LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Pres. Obama has seen more than 300 federal judges confirmed since he took office six years ago. And that puts him ahead of both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton at the same point in their presidencies. A huge chunk of Obama's confirmations happened in 2014. That's a year after the Senate Democrats got rid of the filibuster for most judicial nominations. NPR's Ailsa Chang reports.
AILSA CHANG, BYLINE: OK. I'm about to throw a bunch of numbers at you. I'm sorry, but you really can't understand the kind of sweep Pres. Obama had in 2014 without them. So consider these. Eighty-nine judges were confirmed in 2014. That's the highest yearly total in two decades. And it's almost a third of all of Obama's confirmations since he first took office. Here's another figure - before 2014 about three quarters of Obama's judicial nominees were getting confirmed. Now that rate is more than 90 percent. That's better than either Presidents Bush or Clinton did at the six-year mark. And finally this - Obama got 27 judges confirmed just during the lame-duck session alone. That's the most ever in lame duck history. It made for some grumpy Senate Republicans the last days of session, like Orrin Hatch of Utah.
SENATOR ORRIN HATCH: These type of people ought to be confirmed after the first year when you have the new people here. We've always done it that way, but Harry Reid's trying to push it over.
CHANG: Actually, the majority leader had been pushing through nominees all year, methodically holding floor vote after floor vote. Democrats like Tom Harkin of Iowa say they were just making up for lost time.
SENATOR TOM HARKIN: They spent two years making it harder and harder to get judges. And at the end when we've finally got them through, they say, oh, you shouldn't be putting them through so fast. Well, that's because they kept us from doing this for two years.
CHANG: If you ask both Democrats and Republicans why 2014 yielded a bumper crop of confirmations, most will point to a Senate rules change Democrats rammed through last November to get rid of the filibuster for most judicial nominations. But the man who compiled all the numbers you heard says don't give that rules change too much credit. Russell Wheeler of the Brookings Institution points out that only a small fraction of nominees in 2014 got enough no votes to suggest they would have fallen victim to filibusters.
RUSSELL WHEELER: Most of the nominees this year who did get confirmed oftentimes got confirmed so with very just token opposition. So I think we have to be careful with cause and effect.
CHANG: Wheeler says there are other reasons the president saw such a spike in confirmations last year.
WHEELER: One is he just - he was slow out of the box. For whatever reason, the White House didn't have its act together, and it's gotten its act together now. Secondly, you have this really extraordinary push on the part of Senate Democrats this last year to get as many confirmations as possible.
CHANG: When Obama first took office, 10 of the 13 appeals courts had more judges appointed by Republican than Democratic presidents. Now Democratic appointees form the majority in nine of the 13 appeals courts. But Michael Gerhardt at the University of North Carolina School of Law says you won't see an ideologically transformed bench.
MICHAEL GERHARDT: So he's not appointing extremists, I suppose one might say, or people that fall to the extremes - let's say to the left. But it's not clear that Pres. Obama ever favored appointing people extremely to the left.
CHANG: What he has favored is appointing women and minorities at a higher rate than any president in history, but that started long before filibuster-free 2014. White males have always formed the minority of Obama nominees. He's also appointed 11 openly gay or lesbian federal judges. There was only one before 2009. Nan Aron of the liberal advocacy group Alliance for Justice says a diverse bench builds trust in the judicial system.
NAN ARON: It's important for people to have some confidence that when they step into a courtroom that there is someone there who might, in fact, even look like themselves hearing their cases.
CHANG: Many expect that 2014 will be as good as it will get for Obama's judicial nominations. No one expects a Republican-controlled Senate to keep up that same pace. Ailsa Chang, NPR News, Washington.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Christmas is still to come for many people all over the world. For those following the Coptic calendar, it's next week - January 7. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church observes Christmas on that day, as well. But on the 40 days before, they fast. It's a vegan fast - no dairy, no meat. As part of our series on Christmas food around the world, NPR's Gregory Warner looks at what Ethiopians are not eating right now, but will eat later.
GREGORY WARNER, BYLINE: An Ethiopian kitchen can be a place of both succulence and self-denial. Standing in the kitchen of Abyssinia, an Ethiopian restaurant in Nairobi, with the the owner, Abebe - we're watching a cook prepare what is Abebe's favorite food, kitfo - raw beef whipped up with cardamom and chili and a spicy butter to taste more like delicate cheese than steak tartare.
Do you get hungry for it? Do you wish you were eating meat right now or no?
ABEBE: In fact, that gives a psychological edge to those of us who are fasting because I'm weakening my physical strength.
WARNER: The hungrier you are, the more you feel...
ABEBE: The closer to God you are.
WARNER: The hungrier you are, the closer you are to God, he says. Especially at a time of year when others are gorging, he adds, there's something gratifying in self-denial. The advent fast traditionally allows just one vegan meal a day in the afternoon or evening. Abebe has grown accustomed to serving foods with meat or dairy to his guests that he himself is forbidden to touch. He enjoys that sense of apartness.
ABEBE: To me, it enables me to deal with this world because this world is full of challenge.
WARNER: Does it make the Christmas better?
ABEBE: Yeah. I'm telling you, after two months of fasting, people eat. People drink.
WARNER: Now, what they eat and drink when the Ethiopian Christmas finally arrives on January 7 is traditionally doro wat - poultry pieces drowned in rich red sauce. Abebe's wife, Shitaye, explains that the Christmas doro wat is bit different. You have to slaughter a rooster - not a hen - and carve it into exactly 12 pieces representing the 12 disciples.
SHITAYE: Yeah. The drumstick and the thigh, the breasts, the wings...
WARNER: The wings are each cut in two, plus the neck and the back make 12. Add 12 hard-boiled eggs - some say that that symbolizes eternity - no beginning or end. But eternity is what it can feel like to make the sauce. You have to simmer down nine pounds of chopped onion with a chili called berbere.
SHITAYE: To prepare that onion - I mean, to make it ready, to make it tender, it takes, like, four to five hours.
WARNER: But it's funny because all these people coming into the restaurant - they say, OK, I'll have one doro wat, and you make it. But it's such a special food for you.
SHITAYE: It is very special for us.
WARNER: But that special specialness is lost on the people.
SHITAYE: Yeah. If you do it every day, it is true. But our guests are very special for us.
WARNER: Nice save, Shitaye. Nice save. Now, at precisely 2:45 p.m., when the break fast can begin, Abebe reemerges with a plate of spongy sour flatbread called injera. There's a generous dollop of shiro, a chickpea and white bean dish with 11 ingredients, nine of which are spices. And there are other scoops of lentils, kale and other greens.
ABEBE: OK, can we bite?
SHITAYE: Yeah.
WARNER: Let's bite.
ABEBE: Yes, please. We are through now.
WARNER: It is, I can say, the most delicious fasting food I've ever consumed. Gregory Warner, NPR News, Nairobi.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Here's a twist now on the idea of the dreaded New Year's resolution. We're telling the stories of people who are starting over, by choice or circumstance. In this installment, NPR's Jeff Brady has a story from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It's about a woman from India who started out as a software engineer, but now helps refugees.
JEFF BRADY, BYLINE: When Srirupa Dasgupta came to the U.S. for college in the mid-1980s, she was determined to work in high-tech, not the restaurant industry. But today, she owns a small restaurant and catering service.
SRIRUPA DASGUPTA: The starting over point - well, it wasn't like a Big Bang thing. It was kind of a migration.
BRADY: Dasgupta worked her way from software engineer to manager at a health care company. But then she got burned out and started to look for something different. She liked the idea of helping refugees because she grew up in India with stories of her grandparents fleeing what is now Bangladesh in 1947. And Lancaster has an active refugee community that includes people like Tulsha Chauwan.
She chops vegetables in the kitchen at Dasgupta's restaurant. Chauwan says she spent years in a refugee camp in Nepal, after her family fled Bhutan in South Asia. Her family was granted permission to come to the United States, where she's now making her favorite dish - eggplant tarkari.
TULSHA CHAUWAN: (Unintelligible) What you do - you take eggplant, you make powder and - chili powder - and onion.
BRADY: Where did you get the recipe?
CHAUWAN: My mom makes this one, and my mom teach me. And I learned how to cook here.
BRADY: So it's special to you?
CHAUWAN: Yes.
BRADY: Dasgupta says Chauwan was very shy when she started working here, but now she brings new recipes all the time, hoping her boss will put them on the menu. Dasgupta's restaurant is called Upohar. She says that's the Bengali word for gift. Her idea for the restaurant and catering service came after she heard a speech about businesses that also have a social objective.
DASGUPTA: And I kept thinking about this concept. And I was, like, really intrigued. I just couldn't let it go. Like, what can I do with it? I need to do something with it. I was possessed. (Laughter).
BRADY: Over at the stove, another employee, Rachel Bunkete, has her own favorite dish to cook - peanut stew. She learned to make it in her home country - the Democratic Republic of Congo in Central Africa. In 2008, she fled the political, ethnic and religious conflicts there. Bunkete had to leave behind her husband and three children. Eventually, she got permission to come to the U.S., and she was able to make contact with her family again.
RACHEL BUNKETE: They are not here for now. I'm alone.
BRADY: That must be hard.
BUNKETE: Yeah, it's too hard for me to live alone.
BRADY: And do you know where they are?
BUNKETE: Yes. They are in Nigeria now.
BRADY: Within the next few months, she hopes her family will join her in Lancaster. She's saving money to make that happen. Bunkete is one of only three regular employees at Upohar. Owner Srirupa Dasgupta says for her, starting over has meant starting small.
DASGUPTA: I'm just focusing on my little corner of the world and my neighborhood - literally to say, you know, I'm just going to focus on making a difference right here. And if it grows beyond that, that's wonderful. But if it doesn't, then it will have made an impact to my neighbors.
BRADY: If her version of starting over succeeds, the restaurant needs to turn a profit; it's not yet. But out in the dining room, reviews from customer Nicki Martin are good.
NICKI MARTIN: The food is healthy. It's not mass-produced. It's cooked with love.
BRADY: A good reporter needs to check this out firsthand. I chose the $10 lunch buffet.
Oh, my gosh. That cauliflower dish is amazing. I'm going to finish my lunch. We're at Upohar restaurant in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I'm Jeff Brady, NPR News.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Ernest Hemingway gets two shout outs in today's program. This one's from something he wrote. A cat has absolute emotional honesty. Human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not. Well, Hemmingway might have liked this book of cat poems by Francesco Marciuliano. It's written from the feline point of view. It's also one that got away - a story we just never got around to covering last year. NPR's Jasmine Garsd reports.
JASMINE GARSD, BYLINE: Here's a little bit of feline wisdom.
(SOUNDBITE OF CAT PURRING)
FRANSCESCO MARCIULIANO: You can't hold someone who wants to leave. You can't clutch a memory as if it were today. You can't take an insult close to heart. You can't grasp for glory from your chair. You can't seize life thinking only of loss. And you can't grab a laser pointer dot on the wall no matter how much you try.
GARSD: That's from the poem "Give" from Francesco Marciuliano's best-selling "I Could Pee On This And Other Poems By Cats." Marciuliano used to write for the Onion News Network and has written the comic strip "Sally Forth" for almost 18 years. He says even though the books are done with humor, they started out of sadness.
MARCIULIANO: I had two cats for 17 years - Boris and Natasha - who the book "I Could Pee On This And Other Poems By Cats" are dedicated to. And after my second cat, Natasha, passed away, I was sad. And she passed away on Christmas Day, so I was really sad. And what I wanted to do - I wanted to do something that made me remember the cat in an uplifting way.
GARSD: So he started writing poems, but didn't show them to anyone. It was Charlie Sheen who got Marciuliano to open up.
MARCIULIANO: A few weeks later, Charlie Sheen had a very public mental breakdown.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "GOOD MORNING AMERICA")
CHARLIE SHEEN: You know, I got tiger blood, man.
ANDREA CANNING: You don't worry that you're going to die when you take that many drugs?
SHEEN: Dying's for fools.
MARCIULIANO: So I took some quotes out of context, and I attached them to photos of cats.
GARSD: He put the photos and quotes on his site and in about three days, got nearly a million and half hits. That gave him the courage to post his poems on the site. They also got a good response. He contacted his agent, who encouraged him to keep writing. Pretty soon, he had a book deal. Eventually, a book of dog poems came out, too - "I Could Chew On This And Other Poems By Dogs."
MARCIULIANO: The plants are torn, the garbage strewn, the wires chewed. The couch and I had a fight. Your bed is soaked, your liquor, spilled, your TV, smashed. Your laptop no longer has any vowels. There's a smart phone in the toaster. There's a toaster in the toilet. There's a toilet in the hallway. There's underwear in my mouth. I went places I should never go. I saw a side of myself I should never see. I said things to the cat I can never take back. So please don't ever leave again. (Laughter).
GARSD: But as funny as the poems might be, they speak to a very real conflict.
DANIEL ENGBER: Dog books are much more popular than cat books, historically and even today.
GARSD: Daniel Engber is a contributor for "Slate" and has written on the topic.
ENGBER: There's an old joke in book publishing that the most popular book that could ever be written would be called "Lincoln's Doctor's Dog." And the joke is about the fact that people just love books about Abraham Lincoln, and they love books about doctors, and, of course, they love books about dogs.
GARSD: On the other hand, the Internet, he says, is the undisputed territory of cats. Grumpy Cat, LOLCats and Henri the Existentialist Cat - the list goes on and on. Engber says it makes sense.
ENGBER: Cats are animals that tend to sit around the house. They be in view while you're sitting at your computer. They're short-form animals. They're good for YouTube videos - little two minute clips...
GARSD: ...Whether they play piano, steal the dog's bed or write poetry. Jasmine Garsd, NPR News, Washington.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Last year, while people were worried about Ebola spreading in the U.S., a different, new virus flew right in and made itself at home. Lindsay Lohan just tweeted that she'd gotten it, so now it's definitely a thing. The virus is called - actually, we'll let NPR's Michaeleen Doucleff tell you how to pronounce its name.
MICHAELEEN DOUCLEFF, BYLINE: OK, the virus that were talking about - there's no easy way to say it, but you start off with...
(SOUNDBITE OF CHICKEN CLUCKING)
DOUCLEFF: Chicken, like chickens that you eat. The middle part kind of sounds like goon - you know, the '80s movie "The Goonies."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE GOONIES 'R' GOOD ENOUGH")
CINDI LAUPER: (Singing) Good enough.
DOUCLEFF: And then you just end it like a karate chop.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Ay-ya.
DOUCLEFF: Chicken, goon, ya. But Ann Powers with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says chikungunya has nothing to do with chickens or "The Goonies" - clearly. The name dates back to the 1950s, when the chikungunya was first detected in eastern Africa. The virus didn't kill people, but it caused excruciating joint pain.
ANN POWERS: People were in such pain that they couldn't stand up. They were hunched over. And that's actually where the name came from. Chikungunya basically means that which stoops over.
DOUCLEFF: For 50 years, chikungunya stayed mostly in Africa. But then in 2004, it went on a world tour. Chikungunya spreads by mosquitoes. And the virus hopped across to India and caused a massive outbreak.
POWERS: From there, it basically exploded and went everywhere.
DOUCLEFF: It went to Thailand, Indonesia, then to Taiwan, Italy and France. But during all of this time, the Western Hemisphere remained free of chikungunya until December 2013.
(SOUNDBITE OF NEWS SHOW)
UNIDENTIFIED NEWS REPORTER: The Public Health Department has announced that a vector-borne illness seen widely in the Eastern Hemisphere has reached the Caribbean.
DOUCLEFF: A few dozen cases of chikungunya cropped up on the island of St. Martin. By February, there were thousands of cases across the Caribbean, hundreds of thousands by June. And in July...
(SOUNDBITE OF NEWS SHOW)
UNIDENTIFIED NEWS REPORTER: We're just getting word of our first locally transmitted case of the chikungunya virus in Florida.
DOUCLEFF: The U.S. ended up with more than 2000 cases of chikungunya in 2014. New York state alone had more than 500. All these people got infected outside the U.S. and brought the disease here with them. But in Florida, mosquitoes are now carrying the virus, which means it's spreading inside the state. And at least 11 people caught chikungunya in Florida. Now, that's not many.
WALTER TABACHNICK: But we're worried about this. All of the blocks are falling into place. You got to be worried about this.
DOUCLEFF: That's Walter Tabachnick. He runs the Medical Mosquito Lab at the University of Florida. Tabachnick says Florida and parts of the southern U.S. have all the right ingredients for a huge outbreak, including a constant flow of travelers from Central America. Mexico just reported its first case of chikungunya in November.
TABACHNICK: There is very little predictability, but would 50,000 or 100,000 cases be surprising? I don't know. I don't think so. I wouldn't be surprised.
DOUCLEFF: There's no vaccine or cure for chikungunya. Painkillers are the only treatment for it. Some people end up with joint pain for months or even a year. Tabachnick says the take-home message is twofold - clean up your yard, get rid of all standing water where mosquitoes grow and...
TABACHNICK: Stay tuned. We're not through with this. There will be other cases.
DOUCLEFF: Because here in the U.S., chikungunya is just getting started. Michaeleen Doucleff, NPR News.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
And now let's talk frogs. The life of a frog usually starts in water. A female lays eggs. A male fertilizes them. They become tiny tadpoles. Tadpoles grow into frogs. But there's one frog species that takes a radically different approach to reproduction as scientists recently discovered. NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: As a kid growing up in Southern California, Jim McGuire dreamed of a career studying reptiles and amphibians. He collected his first snake at age five. Not too many frogs lived nearby, but he managed to find them.
JIM MCGUIRE: There was a place near the railroad tracks, and there were Pacific tree frogs there. And I collected some of those, including their tadpoles, and brought them home. I don't even remember what happened to them to be honest, but whatever happened to them probably was not good.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Now he's a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who does his frog collecting in the rainforests of Southeast Asia. Not too long ago, on an Indonesian island, he and some colleagues euthanized one frog to dissect it. When they cut it open, they got a shock.
MCGUIRE: Out came the tadpoles, and they were alive.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: He says the shimmery, quivering tadpoles looked creepy.
MCGUIRE: I mean, it was very reminiscent of the scene in "Alien" where the little monster, you know, explodes out of the stomach of the poor human who's been impregnated with that larval alien.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: The scientists described their find in the journal "PLOS ONE." McGuire says some other frogs do bizarre things to reproduce. A couple of extinct frogs would swallow fertilized eggs and use their stomach as a breeding chamber, then give birth out of their mouths. Other frogs have special pouches on their backs to carry eggs. But McGuire says this is the first frog known to give birth to live tadpoles.
MCGUIRE: This is, you know, another pretty crazy reproductive mode that's evolved within frogs. And so, you know, frog biologists are turned on by that sort of thing.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: It's the kind of discovery even a kid might think was cool. Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
The minimum wage goes up today in 20 states. The state of New York boosted its minimum yesterday. And throughout the year, three more states plus five major cities will be doing the same. As NPR's Yuki Noguchi reports, a majority of states now have a minimum wage higher than the federal government's, which is currently set at $7.25.
YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: About half of the states increasing their minimum wages are doing so because of ballot measures or a legislation that passed in 2014. The rest are doing so as part of automatic step increases. This comes almost exactly a year after Pres. Obama called for raising the federal minimum to $10.10 an hour.
Congress hasn't acted on that, but by executive action, the president increased the base wage to $10.10 for federal contractors, a raise that also goes into effect today. Now the state with the highest minimum wage is Washington state, at $9.47 an hour, which exceeds the federal rate by more than $2. Christine Owens is executive director of the National Employment Law Project. She says the states' actions could spur more national movement.
CHRISTINE OWENS: For the first time, we will have 29 states plus the District of Columbia with higher minimum wage rates than the federal rate. And we think that this kind of activity at the state level will increase the pressure on Congress to act to raise the federal minimum wage.
NOGUCHI: And Owens argues there is an economic advantage to raising the minimum.
OWENS: Roughly 3 million low-paid workers will get a wage increase. That will pump additional resources into the economies of those states.
NOGUCHI: Many employers in the affected industries disagree. Scott DeFife is executive vice president of public policy for the National Restaurant Association. He says in areas where the increases are big, it you could have a chilling impact on hiring.
SCOTT DEFIFE: If there is too much pressure on wages, there may be less of those jobs per establishment. And in certain areas of the country, you could see stagnating growth in the industry.
NOGUCHI: Restaurants employ more than 13 million people. But DeFife says only 5 percent of them earn the minimum wage. He argues with so many states raising their rates, it creates less momentum for a federal increase.
DEFIFE: People say, oh, well, 20, 30 states have done it. And I was like, great, I think that actually lessens the pressure on Congress.
NOGUCHI: The last time the federal minute wage was increased was in 2009. Yuki Noguchi, NPR News, Washington.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Songs about Native Americans were popular in the '60s and '70s, but the singers were almost never Native American. A new CD collection shows that American Indian artists were in fact recording their own music at the time, largely outside of the media spotlight. The set is called "Native North America, Vol. 1," and our critic, Will Hermes, has this review.
WILL HERMES, BYLINE: There are plenty of great stories in the "Native North America" set, but maybe the most compelling is about the Algonquin-Mohawk musician Willy Mitchell.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
WILLY MITCHELL: The name of this song is "Call Of The Moose."
HERMES: In 1969, he was a teenager in Quebec, hanging up posters for his rock band. In the case of mistaken identity involving a set of stolen Christmas lights, he was shot in the head by a local cop. But astonishingly, he survived, and years later, he'd refer to it in his song "Call Of The Moose."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CALL OF THE MOOSE")
MITCHELL: (Singing) And I listen to the man of the law. I listen to his way. And I listen to a crack of a gun. And I'm the one that had to pay. And I listen to the Ojibwe chant and to the drumming of the Cree. And I listen to the cry of the people dying of mercury. Don't you know we (unintelligible)? Don't you know? Can't you see?
HERMES: As a cultural document, this collection is a masterpiece of curation and detective work, assembled over 15 years from records pressed in tiny quantities and recorded by artists from remote areas. But "Native North America" is also a very cool mix tape put together by a smart, crate-digging DJ. Listen to Sugluk, an Inuit band raised in a town near the rim of the Arctic Circle, who are listening to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, just like young musicians at the time all over the world.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FALL AWAY")
SUGLUK: (Singing) And fall away. I fall away. I never got my girl, and now I fall away.
HERMES: But most of the artists here are fusing modern traditions with native ones, like Inuk singer William Tanooga, an Eskimo artist from Nunavut who picked up music after a bout with tuberculosis. He sings this haunting country rock song, a pledge of devotion to his mom, in his native tongue.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ANAANAGA")
WILLIAM TANOOGA: (Singing in foreign language).
HERMES: The essays and illustrations in this set, 120 pages worth in the CD package, sketch out an entire chapter of American music that remarkably and shamefully has been largely lost until now. And alongside some very potent music, they deliver something you rarely get in this age of downloads and streaming services - context and stories. Here's hoping there's more where these came from.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BIRCHBARK LETTER")
WILLY MITCHELL AND DESERT RIVER BAND: (Singing) I wrote her a letter from the bark of a tree. I was telling her that I would soon be there.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: The collection is called "Native North America, Vol. 1." Our critic, Will Hermes, is the author of the book "Love Goes To Buildings On Fire."
GARCIA-NAVARRO: This is all things considered from NPR news.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BIRCHBARK LETTER")
MITCHELL AND DESERT RIVER BAND: (Singing) I thanked him for the love that never ends.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
A batch of new state laws go into effect around the country today. They address issues including sexual assault, discarded electronics and animal welfare. NPR's Hansi Lo Wang reports.
HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE: In California, a chicken cage law has hatched this new year.
PAUL SHAPIRO: This is an earthquake throughout both the egg industry and throughout the entirety of animal agribusiness.
WANG: Paul Shapiro is with the Humane Society of the United States and says the new law, which passed as a ballot measure in 2008, changes the confinement practices for chickens, pigs and cattle raised for veal.
SHAPIRO: What it says is that these animals have to have at least enough space to be able to stand up, lie down, turn around and fully extend their limbs. And what that means is that certain standard meat industry practices and egg industry practices will no longer be allowed.
WANG: And that affects many egg producers in the U.S., not just in California. For 1.6 million of California's unauthorized immigrants, the new year means the chance to apply for a driver's license. California is now the largest state to accept license applications from residents living there illegally.
Also in California, colleges and universities are now required to have policies defining consent during sex. The so-called Yes Means Yes Law means a student must have an affirmative agreement from a partner. It's part of an effort to reduce the number of sexual assaults, an issue lawmakers in Michigan are also trying to address this year.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
GOVERNOR RICK SNYDER: In these situations, let's move promptly, let's get evidence tested, and let's hopefully go after effective prosecutions where law has been broken and people have been violated.
WANG: That's Michigan Governor Rick Snyder at a press conference last summer after signing into law new policies to avoid backlogs in the testing of rape evidence kits. A new law going into effect today creates a commission to better track the evidence. This comes after more than 11,000 untested kits were found in a Detroit police storage facility.
In Tennessee, ex-felons may find an easier time looking for work in 2015. They're now eligible to receive certificates of employability from courts. Today's also the starting date for a new law in Florida requiring all four- and five-year-olds riding in cars to sit in booster seats. It's also the beginning of a new recycling rule in New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF ADVERTISEMENT)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Did you know that as of January 2015 it is illegal to throw away electronics?
WANG: New Yorkers looking to get rid of old cell phones, computers and TVs will now have to drop off their e-waste at designated recycling stations. And there's another rule residents can soon add to their can't do list. Members of the public will not be allowed to have direct physical contact with lions, leopards and tigers in New York. Lawmakers wanted to stop the fad of young men posing with tigers for profile photos on online dating sites. That trend was highlighted on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report."
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE COLBERT REPORT")
STEPHEN COLBERT: Oh, yeah, ladies love a man who cuddles up with big game cats.
(LAUGHTER)
COLBERT: It shows you're spontaneous and don't over think things.
WANG: There's still time for tiger selfie-takers to think over this new state law. It doesn't go into effect in New York until next month. Hansi Lo Wang, NPR News.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Findings of a massive cheating scheme spanning almost two decades rocked the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in October. And the aftershocks are still ongoing. Yesterday, we learned the names of the four UNC employees that have resigned, been fired or are in the process of being fired in the wake of the scandal. One of the four is a former faculty leader. Joining me on the line is Dan Kane of the Raleigh News and Observer. Can you briefly give us a refresher on the cheating scandal?
DAN KANE: Yes. This all came to light in about 2011 when I had found a transcript belonging to a football player who had gotten in trouble at the University, who had been in an upper-level class from the African and Afro-American Studies Department. He'd gotten a B plus. It was the summer before he starts his first full semester as a freshman.
Well, in that first semester of freshman year, he's taking remedial writing. The professor who had taught that class had also missed some plagiarism from a paper written by another football player that had become public a couple of months earlier. So there clearly was something going on. You know, I learned from a former learning specialist there, Mary Willingham, that these athletes were being steered into these classes that didn't meet and which are just told to write a paper.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So basically what we're seeing is fake classes, fake grades, an entire scheme here giving students basically a way to bolster their GPA?
KANE: Yeah. And the investigation that was completed here in October, you know, found about, you know, 3,100 students who had taken these things, about half of them were athletes.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Why did it take so long to learn which employees were getting fired?
KANE: The university, when it's report came out, announced that they were taking action against nine people. Chancellor Carol Folt said that four of them, they were trying to fire. And she argued and the university argued that since these employees, you know, have some appeal rights, you know, there's a process. You know, we don't want to make these names public until the process has been completed. And, you know, we and other media organizations here in the Raleigh area - Raleigh, North Carolina - you know, thought differently. So there was a lawsuit, a judge ordered it to go to mediation and what happened yesterday was that, you know, the names were made public as part of the settlement.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You know, why do you think the UNC resisted making this public? I mean, at this point the university has - its reputation has been damaged. Transparency would ostensibly help, no?
KANE: That's kind of been a story throughout this. It's been the university's first move always seems to be, you know, limiting the amount of information they want to make public. You know, you really would have to talk to them about, you know, why they feel that's the proper route to go given the breath and all the interest in this scandal.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What's next? What are we going to see next with this unfolding scandal?
KANE: Well, in the case of the faculty leader, Jan Boxill - you know, she's appealing her firing. We have the accreditation commission asking questions of the university. You know, the first time I looked at this it got a much more limited picture of what was going on. And from the letter that was sent to the university recently, you get the sense that they feel like they didn't get the full story, and now they want it. And then the other thing, of course, is because these classes involve so many athletes, you know, the question is, you know, are the wins that they earned, are the championships that they earned - should they be allowed to stand? So the NCAA is investigating. So there's a lot going on here.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Dan Kane is of the Raleigh News and Observer. Thank you so much for joining us.
KANE: Well, thanks for having me.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
The United States has 2 million military children. They often move from place to place. They live in communities around the country and on military bases all over the world. This week NPR is reporting on the lives of these children. By many accounts, the military does a good job educating these children, and its preschool system gets high marks. Kavitha Cardoza from member station WAMU in Washington, D.C., reports.
KAVITHA CARDOZA, BYLINE: If this is what you think the military sounds like...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: You're on your way to Afghanistan, you understand?
UNIDENTIFIED MEN: Yes, sir.
CARDOZA: I found at military bases, you'll also hear a lot of this.
(SOUNDBITE OF BABY CRYING)
CARDOZA: Forty percent of military children are under the age of 5.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Could I have hugs and kisses goodbye?
CARDOZA: Starting at 5:30 in the morning at a child development center at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, Marines in camouflage uniforms carrying diaper bags and stuffed animals drop-off their children before they race to physical training.
JENNIFER RIALTA: Give Mom a kiss. I love you. I love you.
CARDOZA: Lance Corporal Jennifer Rialta signs in her 11-month-old daughter, Persephone.
RIALTA: It allows me to focus on work rather than, you know, worry about what's going on all day. If a parent can't be there themselves, they want to know that their kid's, like, taken care of and safe.
CARDOZA: Rialta's days can run long, so Persephone's been at the center since she was 2 months old.
RIALTA: It can go anywhere from nine to 12 hours, just depending on what's going on. All of a sudden you'll see her do, like, different things that I've never seen before. And I'm like, where did you get that from? I know we haven't taught you that.
PERSEPHONE: Mommy, mommy.
CARDOZA: Persephone's taking part in what's been called the largest employer-sponsored childcare program in the country.
BARBARA THOMPSON: Two hundred thousand children in 800 centers, 3,500 family child care homes, about 40,000 employees.
CARDOZA: That's Barbara Thompson, who oversees the military's child care system. At a time when Pres. Barack Obama is pushing preschool for all, the military child care system is being held up as a model. It boasts high teacher pay, affordable fees, mandatory training, accredited facilities and unannounced inspections. But Thompson says military childcare wasn't always as good. In the early 1980s, it was referred to as the ghetto of American child care.
THOMPSON: My center was a prefabricated chapel from southeast Asia that had actually fallen off the ship into the water. And there was just a bin of broken crayons.
CARDOZA: There were cases of child abuse and neglect. Some centers had staff turnover of 300 percent every year. All this came at a time when more women were joining the military, more single mothers and more families where both parents served, says Deborah Phillips, a professor of psychology at Georgetown University.
DEBORAH PHILLIPS: So the need of the military families ramped up for child care at exactly a time when these terrible conditions of child care were being exposed.
CARDOZA: That led to the Military Child Care Act of 1989, a law that tried to systemically improve the cost, convenience and quality at these centers. Marla Talley, who oversees childcare at Camp Lejeune, says commanders began to recognize how important childcare was to the military's primary mission - defending the country.
MARIA TALLEY: Whether they're on the rifle range and firing or they're qualifying, it requires them to concentrate on exactly what's happening so that they'll be prepared for their ultimate goal, which is going to war. I can't go and train if I'm worrying about whether or not my child is well cared for.
CARDOZA: The child development centers just on this base can now accommodate 1,600 children, from newborns to five-year-olds. That number is triple what it was before in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
TALLEY: I had a pediatrician friend at the Naval Hospital, and he said there's two things that Marines do well. They shoot their guns, and they make babies. When they come back, you can almost watch the calendar. Within nine or 10 months after big units return then there's lots more babies being born.
JACOB KING: What do you got? You got keys?
GRACIN KING: Yeah.
KING: (Laughter).
CARDOZA: Two-year-old Gracin King is toddling about the day care center in his Superman shoes, before being scooped up by his dad, Corporal Jacob King. He's a single father who works long hours on anti-tank missiles.
KING: This place stays open as long as I'm at work without charging more.
CARDOZA: The military subsidizes almost two-thirds of the cost of childcare. Teachers in the military are paid more than teachers at civilian childcare centers, $15 an hour versus less than $10 on average. They also get military benefits, and unlike their counterparts at civilian centers, teachers here have to complete a certain amount of professional development. Teachers Deloris Carter and Kristie Tegtmeier say they love it.
DELORIS CARTER: I mean, they pay for the training for you to make more money. They're always wanting you to better yourself.
KRISTIE TEGTMEIER: Just like they teach in the Marine Corps...
CARTER: I love it.
TEGTMEIER: ...Be the best you can be.
CARDOZA: What makes these centers so good is partly what would make any childcare center good. the teachers here also receive specialized training in how to help military children who face unique stresses, including their parents deploying for long periods of time. One way teachers help children process their feelings is through books.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: All right. We have a book that we're going to read, and it's called "Mommy, You Are My Hero." And Mommy works at...
UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN: Work.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: At work, but what kind of job do you think she's doing?
UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN: Duty.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: She's doing - having - doing duty - the military. We always keep mommy where?
UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN: In our hearts.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: In our hearts. We always keep mommy in our hearts.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: And daddy.
CARDOZA: Studies suggests children with a deployed parent are more likely to develop behavioral and emotional problems. Teacher Christy Tegtmeier says she's seen it all.
TEGTMEIER: One time, a child came into the room, just very quiet, and said to me, my daddy left. And I said OK. And he looked at me, and he said, I promise I'll be good. I'll be good. You have to teach them that it is not their fault.
CARDOZA: Research also shows an uptick in child abuse and neglect during deployments, So teachers are trained to recognize and report such incidents. And Tegtmeier says when parents come back from war changed by their experiences, that's confusing for children, as well.
TEGTMEIER: Sometimes the kids will tell you that daddy's really quiet or daddy gets mad at me over little things. And you just have to kind of talk to them and say, you know, it isn't you. He's having a bad day.
CARDOZA: The military spent approximately $800 million last year on early childhood education. But many are worried spending cuts will trickle down to childcare centers. Deborah Phillips of Georgetown University says that would be devastating. She says the early child care system is one of the backbone programs of the military. Phillips says when civilian parents worry about the high cost of child care, she has a simple piece of advice for them.
PHILLIPS: If you want to be assured of having high-quality child care for your child in this country, join the military.
CARDOZA: For NPR News, I'm Kavitha Cardova.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
In case you're just waking up, happy new year. Or if you still have a hangover, happy new year. We thought we'd welcome in 2015 with a look at some New Year's traditions other than sleeping in. Must be nice. In my family, we eat 12 grapes at midnight, then we throw dirty water out the window to signify a fresh start. One of my friends, like many people in Colombia, drags a suitcase around the neighborhood so that the coming year will bring exciting travel. Earlier this week, we asked you, our listeners, to share your traditions with us. Let's take a listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FUNKY NEW YEAR")
EAGLES: (Singing) Funky new year...
MARGO LYNN: My name is Margo Lynn. I call my grandmother. And we joke about, oh, I'm so sorry, I haven't talked to you since last year, and how are things going, and did you have a good New Year's? So it's very silly, but it's a lot of fun. And it's just a tradition the two of us have.
BRADLEY LEEB: Bradley Leeb - Champaign, Illinois - our New Year's tradition is our New Year's coconut. It started a few years ago when my son, who's now 6 - we were discussing coconuts one day on New Year's Eve. And I decided to pick up a coconut to show him.
RETHA SUEDA: Well, I'm Retha Sueda, and I'm third generation Japanese-American. Our tradition is to have what's called ozoni, which is a clear soup with different vegetables in it and also thick, glutinous rice cake.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: If not that, then how about garlicky Italian anchovy dip or a Hawaiian Loco Moco hamburger plate. Those are two other foods people enjoy on New Year's Day. As far as activities go, one of you told us about heading to a sweat lodge to sweat out the old year. On a more somber note, in Texas, a grandson and his grandfather hang out in a cemetery among old war buddies. But many of you are staying home today, ordering takeout and watching a movie for a quiet start to 2015. Brian Watson, however, listens to this.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "NEW YEAR'S DAY")
U2: (Singing) All is quiet on New Year's Day.
BRIAN WATSON: U2's New Year's Day. You know, the beginning starts off with all is quiet on New Year's Day and ends with nothing changes on New Year's Day, which, I think, those two statements are very strong and very powerful. And I think they're very true about New Year's, as well as any fresh start in life. So really, I love the whole song.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: As for us here at ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, we are working this holiday, but don't worry about us. We welcomed in 2015 with our annual crockpot full of Hoppin' John and a little bit of cheese.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HAPPY NEW YEAR")
ABBA: (Singing) Happy new year. Happy new year.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Happy new year from ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
In Brazil today, a somewhat lukewarm inauguration for second term president, Dilma Rousseff.
(SOUNDBITE OF BRAZILIAN PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURATION)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Rousseff barely won re-election because of a sputtering economy. And now she begins her new term with a massive corruption scandal surrounding the state-owned oil company, Petrobras. As she took to the podium, she promised to defend the integrity of the Brazilian constitution.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DILMA ROUSSEFF: (Speaking Portuguese).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Joining me now is Paulo Sotero. He is the director for the Brazil Institute at the Wilson Center. He's speaking to us from KGNU public radio in Boulder, Colorado. Paulo, happy New Year.
PAULO SOTERO: Happy New Year to you, too, Lourdes.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Thank you, so a new term for President Rousseff - a new year, but a tough road ahead.
SOTERO: Yes, the challenges are enormous. The Petrobras is a corruption scandal of epic proportions. And she faces a stagnant economy where unemployment is about to go up. So Dilma will have to really harness all her political skills. But I believe that she is capable of doing the job as an honest politician - an honest leader.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Let's talk about Brazil and U.S. relations. They experienced a breakdown after documents from the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. was spying on President Rousseff, her cabinet and others. President Biden was in attendance today at the inauguration and the president has just appointed the Brazilian ambassador to the U.S. as her foreign minister. So does that show that there is a reconciliation in the works?
SOTERO: I think there is an effort in that direction. I think the presence of President Biden at the inauguration of President Dilma was very important. It is the highest level of American representation at such an event in Brazil in more than 20 years. I think there is not only the desire on both capitals to overcome the difficulties that were created by the spying episode and let President Dilma Rousseff to cancel a state visit to Washington. There is also the need for that. Why? Because of the economy, and President Dilma Rousseff and obviously President Obama know that very well.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: A lot has been made of President Obama's new position on Cuba, the opening up of diplomatic relations, of course. One of the reasons that they said that they did this was to have a closer relationship with Latin America and that this had been a stumbling block. Do you think that Cuba has played a role in perhaps this reconciliation between Brazil and the United States?
