s. If you're in your 60s and you're going to retire soon, then you do need to worry about it because these fluctuations hurt you and you're not going to make the money back within a short amount of time. When the market went down at 2001, it didn't come back until just recently. So anybody who's going to retire between 2001 and 2002 or 2003, they ended up being quite short.
[Farai Chideya:] Well, Bill, thanks so much.
[Dr. Bill Spriggs:] Okay. Thank you.
[Farai Chideya:] Bill Spriggs is a professor and chair of conomics at Howard University, and he spoke with me from NPR HQ in Washington, D.C.

[Alex Chadwick:] I'm Alex Chadwick. Coming up, polo in a working class city in southern California. Water polo. Athletes are training there to play water polo in the Beijing Olympics.
[Madeleine Brand:] But first, you thought the subprime mortgage crisis was bad? Well a new wave of defaults is beginning, this time on mortgages taken out by people with good credit. Some homeowners with so-called Alternative A loans are falling behind on their monthly payments. Mike Larson is an analyst with Weiss Research. It's an investment research company based in Florida. And Mike, first of all, tell us what these Alternative A loans are.
[Mr. Mike Larson:] Sure. Alt A loans are somewhat in-between prime and subprime mortgages on the risk scale. Generally, borrowers have higher credit scores, but they have other things that make their loans riskier. They may want to take out one of these pick-a-payment loans, where you don't have to pay all the principal, or even all the interest due each month. You can get a negative amortization loan, where your balance goes up. Or you may have a high debt-to-income ratio, anything that puts you sort of outside the realm of traditional prime lending, but you're not as risky as a subprime borrower.
[Madeleine Brand:] So now these people are now in trouble? They're falling behind?
[Mr. Mike Larson:] Yes, they sure are. A lot of these loans were made on an interest-only basis or, again, one of these pick-a-payment-option ARMs, where many of these borrowers aren't even covering all the principal or interest due each month. Their loan balances are going up with time. That's fine if home prices are rising as well, but when home prices are falling like they are now, many of these borrowers are finding they owe more than their homes are worth, which gives them an incentive to walk away when times get tough.
[Madeleine Brand:] Now, in the New York Times, the head of JPMorgan Chase says he expects losses on prime loans at his bank to triple in the next few months. Is that what we're going to see in other banks?
[Mr. Mike Larson:] I think so. I mean, if you look at something like the Mortgage Bankers Association, their delinquency figures. Now, the subprime delinquency rate in the first quarter was up to almost 19 percent from just under 14 percent a year earlier. But the prime delinquency rate is up at 3.7 percent versus 2.6. So you've already seen an increase, and given what we know about what home prices are doing, we're probably going to see that increase further going forward.
[Madeleine Brand:] So do you expect even tighter credit, then?
[Mr. Mike Larson:] I think so. We've seen many banks cut back on what they call wholesale lending, meaning the bank is funding mortgages that mortgage brokers are actually taking the paperwork for. A lot of banks are getting out of that business. We're seeing anything that lenders do that is outside of the realm of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac or FHA mortgages they're really clamping down on that. They don't want to do as many jumbos, they certainly don't want to do any subprime lending any more. So all of that means when you or I go to shop for a mortgage, it's going to be either harder to find a loan, or we're going to have to pay up more to get one.
[Madeleine Brand:] Now, there's a column in today's Washington Post that really downplays all this bad housing news, and it says that the data show that most Americans really have not experienced significant declines in the value of their homes, that most of the problems are in four states two of them, you and I are in in Florida and in California, also Arizona and Nevada. But the rest of the country is doing OK. What are your thoughts on that?
[Mr. Mike Larson:] Well, I think, clearly, the problems are the worst in the markets of California and Florida, Nevada, Arizona and some where you had the biggest speculative run-up. But we're also seeing that the decline in home values broaden out. Certainly not as steep or as deep as some of the declines we've had there but, you know, you look at something like the Case-Shiller Index, for example. All 20 metropolitan areas they survey are now showing year-over-year declines in price. Similar for the quarterly numbers you get out of the National Association of Realtors. A higher percentages of U.S. markets are showing decline. So, while the problem is the worst in those hardest-hit markets, there's still a problem that's spreading into other markets as well.
[Madeleine Brand:] Mike, let me get your big-picture take on this, if you will, because, you know, this just seems to be a problem we keep hearing more and more about and, you know, people were saying, oh, we're going to turn the corner in a couple of months or by the end of the year. What do you think?
[Mr. Mike Larson:] Well, I think housing itself has been in its own private recession for more than a year now. And the problem is that that private recession in housing is now spilling over into the broad economy. So, you already had people defaulting because they had high-risk individual mortgages, and because they may have been speculating in homes. That was the first wave of trouble in the industry. Now you're getting that second wave as a result of rising unemployment, the result of less job creation and, you know, just tighter budgets. And that's what's fueling the secondary wave, added in along with the decline in home prices. You add it all up, and I think the housing market's going to continue to struggle for the remainder of 2008 and probably well into 2009. Hopefully, once we get past that point, the combination of an easing credit crisis, a rebounding economy, and just lower home production, fewer new homes being added to the market, will all work inventory levels down and start to stabilize pricing.
[Madeleine Brand:] Mike Larson is an analyst with Weiss Research; it's an investment research company. Mike, thank you.
[Mr. Mike Larson:] Thank you.

[Renee Montagne:] I'm Renee Montagne. South Africa's African National Congress, the party of Nelson Mandela, is facing perhaps its biggest challenge since its founding nearly a century ago. And it's in danger of imploding, as NPR's Charlayne Hunter-Gault reports.
[Charlayne Hunter-gault:] The 96-year-old ruling African National Congress party has overcome a lot of challenges, including decades-long white minority rule. But the ANC is currently facing a challenge it didn't expect: a rising tide of dissidents deserting the party and on the verge of creating a new one. And of the many questions in the air, one of the biggest is what is driving this exodus, principle or personalities? At rallies like this one, dissidents are making the case their defections from the ANC are on principle, saying the party has veered from its original goal and is engaging in practices dangerous to democracy. The move is spearheaded by former top ANC official Mbhazima Shilowa, a former trade unionist and communist, and Mosiuoa Lekota, an anti-apartheid hero and until recently minister of defense. Lekota, who served as the powerful chairman of the ANC, argues when he and others tried to voice their concerns, they were ignored. As an example, he recalled the ANC meeting last December pitting former deputy president Jacob Zuma, a Zulu, against then-president Thabo Mbeki, a Xhosa. Lekota says...
[Mr. Mosiuoa Lekota:] We saw the deputy president of the ANC allow people and now president of the ANC allow people to produce T-shirts which openly advocated tribalism. He didn't see anything wrong with it. And even though, you know, some of us raised concerns about the implications of this given the constitution of the ANC, which enjoins all members to fight tribalism he just allowed it to go on.
[Charlayne Hunter-gault:] But many say the genesis of the split arose two years earlier, when then-party and national President Mbeki fired the popular Zuma as his deputy after he was tied to a corruption scandal. Support remained strong for Zuma within the ANC, and he was elected party president in December. When a judge ruled this summer that Mbeki may have been involved in a political conspiracy to undermine Zuma, the ANC forced Mbeki to resign. Some, like Shilowa, say Mbeki was treated unfairly and unjustly.
[Mr. Mbhazima Shilowa:] The dismissal of Mbeki or putsch, as I call it would have been the trigger that said to people, if there's ever a moment in which we're going to leave the ANC, this is the moment.
[Charlayne Hunter-gault:] ANC President Zuma, speaking to supporters at an outdoor rally, has signaled that there may be other expulsions from the party.
[Mr. Jacob Zuma:] To all who would intend to join the campaign to undermine and divide the ANC, we'll act very decisively to rid the movement of factionalists.
[Charlayne Hunter-gault:] Here in Kliptown, a sprawling township south of Johannesburg, many seem frustrated by what they see as internal party politics. It was here, in a multiracial gathering more than 50 years ago, that the battle against apartheid and the fight for democracy was born with the adoption of the Freedom Charter, which laid out principles for the country, including the ANC. But today, people like Jake Mzobi, a retired teacher and lifelong ANC member, are pained by the split.
[Mr. Jake Mzobi:] It's a tragedy.
[Charlayne Hunter-gault:] Mzobi, who is wavering on whether to stay in the ANC or go with the dissidents, believes the split is personal.
[Mr. Jake Mzobi:] Unfortunately, the guys who pushed Thabo Mbeki out, who recalled him, they're recalling him for their own personal purposes.
[Charlayne Hunter-gault:] Nearby, Neo Moleti busies himself fitting an elderly woman for glasses in his stall. He says, a pox on both their houses.
[Mr. Neo Moleti:] If they can solve the thing inside, then no problem. They may not involve the people from outside, because people from outside they want make it to divide. It's like a family problem.
[Charlayne Hunter-gault:] Lawrence Sanbo, who's plying his tunes for sale through an aging boom box, says the party dissidents are doing the right thing.
[Mr. Lawrence Sanbo:] We needed a strong opposition party.
[Charlayne Hunter-gault:] And the dissidents are pressing ahead with plans for a national convention November 2 to lay the groundwork for the formation of a new opposition party in December. Charlayne Hunter-Gault, NPR News, Kliptown, South Africa.

[Ari Shapiro:] An incredible offer that's how President Trump described a proposal that Russian President Vladimir Putin made during their summit in Helsinki last week. Putin offered to let officials in Washington interview 12 Russians indicted for interference in the 2016 election. The price the U.S. government would allow Russian officials to interview 11 Americans. On the list was Michael McFaul. He was U.S. ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration, and he is also our guest in the studio right now. Welcome.
[Michael Mcfaul:] Thanks for having me.
[Ari Shapiro:] You met yesterday with Fiona Hill, the National Security Council director for Russia. What did she say to you about where the Trump administration stands on Putin's proposal?
[Michael Mcfaul:] Well, I don't want to discuss what we talked about. It was not just Fiona Hill, and I'm meeting with other government officials in other departments. I got the feeling, including things that have been stated publicly, that they are not going to allow U.S. officials to be interrogated with Russian observers in the room. That's the good news. The bad news is they haven't said this as strongly as I would like, and they haven't talked about the dangerous consequences of allowing us to be called criminals in Russian courts.
[Ari Shapiro:] The Senate did vote 98-0 in a nonbinding resolution, opposing allowing people such as yourself to be interviewed by Russia. The State Department put out a public statement, but how concerned are you that this could actually happen? After all, President Trump has changed his position on various issues often.
[Michael Mcfaul:] Well, I'm concerned about that. Thankfully I have legal recourse. They just can't hand me over for interrogation. I can take it to a court if it would come to that. I'm not that concerned about that right now given the groundswell of support for me that I did not expect, by the way. We don't get many 98-0 votes in the U.S. Senate anymore.
[Ari Shapiro:] That's true.
[Michael Mcfaul:] So that was a pretty fantastic thing. So I'm I think it would be highly unlikely to do that, but here's what I really am worried about that the Russians will go forward. They have they allege that I have been involved in criminal behavior me and the 11 others on that list.
[Ari Shapiro:] Involving money laundering and other things.
[Michael Mcfaul:] I mean, it's a crazy scheme that we somehow helped a U.K. businessman, Bill Browder, launder money out of Russia $400 million, I think, is what Putin said, and then he gave it to the Clinton campaign. That's what he was talking about in Helsinki. It's crazy. There's no truth to it whatsoever, but here's the rub. There is no rule of law in Russia. There is no truth in Russia. It is an autocratic regime. And I've seen this done dozens of times to Russian dissidents who have been locked up. And we've seen it done time to time with people abroad, including this gentleman Bill Browder that I just mentioned where he was convicted of a crime in Russia in absentia. And then they went to Interpol, a system where you can ask for somebody to be detained in a third country through something called a red notice. And that's what I fear for me and my fellow Americans right now. And I want my president and his administration to state emphatically that this would be outrageous behavior to go after us and to do it proactively now so that we don't have to be litigating this when I'm, you know, sitting in Kiev or Lisbon or somewhere and I get a red notice.
[Ari Shapiro:] Setting aside the specifics of your case, how extraordinary is it that President Trump that a U.S. president would raise the idea of allowing the intelligence services of a foreign adversary like Russia to interview a former top U.S. official?
[Michael Mcfaul:] It's crazy. It's unprecedented. I can't remember anything like this. And I'm glad you said it's not just about me 'cause it's these 11 other officials. But think about the precedent it would set if that was allowed to happen. Every diplomat around the world would now be under suspicion, would have to worry. Every soldier around the world, every USAID official, every peace corps official, every intelligence officer we can't allow that precedent to go forward. And that's why President Trump I would hope but at a minimum, the Trump administration pushes back on this idea and stops it now before it happens in the future.
[Ari Shapiro:] It's been more than a week. Why do you think he hasn't made the kind of clear, unequivocal statement that you're seeking?
[Michael Mcfaul:] I don't know. To be honest, I really can't understand that. I personally think it would help him. He says you know, he just tweeted today or yesterday he's been stronger on Russia than anybody. Isn't this a really easy thing to be strong on Russia? You do not have the right to indict and call criminals former U.S. ambassadors. I would think that would be a pretty low bar and yet not yet. I hope maybe in the future. That's why I'm here, lobbying on my behalf and on behalf of other Americans who might face my situation. I hope they'll get it right, and I hope they say it on the record.
[Ari Shapiro:] Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia, thanks for coming to the studio today.
[Michael Mcfaul:] Thanks for having me.

[Steve Inskeep:] So all this news has not kept baseball fans away from the game, but some people are disappointed by Mitchell's findings. We've had local reporters and producers out speaking with fans around the country, and NPR's David Schaper rounds up their response.
[David Schaper:] If Barry Bonds is the poster boy for what is now being called the steroid era in baseball, he's now got company in seven-time Cy Young award winner Roger Clemens. In San Francisco, the city Bonds played in for the last 15 seasons, at a sports bar called Double Play, the news raised eyebrows.
[Mr. Alex Alvarez:] I think it's getting more intriguing now that, you know, that Clemens is involved and a lot of other ballplayers.
[David Schaper:] Alex Alvarez is a trader from Concord, California.
[Mr. Alex Alvarez:] I think it wasn't just Barry Bonds. I think there's it's a can of worms that has opened up.
[David Schaper:] Alvarez says he hopes baseball can quickly get over this scandal. But San Francisco construction worker Jim Dickson wonders what the fuss is all about. He isn't even bothered by players using steroids.
[Mr. Jim Dickson:] To me, you still have to hit a round the ball with a round piece of wood. And the point of contact is probably no bigger than a size of a nickel or a quarter. So I don't see where steroids would enhance that eye-hand coordination.
[David Schaper:] St. Louis is where Mark McGwire shattered homerun records in the late "90s. He's been under a cloud of suspicion for years, and he's named in the report. But University of Missouri St. Louis student Jill Hankee says baseball's commissioner and team owners are tackling the players" steroid problem too late.
[Ms. Jill Hankee:] What are they going to do about it now? They wanted to turn their back all those years, and now they want to bring it up and make a big deal about it. But I don't think there's any way to penalize them.
[David Schaper:] Other fans say they too believe owners and the commissioner looked the other way for a long time, because juiced-up players hitting more home runs boosted fan interest, and of course revenue. In a Milwaukee bar called The Harp, Ed Gaddioli says he's ready to see baseball cleaned up.
[Mr. Ed Gaddioli:] I'm glad they're taking care of it so that you can go to a game and not have to wonder who's cheating and you can feel good about the team that you're watching.
[David Schaper:] In Chicago at Harry Carey's Restaurant, named for the late legendary Chicago Cubs broadcaster, the players named in the Mitchell report angered some fans like Mark Hill of suburban Evergreen Park.
[Mr. Mark Hill:] I hope they get what they deserve. I mean, they ruined baseball in a way. So some people don't care about it, but I do. So I hope they get what they deserve. All records removed.
[David Schaper:] Thirty-three-year-old Chicago lawyer Terry Quinn says with all the money at stake, he understands why some players might take steroids for a competitive advantage. But Quinn agrees the integrity of the game is now damaged, and he hopes a better brand of baseball can come back.
[Mr. Terry Quinn:] I think that baseball got a little twisted in its fascination with the home run to begin with. So in a sense, you know, I would find it pleasing to move away from that. There's a whole lot to enjoy in baseball beyond someone hitting up 450-foot home run.
[David Schaper:] But for all the indignation about the state of the game, not one fan said the steroid scandal would change how much they watch or attend ballgames, though some do worry about the impact it will have on young fans and players. Tom Duli is a high school baseball coach from Melbourne, Florida, tagging along with his wife on a business trip to Chicago.
[Mr. Tom Duli:] You've got to use it. It's a teaching lesson. There's no doubt about it. So the short cuts lead to a lot of places, some good, but sometimes a lot of bad things as well and embarrassment, public embarrassment, as we see here.
[David Schaper:] Still, Duli admits some of his players may feel not just disappointed but betrayed to find out their heroes may have cheated. David Schaper, NPR News, Chicago.
[Steve Inskeep:] You know, people whispered about the use of steroids as long ago as the 1980s, but it was only in recent years that baseball officials began to respond. You can read a timeline of events by going to NPR.org.

[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] Time is running out for those in the Republican Party who are trying to stop front-runner Donald Trump. There are just 10 more states left with Republican primaries. And the race could all come to a head about five weeks from now in California.
[Tim Miller:] Some people in the Trump camp want to project a sense that the race is over. But there's so many delegates at stake in California. And Trump has such a history of erratic behavior. Five weeks is an eternity.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] That's Republican Tim Miller of the Our Principles super PAC trying to deny trump the Republican nomination. He says first, though, they're focusing all their attention on another big battleground state, Indiana. Polls suggest Trump is facing a fight there next week with Senator Ted Cruz. Miller says the Never-Trump movement is putting a lot of money into the race there.
[Tim Miller:] We have ads up in the air right now just in Indiana. The ad we have up right now is focused on Donald Trump's past demeaning comments about women, where it's women speaking to camera old quotes that Donald Trump had said. Some of them would not be appropriate for the NPR audience. We also have, you know, mail, live phone calls, radio interviews that go over his record. And, you know, in summation, it would be his history of hurting regular people to enrich himself. And he has his brand of, you know, he's looking out for the little guy. But over 70 years of life, he's never actually demonstrated that he cares about the little guy at all.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] I've got to ask you, you know, there has been a concerted attempt to stop Trump for quite some time now. And, in fact, what seems to have happened is that his campaign has only done better and better. Are you certain that this is really the right tactic?
[Tim Miller:] Well, look, I think that in the media, you know, folks need narrative's, right? You need somebody to be up and down and back and forth to keep things interesting for the audience. But the reality is, the demographics of the party have driven most of this. You know, Trump has struggled in states where there is a high amount of suburban families. He struggled in states where there are high amount of people that go to church every week because they're turned off by his behavior.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] Well, that might hurt him in the general election, but it doesn't seem to be hurting him in the delegate count.
[Tim Miller:] Yeah, sure it does, in the primaries. So that's my point. He struggled in Wisconsin, for example. He struggled in Utah and Idaho. And then he went in the Northeast. These were states where we always expected him to do well, places like Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey. This is his home turf. So now he heads back to Indiana and Nebraska. And we're optimistic that we'll able to slow him down. And next week, you'll have somebody on and say, what happened to the Trump momentum, after Cruz wins Indiana.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] Well, we'll see, but Trump has used campaigns like yours to show that he's being undermined by the Republican, you know, quote-unquote, "establishment." There's an argument to be made that groups like yours have actually helped him.
[Tim Miller:] I think that, you know, Trump is going to cry foul and whine no matter what happens, right? So the counterargument shouldn't be do nothing, right? And I think the reality of the case is that the establishment, to the extent that there is one, has been kind of starting to fold in with Trump. He hired the former Republican National Committee chief of staff and political director. You're not seeing a lot of senators out there talking about him. It's mostly grassroots conservatives. Conservative media are the last stand standing up to Donald Trump. And I think that a race between grassroots conservatives and Donald Trump is one that we can win.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] If he gets the nomination, will you continue this campaign?
[Tim Miller:] Well, the group, I think, is focused on stopping him from getting the nomination. So I doubt that the group will continue after after June.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] There's also, of course, people who say these kinds of campaigns really just help Hillary Clinton, someone that you yourself have spoken out to very strongly against.
[Tim Miller:] Yeah. I think that the thing that would help Hillary Clinton the most would be the Republican Party nominating Donald Trump. You know, Hillary Clinton could just kind of sit at Chappaqua and drink mimosas from July through November if Donald Trump is the nominee because he has no path to general election victory. He's turned off women, Hispanics, African-Americans, Muslims. There just aren't enough white guys to win the election with Donald Trump. And so Hillary would be best positioned to win with him as the opponent. So the best thing that we could do to hurt her is to prevent him from getting that nomination.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] Do you think it's still realistic that there that might be a contested convention?
[Tim Miller:] I do. Look, if Trump does not get to 1,237 delegates, the convention will be open, and it will be contested. You know, that has not happened in modern times. It's been since 1976 that we had an open convention. And the system is set up in a way to ensure that the nominee represents a majority of the party. And Trump has done a good job of getting a strong plurality, you know, the most of the people in the field. But he hasn't been getting over 50 percent in very many states. And you need to be able to coalesce the party to be the nominee. Mitt Romney could do that. George Bush did that. Ronald Reagan did that. Trump needs to demonstrate that he could do that. And we're going to fight him until he does.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] You know, having spoken to a lot of people about this, as one analyst told me, the Trump train has left the station. And, you know, it seems to be going in one direction. Do you really think that at this point you can make a difference?
[Tim Miller:] The direction is defeat. Donald Trump is going to lose whether or not we're successful in defeating him before the convention or at the convention, or whether Hillary Clinton wipes the floor with him in a historic landslide in the general election. Donald Trump is not going to be the president of the United States.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] Thank you so much.
[Tim Miller:] Thank you.
[Lourdes Garcia-navarro:] Tim Miller was communications director for Jeb Bush before he withdrew from the presidential race. Now he works for the main and anti-Trump group, Our Principles PAC.

[Daniel Schorr Reporting:] American-Iranian relations have entered a troubled twilight zone in which the talk is of diplomacy but the hand signals are of force.
[Michele Norris:] NPR's senior news analyst Daniel Schorr.
[Schorr:] Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says on weekend television that Iran is a troublemaker in the international system, but we have man steps yet to take. She rules out giving Iran security guarantees and repeats the all options are on the table mantra. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is coming to Washington this week with the message that Iran is very close to gaining the capacity to make weapons grade uranium. A few weeks, he says, rather than a few years and he says, other nations, read the United States, must take the necessary steps to stop it. So, is war with Iran inevitable? Brookings Institution scholar Ivo Daalder acknowledges that there is an emerging consensus that it is only a matter of time. But Daalder himself believes that with 54 percent of Americans no longer trusting President Bush to make the right decision on Iran, war is unlikely. Meanwhile, however, the administration takes concrete steps to keep the pressure on. Under American pressure, says The New York Times, four of Europe's biggest banks have started restricting their activities in Iran. The Pentagon is planning a joint ArmyNavyAir Force taskforce to stage exercises with Turkey reportedly aimed at demonstrating how the transfer of nuclear technology could be interdicted. Friendly countries in the Persian Gulf are being urged to join the exercise and the Bush Administration is reportedly moving to establish a new anti-missile site in Europe designed to stop future possible Iranian attacks on the United States and its European allies. One way or another, the administration, without making outright threats, wants to let Iran know that it is heading for more serious trouble than it thinks. This is Daniel Schorr.

[Scott Simon:] I'm Scott Simon. The cycle of threat and bluster continues in North Korea today. Foreign embassies in the capital of Pyongyang appear to be staying put so far, despite a warning yesterday to consider evacuating their staff. Now, this comes after North Korea limited access to its joint industrial zone with the South, restarted its nuclear plant, and repeated threats of nuclear strikes against the United States and South Korea. NPR's Louisa Lim has been monitoring the situation; joins us now. Louisa, thanks for being with us.
[Louisa Lim, Byline:] Morning, Scott.
[Scott Simon:] And does the reaction of foreign embassies in Pyongyang suggest that they're not taking the threats very seriously?
[Louisa Lim, Byline:] Well, it does to a certain extent. I mean, what has happened was that they were called in yesterday. They were summoned all the diplomatic missions in Pyongyang and the message they were given was that in the event of conflict, North Korea would be unable to guarantee their safety. And they were also asked to tell the North Korean authorities by next Wednesday that is April the 10th what kind of help they would need if they were to evacuate or relocate. Now, Russia has said it's studying this request seriously. But the British have said that they believe this is part of a campaign of continuing rhetoric and that North Korea is trying to insinuate the reason that they're asking them this is because the U.S. poses a threat to North Korea. So, the British have said they are going to stay put for the moment. So, so far, this looks like it's being seen as bluster.
[Scott Simon:] There's some kind of deadline on April 10th, nevertheless. What's the significance of that?
[Louisa Lim, Byline:] Well, no one knows exactly what the significance of April the 10th is, but interestingly there is a significant date in the North Korean calendar just days after that. That's April the 15th nine days from now and that's the anniversary of the birth of Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea. Now, historically, North Koreans do like to mark these anniversaries with a show of force. So, there's a lot of speculation we could see some kind of demonstration of North Korean power in the days leading up to that. Now at the moment, everyone's looking at the east coast of North Korea. The North Koreans have moved one or maybe two medium-range missiles there, according to the South Korean media. These are Musudan-2 missiles. They have a range of about 2,000 to 2,500 miles. And they're untested so far. And we simply don't know at this stage why they've been moved there; if this could be part of a drill or a test firing exercise or preparations for a targeted strike.
[Scott Simon:] And what's the reaction at the moment in South Korea, which would obviously be within range of missiles. And this is a country that's very sensitive to military maneuvers in the North.
[Louisa Lim, Byline:] Yes, well, South Korea is taking steps. I mean, they've deployed two destroyers, one to patrol the east coast and another to patrol the west coast. And both of those destroyers are equipped with the Aegis missile defense system. So, they could shoot down any hostile missiles. I mean, at the moment in Seoul, the mood is actually quite calm. I mean, they've lived next to North Korea saber-rattling for 60 years. So, they're used to threats and escalations.
[Scott Simon:] But we have seen some moves today inside the joint industrial zone. More South Korean companies are pulling their workers from that zone. Almost 100 South Koreans left that zone today. So, there were only 500 South Koreans inside that zone. Now, North Korea stopped access to the zone, so South Korean companies have not been able to send in supplies. And once their workers leave, no one else is allowed in. And we're hearing that four companies now have stopped operation out of the 120-something based there. So, this really, it's the last symbol of inter-Korean cooperation. So, if it is closed, it's a big blow. NPR's Louisa Lim in Beijing. Thanks so much.
[Louisa Lim, Byline:] Thank you, Scott.

[Liane Hansen:] You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. This summer a new environmental law goes into effect in the European Union which will restrict the amount of lead used to manufacture electronic equipment. When old cell phones and computers are dumped into landfills, they can pollute the ground water. The measure may also affect a centuries-old industry, organ building, because there is lead in the pipes. Katherine Venning is the president of the Institute of British Organ Building and the director of an organ manufacturing company, Harrison and Harrison, and she joins us from her home in Durham, England. Welcome to the program, Ms. Venning.
[Ms. Katherine Venning:] Thank you.
[Liane Hansen:] Did the architects of this law actually consider organs when they issued the directive?
[Ms. Katherine Venning:] I'm absolutely sure they didn't.
[Liane Hansen:] Really?
[Ms. Katherine Venning:] I think it's a very big mistake and when they realized what had happened, there wasn't a lot they could do because it's already passed into law.
[Liane Hansen:] Are old organs actually dumped into landfills?
[Ms. Katherine Venning:] I don't think any organs are dumped into landfill, old or new. There are a lot of old organs which got very old pipe work in them, so as long as the pipe work is good and the voicing is good, those pipes will just stay and stay. But there are obviously organs which are being moved out and anybody here will take the metal to the scrap merchant. If they are a person not connected with organ building and if they're organ builders, they'll put it in the pot, melt it down, and turn it into new organ pipes.
[Liane Hansen:] So they're recycled essentially?
[Ms. Katherine Venning:] They're recycled and they always have been recycled, which is why we find this particular directive such a frustration, because it was never meant to encompass pipe organs.
[Liane Hansen:] So if you can't use lead, what will you use?
[Ms. Katherine Venning:] We haven't actually got that far, although of course it is possible to use other materials such as wood, but as far as replacing the lead, we've not got that far in the conversation yet, because what we want to try and prove is that the organ is not included in the directive. There may have to be some very clever legal argument to prove that the organ is not, according to this particular law, a musical instrument.
[Liane Hansen:] What?
[Ms. Katherine Venning:] Well, I'm afraid that musical instruments are included in this particular directive, which is where we've got scooped up.
[Liane Hansen:] What will you call an organ, a piece of furniture?
[Ms. Katherine Venning:] Well, I think the argument will be slightly different because it's not consumers who buy organs, and so we're trying to say, well, all those other items, which included musical instruments, were consumer items and consumers tend to dispose of them sooner or later. Whereas if you have an organ, it is in fact not only a fixed object, but perhaps more importantly for the wording of the law, that the consumers are in fact not consumers as such, but corporate bodies of some kind.
[Liane Hansen:] Katherine Venning is president of the Institute of British Organ Building and she joined us from her home in Durham, England. Thank you so much for your time.
[Ms. Katherine Venning:] Thank you.

[David Greene:] There were funerals over the weekend for six of the victims of the mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, a week earlier. Funeral services for two more victims will be held today. Although the police investigation continues, a pair of festivals went on as scheduled, giving local residents a chance to regain a bit of normalcy. NPR's Don Gonyea was there.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] For 36 years, Dayton has held its annual Germanfest. There's beer, German food, even folks strolling around in lederhosen, and of course music. But this year's event also offered something else, something far simpler.
[Erika Klaber:] Maybe take a breath, get back to the basics of just maybe dancing, singing. That's such a healing thing.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] Erika Klaber is the leader of a popular German-style band called The Klaberheads, and they had people doing all of those things this weekend in Dayton. Still, she said, it did not feel at all like a normal gig.
[Erika Klaber:] I think people were still a little nervous, sad, you know.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] The audience.
[Erika Klaber:] Right, the audience maybe feel a little guilty for having a good time.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] Like, is it OK...
[Erika Klaber:] Right.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] ...To come out here and have fun?
[Erika Klaber:] Right.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] By the end of the night, the dance floor was full, and you can hear that people embraced the opportunity. Now let's go a short distance to the other side of downtown, to a very different festival, but one that also celebrates Dayton's cultural history.
[The Johnson Treatment:] Going to get this started right.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] This is the first ever Dayton Funk Fest. Funk music was invented right here in this city.
[The Johnson Treatment:] What's up Dayton, Ohio? Going to have some fun. You want to help out, come on. [Singing] Say, uptown funk you up, uptown funk you up.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] Five bands were on the daylong lineup, all local. First on the bill was one called The Johnson Treatment. That's who you're hearing here. The lawn in front of the pavilion filled in over the course of the afternoon. It was a free show. Fifty-seven-year-old bus driver Barry Hawkins appreciated all of it. He, like many others here, pointed to not just the mass shooting but also the deadly tornado that tore through the county and Dayton itself just two months ago. It's been an awful summer, he said.
[Barry Hawkins:] Yeah. Well, we'll never forget what happened, but, you know, you got to move on, you know. You got to keep it moving. We're still here; we ain't going nowhere. Yeah.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] Meanwhile on stage, both events were on the mind of singer and keyboardist Tory James.
[Tory James:] Lot of stuff's been happening, so we need this. We need this coming together. Yeah.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] And then back into music. Here's The LYD Band.
[The Lyd Band:] [Singing] We got a real type of thing going down. Get down.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] Watching the audience, everybody was moving and dancing. I mean, it's hard to listen to funk and not move; it's also hard to listen and not feel better, at least for the moment. Don Gonyea, NPR News, Dayton.
[The Lyd Band:] [Singing] Got to have the funk. We want the funk. Got to have that funk. Y'all sing with me now here.

[Ed Gordon:] Renowned chef and author, Edna Lewis died at her home in Georgia this week at the age of 89. Lewis had no formal culinary training, but her cookbooks on southern cuisine garnered her praise and a wide following. NPR's Vertamae Grosvenor remembers the First Lady of Southern Cuisine. VERTAMAE GROSVENOR reporting Edna Lewis was an elegant woman. Her classical presentation of southern food made you, as Chef Joe Randall says, want to put the South in your mouth.
[Joe Randall:] I have a picture of her and Leah Chase, Edna on one arm and Leigha on the other. Can you imagine the Queen of Creole cuisine on one arm and the granddame of southern cooking on the other? I just was in my world.
[Grosvenor:] She honored the taste and the history of true southern cooking. The recipes in her cookbooks are so seductive; they make you go back to putting lard in your pie crusts. Her recipe for Whipped Cornmeal and Okra is so good it will make you fall in love with the slimy vegetable you swore you couldn't stand. She learned to cook, she said, by watching her mother feed their large family, and followed her example. We lived by the seasons, she wrote, in The Taste of Country Cooking. Chapter headings read, An Early Summer Dinner of Veal Scallions and the First Berries; Emancipation Day dinner in the fall, which she described in a 1993 NPR interview.
[Ms. Edna Lewis:] The food that you would carry would be food of fall which included game and a lot of people carry roast chicken which was a chicken that had become of age and you no longer could fry. And of course, pork and fall greens like turnip greens or mustard greens. And sweet potatoes and pickles and preserves and yeast bread and some dessert like deep-dish apple pie or damson plum pie.
[Grosvenor:] And in winter, a dinner of chicken and dumplings and warm ginger bread. Someone said to me, they thought it was markable that Edna Lewis was a chef during the time when there were few black men and almost no women chefs. Truth be told, for centuries, blacks have stirred the pots in southern kitchens, on plantations, mansions, boarding houses, hotels, and riverboats. It's remarkable so very, very few got their due. Edna Lewis got hers. Scott Peacock.
[Mr. Scott Peacock:] If you saw her, you didn't forget her. We would be in New York sometimes, course she was very well-known there. And a lot of people would come out of storefronts. We'd be walking down the street and they knew who she was and they wanted to meet her, pay their respects. And in Atlanta for that matter too. People would just approach her and say, you know, you're so beautiful, I would love to photograph you, to paint you. She was just exquisite and regal.
[Grosvenor:] She grew up in the farming community of Freetown, Virginia, where gathering fresh eggs, tending the animals were part of her day. She wrote, It wasn't really a town. The name was adopted because the first residents had all been freed from chattel slavery and wanted to be known as a town of free people. Over the years since I left home and lived in different cities, I kept thinking about the people I grew up with and our way of life. I realized how much the bond that held us had to do with food.
[Ed Gordon:] NPR's Vertamae Grosvenor is the author of Vertamae Cooks in the America's Family Kitchen. This is NPR News.

[Michel Martin:] Let's head back overseas to Austria now, where voters will elect a new president. The post is largely ceremonial, but the race is being closely watched in Europe as it copes with its migrant crisis. It's closely watched because Austria could be the first European Union country to choose a head of state from a far-right party. Joanna Kakissis has been covering the story from Vienna and sent us this report.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] At a boisterous campaign rally in a working-class Vienna neighborhood, Norbert Hofer, the charismatic, gun-toting airplane mechanic who hopes to be president of Austria talked about foreigners.
[Norbert Hofer:] [Speaking German].
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] "Those people who don't appreciate our country," he said, "will go to war for the Islamic State or rape women. I tell those people, this is not your home." More than 90,000 asylum-seekers arrived in Austria last year. And Hofer's party, the Freedom Party, has risen to prominence by playing on fears that migrants are criminals. Hofer himself has said that he wants to stop what he calls an invasion by Muslims. I meet Austrian rapper Esra Ozmen in a lively western Vienna neighborhood settled by immigrants, including Turks. She says the Freedom Party's anti-migrant rhetoric has even found support among a few Austrian Turks who are Muslim.
[Esra Ozmen:] Because, yeah, the refugees come and take our jobs.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] But she says most Austrian Turks worry that a Hofer win will make racism more visible. She explains how some Freedom Party supporters are already speaking to her.
[Esra Ozmen:] We have the points, we have the voices, so shut up and go if you don't want to live in Austria. And before, this racism was hidden.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] I meet newspaper editor Florian Klenk in the same neighborhood. He says even if Hofer does not win tomorrow, his party, which Austrians call the FPO, has already moved Austrian politics to the right.
[Florian Klenk:] We have the problem that the FPO party presents themself as standing in the middle of society. But actually, they are not in the middle of society. They are not a centrist party. They are a right-wing party. A lot of positions that the FPO party have are extremist.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] But political analyst Eva Linsinger says the FPO has also tapped into people's unhappiness with the establishment. She says many Austrians view their own government, as well as European Union leaders, as weak and indecisive.
[Eva Linsinger:] If you compare it to different countries, we've got this phenomenon that people seem to be attracted to persons who say, I'm going to take the lead. I'll do that and that and that. You've got it in America with your Donald Trump.
[Joanna Kakissis, Byline:] Hofer faces retired economics professor Alexander Van der Bellen, an independent supported by the Green Party, tomorrow. The election is expected to be close. For NPR News, I'm Joanna Kakissis in Vienna.

[Neal Conan:] Today, American troops near the southern city of Kandahar in Afghanistan peppered a bus with gunfire that left at least four civilians dead and 18 wounded, images of the casualties and the shot-up bus appear on various news outlets. Last week, millions looked at a leaked, grainy video of an airstrike from a helicopter gunship in Baghdad three years ago. Twelve people died in that incident, some armed, some not, two of them reporters. Those of us back home are shocked and disturbed by these images in part because pictures like these are so unusual, not because incidents like these are so unusual but because wars in Iraq and Afghanistan sometimes seem as if they're being conducted out of sight. Today, we talk with a former infantry officer and with an expert on the rules of combat about what the rest of us don't understand about war, about the context. If you've experienced war, in or out of uniform, give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our Web site. Go to npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. What don't we understand about war? Later in the program, Clarence Page joins us on the Opinion Page to talk about the Confederate history proclamation in Virginia and the second Civil War. But first, retired Army officer Matt Gallagher joins us here in Studio 3A. He's also the author of "Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War." Welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.
[Mr. Matt Gallagher:] Thank you. Thanks for having me.
[Neal Conan:] And you served in Iraq. I know you've seen the Apache video. What do you see?
[Mr. Matt Gallagher:] I have. You know, at first glance, it looks terrible. The fact that WikiLeaks labeled it collateral murder certainly doesn't help. But being there, having been in Iraq as an armored cavalry officer on the ground I wasn't a pilot but still, the video begs the question of context. You know, why were the pilots flying in that area? They were clearly looking for something. What were the current rules of engagement on the ground? You know, Wikileaks does a great jobs of marking the two journalists, but they don't point out the fact that they're down the insurgent with an AK-47 or the one with an RPG launcher. You know, those are the questions that I have the benefit of looking for, given my experience, but an average civilian doesn't. You know, they just see the video itself.
[Neal Conan:] And as you say, it looks terrible. Somebody, well, I got an email from somebody: How could people do that?
[Mr. Matt Gallagher:] That yes, and in by itself, in that vacuum, it is, but unfortunately, you know, war, terrible things occur in war. That doesn't necessarily make it a war crime. And, you know, I'm not going to personally, I'm not going to rush to judgment until the entire report is given the context that it deserves.
[Neal Conan:] Also with us here in the studio is Gary Solis Solis, excuse me. He teaches law at Georgetown University in Washington. He wrote the book "The Law of Armed Conflict: International Humanitarian Law in War," and thanks very much for joining us today.
[Mr. Gary Solis:] My pleasure.
[Neal Conan:] And I know you've seen the video, too. What do you see?
[Mr. Gary Solis:] Well, I see much the same thing that Matt saw. And what Americans, many Americans at home watching it on television don't realize is that it's what combatants see if not every day, frequently, not out of the ordinary. Perhaps their language, the language of the pilots and the gunners, was unprofessional, but you often hear unprofessional language in combat situations.
[Neal Conan:] Let's go back to you for a moment, Matt. Did that language there's a moment where one of the wounded reporters, as it turns out, is struggling on the ground, and they say you hear the pilot say: Just pick up a weapon. Just pick up a weapon. And then the implication, then we can shoot you.
[Mr. Matt Gallagher:] Absolutely, and it sounds cavalier, and it was, in fact, cavalier, but that language is soldier language. That's a survival skill. I certainly doubt that when those or I certainly don't doubt that when those pilots went home and slept on it that night, they weren't troubled by it. But at the same time, you know, asking them to pick up a weapon, they're following rules of engagement. That's not murder. If he's waiting for that weapon to be picked up, he's waiting to follow the ROE.
[Neal Conan:] The ROE, the rules of engagement, an acronym that's likely to come up a lot in this conversation. And Gary Solis, the ROE, does that absolve people from war crimes? It's the ROE. We were following the rules.
[Mr. Gary Solis:] Absolutely not. ROE is a term that's used very expansively and very often incorrectly, and it's misunderstood by many who are not familiar with its proper usage. ROE doesn't explain what constitutes a war crime or what doesn't. What the law of armed conflict says through case law, not in the Geneva Conventions or the additional protocols, is that if those pilots and those gunners honestly and reasonably believed that those individuals constituted a threat to American forces, they could lawfully target them. So it would be extremely difficult to convict anyone of a war crime based upon the actions that we saw in that video.
[Neal Conan:] As you know, there was a review of that incident, and the powers that be came to the conclusion that the pilots in that situation had acted within their instructions, and there was nothing to review.
[Mr. Gary Solis:] And in fact in my viewing, several viewings of the video, I saw nothing on which I would be willing to bring charges.
[Neal Conan:] And Matt Gallagher, is this the difference between people who have experience watching such incidents and experience in such situations and the rest of us who see this, well, it's so unusual to see this.
[Mr. Matt Gallagher:] I think it offers a glimpse into that gulf between veterans and the society that veterans fight for. You know, there's far more differences than just that. But there is, you know, a voyeuristic feel to this video of that civilians seem to be getting from it of, oh, this is just what it's like to be there. You're not feeling what those pilots are feeling. You're not aware of who they're trying to protect. You know, there were American ground forces nearby, and that's why those Apache helicopters were in the area, to provide air cover and possibly protect and save, you know, the American lives on the ground.
[Neal Conan:] Nobody seemed to be threatening them. Nobody was pointing a weapon at the a guy had an RPG. And RPG is a threat to a helicopter, but wasn't aiming it at it.
[Mr. Matt Gallagher:] That is correct. At the same time, you know, who's to say that that guy with the RPG was doing five minutes before. You know, what is the context of why the helicopter had followed those particular people there, and had they posed a threat in the past, clearly they're going to pose a threat in the future, as well.
[Neal Conan:] We'll get some listeners in on the conversation. 800-989-8255 is the phone number. The email address is talk@npr.org. Our guests again are Matt Gallagher, you just heard, author of "Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War," former captain in the U.S. Army; and Gary Solis, who's an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown and author of "The Law of Armed Conflict." We'll start with Emanuel, Emanuel with us from Athens in Ohio.
[Emanuel:] Yes. I was wanting to comment on the overall experience of going to combat. I did three tours in Iraq with Third Infantry Division, and I can tell you that my perception of war, being in a peacetime army, changed drastically once I was deployed. And living that every day, seeing your comrades fall, seeing guys that are just as strong or if not stronger than you fall and come to a gruesome demise, it puts you in a different mindset: paranoia, stress, you know, all those things take effect. And basically from what I understand, those helicopter pilots were acting in accordance with their conscience, which is, at the end of the day, what drives the rules of war and everything else. You know, I don't think they should lose any sleep at night. I think the real crime is us Monday morning quarterbacking it. And you know, those pilots now know they're part of a big controversy. And if there was a question of whether they were right or wrong, now it feels like society thinks they were wrong. However, at the time, they did what they felt was right, and now it's coming into question.
[Neal Conan:] Monday morning quarterbacking, and I can understand the feeling, Emanuel. Nevertheless, all of us get Monday morning quarterbacked in all of our jobs. And if I make a mistake on the radio program, people are going to call me on that. And if you in whatever job you've got now, people are going to call you on that. These people are using lethal force in the name of their country. Their actions should be examined.
[Emanuel:] Yes, they should be. The incident should be reported on the [technical difficulties] should be questioned. Now with the spread of the video, that makes it a little more personal and private. That draws out you know, that's not a Lieutenant Calley that had been convicted of something gruesome. If charges were stemmed from what was viewed on that tape, and then they became war criminals, yes, by all means, put it on the media, you know, let everybody see what they did, you know, make an example out of them. So far, I think it's a little early to judge what they did in that particular [technical difficulties] wrong and to air that footage out for the public to make that decision in the court of common opinion.
[Neal Conan:] And I hear what you're saying, Emanuel, but a lot of people believe, and probably correctly, charges would never have been brought against William Calley had not the story been exposed by a reporter in the press and it would've been hushed up, and nothing would have been made of it. So there are two sides of that. But Gary Solis.
[Mr. Gary Solis:] Well, I'm a retired professor at West Point, and as I point out to cadets and I return there frequently to teach the CNN factor, no offense NPR...
[Neal Conan:] Sure.
[Mr. Gary Solis:] The CNN factor is tremendous. And I remind cadets, based upon my own experience, two tours in Vietnam as a Marine Corps company commander, that anything you say or do, presume it's going to be seen on television that night and act accordingly. Remember where you are and who you are and what your job is and what the rules are.
[Neal Conan:] Emanuel, thanks very much for the call, appreciate it.
[Emanuel:] Thank you, I appreciate the time.
[Neal Conan:] Bye-bye. Let's go next to Eli, Eli with us from Fort Myers in Florida.
[Eli:] Yeah, I had a quick point to make. I actually served in the Israeli military, and regarding ROE, I think that it's a very challenging issue because you, on the militaristic side, are really the only side that is required to follow the rules of engagement. And inherently, and I think the situation is very much the same in Iraq, the other side is not only not following these rules, but they aren't interested in these rules, as well. So when you go into conflicts, you are actually more at risk than your enemy, and it's all because you're choosing to following this ROE. I had [technical difficulties] video, and I don't understand exactly what occurred there. I'm going to check it out later today.
[Neal Conan:] Okay.
[Eli:] But I can see where that would be an issue.
[Neal Conan:] Matt Gallagher?
[Mr. Matt Gallagher:] I understand totally what he's saying. We used to call that getting hamstrung. At the same time, that's what you have to do as a counterinsurgency. To be successful in a counterinsurgency, you have to hold yourself to different standards than the insurgency itself, thereby endearing yourself to the local population and starting from there.
[Eli:] And I think one thing that people don't understand is that when you hold yourself to a different set of standards, your life is actually on the line. It's not a simple bargain. You're actually choosing to rise to a different level, and you're putting yourself at risk for that.
[Mr. Matt Gallagher:] Absolutely, and it ebbs and flows on a daily basis. It sounds like you experienced it. I experienced the same thing. And you know, in the moment of the time, a lot of that gets lost.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks very much, Eli. We're talking about the experience of war and what we don't, we civilians, don't understand about it. Well, we look at videos like the Apache gunship video and say: How can people do this? Well, maybe there's a context we don't understand. Give us a call if you've been in that situation in uniform or out, 800-989-8255. Email talk@npr.org. Stay with us. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. This is TALK OF THE NATION. Im Neal Conan in Washington. For most of us, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan play out in soundbites on the radio, maybe the occasional short video on TV or the Web. And an abstract like the rules of engagement means a very different thing when you're on the ground in a war zone. Today, what we don't understand about combat. If you've experienced war as a member of the armed forces or as a civilian, what don't the rest of us understand? Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can join the conversation also on our Web site. Go to npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Our guests are former Army Captain Matt Gallagher, who wrote a book about his experiences in Iraq called "Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War." And Gary Solis is with us, too. He teaches law at Georgetown and wrote "The Law of Armed Conflict: International Humanitarian Law in War." And Gary Solis, give us some wider context. Are incidents like this, other wars, past conflicts, are these unusual?
[Mr. Gary Solis:] Not only are they not unusual, they are more common than civilian observers would probably care to know. You are constantly in an environment where you don't know who's coming, what's coming, who's going to be the means of your death or what the manner may be, and you learn to react, and you react in violent ways. And that's what you know, one doesn't want to say civilians don't understand, but that's what civilians don't understand, that you are constantly on a knife edge, knowing that the next car in Iraq and Afghanistan, a rock, a bump in the road, the next person who comes by could be the means of your death. And it requires you to impose a certain distance between yourself and your surroundings. And you are left with you and the men and women around you that you depend on, that you live with, that you eat with, sleep with, die with. So there is a in combat, there is a combat is a situation which, it sounds so well, it can't be explained. When I came back from Vietnam people say, well, what's it like to be in combat? And I would try to tell them. In 30 seconds, I'd see their eyes begin to glaze over. So now, if I'm asked, I just make up stuff because it's so unique a situation and it requires you to act so differently than you would in any other context that it's hard to impart the experience of what it's like. But what I can say is that what we saw on that Apache video is not unusual. And even more so for someone like Matt, whos on the ground and doesn't have the physical distance of a helicopter gunship, it's even more immediate and stark.
[Neal Conan:] Matt, youre nodding your head.
[Mr. Matt Gallagher:] He absolutely nailed it. You know, you get these survival instincts over there in Iraq or Vietnam, what have you, and then you come back, but you still have those instincts. You may not be there, but that war will always be with you. And you get used to as he hinted at, when civilians want these 30-second soundbites, you just adapt and get used to just giving those soundbites because trying to actually explain it to anybody other than, like, your closest family members is next to impossible. And I think part of that, too, is, you know, something like one percent, less than one percent of the American population serves in today's military, which greatly limits the amount of family members or friends that have it. So it gets back to, like, this voyeuristic feel of the greater American society wanting to know what's going on over there, and then when they get this little, brief, you know, clip that can hold their attention span, they're all over it. And the fact that it's labeled collateral murder just adds to that, you know, Hollywood element that they're going for, but it totally lacks the context of the situation and what we lived and breathed and sweated and bled for for, you know, 15 months or what have you.
[Neal Conan:] Let's get Eddie on the line, Eddie with us from Muskogee, Oklahoma.
[Eddie:] Yes, sir, thank you for taking my call. I enjoy your program.
[Neal Conan:] Thank you.
[Eddie:] I'm an eight-year veteran in the United States Army, 82nd Airborne, and I had I was in the platoon that was half-destroyed. And I can tell you from experience it hits the fan, the rules of engagement kind of are at a distance. You don't mentally think about it. You're in it for your life, and as your host was saying, you smell it, taste it, feel it for the rest of your life. And it's something you don't forget. And rules of engagement are a different aspect whenever you're in the middle of it.
[Neal Conan:] And where was this, Eddie?
[Eddie:] Desert Storm.
[Neal Conan:] Yeah, and the abstract suddenly became less abstract.
[Eddie:] I'm sorry...
[Neal Conan:] The rules of engagement, you're telling us, these instructions that you'd received prior to that situation, suddenly, well, they turned out to be malleable. They could change.
[Eddie:] Whenever you're engaged, whenever you're in the middle of it, to have friendly fire or not to fire on local civilians or try to identify your target 100 percent before you take out your target, you don't think about that nearly as much whenever you're in the heat of it. And a lot of things can be said. I've listened to some of the soundbites on this incident, and some of the things are definitely being taken out of context as far as what's happening at the moment. Those guys may have sounded like they were maybe not following the rules of engagement, but believe me, they probably had a lot of their fellow comrades just destroyed, literally. And their mindset is not on the Geneva Convention or rules of engagement at that moment. And I'm sorry they're being you know, that he's being charged with it. Thats...
[Neal Conan:] Nobody's being charged with anything. And as far as I know, the names of those pilots has not been made public. So far, that's not been part of it.
[Eddie:] Oh, okay, all right.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks very much, Eddie, appreciate it.
[Eddie:] Thank you, sir.
[Neal Conan:] And Gary Solis, let me ask you about an incident in Eddie's war. You talked about the CNN effect a moment ago. The highway of death, this was the last Iraqi troops fleeing Kuwait City with the loot of Iraq. They were taking school buses, ambulances, fire trucks, the contents of every five and dime that had not already been removed to Iraq, with them on the way out of Kuwait City. They're approaching a ridge, the Mutla Ridge, on their way to Iraq. There are also tanks and armored personnel carriers and various kinds of military equipment and that. And American civilians see that convoy, which is cut off by mines in front, mines in back and then machine guns back and forth and back and forth, and they say: How can you kill people who are helpless?
[Mr. Gary Solis:] Well, in fact, the law of war, which is a topic that I teach, says that a combatant is a combatant is a combatant. If he or she puts down his weapon and then surrenders, then they are out of combat and may not be fired on. But as long as they have not surrender or indicated a desire to surrender, they remain lawful targets, even if they don't have a gun in their hand, even if they're retreating, even if they're running away. Until they indicate a desire to surrender, they remain lawful targets, and that was the case in the so-called highway of death. And if you have civilians who are intermingled with combatants, you do the best you can to aim at the combatants, knowing that inevitably, there will probably be civilians who are killed. But the law of war, sometimes called humanitarian law, allows you to kill civilians in such a situation. But there is I don't think there is any combatant who purposely does that, certainly not lawfully. And I don't think any combatant would want to do that.
[Neal Conan:] And let me ask Captain Gallagher a question.
[Mr. Matt Gallagher:] Sure.
[Neal Conan:] The basic tactical maneuver of U.S. infantry, I think going back certainly before the second World War, is fire and maneuver. One part of your unit lays down a field of fire, fixing the force in front of you. The other side circles around the back and, if lucky, shoots them in the back.
[Mr. Matt Gallagher:] Yeah, because that's why we want to win. That's proven successful over the years. You know, a personal anecdote of mine is we rolled straight into the middle of a firefight between the Iraqi army and the Sons of Iraq, the [unintelligible], who were supposed to be allies. You know, they were the kind of paramilitary security forces hired by the United States government to provide additional security. And they were firing at each other. We roll into the middle of it, and suddenly, you know, unknown civilians popped up into the middle of it and started firing at us, too. So, as some of the callers have said, you know, the specific rules, nothing covers that kind of ambiguity. You just make the best that you can and, you know, conduct we conducted a move into contact right into penetrated right into the middle of it, and luckily, the firefight ended without anyone getting hurt seriously.
[Neal Conan:] On your side.
[Mr. Matt Gallagher:] On our side, and the civilians, you know, must have dragged theirs away or, you know, the Iraqi army wasn't hurt, either. But, you know, luckily that day, you know, none of my men, they freaked out, and they handled themselves professionally and were able to maintain their bearing. That doesn't always happen. Things get way messier and more confusing than that, and that's just, you know, a personal story of mine.
[Neal Conan:] Let's quickly go to another phone call. This is Dan, Dan with us from Rock Hill in South Carolina.
[Dan:] Yeah. I'd like to add something. I was captain in Vietnam, and I think it's quite oxymoronic to say that we have rules of engagement. I hear some of the other men at combat. When you are there and they're shooting at you, mortars are dropping all over the place, nobody's thinking. You're just thinking of your buddy or your chance to survive. If we're walking forward and we see a group of people, if we hesitate for a second, we were going to be dead. It is absolutely absurd to talk about rules of engagement. I don't know where they ever came from. You put men in the hell of a situation killing other men, and then on top of that you try to put rules onto it to what? Legitimize it? [technical difficulties] into born killers, you're giving us the authority to kill, and then you're telling us we have to obey certain rules. I've watched men die obeying those rules. I think it's absurd. This conversation is absurd. You put men in harm's way. Their job is to get out of it. My job was to bring those men home. I brought them home. I didn't give a damn about rules of engagement. I brought my men home safely. I did what I had to do, whether I was throwing napalm on a village or not. My men were coming home. They were Americans.
[Neal Conan:] Gary Solis, he's talking about your war.
[Mr. Gary Solis:] He is. And there's some legitimacy to what Dan has to say. On the other hand, as we mentioned before, there's a misunderstanding about what the rules of engagement are. They're not tactical instructions. They don't tell you how to take down a house or how to conduct an attack or who you can shoot and who you can't shoot, except that they say you may never purposely fire on civilians. You can't fire on mosques, et cetera, unless you're receiving fire from those mosques, unless you're receiving fire from those civilians. Once the mosque fires on you, it loses its protection. Any civilian who fires on you, you may return fire in self-defense. So Dan is correct that when you're in a firefight, you're not worried about rules of engagement. The rules of engagement are merely basic instructions that tether the command to the shooter in the field, giving him some very broad instruction on when he or may or may not fire. I do believe that it's dangerous say I'm going to bring my people home no matter what, because the enemy always has a vote in that equation. And so when you are in the field, you have a mission, and your mission is what takes priority, and your men and women come after that.
[Dan:] Not the case. My men the men that were with me, we did our mission and I was to bring them home. I wasn't going to worry about who I killed to get them home, because everybody to me was the enemy. If they weren't the enemy, they shouldn't have been where they were. They shouldn't have been shooting.
[Neal Conan:] If they were shooting, they were enemy.
[Dan:] But how do I know in a village? Do you want me to go through a village and look at hut to hut, and then get myself ambushed? I went in a village, and we thought there was people there. We blew it away, because if not, we were going to get killed. The chances of us going through a village without any tree it's never going to happen. We were going to get ambushed. These people knew how to blend in with the civilians. The difficulty that we're having in Iraq and Iran right now is the same scenario.
[Neal Conan:] We're not in Iran, but thank you, Dan, very...
[Dan:] Blending in with the civilians.
[Neal Conan:] Yeah.
[Dan:] And they're killing all men because we we have to worry about killing civilians. We're worried about collateral damage. They take advantage of that, and then they kill our people. And that's what they did in Vietnam, and that's what they're doing now. The Taliban hides in a church, hides in a hospital and we can't kill them. And all you're doing is killing Americans. The rules of engagement are absurd. If you want the Americans to win, you just simply tell them this is what they have to do, this is their mission, and let them go about it. Our people aren't heinous people. We're not going to go kill children, not a bit without cause. We...
[Neal Conan:] Unless they happen to be in the village in front of you and you don't care whether they're there or not.
[Dan:] Well, we do care, but we know they're there. Because we know that if we don't do it, we're going to get shot because the outfit before us went through there and didn't clean it up and got wasted.
[Neal Conan:] All right, Dan. This could go on for a long time, but thank you very much for the call. We appreciate it.
[Dan:] I'm just simply saying it's got to be real. Take a look what's happening in Afghanistan.
[Neal Conan:] That's what we're trying to do here. Thank you very, again, much, Dan. We appreciate it. We're talking about the experience of combat and getting some vivid contributions. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And Dan raises a point, Gary Solis.
[Mr. Gary Solis:] He does.
[Neal Conan:] Is war legalized murder?
[Mr. Gary Solis:] Oh, well, yes, it is. There is what's known as the combatant's privilege. If you're a lawful combatant, you're privileged to kill people, wound people and destroy objects without penalty of law. The problem, of course, is when you have what is often called unlawful combatants. You have civilians who take up arms and take a direct part in hostilities. And we should remember that once a civilian takes up arms for example, what we saw in the videotape of the Apache once a civilian takes up arms and takes a direct part on hostilities, he or she becomes a lawful target. And it doesn't matter if it's man, woman or child. If you're presented with someone with a weapon coming at you, you have the right under the law of the war, you have the duty to protect yourself and your fellow soldiers and Marines.
[Neal Conan:] Let's see if we can get one more caller in Daniel with us from Elizabeth City in North Carolina.
[Daniel:] Yes, sir. Thank you. What I really wanted to say, I've been listening to this go on back and forth, and I'm a former enlisted Marine that served as infantry in Operation Iraqi Freedom. And currently, I'm an undergraduate student of political science. What I wanted to kind of contribute was that when there's a clearly dominant power in any war, it typically forces the other side into guerilla tactics. What our elite does is more try to level the playing field. When that side has a dominant advantage, it kind of chokes them back up a bit, limits them back and gives the other side a chance to use their military instead of forcing them underground, forcing them to blend with civilians. Because if you can't possibly win, what other choice do you have?
[Neal Conan:] Matt Gallagher?
[Mr. Matt Gallagher:] I think he raised an excellent point. And, you know, the emotion from Dan's call is very telling. And, you know, getting involved in these insurgencies is not like World War II or even Korea, where it's force on force and things are pretty crystal clear. Things get ambiguous. Things get messy and confusing. And, you know, I guess I'd asked that, you know, the American people, as they educate themselves on this, we use this in the future. You know, when we're, as a nation, debating whether or not we're going to get involved in these failing states, you know, a lot of people smarter than me project Iraq and Afghanistan to be the kind of war that the 21st century will see more of. I mean, this is something that we're going to have to anticipate as a society and demand that our political leaders apply them accordingly, because it's never going to be crystal clear, and quelling guerilla wars takes a long time.
[Neal Conan:] And there will be ugly incidents and terrible things will happen.
[Mr. Matt Gallagher:] Exactly.
[Neal Conan:] All right. Daniel, thanks very much for the call. And thank you to both our guests, Matt Gallagher, you just heard. His book is "Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War," former captain, U.S. Army. Gary Solis also with us, adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University. His book is "The Law of Armed Conflict: International Humanitarian Law in War." They both joined us here in Studio 3A. When we come back, the Opinion Page and the second civil war. Clarence Page will join us. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

[Madeleine Brand:] As we mentioned, Richard Holbrooke arrives in Kabul tomorrow. Holbrooke is a veteran diplomat, but he has had little experience with Afghanistan, and this will be his first trip. Even so many Afghans say they expect a lot from him. NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson has the story from Kabul.
[U:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] There's a lot of optimism here at the Bush bazaar, which has unofficially been renamed the Obama bazaar. Many here in this hodgepodge of stalls selling American sundries have not heard of Richard Holbrooke, but they approve of Mr. Obama appointing a special envoy to their country. It's a diplomatic post they hope carries enough clout to turn Afghanistan around.
[Madeleine Brand:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] Afghan politicians familiar with Holbrooke's reputation share their constituents' optimism. They see him as a no nonsense guy with experience at calming ethnic tensions, like his brokering a deal that ended the Bosnian conflict 14 years ago.
[Madeleine Brand:] I think this is the great appointment that we had since seven years.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] Shukria Baraksai is a lawmaker representing Kabul in Afghanistan's Lower House.
[Madeleine Brand:] I'm sure he can solve part of problems. It's very optimistic to say all, but we will be happy if 20 percent problem will be getting solved. I think that will be a great achievement for United States and for Afghans, too.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] In order to speed up progress here, the strategy has garnered support but little action. Paula Cantor heads the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, a think tank in Kabul.
[Madeleine Brand:] That straight talking approach that Holbrooke is known for could be useful here in shaking up actors from the international community to the government, which, while not necessarily complacent at the moment, I think might be somewhat spinning wheels trying to find a new course.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] Mohammad Ichbul-Safi is a lawmaker from Kapisa Province.
[Madeleine Brand:] [Through translator] In the past, when the Americans didn't listen, they failed here, like when we told them that they needed to fight the terrorists in Pakistan. If the new administration doesn't listen, it will fail like the previous one.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] Safi adds the warm reception Holbrooke is getting now could quickly turn cold. Afghan patience has worn thin, he says, especially in this time of insecurity and economic hardship. He and others here estimate the new envoy will have less than a year to prove to Afghans that the new U.S. administration can deliver. Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Kabul.

[David Greene:] Now let's go to our nation's pastime. It's the last day of the Major League Baseball regular season well, maybe it's the last day. Four teams, including the angst-ridden Boston Red Sox, are vying for two final playoff spots. They all still have a shot after playing last night, and if the teams don't resolve things today, there could be more drama on the diamond tomorrow. NPR's sports correspondent Tom Goldman is on the line to talk about what appears to be a thrilling end to a long season. Good morning, Tom.
[Tom Goldman:] Hi, David.
[David Greene:] So give us an overview for what's happening. I guess for two teams, the Boston Red Sox and the Atlanta Braves, they didn't want it to be this exciting.
[Tom Goldman:] That's right. No team in baseball history has had a lead of eight games or more in September and not clinched a playoff spot. And now, as you mentioned, Boston or Atlanta may do it. Earlier this month, Atlanta had an eight-and-a-half-game lead in the race for the National League wildcard. The wildcard playoff spot, of course, goes to the team with the best record that didn't win a division. So Atlanta had this big lead, and today the Braves are tied with St. Louis. Now, we would have heard more about Atlanta's swoon if Boston hadn't done one better, or worse. In early September, the Red Sox led the race for the American League wildcard by nine games, then their pitching staff fell apart. Now they're tied with Tampa Bay. And Boston's collapse is getting a lot more attention, obviously. The Sox are a national team with a well-documented tortured past. And despite two titles in the last eight years, the angst meter in Red Sox nation has been well in the red zone for weeks.
[David Greene:] And we should say, baseball fans in other cities do love watching Boston in angst. There's some examples of how people are feeling in that city?
[Tom Goldman:] From a blog yesterday on the Boston Globe website, the writer says: The 2011 Red Sox are the biggest choke jobs the city has ever seen. And it will go down in history not only for its epic nature but for the contemptible way the team went down with a whimper. Now, David, I'm just wondering how all the vitriol changes to love if the Sox pull out of the tailspin and get to the playoffs and keep winning.
[David Greene:] Well, and there seemed to be some reason for love last night. I mean, if Boston fans were looking for something to hang onto, there were some heroics in the game in Baltimore.
[Tom Goldman:] Absolutely, which the Red Sox won 8-7. It was in doubt until the final out. The star last night was a newcomer. It was a 24-year-old rookie catcher who was a philosophy major at Yale named Ryan Lavarnway. He hit his first two Major League home runs. He was in the lineup because the team's first two catchers were injured. Lavarnway hadn't played in a Major League game before August.
[David Greene:] Wow. A new hero coming in and maybe saving the day for the Red Sox. But Tampa Bay won also, beating the Yankees. And so how does that all set things up for today?
[Tom Goldman:] If one wins and the other loses, the winner's in. And it sets up a wonderful scenario where the Red Sox fans will be pulling for the hated Yankees to beat Tampa Bay. If both Boston and Tampa Bay win or both lose and they stay tied, there's a one-game playoff Thursday in Tampa Bay. Same with St. Louis and Atlanta if they stay tied through today, a one-game playoff tomorrow in St. Louis.
[David Greene:] Well, I'm sure you'll enjoy following all the heroics and drama. It's NPR's sports correspondent Tom Goldman. Thanks, Tom.
[Tom Goldman:] You're welcome.

[Robert Siegel:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
[Melissa Block:] And I'm Melissa Block. The United Nations now estimates almost 2 million people were displaced by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. And many of those survivors now find themselves living in quickly built shacks amidst the debris without jobs, possessions or community. NPR's Jason Beaubien has the story of one woman who lost her simple home on the coast of Leyte Province.
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] Ever since Typhoon Haiyan roared ashore and washed away most of her neighborhood, Gelma Cadion can't sleep at night. Between the rain and her stress, she hardly gets any rest at all. She now lives in a tiny, sheetmetal shack that her husband hammered together. This stretch of sand used to be a neighborhood of small houses set between the main road and the beach.
[Gelma Cadion:] [Foreign langugage spoken]
[Unidentified Interpreter:] It was beautiful. The houses were beautiful. It's just the very thought of all of the things that of what it looks like now, makes her want to cry. And if you like, sit around and think about how bad it's gotten because it was so beautiful here you're just going to go crazy. And also, a lot of people died here.
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] Only two of the neighborhood's dozens of families remain. The typhoon pulverized these homes in to a mash of broken timbers. Cadion's new shack barely protects her family from the elements.
[Gelma Cadion:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Unidentified Interpreter:] When it rains, there's nothing we can do. The whole thing gets wet; and they just have to either stand, maybe sit down, but they can't go to sleep because it's completely wet inside, and rain comes in.
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] Some aid agencies have proposed housing people in tents at least temporarily. But very few tents have been handed out yet. Cadion said she'd be happy with a tent anywhere that's dry. Her 20-year-old son, Manuel, used to have a good job at the local soda-bottling plant, but the storm destroyed the plant. Now, he scavenges for copper wire to sell for scrap. Manuel pumps water by hand from a well, to wash the muddy coils of wire. Cadion says they need the money to buy rice.
[Gelma Cadion:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Unidentified Interpreter:] So yeah, her life is completely turned upside down. She cries all the time. And she doesn't know what to do because the relief goods are going to run out. There's no work. What is she supposed to do once there's no more food coming from the relief? Two of her children worked at the Pepsi plant, and that's how they managed to put up a house. And now there's no Pepsi plant, so there's no work. They don't know what they're going to do.
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] As stressed out as Cadion is over her current plight and uncertain future, her 15-year-old daughter, Maridel, is even worse. The teenager comes out from the shack to add that school should be on the top of the list of their needs right now.
[Gelma Cadion:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] Her school is now in ruins. Maridel says nobody knows when or if it will reopen. Cadion says the whole situation is heartbreaking.
[Gelma Cadion:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Unidentified Interpreter:] She says that her daughter cries every night because she wants to go to school. She wants to go to Manila to be able to study, but they don't have any means to get to Manila. They don't have any family in Manila. So they're just going to be here.
[Jason Beaubien, Byline:] The typhoon didn't just pick up all the houses in her neighborhood and shatter them into splinters; it did that for all of Cadion's life just like for thousands and thousands of other families here in the Philippines. Jason Beaubien, NPR News.

[Steve Inskeep:] It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep.
[Deborah Amos:] And I'm Deborah Amos, in for Renee Montagne. A new international all-news channel goes on the air next week. It's called France Vingt-Quatre, or in English, France 24. And that's the point, the state-run French channel will broadcast in three languages, including English, and it's an attempt by the government to boost the country's image and influence in the world. Anita Elash visited France 24's studios as it prepared for the launch. She has this report from Paris.
[Anita Elash:] The staff of the English language channel at France Vingt-Quatre is rehearsing a newscast. They've been doing this several times a day, since the beginning of October, trying to iron out the kinks in one of the French government's most audacious political experiments in recent years.
[Unknown Man:] Let's go live, now, to the Vatican embassy in Ankara, where the head of the Vatican is receiving... France Vingt-Quatre starts broadcasting tomorrow, with two 24-hour news channels-one entirely in French, and the other, almost completely in English. There will also be a Web site and a third channel, sometime next summer, in Arabic. It's the brainchild of French president Jacques Chirac and his Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin.
[Unidentified Man #1:] [Speaking in foreign language]
[Anita Elash:] The idea of a French-based channel was hatched shortly after the United States and Britain invaded Iraq. As the French foreign minister, Villepin argued against the war at the United Nations. But when the war went ahead, France felt it hadn't been heard, so the government set aside 80 million Euro a year, to try to get the French point of view across.
[Unidentified Man #2:] France Vingt-Quatre, International World News, 24 hours a day.
[Unidentified Man #3:] Welcome to France Vingt-Quatre.
[Anita Elash:] So far, France Vingt-Quatre sounds an awful lot like the channel that hopes to provide an alternative to CNN and BBC World.
[Unidentified Man #4:] France Vingt-Quatre questions, confronts, testifies, analyzes.
[Anita Elash:] There's the usual news bulletin every half hour, weather reports, talk shows and two business programs. But Jean Lesieur says viewers will notice the difference. He is the executive producer in charge of news magazines and talk shows.
[Mr. Jean Lesieur:] This may sound a little bit arrogant but Anglo-Saxon and Arabic channels are a little more self-centered than France Vingt-Quatre will be. France has always been a country where people have loved arguing and debating about all kinds of issues, maybe more than other countries. So France Vingt-Quatre will try to be the reflection of those debates that make up the French society.
[Anita Elash:] Lesieur says he doubt much would have changed if the French channel had existed before the war in Iraq started. But he says the debate might have been more balanced, because people would have heard different points of view.
[Mr. Jean-louis Missika:] I would say it's a bad answer to a good question.
[Anita Elash:] Jean-Louis Missika is a French media analyst. He agrees that the European point of view is often ignored in the rest of the world, and that France is right to try to find a way to increase its political influence. But he doubts the channel can survive. He says the market is already saturated and it's too late to start something new.
[Mr. Jean-louis Missika:] So if you'd create your new business in 2006, it means that you would operational in 2016, and at that time Internet will be the king.
[Anita Elash:] But at France Vingt-Quatre, rehearsals are continuing. And Lesieu, echoing the French philosopher Descartes, says that for now, he had only one measure of success.
[Mr. Jean Lesieur:] Being on the air is a success already. I mean, existing is a success it's a big success.
[Anita Elash:] For NPR News, I'm Anita Elash in Paris.

[Michel Martin:] We're going back now to the raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at a handful of Mississippi chicken processing plants earlier this week, where nearly 700 people were detained. While many people were shocked by the timing of the raids on the opening days of school and just days after Latinos were targeted at a deadly mass shooting in Texas, others might have been puzzled at the location the Deep South, far from a southern border city. Our next guest says that that should not have been a surprise. She says many poultry processing plants have been recruiting and have relied on Latino immigrant workers since the 1990s. Angela Stuesse is an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has spent years studying immigrant labor in the Deep South, including research around the poultry plants like the ones that were targeted this week. Professor Stuesse, thanks so much for joining us.
[Angela Stuesse:] Happy to be with you.
[Michel Martin:] You wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post this week about this. You said, the roots of this lie in two key events. You said, Americans developed a growing appetite for chicken, and African American people who worked in these plants started to organize because their workload was increasing greatly; their wages were not. So faced with this, you know, sort of organizing by these workers, the poultry industry started to do what? What did they do?
[Angela Stuesse:] Well, they started thinking about where they could find a bigger supply of workers, both because they were producing more chicken and had vacancies on the line that they needed to fill and because African American workers who had been trying to organize unions over the '80s and '90s were starting to gain some traction. And the one chicken plant in particular in Morton, Miss., was facing the prospects of negotiating a contract with this union. And so they had the idea that they could go to South Florida in search of immigrant workers. And they had a contact in Miami or outside of Miami at a Cuban store who let them come advertise at the store. And they put advertisements in the local papers. And, yeah, they say that it took them just one week to fill a whole bus with people eager to try their hand at poultry processing in Mississippi.
[Michel Martin:] One of the things you pointed out in your piece you said that you when you arrived to work in Mississippi's poultry communities along the Mississippi Poultry Workers' Center this is in 2002. You said that over half of the country's quarter-million poultry workers were immigrants, most of them in the South. So that's a lot of people. So can we assume that people have put down roots there?
[Angela Stuesse:] Absolutely. I mean, there's been a dramatic transformation of the South since the 1990s, and I attribute a lot of that to poultry processing across the region and their recruitment efforts. But people have been here for a quarter-century, and they've definitely put down roots. I live in North Carolina now. You drive through rural communities in North Carolina and Mississippi, Alabama, many other southern states. And you find Mexican food stores which weren't there before this. You find people playing pickup soccer on the street corners. There are Spanish-language churches. People have absolutely put down roots, and their children are in school and are as southern as anyone else.
[Michel Martin:] You've spent a lot of time talking with poultry workers over the many years that you've been doing this research. What do some of them tell you about why they do this work, what it's like for them and why they stay, even though, as you point out, it's really hard?
[Angela Stuesse:] Yeah, it's terribly hard and degrading on workers' bodies and demoralizing on their minds. People stay in this work because it's one of the few options that they have. The folks that I knew who put down roots in Mississippi or who I know who've put down roots in Mississippi say that they have stayed in Mississippi, particularly, because it's a tranquil place to live and to raise children. They feel like it's calm compared to maybe more urban spaces that they've been. They've felt largely welcome and have been able to sort of live their lives under the radar, feed their families and hope to get ahead.
[Michel Martin:] When you say it's degrading, demeaning, what are you talking about? Can you just describe what do you mean by that? Why do you say that?
[Angela Stuesse:] So, certainly, it's a physically demanding, repetitive job. Workers make the same motion on the line up to 30,000 times in a shift, so bodies wear out, quickly, in the poultry plants. And, you know, African American workers have been on the lines for, now, three or four generations. And I had someone tell me, you know, they just use you up, and they reach back for your kids. So part of it is sort of the wasting on the body but I think beyond that partly because workers are so vulnerable and don't have a lot of other options in poultry, whether they be undocumented immigrants or African American workers or other working-class folks. Chicken plants will do what they can to protect their bottom line. And so some of the stories that I heard working with the Mississippi Poultry Workers' Center the biggest complaint that people would have is that they weren't allowed to take a break to use the bathroom. So people are using the bathroom in their clothes on the line, which is, you know, embarrassing, degrading, demoralizing.
[Michel Martin:] You're saying that these raids have a ripple effect far beyond the immediate people affected. And there were, like, hundreds of people affected as we know. But what is that ripple effect in your view?
[Angela Stuesse:] The local economy revolves around poultry and serving poultry workers, right? So the you could think about the gas station around the corner, where people get gas, where people go to on break to get food. You could think about the sort of more informal economies that spring up to support workers, maybe people selling food in the parking lots or watching their watching the children of workers. I think folks who are not in the immigrant community or working in the plants necessarily are also feeling the effects of these raids.
[Michel Martin:] That was Angela Stuesse. She's a cultural anthropologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She's the author of "Scratching Out A Living: Latinos, Race, And Work In The Deep South." Thank you so much for talking with us.
[Angela Stuesse:] Thank you.

[Tony Cox:] Vitamin D, over the past few years, has been billed by some as the health panacea in your medicine cabinet. Proponents of the supplement have recommended super doses of vitamin D to prevent everything from cancer to heart disease, diabetes, even autism, and the list goes on. But a new report from the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences says there's little evidence that vitamin D can do anything more than improve bone health and that big doses of D may even be harmful. If you have questions about vitamin D and the new report, give us a call. Our phone number here in Washington is 1-800-989-8255. The email address: talk@npr.org. And to join the conversation at our website, just go to npr.org and click on TALK OF THE NATION. NPR health and science correspondent Richard Knox is with us to help sort out what we know and don't know about vitamin D, the so-called sunshine vitamin. And he joins us today from his office in Boston. Richard, hello, nice to talk to you.
[Richard Knox:] Hi. Nice to be with you.
[Tony Cox:] Let's begin with this. Let's explain what vitamin D is. Where do we get it and what does it do?
[Richard Knox:] It's unique among vitamins, it's because it's made in our skin, in our kidneys and livers from exposure to the sun. It's not easy to get from the diet. You can get it through fatty fish, sort of dark-fleshed fatty fish contain vitamin D and, you know, things like sardines as well. But you don't get it from any other places in the diet. That's why they fortify milk and orange juice with it. It's necessary for bone health. We know that for sure. Long ago, people, kids especially, used to get scurvy. They would I'm sorry, rickets. They would their bones wouldn't develop normally if they didn't have enough vitamin D. It works with calcium in the diet. Vitamin D increases the body's ability to use calcium. So you need both nutrients in order to have healthy bones.
[Tony Cox:] We have heard so much, Richard, about the health benefits of vitamin D in the past few years for all sorts of ailments, as we indicated at the top of the story. But this new report says, wait, wait, wait, not so fast.
[Richard Knox:] That's right, yeah. It's been two years in the making. It was ordered up by the governments of United States and Canada. It's part of a process that goes on periodically to look at nutrients. The National -the Institute of Medicine, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences, has a group called the Food and Nutrition Board. And this group of 14 experts went over like nearly 1,000 studies and they, you know, had lots of hearings. They had commissioned a couple of government studies. And they came up, finally, with this new set of guidelines that tells people what they think they ought to be taking in their diet and sometimes in supplements. But most people, it turns out, don't need supplements like the group says.
[Tony Cox:] Now, the report still recommends, doesn't it, a daily intake of vitamin D that is higher than what had previously been recommended?
[Richard Knox:] That's right. It's higher. It's not a whole lot higher. But in the past, it was, like, 400 for most adults and 600 for others. Now they're saying kids need 400 units a day, 600 units is enough for most adults. For those over 70, 800 units a day is a good idea.
[Tony Cox:] Now, one...
[Richard Knox:] And that should satisfy excuse me. That should satisfy the needs of 98 percent of the population.
[Tony Cox:] One other thing that's a little confusing to me personally, and maybe to some of our listeners, is and I asked the pharmacist at my local grocery store I didn't understand the difference between IU and international unit and milligrams. And he and I tried to get a comparison of one to the other, and he was not able to provide that. Is that an issue for us in terms of understanding just how much we are actually getting if it's 1,000 IU as opposed to a thousand mgs.?
[Richard Knox:] Well, no. It shouldn't be confusing. I know it seems like it on the surface, but some nutrients are measured in the units of milligrams. Vitamin D is not. It's kind of a different standard, but you never see vitamin D doses measured in milligrams, so you can sort of forget milligrams when it comes to vitamin D doses. Calcium, on the other hand, is measured in milligrams.
[Tony Cox:] All right. Now, one of the things that might also be helpful to our listeners, as we try to figure out what this how to get to the exact number of IUs for vitamin D in terms of eating an equivalent amount of food, a fruit or vegetable, whatever the case may be, how do you get to 400 units? What do you what could you eat that would be the equivalent of that?
[Richard Knox:] Well, I'm told that the average, you know, decent diet will give you about 200 to 400 international units of vitamin D a day, so most diets will get you a good part of the way there. Exposure to sun is a pretty good way of getting vitamin D, and obviously that varies a lot from person to person or from time of the year I mean, one season to the other. You know, some people wear more clothes. Some people put on more sunscreen. For purposes of this report though, the Institute of Medicine experts decided to ignore sun exposure and just pretend that people, you know, got minimal sun exposure and look at all the other sources. And they told me they were surprised, actually, to find that most Americans do have adequate vitamin D levels even without supplements. So we don't really most people don't need them.
[Tony Cox:] Well, you know, that raises another interesting point about, for some people, the confusion surrounding this because we have this report which suggests that the levels of vitamin D that we intake should be something different than what we had perhaps been told before. At the same time, many doctors have been many people have been told by their doctors that they have a vitamin D deficiency. There seems to be some disagreement there. Are we hearing that correctly? Is there a disagreement? And if so, why?
[Richard Knox:] Oh, absolutely. Yeah. That is a source of the, you know, main source of confusion, and I think it's totally understandable. People have been hearing, especially in recent years, that they need to get their vitamin D levels tested. Many doctors are doing it routinely and many people are being told you're deficient. That's not a happy thing to hear. And you know, I think we need to spend a little bit of time on this because it really comes down to the question of what does deficient mean. And surprisingly, there is no agreed upon expert consensus on what inadequate or sufficient diet, you know, deficient or sufficient vitamin D level is. You'd think there would be. There is for other nutrients, but not for vitamin D. And that's one of the things the panel says we really have to work on. So people have different definitions. Some of the proponents of large doses say that we probably should have a level of 30. That's 30 nanograms per milliliter of blood. And this group, the Institute of Medicine group, says no, 20 is sufficient and most people are well within 20. It makes a big difference. If you use 30 as the level of that everybody ought to be, then most Americans, maybe 80 percent or something, are deficient in vitamin D, and that's what many of the proponents of large doses and supplements say, that we have an epidemic of vitamin D deficiency. This panel looked at the evidence and says no, we don't.
[Tony Cox:] All right. You know what, this is a good point for us to take some calls and have people, you know, chime in on this. Let's begin with Jeff in Vancouver, Washington. Hello, Jeff. You're on TALK OF THE NATION.
[Jeff:] Thank you very much.
[Tony Cox:] Do you have a question or a comment?
[Jeff:] Yes. We have a one-year-old baby and we are giving her a regimen of 400 milliliters of I'm sorry milligrams of vitamin D supplement in the oil. And we've been to both medical doctors and naturopathic doctors and they recommend, because we're in the Pacific Northwest, low sun exposure that probably everyone is deficient. Does that sound right?
[Tony Cox:] Thank you very for that, Jeff. What about that?
[Richard Knox:] It sounds almost right. It probably is 400 units rather than 400 milligrams, as we were talking about earlier. The Institute of Medicine panel, which is making recommendations for both Canada and the United States, is saying that children under four should get 400 units a day and so, you know, you're probably well-advised to make sure your infant has that. Breastfeeding is not a good source of vitamin D. So that's another reason why young children need to have other sources.
[Tony Cox:] Here's another call. This is Aimee in Patterson, California. Hello, Aimee. Welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.
[Aimee:] Hi. I think it's really great that you're doing this right now, because I was just diagnosed with a vitamin D deficiency. My blood test actually showed I had 16 out of 30. I'm not sure why. But I would like to know if there are other alternatives to getting vitamin D besides, like, the milk and the juice, because I'm diabetic, and I'm also lactose intolerant. And, of course, you know, it's sometimes sunny in Northern California. But I was curious to know if there are alternatives, because I don't like pills.
[Tony Cox:] That's an interesting question, Aimee. Thank you very much for that. So what would you say to her?
[Richard Knox:] Well, first of all, I'm not a doctor. But it sounds as though the very best way is to get out in the sun on a fairly regular basis. So like 15 minutes of sun exposure through for, you know, normal kind of clothing, exposing your arms and face and so on, I think would probably help. Sixteen is below what the Institute of Medicine says they'd like to see people. It's not radically below, I guess. But you might consult your doctor and say, should I be taking a modest supplement of vitamin D? It's cheap. You can get it at the drugstore. But just don't according to the Institute of Medicine panel, you don't have to take, you know, 1,000 milligram 1,000 units, 2,000 units, 4,000 units.
[Tony Cox:] Lisa from Placerville, California is standing by. I'm going to go to her in a second, because she has a question that is the same question that I had for you. But it's a little bit a different. I wanted to talk about any potential harm from taking vitamin D. And Alyssa wants to take that question just a little bit farther. Hello, Alyssa. Welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.
[Lisa:] Hi. Thanks for taking my call.
[Tony Cox:] Sure.
[Alyssa:] My husband grew up in New Jersey. And when he was a young child, under four, he actually had an overdosed of vitamin D from sun exposure and ended up in the hospital. And so my question is, these people that are taking, you know, megadoses of vitamin D supplements, are they you know, why aren't we hearing more of those effects? And is that, you know, possible? Is that kind of thing I mean, about the overdose risk.
[Tony Cox:] Thank you very much, Lisa. That was going to be my question. Not overdose per se, but whether or not there was harm from taking too much.
[Richard Knox:] Yeah. There are several issues here. Let's see if we can kind of tease them out. First of all, I think overdosing on vitamin D from sun exposure is pretty unusual. This report doesn't address it. I think it's probably, for most people, not to worry about. The report does raise a concern about harms from high doses. It says that a maximum of about 4,000 units a day is what people should stay within. And that's really not because there's proven harm for higher doses. And certainly the proponents of higher doses say it's a really very safe thing, until you get to really, really, really high levels. But the Institute of Medicine folks say that we just don't really know. There just haven't been a whole lot of studies. And there are sort of hints and some signals in the literature to suggest that there may be an increased risk of certain kinds of cancers such as pancreatic or esophageal. Not proven. There may be a reason to worry about heart disease from deposition of excess calcium in the arteries. Again, not proven. One thing that is known about risk and harm is that kidney stones can result from too much calcium in the body. And remember, vitamin D increases the absorption of calcium. And one of the panel members was telling me this week that it used to be that kidney stones were rarely seen in women. It was more of a men's problem. And but in recent years people are reporting more kidney stones in women. So people need to be a bit careful about doses, especially over 4,000 a day.
[Tony Cox:] We're taking your questions and talking about the new recommendations for vitamin D. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. That last comment that you made about calcium actually is a perfect segue, Richard, for the question that I have for you next, which is we should note that the report that we are referencing also looked at calcium intake. Talk about the findings of the report in that regard.
[Richard Knox:] Yeah. You're not hearing as much about that because it's not so controversial. They don't change very much from what had been thought before. There is a table that they that's in the report that indicates that, you know, children under six months should get 1,000 excuse me, should get 200 milligrams of calcium a day. As children age, and especially get into the rapid growth years, their calcium needs grow. So it's like 1,000 milligrams between the ages of four and eight, 1,300 in nine to 18, the adolescent rapid growth years. Then it goes back to 1,000, then older people need 1,200. That's probably more than you can absorb. But basically it's not a whole lot different from what had been thought before and not particularly controversial.
[Tony Cox:] We had a question about fibromyalgia. I'm not sure if that's something that you feel comfortable talking about. I know I'm asking you on the air, which I probably shouldn't do. But if you feel like you can deal with that, we can take that caller. What do you say, Richard?
[Richard Knox:] Well, I can talk in general terms about what the report says. It doesn't specifically address fibromyalgia, as far as I can tell...
[Tony Cox:] I'll tell you what. Let me see if I can squeeze this person in really quickly. Katie, I've got about 20 seconds for you to make your point.
[Katie:] Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I have fibromyalgia and I've seen a lot of articles speaking lately about the power of vitamin D to reduce symptoms. So I am wondering if the report addressed fibromyalgia specifically and what it said and if it also addressed broader, other health issues like cancer and things that have also been identified as vitamin D?
[Tony Cox:] Thank you very much. We're gonna try to see if we can get that answer for you. What do you say? As our time we've got about a minute or so left.
[Richard Knox:] Sure. Well, the short answer is that the panel does not find health effects from vitamin D doses of any sort, any level, beyond bone health. That's really undisputed. But for all sorts of other things that are claimed, it just didn't find the evidence was very strong. That may change as we get more evidence and there are studies. But you know, the study that exist so far are not considered, you know, strong enough to make a recommendation that people take doses for that reason.
[Tony Cox:] Would you consider this a breakthrough report?
[Richard Knox:] No. I think it's not a breakthrough. It's kind of a consolidation of a whole lot of evidence that's piled up over the past 10, 13 years since the last recommendations. And you know, I think it's striking to a lot of people because people have been hearing that vitamin D was really important for a lot of things. And this group says not proven.
[Tony Cox:] We appreciate the time that you gave us, Richard. Thank you very much. NPR health and science correspondent Richard Knox, joining us today from his home in his home office, that is, in Boston. Again, Richard, thank you.
[Richard Knox:] Sure, any time.