SOTERO: Not directly, but I think it will help now because in Brazil and in the region, there has always a type of anti-Americanism that has been fed by this failed policy of the United States to isolate Cuba. This policy has now been removed. I think that those that have used that in order to create difficulties in the relationship between Brazil and other countries with the United States have less space now.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: President Rousseff in her previous term, unlike her predecessor, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has not actually wanted to engage in the international sphere as much. Do you think that she will be forced to at this particular point with so much trouble at home?
SOTERO: She will have to because this is an important part of her domestic effort to show that Brazil is an active participant in the international economy and also in certain important relations, such as that with the United States.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Paulo Sotero is the director of the Brazil Institute. Thank you so much.
SOTERO: Thank you very much, Lourdes.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
The NFL playoffs begin this weekend, promising a new dramatic chapter in the pro football season. Of course, a lot of drama this year happened off the field. Stories about the behavior of Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson led to new discussions about old and difficult issues - domestic violence, child abuse, corporal punishment. This has been, in many ways, a watershed season. NPR's Tom Goldman reports.
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: In the year and a half Judy Battista has worked for NFL.com and the NFL Network, in the nearly 15 years before that covering the NFL for the New York Times, she has used a gazillion words to describe the league. Battista only needs one to explain the 2014 season.
JUDY BATTISTA: Wow.
GOLDMAN: It was, she says, unlike any season she can remember. Yes, the NFL has had its non-football crises - the Michael Vick dog-fighting scandal, players involved with murder and drugs, work stoppages prompted by warring players and owners. But Battista says parts, or even all of those crises unfolded during the off-season.
BATTISTA: I think what's made this one unique is that it's run concurrently with the games.
GOLDMAN: The regular season began September 4, September 8 the video was release of Baltimore Ravens' running back Ray Rice punching his fiancee. September 12, Adrian Peterson was indicted on child abuse charges. From then on, a mix of weekend football and weekday chatter - much of it on sports talk radio, much of it not about sports.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
COLIN COWHERD: I said this is disgusting, but it goes way beyond Ray Rice. We have a problem in society with violence.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: But maybe we should learn something from this. Maybe the days of beating a kid with a switch - or any other object - is out.
GOLDMAN: On the air, in homes, at workplaces, the conversations and anger flowed, perhaps because the nation already was reflecting on a game it had been closely scrutinizing. The concussion issue made us wonder about football. It made us mad to hear reports the league may have covered up what it knew about the long-term effects of brain injury. Then it made us mad again when NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell bungled his way through the early stages of this season's crisis, the widely criticized initial two-game suspension for Ray Rice, the press conference in which Goodell issued a mea culpa.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
ROGER GOODELL: I got it wrong in the handling of the Ray Rice matter and I'm sorry for that.
GOLDMAN: That hardly quelled the anger. There was criticism even as Goodell tried to make the right moves. He appointed an advisory group of women to help develop new domestic violence policies for the NFL - good. But it was an advisory group on domestic violence that didn't include African-American women - bad. Melanie Campbell had had the Black Women's Roundtable.
MELANIE CAMPBELL: The faces of this are black women, mostly - at this point anyway, black families - and you have all white women external advisors. It just didn't make any sense.
GOLDMAN: A lot about the league's behavior in 2014 didn't make sense and didn't matter, ultimately, to many of the millions who kept going to and watching NFL games.
GENE HUSHAK: The seriousness of the topic, yes, it was a big deal.
GOLDMAN: But not necessarily the league's big deal, says Gene Hushak. He's president of the Seattle Seahawks biggest fan club, the Sea Hawkers.
HUSHAK: I personally don't see it - or any of the circles that I run in see it as being a huge NFL issue as much as it was a domestic violence issue.
GOLDMAN: The distinction that it's more a societal problem than the league's is part of the reason attendance and ratings remain high. Still, this turbulent season has put the league on notice. And Commissioner Goodell has responded by announcing a revised personal conduct policy, a new mandatory anti-domestic violence training and education program for all league employees, which is underway, and by appointing an African-American woman to that advisory group, leaving Melanie Campbell feeling optimistic.
CAMPBELL: We appreciate the fact that they are trying to get it right.
GOLDMAN: After a season of so much wrong. Tom Goldman, NPR News.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Dave Arnold runs the bar Booker and Dax in Manhattan. And back in November, he was on this program showing us how to step up our holiday parties with shaken cocktails and liquid nitrogen. And he even brought a saber to show a how to dramatically open a champagne bottle.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
DAVE ARNOLD: Two, one...
(SOUNDBITE OF BOTTLE UNCORKED)
ARNOLD: Woo...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: In short, Dave Arnold is an expert at creating memorable drinks and helping people enjoy themselves. Well, we asked him back to find out if he has any tips for those who have over-enjoyed. Welcome again, and happy New Year.
ARNOLD: Happy New Year. Thanks for having me back.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So this ship has sailed for many listeners, but the best hangover remedy, of course, is prevention, right?
ARNOLD: Exactly, you shouldn't drink as much the night before. That's the easiest way to not have a hangover. I think also, you know, I in general like to drink something nonalcoholic between every alcoholic drink. That's the kind of best prevention is to have a good pre-party drinking policy of alternating strong with weak, and just not taking those extra shots after you've already consumed the fill that you thought you were supposed to consume.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah, that last thing of tequila probably not such a good idea at the end of the night. So some people might, though, want to keep on celebrating. And if they want to ease their way back into this evening's festivities, what would you recommend?
ARNOLD: I would recommend taking it easy. I'd recommend, you know, something delicious that you can consume in moderation. Stay away from the tequila shots, you know, the boilermakers. Go light, have some champagne. Champagne is delicious and, you know, not that high in alcohol. It hits you fairly quickly because of the bubbles - bubbles make it hit harder - but something nice and festive. You probably have some bubbly left over from the night before. And really, it's always kind of in season - a little bit of bubbly - in my opinion. If you're going to go for a cocktail, if you can sip it, go for a nice old-fashioned. It's easy to make and something you can savor over time.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What's in an old-fashioned?
ARNOLD: Old-fashioned, the name tells you. It's been around for a long, long time. And it's simply about three-eighths of an ounce of simple syrup with two ounces of whiskey of your choice and a couple dashes of Angostura bitters, an orange twist served in an old-fashioned glass with a nice, big ice cube.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Dave, before you go, I wanted to get your opinion on this hangover helper attributed to Ernest Hemingway. He says poor one jigger of absinthe into a champagne glass, add iced champagne until it attains proper opalescent milkiness, and then drink three to five of these slowly.
ARNOLD: This is a huge error in judgment for anyone but an inveterate alcoholic inveterate. This is...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Come on, man. It's got champagne in it. You were talking about champagne just a minute ago.
ARNOLD: I'm very pro-champagne. But all the drinks, like, that are historically attributed to Hemingway, I find to be, in general, repulsive for one reason or another. The Hemingway Daiquiri being violently sour. Here, even for those that love absinthe - and there are many - I think they would add a little bit of sugar to that to balance it out with the champagne. But as written, I think that's an abomination. And five of those is going to hose you because drinking five glasses of champagne is a terrible idea the next day when you feel bad. There...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: No advice from Ernest Hemingway is where you're going with this, I'm feeling.
ARNOLD: Writing advice, perhaps. But, I mean, you don't want to take life advice - much less drinking advice - from Ernest Hemingway.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. Dave Arnold runs the bar Booker and Dax in Manhattan. Thank you so much for joining us.
ARNOLD: Thank you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Dave Arnold's new book is "Liquid Intelligence: The Art And Science Of The Perfect Cocktail."
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
The FCC is a small agency with a big impact on our daily lives. Just a few things it's considering these days - how to regulate the Internet, whether to allow people use cell phones while flying and whether to let Comcast take over Time Warner Cable. As NPR's Brian Naylor reports, all of this puts pressure on the agency's chairman, former cable TV lobbyist Tom Wheeler.
BRIAN NAYLOR, BYLINE: When Tom Wheeler agreed to Pres. Obama's request to lead the FCC, it's doubtful he imagined mornings like the one last November.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Which side are you on, Tom?
TOM WHEELER: I'm on your side. (Unintelligible).
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Unintelligible) Which side are you on?
NAYLOR: A small group of activists blocked the driveway of his Georgetown townhouse, holding a banner that said save the Internet. Wheeler tried to engage the group, but eventually gave up and took public transportation to work. The activists want the FCC to regulate the Internet like a public utility, such as the phone company. That's what Pres. Obama wants, too. Big media companies, on the other hand, such as Netflix and Amazon, want to be able to cut deals with other big companies, like Comcast and Verizon, to ensure their content gets priority. Wheeler is trying to strike that balance. Here he is in a speech to the Minority Media and Telecommunications Counsel last year.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
WHEELER: Never in the life of anyone in this room has there been greater opportunity to exploit the new networks for ownership diversity and content diversity. And that's what makes the open Internet so damn important.
NAYLOR: The net neutrality debate has certainly made Wheeler more of a public figure that many of his predecessor FCC chairs. Wheeler previously headed both the National Cable Television Association and the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association. That led HBO's John Oliver to say putting Wheeler in charge of the agency that regulates those industries was akin to having a dingo watch your baby, to which Wheeler responded...
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LAST WEEK TONIGHT")
WHEELER: I would like to state for the record that I'm not a dingo.
(LAUGHTER)
NAYLOR: Former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell...
ROBERT MCDOWELL: There's a tremendous amount of pressure applied to the FCC from many different quarters. It could be the public. It could be Congress. It could be the media. It could be think tanks and various pressure groups from both the left and the right.
NAYLOR: McDowell, who dealt with Wheeler before he became FCC chair, says the pressure doesn't phase Wheeler.
MCDOWELL: Tom Wheeler is a very strong-willed individual. He has a clear vision of where he wants to go. And he will pursue that vision vigorously, much to the consternation of his opponents and adversaries.
NAYLOR: Net neutrality is not the only issue facing Wheeler and the FCC. In December, the commission approved a plan he backed to help more schools and libraries afford high-speed Internet connections by raising fees on Americans' phone bills. And there are the contentious issues of cell phones on planes and the merger of the big cable companies. Nicole Turner-Lee is vice president of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council.
NICOLE TURNER-LEE: I think he's got a full plate with a lot of entrees that he has to sort of sort through.
NAYLOR: Turner-Lee has met with Wheeler on the net neutrality issue and hopes he'll allow an open Internet that does not give preferential treatment to big media companies while increasing access to minority communities.
TURNER-LEE: He listened to us the same as he listened to the protesters that were sitting on his lawn. I think we're dealing with a chairman that gets this.
NAYLOR: And reaching that balance between industries, special interest groups and consumers may be Wheeler's biggest challenge. Brian Naylor, NPR News.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
The Internet has connected us to faraway people and places, allowed us to share information from around the world. Oh, and it also gave us...
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO, "CHARLIE BE ME - AGAIN")
HARRY: Charlie, that really hurt.
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO, "DAVID AFTER DENTIST")
DAVID: Is this real life?
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO, "EVOLUTION OF DANCE")
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Evolution of dance.
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO, "DOUBLE RAINBOW")
PAUL VASQUEZ: Double rainbow. Oh, my God.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DRAGOSTEA DIN TEI")
O-ZONE: (Singing) Maya hee, maya hoo (ph)...
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO, "LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE")
CHRIS COCKER: Leave Britney alone.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE FOX")
YLVIS: What does the Fox say?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Remember those? I'd like to forget "What Did The Fox Say?" in particular. So we're here to bring you the best of this past year's Internet with the help from Sean Rameswaram. He's a producer at Studio 360 and hosts the pop-culture podcast Sideshow. Thanks for being with us.
SEAN RAMESWARAM: Wonderful to be here. Thank you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You recently did an episode on Sideshow where you asked different people to come up with their favorite video, song, website from the last year. Let's tick through a few of these, starting with...
RAMESWARAM: Sure.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: ...A music video by Sia. I love this, by the way. The song is called "Chandelier."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CHANDELIER")
SIA: (Singing) I'm going to swing from the chandelier.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So tell us a little bit about this. What caught people's imagination about this video?
RAMESWARAM: If this eight-year-old, nine-year-old looking girl in this blonde wig just dancing frenetically all over this sort of, like, shoddy-looking apartment. It's simple, and yet, the dance is incredible and so powerful, and it perfectly matches this song. And it's well on its way to half a billion views.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Incredible.
RAMESWARAM: And rightfully so. The music video is alive and well and arguably doing better than it ever has before, thanks to YouTube.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CHANDELIER")
SIA: (Singing) Over tonight, over tonight.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Also on this list, there is a site called See Hear Party. So I am bringing this up now.
RAMESWARAM: Yes.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Tell me how this works.
RAMESWARAM: Yeah, so I'll explain it, but it's something that you truly need to experience to fully understand. But basically, you go to the site. It asks you to enter tags of anything. So my favorite things that I would put in are pizza...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Here we go.
RAMESWARAM: ...You know, puppies and maybe "The Simpsons," for example.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Pizza, puppies and "The Simpsons"...
RAMESWARAM: Yeah.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm typing that in right now. OK.
RAMESWARAM: So you punch in those tags, and then you click next, and then you're asked to select a song. And, of course, for me, I would just punch in Drake and take any one of his many hits. And it asks you if you want to party.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And we want to party.
RAMESWARAM: You definitely want to party.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: OK, so what I'm seeing now is, like, these unbelievably crazy gifs of just, like, "The Simpsons" and puppies under a tree in various extremely strange outfits. This really feels like a very hallucinogenic...
RAMESWARAM: (Laughter).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: A lot of fun. I like it. I like it.
RAMESWARAM: It's like instead of, like, back in the day, if you went to a really great party where there was, like, this really interesting video collage being projected on some wall. Now you can just make it yourself in three seconds, thanks to this site. It's truly a gift.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: There's also the 11-minute TV sitcom parody "Too Many Cooks."
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO, "TOO MANY COOKS")
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Singing) It takes a lot to make a stew.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Singing) A pinch of salt and laughter, too.
RAMESWARAM: Yeah, right. This was probably the most viral video of the year - at least, one that was satirical and really, really smart. It's this 11-minute take on the opening credit sequences and the TV cheese from, like, basically the '80s onward. It debuted on Adult Swim in late October, but was randomly uploaded by the guy who made it to YouTube and then, like, went just bananas. And what sets it apart from the competition is its density. Like, most viral videos have a few notes and, you know, they're like two minutes long. And then you watch it once, and you get the point. But "Too Many Cooks" dares to achieve more, and it really rewards repeat viewings. It's amazing.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Sean Rameswaram - he is the host of the pop-culture podcast Sideshow. Thank you so much.
RAMESWARAM: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO, "TOO MANY COOKS")
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Singing) So much love...
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
You may beat taking this slogan to heart today - a new year, a new you. It could mean today, for example, on January 1, you're starting a diet or new workout or maybe you're simply vowing to use more sunscreen or to stop drinking. Well, these new year's resolutions to feel and look better remind me of a story I reported earlier this year about plastic surgery in Brazil.
Brazil is now the world leader in plastic surgery. It has surpassed the United States in the number of procedures, even though the U.S. has more people with more disposable income than Brazil. As I found out, many Brazilian women see surgical beautification as a right and not a privilege, and that includes Janet and Jaqueline Timal. They are 40-something-year-old sisters, and they have what they call a plastic surgery fund.
JAQUELINE TIMAL: (Through translator) I'm always saving money. When I see I've gotten enough money for another surgery, I do it.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's Jaqueline. She's had breast implants put in and also a tummy tuck. She's here today to do the famed Brazilian butt lift, which is the same as a boob job, but on your backside. Janet has had a tummy tuck, too, and she's also doing her breasts. That'll be five surgeries between them when this round is done. They both say this isn't about bankrupting themselves for beauty, but rather the opposite. Jaqueline says she sees the procedures as an investment.
TIMAL: (Through translator) I think we invest in beauty because it's very important for women here. You can get a better job because here, they want a good appearance, a better marriage because men care about the way you look.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Janet and Jaqueline aren't rich - far from it. Even with the surgery fund, they wouldn't be able to afford to pay for all those cosmetic procedures, they say, unless they did it here.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Janet.
JANET TIMAL: (Speaking Portuguese).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Here is the Ivo Pitanguy Institute in Rio de Janeiro, named after the famed Brazilian plastic surgeon who is renowned here for saying the poor have the right to be beautiful, too. The institute's lobby is packed as attendants call out the names of women and a few men who are waiting to be evaluated for cosmetic surgeries. This is a charity and a teaching hospital, and the surgeries given are either free of charge or heavily subsidized.
TIMAL: (Speaking Portuguese).
TIMAL: (Speaking Portuguese).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: The sisters tell me the price they are paying for the butt lift, for example, is 3,800 reals, about $1,600. At a private hospital, it could run over three times that.
Hello. How are you? It's great to see you.
FRANCESCO MAZZARONE: Hi.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: We meet with Francesco Mazzarone, who now heads the institute. I ask him why it's important to provide cosmetic surgeries to the disadvantaged.
MAZZARONE: (Through translator) This is about equality, which is the philosophy Pitanguy created - equal rights to everyone. The patients come here to get back something they lost in time. We give to them the right to dream.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Why should only the wealthy have access to something that will increase self-esteem, he asks. What we do here is altruism, he says. So here are the numbers. Last year, according to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, there were one and a half million cosmetic surgeries carried out in Brazil. That's 13 percent of all elective plastic surgeries done all over the world.
Part of the boom can be explained by women's increasing financial power. In the last 10 years, Brazil has grown economically. Salaries have gone up, as has disposable income. Women, like the Timal sisters, have overwhelmingly chosen to use that money on their appearance. That's the thing. While in the U.S., people may hide that they've had plastic surgery like it's something shameful, here, they flaunt it. The attitude is that having work done shows you care about yourself, and it's a status symbol. But the women we speak with also acknowledge there is a lot of pressure in Brazil to conform to a physical ideal.
Some here, though, balk at the idea that happiness can be achieved at the end of a scalpel. They say the image people chase is being defined by marketers and, in Brazil, it has a racial component. Marcelo Silva Ramos is an anthropologist and social scientist. Brazil imported more slaves - some 4 million - than anywhere else in the world. Today, it's a primarily a mixed-race country, but you wouldn't know it if you look on TV and in the magazines here, he says.
MARCELO SILVA RAMOS: (Through translator) If you look at the traditional body type of a Brazilian, you would see a woman with dark skin, curly hair, small breasts and a larger bottom - a body that is very different from the body marketed as desirable, which is a skinnier, taller blonde with straight hair with bigger breasts and with not many curves.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That is meant that today people who don't look the right way - and by this, he means the white way - are often excluded.
MARCELO SILVA RAMOS: (Through translator) In our culture, the view is women who look acceptable get money, social mobility, power.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Speaking Portuguese).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Take, for example, the crazy popular annual contest, Miss Bumbum. All of this year's contestants are lighter skinned.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Speaking Portuguese).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm at a gym in Sao Paulo, and in front of me are several scantily clad women in full makeup, many photographers. This is a press event. And they're working what you and I would call politely our glutes, but what is called in Brazil bumbum. The women here are contestants in the yearly Miss Bumbum contest, which, as you can probably figure out, crowns Brazil's best butt.
CLAUDIA ALENDE: I'm Claudia Alende.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That the 22-year-old front runner who looks like actress Megan Fox. I mean, almost exactly, right down to the blue contact lenses she has over her naturally brown eyes.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So tell me, why are you doing the Miss Bumbum contest?
CLAUDIA ALENDE: Because the contest is famous around the world, and I want to be recognized around the world and become famous, too. (Laughter).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: She says the contest is a way for her to become a TV presenter or an actress. The rules of the contest allow for plastic surgery anywhere but on the backside. She openly admits she's had work done.
ALENDE: Because was, like, moda.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Fashion.
ALENDE: Fashion - was like - was like everybody is doing, and I do.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Previous Miss Bumbum contestants have indeed gone on to arguably bigger and better things. One became a TV presenter. Others have become actors, professional dancers on TV. But for most of the women I speak with, their dreams - the ones the Pitanguy Institute say they are giving them the right to - are much smaller. We meet Maria da Gloria de Sousa on a beach in Rio, on a chilly blustery day. She's unemployed but has had six surgeries at the Pitanguy Institute and speaks about her procedures with that characteristic Brazilian humor and openness.
MARIA DA GLORIA DE SOUSA: (Speaking Portuguese).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm almost an android, she tells. I've done my breasts three times. I didn't stop there. I did a tummy tuck, and then I did lipo, and, lastly, I did my bottom, she says proudly. She says she spent the equivalent of the cost of three cars on her operations.
DE SOUSA: (Speaking Portuguese).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm much happier. There's no doubt about it, she tells me. My bottom will never sag. My breasts will never sag. They will always be there - hard. It's very good to look into the mirror and feel fine, she says. She waves goodbye and, smiling, sashays down the beach, and nothing jiggles.
I recorded that story back in October for our series The Changing Lives of Women. Whatever your aspirations for the new year, thank you for joining us today. Happy new year.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Small communities in Nevada face an economic test. It's how to gain from an opportunity. The electric carmaker Tesla Motors chose Nevada to become the home of its massive battery factory. That decision last summer was a bounty for Nevada towns that have been looking to jumpstart their slow economic recovery. Will Stone of Reno Public Radio reports.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
WILL STONE, BYLINE: When Lance Gilman talks Tesla, it can feel like a return to the days of the Gold Rush, silver mining and pioneers.
LANCE GILMAN: The new Comstock Lode is sitting right in front of us. There's going to be tremendous financial growth.
STONE: The Comstock was the lucrative silver deposit discovered here in the 1800s. Gilman believes Tesla's $5 billion battery factory holds the same promise.
GILMAN: And they've chosen to locate here in Storey County in the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center. And that choice then triggered a tsunami wave of follow-up business.
STONE: Gilman runs this industrial park where the factory is being built, about 30 minutes outside Reno. At the top of a plateau, he points to a scene of cranes and equipment below.
: You can see that there's construction going on down there. They're putting footings in right now.
STONE: In a few years, the so-called gigafactory will churn out more lithium ion batteries than all the producers in the world combined. And Gilman says Nevada was the unlikely winner in a bidding war with states like California and Texas.
GILMAN: Everybody was throwing huge amounts of financial support and commitments, et cetera. Here's this little, old Storey County with 3,800 people in it. And to come out the winner - I think that's epic.
STONE: So, too, the gains. The factory will employ about 6,500 workers alone. Add in the indirect jobs, and that's more than five times the population of this small, rural county. The local construction unions say they'll have to nearly triple their numbers in the next five years to meet demand. And that's not the only industry playing catch-up.
JIM NEW: This is the machine shop.
STONE: Jim New is dean of technical sciences at Truckee Meadows Community College. He says Tesla has brought a new cachet to this field.
NEW: And when we started talking to prospective students about options that were out there, suddenly they were very interested in these types of programs, especially those tied to advanced manufacturing.
STONE: New says their graduates won't necessarily be working in Tesla's factory, but they will make parts for the assembly line, for example. Bernie Magness actually worked in construction during the housing boom. After years of unemployment, he's now a student in this manufacturing program.
BERNIE MAGNESS: There was so much growth residentially and commercially going on that there wasn't enough carpenters to go around. And right now it's kind of, like, the same way. There's not enough machine operators to go around for the work.
STONE: The governor's office estimates a statewide economic impact of $100 billion over the next two decades. But Tesla didn't come cheap. The company received a package of incentives and tax abatements totaling more than a billion dollars. Tesla isn't going to pay property, payroll or sales tax for years.
BOB FULKERSON: Who is going to pay for the services that the workers are going to use?
STONE: Bob Fulkerson is with the advocacy group The Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada.
FULKERSON: We always have this mentality about, well, we'll just figure that out down the road. You know, maybe there will be gold in the next Gold Rush, you know. It's this boom-and-bust mentality.
STONE: But Tesla's abatements are performance-based. And the increase in people working and living here will supply new revenue, says developer Lance Gilman.
GILMAN: I'm going to suggest we just all get busy and earn our money. It's here. We only have it to lose.
STONE: And unlike the Comstock Lode, Nevada hopes Tesla will bring lasting prosperity.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's Will Stone of Reno Public Radio. His report was heard earlier this week on Morning Edition.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Some sad news tonight - former New York Governor Mario Cuomo has died. He was 82. He was elected to three terms and became a national figure, holding up the liberal Democratic tradition at a time when Rep. Ronald Reagan was president. He declined to run for president and refused to be nominated for the Supreme Court. To talk with us about the governor is our political editor Ron Elving. Hi.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Hi, LuLu. Good to be with you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Ron, you covered a speech Cuomo gave in 1984 that really defined him on the national stage. We're going to hear a bit of that in a moment, but first, set it up for us.
ELVING: This was in San Francisco in 1984. Walter Mondale was actually getting the nomination. But after the speech that Andrew Cuomo gave on the first night, if the delegates could have suddenly swung the nomination to him by acclimation, in the old style of the 19th century, that might have happened. It was an enormously impactful speech. And everyone was not only hanging on his words for a solid hour, but many people were openly weeping at points in the speech. And it was - it was difficult to overstate the degree to which he held that entire Yerba Buena Center there in San Francisco in 1984 in the palm of his hand for 60 minutes. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: In the audio version of this story, we mistakenly call Mario Cuomo, the former New York governor who died, Andrew. (His son Andrew Cuomo is New Yorkâs current governor.)]
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Let's hear a little bit of that speech now.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
MARIO CUOMO: In many ways, we are a shining city on a hill. But the hard truth is that not everyone is sharing in this city's splendor and glory. A shining city is perhaps all the president sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there's another city - there's another part to the shining city - the part where some people can't pay their mortgages, and most young people can't afford one - where students can't afford the education they need and middle class parents watch the dreams they hold for their children evaporate.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That feels very relevant to today.
ELVING: You know, it's true. The issue of income and equality, the issue of whether or not everyone in the United States is sharing in the prosperity that some are enjoying - that issue is an current as it could be 30 years later.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What was he like as governor of New York?
ELVING: As governor of New York, perhaps it would surprise many people to learn the degree to which he governed to the center. Mario Cuomo, when he was in office, was more of a tax-cutter, often times - a budget-balancer, as all governors must be. He built a number of prisons, among other things. And he worked very hard to deal with some of the animosities between different groups, not only within the city of New York, but between the city of New York and the rest of the state.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Tell us about the man other than the politician.
ELVING: He was born in Queens. His parents were Italian immigrants. He was an excellent baseball player - in fact, good enough that he was drafted the Pittsburgh Pirates and was making his way up in their organization when he was hit by a pitch in the head in an era before everyone wore a helmet. And it was such a severe injury that it basically ended his baseball career.
At that point, he decided to go back to college at St. John's in New York and on to the law school there at St. John's, where he graduated first in his class in 1956, but could scarcely even get an interview in the most distinguished, most prestigious law firms in New York City, which, at that time, were not that interested in graduates of his school or, perhaps, as he always felt, people with his ethnicity.
So he went on to practice in a smaller firm and, very soon, got involved in Democratic politics and, in the 1970s, was running for office and ran for mayor against Ed Koch. Didn't win that particular race, but won his first nomination for governor running against Ed Koch in 1982, then went on to be elected against Lew Lehrman that fall in 1982 - the first of three terms.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Ron Elving, our political editor, thank you very much for joining us.
ELVING: Thank you, LuLu.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: News tonight that former New York Governor Mario Cuomo has died.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
To mark the beginning of 2015, we have a series of stories about people or places that have changed by choice or by circumstance. It's called Starting Over, and it's a twist on the idea of New Year's resolutions. Today, we hear a story from New York City. It's about a former drug kingpin who now helps others get in shape. George Bodarky of WFUV reports.
GEORGE BODARKY, BYLINE: Twenty-nine-year-old Coss Marte grew up on Manhattan's Lower East Side. He says his childhood was surrounded by drugs, crime and poverty. On a recent chilly evening, he walked me around the neighborhood, recalling his days as a drug dealer. He would often sell from inside or outside the corner store.
COSS MARTE: I used to just hustle right off the corner, right in the bodega, in front of the bodega, sit on a milk crate or sit right here on the stoop and just sell drugs, like 24 hours a day. I was basically a land mine.
BODARKY: And by land mine, Marte means his drug business was booming. He says he started selling marijuana when he was 13. He later added cocaine and other drugs to his inventory. And by the age of 19, Marte says he was making over $2 million a year. He says at times he brought in as much as $30,000 a day. Marte says to him drugs weren't a big deal. It was just a job. Life was good for Marte - that is, until the law caught up with him. When he was 23, Marte was sentenced to seven years in prison. He was overweight when he was locked up. At five-foot-eight-inches tall, he weighed over 230 pounds. Prison doctors, he says, gave him a grim prognosis - he might not live to be released.
MARTE: They said I had high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels. And they said if I don't start exercising and start eating correctly, that I could probably die in just like five years.
BODARKY: Marte didn't want to expire behind bars, so he started working out.
MARTE: I created a series of workouts right in my jail cell that helped me lose over 70 pounds in six months.
BODARKY: Marte's jail cell was 9-by-6 - tiny. His workouts involved simple movements and relied solely on body weight. Now that he's out of prison, Marte is still working out, only not alone.
MARTE: Ready?
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: Yes.
MARTE: All right, we're going to start with the jumping jacks. Let's go - one, two, three.
BODARKY: Marte is the founder of Coss Athletics, an exercise program he markets as prison style. Brooklyn resident Molly Cohen is in the class. She's impressed with Marte's turnaround in life and with his boot camp.
MOLLY COHEN: It's a really hard workout, and it's really no-frills. I like that it's just body weight.
BODARKY: Marte launched his business with the help of Defy Ventures. The nonprofit holds a "Shark Tank" style business plan competition to help people with criminal backgrounds become successful, legal entrepreneurs. Jose Vasquez is a program manager with the organization. He says Marte won about $10,000 to help transform his hustle.
JOSE VASQUEZ: I would say business is business, right, regardless of what you're selling. You could be selling batteries, you could be selling oranges, you could be selling what Coss was selling, right? But to run a business is the same concept.
BODARKY: Coss Marte has no regrets about his previous life as a drug kingpin. He says it was a journey he had to go through to become the legitimate businessman he is today. Marte has about 400 clients. He's holding 14 classes a week and has two trainers working under him. For NPR News, I'm George Bodarky in New York.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The federal government is throwing the book at one of the most vocal critics of the polygraph test. Doug Williams is facing trial on charges of witness tampering and mail fraud. He makes his living teaching people how to beat the polygraph. But his supporters say he's being punished by a government that is overly dependent on those lie detectors. NPR's Martin Kaste reports.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DOUG WILLIAMS: Are you scheduled to take a polygraph test? Let me give you something to think about before you take it.
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: Meet Doug Williams, the self-appointed scourge of the polygraph industry. This is from a video on his website.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
WILLIAMS: I am the only licensed polygraph examiner to ever tell the truth about the so-called lie detector. A polygraph is not a lie detector. Truthful people are often branded as liars and liars often pass easily.
KASTE: For decades, Williams has been selling his books and DVDs attacking the reliability of the polygraph and teaching people how to prepare for the test. He also offers one-on-one training, and that's how the feds got him. Undercover agents posed as clients - people facing polygraph tests at their government jobs. Investigators say Williams helped them even when they told him that they planned to lie. The government calls that a form of witness tampering. Williams calls the prosecution an attack on his right to free speech.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
WILLIAMS: This indictment is brought simply to punish and silence me because I have the audacity to protest the use of the polygraph.
KASTE: The Justice Department won't comment on the case, but even Williams' fans think he's in trouble.
PETER MOSKOS: Obviously, they want to get him. I think they got him dead to rights, too.
KASTE: This is Peter Moskos, a former cop who now teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
MOSKOS: Just 'cause they're getting him and just 'cause he did, perhaps, you know, knowing people were going to line the test, still help them out, that doesn't make the test any better.
KASTE: That's the question that's now being revived by the Williams case. Just how good are polygraph tests? Can you really measure honesty by tracking things like breathing and heart rate? The National Academy of Sciences took a close look at this in the early 2000s. Statistician Stephen Fienberg chaired the review.
STEPHEN FIENBERG: These channels that the polygraph captures, whether it's the sweating on fingertips or breathing, this information does tie in to the notion of lying or deception. Unfortunately, it ties into other things as well.
KASTE: False positives are a big problem, Feinberg says. While the test can catch liars, it also accuses too many innocent people.
FIENBERG: My personal conclusion is that it has no place in government's dealings with its citizens.
KASTE: The defenders of polygraphs actually embrace The National Academy of Sciences review. Raymond Nelson is the president of the American Polygraph Association. He says of course the test isn't perfect, but its accuracy rate is still in the low to mid 80s.
RAYMOND NELSON: That's still better than any other technology available today. And it's still better than trying to make human judgment based on, you know, non-instrumental methods for credibility assessment.
KASTE: The thing is most Americans don't have to worry about the polygraph. Back in 1988, Congress banned private employers from using it on job applicants. But it exempted government, so thousands of federal employees still take it, as do many applicants for jobs with local police departments. That's Peter Moskos hates the test so much. He had to take it when he became a cop in 1999. He passed it by reading up on its flaws. And now that he teaches aspiring police officers, he advises them to do the same.
MOSKOS: I mean, anyone who takes the test, you're a fool if you go into a lie detector test thinking that, yeah, telling the truth is good enough.
KASTE: Meanwhile, the government has increased its dependence on the test. In 2010, Congress expanded the polygraph requirement to Customs and Border Protection. That's now the country's biggest law enforcement agency. That's what sent the wave of new clients to Doug Williams, and it's what caused the subsequent sting operation. Stephen Fienberg, the statistician who led the NAS review of polygraphs, finds the government's reaction to Williams disturbing.
FIENBERG: To think that the government now wants to stop people who are going to help expose its fallibilities is to me pretty ludicrous. That's not what I want government to do.
KASTE: And Doug Williams wasn't an isolated case. A similar sting nabbed another anti-polygraph trainer in Indiana. He got eight months. In both cases, federal investigators got the trainer's client list, including the names of government employees who sought their advice on how to beat the machine - government employees who now have another reason to sweat. Martin Kaste, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And we're going to stick with science now. It's getting more difficult and more expensive to develop new drugs. And one reason is a lot of research depends on mice for testing, but people aren't simply big mice. So, to develop drugs faster, scientists want to grow simulated human organs in a lab. NPR's Richard Harris visited one lab that's working on that frontier.
RICHARD HARRIS, BYLINE: Dr. Mark Donowitz's lab at the Johns Hopkins Medical School is tapping into the high-tech worlds of bioengineering and cell biology to deal with a scourge of the low-tech world.
MARK DONOWITZ: I'm interested in solving a worldwide problem of diarrheal diseases that are still killing 800,000 children per year. And we've failed so far to develop drugs to treat diarrhea using cell culture models and mouse intestine.
HARRIS: So Donowitz's team is building what they hope will be a much better way to study cholera, rotavirus and deadly strains of E. coli. They're building miniature human guts on a device small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. Cells plucked from a human intestine are coaxed into dividing, growing and even organizing themselves much like you find them in human organs.
DONOWITZ: Our first part of this project is to show that what we know about the disease is reproduced. And, in all three of those diseases I mentioned, we've been able to take that first step. So we know that these appear to be really good models of the human disease.
HARRIS: Still, it's a work-in-progress. The guts on a chip produce digestive enzymes, hormones and mucus, but they don't yet incorporate other parts of the human intestines, such as blood vessels or nerve cells.
DONOWITZ: They all have to be incorporated if you really want to move from a simple to a more complex system, which I think you have to do to reproduce intestinal biology.
HARRIS: So how close are you to getting all of that packaged together?
DONOWITZ: This thing has just started 3 years ago.
HARRIS: It's early days, he says.
So, can I see one?
(LAUGHTER)
DONOWITZ: And off we go. OK.
HARRIS: We spend a few minutes looking at small packages made of glass and plastic, where the cells live. Postdoc Jennifer Foulke-Abel picks up a chip that bristles with tiny tubes.
JENNIFER FOULKE-ABEL: The reason that there's so many tubes is that we have a vacuum chamber that will cause the membrane to stretch in the same way that the intestine stretches as it moves food along.
HARRIS: Yes, even micro-guts work better with a bit of regularity. This particular chip would probably accommodate 50,000 gut cells, organized and working in concert, Donowitz says.
DONOWITZ: The biomedical engineers that work on this kind of thing talk in terms of micro-humans - one-millionth of a human.
HARRIS: So, could you take a drug and put it in this and see if the drug interferes with the disease?
DONOWITZ: Absolutely the idea. We think this could be a real step forward in reducing waste-of-time drug development.
HARRIS: And while Donowitz's lab is working to develop the gut, other labs scattered around the country are working on other organ systems.
DANILO TAGLE: There's going to be a brain on a chip, liver, heart and so on.
HARRIS: Danilo Tagle coordinates this overall effort at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, which is part of the NIH. They're funding development of ten organ systems in all.
TAGLE: Their goal is actually to tie them in altogether.
HARRIS: So they collectively act like a entire human being on a chip, at least in some respects. And Tagle says, in the long run, they hope they can build many of these systems, each one based on the cells from an individual person. That way, you can not just study a disease in the abstract, but tailored to an individual or a subset of patients.
TAGLE: And so then you can identify which part of the population might be more responsive to particular drugs, or identify a subset of the population that might be more vulnerable to the harmful effects of a particular drug.
HARRIS: Tagle says this $75 million, five-year project was inspired by pioneering work in this area up at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. Dr. Donald Ingber is the institute's founding director, and he's been pushing this technology forward as fast as he can.
DONALD INGBER: The only way it's going to get to have real-world impact is for it to be commercialized.
HARRIS: And, to that end, the Wyss Institute spun off a chunk of its research on its organs-on-a-chip to a private company.
INGBER: It's called Emulate. It's just getting its feet on the ground. We have about almost 20 people out of the Wyss Institute that are moving out with it.
HARRIS: Ingber says it would be too much to expect this technology to replace mice in medical research anytime soon.
INGBER: What I am hoping to see is to shorten the timeline for drug development and hopefully decrease cost, because, if we can identify things that are more likely to work in humans, that's going to have major impact.
HARRIS: And there are so many avenues to pursue here. He says there's plenty of room for both industry and academics to work on building and improving these organs on a chip. Richard Harris, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
2014 has come and gone. It was a year of many difficult stories. Even in our fiction, both literature and film, there were a lot of dystopias. So, in this first This Week's Must Read of 2015, we have some science fiction that takes a hopeful view of the future. Author Jason Sheehan explains his recommendation.