[Ira Flatow:] Here with me now is Flora Lichtman, with our Video Pick of the Week, and it is a beauty.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] Thanks, Ira. This week I went on a field trip.
[Ira Flatow:] Yes.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] Wee! I went to the Concord Field Station to visit a comparative biomechanics lab.
[Ira Flatow:] That's Concord in?
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] Concord, Mass.
[Ira Flatow:] Mass.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] It's actually in Bedford...
[Ira Flatow:] Bedford...
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] OK. So comparative biomechanics, right? This didn't much to me, but let me translate it for you. It means a ton of animals moving in different ways. And when I went this is a typical day in the office there. I walk in, I'm walking around, and I first bump into post-doc, Maria Miara, who has to go get her guinea fowl on the treadmill.
[Ira Flatow:] Just to go and pick her up...
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] It was training day.
[Ira Flatow:] ...a guinea fowl on the treadmill.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] So that's this is like I'm already...
[Ira Flatow:] Another day at the office.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] Exactly. It's like I can tell that I'm in a special place right from the beginning, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. They have an emu and they happened to have a day-old goat. A baby goat was born the day before. It's totally bucolic. It was like a scientific menagerie. It was just amazing.
[Ira Flatow:] And they have a cockatiel or...
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] Yeah. The main a cockatiel. The main activity that day was happening in the wind tunnel. So this is it's huge. I think I hesitate to do the actual length, but I think probably like 40 feet, not the actual enclosure, but between the fan on one side. And they blow wind through this sort of enclosure and put the birds in, and then they can change the wind speed to make the birds flap, at sort of the equivalent of different speeds.
[Ira Flatow:] So they're like flying in the wind tunnel with the wind in the face.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] They're flying in place.
[Ira Flatow:] In place.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] It's like a bird treadmill. I mean, it's the same idea, right?
[Ira Flatow:] Right.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] And the point of this study, which Ivo Ros is doing, was to figure out how much energy it takes to fly. So they have a little heart monitor hooked up to the cockatiels. But again, like imagine what this is like for the cockatiels. So there's all this training involved because for a bird to be flapping their wings and not going anywhere is really weird. So they have to, you know, encourage them not to sit on the bars. And it just was...
[Ira Flatow:] There's no scenery changing.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] That's right.
[Ira Flatow:] And they're...
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] It looks like a stationary bike.
[Ira Flatow:] And in your video it's our Video Pick of the Week, which you have called the best laboratory in the world?
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] It was enamored with this lab. I'm just going to be honest. I thought it was the coolest lab.
[Ira Flatow:] Coolest lab in the world.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] If you like animals, you should check out this video.
[Ira Flatow:] And they have all these animals that are they're flying. They're on they have them on treadmills. They have they try to get them off the cabinets inside the lab.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] Yeah. I mean, you know, of course, if you're going to get a guinea fowl on the treadmill, it's not that like the guinea fowl is, like, yeah, I'm really looking for a workout. Thank you. It doesn't necessarily want to be on there, although they do seem sort of OK with it.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. Yeah.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] You know, it was they were pretty cooperative, surprisingly.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. It was very interesting, and this is what they do. I mean, they have all these different things, and you got to see the inside of this lab.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] Yeah. And you know, it so what they're studying so I could gush about the animals for a long time, but there's actual science going on here. And the idea is to understand sort of how muscles work and how our skeletons help us move. And engineers are collaborating with them to make better robots, and they have sort of influence on people looking for treatments for movement disorders in people. I mean, this is a really basic biology happening here, but you need to have all these kinds of animals to compare how a guinea fowl runs versus how an emu runs or and so they also have, you know, really cool gadgets. So there's like a huge X-ray machine that takes X-ray video and high-speed cameras everywhere.
[Ira Flatow:] And...
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] It's sort of like a visual dream.
[Ira Flatow:] It is. It's our Video Pick of the Week. It's up there on our website @sciencefriday.com, and also on our mobile apps, that you can download them. And one of my favorite little parts of the video is where the guy points to a treadmill and he says that's a special treadmill.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] A treadmill of note, Ira.
[Ira Flatow:] A treadmill of note? What was of note about that?
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] Andrew Biewener said this as we were walking through the lab. It's where they first jump kangaroos and...
[Ira Flatow:] Of course. Kangaroos on a treadmill.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] To figure out how the tendons work. I mean, it really is neat stuff that I don't think I don't think this a lab like this exists maybe anywhere else.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] I mean, if it does, please let me know because...
[Ira Flatow:] Flora will be there in a minute.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] Yeah, exactly. I'd like to see it.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. Well, if you have any other interesting labs, let Flora know.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] Yeah. And I'd also like to thank everyone who sent in videos when we requested I'm still going through them. So if you haven't heard back from me, it's not personal. It's coming, but they were really great, so thanks for sending them.
[Ira Flatow:] Yeah. Couldn't compete with the guinea fowl this week on a treadmill. So thank you, Flora.
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] Thanks, Ira. And a happy birthday, Ira.
[Ira Flatow:] Well, thank you very much. The secret, the secret...
[Flora Lichtman, Byline:] The secret's out.
[Ira Flatow:] The secret is out.

[David Greene:] And there is new leadership in another Asian nation. Over the weekend, Japanese voters returned a former prime minister to the country's top job. Shinzo Abe took an assertive stand on several big issues during the election. And as NPR's Jackie Northam reports, this sparked concern in the United States that his win could stir up tensions in the region.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] There was a strong current of nationalism running through Shinzo Abe's campaign. He took a hawkish position on territorial issues and a less-apologetic approach to Japan's recent history. That may have helped the 58-year-old Abe capture the prime minister's seat, but it also created a nervousness among some allies, including the U.S., says Sheila Smith, a Japan specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations.
[Sheila Smith:] I think there's a certain amount of ambiguity about how he wants to proceed, especially on security and foreign policy issues.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] Smith says there are several causes for concern in Washington, among them, how Abe will handle bitter territorial claims with China over disputed islands in the East China Sea. Although Japan has administered the islands for decades, China claimed sovereignty, and has been sending patrol boats into the area. Under a U.S.-Japan treaty, the U.S. is obligated to defend Japanese territory. Smith says there is deep concern in Washington about how to manage the dispute.
[Sheila Smith:] The United States is an ally of Japan, and therefore wants to support Japanese efforts to defend its territory. On the other hand, no one in Washington wants to see escalating tensions between Japan and China, let alone anything that might lead to a calculated or miscalculated use of force between the two countries.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] But Ely Ratner who until recently was on the China Desk at the State Department says it's likely the U.S. has already been reaching out to Abe's party and Beijing to try to calm the situation. Ratner, now with the Center for a New American Security, says there are other issues that can potentially create bigger problems, particularly with other U.S. allies in the region. Abe has denied aspects of Japan's wartime history, including its use of women from Korea and other occupied countries as sex slaves for its military. Ratner says that will have major repercussions for relations with South Korea.
[Ely Ratner:] And this poses a challenge for the United States, who has treaty relations with both Seoul and Tokyo. And I think it befuddles a lot of American strategists that those two countries can't get along better, particularly in the face of a rising China.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] Or as the U.S. tries to deal with North Korea's nuclear program. Washington needs all its allies in the region to be on the same page. Michael Green, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says Abe's overheated rhetoric is much different than his track record. Green says Abe had a strong nationalist edge to him when he first became Japan's prime minister in 2006, but he quickly took a more pragmatic view and actually improved relations with China and Korea. Green says Abe will likely moderate his rhetoric now that he's won the election.
[Michael Green:] As a matter of realpolitik and Abe is a strategic realpolitik kind of thinker I think he'll drop it. And certainly I think the U.S. government is quietly encouraging him to do that so that we can move forward together to deal with the problems we face today and in the future.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] Washington will have a chance to do that soon enough. Abe says his first visit when he takes office will be to the U.S. Jackie Northam, NPR News, Washington.

[Michel Martin:] We're going to talk sports now. It's a big night for basketball. Tonight, the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors face off in their seventh and final match for this year's NBA championship. And, yes, it's a face-off between the sport's biggest stars LeBron James and Steph Curry. Here to set the stage is Kevin Blackistone. He is a columnist with The Washington Post and appears on ESPN. He was nice enough to spend part of his Father's Day with us. Welcome. Thanks so much for joining us.
[Kevin Blackistone:] Thanks for inviting me.
[Michel Martin:] So for anybody who hasn't been following the finals, can you just give us a little bit of a sense of the drama of it all?
[Kevin Blackistone:] Sure. Well, this has been one of the biggest back-and-forth finals that we've ever seen, in the sense that all six of these games spread out over the last two weeks have been blowouts. We've never seen this before. Every game has been decided by double digits. So maybe tonight we'll actually see a close game. However, despite the lack of beauty in the basketball being played, it's been as theatrical as anything. We've seen performances from LeBron James that we've never witnessed before in NBA Finals history. He leads every category in this series points, rebounds, assists, blocked shots and steals. We've seen a team come in that set a record for wins in the NBA season the Golden State Warriors with 73 wins and all of a sudden they are teetering. They are a game away from losing in the postseason as many games as they lost in the regular season, which was just nine. So that in itself is amazing. And no team that has been up 3 games to 1 in a seven-game series in the NBA Finals has ever lost the finals. We've had so much theater, so much drama, that this is much-watch TV.
[Michel Martin:] So talk about what this would mean for LeBron James and for Cleveland.
[Kevin Blackistone:] Well, you know what, I feel like just a few games ago when the Cavaliers were down 3 to 1, people were saying, well, this is going to tarnish LeBron James' legacy. Now that he's led them back with this superhuman performance, people are saying this just shows that, win or lose, he is the MVP. And also, you know, this would really validate much of the reason for which he came back to Cleveland one, to bring his home state a championship for the first time in over half a century. But also, just to bring inspiration to black youth like himself who on this Father's Day grew up without a father, who see him as someone who can provide them the inspiration to continue on with their lives and to be successful and no matter what path they choose. And so I think that this win would do a lot more for people in Northeast Ohio and Cleveland. And kids would look up to Lebron James, really, than the fans who just want to see the Cavaliers win.
[Michel Martin:] And finally, what about Steph Curry? I mean, he's no pun intended kind of the golden child. Do you think there is quite as much at stake for him?
[Kevin Blackistone:] You know what? I think that there is, in the sense that he has been anointed kind of as the new face of the NBA. And he has really taken his lumps in this series. He has not been the enjoyment to watch that he was during the regular season. So I think that this is going to speak to his early legacy and remind people that, you know, this is a really difficult game to play. You can't make it look like it's a computer game all the time.
[Michel Martin:] All right. Kevin Blackistone, something to watch on this Father's Day.
[Kevin Blackistone:] That's right, a nice way to end dad's day.
[Michel Martin:] That's Kevin Blackistone. He's a columnist with The Washington Post. He appears on ESPN regularly and teaches sports journalism at the University of Maryland. He was kind enough to join us here. Kevin Blackistone, thank you.
[Kevin Blackistone:] Thank you.

[Robert Siegel:] From NPR News this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel and we begin this hour with fighting in Syria and the terrible impact of that fighting on children. In a few minutes, we'll hear from a refugee camp in Turkey, where families have fled the violence. First, today the Syrian regime appeared to suffer another high level defection. NPR's Peter Kenyon is monitoring that news and other developments from Istanbul.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] The day began with rebel fighters announcing a new offensive in the northern Raqqa Province. This video featured Islamist fighters, including some from the Al Isra Front, designated a terrorist group by Washington. The next batch of videos appeared to show one result of the new clashes, government strikes yielding more heavy civilian fatalities. This video posted by the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights showed bodies lined up on a floor in the village of Katanya, near Raqqa. Some of the bodies are covered with sheets, but it's clear several are women and children. The Observatory reported eight children and three women among the dead. Other activists put the death toll higher. Despite its superior firepower, the Syrian military and security forces continue to suffer losses, some on the battlefield, others due to defections. A man identifying himself in the video as Major General Abdulaziz al-Shalal said he had quit his job as head of the Syrian military police because the military, in his view, was killing its own people instead of protecting the country. It was the latest high-level defection from the government, and activists speculated that Shalal might offer insights into the regime's strategy. International envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, still in Damascus, was reportedly sent to visit Moscow on Saturday to discuss options for ending the violence. Syrian diplomats arrived in Moscow today to meet with Russian officials who have been among their strongest supporters but who have recently shown signs of distancing themselves from the regime. Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Istanbul.

[Robert Siegel:] Some sad news for "Star Trek" fans. James Doohan, who beamed up many a character onto the USS Enterprise, died today at the age of 85. The Canadian-born actor immortalized the character of Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, Scotty, with an unforgettable angst-ridden delivery.
[Mr. William Shatner:] [As Captain James T. Kirk] Scotty.
[Mr. James Doohan:] [As Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott]: Scotty here, sir.
[Mr. William Shatner:] [As Captain James T. Kirk] We have to get out of here within three hours. Spock has orders to kill me unless I complete the military mission.
[Mr. James Doohan:] [As Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott] We've got another deadline, too, sir.
[Mr. William Shatner:] [As Captain James T. Kirk] Explain.
[Mr. James Doohan:] [As Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott] The two-way matter transmission affected the local field density between their universes, and it's increasing. We've got to move fast.
[Mr. William Shatner:] [As Captain James T. Kirk] How fast?
[Mr. James Doohan:] [As Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott] Half hour at the most.
[Mr. William Shatner:] [As Captain James T. Kirk] If we miss?
[Mr. James Doohan:] [As Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott] We couldn't get out of here in a century.
[Melissa Block:] For the record, that Scottish brogue was not his own. When the actor landed the role in 1966, he tried seven different accents before settling on Scottish.
[Robert Siegel:] Doohan was born in Vancouver in 1920. He left home at the age of 19 to fight with Canadian forces in World War II. As a captain, he led men into battle on D-Day in Normandy, where he was wounded in the arm and leg. He lost a finger in combat.
[Melissa Block:] After the war, he began training as an actor in New York City and soon landed roles on radio, appearing in about 4,000 programs in both Canada and the US. But it was as Scotty that Doohan would be best known. Here are some of his most memorable moments.
[Ms. Nichelle Nichols:] [As Lieutenant Nyota Uhura] Ship's outer skin is beginning to heat, Captain. Orbit flux shows we have about eight minutes left.
[Mr. William Shatner:] [As Captain James T. Kirk] Scotty.
[Mr. James Doohan:] [As Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott] I can't change the laws of physics. I've got to have 30 minutes.
[Mr. William Shatner:] [As Captain James T. Kirk] Scotty, you've got to get me some maneuvering power.
[Mr. James Doohan:] [As Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott] I can't repair a warp drive without a space dock.
[Mr. William Shatner:] [As Captain James T. Kirk] Then get me impulse power, half speed, quarter speed, anything. If we can get this hulk moving, maybe we can do something.
[Mr. James Doohan:] [As Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott] I checked the engines. The warp drive is a hopeless pile of junk. If I push these impulse engines too hard in the condition they're in, they'll blow apart.
[Mr. William Shatner:] [As Captain James T. Kirk] You set the ship's impulse engines to overload?
[Mr. James Doohan:] [As Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott] Aye. The shape that thing's in, it's hard to keep it from blowing.
[Robert Siegel:] Doohan appeared on "Star Trek" until it was canceled in 1969. He reprised the role of Scotty in seven "Star Trek" movies.
[Melissa Block:] James Doohan died at his home in Washington state. According to his agent, the cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease. He was 85 years old.
[Robert Siegel:] This is NPR, National Public Radio.

[Susan Stamberg:] Slow season for sports? Not one bit. It is the season for that favorite activity of couch potatoes yacht racing. Also, in another elegant sporting arena, some unexpected lessons at this year's Dallas Cowboys training camp. Our teacher on all this, NPR's Mike Pesca. Hiya, Mike.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Hi. Yachts and the Cowboys. That goes so well together.
[Susan Stamberg:] Yeah. So, the America's Cup right now that's the prestigious yacht sail-off -and it seems that some of the racing boats are making some very serious waves, yes?
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Yeah or not, as the case may be. It's kind of a disaster. In fact, there, you know, were supposed to be, or they had hoped organizers had hoped eight to 10 yachts would be involved and different countries would be able to field teams. But we have to understand why there are only four yachts racing. And in fact, one of these, the Swedish team, is not even up to speed. And so far, all the preliminaries in what's called the Louis Vuitton races, have not raced against each other. They just race against the wind.
[Susan Stamberg:] Well, what's going on?
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Well, the winner of the America's Cup gets to set the rules for the next year. So, America won it in 2010, and Larry Ellison, who's the billionaire from Oracle who runs the America's Cup team, says here is what the rules are going to be. And he decreed that the boats that would sail in this race would be these space-aged metal fix-sail things. He said they wouldn't foil. They foiled. To get one of these things and the technology's really hard to come by, only a few people know how to make them costs like $100 million. This precludes a lot of countries from being in the race. They had hoped China would be in. They had hoped Latin America would be in emerging countries. No. It's only Sweden, whose boat has suffered a disaster when a crew member died in May and Italy and New Zealand and the United States is waiting to see among those who will be able to face it in what to a lot of purists or even casual race watchers say doesn't really look like sailing.
[Susan Stamberg:] Wow, wow. It actually sounds a little like boat doping. The foiling, that comes from hydro-foiling. Is that what that is?
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Yeah, yeah. And then they achieve air. If you look at them, they look one of the "Star Trek" sequels I think it was number four was about whales in San Francisco. And the Enterprise would come in and out of the water, and that's what it looks like a little bit, a spaceship. They're going so fast. I actually spoke with an editor of VSail, a magazine, named Pierre Orphanidis. And I talked to him in Lisbon because there were more yachtsmen there than there are in San Francisco like I said, only four teams competing and he said people are just so depressed and so down on what the America's Cup has become, just because yachting is not exactly an un-elitist sport, but it has gone the realm of only billionaires need apply.
[Susan Stamberg:] And it's making the sport less safe, did you say?
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Yeah. There was a death and deaths happen all the time. So, perhaps we can't directly correlate it to the speed of the boat, but a lot of structural engineers say at those speeds there's so much tension on the hull that they can come apart. And, you know, when you're going that fast and you're going in water it can be dangerous.
[Susan Stamberg:] So, your curveball this week, please. Something about football, geometry?
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Yeah. At the Dallas Cowboys training camp, their head coach disclosed that he was discussing the Pythagorean Theorem with his receivers.
[Jason Garrett:] If you're doing it from 10 yards inside and running to that same six yards, that's the hypotenuse of that right triangle. It's longer.
[Susan Stamberg:] Give me a break.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Yeah. He was telling he told, for instance, Miles Austin, listen, if you line up a few yards past where you're supposed to be, you're going to be running the hypotenuse instead of the leg of the triangle. So, we all know that A-squared plus B-squared equals C-squared. You're running a longer distance.
[Susan Stamberg:] It's wonderful. Thank you. NPR's Mike Pesca. Thanks a lot.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Michele Norris:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
[Melissa Block:] And I'm Melissa Block. President Obama is looking for ways to cut the budget. Yesterday, his former rival for the presidency, Senator John McCain, suggested he look no further than the White House lawn.
[Michele Norris:] Your helicopter is now going to cost as much as Air Force One. I don't think that there's any more graphic demonstration of how good ideas have cost taxpayers enormous amount of money.
[Melissa Block:] And the president didn't disagree.
[P:] The helicopter I have now seems perfectly adequate to me. Of course, I've never had a helicopter before. You know, maybe I've been deprived, and I didn't know it. But I think it is an example of the procurement process gone amuck.
[Melissa Block:] And joining us to talk about this pricey helicopter is Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman. Tom, what's the history here?
[Tom Bowman:] Well, this all started after the September 11th attacks. White House officials went to the Pentagon and said, listen, the president needs a better helicopter, one that can protect him in a better way, and also one where he can have better communications, talk with anyone in the world from his helicopter. And also, the current fleet is almost 40 years old, started flying during Gerald Ford's administration back in the mid-'70s, and they are getting to the end of their lifespan. They're looking at 2017, and that will be the end of these helicopters.
[Melissa Block:] What else do they want this new helicopter to do?
[Tom Bowman:] Well, I just talked with Loren Thompson. He's a defense analyst. He knows a lot about this program. And here's his list of what they want it to have.
[D:] Many of the things that are carried on the presidential helicopter are secret. However, what we do know is that it has extensive self-protection capabilities against surface-to-air missiles; that it has hundreds of pounds of very secret communications equipment so the president can stay in touch with foreign leaders where there's nuclear forces and so on; that it has a kitchen, it has a bathroom, it has seating for 14 people, and it has a multiperson crew.
[Tom Bowman:] Now, it also has to be small enough to land in that tight confinement of the White House grounds. And the other thing, they want it to go farther. The current helicopter goes maybe 150 miles before it has to refuel. This one, they want to go 300 miles in the event of a nuclear attack.
[Melissa Block:] And meantime, this helicopter fleet of helicopters is over budget and overdue.
[Tom Bowman:] That's right. What happened is they kept adding requirements to it. They want it to be able to prevent a missile attack, better communications and so forth. Even the seats had to be able to take nine G's in case it drops out of the sky, and it can protect people. And they've built five of these already, and the next line of 23 will have an even more equipment. And there's talk about adding a new engine to compensate for the added weight.
[Melissa Block:] Why do they need 28?
[Tom Bowman:] It's not only the president who will use these but also the vice president, some of the top leaders, Defense Secretary Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And also, when the president goes around the country or overseas, they'll bring the helicopter along with him.
[Melissa Block:] Now, when Senator John McCain says this is more expensive than Air Force One, is he right?
[Tom Bowman:] Well, he is. In 1990, when they procured the two Air Force One planes, it was a total cost of $650 million, so roughly $325 million each. But a better comparison might be the F22 fighter, the Air Force's most sophisticated jet, and that cost roughly the same as one of these helicopters around $400 million.
[Melissa Block:] Well, what happens now? And Barack Obama said this is a procurement process run amock. Do they scrap it? What do they do?
[Tom Bowman:] Well, it's a good question. Now, they have five now in flight testing. And they said Obama or someone else might be able to fly this in the next year and a half or so. So the question is, will they build the additional 23 with this added equipment? We don't know the answer to that yet. But the one thing we do know is the current fleet of helicopters is getting old, and they need some replacement.
[Melissa Block:] Okay. NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman, thanks so much.
[Tom Bowman:] You're welcome.

[Michele Norris:] Today, we are seeing another road map for financial reform. This one is a proposal from Senator Christopher Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. It's a more ambitious plan than the package proposed by the Obama administration and the bill in the House. And in this latest legislation, the big loser would be the Federal Reserve. NPR's John Ydstie explains.
[John Ydstie:] Chairman Dodd was the last to present a reform proposal, but his is also the most sweeping effort to address the regulatory failings that contributed to the financial crisis. Most importantly, he would consolidate the power of all four of the current federal bank regulators into one super regulator, the Financial Institutions Regulatory Administration.
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] Our proposal will replace the myriad government agencies that failed in my view to rein in the risky schemes, with a single, accountable federal banking regulator.
[John Ydstie:] In doing this, Dodd would strip the Federal Reserve and the FDIC of their power to regulate banks and completely eliminate other bank regulators: the Controller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision that regulates savings and loans. That goes much further than the Obama administration's proposal and the bill developed by the House Banking Committee. They only eliminate the Office of Thrift Supervision. Dodd's bill, which has the support of Democratic members of the Senate Banking Committee, would also go beyond the administration and the House by creating another brand new institution. It would monitor and identify risks to the whole financial system posed by large institutions and complex financial products. The new agency for financial stability would also take power that the administration and House plans give to the Federal Reserve. Dodd maintains he isn't punishing the Fed.
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] Well, I don't see it that way. There's nothing punitive in this bill. I know that people think that. I really want the Federal Reserve to get back to its core enterprises.
[John Ydstie:] Like conducting monetary policy and being lender of last resort. Scott Talbot, head lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable, says the big financial institutions that he represents support the new systemic risk regulator that Dodd proposes. He says the industry is agnostic on the question of a single bank regulator or multiple regulators. There are pluses and minuses to both, he says. But the industry continues to oppose another feature of Dodd's package: a new consumer financial protection agency that would be a watch dog over financial products, from credit cards to mortgages.
[Mr. Scott Talbot:] We're against creating a separate agency to protect consumers. We think you can protect consumers a more effective way by strengthening the existing regulators, rather than creating a separate agency.
[John Ydstie:] Asked about the political hurdles he faces in passing such an ambitious bill, Dodd said this is not a time for timidity. While the Dodd proposal differs in significant ways from it's plan, the Obama administration reacted positively to the chairman's package. Deputy Treasury Secretary Michael Barr said Dodd has proposed a tough bill.
[Mr. Michael Barr:] I think that we're in a strong position substantively and politically to get financial reform done.
[John Ydstie:] But it's not clear that any of the current reform bills can get the Republican support needed to clear the Senate. John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.

[Steve Inskeep:] The arrest of a Chinese tech executive adds to her company's contentious relationship with the U.S. Meng Wanzhou is chief financial officer of Huawei and daughter of the founder. She was arrested in Canada on a U.S. extradition request. NPR's Jasmine Garsd reports on the history of the company.
[Jasmine Garsd, Byline:] Ren Zhengfei is a former People's Liberation Army officer who founded the telecommunications company in 1987. Since then, the company has grown into a worldwide juggernaut. It expects to ring up more than $100 billion in sales this year. Sarah Cook is a senior research analyst for East Asia at Freedom House, a democracy watchdog organization.
[Sarah Cook:] Chinese technology companies generally, and particularly these tech giants their success or failure isn't accidental. It's really contingent upon government support.
[Jasmine Garsd, Byline:] Those ties between Huawei's founder and the Chinese government have raised questions about potential espionage dangers for the U.S., which Huawei has repeatedly denied. But Cook says the concerns are hardly outlandish.
[Sarah Cook:] It's hard to imagine that a company like Huawei would not provide information to Chinese intelligence agencies if it was requested. It's hard to imagine that they would have a choice, even.
[Jasmine Garsd, Byline:] Earlier this year, U.S. intelligence agencies warned American citizens against using products and services made by Huawei and another Chinese company, ZTE. Around the same time, AT&T backed out of selling Huawei's smartphones. The U.S. government isn't alone in its concern about Huawei and Chinese espionage. Australia has banned Huawei for the next generation of cellphone networks. In addition to espionage concerns, Huawei has been suspected of shipping products to Iran despite American sanctions. And that's reportedly why Meng Wanzhou was arrested earlier this week, although the charges have not been publicly disclosed. The Chinese government has demanded she be released. Jasmine Garsd, NPR News, New York.

[Mary Louise Kelly:] Here's one thing we've learned about the shooting at a church in Texas on Sunday. The rifle, used to kill 26 people and injure many more, was sold to the gunman because of an error by the U.S. Air Force. The gunman, Devin Patrick Kelley, joined the Air Force in 2010. While enlisted, he was court-martialed for assaulting his then wife and infant stepson. The Air Force should have forwarded that information to the FBI to be included in a background-check database for gun sales. It never happened. NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman broke this story. He's here with us now in the studio. Hey, Tom.
[Tom Bowman, Byline:] Hey there.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] What happened?
[Tom Bowman, Byline:] Well, simply, the Air Force investigators never put that information, that criminal information into the federal criminal data system. It's supposed to be done, Mary Louise, on two occasions when there's a probable cause a serious crime has been committed, and then once again it's updated after a court reaches a decision, either an acquittal or a conviction. In neither case was this done by investigators at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, where Devin Kelley was serving and then was arrested for assaulting his baby stepson. He actually fractured the child's skull and then also assaulted his wife. So that information on two occasions was never put in the database.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] So does this look like just a case where the military justice system wasn't communicating as it should have been with civilian justice?
[Tom Bowman, Byline:] Right. Well, you're supposed to put this information into the system. And we spoke with a former Air Force prosecutor who said it should have been he should have been prohibited from having a gun for two reasons. The first is his crime was punishable for more than a year in jail. He only served a year, but he was actually he should have received five years, number one. Number two, he should have been barred from purchasing a weapon because of domestic abuse. That should have barred him from getting a firearm. But since none of that appeared, he was able to buy the weapons at the stores in Texas.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] OK. So it's 100 percent clear that if his conviction had been correctly communicated with the FBI, entered into that database, he would not have been able to buy a gun?
[Tom Bowman, Byline:] That's correct.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] OK. Do we know at this point, isolated incident or is there a larger institutional problem here? I mean, might there be others with military convictions who haven't been correctly entered into the national gun database?
[Tom Bowman, Byline:] Well, first of all, the Air Force, I'm told, is taking this very seriously. The Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson has asked for a full investigation. And I'm told the Pentagon inspector general is looking at all the other services to make sure that information is put into the federal database. But the indications are it's probably not enough information is getting in there, that we're told the Pentagon has reported 11,000 service members to this database, but nearly all of those are for dishonorable discharges, and that alone would prohibit you from getting a firearm. In this case with Devin Kelley, he had a bad conduct discharge, which would not have automatically prevented him from getting a firearm. So it appears on the face of it that not enough information is being added to this database by the Pentagon.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Another stunning twist to an awful story. NPR's Tom Bowman there. Thanks very much for your reporting.
[Tom Bowman, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Neal Conan:] This past holiday weekend provided the best box office in Hollywood history and the biggest hit was James Cameron's sci-fi epic �Avatar,� which raked in 75 million all by itself. If you haven't seen it, the movie takes place in the year 2154, on a moon called Pandora, where we humans are the aliens. And it features breathtaking special effects, best seen in 3D. Some critics complain the storyline is both trite and derivative, the dialogue nothing special but there is unanimous praise for the true, out of this world 3D experience with vivid colors, texture and cinematography that combine to bring the wow factor back to the screen. There are a lot of movies that claim to change the entire movie going experience and some actually did it. �The Jazz Singer�, �The Wizard of Oz�, �The Ten Commandments�, �Star Wars�, �The Matrix.� Which film, which scene, which special effect raised the bar for you? Our phone number: 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our Web site, that's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Later in the program, West African correspondent Ofeibea Quist-Arcton will join us with a profile of the man charged with trying to blow up a trans-continental airliner on Christmas day. But first, Richard Rickitt is with us. He is the author of a book called �Special Effects: The History and Technique.� He lectures on special effects at the British Film Institute and joins us on the phone from his home in England. Nice to have you on the program with us today.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Hi, thank you very much.
[Neal Conan:] And �Avatar� has certainly raised the bar this time around. And the use of 3D, there have been a rash of movies in 3D. This one seems to be surpassing them all.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Yes, it does. I think, well, it's something that James Cameron's had an interest in for a long time. I think he's decided that it was time to give it a go in one of his own movies. And it's, well, by all accounts, it's been very successful.
[Neal Conan:] And, of course, as you studied the history of special effects, well, moving pictures are themselves a special effect. I mean, going back to the days when you had the, you know, the flip pictures of horses running and that sort of thing.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Well, that's right. I mean, in the very earliest days of the moving pictures, the very fact that pictures could move was in itself a special effect. And in fact, way back in 1895, when the Lumiere brothers first showed a film of a railway engine coming into a station, people who were watching it jumped up and ran away because they thought this engine was actually about to smash through the screen and run them over.
[Neal Conan:] It should be pointed out, this was a silent picture.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Yes.
[Neal Conan:] And, of course, one of the biggest special effects revolutions of all time was sound, �The Jazz Singer.�
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Yes, well, that was sound in fact created a lot of problems for people creating visual effects because up until that point, films had been made oftentimes outside, in the great outdoors. And all of a sudden, because of sound recording, films had to be made indoors, in a sound stage. And so the problem was how to get the great outdoors indoors and that led to the creation of things like rear screen projection, you would probably be familiar with that, that often seen image of a Hollywood actor in a car or on a ship with a sometimes not very well projected scene behind them. And that was because filmmakers had to find a way of bringing the outside into the studio.
[Neal Conan:] And you could also get films that seemed, well, you know, raising the bar at the time. You think of a film like Alfred Hitchcock's �The Birds,� with those great images of all those birds flocking. And you see it today and, well, it's not so convincing.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Well, unfortunately no. We're all so sophisticated visually now that we often see things that were once considered incredibly realistic and they no longer look that way. But it's hardly surprising. I mean, when you think about �The Birds,� I mean, a lot of those images of �The Birds� were just in fact painted birds, they were matte paintings on a sheet of glass. And to make them look as if they were real birds, they scraped little bits of paint off the back of the painting and moved a light behind it. So, when they filmed it, it looked as if the birds were in fact moving.
[Neal Conan:] And indeed, though, you can go back to the earliest days of cinema to directors like D. W. Griffith and people like that and find these enormous sets that were constructed to represent places like Babylon and, of course, well, �The Ten Commandments,� I guess, is one of the great ones of all time, a little bit later, of course.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Yes, indeed. In fact, at one point, you know, Hollywood, in fact particularly in the 1950s when television was taking over and causing quite a threat, filmmakers actually decided not to use special effects so much and to actually build these enormous sets. And they used that as part of their publicity to persuade people to come and see the films.
[Neal Conan:] And a cast of thousands.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Thousands and thousands of people, which, of course, now would all be computer-generated.
[Neal Conan:] Indeed, but parting the Red Sea, still pretty impressive.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Yes it is, two versions of that, of course. And people have their own favorite but it's still an impressive sight to see.
[Neal Conan:] As you look back, though, there have been notable failures of some technologies that were introduced. Well, 3D the first time around, a novelty act for a little while. We remember Vincent Price stabbing through the screen but other than that it didn't catch on.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] No, but unfortunately the 3D was brought in first in the 1950s. The first film it use it was something called �Bwana Devil.� And filmmakers got rather carried away with the process and the effects rather than telling stories. And so after about 18 months that particular craze dried up because the films were generally so poor, they relied on having something leaping out of the screen at you rather than telling a story, which I think is a salutary note to the filmmakers of today.
[Neal Conan:] Whatever technology they may embrace, story is still the most important thing.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Absolutely.
[Neal Conan:] And let's see we get some callers in on this conversation. We're talking about the special effects that changed the cinematic experience for you, raised the bar for everything that followed 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. And Marion is with us, calling from Rochester in New York.
[Marion:] Yes, I have been raised in the South. I am accustomed to seeing many, many birds and trying to catch them, setting various traps for them. You can never get close to them. And the mere fact that I saw tons and tons of birds running at people, knocking blood out of them, banging into windows and just wreaking a tornado like havoc into the community, I was just blown away. I was scooting down in my seat and if my older brother hadn't have held me, I would have jumped up and ran out of the movie.
[Neal Conan:] I thought that they were just trying to get Rod Taylor's suit to be a little bit less thin, it was so tight on him. But, anyway, yeah, �The Birds,� at the time, Richard Rickitt, was really impressive.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] It was, it was a very impressive film. And, you know, people were very, very scared by it and, you know, had became averse to birds the rest of their lives, some people. Similar to the effect that �Jaws� had some years later.
[Neal Conan:] Just when you were ready to go back in the water, �Jaws 2�, of course, yes. Thanks very much for the call, Marion. We hope you've made your peace with the birds from now on.
[Marion:] I'll do my best. Thank you. God bless, and bye now.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks very much. And I do remember they had a great advertising campaign for that film. Big billboards saying �The Birds� is coming which, of course, is correct because it's a title of a movie but, of course, the seeming grammatical error made a lot of people jump right out of their skin. Let's go to Carl. Carl calling us from Wichita.
[Carl:] Greetings, Neal. I got to say the movie that changed the cinematic experience for me originally was �Star Wars.� The scene where they flew down the Death Star canyon, absolutely, I walked out of that movie at the ripe old age of 12 with my jaw scraping the floor. They did that with models and matte paintings and whatnot. And then I just saw �Avatar� this weekend and I got to say that that really raised the bar for me.
[Neal Conan:] Yeah. They're talking about a 3D version now of �Star Wars.�
[Carl:] And that would be truly a sight to behold. This was actually the very first 3D movie I've ever seen. I'm 46 years old, I hate to admit this is the first 3D movie I ever saw. And one of the things that I think really impressed me about it, one of the things I think that so many of the new CGI films lack is a real depth and texture, that the �Star Wars� movie had since they did it with models. And the newer movies all seem to be kind of flatten and whatnot, but I did not get that feeling from �Avatar,� especially with the added, you know, the third dimension. And I could the movie made me laugh, made me cry. It changed my world. It was just astounding.
[Neal Conan:] Great, Carl, thanks very much for the call, appreciate it.
[Carl:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] And �Star Wars� certainly did raise the bar.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Oh, �Star Wars� I think probably if you ask anybody who's interested in visual effects, then very often that's the film that did it for them. In fact, many people working in effects today, probably working on films like �Avatar,� are there because, simply because of �Star Wars.� I remember clearly seeing it when I was five years old, and I can remember it as if it was yesterday, being absolutely blown away. Of course, I had no idea how it was created. I found out about that much later on, but what an amazing film.
[Neal Conan:] And it's interesting that Lucas has gone back several times to as technology has improved to make the film better and better and better.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] That's right. He's kept on adding bits and pieces that he couldn't do originally as a struggling filmmaker...
[Neal Conan:] Jabba the Hut, for one.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Well, exactly. I mean, there are you know, some people would perhaps rather he wasn't added back in, but it adds something to the story that originally had to be dropped.
[Neal Conan:] And indeed, they are talking about retrofitting movies like that as 3D. Are you familiar with that process?
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Yes, yes, there are several processes now that are available that you can take a traditional movie and actually turn it into a stereoscopic experience.
[Neal Conan:] Let's get another caller in, and let's go to Christine. Christine with us from East Jordan in Michigan.
[Christine:] Yes. The movie that I thought really made a difference was I don't know if you remember, this is an old movie was �The Abyss,� where they took the saltwater and they made it into a being, a face. And I think they used that same type of technology in the �Terminator� movies, where they were taking that silver liquid and making it into a form. And I thought at the time that that was and those are old movies, and I don't think people talk about those as much, but I thought those were really phenomenal special effects.
[Neal Conan:] �The Abyss�...
[Christine:] And I also saw �Avatar� and thought who cares about the storyline? Visually it was just such an orgasm. I'm telling you.
[Neal Conan:] �The Abyss,� as it happens, another James Cameron movie.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] That's right. He's always been looking for stories that really push the limits of filmmaking. And in that case, it was the pseudopod, an amazing creature made out of water, yes.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks very much for the call, Christine. There are, of course, people like Ray Harryhausen who made their techniques using stop-motion animation. And that's how we got �Sinbad the Sailor� and that sort of thing and, of course, �King Kong� as well.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Oh, Ray Harryhausen, I know him well. He lives here in London, and a marvelous man, true gentleman. But his skills are almost supernatural. It's incredible. If you go and see a film today like �Avatar,� and you look at the credits list for visual effects, you know, there are probably one, possibly even two thousand people who worked on it. But you watch a film like �Jason and the Argonauts,� and the people that did the visual effects numbered one. It was him, Ray Harryhausen in a little studio, locked away for months on end. He was the only person working on those films. And if you look at something like �Jason and the Argonauts,� there's a great scene where Jason is fighting seven skeletons, and the skill involved in making sure that the live-action actor's sword could clash with the sword of the skeletons that he was animating, it really makes the mind boggle.
[Neal Conan:] Coming up, more on special effects, plus we'll talk with the lead vehicle designer for James Cameron's �Avatar.� We'll take more of your calls, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. There was a time when sound was an impressive special effect. Now it's 3D cinematography in James Cameron's �Avatar� that's got people in movie theaters gasping. In a minute, we'll talk with the lead vehicle designer on that film. We want to know: What was the movie that raised the special effects bar for you? Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our Web site. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Let's go through a couple of quick emails. FrogGirl send us a tweet: The perfection of Gollum's face in �Lord of the Rings� and the stark beauty of �Battlestar Galactica's� space-scapes, that of course on TV, and �300's� Roman battlefields she of course meant Greek battlefields, but anyway, those were all breakthroughs. And this another pay-in to �Star Wars� from Donna in St. Louis. I have a very clear memory as a �tween of the enormous spaceship flying into the frame from above in the first �Star Wars.� It just kept coming and coming as it got bigger and bigger, and the sound got huger and huger. The day marked a lifelong love of big movies that you have to see in the theater and not at home. And Richard Rickitt, who's the author of �Special Effects: The History and Technique,� and I guess that's the point. They want you to plunk down your $12.50, I guess it now is, and go see the movie.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Well, that's right. That's been what's really kept visual effects going all these years. It's the need to make things bigger and better and more exciting.
[Neal Conan:] Joining us now is TyRuben Ellingson. He's conceptual designer and has worked on films such as �Jurassic Park� and �Mimic,� �Hellboy.� He was the vehicle designer for �Avatar� and joins us today from member station KJZZ in Tempe, Arizona. Nice to have you with us today.
[Mr. Tyruben Ellingson:] Very nice to be here, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] And I understand you worked specifically on the exoskeletal war machines.
[Mr. Tyruben Ellingson:] Well, yes. I worked on all the vehicles that are man-driven vehicles in �Avatar,� but I think you're referencing the AMP suit, which is the big, giant robotic machine that the character Quaritch gets in. And it basically is a robot that amplifies the human operators, you know, physicality inside of a kind of a cockpit that's in the chest of the large robotic machine.
[Neal Conan:] And the large those machines are they have weight. They have gigantic feel. They have enormous power. Did James Cameron turn to you and say, well, I guess money's no object, make it good?
[Mr. Tyruben Ellingson:] Actually, Jim's approach to it was to look at the existing technologies and try to extrapolate from that what, you know, what the military of the future might have without going into an area which would be too fantastic or too fantasy-life. He really talked about these things as an extension of a tank, for example, that had some of the technologies that are being developed by the military today. You mentioned the exoskeleton, is a similar idea, that you wear a suit that's robotic and it actually increases your human capabilities, your strength and your speed. This was that kind of on steroids. It was really a kind of a small chamber that cocooned the operator in a safe zone, in this case in �Avatar� against the poisonous atmosphere. And then as he moved freely within that little compartment, the larger suit on the exterior, you know, was able to move in a very dynamic way and, as you mentioned, with a lot of extra weight and extra strength and extra size, which plays huge in the movie. The kind of equalizer between the height of the Na'vi and the human is this AMP suit, which brings, you know, man's presence up to a scale somewhat equivalent to the Na'vi.
[Neal Conan:] And the control system was fascinating. I guess it's an extension of the old Waldo, the you can stick your hand in a glove and manipulate a robotic glove.
[Mr. Tyruben Ellingson:] Yes, that's it exactly. In fact, we did look closely at all kinds of Waldo technologies. The idea of having an interface that's mechanical, that is calibrated in such a way that it translates the human movements into some kind of, in most cases, a digital code that then is, you know, transmitted to a driver or a robotic joint, and then it's duplicated in some capacity. The early Waldos were cable-driven, and now we have digital versions of them.
[Neal Conan:] And Waldos, of course, they get the name originally from a device first imagined by a science fiction writer, Robert Heinlein.
[Mr. Tyruben Ellingson:] Exactly.
[Neal Conan:] So it all comes around full-circle. And it's interesting that Jim Cameron, the director you call him Jim, I'll call him James, I guess but in any case, that he wanted these things to be not too fantastic.
[Mr. Tyruben Ellingson:] Exactly. He always talked about them as being nimble. He cited linebackers and football players as though in fact, Quaritch does it a little bit in the scene where we're first introduced to this kind of AMP suit technology. He gets inside. He straps himself into the Waldo interface, as you mentioned, and then he does a quick kind of couple of boxing moves, and you see the coordination between his punching and the larger suit's motion. And Jim always intended that these would be nimble and quick and agile, but they would be very powerful and very strong and very much along the line of what you would like to have if you were going to battle against a really formidable enemy.
[Neal Conan:] And indeed, then they get into battles with all kinds of interesting creatures, including, of course, the Na'vi, but the hammerhead rhinoceros-type creatures and the cat-like creature, and then there's a great duel at the end. Well, I'm not going to give it away. But those must have been really, really difficult things to film.
[Mr. Tyruben Ellingson:] Well, actually, there was a process of going through Jim would work with a number of different technicians and they came up with what was called a pre-visualization methodology, where he could explain the actions. And at first, it was very simple, primitive kind of versions of the creatures that it would look very much like a video game, and he could kind of plot those out and talk about in terms of, you know, setting up the staging. That would be like just, like, if you think about the way that you would approach doing a theater play, you kind of stage it, like the camera will be here, and then we'll have the creature come in there, and then the Na'vi will be here. Those drove the process along until they were able to bring in actors who had specialized suits on, which is another whole topic in itself. The motion-capture technology in this film is unprecedented. He could then have the human actors do their lines and make their gestures, and those their movement would be captured by specialized cameras, and then it would be presented on a monitor as though they were the Na'vi. And then he could ask them to move left or move right, and he could make adjustments and capture these things in a kind of piecemeal manner that allowed him to kind of collage them together. And eventually, in post-production, he could manipulate them further, and they grew in their detail and their complexity. It was a very organic, technological process.
[Neal Conan:] Richard Rickitt we're going to get back to calls in just a minute, but I wonder if you know a lot more about this than I do if you have any questions for Tyruben Ellingson?
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] No, no, I'm actually just enjoying listening to his tales of working with James Cameron. What an amazing experience for him.
[Neal Conan:] Tyruben Ellingson is with us from KJZZ in Tempe. Richard Rickitt is with us from his home near London. Let's get some more callers on the line, and let's go next to Steve. Steve with us from Erie in Colorado.
[Steve:] Yeah, I'd like to put my vote in for one of the all-time classics it's ancient is �Forbidden Planet� with Walter Pidgeon and Anne Francis, one of the initial advents of any kind of special effects used in the films.
[Neal Conan:] Robby the Robot was later revived to star in �Lost in Space.� But of course, the monsters from the Id were the big creatures in that. Tyruben Ellingson, do you go back that far? Do you go back to pictures like �Forbidden Planet�?
[Mr. Tyruben Ellingson:] You know, actually, I watch �Forbidden Planet� on Thanksgiving every year. It is a very it's a classic picture. It has you can see all the source materials for many things that were brought through the you know, brought along as cinema developed R2-D2, C3PO, these notions of a fantastic other world. You know, they're all kind of you can see their kind of base coding, their genetic coding in that film very clearly. And I just get a real kick out of it every year.
[Neal Conan:] Why Thanksgiving?
[Mr. Tyruben Ellingson:] I don't know. It just started somewhere along the line, and now I can't separate turkey from, you know, the feast leads straight into Robby making alcohol, you know, for the cook, exactly.
[Neal Conan:] Exactly. And Richard Rickitt, your point about story earlier, along with special effects, they stole a pretty good script.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Well, exactly, yes, of course. You can't go wrong when you begin with �The Tempest.�
[Neal Conan:] Thanks very much for the call, Steve. Let's see if we can go next to Nathan. Nathan with us from Iowa City.
[Nathan:] Yes, hello.
[Neal Conan:] Go ahead, please.
[Nathan:] Well, it's funny you mentioned a moment ago the height of the war machine and the Na'vi and that being important to Mr. Cameron because the special effects that impressed me is not computer graphics or big sets, it's the apple box. The movie I'm thinking of is �Minority Report,� and in that, there was a scene towards the end where Tom Cruise and Max von Sydow have a glare-off, eye to eye. And as I was watching it, I was thinking, well, Tom Cruise is about five-one or two, and Max von Sydow is six-six, six-seven. That's amazing special effects right there, that they are standing nose to nose to one another.
[Neal Conan:] They borrowed the box that Alan Ladd used to stand on, maybe.
[Nathan:] Exactly.
[Neal Conan:] Nathan, thanks very much for the call. Let's go next to James. James with us from Portland, Oregon.
[James:] Hi, thanks for taking my call.
[Neal Conan:] Sure.
[James:] I'm calling about a movie that sort of fell by the wayside, at the time was a brand-new concept, grade vehicles, and at the time, groundbreaking computer graphics, which is �Tron.�
[Neal Conan:] Richard Rickitt, �Tron� actually debut a lot of the technologies that have come to greater fruition in "Avatar."
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Well, that's right. "Tron," 1982, made the first use of a lot of computer graphics techniques. Unfortunately, it wasn't a great success at the box office. And so, many people, in fact, believe that's what held up the use computers in filmmaking for a long time and the studios just didn't see that it was going to be a way of making money.
[Neal Conan:] So, a better story, they might have all had this years and years ago.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Same old story, that's right.
[Neal Conan:] Same old story. "Tron" is is "Tron" one of your predecessors, TyRuben?
[Mr. Tyruben Ellingson:] Well, I'm a huge fan of "Tron." And actually, the designer, Syd Mead, who was the person who came in and did a lot of the cool futuristic vehicles in that, is somebody that I've I had a long, long respect and admiration for. They are, right now, doing a redo of "Tron" that's in production and should be coming out, I believe, next year. So, it should be interesting to see how the transitions from its first incarnation to use with, you know, in a newer version with the newest technologies.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Well, interestingly, they've kept one of the original Syd Mead designs.
[Mr. Tyruben Ellingson:] Exactly.
[Neal Conan:] Interesting. Here's an email from Tom in Cincinnati. He another vote for "The Abyss." This movie sported the water creator visual effect, the same technique used in �Terminator II� for the metal form shaping Terminator. Rats, I forget the model number. Both were groundbreaking in my book and both were James Cameron movies, as we pointed out earlier. And this from Ray in San Francisco. Hi. For me, there were several. The one that hit an emotional chord, as well as visual, was "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." The crescendo of the UFO special effects starting with these small little teasers, ending up with the surprise arrival of the mother ship still sends thrilling shivers of wonder down my spine. And I particularly like the scene where they're playing the, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta, ta. And it finally answers. And we figured out that we can't communicate with another species. Of course, one of the great special effects was the mountain sculpted in mash potatoes. I always thought that's pretty good too. That's a wonderful movie. We're talking with TyRuben Ellingson, the conceptual designer. He's worked on films such "Jurassic Park," "Mimic," "Hellboy," "Blade II" and "Blade Trinity." He was the vehicle designer on "Avatar." Also with us, Richard Rickitt, who lectures on special effects at the British Film Institute, and his book is "Special Effects: The History and Technique." You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION, which is coming to you from NPR News. Let's go next to Eric. Eric's with us from St. Louis.
[Eric:] Well, good afternoon. I was remembering the first time I saw Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." And since you were mentioning the service of special effects in telling stories, if you're going to tell a story, if you go, sort of, to the nature of humanity and what our purpose is in the universe, that's a pretty good story to try to get at with special effects. I thought you really felt like you were in space for that film.
[Neal Conan:] There was the great scene of it. It was Keir Dullea, running around the course and seeming weightlessness as he tried to get his exercise, and that was utterly convincing. And "2001," a great story, Richard Rickitt, and it made a pile of money.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] It made a lot of money, and the studios couldn't work out why. [Unintelligible]. It confused the heck out of them. They didn't know whether it was the special effects, or they didn't know quite why. A lot of people thought it was something to do with the illegal substances that some people consumed in the cinema while watching the famous star gate sequence at the end there.
[Neal Conan:] Eric, thanks very much for the call, appreciate it.
[Eric:] Could I mention one other thing? When I saw "Avatar" I'm partially colorblind, and "Avatar" is the first 3D movie that I could actually see 3D in.
[Neal Conan:] Wow. That's interesting. Okay.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Yeah, that's because normal the traditional 3D process involved using the [unintelligible] process, the blue and the red spectacles, which, of course, some "Avatar" doesn't rely on.
[Neal Conan:] Let's go next to Charles in Macomb, Illinois.
[Charles:] Hi. I wanted to mention "The Wizard of Oz." It's just so old. The effects, you know, weren't as great as they are nowadays. But for the time, I would think that I had a lot of impact on the audience.
[Neal Conan:] Well, just going from the black and white of Kansas to the color of Oz was pretty spectacular. And the I'm assuming a lot of people got pretty scared in the tornado sequence. So, Charles, I think you've nailed that one. That's a huge movie that really did shift everybody's expectations of what was possible and, of course, was a tremendous hit. Thanks very much for the call. Our couple of emails, Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane," nominates Buck in Portland, Oregon, best special effects, use of deep-focus lens. And TyRuben Ellingson, we sometimes forget that lens work like that well, is it a special effect?
[Mr. Tyruben Ellingson:] Well, yeah. I mean, I think you can take almost any facet of filmmaking process, and if you try to take it and use it in a very stylistic way for a specific kind of storytelling point, it becomes a special effect. I mean, you know, you can make things that would be like for example, in "Citizen Kane," they use large foreground objects that are in focus with background performances. So it's like your you can't escape the symbolism that the director is implying. So, yeah, I think it could easily be considered a form of special effect when it's pushed and utilized in that manner.
[Neal Conan:] In that manner and, indeed, I think editing was a special effect, Richard Rickitt, or in the early days, in extreme editing or fast editing -still a very common technique.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Yes, there are a lot of very interesting techniques used in editing to shock audiences, to surprise them, and so forth. I mean, just getting back to "Citizen Kane," and I don't think people realize often how many visual effects there were in that film. And it's a very interesting example of a film which uses visual effects almost in an invisible fashion. It's full of matte paintings, there's animation, all kinds of interesting techniques which don't leap out at you as being special effects but they help tell a story.
[Neal Conan:] On this tweet from A Wilson and talking about "Avatar" and Cameron. We're avoiding the, obvious, "Titanic" that used effects that are unobtrusive and still hold up all the way back what, nine years ago? Still holds up. TyRuben Ellingson, they're talking about a 3D version of that one, too.
[Mr. Tyruben Ellingson:] Yes. I mean, I'm not super knowledgeable as to how they're going to approach taking a lot of these two-dimensional films and making them three-dimensional. There's several techniques where they kind of slit-scan out components and move certain things in the view frame forward, so I'm not really in a position to discuss it. But, of course, now that we have this venue available and we have multiple theaters in most major cities, and people actually have become more interested and hungry for it, I'm sure we'll see a lot of really exciting things coming down the pipe in the years ahead.
[Neal Conan:] Well, TyRuben Ellingson, congratulations on your work and the great success of "Avatar."
[Mr. Tyruben Ellingson:] Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to be here, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] TyRuben Ellingson, conceptual designer. He designed the vehicles for "Avatar," with us today from KJZZ, our member station in Tempe, Arizona. Richard Rickitt, thank you for your time today as well.
[Mr. Richard Rickitt:] Thank you very much. It's been a great pleasure.
[Neal Conan:] Richard Rickitt's book is "Special Effects: The History and Techniques." He also lectures on special effects at the British Film Institute and joined us from his home outside of London.

[Melissa Block:] Later this month, Egyptians will vote in their country's first truly competitive presidential election. Campaign billboards line the highways; candidates are debating each other, speaking on the stump and making the rounds of political talk shows. And as Kimberly Adams reports from Cairo, Egyptian families are hosting their own informal debates.
[Kimberly Adams, Byline:] The normally slow traffic in Cairo becomes even more jammed up than usual on Friday and Saturday nights, as Cairenes pack into their cars to go on family visits. It's common here for people to meet with their extended families on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, usually at the home of an older relative. In the upper middle class neighborhood of Heliopolis, a collection of aunts, uncles, and cousins meets in the fashionably decorated living room of 79-year-old Zeina Hamza. Before last year's revolution, she says these family gatherings were just a chance to catch up.
[Zeina Hamza:] Talk about everything; about expensive food, whatever you think about anything.
[Kimberly Adams, Byline:] But since then, the conversation has changed. Her granddaughter, Nourhan Osama, is 20 and studies law and English.
[Nourhan Osama:] You need a conversation, we're completely different about. No, we never talked about politics, never ever never ever.
[Unidentified Man:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Nourhan Osama:] Yes, never ever about anything. We weren't interested.
[Kimberly Adams, Byline:] There's no doubt they are interested now. Political sociologist Said Sadek, who teaches at the American University in Cairo, says these family get-togethers have been a key outlet for political debate in the 15 months since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.
[Said Sadek:] In Egyptian families who were not usually interested in politics and they were only interested in daily events and entertainment and things like that, politics became very important because it began to affect their lives and now they began to feel that politics are important.
[Kimberly Adams, Byline:] Sadek says the family meetings often reveal the gap in opinion between younger and older generations. That gap exists in Hamza's family. Her granddaughter, Sally, won't support any candidate with ties to the former regime, but Sally's mother supports Mubarak's one-time foreign minister, Amr Moussa, who is among the frontrunners. But, in this upper middle class family, there is some common ground.
[Unidentified Woman 2:] At least all of us all of us agree on one thing, that none of us are voting for the Islamists.
[Unidentified Woman 3:] Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
[Unidentified Woman 2:] OK.
[Unidentified Woman 3:] And I'm [unintelligible], so no.
[Kimberly Adams, Byline:] But some 15 miles outside Cairo in the economically distressed village of Suqayl, posters for Islamist candidates on the sides of dilapidated apartment buildings show the community's support for more conservative leadership. To get to the home of Hayat Ahmed Dawoot, you have to step around huge holes in the dirt road. Men are using cell phones for light as they dig the village's first sewer system. Inside Dawoot's home, she and her sister, Hekma, both in their 70s, preside over their meeting of adult children, in-laws and small grandchildren. Many in this family support the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohammed Morsi, because they want a president who plans to bring Islamic values to the job. But others in the Dawoot family want a more secular candidate. There's support for Amr Moussa here, as well as former prime minister, Ahmed Shafit. Even though the debate can get a bit heated at times, Hekma Dawoot enjoys the exchange of ideas.
[Hekma Dawoot:] [Through Translator] Before, people could not talk, but now everyone has an opinion and has freedom. It is very good. The country is better than before.
[Kimberly Adams, Byline:] Political sociologist Sadek says the revolution has put Egypt through a crash course in political participation.
[Said Sadek:] And, in the last one year and a half during this transition, the Egyptians are learning everything that they didn't know about politics, from how to write constitution, what is a constitutional assembly, what is a free election, fair election all the things that did not exist.
[Kimberly Adams, Byline:] The Hamza and Dawoot families may not agree on which candidate to support, but they do agree on one thing they're all planning to vote. For NPR News, I'm Kimberly Adams in Cairo.

[Ailsa Chang:] All right, let's turn to another story about women trying to find their place in a male-dominated profession. A Japanese medical school has admitted to systematically rigging its entrance exam to hurt women candidates. An internal investigation into Tokyo Medical University found that the school had been lowering women's test scores for at least a decade. It should be noted that some men were given bonus points in order to boost their scores. The school's officials have since publicly apologized, and the scandal has caused outrage throughout the country, bringing to light Japan's deep problem with gender discrimination. Elaine Lies from Reuters has been covering this story in Tokyo, and she joins us now. Welcome.
[Elaine Lies:] Hello.
[Ailsa Chang:] So what originally was the university's rationale for docking scores of women and boosting scores of men?
[Elaine Lies:] The idea was that women would quit early on in their careers as doctors to have children and to raise their families. And they were worried that this would lead to a shortage of doctors at the university hospital. That was the assumption that was made, and they followed it since 2006...
[Ailsa Chang:] Wow.
[Elaine Lies:] ...Apparently. And it was prompted by a jump in women doing well and passing the exams the year before. So they decided they would keep the number of women...
[Ailsa Chang:] Low.
[Elaine Lies:] ...At around 30 percent apparently.
[Ailsa Chang:] Thirty percent and when news of this investigation broke, did people even seem surprised by it in Japan? I mean, what has been the reaction in the country?
[Elaine Lies:] Kind of the overarching reaction was fairly calm. But women were furious, and there was a hashtag campaign on social media saying it is OK to be angry at sexism. And women wrote in, sharing their own stories not just in the medical field but throughout their lives, throughout their job hunts and throughout their experience. And that was really something. And that was...
[Ailsa Chang:] What kind of stories?
[Elaine Lies:] Oh, they were this one woman said that she had fought her parents to go into academia. They said that academia is not a place for women. She got into the best university in Japan. Then when she was job hunting, people said her, if you were a man, we would hire you immediately.
[Ailsa Chang:] Wow.
[Elaine Lies:] And her comment was, wow, I thought my only enemies were my parents, but it was all of society.
[Ailsa Chang:] Now, Japan has one of the biggest economies in the world, but do you have a sense of how it ranks in terms of women being represented in elite professions or in senior positions?
[Elaine Lies:] It is very, very, very low. And Prime Minister Abe when he came to power, he said that improving the gender balance was one of his big goals.
[Ailsa Chang:] Right.
[Elaine Lies:] He said he wanted to make Japan a society where women can shine.
[Ailsa Chang:] And he wanted women to be in 30 percent of the country's leadership positions by 2020.
[Elaine Lies:] Right, right, well that does not seem to be advancing appreciably at this point.
[Ailsa Chang:] What has his government said about this particular case of gender discrimination by the med school?
[Elaine Lies:] Well, Abe himself has not commented on this directly as far as I know, but there were reports today that the Education Ministry is going to look into the entrance exams for all of Japan's medical schools.
[Ailsa Chang:] Wow.
[Elaine Lies:] So we'll see where that goes.
[Ailsa Chang:] To see if scores have been doctored.
[Elaine Lies:] I assume.
[Ailsa Chang:] Elaine Lies of Reuters joined us from Tokyo. Thank you very much.
[Elaine Lies:] And thank you.

[Audie Cornish:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish. It's time now for your letters. But first, a clarification. Yesterday, we told you about the Senate race in Hawaii. It's traditionally a blue state, but former Republican Governor Linda Lingle is putting up a good fight against Democratic Congresswoman Mazie Hirono. In our story, some of you heard us use the word Hawaiian to refer to all who live in the state. But it turns out Hawaiian is not analogous to Pennsylvanian or Californian. In Hawaii, the word is generally reserved for those whose ancestry on the island pre-dates European settlement. Now to your letters. Minnesota Vikings player Chris Kluwe, and Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo have been outspoken in their support of same-sex marriage. In fact, a Maryland delegate urged the Ravens to silence Ayanbadejo for his vocal position. Enter Kluwe, who wrote a strongly worded letter, much of which we can't repeat on air, to that delegate for his, in Kluwe's words, vitriolic hatred and bigotry. The letter went viral and Wednesday, we spoke to both to both players. Ayanbadejo told us the reaction from his teammates and coaches has been encouraging, especially if you consider where it's coming from.
[Brendon Ayanbadejo:] A sport that's known as a macho sport, known for, you know, for making gay slurs and whatnot. I'm glad to see a changing of the guard and people starting to broaden their horizons and accept equality really.
[Audie Cornish:] Erich Alejandro of Alhambra, California writes with this admission, I'm not a sports guy. In fact, I am ashamed to say that I am one of those people who thought that football players were, for the most part, meatheads. I have never been more happy to be proven wrong. Chris and Brendon are clearly intelligent, well-spoken men who are fighting for a great cause. Leslie Machado of Menifee, California adds, I am the sponsor for a high school Gay Straight Alliance. I was touched by the interview with NFL players Chris Kluwe and Brendon Ayanbadejo. Actually it made me smile through my tears. The students have been through so much, and it will be wonderful to play this interview for them at our next meeting this Friday. Please keep your letters coming. Just go to npr.org and click on contact us.

[Rebecca Roberts:] I'm Rebecca Roberts, in Washington. Neal Conan is away. More than 10 million households in the U.S. have underwater mortgages that is, homes that are worth less in value that the mortgage payer owes. These homeowners often cannot take advantage of lower rates on loans or refinancing deals. And their homes are likely to go into foreclosure if the mortgages aren't kept up. So, it doesn't make sense to just give the house back to the bank. Some critics say it's morally reprehensible to walk away from the mortgage. It's breaking a contract and failing to live up to your responsibilities. Others say, is it about morals or about money? Today: walking away from underwater mortgages. Later in the hour: the best way to help earthquake victims in Haiti. But first, walking away from an underwater mortgage. If you're making this decision, we want to hear from you. What are you considering? Or are you critical of those that walk away? Our number here in Washington is 800-989-8255. Our email address is talk@npr.org. And you can join the conversation at our Web site. Go to npr.org and click on TALK OF THE NATION. We begin with James Hagerty. He's a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He joins us from station WQED in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Welcome to the program.
[Mr. James Hagerty:] Thank you.
[Rebecca Roberts:] In reporting on this subject, you've spoken to people who walked away. What did they say? How did they feel?
[Mr. James Hagerty:] Well, some of them that I talked to had to think about it for a long time before they did this. It's not a simple calculation, and every case is different. I think and there are two types of people. There are people who really just can't afford the mortgage, and for them it's just a matter of finding an early solution of getting out. But there are other people who can afford to keep paying the mortgage. They've got a good income. But they now see their house is, really, a losing bet because they think that if they have to pay off their mortgage, they're going to pay far more than the house is ever going to be worth. And for them, it's a really a dilemma.
[Rebecca Roberts:] And what are the horns of that dilemma?
[Mr. James Hagerty:] Well, it's tempting to walk away. For one thing, if you just stop making your mortgage payments, you can probably live there for free for six months, a year, even two years before you get kicked out. And that means that you can go probably rent a similar home for far less and save a lot of money in the short term. On the other hand, it means that you're going to destroy your credit record. So if you need a credit card loan or a car loan later on, you might pay more for that or even not be able to get it. It means that you probably won't be able to get another home mortgage for at least three years, or maybe five years. This stain is going to remain on your credit record for seven years. And it can mean, in some states, that potentially, a lender someday could come after you for the amount of money the lender lost on that mortgage in what's called a deficiency judgment.
[Rebecca Roberts:] So that's over and above just the lender talking the house.
[Mr. James Hagerty:] That's right. The lender takes the house and sells it, but he's still got a loss. In some states, the lender then could try to get that money from you, say, from your future earnings or from any other asset you might hold.
[Rebecca Roberts:] We are also joined today by Brent White. He's a professor of law at the University of Arizona. And he has some interesting advice for people who are underwater on their mortgage. He joins us from member station KUAZ in Tucson. Welcome to the program.
[Professor Brent White:] My privilege. Thank you for having me.
[Rebecca Roberts:] So you are actually advising people to walk away. Why?
[Professor Brent White:] Actually, I don't advise people to do anything. Rather, I wrote an academic article in which I made an observation that has been somewhat taboo. And that observation is that to millions of Americans who are underwater would, in fact, be financially better off if they did walk away, just like Morgan Stanley recently walked away from five properties in San Francisco, five buildings which were underwater. Morgan Stanley just gave the properties back to the bank. But most homeowners, or homeowners as a group, don't walk away. They don't strategically default. And they don't so because of anticipatory shame and guilt and what I believe is an exaggerative fear about the consequences of waking away from a mortgage. And I argue in my paper that these emotions of fear and shame and guilt are cultivated by the government, by the financial industry and, to some extent, the media. And they do this by cultivating a double standard, a standard in which Americans, average Americans are told to have a moral obligation to pay their mortgage and to meet their financial obligations, whereas corporations freely and frequently default when it's in their financial best interest to do so. And, in fact, they would be obligated to protect the interest of their shareholders and walk away from an underwater mortgage if it was a financially wise decision. And my argument is that this norm asymmetry, the difference in norms between average Americans and banks leads to distributional inequalities whereby average Americans are bearing a disproportionate burden from the housing collapse.
[Rebecca Roberts:] And if you divorce the decision from guilt and shame and make it purely a financial one, how do you factor in the potential effect on your neighbors' housing prices if there's a foreclosure on their street?
[Professor Brent White:] Well, you know, I think that's a relevant concern, and, you know, we should be neighborly and be concerned about our neighbors. But when you're hundreds of thousands of dollars underwater and being concerned about your neighbor means going through your retirement and having no money for retirement or not being able to send your child to college, you have to ask, how much pain is the average person supposed to bear for the good of the rest of the economy? And my point in my article is that it's too much. It's not the responsibility of homeowners. The for the most part, people who are still in their homes were not people who were speculating. They were not people who bought more than they can afford. They're people who bought houses that they thought were good decisions. As they were being told, was you should buy a home they're being told this by the government, by the media. They're being told there's no such thing as a real estate bubble, so they make a decision, and then now they are suffering. And they're suffering in ways that have serious consequences for their financial future. And I don't think it's the role of the individual homeowner to prop up the market for the rest of the society. Rather, the government needs to step in, either provide direct assistance to homeowners, just as it provided direct assistance to the banks. Or the government needs to force banks to bear their share of the burden by riding down underwater mortgages, so we could have forced cramdowns, where banks would bear at least a portion of the negative equity.
[Rebecca Roberts:] We heard, at the top of this hour, a clip of tape from a woman named Heather Baker who was unapologetically walking away from her mortgage. And that interview was done by NPR reporter Tamara Keith. And in the context of that piece, Heather Baker goes on to say that had she been the first foreclosure in her neighborhood, it would have been a much harder decision. But considering there were other houses already in foreclosure, she found it easier to be the second or third person. Is that something you found in your reporting, James Hagerty?
[Mr. James Hagerty:] Yes. I think this is very much a concentrated problem. It's not scattered evenly across the country. It's very much in four or five states -Florida, Nevada, Arizona, California, Michigan and a few other places. So that means that many of the people who are in this soup have lots of company. And if you bought a home, say, that was completed in a new community around 2006 or 2007, probably all of your neighbors are underwater. So, everybody has the same problem. Everybody's talking about it, and I think that becomes a kind of contagion. And there also becomes a sense that, well, everybody is doing this, so it much be okay.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Let's take a call from Bill in Boston. Bill, welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.
[Bill:] How you doing? I actually I bought a condo back in early 2005 when I was just 22 years old. I naively got an adjustable rate mortgage. I'm in the construction industry, and I saw everyone around me buying homes and flipping them within a year or two, you know, for a profit of 40 or $50,000, and I thought I could do the same. And probably about six months after I moved in, I saw the housing market starting dropping everywhere around me, the complex and then prices plummeted significantly. And then my mortgage started going up and work started to get really slow. My mortgage started out at 1,100 and last year peaked at about 1,800. And I couldn't afford it anymore. So it actually just became a decision, in the long run as someone at a young age of 26, even though I knew that it would hurt my financial situation, in the long run it was a better situation for me to walk away from the whole even though morally it hurt very much. And it's something I struggle with to this day. It actually foreclosed in October. But in the long run it made more sense for me financially.
[Rebecca Roberts:] And Bill, what have been the consequences in terms of your credit score or fees or things like that?
[Bill:] It's, I mean, it's pretty much as bad as it gets, you know. It's something, you know, I still have I still owe the bank about $80,000 from the foreclosure because I bought it at $170,000, and people are selling their condos now for $90,000. So, it's I knew what was going to happen when I eventually let it go, but I also knew that these small programs, these six-month programs that they were getting me to reduce my mortgage, and six months later, I was still going to be in the same boat. So it was just going to be, you know, a domino effect in the long run. But it's a difficult situation to deal with, especially at a young age.
[Rebecca Roberts:] And you still feel like it was worth it? That getting out of that mortgage is it was the right decision?
[Bill:] Absolutely. It was something I struggled with for two years. And the stress that it brought upon me was it was huge, you know. It's something that you think about constantly. Don't get me wrong, I still have stress now dealing with the situation, especially morally, but in the long run I knew after talking to, you know, some of the older people around me that it just made more sense. I even spoke with a lawyer, the condominium complex lawyer and they said, you know, just in the long run it makes more sense for you to get out of this mortgage.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Bill, thanks so much for your call and thanks for your honesty. The sense that if people actually did walk away more, it might force lenders to negotiate better terms. In some ways they are counting on the guilt and shame and hesitation to keep people from just leaving a mortgage behind Brent White?
[Professor Brent White:] Yeah, I think that's an excellent point. And when you hear Bill talk about the stress and the strain of feeling like he's violating some moral code, I think this works to the advantage of lenders who actually understand that a contract is not a moral document, it's a legal document. And the law does not provide for punitive damages, for breach of a contract because it's not considered to be a moral wrong. In fact, the law encourages the efficient breach of contract. I mean, people should default on a contract when it is in their economic interest to do so. And because sophisticated parties understand this, they generally decide in advance for the consequences for a default on a contract or breach of a contract. In the case of a mortgage contract, the bank is the sophisticated party, and the bank puts in the penalty. And the penalty is if you default, then the bank gets the house back and that's actually the agreement. And so, a homeowner who lets go of their house and gives it back to the bank is honoring the contract and is, in fact, doing nothing immoral.
[Rebecca Roberts:] We are talking about underwater mortgages this hour. When should you walk away? Is that ethical? We're taking your calls at 800-989-8255. And you can send us email. The address is talk@npr.org. I'm Rebecca Roberts. It's TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Rebecca Roberts in Washington. Underwater, upside down, it's just all a way to say that your house is worth less than you owe. It's just one more term we've had to learn after the mortgage crisis. And today we're asking: When is it okay to just walk away? We're talking with James Hagerty, reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and with Brent White. He's a professor of law at University of Arizona. And, of course, we want to hear from you. If you're making this decision, give us a call. What are you considering or are you critical of those who walk away? 800-989-8255. Our email address is talk@npr.org. And you can join the conversation at our Web site, go to npr.org and click on TALK OF THE NATION. Let's hear from Tom in Detroit. Tom, welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.
[Tom:] Hi, how are you doing?
[Rebecca Roberts:] Good, how are you?
[Tom:] Very good. I'm critical of those who walk away from houses that are able to pay. The it's just a continuing cycle of people the pressure of the prices coming down because of the vacant houses and because of bank-owned properties and then more people walk away. So, you know, if you're doing that, you're hurting your neighborhood, you're hurting communities, so on and so forth. It's another thing if you can't actually make the payment. You can't afford to actually live there. When this whole thing started, there was talk of, you know, possible world hazard, you know, the hazard of making it okay to walk away or not to live up to your obligation. And at this point that's what it is. You wouldn't ever had this conversation a year or two years ago because it really wasn't in people's minds for this to be okay to do.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Tom, thank you for your call. Brent White, do you see a difference between people who can't afford a payment or people who can afford it, but have decided it's a bad investment?
[Professor Brent White:] Well, I think that the people who can't afford to make their payments are simply more sympathetic in the eyes of the public. But I don't see a moral difference. And the reason I don't see a moral difference is that the contract itself provides for the option to walk away. And, in fact, in a non-recourse state, that means a state where the bank cannot come after an individual for deficiency judgment. Susan Woodward, an economist, has done a study that shows that people in non-recourse states pay about $800 more per $100,000 they borrow at closing for the right to walk away without recourse, without a deficiency judgment. So the contract provides an option to default. And then people in non-recourse states pay for that right. They pay $800 on average per $100,000 they borrowed for the right to walk away. And so we tell people you have a contract. The contract gives you a right to walk away and you paid for that right to walk away by paying more money at closing. So I don't see the immorality in an individual saying, well, I'm going to exercise this contractual right that I actually paid money for.
[Rebecca Roberts:] James Hagerty, how many states do have that situation where there is no further financial consequence than taking the property. And are, you know, strategic foreclosures more common there?
[Mr. James Hagerty:] Studies have found that people walking away it is more common for people to walk away in states where there is no consequence. The states are really divided on this. No two states are alike. And so you can't say that in 25 it's okay, in 25 it's not. You have to look at every individual state and see exactly what is provided. It may make a difference whether it's an investment home or whether it's your personal home. It may make a difference how large the home is. So, people who are considering this should look into the legal aspects of it.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Let's hear from Brett in Adrian, Michigan. Brett, welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.
[Brett:] Hi, thanks for having me on.
[Rebecca Roberts:] You're welcome.
[Brett:] I'm in a mortgage that my wife and I, we can actually afford this house. I'm unemployed and my wife is working. And we can we're able to manage our finances to be able to pay for our home. I'm a student in alternative energy looking to graduate in April. Well, the unemployment will be running out soon thereafter. So, we're almost at a point where we're going to have to brace for impact, you know. So, and the other thing is is my field of study, there are no real alternative energy job resources in Michigan. They're mostly out West. So, we're left with the option of moving West. But then here we are getting settled into a new environment from where we're at and the costs there are for that. But, again, if we walk away from our home, that's going to hurt our chances of buying a home out West.
[Rebecca Roberts:] And, Brett, as you say, you brace for impact as graduation day approaches, what sorts of things are you considering?
[Brett:] Well, that would be to pack up and move went and get in, hopefully, the community we go into is more of a renter's market, you know, which a lot of foreclosures are being bought up by, you know, investors and they're turning them into rental properties. Hopefully we can get in there, build a nest egg and by that time that nest egg is large enough for a down payment that we may we will our credit scores will rebound somewhat. So, I mean, we've got several avenues of approach to the situation, and, really, none are that good.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Brett, thank you for your call. James Hagerty, I've seen different opinions, I suppose is the right word, about how long it takes a credit score to rebound from a foreclosure and when someone might be able to get another loan for a house or a car.
[Mr. James Hagerty:] It's going to be on your credit record for seven years. And it will be at least three to five years before you could qualify for a mortgage. So you have to be prepared to be a renter for a number of years. I think another thing to stress is that it's not always a question of foreclosure if you leave. There is also the possibility that you might be able to do what's called a short sale. Sometimes the bank will agree to let you sell the house for less than the loan balance due and then forgive the debt. That can be a better option that may do less damage to your credit record.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Yeah, Brent...
[Professor Brent White:] I'm going to add to that, that I think that, you know, the initial thing is that a homeowner has to be willing to miss a payment or two for the most part before being so willing to consider a short sale or a deed in lieu of foreclosure, which are options that have less of a hit on an individual's credit. But individuals are basically put in a situation, they're held hostage with their credit score, and they're told that, you know, you're going to have to show your credit if you want to get out of this home. And it's so effective because we overestimate, I believe, the value of a credit score. We use language it's very common it's going to destroy your credit. You won't be able to get a loan for this or a loan for that. Well, it's going to temporarily destroy your credit or mess up your credit. But assuming an individual has otherwise good credit and continues to make payments on other loan obligations, they can recover within two to three years, four years on the outside for, in terms of their credit score. It's true that the mark will remain on their credit score for seven years in the case of a foreclosure, but the impact lessens significantly within two to three years. And someone can then not have to worry so much about their credit score. And you got to weigh the value of a credit score to the cost of staying in an underwater home. And if you are $100,000, $200,000 underwater, you're paying twice for your mortgage, which you can rent a comparable home for. Well, your credit score's probably not worth that much money. And you may lose a few thousand dollars in higher credit payments over a couple years. But we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars that an individual might be able to save by exercising their contractual right to give the property back to the bank. So, but the financial industry benefits from an exaggerated fear about credit scores that and it's, in fact, very hard for individuals to get good information about their credit scores and what it really means to have bad credit for a few years.
[Rebecca Roberts:] We have an email that echoes that sentiment from South Bend who says: I'm considering this, I've had my house for sale for nearly two years, I have another job in another state and I'm currently paying rent on an apartment and the mortgage on my current house. If I walk away, my credit will be terrible for a few years, but I can recover. If I continue to pay on the mortgage, I'm giving up my savings, my kids' college fund, needing to replace my car. I don't want to walk away, but I don't know how long I can continue to pay on something that has no value to me or to the mortgage market. Let's take a call from Gary in Phoenix. Gary, welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.
[Gary:] Thank you. Your email that you just read, I think that that's, that person is right at the crux of this conversation. And while I think that Professor White is hitting all the key issues, I just wanted to stress this social approbation associated with it. I find it ironic that in a society that worships capitalism and abhors socialism, that the approbation would be upon the rational capitalist that determines the cost of staying in the loan that determines that the cost of staying in a loan exceeds the cost of walking away. If you believe in capitalism, the rational actor stays or goes regardless of any social costs or social impact or social norms. So all of those social considerations are socialism and not capitalism. And thank you for allowing my comment.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Gary, thank you for your call. Well, he's echoing in a slightly different way of what you're saying, Brent, that the emotional social context to this decision is misplaced.
[Professor Brent White:] Well, you know, I think that it's we the fact is, we live in a capitalist society where we don't expect economic actors to be concerned about the economic consequences of their actions for other people. I mean, it would be nice if people went on spending some money right now because consumer spending is down, and that might be good to jumpstart the economy. But we don't expect individuals to sacrifice their own financial well-being and go buy some product they don't need because it's good for the economy. And so if we're going to exist in a society where we expect people to look out for their economic interests, it should be true for banks, as well as individuals. Now, you might imagine a society and a society that I would, in fact, think would be better and that would be where corporations and banks were expected and required to behave in socially responsible ways, and so that banks were required to write down underwater mortgages and required to bear some of their responsibility for this crisis. I mean, we had banks before Congress, I believe today, apologizing for their role in the crisis and apologizing for reckless behavior, but yet not taking responsibility for the bubble and burst. Then the burst has left millions of Americans suffering and millions of Americans with their financial future hanging in the balance. And I don't think we can ask those people to give up their financial security for the good of the whole when we don't expect banks to do the same thing.
[Rebecca Roberts:] When we talk about the feelings of guilt over walking away from a contractor, shame over not being able to meet your obligations, do you think there is something more fraught, James Hagerty, when you're talking about owning your own home, as opposed to say, paying off your credit card debt? Is there some part of the whole American dream of owning your own home and being part of a neighborhood that makes that heightens the emotional context to this decision?
[Mr. James Hagerty:] Yes, I think so. And I think one reason this is so difficult for a lot of people is that we've never been faced with this on a large scale, at least since the Great Depression. We're in an extraordinary situation here, where almost one out of four people with mortgages are underwater, and some of them are just very far underwater. So people have never had to grapple with this before, and it's taken some time to work out how they really feel about it and what really is their best interest. I think one thing is that it's a generational thing, partly. It's easier for people who are young and not too attached to a community to walk away. It's much harder for people with children in school and deep ties to the community.
[Rebecca Roberts:] You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. Let's take a call from Jeff in North Plains, Oregon. Jeff, welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.
[Jeff:] Thanks a lot. I have a similar situation to some of your previous callers. My wife and I bought a home well before the downturn in California's market. And then, as the economy went bad there and the state had budget problems over the last few years, we were going to stick it out, but our jobs were cut back because of budget cuts. And we and my wife and I both had to leave the state to find a similar job, and actually were offered a job and living in Oregon now. And when we started the process, we worked with a farmer up the road that wanted to buy our farm and our house. And the bank told us flat out that they wouldn't talk to us until we stop making payments. And then we've been working in the process and trying to refinance or reduce it, and they still are taking forever to get back to us. And right now, they're just holding onto the paperwork. What I wonder about is why aren't they working with us when we had a buyer that was willing to do a short sale? It was a local farmer that you know, be able to buy the farm. It was just incredible. And so, that's where we are right now. We're paying rent somewhere else. We can't afford to do the mortgage. We told the lender that before we left. It's been a year and a half now that we've been trying to work with them.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Jeff, thanks for your call. Brent White, do you have an answer for him, of why a bank wouldn't work with him?
[Professor Brent White:] Well, his story is very common, to start with. It's difficult to get banks to work with individuals. And it's there's been a lot written to try to explain why banks don't modify more mortgages, why they don't work with homeowners more often. My theory or my position is that banks don't because of the norm asymmetry, because they know that most individuals will not walk away from their homes and will continue to pay. And so the bank tells individuals you have to stop making your payments first before we'll talk to you, because they know from most people, that's going to be enough. And the person's going to go away and they're going to make their payments, because they're just not going to be willing to default. And so, if banks started behaving differently, it might incentivize more people to ask for modifications or say they're going to walk away if the banks won't modify mortgages. So banks are willing to take some losses on properties where people actually do walk away in order to not encourage other people to exercise their contractual option to default, as well.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Well, this brings up an email from Ken in Kingston, Georgia, who says: How many homeowners do you expect will walk away from their mortgages, and what long-term effects will these defaults have on a residential real estate market? And will mortgage companies begin structuring future mortgage agreements differently as a result?
[Professor Brent White:] Well, I think it's probably a good thing if mortgage companies start structuring deals differently and at least engage in more careful underwriting practices where they're concerned about whether or not the intrinsic value of the home is actually worth the collateral on the loan, or the intrinsic value the home is actually worth what the loan is for and requires some types of down payments. I think that, you know, part of the problem is that mortgage companies weren't careful in the loans they gave out, and they and it ran up the market. In terms of the concern about what happens to the market if people walk away, I think it's a valid concern and it seems to be on the a concern of an earlier caller, as well, and lots of individuals. What happens if people walk away? What happens to the market? And I think it's a valid concern. But I think we have to ask the question about whether or not we should prop up the market on the backs of the middle class. And to be clear, it is the middle class that's bearing the primary burden of the housing meltdown. And my answer is no, we can't expect individual homeowners to bear this burden on their own. And we either have to help them out or we have to force banks to modify more mortgages. And they're not going to do it on their own.
[Rebecca Roberts:] That's Brent White, professor of law at University of Arizona. He joined us from member station KUAZ in Tucson. Thank you so much.
[Professor Brent White:] Thank you for having me.
[Rebecca Roberts:] And also thank you to James Hagerty, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who joined us from WQED in Pittsburgh. Thanks to you.
[Mr. James Hagerty:] Thank you.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Coming up, the scale of devastation in Haiti is enormous, and President Obama promises help is on the way.
[President Barack Obama:] More American search and rescue teams are coming more food, more water, doctors, nurses, paramedics, more of the people, equipment and capabilities that can make the difference between life and death.
[Rebecca Roberts:] Coming up, the best way to help victims in Haiti. I'm Rebecca Roberts.

[Ari Shapiro:] Even Hillary Clinton seemed surprised last night when the Associated Press said she had enough delegates to become the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. That was supposed to happen tonight when results come in from six more states that are voting today, but the AP said Clinton didn't necessarily need those wins because she had secured the support of more superdelegates. Those are Democratic leaders who can vote however they want at the party's convention regardless of the outcomes of any elections. NPR's Domenico Montanaro's here to walk us through what happened. Hey, Domenico.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Good afternoon.
[Ari Shapiro:] We know the math. Bernie Sanders, though, says he is taking his fight all the way to the convention. His supporters say superdelegates can change their mind between now and then. So explain why we are counting them as if they're a done deal.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Well, you know, Hillary Clinton was only 23 delegates short, so everyone widely expected her to cross that threshold tonight when polls closed at 8 o'clock in New Jersey. But you know, these superdelegates are people who have come out publicly declared for a candidate, so this is where Hillary Clinton is now called the presumptive nominee? She's not officially the nominee. That will only happen when the convention happens in July when all of the delegates do wind up voting. These are not delegates who are undecided. These are folks who have decided to put their names on something to say that, I am in support of Hillary Clinton. And the AP does a wide canvas and a thorough job of finding out whether or not people are on board one side or the other. Bernie Sanders happened to pick up a couple as well. Just he hasn't gotten anywhere near enough, and that's because we're so close to the end of the process here. And we've never really before been so focused on these pledged delegates, and that was because Hillary Clinton had such a big lead. But she's also on track to win with those tonight.
[Ari Shapiro:] Do you expect tonight's results to end the debate?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Probably not if... ...If any of our Twitter feeds are any indication.
[Ari Shapiro:] Right.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] But I will say this though. What we know is that Clinton has a substantial lead with those pledged delegates. And when the Sanders campaign early on said that don't count those superdelegates because the pledged delegates are what matter because that's the will of the people, that's going to be really key. Well, tonight Hillary Clinton needs 214 of the 694 pledged delegates that remain. That's only 31 percent. She's almost certain to do that tonight.
[Ari Shapiro:] All right, well, 8 years ago tonight, Hillary Clinton conceded the race to Barack Obama and called for party unity. Let's listen to a bit of that.
[Hillary Clinton:] I understand that we all know this has been a tough fight. But the Democratic Party is a family, and now it's time to restore the ties that bind us together and to come together around the ideals we share, the values we cherish and the country we love.
[Ari Shapiro:] Doesn't sound like we should expect to hear a similar speech tonight from Bernie Sanders.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] No. Bernie Sanders last night put out a statement saying that he's taking it to the convention. He thought it was too early to suddenly judge that Hillary Clinton was the presumptive nominee. But you know, let's remember that Hillary Clinton on the night that Barack Obama was named the presumptive nominee, June 3, also did not drop out of the race. She did not concede took her four days to make that decision. Now, it's going to be up to Bernie Sanders on what timeline how much he how quickly he's willing to do this, whether or not he can cross that psychological threshold. What are the levels of his attacks? And the president of the United States may have some say in this if he winds up endorsing later this week, which is possible.
[Ari Shapiro:] Also, Bernie Sanders comes to this from a very different place than Hillary Clinton did in 2008.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] No doubt about it because Hillary Clinton had all the incentive to get out of the race early and have some unity because she wanted to run again. No one expects that Bernie Sanders will want to run again. He may try to take the party and reshape it in his image, but how he lands this is going to be key to see.
[Ari Shapiro:] NPR political editor Domenico Montanaro, thanks.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Thank you.

[Robert Siegel:] From NPR News this is All Things Considered. I'm Robert Siegel.
[Melissa Block:] And I'm Melissa Block. A flurry of names emerged today as the Obama administration appears to be taking shape. Sources close to Senator Hillary Clinton have told the New York Times, she decided to accept the offer to be named secretary of state in the Obama administration. NPR has confirmed that report. We have also confirmed two other names as Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, and as Commerce Secretary, Bill Richardson. Joining us to talk about the developments is NPR correspondent Scott Horsley. And Scott, let's clarify the status here. All three of these folks we've mentioned: Senator Clinton, Bill Richardson, Timothy Geithner, all have been offered the jobs and accepted them?
[Scott Horsley:] That's what sources are telling NPR. I should say with respect to Hillary Clinton as secretary of state both the Obama camp and the Clinton camp are saying it's not a completely done deal, but there are reports that Hillary Clinton has made the decision to take the offer.
[Melissa Block:] OK, and we'll talk more about Senator Clinton in a little bit, but first let's talk about the man who is evidently in line to be secretary of the treasury, Timothy Geithner.
[Scott Horsley:] That's right. He's very well thought of. The stock market soared on news of his selection today. He's young, but former treasury secretary Robert Rubin says you quickly forget that because Tim Geithner is so smart. As president of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, he has been connected to Wall Street, he knows Wall Street, but he spent his career in government, so he hasn't been getting rich off the excesses of Wall Street that the rest of us are now paying a price for.
[Melissa Block:] And he also used to work for a man whose name was also bandied around for the job of treasury secretary and that's Larry Summers?
[Scott Horsley:] That's right. Larry Summers was sort of Tim Geithner's mentor at treasury in the Clinton era. And Geithner is thought of as being similarly smart like Summers, but also more diplomatic and more willing to let other people in the room feel like they're smart. He is known for his self deprecating sense of humor, and his skill at building consensus. In fact, the descriptions of him sometimes sound a little bit like those of the president-elect himself.
[Melissa Block:] Another name, Bill Richardson, for commerce secretary, Bill Richardson of course, himself a one time presidential contender.
[Scott Horsley:] That's right. He was an early contender that this go around and of course the New Mexico governor, he served as the U.N. Ambassador and energy secretary under former President Clinton, but then made headlines when instead of endorsing Hillary Clinton, he came out for Barack Obama fairly early in the primary season. He would be a high ranking Latino cabinet member and that's something that the Obama camp has been trying to achieve. Latinos voted for Obama by a better than two-to-one margin and, of course, they are a growing share of the U.S. electorate.
[Melissa Block:] OK, let's talk now about Senator Clinton and she has apparently had some reservations about leaving the Senate and whether this would be the right move for her?
[Scott Horsley:] That's right. She is a junior senator, but obviously has influence there and wondered about whether she would be actually taking a demotion to become secretary of state. She had a secret meeting maybe the worst kept secret ever with Barack Obama a week ago, Thursday. Since then sources close to the transition tell us there have been more substantive talks between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And now there are reports that she has made the decision that this is a job she wants.
[Melissa Block:] You know, at the same time, there were a lot of reservations on the other side from the Obama team about Hillary Clinton's husband, the former president Bill Clinton, and his connections in the business world through his foundation. What happened to those concerns?
[Scott Horsley:] That's right. We're now told that the financial disclosures for Bill Clinton's complicated business deals have been worked out and that things are on track. That said, we still don't expect a formal announcement for the secretary of state's job until after Thanksgiving.
[Melissa Block:] OK, Scott thanks very much.
[Scott Horsley:] My pleasure, Melissa.
[Melissa Block:] That's NPR's Scott Horsley.