JASON SHEEHAN: I have an affection for zombies. I've stared down plagues and seen the end of the world brought about in any number of ways. But here I am, sitting on the cusp of a new year, knowing the evil and sadness that's passed and fully expecting more to come, and wondering ever happened to Ray Bradberry. Ray was the man, a grandfather of dystopias, sure. I mean, he was the guy who wrote "Fahrenheit 451." But he was also our loopy prophet, who could show you dinosaurs and time machines and spaceships and sea monsters and all the wonders of a future I'm still hoping will come true. He wrote a kind of science fiction we don't see much anymore - fun but not childish, optimistic but not schmaltzy. OK - sometimes schmaltzy. But, at the same time, he also had an enthusiasm for exploration. He wrote a lot of books, and 10 times as many short stories. But, of all his collections, "A Sound Of Thunder" is the one I want to carry with me on into this new year. In it are both sides of Ray, from Bradbury the destructor to that barefoot kid laying on his back in the summer grass and staring, entranced, up into the stars. He hunts dinosaurs in this book, and builds space stations. But, mostly, he sings about the possibility and the promise of tomorrow, because tomorrow was the future and the future was inarguably awesome. Listen to this, from his story "The End Of The Beginning." (Reading) Tonight, he thought, even if we fail, we'll send a second and a third ship. We'll just keep going until the big words like immortal and forever take on meaning. Man will be endless and infinite.
That's Ray at his crazy, hopeful best. And that music, rather than the crackle of fire or the moans of the undead, is what I want to hear more of now, as we all step forward into our own futures.
SIEGEL: The book is Ray Bradbury's "A Sound Of Thunder And Other Stories." It was recommended by Jason Sheehan. His latest novel is "Tales From The Radiation Age."
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
It's common practice these days for musicians to give a farewell tour before heading into retirement - or not. Nearly two years ago, British guitarist, Wilko Johnson, chose to launch his farewell tour, but his motivation was a bit different. He'd been told he had 10 months to live. As part of our series, The Ones That Got Away, stories we didn't get around to covering last year, Alex Cohen of member station KPCC brings us Johnson's story.
ALEX COHEN, BYLINE: Wilko Johnson is better known in the UK than he is here in the States. Over there, the band he formed in 1971, Dr. Feelgood, is a big deal.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ROXETTE")
WILKO JOHNSON: (Singing) I saw you out the other night. I saw somebody hold you tight. Roxette, I wonder who it could be.
COHEN: The band's style is simple and blues-based, yet Johnson insists it's been quite influential.
JOHNSON: I think it's true to say that the whole punk generation was just full up with people who had seen Doctor Feelgood and kind of got off on that idea. So, yeah, we did have that influence.
COHEN: A few years back, Johnson found himself at a music awards show, reminiscing about the good old days with another famous British rocker, Roger Daltrey of The Who.
ROGER DALTREY: So we said, well, yeah, come on, let's make a record. And we kind of threw it around a bit and talked a lot about doing it and never got around to it.
JOHNSON: But then the whole thing changed when - after I got cancer.
COHEN: Johnson didn't just get cancer. Doctors told him he had a severe and inoperable form of pancreatic cancer. In January 2013, he was given less than a year to live.
JOHNSON: I wasn't freaked out when the guy told me. And when I went out of the hospital in this beautiful winter's day, the trees against the sky, and I just felt so elated, and just thinking - you're alive, you're alive.
COHEN: Johnson opted against chemotherapy. He decided to just let the cancer take its course. Soon after, news of his diagnosis began to spread. When Roger Daltrey heard, he called Johnson immediately.
DALTREY: And said, you know, Wilko, let's what's not worry about what we're going to record. Let's just go and record anything. You know, the most important thing of all if you've got a year to live is to have some fun.
COHEN: At first, Wilko Johnson envisioned recording covers of American soul hits from the 1960s.
JOHNSON: But under the circumstance, and when we finally got to record it, I'm thinking - right, well, this is the last thing I will do. I'll have a bit of a retrospective of my songs.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ICE ON THE MOTORWAY")
DALTREY: (Singing) Watch out if you think you're going places. People sometimes take you by surprise. And if you ain't got 50 different faces, you've got to be a master of disguise. Oh, watch out. You got to find out, find out for yourself, boy, what's going on.
COHEN: The two recorded "Going Back Home" in a mere eight days, which, Roger Daltrey says, is one reason the album is so special.
DALTREY: A lot of today's music is made ponderously, where people, you know, dissect it. And they spend hours over-dubbing and all this stuff. And I think an awful lot of what we loved about the rock music when we were young - we did it very simply. And I think that's reflected on this record.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GOING BACK HOME")
DALTREY: (Singing) I want to live the way I like. Sleep all the morning. Go and get my fun at night. Yeah, things ain't like that here - working just to keep my payments clear. I bought a brand-new motor and I'm waiting on a loan, so I can fill 'er up and start her, then I'm going back home.
COHEN: Daltrey thinks the album's title track, "Going Back Home," says it all. The experience captured the spirit of going back to the vitality they had four decades ago.
DALTREY: There's a 70-year-old singer and a dying guitarist (laughter). It's got so much energy. It's ridiculous.
COHEN: The album did remarkably well, both in the UK and the U.S. It was voted album of the year by Classic Rock Magazine, so the duo decided to take the show on the road, including a performance at London's Royal Albert Hall.
JOHNSON: I've had many experiences of standing on stage in front of audiences and feeling that, you know, this could be the last time. And it's quite a wonderful feeling actually - very, very intense.
COHEN: But then, something odd happened. Johnson didn't die. The doctors were stumped, so they ordered a new round of tests and determined they might just be able to remove his tumor. Last spring, Johnson underwent a major surgery that left him, he says, cancer free.
JOHNSON: My body is getting better and better, but my mind is still finding it hard to adjust to this idea that the future is once again an indefinite thing. I mean, I spent all that time believing that I had no future.
COHEN: Johnson says he hopes that future will include a tour to North America. He hasn't been to the U.S. since the 1970s. Roger Daltrey is also optimistic about what lies ahead.
DALTREY: He's got a long way to go, and he'll be a Type I diabetic for the rest of his life, but who knows? Maybe there's a part two to this record. I hope there is.
COHEN: For NPR News, I'm Alex Cohen.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TURNED 21")
DALTREY: (Singing) Caught in my mirror, the sun stares with his one crazy eye from a burning blue sky, and we walked on and on. Darling, you turned 21.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
It's been called one of the hardest jobs in the U.S. government. The Deputy Attorney General is second in command at the Justice Department, responsible for sensitive prosecutions and monitoring threats from al-Qaida and the self-proclaimed Islamic State. James Cole has had this job for four years, longer than anyone since the 1950s. Cole is leaving soon, and he sat down with NPR's justice correspondent Carrie Johnson for this exit interview.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: James Cole rushes into his office suite with an apology. A meeting at the White House ran long - par for the course.
JAMES COLE: There's a number of ways that I've described this job. Virtually everything that happens in the United States government ends up in this office, but broken.
JOHNSON: Two U.S. attorneys fight over who gets to pursue a big case? He's the referee. There's a foreign-policy debate over whether Cuban prisoners in the U.S. should receive clemency as part of a warming of relations? Cole's at the table with decision-makers.
COLE: And what you're confronted with is a large menu of unacceptable options, and you have to pick the least unacceptable option.
JOHNSON: One of the toughest calls in his four years at the Justice Department, he says, was approving subpoenas for reporters' phone records. His decision to seek data from 21 Associated Press phone lines infuriated the news media and some members of Congress when they found out about it in 2013. But Cole is hard-pressed to express regrets about taking those measures to plug a national security leak.
COLE: It was also one of the worst leaks of information that I had seen in my history in the government, so it was a very, very tough call. At the end of the day, I'd probably have to do it again.
JOHNSON: Justice Department officials met with media groups about that controversy. They say they're soon revising guidelines for how reporter records get subpoenaed in the future to give greater consideration to First Amendment concerns. A happier legacy, James Cole says, is his work to dial back tough penalties for nonviolent criminals, rather than throwing the book at everyone.
COLE: We put an end to that. We said no, no, make the punishment and the charge fit the circumstances. And if the person that's standing in front of you has a drug problem, and that's wha's driving it, deal with the drug problem. If they have a mental health problem, deal with the mental health problem. Let's not just throw people in jail as a way of trying to avoid dealing with the problems that are really present.
JOHNSON: Cole says he's confident his successor, longtime Atlanta prosecutor Sally Yates, will share those priorities and bring them to bear during the last two years of the Obama administration. Carrie Johnson, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
One of Africa's most notorious rebel groups was given a deadline to surrender by today. It didn't happen. Instead, the rebels are said to be recruiting and rearming. The deadline was put in place by the UN Security Council and regional African governments. Military approaches have failed to route this guerrilla force, and we're about to hear about one tactic that has had some success, but that faces a loss of funding early this year. NPR's Gregory Warner introduces us to the American behind getting-to-yes-style negotiations in the African bush.
GREGORY WARNER, BYLINE: I met Michael Sharp on a commuter boat crossing Lake Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Not far from the lake were labor rebel held forests, where every few weeks Sharp would walk, unarmed, to the base of a particularly fearsome rebel group called the FDLR. And there he would sit in the shade of banana trees to drink tea, practice his Swahili and listen to these rebel stories.
MICHAEL SHARP: You can always listen. You can always listen to people who want a chance to talk about how they see the world.
WARNER: Sharp was working with the Congolese Protestant Council of Churches in their Peace and Reconciliation Program.
SHARP: We try to build relationships and just interact. The more we interact, the more they trust us to turn themselves into us.
WARNER: Sharp is being a bit modest here. His church group persuaded some 1,600 fighters - that's about a quarter of the force when the program started - to put down their weapons and exit the forest that they'd occupied for two decades. Now, in a minute, I will tell you the magic words that this group used to accomplish this apparent miracle. But first, I need to make room for a story that the rebels tell about themselves.
ANNA HEDLUND: Do you hear me?
WARNER: Anna Hedlund is an anthropologist at Lund University in Sweden.
HEDLUND: Let me just fix the sound here.
WARNER: I called her on Skype because she did her field research in a remote FDLR rebel camp.
HEDLUND: It's far away from everything.
WARNER: Away from markets or farms.
HEDLUND: Yet the living conditions are really difficult. Most of them want to go back to having a normal life. But it's also difficult because many of them don't know what a normal life is or what it means, because they grew up in the forest.
WARNER: How they got to the forest is the troubling part. The original founders of the FDLR were some of those who committed the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. They were part of the Hutu militias that killed Tutsi civilians. Then, when the Tutsi army came, many Hutus were pushed out over the border from Rwanda into eastern Congo. And there, they harbored the intention to return to Rwanda and take over.
HEDLUND: They practice their language. They teach the children how to dance Rwandan dances. They have memorial Sundays where they kind of recreate the memory of Rwanda.
WARNER: Were you surprised to encounter such homesickness?
HEDLUND: Yeah. That was one of the most surprising things, actually, that they tried to prepare and to be ready for the day when they will return.
WARNER: This homesickness is what you might call the weak spot that Michael Sharp and his Congolese colleagues learned to exploit. One of those colleagues, Emmanuel Kambale, speaking French, tells me and my interpreter exactly the words that he would use to convince these former killers to go back home.
EMMANUEL KAMBALE: (Speaking French through interpreter) You, Kambale would say, you're over 50. It's too late for you to take over Rwanda, but your children are growing up unschooled in the bush.
Don't you see that your children, who is the future of Rwanda, when he goes back, he is going to be the slave of those who are there because he is illiterate.
WARNER: That's it. Those are the words, spoken over trust-building cups of tea, that have resonated with hundreds of rebels, maybe because like any diplomat or real estate agent, Kambale is aligning incentives. He's telling the rebels, well, you're in the forest standing your ground. That ground is slipping out from under you because time is against you. If you don't give up now, your children, your children's children will suffer, will be slaves. Back on the boat, Michael Sharp points out that this negotiation strategy is not only more effective and less bloody than military campaigns, but it's many times cheaper.
SHARP: This program operates right now on $12,000 a month.
WARNER: But even that shoestring budget, once supplied by the Norwegian government, had been suspended. Sharp thinks the money got re-delegated to Syria, and this commuter boat ride was actually Sharp's chance to rescue his program. While he and I were talking in the stern of the boat, the bow was occupied by VIPs from the U.S. State Department, including Special Envoy Russ Feingold, who reports directly to John Kerry. But just walking those 10 feet to bend an ex-senator's ear proved almost more intimidating to Michael Sharp than walking into the rebel-held forest.
SHARP: Fundraising isn't generally in my job description, and I'm not an expert fundraiser. So I don't really even - we'll see.
WARNER: In the end, he had more success with the warlords. He got an audience with State, but no call back and no check. The project runs out of funding in March, and hundreds of the fighters that had left the forest have now gone back in. Gregory Warner, NPR News, Nairobi.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Now, stops in Belgium and Russia, courtesy of a couple of films. They're both Oscar hopefuls. The one from Russia is "Leviathan," and the Belgian moving is "Two Days, One Night." Our critic, Bob Mondello, says both pictures tackle social issues by concentrating on family.
BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: A phone rings at the start of "Two Days, One Night," waking up Sandra with bad news about her job. She'd been sidelined by illness. Now, just as she's ready to come back to the assembly line, the Belgian factory she works at has offered its employees a choice. They can have a year-end bonus or Sandra can return to her job - their bonus, her job, their vote. Of 16 employees, 14 have voted for the bonus.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT")
MARION COTILLARD: (Speaking French).
MONDELLO: You mustn't cry, she tells herself. And there is one ray of hope. Because a foreman influenced the vote unfairly, management has scheduled a second vote on Monday. So Sandra has the rest of the weekend, two days and one night, to round up support. As she visits her coworkers at home, her dilemma, which is really their shared dilemma, is clear. In an economic downturn, everyone needs the money. Some turn her down flat. Others are more sympathetic. One burst into tears the moment Sandra broaches the subject, and begs her forgiveness for voting in his own self-interest.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (Speaking French).
MONDELLO: The awkwardness, the humiliation and the central unfairness of the position these folks have been put in is what filmmakers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne are exploring in "Two Days, One Night," a slice of pressurized, middle-class life that they've so real it feels a bit like a documentary. And that's despite the fact that, for the first time, the filmmakers are working with a major star - Marion Cotillard, who's previously played Edith Piaf and a glamorous Batman nemesis, but who, here, more or less disappears into mousey, insecure Sandra - Sandra, who is stronger than she realizes, but who is in a really tense spot for every minute of those two days, one night. The Russian film "Leviathan" is also about an individual bucking a system, but you'd be forgiven for thinking that it's really about vodka. The plot centers on a hot-tempered mechanic named Kolya who consumes enormous amounts of that most-Russian of spirits, even when things are going well. And when we meet him, things are not going well. He's about to lose his waterfront home in a land dispute with the town's crooked mayor. A hotshot lawyer buddy he's called in from Moscow has a plan involving blackmail, but the two of them are three sheets to the wind when the equally-soused mayor shows up with his goons.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LEVIATHAN")
ROMAN MADYANOV: (As Vadim, speaking Russian).
ALEKSEY SEREBRYAKOV: (As Kolya, speaking Russian).
MADYANOV: (As Vadim, speaking Russian).
MONDELLO: Threats, insults, bullying - "Leviathan" is structured as an intimate suspense story with a Job-like hero, on whom all sorts of hell will be visited by an uncaring state. But it's also a dark, social satire of a Russian society that's plagued by the same bureaucracy, corruption and pretense that were mocked by Chekhov and Gogol a century ago. Scenes that are about to turn catastrophic for Kolya often begin with flat-out comedy - a birthday picnic, for instance, where alcohol will mix bad with machismo, starts with Kolya's friends using framed photos for target practice - photos of Lenin, Brezhnev, Gorbachev. When Kolya asks if they have anyone more recent, nobody says Vladimir Putin, but the implication is clear. He's told the newer guy should ripen on the walls a bit. All this is heading to a very dark place for Kolya. When things get about as bad as they can, he drunkenly asks a local priest whether having faith could turn things around for him. The priest quotes a line from the book of Job. Can you pull in Leviathan with a fish hook? But Kolya's not in the mood for biblical riddles, and filmmakers are saving the most caustic observations about the church for later. The state, meanwhile, remains implacable, dominating a landscape of visual mastery and enormous sadness. I'm Bob Mondello.
SIEGEL: Finally, this hour, I want to take a second to say thank you to our fill-in host this week, Lourdes Garcia-Navarro or, as we call her, Lulu. This time of year, a lot of people with normal jobs take vacations, but the news goes on and so do we. And we're able to do it this week because of you. Thanks. It was great to have you in the studio this week.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO: It was absolutely great to be here. The highlight, I have to say, was seeing you in a cowboy hat. It is a good look for you, I recommend it highly.
SIEGEL: (Laughter) And where are you off to next?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I'm off to sunny Brazil. It is summer in Brazil - the southern hemisphere. I'm leaving you all in the winter wonderland.
SIEGEL: OK. We'll be listening for your reports from there, and, again, happy New Year. Thanks.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Happy New Year.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Next week, Republicans take full control of Congress. There has been a lot of assumptions about how this new shift in power will play out. NPR's Tamara Keith has been looking into how real a few pieces of this conventional wisdom are.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Item number one - in the new Congress, Republicans are going to have to show they can govern. At this point, it's been said so many times it's become an established Washington truth. Here's President Obama in his NPR interview late last month.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: They are going to be in a position in which they have to show that they can responsibly govern given that they have significant majorities in both chambers.
KEITH: And Colorado Senator-elect Cory Gardner on "Fox News Sunday" back in November.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "FOX NEWS SUNDAY")
CORY GARDNER: If Republicans don't prove that we can govern with maturity, that we can govern with competence, we'll see the same kind of results two years from now, except it'll be a way of going back in a different direction.
KEITH: He's saying Republicans could lose their majority if they don't show they can govern - or not. Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor at the conservative publication National Review.
RAMESH PONNURU: You're creating a test that you cannot pass, that requires the support of people who have an incentive for you not to pass it.
KEITH: That is if the definition of governing is passing bills the president signs into law, then, Ponnuru says, congressional Republicans shouldn't make that their goal. Instead, he says, they should do the basics, keep the government open for business and outline an agenda they'd implement with a Republican president. That, Ponnuru says, is what Democrats did when they took the majority in 2006 for President Bush's final two years in office.
PONNURU: They don't run in 2008 on the basis of the things they cooperated with President Bush to accomplish. And it's just, I think, sort of absurd to think that that's the right strategy for Republicans to employ.
KEITH: Onto the second piece of conventional wisdom - that House Democrats will be totally irrelevant with even fewer members than they had in the last Congress. Former GOP Congressman Tom Reynolds...
TOM REYNOLDS: Make no mistake about it, minority leader Pelosi would much rather be Speaker Pelosi by any condition. She is the steward of the minority in some real tough circumstances.
KEITH: But John Lawrence, former Chief of Staff to Pelosi, says hold on.
JOHN LAWRENCE: I always refer to her as the Rodney Dangerfield of politics, they get no respect. But in this particular case, the House Democrats are very salient for two reasons.
KEITH: First, when it comes to legislation where Republicans aren't united, like votes to keep the government funded, some Democratic support will inevitably be needed for passage. And second, Lawrence points to presidential vetoes. Take a bill to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, many expect the president would veto it. Republicans don't need House Democrats to get it passed.
LAWRENCE: But you can't override vetoes with only Republican votes and that means that Pelosi and the House Democrats have an ace up their sleeve. And then the House Democrats become highly, highly relevant in terms of upholding those vetoes.
KEITH: But how often will there even be vetoes to uphold? That's our final bit of conventional wisdom. President Obama has said he expects his veto pen to get a workout. But with only 54 Republican senators in the new Congress, it will be rare for a bill Obama dislikes to get the 60 votes needed to overcome procedural hurdles and make it to his desk. Tamara Keith, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Which brings us to our weekly Friday talk about politics with columnists E J Dionne of The Washington Post and the Brookings Institution and sitting in for David Brooks, in person this time, Ramesh Ponnuru of The National Review and Bloomberg View. Good to see you both and Happy New Year.
E J DIONNE: Happy New Year.
RAMESH PONNURU: Happy New Year.
SIEGEL: Let's start with the political obituary of the week. To younger listeners, he may have been Governor Andrew Cuomo and CNN anchor Chris Cuomo's father, but 20, 30 years ago, New York Governor Mario Cuomo was one of the most important Democratic politicians in the country, a fabled orator and advocate of the middle class.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
ANDREW CUOMO: The middle class - those people who work for a living because they have to, not because some psychiatrist told them it was a convenient way to fill the interval between birth and eternity.
SIEGEL: I think that would count as class warfare today. That's from the 1984 Democratic National Convention. E J, how important a figure was Cuomo?
DIONNE: Well, I think he was very important. I got to say, I have enormous affection for him despite his irascibility. I covered him for the first time when he ran for mayor of New York in 1977 and got beaten by Ed Koch. And years later, Cuomo gave a speech after he was out of office attacking anger in politics and I went up to him and I said, Governor, you are the guy who ran on the slogan put your anger to work. And he said yes, but did that guy win? You never wanted to tangle with the lawyer Mario Cuomo. But if you listen to that speech he gave in 1984, it's - there's a lot of it that rings fresh now, particularly with the struggling middle class, the squeeze on a lot of people, the problems of poverty. And the other thing he was is he was a leading, liberal, Catholic who was willing to publicly argue with the bishops about what the state's role should be on abortion. And what he said was that if we want to preserve our rights, we have to give others the same freedom even if it occasionally produces conduct that we hold to be sinful. He was an extraordinary figure who just never had it in him to run for president.
SIEGEL: Ramesh, as a conservative, what did - what do you think of Mario Cuomo and his legacy?
PONNURU: Well, I think that Cuomo's function for liberalism was to be a kind of voice in the wilderness in the '80s, but he wasn't the person who could point liberalism a way out of the wilderness. That would take Bill Clinton. If you look back at that 1984 Democratic Convention speech, it's really striking how little there is in the way of any positive proposal. Well, this is what we as liberals and Democrats think we ought to do with this country. And you really don't get that kind of forward-looking agenda until some years later with a different person and a different cast of mind.
SIEGEL: It's an ironic twist to the career of Mario Cuomo. E J, as you said, he never ran for president. In 1992, he was one of those Democratic superstars who passed on running because George H. W. Bush looked prohibitively popular, fresh from victory in Kuwait. Who could beat him? And the field was left open to the likes of Bill Clinton.
DIONNE: No, that's absolutely right. And what Clinton saw that a lot of other people didn't is President Bush could be subject to something called the business cycle, just like every other politician. And Bush's popularity was sitting at around 80 or 90 percent after the victory in the Gulf War. Cuomo didn't run I think partly for that reason. But I also think he had personal doubts about possibly himself. There was a curious humility about him. He once said I do desperately want to believe in something better than I am. That's not something you hear from many politicians which is why he was so interesting.
SIEGEL: One thing, Ramesh, that struck me even from that little clip we heard of him, he was an utterly un-cool figure. He was a hot, hot, energetic character who spoke the way politicians spoke decades and decades ago.
PONNURU: Yeah, you know, it's - I've been looking for other reasons at some of the political rhetoric of that era and a lot of it is just much hotter than what we have today. And people look grimmer as they deliver their rhetoric whereas now everybody sort of feels somebody's an image consultant - you got to smile, you got to smile more.
SIEGEL: Well, let's turn now to the future. At the mention of President George H. W. Bush brings us around to his son, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush who has resigned from all the corporate boards he's on, evidently cleaning himself up for national political consumption. As he acknowledged a couple of weeks ago, he is very seriously considering a run for president.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
JEB BUSH: This is a really serious and a life-changing decision, and I'm going to take my time. But I realize that at some point, end of this year, early next year, I'll make a decision to really pursue this or to stand down.
SIEGEL: Ramesh, first of all, do you think that that decision really hasn't been made yet, and second, is Jeb Bush the answer to the Republicans' questions?
PONNURU: Well, I think that Jeb Bush could still say no. He has still left that option open to him. But I think that the resignations from these boards is the clearest sign that he is leaning towards a run. And if he does run, I think he's going to be a very formidable candidate and a lot of Republican officials, a lot of Republican money, people are going to be very supportive of him.
SIEGEL: E J?
DIONNE: What better way is there to start 2015 than to talk about 2016? - which is what we're going to be doing all year. I think, first of all, the resignations are interesting because when this campaign happens, it sure sounds like Jeb Bush is going to run. I think one of the criticisms of him is going to be wait a minute, he's got this education reform position but some of these boards he's served on were connected to, you know, a business that really likes the idea of privatization of various education functions. So I think he's tried to push that away. It's a very odd thing. He's a very conservative person when you look at his record, and yet, it shows us where the party has gone. Just because he is for some kind of immigration reform and favors the Common Core on the education standards, that makes him some kind of left winger in the Republican circle.
SIEGEL: Ramesh, what do you think about that? Are those really disqualifying positions or is Jeb Bush who was - I gather, I've been told - was considered the gold standard of conservatism in Florida politics. Will he be acceptable to a broad part of the party?
PONNURU: I'm a conservative who disagrees with Jeb Bush on both immigration and education. But I don't believe that those issues are going to keep him from getting the nomination. The last two nominees for the Republican Party for president have been John McCain, who was for the kinds of immigration reforms that Jeb Bush is for, and Mitt Romney, who was also thought to be vulnerable from the right. He's going to get support from the center and the left of the Republican Party. And that might be enough to get him the nomination.
DIONNE: There isn't much of a left left in the Republican Party, which I think is his biggest problem.
PONNURU: It's a relative term, E J.
SIEGEL: The humorist Andy Borowitz put this out today on his Borowitz Report blog from The New Yorker. It said and in the strongest sign to date that he intends to seek the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush has officially resigned his position as George W. Bushâs brother. Is it a plus or a minus to be the brother of President George W. Bush in 2016 do you think?
PONNURU: Well, it's one of the reasons he has the high national name identification he has, one of the reasons he has this network of donors all across the country, so that's a big plus. On the minus side, he is going to have to distance himself from the George W. Bush administration in way that other Republican candidates wouldn't have to. And he can't run as effectively a kind of turn the page campaign.
SIEGEL: Ramesh Ponnuru, E J Dionne, thanks to both of you. And again, Happy New Year.
DIONNE: Thank you.
PONNURU: You're welcome.
DIONNE: And to you, too.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
We have arrived. It's the future - or one version of the future imagined in 1989.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BACK TO THE FUTURE 2")
CHRISTOPHER LLOYD: (As Dr. Emmett Brown) Marty, you've got to come back with me.
MICHAEL J. FOX: (As Marty McFly) Where?
>>LLOYD (As Dr. Emmett Brown) Back to the future.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: "Back To The Future 2," part of the '80s sci-fi trilogy starring Michael J. Fox, finds the characters Doc and Marty McFly traveling in a flying car to the year 2015.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BACK TO THE FUTURE 2")
LLOYD: (As Dr. Emmett Brown) At 4:29 p.m. on Wednesday, October 21, 2015.
FOX: (As Marty McFly) 2015? We were in the future.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Well, that exact date is still in the future, but we thought it would be fun to take a look at how much the movie got right in its version of 2015.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And what was a little off. First, flying cars...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BACK TO THE FUTURE 2")
LLOYD: (As Dr. Emmett Brown) Where we're going we don't need roads.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Not quite standard issue as predicted, but the idea may not be so far off. A company called AeroMobile successfully tested a two-seater car-airplane hybrid last year.
SIEGEL: And speaking of flying, yes, we do have hoverboards. They cost $10,000, but the Hendo hoverboard company has created a working model that looks surprisingly similar to the one in the movie, minus the bright pink paint.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Speaking of, we can't seem to escape the '80s neon fashion craze. Even that's still around today. But this trend hasn't caught on.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BACK TO THE FUTURE 2")
LLOYD: (As Dr. Emmett Brown) All kids in the future wear their pants inside-out.
SIEGEL: No, the kids don't wear their pants inside-out, at least not on purpose. But there was another thing Marty McFly put on in the movie that will apparently be a reality this year.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BACK TO THE FUTURE 2")
FOX: (As Marty McFly) Power laces, all right.
SIEGEL: Power shoelaces - it's not clear exactly when they'll be ready, but Nike is working on the concept.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And while the film did forecast a clunkier version of Google Glass, there are no smartphones to be seen. But the movie shows fax machines, which are still a thing - well, kind of.
SIEGEL: The McFly kitchen of the future features a food rehydrator to instantly prepare a pizza.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, BACK TO THE FUTURE 2")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: (As food rehydrator) Lithium mode on.
SIEGEL: But in the real 2015, there is 3D-printed pizza technology. This native New Yorker has yet to try it though.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BACK TO THE FUTURE 2")
LLOYD: (As Dr. Emmett Brown) Great Scott.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And Robert, thankfully in the real 2015, we're not on our 19th sequel of the hologram "Jaws." But "Back To The Future 2" did do well with its prediction of drones. They didn't call them that in the movie, but in the film, a little flying robot walks a dog and also takes photos for USA Today.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BACK TO THE FUTURE 2")
FOX: (As Marty McFly) Oh, this is heavy.
SIEGEL: Wait Lulu, there were still newspapers in that version of the future and gladly there still are. And one more thing, the real 2015 is only a couple of days old. And with Jon Lester recently traded to Chicago, what seemed like a low-blow gag in the movie...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BACK TO THE FUTURE 2")
FOX: (As Marty McFly) Wait a minute - Cubs win World Series.
SIEGEL: Hey, it could happen.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BACK TO THE FUTURE 2")
FOX: (As Marty McFly) Against Miami?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Who knows what the future holds?
(SOUNDBITE OF BACK TO THE FUTURE THEME SONG)
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
There are thousands of memorials, monuments and markers in Washington, D.C. They're dedicated to historical figures and the ideals they upheld and inspired. But in the neighborhood of Chevy Chase, there's a fountain honoring a man whose beliefs don't stand the test of time, and some residents want that fountain renamed. NPR's Eleanor Klibanoff reports.
ELEANOR KLIBANOFF, BYLINE: Chevy Chase is one of the wealthiest areas in the country. The population is 87 percent white. To enter or exit, you have to drive around a busy traffic circle that separates Washington, D.C. and Maryland. Most drivers ignore the large fountain in the middle.
GARY THOMPSON: Francis Griffith Newlands, Senator from Nevada - his statesmanship held true regard for the interest of all men.
KLIBANOFF: The engraving on the side of the fountain is read with derision by Gary Thompson, a Chevy Chase neighborhood commissioner.
THOMPSON: It's laughable.
KLIBANOFF: Newlands once wrote, and I'm quoting here, quote, "blacks are a race of children requiring guidance, industrial training and development of self-control. As late as 1912, he proposed repealing the 15th Amendment, the one that extended the vote to all men regardless of skin color. Thompson is leading the charge to get Newlands fountain renamed.
THOMPSON: His views on race weren't just part of the times like, you know, you might say about a local shopkeeper. This guy was the times.
KLIBANOFF: Newlands did more than just write racist tracks and try to repeal constitutional amendments. And active businessman, he also founded Chevy Chase, creating the model for our modern suburbs. Back in his home state of Nevada, he was seen as the driving force behind getting water to the dry western states.
REBECCA MAYDAK: The fountain was built for him because he was one of the fathers of modern irrigation versus a statue.
KLIBANOFF: Rebecca Maydak, another neighborhood commissioner, doesn't want Newlands to be seen as one-dimensional.
MAYDAK: This is our history. George Washington's administration had a policy to, quote, "civilize the Native Americans." It almost led to the annihilation of the Native Americans. So do we now go back and change everything named George Washington?
KLIBANOFF: It won't be easy to rename the fountain. It sits on federal land maintained by the National Park Service and it's on the National Register of Historic Places. Tom Russell is a law professor who knows what it takes to get a name changed. In 2010, he succeeded in getting the University of Texas to rename a building that honored the founder of the Ku Klux Klan in Florida.
TOM RUSSELL: Anytime someone comes along and wants to rename a building because somebody has had a bad idea or sputtered bad thoughts, I actually think that there ought to be some bad acts - criminal acts, terroristic acts.
KLIBANOFF: The building at the University of Texas was named for William Simkins, a longtime law professor who openly bragged about attacking African-Americans and recommended his students do the same. That's the kind of activity that earns a name change, says Russell.
RUSSELL: On the other hand, just because your name goes on a fountain once doesn't mean that your name gets to stay on the fountain.
KLIBANOFF: As Russell points out, that's what chisels are for. Eleanor Klibanoff, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
For the second time this week, a ship carrying hundreds of migrants from the Middle East was abandoned at sea by its crew and taken to shore in Italy. On Wednesday it was the Blue Sky M with around 800 migrants aboard, mostly from Syria. Today the ship was the Ezadeen, said to have up to 450 people on board. What's behind the smugglers' practice of jumping ship in the Mediterranean using relatively large ships? And what becomes of these migrants once they're ashore? These are questions that we're going to put now to Carlotta Sami. She's a spokesperson for the United Nations Refugee Agency. And we've reached her outside of Rome. Welcome to the program.
CARLOTTA SAMI: Thank you very much.
SIEGEL: Is this now becoming routine - a cargo ship 70, 80 meters long full of people seeking refuge in Europe is abandoned by its crew somewhere near land?
SAMI: Well, since we are entering the fourth year of the war in Syria and the Italian government's rescue operation at the Mediterranean was over since the first of November, hundreds, if not thousands, of Syrians in particular are trying any way to escape from the tragic war they are suffering. And this is what smugglers are providing to them - to pay up to $7,000 to leave from Turkey on a very old cargo and to stay for many days in the Mediterranean trying to launch SOS and to be rescued by somebody because they are left alone, adrift into the sea.
SIEGEL: So you're saying that these migrants may very well know when they pay a lot of money for passage on these cargo ships - old ships, typically -that the crew is going to leave them near a shore and jump ship?
SAMI: They know very well. We talked with the refugees, with Syrians in particular, (inaudible) many times. They know this is like risking really to die in a few hours, but they have no other choice. Otherwise, they would not put their lives and daughter's and son's lives at risk. But when they arrive - when they arrive and we met them so many times, they say they could never imagine this would have been so awful. It was the night where they say this is like dying. It's like even worse than staying under the bombs, you know? It's really terrible. They stay for many days, completely abandoned. Many times also clashes erupt into the boat. Smugglers leave the boats alone without any electronical equipment functioning on board, and so they leave a big boat with 400, 600, up to 800 people.
SIEGEL: Now, can you explain - you said this is since the Italian program - this was their Mare Nostrum, Our Sea program - ended. What's the significance of the Italians discontinuing Mare Nostrum?
SAMI: Well, you know, the Italian Mare Nostrum operation was really unique in the sense that it was searching for boats in distress, and at the same time, also by using a submarine, was also able to arrest hundreds, in particular more than 300 smugglers, in one year. So it was really peculiar. And it helped to save 150,000 refugees and migrants in one year. Now that it has been discontinued and that the numbers are the same, it is a demonstration that the operation was not attracting anybody, but it is the war that is pushing an increasing number of people to escape from Syria and now even from Iraq.
SIEGEL: Well, just in the past couple of days, more than a thousand migrants - we believe mostly from Syria - have come ashore in Italy. What are their chances of remaining either in Italy or somewhere within the European Union?
SAMI: They know very well that Italy is facing a difficult situation, especially in terms of job markets and the possibility to, you know, to rebuild their life, so their aim is to go and reach Sweden and Germany in particular.
SIEGEL: But do any of these people get sent back and told no, you don't have papers to arrive in Europe or to live in Germany?
SAMI: No, of course the Syrians are not sent back. When they apply for asylum (inaudible) is always, I mean, accepted because of course the situation in Syria is so terrible that the refugee status is recognized to all of them.
SIEGEL: These ships, the migrants aboard them, they're entire families - men, women, children?
SAMI: Yes. Predominantly families with children. Exactly.
SIEGEL: So a family of, say, four people, the price that they might have paid for passage...
SAMI: Yeah.
SIEGEL: ...Could be very considerable - tens of thousands of dollars possibly.
SAMI: It's something what we say is that they - this are the last money they have. Many times this is people that were having - I mean, just like us - were having small shops, kind of a normal job, and they tried this as the last chance for their lives, you know?
SIEGEL: Ms. Sami, thank you very much for talking with us today.
SAMI: You're welcome. It was a pleasure.
SIEGEL: Carlotta Sami spoke with us from just outside Rome. She's a spokesperson for the United Nations Refugee Agency.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO: The hundreds of migrants aboard those abandoned ships this week have highlighted the plight of people fleeing Syria's civil war for Europe. Our last guest mentioned Germany and Sweden as the main destinations. And we're going to hear about another country where tens of thousands of Syrians live - Russia. The two countries have had close political ties for decades, but Syrians in Russia have trouble getting legal status and face exploitation. Joanna Kakissis reports it's got even tougher for them since the war began back home.
JOANNA KAKISSIS, BYLINE: Drive 21 miles east of Moscow and you'll find Noginsk, a no-frills city landscaped by bland apartment blocks and factories - a textile hub. For years, this was a land of opportunity for Syrians created amid the long, close relationship between Moscow and Damascus.
I meet Yasser, a 25-year-old tailor from the northwestern city of Aleppo, in his cramped apartment. He and his father moved to Noginsk six years ago, recruited by one of the many Syrian-run clothing factories in the Moscow area. Yasser doesn't want his last name used for fear his bosses might retaliate for what he says. The deal was the company would take care of his airfare and visa and pay him about $700 a month. It all went well until 2011 when the Syrian civil war began.
YASSER: (Through interpreter) After the war began, everything started to change. Our bosses stopped paying us on time. They paid us less than we were promised and they said if we didn't like it, we could go back to Syria.
KAKISSIS: But of course it was too dangerous to go back. Yasser's temporary work visa expired. Local police shake him down nearly every day.
YASSER: (Through interpreter) They say, well, you have no papers, so pay 500 or 1,000 rubles and we won't arrest you. If I don't want to pay, they actually look in my pockets for the money. If I don't have the money, they drive me out of town to the middle of nowhere and leave me there.
KAKISSIS: Yasser's former boss, Amal al-Naimi, another Syrian from Aleppo, says he's heard Russian police are extorting money from his workers.
AMAL AL-NAIMI: (Through interpreter) We have tried talking to the police chief. We told him things can't continue like this, but nothing changes.
KAKISSIS: We meet at the restaurant of a Moscow hotel where Syrian businessmen strike deals as a young Russian woman bellydances under a glistening disco ball. Al-Naimi's middle-aged, an overcoat slung over the shoulders of his suit. He's worked in Russia for more than 20 years, part of a wave of Syrians who opened businesses here after the fall of the Soviet Union. He denies he's underpaid or abandoned his workers, and says it's the Russians who started cracking down on visas when the civil war began.
AL-NAIMI: (Through interpreter) If you get caught working without papers, you're deported and you have to pay huge fines. My business is 100 percent according the law.
KAKISSIS: The next day, we visit his factory, located in a fenced-in compound with old tires and rusted cars. The manager, another Syrian from Aleppo, leads us inside. Next to piles of sweaters embroidered with figures of reindeer, young men hunch over sewing machines. Many, like 22-year-old Mohammed Nasser, are also from Aleppo and came to Russia after the war began.