[Ari Shapiro:] H. Ross Perot died today at the age of 89. The Texas billionaire will be remembered for challenging the U.S. political system by running for president twice as an independent. NPR's Brian Naylor has this look at Perot's life.
[Brian Naylor, Byline:] Ross Perot was a version of the American success story. A child of the Great Depression, he had a paper route, was an Eagle Scout, attended the U.S. Naval Academy and served in the Navy. He then got a job selling computer systems for IBM. He left IBM to start his own firm, which processed payrolls and Medicare claims, and sold it to General Motors for $2 12 billion. He then formed another company and sold it to Dell for 3.9 billion. In 1992, Perot tried to translate his business success to politics, launching an independent bid for the presidency. The campaign was as unique as Perot himself. He ran a series of 30-minute infomercials in which he displayed a folksy eccentricity.
[H Ross Perot:] Since we're dealing with voodoo economics, a great young lady from Louisiana sent me this voodoo stick, and I will use it as my pointer tonight. And certainly it's appropriate because as you and I know, we are in deep voodoo.
[Brian Naylor, Byline:] His signature issue was the federal budget deficit. Perot said it was unfair to future generations for the government to rack up huge debts. Here he is on CBS's Face the Nation.
[H Ross Perot:] We cannot spend our children's money. We are looking on the edge of a revolution of young people who are starting to realize that we our generation have put them 4 trillion in debt. And they don't like it, and they shouldn't.
[Bruce Buchanan:] The deficit had come up but not as fervently and repetitively as he would bring it up.
[Brian Naylor, Byline:] Bruce Buchanan is professor emeritus of politics at the University of Texas.
[Bruce Buchanan:] He was, you know, hell-bent on convincing the American people that the two parties were not prepared to take the steps that would be necessary to make this happen, that you needed somebody from the outside that wasn't caught up in the political thicket who could take charge and make things happen.
[Brian Naylor, Byline:] Perot took part in three debates with incumbent Republican President George H.W. Bush and the Democratic challenger Bill Clinton. He made his opposition to the not-yet-ratified North American Free Trade Agreement NAFTA which both Bush and Clinton supported, another issue.
[H Ross Perot:] Pay a dollar an hour for your labor. Have no health care. That's the most expensive single element in making a car. Have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement. And you don't care about anything but making money. There will be a giant sucking sound going south.
[Brian Naylor, Byline:] Perot, who had led in some polls early in 1992, suddenly dropped out of the race that summer, saying he was concerned a three-way race would be settled in the House of Representatives and later blaming Republican dirty tricks for trying to sabotage his daughter's wedding. Perot returned to the campaign in the fall. To this day, Perot is blamed by some Republicans for Bush's defeat by Clinton. But University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato says that's not what happened.
[Larry Sabato:] I think the evidence is overwhelming that Clinton would have won even if Perot had not been on the ballot. The best evidence is that when Perot actually withdrew, which was at the time of the Democratic Convention, Clinton skyrocketed in the polls and essentially inherited most of the formerly pro-Perot part of the electorate.
[Brian Naylor, Byline:] Perot ran again in 1996. But this time, his candidacy failed to catch fire. But Perot made his mark in politics, raising issues that would later be adopted by the Tea Party and possibly carving a path for another Washington outsider businessman to mount a credible campaign for the White House. Brian Naylor, NPR News, Washington.

[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Accusations of rape, sexual assault, harassment, stalking men who faced disciplinary action from their colleges are now suing those institutions, in some cases, in class-action lawsuits. The litigation on Title IX has the potential to change the way sexual misconduct is treated on campus. The men are from Michigan State, the University of California and California State. Michelle Simpson Tuegel has represented both victims, as well as men accused of sexual assault, and she joins me now from Dallas, Texas. Welcome.
[Michelle Simpson Tuegel:] Hi. Thank you, Lulu.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] So first, remind us what Title IX is.
[Michelle Simpson Tuegel:] Sure. So really Title IX was an educational amendment that is now several decades old from 1972. But in the past couple of decades, it has been interpreted and expanded a lot to also protect students, both male and female, from sexual violence, sexual harassment, stalking. Anything that could fall into the category of gender-based discrimination and sexual violence is something that Title IX is also sort of the umbrella federal law over.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] From what I've read, some of the men say that the reason that they want to undertake this kind of lawsuit is because when you have a judgment against you under Title IX, it can have ramifications for the rest of your life. Is that essentially what they're saying?
[Michelle Simpson Tuegel:] I mean, that is one thing they're saying. And having represented a lot of survivors, I can't help but also think and say that it is a much more severe and horrific impact if you've been the victim of sexual violence. That being said, I definitely think that what these men are saying is we didn't get a fair shot. The process wasn't fair. And sometimes, what they're also asking through these lawsuits is for the federal courts to step in and change the results or order the school to conduct the investigation in a different way. And that's part of what some of these class actions are asking for.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] But what is likely to happen if the men succeed and these lawsuits gain class-action status? I mean, could it upend how these cases are treated?
[Michelle Simpson Tuegel:] I mean, if they did gain class-action status, which I personally think is pretty steep thing for them to get, I think that it could result in a lot of these either being kicked back to the school and these students and the survivors having to go through all of this again, and it also has a wider reaching impact as far as what students who are going through these circumstances see and think as far as reporting. And that's one of the things that I see as a concern.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Yeah. What message does it send to the victims?
[Michelle Simpson Tuegel:] Right. What message does it send to the victims who have already been a minority of people who report, and because the school didn't do it the right way, that their situation is not validated. And I do think that it can have a real chilling impact on other survivors reporting and coming forward and saying, as we have said in recent years, #MeToo because they think it just may come back and not matter.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] So I want to ask you, Title IX has been in the news for a while now, especially in the wake of #MeToo, as you mentioned. It's also become very political. Do you see Title IX as the best tool for this kind of process? Or is it one that has been overused and should be replaced with something else?
[Michelle Simpson Tuegel:] I think that it has its place and that we have to have some sort of process on campus. I'll give you an example as to why. Our court systems I believe in lawsuits and the power of lawsuits and the power of citizens having a right to go into a court and to seek a legal remedy, whether it be monetary or otherwise. That being said, that process is often not fast enough for students who are on campus who maybe have to live in the same dorm with their perpetrator or have to go to the same class with the person who sexually assaulted them. We have to have some measure to deal with that. And while I respect how important due process is, there has to be a balance. And I don't think we have to trade one for the other.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Michelle Simpson Tuegel is a sexual abuse attorney in Dallas, Texas. Thank you very much.
[Michelle Simpson Tuegel:] Thank you, Lulu, appreciate it.

[Neal Conan:] It's Tuesday and time for your e-mails. Last week we talked about ballooning CEO salaries. Some of the highest paid corporate executives made over a hundred million dollars last year. Wade Noy, of Anchorage, Alaska, took issue with that. What seems to really be the issue here is what is valued in a company, he wrote. When a company pays its CEO $17 million and pays employees minimum wage, the message is that one person is more valuable. As an employee, I would feel pretty affronted by those numbers. Brent Alverd, in Provo, Utah, thinks something's missing from that equation. Executive compensation should be a function of only contribution to the corporation, he wrote. Basic economics theory states that high risk should be rewarded by high reward. With current Sarbanes Oxley legislation and rules, top executives have an extreme amount of risk in their [unintelligible] shareholders et cetera. This risk must be rewarded. Last week we also marked the 100th anniversary of the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire with a special broadcast from San Francisco. Our conversation stirred memories for Barbara Gibson in Emerald Hills, California. My grandfather was eight years old and living in Haight-Ashbury during the 1906 earthquake, she wrote. He said the buildings remained intact but the chimneys crumbled and the gas service was disrupted. His family and their neighbors dragged their stoves out into the street and cooked over wood for the next few days. He remembered watching the tent city grow up in the panhandle of Golden Gate Park, and said that for an eight-year-old boy it was all a big adventure. I treasure these first-hand accounts both from my family legacy and others too. Yesterday we revisited the speeches of John F. Kennedy. For listener Jamie Keener, it was a fresh experience. I'm young, 22, and I've never heard those speeches before. The thing that struck me the most was the profound sense of patriotism that I felt as I heard them. I never had this experience before. The speeches I've heard in my lifetime only left me with a deep sense of nothing, because of the bickering and backstabbing that was going on behind the scenes. That program also sparked a flurry of e-mails on the origins of Kennedy's famous words from his inaugural address in 1961, Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. One listener attributed those words to the headmaster at Kennedy's Prep School, Choate, another, to the poet Khalil Gabron. Our own research brought up references to Cicero, King George VI, Calvin Coolidge and Warren Harding.
[Thurston Clarke Is The Author Of Ask Not:] THE INAUGURATION OF JOHN F. KENNEDY AND THE SPEECH THAT CHANGED AMERICA and he joins us now from his home in upstate New York. Nice to talk to you again.
[Mr. Thurston Clarke:] Nice to be back.
[Neal Conan:] What do we know about the origins of that phrase?
[Mr. Thurston Clarke:] Well, there are at least a half dozen origins. I think Kennedy came up with it himself. I mean, the idea behind ask not, that you had a, a citizen had a duty to sacrifice, to do something for their country, is hardly a new idea. I mean, indeed, Warren Harding and Oliver Wendell Holmes had all made similar statements. But the phrasing was Kennedy's. And also, the important thing to remember is that the man who says something is what makes it so meaningful. There's Ted Sorensen once, talking about Kennedy, quoted something that was said about William Pitt and that was it's not merely the thing that is said, but the man who says it that counts, the character that breathes through the sentences.
[Neal Conan:] Ted Sorensen, of course, was Kennedy's speechwriter.
[Mr. Thurston Clarke:] Speechwriter. And, in this case, the man who breathed through these sentences, who was asking Americans to ask not what they could do for their country, they knew that he was someone who had fought in World War II, who had lost a brother in World War II, who had himself, you know, practiced what he was preaching. The other thing I'd say is that there's absolutely no evidence that Kennedy had read Oliver Wendell Holmes or Harding, these particular passages.
[Neal Conan:] I'm not sure anybody's ever read Warren Harding.
[Mr. Thurston Clarke:] No. And Kennedy kept a daybook where he put down quotations that he memorized and that he used. Arthur Schlesinger, the historian and, who was also a Kennedy aide, had access to this daybook when he wrote his memoir of the Kennedy administration and the only kind of reference that was similar to ask not that he could find was one that Kennedy had noted in 1945, from the French philosopher Rousseau. Rousseau had said, As soon as any man says of the affairs of state, What does it matter to me,'the state may be given up as lost. Which is a bit of a stretch from ask not, but that's all that Schlesinger could find in Kennedy's book of quotations.
[Neal Conan:] Well, thanks very much for that.
[Mr. Thurston Clarke:] Sure.
[Neal Conan:] Thurston Clarke is the author of ASK NOT: THE INAUGURATION OF JOHN F. KENNEDY AND THE SPEECH THAT CHANGED AMERICA and he joined us from his home in upstate New York. If you have comments, questions, or corrections for us, the best way to reach us is by e-mail. The address is talk@npr.org. Please let us know where you're writing from and give us some help on how to pronounce your name.

[Tony Cox:] Now, here to talk more about the nature of non-profits is Alan Judd. He is an investigative reporter with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Alan, welcome.
[Mr. Alan Judd:] Thank you very much.
[Tony Cox:] The first issue seems to be well, there are several. One is whether or not this inquiry is legal, which was one of the headlines in your own paper yesterday. But perhaps we should start by establishing this point because in the letters that Senator Grassley sent out here's a line I'm going to read directly to you. Since your organization is not required to file Form 990 with the IRS, I am requesting that you answer the following questions. Now, Form 990 is something that churches have to fill up as far as their non-profit status. So what is required of churches legally with regard to their non-profit status and reporting?
[Mr. Alan Judd:] Not a lot when it's compared to other non-profit organizations. A typical foundation or non-profit would have to file an annual tax return called the Form 990 with the IRS, and that's available for public inspection. In fact, it's specifically required by federal law that they make that available, and there are a number of Internet sites where people can look those up. Religious organizations are a little different. They have some protection under a 1984 federal law that largely prevents the IRS from using any kind of aggressive auditing techniques or really looking at them very thoroughly.
[Tony Cox:] The one of the issues seems to be the issue of salaries and compensation for the ministers of these churches. Is that different, the reporting requirement, for them as churches? Does it differ from what would be required of someone in, let's say, a community non-profit organization?
[Mr. Alan Judd:] Yeah. Yes, it is. It's, again, it goes back to what's reported on the tax return. A typical foundation would report, I think, the top five salaries for employees or board members, as well as the top five the highest paid contractors. The church, of course, does not have any kind of obligation publicly. Whether they report that to their own congregation, of course, would be up to them.
[Tony Cox:] Is there a limit on those salaries as far as you know?
[Mr. Alan Judd:] No.
[Tony Cox:] There's not?
[Mr. Alan Judd:] No.
[Tony Cox:] If these if the end of this investigation shows that there has been spending that the committee feels is inappropriate or illegal, what would happen next?
[Mr. Alan Judd:] That's a that's a really good question. I think the only step that they really could take would be to refer this to the IRS and really question the non-profit status of those churches or religious organizations essentially to say that they are abusing their legal status to enrich certain people with the the head of the church or other individuals.
[Tony Cox:] Do you know whether or not, Alan, there's a precedent for this? I know that Charles Grassley has been involved in this kind of legislation before, but can you point to a specific precedent?
[Mr. Alan Judd:] Not involving the religious organizations, as Senator Grassley said, there have been a number of pretty high-profile investigations of other non-profits, even, you know, the Smithsonian Institution being a very prominent one recently. But as far as religious organizations, they've mostly gone without a lot of scrutiny at that level.
[Tony Cox:] Final thing is this: Is there such a thing as a for profit church? Are you aware of that?
[Mr. Alan Judd:] Never heard of one.
[Tony Cox:] Okay. Alan, thank you very much.
[Mr. Alan Judd:] Sure. Thank you very much.
[Tony Cox:] Alan Judd is an investigative reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Now, earlier, we read from the statements of three ministries that the Senate Finance Committee had singled out. Here are two more statements now.
[A Spokesperson For Hinn Ministries Wrote This:] At this time, the church's board of directors and legal counsel is determining the best course of action to best cooperate with the committees' inquiry. We regard this as an important matter and will not respond until further information becomes available. And this from a spokesperson from Eddie from Bishop Eddie L. Long: Bishop Long has received a request for information from the United States Senate. He plans to fully comply. New Birth has several safeguards put in place to ensure all transactions are in compliance with laws applicable to churches.

[David Greene:] Good morning. I'm David Greene.
[Steve Inskeep:] And I'm Steve Inskeep. It took only a few weeks for JPMorgan to lose more than $2 billion. And it's taken just a few days more for a senior executive to lose her job. Ina Drew was Morgan's chief investment officer.
[David Greene:] Her departure has not ended the debate on Wall Street, or in Washington. The story is seeping into the presidential campaign, and lawmakers are asking what, if anything, they should change in bank regulations.
[Steve Inskeep:] The recent Dodd-Frank law imposed new rules on banks after the financial crisis, but a key provision of that law has yet to take effect. We start our coverage with NPR's David Welna.
[David Welna, Byline:] The bad bet JPMorgan made is called a hedge, meant to counter the risk of other deals the bank made. Michigan Democratic Sen. Carl Levin says the Dodd-Frank law permits hedging, just not this kind.
[Sen. Carl Levin:] The language in the law is very clear. You can hedge, but you cannot increase risks with your hedging. You're supposed to decrease risks when you hedge.
[David Welna, Byline:] That language is part of Dodd-Frank's so-called Volcker Rule, named after former Fed chairman Paul Volcker. It says banks with federally insured deposits cannot gamble their own money, or that of others, on risky trading, even though it does allow them to hedge if done so properly. Levin does not think what JPMorgan did would pass that test.
[Levin:] If this law were in effect when they made these trades, I believe that these trades violated or were inconsistent with Dodd-Frank, yes. But Dodd-Frank is not in effect now, and the regulations that implement Dodd-Frank are not in effect yet. They should've been written long ago, but they're not yet written.
[David Welna, Byline:] And there's the rub. Federal regulators have taken months and may take several more to come up with guidelines to implement the Volcker Rule. Tennessee Republican Sen. Bob Corker is on the Banking Committee. Corker is calling for hearings by the Banking Committee on JPMorgan's money-losing episode.
[Sen. Bob Corker:] I think it's really important for all of us to dig into this. I mean, this was a hedge against a hedge that was over-hedged.
[David Welna, Byline:] But the Senate's number two Republican, Jon Kyl, warns against what he calls a knee-jerk reaction. Suppose, says Kyl, that JPMorgan had instead made $2 billion on its investment.
[Sen. Jon Kyl:] Would there be calls for government intervention here? So what's the difference? Actually, here, since they lost, a problem that they weren't aware of was exposed, and you can bet they're going to do something about it internally. You don't need the government to tell them that they need to reform.
[David Welna, Byline:] Just this year, the GOP-run House has passed three bills, and House committees have passed four others, that loosen regulations in Dodd-Frank which was passed when Democrats still controlled that chamber. Still, bank analysts are skeptical about such bills, at least for now. Jaret Seiberg is a policy analyst with the Guggenheim Washington Research Group.
[Jaret Seiberg:] There's no appetite in the Senate to change Dodd-Frank. So the House can pass as many bills as they want. It's very hard to see any path to enactment until we get through the election.
[David Welna, Byline:] JPMorgan's embarrassing loss has already become part of election year politics. Yesterday on CBS, Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat vying for the seat held by Massachusetts Republican Sen. Scott Brown, demanded that JPMorgan's CEO Jamie Dimon give up his post as a director of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.
[Elizabeth Warren:] He is advising the New York Fed about the appropriate oversight of banks like his bank. And I think one way he takes responsibility for what's gone wrong is to resign from that position and say someone else should be in that public position, but that he should not be in it.
[David Welna, Byline:] Instead, JPMorgan announced yesterday that the woman who's led its hedging unit, Ina Drew, is retiring. David Welna, NPR News, the Capitol.

[Neal Conan:] Yesterday, a federal judge ordered a mental evaluation for Jared Loughner to determine whether the suspect in the shootings in Tucson is competent to stand trial. U.S. District Judge Larry Burns ordered Loughner to a Federal Bureau of Prisons facility in Springfield, Missouri. Loughner's defense attorneys argued that an independent expert, not a government-appointed evaluator, should conduct the exam, and that moving Loughner out of Tucson for the assessment could harm him. Mental competency evaluations are common features on TV police procedurals like "Law & Order," but what exactly are they? How are they conducted? What role do they play in the criminal justice system? If you're a mental health professional, does the mental evaluation system work? Give us a call: 800-989-8255. Email: talk@npr.org. And you could join the conversation at our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. And joining us now is Dr. Eileen Ryan, an associate professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia, medical director of their Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy. She's on the phone from her office in Charlottesville, and nice to have you on TALK OF THE NATION today.
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] Hello.
[Neal Conan:] And I guess the first thing we should establish is what this examination is not. It is not to determine whether the person in question was sane at the time of the alleged crime.
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] That's correct. That's a completely different type of forensic evaluation.
[Neal Conan:] So what are they doing here?
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] Well, the requirement that a defendant be competent to stand trial dates back to 17th century, and it's rooted in English common law. And in American courts, competency really has its roots in the concept of fairness. So we really want to see if the defendant has the capacity to get a fair trial. And what the competency to stand trial standard is, that's been actually set by the Supreme Court. They held that competence to stand trial is a fundamental is really fundamental to our system of justice. And the way that they defined competency to stand trial is whether the defendant, whether the accused, has sufficient present ability to consult with his or her lawyer with a reasonable degree of rational understanding, and whether he or she has a rational as well as a factual understanding of the proceedings against him or her.
[Neal Conan:] Would could you summarize that by saying participate in their own defense?
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] Need to be able to understand what's going on, what they're charged with, what the potential penalties are. And they need to be able, yes, to assist their lawyer in their own defense.
[Neal Conan:] And what happens if they are judged not competent to stand trial?
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] Well, that's a determination that's made by the court. A psychiatrist or a psychologist performing that evaluation is basically opining as to whether that person has the capacity the capacities necessary for competence. If the judge rules that they're not competent to stand trial, then they the question would be, can they be restored to competency? And in the case of severe mental illness, typically that restoration to competence would involve treatment of the psychiatric disorder...
[Neal Conan:] And that could...
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] ...typically with medication.
[Neal Conan:] And that could take years.
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] It potentially could, but it often takes less than that.
[Neal Conan:] And you say medication. Could a prisoner be forced to take medication against his or her will?
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] Well, there have been cases in which that has, you know, that has come up. And, yes. You know, in terms of serving the purpose of justice and bringing someone to trial, yes, someone can be forced to take medication against their will. That's typically after an extremely long process in which the defense attorneys are, you know, bringing motions to the court regarding that issue.
[Neal Conan:] Okay. And there is then the question of location. Why would the judge order Jared Loughner removed to a facility, all the way from Tucson to Springfield, Missouri?
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] Well, there can be many reasons. I'm not sure what they would be in this particular case. It really would depend on the defendant him or herself, what the case is about, what the ideas are on the part of the defense attorney and the prosecutor. There's nothing inherent in a competency to stand trial evaluation itself that demands that it be one place or the other. But everyone, the court, the defense and the prosecution, you know, really, has an interest in and investment in a very thorough examination. And a thorough examination, you know, needs to be performed under the conditions that are, really, the most likely to produce valid and reliable results. So sometimes, in an inpatient facility, the you can do a more thorough evaluation.
[Neal Conan:] Okay. So that might explain but why might the prosecution be interested in saying this should be a Bureau of Prisons facility in Springfield, Missouri, halfway across the country, and the defense say, wait a minute, we would prefer an independent expert right here in Tucson?
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] Well, I don't know why in this particular case. You know, typically, attorneys have their reasons for wanting particular evaluations done in by certain people in certain places. One thing may be that there may be the perception that a certain type of evaluation may be done by, for example, psychiatrists or psychologists employed by the government.
[Neal Conan:] Mm-hmm.
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] And so given the fact that we have an adversarial system, there may be a desire to, you know, obtain an expert that, for example, the defense may know does a very thorough evaluation versus an expert that the defense does not know. Same thing can be true of the prosecutors.
[Neal Conan:] For sure. Everybody prefers their own, I guess.
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] Right.
[Neal Conan:] And in such an evaluation, obviously every one is different, but typically, what kinds of questions are asked?
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] Well, you're really doing a thorough evaluation that is looking at first of all, a forensic evaluation is different from a clinical evaluation in that there isn't confidentiality. And so the defendant needs to know that. There isn't a doctor-patient relationship. You're looking at relevant background information, and you're looking at information and presenting that information in a way that would be relevant to competency. So you don't want information, for example, in a report that is going to, in any way, bear on the alleged offense. So you're looking at family history, personal history, educational history, particularly if one of the areas that's being looked at in the competency evaluation is some sort of cognitive deficit, for example, mental retardation. You're looking at relationship history, medical history can be very important, drug and alcohol history, and then, of course, psychiatric history.
[Neal Conan:] Mm-hmm.
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] You're also doing any relevant evaluations, examinations that need to be done, including psychological testing if that is indicated. If there isn't an indication for specific psychological tests, there's no reason to do them. A mental status examination, which is really kind of the psychiatric equivalent of a physical examination, in which you're examining the defendant's thought processes, thought content, really trying to understand if there is evidence of a severe mental illness, for example, psychosis.
[Neal Conan:] Mm-hmm.
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] And then you're asking questions that are specific to that competency standard that I mentioned before. You know, you want to ask questions that would get to whether the defendant understands and appreciates the charges, whether they understand the trial process, whether they've got the capacity to work with their attorneys around preparing a defense.
[Neal Conan:] Mm-hmm.
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] For example, someone who is psychotic and paranoid may feel like his or her defense attorney is in some sort of a conspiracy with the judge and with the prosecution. That would obviously impair the person's ability to work with their attorney. So you're looking at those kinds of questions.
[Neal Conan:] Let's get a caller in on the conversation. We're talking with Dr. Eileen Ryan about the competency, the mental competency exam process. And we'll start with Nicholas, Nicholas with us from Sacramento.
[Nicholas:] Yeah. How you doing today, Neal?
[Neal Conan:] I'm good. Thanks.
[Nicholas:] Yeah, my question actually is that your guest has made a comment that if a person is, you know, is found that at the time maybe they're not completely mentally sound, that they can be sometimes induced to take medication, and as a result, bring somewhat be brought back to competency. But how does that actually hold up as far as when the crime is committed, they obviously weren't of sound mind? So to re-induce some kind of a state of consciousness, I don't understand I guess I'm having a problem with, if they weren't competent at the time, but yet if drugs are going to make them aware of the situation, does that really change their mental state at the time of the crime?
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] Well, that's a great question. And it doesn't, because those are two different evaluations. The competency to stand trial is very much a here-and-now assessment. So really, someone needs to be competent to stand trial in order to go forward. So in order for someone to, for example, to progress to the point where they are asserting an insanity defense, for example, which is mental state at that time of the alleged offense, they need to be competent in order to present that defense. So you can be competent to stand trial. And you can be competent to stand trial without medications, without you can have a competency to stand trial evaluation and be found by the judge competent to stand trial without ever being forced to take any medications but still assert an insanity defense, because that would really be pertaining to the way you were at the time that the alleged crime was committed.
[Neal Conan:] Nicholas, thanks very much.
[Nicholas:] Thank you very much.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking about the mental competency examination. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And let's see if we can go next to this is... this is Glen, Glen with us from Columbus, Ohio.
[Glen:] Yes. I have two points. First one's regarding juveniles. We get into some sticky issues with this where a juvenile is at risk of punishment as an adult, but of course, they don't get any of the rights and responsibilities of an adult. And if they're found innocent, they go back to being children again. Is there any kind of evaluation to determine that a person who's 16 is actually of the sound mind of an adult when they committed a crime, or is it just a dilemma of the prosecutor? And I had a second point.
[Neal Conan:] And obviously, this does not apply to Jared Loughner, who is 23. But anyway, go ahead, Eileen Ryan.
[Glen:] Right.
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] Well, that's a very complicated issue and it really it sort of varies from state to state. In many states, most states, juveniles, depending on their age and the legislation in various states, can be tried as adults. Some states, that's 16. For some states it's 14. And if you are tried as an adult, then you are able to have the same possible defenses...
[Neal Conan:] But that determination of being tried as an adult, that's a determination by the prosecutor, not by any examination by anybody.
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] Well, whether or not one is tried as an adult, whether one is bound over to adult court, that's a determination that can be made by -depending on the state again it can be made by legislature. I mean, there are certain states in which for certain crimes such as murder, the prosecutor doesn't make that decision. You're automatically tried as an adult if you're a certain age. Now, when that happens and in states regardless of whether you're tried as an adult or whether you remain in juvenile court, you can obtain a competency to stand trial evaluation.
[Neal Conan:] And...
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] So there's competency to stand trial evaluations that are done on juveniles who are staying in the juvenile system, and then there are competency to stand trial evaluations of juveniles in the adult system.
[Neal Conan:] And...
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] So regardless of where you are, you have to be competent to stand trial to proceed.
[Neal Conan:] And let's go next to Tim. And Tim is with us from Hyde Park in Utah.
[Tim:] Yes.
[Neal Conan:] Go ahead, please.
[Tim:] You hear me okay?
[Neal Conan:] Yeah.
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] Yeah.
[Tim:] My brother was recently convicted of the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart. And he was repeatedly found incompetent to stand trial in the state court and spent a lot of time in a hospital because of a delusional psychosis. Well, finally the federal court, when they charged him on that, they hired a guy named Welner from out of New York, paid him $500,000, and he finally declared my brother competent to stand trial. But my brother was not willing to actually talk to most of these people. So they did the competency off of statements of family members, statements of, you know, the, you know, young woman who was kidnapped and so forth.
[Neal Conan:] And...
[Tim:] And finally, that's the way they kidnapped I mean, they finally convicted him based on that. But we...
[Neal Conan:] And I don't mean to cut you off, but we're running out of time. And I wanted to give Eileen Ryan a chance to respond.
[Tim:] Oh.
[Neal Conan:] And she may not be familiar with this particular case, but that procedure in general.
[Tim:] Yeah, we kept...
[Neal Conan:] Yeah, let's let Dr. Ryan...
[Tim:] OK.
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] Well, you know, again, these are very much individualized cases, and competency really is contextual. And one of the things that's very important is that it's got to be the evaluator is looking at many things. Again, I'm not commenting on that particular case or the case of this man's brother. But one of the things that all forensic evaluators are assessing is whether someone is incapable of working with his or her attendee...
[Neal Conan:] But if the person refuses to cooperate with the examiner, then you could go to other...
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] Exactly. It's unwillingness versus incapacity.
[Neal Conan:] Yeah. Okay. Tim, I'm sorry we ran out of time. That's an interesting question. Tim joined us on the line from Hyde Park in Utah. And, Dr. Ryan, thank you very much for your time today.
[Dr. Eileen Ryan:] Sure.
[Neal Conan:] Dr. Eileen Ryan, associate professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia, with us on the line from her office in Charlottesville. Tomorrow, legendary comedian Carol Burnett joins us to take your calls. Be there for that. This is TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan, in Washington.

[Robert Siegel:] President Obama says he'll remove Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. That's been seen as an important condition for normalizing diplomatic relations. Congress has 45 days to block the move if it chooses. Otherwise, Cuba goes off the list, leaving just Iran, Sudan and Syria. Joining us once again to talk about this is Roberta Jacobson, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Secretary Jacobson, welcome to the program once again.
[Roberta Jacobson:] Thanks for having me, Robert.
[Robert Siegel:] How does this political statement concretely change U.S. dealings with Cuba?
[Roberta Jacobson:] Well, I think that the decision the president made is a reflection of the facts, and it lifts some sanctions if Cuba were to be taken off the list. There are many other sanctions that remain in place, obviously, but it is as much a change in reputation in some ways. To be on that list is a mark in some ways that countries bear. But it does take them off of certain forms of sanctions that they will no longer have to be constrained by.
[Robert Siegel:] Assuming that this removal of Cuba from the list goes through after the 45 days, what other obstacles stand in the way of upgrading the two countries' interests sections in Havana and Washington to true embassies?
[Roberta Jacobson:] Well, let me be clear that the process that the president sought to review the State Sponsor of Terrorism List was independent of the negotiations that we're having on reestablishment of diplomatic relations and opening embassies. Certainly, the Cubans have at times linked those two things, but we will proceed to continue talking about what we need to have an embassy down there. We hope the Cubans will continue to have those discussions with us to ensure that we can get what we need to have an embassy that operates like embassies do in many other countries, including mobility for our diplomats and the ability to have an embassy that functions with adequate equipment and space for our diplomats.
[Robert Siegel:] Is it fair to say that those talks on upgrading the intersections to embassies are going more slowly perhaps more slowly by weeks, if not by months, than you had anticipated a few weeks ago?
[Roberta Jacobson:] You know, I think that there's a burst of enthusiasm at the beginning of any of these conversations, and you hope that they will go very quickly because there is so much goodwill generated by an announcement like the one that President Obama made on December 17 and President Castro as well. But we still have to remember how much history we have to get past. And so when you sit down at the table and you actually have to talk about the particularities that both sides had to agree on to operate diplomatic missions, sometimes you still have to get past some of the history.
[Robert Siegel:] I'm going to take that down as a yes, that it's a little more slow...
[Roberta Jacobson:] [Laughter] I think...
[Robert Siegel:] ...than you had thought at the beginning.
[Roberta Jacobson:] ...I think that's probably a fair point.
[Robert Siegel:] I have a question about that announcement on December 17. I was in Cuba since I spoke with you last, and the date December 17 is one that all Cubans know for two reasons. It was the announcement by Presidents Obama and Raul Castro, and it's also the day of the pilgrimage of San Lazaro, who in the Yoruba faith of Cuba is merged together with the healer entity Babalu Aye. And it's a hugely important day in the spiritual calendar of Cuba. Was that date selected by the Cubans, by Washington, by chance? How did it happen on that day?
[Roberta Jacobson:] Well, I think I can assure you that it was not selected by us with conscious knowledge of a deep understanding of Yoruba symbolism. But I think it was in fact in many ways a date that simply worked well after a great deal of work had gone into getting to that point.
[Robert Siegel:] Well, Secretary Jacobson, thanks for talking with us once again.
[Roberta Jacobson:] Thank you very much, Robert.
[Robert Siegel:] That's Roberta Jacobson, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs.

[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] In Haiti, violent protests over government corruption have left at least seven people dead and paralyzed the capital, Port-au-Prince. Yesterday, Prime Minister Jean-Henry Ceant announced emergency anti-corruption measures in hopes of diffusing the crisis. CNN's Miguel Marquez is in Haiti reporting on the unrest, and he joins us now. Good morning.
[Miguel Marquez:] Good morning, Lulu.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] So what is the scene on the ground, Miguel?
[Miguel Marquez:] Right now, it is quiet much more quiet than we saw for the first nine days of this crisis. For the last 36 hours or so, people have been sort of getting back to the basics of life, looking for gas, looking for water, for food. Water, in particular, has been in very, very short supply, as has gasoline and kerosene, which they use to cook with long lines throughout the capital. The roads are a mess. They're still littered the remnants of nine days of violence you know, tire fires that were there and rocks and boulders scattered throughout. A bit treacherous getting around town right now, but much more calm. It seems most people are waiting to see what the government does before there may be another round of protests and possibly violence.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] So the prime minister said he's cutting his budget by 30 percent and cutting perks for officials. This round is in response to what the people say is government corruption. Will it be enough to stem the protests?
[Miguel Marquez:] I doubt it. What they want is the president to resign. They feel that the president, who spoke on Thursday night and talked generically about measures that the government would take in order to deal with corruption and deal with the equality in society here the prime minister then last night tried to fill that up with some meat on those bones. But he seemed to fire a shot across the bow of the president himself in saying that they were going to look at corruption at every level of the government, seemingly including the president's office. People here want him to resign because they feel they believe there was a government report last year that basically said billions of dollars have gone unaccounted for from a Venezuelan petrol subsidy program to help Haiti and countries like this, and there has been zero accountability for it. The president's own business is implicated in it, and there is no sense that any of those that are responsible are going to pay a price. So I think there is an expectation that something more dramatic than the speech last night occur here in Haiti.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] We have about 30 seconds left, but I know you've been out and about talking to people. What are regular Haitians saying?
[Miguel Marquez:] They are fed up. It's not just it's every level of society here. It's not only the poor Haitians, but the middle class as well. People who say, look; I've never come out we usually complain about this on Twitter or on Facebook. We've never come out and protested like this. I have a good job, but now, enough is enough. We cannot take it anymore. There has to be a change.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] CNN reporter Miguel Marquez in Haiti, thank you so much.
[Miguel Marquez:] You got it.

[Robert Siegel:] Three people died last weekend in Charlottesville, Va., in connection with the violence between white supremacist groups and counter-demonstrators there. Thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer was killed when a white supremacist drove into a crowd of protesters. And two state troopers also died. They had been monitoring the events from above. They were returning to their base when their helicopter crashed. Mallory Noe-Payne of member station WVTF went to the funeral of one of those troopers.
[Mallory Noe-payne, Byline:] Family, friends and officials, including Virginia's governor, gathered in a church just outside Richmond for the funeral of State Trooper Berke Bates. Bates had served as part of Governor Terry McAuliffe's personal unit for three years.
[Terry Mcauliffe:] These individuals live with you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They're part of our family. We lost a brother. I will miss him greatly.
[Mallory Noe-payne, Byline:] Bates, who was 40, had recently fulfilled a lifelong dream of becoming a pilot. And he was also an avid hockey fan. He coached his 12-year-old son's team, and a contingent of young players in uniform filled three rows. Colonel Steven Flaherty is superintendent of the Virginia State Police. He knew of Bates' talent as a coach.
[Steven Flaherty:] He was able to instill in these kids a love for the game, a respect for the game and instilled in them this desire to be all they could be, to be the best.
[Mallory Noe-payne, Byline:] Bates' funeral comes six days after a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. Bates and Lieutenant Jay Cullen were supporting the police on the ground by doing surveillance from the air. Flaherty says they were there to help people exercise their most fundamental right.
[Steven Flaherty:] To exercise their free speech. That's why he was there. That's why we were all there.
[Mallory Noe-payne, Byline:] But before Bates and Cullen could land, their helicopter crashed just outside of town. Investigators say they'll have a better picture of what caused the crash in a couple weeks. The accident shocked Captain Mark Sticca.
[Mark Sticca:] I just can't imagine how complicated and complex a situation that was for the commanders on site down there to try and compartmentalize what has to be done right now and still maintain safety at that rally, still maintain safety for everybody else who wasn't involved in the rally, just that day-to-day routine stuff and, again, find the time to grieve.
[Mallory Noe-payne, Byline:] The grieving will continue tomorrow. State troopers, local police and the governor will gather for the funeral of 48-year-old Jay Cullen. He had been flying for the state police for 20 years. The lieutenant leaves behind a wife and two kids. For NPR News, I'm Mallory Noe-Payne in Richmond, Va.

[David Greene:] One of the hardest things to preserve in any organized movement is unity, and we're starting to see that in Hong Kong. Protesters there have spent weeks pushing back against China's authority, but there are now signs of division in that pro-democracy movement. The protests, let's remember, started over a bill that would have allowed people in Hong Kong to be extradited to China to face criminal charges. And demonstrators have endured a strong, some would say brutal, response from police. In recent days, though, as the protests spread to Hong Kong's airport, there have been questions about protester violence, with a journalist and a suspected undercover cop, both from mainland China, suffering assaults. Our correspondent Anthony Kuhn is on the ground in Hong Kong and joins me. Hi there, Anthony.
[Anthony Kuhn, Byline:] Hey, David.
[David Greene:] So what is your sense? I mean, how unified is this movement right now?
[Anthony Kuhn, Byline:] Well, I think there's been a clear division all along, and that's between protesters who reject violence and those who don't. And this is obvious because the protests have been getting increasingly violent, and it culminated in on Tuesday night with the mauling of these two mainland people, and also an increasing number of tourists who are just getting hassled and not allowed to get through the airport to and from their flights. And there were very violent clashes with police on Tuesday night. The court ordered an injunction, barring protesters from the airport. And today, the airport was completely cleared of protesters. So protesters now have expressed that they are concerned about, you know, being charged if they violate the court order. And they're also uneasy about what they've done. They felt like they acted like a mob. They're reflecting on their tactics, and some of them have even been apologetic. And this is a real unexpected turn of events, and it's a lowering of a pressure in this protest movement. You know, this had a huge impact on the city, when two days-worth of flights are canceled, and people were very worried about a government crackdown because of it.
[David Greene:] So are people now questioning the strategy going forward? Or I guess asking in a different way, is there, like, one unified strategy for these protesters?
[Anthony Kuhn, Byline:] The protesters say their strategy is no strategy. And their famous line is adopted from Hong Kong kung fu flick star Bruce Lee, who said be like water, by which of course he means, you know, guerilla hit-and-run tactics. But it's really notable that, you know, I've been talking to protesters for days, and they just say we're not going to let up. We're going to keep fighting until the government gives in. But now they have beaten a tactical retreat, and that's a very important sort of thing to have in your vocabulary. Now at a press conference today of civilians, sort of self-appointed spokespersons, there was a woman named Sophia Suen calling, and she reaffirmed that this is a peaceful movement. Let's hear her talk.
[Sophia Suen:] Injury towards anybody is not the original intent of any of the protesters. And in line of that, we are not really sure whether those people who have committed those acts were, in fact, infiltrators or not.
[Anthony Kuhn, Byline:] Infiltrators, you note she says that. And what she's talking about is undercover cops. The police admitted that they were in the crowds of protesters dressed like protesters, and the protesters say they were provoking violence. The Hong Kong police admitted they were in there, but they deny they did anything illegal. But now this is an added factor. The protesters can say we don't know who assaulted these mainland people or hassled the tourists. Maybe they were cops. And they also say they're just on edge because they fear they may have traders or informers around them.
[David Greene:] That's an interesting thing to realize about the violence. Do you talk to a lot of people in Hong Kong who are just against these protests?
[Anthony Kuhn, Byline:] There are quite a few. There are working-class neighborhoods, there are rural villages and farmlands, there are politically conservative pro-Beijing residents there. But they're not so organized, and Beijing has not done a good job of mobilizing them to speak up.
[David Greene:] NPR's Anthony Kuhn in Hong Kong. Thanks, Anthony.
[Anthony Kuhn, Byline:] You're welcome, David.

[Renee Montagne:] NPR's business news starts with Google shifting China strategy. Google is still struggling to figure out how to operate in China's authoritarian Internet environment. The company shut down its mainland China search engine three months ago, saying it did not want to continue complying with Beijing's censorship rules. It began redirecting web surfers to its uncensored site in Hong Kong. But today Google says it won't do that anymore.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Writing on a company blog, Google's chief legal officer said Beijing threatened not to renew its Internet content provider license. Google has other businesses in China, such as music downloading. And a Google spokeswoman says the company wants to continue operating those services.
[Renee Montagne:] In other news from China, Beijing today signed a landmark economic agreement with Taiwan. The pack ends tariffs on hundreds of products. It also gives Taiwanese firms access to key industries on the mainland. Taiwan has had concerns about being economically marginalized and China would like to show the benefits of closer ties between the long-time rivals.

[Steve Inskeep:] Mark this next story as a sign of a changing nation. Comedy Central has announced the successor to Jon Stewart. Trevor Noah takes over "The Daily Show," the fake news program that's often as influential as real news shows.
[David Greene:] Stephen Colbert's fake news program was recently taken over by Larry Wilmore, which means both high-profile shows will be hosted by black men. One of them was not always considered black. Trevor Noah was born in South Africa during the years of apartheid, as he has discussed on stage.
[Trevor Noah:] My mother's a black woman, and then my father's Swiss. So I was born a crime, which is something I don't think they ever thought through because as a family, we couldn't live together, you know? Like in the streets, we couldn't even be seen together. My father would have to walk on the other side of the road. And he would just wave at me from far like a creepy pedophile.
[Steve Inskeep:] In South Africa, people of mixed race like Trevor Noah were not classified as black in those years but as colored.
[Trevor Noah:] I wanted to be black, to be honest. That's all I ever wanted, especially since one day, growing up, I met an American. And he was shocked that in South Africa we had all these titles. And he said to me he said, well, you know, Trevor, if you go out to America, they'll label you as black. I said, really? And he was like, oh, hell, yeah [LAUGHTER]. Yeah, buddy, everybody's black out there, yeah. You'd be super black. That sounds good to me super black.
[David Greene:] Whatever you call him, Trevor Noah now takes over one of the most prominent slots on American TV.

[Renee Montagne:] Talk will soon be cheaper across the European Union under a new policy to cut roaming charges for mobile phone calls. But Teri Schultz reports that consumer advocates are urging the EU to go further, and eliminate roaming fees altogether.
[Teri Schultz, Byline:] The EU's digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes calls it an end to roaming rip-offs, just in time for summer travel. The European Parliament and member governments have agreed to mandate price cuts for pan-European phone calls that will take effect in July, Kroes explains, and continue to drop through 2014.
[Neelie Kroes:] This is really great news for anyone who has been stung by high charges when using a mobile abroad.
[Teri Schultz, Byline:] That would include just about everyone using a European mobile phone, as roaming charges are notoriously high here despite two previous rounds of price-capping and the rates change at every national border. Five years ago it was estimated providers were charging as much as triple their domestic rates to make calls abroad as much as five times more to receive calls. Now the maximum price to make a roaming call will drop from the current 35 cents per minute to 29 cents in July, slashed further to 19 cents per minute by 2014. The cost of downloading data or Web-surfing will be capped at 70 cents per megabyte in July much less than is usually charged now. That will be cut dramatically by some two-thirds more by 2014. And operators will have to warn you when you've spent a certain amount. Commissioner Kroes.
[Neelie Kroes:] No more nasty shocks when you open your bill.
[Teri Schultz, Byline:] But John Phelan of the European Consumers Organization says there may be less shock, but the bills are still nasty. Phelan says rates are still too high. And because in the EU's common market you don't have to pay taxes to buy or sell goods among countries, he says you shouldn't have to pay extra for phone calls either.
[John Phelan:] If you received a call at national level, you're not charged, so why should you within a so-called single market have to pay to receive a call? You still get ripped off very often despite the caps.
[Teri Schultz, Byline:] Telecom operators say they make about five percent of their revenue from these cross-border calls, and with the new caps they'll have to raise prices in other areas For NPR News, I'm Teri Schultz in Brussels.

[Robert Siegel:] Ahead of a trip overseas, President Obama is putting an optimistic face on the election of Donald Trump. Obama spoke at a news conference at the White House this afternoon. He said, Trump is ultimately pragmatic, not ideological those his words. And he told reporters that Americans and foreign leaders should be reassured about Trump's commitment to American alliances.
[President Barack Obama:] In my conversation with the president-elect, he expressed a great interest in maintaining our core strategic relationships. And so one of the messages I will be able to deliver is his commitment to NATO and the Transatlantic Alliance.
[Kelly Mcevers:] President Obama was also asked about Trump's controversial appointment of Stephen Bannon as senior adviser, and he said Americans should be patient. On illegal immigration, though, the president did say he would urge Trump to continue DACA. That's the program that shields certain immigrants from deportation if they were brought to the U.S. as kids.
[President Barack Obama:] It is my strong belief that the majority of the American people would not want to see suddenly those kids have to start hiding again. And that's something that I will encourage the president-elect to look at.

[Steve Inskeep:] Our colleague, Lauren Frayer, is in Barcelona, the Spanish region of Catalonia, listening to people say they do not want change.
[Unidentified Protestors:] [Chanting in foreign language].
[Steve Inskeep:] They're chanting, I am Spanish, meaning they do not want Catalonia to declare independence from Spain. The separatist party that rules Catalonia held a referendum on independence October 1, which was disrupted by police, and leaders now talk of declaring independence this week. So, Lauren Frayer, how divided are people where you are?
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] They're pretty divided. I mean, opinion polls have long showed that Catalans are divided on the question of independence. Though a vast majority want the right to vote on the issue, Spain denied them that right. Catalan leaders went ahead anyway and held that independence referendum on October 1st. And you mentioned those shocking scenes of Spanish police raiding polling stations and beating voters, and the police violence sort of galvanized people. It created a lot of sympathy for Catalans both in and outside of Spain. But what we saw this weekend was people coming out and saying look, yes, those scenes were unfortunate, I'm against police brutality, but it hasn't changed my basic position that I'm also against Catalonia breaking away from Spain. And it may even be a majority of Catalans who feel this way, who have been pretty silent until now because they were really defending the status quo of staying inside Spain.
[Steve Inskeep:] And and now they've got a reason to be pretty passionate because things are getting so dramatic. So what issues divide people besides their response to the referendum?
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] Well, separatist leaders cite the repression that Catalans suffered under a nearly 40-year dictatorship here of Francisco Franco. He died in 1975, but you know, anybody older than age 40 will remember that repression. Much more recently, Catalonia has become Spain's richest region, and some separatist leaders say Catalonia would be better off not subsidizing poorer parts of Spain. Yesterday in the crowd, people were very critical of independence, though. In fact, we had a Nobel Prize winner, Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist, addressed the crowd. And he warned of the dangers of nationalism in Europe, in this case, Catalan nationalism. Among those in the crowd listening was Jose Manuel Gonzalez. He's 45 years old, a businessman born and raised in Barcelona, and here's what he said.
[Jose Manuel Gonzalez:] I don't think they will be better at all because they want to become independent and also take the country outside of the European Union and outside of Spain, and it will be very bad for everybody here in Catalonia.
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] And on that one point, he's right. An independent Catalonia would have to leave the EU at least initially. Trade barriers could go up. We've already seen big banks and other businesses say they'll relocate out of Catalonia if there is a declaration of independence here. I met one woman last night who was already withdrawing her money from a Catalan bank, afraid of the of a run on the banks here if Catalonia goes independent.
[Steve Inskeep:] Well, of course financial issues are a big part of this, but so's national identity. I'm curious, Lauren, as you talk to people, do you really run into a lot of Catalonians who say the opposite of those demonstrators I am not Spanish, I am not in any way part of Spain?
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] We do because we've seen a generation of Catalans who've been raised in Catalan language. The Catalan school system is completely in in Catalan and so they're sort of anybody under 40 has been raised completely in Catalan language, and that has that has led them to disproportionately support independence. The Catalan president has said he'll declare independence within days. A week has gone by, and that still hasn't happened.
[Steve Inskeep:] Lauren Frayer in Catalonia, thanks very much.
[Lauren Frayer, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Linda Wertheimer:] The hundreds of tornados that swept across the Southeast last week inflicted death and destruction throughout the region. The impact will be felt for months or even years, as hard hit communities struggle to rebuild and local economies work to recover. In Alabama, we've reported on the major damage suffered by Tuscaloosa and Birmingham. Today, we look at Huntsville, one of the state's economic hubs, which also took a direct hit. NPR's Alex Kellogg reports.
[Alex Kellogg:] It took a week, but most schools reopened yesterday in Huntsville. Still, many people are spending their days doing the little things to help with the recovery effort.
[Unidentified Woman:] What am I getting a hamburger or hot dog?
[Mr. Robert Schumann:] No, you're getting a hot dog.
[Unidentified Woman:] OK.
[Alex Kellogg:] Robert Schumann is the general manager of the Firehouse Pub. He was grilling hot dogs, hamburgers and chicken for scores of civilian electricians working to restore power to Redstone Arsenal, a massive Army post.
[Mr. Robert Schumann:] People will ask, what were you doing when all this was going on? And we know what we were doing. We were feeding some folks. Doing our part.
[Alex Kellogg:] Redstone is the center of testing, development and support for the Army's aviation and missile programs. It is also one of Alabama's largest employers, with about 36,000 workers. More than a million customers lost power during the storm and 100,000 still don't have electricity. So the army post has been running on generators like this one. But, officials say they expect to have full power restored in the next few days. Colonel John Hamilton says that's good news, as any longer delay may have had an impact on the post's support of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center which is supporting an upcoming NASA shuttle launch.
[Colonel John Hamilton:] We talk about normalcy and, you know, and one component of that is, you know, is Redstone Arsenal running normally, in terms of the way the work is being done. And we'll be able to get back to that very, very quickly. What will take a very long time to return to normalcy are peoples' lives.
[Alex Kellogg:] It's still impossible to get hard numbers, but the economic impact on this part of Alabama and frankly the state as a whole is expected to be massive. Huntsville is the state's second largest metropolitan area. According to its chamber of commerce, it accounted for roughly 40 percent of the new jobs created in the state in the past decade. Rick Davis is the director of Cummings Research Park, which he says houses roughly 300 companies and boasts about 25,000 high-tech jobs. Most of the companies in the research park, including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, were shut down for the better part of a week.
[Mr. Rick Davis:] You've got companies that lost, you know, days of operation. You won't get those days back. So we'll have to see how that part of it plays out. But there's going to be a pretty severe impact.
[Alex Kellogg:] Huntsville wasn't the worst hit part of the state, but the damage here was still severe. Nevertheless, things are starting to return to normal. Huntsville straddles two counties, and blanket curfews in both were recently lifted in areas not hit by the tornado. On Wednesday, Deputy Sheriff Jeremy Hughes patrolled several subdivisions in the Huntsville suburb of Harvest that were ripped apart by a tornado. Dozens of homes here are torn to shreds. Even old oak trees are turned upside down.
[Sheriff Jeremy Hughes:] For people that live in non-affected areas, life is going back to its normal routine. Unfortunately for the people in the effected areas, who knows how long it'll be before life gets back to normal for them.
[Alex Kellogg:] That may be true in many parts of the state and the South that were hit by last week's storms. Alex Kellogg, NPR News.
[Linda Wertheimer:] This is NPR News.

[Audie Cornish:] New Hampshire is already seeing a stream of early visitors eyeing a possible 2020 presidential run. Democrats and Republicans are dropping in on the state that hosts the first presidential primary, still almost two years away. NPR's Don Gonyea is also there.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] This is former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley greeting New Hampshire voters at St. Anselm College's Politics & Eggs breakfast yesterday.
[Martin O'malley:] We've got to keep the eggs.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] A Democrat who ran last time and fared poorly, he reflected on 2016, finding one bright spot.
[O'malley:] Say what we will as a party about Donald Trump, he has been the most effective tool for candidate recruitment we have ever had.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] O'Malley's referring to all of the new Democrats running for federal, state and local offices these days. But he could also be talking about the coming 2020 presidential field. Here is a partial list of Democrats who've been here in recent months Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, former Cabinet secretary Julian Castro and Congressman Tim Ryan. And on the Republican side, Senator Jeff Flake was here last month, and just last night, another veteran of the 2016 race.
[Unidentified Person:] Please join me in welcoming to New England College the governor of Ohio, John Kasich.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] Governor Kasich, like Senator Flake, has emerged as one of the strongest Republican critics of Trump. That was on display last night. Take the president's Easter comments that he would end the DACA program that protects undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children. Kasich had this to say.
[John Kasich:] If we believe in justice, and if we believe in compassion, then there would be no reason why we would take somebody who was brought to this country at the age of 6 who's now 26 with a spouse and children and announce to them that we're shipping you out.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] And then there was this when asked about the White House floating the idea of an Oval Office meeting with Vladimir Putin.
[John Kasich:] You mean, like, now? No, not now. I mean, receive him to do what?
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] Those comments are about President Trump. But Kasich also directed this at some of Trump's strongest supporters, those who see themselves as victims of a changing economy.
[John Kasich:] We need to address their problems. And we cannot allow them to call themselves victims. Victims are people who have a very hard time being able to get up on their feet. Victimhood leads to anger, and anger never leads to anything good.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] In the audience was 60-year-old Gary Glines, a veteran of the first Iraq war. He says in November of 2016, he wrote in Kasich's name. He says he's increasingly alarmed with the Trump presidency.
[Gary Glines:] Just watching the revolving door, it just seems like he's not in control. That means the country's not in control.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] If Kasich does run as a Republican, he'd face an incumbent president with an approval rating currently at 80 percent among New Hampshire Republicans. Jennifer Horn, a former state GOP chairwoman, was there last night. She says it's an unusual time in Republican Party politics thanks to Trump.
[Jennifer Horn:] People kind of aren't sure where he falls on any given day on any given issue. And I think that that opens the door to someone like John Kasich or any of a number of others to come in and make an argument for themselves.
[Don Gonyea, Byline:] Any decisions on whether to run may not come until after this year's midterm elections. Meantime, look for plenty of possible candidates dropping into New Hampshire just saying hello. Don Gonyea, NPR News, Manchester.

[Renee Montagne:] Some hurricane evacuees did get to make a choice where they were airlifted, joining family members in Florida, Texas and elsewhere. Others were simply airlifted out of Louisiana, destination unknown. NPR's Ted Robbins reports.
[Ted Robbins Reporting:] Last Sunday night, Brian Harrison was grateful to finally be leaving New Orleans. A burly young man and his extended family of 18 had lost everything, but he was still disorientated. He was on a plane and he had no idea where it was going.
[Mr. Brian Harrison:] We kept asking once we caught word, `Where are we going?'you know? They wouldn't tell us. They didn't tell us where we was going till we touched down.
[Robbins:] They touched down in Phoenix and were taken to a shelter at Veterans Memorial Coliseum filled with volunteers and donated goods.
[Unidentified Woman #1:] ... [Unintelligible] any volunteers? I have a truckload of men's underwear. Can I get some help unloading the truck, please?
[Robbins:] Here, along with about 500 other evacuees, they got a shower, new clothes, a hot meal and some sleep. Red Cross spokeswoman Jennifer Leroy.
[Ms. Jennifer Leroy:] When they come in, they're in a state of shock, absolutely, but that shower, that meal and a good night's sleep really helps put, I think, some folks into focus, and think, `OK. Now this is what I'm going to do next.'So...
[Robbins:] What some do next is connect with the Phoenix African-American community. Almost all the evacuees here are African-American, and members of African-American churches in the Phoenix area are on site to meet and pray with them.
[Ms. Diane Daniels:] And we just reach out to meet the needs of the people and we just want to be a part of what's happening here.
[Robbins:] Diane Daniels is from Azusa World Ministries. She wears a blue T-shirt that says: Too Blessed To Be Stressed. Carrying a cell phone in one hand, she shepherds the entire extended family out of the shelter, from Brian Harrison, to lean unshaven 49-year-old Ronnie Armont, to a squinting child who has an instant reaction to the blazing Arizona sun.
[Unidentified Child:] Hot.
[Robbins:] Hot. But as they say here, it's a dry heat and it's fine with Ronnie Armont.
[Mr. Ronnie Armont:] It's beautiful. What I've seen of it, I like it.
[Robbins:] Of course, less than 48 hours earlier, Armont was being plucked off his New Orleans roof by a helicopter, on his birthday, no less. He was a music recording engineer in New Orleans. Now he's making plans for a new life in Arizona.
[Mr. Ronnie Armont:] We'll probably stay here from what I've seen so far. Get the children in school, get housing, get resettled, then I have to take care of some business back in New Orleans because I own two houses.
[Robbins:] At the moment, all 18 members of the family are loading into vans for a tour of central Arizona to see where they might want to live.
[Unidentified Man:] Hey, I forgot to ask you how old you were.
[Robbins:] Brian Harrison says it already feels like home because of the warmth of the welcome.
[Mr. Brian Harrison:] The love, the connections 'cause I feel like, you know, it's what God guided me to.
[Unidentified Woman #2:] OK. What's for dinner? We're having chicken, greens, corn bread, peach cobbler, coconut chocolate cake.
[Robbins:] A few hours later, the family and church members are chowing down at the community center in Coolidge, Arizona. Coolidge is a small desert town surrounded by cotton and alfalfa fields about halfway between Phoenix and Tucson. It looks and feels nothing like New Orleans, but that doesn't matter to Brian Harrison.
[Mr. Brian Harrison:] You know, you never judge a book by its cover. You've got to at least read the introduction to see what the next page has to offer. And so far, you know, I'm willing to read the whole book.
[Robbins:] Ted Robbins, NPR News.
[Renee Montagne:] This is NPR News.

[Because Of Unemployment And Foreclosures, More And More Families Are Seeking Assistance From The Last Place They Ever Thought They Would:] a homeless shelter. And as reporter Gloria Hillard found, desperate circumstances are sending people to one of the most desperate places in America, a neighborhood where thousands of homeless congregate, Skid Row in Los Angeles.
[Gloria Hillard:] Colin Coquiza has been in his new job as hospitality director for a little more than a month now.
[Mr. Colin Coquiza:] You know, sit down and interview our guests as they come in and get them a sense get them comfortable...
[Gloria Hillard:] It's a position for which he's well-qualified. For 15 years, he worked in guest relations at a five-star hotel in Beverly Hills, a world away from here. This is the Union Rescue Mission, located in the heart of Los Angeles' Skid Row.
[Mr. Colin Coquiza:] So, you can imagine my the adjustment I had to make mentally from, you know, who's your guest from, you know, Rodeo and Wilshire Boulevard to Skid Row. I always say God has interesting sense of humor.
[Gloria Hillard:] Coquiza came into his new job at the Union Rescue Mission after first coming here with his wife and three-year-old daughter seeking shelter. A recent business venture had failed. At the same time, the townhome he was renting was foreclosed on.
[Mr. Colin Coquiza:] Stayed in a motel for about two weeks. That pretty much tapped out everything we had in savings and then, you know, it was, where do we go from here?
[Gloria Hillard:] Coquiza is not alone. Calls to six other shelters in surrounding areas report a 40-to-50 percent increase in families seeking assistance. Gary Blasi is a UCLA professor of law and poverty attorney. He has worked with the homeless for 30 years.
[Professor Gary Blasi:] I think we are probably headed into the worst situation that we've ever seen. I think increasingly, when you see two-parent families headed into homelessness, it's entirely a matter of the economy and their having exhausted every other possibility.
[Gloria Hillard:] Andy Bales, the director of the Union Rescue Mission, says for those families, a homeless shelter is often the last resort. When I spoke with him, the workload had taken a toll on his voice.
[Reverend Andy Bales:] Often, people turn to family until family gets worn out or gets in trouble themselves, or people go to a hotel or an apartment until their resources run dry.
[Gloria Hillard:] He says the biggest challenge facing the Union Rescue Mission today is meeting the need, just as it did during the Depression.
[Reverend Andy Bales:] We want to live up to our history by stepping up services to the many families that are going to be coming our way now.
[Gloria Hillard:] Bales is in the process of converting an administrative floor to rooms that will accommodate 39 two-parent families. There are currently 38 single-parent families at the shelter. Newcomers navigate the halls with their eyes cast down, embarrassed to speak about their situation. Children seem more resilient, appearing from around corners wide-eyed, a new toy in hand. There are few destinations here the cafeteria, the day rooms where TVs flicker, and the chapel, where every seat is occupied.
[Reverend Andy Bales:] When you're facing homelessness for the first time, it's a scary situation. You don't know what's at the end of the tunnel.
[Gloria Hillard:] Shelter Director Bales says the biggest challenge for the newly homeless is finding the courage to try again. For NPR News, I'm Gloria Hillard.

[Alex Chadwick:] Time now for another visit to the research lab that is Emily Yoffe's life. Emily, welcome back to DAY TO DAY.
[Emily Yoffe:] Nice to be here.
[Alex Chadwick:] Dear listeners, Emily's best known as the Human Guinea Pig for the online magazine Slate, where's she's a writer. In her Human Guinea Pig role, she takes on unusual or unpleasant tasks that the rest of us wonder about, but would never actually do. A partial list of her accomplishments include telephone psychic-you were great at that, Emily-matzo ball-eating contest-I can't remember how you came out on that one.
[Emily Yoffe:] I lost, but I was the leading female contender.
[Alex Chadwick:] Beauty pageant participant-and, it turned out, the winner, Mrs. Washington, DC-street musician. She's back today to tell us about-well, this would have to be your most revealing role so far, Emily. What exactly is it?
[Emily Yoffe:] I posed nude for an art class, twice.
[Alex Chadwick:] This didn't involve an ad in one of these free weekly newspapers, did it?
[Emily Yoffe:] Well, if you give me your credit card, Alex, we might work something out. No, this was utterly legit. This was at the Corcoran College of Art & Design in Washington, DC, a renowned institution.
[Alex Chadwick:] That's a big, important thing. And what sort of-I'll put this as delicately as I can-what sort of qualifications does one need to be a nude model?
[Emily Yoffe:] I found there were two main qualifications. One, you owned a bathrobe. Two, you'd be willing to take it off. I think those were probably the two things.
[Alex Chadwick:] Well, you don't-one need not be Rubenesque, say.
[Emily Yoffe:] The application asked me for a physical description, and I asked the interviewer what was meant by that and she said, `Well, you know, some people write "swimmer's build" or something like that.'I wrote `middle-aged woman,'and-but that was all right.
[Alex Chadwick:] It must be normal, I would guess, for art students to see this. But still, if I were in that position, I would be expecting maybe a room full of gasps or some horrified-I don't know.
[Emily Yoffe:] I myself really had to suppress giggles, and I mean, I could see a couple of the students were seeing me about to crack up, and then I thought, `Oh, if they start laughing, that's just going to be the worst.'So I got myself together; no one laughed. I mean, everyone's had the dream you show up in class naked.
[Alex Chadwick:] Yeah.
[Emily Yoffe:] And in the dream, you realize, `Hmm. OK, this isn't good, but I'm going to act like I meant to show up naked.'So it's very much like that.
[Alex Chadwick:] In your piece in Slate, you quote another woman who is a nude model, and I was interested to read what she said about it.
[Emily Yoffe:] Yes. Well, she was, as she described to me, a starving artist. And so there are certain starving-artist jobs and she said, `This was so much better than working at Starbucks or an electronics store.'And it paid better, too.
[Alex Chadwick:] What is the pay for nude modeling?
[Emily Yoffe:] It was $15 an hour. Now that's about three times the minimum wage just to sit on your rear end.
[Alex Chadwick:] Do you get cold? That's something that always seemed to me would be kind of a job hazard here. Wouldn't you get chilly?
[Emily Yoffe:] Good point. They hand you a list of guidelines. Now your obligation is to have proper hygiene at all times. Their obligation is to turn up the heat if you say you're cold.
[Alex Chadwick:] Well, how did it go as you're sitting there in class? What happened, and how did things develop?
[Emily Yoffe:] The first class, the teacher didn't tell me what to do, which made it both sort of interesting and a little more stressful. I started doing, like, semi-yoga things and I was worried, `This is verging on yoga porn here.'And I got in one pose-I was kind of down on all fours because I had to hold it for 20 minutes, and this middle-aged man who really liked the pose called out, `Great pose!'which actually made me a little uneasy. And he started painting away and painting away just really vigorously; I could hear him. And during the break, I went and looked at all the drawings, and most people were using pencil and chalk. And in some, I looked quite lovely; some I looked like a giant toad. And he had done this almost fresco-like portrait of my rear end. And I have to say I really wanted to buy it and put it over the mantelpiece. It was like the "Mona Lisa" of rear ends. It was really great. I mean, it was much nicer than my actual one.
[Alex Chadwick:] Well, maybe not. Maybe this is it. Are you going to continue? You have a-you've launched a budding career as a nude model, as the Human Guinea Pig. Is this something you would continue?
[Emily Yoffe:] No, I'm not going to continue because I looked up the history of artist models. It's very tortured. You know, they tend to have, like, breakdowns or commit suicide, and I just don't want to go down that path.
[Alex Chadwick:] Emily Yoffe is the long-suffering Human Guinea Pig for our friends at the online magazine Slate. You can find her article there on nude modeling at slate.com. Emily, thank you again.
[Emily Yoffe:] Thank you, Alex.

[Ari Shapiro:] Beyond the U.S., many countries are concerned that fake news stories could influence voters. The Czech Republic has elections later this year, and the country is so concerned about this problem that it has opened a new center against terrorism and hybrid threats. One of its key missions is to monitor social media and identify stories that it deems to be false. To talk about it, we are joined via Skype by Tomas Prouza, the Czech government state secretary for European affairs. Welcome to the program.
[Tomas Prouza:] Thank you very much for having me.
[Ari Shapiro:] What is a specific concern that this center is trying to address?
[Tomas Prouza:] What we have seen in the last two years was growing number of Russia-connected websites who've been reporting blatant lies. And they spread alternative versions on events to make sure that people have no idea what is true any longer, and they simply start doubting the very basics of democracy, and that is the key worry we have.
[Ari Shapiro:] You say that these are connected to Russia, what evidence do you have that Moscow is behind this?
[Tomas Prouza:] One is that many of these websites share stories that originally appear on Russia Today or Sputnik, which are the two key Kremlin propaganda tools. And we also been looking at financing of some of these websites, and some of the leads we have fall in towards financial sources from Russia.
[Ari Shapiro:] Has Russia responded?
[Tomas Prouza:] Well, not officially. Anytime we bring that up in the discussions with them they of course deny any involvement, but friends of Russia have been attacking this center from day one.
[Ari Shapiro:] So when this new center against terrorism and hybrid threats identifies one of these fake news stories, what does it do?
[Tomas Prouza:] It publishes the facts. It uses social media, primarily Twitter, to get things out as quickly as possible, and saying this is a story we have found, these are the facts so use your brain and compare these two. So it's not censorship, they're not trying to close the websites, but they're trying to show very clearly that these things are really false. It's not alternative truth, it's really a falsehood.
[Ari Shapiro:] Should it really be the business of the government to determine what is fake news? I mean, here in the United States, President Trump has referred to unfavorable media coverage that is in fact grounded in facts as fake news. It seems as though this center could easily go from identifying fake news stories to limiting a free press and targeting unfavorable media coverage.
[Tomas Prouza:] We've been very careful. The only mandate they have is to identify stories, verify the facts and publish that. And it's also only one piece of the puzzle. We of course have several NGOs that act as fact checkers. We have some of the traditional media who also cover some of these stories, and we felt that this government center should be part of it. It's not the only thing we do, but we still believe that government needs to defend itself. If we don't defend democracy, it will be gone very quickly.
[Ari Shapiro:] You said that the center will not go after every fake news story that's out there. How large is the volume, and how many do you plan to go after on a given day or week?
[Tomas Prouza:] There's about 40 websites that peddle these stories, so you have dozens of websites that appear. The goal is for them to pick up a few a week. One of the stories we've seen repeatedly was claiming that the migration away from Syria to Europe has been caused by American activities in Syria over the last year or so. That for me is one of these major stories we need to debunk. They're not American activities in Syria, they're Russian activities, Russian bombing in Syria that has been driving people out from their homes. So this is the type of the stories they will go after.
[Ari Shapiro:] There's obviously an urgency in Prague to do this because the Czech Republic has elections this year, but are some of your European colleagues in other countries talking about doing similar things?
[Tomas Prouza:] Very much so. Germany is now discussing how they should address that. For them one of the key areas to focus on so far has been trying to force Facebook and Twitter to go after the fake news themselves. Sweden has been one of the targets for Russia as well. Finland faces similar problems we have, and even the United Kingdom. Each country is trying to see how they can deal with this.
[Ari Shapiro:] Tomas Prouza is the Czech government's state secretary for European affairs. Thanks very much for joining us.
[Tomas Prouza:] Thank you.

[Steve Inskeep:] It's Christmas MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep. It's time to follow up on a campaign promise that was made on NPR a few weeks ago. Senator Christopher Dodd was one of the presidential candidates who attended an NPR debate. It was in Iowa, the first state to voice a preference for president. Some of the candidates were asked if they'd be giving their kids toys made in China. And Senator Dodd responded this way.
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] My toys are coming from Iowa. I'm buying Iowa toys.
[Steve Inskeep:] Senator Christopher Dodd has two daughters age 6 and 2. And we've called to ask out things that worked out. Senator, happy holidays.
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] Happy holidays to you, Steve. And happy holidays to everyone at NPR and your listening audience.
[Steve Inskeep:] Okay. Now, I know you were joking. But were you able to find any Iowa toys?
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] Absolutely. In fact, a wonderful woman Susie Turnbull did a nice event for me the other day in Marengo, Iowa. And she's an artist. And so we had the house party, the town hall meeting at her studio. I managed to pick up some ornaments and she's going to do some work for me for the holidays, as well for my wife, Jackie, and the girls. So we're able to find some wonderful events, some wonderful toys and gifts right here in Iowa.
[Steve Inskeep:] Although, come on, weren't your kids pushing for the consumer electronics?
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] Of course, they were, Steve. And actually, now, they've got wonderful list. Actually, their lists were very responsible. There were flowers and apples and parrots and gerbils and things like that.
[Steve Inskeep:] Then I supposed we should mentioned that as we record this, it's a little before Christmas. Your kids are listening in so you can't actually tell us precisely what they got, is that?
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] Thank you, Steve. I appreciate that very much.
[Steve Inskeep:] But in any event, you're insisting that there are Iowa toys among the...
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] Well, certainly, there is a wonderful thing, like in every state. That's very easy to do actually.
[Steve Inskeep:] Now, we should mention for those who aren't aware that although you're a senator representing Connecticut and we hear your kids in the background and that's just fine. You're a senator from Connecticut. You have moved to the state of Iowa in anticipation of the caucuses. Why take that step?
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] Why take this well, just to be with my family. It's very simple. It wasn't a political decision. Otherwise, you'd be going home from campaigning once every 10 or 12 days or day or so. This way with age 6 and two and a half very mobile, very easy, we found a place. It was for sale. And the guy offered to rent it to us for about five weeks. And you get a better feel for things. I mean, it's when you're go into the store and doing grocery shopping, I think you get a better idea of the state and just being in a hotel room and going from campaign stop to campaign stop.
[Steve Inskeep:] Somewhere we read that your daughter Grace was a bit concerned that Santa Claus may not be able to find her in the new location.
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] That was a big, big gap of problems, Steve. We had Grace that came in to see us, her mother and father, and she said, I'm just worried that Santa Claus won't find me in Connecticut and will he know that I'm in Iowa? So I was home in Connecticut a few weeks ago. We put a little sign up in the front yard [unintelligible] and just said, dear Santa, this Christmas, we're in Iowa, signed Grace and Christina. And we put a sign up here in the front yard. In fact I'm looking at it right now out the window and the sign just says, Santa, this is where we are. We have...
[Steve Inskeep:] And we assumed Santa knows who we are. Who we...
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] Yeah, he does. He knows who's naughty and who's nice. And he knows where you are. This way the guy's busy and the girls are worried about him being busy and which house he's been
[Steve Inskeep:] Won't you rather have a sign that said Dodd for president out there perhaps?
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] We got one of those, too.
[Steve Inskeep:] Oh.
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] [Unintelligible] myself. Then some of the neighbors were very nice actually put up Dodd for president signs in their front yard as well.
[Steve Inskeep:] I should mention, I supposed, that your name has not registered very highly in national polls. Do you see Iowa as your one chance to get some attention and bring things up a little bit?
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] Sure, it's important. I remind audiences here at about eight weeks ago and no one heard the name of Mike Huckabee. But a group of Iowans, Republicans, decided they cared about him. Thought he was a good candidate despite the money that and reputation of a Mitt Romney or Giuliani or John McCain. And today, Mike Huckabee is doing very well because Iowans thought he was important. And I've said here, if Iowans give me that ticket here on the 3rd of January, I'll become a household name within 24 hours and media will pay attention. So obviously doing well here is critical.
[Steve Inskeep:] Well, Senator Christopher Dodd, thanks very much.
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] Steve, happy holidays to everybody, too. Listen, by the way, you want to hear a couple of voices. Hold on, just one second now, Steve. We've got a couple of people here who want to say something here.
[Steve Inskeep:] Yeah, sure.
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] One second here.
[Steve Inskeep:] Hi, Grace.
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] My name is Grace. Merry Christmas.
[Steve Inskeep:] Merry Christmas. How old are you?
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] Merry Christmas. There you go.
[Steve Inskeep:] Who was the second one there?
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] That was Christina.
[Steve Inskeep:] Oh, hi, Christina.
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] Say hi, hi, Steven.
[Ms. C. Dodd:] Hi.
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] Say happy holidays.
[Ms. C. Dodd:] Happy holidays.
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] Okay. [Unintelligible].
[Steve Inskeep:] Happy holidays to you all.
[Senator Christopher Dodd:] All right, to you, Steve, as well.
[Steve Inskeep:] All right. Bye-bye.

[David Greene:] Here's one idea that keeps coming up in the conflict in Syria. Create a no-fly zone or a safe zone carved out inside the country. The Obama administration has not liked this idea. It would not be an easy thing to create or to defend, especially now since the airspace is crowded with Russian warplanes. NPR's Peter Kenyon says there is another concern about a safe zone, and it comes from Syrians who are sheltering next-door in Turkey. They're wondering, what if this became a place to put refugees?
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] It's not such a far-fetched idea that Europe could try to solve its migrant crisis by helping create a safe zone to keep displaced Syrians in their own country rather than fleeing to Turkey and then Europe. The safe-zone idea keeps resurfacing along, with calls for a no-fly zone, despite resistance from the White House as pressure grows in Europe to halt the flow of people to its borders. That wasn't the original impetus for a safe zone. Turkey has long called for a humanitarian corridor, through which aid could get to those who need it most. And U.S.-backed opposition rebels would love a no-fly zone where nearby civilians wouldn't be exposed to the deadly barrel bombs of the Syrian military. But Syrian author and blogger Abu Dandachi says the idea of putting refugees in the safe zone is troubling.
[Abu Dandachi:] Now, if the safe haven will be a place where the political opposition can organize themselves, then yes, that would be useful. But if it's just a place to dump refugees in, then I absolutely am terrified of the prospect.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] July marked the 20th anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica, in which 8,000 Muslims were killed by Bosnian Serbs in a purported U.N. safe zone. Dandachi says those deaths still resonate with Syrian refugees.
[Abu Dandachi:] We already saw in Srebrenica what happened to the people who took refuge in a U.N. safe zone. I will not put my future in the hands of the U.N. or anybody who comes up with this kind of half-baked plan because we've seen the precedent before. And it has been a tragic precedent.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] As long as the Russian air campaign continues, analysts say there's not much chance of a safe zone being established for any purpose. But if the latest talks between Moscow and Washington do bring about fresh diplomatic push, migrants here in Turkey want to make sure that any talk of a safe zone is part of a Syrian political transition and not a solution to Europe's migrant crisis. Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Istanbul.

[Audie Cornish:] Germany is facing a major political crisis over immigration. It threatens to topple the government and potentially end the political career of Chancellor Angela Merkel. A regional party in her ruling coalition is demanding tighter rules for migrants entering the country, and that party vows to act unilaterally if the chancellor refuses. Merkel has two weeks to reach a deal. NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reports from Berlin that may just delay the inevitable.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] This scene three years ago of asylum-seekers thronging Munich's main train station is what the conservative Bavarian party allied with Chancellor Angela Merkel says must never be repeated. More than a million migrants crossed the Austrian border into Germany through Bavaria since 2015. Although that flow has slowed to a trickle, the migrants' impact on German society is a matter of constant debate, including by President Donald Trump, who tweeted inaccurately about it earlier today. The Bavarian party wants to tighten rules governing the entry into Germany of migrants who are first registered in another EU country and those rejected for asylum. Germany's interior minister and a senior leader of the Bavarian CSU party is Horst Seehofer.
[Horst Seehofer:] This is scandalous. [Speaking German].
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] He told reporters the situation is scandalous. Seehofer asked, what's the point of an order barring someone's entry into Germany if that person learns there are no consequences?
[Horst Seehofer:] [Speaking German].
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] The interior minister and his party, which is facing a major challenge from far-right populists in upcoming regional elections, say they will unilaterally prevent migrants from crossing Bavaria's international borders if Berlin doesn't act. A last-minute reprieve gives Merkel until July 1 to convince fellow European leaders to come up with a comprehensive policy to seal Europe's borders to unbridled migration. If she fails, the CSU vows to break its decades-old alliance with the chancellor's Christian Democrats, which would likely lead to new elections. That would benefit Germany's far right, just like the immigration issue has in at least a dozen other European countries.
[Chancellor Angela Merkel:] [Speaking German].
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] At her own news conference, Merkel said she agrees the asylum process needs to be streamlined. But she was also adamant the only way to do so was through a joint EU policy and individual deals with countries where migrants first go.
[Chancellor Angela Merkel:] [Speaking German].
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, Byline:] She said it's vital to know what will happen to any migrants barred from entering Germany so they don't end up back here. Merkel has two weeks to negotiate a new arrangement. Otherwise, many political analysts here predict either the chancellor or her interior minister will have to resign. Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Berlin.

[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Nicole Chung was born into a Korean immigrant family and then adopted by a white couple when she was an infant. Her parents always described her adoption as a kind of divine providence.
[Nicole Chung:] How it was attributed to God or to fate, you know, as if it were meant to be made it harder for me to question the mythology of our family and how it came to be because this story was all I knew. And it was so important to all of us.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] As an adult, Chung did start to ask questions. In a new memoir "All You Can Ever Know," she writes about her search for her birth family and her Korean identity. Growing up in a mostly white town in Oregon, she says her parents didn't really talk about race.
[Nicole Chung:] I think it was something that my family didn't know how to incorporate into, like, our family life, our discussions. They had really been told at the time that they adopted me by the judge who finalized the adoption and by the social worker and by the adoption attorney that my race was irrelevant. The word that the judge used was assimilate.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Treat you as one of them and not really acknowledge the fact that you were of a different race.
[Nicole Chung:] Right. I mean, I think that was sort of the prevailing thought in transracial adoption at the time. And so I think they were given this advice by people they viewed as experts. So to them, it made perfect sense to just kind of ignore it. And I think they really thought because it didn't matter to them, you know, it shouldn't matter to anybody else.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] How is that different? What are the challenges that you faced because of that? Because you couldn't share your experience of being basically bullied and, you know, having racism levied at you with your parents.
[Nicole Chung:] First of all, it wouldn't have occurred to me to say this is racism even, despite that the things that were happening were definitely racism. Like, there were slurs. And there were pulled-back eyes. And there were, like, singsong chants. And beyond that, you know, there was this additional layer of separation between my experience as a Korean-American and my parents' experience as white Americans. I really remember feeling as though I can't tell them. Like, it will hurt them. I have to protect them from this knowledge. And if I tell them, they might not understand anyway because they're white.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] So you started to think about this experience. And eventually, when you get older, you decide to go in search of your birth family as an adult.
[Nicole Chung:] That's right.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] What made you do that?
[Nicole Chung:] There were several reasons. You know, I had thought about it for many years. I think the final push really was that I was pregnant. I remember vividly sitting in the midwife's office for my first prenatal appointment. And she was asking me all of these questions. So many of them were related to family medical history. And what had my mother's pregnancy or pregnancies been like, you know? How many siblings did I have? And how did their births go? And I just remember feeling this deep sense of fear and also inadequacy, as though I don't have enough to offer this child. I can't even answer these basic medical questions. I won't have, like, not just a medical history. I won't have a history to share. And at that point, I really began to think, like, this story, this bare-bones story I'd been given it was enough for me for a while, or I told myself it was. But it didn't feel like enough for my child. And so that was really, I think, the final push that made me decide I need to at least try to find answers if I can.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] And you were surprised by who you found.
[Nicole Chung:] Yes, I was. I think I was always imagining maybe becoming close to, in some way, my birth parents, one or the other or both. What I ended up finding were sisters, in particular my only full sister, Cindy. And, you know, we've become incredibly close. And that was that relationship was not something I looked for, not something I would have expected. And her daughter is my daughter's only cousin, you know? Getting to see them, the next generation, grow up together and seeing them grow old enough to ask questions about our family and how it came to be and how we came to get back together it's just been really, really special.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] This book is really honest and very unflinching about your upbringing. How did your parents respond to reading it, to sort of, all of a sudden, being able to see all the things that you went through?
[Nicole Chung:] I was anxious at first sharing the story with them. I knew I very much wanted to write it. And I knew I wanted them to see it. And my father actually passed away. My adoptive father passed away in the middle of reading it in January of this year.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] I'm sorry.
[Nicole Chung:] Thank you. But by the time he passed, he had read most of the parts that he was in. And he loved it. He really appreciated that one of his goofy jokes stayed in.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] [Laughter].
[Nicole Chung:] So people used to ask us all the time, like, where did they get you? meaning me. And my father would say, oh, if you put a Pole and a Hungarian together, you get a Korean. Like, where do you think they came from? It's a terrible joke. It was his way of kind of saying, maybe you shouldn't be asking us this question.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Right.
[Nicole Chung:] One thing that my they both said to me was that, this isn't the book we would have written about our family or about your adoption, but that's OK. We know it's your story. It's your perspective. And I think they're proud.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] In the book, you have this scene where you are asked by a couple about what you think of having been adopted, which is a pretty heavy question to ask anybody. And you write at the time that you weren't honest with them about your experience. What would you say now?
[Nicole Chung:] You know, I think, in a way, I was honest to a point, but I wasn't willing to kind of scrape deeper. I remember sitting there thinking, gosh, should I tell them about, like, the bullying? Should I tell them about all these questions that I had and all the times I wondered about my birth family and wondered why they'd given me up? It seemed like a lot to lay on them. But the main thing was that I had not put down this burden that I still felt sometimes still feel, to be honest of trying to meet people's expectations as an adoptee because I do love my family. And I do want us, in some sense, to be seen as just like any other family. And I want people to think that I to look at me and see, like, a happy, grateful, well-adjusted person, you know? It was very difficult sometimes still is difficult for me to go beyond that and to sort of complicate that narrative. But I do think that there are a lot of important questions that people who want to adopt transracially could be asking themselves. Many are. Are you going into this realistically? And have you really looked at your family, your schools, your neighborhoods, your religious organizations? If there were a child of color coming into your environment, what would they find? Would they find mostly white people, or would they be able to find people who shared their background and people they could connect with? You know, I think if you're adopting across racial lines, you know, that is the beginning point.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Nicole Chung. Her memoir is "All You Can Ever Know." Thank you very much.
[Nicole Chung:] Thank you so much, Lulu.

[Melissa Block:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
[Michele Norris:] And I'm Michele Norris. The world-famous Mayo Clinic is involved in a bitter battle with, of all things, a railroad. A small, South Dakota railroad wants to increase traffic on tracks that go past the clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The clinic says that could put patients' lives at risk. As NPR's Peter Overby reports, part of the fight is taking place in Washington, D.C., where some powerful players are involved.
[Peter Overby Reporting:] The Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern coal trains go through Rochester at only 10 or 15 miles an hour, like this one the other night. 65 cars crossing Broadway, just a couple of blocks from the Mayo Clinic's sprawling campus. Kevin Schieffer is president of the railroad. His plan is to make it America's first new major railroad in more than a century, to do it by extending the line west and hauling coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming.
[Mr. Kevin Schieffer:] This isn't about one community, it's about the entire country, and it's about a very significant and compelling national need.
[Overby:] The need for more energy. DM&E wants to run mile-long coal trains at 50 miles an hour through downtown Rochester. But the railroad has had safety problems. Right now it's one of just three lines getting special scrutiny from the Federal Railroad Administration. That's made anxieties spike at the Mayo Clinic, which treats some 1.5 million patients per year. The railroad and the hospital have been fighting for eight years now. They're fighting in Washington because the railroad needs federal approval and money to expand into coal country. Schieffer wants to borrow $2.5 billion from the government as seed money. The Mayo Clinic recently held a Washington press conference. Speakers described a threat. A train derails in Rochester, carrying the fertilizer ingredient anhydrous ammonia. A tank car ruptures. The poisonous cloud would spread so quickly the clinic wouldn't be able to evacuate its 2,000 beds. Dr. Glenn Forbes, the CEO at Mayo-Rochester.
[Dr. Glenn Forbes:] I return home tonight, where I am facing thousands of our nurses, aides, workers, anesthetists, physicians, members of the community, who are asking and waiting to hear are their lives and their patients' being placed in danger?
[Overby:] The answer to that is no, according to the Federal Surface Transportation Board. It approved the railroad's expansion plan, and it was upheld in the first round of a court battle. But that raises the question -what about private financing? Frank Wilner is a transportation economist.
[Mr. Frank Wilner:] There's no reason why private investors shouldn't be lined up to lend the DM&E the money it needs, but it's obvious that the private sector is not willing to do so.
[Overby:] Schieffer, the head of the railroad, blames Mayo and other objectors.
[Mr. Kevin Schieffer:] The name of the game in any project of consequence is delay, delay, delay.
[Overby:] So Schieffer, a former Republican Senate staffer, looked to Capitol Hill. He hired a Congressman turned lobbyist, South Dakota Republican John Thune. Schieffer paid Thune $60,000 in 2003. In 2004, when Thune was lobbying and running for Senate, Schieffer paid him $160,000. Thune won the election, and less than a year later, Senator Thune did what lobbyist Thune had been pushing for. As the Senate was assembling a 1,300-page transportation bill, Thune added a provision that boosted funding for federal railroad loans ten-fold. He also changed loan standards in ways that worked to DM&E's advantage. Thune, interviewed just off the Senate floor, says he's been promoting railroads since he was the state railroad director, 15 years ago.
[Senator John Thune:] I don't view it as being anything out of the ordinary, and the fact that I did some work while I was out of government in support of the DM&E railroad and its expansion, I think, is just part of an ongoing effort.
[Overby:] Schieffer says the government wants to see a business plan just as private investors would.
[Mr. Kevin Schieffer:] This isn't the field of dreams. It isn't a build it and we hope they will come.
[Overby:] And he sees an irony in Mayo's ferocious opposition.
[Mr. Kevin Schieffer:] The single biggest user of coal today that we deliver is the Mayo Clinic. They have absolutely no problem with that going through 50 other cities to get there.
[Overby:] Just as Schieffer got help from Senator Thune, Mayo has its own political connections. One of its trustees is former Democratic leader Tom Daschle, the man Thune unseated in 2004, still influential in Washington. Former South Dakota Governor and Congressman Bill Janklow is a Mayo consultant. The Federal Railroad Administration may act on the loan by year's end. But with their lobbyists and lawyers ready, neither side is likely to call that the end of the line. Peter Overby, NPR News, Washington.

[Robert Siegel:] Today the U.S. Supreme Court refused to step in and stop gay marriages from taking place in Alabama. That sends the strongest signal to date that the justices are on the verge of legalizing gay marriage nationwide. And in Alabama, some gay marriages went forward despite a dramatic show of defiance by the state's chief justice. Joining us is NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg. Hi, Nina.
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] Hi.
[Robert Siegel:] Let's deal first with what the Supreme Court did and then move on to the ground game, as it were, in Alabama.
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] OK. To regroup for a moment, Robert, in January, federal judge Callie Granade, a George W. Bush appointee to the federal bench, struck down Alabama's ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional. She ordered probate judges in Alabama to begin issuing marriage licenses, but stayed her order until today to allow the same time for an appeal. Alabama first went to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals based in Atlanta, and when it failed there, it went to the Supreme Court asking that it put a hold on gay marriages in the state until the justices resolve the underlying gay marriage issue in a set of cases later this term. Today, though, the Supreme Court refused to step in and stop same-sex marriages from taking place in Alabama.
[Robert Siegel:] And you figure that sends a message here.
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] Not only me the Court's action today came over the objections of justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. And they said that the refusal to intervene now would be seen as a signal of how the court ultimately intends to decide the gay marriage issue later this term.
[Robert Siegel:] Now, why? Why would that be?
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] Because, as the two conservative dissenters pointed out, it's fairly common for the Supreme Court to put lower court decisions on hold to preserve the status quo at the request of a state. In fact, the court did that a year ago when lower federal courts began to decide gay marriage cases, first in Utah and then in Virginia. But in October, the justices left all the existing gay marriage decisions in place, releasing the holds and letting same-sex marriages proceed. And the rationale since offered by several justices was that there was no disagreement among the lower courts of appeal and thus no conflict for the Supreme Court to resolve. In November, though, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ban on gay marriage in several Midwestern and border states, so there was a conflict among the lower courts a conflict that the Supreme Court has now agreed to resolve later this term. And therefore, it really wasn't crazy for Alabama to expect that the court might or would grant its request to put marriages on hold pending a Supreme Court decision. Therefore, to circle back to where we started, Robert, it's also not crazy to infer that the decision to let gay marriages proceed in Alabama is a pretty strong indicator of where the court is headed.
[Robert Siegel:] All right. Well, now let's move on to what's actually happening in Alabama and this extraordinary confrontation led by the state's chief justice, Justice Roy Moore. What happened exactly?
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] Well, last night, Chief Justice Moore, knowing that the U.S. Supreme Court was about the rule on the state request for a hold on gay marriages, issued his own decree ordering state probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Chief Justice Moore is no neophyte to the modern post-Civil War battle to preserve states' rights, even in the face of federal court orders to the contrary. In 2003 he was unseated as chief justice by a state judicial panel after he defied a federal court order to remove a refrigerator-sized 10 Commandments monument that Moore himself had ordered installed in the rotunda of the Alabama judicial building to, quote, "acknowledge the sovereignty of God." In 2013 he rose again to be elected chief justice and now is leading a dramatic act of defiance that's likely to resonate in many parts of conservative Alabama. At the same time though, many in the state don't want to return to a time when the state was an outlier at odds with the Supreme Court as it was in 1963 when Governor George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door seeking to prevent the desegregation of the University of Alabama.
[Robert Siegel:] And we have more from Alabama elsewhere in today's program. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg, thank you.
[Nina Totenberg, Byline:] Thank you, Robert.

[Kelly Mcevers:] Last week, Baltimore Orioles outfielder Adam Jones said he was the target of racial slurs during a game at Fenway Park in Boston. A day later at Fenway, there was another fan using another racial insult this time directed at a Kenyan woman who sang the national anthem. NPR's Tom Goldman reports that people are wondering if these incidents are isolated or part of a growing problem.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] While the furor around Adam Jones has receded, the discussion hasn't even 3,000 miles west of Fenway Park. On an otherwise carefree afternoon, baseball fans at Angel Stadium of Anaheim stopped to talk about hate speech. None of those we polled this past weekend said they'd ever witnessed it at a ballgame, but all of them said they wouldn't stay quiet if they did. Amanda Israel is a first-year dental student at USC.
[Amanda Israel:] I would honestly I wouldn't even go to the usher. I would go straight to the person. I mean, yeah, some people may be afraid to kind of approach it, but I think if you approach it yourself, you'll know that it will get taken care of, whereas somebody might just brush it off because they don't want to engage in conflict.
[Harry Edwards:] I think it's a positive thing for us to be talking about it.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] That's longtime sociologist and civil rights activist Dr. Harry Edwards. He says a national conversation about hate speech at the ballpark is especially positive because historically, black athletes dealt with racist taunts by themselves, athletes from Jack Johnson to Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali to Shaquille O'Neal and so many others who weren't famous. But Dr. Edwards says with Fenway Park, we need to know what it is we're talking about, an isolated incident or...
[Harry Edwards:] Are we talking about these individuals as simply the latest manifestation of the much wider problem in American society?
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] Perhaps. Dr. Richard Lapchick directs the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida. He tracks racist incidents in sports. In 2016, he says there were 31 nationwide, mostly affecting pro athletes.
[Richard Lapchick:] It was triple the year before.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] That jump from 11 to 31 came at a time when there was a reported 20 percent increase in hate crimes nationwide. But few, if any, of those crimes had the counterpoint seen last week at Fenway Park when fans showed their support for Adam Jones. Again, here's Dr. Harry Edwards.
[Harry Edwards:] You can go from a racist incident that goes viral one day and the very next day have a standing ovation for that same athlete by 35,000 people. That carries a message with it.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] Dr. Edwards says over the last 50 years, he's witnessed the power of sports as a lever for social change. It's a stretch to expect baseball to provide a roadmap for dealing with this country's intractable issue of race relations. Still, MLB wants to send a message within its world. For at least the last decade, all 30 teams have been required to give fans the opportunity to report hate speech by alerting an usher or by sending a text to club officials. Late last week, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said MLB is surveying each team's policies, what they do to handle Adam Jones-like incidents.
[Rob Manfred:] As a prelude to giving consideration to some more industry-wide guidelines in this area.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] At a minimum, baseball hopes to deliver what fans want from a day at the park a day away from the world outside. Tom Goldman, NPR News.

[Unidentified Man:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] Tear gas didn't stop these key protestors, who stayed on this key thoroughfare in central Tunis after most people fled. They shouted and handed out leaflets printed with the names of regime members who are now in the new government.
[Najeed:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] Many more Tunisians, however, feel it's too risky to give the ruling party another chance. Like Mahtou Mosen, a physics teacher and counselor.
[Mahtou Mosen:] We want the coalition that's in place fully, the will of the people, democracy, freedom and the basic need of the population: food, water, clean air, jobs and overall, national dignity. We are not banana's republic.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] University lecturer Fahti Halel says he and others here worry corruption, in particular, is likely to be covered up.
[Fahti Halel:] They are asking for a radical change that gets away from the past, because corruption is deeply entrenched, you know, in all the apparatus of the state.
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] Lawyer Mohammed Abbou, a dissident who spent two-and-a-half years in jail under the former regime, represents a Tunisian businessman who says he was forced to pay $150,000 to one of the former first lady's brothers in 2008.
[Mohammed Abbou:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] Abbou says the businessman was told he needed to pay the bribe in order to spring his Hong Kong shipment from Tunisian Customs. His client filed a complaint, but instead, the police arrested him outside his lawyer's office. The case has gone nowhere, Abbou adds.
[Mohammed Abbou:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] He fears that isn't likely to change, given who the new government has been assigning to tackle corruption. Abbou says a prosecutor who blocked cases against the ruling family during the regime has now been assigned as a watchdog. That prosecutor has been asked by the new government to investigate the ousted president's head of security. He expressed similar doubts about a commission announced this week by the prime minister to investigate corruption.
[Mohammed Abbou:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson:] Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Tunis.
[Renee Montagne:] And just this morning, Switzerland announced it is freezing former President Ben Ali's assets to help in any corruption case that may be brought against him.

[David Greene:] All this week, we are looking at the challenges facing the United States in the New Year. And no challenge seems more central than the relationship with Turkey. It's a NATO ally crucial in the fight against ISIS, but as 2016 draws to a close, Turkey might be moving away from the West and towards a closer relationship with Russia. And let's talk about this with NPR's Peter Kenyon in Istanbul. Peter, good morning.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] Hi, David.
[David Greene:] I guess we have to start with what really was the defining event in this relationship, which was the political coup in Turkey. It failed, but I gather the impact is still being felt there.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] Yeah, very much so. This uprising was a huge shock. It left 270 people dead, reminded Turks of the coups that happened in the last century. And the government responded very strongly. They've been imposing a state of emergency. They're conducting a massive roundup soldiers, police, government workers critics say virtually anyone who disagrees with them. And we've already had the first coup-related trials this week police officers in that one. There's another one coming up with writers and journalists in the dock. This coup may have been aimed at toppling President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but its failure has left him stronger than ever with really no visible opposition.
[David Greene:] And since then, I mean, this is a country that has seen a string of explosions and attacks. Is there reason to think that that's just going to keep going on?
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] Yes, many here do see it that way more of the same in terms of the threat of terror attacks. As Islamic State forces are losing ground in Iraq and Syria, some argue one consequence will be more ISIS fighters leaving. And they'll probably leave via Turkey, raising the prospect of more attacks here. And you have to remember Turkey's own conflict is still ongoing. That's with militants from the Kurdish minority no sign of resolution there. And that's the other major source of attacks here.
[David Greene:] And, Peter, this was a country that really had become a tourist destination. I mean, the tourism economy was doing well. The economy in general was was not doing all that badly, but is that all changing now? Is that all at risk?
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] It seems to be at risk. The forecasts range from uncertain to downright gloomy. The government continues to push ahead with its program of mega projects. We've got a third bridge over the Bosphorus. There's a new tunnel for cars running underneath it, new airport in the works. But tourism, as you mentioned, is way down because of the security concerns. Other sectors are hurting as well. And this is important to President Erdogan because his political success has largely been over the economic growth he's presided over when Europe was stagnant.
[David Greene:] So, Peter, all of that is the backdrop. I mean, we had the coup that Turkey pointed to a cleric in the United States in terms of blame. We have more terrorist attacks. Now, we have a new administration coming in in the United States. What does all this mean for Turkey, the United States? And as we mentioned, Turkey seems to be warming with Russia a little bit.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] They certainly have been, and that's likely to continue. And the impact of a Donald Trump administration on that remains to be seen. I mean, America relies on Turkey in the fight against ISIS, especially for this air base, Incirlik, down in southeast Turkey. But there are some very difficult differences between Ankara and Washington, especially in this fight against ISIS. President Erdogan, in fact, just accused Washington of backing terrorists, including ISIS. The State Department says that's ludicrous. And meanwhile, some allies of President-elect Trump have been questioning whether Turkey even belongs in NATO. Now, so far, the line from Washington and Ankara has been this relationship's too important to ruin it over some policy differences. Whether the Trump administration agrees with that is what remains to be seen 'cause Turkey continues to reassess its ties with both Eastern and Western powers.
[David Greene:] OK, talking about the U.S.-Turkey relationship in 2017 with NPR's Peter Kenyon in Istanbul. Peter, thanks.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] Thanks, David.

[Farai Chideya:] From NPR News, this is NEWS & NOTES. I'm Farai Chideya. During the Clinton administration, Congress passed and the president signed off on welfare reform. There was plenty of fanfare. And since the law changed in 1996, the number of families receiving cash benefits has dropped by at least 60 percent. Millions have moved from welfare to work, according to an analysis by the Associated Press. Now fans of welfare reform say this is absolute proof that the change worked. But critics say not so fast. A lot less people are getting cash benefits, but a lot more have signed up for other programs, including Medicaid, food stamps and disability benefits. In fact, the Census Bureau reports about 44 million people relied on federal anti-poverty programs in 2003. That's five million more than a decade ago and the largest the U.S. welfare state has ever grown. So has welfare reform really worked? Two leading experts weigh in. We've got Vivyan Adair, a former welfare recipient. She's now an associate professor of Women Studies at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. She's also author of the book "From Good Ma to Welfare Queen," a genealogy of the poor women in American literature. She joins us by phone. And also on the line is Robert Rector, senior research fellow of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation. Robert played a major role in crafting the Federal Welfare Reform legislation passed in '96. He's also author of the book, "America's Failed $5.4 Trillion War on Poverty." So good to have you both on the program.
[Professor Vivyan Adair:] Thank you.
[Farai Chideya:] So Vivyan, let me start with you. As we mentioned, the AP analysis suggests that in spite of the fact that welfare per se has plummeted, entitlement, enrollment in other programs has really grown. Does that surprise you?
[Professor Vivyan Adair:] No, it really doesn't surprise me at all. It seems clear that although a large number of welfare recipients were ushered in to work, which may have had some advantages to them, clearly they're working at low wages and are still dependent upon social services in order to survive and care for their families. And this is a problem that I think we need to address and recognize in order to really move people into stability, and the security, and the self-sufficiency that welfare reform was intended to complete.
[Farai Chideya:] So we've seen a number of Americans living in poverty or lacking health insurance increase over the last 10 years. Now is it fair to say that the law plays a significant role in this growth?
[Professor Vivyan Adair:] I think it does. I think that the fact that welfare reform law doesn't allow for the possibility, for example, of low-income workers earning educational degrees or recipients of trainings with which that they might be able to have better jobs and more secure income. I think that part of the law has increased the need for women on our welfare particularly to depend upon these services.
[Mr. Robert Rector:] I think that it's not accurate. In fact, over the last 10 years we've seen a dramatic decline in child poverty and in single-mother poverty, which were the only two groups affected by the reform. For a quarter century prior to welfare reform in 1996, for example, the black child poverty rate was frozen in the low 40 percentiles. As welfare reform kicks in, we have an unprecedented decline, rapid decline in black-child poverty, and in the poverty of single mothers and their children down dropping to around 30 percent the lowest point ever in the U.S. history. It was a dramatic success. The problem with welfare reform is that the federal government runs over 70 means tested aid programs. Those are aid programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care to poor people. Only one small program was partially reformed. None of the other programs such as food stamps or public housing or Medicaid were actually touched. And therefore, those programs have continued to grow. And as the number of people on cash welfare what used to be called aid to families with dependent children shrink, the capacity of welfare reform to have any effect on behavior has diminished. But the reform was extremely successful in moving single mothers off of prolonged welfare dependence and into the labor market. And what we need to do is not to go back and say what we want to do is send all single mothers to college. We did that for 25 years; it didn't work. What we want to do is take the core ideas of the reform, which are moving people to work. And even more importantly, trying to reduce out-of-wedlock child bearing, and apply those to the other programs that are completely unreformed.
[Farai Chideya:] But when you talk about this, Robert, you talk about changing behavior. It sounds to me that's one of the keystones of how you see this. And if in fact you're talking about changing behavior and people have shifted their need for cash onto other programs, has the behavioral change really affected government?
[Mr. Robert Rector:] Yes. Well, it didn't save that much money, but it wasn't really intended primarily to save money. It was intended to shift behavior to say, let's rather than have a system where we have one-way handouts and we give out cash, let's have a system where we demand something back from the recipient in exchange for the aid that's given, and that's going to be good for the recipient. And it will also sort of slow the growth of spending. Again, the problem was that even in the program that was reformed, half of the caseload was always exempt from federal work requirements. And the other programs were completely unaffected. We did see, however, unprecedented surges in the employment of single mothers during the first five years of the reform before it got weakened. And we also saw a plateauing in the number of births that occurred outside of marriage, which is the principal cause of child poverty. Those things seemed to be going back in a negative direction now, which means that we really need to renew our efforts, and the efforts really do have to be focused on behavioral change. For the first 30 years of the war on poverty we essentially said, let's give people cash, let's give them food, let's give them housing. Let's not expect any positive behaviors in exchange. That was a failure and we certainly don't want to go back to that.
[Farai Chideya:] All right, Robert, I want to come back to that point in a second. But, Vivyan, you actually were a welfare recipient. Now you are a founder and director of the Access Project; it's a pilot program that assists parents in getting college degrees. When you hear the talk about behavior and that the goal of welfare was not to try to send women to college, it's now the goal of welfare reformists to really get people onto the payrolls, how do you react to that personally?
[Professor Vivyan Adair:] Oh, I want to first of all point out that I don't think I have not and I don't think anyone has ever suggest that that all poor mothers should be encouraged or supported in their efforts to go to school. But I do maintain that to prohibit those poor single parents who are willing and able to work part-time care for their families and college degrees, to prohibit them from doing so is shortsighted [unintelligible] but most importantly ineffectual public policy. As a former welfare recipient who escaped childhood poverty and adult welfare as often adult welfare recipient and I did so through of a pathway of higher education but more importantly as a researcher and educator of other welfare recipients, I can tell you that this is a pathway that leads for specific populations to true self-efficiency. I was raised by a poor, divorced single mother who worked her entire life. But she simply couldn't provide for us with a minimum wage salary. And like most all of our students, she certainly couldn't afford the training or education or childcare support to secure employment with which she could have provided us with a stable home, health insurance, adequate food or even emotional security. So our students in the Access Project and we've had over 100 of them, this is a demonstration project they work, they go to school, they care for their families, and they earn degrees. We've had this for over six years, and our first year's cohort, a third of them are now enrolled in graduate schools. We have one in medical school, three in law school, and several in other graduate programs. But the other two thirds are all working full-time. None of them, not one of them is receiving any kind of social service support.
[Farai Chideya:] Well, let me go back to Robert with this. Now Robert, you just mentioned at the end of your last set of comments that the social indicators that you looked at are rising again. We have been in a Republican administration for nearly two terms and only recently have the Democrats come into control in Congress. To what do you attribute the change in behavior?
[Mr. Robert Rector:] Well, I think in part you have to understand that welfare reform essentially ended in 2001. And we went five years without a federal welfare reform law that needed to be reauthorized. And unfortunately, Democrats in Congress would not reauthorize it, in particular did not want the federal work requirements. It's also not true to say that the federal welfare law prohibits states from providing college education to welfare mothers. It only affects half of the caseload in one small program. States are free to send, you know, up to half of their [unintelligible] caseload into college. Most don't choose to do that because it's very expensive and it's not particularly effective. It's also somewhat unfair: Considering that about 70 percent of Americans don't have a college degree, to ask them to pay taxes to support a never-married mother and her family for years while she goes through college has some equity concerns. It's also not particularly effective. Education is very good if you do it before you start a family. Trying to do it as a catch-up after you've had a couple of children out of wedlock is not very effective. So there really are three strategies, but we have to employ them all. And those are try to get, try to finish your education before you have a family. You're going to need to work. Everybody has to contribute. And also again, the underlying issue here, the big enchilada, is the 38 percent of all children are born out of wedlock...
[Farai Chideya:] Well, Robert, I'm going to have to give Vivyan her last minute. We're almost out of time. What would you pair with Robert's saying? What would be the key things to you to move people off of welfare?
[Professor Vivyan Adair:] I feel strongly I disagree with Mr. Rector. I feel strongly that allowing those welfare recipients, former welfare recipients who are willing and able to work, to go to school, to care for their families and to lift themselves out of poverty on a permanent and fulfilling basis is important for our culture. I think we have statistics show that this can be done. I think it's interesting that he continually harp on this question of whether or not we should support and reward women who have children out of wedlock. That is really not the issue here. And I think that to not do so, pay short shrift to the potential of a population that is being judged as unworthy and incapable but in fact is not.
[Farai Chideya:] All right, we're going to have to leave it right there. Vivyan and Robert, thank you so much.
[Professor Vivyan Adair:] Thank you.
[Mr. Robert Rector:] Thank you.
[Farai Chideya:] Vivyan Adair is associate professor of women studies at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. And Robert Rector is senior research fellow of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation. He also helped craft the '96 welfare reform law. And just ahead, the top man at the NAACP resigns after clashes with board members, and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton take their campaign battle to Selma, Alabama.

[Scott Simon:] We've heard a lot about the dramatic changes in Saudi Arabia women driving, permission to play music in public, socializing with the opposite sex. Now we're going to hear what Saudis think about them. NPR's Jackie Northam was there and reports that Saudis view the sudden change with excitement but also, for some, confusion and nervousness.
[Unidentified Person #1:] [Speaking Arabic].
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] It's a packed house here at a comedy club in Jeddah, a port city in western Saudi Arabia. On the tiny stage, a young comic laments how he has no baby pictures of himself.
[Unidentified Person #1:] [Speaking Arabic].
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] He talks about how his parents ripped up the family photos in the early 1980s. That's when ultraconservative religious authorities in Saudi Arabia deemed photographs were haram forbidden supposedly by God.
[Unidentified Person #1:] [Speaking Arabic].
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] The punchline now is not only are photos suddenly not forbidden, all the people who banned them or tore up the pictures are now happily posing for selfies. But he wants to know what happened to all his baby pictures. The comic's routine is a dig at the Saudi government and religious establishment reversing decades of social restrictions. Much of what was supposed to be forbidden cinema, music, theater, women driving, even the mixing of men and women in this comedy club is now suddenly acceptable. In fact, it's being encouraged by the Saudi government. The founder of the comedy club, Yasr Bakr, says the changes are long overdue.
[Yasr Bakr:] I think that this is what to do after 40 years of being asleep honestly in Saudi Arabia. Honestly, this is what they need to do. Some of it is dramatic. Some of it is extremely fast. But it is the way to do it.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] The social liberalizations are being driven from the top by Saudi Arabia's 32-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. And they're popular with many young people we met, such as this young girl we ran into at a cafe in Riyadh. She asked us not to use her name.
[Unidentified Person #2:] I'm really happy that it happened now that I'm young and, like, I can, like, live all these changes. The cinema I'm really excited about it. Like, that's the most thing I'm excited about because I love movies so much.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] Still, many people we spoke to are nervous about Saudi Arabia's social changes. It's too much too fast. Just look at what happened during our two-week reporting trip earlier this month. Saudi Arabia announced it would start issuing tourist visas for the first time. It held its first ever fashion week and opened the first cinema in 35 years. For many Saudis, their whole way of life, their whole belief system, is being upended.
[Unidentified Person #3:] It's nothing short of shocking to me. I'm not sure if one can have a culture shock within their own country. But that's what I'm experiencing right now.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] This 26-year-old Saudi man comes from a large and conservative family, so conservative he's asked his name not be used so as not to anger his family for talking to the foreign press. He looks at his own family members and worries they'll be alienated and left behind because they're not fully on board with all the changes.
[Unidentified Person #3:] So on a personal level, when I see them just shrinking and excising themselves from the public sphere, that's upsetting that they believe that the future doesn't include them, you know? Saudi Arabia should be big enough for all people.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] Princess Reema bint Bandar heads up the Saudi sports authority, which is allowing more women to take part in athletics. She's making the rounds to promote the changes but acknowledges the government and the religious establishment need to do a better job explaining them.
[Reema Bint Bandar:] When you live in a community where overnight what was a no is a yes, it's very hard to rationalize if there's no why. Why was it a no? Why is it a yes? And I know when I was raising my kids, they'd asked me why. And I'd be like, because I said so. That's not an answer that most people can accept anymore.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] Some worry that there is no room for dissent. The government has cracked down on opposition figures, including clerics and members of the independent press. While there's some rumblings of discontent in the big cities, it's more obvious in the kingdom's smaller towns, like the one we went to called Huraymila, an hour's drive south of Riyadh. Here, it's so conservative you still can't even buy cigarettes. And, of course, music in public was banned as it was around the country. Rules like this were supposed to be based on guidance from God. And Saudis are now asking, who can decide that suddenly changed? So it's no surprise when the government tried to stage a concert here a few months ago, the town boycotted it. Nasser al-Nasser is a retired health care worker in Huraymila.
[Nasser Al-nasser:] [Through interpreter] There's no doubt that in small provinces accepting such changes is hard. It should be gradual, step by step. And it should be what the people want. There could be festivals and activities every now and then. And God willing, people will eventually accept it.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] We spoke with a member of the religious police. But we are not using his name so he could speak freely. He points out that Saudi Arabia is still an Islamic country and any social changes need to be in line with Islamic teachings.
[Unidentified Person #4:] [Through Interpreter] If the changes violate our religious edicts and beliefs, then we will reject it as a Saudi society.
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] He says if the government tries to organize another concert, the religious police in Huraymila could consider it a violation and petition those in charge. But he and his colleagues have lost some of their power recently.
[Unidentified Person #4:] [Speaking Arabic].
[Jackie Northam, Byline:] He says the government took away the power to arrest from the religious police. Now they can only advise and guide. Jackie Northam, NPR News, Huraymila, Saudi Arabia.

[Scott Simon:] Pakistan's part of that highway passes the ancient city of Lahore and it continues westward toward the tribal zones where, of course, Pakistan fights a war against the Taliban. It also passes near Islamabad, and Islamabad is where we found Steve Inskeep. Steve, thanks for finding the time for us.
[Steve Inskeep:] Oh, glad to do it, Scott, any Saturday morning.
[Scott Simon:] What are you trying to learn as you travel?
[Steve Inskeep:] We're talking with young people, Scott. And we're trying to get a little more deeply into what is happening, particularly in Pakistan, on this side of the border. This is a country that we think about for its conflict between Islam and secularists, or the war on terror any of the phrases that we use. But when you start talking with young people and asking about their future, their dreams, you see people with a far more complicated struggle. This is in some ways a very dysfunctional country with a lot of economic and social problems, as well as political and religious ones.
[Scott Simon:] Yeah. And help us understand some of the divisions in society that might be difficult to understand from a distance.
[Steve Inskeep:] Well, let me give you one sense of this. I went to a university called LUMS, the Lahore University of Management Sciences, where I was talking to elite students who are about as well-educated as almost anybody in the world. I've also been in a tiny village where there were women who had grown to adulthood and had never learned to read. There are huge divisions in terms of class, in terms of economics. This is a country that is very much in transition, and you see that when you talk with young people, as we've been doing along the Grand Trunk Road.
[Scott Simon:] Steve, thanks so much.
[Steve Inskeep:] Glad to do it, Scott.
[Scott Simon:] NPR's Steve Inskeep continues his reporting next week along the Grand Trunk Road. You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.

[Madeleine Brand:] From NPR West, this is DAY TO DAY. I'm Madeleine Brand. Coming up, we'll talk about the president's comments today on where the buck stops on Hurricane Katrina. But first on Capitol Hill today, President Bush's nominee for chief justice of the United States faces more questioning from the Senate Judiciary Committee. Here with more on the second day of hearings for Judge John Roberts is NPR's Ari Shapiro. ARI SHAPIRO reporting Almost as soon as questioning began, John Roberts drew a line on which questions he would not answer.
[Judge John Roberts:] I do feel compelled to point out that I should not, based on the precedent of prior nominees, agree or disagree with particular decisions.
[Shapiro:] The decision in question was Roe vs. Wade, which granted women the right to an abortion. Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter, the pro-choice chairman of the Judiciary Committee, spent nearly his entire half-hour questioning Roberts about abortion rights. And though Roberts would not commit to upholding or overturning Roe, the nominee did say he thinks a precedent has been established.
[Judge John Roberts:] I do think that it is a jolt to the legal system when you overrule a precedent. A precedent plays an important role in promoting stability and evenhandedness. It is not enough-and the court has emphasized this on several occasions-it is not enough that you may think the prior decision was wrongly decided. That really doesn't answer the question; it just poses the question.
[Shapiro:] Specter also asked Roberts about a memo he wrote in the 1980s that referred to the so-called `right to privacy.'
[Senator Arlen Specter:] Do you believe today that the right to privacy does exist in the Constitution?
[Judge John Roberts:] Senator, I do. The right to privacy is protected under the Constitution in various ways.
[Shapiro:] Roberts said his memo was an attempt to convey his clients' opinion, not his own. His clients' views came up again when Specter asked Roberts about work he did on Romer vs. Evans, a landmark gay rights case. Roberts provided free legal assistance to the gay plaintiffs in the case at his law firm's request. Roberts said he'd often been asked to help with cases and never refused.
[Judge John Roberts:] It was my view that lawyers don't stand in the shoes of their clients and that good lawyers can give advice and argue any side of a case.
[Shapiro:] The ranking Democrat on the committee, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, focused his questions on the separation of powers. Leahy quoted memos that Roberts wrote in the "80s as a White House lawyer. Those memos said the president had broad authority despite the wishes of Congress in a particular case concerning veterans" benefits. The senator wanted to know whether a Chief Justice Roberts would keep presidential power in check. Roberts again replied that when he wrote that memo, he was serving a client.
[Judge John Roberts:] I believe very strongly in the separation of powers. That was a very important principle that the framers set forth that is very protective of our individual liberty.
[Shapiro:] Leahy also wanted to know Roberts' opinion on a now-disavowed Justice Department memo that said the president could legally circumvent international treaties outlawing torture.
[Senator Patrick Leahy:] Do you believe that the president has a commander in chief override to authorize or excuse the use of torture in interrogation of enemy prisoners even though there may be domestic and international laws prohibiting this specific practice?
[Judge John Roberts:] Senator, I believe that no one is above the law under our system and that includes the president. The president is fully bound by the law, the Constitution and statutes.
[Shapiro:] As the day progresses, each of the 18 Judiciary Committee members will question the nominee for half an hour. If everything goes according to schedule, the hearing will end on Thursday. Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Washington.

[Ari Shapiro:] Throughout the show, we're remembering some of the people who died in this weekend's two mass shootings.
[Audie Cornish:] Beatrice Warren Curtis was killed early Sunday morning in Dayton, Ohio. Several longtime friends told The Washington Post that she was one of the most generous people they knew.
[Ari Shapiro:] She wasn't married and didn't have children. Friends say she often helped out families in need by buying school supplies or Christmas gifts for the kids.
[Audie Cornish:] Childhood friend Ricky Brown said, quote, "she would do anything for anybody without thought or hesitation."
[Ari Shapiro:] Warren Curtis was 36 years old. She was one of nine people who died in Dayton, Ohio, yesterday.

[Robert Siegel:] In Syria today, another deadly confrontation between protestors and security forces. After Friday prayers, Syrians rushed into the streets calling for the ousting of their president. In the city of Hama, more than 50,000 Syrians marched, that's according to human right activists who say that snipers and security police were waiting for the demonstrators. The activists say at least 27 were killed in Hama, but information from Syria is difficult to confirm. The international media are barred from the country. And today, the government shut down Internet service. NPR's Deborah Amos is monitoring events from neighboring Turkey and she joins us now. And, Deborah, is this an escalation of the protest movement in Syria?
[Deborah Amos:] Well, it was the largest protest so far in the city of Hama, and that's according to Syrians who could get calls through today. Protest organizers dedicated the day to the more than 30 children who've been killed, and that number has been confirmed by the U.N.'s Agency for Children, including a boy who was reportedly tortured to death and returned to his parents for burial a last week. So, many of the protesters were out because they wanted to dedicate the day to the memory of the children. But the large turnout in Hama is significant for another reason. So far, the protests there have been small because of a historical memory. Back in 1982, when Syria was on the brink of a civil war the government then was challenged by the Muslim Brotherhood there was a crack down there and that resulted in tens of thousands of deaths. Much of Hama was leveled, so the city has become a symbol of state violence in the Arab world. Now, this new generation of protesters, they are challenging the government again in Hama. Another reason for the large turnout today, for the first time since the protest began, opponents of the Syrian government, mostly exiled dissidents, met in Turkey. And they called for the ousting of the president and pledged to help coordinate the uprising.
[Robert Siegel:] Now, I wonder how that meeting in Turkey plays in Syria, since the Syrian government has been claiming all along that this protest movement is coordinated and controlled by outsiders. And here there actually was a meeting of Syrians outside.
[Deborah Amos:] Yes, these were mostly exiles. This is the older generation of dissidents. Now, on the day before the meeting, a young activist who planned these street demonstrations, they signaled their support for this gathering because they agreed that it's time to put a public face on the opposition. This has been a leaderless revolution. A few of them did make it to Turkey. They smuggled themselves across the border. They were the stars of that gathering and they made it clear that they are in charge. What they were doing is offering a plan for a transition after Bashar al-Assad. But they are a long way from toppling this regime. Now, what the dissidents want is for the international communities to step up the pressure, as the inside organizers continue every Friday to get people to go out on the streets.
[Robert Siegel:] One more question about the Syrian opposition meeting in Turkey. The Turkish government has been very close to the Assad regime. There's a lot of trade between the two countries. There's open borders between the two countries. Was hosting this meeting a sign that perhaps Turkey is taking a different view of Syria?
[Deborah Amos:] That was how the regime in Damascus saw it. But the official Turkish position is we are a democratic country and we welcome all groups. But it was a subtle signal and you can see that Turkish rhetoric is shifting ever so slightly. Turkey, since the beginning of this uprising, has been urging Bashar al-Assad to reform. Yesterday, the Turkish foreign minister said Turkey is one of the countries most likely to be affected; it's not possible to stay detached. And he said sometimes friends tell friends bitter truths. And the Turkish message is: you must reform before it's too late.
[Robert Siegel:] NPR's Deborah Amos on the Turkish border with Syria. Deb, take care and thanks.
[Deborah Amos:] Thank you.

[Arun Rath:] Thanks for joining us on NPR's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED coming to you from NPR West. I'm Arun Rath. And we're going to cover a lot of territory this hour taking you from the Port of Los Angeles to the edge of interstellar space. And if you love blues, rock or pretty much any American music, you've got to hear our exploration of the blues man Lead Belly. He was a twice-convicted murderer who became a star, and the full Lead Belly story is even more interesting. We start off today with some twists and turns in the ongoing debate over immigration. The White House announced yesterday that the Department of Justice will seek an emergency stay of a court ruling that blocked the president's executive action on immigration. That ruling came from a federal judge in Texas. For now, it leaves millions of people who are here illegally in a legal limbo, and along with their advocates, they're trying to figure out their next moves. NPR's Richard Gonzales reports.
[Richard Gonzales, Byline:] Juan Ramos came to the United States in 2008 when he was 15 years old to reunite with his family and get away from menacing gangs in his native El Salvador. Sitting in a Starbucks in Charlotte, he says good grades earned him admission to five colleges, but he couldn't afford any of them.
[Juan Ramos:] Since in here in North Carolina, I didn't really have the opportunity to go back to school because we don't have in-state tuition for undocumented students.
[Richard Gonzales, Byline:] Still, his ambition, says Ramos, is to become an architect and build his parents a home. But that dream took another hit this week in the Texas ruling by U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen. He ruled that the Obama administration can't offer immigrants like Ramos temporary protection from deportation and a work permit.
[Juan Ramos:] When I found out about the ruling, I think I was a little bit frustrated just because of the fact that I have been in this movement for about four years now.
[Richard Gonzales, Byline:] Ramos is active with United We Dream, a national group of young immigrants brought here as children.
[Juan Ramos:] But at the same time, there was this, like, empowerment as well, that, like, wanting to keep going just because that I know it's not just about myself, but it's also, like, about 5 million undocumented people who will benefit from this.
[Richard Gonzales, Byline:] No one knows how the legal battle over the president's executive action will play out. Immigrant advocates around the country worry that the delay might demobilize their campaign for deportation protection. So they're redoubling their effort to get the word out that the Texas ruling is only a temporary setback. For example, in Oakland, Calif., yesterday about 40 people representing a wide range of legal service groups, labor and nonprofits met to discuss the impact of the Texas ruling.
[Christopher Martinez:] One of the things that we want to talk about when we break up into our groups is defending the program.
[Richard Gonzales, Byline:] Christopher Martinez is legal services director for Catholic Charities of the East Bay. He says it's critical to keep encouraging people to collect their documents and prepare for the day when they can apply for protection.
[Christopher Martinez:] I think it's really important that we continue planning because the community needs to know that we're on their side. Otherwise, if we stop, then the community is going to stop caring about this.
[Richard Gonzales, Byline:] The group's discussion ranges from leafleting at laundromats to posting notices at libraries and schools. In one small group, advocates share stories about what they're hearing on the ground among immigrants. Patricia Flores is a community organizer with the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy.
[Patricia Flores:] One of the people said he was, like, I know that this is just temporary. I know Obama is going to see us through. So I think that they're all really confident, and they have a lot more faith in the you know, in Obama than they did before. You know, they want to keep on fighting for it.
[Richard Gonzales, Byline:] Yet for now, the fight over Mr. Obama's executive action on immigration is primarily in the courts where the president's opponents welcome an indefinite delay. Richard Gonzales, NPR News, San Francisco.

[Scott Simon:] There was a beheading in Liverpool, England, last weekend. Vandals lopped off Ringo Starr's head from a life-sized Beatles topiary at the South Parkway Train Station. The Liverpool Daily Post says that the leafy noggins of the topiary, John, Paul and George, escaped unscathed. An Italian sculptor created the topiary tribute just a few weeks ago to celebrate Liverpool's status as a 2008 European capital of culture. Authorities are now examining surveillance tape to try to identify the cutting culprit. Ringo Starr irritated some residents of his old hometown when, after opening the European Capital of Culture events, he said he missed nothing about Liverpool. I'm surprised that Ringo's little leafy legs were left standing.
[Mr. Ringo Starr:] [Singing] We would be warm below the storm in our little hideaway beneath the waves...

[Scott Simon:] There have been many milestones along the road that Europe is on right now, searching for unity and a relief to its debt crisis. Today, we look at one milestone that's especially important to the 150 million people of France and Germany. To do that we're going to step back in time with NPR's Philip Reeves.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] It's 1962. President John F. Kennedy's about to face a perilous standoff with Moscow over Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. Americans are mourning the death of Marilyn Monroe. The first Wal-Mart has just opened. History's also being made in Europe. The president of France, General Charles de Gaulle, is touring Germany. Only 22 years have elapsed since Hitler invaded and occupied France. De Gaulle's on a mission of reconciliation. He receives a very warm welcome.
[President Charles De Gaulle:] [German spoken]
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] Long live Bonn. Long live Germany. Long live the Franco-German friendship, de Gaulle tells a crowd in Bonn the capital of what was then West Germany. De Gaulle's come here to turn a new page after two world wars. He took part in both. In the first, he was wounded and captured by the Germans. In the second, de Gaulle was the firebrand leader of the French resistance. His personal involvement in these terrible conflicts makes this visit to Germany in 1962 all the more poignant. It's clear Europe's two mighty neighbors, Germany and France, are entering a new era of peaceful cooperation. A few days after that speech that you've just heard, de Gaulle went to Ludwigsburg. That's a small city in southwest Germany. Again, he makes a speech again in German. I congratulate you for being young, the 71-year old general tells a crowd in the courtyard of a baroque palace. I congratulate you also for being young Germans. Yet, de Gaulle does not pull any punches.
[Philip Collins:] The thing that de Gaulle does really well in this speech is that he does not shy away from the conflict.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] British speechwriter Philip Collins.
[Philip Collins:] He goes on in the speech to say you are a great people to the Germans, which has also made some great mistakes in the course of its history. A poor speaker, a less courageous speaker, always shies away from the conflict, which is the point of the speech. De Gaulle doesn't. He takes it on full frontally, and that makes it a speech with a real argument, a real moment, from a real distinguished person. And those are the three components of a great speech.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] That speech got a rapturous reception in Germany. It became a milestone in the history of Franco-German relations. Today, France's President Francois Hollande meets his German counterpart, Chancellor Angela Merkel, in the same baroque palace. It's part of a series of celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of the de Gaulle visit. These modern-day leaders will recall Europe's past at a time when the future remains uncertain. Fifty years on, the nations of Europe still haven't figured out the exact terms on which they'll work together as a political and fiscal entity. Vexed issues, like ceding sovereignty in the name of unity, remain completely unsettled. Their 17-nation single currency zone is in big trouble. Germany and France are the most important players in the collective search for a solution, yet they don't always see eye to eye. Until now, Merkel's advocated austerity as the best medicine for nations in trouble. When Hollande took office in May, he was seen as a critic of that approach, preferring a greater emphasis on growth. Since then, they both seem to have softened their positions. There've also been several important new developments...
[Unidentified Man:] [German spoken]
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] ...including that verdict by Germany's constitutional court clearing the path for a new five hundred billion euro European rescue fund. Yet it's taking a painfully long time for Europe to end this crisis and finally to decide what the European Union will ultimately become. Hans Martens, chief executive of the European Policy Center, says Europe always takes time to sort out its big issues. He says Germany and France do eventually step up to the plate.
[Hans Martens:] They know their responsibility and I think they more or less live up to it but not without battles, of course, because that is the political game. But they always come together and find a solution in the end.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] De Gaulle would be pleased. Philip Reeves, NPR News, Berlin.

[Robert Siegel:] A new type of volunteer opportunity has taken off in New York City. Hundreds of people are going with immigrants to court appearances and appointments with immigration officials. With President Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration, the volunteers want to show solidarity. WNYC's Beth Fertig brings us this story.
[Marissa Lohse:] Perfect. OK, tell me your name.
[Jean Hale:] Jean.
[Beth Fertig, Byline:] On a recent weekday morning, Marissa Lohse is gathering her troops in a coffeeshop in lower Manhattan.
[Marissa Lohse:] Perfect, perfect. That would be great.
[Beth Fertig, Byline:] Lohse is with the New Sanctuary Coalition. It's a network of congregations and individuals who accompany immigrants facing deportation to the Federal Building, which is just down the street. Jean Hale is a first-time volunteer. She doesn't know what to expect.
[Jean Hale:] I think it may be just emotional support and perhaps a big hug.
[Beth Fertig, Byline:] Hale says she's horrified by the Trump administration's aggressive enforcement of immigration laws. She's 73, a retired English as a Second Language teacher. The volunteer program took off in 2010 during a previous crackdown under former President Obama. But Lohse herself an immigrant from Argentina says it's now bigger than ever. Several hundred volunteers came forward after Trump took office. A lot are retirees like her. They call the immigrants, friends.
[Marissa Lohse:] Before, I was just going by myself with a friend. Now it's just, thank God we have so many volunteers. So I do it, and I cry when I think about it.
[Beth Fertig, Byline:] There's a lot on the line. These volunteers are joining people at immigration court hearings to determine whether they can stay in the country. Others are bringing them to check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Many undocumented immigrants were allowed to stay as long as they regularly met with ICE. These check-ins used to be routine. Now, some immigrants are detained without any warning. Lohse has seen that firsthand.
[Marissa Lohse:] I've been one time when I was with a wife of a guy. Then, the ICE agent came out with a pair of glasses and a wallet. Your husband wants you to have this. They didn't give a chance for her to say goodbye.
[Beth Fertig, Byline:] This type of volunteering is not easy. It's emotional, and the issues are thorny. At a training session, volunteers are told all immigrants deserve support, even those who have committed crimes. That gave one man pause.
[Ed Stubin:] I can accept that the criminal justice system isn't always right, but I'm troubled having to go with some people that I don't think should be on this earth, much less in this country.
[Beth Fertig, Byline:] That's Ed Stubin, a business owner who says his father was an immigrant. He decides he will volunteer, however, when a coordinator assures him that immigrants who commit serious crimes are usually held in detention. On the day of the coffeehouse meeting, about 40 volunteers are joining eight immigrants. One of those immigrants is Inez, a young mother seeking asylum who doesn't want us using her full name. She's got her 3-year-old son with her, and she's grateful to have six of the volunteers going with her to immigration court.
[Inez:] [Foreign language spoken].
[Beth Fertig, Byline:] The group includes Jean Hale, the retired teacher and first-time volunteer. They spent four hours in the waiting room outside court. Mostly, they played with Inez's toddler. Finally, Inez had her hearing. The judge gave her three more months to find a lawyer. Afterward, outside the federal building, Hale said some undocumented immigrants deserve to stay.
[Jean Hale:] I would like to see our laws changed so that people could remain who have come to our country.
[Beth Fertig, Byline:] Hale also said she'll continue to volunteer. For NPR News, I'm Beth Fertig in New York.

[Mary Louise Kelly:] To Israel next where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long been a political powerhouse. He has helped move Israel to the right. He has touted his close relations with President Trump. As NPR's Daniel Estrin reports from Tel Aviv, people in Netanyahu's own party are now asking whether his political career is nearing an end.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] The night Netanyahu won reelection in April, his supporters cheered, he's a magician. But his magic ran out last month. One of his right-wing rivals refused to join his coalition, and he was left short of a parliamentary majority. Instead of conceding defeat, Netanyahu opted for new elections in September, which leaves supporters feeling apprehensive.
[Amir Weitmann:] Yeah, people are not happy. I'm not happy. Nobody's happy.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Amir Weitmann is with a group of activists at Netanyahu's Likud Party headquarters. He says the same thing could happen again Netanyahu winning but failing to form a government. In that case, I asked him, would the party want to replace Netanyahu.
[Amir Weitmann:] If it happens again, maybe we will have no choice. But at this stage, nobody is seriously thinking about replacing Netanyahu.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Party members are not calling to replace Netanyahu for now because he's expected to win elections. They stood behind Bibi Netanyahu for years. But for the first time, they're beginning to question if he's becoming a liability. Kobi Matza is a party official.
[Kobi Matza:] Hearing that they put out posts in Facebook, for example, in the media that they're not happy with what Bibi is doing.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Israel's attorney general says he's preparing corruption charges against the prime minister. Some of Netanyahu's allies are upset with how he's responded. Netanyahu has lashed out at the justice system and sought immunity from prosecution. Matza says today some party activists want to talk about the day after Bibi Netanyahu.
[Kobi Matza:] Bibi, he's a he's fantastic. He's a great leader. He's not going to be forever. If it's going to be after this term or the next term, Benjamin Netanyahu he's going to retire. He's going to lose, or maybe he's going to retire from his own will. You need to start building the next leadership.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Netanyahu's former chief of staff Aviv Bushinsky says he's in contact with top Likud politicians and that privately they want to see Netanyahu go in part because they want his job after a decade. If Netanyahu faces serious charges, it could prompt these politicians to come out in the open and break ranks with Netanyahu.
[Aviv Bushinsky:] I think that the benchmark will be whether they're going to charge himindict him for bribery. If it would be bribery, then it's the end of the story for Netanyahu. This will be the chance for the people in his party to say, OK, enough is enough.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] Outside Likud Party headquarters, I meet Mendi Safadi, a low-ranking politician in the party, and I ask him about Netanyahu's corruption case. Do you think the majority of the Likud would want to see him move aside if there is an indictment?
[Mendi Safadi:] Yeah. If we go to this option, I think the majority of the Likud would. They want to find other leader.
[Daniel Estrin, Byline:] A possible indictment could come by the end of the year. Netanyahu vows to prove his innocence in court and remain in office. His main selling point is his close relations with President Trump. At Netanyahu's urging, Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and endorsed Israel's claim to Jerusalem as its capital. Netanyahu promises to continue to, quote, "bring many accomplishments." The question, though, is how long Netanyahu's party will stay by his side. Daniel Estrin, NPR News, Tel Aviv.

[Ari Shapiro:] The White House's guests for tonight's State of the Union were chosen to inspire people and to underline parts of the president's agenda. There's a police officer who adopted a baby from a couple addicted to opioids, a blind double-amputee who reenlisted in the Marines after he was injured in Iraq and Ohio business owners who are expanding their manufacturing company. This tradition started with President Reagan. And to tell us more about the origins of the practice, Gerhard Peters of the American Presidency Project joins us now. Hi.
[Gerhard Peters:] Hi. How are you?
[Ari Shapiro:] I'm fine. I understand there's actually a term for these guests. What is it?
[Gerhard Peters:] Yes, indeed. They're called Skutniks, named after Lenny Skutnik. He was a federal government employee heading to work. And Air Florida had a plane that crashed into a bridge over the Potomac River. The river was icy, and he saved one person.
[Ari Shapiro:] And this was in 1982, right?
[Gerhard Peters:] Back in 1982, just a couple weeks before the State of the Union.
[Ari Shapiro:] Let's listen to a clip of President Reagan's State of the Union address.
[Ronald Reagan:] Lenny Skutnik, who, when he saw a woman lose her grip on the helicopter line, dived into the water and dragged her to safety.
[Ari Shapiro:] What was the reaction at the time? I mean, this must've been really dramatic.
[Gerhard Peters:] Oh, absolutely. And you know, we have to remember Ronald Reagan was an actor of course and...
[Ari Shapiro:] Right man of Hollywood.
[Gerhard Peters:] ...A man of Hollywood and understood, you know, how to use props, we'll call it, and, you know, how to personify things. And the practice has caught on. In almost every State of the Union address ever since, presidents have invited people into the gallery and acknowledged them.
[Ari Shapiro:] Are there any that stand out in your mind from the years past?
[Gerhard Peters:] I think Rosa Parks acknowledged by President Clinton.
[Bill Clinton:] In a very real sense, this journey began 43 years ago when a woman named Rosa Parks sat down on a bus in Alabama and wouldn't get up. She's sitting down with the first lady tonight, and she may get up or not as she chooses.
[Gerhard Peters:] Remember back in 1990, it was George Herbert Walker Bush who actually acknowledged the man who would defeat him.
[Ari Shapiro:] Wait; why was Bill Clinton the guest of George H.W. Bush?
[Gerhard Peters:] [Laughter] Well, Bill Clinton was 1 of 4 governors two Republicans and two Democrats who were there and acknowledged by the president because of their role with the administration in setting new education goals.
[George H W Bush:] And if I might, I'd like to say I'm very pleased that Governor Gardner and Governor Clinton, Governor Branstad, Governor Campbell, all of whom were very key in these discussions, these deliberations, are with us here tonight.
[Ari Shapiro:] I wonder if George H.W. Bush later wished he hadn't invited them.
[Gerhard Peters:] Perhaps.
[Ari Shapiro:] You perhaps jokingly referred to these people earlier as props. Are they just kind of tools for political theater?
[Gerhard Peters:] Well, I don't mean it to sound cynical when I say that, but they are people brought in by the president to help personify heroism but oftentimes also to help with the president in setting his agenda. It could be in the middle of the health care debate on the Affordable Care Act or when the president was encouraging Congress to raise the minimum wage or whatnot. And you know, to bring someone in or to invite someone in and, you know, discuss about how a minimum wage increase would affect their lives, for example, is a way to try to push the agenda forward and try to change public opinion in the country to put pressure on Congress.
[Ari Shapiro:] Gerhard Peters is co-director of the American Presidency Project at the University of California. Thanks so much for joining us.
[Gerhard Peters:] You're welcome. Thank you.

[Renee Montagne:] Thailand has just held a general election, an election its prime minister had called in hopes of ending street demonstrations calling for his ouster. Results are not yet in, but it's already clear that Prime Minister Thaksin Shinwatra won easily. No surprise, since the three main opposition parties boycotted the election. Joining me now from Bangkok is NPR Southeast Asia correspondent, Michael Sullivan. Hello. MICHAEL SULLIVAN reporting Hello, Renee. What is at stake there in Thailand, of course, but also maybe generally?
[Sullivan:] Well, what's at stake is whether or not Prime Minister Thaksin actually stays in office. And I don't think that yesterday's vote is going to satisfy the opposition. And, in fact, even though it's clear that his party won, it's not at all clear that the win was big enough, and I'll tell you why. Even though the opposition decided to boycott, Prime Minister Thaksin promised to step down voluntarily if his party received less than 50 percent of the vote. The opposition then urged voters who went to the polls to tick the abstention box on their ballots, basically, none of the above, in an attempt to deny Thaksin the mandate he was looking for. It's now clear, Renee, that the number of abstentions was much higher than Thaksin and his party predicted, especially in the capital of Bangkok. He's still expected to reach the 50 percent goal for himself. He did extremely well in rural Thailand, where he is very popular. But I think he and his party are clearly rattled by the number of no-votes.
[Renee Montagne:] Explain this story to us, though, for those who might not have been following it. Remind us why and how the prime minister came to call the election when he was just last year reelected with an overwhelming mandate?
[Sullivan:] Well, the opposition in some civil society groups have been very unhappy with him for a while-for years, in fact, claiming that he tramples civil liberties, and he puts his family and his friends interests ahead of the country's, and that he's used his overwhelming majority in parliament to weaken Thailand's democratic institutions. But the straw that broke the camel's back was the sale of the family telecommunications firm two months ago for just under $2 billion. The Thaksin family paid no taxes on that sale, and Thaksin insists it was completely legitimate. But the opposition protests started soon after, and they gained steam over the course of the past several weeks, and they haven't stopped.
[Renee Montagne:] So what's next?
[Sullivan:] Impossible to predict. I mean, it's clear that the election did nothing to resolve the political deadlock here. And, in fact, it may have only muddied the waters even more, because it's not clear that Thaksin's party won enough seats in some of the uncontested areas to be able to claim victory. They have to get at least 20 percent of the vote in each constituency to be declared the winner. And in some opposition strongholds, that may not have happened. There may have been too many no-votes. So it's pretty clear the new government cannot be formed until all of those seats are filled. That means new elections in those seats, and this could drag on for a while. And, in the mean time, the opposition, People's Alliance for Democracy, is now planning to go back on the streets, and has scheduled two major rallies for later this week to demand that Thaksin step down.
[Renee Montagne:] Is it possible that the prime minister may yet step down even after this election?
[Sullivan:] A few weeks ago, I would have said no. Now, I'm not so sure, simply because this political impasse shows no sign of ending, and at some point it's going to start affecting the markets and investors, and maybe tourists are going to start to think twice about coming here. And there are some signs that Thaksin himself maybe starting to recognize this, hence, from some in his Party that now with the election out of the way, he might step aside for the good of the country and let someone else from his party lead. Whether this will be enough from the opposition, or whether they would simply see this person as Thaksin's puppet isn't clear, but we're not there yet.
[Renee Montagne:] Thank you very much.
[Sullivan:] You're welcome, Renee.
[Renee Montagne:] NPR's Michael Sullivan, speaking from Bangkok.

[Rachel Martin:] If you want to fly in or out of Delaware, good luck, unless you have your own plane or the cash to charter one.
[Robert Siegel:] Delaware's is now the only state in the country that does not have access to commercial flights.
[Rachel Martin:] That means Delawareans have to make the schlep to Philly or Baltimore if they want to fly.
[Scott Goss:] To Philadelphia can take about 45 minutes to an hour. To Baltimore, it can be an hour to an hour and a half.
[Robert Siegel:] Scott Goss, a reporter for The News Journal of Wilmington says Frontier Airlines quietly withdrew from Newcastle Airport last week. It had been the only airline offering service in the state.
[Rachel Martin:] Frontier isn't the first to depart Delaware. Since the 1960s, United, Delta and U,S. Airways are about the companies that have come and gone.
[Robert Siegel:] The problem is Delaware's proximity to those other cities. Scott Goss says Frontier began canceling flights last October. That's when it started adding flights out of Philadelphia International Airport.
[Scott Goss:] Those connecting flights it's able to get there may be more profitable for the company, but it wasn't that the service wasn't used or wasn't popular here in Delaware.
[Robert Siegel:] In fact, Goss says, people were using the airport. Flights were more than 80 percent full.
[Rachel Martin:] But there's no regulation that says Frontier or any airline has to commit to an airport.
[Scott Goss:] Airlines are not required to sign any type of contract promising to provide service for any length of time. They can come and go as they please.
[Rachel Martin:] So this is what Delawareans get turbulence.

[Jacki Lyden:] It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Jacki Lyden. Coming up, a novel of village life amid the daily violence of war-torn Chechnya. But first, President Obama sets a new course in the war on terror.
[President Barack Obama:] Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end.
[Jacki Lyden:] James Fallows of The Atlantic joins us, as he does most Saturdays. Hi there, Jim.
[James Fallows:] Hello, Jacki.
[Jacki Lyden:] So the president's speech on Thursday very interesting suggests that we end the concept of what used to be known, Jim, as the GWOT, the global war on terror. But what does this mean, if anything?
[James Fallows:] I think it means something quite important. Indeed, I would argue this is the most important foreign policy speech Barack Obama has made as president. And it doesn't mean of course, declaring an end to the war on terror doesn't mean there will be no more attacks on American people and American soil. We saw the counterpart of that in Britain in this horrific assault this past week. It doesn't mean there will not continue to be anti-terrorist and terrorism activities around the world. But I think what it does mean is an end to the open-ended boundless state of permanent emergency, which justified activities around the world and at home, which in the long run, as the president argued, are at odds with the nature of American liberty and democracy.
[Jacki Lyden:] Hmm. So you've been anticipating a speech like this, wow, for quite some time. About seven years ago, you wrote that it's time to end this. And you said that standing war can be justified for several reasons, but none of them makes sense in America's efforts to defend itself against a terrorist attack. Why is that?
[James Fallows:] There was a very apropos quote that from James Madison that the president used in the speech this week saying that in the long run, perpetual war is at odds with the continuation of liberty. Didn't use exact those words, but that was the argument. And through the ups and downs of its history, the United States has obviously faced terrible challenges before, whether the Civil War when Abraham Lincoln suspended certain constitutional liberties or World War II when Franklin Roosevelt did the same thing. But those were all finite activities and not the idea of a state where you could never have any conclusive victory. And therefore, none of the emergency measures could never be ratcheted back as well. I think there had been a fear that because no president, as this one pointed out, could ever guarantee perfect safety against terrorist attacks, just as he cannot guarantee an end to murder or drug crimes or whatever else. He was afraid to declare that it was time to go back to a more normal existence. So I do admire the fact that this president was willing to take the risks and say it's time to restore the constitutional balance of our civic life.
[Jacki Lyden:] So in taking America off this perpetual war footing, it sounds like President Obama's now calling for a different kind of defense. And I would think that that would have consequences perhaps in [unintelligible] foreign aid, different kinds of diplomacy, a more calculated response to terrorism. But in this political climate, how realistic is that?
[James Fallows:] I think that probably, the practical implications of what the president is saying are probably going to be not that surprising or different. As he pointed out, there are going to be some drone strikes that go on, even though he's going to try to regularize the process. And Guantanamo, he's going to try to close down, although that'll be difficult. Still, I think the fact that we're calling it something different is a step that is worth noting.
[Jacki Lyden:] Let's talk about Guantanamo, Jim. The president said we can't compromise our basic values and then in particular talked about the continuing detention of prisoners at Gitmo. Are we going to be able to undo that?
[James Fallows:] That we certainly, we can't undo the effect that Guantanamo's had on America's standing in the world over the past decade-plus. And anybody who has spent much time outside the United States, you just it's impossible to overestimate how often this comes up in people's conversations about the United States now. But I think the two things that are possible are, first, to find ways for the president to try again to bring these prisoners back into the normal justice system, both civil and military, that has proven itself robust in trying people and keeping them in jail. And also, one particular part of the Guantanamo situation now is a suspension on repatriating people to Yemen in particular, which the president has suspended because of conditions there. I think he is now under pressure to get those people moved back again.
[Jacki Lyden:] Hmm. James Fallows is national correspondent with The Atlantic. You can read his blog and catch his recent profile of California Governor Jerry Brown at theatlantic.com. Jim, as ever, thank you very much.
[James Fallows:] Thank you, Jacki.

[Renee Montagne:] There are signs in Hollywood that an end to the writers strike is at hand. The two sides are talking and the Writers Guild is holding meetings this weekend to update members on contract negotiations. NPR's Kim Masters joins us now. She reports on the business of Hollywood. Good morning, Kim.
[Kim Masters:] Good morning, Renee.
[Renee Montagne:] What do we know about a potential deal to end this strike, which is now in its fourth month?
[Kim Masters:] Yes, it has been a really bitter and divisive situation and I think hurt feelings will linger after the strike is resolved. But as you know, last month the Directors Guild made a deal and that has provided a sort of a template. The writers have gone in and attempted to sweeten that deal and they are approaching a resolution.
[Renee Montagne:] But nobody's talking. None of those involved are talking to the media.
[Kim Masters:] Right, there's a news blackout, and the key sticking point in this negotiation has been how the writers are going to be compensated when their work is streamed over the Internet. And there have been conflicting reports about what the proposal is that will break that logjam, but what's going to happen on Saturday is that the leadership of the Guild will present this deal to the members, hoping for resounding applause. There may be some members who feel that it's not good enough, but the hope is, I think, that they will be able to get the blessing. A lot of writers are really keen to get back to work.
[Renee Montagne:] So if it works, details about the agreement would come out later. But if the strike is resolved, how quickly can scripted television shows get back on the air?
[Kim Masters:] Well, it could be, they could start working on them as soon as next week and that would make it about four to six weeks for sitcoms and a little bit longer for scripted dramas. But certainly, you know, there's eagerness to get those television shows back on the air and salvage some of the current season.
[Renee Montagne:] What about the movies? The impact of the strike hasn't been as great on features, but it's also, for those of us out here it's kind of hard to tell.
[Kim Masters:] Yeah, it is a funny thing with movies. I mean, there have been some major movies that have been held up because the script wasn't quite ready, including the sequel or prequel to "The Da Vinci Code." But concern is, is that we're not sure what's going to happen with the actors because the Screen Actors Guild has made it clear that they are going to demand a pretty enriched deal, and so the question is, you have to get your movie into production in time in case the actors walk out. And that can happen in June, so people are thinking if they don't start their movies about by March, they won't get finished in case there is an actors strike.
[Renee Montagne:] And then to the question of the hour for a lot of TV viewers out there, are the Oscars going to go on?
[Kim Masters:] Yes, I have been predicting for some time that the Oscars will go on. It's been my belief that the studios have played this exactly the way they wanted to. They've had a strike. They've been able to drop contracts with a lot of people they wanted to get rid of, and now, you know what, it's time to go back to work. And the Oscars, I believe, will go on.
[Renee Montagne:] NPR's Kim Masters, thanks very much.
[Kim Masters:] Thank you.

[Steve Inskeep:] And I'm Steve Inskeep in Caracas, Venezuela. This country is about to hold a presidential election. Voters are replacing the late Hugo Chavez, who shouldered this oil-rich republic onto the world stage. He often denounced the United States as an oppressive empire even as he sold Americans oil and imported gasoline from U.S. refineries. The election of his successor this weekend gives us a chance to listen to a changing Latin America. Follow the sound of air horns vuvuzelas and you encounter thousands of people walking a major Caracas street. Some people stop in front of ear-splitting loudspeakers and dance. Hugo Chavez, a brilliant political performer, brought out huge crowds like this during 14 years in power. This substantial crowd is flowing toward a rally for the opposition presidential candidate, Henrique Capriles. Why are you supporting Capriles?
[Yamir Martinez:] [Spanish spoken]
[Steve Inskeep:] Yamir Martinez says: I want a better future for my children. Chavez promoted his brand of socialism. He nationalized whole industries and drew money from the state oil company to help the poor. But now that his rule has ended, inflation is soaring, and people report shortages of basic goods, including food. That's why Martinez hopes to defeat Chavez's chosen successor on Sunday. The opposition contender, Capriles, is a popular state governor who says he's more pragmatic and would support fewer leftist causes around the world. What can he do to change the country?
[Yamir Martinez:] [Spanish spoken]
[Steve Inskeep:] She says he can bring a different Venezuela, with less hatred. We'll hear more about this socially and economically divided country in the coming days on MORNING EDITION, though just now it's getting hard to hear anything.
[Yamir Martinez:] [Spanish spoken]
[Steve Inskeep:] The noise becomes impossible as the crowd flows through a concrete tunnel which acts like a giant amplifier. The crowd emerges in front of a stage, filling block after block between high-rise buildings. They climb up onto the concrete floors of an unfinished building, and strain to hear the opposition candidate tell them they have the power to defeat the powerful. Yet banners on the light poles show the broad smiling face of their former president, one of the most famous men in Latin America, who beat them in election after election and could do it one more time from the grave. In this crowd we met with NPR's Juan Forero, who covered the late Hugo Chavez for years.
[Juan Forero, Byline:] As we've seen in the elections one after the other, the opposition has been able to grow, but still, in the last presidential election in October, Enrique Capriles lost against Hugo Chavez by almost 11 points, so the big question is: How many will they be able to bring out now? And, of course, Hugo Chavez died just a month ago, so the government has the sympathy vote here, so it's going to be very, very difficult for the opposition.
[Steve Inskeep:] This crowd this opposition crowd doesn't look noticeably upper class, but it certainly doesn't look poor, these people.
[Juan Forero, Byline:] Well, these people really are a mix. I think you are going to find a lot of poor people here, honestly I do, and I think you're going to find a lot of people who are working class. I was covering this many years ago, and a decade ago you would see huge crowds come out here for the opposition, but they were most definitely whiter, you know, people who clearly had more money, people who clearly were more middle class even upper middle class. I think you still see those people here, but look at the people we are seeing here, a lot of brown faces, a lot of people who are working class.
[Steve Inskeep:] You just referred to people being whiter if they were upper class, brown faces if they're lower class. That suggests a racial divide in Venezuela and across Latin America.
[Juan Forero, Byline:] I think it's very Latin American. I think you are going to see in many of these countries, whether it's Colombia, Brazil, or Mexico, certainly. Venezuela has had a lot of presidents and you look at them, most of them are of European descent.
[Steve Inskeep:] Chavez was different browner and talked about it. His most vital support came from the neighborhoods that stretch up the mountainsides around Caracas neighborhoods we can see from this center city in the valley; they're the kind of improvised settlements filled with poor people which are common all across Latin America. We knew we'd lose Juan in this crowd, so we agreed to meet later, in one of the most important mountainside neighborhoods of all. OK. So after a trip across town and uphill, we've arrived in this barrio, this poor neighborhood, on the hills overlooking Venezuela's presidential palace. It was a center of support for Hugo Chavez, and it's the neighborhood where he is now entombed, just beyond an eternal flame that I can see at the end of this street here. The neighborhood is called 23rd January. People in this area are known to be politically active and quite often armed. There's a shrine to Hugo Chavez on the street near here. He's pictured on the wall with Jesus wearing a crown of thorns. And inside that shrine, people light prayer candles. This week, a woman who tends the shrine scraped off the melted down wax.
[Eva Garcia:] [Spanish spoken]
[Steve Inskeep:] Eva Garcia is a local government worker and also a volunteer of a local Chavez collective a colectivo partly a political group and partly a militia. She doesn't call Chavez a leader but a saint. Near the shrine we met up again with NPR's Juan Forero and looked across the neighborhood.
[Juan Forero, Byline:] Some of these big blocks were built decades ago.
[Steve Inskeep:] Oh, we're looking over here. This almost looks like Soviet-style public housing.
[Juan Forero, Byline:] Exactly. Right below the mountain, this is looking north in the direction of the United States, actually. But then up here on this hill you can see all these buildings, these houses that, the people who live in them, they built over the years.
[Steve Inskeep:] OK. So this is an area that supported President Hugo Chavez hugely that is now presumed to support Nicolas Maduro, his chosen replacement as president of Venezuela. Why would people continue supporting this party, this administration, given some of the problems that have come up in this country: mass inflation, mass economic trouble?
[Juan Forero, Byline:] Well, the first thing that comes to mind is Chavez told them support Nicolas Maduro. He said that December 8. That was his last speech. Everybody here remembers that. And then the other thing is that over the years there was an interest in this area by the government. So there are different kinds of programs cultural programs, sports programs for kids. You can see that there have been some improvements. It's still a very difficult neighborhood. Violence is just horrific here the high homicide rate and so forth. But people here also had this almost mystical connection with Chavez.
[Steve Inskeep:] NPR's Juan Forero. I'll let you get back to your reporting. Thanks very much.
[Juan Forero, Byline:] Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
[Steve Inskeep:] We have much more on this revealing election which comes this weekend. Tomorrow morning we'll take a walk up the hillside deeper into this neighborhood where the polarizing figure of Hugo Chavez was loved.

[Audie Cornish:] President Trump declared over the weekend that the U.S. is pulling out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Arms Control Treaty. Now, President Ronald Reagan signed this treaty with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the White House 31 years ago.
[Ronald Reagan:] For the first time in history, the language of arms control was replaced by arms reduction in this case, the complete elimination of an entire class of U.S. and Soviet nuclear missiles.
[Audie Cornish:] Here with me now to discuss why this treaty is no longer acceptable to another Republican president is NPR national security correspondent David Welna. Welcome to the studio.
[David Welna, Byline:] Hi, Audie.
[Audie Cornish:] OK, so the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Arms Control Treaty or we can call the INF what does this treaty actually do?
[David Welna, Byline:] Well, you know, this was signed in the 1980s when the U.S. and the Soviet Union had nuclear-tipped missiles deployed along the periphery of Eastern Europe. And they could reach their targets in only eight minutes, which left almost no time for any response. It was a very dangerous situation which neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union wanted to continue. And so the treaty required the destruction of all these intermediate-range, land-based nuclear missiles once and for all, and it really was the beginning of the end of the Cold War.
[Audie Cornish:] Now President Trump says Russia has not been in compliance with the treaty. Do we know if this is true?
[David Welna, Byline:] Well, you know, U.S. officials beginning with President Obama four years ago have been saying that Russia has been cheating on this treaty, that Russia has been deploying some land-based, intermediate-range cruise missiles that could strike targets in Eastern Europe in violation of the treaty. But Obama did not want to kill this arms control treaty, figuring that it still provided a means for talking with the Russians at least.
[Audie Cornish:] Of course Ronald Reagan, a Republican hero right? to the party what is the difference in philosophy here, why we're seeing this president, President Trump, determined to pull out of the treaty?
[David Welna, Byline:] Well, you know, Trump does not like international agreements. He's already pulled out of the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal. I think this really shows that the Russia hawks in the administration are getting their way. And it's not the State Department that's doing this even though that's traditionally where such policies are carried out. This bears the hallmarks of national security adviser John Bolton. He's never liked arms control deals. He wrote in 2011 that the U.S. should leave the treaty. And Bolton is in Moscow today and tomorrow delivering that message.
[Audie Cornish:] What's been the response from the Russian government?
[David Welna, Byline:] Not great. Russia's deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, was quoted yesterday by the Russian news agency TASS as calling this move blackmail by the U.S. He also called it a very dangerous step.
[Audie Cornish:] Is there any chance that Russia can gain something from the U.S. bowing out?
[David Welna, Byline:] There is. It would allow them to more freely deploy weapons that they've apparently already developed while the U.S. only last year began doing research and development for intermediate-range weapons. Remember; thousands of weapons of this nature had to be destroyed, so it's not like the U.S. has a stockpile ready to deploy now.
[Audie Cornish:] Is it possible that the Trump administration might be, for lack of a better term, bluffing right? to get a better deal?
[David Welna, Byline:] That could be. This is a Soviet-era treaty, and it limits what the U.S. can do not just in Europe but across the entire planet. And Trump would like a deal to include China, which right now has no restrictions on deploying intermediate-range nuclear weapons. They might be pressured to join the INF if the U.S. started placing such weapons in the South Pacific.
[Audie Cornish:] David, in the meantime, the U.S. does have other arms control agreements with Russia. Are those in peril?
[David Welna, Byline:] I think this does mark a major shift in U.S. arms control policy. Since the 1970s, the thrust has been to limit nuclear weapons. And Under Trump, the momentum all seems to be toward ending these treaties and letting the stalled nuclear arms race get going again. After all this, administration has pushed for developing new nuclear weapons, and they've been approved by the new defense budget.
[Audie Cornish:] That's NPR's David Welna. David, thank you for your reporting.
[David Welna, Byline:] You're welcome, Audie.

[Debbie Elliott:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Debbie Elliott. Fighting continued for a fifth day in Israel and Lebanon. This evening, an Israeli warship off the Lebanese coast fired missiles at the Beirut airport. Also today, Israeli war planes struck the city of Tyre, killing at least nine, and hit other targets in southern Lebanon. The Canadian foreign minister said eight Canadians of Lebanese descent were killed. Eight Israelis were killed today when Hezbollah fired rockets at the northern port city of Haifa. Tonight, we start with two reports. First, NPR's Linda Gradstein in Haifa.
[Linda Gradstein Reporting:] A rocket scored a direct hit on a train depot in the Haifa Bay, killing the eight Israelis. Israeli officials said it was an Iranian-made Fajar missile with a range of 25 miles. Near the train depot, another building was heavily damaged. Hamudi, an Israeli Arab who didn't want to give his last name, said he and four members of his family were supposed to be at work in the building when the rocket hit. But he was running late after he took his sister for a blood test.
[Hamudi:] Well, I think, you want to know one thing, if my time is finished, I will be dead. But I think I have more to go [unintelligible].
[Gradstein:] You should kiss your sister for making you late.
[Hamudi:] I should say thank God first before I kiss my sister, because everything belong to God.
[Gradstein:] At the train repair depot, Haifa police chief Nir Mariaj said that despite Hezbollah warnings that Haifa could be a target, many found it hard to believe.
[Mr. Nir Mariaj:] Yesterday night, I rode the street and people were sitting in cafes and restaurants until very late hour. So by now everybody knows that Haifa is a target and everybody knows that they have to change their behavior.
[Gradstein:] Changing their behavior means staying in bomb shelters or sealed rooms, as close to a million Israelis are now doing. Israeli officials say Hezbollah has the ability to fire rockets even as far south as Israel's largest city of Tel Aviv. Residents of Tel Aviv were told that if a siren sounds, meaning a long range rocket is on the way, they are to take cover as quickly as possible. Israel's air force chief said Israel had hit dozens of targets in Lebanon. In a televised news conference, he showed black and white films of Israeli jets dropping bombs on bridges, roads, and what he said were Hezbollah weapon stores. Israel's Defense Minister Amir Peretz also talked tough when he visited the train repair depot in Haifa, directly threatening Hezbollah leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.
[Mr. Amir Peretz:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Gradstein:] Did he think for a moment that he could threaten Haifa and he and all of his friends in that terrorist center he built in Lebanon would be out of danger in Beirut? Peretz asked. Absolutely not. Now he knows that even when he uses innocent families as shields, it won't help him. Israeli officials say Hezbollah has fired more than 1000 rockets at Israel since the fighting between Israel and Lebanon began five days ago. Israel has bombed hundreds of targets in Lebanon, and they say they won't stop until Hezbollah is disarmed. Linda Gradstein, NPR News.

[Renee Montagne:] I'm Renee Montagne. The Justice Department is preparing to bring a lawsuit on behalf of black voters in one Ohio community. NPR has learned that the Justice Department believes local election policies discriminate against black voters in Euclid, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. The move would mark the first time in five years since that the department has filed a lawsuit on behalf of black voters, and critics find it suspicious that the action comes just as a powerful Senate committee prepares to hold hearings on the department's civil rights division. NPR's Ari Shapiro reports.
[Ari Shapiro Reporting:] Last fall, when Wan Kim came before the Senate Judiciary Committee for confirmation hearings to lead the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin was frank.
[Senator Dick Durbin:] The Bush Administration has not brought a single voting rights lawsuit alleging racial discrimination against African Americans. I find this disturbing.
[Shapiro:] Committee members' concerns has not diminished since then. There have been reports that political appointees overruled the unanimous recommendations of career attorneys on controversial cases. Career attorneys have left, complaining that the division isn't doing enough to enforce civil rights. And now the Judiciary Committee is preparing to call Assistant Attorney General Kim back to the Hill for oversight hearings. Former Justice Department Attorney Jon Greenbaum says that means one thing.
[Mr. Jon Greenbaum:] When the voting section and the civil rights division know that oversight hearings are coming, we end up seeing action being taken on matters.
[Shapiro:] The Civil Rights Division sent a letter to Euclid, Ohio, accusing the city of discrimination against black voters.
[Mr. Jon Greenbaum:] This particular matter in Euclid has been hanging around in the voting section, going back to 2003.
[Shapiro:] The Justice Department hasn't filed a case on behalf of African-American voters since 2001, and that case was started under the previous administration. The Civil Rights Division did bring its first-ever suit alleging black discrimination against white voters. That was in Mississippi. David Becker is an election consultant who used to work in the Civil Rights Division's voting section. He says the Ohio case stands out.
[Mr. David Becker:] I think the timing is a little suspicious, considering the fact that Senate oversight hearings for the Civil Rights Division are coming up.
[Shapiro:] The hearings were originally scheduled for April 4th but were postponed yesterday for unrelated reasons. Euclid's mayor is Democrat Bill Cervenik. His town is a third black, but there's never been an African American on the city council.
[Mayor Bill Cervenik:] I would certainly listen to any suggestions as to how to encourage a more diverse council. During my campaign in 2003, I made it very clear that it's important that we work to get African-American representation on council.
[Shapiro:] That said...
[Mayor Bill Cervenik:] If we're being used to cover somebody's mistakes or lack of action, then they're going to have a very upset mayor from northeastern Ohio on their hands.
[Shapiro:] Critics say it's not that this case is without merit, it's that this and other cases that continue to sit on the shelf should have been filed years ago. Stanley Miller is executive director of the NAACP's office in Cleveland, which borders Euclid. He says the discrimination in Euclid has emerged gradually.
[Mr. Stanley Miller:] A number of whites have left Cleveland and moved to the suburbs. Now, a number of African Americans are following the same route into the suburbs. And I do believe that there are a number of people that they don't want to live with African Americans. That's real. And at some point, this community needs to face the fact that there is some racism in this community.
[Shapiro:] The Justice Department doesn't accuse the people in Euclid of specific racist acts. They allege dilution of the black vote. That means the city's voting system is set up so that white people can legitimately win every local office, even if the city has a substantial black minority. Justice Department Spokesman Eric Holland said in a statement that the Bush Administration has a strong record of enforcing the voting rights of all Americans. He noted that this Justice Department has filed more lawsuits alleging voting discrimination on the basis of language than in the entire prior history of the act combined. And he reiterated that the administration supports reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Washington.

[Michele Norris:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris. ROBERT SIEGEL, host And I'm Robert Siegel. Nike sneakers, Heineken beer, and Verizon phones. Drive around Washington, D.C., these days and you'll see images of these products painted up on walls, as if they were examples of vandalism, rather than advertising, which they in fact are. The underground graffiti movement has made it to the marketing mainstream. It was only a matter of time, then, before graffiti turned from the mainstream means to a mainstream end. Marc Ecko, the hip hop impresario and owner of Ecko clothing lines, has created the video game Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure. The game follows the subversive artistry of Train, a homeless, spray can-crazed youth, as he navigates New Radius, a city patrolled by brutal fascistic police, the CCK. In a few minutes, we'll speak with Marc Ecko about his game, which goes on sale today. But first, we sat down with NPR's Rob Holt, our manager of digital media infrastructure, and our go-to guy for game reviews.
[Mr. Rob Holt Reporting:] Your goal is to get reputation points by spraying graffiti and spraying your tag, which is your name and designs that you make on walls, and the harder to reach the place that you make your tag, the more reputation points you get.
[Siegel:] Well, let's see if you can make Train do something interesting for us and see what he encounters. He just leapt off the roof, climbing Spiderman-like down the
[Holt:] As you can tell, the language is a little off color.
[Siegel:] Can we find any language that we can actually use?
[Holt:] Since you're climbing down the side of an apartment building, you're actually hearing the people arguing inside of the apartment building.
[Siegel:] I see. That was just the sounds of the city. Oh, these are the fascist police picking up members of the other gang with their billy clubs.
[Holt:] Stay clear of the CCK cops, or they will arrest you. So what I need to do is tag this van. So you hold down the middle mouse button, and you just press the first mouse button, and it draws the tag for you perfectly. So you don't have any free form access to the graffiti.
[Siegel:] I see. Train, when you ever click for Train, Train will put his tag up there. That's what it looks like.
[Holt:] Yes. And you have access to different tags, like here's another one.
[Siegel:] The first one just said, Train.
[Holt:] Let's see, I'll show you the different ones.
[Siegel:] Oh, here's a different one. Express Train.
[Holt:] So you have to tag this thing eight times. This is the police van.
[Siegel:] How novel is the idea of a game that's based on how much graffiti you can put up on walls?
[Holt:] That is novel. And I like that. I wish that you could have free form control over what you drew. I mean, of course, I'm no graffiti artist. And one of these things that this game did give me was a real appreciation for some of the artists that Marc Ecko, growing up in the New York area, he would see these people, so he basically sort of enshrined them in this game. And you meet them throughout the game, and they're mentors to you and you can actually like take pictures of these art pieces that are on the wall. And it really did give me an appreciation for graffiti as art. I don't think I will play this that much more. Now that we're done talking about it, I probably won't play this. But I will actually go get a book on graffiti art. There are some artists, like this game introduced me to RJD2, and I really like his stuff.
[Siegel:] The music?
[Holt:] The music, yeah. So the music is fantastic. The fashion is fantastic. The graffiti is awesome. The game play, not so much.
[Mr. Marc Ecko:] My name is Marc Ecko. I am the executive creative director and the writer of Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure.
[Siegel:] What's so cool about graffiti?
[Mr. Marc Ecko:] I think what's kind of moved me is that it really is the official visual dialect of youth culture and the youth culture experience around the world. If you're in Sao Paulo, Brazil, or if you're in Newark, New Jersey, or Carney, Nebraska, or Detroit, which is a city that has a graffiti problem, you're going to see street art, and the motif of street art, even if it's being marketed to you by soft drink companies or media companies and motion graphics, or whatever at the front of their music videos. It has really become the visual language of youth culture.
[Siegel:] You just said Detroit has a graffiti problem. It's a problem?
[Mr. Marc Ecko:] Yeah.
[Siegel:] It's not the lack of graffiti you're talking about. There is graffiti.
[Mr. Marc Ecko:] Right.
[Siegel:] How is it that you can see this as a problem while you're celebrating it as an artistic activity?
[Mr. Marc Ecko:] I'm celebrating the language. I'm celebrating not throwing the baby out with the bath water. Illicitly going and writing on someone's wall, as someone who owns property, I'm not condoning that. What I am celebrating is the motif of graffiti and the aesthetic language. I haven't put paint on the wall.
[Siegel:] Fair enough. I'd like you to talk about the actual aesthetic of graffiti you would say graf?
[Mr. Marc Ecko:] We've got to get you a tag name.
[Siegel:] You've got to give me a tag name. We can develop that during the interview.
[Mr. Marc Ecko:] We'll do that offline.
[Siegel:] I want you to tell me what it is. Is it simply the drip of paint in broad strokes? Is it the outlining of the lines that are broader? Is it one's name? What is it that you look at it and you say, that's graf?
[Mr. Marc Ecko:] Well, what I'm drawn to by the esthetic is how it's evolved really. In its early iterations in the late '70s, mid '70s even, in Philadelphia and Manhattan, and it was really born from purely aerosol art. And guys would go in and they would modify the spray paint cans. Some guys would find that putting a raid cap on a Red Devil can would give them a fatter, wider stroke or some other cap from another can of a home product would give it a stippled effect. And over the years, the aesthetic of graffiti has just evolved. Now, it involves stenciling, and postering. And the medium can't be defined in a monolithic way. I mean, it's as broad as an artist like Banksy, in London, doing these really politically-motivated kind of statements through stencil art, to someone like Mare 139, who's doing these complicated metal sculptures that take six to eight months to produce each one.
[Siegel:] But the streets are vital to it. This is something that's not it doesn't quite work in the salon situation, in the studio situation?
[Mr. Marc Ecko:] No. It's something that's definitely born from that kind of angst to want to be heard and seen and known. And it is definitely something that doesn't happen in the Ivory Tower. And where the real energy and innovation come from, generally, it's from the street.
[Siegel:] That's Mark Ecko, who is a designer and also creator of the new videogame, Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure.

[Farai Chideya:] So you want to be a rap star, you could shop a demo, crash a record executive party, or click on a video camera, make your own video and send it to YouTube. San Francisco Bay Area rapper, Conceit, won the do-it-yourself route when he made a video for his song, "Scissors & Glue," and it just won YouTube's "Osn The Rise" rap competition.
[Conceit:] [Rapping] What's up? What's up? [Unintelligible] for one more deejay. Let's go. Let's play. You're listening to the wasted talents. [Unintelligible] Hey, you know what? The more you try to change the world, the more it changes you. Since preschool, scissors and glue, of course, then I knew what that...
[Farai Chideya:] So hip-hop stars 50 Cent and Common handpicked Conceit out of thousands of entries. Now, the young rapper gets a fat bag of goodies, including a trip to New York to record a single with 50's label G-Unit. For more, we've got Conceit, as well as Jeben Berg, a programming spokesperson for YouTube. Welcome, guys.
[Conceit:] How are you doing?
[Mr. Jeben Berg:] Hi. Thank you for having us back again.
[Farai Chideya:] I'm doing great. Conceit, probably not as great as you, how does it feel?
[Conceit:] I feel just real good right now. Definitely, real good.
[Farai Chideya:] So some critics, even the rapper Nos cried that hip-hop is dead even when they're still rhyming. What do you think is going on with hip-hop and creativity? Do you still feel like it's got that juice that it's been, you know, that it's had in the past?
[Conceit:] I mean, I believe that it all depends on how you look at it. Of course, maybe the old school fundamentals and maybe, you know, basic blueprints of how hip-hop were in the past, which I appreciate to the fullest. And there's a time that I look back on with some of the greatest music made in hip-hop, it has definitely changed. I wouldn't necessarily say it's dead just because, you know, it's not as it was. It's a music that's meant to evolve. Quality, I mean, that's up to judgment. I mean, you know, fans change over time. Demographics change. Ages change. So I mean, I think, it's a mixture of some parts of hip-hop have ceased but there's others that matured out of it as well, So I don't know, I think it all depends on how you look at it, but hip-hop is here to stay.
[Farai Chideya:] Jeben, when we spoke earlier about this competition you basically said what you have to win was originality in your music and in the production of your video. How does Conceit's work live up to what you were saying?
[Mr. Jeben Berg:] It nailed it point on. As a matter of fact, the video itself it exemplified the creativity that we're looking for. The lyrics were outstanding. I think that they exemplified precisely what we wanted to see come out of it.
[Conceit:] Thank you.
[Farai Chideya:] And what's in it for you guys? I mean, obviously, it's fun to work with some of the biggest names in hip-hop, but YouTube has so many other things going on. Why this? Why now?
[Mr. Jeben Berg:] We just want to make sure that we bring out top-tier talent that otherwise wouldn't have a voice. And that's the most important thing that we can do is to give exposure. If you look at our prize packages that we put together, it's the ability to connect with the decision-makers in the industry. The monetary values that come after it, they're not as important. They're a great incentive, but what we've seen here is all the top 20 were basically the best of the best. They were endorsed by Interscope and G-Unit, and we couldn't have expected more.
[Farai Chideya:] Now, Conceit, you've been rapping for or making music for more than a decade. Give me a sense of how you would describe what it is that you do and what it is you bring to the game.
[Conceit:] I mean, basically it's just bringing, I don't know, basically, the fundamentals I was raised on. Of course, like all music, I was raised with the background of, you know, my grandparents grown up, as I mentioned before, like in songs about, you know, I listened to all types of music from hip-hop as well as Latin, jazz, and rock music, and psychedelic '60s music everything. It's incorporation with growing up. I grew up, basically, on hip-hop music and, basically, it's giving my own twist to it. And, you know, I believe I grew up battle rap. And for those who don't know, you know, it's basically like MCs going head to head in basically braggadocios type of thing. But, I mean, as you get older, it's like over the years, I matured more into actually just talking about social commentary as well as, you know, trying to change what has already been done with the music. So I mean, I don't know, I'm basically bringing myself as well as everything that I've learned through this music that I feel has raised me.
[Farai Chideya:] And what's your song "Scissors & Glue" about?
[Conceit:] I mean, "Scissors & Glue" is basically about my life as well as what I think relates to a lot of people's life in transition, in positive and negative ways. I mean, I think that when I made the song, there was a lot of things that had been going on in my life in a certain period of time that, you know, there's good things in your life that sometimes, you know, are fine as well as other bad things in your life that you got to kind of cut out of your life and then rebuild from it. So that's, like, the whole concept of "Scissors & Glue" is kind of this world is a crazy place; and sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands; and, you know, sometimes things that you've been used to since you were young or that you've been used to for a while you have to cut out of your life and rebuild from there.
[Farai Chideya:] What are you building next, Jeben, with YouTube? What are some of your next adventures, just quickly?
[Mr. Jeben Berg:] Sure. As I mentioned before, we're working going through a number of the different genres. We've got film. That's going to be a big area that we're going to try to tackle very soon. We're certainly not giving up on music. We're going to get more specific as we go along. And I think that what you're going to see are programs that will nurture and evolve a number of different people who, otherwise, wouldn't get that chance.
[Farai Chideya:] All right. Sounds like a lot of fun. Jeben and Conceit, thanks for coming on.
[Mr. Jeben Berg:] Thank you very much.
[Conceit:] Thank you very much for having us.
[Farai Chideya:] We've been talking to Jeben Berg, a programming spokesperson for YouTube, and San Francisco Bay Area rapper Conceit. He just won YouTube's "On The Rise" hip-hop video contest.

[Ailsa Chang:] This week, a website launched. It's like catnip for radio-obsessed people like me. I'm looking at the website radio.garden. It's a simple globe. You spin it around with your mouse and click on dots to play live radio broadcasts from around the world. Like OK, let's just spin around over here.
[Unidentified Woman:] [Speaking Korean].
[Ailsa Chang:] Chungju-si, South Korea.
[Unidentified Woman:] [Speaking Korean].
[Ailsa Chang:] All right. How about here? I'm just going up to Seoul.
[Cnblue:] [Singing in Korean].
[Ailsa Chang:] Oh, yeah nice.
[Cnblue:] [Singing in Korean].
[Ailsa Chang:] All right. Now I'm going to scoot on over to Europe. Rome.
[Unidentified Artist #1:] [Singing in foreign language].
[Ailsa Chang:] It's basically an awesome real-time adventure to hear voices and music from around the planet. Radio Garden was designed by Jonathan Puckey in collaboration with the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Jonathan Puckey joins us from Amsterdam now. Welcome.
[Jonathan Puckey:] Hello.
[Ailsa Chang:] So how did this project come about?
[Jonathan Puckey:] Yeah. So a year ago, we were invited by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision to actually come up with an installation for their museum for a research project called Transnational Radio Encounters. And this research project is about radio that crosses borders and radio of different languages. And we actually quite quickly came up with the idea of making a website instead of an installation.
[Ailsa Chang:] You know, it is interesting. On this globe, you don't see any state borders in the U.S., and you don't see any country designations in the rest of the globe. You know, it's just, like, a satellite image. Why leave out the borders?
[Jonathan Puckey:] Like, radio itself, of course, doesn't know about borders. It's a signal that travels as far as the signal strength goes. And we kind of wanted to reflect that idea. In the past when you used to listen to radio, you would even have, like, the city names on the dials. Like, you would tune into for example, in the Netherlands, you would tune into Hilversum. And we kind of wanted to, like, replicate this sort of idea that, yeah, you're kind of traveling in your mind as you listen to this radio. And you're not, like, busy with where you are exactly.
[Ailsa Chang:] I like that idea. Like, right now, I'm just going to click on this dot in the middle of Asia oh, it's Afghanistan.
[Unidentified Artist #2:] [Singing in foreign language].
[Ailsa Chang:] I love that. I feel like I'm peeking through the window at someone else's party. But I don't feel shut out. I kind of feel invited. And it makes the world feel smaller to me by being able to navigate it so quickly with a mouse.
[Jonathan Puckey:] Yes, I really like the idea that you can get lost. Like, you don't know exactly where you're going. Like I tried, for example, to find San Francisco the other day and actually had a hard time pinpointing it because I'm so used to actually seeing a map and sort of knowing exactly where I need to go really enjoy this sort of fact of sort of getting lost.
[Ailsa Chang:] Right. So besides the live broadcast, there are a couple other buttons here. I'm looking at jingles. I'm going to click on jingles.
[Unidentified Singers:] [Singing] Seventy-seven WABC.
[Ailsa Chang:] [Laughter] That is from 1961, New York, obviously prerecorded.
[Jonathan Puckey:] Yeah, well because we were working together with this research group and one of the research projects was research actually into the world of jingles.
[Unidentified Singers:] [Laughter] Seven-ninety, WAKY...
[Ailsa Chang:] The Radio Garden website it's less than a week old, right? And it's already been shared like crazy on social media.
[Jonathan Puckey:] Yeah, this was really surprising. We launched on Monday, and it's just been going all over the globe. Right now, we're sort of going viral in Brazil and actually Saudi Arabia and actually countries where we didn't even have that many radio stations or content from those places.
[Ailsa Chang:] Wow.
[Jonathan Puckey:] But they seem to really be getting into it. We've been receiving, like, copious amounts of requests of radio stations to have their station put on the website, which is really surprising. I have, like, a list of, like, 600 emails that I still need to, like, run through this weekend...
[Ailsa Chang:] Wow.
[Jonathan Puckey:] ...Adding all these stations the website. So that's been great.
[Ailsa Chang:] Jonathan Puckey helped design the Radio Garden website. He joined us from Amsterdam. Thank you.
[Jonathan Puckey:] Thank you.