MOHAMMED NASSER: (Through interpreter) I really had no choice, he says, my house was destroyed and there was no work.
KAKISSIS: He can't go home but there's virtually no chance he will receive asylum in Russia, says Svetlana Gannuskina, a prominent Russian activist for refugees.
SVETLANA GANNUSKINA: (Through interpreter) The doors are actually closed for these refugees even though the borders are open. They just have no hope of receiving any legal status here. They don't understand that this is going to happen. That's why Russia's sort of a trap for them.
KAKISSIS: Gannuskina estimates there are 10 to 20,000 Syrians in Russia who are undocumented but can't go home. The UN refugee office in Russia says none has been granted asylum this year, including Yasser, the young tailor we met earlier. He now works at another Syrian clothing factory and is trying to renew his expired visa. His mother and brothers have also come from Aleppo to escape the war.
YASSER: (Through interpreter) He says he dreams about moving to Western Europe, but he barely has enough money to survive in Russia.
KAKISSIS: For NPR News, I'm Joanna Kakissis.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That story was reported with help from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO: For more than six decades, one fact about the U.S. southern border has been remarkably consistent - migrants caught crossing it were more often from Mexico than anywhere else in the world. But that has now changed, according to the Pew Research Center. In 2014, for the first time on record, more non-Mexicans were caught than Mexicans. We're talking 30,000 more. And here to talk about that shift and what's behind it is Jeffrey Passel, a Pew senior demographer and one of the authors of the recent study. Thank you so much for joining us.
JEFFREY PASSEL: I am glad to be with you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So, I mean, this is a pretty important shift. It's important to note, of course, that Mexicans still make up the biggest percentage of illegal immigrants actually in the U.S. That said, less of them than ever are coming over the border. Why?
PASSEL: Well, the U.S. economy isn't generating the kinds of jobs that have attracted Mexicans in the past. The increase in enforcement along the border has made it both more dangerous and much more expensive for Mexicans to get in. And then on the Mexican side, things are doing better in the Mexican economy. As a result of historic drops in fertility, there are actually fewer Mexicans in the prime migrating ages. And then in northern Mexico, the drug cartels have made it very dangerous for Mexicans to cross towards the border. So it's really a combination of factors that have come together.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: In your study, you note that we're seeing a lot of Central Americans coming over instead. Of course, this year we saw the crisis with unaccompanied migrant children from that region. Was that the reason for the spike in Central Americans?
PASSEL: That was only part of it. The Central Americans have been increasing in the unauthorized population. The unaccompanied minors are a part of this increase, but actually a rather small part. It's been a multi-year trend of about four or five years where the numbers have just been going up steadily.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: One of the things that really caught my eye though was how the number of non-Hispanics has jumped. Where are we seeing people coming from outside of this region?
PASSEL: Well, in terms of the unauthorized population, we're seeing increasing numbers from India, increasing numbers from China - are the two major sources in Asia. But we've seen small increases in the unauthorized population from basically all parts of the world, really, except Mexico.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what do you think is so important about the shift? What is it saying about illegal immigration and where people are coming from?
PASSEL: Well, the fact that the Mexican unauthorized population has dropped and that the number of people trying to sneak in across the southern border are at historic lows suggest that there has been a fundamental shift, and that enforcement of the border seems to be working in that the numbers have gone down quite a bit. Apprehensions at the border of Mexicans were about 1.6 million in 2000. And this past year, it was 225,000. And the number of Mexican unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. has continued to go down. The rhetoric around unauthorized immigration doesn't seem to have changed, yet the patterns have altered dramatically just within the last five years.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Jeffrey Passel is a Pew Research Center senior demographer. Thank you so much for joining us.
PASSEL: You're welcome.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO: The flu season has already begun, and this year it could be a particularly bad one. Flu is already at epidemic levels according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So for a better sense of what this all means, and what it means for you in particular, we turn now to our science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce. Welcome to the studio.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: Thanks.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Flu seasons are often hard to predict. Why do experts think this one could be so severe?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Well, there's a couple of things that have them worried. For one thing, the most common flu virus out there in the U.S. causing disease right now is what's called H3N2. This particular flu virus has been associated with more severe seasons in the past. We saw one like this a couple of years ago, and that was a moderately severe season. So by severe what they mean is more illness when people get the flu and also more deaths and more hospitalizations. Another thing is that a lot of the H3N2 that's out there is a little bit different from the virus component in the vaccine that's supposed to protect against it. That means the vaccine may not offer as much protection as public health officials had wanted.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, this is something that really interests me. I mean, how do they choose the vaccine? How do they find out what they're going to put in these vaccines so that people can be protected?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Flu vaccine formulation is a little bit of a guessing game, so they need time to make millions of doses of vaccine. And that means months in advance, experts have to decide what's going to go in it. Basically, they look at what's circulating out there and pick what they think. But the trouble is, between their recommendation and the actual flu season, the viruses can change, and that's what happened here.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So it's a bit of a guessing game. But how dangerous is this particular strain?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Well, CDC officials say it's too soon to tell at this point in the season. They'll have to wait until the season is over. But in general, it's good to remember that flu can be a deadly disease. Thousands of people die from flu every year. It's especially dangerous for young people under the age of five, as well as older people over 65, plus pregnant women and anyone with an underlying medical condition like heart disease, asthma, diabetes.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So people listening to this might think, all right, if the vaccine isn't going to protect me, then I shouldn't get vaccinated. Should they?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Well, the CDC says you should. And the reason is the vaccine will still offer some protection against the main flu strain. Plus, the vaccine includes other components that offer good protection against other flu strains that are out there causing disease. Basically, the CDC wants everyone over the age of six months to get vaccinated, but in reality, less than half of those people do.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Beside vaccination, what else can people do though?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Well, if you're in one of those high-risk groups and you have symptoms of flu - so things like cough, fever, sore throat - call your doctor quickly. Go get evaluated so that you can get some treatment, because the antiviral drugs work best if they're given early, like the first two days after the symptoms start.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Thank you so much. That's NPR's science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO: We're expecting some changes to the country's energy policy as Republicans take control of the House and Senate. They want to approve the Keystone XL pipeline and to delay or derail the Obama administration's clean air proposals. But there is potential for compromise with hydropower. Dan Boyce with member station KUNC reports.
DAN BOYCE, BYLINE: In a tiny shack nestled in the rugged peaks of southwestern Colorado, you can hear the sound of hydropower's future. It's not construction crews building some behemoth new dam, it's this...
(SOUNDBITE OF GENERATOR)
BOYCE: A generator no bigger than a wheelbarrow, pulling in water from a mountain stream, making enough electricity to run 10 homes. And fans of this little generator say it helped change the course of hydro-history.
BEVERLY RICH: Come on, really? This little, tiny thing is causing all of this?
BOYCE: That's Beverly Rich.
RICH: And I am chairman of the San Juan County Historical Society.
BOYCE: Her society has been taking care of this historic mill site near the town of Silverton for about 15 years. Along with the building came the mill's water source, a pipeline the mill workers used to process precious metals like gold and silver.
RICH: At that time, we kept thinking, gee, there really ought to be a way that we can use that water.
BOYCE: So they started walking through the federal licensing process required to install a power generator.
RICH: And had no idea how really onerous it is for really tiny, tiny, little projects.
BOYCE: Forcing them to jump through the same hoops you'd have to to build another Hoover Dam - not exaggerating. That was the case for a lot of projects trying to generate electricity from water. That is...
(SOUNDBITE OF WATERFALL)
BOYCE: ...Until August of 2013.
ED WHITFIELD: The other bill under consideration today is hydropower legislation.
BOYCE: Advocates of small hydropower projects worked up a pair of bills for Congress, and the mill project in Silverton was a poster child. This legislation streamlined the licensing process for small hydro, cutting it down from years to as little as 60 days. For lawmakers on the right, the legislation shrinks federal bureaucracy. And an energy analyst Cameron Brooks says on the left, it means a win for renewable energy without building new dams on America's rivers.
CAMERON BROOKS: I think the days of megaprojects of hydropower are gone.
BOYCE: In fact, the big hydro news out of Washington State this year was the world's largest dam removal - the Elwha Dam on the Olympic Peninsula. So the hydropower industry is focusing more on smaller, noncontroversial projects like that tiny generator in Silverton and adding projects onto already existing dams that currently don't power generators. Hydropower consultant Kurt Johnson says if all of these dams in the U.S. were electrified...
KURT JOHNSON: ...That would create enough power for about 4 million American homes.
BOYCE: Or about as much energy as from a dozen large coal-fired power plants. Johnson applauds the hydropower bills passed by Congress. Still, he thinks it could go even further, describing the bills as a kitchen knife gently cutting the government's red tape.
JOHNSON: We need another round of legislation, perhaps to get a machete and further clear out some of those regulatory barriers.
BOYCE: Hydropower legislation will likely make a reappearance. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski is set to be the new chair of the Senate Energy Committee. She's on record calling hydropower an underdeveloped resource, saying more hydro could support economic growth and create jobs. It's an idea both sides of the aisle may get behind again. For NPR News, I'm Dan Boyce in Denver.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: This story comes to us from Inside Energy, a public media collaboration focusing on America's energy issues.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO: Tunisia's uprising that began in 2010 ousted a dictator and set the country on a new democratic course, but emblems of its history took a beating along the way, especially in Medina, a section of the capital, Tunis. NPR's Leila Fadel sent this story on efforts to bring new life to a city which dates back 13 centuries.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: The tinkering of the coppersmith's designing their plates.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FADEL: Carpenters restoring old doors.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FADEL: And people streaming through the cobblestone streets of Tunis' old Medina district to shop in the market or tour the 700 monuments, fountains and courtyard homes, tracing Tunisia's history. These are the sounds of the old city. The area tells a tale of opulent empires and dynasties of the past, but it's also got a reputation for seediness at night, when the stores are closed and the streets empty. It's something historians, architects and lovers of the Medina are trying to change, to encourage young, moneyed Tunisians to move in and restore neglected buildings to their past glory.
LEILA BEN GACEM: They lived here for 300 years.
FADEL: Leila Ben Gacem borrowed money to buy a beautiful courtyard home a few years ago. She spent four years restoring it, and now it's a boutique hotel called Dar al Gacem.
GACEM: We, of course, we did not want to change anything from the original architecture.
FADEL: But she's having a hard time convincing others to follow suit.
GACEM: I think logistically - I call friends and they're like, there's no parking. It's not safe (laughter). It's not clean.
FADEL: Leila works for the Association to Safeguard the Medina. She's focused on documenting and advocating for craft makers in the old city, which is now a district of greater Tunis.
GACEM: The Medina is a melting pot throughout the years.
FADEL: But after the revolution, which started just over four years ago, a bad economy is driving craft makers out of the area.
ADNEN EL GHALI: (Foreign language spoken).
FADEL: Adnen El Ghali, who's also with the preservation group, leads me through old archways and points out hidden palaces. Their large, wooden doors have graceful geometric patterns made with nails. But, he says, illegal construction is damaging the buildings and city officials are too cowed, after four years of popular revolt, to enforce the rules.
EL GHALI: Before the revolution, the power was so authoritarian that, after, local authority were afraid. They're always afraid that people say, well, you use violence or are not respecting my freedom.
FADEL: From the rooftop of one historic home, the old city comes into sharp focus. Mosques dot the landscape, and the large wooden doors are elegant passages to mansions from another time. Leila Fadel, NPR News.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Facing the end of life is never easy, but it can be even harder for people in remote, rural areas. One doctor here in California is struggling to care for such patients in their own homes. To make that work, he's turning to the entrepreneur model for a new kind of start up. April Dembosky of KQED explains.
APRIL DEMBOSKY: Dr. Michael Fratkin is getting a ride to work today.
MARK HARRIS: Clear prop. My name is Mark Harris. I'll be your pilot today.
DEMBOSKY: They buckle into this Cessna 182 named Thumper. It takes off from a tiny airport in Eureka, California, 300 miles north of San Francisco. It's a 30 minute flight from here to the Native American reservation in the Hoopa Valley, where Fratkin's going to visit a patient dying of liver cancer.
MICHAEL FRATKIN: A good number of patients in my practice are cared for in communities that have no access to any hospice services.
DEMBOSKY: Fratkin's here to see a man named Paul James. Everybody calls him Pop. It's a visit his wife Cessie has been waiting for.
CESSIE ABBOTT: Doctor Fratkin has kind of been my angel to me, because he gets Pop to open up where he don't open up to me. Then I get to hear how he feels when he doesn't let me know, because he's trying to be strong for us I think.
DEMBOSKY: Paul and Cessie know he's dying, but it's hard for them to talk to each other about it. Cessie tells Fratkin that the pain in Paul's belly has been getting worse.
ABBOTT: He's like moaning in his sleep now.
FRATKIN: Have you ever taken morphine tablets?
ABBOTT: It don't work now.
DEMBOSKY: This is what palliative medicine doctors do - tweak meds to better address pain, nausea, breathlessness. They also try to have frank conversations with patients about death. Fratkin believes there should be a spiritual component of this discussion, too. Cessie says she's been hearing Paul praying when he's alone. Fratkin asks him to light some Indian root and say a prayer now.
PAUL JAMES: Great spirit, that created this earth and brought all of our people here...
DEMBOSKY: By the time Fratkin flies back from the Hoopa Valley, he's spent half a day with one patient. This is something the hospital in Eureka just can't afford for him to do. Fratkin says he's under constant pressure to see patient after patient to meet the hospital's billing quotas.
FRATKIN: It's very hard for one doctor to manage the complexity of each of these individual patients and to crank it out in any way that generates productive revenue.
DEMBOSKY: Fratkin's convinced he can't provide this kind of palliative care within the healthcare system. So he quit and is launching a startup.
FRATKIN: I had to sort out an out-of-the-box solution.
DEMBOSKY: His idea is he'll have no office, no clinic. He wants to put those overhead costs into hiring a team of people who can travel to see patients at home. When time is short, he plans to use videoconferencing.
FRATKIN: So that we're staying on top of their needs and not burdening them with the need to come to the office.
DEMBOSKY: The key challenge is financing his big idea. Government programs like Medicare and Medicaid don't pay for video sessions from home, and they pay poorly for home visits. Fratkin's solution so far is a crowdfunding campaign. He's looking for foundation money, and he's even hoping some of his patients will pay out-of-pocket for his services.
Back at the Eureka airport, Fratkin hops into his blue Prius and drives 20 minutes north to see his next patient. Mary Maloney is dying of esophageal cancer. She tried chemo for a while, but it made her feel awful. Fratkin was the one who told her it was OK to stop.
MARY MALONEY: I mean, I love life. I don't want to let it go. But I don't know if I'm willing enough to put myself through all the things I would have to put myself through.
DEMBOSKY: About a month after Fratkin's visit to the Hoopa Valley, Paul James passed away. Fratkin hopes to provide the same relief and respect at the end of life to all of his patients. Like his young Silicon Valley counterparts, Fratkin thinks his start-up will change the world. He's also up against similar odds. Most startups don't succeed. For NPR News, I'm April Dembosky in Eureka, California.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
For any music critic that released a best of 2014 list before December, they found themselves scrambling to add this one. It's by D'Angelo from an album called "Black Messiah." And a few weeks ago, it was one of the sneakiest, stealthiest releases of all time. Nobody saw it coming. We originally asked Stephen Thompson from NPR Music to come talk about the albums he's most looking forward to this year, 2015, but it seems only appropriate that we start with one of the final releases from 2014. Stephen, welcome.
STEPHEN THOMPSON, BYLINE: Hey, thank you for having me.
RATH: So this D'Angelo album has an interesting story behind it because it was supposed to be one of 2015's releases you were anticipating.
THOMPSON: Yeah, I mean, we've been anticipating it for something like 15 years.
RATH: Yeah.
THOMPSON: And then it drops after we're done with all of our year-end coverage. And it's - not only is it oh, it's one more record we have to consider, but it is this massive expanse of a record. It's this very full-blooded kind of mysterious album. And so as we're thinking about 2015, we're still left scrambling to unpack 2014.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SUGAH DADDY")
RATH: It's weird. It's the album that a lot of us have been waiting for for a long time. But isn't it kind of weird to sort of slip it in there almost. It could be overlooked - well, not though.
THOMPSON: It's weird, like...
(LAUGHTER)
THOMPSON: No, this record is not overlooked. I don't think there's too much danger of that. But it is weird when these records come out with no warning. And sometimes if they don't hit the right nerve, they can be very, very quickly forgotten. I mean, everybody forgot that Thom Yorke from Radiohead put out a solo record in the middle of last year, just 'cause it didn't connect with anybody. And then it was gone as quickly as it came.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SUGAH DADDY")
RATH: That song is "Sugah Daddy" from the new D'Angelo album "Black Messiah." Now, let's go back to what we'd planned on doing. Let's talk about some of the big albums you're looking forward to in this new year.
THOMPSON: Yeah, well, one of the first records I'm incredibly excited about in 2015 is this record called "Strangers To Ourselves" from the band Modest Mouse that comes out in March.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LAMPSHADES ON FIRE")
MODEST MOUSE: (Singing) Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh-duh-dah. We’re all goin’, we’re all goin’. Well, the lampshade’s on fire when the lights go out. The room lit up and we ran about. Well, this is what I really call a party now. Packed up our cars, moved to the next town.
RATH: Now, Modest Mouse has been going for a while, but they still sound fresh.
THOMPSON: Yeah, and this is their first new record in eight years, their first new studio record of all new material. And, I mean, it's not quite as long a gap as the D'Angelo record, but still, you know, our cultural memory is so short nowadays, it's nice to see another artist pick up exactly where it left off. I mean, this is just as jittery and propulsive and nervous and weird as the best Modest Mouse stuff. So I heard this song "Lampshades On Fire" they we're hearing now, and I'm just thrilled. I can't wait to hear the whole record.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LAMPSHADES ON FIRE")
MODEST MOUSE: (Singing) Ah, this one's done so where to now? Our eyes light up, we have no shame at all. Well, you all know what I'm talkin’ about. The room lights up, well, we're still dancing around. We're havin’ fun, havin’ some for now.
RATH: That's Modest Mouse with the song "Lampshades On Fire." It's taken from their new album "Strangers To Ourselves," which comes out on March 3. What do you got next for us, Stephen?
THOMPSON: Well, an English singer named Laura Marling.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SHORT MOVIE")
LAURA MARLING: (Singing) I'm paying for my mistake. That's OK. I know when I will pull in.
THOMPSON: She's still not yet 25 years old and this is her fifth album. She started recording when she was like 16. Her last record, "Once I Was An Eagle," was one of my favorite albums of 2013. And I love the way album after album she continues to get more aggressive, more aggressive in her tone, more aggressive in her sound. She started out as this very soft folk singer and now she's just this destroyer of worlds. And I just absolutely love her. This record is called "Short Movie." It comes out March 24. And it's electric. She's not usually electric. But it is electric in every way.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SHORT MOVIE")
MARLING: (Singing) I got up in the world today, wondered who it was I could save. Who do you think you are? Just a girl that can play guitar.
RATH: Again, that's Laura Marling. That's the title track to her forthcoming album "Short Movie." I'm talking with Stephen Thompson from NPR Music about some of the albums he's looking forward to in the new year. Stephen, what else you got?
THOMPSON: Well, I've got a band from New Jersey called Screaming Females. They've been around for about 10 years. This is their sixth record called "Rose Mountain." And it comes out in February.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "EMPTY HEAD")
SCREAMING FEMALES: (Singing) You went and put salt in my drink. Now I’m cross. You got nothing to say. You give me the gun and I think I’m a mess, and I need you to stay.
THOMPSON: Their lead singer Marissa Paternoster is this very, very tiny woman. We had her play a set at the tiny desk in the NPR offices a few years ago. And she's a powerhouse with a voice, you know, just like a hundred times the size of her physical presence. And what's interesting to me about this record - it's very slick and massive. It's clearly designed to be this shot across the bow where like everybody is going to know about this band in 2015.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "EMPTY HEAD")
SCREAMING FEMALES: (Singing) Sit outside from this ring system, cover me in dust where magic lies with a fool’s wisdom just below the cross.
RATH: Just some great rock 'n roll - reminds me of a lot of great female bands that have this - they can be sort of rough and smooth at the same time.
THOMPSON: I think rough and smooth is a perfect way to describe it. It still sounds like the band that fans know, but it's very slicked up and polished to be like a radio anthem.
RATH: That is the awesome Screaming Females. Their new album comes out on February 24. It'll be called "Rose Mountain." And that song we heard is "Empty Head." Stephen, we have time for just one more. You got a lot to choose from though.
THOMPSON: God, there are so many. I mean, there's a new Dan Deacon, Decemberists, Belle and Sebastian, Sleater-Kinney. I mean, there are all these amazing bands putting out records in the beginning of 2015. The one that I thought I would highlight is a band from New York - this really charismatic band called The Lone Bellow.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THEN CAME THE MORNING")
THE LONE BELLOW: (Singing) Then came the morning.
THOMPSON: Their sound to me, particularly this song, is just right out of like the Van Morrison playbook. It's just right down the middle, hits this perfect sweet spot. The album and the song are called "Then Came The Morning.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THEN CAME THE MORNING")
THE LONE BELLOW: (Singing) Like a flood from the storm that you cut from my heart. Take the dawn with you when you leave. Wash my hands of all this broken heave. Never forget what you thought you'd never be.
RATH: Nice, big sound - definitely a retro feel there, too.
THOMPSON: Yeah, it could be from a bunch of different eras, and I always love that. I mean, it's a timeless song. Even though we're talking about a very specific point in music history, I feel like it belongs to many of them at once.
RATH: One more time, that's The Lone Bellow with the title song from their new album "Then Came The Morning." That's coming out on January 27. If you want a longer listen to any of those tracks, go to our website nprmusic.org. Stephen Thompson has been our guide. Stephen, this was great. Thank you.
THOMPSON: Thank you, Arun.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THEN CAME THE MORNING")
THE LONE BELLOW: (Singing) Take my words, breathe 'em out like smoke. Burn every single letter that I wrote. Let the pages turn to ash, I don't want them back. Everything you've always said to me starts to sound like broken glass on speakers.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
The average age of a farmer in the U.S. is 58. That number has been steadily creeping upward for more than 30 years. But in certain parts of the country, the trend is reversing. Maine is one of those places. As Jennifer Mitchell of Maine Public Radio reports, small farms may be getting big again, and there's a new crop of farmers to thank for it.
JENNIFER MITCHELL: It's 10 degrees. The snow is crunching underfoot on this windy hillside just a few miles from Maine's rocky mid-coast. Hairy highland cattle are munching on flakes of hay. Native Katahdin sheep are mustered in a white pool just outside the fence. Not far away, heritage chickens scuttle about a mobile poultry house that looks a bit like a Conestoga wagon.
(SOUNDBITE OF ROOSTER CROWING)
MARYA GELVOSA: Just a few years ago, if you'd told me that I was going to be a farmer, I would have probably laughed at you.
MITCHELL: That's Marya Gelvosa. She's 29, majored in English literature and has never lived in the country before. But she and her partner, Josh Gerritsen, a New York City photographer, have thrown all their resources into this farm where they provide a small local base of customers with beef, lamb and heritage poultry. Gerritsen says their livelihood now ties them to a community.
JOSH GERRITSEN: Living in the city, you commute by subway, you buy your food at the supermarket, you work in a cubicle all day. You're not intimately tied to anything.
MITCHELL: Gelvosa and Gerritsen are part of a generation for whom global warming has been hanging overhead like the sword of Damocles. In fact, all the young farmers we talked to for this story mentioned environmental health and climate change as factors in choosing a life on the land. It's a generation that has grown up in the digital age, but embraced some very old-school things - the farmers market, craft beer and artisan cheese. The point, they say, is to find a way to live high-quality, sustainable lives, and help others do the same.
GELVOSA: It's very fulfilling work and noble work.
JOHN REBAR: Certainly in Maine, farmers under the age of 35 have increased by 40 percent, when nationally that increase is 1.5 percent.
MITCHELL: Young farmers are being drawn to other rural Northeastern states as well, says John Rebar, executive director of the University of Maine Cooperative Extension. Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont were all hotbeds of activity during the previous back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s. Many of those pioneers stayed and helped create farming and gardening organizations that now offer support and encouragement for new farmers. The social climate now is very different than the one Rebar encountered 30 years ago when he himself was an aspiring producer of cattle and sheep.
REBAR: I was called Farmer by my classmates in high school. That was OK with me, but you could tell it wasn't a term of endearment. There was a lot of negativity about encouraging young people to go into farming. So it's a cultural shift that says we value this as a part of our society. We want this to be part of our social fabric, so we're going to figure out ways to make it work.
MITCHELL: And part of making it work means access to land. Gelvosa and Gerritsen on their coastal farm, where acreage is more expensive than it is inland, say they're luckier than most. Gerritsen's parents had bought the property years before, which made starting up for the couple a lot easier.
In Iowa, farmland prices are inching toward $9,000 per acre, which has some financial experts talking about a farmland bubble. But sparsely developed states like Maine still possess affordable lands, which savvy young farmers with a little money and a lot of elbow grease are starting to acquire.
Gene and Mary Margaret Ripley are just such a pair. In what's often cited as one of the poorest counties east of the Mississippi, they paid less than $200,000 for a full house, barn, eight acres of hay fields and enough land for their organic vegetable business.
MARY MARGARET RIPLEY: The whole property, we have 38 acres, but most of that is woods. And we did about 2.5 acres of cash crops this year.
GENE RIPLEY: We are getting to the point where demand is outstripping our supply, and so this year we cleared a one-acre section of woods right here. And just last week, which is really exciting, we just hired our first full-time employee, who is going to be starting in the spring.
MITCHELL: Twenty- and 30-somethings like Gelvosa and Gerritsen and the Ripleys represent the new face of the new farmer, say John Rebar with Cooperative Extension. They're college-educated, concerned about quality of life, and they've cashed in the usual benefits of a professional life, such as a medical plan, a retirement scheme and even a guaranteed paycheck, for something else.
REBAR: This is about creating something. This is about building something themselves. This is about using their two hands to make a difference
MITCHELL: And, he says, this new generation of farmers - well, they've made farming cool again. For NPR News, I'm Jennifer Mitchell.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Now, for the latest installment of our series My Big Break about career triumphs big and small. Mireya Mayor is a primatologist and correspondent for National Geographic. Her job plays out like an adventure movie - diving with great whites, rappelling down cliffs, even being charged by guerrillas. But you'd never guess what Mayor was up to before her life of extreme reporting.
MIREYA MAYOR: While I was in college, I was an NFL cheerleader for the Miami Dolphins. And I took this anthropology class really by accident, because I had to take a science requirement. I was on a very different path to becoming a lawyer. And anthropology was available and fit my schedule. And it was during that class that I realized that that's what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
I left cheerleading and headed straight to South America. I mean, literally, I cheered at my last football game and then a week later, was on a plane to Guyana. You know, had to give up the pom-poms and trade them for field boots. (Laughter).
It was just this beautiful, natural, green abyss of impenetrable forest. Monkeys jumping everywhere and macaws flying overhead, and we would park this canoe at night on the side of the riverbank, climb out and basically machete our way in. And at the time I - not only did I not have a passport, I'd never been camping.
About four months into the expedition, I started noticing that my hands were swelling. And then spontaneous wounds started appearing and red streaks started going up my leg. I had a systemic blood infection, and if I didn't get out, I was going to die. So I had to literally hack my way through forests, and I was able to get back to Miami just in time, because I basically had a few more hours to live. But after 10 days of being in the hospital and on IV antibiotics, I spent those 10 days planning my next expedition. So that tells you something.
I was in Madagascar studying the larger-bodied lemurs with a colleague of mine. And we decided to set out these small mammal traps to see what else was in the area. So we were doing a biodiversity survey as well. And one rainy morning, I took one of the mammal traps in and I peeked inside of it and these two giant eyes stared back at me with this tiny, little body. I mean, it's basically all eyes.
It looked familiar because there were two species of mouse lemurs known at the time. But this was just a very different looking critter. And lo and behold, it was a brand new species to science - world's smallest mouse lemur, weighs less than two ounces, fits in the palm of your hands. I mean, it was complete elation. First of all, when you go into the field of science, you secretly have a dream that you might discover something someday, but you don't really expect to.
I was now armed to be able to request a meeting with the prime minister and the president of Madagascar. And this tiny little mouse lemur got me in the door. I was able to bring in maps of the area and point out that it lives in this very remote area, and only there. And we were in urgent need of protecting that forest. And they agreed to have the government of Madagascar be so supportive and declare the area a national park.
This tiny little creature became a huge ambassador for all things wild in Madagascar. That's a pretty big break. (Laughter).
RATH: Primatologist Mireya Mayor. You don't have to discover new species to have a big break. Send us your story - mybigbreak@NPR.org.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
The rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS, was one of the biggest stories of 2014. The extremist group thrived in the chaos of the Syrian civil war. Then, in the summer, its forces surged over the border into Iraq and took over the cities of Mosul and Tikrit. NPR's Alice Fordham reports on the U.S.-led coalition now leading the fight against ISIS and what's likely to happen to the group this year.
ALICE FORDHAM, BYLINE: In the heat of summer this year, Baghdad was spooked. A third of Iraq was under the control of ISIS and people worried the capital might be next. Six months on, that's changed. On New Year's Eve, the usual midnight curfew was lifted, and people partied in the streets and uploaded videos of themselves letting off fireworks. Baghdadis say that change is because they feel the push-back against ISIS has begun in earnest. At a Friday book market, I meet Alia al-Taiee.
ALIA AL-TAIEE: (Through interpreter) We're always optimistic, she says, looking for the best.
FORDHAM: What's encouraged her is a mass mobilization of volunteers to fight the extremists. ISIS' Sunni Muslims, and most of those who volunteered to fight were Shiite. But Alia and her sister, Khaha, want people from every religion and ethnicity in Iraq to sign up - Sunnis, Christians, Yazidis. And, of course, the fight-back hasn't come just from Iraqis or even from their Iranian military allies. Over Iraq and Syria, American warplanes have led a coalition's efforts to cripple ISIS with bombings since September. Now Americans are training Iraqi troops to fight ISIS and say they'll do the same with the rebels they back in Syria. Analyst Hisham al-Hashemi reckons the airstrikes have already had in impact.
HISHAM AL-HASHEMI: (Through interpreter) The coalition targeted some of the leadership at the organizational level. This has been the most painful attack on ISIS.
FORDHAM: Hashemi says the group's lost three senior leaders and mid-level commanders. It's more difficult for them to move around freely and a key source of funding, oilfields, has taken a pounding. Plus, his sources tell him the number of foreigners volunteering to join them has slumped.
AL-HASHEMI: (Through interpreter) There are 80 percent fewer Arab and foreign recruits. ISIS lost all of this since the coalition announced the war.
FORDHAM: U.S. commanders say they're debating hard with Iraqi counterparts when to push ground troops into the ISIS-occupied areas - maybe the spring. The most populous ISIS-controlled city is Mosul in northern Iraq. Major General Dana Pittard thinks the city should be taken back fast. He calls the group by their Arabic nickname - Daesh.
DANA PITTARD: We're just getting indications of morale problems. And with the people that are in Mosul and seeing Daesh, they just say there's not more than about a thousand there now. So certainly no more than 2000.
FORDHAM: And, he says, they're losing local support.
PITTARD: Because in Mosul, we're finding out that Daesh - they don't govern very well. They're governing, in fact, terribly, whether it's city services - things like that.
FORDHAM: Analysts reckon the group's cachet depends on its being able to govern. That's why it calls itself the Islamic State. But General Pittard says in Mosul, Iraqi-Kurdish soldiers have cut off ISIS' crucial supply lines, so they can't provide fuel and clean water. The extremists themselves constantly issue propaganda with ambitious plans for expansion and global attacks. As the international effort to stop them gets more organized, that's looking more far-fetched. However, the Iraq analyst, Hashemi, reckons that doesn't mean they can't cause harm.
AL-HASHEMI: (Through interpreter) They have more than 20,000 fighters in Iraq directly engaged in warfare and more than 40,00 fighters in sleeper cells.
FORDHAM: Under pressure, Hashemi thinks the group could go back underground, focusing on insurgent tactics like bombings. Meanwhile, in Syria, U.S.-led training of ground forces to fight ISIS is way more slow and complicated by the messy civil war there. The group is likely to be weakened in 2015, but no one's betting on defeating them entirely. Alice Fordham, NPR News, Baghdad.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
The taste of foods from our childhood can trigger intense emotional reactions. That's a fact well known to students of French literature and marketing executives. Thanks to the power of food nostalgia, General Mills is bringing back the sugary cereal French Toast Crunch. To help us understand what's going on here, we turn to Nick Fereday. He's the executive director and senior analyst of food and consumer trends at Rabobank International.
NICK FEREDAY: Nostalgia is an important almost weapon in a marketer's arsenal. It's one of those standard things that companies like to play with every now and again to lure customers back to their products.
RATH: The excitement over this return of French Toast Crunch seems to be targeted at millennials. Here is a great example of the way they're trying to hit that nerve. They made an online ad for this new release of French Toast Crunch featuring the '90s staple call-in psychic Miss Cleo.
(SOUNDBITE OF FRENCH TOAST CRUNCH AD)
YOUREE DELL HARRIS: (As Miss Cleo) I'm sensing that you have a large box that keeps things cold.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As caller Steve) My refrigerator. Yeah, that's miraculous.
HARRIS: (As Miss Cleo) Is there a jug in there with 2 percent on it?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As caller Steve) I actually do have some 2 percent here. It's milk.
HARRIS: (As Miss Cleo) I predict that you will pour that milk into a bowl of French Toast Crunch.
RATH: We get a kick out of it, but does nostalgia work as a marketing strategy?
FEREDAY: Marketers like to find a story to tell about their product. And I think nostalgia is a great way of doing that if you can make that connection, if you can have that story around the product. I guess one of the challenges for the millennial generation is that it's a much more diverse group than, say, generations before. So, for example, not everyone may know who the horoscope lady is, for example, in a way that, you know, 40 or 50 years ago, everyone knew who the cartoon characters were.
RATH: Do you think that French Toast Crunch would be coming back if not for all the people talking about their love of it and desire for it on, you know, Facebook and Twitter and everywhere else?
FEREDAY: Probably not. I mean, it's a great way for people to get interested in that particular cause. It's also kind of interesting from a food company perspective that they're kind of having to look to the consumer for their ideas, which may suggest a lack of innovation on their part. Breakfast cereal has had a tremendous success story for over a hundred years. And in the last five to 10 years, they've started to decline.
And it's really a struggle. It's not just affecting breakfast cereal but also a lot of traditional foods in the American diet. It's left them scratching their heads to a certain extent, because they can't necessarily point the finger at one particular cause. It's actually almost like death of a thousand cuts where there's lots of different things going on.
And so to try and remedy that, they're trying, you know, more than one approach. So at the same time as re-launching an old product, they're selling us Cheerios that don't have any GMO food ingredients. And now you can get Cheerios with protein and even quinoa. I mean, kale will be next, I guess. So they're trying lots of different things and hoping that something will stick.
RATH: Nick Fereday is Rabobank International's executive director and senior analyst of food and consumer trends. Nick, thanks very much.
FEREDAY: Thank you very much indeed.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
The start of the new year on Thursday means minimum wage workers in 21 states are now earning more money. The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank based in D.C., estimates that over 3 million people will be affected. In many states, it was a modest increase tied to inflation - 13 or 15 cents or so. But minimum wage employees in South Dakota are set to make a whole $1.25 more every hour, thanks to a vote in last November's elections. The new minimum is $8.50. Just off the main drag in Madison, South Dakota, is a Dairy Queen. It's been there for more than 40 years, serving the 7,000 or so people who live here. These days, it's run by a fellow named DeLon Mork.
DELON MORK: I've got about seven full-time people. And I've got 25 part-time kids ranging from minimum wage up to about $16 an hour.
RATH: Mork says the new law adds to his expenses in other ways. To be fair to his non-minimum wage employees at the Dairy Queen, he'll have to raise wages for everyone.
MORK: I can't narrow that gap from the 16-year-old student that is getting their first job that, quite honestly, doesn't know what end of the broom to hold onto to sweep. I can't compress the wages from that person to my experienced college-age night manager. I can't narrow that gap, so everybody moves up.
RATH: He'll have to cut hours, he says, and think about trimming back on community service, like giveaway specials or sponsoring kids sports teams. And, of course, his prices are going up.
MORK: Probably my largest price increase ever. My Blizzards went up 20 cents. $2.99 went to $3.19.
RATH: Those new prices start today.
MORK: I kind of am looking forward to people's reaction when they see the prices are up if they correlate the difference for the prices to the minimum wage increase that they voted on a couple months ago.
RATH: Alaskans also voted to increase their minimum wage last fall. There, it's $7.75, and in February, it'll go up a dollar. Faye Gavin is a banquet server at a hotel in Anchorage. Even though she's experienced, a raise has been tough to come by.
FAYE GAVIN: For many years now, it's been locked for me, personally. And I get about $8.45 - $8.50.
RATH: So she'll get a raise of about 30 cents come February. We asked Faye if she'd be getting an additional raise above that minimum, like DeLon Mork's more experienced employees at the Dairy Queen.
GAVIN: No. I won't get a bigger jump - definitely won't. I'll just get whatever the law states. You know, they're just not generous people (laughter). So, they only kind of go with what they're forced to pay.
RATH: She says it's tough to get full-time hours in the hotel business in Anchorage. Given her part-time hours, this new minimum wage will mean just a few extra dollars a week.
GAVIN: I don't anticipate, other than noticing that I - if I wanted to go to the grocery store, I'd have more money in the account. No. I'm not certainly going to be able to go take a trip on my increase.
RATH: Faye Gavin's income is supplemented with a pension from her late husband. Because of that, her life at the minimum wage isn't a huge struggle. But she says her coworkers have to string together multiple part-time jobs to make ends meet. For them, this wage boost, even if it's just another 10 or 20 bucks a week, is a huge help.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Across the country, people and places are being transformed by choice or circumstance. We're telling some of their stories this month in a series called Starting Over. In this latest installment, we go to Seattle, where the average unemployment rate for people under the age of 25 is more than twice the national average. Carolyn Adolph of KUOW reports on a young woman who changed her life by bridging the opportunity gap - that space between wanting a better life and actually getting it.
CAROLYN ADOLPH, BYLINE: Thuy Pham's days used to end with a bus commute from her job in Seattle's International District to her home.
THUY PHAM: And I usually take number 60.
ADOLPH: There was an advertisement on that bus.
PHAM: I saw it, like, every day.
ADOLPH: It said something about an opportunity gap and offering a way to get past it.
PHAM: I don't understand it at all until one day that I really tired. And I feel like - I think, like, when this life going to change?
ADOLPH: Pham had a part-time job making sandwiches at this deli.