[Melissa Block:] Now to Ecuador which is rich in oil and gold deposits. But the country's natural resources may one day run out. So Ecuador is now trying to develop a high-tech economy by building a South American Silicon Valley. John Otis takes us there.
[John Otis, Byline:] Near the snow-capped Andean peaks of Northern Ecuador workers are constructing a brand-new city from scratch. Plans for this 12,000 acre site include a science and technology park and a world-class research university. There will also be a campus for companies like Microsoft, Cisco Systems and China Telecom that plan to set up shop here. Like Brasilia and other planned cities, it's going up far from other urban centers in an effort to develop Ecuador's interior. This new city of knowledge has been dubbed Yachay, a Quechua Indian word that means to learn. Even as construction continues some classes at the Yachay University have already begun.
[Unidentified Man #1:] I will buy a gift for her. Gift.
[Unidentified Woman #1:] All right, gift.
[John Otis, Byline:] Yachay is working closely with top American universities such as Stanford and Cal Tech. Kansas State University is providing English professors, like Tyson Umberger. He says, students at Yachay are extremely motivated.
[Tyson Umberger:] It's really refreshing really rewarding when you're able to walk in and those students are just as eager to talk about the past simple or the presence simple verb tenses as you are. It's really it's wonderful.
[John Otis, Byline:] Yachay came about after Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa toured Asia. He was impressed by their research and business clusters in South Korea and Singapore and envisioned something similar back home.
[Rodriguez:] This is the transformation of Ecuador. This is a social transformation.
[John Otis, Byline:] Hector Rodriguez, the general manager of Yachay, says the goal is economic diversification.
[Rodriguez:] We know that the oil is going to be done in a few years and we cannot just take off all the minerals of the land. We need to get this transformation right now because there is no future for countries like us.
[John Otis, Byline:] But building world-class research facilities can be extremely costly and they usually require academic autonomy to succeed. Critics call Yachay a top-down government enterprise that could become a tool of President Correa's social and economic agenda. Cesar Montufar, who teaches at the state-run Simon Bolivar University in Quito, says Yachay could turn into a city of elites, cut off from the rest of the country much of which is poor and underdeveloped.
[Cesar Montufar:] A university is something that grows and develops within an environment. It's part of a country. It's part of a social reality. So you can not bring Ph.D.'s from everywhere in the world, put them in a small town in Ecuador and pretend that from that you can create a successful academic and research project.
[John Otis, Byline:] Opposition politician Martha Roldos claims the billion dollars being spent on Yachay should go to Ecuador's struggling public universities.
[Martha Roldos:] All the other universities are underfunded. This university has almost the same funding that all the others together something is not right.
[John Otis, Byline:] Roldos points out that Correa, who was first elected in 2006, is pushing Ecuador's Congress to scrap presidential term limits so he can be reelected indefinitely. She calls Yachay a grandiose vanity project designed to impress voters.
[Martha Roldos:] It's like an Egyptian Pharaoh. I think they are monuments to them, not to their country.
[John Otis, Byline:] Rodriguez, the general manager of Yachay, denies the government is watering down other universities.
[Rodriguez:] [Spanish spoken].
[John Otis, Byline:] He says, the government has increased the overall budget for higher education. He also claims traditional universities have produced little in the way of scientific publication or patents and that a fresh start is needed. What's more, Rodriguez says Yachay is already reversing the problem of brain-drain, by convincing the countries best and brightest students to stay home rather than study abroad. One of them is 17-year-old Daniela Armijo. She rejected a scholarship to Belgium's top university to study genetic engineering at Yachay.
[Daniela Armijo:] [Spanish Spoken].
[John Otis, Byline:] We get high quality education here. Our professors hold Ph.Ds. The government is making good on its promises, Armijo tells me. This is where we are building the future of our country. For NPR News, I'm John Otis.

[Neal Conan:] At 10:25 last Friday morning, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont stood up to make a speech on the Senate floor.
[Senator Bernie Sanders:] Mr. President, as I think everyone knows, the president of the United States, President Obama, and the Republican leadership have reached an agreement on a very significant tax bill. But in my view, the agreement that they reached is a bad deal for the American people. I think we can do better. And you can call what I'm doing today whatever you want. You can call it a filibuster. You can call it a very long speech. I'm not here to set any great records or to make a spectacle. I am simply here today to take as long as I can to explain to the American people the fact that we have got to do a lot better than this agreement provides.
[Neal Conan:] Senator Sanders continued for eight and a half hours. His name trended number one on Twitter throughout much of that afternoon. He even got his own hash tag, FiliBernie. Senator Sanders joins us now from the Senate gallery in the Capitol. Nice to have you with us today.
[Senator Bernie Sanders:] Good to be with you.
[Neal Conan:] And what was it like to talk for eight and a half hours?
[Senator Bernie Sanders:] It was a long talk. Got tired. You know, for me, it was an opportunity to do what sometimes is very hard for a senator to do is go beyond an eight-second TV soundbite or brief radio show and really talk about why the middle class of this country is collapsing, why the gap between the very rich and everybody else is going growing wider and why many, many people in this country are worried about our future and what happens to their kids, and to put that within the context of why the agreement signed by the president and the Republican leadership is not a good deal for the American people.
[Neal Conan:] As you know, that agreement passed the Senate yesterday with, I think, over 80 votes and goes before the House today, where it's got tougher sledding but it looks like, one way or another, it's likely to be law.
[Senator Bernie Sanders:] The folks, the Democrats in the House, are putting up a fight. And I think what they are saying very loudly and clearly is what I believe is that it is basically absurd to be giving huge tax breaks to the richest people in this country, including many millionaires and billionaires at the same time as we have a record-breaking deficit of $13.7 trillion national debt, at the same time as we are ignoring many enormous problems facing our country, including a crumbling infrastructure, an educational system which needs a lot of support, and the fact that we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on Earth. So I think what some of the progresses in the House are doing is saying, excuse us. The American people don't think it's appropriate to get tax breaks to people who don't need it, and we're going to fight that. And I support what they're doing.
[Neal Conan:] There are some rules that you had to obey. You said, you can call it a filibuster if you want. Technically, the Senate was not voting until yesterday, so it wasn't a filibuster. You weren't blocking a vote but, nevertheless, still a very long speech. And you are required, as I understand it under the rules I guess we all remember "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" you have to stand the whole time?
[Senator Bernie Sanders:] Yes, that's correct.
[Neal Conan:] And are you allowed any breaks at all?
[Senator Bernie Sanders:] You have to stand. You have to stay on the Senate floor. You can't eat and that's what you got to do.
[Neal Conan:] And are you allowed to yield to a colleague?
[Senator Bernie Sanders:] You can and that happened early on. Senator Mary Landrieu and Senator Sherrod Brown were around and we had a dialogue, which I thought was pretty productive.
[Neal Conan:] Did you plan to go that long when you started?
[Senator Bernie Sanders:] No, I really didn't. I think probably the longest speech that I've ever given in my life was about maybe an hour, hour and a half, when I was mayor of Burlington, I suspect. So I had no idea how long I would go. But what ended up happening is once you get going and you talk about what's happening in this country in a way that I think many people don't often hear for example, when you raise issues about whether it is morally appropriate in this country to continue a situation where the top one percent earns 23 and a half percent of all income in this country that's more than the bottom 50 percent where the United States today has the top one percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. And then I you talk about that from a moral perspective and from an economic perspective. We talk about and had the time to do that -about these CEOs of large corporations, General Electric, all the rest talking about how wonderful it is, all of the opportunities available in China, while they throw American workers out on the street, move abroad, hire people for 50 cents an hour, bring their products back in this country. Then you know what? Then when they needed a bailout and GE got a $16 billion bailout during the from the Fed during the Wall Street collapse they didn't go to China for that bailout. They went to the taxpayers of the United States of America. And you know, it gave me the opportunity to talk about the crooks on Wall Street and I use that work advisedly who today after wrecking our economy, driving us into the worst recession since the Great Depression, today earning more money than they ever did while millions of people remain unemployed as a result of their efforts. People have lost their homes, lost their savings. And what's happening to these guys? Are they being prosecuted? No. They're actually doing quite well, better than they did before the recession. So it's an opportunity to go into some length about various aspects of what's happening to the middle class and the fact that in many ways this country is moving, in my view, toward an oligarchy in which very few people on the top have incredible wealth and power and they're using their power, both economically with billions of dollars a year going to lobbyists right here on Capitol Hill, as well as politically now as a result, as you know, of the Citizens United decision, you're going to have a handful of billionaires sitting around dividing up the country and deciding which candidates they're going to support, not or not support, or oppose. And they don't even have to be disclosed. So I think the reason that that speech kind of caught fire was not just because many people think that the agreement struck between the president and Republicans is a bad deal for the middle class. I think it began to touch on a nerve of the power of big money in this country, something that we don't talk about very often in the media or, frankly, on the floor of the Senate.
[Neal Conan:] Do you think it changed any minds?
[Senator Bernie Sanders:] Well, I think it changed the minds of people in the United States of America.
[Neal Conan:] Well, senators were presumably your immediate target.
[Senator Bernie Sanders:] Well, not really. No. I have to tell you the truth, that's not accurate. My immediate goal was to talk to the American people because I think the only way you're going to make change, when we have an aroused citizenry, when millions of people stand up. And what I said during my remarks is, please call your senator, please call your members of your House. Tell them whether you think it's a good idea to give tax breaks to billionaires, people who'll be getting over $100,000 a year in tax breaks at the same time as millions of Americans can't afford child care for their kids or college education for their sons and daughters. I was talking to the American people to put pressure on members of Congress, more frankly more so than members of Congress.
[Neal Conan:] I think we're beginning to get an idea of how you could go on that long. There have been famous long speeches in the Senate -filibusters, unlike yours. But Strom Thurmond, I think, when he was protesting the Civil Rights Act of 1957, read from the phone book to use up the time. You did not do that.
[Senator Bernie Sanders:] No...
[Neal Conan:] You stuck to the issues.
[Senator Bernie Sanders:] My goal was not to stand there and waste time and read from the phone book. My goal was to do the best that I can to give people my view as to what is happening in this country. And I think it's a perception that is in fact shared by millions of Americans. You don't hear it terribly often, again, on the floor of the Senate. You only hear it very often in the media. But I think many, many people in this country are outraged by the power of big money over the political and economic life of this country. And they wonder why. They're sitting around wondering why this country is gradually moving in the direction of a Third World nation if we don't turn it around, in terms of our crumbling infrastructure, the fact that our kids are falling behind students around the world in terms of educational capabilities, and yet at the same time people on top are doing phenomenally well, owning more and more of the nation's wealth and capturing more and more of the nation's income and using that power, politically, to get more and more and more. And I would say, you know, if you want to know what the theme of the speech is, it was greed. It was uncontrolled greed on the part of big money. And to ask: When does it end? How much do they need? Is earning 23 and a half percent of all income for the top one percent, is that enough? Apparently it's not. At what point does it end? What happens to the middle class when we lose 48,000 factories in the last 10 years and almost 30 percent of our manufacturing base? Why is it that you can't it's very difficult to buy a product manufactured in the United States of America today. Those are some of the issues that we need serious debate on. And I hope that by raising those issues, it can drive some discussion.
[Neal Conan:] Yet presumably those issues could have been raised in one of those hour and a half speeches you may have made when you were mayor of Burlington or maybe a two-hour speech. Clearly the purpose of a speech that long was to attract attention simply on the length of the speech itself. It was a stunt, no?
[Senator Bernie Sanders:] No. I mean, one of the interesting things is that often I'm asked about the speech and people say, well, didn't you have to urinate? Weren't you hungry? Didn't you get tired? Because people focus on those aspects of the filibuster rather than the media talking about the real issues. So what I'm trying to drive at in the speech and directly to millions of people, I suspect, who at one point or another turned on, are the issues that I'm raising with you today. Is it appropriate that the top one percent of the people in our county earn more income than the bottom 50 percent? Is that appropriate? Well, let's have a good discussion on it. And I was able to raise that issue to millions of Americans who, I think, responded. And they said no, there's something wrong going on in this country. I mean, you tell me. I mean, that's what I asked the American people. Tell me, does anybody think it make sense to give, on average, $100,000 a year of tax break to people who make more than a million dollars a year?
[Neal Conan:] Senator, as you know, most people may agree with you. I don't know about that. But there are certainly are people who do think it's appropriate.
[Senator Bernie Sanders:] Yes, they are. I think that they are in the minority. And I think that is why I'm trying to arouse the American people to oppose this deal. No question. There are some people who do think that it is appropriate to give tax breaks to billionaires and drive up the national debt. I don't think that they are in the majority.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who spoke for eight and a half hours on the Senate floor last Friday. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And what do say to you are independent but you caucus with the Democratic Party what do you say to those Democrats who held their nose and said, well, yeah, there's a lot, part of this that I don't necessarily agree with, but it's, you know, we don't want to taxes to go up on middle class people either on January 1st; the president's right; they're being held hostage by the Republicans, who were recalcitrant; let's just vote for this thing and go at it again in two years?
[Senator Bernie Sanders:] Well, I do understand the position that people Democrats and everybody else are being put in, because nobody wants the middle class to be paying more in taxes. I don't know anybody who thinks that it's not appropriate to extend unemployment benefits to two million people who are about to lose them in the midst of a terrible recession. The point that I was making is I think that the president reached an agreement with the Republicans much, much too early. May you might we have to compromise? Yeah, maybe we do. But you gotta wage the fight before you compromise. You gotta take the case to the American people, and we didn't do that. And my criticism was that a deal was reached by the administration and the Republican leadership not involving members of the caucus, certainly not involving the American people. And the main point that I want to make is, why is it always that progressives have got to compromise? Why aren't the Republicans compromising? The narrative that we're seeing right now is Republicans are firm, they're not going compromise. They are saying that we have got to lower taxes on the estate tax, which only applies to the top three-tenths of one percent of the American people, and they're not going to budge on it. But we are supposed to budge all of the time. And I think -my criticism is that if the president had taken that fight to the American people, I think we could have put the Republicans on the defensive. Let them tell the American people why we drive up the national debt that our kids are going to have to pay off in order to give huge tax breaks to the top three-tenths of one percent. Ninety-nine point seven percent of people don't gain a nickel. Those are the battles that we have got to fight. And if you keep compromising on that, it's only going to be the start for what it comes down next year, when the Republicans control the House. You know what's going to happen? They're going to go after Social Security. One of the more onerous provisions in this agreement was the so-called one-year payroll holiday, which will divert $112 billion from the Social Security trust fund. In my view I hope I'm wrong on this next year it will be extended again and then again and then again, and then what you're talking about, according to major senior citizen organizations, is really the beginning of the end for Social Security. Is this a good idea? Social Security has worked wonderfully for 75 years. Why are we trying to dismember it and cut funding for it right now? So those are the issues that we want to take to the American people, and the president didn't give us that opportunity.
[Neal Conan:] Yesterday Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, proposed that the entire START treaty be read aloud, as is allowed under the law of the procedures of the Senate his purpose, clearly, to delay debate on that measure and let time tick away on the lame duck session. But how is what he's proposing to do, denounced by Democrats as ridiculous, but how is what he's trying to do different from what you did, eating up eight and a half hours of Senate time...
[Senator Bernie Sanders:] Well, I think it's very different. Senator DeMint has every right, under the Senate rules, to waste huge amounts of time by having you know, I don't know how long the bill is, a thousand, two thousand pages read. It's stupid. If Senator DeMint wants to come to the floor and speak for a very long period of time as to why he is opposed to the START treaty, I respect that. I would respect that. Historically, that's what the Senate rules are about, that senators can come down and in fact speak at great length. Does Senator DeMint have the right to ask that the entire treaty be read? Sure. I, you know, that's his right to do it if he wants to do it, but I don't think that makes a lot of sense. That is, I think, very different from somebody standing up and saying, look, I'm going to stand here for five hours or 10 hours and tell you why I am opposed to the START treaty. Now, I support the START treaty, but if DeMint wants to oppose it, let him say it. But this is clearly just a waste of time. And if he wants to do it, I guess he can do it. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
[Neal Conan:] Senator Sanders, thanks very much for your time today, and we appreciate it.
[Senator Bernie Sanders:] Thank you very much.
[Neal Conan:] Bernie Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, joined us from the Senate gallery in the Capitol. On Monday we'll hear a counterview on the tax deal from Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, who used to write speeches for President Bush.

[Michel Martin:] President Trump's comments at the G-7 come on the heels of an already chaotic week when the U.S. and China threatened each other with increasing tariffs, and President Trump ordered American companies to get out of China immediately. It isn't clear whether he has the authority to do that. The stock market took a plunge. And yet, after seeming to walk back his hard line on China, today, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham said the president, quote, "regrets not raising tariffs higher." So what do all these twists and turns mean? That's what we wanted to talk to Jennifer Rubin about. She's a conservative columnist for The Washington Post, and this morning, she published an op-ed entitled "How To Respond To A Manic President Driving The Economy Into A Ditch." And Jennifer Rubin is with us now. Thank you for talking with us once again.
[Jennifer Rubin:] My pleasure.
[Michel Martin:] So it's pretty clear from that title, from the headline of your piece, where you stand on all of this. But I just want to point out that you are not the only one to publish such a strongly-worded piece this weekend. I mean, your colleague, Megan McArdle, who's a self-described right-of-center columnist, a libertarian, wrote a piece titled, "When Will Trump Supporters Finally Say, OK, This Is Not Normal? " Michael Gerson is a former Republican speechwriter. He wrote a piece saying the Trump presidency is not just unfolding it's unraveling. There was a similar piece by Max Boot, another former conservative writer. So what is it that all of you are responding to in this moment?
[Jennifer Rubin:] I think in this particular episode, as opposed to some of the other ones, it was the frenetic zigzag back and forth on policy. One day, he was going to have a tax cut the next day, he wasn't. One day, he was talking about Jews being disloyal the next day he was calling himself the chosen one. It was this frenetic pace of kind of lashing out that seemed to be discombobulated. If you had a relative that was behaving this way, you'd maybe take them in or tell them to have a nice cup of tea and sit down. This is the president of the United States. And what we saw was what the market saw. And although I think presidents sometimes get too much blame and too much credit for the economy, here, I think there's a very real connection, which is businesspeople don't know what's coming next.
[Michel Martin:] The European Council President Donald Tusk said something that was widely believed to have been directed at Donald Trump yesterday when he said that, quote-unquote, "senseless disputes with other countries are careening the global economy towards a recession," you pointed out in your piece that no congressional leader or presidential candidate in the United States has come out and said the same. One would think that they have at least as much stake in the American economy as Donald Tusk does. Why do you think that is?
[Jennifer Rubin:] I attribute the Republican silence to their general strategy of not saying or doing anything to make him even madder at them. You can call it cowardice. You can call it avoidance. You can call it self-delusion. But they have really not stood up to this president, and I think they're hoping to just stay out of his way at this point. As far as the Democratic presidential candidates, it's a really good question, and I actually think they should. And I think there is that opportunity for Democrats to be the grown-ups here to give a serious speech explaining the dangers of increasing tariffs, to explain the importance of an independent central bank and to lay out in their mind what would be a better strategy in terms of taking on the Chinese. I think it would make a really impressive contrast right now as the president is unspooling. And these people are running for the job, and it would be nice to hear, like, an audition. Well, if we had so-and-so, what would they sound like?
[Michel Martin:] You know, essentially, your colleagues at the on the Post editorial page, Megan McArdle, also wrote a piece. Again, as I mentioned, it's called, you know, "When Will Trump Supporters Finally Say, OK, This Is Not Normal?" And she says that her task to this point has been to persuade people that even if this manner of governing has its appeals to people on the right, in the long run, it's not functional. The question I think this question continues to be, you know, why is it that this argument does not seem to be persuasive to people on the right? You know, as I think many people have noted, the president's approval rating among Republicans, self-identified Republicans, remains quite high.
[Jennifer Rubin:] I think what has gone on is that in the past, his crazy antics, his bigoted comments, his somewhat manic behavior didn't really seem to matter much. The economy was going strong. He wasn't slapping tariffs on people. So they got kind of into the habit of ignoring him. Now it's a whole different ballgame because what he is saying is, in fact, threatening that good economy, which was the one reason they were sticking with him in the first place.
[Michel Martin:] You know, finally, you've in your column, you've just laid out some of your thoughts a step-by-step plan of managing the economic damage that you attribute to President Trump and his style of governing. You said, you know, the Democrats should give a serious speech warning of the dangers of this escalating trade war. They should reaffirm the independence of the Fed and pledge to keep politics out of the central bank and noting that Trump has been very critical and personally insulting toward the Fed chair, whom he appointed. You said that Democrats and the president the presidential race should demand hearings when Congress reconvenes to analyze what's going on and explain where all this is headed, how this actually works. So your column is very much directed toward political elites and, like, what they should do. Is there something that you think citizens should be doing right now?
[Jennifer Rubin:] Registering to vote, perhaps [LAUGHTER]. You know, this is the problem that an ordinary citizen doesn't have much leverage. But there are citizens who do, and that is the business community. And I think he does listen to them. And when you have someone like Josh Bolten, who was with the George Bush administration Bush 43 go on national television and essentially plead with the president to stop this kind of stuff, that may have some effect. So I think the people who have influence with Trump because he sees them as peers as opposed to political opponents and who make economic decisions now would be a really good time for them to weigh in, either privately or publicly, and let him know exactly what's going on. It was interesting today that one of his closest international allies, Boris Johnson, weighed in and needled him just a little bit about these trade deals. And I actually think that's the right approach. It has to come from people who he thinks are like him and on his side for him to perhaps accept some guidance and to begin to calm things down and maybe even roll things back a bit.
[Michel Martin:] That is Jennifer Rubin, opinion writer at The Washington Post. Jennifer, thanks so much for talking with us once again.
[Jennifer Rubin:] My pleasure.

[Debbie Elliott:] As one tradition ends, another marches on. The Girl Scout motto is be prepared, but the 94-year-old organization now finds that it might not be prepared to serve the girls of the 21st century. This week, the Girl Scout announced a plan to update their programs to address what some leaders describe as a crisis of relevance. Courtney Shore is a senior vice president of Girl Scouts of the USA. Ms. Shore, you were on the committee that interviewed girls and wrote a report about this crisis of relevance. What is this crisis of relevance?
[Ms. Courtney Shore:] The crisis of relevance in this country is about the issues facing girls in their real lives. This is not an issue that faces just Girls Scouts. It's an issue that faces any organization that works with girls. The crisis of relevance, it's really about how they use their time, the things they're being exposed to, and the fears that they have about their future.
[Debbie Elliott:] What did they say about the Girl Scouts as an organization and where it was and was not meeting their needs?
[Ms. Courtney Shore:] And most of all what girls said was that they loved Girl scouting. They just wished that it was more cool to stay in, that we had a lot of girls say that they were not telling their friends that they were staying in the program, even though they were. They liked the fact that they're safe, that they're in a nurturing environment where they get to learn. But the pieces that we were really very interested in were some of the rather worrisome issues that are facing girls as young as nine years old.
[Debbie Elliott:] Was there one thing that really stood out for you that you found surprising?
[Ms. Courtney Shore:] I think the thing that I was personally the most touched by was how many girls were talking about being overscheduled, about already being on very severe diets, about feeling like they would be bullied. Forty-five percent of girls in class said that they don't raise their hand even when they know the answer because they're afraid of being bullied as being too smart. There's a new term called cyber-bullying, where people are already spreading rumors about you through IM-ing and text messaging. And so knowing that a young woman who should be focusing on schoolwork and her family activities, knowing that these issues were impacting her life, was terribly important to us and one of the bigger findings that I found surprising.
[Debbie Elliott:] You know, I noticed one of the findings that you reported was that girls reported problems with things like self-mutilation. How do you go about addressing such an issue in a program for a Girl Scout troop? What do you do?
[Ms. Courtney Shore:] Well, youth development experts tell us that at the heart of most of the issues that we found is really self-esteem. And so part of our new leadership development program is around building self-esteem in girls so that when they're affected with the stressors that might impact such things as cutting or anorexia or some of the other scary things that are facing girls today, they have a network to go to, they've got friends who help them build self-confidence so that they are not more prone to those activities.
[Debbie Elliott:] When you were talking to girls, were there any core issues that came up relating to race and class and how the Girl Scouts might become more relevant to the full spectrum of American girls?
[Ms. Courtney Shore:] Absolutely. I'm so glad you asked the question. One of the things that we looked at were first generation children in this country who don't have families that know the system, so to speak, and how to access programs and activities that can help their child. And so we are working very, very hard...
[Debbie Elliott:] Like how to sign up for the Girl Scouts.
[Ms. Courtney Shore:] Like how to sign up for the Girl Scouts. We think about programs like our Girls Scouts Beyond Bars, where we go into prisons so that parents who have children outside of the prison system can experience a normal relationship that benefits not just the child but the parent.
[Debbie Elliott:] When the Girl Scouts first started back in 1912, what would you say were the values at that time that made scouting relevant to girls?
[Ms. Courtney Shore:] Well, it's interesting. Juliette Gordon Low, our founder, was one of the first female aviators in this country. She cared very much about making sure that girls had an alternative to being either married or in the factory and made sure that Girl scouting from day one had badges around things like telegraphy so that they knew how to use a telegraph machine. So from the very get-go we feel that we've been a very progressive organization.
[Debbie Elliott:] Courtney Shore is a senior vice president with Girl Scouts of the USA. Thank you.
[Ms. Courtney Shore:] You're very welcome. Thank you, Debbie.

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[Steve Inskeep:] And I'm Steve Inskeep. A few words by President Obama have provoked a strong reaction in the Middle East, specifically in Israel. The president is traveling to the Middle East this week. And in an interview with NPR News before he left he suggested that he may have to press Israel harder to change its policies.
[Barack Obama:] Part of being a good friend is being honest. And I think there have been times where we are not as honest as we should be about the fact that the current direction, the current trajectory, in the region is profoundly negative. Not only for Israeli interests but also U.S. interests.
[Steve Inskeep:] Hi, Lourdes.
[Lourdes Garcia:] Hi.
[Steve Inskeep:] What does each side say about these settlements right now?
[Lourdes Garcia:] The Israelis term it natural growth, meaning that they believe because residents of settlements have children, those children should be allowed to live near their parents if they so choose and therefore build new housing. The U.S., of course, wants all settlement activity to stop completely.
[Steve Inskeep:] And then the president put out these comments suggesting not too specifically that there could be consequences if Israel continues on this course. What's the reaction?
[Lourdes Garcia:] So a lot of consternation here about the American administration's intentions. Israel is used to have the unstinting support of the United States. And when relations become strained, as they appear to be right now, the people get very, very nervous here.
[Steve Inskeep:] It's interesting that you mention the unstinting support, because the president's remarks seemed rather measured and he didn't warn of any specific consequences or a timeline. But you're saying that even so, this is a great surprise to Israel to have any kind of warning that they may be forced to change their behavior.
[Lourdes Garcia:] If, on the other hand, he faces a confrontation with the United States, then he faces another set of difficulties here, which is that people in this country get very nervous when the United States and the prime minister of this country are facing off against each other.
[Steve Inskeep:] Lourdes, do you actually see settlements growing, construction going on, even as this debate continues?
[Lourdes Garcia:] So I think it's going to be a lot there's going to be a lot of tension here in the coming weeks and certainly in the coming months.
[Steve Inskeep:] Lourdes, good to talk with you.
[Lourdes Garcia:] You're welcome.

[Michele Norris:] And I'm Michele Norris. NASA now says the earliest possible launch time for the space shuttle Discovery is late next week. The shuttle was due to blast off two days ago, but a faulty hydrogen fuel sensor forced NASA to cancel that launch two hours before liftoff. This is the first shuttle mission since the 2003 Columbia disaster, and no one wants to take chances. The Discovery has undergone a series of technical fixes, but the accident investigation board noted that the underlying causes of the Columbia accident were cultural and organizational. NASA, it said, was overconfident, under pressure, and concerns weren't always heard. Over the last two and a half years, NASA has tried to change. It's unclear how much has really improved. NPR's David Kestenbaum reports.
[David Kestenbaum Reporting:] Sometime last year, John Young walked into the astronaut office at NASA. Young is a veteran astronaut, he had walked on the moon and is sometimes called NASA's conscience. He asked how many people thought NASA had changed its culture. About 100 people were there, and he said nobody raised their hand. He told that story to the Associated Press. Shortly after, NASA's then administrator, Sean O'Keefe, responded. He said the real answer to whether NASA had changed was being measured by a consultant.
[Mr. Sean O'keefe:] Rather than have me or anybody else assert that it is or isn't properly focused or corrected or broke or whatever else-those are neat bumper stickers, but they sure can't be assessed in any way unless you have a metric and a measurement to do so.
[Kestenbaum:] The measuring was being done by a company called Behavioral Science Technology. It's run by Thomas Krause, who has a PhD in psychology. He says his company has worked with about half of the Fortune 100 companies. Their method of measuring culture? Surveys asking employees if they agreed or disagreed with various statements like, `I feel free to speak up if I have a concern.'Workers had to rate their feelings on a scale from one to five. BST consultants also coached NASA managers.
[Dr. Thomas Krause:] We would teach principles that underlie good decision-making.
[Kestenbaum:] I mean, I think to a lot of people that seems sort of obvious, right?
[Dr. Thomas Krause:] Well, yeah. I mean, that's the stuff-that's the thing about culture stuff. The things that are obvious aren't done. It's one thing to say something is obvious; it's another thing to get an organization of 19,000 people to do that in the day to day.
[Kestenbaum:] This February, BST published a 115-page report filled with graphs showing improvement. And then NASA terminated its agreement with Behavioral Science Technology. BST was about halfway through its $10 million contract. Krause says his company has had over 1,700 clients, and that's only happened a few times.
[Dr. Thomas Krause:] It's very unusual. And it's-we've never had a situation before where we were working with the seniormost leaders in the organization and they canceled it.
[Kestenbaum:] OK. So can I give you a survey?
[Dr. Thomas Krause:] Sure.
[Kestenbaum:] NASA's culture is improving.
[Dr. Thomas Krause:] Strongly disagree.
[Kestenbaum:] Krause says NASA abandoned a process of reform that was working. A NASA spokesman says the space agency simply decided to carry on with the work internally and said BST had given NASA a good start. But part of the reason for the change appears to be that NASA's new chief, Michael Griffin, doesn't think culture change is something you can graph. Griffin was asked in a press conference in April if he thought NASA's culture had improved.
[Mr. Michael Griffin:] I don't know because I don't know how to measure cultural change. You know, culture is something that you feel.
[Kestenbaum:] Griffin later said that he felt fixing the safety culture meant working on things that are taught in kindergarten. Quote, "Listen to what other people have to say, pay attention to their opinions," end quote. Since the Columbia accident, NASA has tried to address bigger systematic problems. It set up a quasi-independent safety organization that is supposed to be immune to budget pressures and schedules. Still, the track record for organizations trying to change their culture is not good. Most fail. That's the perspective of Sidney Dekker. He's a professor of human factors in aviation safety at Lund University in Sweden.
[Professor Sidney Dekker:] You can't just assign a project manager and say, `Now, OK, your project for the next two years is change our culture,'right? Just like another project manager had to solve the phone problem. It doesn't work the same way at all.
[Kestenbaum:] You need external help, he says, everybody has to be on board, and it takes years, many years. David Kestenbaum, NPR News, Washington.

[Debbie Elliott:] From NPR News this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Debbie Elliott. There are reports this weekend that the Bush administration is giving serious consideration to a military strike against Iran. The White House has said it prefers a diplomatic solution to get Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions but President Bush has been clear: He will rule out no option, including force.
[President George W. Bush:] The threat from Iran is, of course, their stated objective to destroy our strong ally, Israel. That's a threat, a serious threat. It's a threat to world peace. It's a threat in essence to a strong alliance. I made it clear and I'll make it clear again that we will use military might to protect our ally, Israel.
[Debbie Elliott:] That was President Bush in Cleveland last month. In this week's New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh cites unnamed officials who say Washington has stepped up planning for attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities. And the Washington Post reports today that Pentagon and CIA planners are exploring possible targets. One man in Washington who has been tracking the Iran nuclear issue is Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Thanks for being with us.
[Joseph Cirincione:] Thank you for having me.
[Debbie Elliott:] Now, you've been hearing rumblings about this for several weeks now but you write that you found it hard to believe.
[Joseph Cirincione:] Well, I've been saying for months that no serious consideration was being given by senior officials to these strikes, but I changed my mind in the last few weeks as friends came to me with stories of planning in the Pentagon and conversations in the Vice President's office. And then I started to hear statements coming out from senior administration officials, and it was those statements themselves that convinced me.
[Debbie Elliott:] Now, can you take me through some of those statements? I mean what you were hearing?
[Joseph Cirincione:] Well, we heard the Vice President of the United States give a major address focused on Iran. We hear the Secretary of State say that the problem with Iran goes beyond the nuclear issue, that it's the regime itself that's a threat to the Middle East. The Secretary of Defense links Iran to the global struggle against terrorism. Even vague references to 9ll, calling it the chief sponsor of terrorism. The President of the United States blames Iran for attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. And then we have a new national security doctrine that comes out that once again talks about preemptive war and labels Iran as the main threat to U.S. interests.
[Debbie Elliott:] Now, what makes you believe that this is a lead up to war instead of say just tough talk?
[Joseph Cirincione:] Well, it looks like the same kind of coordinated campaign that the administration waged before the war in Iraq. It looks like they thought that playbook worked and they're going back to it again, and once again you're seeing the threat inflated, talk about a danger that is near, that's intolerable, and the risks of military strikes being downplayed.
[Debbie Elliott:] What is the threat of Iran having a nuclear weapon?
[Joseph Cirincione:] Well, Iran is a good five to ten years away from having a nuclear bomb, that according to independent analysis and the national intelligence estimate of the United States, as reported back in August of 2005 by the Washington Post. But some believe that the threat is closer.
[Debbie Elliott:] Now, couldn't this just be a bluff? I mean you've got a diplomatic effort going on right now to try to sanction this country for its nuclear program and some countries, China and Russia, have been reluctant to do that. Could this be the way that the U.S. is trying to put pressure on this country, on those countries?
[Joseph Cirincione:] It's possible, but there is no indication that this administration wants to cut a deal with the regime in Iran. They see the regime itself as the problem. The administration wants to fundamentally transform the Iranian nation from one headed by a theocracy to one which they hope would be headed by a pro-Western democratic government. That's their goal. The nuclear program is secondary.
[Debbie Elliott:] How can the U.S. decide whether a military strike is necessary in the coming months?
[Joseph Cirincione:] The key is the threat assessment. How close is Iran really? Let's declassify the national intelligence estimate. Let's get all the information on the table and not use this as a political football where the Democrats try to get the right of the administration or the Republicans try to unleash a national estimate on the eve of a vote authorizing the use of force. Let's learn from the mistakes of Iraq and get all the facts on the table so we can make as a country an intelligent decision this time.
[Debbie Elliott:] Joseph Cirincione is Director for Nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Thank you for coming in.
[Joseph Cirincione:] Thank you for having me.
[Debbie Elliott:] In response to recent reports, the White House told the AP the US is conducting normal defense and intelligence planning as the president seeks a diplomatic solution to the Iran nuclear stand-off.

[Neal Conan:] I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Sanford trails in South Carolina, the Democrats get it on in Massachusetts, and the lady from Maine scoffs at sequestration. It's Wednesday and time for a...
[Sen. Susan Collins:] Manufactured crisis...
[Neal Conan:] Edition of the political junkie.
[President Ronald Reagan:] There you go again.
[Vice President Walter Mondale:] When I hear your new ideas, I'm reminded of that ad: Where's the beef?
[Sen. Barry Goldwater:] Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
[Sen. Lloyd Bentsen:] Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy.
[President Richard Nixon:] You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore.
[Sarah Palin:] Lipstick.
[Gov. Rick Perry:] Oops.
[President George W. Bush:] But I'm the decider.
[Neal Conan:] It's Wednesday, and as usual Ken Rudin, our political junkie, joins us to review the week in politics. Celebrity sister Elizabeth Colbert Busch takes the lead in South Carolina's special House election. A week out from the Senate primary, Massachusetts Democrats Ed Markey and Steve Lynch start to throw punches. Max Baucus joins the stampede toward the Senate exits, and the president fumes after the Senate fails to close the gun show loophole. Later in the program, readings, seminars and signings, the gigs of a poet. Charles Simic joins us. But we begin, as usual, with a trivia question. Political Junkie Ken Rudin joins us and Ken, welcome to Studio 42.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] The first trivia question in the new building.
[Neal Conan:] How about that?
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] I can't believe how exciting. OK, the question is: Montana, as you said, Montana's Max Baucus yesterday became the eighth senator to call it quits for 2014. The question is: Of all the senators who are retiring, which one ran statewide the most?
[Neal Conan:] If you think you know the answer to this week's trivia question.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] And it is a trivia question, very important.
[Neal Conan:] Of those senators retiring, who have announced their retirement.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] For 2014.
[Neal Conan:] Which one has run most often statewide? Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. The winner of course gets that free political junkie T-shirt and a fabulous no-prize button.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Unbelievable. You know why we asked that question, Neal?
[Neal Conan:] Why?
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Because we can.
[Neal Conan:] Aha, OK. In the meantime, Max Baucus, and you would think initially this is going to worry Democrats, but in fact they think they have an even better Democratic candidate in the wings.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Well first of all, before we even get that far, remember in 2012, we kept saying that Jon Tester is in big trouble because it's a Republican-leaning state, and of course and Mitt Romney's going to do very well in Montana, and he did. It was really a Butte for him.
[Neal Conan:] Aha.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] He won by 14 percentage points. But Jon Tester did win against the best Democratic candidate. Anyway, Max Baucus, the announcement, he will not seek a seventh term, is surprising. He's been in the Senate, he'll be in the Senate for 36 years. He had $5 million in the bank. But he has riled some supporters of the Democrats, are not his numbers are not great. He's angered he's one of the four Democrats who voted against the gun...
[Neal Conan:] The filibuster.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Well, the filibuster and of course the background checks, he was one of the four Democrats to do that. Anyway, former Governor Brian Schweitzer, who was two-termed, who was term limited, left office last January...
[Neal Conan:] Very popular.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Very, very popular. He's kind of a he's kind of a Chris Christie kind of guy. He's very bombastic. He's very sure of himself. Democrats love him, the opposite of New Jersey, and Republicans don't necessarily care for him. But he is very popular. If he runs, and he says he's leaning toward running, you could probably expect that the Democrats will hold on to this seat. But of course who knows? You know, we always predict you shouldn't predict anything a year in advance, and of course a lot could happen in 2014, when perhaps the when President Obama is not on the ballot.
[Neal Conan:] Well, speaking of Senate seats, there is one open at the moment in Massachusetts, occupied just a few weeks ago by the current secretary of State, John Kerry. There is of course in this state winning the Democratic primary is usually tantamount to victory in the...
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Neal loves that word.
[Neal Conan:] I love that word. In the meantime, there was a debate last night between the two Democrats touted for the nomination, and these are both members of Congress. This is Congressman Ed Markey and Rep. Stephen Lynch, and they traded barbs over homeland security. Here's Congressman Markey.
[Rep. Ed Markey:] He's taken a page right out of the Karl Rove Swift Boat playbook, and it's very sad, especially just one week after what just happened in Boston and Cambridge and Watertown.
[Neal Conan:] And here's Congressman Lynch responding.
[Rep. Stephen Lynch:] I didn't take the page from Karl Rove's playbook; I took the page from your voting record. That's where this page came from.
[Neal Conan:] And this had been a very civil conversation up until this point, Ken.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] It was. Lynch says, you're a liar; then Markey says, you're insulting. And let me just tell you, I got this tweet today from Sally Gore, who writes: Because nasty is exactly what we need in Massachusetts now, after all that happened on last Monday. And so the Democrats look, it looks likely that and the primary is next Tuesday. Whoever wins between Markey and Lynch and Markey is favored, although the numbers have narrowed a bit whoever is likely to win the general election on June 25. But all that civility, that nice Massachusetts stuff that they're known for, certainly went out the window in last night's debate.
[Neal Conan:] A few elbows being thrown.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Oh, yeah.
[Neal Conan:] In the meantime, they're talk about elbows, after the terrible bombings last week in Boston, there is now a new part of the controversy on the immigration reform effort. Those some on the right are citing the case of these two immigrants, saying maybe we ought to rethink this reform effort.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Well, you know, of course people play politics with everything. There's a new just to go off the subject for one second, there's a new gun bill, gun ad proposed by the Gabby Giffords group, and basically they're attacking Mitch McConnell and Kelly Ayotte for their votes. But they're not attacking Democrats. So everybody can you can play politics with Newtown, you can play politics with guns, but there are Republicans...
[Neal Conan:] Probably attacking Jeff Flake, too.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Well, they are, exactly, but this group is not attacking Democrats, at least not yet. But anyway, a lot of Republicans are saying well, look, you know, Russia warned the FBI about these two brothers. Why didn't the FBI come forward?
[Neal Conan:] Just asked about one of them.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Exactly, about one of them. And of course if we're having this immigration bill, I mean, you know, what about why aren't we following all these people who come into the country? Of course they were naturalized citizens, so I don't know what this would change. But I think what some Republicans are trying to do is say look, this is not about us dissing Latinos, it's about protecting our borders, and they're trying to use the tragedy in Boston to help them in that goal.
[Neal Conan:] In the meantime there is another special election coming up and that one in South Carolina. Mark Sanford, of course, the former governor of South Carolina, appears to be losing ground in his race for the Palmetto State's 1st District, a district he previously represented. In an ad released by his campaign earlier this week, he went on the attack against his opponent Elizabeth Colbert Busch for her ties to organized labor.
[Unidentified Woman:] Colbert Busch is funded by labor union special interest money, even the one who's trying to shut down Boeing. In Congress she'll return the favor.
[Neal Conan:] And now Elizabeth Colbert Busch has an ad out, as well. As opposed to that one you just heard, this one goes for the high ground.
[Elizabeth Colbert Busch:] After my first marriage, I had three young children to support. So I went back to school and made a career in business. I know the importance of a good job because I really needed one. And I know how to create good jobs because I've done it.
[Neal Conan:] And Ken, Mark Sanford has to do something because, well, Mark Sanford has to do something. He's trailing.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Well yes, this has nothing to do with Elizabeth Colbert Busch. We always like to talk about, you know, his sister is Stephen Colbert, and it's a good story and all the things like that. This is all about Mark Sanford, and of course the recent news that his ex-wife Jenny Sanford filed a complaint that he trespassed in their home on several occasions...
[Neal Conan:] Violating the court order.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Exactly. So the NRCC, the congressional committee run by the Republicans, are pulling out of the race. The Republicans have held this seat since 1981. They should be favorites. It was a big Romney district. Again, if they win, if the Democrats win it's not because of Colbert Busch, it's because of Mark Sanford.
[Neal Conan:] And he could be in some trouble. In the meantime, we have some people on the line who think they know the answer to this week's trivia question.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] A very important question.
[Neal Conan:] And that is: Of the eight members the current members of the Senate who say they will retire before 2014, or after the 2014 elections, which one has run the most often statewide? Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. And we have Jeremy on the line with us from Birmingham.
[Jeremy:] Yes, my guess is Max Baucus because he also served as Montana's U.S. House member.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] That's true. It's a very good guess. Max Baucus did run for the Senate six times, and he did run for the congressional seat for the House...
[Neal Conan:] And it's statewide because...
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] But it wasn't statewide because when Max Baucus was in the House, Montana had two members of Congress. So he didn't run two members of the House. So he didn't run statewide. So Baucus ran statewide six times, not part of the House campaign.
[Neal Conan:] Jeremy, thank you very much.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Does any of that make sense?
[Jeremy:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Let's go next to this is Will, Will with us from St. Paul, Minnesota.
[Will:] Well, I was going to guess Tim Johnson from South Dakota, but as I was sitting on hold, I remember that Jay Rockefeller used to be governor. So I'm going to guess Jay Rockefeller.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Well, Jay Rockefeller is the correct answer.
[Neal Conan:] Ding, ding, ding.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] And let me tell you why. He not only ran statewide nine times, once he ran he was elected secretary of state. Once he ran for governor and lost. Twice he was elected governor, and the rest of the time, the five times, he was elected to the U.S. Senate.
[Neal Conan:] Oh wait a minute, Ken, we're giving away two T-shirts and two buttons today. Here's a correct email answer from Corey Heaton, who is going to get one, too.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] OK, well there it is. Jay Rockefeller is the correct answer. Second place, for the record, record with an R in that word, was Tim Johnson, who was when he ran for the House did run statewide.
[Neal Conan:] Only one district.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Well, he wanted to be among his peers.
[Neal Conan:] Oh my God. All right, thank you very much. Stay on the line, Will. We'll collect your particulars. Congratulations. We'll be sending you a free political junkie T-shirt and the fabulous no-prize button.
[Will:] Wonderful. Thanks much.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks very much. In the meantime, Ken, there is some other political news in Hawaii, where of course we've had a senator appointed a replacement, but, well, there could be some opposition in the Democratic Party.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Exactly this seems to be all about ambition. Colleen Hanabusa is one of the two House members of Hawaii. She was not chosen to succeed the late Daniel Inouye.
[Neal Conan:] Over his choice.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Even though Inouye obviously wanted Hanabusa. But Governor Neil Abercrombie just picked Brian Schatz.
[Neal Conan:] His lieutenant governor.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] His lieutenant governor, and it looks like that Hanabusa will challenge Schatz in the Democratic primary. Of course this is a Democratic seat; the Republicans don't look like they'll play a force. So whoever wins the primary is...
[Neal Conan:] Tantamount.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Exactly, I know you love it. But anyway, so a little split in the Democratic Party in Hawaii.
[Neal Conan:] And there is also some sad news, a couple of national political figures who passed away since the past week, among them Bob Edgar.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Well Bob Edgar, one of the most liberal members of Congress, he was one of those Watergate babies who was first elected to the House in 1974, winning a Republican district that had not gone Democratic since 1858, when we first started this show. But anyway, he was also he was in the House from '74 to '86. He challenged Arlen Specter. Then he headed up Common Cause, a real you know, he was very concerned about the danger of money in politics, a very liberal guy. Anyway, he died on his treadmill yesterday morning at the age of 69, big shock.
[Neal Conan:] The very liberal Bob Edgar and the very conservative Howard Phillips.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Howard Phillips, right. I mean, he once was a Republican, he once was a Democrat. He later became chairman of the Conservative Caucus, and he ran for president on the Constitution Party and also the U.S. Taxpayers Party in 1992, 1996 and 2000, very, very conservative, opposed Sandy Day O'Connor because she was pro-abortion.
[Neal Conan:] Ken, stay with us. When we come back, we're going to be talking about difficult votes in Congress with former Congress members Marjorie Margolies and Chris Cannon. They'll weigh in on what it's like to vote with your gut instead of with your constituents. And, well, sometimes that can cause a high price to be paid, at least for the politician. Stay with us. We'll be back in just a moment. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan. It's Wednesday, which means we're here in our brand new studio with political junkie Ken Rudin. And so Ken, ScuttleButton winner this week?
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] There absolutely was. Yes, let me just quickly go over what the buttons were. The first button said save Voorhees Campus, it was from the New York City Community Colleges; there was an A button for the Anarchist Party; Vernon Jolly for Congress from New Jersey; Wilson Goode for mayor of Philadelphia; and there was a Buck Fella button...
[Neal Conan:] Oh, even I can get this one.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Which is?
[Neal Conan:] For he's a jolly good fella.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] That's exactly right. And but the winner you don't get the T-shirt.
[Neal Conan:] No I don't.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] But Jerica Mercato of Blackfoot, Idaho, gets the button and the T-shirt.
[Neal Conan:] Well, and political junkie column back next week?
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] It will be back next week, yes.
[Neal Conan:] A week ago today, the Senate voted down a proposal to expand background checks on gun buyers. Four Republicans crossed party lines to vote in favor of the measure; four Democrats voted against it. Several senators from pro-gun states supported the checks, despite polls showing that voters in those states opposed them. In a representative democracy, we expect politicians to make decisions in our interest, but what does that mean when it comes time to cast a vote on a specific piece of legislation? What happens if a politician's conscience does not match the desires of their district or their state? We're going to talk with two former representatives about their voting experiences in Congress. We want to hear from you, as well. Tell us about a time when your elected official cast a vote that later cost him your vote. Give us a call.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Or her.
[Neal Conan:] Or her. 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can join the conversation at our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Marjorie Margolies is a former Democratic congresswoman from Pennsylvania's 13th District and served in Congress from 1993 to 1995. She joins us now from her office in Philadelphia. Good to have you on the program.
[Marjorie Margolies:] Oh, nice to be here.
[Neal Conan:] And of course some of us will remember you as a broadcaster on I think it was Channel 4 in New York.
[Marjorie Margolies:] And well right, and Washington and worked a lot for "The Today Show."
[Neal Conan:] But you were the deciding vote in Congress on Bill Clinton's 1993 budget, and, well, it involved a tax increase on the rich.
[Marjorie Margolies:] It did, and they all lived in my district.
[Neal Conan:] And some of them voted against you after that.
[Marjorie Margolies:] Oh my gosh, yes, true.
[Neal Conan:] And what did you know when you cast that vote that it was a potential career killer?
[Marjorie Margolies:] Well, let me can I take you back there?
[Neal Conan:] Sure.
[Marjorie Margolies:] I had you know these bills are so complicated. I agreed with a good portion of the bill, did not agree with some of the it hasn't happened yet, but it only addressed entitlements on the margins, and there were other things. And I thought that the cuts were not deep enough. But when I got to the floor that night, I got a call from the president, and basically he said that, you know, that this thing had to pass. And I believed that it had to pass. And all day long on the floor, Republicans, although they were not voting for it at all, and Democrats said it had to pass. And everybody was the Republicans were high-fiving, and the Democrats were saying they were switching their votes. And I got on the telephone with him, and I said we had to discuss entitlements, we had to discuss deeper cuts, and I will only be your last vote if you need me. I think that it has to pass. And there had only been two votes like that in history, one for the draft and one for the impeachment of Andrew Johnson.
[Neal Conan:] And that last one was one of those profiles in courage that John Kennedy wrote about.
[Marjorie Margolies:] Yeah, that's true. So I, A, thought I was pretty safe; B, I really did know that it had to pass. And we came in with Clinton. So when it came down to in the House, 217-217 tie, you lose. In the Senate, the vice president breaks the tie. And it came down to that. And so and I said to them on the phone, because chairs of committees are voting against this thing. I said and you know you lose this my district. You've never had this district ever. I mean, it was the most Republican district represented by a Democrat in the country. I said, you know, you lose this district, but I won't let this thing go down. And that's what happened, and it was it was a bizarre moment in my life.
[Neal Conan:] Ken?
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Congresswoman, of course now people know you as Hillary Clinton's mother-in-law, but of course...
[Marjorie Margolies:] No, no, no, Chelsea Clinton's mother-in-law. Hillary Clinton had another mother-in-law.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Exactly, Chelsea Clinton's mother-in-law, but back then of course and of course you failed to say, and of course everybody remembers, that when you made that dramatic vote, and that was a dramatic vote, I remember it very well, the Republicans stood up and sung and serenaded you goodbye Marjorie because they knew that was the end of your career.
[Marjorie Margolies:] But actually, actually, it was the picture was much prettier than that. Bob Walker was jumping up and down. I didn't see it until the next day, jumping up and down saying bye-bye Marjorie. He was right, and he's a fantastic jumper.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] But here's my question, though: If why I mean, we're talking about profiles in courage, and ultimately you feel that you made the right vote, but why did you wait until the last second? In other words, why did you have to become the ultimate vote? Why not somebody in a safe Democratic district?
[Marjorie Margolies:] That's what that's a good question. That was my question exactly. It just wasn't there. They were all switching their I mean, they were all threatening to switch their votes and everything. And it had to pass. I mean everyone said the same thing. They didn't know what was going to happen. We nobody knew what was going to happen with this piece of legislation. The sense was that it was going to create an environment where small businesses in districts like mine could grow. And that's exactly what happened. But there was a 1.2 percent of the population with incomes that were pretty substantial were going to be their taxes were going to be increased by a bit. And there was a 4.3 cents-a-gallon gasoline tax increase. Now I had said, and it's been reported incorrectly a whole lot, that I never promised that I wouldn't raise taxes at all. I said that I was against certain kinds of increases, et cetera, but that I didn't know what was going to happen when I got down there. I said repeatedly I was not going to be a read-my-lips candidate. And yet I was you know, I was accused of lying and but I didn't. Can I be cranky? I didn't, yeah.
[Neal Conan:] Go ahead, Ken, quick question.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Just quickly, OK. It ended your career. The vote basically ended your career. Any regrets about voting that way?
[Marjorie Margolies:] No, I mean I revisit it in a strange way, but I think that's the reason and I don't want to sound this way, so excuse me all of you who are listening. I think that's the reason we send people down there. I think there is a difference between representation and leadership, and I think sometimes they cross-pollinate, and sometimes they don't. And I think we should send people down there who are not only worried about having a primary, who are not only worried about coming back, and many people down there are that way. But they should take the tough votes.
[Neal Conan:] Well, joining us now is another former member of Congress, Chris Cannon, who represented Utah's 3rd District, and he joins us on the line from Provo, Utah. Good of you to be with us today, congressman.
[Chris Cannon:] A pleasure. Good afternoon.
[Neal Conan:] And I wonder, we just mentioned primary. Does that ring a bell?
[Chris Cannon:] Yeah, I actually had a primary, you know, and lost.
[Neal Conan:] And was this another similar circumstance, where you cast a vote, and your constituents said wait a minute?
[Chris Cannon:] Well, you know, actually constituents is a lot of people, and the people who voted in the primary were not many. And the people that did vote were highly motivated and frankly, they just didn't like the idea that we should do something with 12 or more million people in America illegally. And so rather than want to solve the problem, they decided to elect someone who yammered loud about it.
[Neal Conan:] It's interesting we have you on the line, and the issue was immigration; and of course, Rep. Margolies, and that was on raising taxes on the wealthier in our country. I'm sure glad we've resolved those problems.
[Marjorie Margolies:] Yeah.
[Chris Cannon:] Leadership will do wonderful things, won't it?
[Neal Conan:] It will. But I wondered, when you cast those votes, Chris Cannon, did you think this was going to be well, you know, cost you your seat in Congress?
[Chris Cannon:] Well, in my case, we never got to the point of a vote because the Republican leadership decided that wedge issues were more interesting, and more helpful to them, than resolving problems. And so it was actually not a vote but a position. And yeah, it was significant, and clearly people would scream at me at the town hall meetings. On the other hand, you know, if you can get from a scream to a conversation, most people ultimately agree. In fact, in the case of immigration, there's like 85 percent agreement on all the issues, and it's only the people who grab the harsh extreme issues that for purposes of dividing people instead of solving problems that where you have differences.
[Marjorie Margolies:] Well, you know, the reasonableness comes in, sometimes, at three or four minutes. The commercial on television is 30 seconds. And that...
[Chris Cannon:] You're right.
[Marjorie Margolies:] I mean, it really kind of kills you every time. And the other thing that happens is that small between 10 and 12 percent of the people who are impassioned, come out. And that...
[Chris Cannon:] Right, on both sides of the spectrum.
[Marjorie Margolies:] Right, but they come out for one issue and that...
[Chris Cannon:] Right.
[Marjorie Margolies:] ...so that kills you every time.
[Neal Conan:] We want to get some callers in on this conversation. When was there a time when your senator, your congressperson, or your representative of some sort or another, cast a vote that eventually cost them your vote 800-989-8255; email us, talk@npr.org. We'll start with Susan, and Susan is on the line with us from Cedar Rapids.
[Susan:] Hi. How are you today?
[Neal Conan:] Good. Thanks.
[Susan:] Good, good. Charles Grassley just recently voted against the increased gun checks, and I voted for him a couple of times in my past in the past 40 years that he's been in office. But I won't ever do that again. The other one that he lost my vote on was, he's the one that coined the phrase "pull the plug on Grandma," with regard to Obamacare. And that lost me, too.
[Neal Conan:] Mm-hmm. So you're one way or another, Charles Grassley cannot count on Susan from Cedar Rapids.
[Susan:] That's correct. And he can also count that I will talk to every person I know, to make sure they don't vote for him, either.
[Marjorie Margolies:] And Susan has a big mouth.
[Neal Conan:] Well, we're glad Susan used it to call us. Thank you very much for the phone call.
[Susan:] Thank you. Bye.
[Neal Conan:] I wonder Marjorie Margolies, did you ever hear from constituents like Susan, individually?
[Marjorie Margolies:] Oh, my gosh. I mean, in my town meetings and things like that, I often had to be taken out with help of police. But it was extreme. Either they said I was you know, a heroine; or that I was just, you know, the antichrist. And neither was right. It was just but it was very extreme. The I had no idea how really awful it would be.
[Neal Conan:] Chris Cannon, some people can be pretty passionate on that immigration issue, too.
[Chris Cannon:] You know, I noticed that there was probably a correlation between high passion and low IQ
[Neal Conan:] Ken?
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Congressman...
[Marjorie Margolies:] You're not running for anything, are you?
[Chris Cannon:] No, no. I have the pleasure of saying, I will never run for public office again.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Congressman Cannon, that's exactly what I was going to ask you. You were one of the most con it's not that you're a liberal Republican; you were one of the more conservative members of your party and yet, you were defeated from the right. So it gives you it says something about what's happening to the Republican Party.
[Chris Cannon:] Yes, it does. And let me just say, I have a lovely sister-in-law who knows that I don't like the extremism that's happened on both sides. I mean, I think you can be very clear in your principles and your ideas, and then negotiate and discuss and come to conclusion. I passed a lot of legislation doing that. But so we're finished an evening at her house and as we're leaving a couple of years ago she stopped me at the door, and she said, you know, Chris, I sort of like the Tea Party. I looked at her, and I said, do you like the Tea Party, or do you like the idea of limited government and a balanced budget, and those kinds of things? She said, well, no; I like the idea of a balanced budget and a limited government. I said oh, OK. She's a high-IQ person. And to the degree you get people thinking and using whatever rights they do have, and wanting to work out and solve problems, America goes forward. But if you say, you know, those lousy Mexicans and start driving wedges along racial lines, then you end up with and presidential elections where 2 million fewer Mexicans voted for the Republican candidate. And that cost the Republicans the presidency. At some point, you hope that people actually start thinking about these things instead of just being driven by their flattering leaders, to harsh and untenable positions.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking with former members of Congress Marjorie Margolies and Chris Cannon, both of whom lost their seats after casting or taking some positions their constituents or at least, some voters in their districts were unhappy with. Wasn't it Sen. Bob Bennett who later found out that he'd been canonized also in Utah? Of course, Political Junkie Ken Rudin is with us. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And Congresswoman, I'm sorry. I cut you off.
[Marjorie Margolies:] No, no. That's OK. Last semester I teach at Penn University of Pennsylvania. I taught a class with David Eisenhower, who was, you know, Ike's grandson, and...
[Neal Conan:] You would have thought he would have graduated by now.
[Marjorie Margolies:] You're cute. He's fantastic.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] She's also David Eisenhower's mother-in-law too.
[Marjorie Margolies:] But we took both we took a class to both conventions, and it was extraordinary. It was great. But both of us, both David and I feel that the same center and the moderate middle had been neglected. There are very few issues that David and I disagree on. But it's this extreme that's driving both of us crazy, and a lot of the class seemed to feel very passionately about this.
[Neal Conan:] Chris Cannon said he would never run for office again. Do you hope to represent the sane middle again, Marjorie Margolies?
[Marjorie Margolies:] Wouldn't that be fun?
[Neal Conan:] I'll take that as a yes.
[Marjorie Margolies:] I'm thinking about it. I'm we're talking the person who now Allyson Schwartz now represents the 13th District is running for governor. So it would be an open seat, and so I've been talking I've been surprised at the number of people not huge numbers but the number of people who have called and said why don't you think about it, and I am doing just that.
[Neal Conan:] Let's get another caller in. This is Chris, and Chris is on the line with us from Baltimore.
[Chris:] Yes. I'm actually going to seriously reconsider voting again for Barbara Mikulski. In the new farms bill that just went through a couple of weeks ago, there was something stuck deep into it that basically makes Monsanto completely immune from prosecution for anything that might happen down the road with their genetically modified food. Among other things, I mean, it's basically been called the Monsanto provision in this bill, and as many farms as we have in Maryland and in this country, I think it was just really egregious for someone who's been in D.C. as long as Barbara Mikulski to just vote without even reading the whole thing.
[Neal Conan:] So that one part of a very large bill, that's going to decide your vote?
[Chris:] So far, yes.
[Neal Conan:] It's interesting. Thanks very much for the call, Chris. And, Ken, single-issue voters are very important, as Chris Cannon discovered, often in primaries, less so in a place like Maryland where Senator Mikulski, should she choose to run again, would be heavily favored.
[Ken Rudin, Byline:] Well, that's regards what the same with what Susan from Cedar Rapids said earlier, that she was going to vote against Chuck Grassley. But Chuck Grassley always wins big. Barbara Mikulski always wins big. But what I want to ask quickly about, Marjorie Margolies, is that you have been used as a figure when the Republicans had Obamacare, when that vote, they used you as the example of taking that kind of risk. Do you are you proud of that as a badge of honor for you?
[Marjorie Margolies:] I became a verb. I was really surprised, sure. I mean, I think that if you do something that that's you think is fundamentally right although I just hate the way it sounds: I did the right thing. I don't mean to sound it that I don't mean to sound that way. But, see, if you do something that's fundamentally right and I think people should be taking tough votes. I think we're foolish to accept folks down there not taking tough votes.
[Neal Conan:] Marjorie Margolies, thank you very much for your time. Our thanks as well to former Representative Chris Cannon. Appreciate your time. And Ken Rudin will be back with us next Wednesday with another edition of the political junkie. Up next, partying in a foreign city until four in the morning with just enough time for a change of clothes. It's a poet, right? It's TALK OF THE NATION.

[Neal Conan:] I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Women, somewhat to their surprise, find themselves on the cutting edge of the culture wars again. More than 50 years after the pill, contraceptives and conscience are an issue of debate in Congress and on the presidential campaign. Nearly 40 years after the Supreme Court legalized abortion, loud debate erupted over ultrasound legislation in Virginia and Texas, and funding for Planned Parenthood. This doesn't appear to be a contrived campaign. These issues do bubble up from time to time, abortion in particular. But most regarded contraception as something settled decades ago. So why now? We'd like to hear from women today. Have these controversies prompted you to rethink feminism and history and politics? Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. Go to npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Later in the program, Trayvon Martin and the "Invisible Man" Leonard Pitts and Jonathan Capehart on the Opinion Page this week. But first, Pamela Scully joins us from member station WABE in Atlanta, where she's professor and chair of the department of women's gender and sexuality studies at Emory University. Nice to have you with us today.
[Pamela Scully:] Thank you very much for having me.
[Neal Conan:] And have we seen a moment like this before?
[Pamela Scully:] I'm not sure an exact moment like this before but yes, I think quite often, and this would be an explanation for why now. I think in times of economic and other forms of uncertainty often containing women, talking about women's rights, in a sense trying to go back to a kind of a mythical time in the past often, you know, gets put on the agenda. So I would say that it's not new, but perhaps we are surprised to be fighting some of these battles again, yes.
[Neal Conan:] Has, in part, the definition of feminism changed?
[Pamela Scully:] Yes, I think it has. There are generational differences. So I would say one of the reasons, you know, for the kind of debates we're seeing at the moment is, in part, a sort of an irony that we've seen both this of the legacy of some of the successes of the second wave of feminism but also some of the things it was not able to accomplish, for various reasons. So for example, you know, the second wave in the '60s, '70s and early '80s was concerned with issues of equality, opening up the professions to women, reproductive rights, etc. But the things they were, I think, less able to solve unlike, perhaps, in some other countries were the in a sense transforming the workplace to allow women who also wanted to be mothers to work as well as be mothers. And so I think that's left some women out of identifying with feminism. So I think that is one of the reasons why there's still quite a broad fear of support from, I think, an agenda that doesn't call itself feminist. But I think it's also true that, you know, talking to your point about generations, that there are different feminisms, there always have been. And today I think young feminists, some will claim the name, others not, but they tend to be more willing to work with men, interested in things like sexuality, eco-feminism. And so I think perhaps also because we feminists thought that some of the battles had already been fought, there was a sort of a broader movement to embrace other issues. So it's both, I think, changes in feminism itself and maybe I think some feminists from the earlier era really got exhausted. I mean, they really fought very hard for things like Roe v. Wade. And so in that sense, it does catch one by surprise, I think.
[Neal Conan:] Well, it's also that in the process of those battles, feminism itself that term became something of a pejorative.
[Pamela Scully:] Yes, and I think that's why indeed, that the term feminism, exactly, became something that was named by people who did not see themselves as feminist. And so I think I see this in my students who, you know, when one started talking about do you believe in women's autonomy, do you think women should have access to jobs, should we get equal pay, they all say, of course. And then I say well, and would you call yourself a feminist? And there's a sort of general rustling in the room, and a few hands will come up. But in general, young women are not comfortable doing that I think precisely because feminism has been labeled as something that isn't, you know, a good thing. So yes, I think you're right.
[Neal Conan:] We want to hear from women in the audience today about whether these controversies have prompted them to rethink feminism and politics and history, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. We'll begin with Suzanne, Suzanne is on the line with us from Miami.
[Suzanne:] Hi, thank you for taking the call. I was telling the person that I was speaking to before that I'm particularly incensed at the political climate at the moment, especially the bishops. They are so incensed at the birth control situation when they did not come out in arms about the child abuse scandals, and all the priests are going on the pulpit every Sunday. And I'm a Catholic, and I find that appalling. And also I'm very incensed that they're you know, this situation is, you know, it's affecting the livelihood of women. What are we to do, just stay home and have babies? This is taking us back, you know, years. You know, we've fought so hard to get in the workplace, and now they're telling us we're not allowed to take birth control because it'll harm us.
[Neal Conan:] Yet by any objective measurement, women are far more prominent and successful in the workplace than ever before.
[Suzanne:] We are. And I think these politicians really need to take a hard look at what they're saying to women out there. You know, if you feel like, you know, you want to stay home and have babies and be barefoot and pregnant in your kitchen, then that's fine, but do not, you know, put that upon the rest of society.
[Neal Conan:] Suzanne, thanks very much for the call, appreciate it.
[Suzanne:] OK.
[Neal Conan:] And Pamela Scully, you can obviously hear the anger in her voice. Is it fair, though to put this on politicians?
[Pamela Scully:] You know, I really feel for the caller. Fair to put it on politicians, what do you mean by that?
[Neal Conan:] Well, she said the bishops, and she talked about hypocrisy, as she saw it, but she said the politicians have to learn about this. Is this something that politicians have contrived, or is this something that has come up?
[Pamela Scully:] I think that's a hard one. I think one could argue that there's a political movement to limit women's rights to reproductive justice. So for example, you know, in 2011, something like 26 states passed one or more anti-choice bills. The U.S. House of Representatives voted on, for example, two sort of choice issues twice in 2006 and '07 and then 11 times in 2011. So I think, you know, you can argue there's a political force at work here, but I think also there's a larger sort of cultural-social issue at work, which I think, you know, the world is changing. We're A, we're in economic, you know, difficulties, and the world is changing. We have much greater struggles and acknowledgement of LGBT rights. We have women, as you were saying, advancing in the workplace, and I think this makes some people scared. You know, change is scary. And so I think in history, if one looks back, often when there's fear and uncertainty in various ways, people are comfortable with a familiar story, and one of them is that women should indeed, you know, that the world would be better if women were back in a home, you know, not trying to combine work and motherhood.
[Neal Conan:] Let's go next to Pam, Pam's on the line with us from Wilson in Wyoming.
[Pam:] Hello, thank you for taking my call.
[Neal Conan:] You're on the air, go ahead.
[Pam:] For me, the irony is that we are becoming the fastest, most educated part of our population, and yet we still find ourselves being challenged for our own personal rights. And I don't know how this issue came back to the forefront. I don't know if it's politicians or insurance companies or whoever, but it's just astonishing to me that we are the most we are becoming more educated, and yet here we still are discussing this.
[Neal Conan:] And by that, the majority in college and certainly even more so the majority in graduate school.
[Pam:] And medical school and a lot of things, yes.
[Pamela Scully:] That's such a great point. I really appreciate that point.
[Neal Conan:] Pam, thanks very much.
[Pam:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Catherine Rymph joins us from member station KBIA in Columbia, Missouri, where she's associate of history at the University of Missouri. She's also the author of the book "Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage Through the Rise of the New Right." Thanks very much for being with us today.
[Catherine Rymph:] Thanks for having me.
[Neal Conan:] And we've become accustomed to seeing this in pretty much in, I guess, black and white in terms of liberal and conservative, in terms of Republican and Democrat. But I think the political narrative was not always so simple.
[Catherine Rymph:] I think you're absolutely right about that, and if you look back to the 1970s, which was really the heyday of second-wave feminism, the feminist movement was not in the beginning of the 1970s, it was not so firmly associated with the Democratic Party as it would become by, say, the mid-1980s because there were Republicans and Democrats who identified as feminists. There were Republicans and Democrats who opposed feminism, and there were there was a group of feminists within the Republican Party who identified very strongly as feminist, identified very strongly as Republicans and believed that they could use their influence to keep the Republican Party on board with feminist issues that it had supported in the past and get it on board with newer issues that were emerging in the '70s. And ultimately they failed, but there was a real moment when they were a real force.
[Neal Conan:] Yet, you talk about this transition from the '70s to the '80s. We talk about the culture wars. Everything seems to go back to the '60s.
[Catherine Rymph:] Well, yeah. I think historians would tend historians always want to complicate these narratives, but yes, yes, certainly in our popular discourse, everything goes back to the '60s. But in terms of the kind political potential of second-wave feminism, that I would say that really doesn't begin until '71, '72.
[Neal Conan:] And there is an effort then to also pass the Equal Rights Amendment, which eventually founders.
[Catherine Rymph:] Right, right, and that becomes the organizational focus of much of feminism in the 1970s. And as Pamela said before, feminism is itself very diverse and has always been diverse, and not all feminists were thought the ERA was the most important issue in the '70s. But for better or for worse, it did become the focus, and it had again as I've suggested, it had supporters in both parties, it had opponents in both parties, but eventually opposition to ERA became associated with the Republican Party largely, I would say, because of the influence of Phyllis Schlafly, who was a Republican organizer.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking with Catherine Rymph at the University of Missouri; also with us, Pamela Scully at the Emory University in Atlanta. We'd like to hear from women in our audience today. The issues of women's health and contraception back on the front lines in the culture wars. Have these controversies prompted you to rethink feminism and history and politics? Give us a call, 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. Stay with us. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan. When the first GOP presidential hopefuls readied their candidacies last summer, many political observers declared social issues would be all but absent from the 2012 campaign. Not anymore. Issues from contraception to abortion erupted in recent months. Women find themselves again on the front lines of the culture wars. We'd like to hear from women in the audience today. Have these controversies prompted you to rethink feminism and politics 800-989-8255 is the phone number. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Our guests are Pamela Scully, professor and chair of the department of women's gender and sexuality studies at Emory University in Atlanta; also, Catherine Rymph, associate professor of history at the University of Missouri and author of "Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage Through the Rise of the New Right." And let's see if we can get another caller on. This is Angie, Angie with us from Tulsa.
[Angie:] Yes, hi.
[Neal Conan:] Hi, go ahead, please.
[Angie:] Yes, I just wanted to comment that I find it interesting that a large of majority of it seems to me that these politicians that are bringing this to the forefront are not Catholic themselves, but they're sort of carrying the banner for the Catholic faith, where it seems to me that my grandmother I was raised Catholic she had 18 children. And none of her children had that many children, so they were obviously using something to avoid that. The Catholics seem to have sort of silently solved this issue for themselves within their own families and not really brought it out to the forefront, and now these non-Catholics are sort of forcing the issue for everyone, and they don't have to live with the consequences.
[Neal Conan:] Yet the church has taken a position in the forefront.
[Angie:] Right, the church does, but the families, you know and another issue, too, I doubt that the men in these families also want to have large families such as 18 children in a family, either. It's not just a women's rights issue.
[Neal Conan:] And so do you think this is going to be resolved within that issue within the Catholic community? No, I don't. I don't think it will be. I mean, the Catholic Church is run by men and, you know, men who don't have to live with children, with 18-plus children, either. So, you know, I don't think it will be resolved. But I just find it interesting that the politicians who are bringing it up, for the most part, are not themselves Catholic and don't have to live with the consequences of not having birth control in their families. All right, thanks very much for the call, Angie. And Pamela Scully, she's got a point.
[Pamela Scully:] She does, and I think, actually, this raises a question which Catherine is probably better able to answer, but is you know, why is someone like Rick Santorum getting so much support from women? Recent polls have shown that they're not fleeing. They're flocking to him. And I think this does have to do with complicated relationships between feminism and motherhood. I think it has to do with the fact that Santorum generally appeals to people who do home-schooling, who are if you are often evangelical Christian; indeed, not Catholic. But that I think the rhetoric, he's very successful in a rhetoric of fatherhood, of family, of supporting women. And I suspect that women who support him don't necessarily actually support him or anyone else actually on the issue of contraception necessarily but the package of family values, etc., etc., that is actually pulling them in and that, as the caller rightly says, I think there's a disjunction between public pronouncements about contraception being bad and what people actually practice in their private lives.
[Neal Conan:] Catherine Rymph?
[Catherine Rymph:] Yeah, I think that's absolutely true, and to pick up on a point that I think Pamela was raising about the question of a gender gap in support for the different Republican candidates and for Obama, the Wall Street Journal recently wrote an article about a poll it did that shows that Obama is winning among women versus all of these candidates, winning among women versus all of the Republican candidates but doing not so well among men. And I think oftentimes, and we've seen this in the past, the gender gap can be misinterpreted. And a good example of that is the 1980s, when 1984 in particular, when feminists in the Democratic Party noticed that Reagan was not polling so well among women. He had not done as well among women in 1980 as he had done among men. And they interpreted that, those numbers, as suggesting that if the Democratic Party just put a woman on the ticket, women would flock to the Democratic Party, and Reagan would be defeated. And so Geraldine Ferraro was nominated, and in fact that strategy was completely wrong. It didn't work at all. It backfired partly because Democrats did not pay attention to the fact that at the same time that the Republican Party was losing female voters, the Democratic Party was losing male voters, and that turned out to be very significant. But also, and I think this is important to bear in mind today and relates to the point that Pamela was making, Republicans in the mid to late '80s became very good at figuring out which women voters were likely to support Republican candidates and targeting their appeals at those women rather than just assuming all women would vote for a Democratic vice-presidential candidate. And so I think it's too soon to tell how things will play out in this election, but I would say that just because there's a lot of flak targeted towards Republicans on the birth control issue does not necessarily mean it's going to end up being a losing issue for Republicans in the fall.
[Neal Conan:] Well, we want to take it out of the partisan context, strictly. It's fair to point out there was a gender gap four years ago when these issues were not as vehement, I don't think, as they are today. But let's try to take it out of this partisan divide, good for Democrats or bad for Republicans or the other way around, and try to focus on how this issue is why this issue is coming to the forefront at this particular moment. Of course, everything gets subsumed into partisan politics, including everything gets subsumed into partisan politics, but there seems to be more going on than just that. In any case, let's see if we can get Jennifer on the line, Jennifer with us from Charlotte.
[Jennifer:] Hi, Neal. I found this topic interesting. I happen to be wearing a new T-shirt today that says feminism, the radical notion that women are people. I was which was ironically a gift from my brother. But I was fascinated I'm in my mid-'30s, and I was fascinated by the responses I've gotten today wearing it from other women. A lot of uncomfortable laughter, puzzled looks, things like that. And it is disappointing. I've always proudly identified as a feminist. I feel as if lately my peers have really shied away from that term.
[Neal Conan:] Why?
[Jennifer:] I'm not entirely certain. I don't know if it's the era that most of my peers have children, but I do feel that for example when I was in high school, my generation was very much, much more active in contraceptive rights, things like that, and now I'm not sure if the younger generation is just busy with life and is not as active or if it's a result of some of the pejorative, you know, Rush Limbaugh has been very successful with some of his femi-Nazi type of categorization of...
[Neal Conan:] It doesn't have to go that far. Catherine Rymph, we talked about this with Pamela Scully earlier, and I will get in trouble for stereotypes, but some people will hear feminist and say humorless, stern, sexless and go right down a checklist.
[Jennifer:] Yeah, which I found very disappointing because as my shirt says, it's really if you support equal rights and all of these things it's what your speaker was saying earlier you are, in fact, a feminist.
[Neal Conan:] Catherine Rymph?
[Catherine Rymph:] And I think there are a lot of I mean, it's a complicated story of figuring out exactly how that happened. But one factor that I would point to is that and it's certainly not the only factor, but that collapse of Republican feminism in the early 1980s. I think you know, in the '70s, Republican feminists really held to a vision of a feminist movement that would have advocates in both parties; you know, a feminism on both sides of the political aisle. And I think because feminism has it became maybe understood to be more one of a number of interest groups that is important to the Democratic Party; that there isn't a space for people who are more conservative, or who are Republicans, to identify as feminists. And I certainly don't think that's the only reason why there's a reluctance to identify as feminists, but I think to the extent that feminist has a political association, that also plays a role.
[Neal Conan:] Here's a point from an email from Mara: I take pride in calling myself a feminist, but a lot of people in my conservative state, Wyoming, don't see the term as a source of pride or progress. Some people I've encountered ask if being a feminist means being a man-hater. I always try to explain that it connotes quite the opposite. And so that goes along with, I think, with what Jennifer was saying. Thanks very much for the phone call. Let's see if we can go next to this is Adia am I pronouncing that correctly?
[Adia:] Adia.
[Neal Conan:] Adia in Houston, go ahead, please.
[Adia:] Yes, how are you? Thank you for taking my call. I am 40 years, and I'm an African-American woman who is a physician. So I grew up in post-civil rights, post-equal rights era, and I never grew up with the notion that I had any limitation. I could be anything I wanted to be; I could do anything I wanted to do; and that my color and my sex would not limit me. And in this current discussion about reproductive life and so many things that are now coming to the forefront, I've always thought that my mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers have fought these battles. My generation never had to worry about these things. We kind of took these things for granted. And I think it's incredibly interesting, and it's really disconcerting, that this discussion is coming up again because it seems so archaic that I don't even sure how to fight it because I actually never had to fight this part of the battle.
[Neal Conan:] Mmm, interesting. Pamela Scully took for granted.
[Pamela Scully:] I think that is true. It was taken for granted because, you know, Roe v. Wade, etc., etc. But I do think I was thinking, actually, before the caller rang, but I agree with her completely that I do wonder how race plays into all of this as well. It's not to say that there are uniform racial codings around this at all. I mean, there are differences within the black community around whether contraception or abortion rights are actually, you know, part of a sort of genocide or in fact, they are good to protect women. So there's debate there. But I do wonder how, you know who is supporting Santorum and, you know, just generally these moves, not necessarily Santorum. And I suspect it's probably whites largely white, stay-at-home mothers who feel left out by feminism; families who do home-schooling, who there's a whole story there about, I suppose, segregation of schools. I think there's a racial component here a component around race that would be a very interesting issue to explore.
[Neal Conan:] Audia, what do you think?
[Adia:] I actually agree because when you listen to the coded language that you hear, it's not only anti-woman, it's also anti-color. It's anti-black. It's anti-immigrant. And it's very limited in this acceptance of religious beliefs. And I feel that we're reversing. All of the gains have been done over the past 100 years, they're slowly reversing, and they're slowly taking away the rights of people of color and of women. So as a black woman, I feel the pressure from both sides. And it is really frightening because I like I said, I thought these battles have already been fought, and I never had to worry about this. So now I'm on my P's and Q's. I'm this is absolutely disconcerting. And it's so archaic, and it's so ridiculous that we're even having these conversations.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks very much for the call. Appreciate it. We're talking about women's issues and why they are in the forefront of the culture wars, again. Our guests are Pamela Scully, professor and chair of the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University; and Catherine Rymph, associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Missouri and author of "Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right." You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION coming to you from NPR News. And Catherine Rymph, that sense that we just heard from Audia in Houston, losses are mounting. Some things that have been won are being lost. Is that it doesn't seem that that's represented at least in terms of reproductive rights. You see some of those abortion laws in various states. But in terms of employment opportunity, no.
[Catherine Rymph:] Right. And I'm thinking back to through the original question that I think you asked at the beginning, Neal why are these social issues coming to the forefront now? And I think it's this is where the difference between a social issue and a nonsocial issue, they really become very entangled because I think from the perspective of, say, Santorum and his supporters, I think that they would articulate the concern here as being about the role of government, and it goes back to health care reform and mandates that insurance cover birth control. And from so it's perhaps they would define this not as a social issue. I mean, I think that it is a social issue. But it is very much interconnected with the debates that we're having about government right now, which are, I guess, debates we've been having for a long time, but they've taken on maybe an unexpected it's gone in an unexpected direction. We knew that there would be that health care reform would be an issue in this campaign, but perhaps we didn't know that it was going to go in this particular direction that seems to have opened up a kind of seething about issues of reproductive rights that maybe we didn't realize were so close to the surface.
[Neal Conan:] Let's go to Mary. Mary with us from Henry County in Virginia.
[Mary:] Hi. I'm an angry Virginia woman. I agree with the lady from Texas. I think this is a sneaky way of taking advantage of a population in the United States that's very afraid because of the way the economy has been. It's a great time to slide this kind of thing through. In Virginia, the transvaginal ultrasound was embedded in other legislation, and someone coming through it found it at nearly the last minute or it would have been passed, but...
[Neal Conan:] It has been put on hold, yeah.
[Mary:] It has been put on hold but there something else did pass, which is that the jelly on the belly, as they call it, they're still they still passed that. So that and I understand that they're going to you have to a child excuse me. I'm sorry. A woman who is going to have who wants to have an abortion still has to have that, still has to sign off saying that she has actually seen a picture of a what the sonogram shows or what the ultrasound shows.
[Neal Conan:] And the transvaginal procedure is, I think, still law in Texas, so...
[Mary:] Yeah. That's a law in Texas, I understand.
[Neal Conan:] So...
[Mary:] I'm really angry. I'm almost 60 years old, and we fought this. And I think that it's just it's a dial back to I mean, we cannot go back to Ozzie Nelson. When I see Rick Santorum in that vest, I think Ozzie and Harriet, people are afraid. Let's dial it back to a time where everyone looks white. And you know, it was just like it was all controlled and easy going and just like on a TV show. Well, it just isn't that way. What I can't figure out is why the same people, mostly men, who are interested in this, they want they don't want to pay for birth control. They don't want women to have access to abortion as a choice. And they also don't want to have to pay for babies that are born because they deny them access to other forms of birth control. So what is it I mean, it's a rhetorical question, but what is their answer to this?
[Neal Conan:] Well, we have to leave that rhetorical question as the last one. Mary, thanks very much for the phone call. And Pamela Scully, thanks very much for your time today.
[Pamela Scully:] Thank you so much for having me.
[Neal Conan:] Pamela Scully joined us from WABE in Atlanta, our member station there. Catherine Rymph joined us from KBIA in Columbia, Missouri. Thanks very much.
[Catherine Rymph:] Thanks for having me.

[Alex Chadwick:] I'm Alex Chadwick. A big voice and a no-holds-barred performance style two things that defined singer Frankie Lane.
[Mr. Frankie Lane:] [Singing] Keep rolling, rolling, rolling. Though the streams are swollen. Keep them doggies rolling, rawhide. Through rain and wind and weather...
[Alex Chadwick:] Frankie Lane's recording of "Rawhide" released in 1959 is familiar to generations. We learned this morning that he died yesterday at age 93.
[Mr. Frankie Lane:] [Singing] To meet where gypsies play down in some dim cafe. And dance...
[Madeleine Brand:] Frankie Lane burst unto the musical scene with this R&B-inspired hit "That's My Desire" in 1947. But he'd been kicking around showbiz for more than a decade, getting his start in the 1930s as a marathon dancer. He once danced for 3,500 hours in 145 consecutive days.
[Mr. Frankie Lane:] [Singing] I'll gaze into your eyes divine. I'll feel the touch of your lips pressing on mine.
[Alex Chadwick:] Frankie Lane went on to become one of the most popular singers of the post-war years, recording scores of hits, including 21 gold records. He also built a career as an actor, and he hosted a television variety show that ran two summers during the early '50s. Like many singers of his generation, Frankie's career was derailed by the arrival of rock and roll later in that decade, but he continued to perform and record. His last album was released just three years ago.
[Madeleine Brand:] Frankie Lane's vocal style was heavily influenced by black performers. He was an active supporter of the civil rights movement, and the first white artist to appear on Nat King Cole's variety show.
[Alex Chadwick:] In 1993, Congress declared Frankie Lane a national treasure. He died at age 93 yesterday from heart failure. Here he is singing one of his signature tunes, "Mule Train".
[Mr. Frankie Lane:] [Singing] There's a plug of chaw tobaccy for a rancher in Corolla. A guitar for a cowboy way out in Arizona. A dress of calico for a pretty Navajo. Get along mule. Get along. Mule train. Hee-hyaw! Hee-hyaw! Mule train.

[Audie Cornish:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.
[Melissa Block:] And I'm Melissa Block. We begin this hour with the unfolding scandal involving former CIA director David Petraeus. It got more complicated today, with investigators now looking into another senior office, General John Allen. Allen's the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan and he apparently exchanged hundreds of emails with the woman who triggered the investigation into General Petraeus. NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman is following the story. He joins me now. Tom, my head is spinning. Bring us up to date. What's the latest?
[Tom Bowman, Byline:] Well, Melissa, first of all, General Allen was supposed to have his Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday to become commander of U.S. forces in Europe and NATO. That's been cancelled and his nomination has been put on hold. And it's important to note that General Allen is denying he did anything improper and he told the chairman of the joint chiefs, General Martin Dempsey, he did not have an inappropriate relationship. And that the White House spokesman said today the president still has faith in General Allen. In fact, he'll remain as commander in Afghanistan, but the Pentagon wants the Senate to expedite his successor, General Joe Dunford, who may go over to Afghanistan early.
[Melissa Block:] But back up a bit, Tom, because this is yet another investigation into emails. What's at stake here? What's involved?
[Tom Bowman, Byline:] Well, the Pentagon inspector general is looking into emails between General Allen and a woman in Florida who is connected to the Petraeus case. And just to remind everybody, she's Jill Kelley. She's a socialite and a sort of a social ambassador to the military at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, where both General Allen and General Petraeus served in recent years. And I'm told that Jill Kelley's also close friends with Allen's wife, Kathy.
[Melissa Block:] And to clarify here, it was Jill Kelley who originally contacted the FBI, right, about getting these harassing emails that turned out to be from Paula Broadwell, who was General Petraeus' mistress. The question here now is, is there anything improper in the email exchanges between Jill Kelley and General Allen?
[Tom Bowman, Byline:] Well, it's important to stress, at this point, we don't know for sure. There's been an assumption of a romantic relationship, but we're hearing it may not be true. There were apparently times in the email exchanges where he addressed Jill Kelley as sweetheart, which might have raised red flags. But that also might be innocent. He's from Virginia. This might be a quaint way of addressing her. And also reports of 20,000 to 30,000 pages of emails. That might be misleading because of printouts, people being copied on these emails. Those familiar with this say we're talking a couple of hundred emails over three years or so. And again, he's denied any affair, so we really need to avoid jumping to any conclusions at this point.
[Melissa Block:] Now, Tom, General Allen has been in command in Afghanistan for a little over a year now. What can you tell us about him?
[Tom Bowman, Byline:] Well, he's a very cerebral guy. He gained fame in military circles during his Iraq service, not as a combat leader, but working with what became known as the Sunni Awakening, getting local Sunni sheikhs to break with al-Qaida and work with the Americans and the Iraqi government. By all accounts, he's upstanding. He's a naval academy grad who said if he didn't go into the military, he would've become an archeologist. He was a fan of Gertrude Bell, the British Arabist.
[Melissa Block:] Huh. Why do you think, Tom, what have you heard? Why is the Pentagon looking into these emails?
[Tom Bowman, Byline:] Well, first of all, the volume of email traffic and also its connection to the Petraeus case. And Petraeus, of course, resigned over his affair. And also, we're talking about, you know, there's a concern there might be scheduling information in here, people going leaving MacDill Air Force base, going on trips, there may be some sensitive information in these emails.
[Melissa Block:] Okay. NPR Pentagon correspondent, Tom Bowman. Tom, thanks.
[Tom Bowman, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Scott Simon:] An independent agency that investigates police conduct has released a body and dash cam video of the shooting of Paul O'Neal an 18-year-old unarmed black teenager. He was shot to death by Chicago police last week as he ran from a stolen automobile in the city's South Shore neighborhood. The head of that agency called the video, quote, "shocking and disturbing." The incident comes as more questions are being raised about policing and as Chicago's homicide rate has continued to rise. I'm joined now by Carol Marin, columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and political editor of WMAQ-TV and "Chicago Tonight." Carol, thanks for being back with us.
[Carol Marin:] Good morning, Scott.
[Scott Simon:] Why was this video released more quickly than they have usually been?
[Carol Marin:] I think it is in reaction, strong reaction, to the question of police accountability. And the agency that released it now has a new director and a new mission of greater accountability. And so Sharon Fairley did what her predecessors did not. She responded almost immediately.
[Scott Simon:] Any concern you've heard from county prosecutors, for example, that releasing the video could jeopardize any eventual prosecution of police officers, if that's what it comes to?
[Carol Marin:] There is always there is always that concern. But part of the problem here in Chicago right now is that there is no full faith and credit in the police department by communities that are beset by shootings, both from individuals, gang people, but also situations where police and black youth end up in the exchange of gunfire.
[Scott Simon:] Yeah. You've seen the video?
[Carol Marin:] I've seen the video. There are nine videos actually.
[Scott Simon:] Yeah. The O'Neal family says that it shows cold-blooded murder. There is certainly rough language. I saw about nine minutes of one video. I think a lot of civilians might it's a confusing thing to see. It's a it's a crime scene after all, and it begins with the police car being sideswiped by a car stolen by the young man. At least one officer thought he'd been shot at.
[Carol Marin:] Right. And it is it is, among other things first of all, you do not see the shooting of the 18-year-old because the officer who did the shooting, the fatal shooting, which was a gunshot to the back, was not his his personal camera, body camera, was not turned on for whatever reason. But you see the vantage point of nine cameras, some worn by police officers, some on the dash boards of the car. And what you see is the kind of adrenaline and mayhem of police officers trying to corner a suspect. And so when you finally do see Paul O'Neal, he is on the ground, face down. He's being handcuffed. Blood is coming out of his back. An officer has a foot on one of his legs as if to restrain him. And there's confusion because police are saying to each other, did you shoot? Were you shot at? And so there is a kind of mayhem quality.
[Scott Simon:] In the time we have left, police and others have suggested that some of this, once again, an increase in homicide is because many gang leaders have been jailed or killed. How does that follow?
[Carol Marin:] Part of it is that public housing was taken down in Chicago. There's been a kind of dispersing of gang followers. The leadership seems to be missing. So even in gangs, there is organization, and there isn't here, and it contributes to some of the chaos we're seeing in the street.
[Scott Simon:] Carol Marin in Chicago, thanks so much for being with us.
[Carol Marin:] You're welcome.

[Mary Louise Kelly:] Sunday night on the Las Vegas Strip was chaos with people running from the path of bullets. There were also reports of multiple shooters, which turned out to be false. Through it all, emergency responders were trying to save the wounded. One of them was Caitlin Medina. She's a young, advanced EMT who's been doing this for about a year and a half. NPR's Leila Fadel spent the morning with Medina as she returned to her regular shift.
[Unidentified Woman:] Morning, Ms. Caitlin.
[Caitlin Medina:] Good morning, Ms. Marla oh, you know, just living the dream.
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] Caitlin Medina greets colleagues on her way to her truck at Community Ambulance where she's an advanced EMT. She has on her pink breast cancer awareness shirt, a sparkly headband adorning her blond hair and her usual positive attitude. Her partner, Sarah Derleth, is already inside the truck.
[Sarah Derleth:] We need to still wipe everything down because I found remnants of it.
[Caitlin Medina:] Yeah, we've been going through our trucks, unfortunately. With everything that's happened and we find blood in random spots in our...
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] You wouldn't know it by looking at her, but 20-year-old Medina is back to work after being a first responder during Sunday's massacre. Laughing with Derleth helps.
[Caitlin Medina:] [Laughter].
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] She's back to regular days where the calls are about chest pains, stomach aches or maybe one gunshot wound, nothing like what she witnessed this weekend when she arrived at the grounds of the country music festival with an active shooter still out there.
[Caitlin Medina:] Walking into that seemed absolutely like a horror movie bodies everywhere, just everywhere.
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] It looked fake, she says. She loaded people into trucks, decided who had a fighting chance and piled them in, sometimes five at a time, to get to the hospital. She was in work mode, she says. But there is one moment that haunts her a woman lying on the road, wounded.
[Caitlin Medina:] She unfortunately took a fatal shot to the head but was still alive. And I had to sit there and make that decision on, do I call for help?
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] She knew nothing would save her.
[Caitlin Medina:] I didn't have the heart to just let her stay there by herself and be alone. And so I sat there with her until she took her last breath.
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] The only thing to do now, she says, is to keep going.
[Caitlin Medina:] I think that the one day off was more than enough only because sitting at home allows you to dwell on it getting back into the swing of things and back into your normal life and having those moments of, oh, that sucked.
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] Medina's partner, Derleth, is also her best friend.
[Caitlin Medina:] Did the boys end up winning their game last night?
[Sarah Derleth:] Yeah.
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] It's slow today, so they have time to talk about Derleth's kids. The joking, the laughing it brings lightness to tough moments. She brainstorms with Derleth about ways to subtly look Halloweeny during their upcoming Halloween shift.
[Caitlin Medina:] I did find these Ninja Turtle ones. It's a shirt with, like, kind of, like, a tutu.
[Sarah Derleth:] Yeah, but we can't wear those because of our shirts.
[Caitlin Medina:] We'll probably might need to make this happen.
[Sarah Derleth:] [Laughter].
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] Bad things happen, she says. This was a really big one, but it doesn't mean she walks away from this work.
[Caitlin Medina:] Being on the ambulance gives me joy. Like, I love what I do. I genuinely love what I do. So being back at a spot where I can do what I love brings me a peace of mind.
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] She was made for this, she says. And more than ever, she feels like she's making a difference. Leila Fadel, NPR News, Las Vegas.

[Linda Wertheimer:] Time now for sports. Its spring and its playoffs, the march to the Stanley Cup is under way in hockey. NBA teams are still jostling for spots in their post-season. Joining us to sort it all out is NPR sports correspondent Tom Goldman. Hey, Tom.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] Hello.
[Linda Wertheimer:] So, Tom, five months ago, we were not sure there would an NBA season. A labor dispute threatened to wipe out the whole year. In the end, it only shortened the season from 82 to 66 games. But it seems like the fans are OK with that.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] Yeah, absolutely. You know, and I was as grouchy as the next NBA fan; those blasted owners and blasted players with their $5 million average salary. But you know what? Great hoops have cured the grumps. And every night, this condensed season means nightly action. And it's been heating up as we get closer to the playoffs, which happen to start two weeks from today. We've had great games this week between Eastern Conference powers, Chicago and Miami the Bulls won in overtime. So there's been great drama, great intrigue. And, Linda, the race for the championship is wide open. I would say between seven and 10 teams can make a case. TV ratings up from last season, which was an extremely popular season especially the playoffs. And season ticket renewals are at about 80 percent. It's a good clip.
[Linda Wertheimer:] So, this very intense schedule has been fun for the fans, but what about the players?
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] Yeah, not so much. The players' bodies are getting the worst of it. Your reigning league Most Valuable Player, Derrick Rose, has missed a lot of games because of injury. You've got Jeremy Lin remember Linsanity out after knee surgery. And aside from the big injuries, you've just got a lot of basic soreness and fatigue. The coaches are trying to rest players when they can, but you don't have many off-days. And the coaches are having to decide between practice and rest, both of which are important.
[Linda Wertheimer:] In pro hockey, Tom, the NHL playoffs are already under way. Our Capitals are in the hunt. The first game between Nashville and Detroit was punctuated by a nasty hit from Shea Weber on Henrik Zetterberg. And Weber got off, should, you know, can we say pretty close to scot-free for that?
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] I think we can; a $2,500 fine which is pocket change for most professional athletes, for grabbing Zetterberg's head and shoving it into the glass. You watch the replays and listen to the commentators and they sound certain that a suspension would be coming, especially since the league is supposed to be cracking down forgive the pun on head injuries. But Zetterberg wasn't injured and that apparently is why Weber wasn't suspended. Then in L.A.'s first game against Vancouver, you've got one player getting suspended two games after he plowed into another guy against the boards. The guy was injured and that apparently played into the suspension. So it seems that the league should b looking at intent as well as the result of these incidents. With this inconsistent policing and the NHL still won't outlaw all hits to the head, you know, it just turns some people away from the sport. And it's a sport that can be breathtakingly exciting without all the head smashing.
[Linda Wertheimer:] NPR sports correspondent Tom Goldman. Tom, thank you.
[Tom Goldman, Byline:] You're welcome.
[Linda Wertheimer:] You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.

[Linda Wertheimer:] In Pakistan, numbers of heavily armed gunman attacked the Sri Lankan cricket team today. The team was on its way to a match in the city of Lahore. Several players were wounded. Five police officers were killed in the attack, which is sure to raise tensions in the region. The incident comes just three months after the deadly assault in Mumbai. NPR's Philip Reeves is at the scene in Lahore and joins us now. Good morning, Phil.
[Philip Reeves:] Good morning.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Can you give us a picture of just what happened?
[Philip Reeves:] Yes, the Sri Lankan cricket team was traveling in a bus to the cricket ground and it was under police escort. And when it reached a circle, a big circle in the middle of Lahore, it was basically ambushed by anything between seven and 12 gunman. Those gunman arrived by car. Some of them blocked off the traffic. Others of them advanced towards the coach and the police escort van and opened fire on it. And one of them fired a rocket propelled grenade. We're not sure whether the idea was to hit the coach with that or whether it was diversionary. It landed in the front of a shop. Gunfire sprayed all over the area. The police were hit and killed, and the players and the coach dived for cover.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Are there any obvious suspects? Anybody know who did this?
[Philip Reeves:] Well, the range of possible suspects is quite large. It could be the Taliban and al-Qaida, who are fighting in the northwest of Pakistan against the Pakistani military. Suspicions abound, though, to point at the possibility that this is Lashkar-e-Taiba, the same group that carried out the attacks in Mumbai in India; it's a jihadi group related to Kashmir. And also let's not forget there's a civil war going on in Sri Lanka in which the government there is close to inflicting a complete military defeat on the Tamil Tiger separatists that they've been fighting for a quarter of a century. And so some are suggesting that we shouldn't rule out the possibility this is the Tamil Tigers. But no one knows the answer to that question for sure.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Phil, were any of the gunman killed or captured?
[Philip Reeves:] No, they escaped and there's a search going on right now in Lahore for them. The police have set up some checkpoints. There's a much larger than usual presence of the security forces on the streets of Lahore, and they say that they're making an effort to find these guys. There's some interesting footage shot perhaps on a mobile phone or on some armature device that's emerged which shows these gunmen actually shooting, two of them standing on the circle walking backwards very coolly, shooting at the bus belonging to the Sri Lankan cricketers and the police escort van.
[Linda Wertheimer:] NPR's South Asia correspondent Philip Reeves is in Lahore, Pakistan. Thanks very much, Phil.
[Philip Reeves:] You're welcome.

[Melissa Block:] A year and a half into the Obama presidency, and just in time for last night's presidential address, the Oval Office has gotten a makeover: new sofas, new coffee table, new wallpaper, and a new oval carpet, all made in America. The new rug features the presidential seal, of course, but also some of the president's favorite historical quotes. The rug was donated by Scott Group Custom Carpets, which also made President Clinton's Oval Office rug. The company's co-owner, Rich Ruggeri, says the Obama rug is among the most spectacular they've ever made.
[Mr. Rich Ruggeri:] The rug's done in very warm, soothing colors: wheat, cream, blue. You look at the photographs, and you'll see the presidential seal. There's 13 clouds above the eagle. There are 13 bands that are in the actual shield on the eagle, 13 leaves in the olive branch and then the 13 arrows that are in the talon of the eagle. And the eagle is facing towards the olive branch, which is really a sign of -we're a peaceful nation. It has the notable quotes around the perimeter of the rug.
[Melissa Block:] One of those quotes, from FDR: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
[Mr. Rich Ruggeri:] Correct. The arc of moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. That was Martin Luther King. The government of the people, by the people, for the people, that was obviously President Abraham Lincoln. No problem for human destiny is beyond human beings, that was President John F. Kennedy. And then the last presidential quote was the welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us, and that was President Theodore Roosevelt.
[Melissa Block:] Now, when we say the rug was made in America, was every component of the rug made in America?
[Mr. Rich Ruggeri:] It was. Our factory is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There were a team of 30 craftsmen who really put their hands on this product and put 570 hours into producing this rug. It is the pinnacle of all installations, and it's the most powerful office in the world, and it reflects what is done here in America by great craftsmen making great product right here in the United States.
[Melissa Block:] Mr. Ruggeri, we've been reading that this new Oval Office rug is made from 25 percent recycled wool. Is that the case, and what does that mean?
[Mr. Rich Ruggeri:] What that means is that when we were producing the rug, we looked at the components going into the rug, the number of colors, the size of the rug, the number of pounds of wool yarn that were going to go into actually physically hand-sew this rug and working with the designer and the president's team to try to figure a way to use reclaimed and recycled materials. And what we felt that we could do is use 25 percent recycled materials within our building. Those yarns were in the building from previous projects that we had in the building, and we used that percentage back into the rug.
[Melissa Block:] Aha, so it doesn't mean another rug or carpet was unwoven and reconstituted in this Oval Office rug?
[Mr. Rich Ruggeri:] Yeah, you physically couldn't do that effectively. You would not get the structure of the product that we've been noted for globally, and let alone putting it into the president's office and having a rug that we don't know how it's going to perform. There's no history with anything like that.
[Melissa Block:] I have heard a little concern expressed about the presidential dog, Bo, and the possible effects on this rug, which is light in color, right?
[Mr. Rich Ruggeri:] It is somewhat light in color around the actual presidential seal. You know, I'm not concerned about if the president's dog potentially has an accident.
[Melissa Block:] You're not concerned?
[Mr. Rich Ruggeri:] No. I mean, wool is a natural fiber that cleans very easily, and I'm sure with his team of people and himself, if there happens to be an accident, I'm sure he'll get after it.
[Melissa Block:] They could take care of that, you think?
[Mr. Rich Ruggeri:] I think so.
[Melissa Block:] Well, Rich Ruggeri, thanks for talking to us about the new rug in the Oval Office.
[Mr. Rich Ruggeri:] Thank you for your time.
[Melissa Block:] Rich Ruggeri is co-owner of Scott Group Custom Carpets.

[Melissa Block:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
[Robert Siegel:] And I'm Robert Siegel. The US military in Afghanistan says it's investigating allegations that American soldiers desecrated the bodies of two dead Taliban fighters. A videotape also appears to show the men mocking Islamic customs in an effort to taunt other guerrillas into a fight. As NPR's Corey Flintoff reports, the US is worried that the tape could provoke a backlash against Americans in Muslim countries around the world. COREY FLINTOFF reporting The allegations surfaced in a TV program aired by Australia's SBS Television Network. It contained video that showed American soldiers burning the bodies of two suspected Taliban fighters in a remote mountainous area in southern Afghanistan. Stephen Dupont, the journalist who shot the video, said he was embedded with the Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade, and that the men were following orders.
[Mr. Stephen Dupont:] Basically, you know, we'd been told to burn the bodies because the bodies have been here for 24 hours and they're starting to stink. So for hygiene purposes, this is what we're going to do.
[Flintoff:] Later, Dupont said some soldiers from a psychological operations unit, psyops, positioned the bodies so they were facing toward Mecca and used loudspeakers to broadcast taunting messages in the direction of a nearby village, which was believed to be harboring Taliban fighters. One soldier shown in the video translated the message this way: `Attention, Taliban: You are all cowardly dogs. You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burned. You're too scared to come down and retrieve their bodies. This just proves that you're the lady-boys we always believed you to be.' Ibrahim Hooper is the communications director for CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. He says the actions of the psyops team were a deliberate effort to inflame Muslim sensibilities.
[Mr. Ibrahim Hooper:] Muslims, when you bury the dead, you position them-the bodies facing Mecca. And also, cremation is prohibited by Islamic tradition. So to have American military personnel mocking these religious traditions and sensitivities sends a very negative message to Muslims in Afghanistan and throughout the world.
[Flintoff:] Stephen Dupont told an Australian interviewer that he didn't believe the men who set fire to the bodies knew they were violating Muslim traditions, but the psyops soldiers did.
[Mr. Stephen Dupont:] I think that the psychological operations unit that did the broadcast of the incident with the Taliban, including some other broadcasts-I think they're quite well aware of it. These are older guys. I mean, that's their job. They're psyops, you know; they use this as a weapon.
[Flintoff:] Major Matt McLaughlin, a spokesman for the Army Central Command, says the Army has launched a criminal investigation. Major MATT McLAUGHLIN [Spokesman, Army Central Command]: These are extremely serious allegations. That's absolutely unacceptable behavior. But let us be very clear: It is the policy of the US military to treat all human remains with absolute respect and dignity, consistent with the Geneva Convention. Anything else is absolutely unacceptable. A US military official familiar with the issue said the investigation was ordered by the highest levels of the US command in Afghanistan, and said the video was regarded as `horrific.' Ibrahim Hooper says the Council on American-Islamic Relations is concerned that the incident is one of many that represent a coarsening of attitudes among US military people who are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. He says his group fears that some returning soldiers may bring those prejudices home with them.
[Mr. Ibrahim Hooper:] We're concerned that you're going to eventually have a lot of American military personnel coming back from these areas with very negative attitudes about Islam and Muslims. And what will happen when these people are interacting with the millions of fellow citizens who are Muslims?
[Flintoff:] The Afghan government said it has opened its own investigation into the incident. US officials, meanwhile, are concerned that the charges could spur another round of protests like those last May, triggered by allegations that US interrogators had flushed a Koran down a toilet at Guantanamo Bay. Corey Flintoff, NPR News, Washington.

[Scott Simon:] A year ago today, people in Turkey watched elements of the military try and fail to overthrow the government. A harsh crackdown followed. More than 50,000 people were arrested. NPR's Peter Kenyon reports that officials in Turkey are using the anniversary to justify the fallout from that attempted coup and its profound impact on Turkish life.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] People across Turkey were stunned a year ago as renegade soldiers tried to topple the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Until that night, everyone believed Turkey had finally put its troubled history of military coups behind it. A year later, the shocking events of July 15, rocket attacks and street battles have been packaged into emotional documentaries by state-funded news channel. Their focus is on the heroism of those who stood against the coup not on the massive intelligence lapse that failed to see it coming. A year after the coup, Turkish security forces continue to raid homes, businesses and schools in a crackdown that shows no sign of abating after 140,000 sackings and tens of thousands of arrests. Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu told reporters the emergency powers are vital to making sure there are no more coup conspirators hiding inside or outside the government.
[Suleyman Soylu:] [Through interpreter] Whoever these perpetrators are and whoever is behind them, we make a promise to our noble nation, we will hold them to account.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] But the crackdown has broadened out to include teachers, journalists, civil servants people, critics say, with no connection to the coup attempt. Lately, there has been some pushback. At an opposition march last weekend, I met Aysun, a history teacher who had lost her job in the purge. She said she had nothing to do with the coup or with the U.S.-based cleric Turkey accuses of masterminding it.
[Aysun:] [Through interpreter] I'm a victim of the purge. It's been almost a year since I was fired. And economically and psychologically, I've been hit really hard.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] As far as Aysun can tell, authorities found a certain messaging app on the phone of her school's director one the government says the coup plotters used. After that, she says dozens of liberal, secular teachers were fired, including her. The government rejects claims that the purge is politically motivated or that Turkish democracy is being undermined. Erdogan said this week that complaints about sacked civil servants or jailed journalists fail to take into account the pressure the government is under to make sure another coup doesn't happen.
[President Recep Tayyip Erdogan:] [Through interpreter] Turkey is not a country with no press freedom, no free expression. That's not true. But let me be clear, it's not possible to have unlimited freedom of the press. If the media is willing to harm the country, then they must face the judiciary.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] Erdogan says things are starting to turn around, but it's still too soon to end the state of emergency imposed last July, which gives him sweeping powers. He's vague about when it might end.
[President Recep Tayyip Erdogan:] For sure, we will finish this emergency when there's no longer a need for it. It's possible that the state of emergency will conclude in the not so far future.
[Peter Kenyon, Byline:] An appeals panel is being set up so people can try to get their jobs back. It's likely to be a large and growing caseload with more firings and more arrests expected this summer. Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Istanbul.

[Kelly Mcevers:] Presidential candidates deliver hundreds of stump speeches over the course of their campaigns, and this week we're listening closely to the messages that the two major party candidates deliver in city after city. Yesterday we heard Hillary Clinton. Today it's Donald Trump. NPR's Sarah McCammon has heard many, many of his speeches as she follows his campaign, and she's with us now. Hi there.
[Sarah Mccammon, Byline:] Hey, Kelly.
[Kelly Mcevers:] Donald Trump tends to deliver his stump speeches at these big rallies in these big arenas. Just tell us what that's like.
[Sarah Mccammon, Byline:] You know, Kelly, they're all pretty similar. I mean early in the campaign, he used to be really free form and never speak from a script. He's been more scripted lately, but you know, just about every stump speech hits some of the same major themes. We're going to listen now to parts of a speech that Trump gave late last week in Pensacola, Fla. Now, there's always a rotating playlist of very loud music at these rallies. This one opened up with the country song "God Bless The USA."
[Lee Greenwood:] [Singing] And defend her still today...
[Donald Trump:] Now this is a crowd. There are thousands of people outside that can't get in fantastic. Way to go. Thank you. Thank you, everybody.
[Sarah Mccammon, Byline:] So Kelly, that was true in this case. There was a big, long line of people who couldn't get in. But Trump tends to say this regardless of the size of the crowd. He pumps them up by telling them that they're part of a movement, and there's a consistent way in which he tries to demonstrate that.
[Donald Trump:] Polls came out today. We're up in Ohio. We're up in Florida. We're up in North Carolina up. We're up nationwide. CNN two days ago up nationwide.
[Kelly Mcevers:] OK, so Donald Trump just cited a CNN poll there, but we also often hear him spending a lot of time during his stump speeches actually attacking the media, right?
[Sarah Mccammon, Byline:] Right. At just about every rally, he points back to the reporters gathered at the back of the room and calls them dishonest. And you know, again, he's working with the people in the crowd here who almost always turn around and boo.
[Donald Trump:] And with thousands of people outside, I challenge those cameras to show this arena packed. They never do. They never do. They never, ever do.
[Sarah Mccammon, Byline:] Now, the truth is a lot of crowd photos are taken by the media at Trump rallies...
[Kelly Mcevers:] Yeah.
[Sarah Mccammon, Byline:] ...Because the crowd is just such a huge part of the story.
[Kelly Mcevers:] OK, so whipping up the crowd that's clearly a thing that he does at these stump speeches. When he does start talking about substance, what is his message?
[Sarah Mccammon, Byline:] So his attacks on the media are kicking off an indictment of something bigger, what he calls the rigged system. He says the establishment, the government, the mainstream media have created rules and institutions that are hurting average Americans.
[Donald Trump:] All the people who've rigged this system and we have had a rigged system for their own personal benefit are trying to stop our change campaign because they know that their gravy train has reached its last stop.
[Sarah Mccammon, Byline:] And it doesn't take long before Trump lands this message right on his opponent.
[Donald Trump:] It's been happening long enough. And the reason they don't do anything about it is because the special interests and the donors control our politicians, and they control Hillary Clinton.
[Kelly Mcevers:] Does Trump lay out how exactly he thinks the special interests and the donors have controlled politicians?
[Sarah Mccammon, Byline:] He doesn't say quite how, but he walks through all the things he says have gone wrong because of people, he says, like Hillary Clinton you know, her handling of the attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, and the private email system she kept while secretary of state.
[Donald Trump:] Hillary Clinton has presided over the greatest series of foreign and you know this I mean the greatest series that I've ever seen of foreign policy failures and mistakes and blunders that anyone has ever seen. Everything she touches has turned bad. Now she wants to be president. I mean the only thing she's done well and she'll go down in history for, I have to admit, is getting out of trouble with the emails. That's the single greatest achievement of Hillary Clinton. True.
[Unidentified Crowd:] [Chanting] Lock her up. Lock her up.
[Kelly Mcevers:] And you can hear the crowd chanting lock her up there. So that is Donald Trump's case against Hillary Clinton. How does he lay out his own agenda?
[Sarah Mccammon, Byline:] So there are a couple of key issues he always mentions in really every stump speech. Let's hear that.
[Donald Trump:] We're going to pursue new trade policies that put American workers first, and we're going to keep our jobs in our country.
[Sarah Mccammon, Byline:] So he's promised to cut better trade deals, even renegotiate existing deals like NAFTA. And then of course there's the issue that's been the core of his campaign.
[Donald Trump:] We will also have a very, very strong border... ...That stops people and drugs and those drugs are poisoning our youth and poisoning our people from illegally pouring into our country. And we will build the wall, and Mexico will pay for the wall.
[Kelly Mcevers:] Building this wall of course has been Trump's biggest, most consistent promise of this campaign. Is it also you know, during these speeches, is it the biggest moment?
[Sarah Mccammon, Byline:] Yeah, I mean there are a lot of big moments. It's not just the wall. It's his promise to build up the military, to be tough on our adversaries. And all these lines in Trump's speech feed into the iconic idea of his campaign. We will be strong. We will be safe. We will win again. Ladies and gentlemen, we will make America great again. Thank you very much. God bless you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody.
[The Rolling Stones:] [Singing] A glass of wine in her hand...
[Sarah Mccammon, Byline:] And often Trump closes his rallies with this Rolling Stones song "You Can't Always Get What You Want," which matches the kind of defiant tone of his speeches.
[Kelly Mcevers:] That's NPR's Sarah McCammon Thank you.
[Sarah Mccammon, Byline:] Thank you.
[The Rolling Stones:] [Singing] You can't always get what you want. You can't always get...

[Mary Louise Kelly:] To Pakistan next, where people are clamoring for the public hanging of an alleged serial killer. A warning there are details coming over these next four minutes or so that could disturb some listeners. This story begins with a little girl. She was found in a trash heap after being raped and killed. It is an awful story. And among the many questions it's raising is whether her death might lead to changes in Pakistan. NPR's Diaa Hadid visited her hometown today, and Diaa joins me now. Hi.
[Diaa Hadid, Byline:] Hey there, Mary Louise.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Tell us what this little girl's name was and what you found when you visited her town.
[Diaa Hadid, Byline:] So this little girl her name was Zainab Amin. She was 7 years old. And she was from a provincial cotton mill town called Kasur. It's about an hour from where I am. And it could be anywhere in Pakistan except for this. Just about every kid I saw was escorted. And when I asked their parents, their grandparents and their older siblings why these kids weren't running around freely like they are anywhere else in Pakistan, they said it was because they were afraid of letting them out alone. One of the people I spoke to is a human rights lawyer called Waqas Abid, and here's what he had to say. He really echoes what residents were feeling.
[Waqas Abid:] This is very painful for me. Whenever they go to the school, I try to drop them myself. And we all family members are very much careful. It's very painful when I think that what happened with the innocent children in our city.
[Diaa Hadid, Byline:] So when he says the innocent children in our city, what he's talking about is that activists count here that 13 children were raped and killed over the past two years here. The 13th child was Zainab.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Now, police believe they have found the alleged killer. He's been arrested. Is that right?
[Diaa Hadid, Byline:] That's right. He's a 23-year-old construction worker, and he lived about a minute's walk from where Zainab lived. And I spoke to his neighbors today, and they said he'd like to go to the roof of their building to watch the girls in the pink-painted primary school that's just across the narrow alleyway.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] To look down at the girls school it's awful. It sends chills up your spine.
[Diaa Hadid, Byline:] Yeah.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] Let me ask you this. He's been caught, but you said people are still scared of letting their children out to run around freely. Why?
[Diaa Hadid, Byline:] Because people worry that there might be another murderer. And it really just it just gets to the heart of the problem in Kasur and generally in Pakistan is that people don't trust the police. They don't trust the government. They see their officials as corrupt, inept, inefficient. And they see them as being subservient to the rich and contemptuous of the poor. And most of the families whose children were killed here are quite poor.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] So Diaa, people are furious, I gather. There have been riots. There have been calls for this suspect to be hanged if he's found guilty. People have attacked the police station where he was being held. Do we know yet what the lasting impact might be, what changes this might result in going forward?
[Diaa Hadid, Byline:] So when I was in Kasur today, I went to the police station which still reeks of smoke from when residents tried to burn it down. And there was still smashed cars in the yard. And police said that the furor around this case really changed things, and it forced the state government to throw more resources and money at this case, which is why they were able to solve it. And so that's one important change that we might see looking forward is that the government will be reluctant to let these cases drag on like they did in the past.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] I also wonder, Diaa. Is it significant just that this is we are talking about this girl by name. Her family has come forward. The national press is all over this story. Are there more cases coming to light as a result of what happened to her?
[Diaa Hadid, Byline:] Yeah, there are. I spoke to one NGO worker who said that he counted 100 more cases that had come forward after Zainab's death created this...
[Mary Louise Kelly:] One hundred wow.
[Diaa Hadid, Byline:] ...Enormous response in the media. One hundred and those aren't cases that happened after she was killed. They're families who were reluctant to say what had happened to their children, who found the courage to come forward. That in itself is a pretty big deal here.
[Mary Louise Kelly:] That's NPR's Diaa Hadid reporting from Lahore. Diaa, thank you.
[Diaa Hadid, Byline:] Thank you, Mary Louise.

[Alex Chadwick:] April 15th was Saturday. But the deadline to file your taxes is actually midnight tonight in most places. Some of us will get a refund. Others will be sending money to Uncle Sam. And that raised a question for the Explainer Team at the online magazine Slate. What exactly does happen to those checks we send to the U.S. Treasury? Here with the answer is Slate's Andy Bowers.
[Mr. Andy Bowers:] The money ends up in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. But it makes a few pit stops along the way, depending on whether you pay with a paper check or electronically. Taxpayers who owe money are instructed to send their tax forms and their check or money order to an Internal Revenue Service center. If you pay with paper, your payment goes from the post office or service center to what's called a lock box bank, essentially, the equivalent of a really expensive P.O. box. Lock box banks are often used to process high volume mail, such as utility payments, and they're outfitted with equipment that allows for high-speed envelope opening. The lock box bank deposits your check into an in-house Treasury Department account. A bank official logs all of the tax payments that have cleared, and eventually wires the money electronically to the Treasury General Account at the Federal Reserve Bank. The government has your cash in its main account by the next business day. The system works differently for electronic filers. Once you provide your bank information to the IRS, what's called the Electronic Federal Tax Payment System transfers the money you owe, from your account, directly into the government. The IRS does not take American Express, or Visa, or any other credit card either. But third parties do offer this service for a fee.
[Alex Chadwick:] Andy Bowers is a Slate senior editor. And that Explainer was compiled by Melonyce McAfee.

[Lynn Neary:] Another sports oddity this weekend, this one in a more positive vein a college savings plan sponsored a NASCAR race.
[Unidentified Woman:] Are you ready for the [unintelligible] college savings [unintelligible]?
[Lynn Neary:] It's a marketing experiment that could flop or open up an entirely new way to get a lot more people to think about their kids and their own education. NPR's Claudio Sanchez reports.
[Claudio Sanchez:] The Virginia 529 College Savings plan, the nation's largest, made its debut in the middle of a vast noisy parking lot at the Richmond International Raceway. The group's sales pitch here is straightforward. This is about your future. College is important and we want to help you set aside money for it. Not exactly punchy or clever, but it attracts a few people.
[Unidentified Man #1:] You guys want to pick a duck and win a prize?
[Claudio Sanchez:] There's earplugs, a cup holder, or a T-Shirt, all with a Virginia 529 College Savings plan logo. You can sign up for a savings account for as little as $25. And if you do, you get a seat cushion.
[Unidentified Man #1:] Everybody wants a seat cushion, but you have to register to get a seat cushion, which is good.
[Claudio Sanchez:] The name of the game here is branding.
[Unidentified Man #2:] Step right up, Hamburger Helper. Get your free sample.
[Claudio Sanchez:] Hamburger Helper, Red Bull, Redman, Coca Cola, the U.S. Army, the Speed Channel, a Who's Who of America's most popular brands are all here, pitching their wares and people love them. The question is: Will NASCAR fans respond the same way to the Virginia 529 message?
[Ms. Vicky Bracken:] Well, see, when people think about NASCAR they assume they're all dumb rednecks and they're not. So I actually it's a pretty good choice. Better than Winston or better than Marlboro.
[Claudio Sanchez:] Vicky Bracken has been to the Virginia 529 tent and learned that the plan is a tax deferred way to save for college. She's precisely the kind of NASCAR fan that Mary Morris is hoping to hook. Morris is the head of the Virginia College Savings plan.
[Ms. Mary Morris:] Part of what I think we're doing here this weekend is catching people unawares. You know, you don't traditionally think about saving for college when you come to a NASCAR event.
[Claudio Sanchez:] Today's race is still several hours away. At a picnic table between a couple of food trailers, 13-year-old Brandon Wright, his young brother Colby, and their dad, Earl, are debating who the best driver is.
[Mr. Brandon Wright:] I thought it'd be Joey Logano for you. No.
[Mr. B. Wright:] Who would be you, Jimmy Johnson?
[Mr. C. Wright:] Yeah.
[Claudio Sanchez:] Wright took his sons out of school today to be here because they love stockcar racing.
[Mr. Brandon Wright:] Other than today, they'll have perfect attendance. They don't miss school. So, you know, it's just a rare exception to the rule.
[Claudio Sanchez:] Wright, a contractor, says he and his wife didn't go to college so he wants to see his kids in college. But it's really hard these days to put any money away for their education.
[Mr. Brandon Wright:] My wife's unemployed and my business has cut back tremendously. So, it's definitely going to come a time when we consider it, but right now I absolutely wouldn't.
[Claudio Sanchez:] It's hard to say if Wright would be persuaded to start saving for college by visiting the Virginia 529 plan tent. In fact, it may be weeks before anybody knows if fans of today's race were persuaded. Saving for college is not an easy sell. In this economy, everybody, even NASCAR is hurting, both attendance and corporate sponsorship are down. Still, Andrew Giangola, NASCAR's director of communications, says the Virginia College Savings plan's decision to sponsor today's race is a good idea.
[Mr. Andrew Giangola:] The DNA of our sport is so sponsor-friendly that our fans have very high rates of awareness and loyalty towards NASCAR sponsors.
[Claudio Sanchez:] It's time for the race to start.
[Ms. Mary Morris:] Hello, Richmond.
[Claudio Sanchez:] As part of their sponsorship deal, CEO, Mary Morris gets to start the race.
[Ms. Mary Morris:] Gentlemen, start your engines.
[Claudio Sanchez:] Morris says people who run 529 College Savings plans across the country have called her and are dying to know how this sponsorship deal works out. She's dying to know if her organization's message has broken through the noise. Claudio Sanchez, NPR News.

[Melissa Block:] We've been hearing this week from European Muslims about the tension between their faith and the values of their Western societies. France is a secular country with a strict separation of church and state. It's a principal called laicite, and it's central to what it means to be a French citizen. Our colleague Audie Cornish has been traveling through Europe and continues her reporting from France.
[Audie Cornish:] And I'm here in central Paris with our correspondent Eleanor Beardsley. Eleanor, thanks for having us.
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] Audie, welcome to Paris.
[Audie Cornish:] Now that word we just heard that French word, laicite it's often translated as secularism. But I know it's not just a cultural idea, right? I mean, it's law.
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] That's right, Audie. This is a law since 1905, which was designed to curb the powers of the Catholic Church of the clergy. And what it means today is a complete separation of religious identity and affiliation from the public space. In public, you don't have a religion. You're just a citizen of the Republic.
[Audie Cornish:] So what does that mean in everyday life?
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] Well, in everyday life it means, for example, you would never hear the president say, God bless France. You would never have a congressional prayer breakfast of lawmakers. People do not pray in public. It is not seen as an added value to talk about your relationship to God never. That is your private, personal business, and in the public sphere, that is no one else's business.
[Audie Cornish:] And in fact, that's what's taught in schools, too. I mean the education minister announced a renewed strategy to help teachers address this after reports that there were kids who refused to participate in the moment of silence for the Charlie Hebdo attacks. We went to meet some teachers in the Parisian, Sofia Arrash and Samira Enni. We're at Samira Enni's apartment building. Her flat is cozy, but the walls are thin. You can hear the footsteps of kids running around upstairs and muffled voices from next door.
[Samira Enni:] Bonjour.
[Audie Cornish:] Enni is 34 years old, built like a bird, and looks enough to be one of her own students. She clears off the table where she's been grading papers.
[Samira Enni:] [Speaking French].
[Audie Cornish:] Her friend, Sofia Arrash, is there. She's 28 years old with a wide smile and a gorgeous halo of auburn spirals for hair. She teaches history and geography. They're both French-born from Algerian Muslim families with very different experiences in the classroom. I began by asking them how students in their classrooms reacted to the attacks at Charlie Hebdo on January 7. Samira Enni teaches in a vocational school, a racially mixed class of young adults 18 and up. And she says the discussion got awkward.
[Samira Enni:] [Through interpreter] A lot of them actually talked right away about a conspiracy. The media are exaggerating. It serves other causes. There were a lot of reactions about how it was all a conspiracy.
[Audie Cornish:] Did that surprise you?
[Samira Enni:] [Through interpreter] Not really because for students, everything is a conspiracy. Even the grades we give them are conspiracies. But many of them were actually sad about the people who died, but some students were so angry. And for many of my older students, they were confused and had a lot of questions.
[Audie Cornish:] Sofia Arrash, on the other hand, teaches mostly Muslim students between the ages of 12 and 15, and for her, it was a different story. She says the kids are really suspicious of traditional media, and they were clearly getting all kinds of ideas online.
[Sofia Arrash:] [Through interpreter] Some of my students told me, but miss, we didn't see the blood come out of the policeman's head who was shot, so it might not be true. Maybe he's naturally dead or he wasn't actually killed. And on top of that, because it was Charlie Hebdo, they knew it by reputation because of the caricature they did of the prophet. So some of them not everyone they said it was deserved in a way. But when you put things back into context, they understand that there were collateral victims. And after a while they thought about it, and they said that yes, maybe it went too far.
[Audie Cornish:] It also ended up sparking real debate in her class, Sofia Arrash says a debate about freedom of expression versus freedom of religion.
[Sofia Arrash:] [Through interpreter] Because in terms of the question they had, they were getting things confused. They saw that the backlash after Charlie Hebdo was an attack against Muslims.
[Audie Cornish:] Sofia Arrash says she told her students that French secularism is actually meant to protect Muslims like them from discrimination.
[Sofia Arrash:] [Through interpreter] I reminded them what laicite is, and that it's not just about forbidding visual symbols of faith, but that laicite is actually meant to protect religion. It's meant to allow different religions to be expressed to leave your religion in one country because there's no official state religion in France.
[Audie Cornish:] It's the kind of answer a civil servant in this country would give. I mean, teachers are very much bound by the laws of laicite. Now, Samira Enni's younger sister has been leaning in a doorway to the room, listening in. Her name is Anisa. She's 24, a law student who speaks fluent English, and I can see she wants to jump in. And you were listening to her answers, but it sounds like you guys are arguing now that you disagree with how they've explained laicite and what kind of effect it has on Muslims? I mean, what does it mean to you?
[Anisa:] Today, laicite is really, really dangerous for people who practicing their religion. And I think they didn't emphasize this.
[Audie Cornish:] So what makes you upset about them as teachers talking about it in this way? Do you think that they're being kind of soft on their explanation?
[Anisa:] And I'm not saying that because I'm a Muslim. I'm impartial. I'm saying the truth. In France today, it's really hard to practice a religion, whatever it is. It's not just Islam, but I mean, my headscarf is an obligation in my religion, so I don't have any choice. I wear because I want to because I believe my religion teach me to do it.
[Audie Cornish:] You started wearing the hijab, your headscarf, just three years ago. What do you think this generation is going to have to deal with if they're going to really feel a part of France?
[Anisa:] Some of them will have to choose between, for example, work and their headscarf. I have a lot of friend who can't wear it, so they decided to take it off just to work. And some of them want to go out to leave France, like me, because I don't want to choose between a work and my religion. It's not normal for us to leave a country just to be able to practice a religion.
[Audie Cornish:] Do you see your future in France?
[Anisa:] No. I can't because I don't want to stay home. I want to work, but in France they won't accept me. So what other choice do I have? I have to leave. I want to go to England maybe or even America or whatever they accept me.

[Renee Montagne:] We introduced you yesterday morning to Chef Bryon Brown. Earlier this spring, he created a theatrical dinner project here in Washington, D.C. that uses the science of memory to help diners do something that's actually hard to do, and that's remember what they eat. NPR food reporter April Fulton was there for opening night.
[April Fulton:] The project is called Sensorium. It takes place in a geodesic dome. Thirty-two dinner guests are gathering around a glowing turquoise bar. They're drinking some spicy sangria. They don't know it yet, but everything about tonight is designed to make them remember the 12-course dinner they're about to eat: music, actors, lights and food. Chef Bryon Brown is the mastermind.
[Mr. Bryon Brown:] This is going to be epic.
[April Fulton:] And Ed Cooke, Byron Brown's consultant, is our memory dinner critic.
[Mr. Ed Cooke:] Yeah, I'll try and be profound.
[April Fulton:] After two glasses of sangria, Ed Cooke's feeling pretty positive.
[Mr. Ed Cooke:] I can already tell this is going to be one of the best evenings of my life.
[April Fulton:] The diners take their seats, and the show begins.
[Mr. David London:] Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Sensorium.
[April Fulton:] The master of ceremonies is wearing a top hot and a fake mustache. Memory expert Ed Cooke is sitting stage left. Cooke is here to see if Chef Brown and the actors have taken his advice on how to make the food memorable. He says the 12 courses have to be vivid, distinct from one another, and tied together with a storyline. In the kitchen, Chef Brown's getting a little nervous about the show.
[Mr. Bryon Brown:] The challenge is: How do we incorporate some of these memory techniques and still have the artistry intact?
[April Fulton:] But for now, he's got to focus on the food. Whoa, a blow torch. Brown's creating frozen clouds of soda water and liquid nitrogen. He's using the blow torch to unstick them from their molds. I'm going back to the dining room. The second course has begun. In front of each diner is a black, fabric-covered box. On top of the box, a white spoon one of those Asian soup spoons containing tiny crystals. Ed Cooke's eyes light up.
[Mr. Ed Cooke:] Yes, I'm pretty fascinated by this. It's almost a sediment of miniature gemstones.
[Mr. David London:] Step one: pick up the spoon. Step two: pick up the cup.
[April Fulton:] Master of Ceremonies David London gives the instructions.
[Mr. David London:] Step three, empty the contents of the cup into the contents of the spoon.
[April Fulton:] The mystery foods he's asking them to mix together turn out to be Pop Rocks candy and a solid form of the cocktail called a Kir Royale.
[Mr. David London:] Step seven...
[April Fulton:] Diners put the mixture in their mouths. The Pop Rocks fire, and the actors gyrate wildly around the room.
[Mr. Ed Cooke:] The dancers are kind of imitating what's happening in my mouth.
[April Fulton:] The performance is really vivid. Cooke thinks this course will be remembered. The dance ends, and actors swoop toward the tables and lift off the black boxes with a flourish, releasing a dry ice fog.
[Mr. David London:] Cloud nine salmon salad.
[Mr. Ed Cooke:] I've just had some blood-red salmon revealed on a plate of ice before me.
[April Fulton:] Cooke's verdict: vivid, surprising, distinct from the last course all good from a memory perspective. But then comes a parade of pasta, pork-belly and sunchoke soup, and the courses start to blur and the service slows down.
[Mr. Ed Cooke:] It almost feels, at the moment, a bit like a play, where there are 10-minute gaps between scenes. Who knows what's going to come out of this memory-wise.
[Mr. Bryon Brown:] Let me get a slotted spoon, slotted spoon right now.
[Unidentified Woman #1:] Here it is, slotted spoon, got it.
[April Fulton:] Chef Bryon Brown's typical cool is failing him. He takes the mini-chocolate polenta souffles out of the oven.
[Mr. Bryon Brown:] They're burnt. [bleep]
[April Fulton:] Brown orders the assistant chef to start making new desserts right now.
[Mr. Bryon Brown:] Go. Go. Go. Go.
[April Fulton:] Back in the dining room...
[Mr. Ed Cooke:] An incredibly cool...
[April Fulton:] ...things are starting to pick up again with the fish course.
[Mr. Ed Cooke:] So we had puppeteers kind of narrate the lives of two different kinds of fish: an amusing pink fish, and then a kind of one of those horrifying creatures from the deep.
[April Fulton:] Ed Cooke thinks this one will be remembered.
[Mr. Ed Cooke:] It was really quite striking what it was like to taste the fish while contemplating the horror of the deep sea.
[April Fulton:] The substitute dessert, a chocolate souffle sprinkled with salt, is served.
[Unidentified Woman:] [Singing] It's so sweet, what you've got. It's so sweet.
[April Fulton:] And then Chef Bryon Brown finally comes out of the kitchen. He's sweaty, exhausted, triumphant. He takes a bow. Ed Cooke hugs Chef Bryon Brown.
[Mr. Ed Cooke:] Top job. Top job.
[Mr. Bryon Brown:] You like that?
[Mr. Ed Cooke:] Yeah. This is like truly close to being totally spectacular.
[April Fulton:] But nothing's perfect. Ed Cooke still thinks there needs to be a storyline. Then the diners drift outside, trying to remember all the things they ate tonight.
[Unidentified Woman #2:] So, we started with sangria. We had...
[Unidentified Man #1:] Then we sat down. We had zucchini.
[Mr. Ed Cooke:] A what?
[Unidentified Woman #3:] This is where we start to get the order confused, whether it was the fish or the...
[Unidentified Man #2:] The taste of Pop Rocks stayed with me all evening long.
[April Fulton:] Chef Brown is pretty happy with the show, but he can't say right now whether the memory science part worked.
[Mr. Bryon Brown:] You know what? You have to ask me that question next week. Because I can't remember anything else but how tired I am right now.
[April Fulton:] By the time it was all over, Bryon Brown had put on almost 50 dinner shows and they were sold out most nights. He says he didn't make money, but he didn't lose any, either. He's already planning his next Sensorium, which he hopes will open in Miami this fall. April Fulton, NPR News, Washington.
[Renee Montagne:] It sounds fantastic. If you'd like to see a video of Sensorium, visit our website: npr.org. You're listening to MORNING EDITION, from NPR News.

[Ed Gordon:] Now from high-tech gadgets to very low-tech veteran writing. Even after publishing 11 books and winning an American Book Award, J. California Cooper still prefers writing in bed with a pen and pad. Her latest work, Wild Stars Seeking Midnight Suns, is a collection of short stories that highlight Cooper's ability to spin simple tales filled with wisdom and insight. J. California Cooper, so nice to have you. Welcome to the show.
[J. California Cooper:] Thank you. I'm pleased to be here, honestly.
[Ed Gordon:] My pleasure. Let me ask you this: so many African-American female authors have been able to make their way, but so many of them point to you as inspiration. When you were out there in the beginning, there were so few of you, did you even think about, boy, maybe I shouldn't even be doing this?
[Ms. Cooper:] No, because I do what I-you know, what you feel. And I like to write. And Alice Walker walked into my life and made it possible for my book to be published. But before then, I had only done plays. But I never thought I could write.
[Ed Gordon:] Let's start with the Alice Walker story, that Alice had seen some of your plays and said, my goodness! You are a terrific-a wonderful storyteller, and encouraged you to do so, so you could reach a larger audience.
[Ms. Cooper:] Well, she just said if you turn them into stories I'll publish them.
[Ed Gordon:] Mm-hmm.
[Ms. Cooper:] So she must have liked them a little anyway.
[Ed Gordon:] What was it that you think she-and I'm sure you all have had this discussion-found in these characters and the way you told a story that she was so impressed by?
[Ms. Cooper:] Well, actually, you know one wouldn't ever know, but I-here's what I think. I think people see a lot of, they think-most people think they're from the south, so people see some of their family in it. They're very honest, so I try to tell the truth, because what I'm basically trying to do is help somebody make some right choices. You know, I'm not writing up-and I'm trying to write to people who don't know. That's why the language is simple, that's why the stories are simple. Sort of like parables, because these people who are out here struggling, this is no game out here in life. They call it a game, but this is serious. This is survival.
[Ed Gordon:] What's the difference in trying to put a book together that is a book of short stories versus writing a novel? One harder than the other?
[Ms. Cooper:] Well, novels, you just stay with them longer. I like shorter stories. They're over quicker and you get to meet more people in your mind, you know?
[Ed Gordon:] With a novel, you have the breath of three, four, 500 pages to make sure that that story's told. When you talk about telling a short story, you've got to figure out how to get to A to Z in a way that you finish and complete that story.
[Ms. Cooper:] Well, you know what? I don't often talk about this, but I'm just gonna tell you the truth. I don't have to figure it out. The people do it themselves. If I do one or two paragraphs at the beginning and I turn it over to the characters, they gonna take that story and run off with it and I have to keep up with them. But when I write, I talk about what's really important. Respect, for one thing. And I'll tell you one more thing and then I will hush. The thing is, that women and men think that-can I say nookie? Okay. Women and men think that getting a little nookie, you have done something. You really did it. But the thing is, you're missing the best part, you know, the warmth? Somebody get up...
[Ed Gordon:] Mm-hmm.
[Ms. Cooper:] ...and fix something for you when you're sick. You're missing that. That's what life is about. Not that stuff you do in some corner. You know what I mean? And I can't say it like I feel it, but you got it.
[Ed Gordon:] We got it. We got it. Had you not received the attention, the adulation, the critical acclaim, do you think you'd be able to continue to write? Is writing that much in your blood that had you not received the applause back-do you think you'd still be a writer?
[Ms. Cooper:] I didn't write for applause. I'm glad it came, no doubt about it. But I wrote because I've been-I was telling stories before I could write. I played with paper dolls 'til I was 18 and nobody even knew my stories except my mother. You know, you do what you do...
[Ed Gordon:] Did you-have you ever thought that strange?
[Ms. Cooper:] I still don't, because my best friend was a tree once and the next one was a rooster. S, I don't think things are strange and I was just explaining to my PR that-person that I just noticed I have two snails and I saw them fall in love. Now somebody would say, this woman is crazy. But if you look at things and listen, lots of things are going on around you that you're not paying attention to...
[Ed Gordon:] Mm-hmm.
[Ms. Cooper:] ...and I happen to see that.
[Ed Gordon:] Do you have a story in you that you haven't figured out how to translate yet?
[Ms. Cooper:] Yes, about three or four of them. I've got the first thing-I heard someone say once, be careful who you lie to, they may believe you. Now, that's really heavy to me, because some people get killed about believing what someone -and there's another one. I've been seeing this woman about-at least 10 years, sitting in this doorway with a pair of man's shoes on and the-you know how they used to cut the toe out for your corn not to hurt? But she's sitting there. She has on a flowered skirt and a kind of a blue blouse. She's sitting on this step and it's in a doorway in a building, but she hasn't said a word in all these years.
[Ed Gordon:] How do you think that you've been able to find these universal appeals? Because when you talked about cutting the toe out, I saw my Uncle Adolph because that's what he did...
[Ms. Cooper:] See? See?
[Ed Gordon:] I mean, we all knew it, but it's so universal, so many of your stories. Is it just life?
[Ms. Cooper:] It's just life and they're just human beings, and they can be any color.
[Ed Gordon:] Now, you knew that this question, I guess, was coming, because you pulled out a piece of paper in your purse. But talk to me about what's on that piece of paper.
[Ms. Cooper:] No, no, no. It's not obligatory; you don't have to do it. But I'm trying-when I'm telling people about their choices, this-it's very brief.
[Ed Gordon:] Mm-hmm.
[Ms. Cooper:] This is a caliph in Spain and he put this on his tombstone. Now you know when you die that you're not going to get any benefit from anything you lie about, so there was no reason for him to lie about what he put on his tombstone. But he said: [Reading] "I have now reigned above 50 years in victory and peace. Beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honor, power and pleasure, have waited on my call." Did you hear that? "Nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting in my years. During this life of wonder, I have kept count of the days of happiness, which have been given me. They number 14." Fourteen, and he had everything the world tells you...
[Ed Gordon:] Mm-hmm.
[Ms. Cooper:] ...you need to be happy. So, it's not money, it's your choices. How you build your mind and what you desire to do with your life. That's why, sometimes-I'm quite content, to be honest with you. I'm quite content and I sure need some money, but that is not the whole thing, you know what I'm trying to say?
[Ed Gordon:] Mm-hmm.
[Ms. Cooper:] It's being able to be content with that spring in back of my house and my frogs and my stuff and-but I never, never, never want to have to worry about utility bills and things.
[Ed Gordon:] J. California Cooper, it's so wonderful to have you with us. The latest book, Wild Stars Seeking Midnight Suns. And also, we should note that your novel, Some People, Some Other Places, is now a soft cover book...
[Ms. Cooper:] I love it, yeah. I love it.
[Ed Gordon:] ...as they say. That is out there, as well. Thank you so much.
[Ms. Cooper:] No, thank you.

[Rachel Martin:] Telling you that the U.S. government is going to be open for business tomorrow should not be news, but it is. And after 24 hours of brinksmanship, deal-making and parliamentary hijinks, last night, the U.S. Senate passed a bill to fund the federal government for the remainder of the fiscal year. The bill now heads to the president's desk for his signature. Joining us is our national political correspondent Mara Liasson to talk more about this. Hey, Mara.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Good morning.
[Rachel Martin:] So what happened last night? Was this expected in the end?
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Well, the last minute hijinks weren't expected. What happened was the effort to fund the government for another year met some pretty strong headwinds from conservatives in the Senate. The last-minute monkey wrench was Ted Cruz's futile effort to stop President Obama's immigration actions, and that caused senators who thought they were getting the weekend off to scramble back to Washington. But Cruz's effort backfired and Harry Reid, the outgoing majority leader, the Democratic leader, was able to take advantage the opening that Cruz's gambit created by scheduling votes on a couple dozen presidential nominees who will now probably be confirmed this coming week. And that's probably a lot more nominees than Democrats would've gotten through the Senate otherwise.
[Rachel Martin:] OK, so let's talk about Ted Cruz. A lot of this was pivoting around him. What was his strategy? What was he looking for?
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Well, he wanted a vote on the president's immigration actions. He got one, but he only got 22 votes. That's about half the current Republican ranks in the Senate, but he lost. His colleagues are hopping mad at him. They think what he did was ineffective, grandstanding. However, he might have been looking outside of Washington to the Tea Party base of the Republican Party. That's who he will be looking to for support when he runs in the Republican presidential primaries next year.
[Rachel Martin:] OK, so were there any winners in all of this...
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Yes.
[Rachel Martin:] Congressional shenanigans?
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] I think there were a couple of winners. I think Mitch McConnell, who's the new Republican leader, won. Even though he was blindsided by Cruz, he came out as an able leader. And he got to make the point that Ted Cruz can't fight his way out of a parliamentary paper bag. Harry Reid comes out looking stronger, briefly. He made the most out of his last few minutes as majority leader. And another winner is Elizabeth Warren, Democratic senator from Massachusetts. Her status as the leader of the liberal wing of the Democrat party what Howard Dean used to call the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party is enhanced. She voted against the funding bill. She thought it had too many sweeteners for Wall Street. And the chorus calling for her to run for president next year is now louder than ever.
[Rachel Martin:] OK, so a lot of deal-making. In the end, they funded the government. Can we learn anything about the future, Mara, through all of this? What does it say about the next Congress?
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Well, it says a lot of different things. It did lay bare divisions in both parties. We know there are divisions in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. However, we do know, as you said at the outset, that they did get the government funded. That's a basic function. It seems crazy to congratulate them for doing it, but given the extreme dysfunction we've had in the past and the near government shutdowns the government shutdowns and the near default maybe that means that next year Congress and the White House will be able to get more things done by working together, even though they'll also be having a lot of very messy fights and big veto fights.
[Rachel Martin:] You are such an optimistic woman.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] [Laughter].
[Rachel Martin:] NPR's national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Thanks so much, Mara.
[Mara Liasson, Byline:] Thank you.

[Scott Simon:] Protests continued this week in Hong Kong as millions of people there continue to push for autonomy from China and call for free elections. The massive protests have been going on since June and shut down the airport. The way China responds will be critical. Susan Shirk is chair of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California San Diego and a former deputy assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration. Professor, thanks so much for being with us.
[Susan Shirk:] Sure. My pleasure.
[Scott Simon:] What do you think some of the options the Chinese central government is weighing now?
[Susan Shirk:] Well, of course, the big decision is whether to allow the Hong Kong police to handle the demonstrations and to gradually try to wind them down or to send the paramilitary force of the People's Liberation Army whether or not to send them over from the mainland into Hong Kong. And my own view is that Xi Jinping will be very reluctant to take that latter course.
[Scott Simon:] And why?
[Susan Shirk:] Because people will die if the PLA even the People's Armed Police, even if they're in plain clothes, they come over, I think they have less experience with these kinds of demonstrations that have become violent. And, really, what they can do is to use more lethal force. That's a decision that Xi Jinping then will own. And, of course, everyone will be comparing it to the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. And meanwhile, the people of Hong Kong will become even more resistant to being absorbed into the People's Republic.
[Scott Simon:] And what's the effect of words from President Trump in this situation where he seems to have encouraged President Xi to meet with the pro-democracy demonstrators but also lauded President Xi as a great leader great, strong leader, in fact?
[Susan Shirk:] I don't think it's helped. I think it's kind of complicated and confused matters. The Chinese Communist Party and propaganda authorities have blamed the demonstrations on American interference. I mean, the whole idea that the United States could bring millions of Hong Kong people out on the streets, of course, is ridiculous. But in a highly controlled information environment, I think there probably are a lot of people who believe that. But that means in turn that supporting the demonstrators without any comments about, of course, avoiding violence or, you know, hope that it can be resolved in a peaceful manner that's not good either because that just plays into this myth that it's driven by U.S. support and interference.
[Scott Simon:] What do you see happening over the next few weeks?
[Susan Shirk:] I think there is a chance that the Hong Kong authorities and the police and the public itself will kind of gradually de-escalate the situation. When the students go back to school, that may reduce the numbers of demonstrators. And then the autonomy movement will live to fight the next fight. Remember; the autonomy's for 50 years.
[Scott Simon:] Yeah.
[Susan Shirk:] But Deng Xiaoping said at the time that that didn't mean it couldn't be renewed for another 50 years, say. So, certainly, I'd say that most people in Hong Kong that's what they would like to see.
[Scott Simon:] Susan Shirk, who is chair of the 21st Century China Center at University of California San Diego and former deputy assistant secretary of state, thanks so much for being with us.
[Susan Shirk:] Thank you.

[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] After his defeat in health care, President Trump this past week switched focus and returned to one of his signature campaign issues, immigration. He threw his support to a bill that would sharply cut immigration numbers and changed the requirements for people legally migrating to the U.S. Right now U.S. immigration favors bringing in people with family ties. The proposed new system would favor English-speaking immigrants with more skills. The bill has a lot of opposition, including among conservatives. Joining us in the studio now is Alfonso Aguilar, executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles. Good morning.
[Alfonso Aguilar:] Good morning. Happy to be with you.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] So what are your thoughts on the bill?
[Alfonso Aguilar:] Well, it's bad legislation. I mean, immigration is is what America is all about. I think that in the past, we've seen Republicans who oppose immigration reform opposing illegal immigration but saying that they support legal immigration. This is about reducing the levels of of legal immigration in the country. And, frankly, immigration is good for the country. It helps promote economic growth and create jobs for Americans. Immigrants are taking jobs that Americans don't want or for which there are no Americans of working age. So it's important to fill those jobs jobs that are necessary to fill to, as I've said, create jobs for Americans.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Do you think this targets Latino immigrants, as has been suggested, and are you concerned about the message it sends?
[Alfonso Aguilar:] Well, I think, in a way, it does because it's saying we want to bring now only people who are educated. English is a consideration. It would be a consideration for granting an immigrant visa and permanent residency. So, basically, you're discriminating against people from poor countries like Latin America. President Trump has said that he wants to move away from the low income, as he calls low skill, as he calls it immigration system. But the truth is that, as I've said before, those so-called low-skill jobs are very important. And we need to fill them to grow the economy and to grow better-paying jobs for American workers.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] I'd like to talk briefly about the dreamers. One of the issues that people who favor a more open immigration policy really care about is their right to stay. Do you think this administration will kick out these people who are brought to the U.S. illegally as children as a way to move this agenda forward?
[Alfonso Aguilar:] I don't think so. And this is what's very interesting that even though we're talking about reducing the levels of legal immigration, there is some glimmer of hope. And that's with dreamers. The president hasn't rescinded DACA, which is the executive order that President Obama put in place to provide some relief to those who entered the country legally when they were minors. He said that he cares about dreamers, that it's an issue that he struggles with so DACA still in place. And he said that he wants to find a solution.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Some suggest that he could use it as a negotiating chip to get the permanent changes to immigration law that he wants. Do you think that's a possibility?
[Alfonso Aguilar:] Well, right now there is no support in Congress among the Republicans, conservatives to reduce the levels of legal immigration. I think there would be support for a DREAM Act. Legislation has been introduced by Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, along with Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois. It's a bipartisan bill. And it will provide relief, legal status to dreamers.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] I have a question for you. Earlier this year, you publicly said that you supported some of the president's positions on immigration, including, for example, the White House's move to target sanctuary cities.
[Alfonso Aguilar:] Right.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] But a lot has happened. How are you feeling about President Trump's stand on immigration now?
[Alfonso Aguilar:] Well, look. I said that my position is nuanced. I believe immigration is good for the country. There are aspects of President Trump's immigration proposals that I agree with. I do believe in fencing. It does work. It has shown that it works to disrupt illegal entry.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] You mean the wall, the proposed wall.
[Alfonso Aguilar:] Correct fencing. And I believe that, in terms of targeting sanctuary cities, I think law enforcement local law enforcement should refer to federal authorities people who they detain, undocumented immigrants who have criminal record. So I support that. At the same time, I do believe that we need to find a way to deal constructively with undocumented immigrants, the majority of whom pose no threat to our communities. And right now the Republican Party seems to be stuck, not willing to deal constructively with undocumented immigrants. And that's the key. So I'm hopeful that, you know, if we secure the border, we remove undocumented immigrants who have criminal records that, eventually, Congress could deal in a more humane, constructive way with undocumented immigrants.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Just very briefly, do you think that this bill is a nonstarter?
[Alfonso Aguilar:] I think so. I think it's not going anywhere. I think he did it to please his base, to energize his base. But, frankly, it goes nowhere.
[Lulu Garcia-navarro:] Alfonso Aguilar is the executive director of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles. Thank you very much.
[Alfonso Aguilar:] Thank you.

[Michele Norris:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
[Melissa Block:] And I'm Melissa Block. President Obama appeared today at a long conference table flanked by smiling lawmakers smiling at least for the cameras. The president and the congressional leadership sat down to try to work through their differences on the budget, the deficit and the debt ceiling.
[Michele Norris:] The president said the meeting was very constructive.
[President Barack Obama:] People were frank. We discussed the various options available to us. Everybody reconfirmed the importance of completing our work and raising the debt limit ceiling so that the full faith and credit of the United States of America is not impaired.
[Michele Norris:] Mr. Obama said the same group would gather Sunday for more talks. At this point, one major question revolves around revenue increases. The Republicans have repeatedly vowed to reject any tax hikes, but recently they suggested that some tax reform, which closes loopholes, might be acceptable. In a moment, we'll hear more about the talks at the White House from our correspondent Mara Liasson.
[Melissa Block:] First, we're going to hear from representative Tom Price, Republican of Georgia and a member of the Tea Party Caucus in the House. Congressman Price, welcome to the program.
[Representative Tom Price:] Thanks so much, Melissa. Good to be with you.
[Melissa Block:] When you hear House Speaker John Boehner say that tax hikes are off the table, I wonder how you interpret that because, evidently, they are discussing a number of ways that would increase revenue including eliminating things like the tax breaks on hedge fund managers, corporate jet owners, closing loopholes like that. Would that be acceptable to you?
[Representative Tom Price:] Well, in fact, our budget proposed decreasing the loopholes and closing many loopholes so that we broaden the base of taxation in this country and lower the rate. But please understand, the American people know that tax increases don't create a single job and that we're not in this boat right now because the Washington tax is too little. We're in this boat because Washington spends too much. So, the American people are not interested in having a tax increase. The American people understand that Washington spends way too much money and we need to get our fiscal house in order by decreasing the size, scope and reach of Washington, as well as decreasing the spending from the federal government.
[Melissa Block:] Is there a risk, though, when you speak of what the American people want that they will perceive, they will look at what's going on and say, Congress -Republicans in Congress are fighting to protect the wealthiest among us, corporate jet owners and hedge fund managers, what about me? You are cutting my Medicare. You're cutting my Social Security.
[Representative Tom Price:] Well, that's the kind of demagoguery that you hear from the other side, but I think the people are smarter than that.
[Melissa Block:] Congressman Price, at stake here, of course, is getting to a deal that would allow you to vote to raise the debt ceiling. To what degree do you think the idea has taken hold among your fellow House Republicans that, in fact, the debt ceiling does not need to be raised? Do you think there's still a widespread belief that it would not cause a lot of harm?
[Representative Tom Price:] Oh, no. I think there's a clear recognition that not solving these challenges will create significant disruption in the economy. Many folks, however, believe and I think rightly so that doing something that just kind of papers over the real challenges that we face causes the exact same kind of remarkable decrease in the ability of our economy to recover. So there's a balance between the two.
[Melissa Block:] We heard economists, President Obama, the Treasury Secretary all warning that if Congress does not raise the debt ceiling, it will be economic calamity, that interest rates will go up, business investment will sag, along with consumer confidence, and you'll kill jobs. Do you agree that that is the likely scenario if the debt ceiling is not lifted?
[Representative Tom Price:] Well, I don't know. We've never been in this situation with this kind of debt level. I don't think that the secretary of the Treasury did himself or anybody any favors by moving the date from what that we would reach the debt ceiling from May 16th to August 2nd. All he did was give credibility to those folks that, as you mentioned, don't believe that there's any significant problem with the debt ceiling and that all these numbers are fuzzy anyway. And then, I think the president hurts himself when he says, look, if this doesn't happen, then students won't be able to get loans, Social Security checks won't go out, we won't be able to pay the troops, when he knows that if we were to prioritize appropriately and decrease the amount of spending, for example, in the Department of the Interior, the Department of Commerce, that we could continue to pay the interest on a debt, which is a relatively simple thing to do at 8 to 10 percent of the amount of money that's coming in still, and pay the troops and pay the Social Security checks. Now, you can't do that forever, but the president ought to stop the demagoguery and sit down and talk honestly and openly with us about the real solutions.
[Melissa Block:] Congressman Price, thanks for being with us.
[Representative Tom Price:] Thank you so much.
[Melissa Block:] That was Congressman Tom Price, Republican of Georgia. He's chair of the House Republican Policy Committee and a member of the Tea Party Caucus.

[Neal Conan:] And now, The Opinion Page. While Syrians appeal to the outside world to do something to end the growing violence there, options appear limited. Russian and Chinese vetoes leave the U.N. Security Council on the sideline. Economic sanctions are already in place. The Arab League called on its members to cut diplomatic ties with Damascus, and some seemed ready to send arms to the opposition. In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Daniel Byman argued to remember that well-intentioned steps can actually make things worse. So what are the consequences we ought to consider as a bloody crackdown devolves into a bloody and possibly volatile civil war? 800-989-8255. Email us, talk@npr.org. You can also join the conversation on our website. That's at npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. Daniel Byman joins us by phone from his office at Georgetown University where he teaches in their school of foreign service. And nice to have you with us today.
[Dr. Daniel Byman:] Thanks for having me.
[Neal Conan:] And in your op-ed, you said, quote, "The United States should present a cohesive front, use tough love to cajole and reward the opposition for unity and cooperation, while recognizing that some fissures will be inevitable." In order in other words, to work with the opposition?
[Byman:] That's correct. For the United States right now, at least direct intervention is not in the cards. You mentioned Russia blocking various international efforts at the Security Council. I think there's no appetite in the United States for a sustained U.S. military intervention. So if we want to get Assad out, we have to work with the Syrians for them to do it, and the opposition is the key to that.
[Neal Conan:] And work with them how? Provide them with money, with weapons, what?
[Byman:] Yes. The opposition has many problems. They are divided. They are untrained. They are not ready to go directly up against Assad. And we see this on a daily basis, where they're being shot down in the streets. And the first thing to do is to get them unified. And while that's going on, the United States can also train them. And for all of this, it's very important to work with and at times through regional allies.
[Neal Conan:] Well, you'd have to because unlike Libya where there was roughly half the country that had been liberated by the Libyan people themselves, the eastern half near Benghazi, there is no such place in Syria.
[Byman:] That's absolutely right. And even more than that, if we don't do it with the allies, we would be doing it against the allies. They have their own interests, and we should respect these interests. And if we're going to make progress, it's going to have to be in harmony with what they want.
[Neal Conan:] Yet, those allies are hardly united, either. You have Iraq so far, our ally still supporting Bashar al-Assad; Turkey, his former ally, very much opposed; Jordan sort of on the fence; Lebanon well, Lebanon is not sure what to do. Of course, Hezbollah, the biggest force there, is a powerful Syrian ally.
[Byman:] That's correct. Some allies, I would say, Jordan and particularly Turkey, are the most important for this. With Turkey, it has not only tremendous military power of its own but tremendous influence in Syria and a lot of respect in the broader Middle East. So while allies don't always agree, and some are, I would say, skeptical, to put it mildly. There are some that matter more than others. And the United States should focus first on those.
[Neal Conan:] And even so, if we're working with the opposition, we've seen just in the past few days, al-Qaida coming out and saying support the Syrian opposition. What do we do with allies like that?
[Byman:] That's absolutely right. And this is the danger. If the Syrian people believe they're abandoned, if they believe that no one is standing by them, then they're going to turn, out of desperation, to groups like al-Qaida, where al-Qaida could say we are here to defend you. And more moderate opposition thinkers may not want this, but if the choice is between being shot by Assad or working with al-Qaida, some may choose radicalism over a more moderate approach.
[Neal Conan:] And we are seeing increasingly a sectarian divide. That this is becoming the Sunnis, the biggest single group in Syria, against the Alawites, the minority group, an offshoot of Shia Islam, that's in power.
[Byman:] That's one of the biggest dangers that Syria's conflict may go from anti-regime violence to a war of community against community. And this sort of war could have ramifications well beyond Syria, which is part of why the international community needs to become involved. This conflict will not be limited to Syria. If it's allowed to go to run amok and where it's moving in the wrong direction.
[Neal Conan:] Yet moving in the wrong direction, it's moving towards a much more armed resistance model that is becoming, rapidly, civil war.
[Byman:] And that's something that's been happening fairly steadily where at first the opposition was almost entirely peaceful, and then we saw sporadic opposition, and now it's much more sustained. But the bigger problem is that we're seeing this not an opposition against a narrow, despotic regime, but a regime trying to play a sectarian card, trying to make this war of communities that it believes will win. And if that happened, then the hope for a future Syria, Syria that's united, a Syria that is not repressive, is diminished.
[Neal Conan:] Let's see if we get some callers in on the conversation. We have to be careful to do things that don't actually make the situation in Syria worse. And, Daniel Byman, just by way of illustration, what might some of those be?
[Byman:] So the things that can be make the situation worse one of them is focusing on Assad himself rather than on focusing on his regime. If we put our emphasis on getting Assad out of power but don't try to remove the broader power structure, we're simply replacing one dictator for another. It won't satisfy the opposition, and at the same time, all the risk of fracturing the country remains. So that would be one thing, I think, that can make it worse. Another would be to focus only on narrow humanitarian issues without the broader political and strategic picture in mind. So caring for refugees, protecting Syrians, these sorts of things are tremendously important, but they're going to be a Band-aid on a gaping wound if they're part of a broader strategy. Yet there's a natural respond from the international community to focus only on the immediate rather than on the longer-term issues.
[Neal Conan:] 800-989-8255. Email us: talk@npr.org. We'll start with Arthur, and he's on the line with us from San Francisco.
[Arthur:] Yes. Hi. Good morning. Thank you for taking my call. I'd like to just make a comment. It seems that we've completely forgotten about history. Every time we involve ourselves in these conflicts, be it in you know, look at our history Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq, that whole Middle Eastern region we seemed to make the matters worse. You know, our enemies' enemy is not necessarily our friend. What is the you know, what are we what is America's real the United States' real objective in this part of the world? And, you know, why do we think that buying our friends will somehow yield the results we want? Leave the place alone. The more we interfere, the more people don't like our country's interference. You know, we got very offended when foreign powers are telling us about budget situation. You know, we say, don't dare tell us what to do. Well, who are we to do the same in that part of the world? It's a terrible humanitarian situation, I agree, but why involve ourselves again like we've forgotten what we've done in the past and failed. And I'll take my comments on the air off the air. Thank you very much.
[Neal Conan:] Well, Arthur OK, Arthur I guess is leaving, but the quick response is, someone would say Libya seemed to work out OK.
[Byman:] That's correct, and I would add to that. The United States is often blamed, either for acting or for not acting. So on Israeli-Palestinian issues, there is tremendous criticism in the region that the United States is not doing enough. The United States should be more involved, that it has allowed the peace process to die. And regardless of how you feel about that particular issue, this is one of the problems of being a superpower. Where if you act, you will, of course, incur criticism. But if you don't act, you also will.
[Neal Conan:] And if you act in concert wait to act in concert with the United Nations Security Council, with their blessing, as was done in Libya, then, well, sometimes you're waiting too long. In other times, if you act without their blessing, as in Kosovo or as in Iraq, well, then you're defying world opinion.
[Byman:] That's absolutely right. And world opinion is desirable politically in the United States as it sends a message that this mission is shared by the civilized world. And it's in particular important for a number of U.S. allies, that really want that international stamp of approval as part of motivating their own people to make sacrifices.
[Neal Conan:] Let's go next to Paula, Paula with us from Lansing.
[Paula:] Hi. One thing that I would like to point out is for us to look at our own revolution. If France hadn't provided us with money and military guidance and military leaders, we never would have achieved our freedom. We would still be a colony of England.
[Neal Conan:] And the...
[Paula:] And we have an obligation to help other countries that are trying to achieve their independence because we would we were in their position 200 years ago.
[Neal Conan:] And their contemporary equivalent of a no-fly zone, the French fleet that kept the British from relieving their forces at York town. She's got a point, Daniel Byman.
[Byman:] That's right. What we're seeing in Syria is that other countries are intervening one way or another. So Iran is very involved in helping the Syrian government, especially financially. The Russians have been helping them diplomatically, as well as with armed supplies. So intervention is a occurring. So the question is simply is there going to be intervention only on the side of the regime a despotic regime, one hostile to the United States, or will there be intervention to counter-balance that and ideally overcome that?
[Neal Conan:] Well and Paula, thanks very much for the phone call. We had Saudi Arabia, over the weekend, thinly-veiled suggestion that it's time to provide arms to the opposition. And if you're suggesting that you have Iran on one side and Saudi Arabia on the other, is this not just an extension of their proxy fight in the Persian Gulf?
[Byman:] Certainly, the Saudis see Iran as trying to extend their influence all over the region, whether it'd be Iraq or Lebanon and now Syria or I should say, now Syria Iran's had a long relationship with Syria, and the Saudis are trying to combat that. But the United States should be trying to make it more than that. I certainly believe that trying to end or at least reduce Iranian influence in Syria is an important U.S. goal, but there's more to it than that. Syria is a very important Arab country, well beyond the question of Iran. And trying to get a more a government that is friendlier towards the West, that is less hostile, less repressive in general, is desirable for a host of reasons.
[Neal Conan:] You wrote: To be of any value, an intervention must end the bloodshed or at least diminish it dramatically. Syria must also remain an intact state capable of policing its borders, stopping terrorism and providing services to its people. Well, by that last sentence's definition, you'd have to say Libya's the intervention of Libya, well, that sort of up in the air on all of those points.
[Byman:] That's absolutely correct, and I think Iraq showed that it's not good enough to replace a dictator with a state that fails. You need more than that, and so this, again, is why the Syrian opposition is so important. If we talk about removing Assad, the obvious next question is, what's going to take his place? And too often, there's been a focus, simply on the first step, remove the dictator. I think we need to focus on the long term, which is what's going to take his place. And here, developing the opposition into a coherent, democratic, effective opposition is very important.
[Neal Conan:] Daniel Byman is with us on the Opinion Page this week, a professor at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service. There's a link to his op-ed published in The Washington Post on our website. Go to npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. And this is TALK OF THE NATION, with you from NPR News. Let's get Minette on the line. Minette with us from Zanesville in Ohio.
[Minette:] Hi, Neal. Thank you for taking my call.
[Neal Conan:] Sure.
[Minette:] I love your program, and this is a very sensitive subject for me. I think that, yes, in a lot of cases, America should sit back and mind their own business. But in this particular case, this people are being brutalized by a regime that has been Assad, the father, and now Assad, the son, is doing the same thing. They're murdering children and women, and people can't get outside to get food. They can't get shelter, electricity, anything, because this man is just instructing the government to go ahead and just blast everybody. They have lived under dictatorship by this and terrorism by this man for years. And I think that by sitting back and doing nothing, it makes us just as guilty. We have to stick up for the people who can't take care of themselves.
[Neal Conan:] Do something, but what?
[Minette:] I don't know, but there has to be intervention. We have to go in there and let Assad know that he cannot brutally terrorize people. My husband's family is over there. My neighbors' family, my best friend, they're all from Syria. They're terrorized every single day. They can't even talk on the phone because they're afraid that they're going to get murdered for the things that they say, if they say anything against the government. I mean, this is an oppressive, brutal government that has done nothing but terrorize its people for years, and they're slaughtering them, they're dismembering children. It's beyond what you can even imagine in your worse nightmares. We need to do something. We need to go in, and we need to stop the violence.
[Neal Conan:] Well, Minette, thanks very much for the phone call. Appreciate it.
[Minette:] Glad to do it. Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] And, Daniel Byman, it is an awful situation. It is not unprecedented. The father of this Assad killed 10,000 people at Homs, some years ago, to sustain his regime then. And so as we sit and watch this get worse and worse and worse, the call to do something gets louder and louder and louder.
[Byman:] That's right. And the danger is that with the father, the balance ended very decisively. The danger here is not only that we'll have these horrors go unpunished, but that they will grow, and we'll see the violence spread. There was a painful piece at New York Times this morning that talked about the some of the ideas, some of the violence spreading to Iraq, where fighters there were mobilizing on behalf of the Syrians. So this has a potential, not only to engulf Syria, but also to spread in a very negative way to several already fragile states.
[Neal Conan:] Let's get one last caller on the line. This is Erwin, Erwin with us from Tyler in Minnesota.
[Erwin:] Yeah. I sort of think that the American people are in agreement that we should do something. We should at least furnish them with weapons, whether it'd be covertly, whatever. Assad is just a dictator and a butcher, just like his father. It's time for him to go. Regardless of the results, if we let al-Qaida get in there and claim the victory when they finally do overthrow him bad for us. Get in there, support the people. I mean, he is butchering people and killing them indiscriminately. Give them something that they can fight them tanks for with and get rid of him, assassinate him. Just get rid of him.
[Neal Conan:] Erwin, thanks very much for the call. In fact, I think the polls show that the majority of the American people are widely unconcern with the situation in Syria, Daniel Byman.
[Byman:] I think that's correct. Understandably, the economy, while, perhaps improving, is still in very bad shape, and there are hosts of problems at home. And Americans can go about their daily lives without the situation in Syria affecting them. But again, if we think about this in the broader picture, what the United States wants to accomplish in the Arab world, we want the Arab Spring to succeed. We want Iran's influence to be diminished. We want supporters of terrorism like Syria to like Assad's regime to be punished and to go in decline. The strategic consequences are real, and I recognize that, for many Americans, this seems rather remote, but it's very important even beyond these humanitarian aspects.
[Neal Conan:] And something quickly, an assassination?
[Byman:] The question whether the United States should kill foreign leaders, to me, is a very troubled one. I'm supportive of going after terrorist leaders as we see in the Obama, and before that, the Bush administrations, do. But opening the door to assassinating foreign leaders is a very troubling precedent for the United States.
[Neal Conan:] Daniel Byman, thanks very much for your time today. Appreciate it.
[Byman:] I appreciate your having me.
[Neal Conan:] Daniel Byman, professor at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service, also a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. His op-ed, again, there's a link to it on our website. Go to npr.org. Click on TALK OF THE NATION. It appeared in The Washington Post. Tomorrow, the ongoing debate among Catholics over health coverage and birth control. Join us for that. I'm Neal Conan. It's the TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.

[Alex Cohen:] I'm Alex Cohen. In a few minutes, you love your chiropractor but you can't afford him anymore. Advice for break-ups in the recession.
[Madeleine Brand:] A recession that's gone global. In Spain, more than 3 million Spaniards are out of work. Just a few years ago, the country was so prosperous it attracted millions of immigrants. Now, they're finding that their new country is not so welcoming. Jerome Socolovsky reports from Madrid.
[Jerome Socolovsky:] The bus to Bucharest has just pulled in to the Madrid south bus terminal. A crowd of Romanians shuffles towards the door, dragging heavy bags and bundles, even the odd TV. Nicoleta Badjan is among the passengers. Not long ago, she lost her job as an elderly woman's live-in nurse, and her husband lost his job as a construction worker.
[Ms. Nicoleta Badjan:] [Romanian spoken]
[Jerome Socolovsky:] I'm going back almost empty-handed, she says. The idea was to earn money and save up here in Spain.
[Ms. Nicoleta Badjan:] [Romanian spoken]
[Jerome Socolovsky:] But we can't manage anymore. When things don't work out, it's better for everyone to go back to their own place and their own home, she adds. Just a few years ago, it was an entirely different story. Spain had one of Europe's fastes- growing economies, and immigrants had jobs for the taking as construction workers, domestic servants and farm laborers. Since the beginning of this decade, Spain's population has swelled by more than 10 percent as 5 million immigrants arrived in the country. Most came from Romania, Morocco, Latin America and West Africa. Mamadu Baji is Senegalese. It was a harrowing voyage that took him in a large, crowded canoe from a beach in West Africa to Spain's Canary Islands.
[Mr. Mamadu Baji:] [Senegalese spoken]
[Jerome Socolovsky:] It took nine days, he says. It was really tough because the last two days, there was nothing to eat. I don't even know how to swim. We could've all died. Baji didn't have working papers, but he got a job in the south of Spain picking olives. Now, he's out of work. This harvest season, towns in the olive-producing region of Andalusia are overflowing with immigrants sleeping in public parks and church shelters because jobless locals are being hired instead, and there are plenty of them. Unemployment in Spain has reached 13.9 percent. That's the highest rate in the European Union, and it's forecast to reach almost 20 percent before the recession is over. Juan Carlos Rodriguez walks out of an unemployment office in the Madrid suburb of Colmenar Viejo. Two weeks ago, the Internet company, where the 35-year-old IT specialist worked, went bust. He says that at some point, he, too, may have to take the kind of job that immigrants have been doing.
[Mr. Juan Carlos Rodriguez:] [Spanish spoken]
[Jerome Socolovsky:] I'll try to hold on a bit and look for a job that fits my experience. But if there's no alternative, that's what I'll have to do, he says. At bus stops and subway stations, the Labor Ministry has put up billboards advertising financial incentives for immigrants to leave the country. But it's basically the unemployment benefit they're already entitled to, except that it would be paid in advance if they hand over their residence papers. During the first month of the program, so far, only 767 people sent in applications. Romanians and people from other European Union countries don't qualify for the paid-return program. But because of the EU's open borders, they know that if things get better, they can just hop on a bus and come back. Authorities are worried about the millions of other foreigners left languishing in Spain as the economy weakens. In the southern region of Almeria, which exports fruits and vegetables all over Europe, race riots have already broken out between Africans, gypsies and Moroccans. Back at the Madrid bus terminal, Mamadu Baji says his life in Spain hasn't worked out as he'd hoped.
[Mr. Mamadu Baji:] [Senegalese spoken]
[Jerome Socolovsky:] It's been a big disappointment, he says, a big disappointment. But for the moment, I'm not going back to Senegal. He nearly died trying to reach Europe, so he says he'd rather stay in Spain and suffer through the recession. For NPR News, I'm Jerome Socolovky in Madrid.

[Scott Simon:] Investigators may be getting closer to understanding what went wrong in the crashes of two Boeing 737 MAX jets. Attention is focused on an anti-stall system called MCAS and this week Boeing laid out a proposed fix for that software. NPR's Camila Domonoske has more.
[Camila Domonoske, Byline:] Even though we do not have final reports on the crashes of the Lion Air jet in October, or the Ethiopian Airlines flight this month, evidence so far has brought attention to MCAS.
[Anthony Brickhouse:] The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System is what it's called.
[Camila Domonoske, Byline:] Anthony Brickhouse is an aviation professor and an experienced crash investigator. He explains, the system only kicks in if the plane's about to stall, to prevent a disaster.
[Anthony Brickhouse:] But it looks like in the Lion Air accident there was something going on with the angle of attack indicator or sensor that actually feeds information to the computer.
[Camila Domonoske, Byline:] And based on the bad data the computer sent the plane down toward the ground. There are signs the Ethiopian Airlines plane may have gone down under similar circumstances. This week Boeing unveiled fixes for the software. The company has been working on them for months, since before the second crash. MCAS used to rely on one data input, now it will take two. Modern airplanes rely on a lot of automation to fly and experts agree that's made them safer. But Boeing can't just make the software better. It also has to grapple with human behavior.
[Clint Balog:] They cannot assume that the automation is never going to fail because we know from experience that automation fails, anything manmade fails.
[Camila Domonoske, Byline:] Clint Balog is a professor of aeronautics. He's a former test pilot who now researches the human factors of flying.
[Clint Balog:] You have to look ahead to how they can fail and you have to look ahead at giving the pilots the tools they need to maintain safe control of the aircraft when they do fail.
[Camila Domonoske, Byline:] In fact, the 737 Max had a system to allow the pilots to take control away from the software. But at least in the Lion Air crash, investigators say the pilots didn't use it. MCAS is new, added for the 737 Max. It was added to correct for how bigger engines changed the plane's center of gravity. But because the system didn't change how the plane handles and pilots could override it with existing procedures it wasn't mentioned in trainings or handbooks. Some pilots were upset to discover they were not told about the system and senators pushed the Federal Aviation Administration on this in a hearing on Wednesday. Here's Senator Ted Cruz of Texas...
[Ted Cruz:] As a passenger I would certainly find it troubling if the captain is describing the training manual as quote, "inadequate and almost criminally insufficient."
[Camila Domonoske, Byline:] So part of Boeing's fix is about putting power back in pilot's hands with an easier way to override the system and more training. Historically, Balog says, humans taking control has been a big part of Boeing's approach to automation.
[Clint Balog:] Boeing has a human-centric automation philosophy in which in most cases the pilot is the ultimate decision maker.
[Camila Domonoske, Byline:] So making automation easier to overrule is not an unusual step for Boeing, if anything it's a return to form. Boeing says it's working closely with customers and regulators on software and training updates.
[Ashley Nunes:] Boeing is certainly on the hook to convince the FAA that the fix ensures public safety.
[Camila Domonoske, Byline:] Ashley Nunes is a researcher at M.I.T. who studies regulatory policy and transportation safety.
[Ashley Nunes:] There have been regulators that have said, you know, until we know what the reasons are for why the airplane actually crashed it doesn't matter what the remedy is that Boeing comes up with, these airplanes are still grounded.
[Camila Domonoske, Byline:] Boeing continues to stand behind the safety of the 737 MAX, even before the software change. But passengers and regulators need to be persuaded. Camile Domonoske, NPR News.

[Robert Siegel:] The Justice Department's investigation into FIFA was aided in part by an American informant named Chuck Blazer. He was on FIFA's executive board until 2013 that's when he pleaded guilty to charges including racketeering and money laundering also tied to soccer. And CONCACAF, the group we mentioned earlier that runs soccer in the Caribbean and the Americas, had its own questions about how he did business. The organization revealed that he had charged business expenses to his personal American Express card. Not a dinner or two out, but $26 million worth of expenses.
[Brian Kelly:] My first reaction is, wow, I'm pretty impressed. This guy's savvy. You know, 26 million AmEx membership rewards points are really valuable.
[Robert Siegel:] The thought that Brian Kelly had there is one of the actual explanations for why Chuck Blazer may have done this he wanted the American Express reward points. We couldn't resist calling Kelly. He's the founder of thepointsguy.com, a website that advises on how to maximize your points for travel, and we asked him what Blazer could've done with $26 million worth of points.
[Brian Kelly:] Something tells me he's probably a first-class traveler, so he'd be able to get 208 round-trip, first-class flights to Europe. And at 9,000 bucks a ticket, that's over $1.8 million in value.
[Robert Siegel:] Not too shabby. And while this amount is over the top, Kelly says that for a lot of companies, this practice is business as usual.
[Brian Kelly:] A prime example of a business that rakes-in points I know several high-end travel agents that book all the travel for their clients, and then they get paid by check. So they spend hundreds of thousands a years on safaris and flights, and they earn all the points personally.
[Robert Siegel:] If you're racking-up the points and are more of a homebody millionaire, there are other options. Consider this offer on AmEx's website a 56-foot, above-ground metal storm shelter for only 13 million points.