PHAM: I'm making bahn mi over there. So I standing ready and making for them.
ADOLPH: Pham and her parents immigrated here from Vietnam five years ago. This was the way she was supporting herself.
PHAM: Putting the food on the table. But at the same time, I also understand that without a education, I cannot - I cannot move on from this job. I cannot, you know, like, move up the career.
ADOLPH: It took time, but eventually she called the number in the ad on that bus. A free work training program called Year Up accepted her. It promises half a year of job skills training, and then half a year of company internship - a big, tough year.
PHAM: There are some student cannot get through the program. The first six months, I don't let it make me feel down. I still keep going.
ADOLPH: Then, she landed here - the business intelligence unit of Microsoft.
PHAM: The first day that I sit over there, we talking, like, the whole day.
EOIN GALLAGHER: You know, our first conversation was interesting when we simply said, look, whatever it is you want, you can do. There's no reason to limit yourself here.
ADOLPH: This is Eoin Gallagher, Pham's boss during her internship - more than that. After her internship, he helped her find her first job. In Seattle, Microsoft competes heavily with other tech companies for talent. It needs a bigger pool of trained people to pull from. But Gallagher says bringing in people from all kinds of backgrounds is good for the technology industry.
GALLAGHER: And the fresh ideas and the fresh approach and just the ability to question why. It's important, and Thuy showed those traits all the way up the organization as I exposed her to more and more senior people.
ADOLPH: This whole process is part of an umbrella project at Microsoft called Youth Spark, a group of programs creating opportunities for young people worldwide. That advertisement on Pham's bus was part of it. And now she has $45,000 a year job. It was so much more than she was making at that deli. She was going to stop there, but Gallagher has convinced her to go for a four-year degree.
GALLAGHER: Not just for something on your resume but for that learning.
ADOLPH: That ability to develop.
GALLAGHER: The sky's the limit here.
PHAM: My friends - they said that I got lucky.
ADOLPH: But Pham says, actually, no.
PHAM: It's not only lucky. I'm working really hard.
ADOLPH: Thuy Pham is starting her bachelor's degree in computer systems this month. For NPR News, I'm Carolyn Adolph in Redmond, Washington.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
A 17-year-old committing suicide is heartbreaking enough, but the death of transgender teen, Leelah Alcorn, has become a national tragedy and a point of debate because of the suicide note she left behind. She writes of her parent's refusal to accept her identity and says that the only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren't treated the way I was - they're treated like humans with valid feelings and human rights. A recent study from UCLA found that 41 percent of transgender people had attempted suicide - nearly nine times the national average. That's why Greta Martela founded Trans Lifeline, a suicide hotline for transgender people run by transgender volunteers.
As a transgender woman herself, Martela knew how badly it was needed.
GRETA MARTELA: When I came out, I kind of assumed that something like Trans Lifeline would be there for me, and I was shocked to learn that there was just really not much.
RATH: Trans Lifeline launched in September, and it's already getting around 60 calls a day. Greta Martela says she wishes she could have had the chance to counsel Leelah Alcorn.
MARTELA: For all of the trans women I know, the first thought is, you know, this could be me. This is - this is so much like my experience. You know, we're just finishing up the holidays, and that's a time of year when it's really clear, if you're a trans person, and, like me, most of your friends are trans people, you know, nobody is going home for the holidays. Most trans people end up kind of orphaned from their families and have to build new families. So to hear about the way that her family was rejecting her and working to isolate her, I think every trans person I know was crying about it the day that it came out, so...
RATH: Based on what Leelah wrote, how would you have counseled her?
MARTELA: We do get a lot of teens calling Trans Lifeline, and their situations are frequently really similar to what Leelah describes in her letter. I just came out to my parents, and they're rejecting me - that scenario. So the things that I do when I have a kid like that on the line with me is I try to find one adult in their community who's a safe person, who is going to listen to them about what's going on with them and not question their identity. So I try to hook them up with one adult.
And I try to emphasize that - let's say you've got two years left in high school - that that seems like forever, but it's not that long. The important thing for teenagers to do in that situation is to make plans to help them get through however long it is. Because the truth is some people's parents in this country are never going to respect their identity or accept them as trans.
RATH: Forgive me for asking this, but have you been suicidal yourself? I mean, you talked about how you could relate to what she wrote about.
MARTELA: Oh, it's fine to ask that. Yes, before I transitioned I had many instances of being suicidal. I was hospitalized for being suicidal I think five times before I transitioned. My experience that led me to start this was calling a big national suicide hotline, and the operator didn't know what transgender meant. So I had to explain that to him. And once he did understand what I was talking about, he got really uncomfortable.
But I went to the ER - and this was in Berkeley, California - I had to explain again what transgender was. And I had to push-back against the nurses to get them to use my right pronouns and my preferred name. And so it's really clear to me that we have such a long way to go on this issue. It's not just trans kids in Ohio whose religious parents are overly-strict with them. It's - it's a common experience. It's something that all trans people are going through on a daily basis.
RATH: Greta Martela is the founder of Trans Lifeline. She joined us from San Francisco. Greta, thanks so much.
MARTELA: Oh, you're welcome.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Russia's official entry to the Oscars this year is a bleak and scathing portrait of a corrupt and oppressive government. It's called "Leviathan." It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and has earned rave reviews ever since. It opens in the U.S. this week. NPR's Bilal Qureshi has the story.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "AKHNATEN")
BILAL QURESHI, BYLINE: "Leviathan" opens with music by Philip Glass as meditative images of vast landscapes and ocean unfold onscreen. We're at the northern borders of Russia in a remote coastal village on the Barents Sea. It's a frontier where people build their lives themselves.
The hero of the film is Nikolay, a handyman who lives and works in a house he built on the water with his family. The town's corrupt mayor has set his eyes on the property and uses his authority to seize it. What follows is Nikolay's tragic struggle to reclaim his land and save his crumbling family life. John MacKay is a scholar of Russian cinema at Yale University. And he says the tragedy of "Leviathan" follows in a long tradition of Russian storytelling.
JOHN MACKAY: There's a word in Russian for this that comes from the word for black, meaning darkens. It's the word chernukha from chernyy - and that much Russian film is basically a form of this pessimistic, bleak, squalid sort of representation.
QURESHI: In "Leviathan," that's presented as a struggle between a simple man and an utterly corrupt local government. And John MacKay says that, too, is central to Russian cinema.
MACKAY: There's a long Russian tradition - in fact, it goes back to the Soviet period of attacking governments' corruption, bureaucratic mishandlings of money and all the rest of it. This, in fact, was a great theme of the Stalinist cinema of the 1930s.
QURESHI: What's remarkable, says MacKay, is that films like this are made and released at all.
MACKAY: If you think about the history of authoritarian regimes, one is always surprised by the kinds of things that come through.
QURESHI: Just as surprising is the timing of "Leviathan's" release. It emerges at a time when Russia is perceived as moving backwards to Cold War posturing, threatening its neighbors and suppressing dissent. So "Leviathan" feels like a pointed, timely critique. But filmmaker Andrey Zvyaginstev says that wasn't his intention. For one, he says, he hasn't even been watching the news.
ANDREY ZVYAGINSTEV: (Through interpreter) To tell you honestly, I have been living for about a year - I have been living out of the political context. I don't even own a TV at home anymore and that was my conscious decision.
QURESHI: And why?
ZVYAGINSTEV: (Through interpreter) I'm just afraid to become another victim of the propaganda that is flowing in from the TV screen in enormous amounts.
QURESHI: What he hopes flows from his film is a more universal and timeless critique of government in general, about the ways in which the march of development and greed is destroying traditional life and how the little man is crushed by those in power. When a priest tries to console the grieving central character, he evokes the story of Job and the miseries he endured.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LEVIATHAN")
QURESHI: Andrey Zvyaginstev says that story is the inspiration for the film's title.
ZVYAGINSTEV: (Through interpreter) The idea to name the movie "Leviathan" comes from the dialogue between Job - the biblical Job - and God, when God invokes the image of Leviathan as talking about an enormous power.
QURESHI: The title also draws on Thomas Hobbes and his "Leviathan," a classic treatise of political philosophy that argues the need for a strong central authority to control human impulse. Director Andrey Zvyaginstev says today that authority has become the monster.
ZVYAGINSTEV: (Through interpreter) I do believe that humans have created that monster, hence comes the idea of the social contract. But for me, this contract is a contract by the devil, because by entering that contract, you essentially give away your most important possessions, your freedoms.
QURESHI: You would think given Andrey Zvyaginstev's criticism, "Leviathan" would be as controversial in Russia as "The Interview" has been in North Korea. Instead, the film is Russia's official entry to the Oscars. I asked the director if he struggles with making art under the scrutiny of Russia's government.
ZVYAGINSTEV: (Through interpreter) Luckily, my relationship with the state has been working out pretty well. In fact, I got government funding in the amount of 35 percent of the funding of the movie, which is a substantial amount if you think about it. So I'm actually little bit surprised that they have decided to help me out.
QURESHI: Yeah, I mean, especially because the film is asking you to be quite suspicious of people in government when you watch it. I mean, the mayor is not a very likable person.
ZVYAGINSTEV: Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. (Through interpreter) I still don't understand why the government has supported the movie, to be honest with you. This must be a paradox of Russian reality.
QURESHI: And Andrey Zvyaginstev's film brings that paradox of Russian reality starkly to screen. "Leviathan" is scheduled to open in Russia next month. Bilal Qureshi, NPR News.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Patton Oswalt's new memoir, "Silver Screen Fiend," comes out tomorrow. He joined me here at NPR West to discuss his addiction to film. Now, the word addiction gets thrown around pretty recklessly. But for Patton it is spot on.
PATTON OSWALT: If you're looking at the definition of addiction, it controls your schedule. It controls your life on its own terms.
RATH: It affects relationships.
OSWALT: It affects your relationships. It affects your job. It affects your career. Then, yeah, my compulsion to go see every single movie that I possibly could operated exactly the way that an addiction does.
RATH: So at your worst, how many films were you cramming in?
OSWALT: I think it was either in '96 or '97, I saw over 250 films just in theaters - that's not counting what I was checking out on videotape, on Turner Classic Movies. That's when it was really biting hours and days out of my life.
RATH: And you actually have a funny story about - you kind of lost a girlfriend because of this addiction.
OSWALT: I think - oh, I think it led to the - there was a lot of other factors to it. But, yeah, I was at some kind of all-night horror marathon and it was an addiction and a superstition in that I had to see a movie from its very beginning. I couldn't like miss the first five minutes or it didn't count.
So it was now three in the morning and she wanted to go home and I just made her walk out to the parking lot of the Cinerama Dome at 3 a.m. at the end of October in LA so that I could watch the very beginning of "I Married A Monster From Outer Space." I was just this horrible - like just the most awful human being you could be, not even being a human being at that point. Just, I am a function of this addiction and this compulsion.
RATH: And when you talk about the compulsion, you actually develop this kind of compulsive magical thinking about why you needed to see all these.
OSWALT: Well, it was two things. It was deluded thinking in that I thought, well, if I see enough of these movies, I'll just become a director. So I have to do this, this is a good thing I'm doing.
But then it became, almost the way that athletes who are in a pennant race, they don't change their socks. Or a lawyer uses the same briefcase all the time. It became a totem where I had these five film books at home and I would see a movie and then go home and check it off in that book. And that made a better comedian.
RATH: It's weird, though, while you're doing this, you're actually becoming a success. You were - I'm mean, you didn't stay long on "Mad TV," but you were a young guy writing for a comedy show.
OSWALT: I wrote for two years on there. Yeah, there was a string of luck and successes that I guess you could say was connected to the addiction. But the addiction began to replace my life. And when that starts to happen, it starts to hurt your comedy, 'cause you're not living enough of a life to really feed into a memorable comedic set, I guess. If you just end up talking about movies you've seen and stuff you don't like, in the long run, that becomes forgettable.
RATH: And even your daily conversations, if you're talking about movies, it sounded like you were pretty insufferable.
OSWALT: Yeah. My conversations were not conversations. It was me spouting paragraphs at people and then not listening to them and wanting to get to showing off the next thing that I knew, rather than being present with another person and finding out what they think and learning from them, basically.
RATH: And it's kind of wild that you're trying to translate these lofty concepts you're getting from great films into sketches that you're writing for "Mad TV."
OSWALT: Yeah, not even lofty concept. What I was trying to do, which is even more pretentious, was I was looking at the grand risks some of these movies were taking and then saying why aren't I doing the same grand risk with a sketch that I'm writing for "Mad TV?" Except that the sketches I was writing were so sloppy because I was so sleep-deprived from going to see movies and going out to do stand-up that I was using it as a defense for my half-assedness in writing the sketches. I was like, yeah, but I'm taking a risk here. Why do you care where it goes? It shouldn't go anywhere, man! And, again, it was a young guy who thought that my attitude and my boldness could take the place of actual competence and skill and work.
RATH: A few things kind of come together to kill the addiction for you. But one is the release of "Star Wars Episode I: Phantom Menace."
OSWALT: Yeah.
RATH: Which - I know that killed my desire for more "Star Wars" movies, but how did that kill your desire for movies?
OSWALT: It didn't. It's not that it killed the addiction. It made me look at the addiction from such a different angle that it didn't hold any power over me anymore. I'll put it this way - you know, I was the worst kind of movie fan in that I'm the kind of guy who saw six movies a day, didn't write any movies, didn't make any movies, but then could be armchair quarterbacking on a movie that I had no hand in making.
But, yes, I thought it was a failure, but the dude took a shot at it. He, you know - it hit me that I was spending days and days and nights and nights with my friends, arguing back and forth about this film, but this guy made a movie. Good or bad, he made a movie. He's, you know, he's on a different realm than you. And just at the same time that I went and saw that and was having that realization, I went to the New Beverly the next day and I gave...
RATH: This is the theater where you saw a lot of these classic films.
OSWALT: The New Beverly on Beverly Boulevard, that was my crack house, basically. And Sherman Torrigan, who founded it and was - the late Sherman Torrigan - I went to the New Beverly and bought a ticket and Sherman said I thought you'd be handing me a screenplay by now.
RATH: And when you write that, you put in parentheses kick.
OSWALT: I was - yeah, I was basically doing the version of a guy that's shooting heroin and he's like, I'm doing this so that I can be like Lou Reed and David Bowie. I'll eventually do, you know, "Ziggy Stardust" and "Transformer," but I've been doing it - it's like, no, you can't do the heroin addiction first. You have to become a good musician first. And even then you shouldn't do the heroin addiction, but I'm just saying, you're doing this all backwards.
RATH: So back in the '90s when you're just sucking in all of these films, you mentioned...
OSWALT: I wish I could say sucking in. I was laying on my back and dumping them into my - I was the equivalent movie-wise of a guy like in a Barcalounger and he's tilted back just perfectly that he can just shovel Cheetos into his mouth - barely chewing them.
RATH: So you're shoveling these films into your mouth.
OSWALT: Yes, shoveling them.
RATH: And it's your dream that you want to be a director. You want to direct films.
OSWALT: Yeah.
RATH: Do you think you might direct a film now?
OSWALT: Eventually, I will. But when I make the leap to become a director, I've got to convince a platoon of people to make the leap with me. So that's really nerve-racking. Now, I'm, you know - I'm in the process of working up to that. And hopefully, someday, someone can play back this interview, if I've made a movie, and I can go, oh, OK. I was at least approaching it respectfully. But it's going have to be me finally just closing my eyes and hitting the gas pedal and pulling out into traffic.
RATH: Patton Oswalt - comedian, actor, writer, recovering film addict. His new book...
OSWALT: Potential director.
RATH: Potential director - director in waiting.
OSWALT: God, that sounds so sad.
RATH: ...New book is "Silver Screen Fiend." Well, make it.
OSWALT: All right, stop yelling at me.
RATH: (Laughter) Thank you so much.
OSWALT: Thanks for having me on. Honestly, I appreciate it. Thank you.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
All this week we've been talking about our nation's military children. Today we'll hear from a few of the approximately 5,000 who have lost a parent in the past decade. To help these kids, the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, or TAPS, holds what they call good grief camps around the country. From member station WAMU in Washington, D.C., Kavitha Cardoza has more.
KAVITHA CARDOZA, BYLINE: It's Saturday morning, and I'm at a TAPS camp in Philadelphia.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHILDREN PLAYING)
CARDOZA: This could be any standard hotel room filled with cute five- to seven-year-olds, until you look at the pictures they're drawing.
GRAYSON: This is my dad watching TV and this is a graveyard.
CARDOZA: He's watching TV in the graveyard?
GRAYSON: Yeah.
CARDOZA: Six-year-old Grayson Garber is from New York. His father Richard was serving in the Navy when he died in 2011.
GRAYSON: He got hit by a bomb. And also he died because a big missile hit him.
CARDOZA: Catherine Clark is sitting next to Grayson, furiously coloring with blue around a winged figure. She's five and a half.
CATHERINE: My dad's an angel, and he's about to swim in Hawaii.
CARDOZA: Have you been to Hawaii with your dad?
CATHERINE: Yes. It was hot. He likes to tickle people.
CARDOZA: And what would you do?
CATHERINE: I would tickle him back.
CARDOZA: Catherine's father Kevin died in Afghanistan in 2012.
DYLAN: Dear David, I miss you so much.
CARDOZA: Dylan Bayless is 8. He's written his name on a bright yellow star and right next to it is the name David.
Can you read what you've written?
DYLAN: Dear David, I miss you so much. I want you to come back, please.
CARDOZA: That's his stepfather who died in combat in Afghanistan in 2009.
DYLAN: I really didn't want him to die. And I said don't go out there because you're going to die, and he didn't listen.
CARDOZA: Vanessa Daley, who helps run the camp, says the children see each other's badges with pictures of their loved ones who've died and feel less alone.
VANESSA DALEY: One of the parents came down and said thank you so much. This was her daughter's first time. And she said she came up to the room and she said mom, everybody in my room, all of them have a button on like me. And so they just connect with that.
CARDOZA: Children here do an activity during which they write a letter to whomever they're angry at.
DALEY: If it was in Iraq or Afghanistan and it was the bad guy that shot them or threw a bomb at them and they're just, you know, really angry. And why did you have to do that? Why did you have to throw it at my dad?
CARDOZA: Fourteen-year-old Madison Cheever says this is the only place she can talk about her dad, Rob, as much as he wants.
MADISON: You don't have to worry about oh, what if someone makes fun of me. Because they know how hard it is.
CARDOZA: Just three days after Sergeant First Class Robert Cheever returned to the U.S. after his third tour of duty in Afghanistan, he had a stroke. When his family was told he wouldn't recover, they moved from an Army base in New York to rural Minnesota, where Rob's family lived. His wife Jill Bailey says her children's sorrow was compounded by leaving the only home they had known.
JILL BAILEY: The military, they're a family. You all come together. You have your Army sisters, Army brothers, you're family.
CARDOZA: Now his daughter Madison says she can't relate to other children in her public school.
MADISON: They're like, oh, yeah, I lost a grandparent. They don't know how it feels to lose someone who would possibly walk you down the aisle some day.
CARDOZA: Cheever fills her journals with letters she's written to her dad because she's sure he reads them.
MADISON: Because then I still can remember him, and he's not slowly fading away into just being a memory.
CARDOZA: She says when they visit his grave, she sits down and talks to him.
MADISON: Until my mom finally says we need to go.
CARDOZA: When you hear the children giggling and playing tag at this TAPS camp, you're so glad they found a space where they can giggle and play tag and just be children. Grayson Garber is waiting for the next activity to start. I ask about the stress ball he's made out of balloons and Play-Doh. It's meant to help him cope with anger.
Grayson, what do you usually do when you get angry at home before you had your stress ball?
GRAYSON: Um, wrestle my brother.
CARDOZA: And now what are you going to do?
GRAYSON: I'm going to throw it at Aiden.
CARDOZA: You're going to throw your stress ball at your brother now? I think you're supposed squeeze it.
Vanessa Daley with TAPS listens as children share what they've learned at this camp.
DYLAN: Even somebody died in your family, you can still have fun.
CATHERINE: You can share your feelings that you never shared with people.
DALEY: What I learned was that you guys are really, really brave.
CARDOZA: Daley herself lost her father 11 years ago when he was deployed in Iraq and was hit by an RPG. She wants these children to know there are two paths they can take.
DALEY: You can take that grief and you can hold it inside and it can be very negative. I just want the kids to see that there's another road, and that's the road that their parents would want them to take.
CARDOZA: Daley wants these children to know that it's OK to be sad about their parents' death while also being proud of their service. For NPR News, I'm Kavitha Cardoza.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Betto Arcos is a frequent guest on this program. He's a world music DJ for KPFK, and he travels all over the world in search of cool music. We take full advantage of that here. Betto is just back from Portugal, and he's with us in the studio. Betto, welcome home.
BETTO ARCOS: Oh, it's great to be back here. Thanks for having me.
RATH: Now, if somebody says to me music from Portugal, I immediately think the word fado, and I think of the artist Mariza. But I don't even know how to explain what fado is. I'm going to have you expand my fado horizons. What do you got for us first?
ARCOS: The first voice we want to hear is actually a revelation in terms of voice, in terms of presence in the fado scene. She's not originally from Lisbon, but she is from the north, from Barcelos, the north of Portugal. And her name is Gisela Joao.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MALDICAO")
GISELA JOAO: (Singing in Portuguese).
RATH: So you say that she's not from Lisbon. Tell us about her.
ARCOS: Most people that sing fado are from Lisbon. But in the last decade or more, there's been a lot of different singers coming from different parts of the country. She started singing when she was a teenager. She found herself in the city of Porto singing in a little club there. And someone said, you know, you sound good. Let's give you a place to sing every week. And so she started singing there away from the fado houses. Soon enough, of course, somebody realized, you know, this girl has a career. She moved to Lisbon. She started living in the heart, in the cradle of fado in the neighborhood called Mouraria. And pretty soon, she recorded her first album which is what we're hearing now.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MALDICAO")
JOAO: (Singing in Portuguese).
RATH: That is just beautiful. I'm not going to butcher this name. Will you tell me her name again?
ARCOS: Her name is Gisela Joao, and the song we're hearing is called "Maldicao."
RATH: Love it. So what do you got for us next?
ARCOS: The next singer - I was lucky to go see him perform at one of the dozens of fado houses in Lisbon. His name is Marco Rodrigues, and he's going to sing a song all about a neighborhood, "Bairro Alto," which means high neighborhood or upper neighborhood.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BAIRRO ALTO")
MARCO RODRIGUES: (Singing in Portuguese).
RATH: So Betto, what's he singing about?
ARCOS: He sings about living in the city of Lisbon. Now, I just recently found out that Lisbon has probably the most songs written about the city. It's talking about two specific neighborhoods of Lisbon where you can encounter love if you try hard enough.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BAIRRO ALTO")
RODRIGUES: (Singing in Portuguese).
RATH: So that's Marco Rodrigues.
ARCOS: Marco Rodriguez. And I got to see him in concert at a kind of fado club called Adega Machado, where Amalia Rodrigues, the biggest name in fado, historically, used to sing.
RATH: Wow. I'm speaking with world music DJ Betto Arcos about some of the music he's discovered in Portugal. What else did you find?
ARCOS: Well, this one is actually a tower, a pillar - I should say the most important fado singer today, still alive, Carlos do Carmo.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FADO E AMOR")
CARLOS DO CARMO: (Singing in Portuguese).
RATH: It's gorgeous. And I feel like I'm hearing some more experience in that voice.
ARCOS: Indeed. In fact, think of him as a sort of Frank Sinatra of fado. This man has been influenced by music from the outside, and at the same time, he helped to kind of open up the world of fado in Portugal. Because it was usually just played on the traditional instruments, the Portuguese guitar and the Spanish guitar. He said, well, fado's more than that. It's not just about, you know, pain and sadness. There's also joy. And there's faster songs. And we can add other instrumentation and even an orchestra. And in the mid-'70s, he did that with a specific album that really kind of opened the door to all of these amazing new voices and fado styles.
RATH: So there's another voice here, a woman. Is that one of those newer voices?
ARCOS: Yes. In fact, Carlos do Carmo, in this particular album, it's kind of an homage to him. He's doing an album of duets, and he invited different new voices of fado. And in this case, this young wonderful singer named Carminho.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FADO E AMOR")
CARMINHO: (Singing in Portuguese).
RATH: Love it. Betto, we've got time for one more song.
ARCOS: The last thing we're going to hear is the essence of fado. You cannot sing fado, you cannot play fado without the Portuguese guitar. Let's take a listen to Ricardo Parreira and this beautiful tune composed by one of the great composers and guitarists of the Portuguese guitar, Carlos Paredes. The tune is called "Danca Da Aldeia."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DANCA DA ALDEIA")
ARCOS: This young musician, who actually is one of the youngest Portuguese guitar soloists, is absolutely amazing. I got a chance to see him at one of the fantastic fado houses in Lisbon called Maria Severa.
RATH: Betto, how is the Portuguese guitar different from what we think of as a traditional guitar?
ARCOS: Well, originally, they say that the instrument comes from England, that it was called the English guitar. And it came just like they say that the port wine came originally from the influence of the English. It's an instrument that came to Portugal, and it was added as a sort of second voice of the music, of the fado. And so if you ask a Portuguese guitarist, he or she will say - actually I should say he will say, the guitar is meant to accompany the voice and to respond to the voice. So that is the role of that instrument specifically, to dialogue with the fado voice.
RATH: Tell us the name of that guitarist one more time.
ARCOS: His name is Ricardo Parreira.
RATH: That's DJ Betto Arcos. He's the host of Global Village on KPFK here in Los Angeles. If you'd like to take a longer listen to any of the music from Portugal we just played, go to our website nprmusic.org. Betto, always a pleasure, man. Thank you.
ARCOS: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DANCA DA ALDEIA")
ARUN RATH, HOST:
But first we're starting the new year with stories about starting over, people or places that have purposefully or unwittingly been changed and started anew. Mira Johnson is one of those people. At just 32, she's made a lot of changes, some drastic.
MIRA JOHNSON: I remember writing in my journal that week. This is the last day I'm going to be a good girl or something where I was, like, really clear about the fact that my life was about to change forever.
RATH: NPR's Nathan Rott brings us Mira's story from the lows to where she is now coaching others to make changes themselves.
NATHAN ROTT, BYLINE: Perhaps the best place to pick up Mira Johnson's story is with a little-known saying about Portland, Oregon.
JOHNSON: They say that the city has the most strip clubs per capita in the country.
ROTT: Portland, Oregon?
JOHNSON: Portland, Oregon, not Vegas. Portland, Oregon. And so naturally, it's - you throw a stone and you hit a stripper.
ROTT: Johnson had been in Oregon for a couple of years. She had moved there from Georgia after college working in corporate sales, advertising.
JOHNSON: I dabbled in network marketing.
ROTT: All the while wanting more than anything to own her own business. The question was how. You can connect the dots.
JOHNSON: So I made a few friends who were in the industry while I had my last, quote, "day job." And I was like, oh, that's a way I could make a lot of money in a short period of time and have free time to start a business.
ROTT: So Johnson started dancing, taking home $500 a night on a good night. And for a while it was good. She paid off her school debt and started her own business planning events. But then the late-night work started to take a toll. She made bad business partnerships, found herself in an abusive relationship.
JOHNSON: I knew if I stayed in the situation I was in much longer, I would be suicidal to the point of being serious about it.
ROTT: She knew she needed a change, and she had an idea of what that change would be. Before she started stripping, Johnson went to this convention, some standard meet-and-greet sales thing. A woman stood up...
JOHNSON: ...And she said I'm a life coach. This is what I do. And I just had that moment where I was like, ding, that's what I've been looking for. And I, like, made a beeline across the room and was like can I take you to lunch. I have to hear all about what you do.
JENNIFER POWERS: She came and she told me that this was something that she wanted to do. Can I pick your brain? And I was like, I used to get a lot of those calls.
ROTT: This is Jennifer Powers.
POWERS: I could see that she was really driven to do this. But her timing wasn't right.
ROTT: Johnson didn't feel like she had enough life experience to be a life coach. So she put it on the back burner.
POWERS: I'm going, OK, I know that's there and I know it's possible 'cause someone else is doing it.
ROTT: Years later, knowing she needed a change, she looked back to that. She quit stripping, packed up her life.
JOHNSON: And moved to Los Angeles of all places. Don't ask me what I was thing, because I didn't have a plan.
ROTT: But it wasn't that easy. LA isn't cheap. She was so busy just trying to make ends meet there wasn't much time for anything else. And then one day...
JOHNSON: Lo and behold, I meet a woman who works as a dominatrix.
ROTT: And the money in that job.
JOHNSON: I mean, surgeons make that kind of money, you know. But who else makes that kind of money?
ROTT: So she went back to the adult industry, this time with an exit strategy. She signed up for life coaching classes to get certified from the woman who had originally inspired her to become a life coach, Jennifer Powers, paying the way with the money she made as a dominatrix.
POWERS: What Mira did was she accepted the fact that she was who she was. She accepted that she had this past.
JOHNSON: And what, you know, the gift in it now, as a life coach, is that the women who read my story, whether they share my experience or not, they see that I have pulled myself out of a dark place and that it's possible.
ROTT: And she says they know that she won't judge them no matter where they're coming from. Nathan Rott, NPR News.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Now that the holidays are over, another season has arrived. 'Tis the time for children to put pen to paper and scratch out thank you letters under the watchful eye of their parents. In a recent piece for The Guardian, Peter Ormerod writes that it's time to do away with that tradition. Peter Ormerod joins me from his home in Leamington Spa, England. Welcome to the program.
PETER ORMEROD: Thank you very much, Arun.
RATH: So first give us your bid here. Why do you think parents should stop making their kids do this?
ORMEROD: It's really because gratitude is so important to me. I don't however think that forcing children to write what are often quite formulaic letters - I don't think that that's necessarily the best way of helping children develop gratitude.
RATH: Peter, I'm a parent, and it's going to be obvious where I stand on this. I think formulas are bad, but I think it's good to make kids express gratitude.
ORMEROD: I see where you're coming from. I think it's better to get kids to feel gratitude and experience gratitude rather more first. And that can be expressed in a fun way and in a creative way I think. So it could involve something like, you know, drawing pictures. It could involve taking photos. It could involve baking cakes. They could even write little songs for people. I've done that for a couple of people - ways that feel much less like a chore.
RATH: OK, so we agree that you should do something at least.
ORMEROD: Yeah.
RATH: Here's another argument though I'd make for the written note and that's that, you know, my wife and I were talking about this, so much these days is electronic. This is maybe the last thing where kids are actually involved in writing things out by hand and sending them in the mail. There's something nice about that old-school quality.
ORMEROD: There is. There is something nice about that, and, of course, if your children really want to write letters and put their heart into, then that's fine. However, in my experience and evidently in the experience of quite a few people who read my piece in The Guardian, that isn't how you feel when you're writing them.
RATH: So it sounds like you have some unpleasant memories about being compelled to write letters like this when you were a kid.
ORMEROD: Yeah, I have. I mean, I don't really want to blame my parents, because it wasn't their fault. It was what they were brought up doing. But it was something sort of tacked on after Christmas or after birthdays, and it was always oh, now I've got to do that. I don't think that I really appreciated that people had taken the time to think of me and to buy something for me.
RATH: Yeah, but that note meant so much to Auntie Beryl (ph).
ORMEROD: Perhaps so, but the other things might well have meant a lot to Auntie Beryl, too. And actually, one of the fascinating things reading the comments under my Guardian piece - the number of older people, actually, who say, you know, I've actually told my nieces and nephews and grandchildren not to send me thank you letters, because I know that it's a bit of a slog to do them, and I take their appreciation and their gratitude for granted.
RATH: Before I let you go, I've got to ask you, do you have any kids of your own yet?
ORMEROD: I'm afraid I haven't. No, I haven't. And perhaps I'd feel a bit differently. I can appreciate there may well be some parental peer pressure, so I hold it in my hands if I turn out to be a massive hypocrite on this one.
RATH: Journalist Peter Ormerod contributes to The Guardian. Peter, it was great talking with you. You can leave now.
ORMEROD: Thank you, Arun.
RATH: No, I'm just kidding. Thank you. Thank you. That was rude. Great talking with you.
ORMEROD: (Laughter) Good talking with you as well, Arun. Thank you very much.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THANK YOU")
DIDO: (Singing) And I want to thank you for giving me the best day of my life.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
What do a woman freed from a religious cult, a crooked lawyer and TV's longest-serving late-night host have in common? NPR TV critic Eric Deggans says they're all part of the hottest trends in television for 2015. Here's his look at the issues and series that will transform TV in the new year.
ERIC DEGGANS, BYLINE: Kimmy Schmidt has survived years in a dehumanizing cult that told her the world was destroyed by nuclear fire. But surviving her first interview on the "Today" show after she and her friends were rescued from that cult? Well, that might be even tougher.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "UNBREAKABLE KIMMY SCHMIDT")
MATT LAUER: Ladies, you've been given an amazing second chance at life. People have donated thousands of dollars to the Mole Women Fund.
ELLIE KEMPER: (As Kimmy Schmidt) And we are so grateful, but honestly, we don't love that name.
LAUER: So, Mole Women, what happens next? What do you do now?
LAUREN ADAMS: (As Gretchen) I go with you now. Yes, I'm married to you.
LAUER: No, no, Gretchen, no.
DEGGANS: The "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" is a new series from Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, who worked together on Fey's NBC series "30 Rock." The program was made for NBC but sold to Netflix, which picked up the canceled show before it even aired on the network.
It's a growing trend - TV shows moving online from more traditional starting points. Yahoo will continue to produce new episodes of NBC's canceled comedy "Community." And a show originally developed for FX, the superhero series "Powers," will debut not on FX but on The Playstation Network. Yes, there will be an original TV series made just for a videogame console.
But the biggest sea change in television this year comes courtesy of this announcement - David Letterman's surprise announcement last year.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LATE SHOW")
DAVID LETTERMAN: I said when this show stops being fun, I will retire 10 years later.
(LAUGHTER)
DEGGANS: David Letterman, TV's longest-serving late-night host, officially retires May 20. But he's already changing television, prompting Stephen Colbert to leave his "Colbert Report" to take over Letterman's "Late Show," which made room at Comedy Central for a new voice. Larry Wilmore.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "NIGHTLY SHOW")
LARRY WILMORE: Hi, I'm Larry Wilmore, host of the new "Nightly Show" with Larry Wilmore.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Who?
WILMORE: Larry Wilmore - I'm the host of the "Nightly Show."
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: I thought you said it was a daily show.
WILMORE: Well, it is a daily show at night.
DEGGANS: Larry Wilmore, known as "The Daily Show's" senior black correspondent, takes over Colbert's timeslot with "The Nightly Show" on January 19.
Wilmore's show was originally called "The Minority Report," but they changed it after learning the 2002 film of the same name would be made into - you guessed it - a TV pilot. Still, Wilmore will be the only African-American hosting a late-night entertainment show in 2015. Along with Colbert and new "Late, Late Show" host James Corden, he's expected to bring lots of fresh voices to a big block of TV's late-night neighborhood.
And there's some other big goodbyes coming in 2015.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "PARKS AND RECREATION")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: The farewell season of "Parks And Recreation" comes to you from the distant future - the year 2017.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: Good Lord.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: Oh, take my hand. Let's get into bed like "The Notebook."
DEGGANS: NBC's "Parks And Recreation" begins its final season January 13. It's among several TV shows taking a final lap this year, including CBS' "Two And Half Men" and AMC's "Mad Men." But I'm really going to savor the final season this year of FX's show about a gun slinging federal marshal - "Justified" - mostly because of scenes like this one featuring Marshal Raylan Givens taking stolen documents from his bitter rival, bank robber Boyd Crowder.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "JUSTIFIED")
WALTON GOGGINS: (As Boyd Crowder) I found some items lying on the side of the road I believe belong to our mutual friend. I took it upon myself to ensure their safe return. Now, I'm just following my instincts, kinda like a higher power slipping me a word.
TIMOTHY OLYPHANT: (As Raylan Givens) Well, I slip a Glock in my holster every morning. So when you hand me those items, do it slow. Or I'll shoot you.
DEGGANS: In a TV world filled with Honey Boo Boos and Duck Dynasties, it's a pleasure to watch a show set in the South with sharp, smart characters. That's not, however, the best description for a guy at the heart of another series, which just happens to be cable TV's most anticipated new show.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "BETTER CALL SAUL")
BOB ODENKIRK: (As Saul Goodman) Traffics accident? Better call Saul. Confessed to a homicide? What are you waiting for? Hi, welcome to the Law Offices of Saul Goodman and Associates.
DEGGANS: Saul Goodman, also known as Walter White's shady lawyer from "Breaking Bad," gets his own spinoff series on AMC. It debuts over two nights on February 8 and 9, showing how small-time lawyer Jimmy McGill becomes the full-on sleazebag that "Breaking Bad" fans love, with a real talent for recruiting new clients.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "BETTER CALL SAUL")
ODENKIRK: (As Saul Goodman) I'm number one on your speed-dial, right next to your weed dealer. Please call me Jimmy.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) Think I'd look guilty if I hired a lawyer.
ODENKIRK: (As Saul Goodman) It's getting arrested that makes people look guilty.
DEGGANS: Who could say no to that? Ultimately, the word which best sums up TV in 2015 is more - more new series in unexpected places, more new voices in late-night and more high-quality shows than anyone can keep up with - except maybe a highly motivated TV critic. So if you thought TV was good last year, you might want to buckle up, because the pace only gets faster and more fun in 2015. I'm Eric Deggans.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
The average American produces an estimated 66 pounds of electronic waste every year. You can't compost it, so it's got to go somewhere, often in violation of the law - that means a dump in the developing world, like the region of Agbogbloshie in the West African nation of Ghana. Not so long ago, Agbogbloshie was a lush mangrove swamp.
In the current Atlantic, reporter Yepoka Yeebo describes what Agbogbloshie looks like today.
YEPOKA YEEBO: It looks like hell. It's this massive blackened field. And the first thing you notice is this pool of thick black smoke that burns. It's this choking smoke. And I sort of coughed and splattered my way through my first few minutes like right in the middle of the dump.
And it's dotted with these little hills of old electronics and scrap bites or piles of CPUs, heaps of car doors, stacks of old televisions, and hundreds of people work there.
RATH: And you describe this awful type of smoke that you're walking through there. What's burning?
YEEBO: It's mostly the boys, the sort of people who process the scrap, burning huge bundles of copper wire to strip the plastic off. And so they sort of - they get the bundle of copper wire or whatever else they're melting - sometimes they melt down old air-conditioners. They throw on a tire or the old insulation foam from old refrigerators, and they set that alight.
So what's really burning is the tire and the fires get big and hot and sometimes they change color. When it's copper they turn green. And it lets off all this smoke. And this melts down whatever's in the bundle. And so you see pools of aluminum. You see pools of like bits of melted plastic. And then they're left with these bundles. It's an incredibly inefficient way to process anything. And it's incredibly dangerous, too.