[Steve Inskeep:] Been dealing with the aftermath of the nation's worst mass shooting in generations. Las Vegas can draw on the experience of other cities.
[Rachel Martin:] On the one hand, knowing you're not the only city to suffer this kind of thing can be reassuring in a way. On the other hand, it is gut-wrenching. There have been enough mass shootings that Vegas can learn from Tucson or Charleston or San Bernardino or Orlando. Clark County emergency manager John Steinbeck says Las Vegas is getting advice from cities elsewhere.
[John Steinbeck:] They've given us a footprint as to what to expect over the next months and even years. This is not something that we're going to walk away from anytime soon. And we're realistic with those timeframes.
[Steve Inskeep:] So what's a city do now? Let's talk about that with NPR's Sarah McCammon, who's in Las Vegas. And, Sarah, what is the city learning from the past?
[Sarah Mccammon, Byline:] So, as we heard, they're learning from other people who've been through this. And that's a growing list of cities. Las Vegas officials have reached out to places like Orlando and San Bernardino in particular. Some of those city officials have come and spent time here, working with the officials in Las Vegas. And John Steinbeck, the Clark County emergency manager we heard from earlier he says that they've given Vegas officials a sense of what to expect and especially the sense that it's going to take a long time to get through this. Aside from sort of the you know, the emotional aspect of coping and helping people heal, one of the specific questions they're looking for guidance on is just how to disperse these funds that are being raised for the victims. City officials met yesterday to talk about that question. Donations have just been pouring in. More than $13 million total an amount that keeps growing. So they're trying to figure out the best ways to spend and disperse that money amongst the victims' families and survivors.
[Steve Inskeep:] Thirteen million dollars a lot of money. But when we talk about 58 dead, hundreds of wounded, you realize that might actually not add up to that much help for any individual, depending on how it's distributed. What's it like...
[Sarah Mccammon, Byline:] True.
[Steve Inskeep:] ...Sarah, just walking around Las Vegas right now?
[Sarah Mccammon, Byline:] Well, it's really clear, you know, that this is on people's minds. You know, I hopped in some, you know, ride share rides yesterday. And everybody was talking about it. Everybody seemed to have some connection to it. One driver told me she'd been driving down the strip at the time and had to duck in her car. Another driver told me that he'd been at the festival where this happened the day before. And it, you know, hit really close to home for him. So, you know, people are mourning. They're busy putting together memorials. And there's a memorial garden that's opening up later today, among lots of other things people are doing just to try to show support and grieve.
[Steve Inskeep:] Is it any clearer what the motivation of the shooter, Stephen Paddock, was?
[Sarah Mccammon, Byline:] That is the big question. And, you know, Steve, it's been a pretty quiet 24 hours on that front. There have been some reports that the shooter may have been casing other music festivals in other cities. We know a hotel in Chicago did have a reservation in the shooter's name back in August around another music festival. That's something police are aware of. But that's all we really know. And it is the big question.
[Steve Inskeep:] Sarah, thanks for your work. Really appreciate it.
[Sarah Mccammon, Byline:] Thank you.
[Steve Inskeep:] NPR's Sarah McCammon is in Las Vegas. Now, the attack there leaves Congress here in Washington considering what, if anything, to do about guns.
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah. Republicans have blocked any new gun restriction for years. In this case, they are indicating they could be open to some kind of change. Several say they don't see a point in these things called bump stocks, which allow a semi-automatic weapon to fire almost like a machine gun.
[Steve Inskeep:] Yeah.
[Rachel Martin:] Stephen Paddock, the shooter in Las Vegas, had a dozen of these on hand when he opened fire on that concert. Now even the NRA, the National Rifle Association, says it is open to thinking about regulating these bump stocks.
[Steve Inskeep:] OK. Open to thinking about regulating.
[Rachel Martin:] Caveats.
[Steve Inskeep:] What does that really mean? NPR's Susan Davis is here to tell us about that. Hi, Sue.
[Susan Davis, Byline:] Hey. How you doing?
[Steve Inskeep:] So how big a deal is that from the NRA?
[Susan Davis, Byline:] You know it really remains to be seen because we don't know what the outcome of it's going to be yet. It's important to note that what they called for was the executive branch to review regulations, specifically the Bureau for Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. They did not call for Congress to act. They did not call for new legislation.
[Steve Inskeep:] Didn't use the word ban, either.
[Susan Davis, Byline:] And they didn't use the word ban, either just review. So the questions will be, will the administration take any changes to regulations? And if they do, does that give Congress a pass?
[Steve Inskeep:] I just want to put this right on the table. When you're somebody like the NRA, and you're under pressure and this can happen with lots of different interest groups and someone is demanding something of you, you can say, well, I'm kind of open to the most moderate possible change as a way of killing time until you can just kill any change at all. Is the NRA serious? Are Republicans serious about wanting to do something on this issue where they really don't generally agree that it's a good idea to act?
[Susan Davis, Byline:] What was notable on Capitol Hill was that there were a number of Republicans and prominent Republicans saying they were open to legislation to banning these bump stocks. That is the first time in response to these mass shootings, of which we've had many of which I've covered congressional responses to many that Republicans have been open to gun legislation, not just mental health legislation, which they say is generally the cause of these shootings.
[Steve Inskeep:] So there is something happening here, however small.
[Susan Davis, Byline:] There is something happening. It just is not clear to me yet that Congress is going to act.
[Steve Inskeep:] Well, let's listen to somebody who's not entirely sure that he wants to act. It is Steve Scalise. He's the Republican congressman who survived a shooting over the summer. He recently returned to work, and he's not sure how far this should go. He was talking on NBC's "Meet The Press."
[Steve Scalise:] I mean, look, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi already said she wants it to be a slippery slope. She doesn't want to stop at bump stocks. They want to go out and limit the rights of gun owners. And so I do think it's a little bit early for people to say they know what to do to fix this problem.
[Steve Inskeep:] What do you hear there, Sue?
[Susan Davis, Byline:] You know, this is what I remind people when we talk about this gun debate in Congress. It's important to remember that a majority of Congress simply does not believe that gun owners' rights should be restricted and that that view has been reinforced in elections. There has been three elections since Gabby Giffords was shot. There has been two elections since Newtown. And, consistently, when the gun issue was on the ballot, Republicans win. So there is not a lot of incentive here to act.
[Steve Inskeep:] Meanwhile, Democrats are saying this is such a minor thing to ban bump stocks. Even if they could do that, there's so much more they would like to do.
[Susan Davis, Byline:] It is this is one issue where we could potentially see bipartisan agreement. But even that seems unlikely.
[Rachel Martin:] Plus, there's still no motive in the Las Vegas shooting. And so guns are the thing that people are focusing on. As soon as you start to understand the contours of what was motivating this shooter, that might you might see the NRA stepping back from pushing this particular regulation.
[Susan Davis, Byline:] Absolutely.
[Steve Inskeep:] OK. NPR's Susan Davis, thanks for coming by.
[Susan Davis, Byline:] You bet.
[Steve Inskeep:] One of the more powerful men in Hollywood has apologized for how he used that power.
[Rachel Martin:] Harvey Weinstein is a big-time studio executive behind some of the most celebrated films in Hollywood history "Pulp Fiction," "Good Will Hunting." Seems like every time you turn on an award show on TV, someone is thinking him big names like Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Lawrence or Meryl Streep. Now some people are seeing him in a new light. The New York Times has reported Weinstein's settlements with multiple women who said he sexually harassed them, essentially asked for sex in exchange for helping their careers.
[Steve Inskeep:] The Washington Post's pop culture correspondent is on this story. Elahe Izadi is her name. She's been following his career for a long time. And she's in our studios. Good morning.
[Elahe Izadi:] Good morning.
[Steve Inskeep:] Having followed Harvey Weinstein, were you surprised?
[Elahe Izadi:] This has been referred to as one of Hollywood's worst-kept secrets, an open secret. Once the story drop, we saw, you know, executives coming out media executives and reporters saying, oh, this was our white whale. You know, we've been following this story. And there have been reports about many journalists over the years trying to crack open this story. So I think there's kind of a mixed response as, wow, The Times has this big, bombshell report. And at the same time, it doesn't strike a lot of people who have been following him in these rumors and gossip as a total surprise out of left field.
[Steve Inskeep:] And I hate to say it's almost as described, almost stereotypical behavior for a studio executive inviting women into a room or into a hotel room and saying, I'll help with your career if you do certain things for me. Is this normal for Hollywood? Was it normal for Hollywood in generations past, as Harvey Weinstein now says? And is it normal even now?
[Elahe Izadi:] Well, yeah. I mean, a lot of what people are talking about now is that notion of the casting couch...
[Steve Inskeep:] Yeah.
[Elahe Izadi:] ...And how there was almost this kind of romantic notion placed upon it for many years. And, also, folks are saying, you know, this points out that Hollywood actually isn't a very progressive industry necessarily, despite what people might say at awards shows. And Harvey Weinstein himself puts himself out there as a liberal who supports liberal causes. He's fundraised for Hillary Clinton. So, you know, there's kind of this dichotomy there right now. But the big news here is the settlements this revelation of eight settlements in addition to Ashley Judd coming on the record and saying that Harvey Weinstein made unwanted advances towards her. And I think with a story like this, as we've seen in the past with stories about big, important men media moguls once one of these stories comes out, it kind of opens the floodgates. And if there are other stories, it kind of shakes the tree loose.
[Steve Inskeep:] Very briefly, what do you make of Weinstein's statement? He says, I'm really sorry. I'm trying to get better. I've hired a coach. I'm really angry, so I'm going to attack the NRA to get my anger out. And, meanwhile, his lawyer says he's suing The New York Times. What do you make of all that?
[Elahe Izadi:] Yeah, and he also misquotes a Jay Z lyric in that, too.
[Steve Inskeep:] [Laughter].
[Elahe Izadi:] So it kind of goes all over the place and is kind of crisis management. It goes from kind of being apologetic to saying he's going to sue The Times for $50 million. So it's a little all over the place. And it's unclear exactly the narrative he's trying to push. But it is important to say that his lawyer said that he denies many of the accusations. Not all many.
[Steve Inskeep:] Can he survive this, since it is his company?
[Elahe Izadi:] Unclear. It's the Harvey Weinstein company. It's private but and he has a board of directors. But his brand might become so toxic that he can't weather this.
[Rachel Martin:] You need more women in Hollywood. You need more women producers. You need more women directors. You need more women who are in control the power in Hollywood.
[Steve Inskeep:] Solutions from Rachel Martin this morning.
[Rachel Martin:] There you go my two cents.
[Steve Inskeep:] And Elahe Izadi of the Washington Post, thanks for coming by. Appreciate it.
[Elahe Izadi:] Thank you.

[David Greene:] Good morning. I'm David Greene. The financial woes of Greece and other countries of the eurozone, have meant painful austerity measures in exchange for financial bailouts. Now, Irish voters have approved a European Union treaty to battle the debt crisis. It's an effort to enforce strict budget cuts or face financial penalties. Critics had accused officials of using scare tactics to gain voter support for yesterday's referendum. They said even if Ireland didn't approve the treaty, the European Union would continue to help the country financially. But Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, told Europe's leaders that the crisis is no bluff. As NPR's Philip Reeves reports, it was the sternest warning so far from Europe's top banker.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] The debate over how to save the eurozone from breaking up has a new note of urgency. In the last couple of years, the crisis has brought down governments, wrecked banks, and ruined countless lives and businesses. Yet, says Mario Draghi, Europe's leaders are lost in a fog. Draghi addressed the European Parliament yesterday and posed this question
[Mario Draghi:] How is the euro going to be, to look like in a certain number of years from now? What is the Union vision that we that you have, a certain number of years from now? And I think the sooner this has been specified, the better it is.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] Well over a decade has elapsed since the euro was launched. The currency is now used by 17 nations. But Europe's currency union was set up with some fundamental flaws including the absence of a common fiscal policy. These flaws need fixing, says Draghi.
[Mario Draghi:] That configuration that we had with us, by and large, for 10 years which was basically considered sustainable, I should say I should add, in a perhaps myopic way is being shown now to be unsustainable unless further steps are being undertaken.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] The European Central Bank that Draghi heads is credited with doing a lot to stave off disaster in recent months. It's pumped well over a trillion dollars in cheap loans into Europe's banking system. But Draghi said his bank cannot fill the policy vacuum caused by the lack of effective action by the eurozone's national governments. His appeal for a plan was echoed by Olli Rehn, the European Commission's top financial official.
[Olli Rehn:] Let's be frank: At least, we want to avoid a disintegration of the eurozone and instead, make the euro survive and succeed for the sake of its member states and especially, their citizens.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] Europe's leaders are worrying about the impact of a Greek exit from the eurozone. But the spotlight's also now trained on Spain, the zone's fourth largest economy. There's growing concern Spain will need a big bailout like Greece, Portugal and Ireland because of its banking crisis. Draghi wants there to be tighter central control over Europe's banks though that would mean countries losing some sovereignty. He says national governments aren't all that good at dealing with banks that have run into trouble.
[Mario Draghi:] Whenever we are confronted with the dramatic needs to recapitalize, if you look back, the reaction of the individual governments, countries, supervisors, national supervisors, is to first to say, underestimate the importance of the problem; then come out with a first assessment, then a second, then a third, then a fourth...
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] That problem's arisen in Spain. Its government now says one of its biggest banks, Bankia, needs a bailout of more than $20 billion. That's much more than it initially estimated. Spain's approach is par for the course in Europe, says Draghi.
[Mario Draghi:] This has been the experience in I would say everywhere. Now, if you look at the all countries have done exactly the same thing. Now, that's the worst possible way of doing things because you end up obviously, everybody ends up doing the right thing, but at a highest possible cost and price.
[Philip Reeves, Byline:] Philip Reeves, NPR News, London

[Steve Inskeep:] France elects the leaders of 13 administrative regions this weekend. After a first round of voting, the National Front is in the lead. It was once considered a fringe party of the far right, but the National Front now attracts wide support. It is considered a nativist party in a time of political anxiety and terror attacks. Its newest star is a symbol of its new appeal. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports from Marseille.
[Marion Marechal-le Pen:] [Speaking French].
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] Marion Marechal-Le Pen is the niece of National Front leader Marine Le Pen and the granddaughter of party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, and this crowd in Marseille can't get enough of her. This svelte blonde lawyer and mother is the hallmark of the party's success in this round of elections. The 26-year-old stands poised to govern one of the country's most prosperous regions along the French Riviera. Across town at Socialist Party headquarters, the mood is not so ebullient. The socialists ran this region for the last 18 years, but they did so poorly in last weekend's first round that the party has dropped out of the race entirely. They're urging their voters to support the mainstream conservative candidates in order to block the National Front. Twenty-six-year-old Eva Tahla was a Socialist candidate for regional council. She says Marion Marechal-Le Pen is a dangerous adversary.
[Eva Tahla:] [Through interpreter] She incarnates the new generation and the older generation of her grandfather, so she can mobilize everyone. She especially appeals to the young people who are unemployed.
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] With the National Front poised to take one to six French regions for the first time in history, the political establishment is in a panic. All week, elected officials from both sides have been urging the large number of voters who stayed home last weekend to turn out Sunday to block the National Front. Le Pen and her supporters in Marseille reveled in all the attention.
[Marion Marechal-le Pen:] [Speaking French].
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] Don't listen to the elites who want to take our democracy hostage, said Le Pen. They say we're the party of fear, but they resort to lies and intimidation to keep us from being elected. They are the real party of fear. The National Front has gotten a boost from the recent terrorist attacks and the migrant crisis, but it's hardly had to work at it. It is as if recent events are catching up to the party's scaremongering over mass Muslim immigration and terrorism. Far right specialist Nonna Mayer says the National Front has been gaining broader appeal since Marine Le Pen took over four years ago and broke with her father's racist and anti-Semitic brand of politics.
[Nonna Mayer:] So it's a progressive but a constant electoral dynamic linked to her strategy of presenting a normal face of the party.
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] That normal face of the National Front is drawing more women and young people who say they're ready to try something new. Students like Boris Elgoyen hang out in front of the law in the southern town of Aix-en-Provence.
[Boris Elgoyen:] [Through interpreter] Today's National Front is completely different from the past. And even if they don't win, it's great they're putting pressure on the traditional parties who've been in power forever and haven't done what they promised to improve unemployment and security.
[Unidentified Crowd:] [Singing in French].
[Eleanor Beardsley, Byline:] Back at the rally, the crowd sings the Marseillaise. Le Pen notes that since the terrorist attacks, some politicians have embraced the national anthem and the flag. We always have, she says. Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Marseille.

[Robert Siegel:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
[Melissa Block:] And I'm Melissa Block. New Jersey has some tough new rules for chemical companies. It has become the first state to require chemical plants to protect themselves and the public from a terrorist attack or a catastrophic accident. New Jersey announced the new rules yesterday after months of criticism that the state relied too heavily on the chemical industry to address safety concerns. NPR's Nancy Solomon reports.
[Nancy Solomon Reporting:] New Jersey has some of the most dangerous chemical plants in the nation, and some of those are located perilously close to heavily populated urban areas, most notably New York City. Elvin Montero, spokesman for the Chemistry Council of New Jersey, says the new regulations are a slap in the face to the state's chemical industry.
[Mr. Elvin Montero:] What we are concerned with is the end or the abandoning, if you will, of the cooperative approach that the state and our sector shared for many years in working together. It gives a perception that our industry hasn't done anything, which, in fact, in New Jersey, we've done a lot.
[Solomon:] Since 911, Montero says, chemical plants in New Jersey have voluntarily spent millions of dollars in the form of gates, cameras and guards. But New Jersey will now require 140 chemical plants to evaluate whether they can produce their products in a safer way, with different chemicals or by stockpiling less. This provision, called inherently safer technology, has been the primary objection of the industry both in New Jersey and nationally. Fred Millar, a chemical safety expert who's worked for environmental organizations and now consults with cities, says it's the only way to make plants safer.
[Mr. Fred Millar:] But it really won't happen unless there's some government presence there because it's just really too cheap and too easy to continue having the old situation of lots of really toxic chemicals in storage on your facility.
[Solomon:] New Jersey chemical plants will now have 120 days to complete a review of their security and chemical processes. Governor-elect Jon Corzine says the new regulations are a good first step, and he plans to make them even tougher when he takes office. For NPR News, I'm Nancy Solomon.

[Ed Gordon:] What does a powerful multi-industry mogul look like? This one sports baseball caps, flashy sneakers and diamonds. Damon Dash is CEO of Rocawear, a multimillion-dollar clothing line, and heads the Damon Dash Music Group and Dash Films, which last year helped produce the critically acclaimed movie "The Woodsman" starring Kevin Bacon. This October, BET is turning the cameras on the business and personal life of the New York native. The reality show "The Ultimate Hustler" is "The Apprentice" with a hip-hop flair. We spoke recently, and I wondered if Dash was amazed at just how pervasive hip-hop has become in shaping the culture of the world.
[Mr. Damon Dash:] Sometimes I'm amazed that it's not bigger, like-and I can tell you what I mean by that, like, as it relates to, like, movies. You know, "Hustle & Flow" came out, and I was really rooting for "Hustle & Flow" because, you know, it was a hip-hop movie and it was a good movie. It was well acted. I was very impressed with the performances, and I was, like, you know, this will definitely be good in the urban market, but I wanted it to translate in the outside of the urban market so people would respect the hip-hop world and it would open the doors to where we can make more hip-hop movies. Like, you know, when we go to make a movie, they still want us to make comedies. I would love if we had a little more respect as related to movies. You know, I also think that, you know, there's a lot of positives in hip-hop. I think, you know, the press tend to capitalize or rather just key in on the negative things. Like, you can do 10 great things. And one bad thing happens, all you hear about is the bad thing, you hear...
[Ed Gordon:] Yeah, Damon, the truth is, too, there is this want to hang on no matter how far you go on the ladder the gangster image.
[Mr. Damon Dash:] To me, like, gangsters are carrying guns and played out. I think it shows, you know, a lot of insecurity. I don't think it's gangster to carry on a gangster image but you can't forget where you're from. You just can't walk away from...
[Ed Gordon:] But it's not an issue of leaving your boys behind or leaving the idea that you are who you are from birth...
[Mr. Damon Dash:] Right.
[Ed Gordon:] ...and you don't forget those experiences...
[Mr. Damon Dash:] Yeah.
[Ed Gordon:] ...but when you listen to some cats who now are multimillionaires...
[Mr. Damon Dash:] Those cats are phony. I'm not advocating that at all.
[Unidentified Man:] [Rapping] Memories...
[Mr. Damon Dash:] Kanye West, Common Sense-those are rappers, too. Those dudes are poets.
[Unidentified Man:] [Rapping]... [Unintelligible]. Got Uncle Zack smoking stuff they blow up they nose to cope with their lows...
[Mr. Damon Dash:] Trust me, within the culture, we're looking at those guys that are professing all that gangsterness and we think they're clowns. So, you know, I don't advocate that, but I'm not going to say that that represents my whole culture...
[Ed Gordon:] Right.
[Mr. Damon Dash:] ...or the whole culture of hip-hop.
[Ed Gordon:] Let me ask you this. What about this generation, allowed those of you who've been able to attain what is truly the American dream and beyond it? Was there something special about the way you grew up? Was there something special that allowed your generation to get it in ways that generations before just didn't economically?
[Mr. Damon Dash:] I don't think my success or me having the opportunity to have success is from our generation. I think it's from the generations before us. I think it's the fact that people like Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers and people like that fought for us to have the freedom to do and say what we want and have the opportunity to make money. So I feel like it's just an evolution. Those doors are open for us that weren't open for them, and we're capitalizing. So we're just lucky. Like, I don't know if I would've had the chops to fight like Martin Luther King or Stokely Carmichael or any of those dudes. You know what I'm saying? Like, we didn't come up in that climate. So now that, you know, there's more freedom, we're allowed to speak, we can look at people in their face, we're allowed to be ourselves, and we're also allowed to question when people are taking advantage of us. And we're also able to learn from other people's mistakes. And, you know, we also have the wherewithal to, you know, have the cameras on somebody. Ought to be able to articulate our concerns. It's made it to where we can get treated a little bit fairer. I still don't think we're where we should be as a culture, but, you know, I think it's a progress in motion. So hopefully I'm opening the doors for other guys that'll be way bigger than I am.
[Ed Gordon:] You know what I find most interesting is one of the things that you and others have been able to do is function with the idea of knowing what's popular in our community and not just putting your name on it but actually motivating others and yourself to be a part of it. I think of the idea that you guys have now bought into PRO-Keds.
[Mr. Damon Dash:] Yeah.
[Ed Gordon:] And the sneaker game has been big for a long time. Talk to me about the motivation of doing that.
[Mr. Damon Dash:] Well, I'm an objective consumer. You know what I'm saying? Like, everything I sell is from my lifestyle and I'm one that's bought a lot of sneakers. And you know what's really funny is now that I'm, you know, making the PRO-Keds and we're becoming a competitor of, like, Nike and Adidas, like, you know, we're on these guys' radar. And, you know, Nike being a big corporation, they're trying to use their muscle to get us out. So they're actually going to the retailers and telling them, `If you take the PRO-Keds, we're not going to sell you the Nikes.'And it's like-that's like telling somebody you can't get money on your own block. You know what I'm saying? I'm the person that's been buying the sneakers. You guys selling your sneakers in my neighborhood, and you're going to tell me I can't put those sneakers in my neighborhood? So I'm up for that fight with Nike. You know what I'm saying? I think it's actually pretty much hilarious that they think they can exploit my culture and make most of their money from my culture, and then tell me someone of that culture can't get money from it. So, you know, I'm up for that fight. Me and Nike, we got a little bit of a beef right now. I represent millions of people that are like me because I'm just an average cat and I know how to definitely talk and facilitate their demands for anything they need as it relates to sneakers. You know, it just only makes sense. You know, I'm a businessman. My job is to be an entrepreneur, and any opportunity that I have to capitalize off of my lifestyle and my true experience, I will. And I'm not going to let somebody outside of my culture ever tell me I can't sell to people in my culture. I mean, I just think it's crazy.
[Ed Gordon:] Let me ask you something that you said that I found interesting. You said-and often you hear this from people who've made it-sometimes we want to be looked upon. Now you say, `I'm just an average cat.'Do you really see yourself that way?
[Mr. Damon Dash:] Yeah. I mean, you know, I think...
[Ed Gordon:] You don't see yourself in any means as extraordinary?
[Mr. Damon Dash:] I mean, I think I'm extraordinarily motivated. You know, I have a lot of energy, you understand? But, you know, I was lucky. You know, I was lucky to grow up in two different extreme circumstances. Like, I was lucky enough to go to boarding school, go to school downtown, go to private school. You know, I saw the world when I was younger, you know, through the eyes of my mother, and, you know, she's a black woman that made sure I saw these things. She was a secretary and, you know, she did what she had to do to make the extra so I could see the extras and get educated and articulate myself. But also, you know, I was raised uptown. You know, I was on 142nd Street and Lenox and I got to see some extremely rough things, and I learned how to survive. You know what I'm saying? So I think anyone that's been where I'm at-you know, it's almost like I've been built to do this, like, I'm built to represent the extreme circumstances as it relates to the urban culture, but I'm also built to survive in other cultures, like, to make my experience or represent my experience to people that couldn't fathom it.
[Ed Gordon:] Let me take you, before we let you go, man, into some of your projects. And as I say, you always have so much on the table, it's sometimes hard to get to in the time limit. But one of the things I want to talk about is the new TV show, "The Ultimate Hustler"...
[Mr. Damon Dash:] Yeah.
[Ed Gordon:] ...which is going to be on BET.
[Mr. Damon Dash:] Sure.
[Ed Gordon:] It's kind of your reality show. Talk to me about it.
[Mr. Damon Dash:] Well, you know, I had been approached by a lot of different networks to do a reality show. And I was, like, you know, to me, reality shows are corny-You know what I'm saying?-and they're just a waste of time. And I was, like, I'm not going to go anywhere where I'm going to get exploited. And, you know, when BET approached me with it, I was, like, you know, BET has done so much for me and my career. Regardless of what, you know, you can't knock them. You know, they're the only outlet we really have for our culture.
[Ed Gordon:] Right.
[Mr. Damon Dash:] And, you know, because of the success I've gotten from BET, I've been able to go and experience other things, and I've made so many different kinds of connections. So I was, like, well, if I can talk directly to my culture, directly to my people, and if I can bring production quality that I've gotten from the fashion world and the things outside of the urban world and bring that to BET, you know, I thought that that would be a score. I'll be teaching people my ideals, not to say they're right or wrong, but they're things that got me to where I had to go, but also the look of the show, I can bring that. And also I figured BET would give me a little more control. We got to outsource everything. I got to use all my connections in every business from the movie business to the fashion business to the sports business, and I got to bring all that and show my culture, not to say that my life is aspirational, but everything I'm doing outside of the culture as well and teach them how to do it and for them to be savvy about it and to live by the ideals of no lying and not snitching and be strong, the worth ethic. Like, I could really show it. And, you know, it's a funny show, it's very educational. A lot of people say they want to be entrepreneurs, but, you know, you'll see in the show a lot of them really don't have the chops.
[Ed Gordon:] Let me ask you this, too. And that, we should note, will start in the fall. "State Property 2"...
[Mr. Damon Dash:] Yeah.
[Ed Gordon:] ...you've been dealing with, but what I found most interesting a lot of people don't know is that you were an executive producer on "The Woodsman"...
[Mr. Damon Dash:] Yeah. Yeah.
[Ed Gordon:] ...with Kevin Bacon, a critically acclaimed movie and not enough people, I think, saw that. It was actually a good movie that deals with topics that Hollywood often turns away from, and that was pedophilia.
[Mr. Damon Dash:] Right. Right. Yeah, I mean, I thought it was important on a lot of different reasons or a lot of different levels. Number one, I am a true movie maker. And, you know, I am very much-I don't want to say infatuated, but I'm impressed with the art of making a movie and invoking emotion. You know, when I started making movies, I thought it was easy, and then when I got into it, I was, like, this is not easy at all. And, you know, I identified a really good script, something that was socially conscious, had really good talent-you know, Lee Daniels was the producer and I wanted to work with him. He had got an Oscar for Halle Berry. I wanted to work with Kevin Bacon and Benjamin Bratt and Kyra Sedgwick. And then I wanted to do something that sort of, like, broke down the stereotypes of an urban individualist. Like, people think urban people can only make urban movies. So I was, like, `Look, man, I can cut a check for this just like I can cut a check for "State Property," you know, and make a good movie and something that, you know, was, like I said, socially conscious.'And then, you know, to me, you know, I made my money back. It was a win for our culture just because, like I said, I feel like I'm an ambassador of it. And now people may take a person with a baseball hat cocked to the side a little more serious. And, you know, we made a good movie.
[Ed Gordon:] Well, listen, man, whether it be the distillery and the vodka or the clothing line or the music line or the movies, you're keeping it up front. And as we, I think, showed people, you know, you're real about what you're doing, and I appreciate your time today, bro.
[Mr. Damon Dash:] Thank you, man. I appreciate that.

[Steve Inskeep:] Here is one big question for President Trump's trade negotiator. What is the United States gaining through all the expense and pain of a trade war? Robert Lighthizer is leading trade talks with China, and he faces questions before a congressional committee today. Amy Celico is a former government trade negotiator who has long experience with China, and she's come by our studios. Good morning.
[Amy Celico:] Good morning.
[Steve Inskeep:] I should note this testimony happens just after the president put off an escalation in the trade war to allow time for more talks, which suggests they're getting close to a deal. Looking at it from the outside, do you feel you understand how close they are?
[Amy Celico:] Well, if we listen to what the president is saying and the Chinese confirmed this there has been substantial progress being made in the talks. They are talking about setting a high-level summit at Mar-a-Lago for the two to finalize an agreement. And so rhetorically, there are signs that there is interest in both sides in a deal being made. The challenge for Ambassador Lighthizer today before Congress is whether or not this deal is going to be the comprehensive deal addressing all of these underlying challenges that we, the United States, have been facing with China for a decade, whether they can do that in this next deal.
[Steve Inskeep:] U.S. officials have said on this program, our goal is to fundamentally get China to change the way they do business. This is not a matter of tweaking one trade practice or another.
[Amy Celico:] Exactly. And Ambassador Lighthizer has been very consistent on this point. He has said, we are going to be more aggressive than anyone in the past to confront China on its trade practices, its unfair trade practices, that undermine U.S. interests and distort the global trading system. And he said we're going to do that by using all the tools at our disposal, whether they're tariffs, WTO litigation or banding together with like-minded countries to pressure China to change.
[Steve Inskeep:] The highest profile of those, of course, is the tariffs on products coming from China, which President Trump has imposed and which he has threatened to impose further, but, as has been widely noted here, it's actually U.S. consumers who pay the tariffs. It's U.S. companies who pay the tariffs, in terms of higher prices. As far as you can tell, is the United States applying the right leverage to get China to move?
[Amy Celico:] Well, I think consistently across the board, the U.S. business community did not support application of tariffs as the proper remedy to the situation. The situation being that China distorts global trade rules and is undermining American companies in China. However, now that we're mid-process, the U.S. business community is saying, let's stay tough on China, let's not give away the leverage that we have gained by getting the Chinese to the negotiating table through application of these tariffs. Let's not let up until we have a real deal in place. Not a half deal that only involves purchase agreements, but one that actually in a verifiable way will bring China to change some of the underlying issues that harm American interests. And that's what Ambassador Lighthizer is going to be hearing about from Capitol Hill this morning. I think he's preaching to the choir in many ways because he, too, wants a comprehensive deal. The question is, to your original point, do we have enough leverage to bring the Chinese to make substantial changes? I think President Trump continuously talking about a deal in the future maybe undermines us a little bit in trying to get and gain and maintain that leverage.
[Steve Inskeep:] In a few seconds is anything happening in China that would make them really want a deal on their own, for their own purposes?
[Amy Celico:] Absolutely. The slowing of the Chinese economy is significant. China is about to launch its annual National People's Congress meetings next week in Beijing. There will be significant focus on the economy on the legislative agenda. And so from the Chinese perspective, of course, they want this trade war ended.
[Steve Inskeep:] Ms. Celico, thanks very much for coming by. Really appreciate it.
[Amy Celico:] Great to be with you.
[Steve Inskeep:] Amy Celico is a former China trade negotiator for the U.S. Trade Representative's office. She now works for the Albright Stonebridge Group.

[Neal Conan:] The White House says President Bush will send up to 20,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq. Most of the increase will be felt in Baghdad. The president will outline his plan in an address to the nation tonight. And New Orleans is launching a crackdown on crime following a slew of murders since the start of 2007. This comes in advance of planned community demonstrations against the killings. You can hear details on those stories and, of course, much more later today on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Tomorrow on TALK OF THE NATION, it was five years ago that public allegations of sexual abuse first shook the Catholic Church. We'll talk with victims, the clergy, and with the reporters who uncovered the story about what's changed since 2002. Plus we'll talk with the man who's been called the greatest bull rider ever. That's tomorrow on TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. When Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, announced the new iPhone yesterday he put an end to months of rumors and guesses about what some Macalites called the Holy Grail of gadgets. The iPhone, of course, is a handheld device that combines a cell phone with an Internet browser, a video player, an e-mail device, and of course that ubiquitous iPod music player.
[You Can Get A Look At The Iphone And Read Some Of The Reaction From Bloggers At Our Web Site:] npr.org. Joining us now is Walt Mossberg. He's the personal technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal. And he's in Las Vegas where he's covering the Consumer Electronics Show. Walt, nice to talk to you again.
[Mr. Walt Mossberg:] Nice to talk to you, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] And we want to hear from our listeners, Apple fans or otherwise. Are you planning to pick up the iPhone? What questions do you have about it or if you have questions about gadgets you've read about or heard about at the CES, give us a call. 800-989-8255, 800-989-TALK. E-mail is talk@npr.org. And I know, Walt, you flew to San Francisco yesterday and met with Steve Jobs at MacWorld. Did you see the iPhone? Did you get to play with it?
[Mr. Walt Mossberg:] I did get to play with it, Neal, for about 15, 20 minutes. You know, my job is to review and test consumer products like that. I would never do a proper review based on 15, 20 minutes. But I can tell you I sat through the presentation and then I did work with it a little bit. It is a radical and revolutionary approach to a cell phone that I think will shake up the market considerably.
[Neal Conan:] Really? Radical in what way?
[Mr. Walt Mossberg:] Well, here's the interesting thing. We all know about the iPod, the big success it has been. And everyone knew that Apple was working on two things. One was an iPod, which was combined with a phone in some way. And the other was an iPod that would have a huge screen and touch control so that you could devote the whole surface of it to being a screen. What we learned yesterday to our shock was that they were merging those two things into this one iPhone product. And that's what's so interesting about it. You pick the thing up. It's quite thin. It's thinner than the thinnest smart phone today, like the Motorola Q or the BlackJack. It's much thinner than a Treo. But it has this enormous, extremely high resolution, highly vivid screen that not only allows you to do things like photos and videos in a really pleasing way, but gives them the real estate and the resolution to make it look kind of like a Macintosh in your hand. You know, that beautiful user interface. Vivid icons, just, you know, anything, reading an e-mail, viewing a Web page, extremely sharp. And I think that was the big surprise.
[Neal Conan:] It sounds to me like what you're describing is that a three and a half inch screen doesn't look small.
[Mr. Walt Mossberg:] It doesn't look small. Obviously it's smaller than what you would have on your laptop, but it's three and a half inches diagonally. It's high resolution, the highest resolution of any portable device I have ever seen. And it has an extremely high pixels-per-inch number for this kind of a device, which gives it a tremendous saturation and richness on the screen. And that may not sound like it means anything to people, but what it means is they are able to produce a user interface which is so sophisticated because of the screen that it makes I don't mean to sound like a commercial because again I haven't I'm not endorsing it, I haven't reviewed it but it really made my brand new Treo look primitive next to it.
[Neal Conan:] One complaint that we've heard already and I have to say it was a similar complaint we heard about the early iPods too: battery life.
[Mr. Walt Mossberg:] Well, I'm amused by these complaints, because nobody's tested it. Apple hasn't finished it. The reason they announced it yesterday, even though they're not going to sell it until June, is that they have to go for FCC certification, and that would have meant it would've leaked out. But let me just talk about battery life for a minute. This is always a problem and the battery life on the iPod has not been a problem in terms of the amount of battery life you get between charges. The iPod has actually been fairly good at that. Complaints about the iPod is that over a couple of years, the battery, if you use it heavily and recharge it all the time, the battery will fail and that's just a fact of physics and chemistry, and that's going to happen on any of these things. But what Steve Jobs announced about this iPhone yesterday was that if you were just playing music on it, just using it like an iPod, you would get 16 hours on a single charge, which is quite good. But if you're using it as a cell phone and mixing in some Web-browsing, some e-mail, some music, whatever, he gave an estimate of like five hours of talk time. Now the truth is, that's really good for a cell phone, too. But the thing is so much more than a phone that it's going to be very difficult, I think, to figure out what a typical pattern of usage is, and therefore to figure out a realistic battery life. And when I get one to test, I'm going to test it in all these modes. But until then, I don't think you can complain about it because you don't know.
[Neal Conan:] Let's get some listeners' questions on the line. Again, if you'd like to join us, Walt Mossberg is out guest. He's the personal technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Give us a call at 800-989-8255, 800-989-TALK. E-mail is talk@npr.org. Craig is with us, Craig calling us from Portland, Oregon.
[Craig:] Hello.
[Neal Conan:] Hi, Craig.
[Craig:] Yeah, my question is whether or not, since the phone runs on OSX, which is the operating system for Macintosh, whether or not it will run other applications like well, the one I use is Panorama. It's an ultra-fast RAM-based database.
[Mr. Walt Mossberg:] Well, it's a great question, and the answer is no. First of all, your point is extremely important. One of the things that makes this phone so unusual and so interesting is that it runs on a subset of a real computer operating system, not one of the kind of what Jobs called, yesterday, baby software programs. But, it isn't the full OSX Macintosh operating system, which is enormous and could not fit in the memory of a phone. So it's a subset of OSX. Now, even if that allowed it to run programs like the one you mentioned, Apple has made a decision that it's not going to allow you to load other programs on this thing. It's not going to let you use it as you would use a computer. And there are some business reasons for that, there are some security reasons, but they are treating it like an iPod, which as you know, for the most part, is difficult to load outside software on. And you buy things from Apple, whether it's a game, or a song, or a video or audio book and load it on the iPod, but the iPhone, at least in the first iteration for June, is not going to be open to loading other programs onto it.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks for the call, Craig.
[Craig:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] Bye-bye. Let's go to Jeff, and Jeff's calling from Cincinnati.
[Jeff:] Hi, gentlemen.
[Neal Conan:] Go ahead, Jeff.
[Jeff:] Hi. I have a question about the phone provider. Are we allowed to just go on with the account that we already have, or do we have to sign up with Cingular or somebody like that?
[Mr. Walt Mossberg:] Well, you know, part of this is an Apple answer, and part of is an answer that has to do with the way cell phones are in the United States. In Europe and in Asia, people are quite used to popping the little SIMM card, that little chip that's inside some cell phones out, and changing their carrier. They can keep their phone and change their carrier, or they can keep their carrier and change their phone. In the United States, you can do it, kind of, sort of, some of the time, but not so much. So that's the background on this. Now then specifically, Apple has done a deal with Cingular wireless, and this phone in the United States is being designed in such a way that it will only work with Cingular wireless. So if you have a Verizon account, a Sprint account, even a T-Mobile account, which is the same technology as Cingular, you're not going to be able to use this phone. You are going to have to go to Cingular. If you take it overseas, you can pop the chip out and put in a SIMM card from one of the European phone-makers, phone companies. You will not have every feature, because some of the features on the iPhone are done in collaboration with Cingular, but you will be able to use it. But in the U.S., at least until someone finds a way around this or hacks it, it is Apple's intention that it only will work with Cingular.
[Jeff:] Okay, thanks so much.
[Neal Conan:] Thanks, Jeff. Let me ask you a question about price, and as I understand it, again it's coming out in June. That's when it's supposed to be available to consumers in two versions, either $499 or $599, depending on how much memory you buy.
[Mr. Walt Mossberg:] That's right, and that's very expensive. This is a BMW of cell phones, or a Lexus of cell phones. That's not unusual to Apple, at least when they start a product line. Remember, the iPod, when it came out in 2001, was $400. It was the most expensive MP3 player on the market, and yet it became the best-selling one. So they're not trying to this phone is not intended to compete with the free or $69, you know, flip-phone you buy in the store. It's intended to compete with Trios and Blackberry phones and some of the higher-end music and multi-media phones. But even compared to them, it's a little bit more expensive. Now, I believe this is only the first of a series of iPhones, and just as with the iPod you know, you can now buy an iPod Shuffle for $79 I believe you will see a range at difference prices. But for a while, for probably a year or two, this is going to be a premium, high-priced phone. And while we're on that subject, Neal, let me just quickly mention there are a couple of other obvious downsides to this that have to be mentioned. One is the touch screen. Apple's invented this really interesting new way of using a touch screen. They have all kinds of patents on it, but it's still a touch screen. And for people who do a lot of e-mail on the phone and who would want to sit there typing, it is a there are a lot of people who don't like typing on a virtual keyboard on a screen. Now, I found it to be, in my very short time working with it, pretty good, but I don't know whether over the course of two or three weeks doing a lot of e-mail, it would annoy me or other users. Secondly, there are a bunch of different cell-phone networks in this country, and even any one carrier, like Cingular, has a number of different speeds and networks. The iPhone in its first release is running on a relatively slow cell-phone network, not the fastest one that Cingular does offer, and that's going to be a disadvantage, particularly when you're paying a lot of money and you have a lot of Internet-type capability on the phone.
[Neal Conan:] Particularly on that last point, I can hear teeth gnashing across the country.
[Mr. Walt Mossberg:] Yeah, absolutely right, and I believe, and I can't say why I believe this, but I believe Apple will upgrade these phones or not the first ones they sell, but there will be follow-on iPhones that will work on the highest-speed network. But the iPhone that is coming on in June will be on something called Edge, which despite its edgy name, is actually a slow network. It's somewhat mitigated by the fact that this phone also does Wi-Fi. We all know about Wi-Fi, and that's much faster. So if you're in a say, a Starbucks or an airport or somewhere where there's a Wi-Fi connection, the phone will automatically switch that connection if you like, and you can get much faster speed. But it would've been nicer if this thing came out on the fastest phone network available, and it didn't.
[Neal Conan:] Walt Mossberg is personal technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And let's get Maggie on the line, Maggie calling us from Walnut Creek in California.
[Mr. Walt Mossberg:] Hi, Maggie.
[Maggie:] Hi there. I am curious about, since Apple is going into the consumer electronics so much more, I am curious how that's going to impact its computer industry, both for business and the quality of the computer.
[Mr. Walt Mossberg:] Well, Maggie may be referring to the fact that yesterday, at the end of his presentation, Steve Jobs announced that he's changing the name of the company from Apple Computer to just Apple. And here's the deal. Right now, most of their revenues still come from the Macintosh computer. Although it has a very small market share, this is probably the most successful period in the history of the Macintosh. They are growing at four times the rate of the rest of the computer industry, and they're profitable, and you know, you can just ask around, look around at your friends and neighbors, you will see more people switching over than probably you have ever remembered. Now that's still a very small share. It's 5 or 6 percent of the U.S. market. So Apple is not getting out of the Macintosh business, at least that's what they told me. They have new models coming, they continue to invest in it, but they are clearly, and this is what's so interesting about them as a company, they are the company that stands most successfully at the juncture between the computer industry and this new digital consumer electronics industry, which requires a lot of the skills and talent, including very good software, that exist in the computer industry. And they are making this kind of...
[Maggie:] So you don't think it'll impact the quality at all?
[Mr. Walt Mossberg:] They're not going to no, I don't think they're going to drop the Mac. There's no intention to drop the Mac that I can detect there at all. And as you know, Maggie, if you're a Mac user...
[Maggie:] I am.
[Mr. Walt Mossberg:] There are, in fact, about to announce or have announced and about to bring out in the spring a massive new Mac operating system. So no, the answer to that is as far as I know I mean, Steve Jobs can do, you know, bold things at any time but as far as I know in my conversations with him and other officials there, they have every intention of continuing to do Macintosh computer.
[Neal Conan:] Maggie, thanks very much for the call.
[Maggie:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] And Walt Mossberg, before we let you go, you're actually in Las Vegas, not San Francisco. You're at the consumer electronics show. Some guy named Gates made a big speech there also. What was he talking about?
[Mr. Walt Mossberg:] Well, you know, Bill Gates and Steve jobs obviously are rivals, and they've known each other for 30 years. And interestingly, they both were talking about very many of the same thing about mobility and wirelessness in terms of the phones. You know, Apple announced this thing called AppleTV, which is an effort to take your digital content from your computer through the Internet and put it on your TV. Bill Gates talked about exactly the same thing. There will be Microsoft-based products that companies will bring out that do some of these things, and Bill Gates is in the cell phone, the smart phone, market. Apple, in effect, is now wading again into the competition with Microsoft because many of these smart phones are powered by Microsoft software. So they're both aiming at the same targets, which is the digitalization of the home, the digitalization of the cell phone experience, and we're going to you know, it's going to be Chapter 999 in the rivalry between Microsoft and Apple.
[Neal Conan:] Walt Mossberg, thanks very much for your time. We appreciate it. And have a great time in Vegas.
[Mr. Walt Mossberg:] Thank you. Take care.
[Neal Conan:] Walt Mossberg, personal technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal, joined us today by phone, cell phone, from the floor of the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas. If you'd like to take a look at that new iPhone, you can do so at our Web site, npr.org. This is TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.

[Renee Montagne:] On Mondays our business report focuses on technology. Today, new gaming consoles. The coming week is an exciting one for people who like to play computer games. Two new consoles will be released Nintendo's Wii and Sony's Playstation 3, or PS3. This isn't the start of a console war, at least not between Nintendo and Sony. NPR's Laura Sydell reports.
[Laura Sydell:] These two players aren't at war. They're different, and a spoof on YouTube shows us how. The PS3 is played by a large woman with thick glasses and, well, schlubby clothes. But Wii is a slim blonde in a red and white bikini.
[Unidentified Woman #1:] All you have to do is just touch me and you'll have the time of your life.
[Unidentified Woman #2:] But I'm multilayered, well rounded for multiple players and ready to rule your life with all my multi-application and multi-ambition...
[Ms. Perrin Kaplan:] The Wii takes everything in really a right turn. It's not consoles as people know them.
[Laura Sydell:] That's Perrin Kaplan, vice president of marketing at Nintendo. The Wii is meant to be easy to use and is as appealing to videogame pros as it is to novices.
[Ms. Perrin Kaplan:] Its most innovative feature is the remote. It looks like a very sleek TV remote. And the system is based on movement. So if you're going to play a tennis game, for example, you're going to pretend that remote's like a racket and you're going to swing.
[Laura Sydell:] We set up the Wii in NPR's offices in San Francisco. Christina Nunez, who works at NPR Online, gave it a try.
[Ms. Christina Nunez:] I'm what they call a power baseline player.
[Laura Sydell:] The television set is the court and the remote the racket. After a few tries...
[Ms. Christina Nunez:] I won. That was the first time I won.
[Laura Sydell:] Setting up the Nintendo Wii is easy, and the games don't necessarily require hours to understand or to play. Rather than going after the hardcore game market, Nintendo is aiming for mothers, casual gamers and families. Van Baker, an analyst at Gartner Research thinks Nintendo is making a wise move.
[Mr. Van Baker:] It's a better choice for them to go after a subset of the market that they're particularly attuned to and have it be a profitable business than it is to go in and butt heads with Sony and Microsoft in the high-end game console market.
[Laura Sydell:] While Nintendo is bragging about simplicity, Sony is bragging about the high definition capabilities and multiple functions of the Playstation 3, which is trying to compete head-on with Microsoft's Xbox 360. Ryan Bowling of Sony boots the new game console.
[Mr. Ryan Bowling:] If we look at the side of his head there, see his sweat?
[Laura Sydell:] Yup.
[Mr. Ryan Bowling:] So you can see the detail we're able to get.
[Laura Sydell:] Right. The PS3 can be used as a DVD player and it plays Sony's new high definition Blu-Ray disc. It holds music, photos. The high-end version of the PS3 also has wireless capability.
[Mr. Ryan Bowling:] A lot of the technology here in the box is brand new. No other consumer product's using this. We feel that all this technology that we're providing the consumer is a good deal for the price point.
[Laura Sydell:] In fact, the price point could discourage some buyers. The Wii is going on the market for $279, and the latest generation Xbox sells for 399 and 499. The low end PS3 sells for 499 and it's 599 for the wireless version. Sony has the lion's share of the game console market with its first and second generation Playstations, but it's got to keep that going, says Van Baker of Gartner, because Sony is behind in so many other areas. It lost the portable audio market it once dominated with the Walkman and it was late entering the flat screen TV market.
[Mr. Van Baker:] A lot of the revival of their fortunes is dependent upon the success of Playstation 3.
[Laura Sydell:] There's no doubt that at least some are excited by the PS3. Serious players have put ads on Craigslist offering to pay as much as $150 to people who will wait on line to get the console on day one. And the Wii was featured on a recent South Park.
[Unidentified Man #1:] [As Cartman]: Come on, come on.
[Unidentified Man #2:] [As Store Employee] Look, kid, for the 40th time, pacing in front of the store isn't going to make the Wii come any faster.
[Laura Sydell:] November 19th is as early as the Wii will be available, and it's November 17th for the Sony Playstation 3. Laura Sydell, NPR News, San Francisco.

[Melissa Block:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
[Robert Siegel:] And I'm Robert Siegel. Remember the Iraqi journalist who took off his shoes one-by-one and hurled them at President Bush at a news conference in Baghdad? Well, it looks like he's created a new global form of political protest. The head of China's government was the latest target of flying footwear. It happened yesterday during a speech at the University of Cambridge in England. What is surprising is how China's media handled the incident. As NPR's Anthony Kuhn reports, Beijing took that shoe and spun it.
[Anthony Kuhn:] Premier Wen Jiabao was most of the way through the Rede Lecture, a 500-year-old tradition at Cambridge. He assured the audience that China's growing power threatens no one. Premier Wen paused, as a young Caucasian man in the back of the audience stood up and blew a whistle.
[Unidentified Man #1:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Anthony Kuhn:] How can this university prostitute itself with this dictator? the man yelled. How can you listen to the lies he is telling? Shame on you, said some in the audience, which included many Chinese students.
[Premier Wen Jiabao:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Anthony Kuhn:] Teachers, Wen began again he looked to the right as the black sneaker, hurled by the protester, thudded on to the stage several feet from his lectern. The protester was hustled away by university security and is due to face charges next week of disturbing public order. With the exception of one tabloid's web site, Chinese media made no mention of the shoe until Tuesday, when it got four minutes on the 7:00 evening news, watched by an estimated 500 million viewers.
[Unidentified Man #2:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Anthony Kuhn:] The report focused on Wen's unruffled response.
[Premier Wen:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Anthony Kuhn:] Teachers and students, he said, this despicable move cannot obstruct the friendship of the Chinese and British people.
[Unidentified Man #2:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Anthony Kuhn:] The report noted a message from the university's vice chancellor expressing regret for the incident, and stressing that Cambridge is a place for considered argument and debate, not for shoe throwing. One Chinese reader wrote approvingly on the Web site of the British newspapers, The Times: Our Prime Minister stood still and acted properly. Media scholar Yu Guoming at People's University in Beijing says that a news report such as tonight's is unprecedented. He says it suggests a more self-confident Beijing and one that has learned a basic rule of public relations.
[Professor Yu Guoming:] [People's University, Beijing]: [Through translator] In the past, the Communist Party's propaganda department understanding was that bad news produces bad effects. But events in the past year, particularly those surrounding the Olympics, helped them to understand that this isn't always the case.
[Unidentified Woman:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Anthony Kuhn:] Some of last year's bad news, such as protesters' disruptions of the Olympic torch relay, rallied many Chinese to defend their government. Yu also notes that Beijing has introduced some limited moves towards transparency, including a Freedom of Information Act. Beijing may not allow its media to report on every such incident in future, says Yu Guoming, but it will have to face a clear trend. As the Internet continues to erode its monopoly over information, the public is increasingly fed up with government censorship. Anthony Kuhn, NPR News, Beijing.

[David Greene:] Yeah. So up first, Rachel, Donald Trump's 36-year-old son-in-law Jared Kushner he is wearing so many different hats in the White House these days. Officially, now his title is senior adviser to the president, but what does that mean? Well, he's been leading a new White House initiative on innovation. He also flew to Iraq with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Here is White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.
[Sean Spicer:] Jared's going to specifically express the commitment of U.S. of the United States to the government of Iraq, meet with U.S. personnel engaged in the campaign, and it's not like this is a one-shot deal. In the course of conversation and extensive meetings, that invitation was extended, and they took it up.
[David Greene:] And so, by the way, Kushner is also the guy that President Trump has tapped to come up with a plan for peace in the Middle East. He's doing a lot.
[Rachel Martin:] Yeah. A little busy. OK. So with us this morning Domenico Montanaro of NPR's Politics team is here with us. Hi, Domenico.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Good morning, Rachel.
[Rachel Martin:] And we have David Folkenflik. He covers media for NPR. He's joining us on the line from New York. Hi, Folkenflik.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] Hey, guys.
[Rachel Martin:] And you will be Folkenflik in this conversation because we have two Davids. It's too confusing.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] [Laughter] Proud of it.
[David Greene:] Please, please.
[Rachel Martin:] We're just going to do it that way. But we're going to start with Domenico. So let's talk about Jared Kushner here. The Washington establishment has thrown a lot of barbs at this guy, criticizing his lack of experience on foreign policy in particular. But he's not a Cabinet secretary. He's a senior aide to the president. And as far as I understand, the only real job requirement for those people is to have the trust of the president, right?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Yeah. I mean, that's true except for the fact that at least Cabinet secretaries have to go through these long confirmation hearings where you do get to learn about what they believe and what their experiences, and, you know, the thing is when somebody has that much influence. There are a lot of legitimate questions about the kind of advice the president is getting. You know, nothing against 30-somethings just saying but Kushner has a wealthy dad, is married to Trump's daughter, has no policy diplomatic or government experience and now looks like the most powerful person in the White House who's not the president.
[Rachel Martin:] Do we have any sense at this point I mean, we see him in a lot of photos. But do we know what his imprint has been on policy yet?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] We don't really because he doesn't have a ton of policy experience. We know that he's of what's the so-called New York wing of the White House warring factions, if there are that many. But he's, you know, more moderate on a lot of different positions. We've heard that he and Ivanka have pushed this president on things like LGBT rights, a little bit more than the Steve Bannon wing, for example, which is much more nationalist, populist.
[Rachel Martin:] And we'll get to that, but, Folkenflik, you've reported on Kushner's time in New York as a real estate mogul himself. How could his experience there influence how he is advising the president?
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] Well, there are a couple of things. You know, in some ways his greatest success has been to be taken seriously in New York itself. He comes from a New Jersey family. His son, a very wealthy New Jersey real estate developer, who groomed him in politics and who, you know, was a huge fundraiser for major Democratic politicians that used to come through his New Jersey home and give talks and, you know, to figures who would give money there. Benjamin Netanyahu did that. He comes from a Jewish family. So, you know, Netanyahu as a rising Israeli politician basically did the same thing decades ago. But his great success was to be taken seriously in New York. He went and bought the New York Observer, a bird that sort of caters to lead interest covering things like banking and real estate and gossip...
[Rachel Martin:] Kind of a presumptuous move.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] Yeah. Well, but it was his entree into the elites. He also wildly overpaid for major building here on Fifth Avenue, simply to ensure that his real estate empire was taken seriously in this in the media capital, the banking capital of the world.
[Rachel Martin:] So real quick, Domenico, you mentioned Steve Bannon. Kushner's up. Is Bannon down?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Probably, yeah. Most likely there's Jared Kushner is ascendant in the White House. Steve Bannon's influence definitely seems to be waning just a bit.
[David Greene:] You know, Rachel, here we are trying to figure out who this guy Jared Kushner is. That's what confirmation hearings are for. We covered so many of them, as you said, Domenico. I mean, so many tough questions from lawmakers about people who would presumably be playing these big roles revealing themselves. Jared Kushner hasn't had to reveal much at all, and I'm looking for moments if they come when we can learn something his beliefs or whether he's defined by ideology somehow like Steve Bannon. Those moments haven't come yet.
[Rachel Martin:] All right. We're going to move from a rising star in Jared Kushner to who appears at this point to be a person falling from grace. We're talking about Bill O'Reilly one of, if not the top anchors at Fox News. He's going on a vacation, David.
[David Greene:] Yeah.
[Rachel Martin:] And tell us why this is news.
[David Greene:] Yeah. Vacation-ish maybe. I mean, he's going on a vacation at a time when he's facing multiple accusations of sexual harassment. Five women have received payouts totaling about $13 million to settle lawsuits against O'Reilly, and more than 50 companies have now pulled their advertising from his show. So is O'Reilly really on vacation or is this a sign that he is being pushed out? Here's what he told his viewers the other night.
[Bill O'reilly:] Often around this time of year, I grab some vacation because it's spring and Easter time. Last fall, I booked a trip that should be terrific, not going to tell you where it is, but we have a contest on billoreilly.com, guess where Bill's going. I'll have a full report when I return.
[David Greene:] So O'Reilly has we should say one very powerful defender, and that is President Trump. Last week, Trump told The New York Times that O'Reilly is, quote, "a good person." And Trump said, quote, "I don't think Bill did anything wrong."
[Rachel Martin:] All right. Folkenflik, what's going on here?
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] Well, look, let's pretend that this is actually what happened, and the sequence is real that he did book, as people inside Fox claim, his tickets last October. He sure announced this awfully abruptly this week, and he's skating on the thinnest ice of his career. He settled these allegations against these women. They weren't all lawsuits actually. What happened was one of the big one's lawsuits, but they a number of them were settled quietly to keep them out of the public eye. And The New York Times, you know, rammed them right back into the public eye a few days ago. There's a complaint made by a woman who can't file a lawsuit. She's outside the statute of limitations, a woman named Wendy Walsh we interviewed a few days ago, had her on the air. And she decided to go through the formal complaint process with Fox anyway and say this happened to me, so they're reviewing it. If they want to, this can be a pretext for them to shove him out. But there's also something else going on. You know, the real subtext to all this is that Roger Ailes, the founding chairman, the creative drive behind the success of Fox was forced out last summer for sexual harassment. And right now, you know, Fox is under the gun for this and also under a federal inquiry to see if they hid payments to women to try to keep it a secret, not only from the public, but from shareholders that could constitute federal crime. And if that's the case, then anybody connected to the idea of payouts for sexual harassment secret payments to keep them out of the public eye that becomes a real problem for Fox News and for the Murdoch family that controls it.
[Rachel Martin:] Domenico, President Trump has come to O'Reilly's defense as we heard. Fox is aligned with the political right in this country, but Trump really does have a unique relationship with this network, right?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Well, look, any Republican president, any Republican is going to need Fox News. Fox caters to a conservative audience which is why I was so surprised, frankly, during the presidential primaries when Trump took aim at Fox News and said they weren't being fair to him, took aim at Megyn Kelly who at the time was the top rated anchor on the network and has since left for NBC. The fact that Trump won in that situation was really mind-boggling because that's just not what happens in a Republican primary. But the irony here of Trump himself who has been somebody who's been accused of sexual assault to be somebody who's defending Bill O'Reilly, you know, without really knowing the facts or the evidence is not usually something any president does.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] And let's be clear, you know, Bill O'Reilly defended Donald Trump...
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Good point.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] ...When he came under attack for this. These two guys are built for each other. You've got bombastic, older men who basically fall in roughly the same place of the quasi-center right. They're built for each other. He's perfect for the Trump age, and that's what makes it hard.
[Rachel Martin:] They've had a long relationship those two.
[David Greene:] Yeah, I mean, I just want to see what Fox's next move is. I mean, this is the highest rated cable news show on television. Fox doesn't want to jeopardize that. They also want to be seen as doing the right thing, and what about Donald Trump? Many people voted for him despite those stories about how he treated women. I want to see if there's a political cost if Trump stands by someone like O'Reilly now that he's president.
[Rachel Martin:] All right. We'll leave it there. Domenico Montanaro of NPR's Politics team. We also were joined by NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. Hey, you guys. Thanks so much.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] You bet.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Thank you, Rachel.
[Rachel Martin:] All right. OK. We've got one more story. Sounds like YouTube is in a bit of a bind, David.
[David Greene:] Yeah. I would say so. This started a couple of weeks ago. The Wall Street Journal reported that ads for some big brands like Coca-Cola were popping up next to extremist, anti-Semitic YouTube content. Advertisers pulled their accounts from YouTube. Youtube changed its algorithms to try and fix this, but some content creators are saying like come on I'm losing ad money for just saying a bad word.
[Unidentified Man:] Guys, I don't think that I can call you beautiful bastards anymore because apparently that and several other things I do are not, quote, "advertiser friendly." I had heard murmurings. I had heard a few...
[Rachel Martin:] All right. We've got someone here to explain this, Laura Sydell. She covers tech. She's on the line from San Francisco. Hi, Laura. Good morning. How exactly are these new algorithms hurting YouTube content creators?
[Laura Sydell, Byline:] Well, first, let's say there's just the overall sense that all these advertisers have pulled out, so there's less money. Secondly, what seems to be happening is that, you know, it's far from perfect, this algorithm. So I talked with comedy producer Ethan Klein of H3H3 productions, and he told me that some videos with the word dioning got ads taken off. And, I mean, like, you know, we're talking I almost died laughing. Oh, man. This other content creator right? it's a channel called Real Women Real Stories, and it features interviews, you know, with women about like hardships, sex trafficking. And the videos aren't graphic, it's just a it's an advocacy group for women. But it relies on the ad revenue to fund the production of these videos.
[Rachel Martin:] All right. It's a story we will continue to follow. NPR's digital culture correspondent Laura Sydell in San Francisco. Hey, Laura, thanks so much.
[Laura Sydell, Byline:] You're welcome.

[Renee Montagne:] It's been a diplomatic game of tit for tat between Great Britain and Iran this week. The British government said yesterday that it was expelling two Iranian diplomats. That move came after two British diplomats were told to leave Tehran. The expulsions mark the latest chapter in the long history of difficult relations between the two countries. NPR's Rob Gifford reports from London.
[Rob Gifford:] Iran accused the two British diplomats of activities incompatible with their diplomatic status, a charge rejected by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Brown in parliament yesterday condemned the expulsions, calling them completely unjustified. But he did continue to hold out the possibility of cooperation with Tehran.
[Prime Minister Gordon Brown:] I'm disappointed that Iran has placed us in this position, but we will continue to seek good relations with Iran and to call for the regime to respect the human rights and democratic freedoms of the Iranian people.
[Rob Gifford:] At least five other European Union countries have called in Iranian envoys to protest against the Tehran government's crackdown. But it's Britain that has borne the brunt of Iran's attacks in recent days. Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last, week when criticizing interference by foreign powers, called Britain the most treacherous of Iran's enemies. So whatever happened to the Great Satan, the United States? Some commentators suggest Iran may have been singling out Britain as a scapegoat because it has not wanted to reject out of hand recent overtures by President Barack Obama. But Heidi Walcher, lecturer in Iranian history at the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University, says Britain has a long history of often covert involvement in Iran and as a result there has always been suspicion of British motives.
[Ms. Heidi Walcher:] There definitely is this very negative image of Britain in Iran. If today as a European you go to Iran and you say you're a German, everyone thinks, oh, this is great and they like you and they're very sympathetic. If you say you're British, you're invariably met with this kind of wall of antipathy and people are much less sympathetic.
[Rob Gifford:] Walcher says the British played a major role in the 1953 coup usually attributed to CIA involvement that brought the Shah to power. British residents in Iran say there is a popular, sometimes humorous tendency to blame anything that goes wrong on the dastardly British. When Irish hunger striker Bobby Sands died protesting British presence in Ireland in 1981, Iran promptly renamed a major street near the British embassy in Tehran Bobby Sands Street just to provoke the British. Another cause of recent Iranian government anger has been the establishment six months ago of a Persian language television news channel on the BBC broadcasting to Iran from London. The BBC's Jamshid Bazega rejects accusations that the channel is in any way fomenting trouble or supporting demonstrations, and he says the BBC's popularity in Iran reflects the changing views of the West among the younger generation of Iranians.
[Mr. Jamshid Bazega:] Mostly in the past they're thinking the U.K. is behind everything. But the new generation don't think so. And, you know, our viewers and the number of viewers and listeners and visitors inside Iran who are coming to us to receive the latest news and the most accurate and impartial news show that they don't think so.
[Rob Gifford:] Meanwhile, in response to Iranian government criticism of Britain and in the spirit of British anything you can do we can do better tabloid headlines, the Sun newspaper here yesterday published a picture of Iran's supreme leader Khamenei under the headline: The Liar-tollah. Rob Gifford, NPR News, London.

[Don Gonyea:] Now that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is back from the Middle East, diplomacy on Lebanon shifts to the United Nations Security Council. President Bush says he wants the Security Council to pass a resolution that deals with what he calls the root causes of the conflict Hezbollah and its backers. But U.N. diplomats are already considering a resolution that puts the emphasis on an immediate halt to the fighting. NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
[Michelle Kelemen Reporting:] The deadly Israeli air strike on residential building in Qana, Lebanon over the weekend has sparked more urgent calls for a cease-fire. President Bush, though, has kept to his script. He says his idea of a U.N. Security Council resolution would be to get a sustainable cease-fire and empower Lebanon's government to exercise authority over its territory.
[President George W. Bush:] A multinational force must be dispatched to Lebanon quickly so we can help speed the delivery of humanitarian aid to the Lebanese people. Iran must end its financial support and supply of weapons to terrorist groups like Hezbollah. Syria must end its support for terror and respect the sovereignty of Lebanon.
[Kelemen:] But the Bush administration doesn't talk to Syria or Iran, and that position has put it at odds with other U.S. allies including France, which is expected to play a leading role in an eventual stabilization force for Lebanon. The foreign minister of France said yesterday that Iran is crucial to the stability of the Middle East, and he met his Iranian counterpart in Beirut. As for the stabilization force, the U.N. had to postpone a meeting with potential troop contributors. U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said it was merely a scheduling issue, but French Ambassador Jean-Marc De La Sabliere signaled deeper differences.
[Ambassador Jean-marc De La Sabliere:] We thought it was premature. You know, France is in favor of setting up an international force to implement a political settlement.
[Kelemen:] France has drawn up its own draft U.N. Security Council resolution, which calls for an immediate halt to fighting and seeks a new buffer zone in southern Lebanon. De La Sabliere said that Israel and the Lebanese government, which includes Hezbollah, have to reach a political settlement before a force can go in. And he made clear that while disarming Hezbollah is important, that should not be the job of an international force.
[Ambassador Jean-marc De La Sabliere:] Having a de-militarized zone where only the Lebanese army and an international force would be allowed, you know, is something which is the proper thing to do.
[Kelemen:] The draft resolution his country has been circulating touches on another controversial aspect of the conflict: the future of Sheba Farms, which is still occupied by Israel and claimed by both Lebanon and Syria. Analysts say that Hezbollah uses Israel's occupation of the land as a pretext for maintaining an armed presence along Israel's borders. At the U.N. Security Council yesterday, Lebanon's acting foreign minister, Tariq Mitri, appealed for some help.
[Mr. Tariq Mitri:] A commitment from the Security Council to place the Shebaa Farms and the Kafr Shuba Hills under U.N. jurisdiction until border delineation and Lebanese sovereignty over them are fully settled.
[Kelemen:] Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said this is an issue for Syria and Lebanon to work out, not something she can resolve. Israeli officials have made similar statements. As she returned from the Middle East, Secretary Rice played down differences over diplomatic next steps. She insisted there's a growing consensus on a three-part settlement that includes a cease-fire, a political agreement, and the authorization for an international force. Those are all things she hopes to achieve in a U.N. Security Council resolution this week. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.

[Robert Siegel:] Now to Egypt and news of the emergence of a group that's worrying some Egyptians. It calls itself the Black Bloc and it's made up of violent anarchists. They have vowed armed resistance to protect anti-government protesters from attacks by Egyptian security forces. The country's prosecutor-general has labeled the Black Bloc a terrorist organization. But as we hear from NPR's Leila Fadel, some analysts and activists say the government is exaggerating the threat.
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] They mostly come out at night these days. The young men and women move in packs wearing black masks. Some wield clubs. They move around demonstrations like this one in front of the presidential palace, watchful and wary. Since the movement appeared in mid-January, Black Bloc has become the self-declared guardian of the anti-government protest movement. Egypt's leadership has condemned the organization and it has quickly been demonized in the state media. President Mohammed Morsi's allies in the Muslim Brotherhood call it the root of the violence that has arisen in Egypt. It's also been accused of a slew of violent attacks, including arson and assaulting government buildings, as well as acts of civil disobedience like trying to disrupt Cairo's metro system. The group has been talked about so much in local media and by government officials, everyone knows what the Black Bloc is. In the streets of the working-class district of Imbaba, Hagar Mohammed and her friend, Iman, walk out of a computer class together. They don't pay much attention to politics, but they have a visceral reaction to Black Bloc.
[Hagar Mohammed:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] They're trying to destroy the country, Hagar says. Others on the street echo the sentiment. Why do they cover their faces? Why haven't they been arrested? In a video posted on the Internet last month, Black Bloc introduced itself to Egypt. In the dead of night, young masked men marched along the Nile, just off Tahrir Square; faces covered in masks, some carrying sticks and flags with the letter A, for anarchist. They are faceless and voiceless. Words on a black backdrop spell out their message: We've been seeking for years to liberate mankind, destroy corruption and overthrow tyrants. The message goes on to say Black Bloc will confront what it calls the fascist regime of the Muslim Brotherhood. In Tahrir Square, black masks are all the rage these days. It's a new fashion, says one street vendor.
[Unidentified Man:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] But despite their growing mystique, these young men and women number only a few hundred at most, say seasoned activists here, and they aren't capable of all the violence that's been blamed on them. Hossam el Hamalawy is part of the revolutionary movement who has been involved in the protests since the beginning. He says he doesn't like Black Bloc's tactics.
[Hossam El Hamalawy:] Small groups of, like, hooded and masked men and women, they cannot defeat the state. Even when they, like, when we get all happy that, yeah, maybe a police officer got beaten up here and there, I mean, that's not going to purge, you know, the police. Actually, you're inviting their attacks. You're scaring away, I mean, some protesters who would have loved to join these marches.
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] But Hamalawy doesn't blame a few hundred kids, as he describes them, for the violence. He says it is the state that has weapons and attacks protesters, not Black Bloc. Black Bloc claims its creation is in part a reaction to an incident last December when the Muslim Brotherhood called out its supporters to confront protesters outside the presidential palace. Fatal clashes ensued. There were deaths and injuries on both sides. Issander El Amrani is an Egypt expert and author of the Arabist blog.
[Issander El Amrani:] I think it's, you know, that was a watershed moment for many of the street protesters because what they saw was essentially the ruling party, the Muslim Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice Party, turn into a militia and begin to, you know, carry out, you know because it was frustrated the police wasn't doing anything.
[Leila Fadel, Byline:] Amrani says the hysteria in local media and within the government is a lot bigger than Black Bloc. But he says the group could be a very early indicator of something much larger the radicalization of the protest movement. Leila Fadel, NPR News, Cairo.

[Farai Chideya:] It's time now for our Africa Update. This week, increasing calls for food and other aid to Ethiopia and Somalia, reports of more violence in Mogadishu plus the U.S. comments on anti-terrorism efforts in East Africa. For more, I'm joined by Gwen Thompkins NPR's East Africa correspondent. Hi, Gwen.
[Gwen Thompkins:] Hi there, Farai. How are you?
[Farai Chideya:] I'm doing great. So let's talk about Ethiopia and Somalia. There have been increasing calls for food aid. What's going on?
[Gwen Thompkins:] Yes. This has been going on for the past few weeks, actually. And it only seems to be getting worse. Humanitarian aid organizations are saying that there were regions of Ethiopia and Somalia that are experiencing real food insecurity, particularly in Eastern Ethiopia. This is where there are an awful lot of people of Somali origin who were living where there's been also a lot of rebel activity. Earlier this year, Ethiopia sort of closed off this area. And a lot of the markets that the pastoralists usually go to to sell their livestock, those markets have been off-limits to them. And there's not been a whole lot of food that's been raised in the region. This has created quite a lot of insecurity. And the food that the government is actually bringing into this area of Eastern Ethiopia is just not enough to feed the people.
[Farai Chideya:] So that's one aspect of what's going on in the region. I want to ask you about something else that is also destabilizing the area. There's violence in Mogadishu, Somalia. Three soldiers killed over the weekend, reportedly. What's going on there? Is the situation deteriorating?
[Gwen Thompkins:] Yes. The situation appears to be deteriorating. Not only is there food insecurity, apparently, in Mogadishu but ongoing tensions between the transitional government forces as well as Ethiopian forces they're working together against those insurgents who are challenging their authority. This is ongoing. There are an awful lot of casualties. And an issue that seems to be coming to the fore of late is the dearth of medical facilities in Mogadishu to deal with those who've been injured. The Ugandan peacekeepers who were there have offered medical services from their sort of temporary medical facilities that they've put together for themselves. Now, they're offering some medical services to Somalis on the ground who need them. But that's just not enough for population of a major city like Mogadishu. This fighting comes in the wake of two major conferences. One, a reconciliation congress that took place in Somalia. This went of for more than 40 days and the whole thrust of the conference was to create conditions of peace in the area. And then there was an alternate conference. This is a conference of the transitional government's enemies. These are former members of the Islamic Courts Union who used to run Somalia. Now, they all met, about 300 delegates of them, hoping to coordinate their efforts against the transitional government and the Ethiopian forces.
[Farai Chideya:] So, Gwen, there are also reports of al-Qaida members being spotted in Somalia's breakaway republics. What can you tell us about the anti-terrorism efforts there?
[Gwen Thompkins:] Well, yes, there have been some reports talking about al-Qaida suspects being detained or fought in the Somali land region. And then also last week, there were reports that one of the top al-Qaida suspects that the U.S. has been pursuing was actually killed last week. Now, none of these reports appeared to have been substantiated, but this would be Saleh Ali Saleh Naban. Here in Nairobi, U.S. Ambassador Michael Ranneberger, who is also responsible for U.S. relations to Somalia he had some comments about that. Let's listen.
[Ambassador Michael Ranneberger:] Well, on the three so-called high-value targets. We can't confirm anything about Saleh Naban. Whether he was killed or not, we don't know. I mean so we're obviously looking into that, but we don't know. We're still in pursuit of the other two. We obviously, I can't go into details to that. But I would say that, again, that's a very, very active, ongoing effort to apprehend those folks.
[Gwen Thompkins:] Ranneberger also went on to reiterate what he's been saying for months now, which is that there are no U.S. combat forces on the ground in Somalia at this point.
[Farai Chideya:] So, did Ambassador Ranneberger elaborate on U.S. collaboration with other East African states on anti-terrorism?
[Gwen Thompkins:] Well, yes, he did, actually. The United States, of course, has made partners of Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya many countries in this East African region to combat terror in the region. Now, the flipside of this cooperation has been sort of a growing perception among people here that in return for the cooperation of these governments Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, the transitional government in Somalia that the U.S. is willing to look the other way on certain domestic human rights issues and other sort of issues that government leaders in these countries would like to sweep under the carpet. Someone asked Ambassador Ranneberger, specifically, about how the U.S. is viewing Kenya's efforts at anti-corruption. Now, corruption has been a very ugly mark on Kenya's reputation for years now. There have been money laundering scandals, the Anglo Leasing scandal, as well as the Goldenberg scandal, which have the investigations have shown that some political leaders have been involved in these scandals and yet no one or no big ticket person has ever come to justice. So Ranneberger was very interested in responding to the perception, at least, that the U.S. is in some way abetting efforts to derail anti-corruption efforts in Kenya. Here's what he had to say.
[Ambassador Michael Ranneberger:] There is a perception, and it's a misperception. So let me correct it. Again, there hasn't been any tradeoff at all. I've never had a discussion with anybody in the government, with the president or anybody else. Let me be clear on that, categorical, saying that if you help out because you're helping us in Somalia, you know, we will tilt towards you. We will be more quiet on corruption or whatever. Absolutely not, in any way, shape, performed directly or indirectly. I don't think I can be clearer than that.
[Gwen Thompkins:] Now, he went on to congratulate or applaud Kenya for the anti-corruption efforts it's made so far. He went on to say that Kenya has won an award from the U.N. in some of its efforts for governmental reform, for instance. But he had to acknowledge that on the big ticket items the Goldenberg money laundering scandal, the Anglo Leasing scandal that Kenya has yet to bring anyone, really, to justice. This is what he said.
[Ambassador Michael Ranneberger:] The country is making substantial progress in efforts to improve governments and fight corruption. Now, the high level cases Anglo Leasing, Goldenberg have not come to fruition, although there are cases pending. And we're disappointed that those cases have not come to fruition. But that requires cooperation of the judiciary and others as well as the government.
[Gwen Thompkins:] But as long as these issues continue to stay in the public eye, there's every chance that this kind of perception that the U.S. is making trades will continue.
[Farai Chideya:] Well, Gwen, thanks again.
[Gwen Thompkins:] Thank you.
[Farai Chideya:] That was NPR East Africa correspondent Gwen Thompkins, speaking with us from Nairobi, Kenya.

[Melissa Block:] So a sad day for backers of the movement for an independent Scotland.
[Robert Siegel:] But Scots have been in a corner before.
[Mel Gibson:] [As William Wallace] They may take our lives but they'll never take our freedom.
[Robert Siegel:] This is the battlefield speech from the film "Braveheart," depicting this 13th century Scottish hero.
[Mel Gibson:] [As William Wallace] I'm William Wallace.
[Randall Wallace:] And I'm Randall Wallace, screenwriter of the 1995 film "Braveheart." When I got the news of the referendum, I was heartbroken still am. I was really hoping that they would choose the path of independence.
[Melissa Block:] Those in Scotland nursing an emotional letdown today may have Wallace, Randall Wallace, to blame for raising their hopes so high for independence. It seems the movie he wrote, "Braveheart," is a cultural touch point. We've talked with a pollster who referred to the "Braveheart" generation, many just 30 to 50, who were the most ardent supporters of Scottish independence. Randall Wallace simply calls these fans Bravehearts.
[Randall Wallace:] I believe the people who've really responded to the movie have seen in that story an affirmation of a heart of courage. And courage means facing fear. Courage means facing difficulty. That's what it means to me.
[Robert Siegel:] So it seems we could all be Bravehearts with or without the kilt.
[Randall Wallace:] Scotland forever, Alba gu brath.

[Arun Rath:] We have a snapshot of what life was like for Osama bin Laden in the months before he was killed thanks to the recent release of documents seized in the raid that took out the al-Qaida leader. Thousands were taken from his compound, but so far, only 25 have been made public. CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen says the documents reveal that bin Laden and al-Qaida were reeling from the CIA drone campaign.
[Peter Bergen:] I would say under siege is a good kind of summary embattled, and also very conscious of how embattled they were. I would say there were a few overall takeaways. First of all, the CIA drone program was eliminating many of the top leaders of al-Qaida. And one of the documents has a very elaborate description of an actual drone attack that killed the number three of al-Qaida at the time. There was much discussion internally within al-Qaida's leadership about moving out of the federally administered tribal areas on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and moving either to Iran, moving to Afghanistan or moving deeper into central Pakistan, into the Punjab or areas very, very far away from the drone strikes. So the CIA drones program, according to al-Qaida's own internal memos, was very effective.
[Arun Rath:] Was there any indication that bin Laden or anybody in al-Qaida had the sense that the CIA was hot on his trail at that point?
[Peter Bergen:] Yeah, there was a fascinating letter from an al-Qaida leader to bin Laden, saying look, you should stop your communications. Clearly, the Americans have very good espionage against us. Let's communicate more frequently. And this letter went to bin Laden on June of 2010 and turned out to be rather prescient, because August of 2010 is when the CIA first began focusing on a mysterious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where somebody they suspected was bin Laden's courier was living. And very quickly they then suspected that that's where bin Laden was living. And everybody listening to this knows how that story ends.
[Arun Rath:] Was there anything in the documents that surprised you?
[Peter Bergen:] I think there were a couple of things that were surprising. One is there was somebody in the documents called Tayeb Agha, who is pretty much Mullah Omar's who's the head of the Taliban senior aide. And he has been the principle conduit for U.S. negotiations with the Taliban, and he was in touch with al-Qaida at the same time that he was negotiating with the United States. Now, we don't know the content of these discussions, but I think it's interesting to what extent the Taliban and al-Qaida are joined at the hip or not. So that's just an interest telling detail and leads to another issue, which is we've only seen 25 of these document so far being released. And there are thousands or tens-of-thousands or more of these documents that I think would be very useful for historians, counterterrorism analysts, the public at large to get a look at because we learn every time they come out, we learn something new.
[Arun Rath:] So Peter, we have this snapshot of al-Qaida where they're under siege, very much weakened by the drone attacks. This is four or five years ago. Based on your reporting, how does it compare with al-Qaida right now?
[Peter Bergen:] I think al-Qaida right now is in the same very bad shape they were that these documents reveal. You know, one of the interesting things about these documents is a kind of a constant bemoaning of the fact that hey, you know, we tried to attack the U.S. embassy in Russia. That didn't work out. We tried to send some folks to the Great Britain to do attacks. That didn't work out. We sent some folks to Denmark, you know, to revenge the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. That didn't work out. And so yeah, their principal goal of attacking the West, in particular, the United States, has not worked out. And that is true today, and that was true around the time bin Laden died.
[Arun Rath:] Peter Bergen is a national security analyst for CNN and author of the book "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search For Bin Laden From 911 To Abbottabad." Peter, thanks very much.
[Peter Bergen:] Thank you very much, sir.

[Guy Raz:] We're back with All Things Considered from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
[President Barack Obama:] Just as we condemn intolerance and extremism abroad, so will we stay true to our traditions here at home as a diverse and tolerant nation.
[Guy Raz:] President Obama at a memorial service outside the Pentagon this morning, marking the attacks of September 11, 2001. James Fallows is with me now, as he is most Saturdays, for a look at some of the ideas behind the headlines. Hi, Jim.
[Mr. James Fallows:] Hello, Guy. Nice to talk to you.
[Guy Raz:] Obviously, Jim, President Obama's quote that we just heard, I think, was alluding to some of the recent controversies over the issue of, you know, whether to build an Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero or mosques in certain places in the country and then, of course, all this international attention paid to a fringe pastor at a tiny church in Gainesville, Florida.
[Mr. James Fallows:] Indeed. And let me suggest a possibly positive outcome of some of the events of the last week, which have been disruptive and negative in many ways, which is that I think that what we seen, in a way, is a version of something that's happened in local TV news. Over the last generation, TV news producers have discovered if they have a tornado, if they have a car crash, they have some violent crime, viewers will stay with them, which makes citizens feel more afraid than, objectively, they need to about the world around them. I think something similar may be true here. In a nation this big, on any given day, you're going to have some anti-Islamic protest and anti-black and anti-Jewish and whatever you want.
[Guy Raz:] Mm-hmm.
[Mr. James Fallows:] There's going to be something like that in this country. And there may be some reflection by the media, led strikingly by Fox News, which said that if the Qur'an burning happened, it wouldn't televise shots of that. In asking what is the proportion in which we publicize both domestically and also around the world these inevitable extreme expressions.
[Guy Raz:] What's amazing to me is how much power this example can give to an individual. I mean, on your blog, I noticed there was a reference to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, right, by Princip. This was one man who had carried one act that led to World War I. And I wonder if, in this case, given how seriously public officials took it, it also sends that message that one person can really have a damaging impact on world affairs.
[Mr. James Fallows:] It certainly is the case that when the world is thoroughly but imperfectly connected, where people can see TV shots, you know, almost instantaneously around the world, all over the Internet, but imperfectly in a sense they don't know how to put those things in context, the possibility for this kind of snowballing and just out of control effect is it's larger than it's been in quite a while. And as you mentioned, the effect has been there for a long time. This doesn't mean that the media should censor the things they cover or it doesn't mean that we should control speech within the United States, but I think it is a useful reminder for media officials, public officials and perhaps the citizenry, too, of the unintended effects sometimes of extreme views.
[Guy Raz:] Jim, I want to ask you about politics. Because, as you know, almost every poll shows that Republicans are poised to win big this November. If the Republicans do make those gains, and given the amount of political daylight between congressional Republicans and the president, how are they going to get anything done? I mean, I know the question was asked in 1994, but I sense that it's more of a pronounced difference today.
[Mr. James Fallows:] I think that compared to that time, you know, the final six years of the Bill Clinton administration, where he dealt with a Republican-controlled Congress, compared even to that time, there's a much more seemingly polarized partisan view, where Democrats aren't going to vote for Republican proposals and certainly vice versa, Republicans pretty much being unified against the Obama administration's attempts. And so, what we saw in those last six years into Bill Clinton were a variety of smaller initiatives that large, sweeping legislation simply is not going to get through this kind of either a gridlocked or opposition-held legislature. And so we may see something like that last stage of Bill Clinton. The bright side of that was that was a good time economically for the country.
[Guy Raz:] Right.
[Mr. James Fallows:] So, that would be, from the administration's point of view, the silver lining.
[Guy Raz:] And polls consistently tend to indicate that Americans like a split government. They want different parties in power in different parts of the government.
[Mr. James Fallows:] This is part of our luxury as a schizophrenic and thick old people that we like getting things done, we don't like gridlock, but we also like checks and balances. So, we'll see how that plays out in a little less than two months from now.
[Guy Raz:] That's James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic. You can read his blog at jamesfallows.theatlantic.com. Jim, thank you so much.
[Mr. James Fallows:] My pleasure. Thank you, Guy.

[Noel King:] President Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has gone on TV a lot in the past few days to defend the president and in particular to defend the president's phone call to Ukraine's president. Here's Giuliani on Fox News last night. He's talking to Sean Hannity.
[Rudy Giuliani:] Joe Biden was sent to Ukraine to, in part, deal with corruption, and he helped to corrupt the Ukraine. He is a laughing stock. We are.
[Noel King:] OK. To be clear, Giuliani's claim that Biden helped corrupt Ukraine, there is no evidence for that. But it seems like instead of helping the president, it's possible that these TV interviews that Giuliani's doing are drawing even more questions. NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik is on the line. Good morning, David.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] Good morning, Noel.
[Noel King:] So Giuliani has been on TV banging this drum in defense of the president a lot. Was there anything new in what he said on Hannity's show last night?
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] Well, you know, in some ways, he went to "Hannity" 'cause it was the warm embraces of one of the president's closest advisers on the president's favorite TV channel. The key thing in some ways, as Hannity advertised, was that it was an exclusive. The president's personal lawyer, Giuliani, as well as being a supportive voice is also in the middle of this question of what the president's behavior has been towards Ukraine, himself going to see if he could get dirt, essentially, that would reflect negatively on Joe Biden and his son. And Giuliani has been subpoenaed by three investigative committees of Congress right now, so this was projected as an exclusive. And basically, Giuliani said he may comply with the subpoena. He may cooperate with the investigations. He may, provided as long as he's able to use what he described as videotapes, audiotapes, other materials that he's gathered in order to present the information that he thinks is most vital.
[Noel King:] In the subpoena from congressional Democrats, they actually said to Giuliani we are doing this in part because of an interview that you did on CNN a few weeks ago with Chris Cuomo. Is Giuliani just getting himself in trouble when he appears on these TV shows?
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] Well, it certainly tells you that this has repercussions. You know, this is a tactic, I think, that's being mistaken by the White House as a strategy to be on there. But, you know, right now, Giuliani has to decide if he's going to comply with this. There are serious repercussions if you don't comply with a congressional subpoena. But, you know, what they've been doing is going to safe places and had friendly interviews where they turned the subject each time to what the Bidens have done in Ukraine as opposed to what the president is reported to have done there not only in Ukraine and now but perhaps with other world leaders, as well. But they also have been going on other news organizations, like CNN, to show the president's base, to show the president's supporters, to show the president himself they're going to take the fight to the rest of the media make not only the question of what the whistleblower has done, what the president's critics are saying, what people on Capitol Hill are doing but the media's behavior in reporting on what the president has done in an effort to discredit those kinds of accusations.
[Noel King:] Well, to that end, there was a really interesting development over the weekend. Joe Biden called on news shows to stop interviewing Giuliani. He Biden basically said, this man is spreading false allegations; you shouldn't talk to him. How have media organizations responded to that?
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] Well, I think, quite understandably, journalists don't want to be told by current or former officeholders who they can and cannot interview. That smacks of a certain kind of preemptive censorship of a kind. And at the same time, that debate is going on within journalism. That is, when you have people who are deeply misleading, as Giuliani is said to be being right now about what's known in the Ukraine, the question is how do you have them on? When you have live interviews, are they going to go off the rail? And with Giuliani, the additional wrinkle is he is a player in all this. He's a legitimate person being interviewed. He may have answers that are useful, constructive or illuminating. He may just not be willing to give them.
[Noel King:] Yeah.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] How do journalists handle that? And so the real thing is is that it's baked into the mix. You've got friendly forums like Fox. But you also other ones, like CNN, where conflict is baked into part of the formula over there.
[Noel King:] NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. David, thanks so much.
[David Folkenflik, Byline:] You bet.

[Unidentified Man:] [Speaking French]
[Eleanor Beardsley:] In a new streamlined operation, German Thomas Enders will take sole charge of Airbus while Frenchman Louis Gallois will become the only CEO of the EADS. The shakeup is meant to clarify leadership roles as Airbus closes plants and cuts 10,000 jobs over the next four years. Production delays in its A380 program have cost the company billions of dollars. While Merkel has said she wants to see EADS and Airbus led by corporate considerations rather than political ones, Sarkozy has shown a penchant for economic nationalism. But yesterday the French president had clearly come around.
[Nicolas Sarkozy:] [Speaking French]
[Eleanor Beardsley:] For NPR News, I'm Eleanor Beardsley in Paris.

[Michel Martin:] Somehow, she came to be billed as the next Steve Jobs, a 19-year-old college dropout inventor of a revolutionary new technology that would upend an industry and change the world, a role model for young women in tech, a darling of the business media and venture capitalists and other powerful men who pumped $9 billion into her company, crammed onto her board and defended her from all comers. Sounds too good to be true and according to the courts and regulators, it was. That company, Theranos, was supposed to have built technology that could run a variety of blood tests with just a finger prick. But it not only didn't work it never worked, posing a huge risk to the health of customers who relied on the results. That one-time celebrity, CEO Elizabeth Holmes, is now facing charges of criminal conspiracy and fraud. And the story of her spectacular rise and equally stunning fall is the subject of a new documentary by Alex Gibney titled "The inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley." It airs on HBO Monday night. Alex Gibney joined me from our NPR studios in New York along with Tyler Shultz, a former Theranos employee who turned whistleblower about the company's practices. Now, of course, hindsight is 2020, but we wanted to know why Theranos originally seemed like such a great bet. Here's Tyler Shultz.
[Tyler Shultz:] Well, the idea was so compelling not only because of the small volumes but also because of its portability. Theoretically, this could be used in the battlefield and medevac helicopters and operating rooms and doctors' offices maybe even in your homes. You could quickly get these results and make medical decisions based on those results.
[Michel Martin:] As opposed to having to, you know, draw a vial of blood with all the scariness that that implies, send it off to...
[Tyler Shultz:] Correct.
[Michel Martin:] ...A lab, get it back that whole business. Alex, give me I'm going to start by asking you, how did this very young woman get all these investors to believe in her when she wasn't in medicine and had no track record? Well, I think she was an extraordinarily good storyteller. And that was something that she shared with her idol, Steve Jobs. And I think she also did something very clever, which is to surround herself with respectability. On her board were George Shultz, secretary former secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, former secretary of state, Jim Mattis, defense secretary. Her lawyer was the noted David Boyce. There was a key scientist at Stanford named Channing Robertson who had signed on to be a key adviser to the company, and she was routinely paraded on stage by people like Bill Clinton and Joe Biden. So she surrounded herself with this kind of patina of respectability that was very hard to ignore. And so everybody thought, well, everybody's in. I guess I'm in, too. And, Tyler, do you want to add to that, as somebody who worked with her? And we want to note that that George Shultz on the board, former secretary of state, former secretary of the treasury, is your grandfather.
[Tyler Shultz:] Yeah.
[Michel Martin:] So what is it about her, based on your experience with her, that made her so compelling?
[Tyler Shultz:] So I would say that Elizabeth is really good at making you feel like you are so important to accomplishing this enormous vision that she's already laid out to you. And I would literally be working with these devices in the lab feeling like nothing was working. I would be very frustrated. I'd be kind of distraught. And I would go have maybe a five-minute conversation with Elizabeth, and I would leave feeling motivated, ready to go back into the lab, feeling like I was about to change the world. So she really did have an amazing gift of motivating people and getting them to do what she wanted.
[Michel Martin:] So, Alex, pick up the thread from here. The people doing the work knew that it wasn't working. What is the larger story here? Is it the hero worship? What is it?
[Alex Gibney:] I think you just hit it right there. I think the idea in a way, the film is about storytelling. A very compelling story can make us want to invest in it in a way that we become caught up. It's something so good you want to believe in it. I think the other thing, too, that this is a story about it's a story about the end justifies the means. Elizabeth had a dream. But as the dream grew further and further and further away from accomplishable reality, instead of admitting that, she kept pretending that the dream was real.
[Michel Martin:] Tyler, what about that? I mean, you founded you're still in biotech.
[Tyler Shultz:] I am, yeah.
[Michel Martin:] You founded your own company. What lessons did you take from your experience at Theranos?
[Tyler Shultz:] [Laughter] Oh, man. I don't know even know where to start. But one of the big lessons is that, you know, CEOs really do have to sell a vision, but they also need to be clear on what is vision and what is reality. I think one of the problems that Elizabeth had is that she somehow refused to acknowledge that things were not going well. This would be like if Elon Musk had a rocket explode, and people said, look at the rocket explode, and he said no, it didn't. No, it didn't. Let's do it again. That was kind of what was happening at Theranos. Things were not working, and rather than actually work to improve them, we would repeat things. An experiment would fail, and we would just repeat it until we got the result that we wanted. And we would say, OK, great. Let's move on which is not how good science is done.
[Michel Martin:] But, you know, one of the painful things about this film I have to be honest is the you know, your grandfather, as we said, former secretary of everything George Shultz was on her board. And at some point, when you started raising questions about what has now been, you know, demonstrated to have been fraudulent practices, that he sided with her over you. And that has to be painful. And I just I don't even know how do you even understand that?
[Tyler Shultz:] Yeah. It was extremely painful. But at the time, you know, I was under so much legal pressure that I basically felt like I was fighting for my own survival, in some ways. So I very quickly stopped caring. He had a really close relationship with Elizabeth, and I think he really idolized her. He treated her like a daughter. I don't think he could even conceive that she would lie to him.
[Alex Gibney:] You know, one of the things that's interesting and important about this story and one of the reasons I wanted to do the film is that this is really about the psychology of fraud. I mean, if you think about it, there was the board, and they were convinced even though they didn't really get independent verification of how the machine worked. But there were investors like, Rupert Murdoch put in $125 million into the company. None of the investors ever saw an audited financial statement. They just took it on faith. We're trained to believe. You begin to be corrupted, and you're corrupted because you think it's in the service of a good cause, which is doing something good and important for your child. And what's more important than that? So I'm not excusing it. I'm just trying to describe how that slippery slope happens.
[Michel Martin:] So, Alex, you know, I don't want to leave you without asking did you ever talk to Elizabeth Holmes? And did you I assume you tried to.
[Alex Gibney:] I did.
[Michel Martin:] Did you, like, talk to her? You did.
[Alex Gibney:] I never did. No, no. I tried to talk to her.
[Michel Martin:] You tried to.
[Alex Gibney:] My producer sat down with her for five hours early in the process. But one of the things we got out of it was that Elizabeth and this was in 2017, before her company completely dissolved, but it was certainly on the way down saw herself as a victim. And that is the most interesting thing of all.
[Michel Martin:] That's filmmaker Alex Gibney. His documentary, "The Inventor: Out For Blood In Silicon Valley" airs Monday night on HBO. Tyler Schultz is one of the subjects in the documentary. He was a whistleblower, and he's still in biotech and has founded his own company. And he was kind enough to join us as well. Alex Gibney, Tyler Schultz, thank you both so much for talking with us.
[Tyler Shultz:] Thank you.
[Alex Gibney:] Thanks, Michel.