RATH: Tell us more about these trash pickers that you spent time with. You used the word boys. How old are these kids?
YEEBO: The boys I hung out with were 13 and 14. Kwesi was the older, slightly more experienced kid who knew everything about the way the scrap business worked in Agbogbloshie. And Inusa was sort of younger and slightly more naive. And during the week, these kids were both, like, regular school kids in spotless uniforms out of school down the road. And they came down to this place on evenings and weekends to just earn little bits of money to help pay their school fees or buy shoes.
RATH: Why are kids that young having to pay school fees?
YEEBO: Education is supposed to be free, but beyond the basic level, beyond primary school, it's not. And they don't have to pay school fees, they have to pay for lunches. They have to pay for exams. They have to pay for books. All these little sums of money add up.
And Kwesi wanted to join the army and Inusa wanted to join the air force. And in Ghana, the armed forces are incredibly prestigious, so there's a lot of competition to get in. And the only way they can get in is to finish school. And without paying their fees, that will never happen.
RATH: There's a lot of toxic stuff in electronic waste. And you also mention that the fires from things like plastic and other things - that can't be good. Can you talk about the health risks these kids face?
YEEBO: So there's the choking smoke. It's burning tires. It's thick and it's black and it's visible from, like, the main road, which is a good long walk away. There's also the fact that these are just open fires of bundles of metal.
So at one point in the story, I talk about sort of this explosion and this burning aerosol can flying through the air and landing on the ground near us. That could quite easily have hit someone.
I hung out at the sort of shed where both Kwesi and Inusa sell most of the scrap they pick up. And I watched as this tiny kid basically sliced his toe in half stepping on a piece of glass from what looked like a smashed TV screen. There are hazards all over the place.
And there are also environmental campaigners who say that the boys who've been there for a while are starting to die really young. So people tend to have respiratory problems, and they also say that some of the older boys are dying of cancer.
RATH: And how does this stuff, the electronic waste from the developed world, end up in this digital graveyard there?
YEEBO: A great deal of it is foreign. A great deal of it is stuff that was supposed to be formally recycled that sort of falls into a shady world of recycling companies that export the stuff to the Third World. And there've been a couple of prosecutions in the UK.
And so most of it, at least in the past, turned up in shipping containers at the port either disguised as secondhand electronics or hidden behind functional electronics or just sort of illegally shipped in. And it gets trucked into a place like this.
And a lot of it is also from the market district where there are sort of auto repair shops and places that sell motors and air conditioners. And when the stuff doesn't sell or it gets too old, it gets dumped back there where people can process it into metal.
RATH: Yepoka Yeebo is a reporter and photographer based in West Africa. Her feature about Ghana's urban mine ran in The Atlantic this week. Yepoka, thank you very much.
YEEBO: Thank you so much for having me.
RATH: And if you want to see some amazing photos Yepoka took in Agbogbloshie, check out our website, npr.org.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Boston is gearing up for the trial of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Jury selection begins tomorrow - 1,200 prospective jurors have been summoned. In recent days, courts rejected motions to delay the trial and to move it to another location.
Milton Valencia of the Boston Globe says the defense argued it's impossible to have an impartial jury so close to the site of the attack.
MILTON VALENCIA: The concern here is that the city itself was a victim, you know, not just three people and 260 who were injured. Really the region was a victim itself, and there's concerns that there's no way to pick an impartial jury here.
RATH: And we're reading that 1,200 jurors have been called. That sounds like a huge number. But what does this sort of compare to? What's your model for this in terms of the jury selection?
VALENCIA: In Boston, the judicial system here has had some experience in high profile trials. The trial most recently of James "Whitey" Bulger, the notorious gangster, and some other high-profile political corruption trials, the type of trials that really get a lot of media publicity. They've outlined a multistage process to try and get an impartial jury. That's the use of questionnaires to kind of do an initial screening. Then whenever potential jurors pass that initial screening, they'll move on to more in-person questions by both lawyers and defense attorneys.
RATH: These questionnaires - if you've seen some in the past for trials, how big are they? How in-depth are these questions?
VALENCIA: We haven't seen them because they're keeping them sealed. They don't want, you know, to tip off jurors to what these questions are likely to be. But we've seen some of these surveys at more than 50 pages. They're asking views on interaction with law enforcement, any connection to the bombing, any connection to victims. How much have you read about this case? Do you read the newspaper? Do you watch TV? Do you run the marathon? I mean, these are all intimate questions that are going to help lawyers, the judge, and prosecutors do that initial screening. They're going to have digital copies of them. And really, you know, look really to see who can potentially serve and more importantly who cannot.
RATH: What are the other kind of questions that they're asking? I know the questions are sealed, but what's your sense?
VALENCIA: Right, well, there's two points here to make because one, can you serve on a jury for four to six months? This really is an investment on the juror's time. The other thing about this is this isn't just a high-profile trial, this is a death-penalty trial. And the key legal term here is a death-qualified jury. And you need someone who can sit there and say, I can hand out the death penalty if it's warranted or I can give out a sentence of life in prison if it's not warranted. And my views on the death penalty, either way, would not influence my decision.
RATH: So from Monday, the selection process, how long do you expect it's going to take to whittle down that very large initial pool of jurors?
VALENCIA: Well, what we've seen from federal trials - keep in mind this is a federal trial, not a state trial - we've seen on average that these jury selection processes can take a month if not more. And that's really just even if there's a fair, impartial jury, I think there are so many steps. The bar is so high just to make sure you're doing it right, that I think they go through all these steps and these protocols and that's just the amount of time it takes in general. Once you complete that, I think we are going to be here a little bit longer 'cause I think there's just going to be so much more attention, so much caution paid to the fact that we are selecting jurors from Eastern Massachusetts and are we selecting jurors that can remain fair and impartial.
RATH: Milton Valencia is a reporter for the Boston Globe. Milton, thank you.
VALENCIA: Thank you.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
It's been an exciting weekend in the NFL Playoffs, but there was a sadness pervading ESPN's broadcast today. Treasured colleague Stuart Scott died this morning after a long battle with cancer.
Scott had been a host of ESPN SportsCenter and Monday Night Countdown but his influence extends far beyond the world of sports. Scott demonstrated that he could be a huge success broadcasting to a wide audience without trying to sound like a white man or like a white man's idea of a black man. A number of people chafed at what was called his hip-hop sensibility, but the vast majority of viewers loved it. And beyond the race factor, Stuart Scott showed everyone you don't have to water down your personality to be a serious broadcaster. After Scott hit the scene, it seemed like everybody had to have a catchphrase. But no one could deliver them like Stuart Scott.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPORTS BROADCAST)
STUART SCOTT: Call Conoco butter 'cause he is on a roll.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPORTS BROADCAST)
SCOTT: This kid is as cool as the other side of the pillow.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPORTS BROADCAST)
SCOTT: Derek Jeter in first. Boo yah. Alex Rodriguez, second.
RATH: In his final years and days, Stuart Scott inspired cancer survivors, getting through multiple rounds of chemotherapy while engaging in a punishing fitness routine based on mixed martial arts and working whenever he could. Few people could turn a phrase like Stuart Scott, so it seems appropriate to leave you with his own words from a speech he gave this summer that he seemed to know could serve as his own eulogy.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
SCOTT: When you die, it does not mean that you lose to cancer. You beat cancer by how you live, why you live and in the manner in which live.
(APPLAUSE)
SCOTT: So live - live. Fight like hell. And when you get too tired to fight, then lay down and rest and let somebody else fight for you.
RATH: ESPN anchor Stuart Scott. He died this morning at the age of 49.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
More than 20,000 youths around the country age out of foster care every year, typically when they turn 18. Many leave with next to nothing - no family, no money, no support. Roughly half drop out of high school. And those who make it to college rarely graduate - less than 3 percent, in fact. But some states, like Michigan, are actively helping former foster kids get through college. Michigan Radio's Jennifer Guerra reports.
JENNIFER GUERRA, BYLINE: In the summer of 2008, Jasmine Uqdah grabbed her duffel bag and two small garbage bags and stuffed everything she owned inside, which wasn't much - some clothes, a few stuffed animals. She said her goodbyes to her foster family in Detroit and moved out.
JASMINE UQDAH: It was pretty scary, to be honest.
GUERRA: Growing up, it was just her and her mom. Her dad died when she was 4. Uqdah wouldn't go into detail except to say that life with her mom wasn't great. And she was eventually removed and placed in foster care. She had spent nearly half her life in the system by the time she aged out.
UQDAH: Every 18 and 19-year-old thinks they're ready (laughter). But you're not. You're not ready for shutoff notices. You're not ready for eviction notices. You're not ready for car repossessions.
GUERRA: Uqdah is easy to talk to. She seems to make friends pretty easily. It's a good thing, too, considering how many times she's had to start over. The one constant in her life is this pillow she's had since she was a teenager. It's shaped like Mickey Mouse. She likes how his ears stick out just like hers. Having it with her made moving a little easier. And she's moved a lot - 15 different schools, 24 different foster homes.
Let's do a little checklist here. When you aged out at 19, did you have a job?
UQDAH: When I first aged out, no.
GUERRA: Did you have a checking account?
UQDAH: No.
GUERRA: So I'm guessing you didn't have a savings account either?
UQDAH: No.
GUERRA: Did you have a car?
UQDAH: No. I didn't even know how to properly fill my refrigerator, honestly (laughter). I had like 10 boxes of cereal and one gallon of milk (laughter) and some Hot Pockets (laughter).
GUERRA: In addition to the Hot Pockets, Jasmine Uqdah also had a college acceptance letter to Wayne State University in Detroit. What she didn't have was money to pay for it. Now, this was back in 2008. There were some scholarships specifically for foster youth but not a lot. The only thing Uqdah qualified for was a $2,500 federal Pell grant. The rest she had to take out in loans.
UQDAH: It's pretty difficult to stay focused on your education when you have to worry about a lot of other life issues, like having somewhere to stay, having food to eat and just the general support for motivation to stay in school.
GUERRA: She had your typical freshman schedule - math, English comp, world history. But it was harder than she thought, and she wasn't used to having the big lecture hall classes with a couple hundred students. Trying to balance school and a part time job and money and life on her own - it was just too stressful. So she dropped out after two semesters with more than $15,000 in debt and took a second job as a meat slicer at a Detroit market. But she never stopped dreaming about college. A couple years ago, she decided to re-enroll. This time, she's at a community college.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Whenever you want to change the denominator...
GUERRA: The big difference this time around? It's all free. Jasmine Uqdah doesn't have to pay a thing. See, over the last few years, there's been this nationwide push to get more foster youth to college. And now Michigan, in conjunction with its colleges and universities, is among a growing list of states to offer what is essentially a full ride - or close to it - for youth who have aged out of the system.
MADDY DAY: I think that what's happening in Michigan is really very exciting.
GUERRA: Maddy Day works for something called Fostering Success Michigan, an initiative of Western Michigan University. The goal is to help every foster youth in the state get into college and keep them on track to graduate. She says in order to succeed, these young people need more.
DAY: They need the people on campuses who can walk them through those challenges of I don't know what I'm going to major in. You know, where do I live? How do I navigate peer relationships?
GUERRA: Maddy Day says the most successful programs provide year-round housing, a way to connect with other former foster youth and campus coaches who are on call 24 hours a day to help. There are some schools across the country that offer all of that. And they have a pretty good track record in terms of improving graduation rates for former foster youth. The jury's still out, though, on whether tuition assistance alone is enough. Jasmine Uqdah thinks it is.
UQDAH: Now that I have my tuition paid for, I have no excuse whatsoever not to turn in any assignment.
GUERRA: She has her books, her supplies, and she's on track to get her associates degree this winter. She then hopes to enroll at the University of Michigan in Flint to get her bachelors in social work.
UQDAH: And it's just a great feeling to know you're not five steps backwards from the class. Like, you're right there. So if you feel - that's on you because you have no excuses at this point in time.
GUERRA: OK, she's being pretty hard on herself. Jasmine Uqdah has had more bad things happen to her than many of us will experience in our lifetimes. But now, at least, she has a real shot at success. For NPR News, I'm Jennifer Guerra.
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Think about the times you've overheard someone on the phone. You could probably take a pretty good guess about who's on the other end, whether it's a spouse, child or colleague. We all seem to give those clues away - subtle, unconscious changes in our voices - depending on who's on the other end. Well, recently, a team of scientists wondered if people's voices change in predictable ways when they're put in positions of power. NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports now on the voice of authority.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: What does a powerful, authoritative voice sound like? Maybe like this...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FORMER PRIME MINISTER MARGARET THATCHER: The greatest divisions this nation has ever seen were the conflicts of trade unions towards the end of a labor government.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: That's Margaret Thatcher, pretty powerful. But here's how she sounded earlier in her political career.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
THATCHER: I'm very much aware of the responsibilities and a little bit apprehensive. Who wouldn't be?
SEI JIN KO: I'd always been fascinated by Margaret Thatcher's voice because I knew that she went through voice coaching to sound more authoritative.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Sei Jin Ko is a social psychology researcher with San Diego State University. She and a couple of colleagues recently did an experiment to see if and how people change their voices if they're put in a position of power, even without voice coaching. Over a hundred college students came into their lab to have themselves recorded, starting with a baseline of recording of their everyday voices.
KO: Having them saying just, you know, what they did in the morning when they got up.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Then they were asked to imagine a scenario, like negotiating the purchase of a new car. Some people were told they were in a position of high power. They had inside information or lots of other offers to choose from. Meanwhile, others were told they had very little power.
KO: They really didn't have many options. The cars are selling very fast, and so the dealership's probably not going to give you a very good deal.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Both groups were then recorded reading the exact same text out loud.
KO: It was something to the effect of, I'm glad we're meeting today to discuss this. We have a few differences that we'll need to iron out before we come to an agreement - something like that.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Researchers took the recordings and then looked for differences between the two groups. They analyzed acoustical features like pitch, resonance and intensity. It turned out that feelings of power are reflected in people's voices.
KO: When you put them in the situation, their voices change. I think that's very, very exciting and quite powerful, shall we say - no pun intended.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: She says the voices of people with power were steadier, less sing-songy. They also were more dynamic.
KO: Because it increased in pitch and intensity variability. So they went in and out of loudness more than those in low-power.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: She couldn't play us recordings from her study for privacy reasons. But you can hear almost exactly the same thing in Margaret Thatcher's voice after she had coaching.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
THATCHER: Let me answer that very deeply because I feel very strongly about it.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Ko says the changes Thatcher seems to have deliberately made in her voice were almost identical to the changes made automatically by the speakers given power in her study.
KO: So that was quite remarkable actually.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: These results appear in the journal Psychological Science. But the researchers didn't stop there. They did another study using the recorded voices. They wanted to know if listeners could tell who had power and who didn't. And listeners could.
KO: They do use these characteristics to make very accurate predictions of whether the speaker is the boss or not.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Now, at NPR, we think about voices a lot. I think it's fair to say that most of us here work at sounding authoritative, powerful. Here's my very first radio piece.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Kevin McGowan has studied the crows living in Ithaca, New York for over 15 years. They hate his guts.
Just for fun, I sent Ko that bit of tape and asked her to run a comparison with the way I sound now.
KO: I actually have your graph right in front of me.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: She saw changes in three of the six features that seemed key in their study.
KO: You're much less sing-songy, actually a huge difference.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Lots of things are probably at play here, like the fact that I'm 10 years older, and now I'm way more comfortable in front of a microphone. Ko says there actually hasn't been much research into how an individual's voice varies when they're put in one situation rather than another.
KO: That's what's amazing. It's practically unstudied.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Even though as listeners we're hearing these differences all the time. Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
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China today is a whirlwind of competing trends - authoritarianism versus personal freedom, pollution versus environmentalism, self-interest versus spirituality. As for that last conflict, NPR's Frank Langfitt says you can see it play out on weekends along the river in Shanghai.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED GROUP: (Singing in foreign language).
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: Hundreds of Buddhists pack the banks of Shanghai's Huangpu River every other Sunday morning. Monks in saffron-colored robes lead them in song in the shadow of some of the world's tallest skyscrapers. Then...
(SOUNDBITE OF WATER SPLASHING)
LANGFITT: They pour thousands of fish and mollusks into the muddy waters that empty a dozen miles downstream into the mighty Yangtze River. Shen Tianlong, a retired chef, climbs over the railing onto a ledge and gently brushes the remaining snails into the water.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Speaking foreign language).
LANGFITT: Everybody's worried he'll fall in. Unfazed, he pauses to explain why he's here.
SHEN TIANLONG: (Through interpreter) We are freeing captive animals. Why do we free them? They're just like us. We are all living creatures.
LANGFITT: Releasing animals is an ancient tradition among Chinese Buddhists, who believe saving an animal that's about to die is an act of compassion. Xu Gaosheng, a retired ad agency worker who's wearing a pink polo shirt, explains.
XU GAOSHENG: (Through interpreter) Buddhism seeks to deliver all living creatures from torment and emphasizes benevolence. All living creatures should be treated well.
LANGFITT: Environmentalists have criticized animal releases disruptive to habitats. The ritual here also draws opportunists...
(SOUNDBITE OF TAPPING ON METAL CUP)
LANGFITT: Like the beggar who shows up to work the crowd while tapping a metal cup or migrant workers who prey on the Buddhists' conscience by hawking turtles at exorbitant prices. And then, just 20 yards downstream, there are the two-dozen men who lie in wait with nets, men who see this ritual as nothing more than a free meal.
There's a fisherman here named Li, and he's doing a bonanza, getting a lot of fish. He's got, like, a 15-foot pole. And he's just - people are dumping them right in front of him. Oh, he's double dipping, going in and getting another one. So now he's got two. He's just actually tossing them in the shrubs and going to pick them up later.
Li's caught over 20 fish. I ask if he thinks scooping up all these fish is fair.
LI: (Through interpreter) What's fair? What isn't fair? There are people releasing fish and people catching them. Nothing's fair in today's society. The more skilled swindlers just cheat the weaker ones.
LANGFITT: Wang Jisi disagrees. She's a retired accountant and Buddhist who's helping release the fish today. She chases down Li and scolds him.
WANG JISI: (Speaking foreign language).
LANGFITT: She says he may catch fish today, but karmic payback is coming.
JISI: (Through intepreter) If they catch fish and it makes them happy, then I guess I'm happy for them. But when something bad happens to their family and they wonder why, it's because he did something bad.
LANGFITT: In these fisherman, Wang says, she sees a greed that pervades society here and elsewhere around the world.
JISI: (Through intepreter) I don't think I hate them. I pity them. They aren't enlightened. They don't understand. They don't understand karma.
LANGFITT: And they aren't likely to anytime soon. Li shrugs off his scolding and returns to the railing where he reaches over with his net and tries to add to his catch. Frank Langfitt, NPR News, Shanghai.
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One of our music reviewers has been captivated by a book. It features many previously unpublished photos from Chris Stein, better known as the guitarist and cofounder of Blondie. Stein is a lifelong New Yorker. He studied photography at the School of Visual Arts, training his camera on Manhattan's burgeoning punk rock and new wave revolution. Our reviewer Meredith Ochs says his new book titled "Negative" chronicles that scene and his band's assent to global stardom.
MEREDITH OCHS, BYLINE: Chris Stein's photos document a New York that is barely recognizable today. It was the days of boom boxes, Xeroxes and smoking indoors, rents that were cheap enough for artists to afford - a city in decline that was fertile ground for phenomenal artistic ferment.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HEART OF GLASS")
BLONDIE: (Singing) Once I had love and it was a gas. Soon turned out, had a heart of glass.
OCHS: It's a fairly well-documented era, but Stein's vantage point is unique. He landed in Andy Warhol's world when his high school band opened up for The Velvet Underground and later found himself at the epicenter of the downtown music scene, which spawned bands like the Ramones, Talking Heads and his own group, Blondie.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HEART OF GLASS")
BLONDIE: (Singing) I fear I'm losing you. It's just no good, you teasing like you do.
OCHS: Chris Stein also happened to be partners - both in music and in life - with Debbie Harry, Blondie's lead singer, one of the world's most iconic beauties. Much of the book is centered on their relationship. Her astounding looks and shocking style are unavoidable, but Stein also captures everything that makes her one of rock's coolest front-persons, including the keen ironic sensibility she and Stein shared. Many of the photos subvert female stereotypes - Harry in a fire-singed gown in her kitchen, holding a frying pan full of leaping flames. Or, reading a newspaper with the headline "Women Are Just Slaves."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SHAYLA")
BLONDIE: (Singing) Shayla worked in a factory. She wasn't history, she's just a number.
OCHS: In his book, Chris Stein makes the connection between well-known performers and those who deserved more attention. Not just musicians, but filmmakers, painters, fashion designers, even nightclub impresarios. It's a joy to see them all in context and understand the way they influence one another. It's also a touching elegy to those who are gone, like Warhol and Jean Michel Basquiat, who had a cameo in the video for Blondie's pioneering rap crossover hit, "Rapture."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "RAPTURE")
BLONDIE: (Singing) And you hip-hop and you don't stop. Just blast off, sure shot. 'Cause the man from Mars stopped eating cars and eating bars, and now he only eats guitars. Get up.
OCHS: Alongside his photographs, Chris Stein provides an easy personable narrative, but never so much that it detracts from the art itself. As musically adventurous as Stein is, these images reflect his eclectic influences in greater depth. His use of shadow, space and place are wildly creative, and his ability to capture friends at unguarded moments speaks to his understated nature. Stein's book is not a comprehensive look at the time it chronicles - it can't be. But it takes you on a tour of places that will never exist again and illuminates the people who made them so magical.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DREAMING")
BLONDIE: (Singing) Imagine something of your very own, something you can have and hold. I'd build a road in gold just to have some dreaming.
SIEGEL: The book of photographs by Chris Stein is called "Negative: Me, Blondie And The Advent Of Punk." Our reviewer Meredith Ochs is a talk-show host and DJ at SiriusXM radio.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DREAMING")
BLONDIE: (Singing) Dreaming is free. Dreaming is free.
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You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
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We're going to hear next about a program that helps victims of domestic violence take legal action while they receive medical care. This program at St. Joseph's Regional Medical Center in Paterson, New Jersey, has been operating for a few years and is about to expand. NPR's Laura Starecheski reports.
LAURA STARECHESKI, BYLINE: If you've ever used video on Skype or FaceTime then you can picture how this special program at St. Joseph's works. In the emergency room here - it's a busy one - patients are screened for domestic violence. For those who choose to explain their injuries, the evidence is often painfully clear, says Sister Maryanne Campeotto.
MARYANNE CAMPEOTTO: Broken bones, broken arm, or broken leg, broken nose.
STARECHESKI: Sister Maryanne helped start this program. She says the hospital staff noticed how hard it was for victims with injuries to get up the courage to ask for help. That can become tougher once they leave the safety of the hospital. So while they're still here, a social worker helps them video chat with Diana Bodeen, a domestic violence hearing officer for Passaic County.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO CHAT)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Hi, Diana.
DIANA BODEEN: Hi.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: Hi, Diana.
STARECHESKI: Diana Bodeen's face comes up on a screen and in about 45 minutes, the patient can get a temporary restraining order before they even leave the hospital.
BODEEN: Sometimes we've done hearings actually from the emergency room, you know, from literally somebody sitting in a bed with curtains around them.
STARECHESKI: The video is essential for patients like one Bodeen remembers who had neck injuries so severe she had to have a tracheotomy.
BODEEN: She could not talk.
STARECHESKI: So she answered questions with thumbs up, thumbs down hand signals.
BODEEN: She was so interested in communicating with us that she took her pad and started writing information to us and holding it up.
STARECHESKI: Video is useful for legal documentation too, says St. Joseph social worker Tina Miles.
TINA MILES: The judges or the hearing officer will utilize the technology to zoom in, to take a look at bruising and any injuries.
STARECHESKI: The program was the first of its kind in New Jersey when it began four years ago. Soon it'll be the first to be available 24/7. A county judge will be on-call at night and on weekends, when most victims show up at the hospital, via an iPad. That expanded service should start sometime in early 2015.
Laura Starecheski, NPR News.
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We don't tend to think about rape in war-torn countries as a topic for research, but a new center in eastern Congo - the so-called rape capital of the world - aims to combat sexual violence with better science. At the center, Congolese researchers are studying the long-term impact of rape on survivors their families and communities. NPR's Gregory Warner visited the center to find out what local researchers see that internationals don't.
GREGORY WARNER, BYLINE: When Tina Amisi was a teenager, her mom told her it was time to stop school and help out around the house, but her father protected her. Amisi grew up in a small village in the Democratic Republic of Congo with 26 brothers and sisters, but her father supported her dream to go to medical school in the city of Bukavu. She's so excited recounting the story, she can't stop from clapping.
TINA AMISI: (Through interpreter) And then my father said well, is there a university in Bukavu? I said yes, yes, yes, yes - I'm going. You'll leave your mother? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes - I'm going.
WARNER: When the class-work got too hard and she decided to drop out, it was her father who walked hundreds of miles from his village to her dorm room just to give her a critical pep talk.
AMISI: (Through interpreter) And truly I thank him for that. If he hadn't done that, I wouldn't have been able to become a doctor.
WARNER: Now Dr. Tina Amisi works with women who've mostly been rejected by their fathers and husbands. She works at Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, which every year treats more than 2,000 survivors of rape. Many of the women have been shunned by their communities, and so the hospital doesn't just give medical care, it also hosts Western organizations that teach these women job skills like basket-weaving in order to give them some means of self-support when they leave the hospital. But after years of working here, Dr. Amisi has come to wonder if this approach - this Western solution to encourage self-reliance - is the right fit for her country's communal norms. She points out that most women end up returning to their home villages. If the woman is a pariah, her neighbors may not buy her baskets no matter how well she weaves them.
AMISI: (Through interpreter) Thus we have to ask now the question, what is the impact of all that? Does the community perceive it positively or negatively? And the woman herself when she returns home, how does she feel?
WARNER: Amisi doesn't know the answer to these questions yet. She's just at the beginning of her research. But her research is only possible thanks to a new center at Panzi Hospital established by the University of Michigan. Center director Kanigula Mubagwa says it's giving Congolese doctors the resources to study with academic rigor the bigger issues for the patients that they encounter every day in their clinics.
KANIGULA MUBAGWA: The role of Congolese researchers will be similar to the role played by other researchers when they work in their own countries.
WARNER: That is, that they can look at the broader context of the problem. In this case, not just doing a survey to find out how many people were victimized by what armed group, but what it will take for the community to repair itself, for rape survivors and their children to be accepted back into the fold. Perhaps, for example, some of the money that's given to individual survivors to teach them job skills might be more effectively granted to a project that helps the whole village's economy.
MUBAGWA: And I think these people - the researchers, the local researchers - when they talk to the population, they might be much more easily heard than a Westerner who would come and say well, you have to accept these women, you have to accept these children. People might think that they are being imposed traditions which are different from theirs.
WARNER: Dr. Amisi, the doctor with the 26 siblings, says she's excited to get to that stage of her research. One thing that working at Panzi Hospital has taught her is that rape survivors can be incredibly strong. She's eager to follow them into their home communities to find the strong men that can support them.
Gregory Warner, NPR News, Nairobi.
(MUSIC)
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Cardiac surgery in the U.S. can run hundreds of thousands of dollars. A state-of-the-art medical center in Bangalore, India, performs open heart surgery for a fraction of that. The majority of operations there are steeply discounted or free of charge. NPR's Julie McCarthy introduces us to a surgeon who is rewriting the rules of affordable, high-tech cardiac care.
JULIE MCCARTHY, BYLINE: We scrub up and step into a world where Dr. Devi Shetty says he never gets tired...
(SOUNDBITE OF MEDICAL DEVICE BEEPING)
MCCARTHY: The operating room. Shetty joins a team of doctors performing surgery on 6-year-old Nitha Nisar, magnifying lenses perched on his nose. Shetty says the child has a leaking heart valve.
DEVI SHETTY: Repairing the child's heart valve - it requires lot of expertise. It is done in very few centers across the world. And we have done thousands of them.
MCCARTHY: Shetty is Buddha-like calm. Nothing of the nail-biting tension of TV hospital dramas here, Narayana Health, the center he founded. The gurgling heart-lung machine does the work of Nitha's stopped heart. Monitors keep a metronome-like rhythm, and music infuses the air.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC IN OPERATING ROOM)
SHETTY: Music is very soothing because the operation lasts six hours, eight hours, 10 hours. You need to create that environment.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC IN OPERATING ROOM)
MCCARTHY: Shetty also insists that young surgeons at this teaching hospital attend painting classes to learn to treat instruments like paint brushes. Ultimately, we are all artists, he says.
SHETTY: Because of the huge volume - because the number of operations we perform on a daily basis, we have developed phenomenal skills.
MCCARTHY: Shetty says it's why they have good outcomes. He speaks huddling over the spliced open chest of the child.
SHETTY: Now I'm trying to close the opening we created to repair the valve. These are the fine sutures made up of a material called Prolene.
MCCARTHY: To cut costs, Shetty assessed the price of the sutures supplied by a multinational company.
SHETTY: Every year, the product price goes up by 5 percent, 10 percent. And the revenue of people doesn't go up by 5 percent, 10 percent.
MCCARTHY: Shetty switched to a cheaper Indian brand, spurred competition and made savings.
SHETTY: Huge saving - huge, huge saving.
MCCARTHY: Some doctors complained that the cost-cutting compromises quality but say they use their skills to overcome any shortcomings. Shetty has slashed costs on everything from the operating table to the lighting, all from American or European companies.
I understand you're a very tough bargainer.
SHETTY: I'm not negotiating on my behalf. I'm negotiating for the man who's selling his house to sleep on the hospital bed.
MCCARTHY: Selling a home, a cow to pay for a hospital stay is not uncommon. While health care in India is universal, coverage and quality are spotty. And most Indians still don't have insurance.
SHETTY: So it's my duty to give him at the best price.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC IN OPERATING ROOM)
MCCARTHY: A flutter of excitement ripples through the OR as Nitha's heart begins to pump on its own again.
SHETTY: Show them, yeah. You can see the heart. It looks like a happy heart now.
MCCARTHY: Success.
SHETTY: God's grace.
MCCARTHY: Shetty deflects compliments the way one of his former patients, the late Mother Teresa, might have. He calls the tiny nun a Nobel laureate, a towering influence on his life. From Shetty's glass-walled OR, I peer into a row of active operating theaters. Fifty-eight surgeons work six days a week here, stitching back life into broken hearts for a fraction of what they might earn at a premier private hospital in India or in the U.S.
NARAYANA RAJAGOPALAN: You know, there are certain things that in life, you know, you just do only once.
MCCARTHY: Pulmonary critical care specialist Dr. N. Rajagopalan came home to treat his fellow Indians, quitting a $350,000-a-year practice in Miami.
RAJAGOPALAN: It's precipitous fall from that year (laughter). But as I said, I think health care is a mess everywhere. I think whatever Dr. Shetty has been doing is remarkable.
MCCARTHY: Devi Shetty says Narayana's profits are poured back into the enterprise, which now has 29 hospitals in India and one in Grand Cayman. The volume of surgeries - 14,000 last year - have drawn comparisons to the assembly lines of Henry Ford.
SHETTY: It's pointless building boutique hospitals where one surgery or two heart surgeries are done in a day. We need to have few hospitals, but these hospitals should do very large number. Then your quality improves, cost goes down.
MCCARTHY: So Henry Ford's not a bad model.
SHETTY: Oh, not at all. This is the way forward for the world.
MCCARTHY: Shetty contends people are entitled to cardiac care, regardless of how little they earn.
SHETTY: We have never refused a single patient because they have no money.
MCCARTHY: The fees from the rich offset the costs for the poor. Patients with money pay several thousand dollars for open heart surgery. But patients with little money - and little hope of raising any - pay very little. They are 60 percent of the cases. The head of the charitable trust wing, Lakshmi Mani, says there's no complicated means test to determine who's eligible for free surgery.
LAKSHMI MANI: One look at them, we can make out they are poor. They don't have the money. And once we start doubting their credential, there's no end to it.
MCCARTHY: But the hospital is tougher on a male child who needs surgery. Shetty figures in a culture that puts a premium on sons, families of boys will somehow raise the money. A girl child in India, however, is far more likely to die before the age of five for lack of adequate food and medical care.
SHETTY: They will never raise the money for a girl child. So if it is a girl child, we talk to them very politely. And the moment they start asking tough questions, we tell them don't bother. You don't pay anything. We'll take care of the child.
MCCARTHY: Cardiac disease is on the rise in India. The chief's office is a revolving door of stricken breadwinners and babies.
SHETTY: More than 90 percent of the heart problems in children are correctable. Six-hundred to 800 children are born every day with a heart problem.
MCCARTHY: Baby Aswin was fortunate to get treatment. Ninety-five percent don't.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHICKENS CLUCKING)
MCCARTHY: Amid the clamor of chickens and children, the wide-eyed infant recovers at his uncle's house. Anjali Subramaniam cradles her son in her sari and talks the ordeal that left a scar the length of his tiny chest.
ANJALI SUBRAMANIAM: (Speaking foreign language).
MCCARTHY: The father's meager $5-a-day wage meant that the infant's surgery was done for free. But expensive incidentals were not covered. Anjali's brother scraped together $1,000 for those, saying, Dr. Shetty cares for the poor like us. Anjali says her son has been given a second birth.
SUBRAMANIAM: (Speaking foreign language).
MCCARTHY: We see the doctor as a god, the young mother says. And that hospital for us is a temple. Shetty is overturning how cardiac care gets apportioned in India, whether it's addressing gender bias or redistributing care to the poor. The hospital's break-even point for surgery is $1,200. Shetty wants to cut that in half.
SHETTY: Like we get oxygen, air and water, health care should become available to everyone on this planet, naturally.
MCCARTHY: Devi Shetty predicts that in India will become the first country to disassociate health care from affluence. Julie McCarthy, NPR News.
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This year, banks will be reissuing hundreds of millions of credit cards. The new cards will store information about the user on a computer chip embedded in the card. It's supposed to provide a higher level of security for credit card transactions. But the banks are stopping short of another step that would provide even better security against credit card fraud. As NPR's Jim Zarroli reports, a lot of retailers aren't too happy about that.
JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: Americans use their credit cards a lot, and most of the cards they use operate the same way. The credit card is a swiped through a machine. The machine reads the customer's personal information, which is stored in a magnetic strip on the back. The problem, says Kevin Yuann of the website NerdWallet, is that this magnetic strip is really easy for criminals to access.
KEVIN YUANN: The Target breach, for example, the Home Depot breach - someone skimmed all that card data and then printed out fraudulent cards.
ZARROLI: Now, however, U.S. credit card companies are moving to cards encoded with small chips - the kind of cards long used overseas. And Yuann says fraud will become a lot harder to pull off.
YUANN: That type of fraud won't be able to occur because the chip prevents someone from emulating a card that way.
ZARROLI: The United States has been slow to accept these chip-encoded cards until now because most retailers didn't have the machines that could read them, and they didn't want to pay for them. But later this year, retailers that don't accept cards with chips will be responsible for any fraud that occurs as a result. So the retail industry has invested billions of dollars to buy the new technology. But Mallory Duncan of the National Retail Federation says the new cards won't be as safe as they could be, and he blames the big banks.
MALLORY DUNCAN: It's really disappointing to see that after all of the hacks that have occurred, the banks are only willing to take the steps that protect the banks.
ZARROLI: As anyone who's traveled to Europe lately knows, using a credit card overseas usually requires entering a PIN number, just as you do with your bank card in the United States. But the U.S. banks that issue credit cards didn't want to ask their customers to do that. So they'll just be required to provide their signature the way that they do now, for the most part. Doug Johnson is senior vice president of payments and cyber security policy for the American Bankers Association.
DOUG JOHNSON: Most credit card users in the United States - in fact, the vast, vast majority of them - are not accustomed to using a PIN within a credit environment. So I think that that's something that was central to the decision of the credit card issuers.
ZARROLI: In essence, U.S. consumers aren't used to punching in a PIN number when they buy something with their credit cards. Kevin Yuann says credit card companies did marketing studies and found that requiring PIN numbers would actually turn off customers. U.S. consumers don't like them.
YUANN: The banks want to make sure that cardholders use their card. And so they want to make it as easy for the cardholder - and so until they see adoption of PIN across the system, no bank wants to be the only one with a PIN-only enabled credit card.
ZARROLI: But requiring PIN numbers would make credit cards even safer - a lot safer, in fact. Bank industry officials brushed aside this concern, saying it's a temporary issue. There's a new generation of credit cards coming that won't use numbers at all - not even account numbers. Until then, they say the new chip-encoded cards will provide an extra level of security even if they don't go as far as a lot of retailers would like. Jim Zarroli, NPR News.
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The annual International Consumer Electronics Show is filling the city's hotels and convention halls. There are curved TV screens, video eyewear and devices to track your mood or your fitness. And there's a growing wave of tracking devices and apps that you can use for medical purposes. NPR's Aarti Shahani is in Las Vegas.
AARTI SHAHANI, BYLINE: Let's start with the basic ear examination. When your kid's ear is throbbing at 2 a.m., you might want to grab the car keys and head to the emergency room. But, Erik Douglas says, grab your iPhone instead.
ERIK DOUGLAS: So I'll go ahead and - I'm going to pull your eardrum - or your ear - back a little bit to be able to get a clear view.
SHAHANI: Douglas is CEO of CellScope and we are playing doctor. He's not an M.D.
OK.
DOUGLAS: And start recording.
SHAHANI: CellScope has built a little ear probe that you clip on top of your iPhone camera. The footage streams into an app. He shows me.
DOUGLAS: And right down here, that's your eardrum.
SHAHANI: I've never seen my eardrum before.
DOUGLAS: (Laughter). Well, that looks like healthy one.
SHAHANI: My eardrum looks like a translucent blob. It's the ultimate selfie. I could be tempted to use the $79 device to diagnose myself and not seek real medical care, even if I needed it. But, Douglas says, CellScope isn't replacing the doctor. They've got doctors on-call who analyze ear footage in under two hours. So families get medical care more efficiently.
DOUGLAS: The ones that have been most enthusiastic about it so far have been those families that are in the doctor's office once a month for ear infections.
SHAHANI: And let's say you have a disease that does not have a cure - like Alzheimer's. Elli Kaplan's Neurotrack is trying to crowdsource the cure.
ELLI KAPLAN: There are thousands of people taking the test. And then we're working with pharmaceutical companies to help them develop their drugs.
SHAHANI: Neurotrack is developing an online quiz whose effectiveness is a wide-open question - there's no definitive way to diagnose Alzheimer's. You sit in front of your laptop and look at a series of images. Your camera watches where your eyeballs focus and fail to focus, to identify if you're showing early signs of the disease.
KAPLAN: It's only possible now or only possible in the last few years because web camera technology has improved so dramatically.
SHAHANI: The test is not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Kaplan says when it is, a medical expert would call to discuss results, not just throw out a big, blunt red-alert. Telemedicine is not risk-free. Cyberattacks are increasingly targeting health care data that's stored on the cloud. Still, enthusiasts say, the rewards outweigh the risks.
MALAY GANDHI: In under five years, if we want, we'll be able to measure pretty much every aspect of clinically-useful physiology from our home.
SHAHANI: Malay Gandhi makes a production.
GANDHI: We won't have to go into an office.
SHAHANI: Gandhi is managing director at Rock Health. His company invests in medical startups that already have or are applying to get approval from the FDA. He says that means they've got real quality control. They'll deliver accurate data that doctors actually want to use. And he says they'll help doctors keep an eye on their patients from a distance. Take that ear device, which is registered with the FDA.
GANDHI: Well, I can just pull up the video and look at it tomorrow. I don't need to make a decision on the spot. And if it's fine - not changing - why prescribe antibiotics?
SHAHANI: At this year's Consumer Electronics Show, there are nearly 300 health and biotech exhibitors, up 35 percent from last year. And while the company Apple is not making a splash here, experts say the iPhone and its health app are poised to be the platform - the basic tool kit that gets us into tracking ourselves for medical purposes.
Aarti Shahani, NPR News, Las Vegas.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
We're going to hear next about a case that involves the former head of cyber security for the Department of Health and Human Services. He's being sentenced today in Nebraska for accessing child pornography. The case highlights a problem for prosecutors. They say tools that cloak online identities complicate their efforts to police all types of crimes. The Justice Department says the man used free software to try to remain anonymous. NPR's Carrie Johnson has more, starting with the headlines the investigation sparked.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: A federal cyber security director turns out to be a predator.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Caught and convicted here in Omaha in one of the most horrific cases of child pornography we have ever covered.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Prosecutors say they found graphic images of children on a laptop computer in the home of Timothy Defoggi. He once led cyber security efforts for the Health and Human Services Department. But in this case, the Justice Department says Defoggi used his expertise to hide from the law, along with other users of child porn sites on a network called Tor. Tor provides popular software that helps people hide their location and viewing habits by bouncing messages all over the world. Supporters say it can be used for perfectly legitimate reasons, to protect the privacy of protesters and artists and repressive regimes. But it's also drawn attention from people like Leslie Caldwell. She runs in the criminal division at the Justice Department.
LESLIE CALDWELL: A lot of what we thought of as traditional unsophisticated criminals are now on the Internet selling drugs, selling guns, selling murder-for-hire schemes, selling child pornography.
JOHNSON: And those criminals, Caldwell says, have gotten a lot smarter about covering their tracks.
CALDWELL: Technology is trending toward even greater anonymization, which is something that is just going to make our job that much more difficult.
JOHNSON: In the Defoggi case, prosecutors say he took substantial steps to avoid detection. They say he used software programs to erase his web searches and had to be physically removed from his laptop when the FBI searched his home. Defoggi's lawyer at the time of the trial, John Berry, didn't return phone calls. But he talked with Omaha's KETV about the case last year.
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JOHN BERRY: Just because you have a screen name and IP address, that does not tell you who is behind the computer, especially when there are multiple people that live in a residence.
JOHNSON: And that's the anonymity problem in a nutshell. Except for this - prosecutors in this case were able to unmask many users of those graphic sites. The FBI seized the sites and watched for weeks, tapping communications and using other investigative techniques. Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell didn't want to share details for fear criminals would work around them, but she says the government gets judicial approval to take those steps.
CALDWELL: Certainly in the criminal context, there are a lot of checks and balances and we work with the courts and under the supervision of the courts.
JOHNSON: Skeptics of government surveillance wonder if prosecutors tell judges exactly what they're doing and whether courts understand those steps. Julian Sanchez is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
JULIAN SANCHEZ: There is a problem of the gap in knowledge between the people implementing and deploying high-tech search methods and the judges that are supposed to be authorizing them.
JOHNSON: Sanchez says there are important trade-offs to balance between crime-fighting and privacy, and unknowns such as whether the U.S. has cracked the Tor network.
SANCHEZ: That's something that's important for the world to know. It's important for democracy activists and repressive regimes to know because if we can do it, probably China's intelligence agency can do it, too.
JOHNSON: Last week a computer science researcher at a conference in Germany reported 4 out of 5 visits to Tor hidden sites relate to child abuse or pedophilia. But no one knows how many of those visits come from law enforcement patrolling the web for criminals.
Carrie Johnson, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Think everything's going to be the same on Capitol Hill this year? Well, think again. A new Congress that takes the oath tomorrow and the elections of last November have produced Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate. We've been hearing a lot about how big these majorities are, especially in the House, which hasn't seen this many Republicans since the presidency of Harry Truman. And joining us to talk about this seismic shift on Capitol Hill is NPR's senior editor and correspondent, Ron Elving. Ron, we keep hearing about the big new majority in the House. Remind us why this year is so remarkable.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: It's a big class. Two-hundred-and-forty-six Republicans are expected to take the oath tomorrow. And that is the most since the Congress elected in 1946. The last time the Republicans had a larger majority sworn-in was in 1929, when they had about 62 percent of the seats.
SIEGEL: So how much difference do a dozen seats make?
ELVING: It gives the speaker more breathing room. The speaker is likely to worry a little less about being hamstrung by, say, a handful of its dissidents. It lets the leadership think big about legislation and really, the biggest majorities in history have tended to make laws that really changed the country. The big Democratic majorities in Lyndon Johnson's era 50 years ago passed the Voting Rights Act and Medicare and the Great Society programs. The big Democratic majority six years ago passed Obamacare.
SIEGEL: Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s had even bigger majorities on the hill.
ELVING: Yes, more than 330 seats and 77 percent of the House, at his peak. And that majority passed the Wagner Act just 80 years ago this year, giving labor unions economic and political clout. And then when the Republicans came back after World War II and won that big majority I mentioned in 1946, they curtailed the Wagner Act with the Taft-Hartley Act and made it stick over Harry Truman's veto.
SIEGEL: Now, it's not just that there are more Republicans in the House and they have a bigger majority, but the huge change is also that the Senate is now in Republican hands, too - more significant?
ELVING: In a way. It is the first time in the Obama presidency that the Republicans have had both chambers under their control. And they have a few votes to spare in the Senate, having risen all the way to 54 seats there.
SIEGEL: But that doesn't give the GOP the 60 votes that they would need to close off filibusters and really run the show, under the rules of the Senate.
ELVING: That's right, and they're going to have trouble finding six crossover votes in this environment. You know, they beat some of their best prospective crossovers, in the sense of Democrats who might have voted with them on some of these issues. And they would need more than a dozen crossovers if they're going to override a presidential veto. That takes a two-thirds majority. And we may see vetoes and attempts at overrides very soon on issues such as the Keystone pipeline.
SIEGEL: And in the House, are the Republicans secure now for the time being, with such a big majority?
ELVING: It would seem so. We should mention that the last two times Republicans had this many seats in the House, they had disastrous elections at the very next cycle and lost control. But that's far less likely now. The regional base of the Republican Party has shifted. The last time they had this many seats, they had very few in the South. Now that's the bedrock of their majority. And in the rest of the country, Republican seats are largely locked in by the district maps that will be in effect until after 2020.
SIEGEL: OK. Thank you, Ron.
ELVING: Thank you, Robert.
SIEGEL: That's NPR editor and correspondent Ron Elving.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Lebanon has no ability to receive more refugees.
Those, the words today of the Lebanese interior minister. He was defending the country's decision to introduce a new visa policy for Syrian refugees, a policy which went into effect today. Lebanon has taken in an estimated 1.5 million refugees fleeing Syria's civil war over the past four years. And for a country the size of Massachusetts with a population of about 4.5 million, Lebanese officials are now saying, enough. For more on what this means, we have reached Lama Fakih in Beirut. She is the Syria and Lebanon researcher for Human Rights Watch.
Welcome to the program.
LAMA FAKIH: Thanks for having me, Robert.
SIEGEL: First of all, explain the new policy. What does it require of Syrians now that it didn't require of them before?
FAKIH: What the Lebanese government has done is introduce six new categories of individuals that can enter the country. This means that Syrians can only access Lebanon in very limited cases - if they're students, if they're coming for tourism, for work, if they own property in the country, if they're coming for medical treatment or if they're transiting. These very limited criteria, however, do not extend to refugees.
SIEGEL: Does that mean that a Syrian family fleeing the war in Syria and trying to get into Lebanon would be turned back at the border?
FAKIH: We are looking to general security to make clear what exactly this means for Syrians. We are hoping that the government will continue to extend refuge for families that are trying to access the territory. But we are very concerned that these new categories will actually close out a range of people that are fleeing the violence in Syria.
SIEGEL: I'd read that the Lebanese are often upset at how many Syrians are finding work in Lebanon, driving down wages, driving up rents for lodging. And they simply resent the economic impact of this refugee population. Is that accurate?
FAKIH: There is no doubt that the growing refugee population has put a strain on some local communities. We have seen an increase in the cost of rent, decrease in wages, badly-strained infrastructure all the more strained. We're talking here about health care, about schools. And the Lebanese government, you know, cannot manage the refugee burden alone. There is also responsibility on donor states to be providing assistance to the Lebanese government so that they can continue to maintain an open border policy and so that they can ensure that basic standards of living are not being reduced for the most vulnerable Lebanese.
SIEGEL: If in fact Syrians were to be convinced that Lebanon is not a welcoming country for refugees anymore, what options do they have? Could they cross into Turkey or Jordan instead?
FAKIH: We have seen that the Lebanese government recent directives in - actually happening within a context, within neighboring countries trying to restrict access. The Jordanian government has taken a number of steps to try to restrict access for Syrians trying to enter the country. And we've seen similarly the Turkish government and Iraqi government have taken steps to limit the numbers of Syrians entering their territory, as well.
SIEGEL: So all the exits are a lot harder to get through at this point?
FAKIH: We are looking at an overall context in which options for Syrians fleeing the violence are dwindling. And this is at a time when active fighting continues across the country.
SIEGEL: Lama Fakih, thank you very much for talking with us today.
FAKIH: Thank you.
SIEGEL: That's Lama Fakih. She's the Syria and Lebanon researcher for Human Rights Watch. She spoke to us from Beirut about Lebanon's new visa policy for Syrians.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Time now for feedback from your emails and comments. And we begin with a correction. In a report that we aired on New Year's Day, we made a mistake when we spoke about the position Netflix and Amazon have taken on net neutrality. Those companies do not support the idea that they and others should be able to pay more to get better Internet service. They are on record as opposing moves that could mean some Internet traffic is given priority. We regret the error.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
We got the attention of Professor Leonard Saxe of Brandeis University when he heard our story about the prosecution of a man who teaches people how to beat polygraph tests. One expert in that piece said that though they're not perfect, polygraphs still have an accuracy rate above 80 percent. Well, Dr. Saxe wrote in to tell us he's researched the validity of so-called lie detectors, and he disagrees. He writes this. (Reading) Polygraph tests continue to be used not because they are accurate, but because of beliefs in their accuracy. In some subjects, this belief motivates them to volunteer information or to be extremely anxious when they provide false information. Unfortunately, the test can't determine what a subject believes.
SIEGEL: A recent pair of stories about the no-kill movement in animal shelters that ran here and on Morning Edition brought a lot of response. Some wrote to say that the series should have emphasized the success of spay and neuter programs more. But John O'Neill of Cedar, Michigan says no-kill shelters can cause a knock-on animal tragedy, carnage for songbirds. He writes this. (Reading) The no-kill policies add to this greatly in two ways. First, they often involve neutering cats and then releasing them into the wild. Secondly, shelters cannot cope with the number of unwanted cats and often refuse to take cats, increasing the number of feral cats. It is a disastrous policy that is hostile to wildlife.
BLOCK: Robert Young of Longmont, Colorado volunteers at a Denver area feline rescue and believes it is almost never acceptable to kill cats who are deemed unadoptable. Here's his take. (Reading) Even those who might seem unadoptable can become so. We had one cat who would, if allowed, attack the first cat it saw mercilessly. He explained, while the other cats roamed freely, this cat had to be contained. But, Mr. Young says, the cat was very sweet on humans. And after many months, the right family adopted the animal.
SIEGEL: We're always happy to hear from you to tell us if anything you hear on the program has you happy or howling. Go to npr.org and click on contact at the bottom of the home page.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Potential jurors are being screened in Boston to decide the fate of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The bombings in 2013 marked the deadliest terrorist attack in the U.S. since 9/11. Hundreds of candidates today filled out questionnaires asking whether they were personally affected by the Boston Marathon blast and whether they would be willing to impose the death penalty. NPR's Tovia Smith was in the federal courthouse and joins us now.
And Tovia, this was the first day of what's expected to be a very long jury selection process. What else can you tell us about what happened today?
TOVIA SMITH, BYLINE: Well, for starters, there were hundreds of members of the public today who got to lay eyes on the defendant, Tsarnaev, who has only been seen publicly since the attack through courtroom sketches. So there was definitely a curiosity factor, a lot of staring.
Tsarnaev, meantime, was fidgety, he was looking around. He was dressed in a sweater and khakis, stroking his shaggy beard. He still has long hair. One side of his face and his eyes still look droopy, presumably as a result of the injuries during the shootout after the marathon. He said nothing and just looked down as the judge introduced him as the defendant. He's facing 30 federal counts of murder and terrorism. And the judge told potential jurors, quote, "we need your help," and he told jurors they shouldn't think of this as a, quote, "annoying burden," though I spoke with a woman who said her son was among the candidates inside, and they were both hoping he would not make the cut for this trial that may go on for five months or so.
BLOCK: And apart from the potential jurors, Tovia, were there any survivors or victims' families in the courtroom today?
SMITH: None visible to reporters, though I am told that they were here to watch. And you know, survivors and their families feel very differently about this. Some want to be at the trial to see Tsarnaev and to try to understand. Others say they want him to see them and the pain he allegedly caused. And then there are others who say they don't want to come because they want to focus on their own healing, not on him.
BLOCK: Talk a bit about the process here, Tovia. What would it take to get through jury selection and actually onto this jury?
SMITH: It would take a lot. They're whittling a pool of about 1,200 candidates down to just 12 with six alternates. Some will be excused for hardship, and then jurors will be grilled about two big issues - first, whether they could impose the death penalty if Tsarnaev is convicted. In other words, they just have to have an open mind to the possibility. And second, whether they have a personal connection to the attack. And that's going to be a tricky one because that can mean very different things, you know, just anyone who was injured, anyone who knows someone who was a victim, anyone who was there. As the prosecutors put it, the city of Boston itself was a victim of this crime. So it is an issue of where to draw the line.
BLOCK: And that helps explain why up until recently, Tsarnaev's defense attorneys have been trying very hard to get this trial moved out of Boston.
SMITH: Right. Even up until the day before yesterday, when a federal appeals court rejected an 11th hour emergency motion and basically backed the trial judge, who insists that impartial jurors can be found here. Though I should add, the trial judge has also said that if it turns out that he's wrong and it's not happening, he says the issue of moving the trial can be revisited down the road.
BLOCK: OK. NPR's Tovia Smith, who is covering the trial of the accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Boston. Jury selection began today.
Tovia, thanks very much.
SMITH: Thank you.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
The lead defense attorney representing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has an excellent track record in sparing the lives of her clients. She is Judy Clarke, and she's made her reputation over the years defending notorious killers and keeping them from being executed. Among them, Susan Smith who drowned her two toddlers, the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and Tucson shooter Jared Lee Loughner, who killed six people and wounded many others including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. All of them were spared the death penalty. Joining me to talk more about Judy Clarke is Jonathan Shapiro, also a defense attorney who handles death penalty cases, and a friend and colleague of Ms. Clarke.
Welcome to the program.
JONATHAN SHAPIRO: Thank you.
BLOCK: And why do you think she's so successful in these cases?
SHAPIRO: I think in large measure, Judy's success has to do with the incredible energy that she puts into every one of these cases. She spends enormous time with her clients for the purpose of building trust and having a good working relationship, which is so important when the stakes are so high and decisions are literally life-and-death kinds of decisions.
BLOCK: She doesn't talk much to reporters, but one thing she has said is this - that she thinks a civilized society, in her words, shouldn't legalize homicide, referring to the death penalty.
How much do you think that belief fuels her interest in taking on these cases?
SHAPIRO: You know, I've often heard Judy Clarke say to students and others that she would hate to be judged based on the worst day of her life. And I think that is the way she views these cases, that there's so much more to a person's story, their life trajectory, than just the crime, and it's always a hard crime but I think it's just abhorrent to her that the state should take a life, particularly just trying to look at that one day.
BLOCK: If you're a defense attorney handling a case like this one, given all the evidence that's known, is your assumption at a certain point that your client will be found guilty and that your real job is to save his life in the penalty phase?
SHAPIRO: Yeah. I mean, there's no question. When the government brings a death penalty case, you know, the finding of guilt is virtually a foregone conclusion. So anybody who does this kind of work, Judy at the top of the list, will tell you that 95 percent of the effort in the run-up to trial is preparing the case for life. We haven't talked nuts and bolts about the case or her investigation or anything like that, but I can imagine that she has, you know, spent this last year finding everyone she can who knows anything about this young man's past - overseas, wherever, around the globe. I'm sure she's traveled numerous times overseas and spent a lot of time just doing the deep digging. That's where the time is spent and, you know, let's spare this client - it's not guilt or innocence.
BLOCK: There are so many victims in this case, in the Boston Marathon bombing. I wonder if seeing them in court, hearing their testimony, would ever cause her to waiver in her beliefs about her client?
SHAPIRO: You know, I kind of doubt it. You'd have to ask her. That's not to say that a lawyer defending somebody who's charged with the terrible crime like this doesn't feel the pain of the victims when they come and testify. I have been on the verge of tears myself having to do that. But it really doesn't change the big picture here. We are - Judy is - trying to save the life...
BLOCK: In this case, the life of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
SHAPIRO: Exactly.
BLOCK: Well, Mr. Shapiro, thanks very much for talking with us.
SHAPIRO: Well, you bet.
BLOCK: Jonathan Shapiro is a defense attorney. He's also a visiting professor at the Washington and Lee University School of Law.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Today, Florida became the 36th state to legalize gay marriage after an extended legal battle in state and federal courts. NPR's Greg Allen was at the courthouse in Miami for today's ruling.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: Gay and lesbian couples and their supporters filled the courtroom today as Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Sarah Zabel announced she was lifting a stay allowing same-sex couples to get married.
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UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Cheering).
ALLEN: Judge Zabel was one of five state judges who, over the last year, heard cases challenging Florida's ban on same-sex marriages. In every case, the judges struck down the ban, which was enshrined in the state constitution by a voter referendum in 2008. Like the other state judges and U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle, Judge Zabel ruled that Florida's ban violated the constitutional right to due process and equal protection under the law. Following his ruling striking down the ban, Judge Hinkle imposed a stay to allow clerks of court in Florida's 67 counties to get ready to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. That stay expires tonight at midnight. But Judge Zabel held a hearing early to allow couples in Miami-Dade to lead the way.
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UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Cheering).
ALLEN: Outside the courthouse in downtown Miami, gay and lesbian couples posed for photos while onlookers yelled, kiss, kiss. Melanie Alenier and Jorge Diaz, with their partners, were two of the couples who sued for the right to marry.
MELANIE ALENIER: Emotional - I mean, finally, we're allowed to do something that we want to do. And no one's going to tell us no.
JORGE DIAZ: And we're equal, which is the most import thing - very proud of our county today and very proud of our state.
ALLEN: On a national level, Florida's actions are hardly groundbreaking. Already, 35 states plus the District of Columbia allow same-sex couples to marry. Florida, though, is a big state with some 20 million people. As of midnight, now some 70 percent of the nation lives in a state that recognizes gay marriage. For Florida and Miami, there's another significance as well. It marks a turnabout from the 1970s, when former beauty queen Anita Bryant led a campaign opposing gay rights that started in Miami. In the meantime, many gay and lesbian couples in Florida have gotten married in other states, but not two of the plaintiffs in the Miami case, Jeff Delmay and his partner, Todd Delmay. They decided to wait.
JEFF DELMAY: Florida's our home. We always wanted to get married here. It means so much to us and to our family, you know, our life here. We just decided we wanted to stay and fight and do whatever we could to help make today possible.
TODD DELMAY: Absolutely.
ALLEN: In Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, St. Petersburg and other cities, lifting the ban is an occasion for celebration. But there are still many in Florida unhappy with the court rulings. Anthony Verdugo is with the Christian Family Coalition, a group that fought to maintain the gay marriage ban. He says in lifting the ban, Judge Zabel and the other judges disregarded the will of the voters.
ANTHONY VERDUGO: Eight million Floridians voted on this issue. This is a public policy issue. And their votes have been violated. So it is shameful. We're witnessing the death of democracy in Florida.
ALLEN: In more than a dozen counties in North Florida, including Duval, county clerks say they will issue licenses but will stop holding any courthouse weddings. It's a decision that Stratton Pollitzer of Equality Florida calls shameful.
STRATTON POLLITZER: I think they will look back on this with embarrassment and regret. I think it is the ugliest form of prejudice manifest, and I hope they reverse themselves right away.
ALLEN: In Miami, weddings are already underway. In Ft. Lauderdale, Key West and other cities, licenses will begin being issued and marriages performed for gay and lesbian couples beginning at midnight. Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
We turn now to the very public rift between the mayor of the nation's biggest city and its largest police department. Yesterday, scores of New York police officers turned their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio at a funeral for the second of two officers who were shot in their patrol car last month. Today, Mayor de Blasio broke his silence about that protest.
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MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO: They were disrespectful to the families involved. That's the bottom line. They were disrespectful to the families who had lost their loved one. I can't understand why anyone would do such a thing in a context like that. I also think they were disrespectful to the people of this city, who, in fact, honor the work of the NYPD.
SIEGEL: Mayor Bill de Blasio, speaking today at a news conference at police headquarters in New York. Joining me to talk about this is NPR's Joel Rose. Joel, what else did Mayor de Blasio and Police Commissioner William Bratton talk about today?
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: Well, ostensibly, they called this news conference to talk about the final New York City crime statistics for 2014, which, by the way, are very good. Major crime was down 4.6 percent citywide. Crime was down across all five boroughs. Robbery is at an all-time low, murder also at an all-time low - all this continuing trends that began before de Blasio took office. De Blasio and Bratton were very quick to praise the officers of the NYPD for that. But then the tone of the news conference really started to shift noticeably when de Blasio started taking questions about the protesters inside the department who have turned their backs on him several times now. And as you heard at the top, de Blasio called those acts disrespectful to the families of the fallen officers and to the whole city.
SIEGEL: Police unions have been saying for weeks that de Blasio has encouraged an anti-police climate in New York. Why do they say that? Why do they think that?
ROSE: This tension goes all the way back to the mayoral campaign last year. De Blasio ran on a progressive platform to reform the NYPD's interactions with communities of color and to cut back on what critics of the department would call the over-policing of those residents. But things have really come to a head since the grand jury's decision not to indict the police officer involved in the case of Eric Garner, the unarmed black man who died in police custody last year. De Blasio said that was an outcome that many New Yorkers did not want. And he spoke in very personal terms about warning his own son Dante, who is multiracial, to take special care during his interactions with police. To many officers, it sounded like Mayor de Blasio was siding with the demonstrators in the streets against the NYPD. And things became really toxic when two officers were killed last month by a gunman who later committed suicide.
SIEGEL: Mayor de Blasio, as we heard, highlighted the overall crime statistics for 2014, which, as you said, were very encouraging. But there is another set of numbers, a recent drop in arrests, that actually potentially troubling. What's that about?
ROSE: Well, yes, we've seen a huge drop in arrests citywide now in the two weeks following the deaths of Officer Liu - officers Liu and Ramos. For the second week in a row, arrests were reportedly down more than 50 percent compared to the same week a year ago. And tickets for minor infractions were down more than 90 percent. So it's getting very hard to avoid the conclusion that there is a coordinated slowdown happening; whether this is something that was formally organized or not, we don't know. Commissioner Bratton noted that many cops have been working without a contract for several years. He did not dispute that arrests are down. But Commissioner Bratton says the department isn't exactly sure what is going on.
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WILLIAM BRATTON: We will take a look at who is maybe not doing the work that we expect of them. And we will deal with it very appropriately if we have to. We may see, during the course of this week as we come out of the turmoil of the past month, that things begin to return to normal on their own volition.
SIEGEL: Joel, it doesn't sound like this feud between the police and the mayor is simmering down anytime soon. Any sense of what it would take to repair this relationship?
ROSE: Well, police union leaders would like to see Mayor de Blasio publicly apologize for these remarks that have offended the department's rank-and-file. But he did not do that today. And anyone who was hoping to see a contrite Mayor de Blasio did not see that.
SIEGEL: Thank you very much. That's NPR's Joel Rose in New York.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
The data from those personal health apps and devices will be added to the vast amount of medical information now stored in digital form. For example, electronic medical records of individual treatments and their outcomes. Those are available to professionals and importantly they're searchable. All that information adds up to a great example of big data. It could help practitioners answer important questions about how to treat their patients, but there's also wariness about big data in medical settings. Here's Amy Standen of member station KQED in San Francisco.
AMY STANDEN, BYLINE: In 2011, a young girl from Reno, Nevada, was flown by helicopter to the pediatric intensive care unit at Stanford's Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. Jenny Frankovich was an attending physician there.
JENNY FRANKOVICH: She was gravely ill. Her kidneys were shutting down.
STANDEN: Tests showed the girls had lupus, a disease in which the immune system goes rogue. Frankovich had seen kids like this before. And she recalled that some of them also developed blood clots, which can be deadly. Blood clots can be prevented with an anticoagulant, but that too carries risks.
FRANKOVICH: You could stroke. A patient could bleed into another organ.
STANDEN: Giving the drug was risky. Not giving the drug was also risky. So Frankovich asked the other doctors around the girl's bed, what should we do here? The answer - we don't really know.
FRANKOVICH: There wasn't enough published literature to guide this decision. And really, the best route was to not do anything.
STANDEN: And that's when she had her big idea.
FRANKOVICH: I knew I had the patients' charts, all electronic, in a database that was searchable.
STANDEN: Not long ago, she says, this data would have filled an entire office room with boxes of paper files. Now she could search it with a keystroke.
FRANKOVICH: I brought the data back to that big team of doctors that was around her bed. And I said, hey, this is the number of lupus patients we've had. This is the number that had a clot. What do you think? Universally everybody said, wow, based on those numbers, you know, it seems like we should try to prevent a clot in her.
STANDEN: So they did. It worked.
FRANKOVICH: She didn't develop a clot. And over time, her lupus did get better. And she's, as far as I know, doing well.
STANDEN: This may sound kind of obvious, like something doctors would do all the time. But it's actually really unusual, the only time her hospital had used medical records in a situation like this. And to Atul Butte, who studies medical data at Stanford, this is a big step, an example of a seismic shift he believes is happening right now in medicine.
ATUL BUTTE: The idea here is the scientific method itself is growing obsolete.
STANDEN: This idea draws from an essay published in Wired magazine back in 2008 called "The End Of Theory." And according to the essay, in the future so much information will be available at our fingertips that there will be almost no need for experiments.
BUTTE: Think about it - the scientific method, we learn this in elementary school. You come up with a question, or what we call a hypothesis, and go make the measurements to address and answer that question or hypothesis.
STANDEN: The answers already exist.
BUTTE: We already have the measurements and the data. The struggle is to figure out what do we want to ask of all that data?
STANDEN: To Butte, this cloud of data means that pretty soon we shouldn't need so many controlled trials. The answers are already there in the patient records and other digital health databases. If Butte's right, you might think that what Frankovich did has become standard practice at her hospital. In fact, the opposite happened.
FRANKOVICH: We're actually not doing this anymore.
STANDEN: The system just isn't ready, the hospital decided. What if Frankovich had used the wrong search terms or the engine itself had bugs? What if the records had been mis-transcribed? Even Frankovich agrees that it's just too risky.
FRANKOVICH: I mean, for sure the data is there, right? Now we have to develop the system to use it in a thoughtful, safe way.
STANDEN: Getting that system in place, she and others hope, will lead to better, faster, cheaper medicine. But it's still many years away. For NPR News, I'm Amy Standen.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Today was report card day for the auto industry, and it was a good one. Sales surged in December, capping a fifth straight year of growth for carmakers. Analysts expect final sales for the year to exceed 17 million, a figure that hasn't been reached in more than a decade. Cheap gas helped boost sales of trucks and SUVs and luxury vehicles. Today, the price of oil briefly tumbled below $50 a barrel. But as NPR's Sonari Glinton reports, low gas prices aren't necessarily good for the health of the industry.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: Before the bottom fell out of the economy, the car companies, especially ones from Detroit, were addicted to the sales of big trucks and SUVs. When gas prices skyrocketed, the companies nearly lost it all. Well, now we have crazy low gas prices, and consumers are gobbling up SUVs.
SCOTT PAINTER: Well, there's no doubt that when you have these kinds of fundamentals in place, that you open the door to bad behavior.
GLINTON: Scott Painter is founder and CEO of truecar.com, an automotive sales website.
PAINTER: When gasoline falls below $3, consumer interest in low mile or lower mile-per-gallon vehicles, bigger vehicles, picks up.
GLINTON: Jeep, for example, was one of the biggest winners, as consumers picked crossover SUVs. Its sales were up more than 40 percent for the year. At the same time, hybrid sales and alternative vehicle sales took a hit in 2014. Painter says even though some of the hunger for bigger cars has picked up, he says maybe Detroit executives have learned a lesson from their near-death experience. And they haven't forgotten yet.
PAINTER: What you cleared out of the system in the last four or five years was 40 or 50 years of accumulated, perhaps bad, behavior versus, you know, we've only had a couple of years now since our last real recession in automotive.
GLINTON: Painter says even though bigger vehicles are more profitable, today's cars, no matter the size, are far more fuel-efficient. Stephanie Brinley, with IHS Automotive, says this 17 million is much healthier than the last time the industry hit 17 million cars a year. She says the industry has learned a very basic economic lesson.
STEPHANIE BRINLEY: The automakers in general have shifted to adjusting production for demand overall. So what will happen now is that if an auto manufacturer is seeing a vehicle not performing to expectations, they can adjust the number of vehicles that they produce.
GLINTON: So if gas skyrockets, then she says carmakers can in theory shift from making big SUVs to making small cars. Meanwhile, Michelle Krebs with autotrader.com says consumers only save a few hundred dollars because gas is cheaper. That's not enough to send them into the dealership.
MICHELLE KREBS: People keep focusing a lot on just gas prices. But that's not the full picture. There's a big economic picture at play here as well.
GLINTON: Krebs says the health of the auto industry comes not as much from cheap gas as from an improving unemployment rate, improving consumer confidence, low interest rates and...
KREBS: Credit was widely available. We saw a big increase in leasing. So that made vehicles available to more people on a wider spectrum of credit worthiness.
GLINTON: Krebs says the business model for carmakers has changed in the last decade. Carmakers can turn a profit selling far fewer cars. She says another big reason that carmakers aren't likely to return to their previous bad habits is...
KREBS: The automakers still have to meet fuel economy standards in 2016 and even more stringent ones in 2025. So that is not going to stop them from developing fuel-efficient vehicles.
GLINTON: Krebs says she expects consumers and car companies to enjoy the cheap gas while it lasts. Sonari Glinton, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And picture this; our next guests talked to us as they were suspended high up in midair.
TOMMY CALDWELL: So we are about 1,200 feet up the face of El Cap which is about 3,000 feet tall.
BLOCK: And let's explain El Cap is El Capitan, the formidable granite monolith in Yosemite National Park.
CALDWELL: And we're sitting in a portaledge, which is basically a hanging cot with an aluminum frame and nylon stretched between it. And there's sort of a tent that goes around the whole thing, so we can keep out the weather.
BLOCK: That's professional climber Tommy Caldwell. He's made it almost halfway up the Dawn Wall of El Cap with his climbing partner, Kevin Jorgeson, who told us the view is incredible.
KEVIN JORGESON: When I look down, I see El Cap meadow and a couple people that look very, very small down there, cars driving by, a lot of ice on the shores of the Merced River and just faint bits of snow on the gullies of the north side of the valley. It's been slowly melting over the past 10 days.
BLOCK: When I talked with them yesterday, Jorgeson and Caldwell were 10 days into what's considered one of the world's most daunting climbing challenges. They're attempting to free-climb the sheer vertical face of the Dawn Wall. That means they're using only their hands and feet to make the ascent, with ropes just to break their fall. And that's the key difference, Tommy explains. No one has ever free-climbed the Dawn Wall in one continuous push.
CALDWELL: There's hundreds of people that climb El Cap every year. The thing that makes our climb different is that we're just trying to free-climb an extremely difficult part of the wall. And don't get free-climbing confused with free-soloing. We do have ropes with us. We actually fall quite often. But we are climbing the rock face. We're not actually ascending the equipment.
BLOCK: And what is it about the Dawn Wall in particular that's such a challenge?
CALDWELL: It's just an extremely blank, very, very difficult part of El Cap that I took on as a project years ago. And it was - just captured our imagination and seems to be capturing the imagination of the climbing world as well.
BLOCK: And, Kevin, the two of you have been doing this for a few years now - right? - testing - doing test climbs bit by bit to get familiar with the face and to insert bolts that you're using now, right?
JORGESON: Right. I kind of equate it to riding the individual stages of the Tour de France, if you will, like practicing each stage. And some stages are harder than you can actually climb at the time. So you really have to work it out. So over the past six years together - and longer, Tommy on his own - we've been working on each of these stages and climbing - those are called pitches. And they're broken up by rope length. You know, our ropes are about 200 feet long, so the pitches are obviously 200 feet long or less.
BLOCK: Kevin, I want you to translate something you tweeted this week. You were talking about pitch number 16, which is a segment that's still ahead of, I think. Here's what you said; it's pretty insane to huck an 8-and-a-half foot sideways dyno 1,500 feet up.
JORGESON: Yes.
BLOCK: All right, what does that mean?
JORGESON: So a dyno is short for dynamic, and that's when all of your limbs, hands and feet, are off the rock. So basically there's a huge 8-and-a-half foot expanse of rock with nothing in between. It's total porcelain. And on one side, it's a little door-jam-sized edge you can hang onto, and likewise on the other. And the only way to get between the two is to jump. And they're directly horizontal from one another. So it's a pretty ballistic move to be doing, especially in this environment.
BLOCK: Tommy, how are your fingers holding up?
CALDWELL: That's one of the major struggles for us really. You know, it's one of the things that is the most likely to shut us down is just the skin on our fingers can't hold up. And it's one of the reason it takes two weeks. We're grabbing really, really sharp holds that, you know, tear our skin away.
BLOCK: Kevin, what about you?
JORGESON: I split my right index finger on day two and my right middle finger on day three. And I think because it's been so cold and dry, the healing process is taking a lot longer than normal. So I feel like the only thing keeping me from pitch 15 is fresh skin on that finger. I tried to climb that pitch with tape, and you can't feel anything really with tape.
BLOCK: So what do you do to take care of your hand when they're getting so beat up?
JORGESON: I've been taking Tommy's advice and lathering Neosporin on the cuts at night and wrapping tape loosely around those. That and just staring at them about eight hours a day.
BLOCK: (Laughter) You think that helps?
JORGESON: Yeah, well, it can't hurt.
BLOCK: Tommy, any other advice for Kevin about the fingers?
CALDWELL: (Laughter) It's pretty funny we obsess about our fingers a lot. It probably looks ridiculous to anybody outside of our world. But we really do. We really sit there staring at our fingers being like, what are we going to do about this?
BLOCK: It's an understandable question. I mean, without them...
CALDWELL: Yeah.
BLOCK: How are you getting food up there?
CALDWELL: Well, this is not just Kevin and I on the wall. We have a few friends that are making a film, and they bring up fresh batteries and they bring us stocks of food. And it's a bit like an expedition, like an expedition up Everest or something. That way we have a base camp; we have porters.
BLOCK: So you never feel like you're quite alone up there.
CALDWELL: No, this is very different than most types of climbing I do, when I go to more remote places where you really are all alone. And El Cap isn't that anymore. You get cell phone service. We're doing an interview with you from the side of the rock face, which is a very new thing in our world.
BLOCK: Tommy, I know you have talked about the Dawn Wall of El Capitan as your Moby Dick - right? - the thing of your dreams that you've been pursuing for a really long time. What does it feel like to be doing this now and thinking that maybe this time you'll actually - you'll finish it, you'll make the climb?
CALDWELL: I mean, it's something that I've pursued for so long, and I've gained so much through that pursuit. It's driven me to just try and be a more complete person in so many ways, and I'm a little worried that if I complete it, I'm going to lose that. So finishing it is obviously the goal, but it's also going to mean that I'm sort of ending a relationship that I've had for seven years.
BLOCK: You know, I've got to ask you - when I look at the pictures of you guys up there, and some of them are from above -right? - so we see you and then we see all the way down to the ground. And it is completely terrifying and completely dizzying. When you guys look down, is it not scary for you? Are you dizzy at all when you think about where you are, Tommy?
CALDWELL: I'm not dizzy at all. I mean, I've grown up in this world. I've been climbing on El Cap for a long time. I think at this point, it's just exciting. It's a very engaging environment to be in. It's kind of where I operate best, oddly.
BLOCK: And, Kevin, same for you - no fear at all?
JORGESON: Well, I have been considerably less big-wall climbing. I think a lot of people would be entertained to know that I haven't climbed El Cap prior to this, and to this day, this is still my first El Cap climbing project. So climbing this high up could take quite a few years of getting used to. But now I'm pretty comfortable with it. That, and much of our climbing is done at night, so you can only really see what your headlamp illuminates.
BLOCK: That sounds even more scary to me.
JORGESON: (Laughter).
BLOCK: That doesn't sound like it would make me feel any better.
JORGESON: No, it's great. You can imagine you're just right on the ground.
BLOCK: I'm not buying it. Well, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson, thank you so much for taking time to talk with us. And best of luck.
CALDWELL: Great. Thank you so much.
JORGESON: Thank you.
BLOCK: Climbers Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson talked with us yesterday afternoon. They were in hanging cots 1,200 feet up the Dawn Wall of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. And you can see some dizzying images from their climb on npr.org. They hope to reach the top within a week, becoming the first people ever to free-climb the Dawn Wall.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
This is NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
As the new year gets underway, we're hearing about people who have started over or reinvented themselves by choice or circumstance. Today, we have a story about faith lost and found again. We're going to meet a military chaplain who lost the very faith he was expected to embody for his soldiers. NPR's John Burnett reports.
JOHN BURNETT, BYLINE: David Peters' life was supposed to be one continuous arc of piety and service. He grew up in a fundamentalist evangelical church in Pennsylvania, served as youth minister, then went to war as a chaplain in the U.S. Army.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (Yelling, unintelligible).
(GUNFIRE)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: You need any more ammo up there, Cochran?