[Kelly Mcevers:] Seven years ago this week, Tunisia's dictator fled the country. That's how the so-called Arab Spring started. Pro-democracy protests spread across the Middle East after that. Many of those movements ended up in conflict or chaos. Tunisia formed a democracy. In recent days, though, there have been violent protests across Tunisia because of the poor economy, and also anniversary celebrations. NPR's Ruth Sherlock reports from the capital, Tunis.
[Unidentified Man:] [Singing in foreign language].
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] In downtown Tunis, on the wide, tree-lined Habib Bourguiba Avenue, thousands gathered to mark the anniversary of the day Tunisians forced their dictator, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, from power. On one part of the street, followers of the religiously conservative Ennahda political party chant and play songs from the revolution. The women wear headscarves.
[Unidentified Man:] [Singing in foreign language].
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] But beside them, liberals celebrate their way. A scantily clad bellydancer moves sensually to French pop music on stage. And these liberals and conservatives seem to revel in their differences. They laugh and yell insults as they pass each other. The one thing everyone does agree on is that freedom of expression is the main reward of the 2011 revolution. Here's how Chehab Bendala, a factory worker at the anniversary celebrations over the weekend, puts it. What changed in your life before and after the revolution?
[Chehab Bendala:] Hurriyah, freedom. Yes. Now I have liberty to speak to anyone and anywhere.
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] Tunisia's revolution in 2011 set the stage for the Arab Spring. And of all the countries in the Middle East that tried to throw off their dictators, Tunisia has fared the best. It's not succumbed to wars like in Syria, Yemen or Libya, or a strongman-style president like in Egypt. But its democracy is fragile. Meherzia Labidi, a leading female member of Parliament, reflects on this at her office. Tunisia has already gone through nine governments since the revolution seven years ago. She says they've all failed to give Tunisians, especially young Tunisians, what they're asking for a better economy.
[Meherzia Labidi:] The government, one after the other, have not answered the expectations of Tunisian youth. This is really the failure. This is where we failed as politician.
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] That failure has plunged Tunisia into crisis. The government is struggling to pay off an International Monetary Fund loan and has imposed austerity measures that have shrunk the public sector. But that means fewer jobs at a time when unemployment is at 15 percent.
[Unidentified Protesters:] [Chanting in foreign language].
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] Anger and resentment have boiled over into mass demonstrations the last week, some of them violent. Some 800 people have been arrested. All this has given rise to a new movement led by young people whose name translates in English to, what are we waiting for? It's only a few weeks old, but it seems to be having an impact. Nawra Douzi, a spokeswoman, was at the anniversary celebrations. She's just 21 and wears a T-shirt with her group's slogan on the front and a checked keffiyeh scarf. I ask how she defines the austerity measures.
[Nawra Douzi:] Well, when you have to be starving and poor enough to in order to let the state have more money and the government have a lot of money. Yeah. Classic.
[Ruth Sherlock, Byline:] The movement isn't calling to overthrow the government at this stage, she says. But young people have to have a future in Tunisia, she warns, otherwise the government risks the very future of the country itself. Ruth Sherlock, NPR News, Tunis.

[Ailsa Chang:] Our poll also reflected a racial disparity on the issue of letting teachers carry guns. People of color were far less likely than whites to back the president's proposal.
[Stephanie Gates:] When I first heard the idea of teachers being armed, I was like, that's absolutely ludicrous.
[Ailsa Chang:] That's Stephanie Gates. She's been teaching in Chicago public schools for 25 years. She's African-American, and most of her students are black or Latino.
[Stephanie Gates:] I think the conversation about arming teachers is different for teachers of color because we live in a culture where we have implicit bias. And teachers of color are judged by the color of their skin. So if there's a situation where there's an active shooter and the police enter the building, how do the police know who the active shooter is? And if there's some prejudgment there, they might assume that a teacher of color's actually the shooter.
[Ailsa Chang:] Last week, we spoke with a superintendent in Texas, Ricky Stephens, who has a program much like what President Trump put forward. Some teachers at his schools carry guns, but only the ones who want to and the ones who are trained. Here's what he said.
[Ricky Stephens:] Parents, teachers, even students were saying that that they feel so much more comfortable knowing that they have teachers, who they don't even know, walking the halls that are ready to protect them.
[Ailsa Chang:] So I understand that you don't want to carry a gun at your school, but can you see the point that someone like Ricky Stephens is making that it would make some people just feel safer?
[Stephanie Gates:] So I live in a neighborhood that has high crime. In the summertime on particular days, particularly when it's really hot, we'll have increased police presence. And also when there were shootings that took place in different places in the country, I noticed that we get increased police presence. As someone who lives in the neighborhood where this happens all the time when I'm driving around and I see increased police presence, it doesn't make me feel safer. It actually makes me feel less safe because when I see a police car on this corner, and I drive another block and I see a police car on that corner, it makes me think that, at any moment, something can happen.
[Ailsa Chang:] Right. So what you're saying is that the presence of more authority figures in a school, who happen to be armed, can actually increase tension?
[Stephanie Gates:] I think it can. We know that the research says that children of color are suspended at higher rates. They're expelled at higher rates. And so now you arm teachers which, I think, would make the environment even more hostile to students of color who are already targeted in some schools.
[Ailsa Chang:] Are you worried, too, that some teachers might not always make the best decision on when to use a gun?
[Stephanie Gates:] I think that's a possibility with anybody who carries a gun. And also if you're talking about a teacher who's armed in an active shooter situation, who's to say where bullets go? Worst possible scenario, I'm an armed teacher. An active shooter's in my building. I, you know, engage in a shootout. Who's to say I don't shoot a student?
[Ailsa Chang:] It seems like so many people right now are expressing such tremendous fear after Parkland. Can you relate to any of that? Do you share any of that right now?
[Stephanie Gates:] Of course I share fear. I'm a teacher. I walk into a building every day. It concerns me greatly because parents send their children to school to be safe. And I tell that to my students all the time. I say your parents send you to school, and they expect, at the end of the day, for you to come home from school. So yes, it's a fear. And it's always there. But it if it's greater than what I do, then why would I get up and go to work every day? I have to take that fear. I have to deal with it, and I have to do what I can during the course of the day to make sure that the students, who are entrusted in my care, can go home at the end of the day. All I can do is what I can do.
[Ailsa Chang:] Stephanie Gates is an elementary language arts teacher in Chicago. Thank you so much for talking to us.
[Stephanie Gates:] Thank you.

[Farai Chideya:] And now, a closer look at a Democratic race that's dealing with race. Over the past few days, there had been a lot of mentions of the race card, but who is playing it? For more on this, we've got Robert George, associate editorial page editor for the New York Post. And Roland Martin, a CNN contributor and special correspondent for Essence magazine. Welcome, gentlemen.
[Mr. Robert George:] Glad to be here.
[Mr. Roland Martin:] Good to be here. Thank you.
[Farai Chideya:] So things are heating up in more ways than one, and a lot has been set over the past few days about the back and forth between the Clinton camp and the Obama camp surrounding race. The bottom line: is anyone actually throwing the race card or is this just politics as usual? I'm going to go to you first, Roland.
[Mr. Roland Martin:] Well, I think, when you say throw the race card, you know, I interviewed Shelby Steele on my radio show and he talked about his book about man. And he said there's no doubt for him the Clinton campaign was throwing the race card. I talked to many others who said they sense that there's race baiting and then Obama does not want to have a conversation. He really doesn't want to have a conversation about race. I mean, his campaign people flat out or skittish about this topic. And so when you talk about what's the race card, well, when Bill Shaheen makes a comment, addressing, you know, well, they say he was a drug dealer. People [unintelligible] again to that. And then, of course, then you hear New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo make a comment about shucking and jiving. And so, if you're talking about Obama and then what happen is they'll say, no, I wasn't talking about him. At the end, the whole brouhaha, which I don't think it was a big deal over Clinton's MLK comments and then Bill Clinton's comments about fairytale. And so, that's right to be like, getting this sort of coated word, coated words being thrown out that may not be in the category of the race card, but maybe in the same family.
[Farai Chideya:] I'm going to throw in a little bit of, a little bit more gasoline on the fire. There were comments from the Hillary camp and then Bill Clinton brought on the controversy surrounding race. Now, we have some comments by BET founder Bob Johnson that have reignited the flames. Let's take a listen.
[Mr. Bob Johnson:] As an African-American, I am insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid, that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues... ...when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood and I won't say what he was doing but he said it in the book.
[Farai Chideya:] Robert, what was that wink, wink, nudge, nudge and how did it play out?
[Mr. Robert George:] Well, the wink, wink, nudge, nudge, was most definitely an allusion to the drug use, and Johnson obviously was trying to possibly that way Bill Shaheen, the Hillary's former co-chair in New Hampshire, was alluding to that. Since Obama has admitted to not just smoking pot, but actually using cocaine, now, the political game is, well, you know, was it more than just using it? Was he possibly distributing it? So I'm not quite sure whether that's necessary, it's exactly an aspect of, say, the race card. Now, is it incredibly disingenuous for Robert Johnson to say, oh, I wasn't referring to drugs, I was referring to his community organizing in Chicago, which is absolutely silly. So I'm not necessary sure if that really just considered part of the, part of the race card, but it is certainly a kind of a generational, cultural knife that the Clintons are certainly going to try and use against Obama.
[Farai Chideya:] Roland, let me...
[Mr. Roland Martin:] Well, Farai, what's interesting is he talks about that when he was, you know, a teenager, yet I mean, let's think about it. Fred Thompson, a former U.S. senator, he was riding around on airplanes of a guy, who very recently, as in the last decade, who was busted for trying to distribute cocaine. I mean somebody who actually did it, riding the plane, a huge campaign supporter that story had a life and a shelf life, maybe a couple of days. I'm not grafting part of this because he's not a frontrunner. He's sort of in the middle pack right now, but there's an illusion...
[Mr. Robert George:] But Roland, we're talking about the candidate's...
[Mr. Roland Martin:] No, no, no. I understand that...
[Mr. Robert George:] ...as opposed to the candidate's associate.
[Mr. Roland Martin:] I understand that, but this is...
[Farai Chideya:] Well, Roland, let me redirect this a little bit, and Robert, you can jump in. The question comes to mind for me of proxies. There are the candidates and then there are people who were proxying for the candidates.
[Mr. Roland Martin:] Yes.
[Mr. Robert George:] Surrogates.
[Farai Chideya:] Yes, exactly. And so in this case, you have Bob Johnson being a proxy for the Hillary Clinton camp African-American man, hyper-wealthy. What does it mean to have what some people would call crab-in-the-barrel syndrome? Is that even a fair characterization of one black man being used as a proxy against another black man?
[Mr. Robert George:] No. I think what you have here is and actually, I talked with I was on a debate with Bob Johnson and I also talked with him regarding his comments. And he said, look, the Clintons are friends of mine. If they are in a fight, I'm in a fight. And that's what you have here, that's what surrogates do. And the politicians use them to say, we know I didn't say it. They said it and solve your concern you need to give them a call.
[Farai Chideya:] Robert, if you already had a situation where one of the people working for the Clinton campaign was let go because of pushing the cocaine issue, is this not just the cocaine issue but could these racial issues be a third rail for anyone attacking Barack Obama? Is his is Senator Barack Obama's nice guy image one where he actually could gain some support, sympathy support?
[Mr. Robert George:] Yes and no. In a context of the Clintons, they have to be very, very careful because the African-American community is a significant base of the Democratic Party, and they cannot be seen as if they're trying to use race to bait Obama and to gain explicit political advantage because that same base they need if Hillary Clinton becomes a nominee, they need that same base to turn out for her.
[Farai Chideya:] Is it all is fair in love and politics during the primaries, or do the Democrats have to think about are we in a circular firing squad? How much do you have to play nice during the primaries with people of your own party? Roland?
[Mr. Roland Martin:] Well, first of all, when you're running for president, your job is to win the nomination, so you worry about that drama later. Everybody always say, oh, let's not attack one another because we don't want Republicans to use this against us. But you have to win the nomination to even get to the general election. And so you're going to do everything you can to win. That's just the bottom line. And so all the people who won the nice little campaigns guess what, they are the ones who dropped out. There's only three standing well, four, with Dennis Kucinich but essentially, there are three standing. But you got to be real careful when you, all of sudden, will you have a woman U.S. senator who could win the nomination, an African-American who can win the nomination that's very careful that they have this to step because again, women are going to make 60 percent of those who are voting. African-Americans are a significant, loyal group with the Democratic Party. You don't want to tick either one off. You do have to thread carefully.
[Farai Chideya:] All right, gentlemen. Thank you so much.
[Mr. Robert George:] Thank you so, Farai.
[Mr. Roland Martin:] Thank you so much.
[Farai Chideya:] We just talked about race and politics with Robert George, associate editorial page editor for the New York Post. He spoke with us from our studios in New York. And Roland Martin, CNN contributor and special correspondent for Essence magazine.

[Renee Montagne:] One of the big stories in the business world over the past year has been Marissa Mayer's turnaround effort at Yahoo. Since taking over, she's made major acquisitions like buying the blogging site Tumblr, and she's tried to improve worker morale. Today is Mayer's first anniversary on the job. And as it happens, yesterday Yahoo reported its earnings for the year. The stock price is soaring, but sales are flat and revenue is down. To discuss Yahoo's fortunes, NPR's Steve Henn joined us. Good morning.
[Steve Henn, Byline:] Good morning.
[Renee Montagne:] So Steve, what should Wall Street make of Yahoo's new earnings report, which sounds, to me at least, like a mixed bag?
[Steve Henn, Byline:] You know, it really was a mixed bag. And I think investors and analysts could choose to look at it in one of two ways. They could either focus on the numbers or they could choose to pay attention to the story Marissa Mayer is telling about Yahoo. And since she took over, she's argued that Yahoo needed a turnaround, and right now she says she's in the middle of it. The first thing she did was recruit great people. And then she said the company needed to start focusing on building exciting new products that would drive new traffic to Yahoo's site. That, Mayer says, is where Yahoo is now. Traffic is finally increasing. This is how Mayer put it.
[Marissa Mayer:] Renewed traffic growth in the face of multiple years of decline is, to my knowledge, unprecedented among industry players that operate with billions of page views.
[Steve Henn, Byline:] So that's Mayer in the earnings call yesterday. And she's arguing that if Yahoo focuses on quality products, eventually new revenue will follow. This is the same argument you hear from start-ups. Build the product first and worry about the money later. Now you're hearing it from an industry icon: Yahoo.
[Renee Montagne:] Well, what if investors don't want to worry about the money later? What in fact did the financial results look like?
[Steve Henn, Byline:] They weren't that great. You know, in the U.S. market, Internet advertising is still growing really fast. Nationally, this industry expanded by something like 15 percent this year. Not only is Yahoo failing to keep pace with that expansion, it's actually losing ground. Revenues in its Internet ad business fell by double digits. That's in contrast to ad revenues at Yahoo's biggest competitors, like Google and Facebook and Twitter all growing by double digits. So even though Yahoo's still quite profitable, its core business is shrinking. One bright spot financially for Yahoo is its stake in the Ali Baba Group. This is a Chinese e-commerce site that Yahoo invested in a few years ago. Yahoo still owns about a quarter of that company. Ali Baba is booming and it's gearing up for a big IPO. The long-term plan appears to be to sell off some its stake in these Asian properties and then reinvest that money domestically and hope for a hit.
[Renee Montagne:] And you know, we talk about morale one thing that Marissa Mayer did this past year that actually created enough of a controversy that got her off the business pages and on the front pages was when she ended the company's policy of allowing people to work from home. How is company morale?
[Steve Henn, Byline:] Well, you know, it's always tough to judge, but on the earnings call yesterday Mayer made the point of saying that Yahoos, as corporate employees are known, are as productive and focused as they've ever been. As the company's CEO, of course she had to say that. But she did have a few stats to back up these claims. The company is now receiving up to 10,000 applications a month for jobs there, which is a big step up. And many of those new applicants are former Yahoo employees who have decided that now could be a good time to come back. So those are both encouraging signs.
[Renee Montagne:] Now, there is one sort of odd thing Mayer started just this week, and that was allowing people to take over other people's old Yahoo email addresses if those addresses hadn't been used for a year. What is the company trying to do?
[Steve Henn, Byline:] Well, I think they're trying to generate a little buzz. You know, if you've ever signed up for an email address at a popular site say, Gmail you probably weren't able to get your name. You might have had to settle for RMontagne, you know, 123. This is Yahoo's bid to lure people onto its email service with the possibility that they could get, you know, a much simpler email address than the one they're using now or at least that's the hope.
[Renee Montagne:] Steve, thanks.
[Steve Henn, Byline:] Oh, my pleasure.
[Renee Montagne:] That was NPR's technology correspondent Steve Henn speaking to us from Silicon Valley.

[Mr. Don Ho:] [Singing] Tiny bubbles in the wine, make me happy, make me feel fine.
[Liane Hansen:] Hawaiian singer Don Ho, one of the last of the '60s-era crooners, died yesterday of heart failure. He gave his last performance this past Thursday. Ho's parents owned a bar in Waikiki, and soon after he entered the entertainment scene, he became a fixture in his home state. Hawaii is my partner, he once said. "Tiny Bubbles," his signature tune, was released in 1966 and brought him international fame. He started and ended each performance with the song. In 1998, NPR's Scott Simon spoke with Ho and asked him about that.
[Mr. Don Ho:] You have to make it different and nice for them. You can't bore them every night. You may be bored with singing "Tiny Bubbles" every night, but you've got to think about the people who want to hear that song every night.
[Scott Simon:] True.
[Mr. Don Ho:] And they come back every year to hear it again, and again, and again, again, and again.
[Liane Hansen:] Don Ho died yesterday in Honolulu. He was 76 years old.
[Mr. Don Ho:] [Singing] With a feeling that I'm going to love you 'til the end of time.
[Liane Hansen:] You're listening to NPR News.

[Linda Wertheimer:] Of course, the Homestead Act was born during troubled times in American history. It passed during the Civil War, but just barely. And it came at the expense of Native Americans, who were displaced from lands they have settled for generation. We spoke to Jonathan Earle, an associate professor of history at the University of Kansas, and asked him why the Homestead Act was so difficult to pass.
[Jonathan Earle:] The groups that were against it were very powerful. They are the owners of factories in the East that are worried that their workforce is going to bleed out to the West and become farmers. Then there's the powerful slave-holding bloc in Congress that did not want to have the West settled by small-time farmers, yeomen from the north and from Europe. They knew that that would kind of block them from cultivated the West the way they had cultivated the South and the old Southwest.
[Linda Wertheimer:] So, now, when you talk about the Homestead Act passing in 1862, when did it really get underway? I mean, when did the large numbers of people start to take advantage? It's sort of a difficult situation to do this in the middle of a war.
[Jonathan Earle:] It is, and it really didn't get started that much during the Civil War. But you're right. The real peaks for homesteading were the first two decades of the 20th century, when you had this huge influx of immigrants from Europe, really that ended up being this incredible valve for European overpopulation. More and more Germans, more and more Swedes people from northern Europe who had the means to get across the ocean, had the means to pay the filing fees the land was free, but you had to come up with a little bit of cash for the filing fees and also the amount of money to buy seed, to buy tools. It was not for the indigent. You couldn't have made it work unless you had both a little bit of capital and a lot of knowhow about how to farm.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Now, how much land was given away finally?
[Jonathan Earle:] Ten percent of the entire United States land mass over 270 million acres. So, we're talking about a lot of land.
[Linda Wertheimer:] But that was pretty much the United States as we know it now. I mean, they included California, it included Texas.
[Jonathan Earle:] Correct. It's pretty much in the 48 states. Now, homesteading actually lasted in Alaska until halfway through Reagan's presidency I think it might have been 1986. But until the '70s, when you could homestead and make the lower 48, it was pretty much the Great Plains, Florida has a significant amount. The leading state in terms of acreage is Nebraska that had 45 percent of its land area homesteaded, claimed by these actual settlers on the Plains.
[Linda Wertheimer:] And that would include my grandparents, who homesteaded in Oklahoma. Now, what did you get?
[Jonathan Earle:] What did you get? Well, when you first got there, you had 160 acres, which is a quarter section, a quarter mile, that you would file for in a land office. And it took a long time it takes five years that you have to stay on the land, you have to improve the land, which means you have to build fences and a structure. You have to live on it, and after five years you can apply to the Federal Land Office to get clear title to the land. And then you get 160 free acres of our public lands.
[Linda Wertheimer:] How many of the people who homesteaded made it, do you think? I mean, can you figure that out?
[Jonathan Earle:] I can tell you, well, I can tell you, first of all, even the people who applied and were granted that homestead, the title after five years, it's only 40 percent. So, 60 percent of even the people who filed the paperwork failed inside of that first five years. After that, it really depends on what you mean by succeeds. I mean, I think your grandparents, it sounds like, are a fabulous success. They made a living, they raised families. I mean, there's a whole...
[Linda Wertheimer:] Thirteen children.
[Jonathan Earle:] Oh, my gosh. And there's a list of really successful Americans who came from homesteading stock. You know, in your business, Chet Huntley is the children of homesteaders and Whoopi Goldberg, I think, is the granddaughter or great-granddaughter of homesteaders in Florida. But there were ecological problems, there was a lot of fraud with the Homestead Act. Powerful people banded together to game the system, to get large estates that could hoard water rights or mineral rights or timber rights. So, there was a lot of chicanery that went along with it. But overall, I have to say that, you know, if you're looking at how America got it character, that can-do, rural character that we hear about during election years, a lot of that is because of the Homestead Act. When you think of the homesteader in your head, whether that's Pa Ingalls from "Little House on the Prairie" or the Tom Cruise character in "Far and Away," it's a rugged, individualistic pioneer type. And I think that that gave our Western states a lot of their character.
[Linda Wertheimer:] I think, and historians like yourself, don't you believe that this was the beginning of the middle class in the heartland of the country?
[Jonathan Earle:] I absolutely do believe that. I mean, the two great significant aftereffects of the Homestead Act are this growing and burgeoning and exploding rural middle class; mostly white, a lot of immigrants, although you could file for a homestead if you were an ex-slave or a single woman head of household. And the other is when you're looking down from an airplane from seven miles up, you see the landscape that the Homestead Act created that grid of quarter sections...
[Linda Wertheimer:] That checkerboard, yes.
[Jonathan Earle:] Exactly, with a farmhouse in the corner and fields in the rest of it. It literally etched itself onto our landscape.
[Linda Wertheimer:] That's Jonathan Earle. He's an associate professor of history at the University of Kansas. Dr. Earle, thank you so much.
[Jonathan Earle:] You're welcome. Thank you.
[Linda Wertheimer:] You're listening to WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News.

[Scott Simon:] Puerto Rico's Governor Rossello held a town meeting this week not in Puerto Rico but Central Florida. As many as 300,000 Puerto Ricans relocated to Florida after Hurricane Maria, joining more than a million Puerto Ricans already living there. NPR's Greg Allen reports that the governor has begun a campaign to organize Puerto Rican voters in Florida and other states before the midterm elections.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] When firefighter Oscar Negron sang "La Borinquena," Puerto Rico's territorial anthem, at the Kissimmee Civic Center, many of the hundreds of people there for the town meeting joined in.
[Oscar Negron:] [Singing in Spanish].
[Unidentified People:] [Singing in Spanish].
[Greg Allen, Byline:] It was after he sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" and a unifying moment for those concerned about their island's future. Darren Soto, a Puerto Rican and the member of Congress for this area, said there's something else that unifies this community disappointment from the federal response to Hurricane Maria.
[Darren Soto:] We're a proud people, and this is a very deeply concerning issue for us that it's been a hundred days since much of the island has had power. They're just being treated differently, and it hurts our community. It hurts us personally. We take this personally.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] Puerto Rico's governor was in Washington most of the week lobbying to get his island the help it needs in a disaster bill now before Congress. Rossello was disappointed last fall when Congress passed a tax bill that he says penalizes manufacturing companies on the island. In Kissimmee, he called on Puerto Ricans living on the U.S. mainland to do what people in the territory can't do register and vote for members of Congress, Senate and in the general election for president in 2020.
[Ricardo Rossello:] So that we can make distinction between those that have been friends of Puerto Rico and those that have turned their back and that we can be influential in the up and coming midterm election... ...And the up and coming presidential election and that we can change the path forward.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] Rossello says because it's a territory and doesn't have representation in Congress, Puerto Rico is at a disadvantage securing its fair share of disaster aid, even though residents are U.S. citizens. The island is competing with the Virgin Islands and some powerful states that also saw disasters this year Florida, Texas and California. The governor is calling on Puerto Ricans to join him in tracking who in Congress votes to support the island and who doesn't.
[Ricardo Rossello:] When it's all said and done, we're going to tally. Our community's going to see. And of course, we're going to take strong stands when we see clear differences on policy for the people of Puerto Rico and against the people of Puerto Rico.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] Rossello said it's not about party but about voting records. Joining him onstage, however, were two leading Democrats, Congressman Soto and Florida Senator Bill Nelson. Nelson, who's up for re-election in the fall, agreed that in the response to Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans were being treated like second-class citizens.
[Bill Nelson:] No American should have to go through what the people of Puerto Rico are still going through.
[Unidentified Woman:] That's right.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] Nelson's expected opponent in the fall, Florida's Republican Governor Rick Scott, was also at the town meeting. Betsy Franceschini is with the Hispanic Federation, a group that's already registering Puerto Rican voters in Central Florida. She says voter outreach efforts will soon be kicking into high gear.
[Betsy Franceschini:] We're going to hold elected officials accountable. I think we have, right now, the position. It's our time and our influence to make a difference in the elections.
[Greg Allen, Byline:] Puerto Rican Governor Rossello said he'll be back before the midterms to campaign in Florida, also Pennsylvania, Ohio, Connecticut and other states. Greg Allen, NPR News, Kissimmee, Fla.

[Steve Inskeep:] And I'm Steve Inskeep. Good morning. Our colleague Renee Montagne is reporting from one of the states that may decide this fall's presidential election. She spent last evening at a debate party in Albuquerque, New Mexico. That's a state that went for George W. Bush in 2004 by just a few thousand votes. It went for Al Gore, the Democrat, in 2000 by just a few hundred votes. Now, New Mexico is among the states that could go either way, possibly depending on the decisions of voters like the ones who watched the debate with Renee.
[Renee Montagne:] And Steve, this group of 15 undecided voters were undecided, it seemed, because they were taking their votes very seriously. Host Margaret Aragon De Chavez, herself an undecided Democrat because she's not quite over Hillary Clinton, had brought together registered voters from both parties. And I'd like to welcome everybody, and really quickly we have note pads for note-taking. If you want to just write down any information during the debate. You don't have to... Margaret Aragon De Chavez is used to giving political parties. She was once the first lady of Albuquerque when she was married to a three-term mayor. So I think everybody has introduced themselves. So the debates, I think, we have maybe a few more minutes. My clocks are always ahead because I'm always running late! And so, make yourself at home. This is an important debate. Aragon De Chavez had one main rule, civility. No hooting, no cheering, no groaning, and once it was over, everyone crowded around her kitchen table and offered opinions. Strikingly, a fair number who were leaning towards one candidate moved over last night to the other. OK, Dominic. Now, it was one of the things that was kind of annoying me is he kept bringing Bush, Bush, Bush, and I was like, well, I don't want to hear any more about what Bush did because it's over. He's a lame duck president. You know, what's the solution? How are we going to move forward? And really the only question that I that was really answered from Obama that seemed clear-cut to me was the one that he had on health care. As far as John McCain though, the thing that really appealed to me about him is his idea of how to bail the housing market out, actually buy the values and renegotiate them. So really, at this point, I'm kind of leaning towards McCain. Dominic Aragon is a student in his late 20s who started a hightech company. His switch from Obama to McCain was seconded by another young man at the table, and then challenged by a woman in her 30s. I actually heard something completely different than what you guys did in the sense that I thought McCain was pointing the finger a lot. And I did actually capture more solid answers from Obama than I did from McCain, such as like the tax credits that are going to be going on for businesses, for insurance, and his answer with health care, and how it's a right instead of a responsibility, and his priorities kind of align more with mine as far energy, health care and [unintelligible] security, so it's interesting that I heard something completely different. Valerie Quintana is a behavioral health outreach worker for the state. And she said she came in truly undecided. Now, she'll probably vote for Obama. And then, there's Martinique Chavez who surprised her Democratic mother by registering as a Republican. At 18, she'll be voting for the first time. I've been swaying towards McCain this entire election. And after watching these debates, I've become more undecided because I think that I need to wait till another debate and see and learn more of the facts. In New Mexico, right now, polls show 14 percent of the voters are undecided. That's about twice the national average. Barack Obama does have a five-point lead here over John McCain, but one guest at last night's debate party may well have predicted how long the uncertainty will last. Jim Rivera said he was leaving the party having made a decision and that decision is he still needs more information. So I will be looking and reading and following closely for the rest of the campaign here up until probably the day of voting. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, I'm Renee Montagne.

[Scott Simon:] I'm Scott Simon. The United States and Russia have agreed to try to dismantle Syria's chemical weapons arsenal by the middle of 2014. Secretary of State Kerry made the announcement today from Geneva where he's been holding intensive talks the past three days with the Russian foreign minister. Now, if Syria's President Bashar al-Assad refuses to comply, Mr. Kerry said the United States would seek a U.N. resolution allowing for the use of force. Today's joint announcement has reduced the likelihood of any U.S. military strike against Syria but it has not halted Syria's civil war or the enormous flow of refugees into neighboring countries. We turn now to NPR's Deborah Amos, who has been following events from Syria in Beirut. Deb, thanks very much for being with us.
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] Thank you, Scott.
[Scott Simon:] In your estimation, do you foresee today's announcement of an agreement affecting the situation on the ground?
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] Not likely to affect the fighting on the ground. We have already seen that rebel General Salim Idriss in a press conference in Istanbul he is the leader of a faction of the rebels, the Free Syrian Army, backed by the West he said: The initiative doesn't interest us. For him, the chemical weapons attacks have killed less than 2 percent of those who have died in Syria. He said that the U.S. secretary of state called him, assured him the threat of force is still on the table. But Idriss said that a few days ago, he gave the U.S. information that the regime was moving some of those chemical stocks to Lebanon and Iraq. There is still an imbalance of arms for the rebels. A spokesman for the political opposition said: Our people will not feel ease. The regime is killing and bombing civilians with conventional weapons, he says. So I think on the ground, Syrians who feel the brunt of the regime's power from the air, from barrel bombs that are dropped from helicopters, from hospitals that are targeted, this is nothing for them because of the way that they've been living for the last two and a half years.
[Scott Simon:] And as we've been fastened on those talks in Geneva over the past two days, what's been happening in Syria on the ground?
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] The civil war has resumed. There was a lull after the August 21st attacks. But the regime has been back up in the air. They hit a hospital in northern Syria. There has been fighting across the country. One battle that's gotten quite a bit of attention is because of the headlines. And they're very provocative looked on in Congress as this debate was happening about whether the U.S. Congress would back strikes against Syria. And here's the headline: Christians Flee Village Where Syrians Speak the Language of Jesus. And I'm talking about the historic village of Ma'loula, and Syrians there actually still do speak Aramaic. And it's been spared from the fighting since the beginning of the conflict. Built into a hillside, there's two monasteries there. But fighting broke out on September 4th. An Islamist group known as the Nusra Front this is a group linked to al-Qaida sent a suicide bomber to blow up an army checkpoint. And then a coalition of rebels, including more moderate local rebels, also entered the town. And the fighting's been going on ever since.
[Scott Simon:] Anybody clearly in control?
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] At the moment, no. Both the rebels and the regime are outside of the town. It's very interesting about this place; it's not particularly strategic, but when the rebels entered the town, they were aware that they had a perception problem, because all sides went into full propaganda mode. The local rebels posted videos showing how they helped the local Christians. Even Nusra Front posted a video showing a commander urging his men not to harm the churches, while Syrian state television countered with a number of interviews with Christians who said the rebels had forced them to convert, had burned the churches. We called a sister, who is running one of the monasteries there, Sister Polagia. She heads the Mar Taqla Monastery, and this is what she had to say.
[Sister Polagia:] [Foreign language spoken]
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] It's in Arabic. And she said that the rebels had knocked on the monastery door late at night and when she didn't answer they kicked the door in. But they didn't enter the monastery. And she was called a terrorist by some pro-regime Facebook pages. When the army arrived, and she got on Syrian state television, she said that she'd protected some pro-regime people in the monastery. It's interesting to look at this particular conflict because it shows you how complicated Syria is and how difficult to stop this civil war.
[Scott Simon:] And, quickly, the U.N. inspection team report is expected to be released on Monday. I guess the secretary general kind of gave us a taste of it. Any effect expected on the ground?
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] Well, he said, in remarks he didn't think were going to be published, that it will show that chemical weapons were used there and he said that President Bashar al-Assad had committed crimes against humanity.
[Scott Simon:] NPR's Deborah Amos in Beirut. Thanks so much.
[Deborah Amos, Byline:] Thank you.

[Neal Conan:] Hezbollah continues to fire rockets into northern Israel, killing 24 people thus far. The rockets are come under a variety of names, come in different sizes as well. Some are believed to be manufactured in Iran. Hamas militants in Gaza, on the other hand, have been firing homegrown rockets called Qassams into Israel. To tell us more about these groups' stockpiles, we turn now to John Pike, director of the Alexandria, Virginia, based firm GlobalSecurity.org, and he's with us by phone from his office in Alexandria. Nice to speak with you today.
[Mr. John Pike:] Good to be with you, Neal.
[Neal Conan:] What can you tell us about the rockets in Hezbollah's arsenal? Most of them are called Katyushas, of various sorts.
[Mr. John Pike:] Well, Katyusha, [unintelligible] Russian was the name that these artillery rockets were originally given back during World War II. Today, this term applies to a broad range of artillery rockets, some with small warheads of only a few pounds of explosive with a range of only a few miles, some with warheads of over 100 pounds of explosive and ranges of dozens of miles. There are several things that are new about this artillery rocket campaign of the last several days. We're seeing new rockets, much longer-range, such as the ones that are being fired against Haifa. That's new. We're also seeing them fired in much, much larger numbers. By one count yesterday, over 350 had been fired. Over the last decade, normally Hezbollah would fire a few of them and that would be it. So, we're also seeing I think a third significant event is the Chinese cruise missile, apparently, reportedly, that was fired against the Israeli patrol craft last week. That's something that is completely new. Possibly, Iran may have not a hand in that not simply Hezbollah.
[Neal Conan:] That originally that attack was reported as being from a drone, a pilot-less aircraft flown by Hezbollah. In fact, as you said, Israeli sources now say that was a C-802, a Chinese-made missile, and they say it was fired radar guided and fired with the use of Lebanese government radars as well.
[Mr. John Pike:] Well, this all sounds a bit more complex than the sort of relatively simply artillery rocket attacks that we've normally associated with Hezbollah, and so I think people are looking very closely at this to try to understand the extent of which the violence that we're seen over the last several days is being driven simply by internal political dynamics in Lebanon and the extent of which maybe is part of a larger initiative on the part of Iran. Looking at the types of weapons that are being used, of course, is one indicator of that.
[Neal Conan:] And these longer range missiles that have been fired at places like Haifa, these are described as Fajr-3s and Fajr-5s, Iranian designed, maybe Syrian manufactured?
[Mr. John Pike:] Well, probably of Iranian manufacture, because Iran developed a very extensive artillery rocket industry with the help of North Korea back during its war with Iraq, and has been quite proud of its technical achievements on that front.
[Neal Conan:] We're talking with John Pike, director of the Alexandria-based firm, GlobalSecurity.org, and you're listening to special coverage from NPR News. Let's move to Gaza, now. And, John Pike, the rockets that are being fired by Hamas across the border into Israel, these are much smaller, homemade devices?
[Mr. John Pike:] Well, they started out small, but they're getting larger. The Qassam rocket, named after an early leader of the Palestinian arms struggle. These rockets started out small, with a small warhead and a range of only a few miles. That was the Qassam 1. Now we've worked our way up to the Qassam 3, a much larger warhead and much larger range. Thus far, they've basically been fired out of Gaza. There's concern if Hamas started firing these out of the West Bank that a much larger part of the Israeli population would be vulnerable; and of course if Hamas obtained some of the artillery rockets of the type that Hezbollah has had for some time, again, a much larger portion of the Israeli population would be at risk.
[Neal Conan:] And these, all of the rockets we're talking about, what kind of guidance do they have? Are they un-aimed?
[Mr. John Pike:] Isaac Newton. The rocket motors fire briefly and after that it's on a ballistic trajectory. Basically, depending on the direction that the launcher is pointed at, the angle from the ground that it's inclined to, that's going to determine the target that it actually hits. They're not overwhelmingly accurate, but when you're firing into a densely populated area like Haifa it doesn't have to be terribly accurate in order to hit something.
[Neal Conan:] And let's talk about the other party in this conflict. Israel. It's been using its air force, its artillery, and its navy.
[Mr. John Pike:] Well, they've imposed a blockade on Lebanon in order to make it much more difficult for Syria or Iran to resupply Hezbollah. A naval blockade bombed the airport to close the airfield, bombed roads. Israel has also been bombing infrastructure targets in Lebanon as a way to try to pressure the Lebanese government into doing something about Hezbollah, whether that's going to be effective I think is questionable. But that explains why things like power plants and other industrial facilities have been bombed. They're not directly connected to Hezbollah, but it's a way of the Israeli's trying to pressure other factions in Lebanon to do something about Hezbollah.
[Neal Conan:] As we've does Israel have the same kind of guided bombs and guided missiles that the United States has been using, which we've seen, of course, are very accurate, though not perfect?
[Mr. John Pike:] Well, generally they're going to be using either satellite-guided bombs or laser-guided bombs. The problem, of course, is that these heavy weapons are not particularly well suited to urban operations. The United States in Iraq has been trying to move towards much smaller bombs that would destroy a building but not an entire neighborhood. This is one of the reasons that the Israelis are using artillery in addition to using bombs. The problem being, though, that the artillery, while the explosion is smaller, can be less accurate. The big problem that the Israelis have in targeting Hezbollah is that by the time one of these artillery rockets is fired, the people who fired it are long gone. They're detonating them remotely the way the roadside bombs are detonated remotely in Iraq.
[Neal Conan:] So this, when even if you can track the trajectory and fire back almost immediately, there's generally nobody on the receiving end.
[Mr. John Pike:] Well, hopefully there's nobody on the receiving end. If you're unlucky, the way the Israelis were back in the '90s, what's on the receiving end is going to be a refugee camp. They had some very serious civilian casualties as a result of some of their operations against these rocket launchers when they first went into Lebanon in the mid-90s.
[Neal Conan:] And the there have been accusations that Israel has, at least at times and in places, used fuel-air bombs. Are those in use?
[Mr. John Pike:] I haven't seen those reports. Fuel-air munitions are suitable for certain types of targets, but generally you're going to be using something other than that. But they are part of the American stockpile. I'm not aware of reports that they have been used by the Israelis recently.
[Neal Conan:] They were used in Afghanistan by the United States and thought to be pretty effective in cave situations.
[Mr. John Pike:] Right.
[Neal Conan:] And as you look ahead at this, on the Hezbollah side, they're said to have maybe 10,000 or more of these rockets. Obviously, the more sophisticated longer range ones many fewer than the Katyushas.
[Mr. John Pike:] Well, over the years they've stockpiled an enormous number of these things. As you said, most of them are the short range, with a range of less than ten miles. But it's reported that they have hundreds that would be able to reach a few dozen miles, possible dozens that would be able to reach a range even further than that. Even though the number of rockets that they've fired over the last few days is really unprecedented it's just outside of our experience base it only represents three percent of their reported stockpile. So you have to be concerned that we're much closer to the beginning of this thing than we are to the end of it.
[Neal Conan:] And very quickly, if you look at the range of these weapons down the road, if you're talking about operational security, how far back Israel might want to push various forces...
[Mr. John Pike:] It's going to be very difficult for them to get security against these longer range missiles simply by pushing Hezbollah a few miles away from the border the way they did back in the '90s.
[Neal Conan:] John Pike, thanks very much.
[Mr. John Pike:] Thank you.
[Neal Conan:] John Pike, director of the northern Virginia-based firm, GlobalSecurity.org. He joined us by phone from his office in Alexandria. You've been listening to special coverage from NPR News. I'm Neal Conan, in Washington.

[Steve Inskeep:] It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
[Linda Wertheimer:] And I'm Linda Wertheimer. Efforts are underway to speed up delivery of aid to the Philippines islands worst hit by Typhoon Haiyan. The monster storm tore through the region this past weekend. Some 10,000 people are thought to have died. Hundreds of thousands have been left homeless. The widespread devastation has made it incredibly difficult to get aid to those most in need. Philippine soldiers have now begun distributing food and water in the devastated city of Tacloban. The U.S. military is also being mobilized to help, and the man on the scene there is Marine Brigadier General Paul Kennedy. General Kennedy, welcome to our program.
[Brigadier General Paul Kennedy:] Thank you, Linda. Good morning, your time.
[Linda Wertheimer:] I understand that you've actually seen much of the devastated area. You've flown over it. Could you tell us what you saw?
[Brigadier General Paul Kennedy:] Absolutely. We flew over the metropolitan area of Tacloban, which is a city about of 350,000 people, and then out along the southern coast of Samar. The area is, as you would expect, with 200-mile-an-hour winds and a 25-foot tidal surge, it looks like a bomb went off. Virtually all of the structures, if they were not made out of concrete or steel, are gone. It looks like a 50-mile-wide tornado hit landfall and just tore everything apart.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Well, so, what is your first priority when you're looking at a situation of such devastation and confusion?
[Brigadier General Paul Kennedy:] We want to get shelter for these people and who are exposed to the elements. And we have a second tropical depression hot on the heels of this typhoon. So we want to get these people under shelter as quickly as possible. Then we could distribute the food and water and medical supplies to start to piece this thing back together.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Now, you have Marines and sailors under your command who will be participating in the relief effort. What are you going to sending them out to do?
[Brigadier General Paul Kennedy:] This is more than just Marines and sailors. We're working side-by-side with USAID and the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance. And they're giving us direction on how we can use these military assets to help facilitate distribution [unintelligible]. So our first priority is to find a place where we could land even 30 airplanes.
[Linda Wertheimer:] So what do you see as the most serious challenge to doing what you're trying to do?
[Brigadier General Paul Kennedy:] The challenge is we take for granted all of the infrastructure that goes into [unintelligible] an airfield. You need a tower. You need lights. You need electricity. You need gas. You need a space to offload your aircraft. You need people that have forklifts. You need all of that stuff, none of which is present. It's either destroyed the infrastructure was destroyed, and all that equipment that you would use to service the aircraft are now washed out to sea or washed into the interior of the city.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Can you give us a sense of how long it will take to get actual supplies of food and water and shelter to the people who need it? Do you have any kind of a timeline yet?
[Brigadier General Paul Kennedy:] The first aircraft flew in yesterday. They started offloading the supplies that I described. We back-loaded the plane with citizens that needed to get back to Manila, to the points that were less affected by the storm. And so, really, within about 36 hours, all of that flow started, and it's especially just a matter of building it up over time.
[Linda Wertheimer:] What about the outlying areas? Is there any way to get to them yet?
[Brigadier General Paul Kennedy:] Well, to be honest with you, that concerns me the most. Tacloban looks like we'll be able to get the airfield back in working condition with the help of Philippines Armed Forces and the Civil Air Authority. That will happen. It's just a matter of time. The outlying areas have got significant challenges. The roads that connects these smaller municipalities are closed, only because there's trees and fire lines and there are structures lying across them. Virtually every tree along the southern coast of Samar, all the palm trees have been ripped out of the ground completely, like matchsticks, and they are strewn all across the what we call lines of communications. So all of those roads have challenges in getting them cleared. What we will do and it will be a dual effort with the Philippine government we will start clearing those roads from Tacloban out to the southern reaches of Samar. As that's being cleared, we will start using our aircraft, our helicopters, to ferry supplies into these isolated towns, shoulder to shoulder with the Philippine Armed Forces and the government of Philippines.
[Linda Wertheimer:] Brigadier General Paul Kennedy: He is coordinating the relief effort of the 3rd Marine Expeditionary Brigade in the Philippines. Thank you very much, sir.
[Brigadier General Paul Kennedy:] Thank you, Linda.

[Arun Rath:] It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR West. I'm Arun Rath. Thirteen years ago today, the first 20 war on terror detainees arrived at the prison at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. President Obama has yet to make good on his campaign promise to close the prison. Congress cut off funds to transfer the detainees to prisons in the U.S. The president has been getting around that by transferring prisoners to other countries, and the pace of those transfers has been increasing. But Carol Rosenberg of The Miami Herald says that transferring detainees who were cleared for release long ago is the easy part. The real concern is the group of prisoners considered too dangerous to release and those on trial in the military commissions. Right now there's no sign they're going anywhere.
[Carol Rosenberg:] That's not going to change in the last two years of this presidency. So if he wants to close it, he either has to make a deal with Congress to lift that embargo on transferring detainees to the States, or he has to decide that he has the authority to defy Congress.
[Arun Rath:] Now, I saw Senator John McCain last month, actually. He sounded kind of a consolatory note, saying that he would work with the administration, but he still has his long-standing objections about the president not having a good plan.
[Carol Rosenberg:] Right. He wants a plan. And I do think that Senator McCain is the wildcard in the situation because he campaigned against Obama saying Guantanamo should close. If he and President Obama can find the formula for transferring them to the United States, then it closes. Otherwise, I don't know how this president makes good on that promise.
[Arun Rath:] And, Carol, what about the detainees that are being tried by the military commissions? Isn't that going to kind of gum up the plans to close the prison?
[Carol Rosenberg:] So they're trial by military commissions, and there is nothing in the law that says those military commissions have to be held in Guantanamo. If they come up with a formula for moving them to the States, that trial could continue. But those trials, particularly the death penalty trials that, you know, there'six men who were disappeared for three and four years into the CIA black sites, they have been charged for more than two years now. And they're not moving very quickly. So again, none of that may have been concluded by the time that this president leaves office.
[Arun Rath:] Finally, Carol, you mentioned that these were men who were detained in these black sites. And I know that one of the things that been holding the trials up has been the contentious issue of whether or not they can discuss what happened in those black sites. With the release of the Senate committee's report involving interrogation techniques, with that now being on the public record, does that simplify things?
[Carol Rosenberg:] It both simplifies it and complicates it. Yes, there are certain things that we in the public now know officially in an unclassified fashion or a declassified fashion. And those things can come into the court. The judges responded to the release of that report by telling the prosecution to go back through more than two years of court records and evaluate anything that was done in secret about whether it now needs to be declassified. But, you know, the defense attorneys say it has just whet their appetite to find out in the most graphic detail what happened to their clients because they argue that they need to know what was done to them when during the years that they were disappeared so that they can challenge evidence brought at trial as potentially the fruit of torture. And if the five men accused of the 9-11 attacks are convicted, the next phase is the penalty phase. And they want, again, the most graphic details to present to that military jury if they're convicted to say the United States no longer has the moral authority to execute them.
[Arun Rath:] That's Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald. Carol, thank you.
[Carol Rosenberg:] Thank you, Arun.

[Robert Siegel:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
[Audie Cornish:] And I'm Audie Cornish. Got grit? That's the new it-thing in education. New research suggests that perseverance and resilience are key to a student's success. The science is still out on how or if grit can be taught, but schools around the nation are trying. One program in particular called Brainology is showing some promise. NPR's Tovia Smith checked it out at a public school in Brooklyn.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] The first thing you need to know about the Lenox Academy for Gifted Middle School Students is to never say that out loud.
[Joe Giamportone:] No. No. We don't use the never use the word gifted ever. In our school, you will never hear it.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] Assistant Principal Joe Giamportone says that goes for everyone from the gifted students to their teachers, like Christa Quint and June Davenport.
[Christa Quint:] Yes, smart is like a curse.
[June Davenport:] Yeah, so smart is a dirty word now?
[Christa Quint:] Right.
[June Davenport:] It suggests some kind of a natural intelligence that enables you to do so well.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] The problem is that those kids who think they've got it and always skated through school, Giamportone says, would get to middle school and crumble.
[Joe Giamportone:] When that curriculum got tough, a majority of them retreated. And so performance declined over the course of three years.
[Jamal Parris:] I started thinking that I wasn't that smart and didn't deserve to make it into this school.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] Seventh grader Jamal Parris was typical.
[Jamal Parris:] Like, when I was in fifth grade, I used to be so good at math. And then when I came to Lenox Academy, like I just hit a wall. I was like what, letters in math? And I just couldn't understand anything. And some days I wouldn't even go home to study because I was like, I'm just going to get low grade anyways even if I study.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] It's exactly the kind of mindset problem that Stanford University Professor Carol Dweck has been warning about for years. Kids with a fixed mindset, who believe high-achievers are born, not made, don't want to risk looking like a loser, she says, so they run from challenge. But kids who believe success comes from effort are grittier and ultimately do best. It's why Lenox Academy launched their kind of crusade to build up what's called a Growth Mindset.
[Alina Blaze:] It's the term in every class use the growth mindset, have a growth mindset. It's just you can put towards the effort and get something you want.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] Eight grader Alina Blaze says it's not unlike what Grandma always said: You can do anything, just practice, practice, practice and don't give up. But what convinced her, Blaze says, is the science.
[Unidentified Man:] The most revolutionary finding is that when you learn you actually build up your brain, making it smarter and stronger. Grunt...
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] The Brainology program, developed by Dweck, starts with a kid-friendly computer-animated crash course in how the brain works like a muscle
[Nyashka Laurore:] I learned how every single day, the more you learn things the more neurons that pop out of your brain.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] Even after a few lessons, sixth grader Nyashka Laurore says she already felt more capable.
[Nyashka Laurore:] I was like, the more I practice the more that at school wouldn't really be something I can't do.
[Christa Quint:] That's right and if I drew a line between these two points...
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] In classes at Lenox, when kids get practice making graphs, for example, they also get practice being gritty.
[Christa Quint:] Yes?
[Unidentified Child #1:] They equal to six?
[Christa Quint:] That they all, what do we mean those points equal six?
[Unidentified Child #1:] They equal to...
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] Eight grade math teacher Christa Quint lets students squirm a little through an awkward silence.
[Unidentified Child #2:] That causes them to be equal to six, like the weights?
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] The idea is to make kids comfortable with struggle so they see it as just a normal part of learning.
[Christa Quint:] It's OK. She's, just give her a second to answer 'cause she's becoming...
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] The focus is always more on effort than answers. Giamportone says teacher have done a 180 on how they see students and how they speak to them.
[Joe Giamportone:] You're so smart... ...that just does not happen anymore. Please, for you to perform this well, you had to have put forth a lot of effort.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] Some schools actually grade students on Growth Mindset and grit. At Lenox, it doesn't make it to report cards, but kids do get evaluated on it, by other kids.
[Nathan Curley:] Who today really worked hard to overcome obstacles and challenges?
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] History teacher Nathan Curley calls out to a ring of eighth-graders, who are rating their classmates on things like learning from past mistakes.
[Unidentified Child #3:] Well, normally, Timothy, he don't pay attention that well. But he's able to take charge and...
[Nathan Curley:] I think that if I was outsider and I was hearing this conversation, I might think that this was some kind of hippy-dippy love fest. And I'd think: The kids need to learn. But what you see is actually a more rigorous and risky learning environment.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] Curley says in three years, he's seen kids grow less afraid of making mistakes and more willing to ask for help. Test scores have jumped 10 to 15 points. Eduardo Briceno, head of Mindset Works that developed the program, says it makes sense, that if grit begets success that Growth Mindset begets grit.
[Eduardo Briceno:] It's really hard to have high tolerance if you believe that your abilities or intelligence are fixed. Because if you believe you can't change my own abilities, then trying hard doesn't make any sense. It's like pounding your head against wall.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] The number of schools using Brainology will double this year to a thousand. But even Briceno concedes they are still just small islands in a culture that may give lip service to earning an A for effort, but still rewards grades and scores above all. It's a reality parents know all too well. As Giamportone says, they all love the idea of their kid learning to be more resilient. But he says no one likes when their gifted kid comes home with his first C.
[Joe Giamportone:] We get pushback from parents when they come here. And now: Oh, my God... ...this never happened before. But, you know, those are the tough conversations.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] Especially when the long and short-term prospects for growing grit are still unknown.
[Angela Duckworth:] We don't know whether we've had any effect. The jury is out, at least for us.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] University of Pennsylvania Psychology Professor Angela Duckworth, who coined the term grit, is also experimenting with making middle schoolers grittier. Her efforts also focus on making kids believe that frustration and mistakes are part of learning. But she says a limited intervention, if not consistently reinforced in and out of school, can only have limited results.
[Angela Duckworth:] It just seems to me extremely implausible that that's going to permanently and impressively change a child.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] Indeed, even after three years at Lenox Academy, sometimes all it takes is one bad test score for kids to lapse back into the old I'm just not good at math. But teachers say there are also encouraging signs, like 8th grader Alina Blaze who says she's definitely grittier- not only in school but also out. She recently decided to take up the viola again, three years after she quit, because she was afraid she'd embarrass herself.
[Alina Blaze:] I found so difficult to learn. And I said you know what? I'm just not good at this. I might as well not try. And then soon enough I just put viola up their on top of the closet and that was the end of that.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] But now, as Blaze puts it, she believes you can teach old dogs new tricks,
[Alina Blaze:] I think that if I just put in enough effort into it, I can be the next Yow Ming. Yo Yo Ming, I'm sorry.
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] His name is Yo Yo Ma.
[Alina Blaze:] Yo Yo Ma...
[Tovia Smith, Byline:] Mistakes like that one will always be kind of embarrassing, says Blaze. But now she recovers more easily. She's one who's got the message, as they like to say around here, that the secret to success is failure. Tovia Smith, NPR news.
[Robert Siegel:] This is NPR News.

[Guy Raz:] So tomorrow night for the first time in the history of the Bowl Championship Series, two teams from the same conference, the Southeastern Conference, the two best teams in college football, Louisiana State University and the University of Alabama, will face off in the BCS National Championship in New Orleans. Who's going to win? Well, to help us answer that question, Mike Pesca joins me now. Mike, these two teams actually played each other back in November. LSU beat Alabama back then. So this has got to be the rematch that Alabama's been waiting for.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Well, sure, because there was some question whether Alabama would be invited to play in this game, and there were two arguments against it. One argument was they already had their shot, but there's another argument about it, and that's made by computers. And the computers, not the human voters, they actually said that Oklahoma State should have been playing in this game. But so many human voters said, you know what, that game between Alabama and LSU was so close, and we happen to think that Alabama has the next best team. I kind of like the fact that it's a rematch just because we have a frame of reference. And NFL games, you know, Super Bowls, sometimes they're a rematch, but at least everyone plays the same group of 31 other teams. This time, they know each other very well, and I think that adds to the drama.
[Guy Raz:] So, Mike, tomorrow night, who should we be looking out for?
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Guy, I like cake, and I like steak. But I don't want just eat cake.
[Guy Raz:] Right.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] And so far, in these bowl games, I have gotten cake. I have gotten dessert, which is offense. And all the college football fans have gotten so many games where the scoring has been so high Oklahoma State and Stanford, those two teams totaled for 79 points. We just saw West Virginia put up 70 points. It's so sweet that I'm not even getting the sustenance of defense.
[Guy Raz:] Yeah. This is like a glucose overdose. This is going to be a low-scoring game?
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] It will. The last one was. And one of the reasons it was low scoring was Alabama missed three field goals. But I would say having watched that game, it did seem that Alabama was better at moving the ball against LSU.
[Guy Raz:] Ha.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Although once Alabama got into deep into LSU territory, the majority of their plays went for negative yards.
[Guy Raz:] Mike, let me ask you about this conference, this Southeastern Conference, because I believe and correct me if I'm wrong this is one of the most lucrative football conferences in the country. They signed a huge TV deal. You've got two teams from that conference playing against each other. People who run that conference must be thrilled about that from a financial perspective.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Right. The SEC is geographically a hotbed of football with teams in the South. Now they're actually stretching their tentacles to in the future, include teams from the Midwest and the Southwest. Right now, the SEC is sort of like the Goldman Sachs of college football.
[Guy Raz:] Every year, of course, there's always the question of whether the BCS system is the right way to go, or should college football go towards a system like college basketball where you've got brackets and teams play against each other, there's an elimination and a final four and a winner. What do you think? I mean, is this system ever going to be reformed?
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] It might never be reformed. The biggest argument that people use to defend the system is that it makes every regular season game meaningful. So with college football, they say, every game is meaningful.
[Guy Raz:] Ah.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] The season could be lost in week two. But look at this game. Alabama lost already. How is that game meaningful? They got their second chance. You know, this is standing what is usually the best argument for this system on its head.
[Guy Raz:] All right. So cake, but probably more steak tomorrow night. That's NPR's Mike Pesca in New York for us. Mike, thanks so much.
[Mike Pesca, Byline:] Bon appetite.

[Linda Wertheimer:] It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Linda Wertheimer. Steve Inskeep is on assignment in Cairo.
[Renee Montagne:] I'm Renee Montagne. Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour is comporting himself more and more like a presidential candidate. The Republican is hiring key political operatives and showing up in Iowa and New Hampshire. But even as he works the national stage, his would-be campaign is hampered by early stumbles. NPR's Debbie Elliott reports.
[Debbie Elliott:] As he considers a run for the Republican presidential nomination, Governor Barbour is spending less time in Mississippi's capital and more time in early primary and caucus states.
[Governor Haley Barbour:] Great. I'm Haley.
[Unidentified Woman:] Hi.
[Debbie Elliott:] At the Iowa GOP Chairman's dinner in Davenport last night, he blamed President Obama's policies for stifling the economy, and laid out his plan to reign in federal spending all of it.
[Governor Haley Barbour:] Let me tell you something, we can save money at the Pentagon. Anybody thinks that you can't save money at the Pentagon has never been to the Pentagon. We can save money on defense. And if we Republicans don't propose saving money on defense, we'll have no credibility about anything else.
[Debbie Elliott:] It's a position intended to distinguish him, early, from others testing the GOP political waters. Barbour might not be as widely known as Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, or Sarah Palin, but he comes with serious GOP credentials, dating back to his days as political director in the Reagan White House. He chaired the Republican National Committee during the party's 1994 revolution and presided over the Republican Governor's Association during the last election. He spent much of his career as a high-powered Washington, D.C. lobbyist. In speeches, the 63-year old Barbour doesn't shy away from his life as a political strategist, bragging that he saw the sausage factory up close. In Sioux City, Iowa this week, he told TV station KTIV being a lobbyist is not a liability.
[Governor Haley Barbour:] Lobbying? The next president of the United States, the day he gets elected, will start lobbying.
[Debbie Elliott:] But GOP political consultant David Woodard says perhaps the biggest challenge the two-term governor faces is where he comes from Mississippi and its history of racial strife.
[Dr. David Woodard:] It just haunts the South. I mean, it's just the specter that haunts every politician I believe. And it's haunting him.
[Debbie Elliott:] Woodard, a political scientist at Clemson University in South Carolina, says fair or not, just like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, Barbour must be able to withstand scrutiny on the issue of race. And it's proving difficult. Late last year, Barbour had to clarify comments he made to the Weekly Standard about desegregation not being that bad in his hometown of Yazoo City. Later, he refused to denounce a move by a Mississippi confederate group to get a car tag in honor of Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest, only to eventually say he would veto any such legislation. Woodard says he would've expected the politically savvy Barbour to have been better prepared.
[Dr. David Woodard:] [Unintelligible] stumble out of the gate with a racial problem is almost fatal when you come from a Deep South state.
[Debbie Elliott:] Adding to his troubles, Barbour's press secretary resigned Monday after circulating an email with an off-color joke about the tsunami in Japan. So, can the two-term governor rise to the top of the open GOP field?
[Dr. David Woodard:] Well, that's the great question a white guy from Mississippi running against a black guy from Chicago. And every time he talks, he's going to have I mean, to a certain audience, not to me, but to a certain audience -that's going to be kind of grating.
[Debbie Elliott:] That didn't seem to be a problem in Davenport last night.
[Ms. Carolyn Scott:] I think it's great. I love the southern accent.
[Debbie Elliott:] Carolyn Scott wants to hear more from Barbour.
[Ms. Carolyn Scott:] He just seems very sincere and honest, and a sense of humor. And just an all around, all American guy.
[Debbie Elliott:] Barbour says he won't make his decision until the Mississippi legislature wraps up its session next month. But, after Iowa, he's heading to donor-rich California to address the state GOP convention this weekend. Debbie Elliott, NPR News.

[Melissa Block:] The Gulf Coast is covered in debris from southwestern Louisiana to Mississippi and Alabama. The Yates Construction Company helped build the casinos and hotels in Biloxi, Mississippi. Now it's one of three contractors the city has hired to haul away the tons of debris left by Hurricane Katrina. There was a competitive bid process right after the storm. Yates is being paid $16 per cubic yard to collect, haul and sort debris. William Yates is the company's president.
[Mr. William Yates:] There are slot machines from the casinos. There are refrigerators. There are cars in places that cars shouldn't be. There are all sorts of collapsed wood structures that you're not even really sure where they came from; lots of signage, just a lot of mass that you can't even tell where it originated. It's just now metal and wood and other debris in between.
[Melissa Block:] Where do you start? How do you organize this effort?
[Mr. William Yates:] Well, you have to come up with a plan that makes sense. And another big challenge we've had is actually transportation and hauling. We've had all these bridges and roads that have been affected, and so actually getting the debris from point A in the city to point B outside the city has been a whole nother challenge. So we've had to deal with issues like staging debris at an intermediate location and then waiting until traffic is not quite as bad and then trying to get the debris out of the city.
[Melissa Block:] Where are you trying to take it?
[Mr. William Yates:] Well, we're taking it to approved landfills. Some of it, if it meets the qualifications for burnable material, it's being burned.
[Melissa Block:] What would be burned? What kinds of stuff?
[Mr. William Yates:] Just wood products that aren't painted or don't have any harmful substances on them.
[Melissa Block:] So somewhere along the line you have to be sorting this stuff out, figuring out what gets burned, what gets put in a landfill.
[Mr. William Yates:] That's right.
[Melissa Block:] How do you do that?
[Mr. William Yates:] Well, it's just a visual process with supervision. And you make sure that if there's any question as to whether it's burnable or not, you go ahead and assume that it's not.
[Melissa Block:] How much progress have you been able to make since Katrina came in?
[Mr. William Yates:] Significant progress. We-the way our contract works is we have to make four passes down every street in our area. We're complete with the first pass, which means we've now gone through every street and picked up the debris on the side of the road. We have three more passes left. Logically it'll-you know, we'll probably get less and less as the major debris gets picked up. And so, you know, we're probably in terms of passes 25 percent complete, but in terms of actual debris removal, I would say we're closer to 50 percent complete. Of course, the debris removal is just a small part of what it's going to take to build our community back.
[Melissa Block:] As the president of a construction company, you've got to be thinking about that end, too, about the rebuilding.
[Mr. William Yates:] Sure. I mean, that's what we do, and we take pride in it. And there's a need for our services now. And there are all sorts of mixed feelings on our behalf because we have had-we think we have lost one employee that has been identified and we think possibly another one. We've had over 60 of our employees who have substantially lost their homes, and so it's very, you know, upsetting from that standpoint. But at the same time we feel a responsibility that we have to help build our community back and do it as quickly as reasonably possible and do it in a way that creates a bigger and better Biloxi for the future of all of us and all our kids and all of our grandkids.
[Melissa Block:] Mr. Yates, thanks very much.
[Mr. William Yates:] No problem.
[Melissa Block:] William Yates is president of Yates Construction. He spoke with us from Philadelphia, Mississippi.

[Scott Simon:] After winning the conviction this week of Lewis Libby, the vice president's former chief of staff, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald said something that caught the ear of many people in Chicago.
[Mr. Patrick Fitzgerald:] We're all going back to our day jobs.
[Scott Simon:] And for Mr. Fitzgerald that means going back to Chicago, where he's U.S. Attorney for the northern district of Illinois. That may be good news for some government reformers, but it's not encouraging for some city and state political leaders who will now have Mr. Fitzgerald's undivided attention. NPR's David Schaper has that story.
[David Schaper:] At Chicago's famed Billy Goat Tavern, you still hear this.
[Unidentified Man:] Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger.
[David Schaper:] And at the 1970s-era Formica tables and vinyl covered bar stools, this dim and smoky joint is still the place where Chicago journalists get together for lunch or a stiff drink to share what they really think about the day's news and the people they cover. This week, the main topic is Fitzgerald's victory in the Scooter Libby trial.
[Mr. John Kass:] He's probably stronger now than he was before.
[David Schaper:] John Kass is a Chicago Tribune columnist.
[Mr. John Kass:] When he said that we're all going back to our day jobs, as soon as I heard that I knew I had a column, because politicians here in Illinois heard that line and felt like they were crossing an icy river without waders. You know, a little shriveling and freezing going on there.
[David Schaper:] In his column, Kass frequently takes on bipartisan political corruption in Illinois, Democrats and Republicans who he says join at the feeding trough of state and local government. Kass says the number and pace of corruption investigations have really picked up since Fitzgerald left the U.S. Attorney's office in New York six years ago to become Chicago's federal prosecutor.
[Mr. John Kass:] It just keeps multiplying. Democrats, Republicans. People who were untouchable are no longer untouchable.
[David Schaper:] If anyone doubted that before, Fitzgerald more than proved that point in the Libby trial, according to Jay Stewart of the nonpartisan Chicago-based Better Government Association.
[Mr. Jay Stewart:] He believes the law applies to everybody. And just because you're a high government elected or appointed official, you don't get a pass.
[David Schaper:] Some in Washington questioned whether Fitzgerald would be able to return to Chicago with his sterling reputation for integrity and independence intact, considering the intense media and political scrutiny on the trial. But those who know him say the pressure cooker of a case didn't change a prosecutor one friend once called Elliott Ness with a Harvard degree.
[Ms. Mary Jo White:] I think he comes away from this case as Pat Fitzgerald, which is he is who he is.
[David Schaper:] Mary Jo White is the former U.S. attorney for the southern district of New York, Fitzgerald's former boss.
[Ms. Mary Jo White:] He's, you know, very independent, does his job, does it fairly, does it exceptionally well, and I think he comes away, you know, from the Libby trial with that reputation totally intact, if not enhanced, despite some of the controversy surrounding the case.
[David Schaper:] Many of Libby's supporters, including conservative bloggers and commentators, say Fitzgerald is a prosecutor run amok who overreached in charging Libby with perjury and obstruction while not bringing charges for the leak he was appointed to investigate. Some criminal defense lawyers in Chicago have in the past accused Fitzgerald of being overzealous, though none we talked to for this story would say so on air. Former Republican Illinois Governor Jim Thompson, who was Chicago's U.S. Attorney more than 30 years ago, and is a close friend of one of Fitzgerald's recent targets here, convicted former governor George Ryan, didn't want to comment on whether Fitzgerald was right to pursue the case against Libby.
[Mr. Jim Thompson:] Pat won his verdict so it means that he worked hard and persuaded the jury that the evidence was there.
[David Schaper:] No one who knows him sees political aspirations in Fitzgerald. His supporters and his critics say he loves being a prosecutor. There will be no post-Libby trial rest for Fitzgerald. His office starts the corporate fraud trial of international media mogul Conrad Black next week. David Schaper, NPR News, Chicago.

[Madeleine Brand:] A lawyer in the steroid case involving baseball stars Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi could be going to jail himself. Troy Ellerman has admitted giving information about his clients to two San Francisco Chronicle reporters. They broke the so-called BALCO steroid story, and they had faced jail time themselves for refusing to reveal their source. Now it appears they are off the hook. Here is one of the reporters, Lance Williams, from an earlier interview with NPR. Mr. LANCE WILLIAMS [Reporter, San Francisco Chronicle]]: We're not out there to enforce secrecy regulations imposed by governments or business or anyone. That's their lookout that's not our game. Our game is to find out as much truth as we can and print it as a—directly as we can. That's Lance Williams of the San Francisco Chronicle. Here to talk about the case is NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik. Hi David.
[David Folkenflik:] Hey, how you doing Madeleine.
[Madeleine Brand:] Fine thank you. Well, remind us quickly about BALCO. What were the issues involved and why were these reporters under subpoena?
[David Folkenflik:] Well as you may remember, BALCO was this athletic supplement clinic based south of San Francisco. There was a big raid in late 2003 that lead to federal indictments in early 2004 announced by the attorney general himself, John Ashcroft. One of the striking thing about it was that they named a lot of— the four people involved in distributing these drugs but didn't name any of the professional athletes who they said had been purchasing and consuming these illegal substances. That struck a lot of people as wrong. It soon lead to speculation, given the links the clinic had to others, to prominent athletes, baseball, NFL players, Olympic sprinters that prominent athletes were involved. And indeed Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams of "San Francisco Chronicle" later reported some of the people who had testified, including these big names like San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds and New York Yankees slugger Jason Giambi these guys ultimately were — their actually grand jury testimony which had been under seal was reported by the "Chronicle" the judge and federal prosecutors demanded that be investigated.
[Madeleine Brand:] So now it appears that the lawyer, Troy Ellerman for BALCO let them look at these grand jury recordings; secret testimony. Why would he do that?
[David Folkenflik:] Well there was a lot of feeling at the time that this was the inversion of justice. That is that in a typical drug case prosecutors like to use—you know the consumers to get at the dealers, the drug kingpins. In this case the suppliers were in some ways the little guys. The guys making millions and millions of dollars in contracts and endorsements were the big athletes but the justice department was not naming them even though, regardless of their—how they were regulated by their sports they were certainly illegal under federal law. So you know people like Victor Conte the flamboyant founder of BALCO for whom Ellerman served as lawyer for a while felt it was very unfair that he was being singled out and that these athletes were not.
[Madeleine Brand:] Hmm. And so Ellerman, why did he admit now that he showed the reporters this testimony?
[David Folkenflik:] Well late last year a guy came forward a fired former investigator for Ellerman and the defense team came forward to the feds and to actually a reporter for Yahoo News to say that Ellerman had indeed supplied this information. Ellerman had been confronted by federal investigators according to court papers recently filed this week, and it was clear that he'd be facing some heavy duty prosecution if he didn't reach a plea agreement -which is what he did.
[Madeleine Brand:] And throughout it all the reporters refused to identify him as their source. Are they now completely off the hook?
[David Folkenflik:] They are indeed. They, they persevered in their stand. Unlike reporters say, back East here, with be trial of the Vice President's former chief of staff. They said they would not reveal their secret sources.
[Madeleine Brand:] Well—are there any similarities between those two cases?
[David Folkenflik:] The similarity is that the federal government gets pretty much what it wants when it wants it. The difference is that in this case the journalists held firm.
[Madeleine Brand:] David Folkenflik is NPR's Media Correspondent. Thank you David.
[David Folkenflik:] You bet.
[Madeleine Brand:] Stay with us on DAY TO DAY from NPR News.

[Ari Shapiro:] It's night two for the Democrats, and a whole new cast of candidates will be onstage at their debate in Detroit. Last night was very much a battle of ideas. Progressives Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were calling for sweeping policy changes on health care as more centrist candidates accused them of making impossible promises that will deliver Donald Trump a reelection victory. Here's how Warren responded to that.
[Elizabeth Warren:] You know, I don't understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can't do and shouldn't fight for.
[Ari Shapiro:] Tonight, the arguments may be very different. And to explain why, we are joined from Detroit by NPR lead political editor Domenico Montanaro and NPR political correspondent Asma Khalid. Hi, guys.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Hey there.
[Asma Khalid, Byline:] Hey there.
[Ari Shapiro:] Let's start by taking stock of what happened last night, the first night of this debate. Domenico, what was your main takeaway?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Well, a real debate broke out. You know, we had a debate over health care and on immigration to maybe a lesser extent between this moderate wing of the Democratic Party and the more progressive wing. I mean, you had Senator Elizabeth Warren, who we heard there, center stage with Bernie Sanders. And coming into the debate, a lot of people wondered if maybe there'd be some distinctions drawn between the two of them. Guess what not so much. They were both allies. And what they said after the debate at least people within Sanders' campaign said that don't expect them to criticize each other. There's six more months left of voting. And if the two of them are left standing, then maybe we'll see Sanders go after Elizabeth Warren. We also saw Steve Bullock, the governor of Montana, really be able to distinguish himself on the moderate wing. And it was the first time for him in the debate lineup, so that was key.
[Ari Shapiro:] OK, so let's turn to tonight because last month, the first night of the debate was practically forgotten after, on the second night, Senator Kamala Harris sparred with former Vice President Joe Biden over his civil rights record. They are next to each other once again at center stage tonight. So, Asma, what are you watching for?
[Asma Khalid, Byline:] I am looking for the degree to which Joe Biden can defend himself this time. You know, part of this we should give the backstory is because Joe Biden enjoys considerable support among African American voters. There is a sense from both California Senator Kamala Harris as well as New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who will be on the other side of Biden, that they need to peel away some of that support from black voters in order to do well in this primary season. That is why they've been attacking Joe Biden. You know, I will say that over the last week or so, we've seen a real kind of public spat, particularly between Biden and Booker. Booker has been criticizing Biden for his record on criminal justice reform, saying that he was an architect of mass incarceration because of his support for the 1994 crime bill. Biden, of course, and his advisers disagree with this, and they've been going after Joe Biden's record. And I presume we'll hear more about criminal justice reform and racial justice issues tonight.
[Ari Shapiro:] So if Biden goes into this debate with a target on his back, how is he preparing to defend himself?
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Well, what senior advisers said this afternoon was that he's going to go after Donald Trump. That's his first and principal thing that he's going to do. But he is prepared to attack back on other people's records. They said, look; if you're going to attack Vice President Biden's record, then guess what; the rest of the people on this stage they have records, too, and be prepared to defend those things. And, as Asma pointed out, when it comes to black voters, Vice President Biden is still doing very well with African Americans. And what one adviser said is that if that the reason that these other candidates are going after him is because he's got 51% of African American voters in a lot of polls, and they want it.
[Asma Khalid, Byline:] And, you know, one of the other things I think that's worth pointing out is that overall, you know, there will be a conversation tonight on health care because Joe Biden has been very critical of a "Medicare for All" system. Kamala Harris released a plan recently that is kind of a hybrid between Biden and Sanders; it's a Medicare for All plan with a limited role for insurance. But Joe Biden is already criticizing that. Here's what he had to say.
[Joe Biden:] Well, I find that people will say they're for Medicare for All but they're not going to tax the middle class because you don't need to do that. Come on. What is this? Is this a fantasy world here?
[Ari Shapiro:] That is the voice of Joe Biden, one of 10 candidates onstage tonight at the second night of the Democratic presidential debate in Detroit. NPR's Asma Khalid and Domenico Montanaro speaking with us from Detroit there. Thanks to both of you.
[Asma Khalid, Byline:] You're welcome.
[Domenico Montanaro, Byline:] Thanks a lot.

[Rachel Martin:] Recently, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the migrant detention centers at the U.S.-Mexico border concentration camps. Her comments triggered a whole debate about when and how that term should be used. NPR's history podcast Throughline looked at one of the earliest modern examples of a concentration camp. I'm joined by one of the hosts of the podcast, Rund Abdelfatah. Rund, thanks for being here.
[Rund Abdelfatah, Byline:] Thanks for having me.
[Rachel Martin:] So today, the term concentration camp is just about synonymous with Nazi Germany, but it predates that time, right?
[Rund Abdelfatah, Byline:] Yeah, it does. It actually goes back to the end of the 19th century, when several Western colonial powers used concentration camps to deal with rebellions in their colonies. This included Spain in Cuba, America in the Philippines, and the focus of our episode Britain in South Africa.
[Rachel Martin:] So why the focus on the British concentration camps in South Africa?
[Rund Abdelfatah, Byline:] Well, we came across the really fascinating story of Emily Hobhouse. She's an upper-class-English-woman-turned-whistleblower. She played a big role in exposing the realities inside the concentration camps that were created by the British during their war against the Boers. The Boers were descendants of Dutch settlers who had colonized South Africa in the 1600s. And by the late 1800s, they were waging a guerrilla war against the powerful British Empire. In order to break their will, the British began burning Boer farms to the ground, leaving thousands homeless. And hearing about all this, Emily Hobhouse decides to join the anti-war effort. My co-host Ramtin Arablouei and I share her story in the episode.
[Ramtin Arablouei:] Emily Hobhouse is unique in a few ways. Not only is she politically engaged, she's single, coming up on 40 and incredibly outspoken. And pretty soon...
[Elsabe Brits:] She decides she's going to come to South Africa. She's going to help.
[Rund Abdelfatah, Byline:] This is Elsabe Brits, a journalist and author based in Cape Town, South Africa.
[Ramtin Arablouei:] At the end of 1900, Emily boards a ship on her own with 300 British pounds. She travels for three weeks, arrives in Cape Town with a plan to visit the torched homesteads and deliver food and clothing to the Boer families who've lost everything. Little does she know, no one's there.
[Elsabe Brits:] Within days, she heard about, oh, my word, there are concentration camps.
[Rund Abdelfatah, Byline:] Emily had heard about a camp where women were being held not through the British papers, through her own contacts. But when she arrives, she learns that there are dozens of concentration camps.
[Elsabe Brits:] Everybody that lost everything were put in these camps. The majority were women and children in all the cases.
[Rund Abdelfatah, Byline:] One reason the British started to do this was to cut off the supply of the guerrilla movement a practical strategy. But there is another deeper psychological reason.
[Elsabe Brits:] Imagine you you're a man. You're fighting a war against a force 10 times, a hundred times greater than you. And then suddenly, they take your mother, your sister, your wife and all your children. They put them in a concentration camp where there's no clean water. There are no candles. There are no blankets. There's just tents. Your children are dying. What are you going to do? Are you going to continue fighting?
[Rund Abdelfatah, Byline:] These accounts made Emily realize...
[Elsabe Brits:] This was much, much bigger than she originally thought and decided there and then well, now I know my destination; I have to go to the camps.
[Ramtin Arablouei:] To access the camps, she needs to get a permit from one of the highest-ranking British officers, Lord Milner easier said than done.
[Elsabe Brits:] 'Cause remember, a woman in 1900 asking to see this very important man who was running a war what's her business?
[Rund Abdelfatah, Byline:] At first, he won't see her. But after three weeks, he finally gives in.
[Elsabe Brits:] I can only imagine that this woman from the upper class, suddenly landing in this country, traveling through the dust it's sun. She's all alone, and there's a war.
[Ramtin Arablouei:] After three days on a train with all men, Emily arrives at a camp. It's bleak.
[Elsabe Brits:] These people are just dropped in the middle of nowhere. And among the sights that she saw was this a baby of six months gasping its life out on its mother's knee, children who were so weak from measles that they weren't able to walk, lying there white and wan.
[Rund Abdelfatah, Byline:] Emily takes meticulous notes of what she's seeing.
[Elsabe Brits:] I can't describe what it is to see these children lying about in a state of collapse. It is just exactly like faded flowers thrown away. And one hates to stand and look on such a misery and be able to do almost nothing.
[Ramtin Arablouei:] Over the course of a few months, Emily manages to get access to several camps the whole time, she's documenting the conditions.
[Elsabe Brits:] And then she decides there's nothing more she can do here.
[Rund Abdelfatah, Byline:] So she returns home, finishes her report and presents it to the secretary of war. But his response is denial. He says conditions are perfectly fine in the camps.
[Ramtin Arablouei:] The reality tens of thousands of people are at risk of starvation, dehydration and disease. And seeing no other option, Emily decides to go public with her report.
[Elsabe Brits:] And everybody knows.
[Ramtin Arablouei:] But Parliament just downplays her findings.
[Elsabe Brits:] And then her battle starts. People throw stones at her. And she was vilified in the press as being a liar and a traitor. You don't want to hear in wartime that your country is doing this to defenseless women and children.
[Ramtin Arablouei:] Finally, after a few months, Parliament decides to send their own commission down to South Africa to investigate the camps. They select a group of elite women to do the work Emily had already done but intentionally leave Emily off the roster.
[Rund Abdelfatah, Byline:] In late 1901, the women's commission gets back to England and delivers their own report. It's almost identical to the one Emily made. But because it's a government-backed report, this time, it leads to action basic improvements like more food and water.
[Ramtin Arablouei:] But it's too late. By now, the war is coming to an end. The Boers eventually surrender and sign a peace treaty with the British. And in total, almost 50,000 people have died in the camps.
[Rachel Martin:] What ended up happening to Emily Hobhouse when the war was over?
[Rund Abdelfatah, Byline:] Well, she spent the next few years travelling back-and-forth to South Africa helping to rebuild. And she remained a staunch pacifist for the rest of her life, continuing to speak out against the horrors of war.
[Rachel Martin:] Rund Abdelfatah. She is a co-host of NPR's Throughline. Thank you so much for sharing a story with us.
[Rund Abdelfatah, Byline:] Thanks for having me.

[Michele Norris:] From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
[Melissa Block:] And I'm Melissa Block. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said today that there are adequate supplies of oil to keep refineries on the West Coast running, even without supplies from BP's Prudhoe Bay field in Alaska. BP has shut down a major pipeline. It needs to repair at least 16 miles of severely corroded pipes. That corrosion was discovered by a pig. Not a barnyard pig. NPR's Nell Boyce tells us about the pigs that roam through pipelines. NELL BOYCE reporting When it comes to pipelines, there's two kinds of pigs dumb pigs and smart pigs. Al Crouch says that dumb pigs came along first, decades ago, to clean out the pipes.
[Mr. Al Crouch:] They were often made of bales of straw, maybe with barbed wire wrapped around them, and they would pump them through the line to do a cleaning job. This made a squealing sound and that's where the name pig came from.
[Boyce:] Crouch is an engineer at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. He says dumb pigs are no longer made out of straw, but companies still send modern versions through their pipes to scrape out junk. Then there are your smart pigs. Crouch says a smart pig is a machine that has a power supply, a data storage device and a sensor that looks for flaws.
[Mr. Al Crouch:] And since it had intelligence, they say, to it, it was called a smart pig.
[Boyce:] The first smart pig came along in the 1960s. Today's versions are multimillion-dollar machines that look like torpedoes. Some use magnetic fields, some use ultrasound. They weigh several tons and can be 15 to 20 feet long. Instead of squealing, they rumble like a freight train. Crouch says they can travel for hundreds of miles.
[Mr. Al Crouch:] What some people don't realize is that the amount of data recorded by one of these smart pigs is enormous. It's every square inch of a pipe for 100 miles or more, and all of that has to be stored on board the pig.
[Boyce:] Each pig only looks for a particular kind of damage, usually corrosion or cracking. BP has been criticized for not using pigs to maintain its Alaska pipelines. The lines shut down now hadn't seen a pig since 1992. But after an oil spill earlier this year, federal regulators ordered the company to send in the pigs, and they found corrosion. BP says it hasn't used pigs because the lines were above ground and could be inspected by workers. But Ronnie Chappell, a company spokesperson, says that will change.
[Mr. Ronnie Chappell:] You know, in the future, smart pigging is going to be a much bigger part of our corrosion inspection program.
[Boyce:] But pipeline experts say that smart pigs are no panacea. They can't detect all kinds of damage like a scrape from a backhoe that's working above a pipeline. Pigs have other problems. For example, they can't go around sharp curves.
[Mr. Richard Kuprewicz:] There are pipes who can't, for various reasons, can't take smart pigs, and can't even take cleaning pigs.
[Boyce:] Richard Kuprewicz is a pipeline consultant with a company called Accufacts. He says there have been cases where a pig said a pipe was okay, then it later ruptured.
[Mr. Richard Kuprewicz:] There's lots of ways to screw up pardon my French to mess up a smart pig. You know, you can choose the wrong pig for the type of problem you have. The vendor could be overstating the capabilities of the pig.
[Boyce:] Or someone might misinterpret the pig's data. To help improve things, last year the American Petroleum Institute released some new guidelines on how to best use pigs. And the pigs just keep getting smarter, though Kuprewicz says no one has built the dream pig, a single pig smart enough to detect every possible kind of flaw in a pipe.
[Mr. Richard Kuprewicz:] That's kind of like the Holy Grail. That's like getting the space shuttle launched, okay. It's easier said than done. There's a lot of technical hurdles there.
[Boyce:] It's a tall order for a small community. Just a handful of companies and a few hundred people work on pigs. Nell Boyce, NPR News.

[Steve Inskeep:] President Obama is traveling in East Asia, the region he would like to bind ever more closely to the United States, not least through a trade deal. It's the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an agreement that stands as one of his last big priorities.
[President Barack Obama:] I'm a strong supporter of TPP because it will reduce tariffs taxes, basically on American goods, from cars to crops, and make it easier for Americans to export into the fastest growing markets of the world.
[Steve Inskeep:] Here's the reality the president and other Pacific nations will face when they turn up at a series of big meetings over the next few days. That big trade deal is stuck in the U.S. Congress. In the presidential election campaign, both of Obama's would-be successors decided to oppose it.
[Donald Trump:] The TPP is a horrible deal. It is a deal that is going to lead to nothing but trouble.
[Hillary Clinton:] I oppose it now. I'll oppose it after the election. And I'll oppose it as president.
[Steve Inskeep:] And the other signers of the deal, from Mexico to Japan to Malaysia, have certainly noticed. The agreement is not moving. Miriam Sapiro says the entire agreement, years in the making, has paused. She was involved in negotiating the deal as a top trade official in past years under Obama. How are the other nations involved in this agreement doing it ratifying it so far?
[Miriam Sapiro:] They're scratching their heads. [Laughter] I think there's a great deal of concern and the president will hear about this on his trip to Asia that the U.S. does not look, at this point, as if it will be able to do it this year. Again, there is a chance. But at this point, nobody can make a prediction as to the likelihood that that will happen. Japan and other countries are ready to move forward. I think it's particularly important for Japan because they have made some tough economic choices based on the promise of the benefits of the TPP agreement for liberalizing their economy.
[Steve Inskeep:] So we're waiting on the possibility of a vote by Congress. There could be, conceivably, a vote after the election in the lame-duck session, before the new president takes office, if lawmakers chose to do so. Suppose they miss that. What happens then?
[Miriam Sapiro:] Then, the incoming president takes office in January. She or he assembles their team. They'll be a look at a lot of issues, including what the new trade agenda should look like. Part of that discussion, presumably, will be what to do with TPP. And it's going to be a challenge because both candidates have come out strongly against the current agreement. It's not clear if there will be any appetite for taking a fresh look at what could be improved. And even if the U.S. government decides that there are ways to try to address the problems that have been identified, it's quite unclear whether any of the TP partners would be willing to go along with such an effort.
[Steve Inskeep:] Would there have to be another renegotiation that might take years?
[Miriam Sapiro:] That's certainly one scenario. And given the fact that there's likely to be little appetite among the other 11 countries to renegotiate this agreement, it will likely be on the backburner for a while.
[Steve Inskeep:] You know, if I might, Donald Trump has suggested he's going to create some appetite. He's going to pressure countries in ways they haven't been pressured that everybody wants to do business with the United States and that he can make other countries pay his price. As someone who was involved in negotiating this deal, do you think there's leverage the United States hasn't used yet?
[Miriam Sapiro:] I think that's a naive assumption because what people forget is we don't face a level playing field right now. The U.S. economy and market is much more open than those of foreign countries. So it actually disadvantages U.S. exporters when they face high tariffs or non-tariff barriers, like regulatory red tape, when they're trying to export more goods and services.
[Steve Inskeep:] Could we threaten to close the U.S. economy in some way or partially close the U.S. economy in some way?
[Miriam Sapiro:] Yes, Steve, that idea has come up in the presidential campaign. And I and many others think that would be highly counterproductive because then we would be facing retaliatory tariffs.
[Steve Inskeep:] What happens if this deal dies if it doesn't get ratified in the end? What is the effect on the United States and the world?
[Miriam Sapiro:] I think the impact would be a blow to our credibility and make it harder for us to assert a strong economic presence in Asia. I don't think it's going to change our strategic orientation or our commitment to our friends and allies there in any way. But I think they will worry that we were not able to follow through.
[Steve Inskeep:] Miriam Sapiro, thanks very much.
[Miriam Sapiro:] My pleasure, Steve.
[Steve Inskeep:] She was the acting U.S. trade representative in 2013 while the Trans-Pacific Partnership was being negotiated.