COCHRAN: I'm good.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: (Yelling) Hey, he's behind the building, gunner.
BURNETT: This was a fire fight in Sadr City, Baghdad, shortly after the city fell to U.S. forces in 2003. Peters got to Baghdad two years later and saw things just like this. He was 30 years old, serving as chaplain for the 62nd Combat Engineer Brigade, a unit that built guard towers and repaired roads.
DAVID PETERS: So they were operating all around Baghdad - at night, in the streets, in the neighborhoods - and really exposed to an incredible amount of danger.
BURNETT: His duties included administrating last rites, grieving with survivors and listening to soldiers lament their broken marriages back home. After 12 months in a combat zone, it was time for Peters to go home.
PETERS: I found that going to war was really pretty easy, and it was kind of exciting. And there was a lot of energy around it. But when I came home, I really felt part emotionally and spiritually.
BURNETT: When he arrived back in Texas, he realized that he had changed. He had symptoms of PTSD, and his own marriage had shattered while he was away at war. His homecoming was not unusual it turns out. This is former Army Captain Kurt Stein, the signal officer in the engineering battalion who grew close to Peters in Iraq.
KURT STEIN: The real crisis is when we were deployed, we were always told, you know, when you guys get back - December, 2006, all your problems are going to be over. You're going to be a hero. You know, your families are going to be glad to see you. For David and for a lot of us, that just wasn't the case.
BURNETT: Peters says it was his lifelong relationship with God that suffered the most. In fact, the God that he'd taken with him to Iraq, the benevolent deity who loves everyone and reward the faithful - that concept of God died along with a whole bunch of brave soldiers. Peters had a hard time even going to church anymore.
PETERS: The church was asking me to confess my sins when I felt like God had done far worse things than I've ever done.
BURNETT: Such as...
PETERS: Standing by and not really doing much for the world that's full of war and conflict and despair, loss. I looked at my own life, and I felt that way. I had just gotten divorced. I was just really angry at God for disappearing on me when I needed him most.
BURNETT: David Peters wound up working as a chaplain in the amputee ward at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, meeting with veterans whose troubles seemed to dwarf his own and in the psych ward, where he says, there was a thin line between the patients and me. Off work, his life had imploded. Newly single, he dated a succession of women because he says, sometimes, they can take the pain away. His younger sister, Sarah, visited him in D.C. and noticed a dramatic change.
SARAH: He was drinking a lot. I just remember him being very angry at people, at just things that were so out of character for him.
BURNETT: Last year, a small veteran-owned press published a slim, anguished memoir that Peters wrote about his journey. In the book, titled "Death Letter: God, Sex, And War," he writes, (reading) I went into the business of religion to understand death. He says since the book came out, he's gotten emails from others.
PETERS: Army chaplains who have experienced just real transition, like I did, when they came home. And yet, they're religious people. They weren't allowed to have problems.
BURNETT: And so David Peters had to start over. He had to leave the Bible Fellowship Church that had endorsed him as a military chaplain because he was divorced. He eventually found a home and became ordained in the Episcopal Church. He also remarried. He and his new wife are expecting a child next month.
PETERS: To start over, to start a new marriage, to start a new job, to start at a new church - all those things took a great deal of just patience.
BURNETT: The trauma of war and divorce deepened his spiritual self in such a way that he can now connect as a priest and chaplain with others who are living through a dark night of the soul. At 39, Father David Peters is today on staff at an Episcopal church in Georgetown, outside of Austin. He still serves as a chaplain in the Army Reserve up the highway at Fort Hood.
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UNIDENTIFIED CONGREGATION: For these eyes of mine have seen the savior.
BURNETT: And he started a weekly veteran's ministry in Austin that meets to talk, drink coffee and pray for one another. John Burnett, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah tried to reassure his country today that it can handle the challenge of low oil prices. But his statement was read by the Saudi prince, next in line for the throne. The king, who is in his early 90s, is in a hospital being treated for pneumonia. And that is fueling concern about succession in the Saudi monarchy and what that means for the U.S. NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Saudi watcher Rachel Bronson isn't expecting much chaos when King Abdullah eventually leaves the throne. She says Saudis don't want to further upset the oil markets. What concerns her is too much stability in a country that needs to be agile.
RACHEL BRONSON: As it is, it's a very slow-moving state. So anything that slows down decision-making makes it harder for them to fight terrorism and increase liberalization, continued liberalization, which is necessary. All of those things just become very slow. And that's what I worry about.
KELEMEN: Bronson is with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and author of the book "Thicker Than Oil: America's Uneasy Partnership With Saudi Arabia." She says if power shifts to the next-in-line 79-year-old Crown Prince Salman, we could enter a period of very slow decision-making, something similar to what happened under Saudi Arabia's previous ruler, King Fahd.
BRONSON: He suffered a stroke in the mid '90s, and he continued to rule until he died in 2005. And so everything kind of came to a halt and he didn't have the agility and flexibility that you need at difficult times.
KELEMEN: And these are difficult times for Saudi Arabia. Its regional rivalry with Iran is a perpetual concern, and the threat of the self-proclaimed Islamic State militants, or ISIS, also tops the agenda. While Crown Prince Salman read out the king's speech today, he's not in good health, according to Simon Henderson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
SIMON HENDERSON: Prince Salman himself has had at least one stroke, and he's also been slowing down. This is pretty well accepted by everybody. How you actually describe that slowing down is a matter of debate. I've tended to think it's some form of dementia.
KELEMEN: The next in line for the throne is Deputy Crown Prince Muqrin, the youngest surviving son of Saudi Arabia's founder. Some Saudi watchers think it's possible that power could move to him quickly and smoothly. But Henderson is not so optimistic.
HENDERSON: There's every reason why the rivalries and tensions in the house of Saud could lead to some real sharp divisions. That sort of event is bad news for policy against Iran, policy on oil and policy against ISIS.
KELEMEN: Saudi Arabia didn't do much, he says, when ISIS was threatening Syria and the previous government in Iraq. But he says Saudi Arabia now sees ISIS as a direct threat to the kingdom, and the U.S. needs to encourage Riyadh to do much more to counter the group's ideology.
HENDERSON: Washington cannot afford to have a hiatus in leadership in Riyadh. And it cannot afford to have anything but a smooth succession.
KELEMEN: The U.S. tends to avoid talking about such issues, though, says Bronson of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
BRONSON: We will continue to engage very actively with the leadership, whether it's the counterterrorism, whether it's intelligence. We will continue to interact, but I think we will stay very quiet.
KELEMEN: Henderson says that the U.S. should be sending discrete messages to Riyadh to make clear that any argument over succession will be damaging to both Saudi and U.S. interests. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
There were 35 executions in the U.S. last year - that's the lowest in two decades. Death penalty states are having increasing difficulty obtaining the drugs they've used in the past. Pharmaceutical companies don't want to be associated with killing people. And states have been seeking new formulas using untested doses and are trying to find new compounding pharmacies to make their execution drugs. The results in 2014 included four executions that didn't go as planned. NPR's Wade Goodwyn takes a look at one of those cases and the latest questions in the debate over the death penalty.
WADE GOODWYN, BYLINE: Michael Kiefer is a veteran reporter for The Arizona Republic, who, over the years, has been witness to five Arizona executions. Last July, Kiefer was observing the execution of double murderer Joseph Wood. For Wood's execution, the Arizona Department of Corrections was using a different drug formula for the first time.
MICHAEL KIEFER: We were escorted in. Everything seemed to go smoothly. You watch the catheters being inserted. Joseph Wood closed his eyes, his head went back. It looked like executions I'd seen before using thiopental and pentobarbital.
GOODWYN: With those drugs, Kiefer says it normally took five to 10 minutes for a condemned man to die, but at the six minute mark...
KIEFER: Suddenly, he opened his mouth. I mean, his mouth sort of made this funny round shape. And it was just - you could see this expulsion of air. And we all jumped, you know? This was - this was something different.
GOODWYN: Wood had begun fighting for his life, taking large intermittent breaths.
KIEFER: And then there was another and then another and then it just kept going. I started putting little hash marks on my pad, my notepad, to see how many times he did this - 640 times.
GOODWYN: The executioner eventually came out, turned on the death chamber microphone and tried to reassure everyone that Wood was asleep and it was OK. But Kiefer says the sounds emanating from the condemned man that were suddenly brutally audible behind the executioner's voice only added another layer to everyone's distress. An hour passed.
KIEFER: We looked at each other; you could see the alarm on the faces of the prison personnel. Nobody said anything. I turned to the reporter next to me and said I don't think he's going to die. I was wondering if Wood was going to open his eyes again.
GOODWYN: Arizona's new drug formula - 50 milligrams of midazolam, a sedative, and 50 milligrams of hydromorphone, a narcotic - was supposed to be a lethal dose. Obviously, it wasn't. So the executioner gave Wood a second dose and then a third - four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. And then, mercifully, on the 15th dose, Wood died. It had taken nearly two hours.
MAURIE LEVIN: A mess is a good way to put it.
GOODWYN: Maurie Levin is a capital defense attorney in Texas who's been doing most of the lethal injection litigation in the state that is the runaway death penalty leader. For both moral and public relations reasons, pharmaceutical companies no longer want any association with the death penalty process. Their drugs are to be used for healing only. Levin says that has forced death penalty states to search for new drug combinations and new sources - compounding pharmacies.
LEVIN: Texas - TDCJ - the prison, went to a pharmacy in Houston. They wrote them a letter, it was only discovered later, that said we promise you that we will keep this on the down-low.
GOODWYN: Down-low was actually the phrase used. Just like the big pharmaceutical companies, compounding pharmacies don't want to be associated with executions either. So when the name of the pharmacy was disclosed in a court proceeding, the Houston compounding pharmacy was furious, embarrassed and quit.
LEVIN: And the pharmacy asked for their drugs back, and the prison refused to give them back.
GOODWYN: The outing of compounding pharmacies has become a serious threat to death penalty states' drug supplies. Like several other death penalty states, Texas argues the identity of its drug suppliers should be a state secret, not even judges should be able to find out. Jason Clark is a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
JASON CLARK: We've said before that disclosing the identity of the pharmacy would result in harassment of the business and it's going to raise serious safety concerns for the business and its employees.
GOODWYN: But last month a Texas judge rejected the state's arguments, ruling the name of the compounding pharmacy is public information. Texas is appealing. This is the new front in the legal war over the death penalty. Aclean and painless death by injection has played a major role in preserving capital punishment in America. If that becomes a problem, it could complicate the institutions long-term survival. Wade Goodwyn, NPR News, Dallas.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Today, on snowy Capitol Hill...
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BLOCK: The 114th Congress began a new legislative session. The House and Senate both opened with a prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance and then members of the House voted for their new speaker.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Mr. Abraham, Boehner, Adams, Pelosi.
BLOCK: That went on for a long time.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Meanwhile, in the Senate...
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MAJORITY LEADER MITCH MCCONNELL: Mr. President...
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Majority Leader.
MCCONNELL: Today is an important day for our country. Many senators took the oath this afternoon - 13 for the first time - and a new Republican majority accepted its new responsibility.
SIEGEL: Mitch McConnell accepted the responsibility of Senate majority leader - a longtime dream.
BLOCK: And, eventually, despite some conservative defections, the members of the House chose their leader.
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SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES JOHN BOEHNER: Friends, colleagues, countrymen.
BLOCK: John Boehner tearfully accepted his re-election as speaker of the house.
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BOEHNER: This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad. We rejoice that our new members and families are here. I want to welcome them. We're glad and humbled to begin anew as servants of the people's House.
SIEGEL: Meanwhile, in room 236 of the Cannon House Office Building, friends and family of Mimi Walters, that room's new occupant, celebrated her big day.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: Mimi Walters.
REPRESENTATIVE MARIAN WALTERS: That's me.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: Boehner.
(APPLAUSE)
SIEGEL: Mimi Walters, of Laguna Niguel, California, is one of 52 freshmen House members of the 114th Congress. They were sworn into office today. She is one of two members we'll check in with over the coming months. She's a Republican, a former city and state legislator, now the representative of California's 45th Congressional District. I spoke with Representative Walters yesterday before she was sworn in.
WALTERS: Hello, hi, Mimi Walters.
SIEGEL: Robert Siegel, hi.
WALTERS: Robert, nice to meet you, hi.
SIEGEL: Nice to meet you.
She was still moving in. The pictures that hung in her state senate office in Sacramento still hadn't arrived, so the walls were bare.
Have you met your neighbors here in the Cannon House Office Building?
WALTERS: No, I actually just arrived for the first time and you're the first person I've met in my official office.
SIEGEL: I'm honored. I'm honored to be your first guest.
Mimi Walters is a 52-year-old former stockbroker with four kids - three in college, one already out. She is for the Keystone XL pipeline, for gun rights, pro-life and very much against the Affordable Care Act.
We hope to be talking to you throughout your term in this Congress and I'm just curious - as you set goals for yourself and you think about what would be a successful freshman term for yourself, what are the criteria you have in mind?
WALTERS: A successful term for me is to be part of the solution and to make sure that we put legislation on the president's desk to show the American people that we are wanting to move America forward.
SIEGEL: At least to get as far as the White House.
WALTERS: Exactly, exactly. To me, that's a success because at the end of the day the president's going to decide what he's going to decide, but at least I can show people in California that I was part of solutions.
SIEGEL: Is there anything that President Barack Obama could say to you in his State of the Union address that would make you think OK, maybe there's more here, you know, that we can get done than I thought. Is there some message you'd like to hear?
WALTERS: I would like the president to say to the world that he wants to work with the Republicans.
SIEGEL: What would be a test of that? What would be a concession that you saw that said that's not just rhetoric, that's...
WALTERS: Reforming Obamacare 'cause to me that is his biggest single issue. That is his legacy and I think he understands it's not really working. So if he said to us and to the American people I'm willing to make concessions then I think he's serious.
SIEGEL: One issue has been how do you define a full-time worker - an important question?
WALTERS: Absolutely, absolutely. We have to redefine the full-time worker because what's happening now is you have small businesses are being hurt. People are not having as many hours to work and they are being cut back on their working hours because of this issue.
SIEGEL: The issue being that the Affordable Care Act defines someone who works 30 hours a week...
WALTERS: Correct.
SIEGEL: As a full-time worker. That means - it is said at least - that employers are scaling people back...
WALTERS: Exactly.
SIEGEL: To try to give them fewer hours.
WALTERS: Exactly.
SIEGEL: And make them less costly - back to 40 hours a week for a full-time worker.
WALTERS: I believe so, yes.
SIEGEL: Possible - I mean, do you get the sense that that's one that you could get enough Democratic buy-in for that it could actually pass?
WALTERS: I believe so.
SIEGEL: Have you had any moments since you announced for Congress, any moments of any regret that you were either trading in Orange County winters for this place or moving 3,000 miles away or walking into a place that the public - about 8 percent of Americans - think is doing a good job?
WALTERS: I am just really excited to be here. I was an intern back in 1981 on Capitol Hill. I was an intern for former Congressman Bill Thomas, so I'm looking forward to finding out where I used to work, but it's just so awesome to be back. I am so grateful that the people elected me to serve. And it's sort of a dream come true.
SIEGEL: You've come back home.
WALTERS: I've come back home, yeah. Many, many years ago I was here.
SIEGEL: Well, Representative Walters, thanks for talking with us, and I hope we'll be talking with you throughout this term.
WALTERS: Thank you, I look forward to it.
SIEGEL: That's Republican Mimi Walters, of California. We'll also be checking in with freshman Democratic Congressman Ruben Gallego. He is a Chicago-born son of Latino immigrants, raised by a single mother. He went to Harvard, enlisted in the Marine Corps, served in Iraq and followed his girlfriend, now his wife, to Phoenix. He became a state legislator, and last November, he won Arizona's seventh Congressional District.
REPRESENTATIVE RUBEN GALLEGO: You grow up being told that you can do whatever you want. You know, follow your American dream and I guess I was one of those foolish little kids that actually did believe it, and I'm here.
SIEGEL: A couple of weeks ago, our producer, Matt Ozug, met with you in the Longworth cafeteria - that's the cafeteria at the Longworth House Office Building.
GALLEGO: Yeah.
SIEGEL: You didn't have an office yet at...
GALLEGO: No.
SIEGEL: That time, so you met in the cafeteria. And you remarked on how, at age 35 - and a rather youthful looking 35 - you know, you weren't convincing a lot of people that you actually belonged in the Longworth House Office Building.
GALLEGO: (Laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GALLEGO: Well, so far, I mean, I've gotten, you know, I've been stopped a lot by security and rerouted to different areas. So like no, no, no, this is for congressman building staff. Go that way. As in, like, I'm supposed to - they think I'm staff. I've been asked twice, like, whose - who I'm interning for.
(Laughter) Yeah, it's (laughter) you know, it's a good problem to have and, you know, I just have to live with that good curse, I guess (laughter).
SIEGEL: That's a lot better than who's that old guy trying to get into the office, right?
GALLEGO: Exactly, yeah (laughter).
SIEGEL: You are a Democrat and the Democrats are very much in the minority in this house. Is there any sense you have at all of, you know, I wish we could - I wish I could be part of the process of actually accomplishing things and being positive during the next couple of years?
GALLEGO: Well, you don't know - I think, you know, I was in the minority in Arizona for all four years. And our caucus was so small we were called the pizza caucus 'cause you could feed our caucus with one extra large pizza.
SIEGEL: (Laughter).
GALLEGO: You know, so trying to wake up every day and get yourself feeling relevant...
SIEGEL: But was the Latino caucus a slice of that?
GALLEGO: Yeah, the Latino caucus was the spicier slice of that, yes.
SIEGEL: Yeah, yeah.
GALLEGO: But, you know, when you're in the minority - and this is just from my experience in the Arizona State House - what you have to hope for is to find both relevance to your constituents. So trying to pass any bills that are, you know, bipartisan or at least non-offending to both sides too, but also stand up for the values of your constituents. I represent a very progressive district and they want me to be here fighting for their values every day.
SIEGEL: One thing the Republican majority in both houses intends to do is challenge the Affordable Care Act. If they can't repeal it altogether, repeal parts of it. Is the Affordable Care Act actually popular with your constituents?
GALLEGO: It is. Look, my district is about in the mid-60s in terms of Hispanic representation and the Latino community has been the biggest beneficiary to the Affordable Health Care Act. So we know that it's saving lives. We know it's giving people access to medical care that they normally wouldn't. And, you know, I certainly ran on protecting the ACA program and I'm proud to continue doing that.
SIEGEL: You know, flashback 60, almost 70, years ago and the Congress was full of men - almost entirely men who had served in the Second World War and then came back and served in Washington. Today, for you to have served in Iraq makes you a member of a rather small group of legislators. First, do you find that frustrating that the experience is so unusual for people in public office? And what do you intend to do on behalf of the people currently serving or who served?
GALLEGO: I do find it frustrating. And I don't believe that, you know, we should ever go back to a draft or anything else of that moment. I was in the combat arms of the Marines. I was in the infantry and it's very hard work and you have to want to be in the infantry.
You have to want to be a Marine in order to do your job well, but sometimes talking to politicians, and even to everyday citizens, their misconceptions about the military, about their capabilities, really scares me because it really just - I don't think it allows policymakers to know how to properly deploy the military. And, you know, I do wish if you don't serve in the military and you're a policymaker, I hope at least what they'll do is they will hire some veterans into their offices, you know, at least to kind of get a perspective of this.
SIEGEL: You're 35 years old.
GALLEGO: Yep.
SIEGEL: Ideally, how long would you like to serve in the House? Not that you've experienced being a congressman yet, but when you think about it...
GALLEGO: I mean, I think I could easily see myself serving 15-20 years. And, you know, there's a lot of politicians that will say, you know, I'm here for - to serve for two years and I'm out and I'm not going to be a lifelong politician, but I kind of feel that...
SIEGEL: Astonishingly, they're still saying that 20 years later.
GALLEGO: Yeah, exactly, and so I'm not really useful to my constituents if I'm only here for two years or four years. To be honest, if you're really going to do good work you do have to be here for a long time. And you have to learn the process and you have to build relationships with the Democrats and Republicans. And the only way you do that is by willing to put in the time to do it.
SIEGEL: Ruben Gallego, thanks for talking with us.
GALLEGO: Thank you, sir.
SIEGEL: And we'll be checking in with Democratic freshman Ruben Gallego and Republican freshman Mimi Walters over the coming months.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Some 18,000 people in the East German city of Dresden took the streets yesterday protesting against what they call the Islamization of Europe. They chanted, we are the people. The group has been protesting every week since October, but yesterday's rally was the largest so far. It provoked counter-protests in Berlin, Homburg, Cologne and Stuttgart. And in her New Year's Day address, German Chancellor Angela Merkel denounced the protesters.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
CHANCELLOR ANGELA MERKEL: (Speaking German).
SIEGEL: She said, don't follow their call because mostly what they have in their hearts is prejudice, coldness and even hatred. Germany does take in more refugees and asylum-seekers than any other country in Europe. Melanie Amann is a reporter and editor with the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel and joins us from Berlin. Welcome to the program.
MELANIE AMANN: Thank you, Robert. It's good to talk to you.
SIEGEL: And, first of all, who are these protesters in Dresden, and what do they want?
AMANN: Well, it's hard to put just one face on them. They are such a diverse group. They have all kinds of people from all kinds of age groups and different layers of society. I mean, there are 18,000 people after all. You find average citizens, teachers, salespeople, people sitting at a cash desk in small stores. It's very, very different people.
SIEGEL: And what do they mean when they talk about the Islamization of Germany or Europe, which seems to upset them so much?
AMANN: Well, you really have to ask them that because there are hardly any Muslims, and especially in Saxony where the main protests are taking place. Those protesters, they are worried that extremist Muslims might take over in Germany. In whichever way, they might influence our cultural life. They might ask for women not to wear miniskirts in public, for children not to eat pork in public schools where they have lunch. And they are worried that all of the German society - our cultural life might be influenced by Islamic extremists, and they might even take over our political system.
SIEGEL: It seems as though the German political establishment and big institutions - the Cathedral in Cologne, Volkswagen - have all joined in counter actions against these protesters. Were the elites and was the government leadership taken by surprise by the rise of this anti-Muslim movement?
AMANN: Yes, I believe they were taken by surprise. I mean, these protests have been going on since late October. And only, I would say, about a month ago have we all, one must say, really woken up to it and realized that it's a big movement in Dresden. And so, at first, politicians didn't really know how to deal with it. And at first, they were open and understanding towards these people. They were saying, we have to deal with their fears. We have to find out what their fears are and face them and talk to them. But this - recently, this is changing. There's - you mentioned the chancellor's speech early on in the program. And she has used quite harsh words against the organizers. So I have a feeling the tide is turning.
SIEGEL: Whenever there is any kind of racial protest in Germany or some movement that is anti-immigrant or whatever, it gets a tremendous amount of attention, even if it represents a very small share of what a comparable movement in France, say, might get at the polls every year. People are very sensitive about Germany for that reason, some would say overly so.
AMANN: Well, I think we cannot argue that, considering our past, that we still have responsibility to deal with these topics sensitively. And we have to be - we just have to be careful how we discuss these topics. And this is also part of what annoys the protesters. There's a huge group of them who say, like, I want to say what I think. I want to be able to say that Muslims - that I don't like Muslims. And I don't want to be called a Nazi just because I'm - I think that we take on too many refugees. I mean, this is a feeling that's against the media, against politicians and against the foreign press, too.
SIEGEL: You thank you very much. That's Melanie Amann, a reporter and editor for Der Spiegel, speaking to us from Berlin. Thanks.
AMANN: Thank you. It was a pleasure.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
President Obama's first foreign policy move of the new year was a meeting with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. They discussed the new U.S. approach to Cuba and the abduction and apparent murder of 43 college students in Mexico. NPR's Mara Liasson reports now that immigration and trade were also on the agenda.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: It's hard to exaggerate the extent to which the U.S. and Mexican economies are intertwined. There's half-a-trillion dollars of U.S.-Mexican trade every year. That's a million dollars each minute. Around 10 percent of the U.S. population is of Mexican origin. Today, the Mexican president, speaking through a translator, praised President Obama for two recent steps - reestablishing diplomatic relations with Cuba and the offer of deportation relief to certain immigrants currently in the U.S. illegally.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT ENRIQUE PENA NIETO: (Through interpreter) And among the population that will surely be benefited through your executive actions there's a very big majority of Mexican citizens.
LIASSON: Mexico will play a big role in implementing the president's actions on deportation relief. President Obama acknowledged that the Mexican government is participating in an education campaign to explain who is and isn't eligible.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We very much appreciate Mexico's commitment to work with us to send a very clear message around to the executive actions that I'm taking, that we are going to provide a mechanism so that families are not separated who've been here for a long time.
LIASSON: The president's immigration's actions are a hot-button issue for the new Republican Congress, but they're also vitally important to the Mexican economy, says Simon Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network, a think tank that focuses on issues including immigration and border security.
SIMON ROSENBERG: The Mexican migrants that are here in the United States can be fully participants in the American society. There's no question that they have a lot at stake. The Mexican diaspora population in the United States is huge. And it's wealthy. And it's a critical part of the Mexican economy.
LIASSON: As the two leaders spoke at the White House, the new Republican Congress was being sworn in on Capitol Hill. Republicans say one of their top priorities is to block the president's immigration actions. Rosenberg thinks that will be difficult.
ROSENBERG: I know that there's a lot of energy today, but Republicans also have a lot of other things they want to get done. And I'm a little skeptical that they're really going to mount the kind of aggressive effort to unravel the reforms that will be necessary to really slow them down or dent them in any significant way.
LIASSON: Outside the White House, about 50 people were protesting Pena Nieto's visit. They were angry about the September abduction and presumed murder of 43 Mexican college students, allegedly at the hands of local police in league with drug cartels. President Obama said he's been following the case and that the U.S. was committed to supporting Mexico in its efforts to eliminate the cartels. But he said ultimately, it's up to Mexico to stop the violence and reform its justice system. Mara Liasson, NPR News, the White House.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
One of New York City's most colorful characters died privately last month. Bess Myerson was an author, a TV personality and a public official who advised three presidents. But she became famous for walking down an Atlantic City runway in a white bathing suit.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: They're about to pick Miss America of 1945.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Well, they've made their choice. And the crown goes to Miss New York City, a 21-year-old, 5-foot-10 brunette. Bess Myerson, Hunter College graduate.
SIEGEL: Bess Myerson was the first and still the only Jewish Miss America ever crowned. NPR's Neda Ulaby has our remembrance.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: Bess Myerson did not initially aspired to be a groundbreaking beauty queen. She was a serious music student who wanted to buy a Steinway piano with the prize money. In the 2002 PBS program "American Experience," Myerson remembered the pageant organizer said she could win if she changed her name to Beth Merrick.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "AMERICAN EXPERIENCE")
BESS MYERSON: I said I can't change my name. I live in a building with 250 Jewish families, the Shalem Alechim apartment houses. If I should win, I want everybody to know that I'm the daughter of Louie and Bella Myerson.
ULABY: The daughter of Russian immigrants was snubbed and discriminate against during her Miss America promotional appearances. So she toured instead for the Anti-Defamation League. Myerson parlayed her fame into a career on television. Her exquisiteness and focus earned her a nine-year stint as a panelist on the show "I've Got A Secret."
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "I'VE GOT A SECRET")
MYERSON: Were you submerged in water?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: At times.
MYERSON: Oh, I see. Well, I thought perhaps it might have been some kind of a submarine.
ULABY: Bess Myerson's popularity in New York led to her appointment as the city's first commissioner of Consumer Affairs. She excelled at it, says her biographer Jennifer Preston. She says Myerson pushed tough laws that set national precedence.
JENNIFER PRESTON: For example, when you pick up a loaf of bread and it has a date on it - that's Bess Myerson. If you go into a grocery store and you purchase poultry and it has clear cellophane wrap - that's Bess Myerson.
ULABY: In 1977, Myerson threw her considerable clout behind a then obscure mayoral candidate. Her friendship with Ed Koch pops up in the 1985 musical "Mayor" in a number when she convinces him to run.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSICAL, "MAYOR")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: (Singing) What's your answer? Yes or no?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: What you see is what you get.
ULABY: What voters saw were news photos of Bess Myerson holding hands with Ed Koch, his campaign signs bearing her picture. People assumed they were engaged. This was incredibly important says Jennifer Preston, at a time when a hint of homosexuality could ruin a political career.
PRESTON: Ed Koch was a bachelor and there were signs popping up in Queens that read - Vote For Cuomo, Not The Homo.
ULABY: Koch was grateful after he was elected and made Bess Myerson the city's cultural commissioner. And that's when her troubles began.
PRESTON: The Bess mess.
ULABY: Myerson feel for a contractor 20 years younger and married. When his wife found out about their affair, it got very public and very ugly.
PRESTON: Bess Myerson was accused of giving a city job to the daughter of the judge who was presiding over her boyfriends divorce case.
ULABY: Jennifer Preston, then covering the trial in 1988, says Bess Myerson was eventually acquitted of charges of conspiracy, bribery and mail fraud, the same year she was arrested for shoplifting. Bess Myerson retreated to a life of privacy and philanthropy. She died December 14 at her home in Santa Monica. She was 90 years old. Neda Ulaby, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The satellite TV provider DISH hopes this will get the attention of younger viewers - an Internet-based, TV subscription package. DISH calls it Sling TV. It will give subscribers about a dozen live channels, including sports coverage from ESPN and ESPN2. It'll also include channels like The Food Network, ABC Family and CNN. The cost - $20 a month. NPR's David Folkenflik says the creation of Sling TV moves the industry closer to the day when viewers can pick and choose what they pay for. And he joins us now from our studio in New York. David, this seems pretty close to a la carte viewing. Is this what cord cutters have been waiting for?
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: It gets us a lot farther down the road in that direction, surely. You know, in addition to the channels you mentioned, there's HGTV, Cartoon Network. But ESPN, as you mentioned, probably by far the most important of all. It's been crushing in ratings in many ways. It's the top rated channel on cable television and had record, record cable ratings for recent college bowl games, proving the recent truths that live sport really is the best driver of audiences these days. But right now, you're seeing this interesting kind of informal coalition between certain lawmakers on Capitol Hill who help to regulate telecommunications and media industries between - and young folks who just aren't inclined to pay for these enormous bundles. You know, my cable bill is about - over a hundred bucks a month and it includes broadband Internet and - as well as cable TV and premium channels and the like. And people are saying why are we paying for everything that is offered rather than for the things that we want most? HBO and ESPN are making moves to offer their own streaming, just singular digital services. And now DISH is saying we want to play in that world as well.
SIEGEL: ESPN's owned by ABC, isn't it? What does this say about the industry?
FOLKENFLIK: Right, ESPN is part of Disney. And you're seeing a number of the channels being offered by Sling are part of Time Warner, the large entertainment media conglomerate. What you're seeing are a lot of these companies looking at a somewhat uncertain future. Cable is expanding into broadband service. You know, the merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable, these two giants, that's been proposed and is under consideration in Washington is really driven about the desire to dominate broadband Internet service provision rather than simply television. And you're seeing a lot of folks who offer streaming digital services like a Hulu, like Netflix, like the Amazon Prime service offered to customers there. They're creating original content as well, in a sense, serving as an entertainment bypass to these major pricey big-ticket cable packages. So you're seeing a world in which people at DISH are saying we have to embrace this and they see it as complementary, that is, they don't think their satellite subscribers are going to pay for it. They look at audiences that have been turned off by the big pay ticker there and say we're going to get some additional people we might otherwise not get at all.
SIEGEL: There's another sign of change is afoot in the business that I want to ask you about. The cable channel CNBC announced today that it's dropping the Nielsen ratings. It's not exactly a star in the Nielsen ratings, we should note, but what's at stake there?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, look, its ratings have dragged, but in terms of cable financial television, it does quite well, it really dominates it. What it is doing is part of this overall story that we're seeing, which is that people are struggling with how to measure impact, how to measure audience, how to measure significance and how to spin that story for people who advertise or pay for those services. This is another example, as CNBC says, that much of its audience in the daytime isn't being measured. I think you're going to see more and more of that as time goes on.
SIEGEL: OK, thank you, David.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet.
SIEGEL: That's NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik in New York.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
If a child suffers a concussion, standard care involves strict rest at home, no school, no physical activity. But how much rest? How many days? Well, a new study published in the journal Pediatrics says more rest is not necessarily better. Dr. Danny Thomas led the study. He's a pediatric emergency medicine doctor at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin. Dr. Thomas welcome to the program.
DANNY THOMAS: Hi, thank you very much.
BLOCK: And first of all, what was your assumption going into this study?
THOMAS: When we started the study, we really thought that rest would be better, and that's why we thought to test more rest up front being helpful in improving concussion outcomes.
BLOCK: OK, well, you studied 88 patients ages 11 to 22, all of whom were diagnosed with concussions, discharged from the ER. Right?
THOMAS: Correct.
BLOCK: And half of them were sent home, told to rest for one or two days; the other half told to rest for five days.
THOMAS: Yes.
BLOCK: What did you find?
THOMAS: The group that was told to rest for five days did not have better outcomes at the 10-day mark. Their neurocognitive outcomes were the same, so as were their balance outcomes. What was more surprising is we found that they actually had complained of more symptoms throughout the whole course of the study. Specifically in the first few days, they had more physical symptoms, like headache and nausea. And then over the course of the study, they complained of more emotional symptoms, irritability and sadness.
BLOCK: What would explain that, when you think about those symptoms that this group that was told to rest for longer reported having?
THOMAS: Well, I think what explains it is that, you know, they're teenagers largely, and they're told to sit at home. And school has a social aspect to it. And I think that they perseverate on their symptoms or dwell on them, much like a toothache. So when you have a toothache, it hurts you in the daytime, but it hurts you most at night when you're trying to sleep and there's no distractions.
BLOCK: One of the other ideas, a possibility raised by another doctor, was that the patients who were told to stay home for five days may have assumed, well, I'm sicker, and that that could have influenced what they reported - reporting bias, basically.
THOMAS: It may have. But the fact that they were randomized to that group meant that we were randomly assigning them to that role so that they assumed that sick role, then, from our random assignment, which may suggest that there is some sort of role in how we frame the injury so as not to influence their outcome.
BLOCK: One thing that you do point out in your study, Dr. Thomas, is that the young people who were told to rest for five days simply had more time to fill out the symptom diary. So they may have been better reporters than the kids who were told, go back to school after one or two days.
THOMAS: That is true. There could be that reporting bias just from the mechanics of the study itself. But in the end, that's actually where I would say is the most important aspect, is that they didn't really have a difference in their outcome. So five days of rest didn't really make them better and actually delayed the time that it took to get them back to their school and back to the normal activities.
BLOCK: So, Dr. Thomas, what's your advice to parents who have a child who they think may be concussed? What do you tell them?
THOMAS: First, I think your child needs to be evaluated if you think that they have suffered a concussion by a physician, and that physician can make a determination whether your child has a concussion or has a more significant brain injury. Once that determination has been made that your child has more of a mild traumatic brain injury, then I think that we would recommend one or two days of rest until the symptoms start to get better, then starting to resume normal activities slowly in a stepwise fashion.
BLOCK: Does that also apply to adults with concussions or just to young people that you studied?
THOMAS: I think that this only applies to adolescents at this point. I don't think we have enough data for adults to be able to make the same generalizations. I think that there's probably going to be a lot of similarity, but an adult study would have to be done to really determine that.
BLOCK: Well, Dr. Thomas, thanks so much for talking with us.
THOMAS: Oh, no problem. Thank you very much.
BLOCK: That's Danny Thomas. He teaches at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and he's a pediatric emergency medicine doctor at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin. The hospital study of rest time for young people with concussions is in the journal Pediatrics.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
We've reported here on the tense relations between New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city's police. At the funeral Sunday of Officer Wenjin Liu, hundreds of officers turned their backs on the mayor, as officers had done at the earlier funeral of Liu's partner, Raphael Ramos. Yesterday, Mayor de Blasio, the target of that snub, had this to say.
MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO: They were disrespectful to the families involved. That's the bottom line. They were disrespectful to the families who had lost their loved one.
SIEGEL: Officer Patrick Lynch did not turn his back on the mayor. But the head of the big New York City police union, the Patrolman's Benevolent Association, has said the mayor has blood on his hands for having encouraged police haters. And Pat Lynch joins us now from New York. Welcome.
PATRICK LYNCH: Robert, thank you for having me.
SIEGEL: First, to pick up on what the mayor said, was it a point of disrespect to the mourners of officer Liu to have turned his funeral into a silent protest against Mayor de Blasio?
LYNCH: Absolutely not. It's not disrespectful to our hero police officers or for the supporters in the street of NYPD. Civilians and police officers from around the country alike who stood there who knows that City Hall is creating a climate where every interaction with police officers turn into a confrontation. And we had warned that the atmosphere needs to be turned down in the street, that chants of - what do we want, dead cops; and when do we want them, now - went unchecked. And we cautioned that that has to stop because it will lead to just that. And unfortunately, it did.
SIEGEL: When you're saying that it did, you are attributing the shooting of the two officers to protests on the street and to the people who didn't stop that?
LYNCH: We're attributing it to the atmosphere that's created when it goes unchecked.
SIEGEL: Right now there's been a very sharp falloff, it seems an unnatural falloff, in arrests and even tickets, summons being written by New York police. Is there an undeclared rulebook protest underway by the NYPD right now?
LYNCH: Absolutely not. What you have now is police officers being assassinated. So we had to redouble our efforts to make sure that police officers are safe so that we can keep the public safe. That means we have to double up on jobs. The police department does not have any solo foot posts or any solo vehicles on the road. They are doubled up. So police officers are out there doing their job, and last night's a perfect example. Up in the Bronx, police officers, when a robbery came over, ran out of the station house to stop the robbery and ended up getting shot on the street.
SIEGEL: Since the event that took place in New York City that prompted so much protest there was the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island, I have to ask you, from what you know of that, I understand you don't think it warranted an indictment of a police officer. Did it strike you as a good, bad or average bit of police work that resulted in the death of that man?
LYNCH: I think it's police officers that were sent to that location by complaints from the community, a policy of City Hall to go after what they call looseys in those small crime...
SIEGEL: Lose cigarettes, you mean.
LYNCH: Cigarettes, correct. And police headquarters sent us there. And there's no script for police officers. And then what we had is we had someone that resisted arrest and said, I'm not going. So a lot of folks are telling us what we shouldn't do and what we can't do...
SIEGEL: No, but I'm asking you your judgment. I'm asking you your judgment.
LYNCH: But no one is telling us what we should do when a police officer, if faced with a resisting arrest situation...
SIEGEL: Well, I mean, if everyone who resisted arrest were killed, that would be - there would be a lot more deaths in the country. I mean, your reaction to what you saw there - I mean, I know that the PBA is there to protect the police and to stand up for the police. But, honestly, was that effective policing, or did somebody really screw up in Staten Island in uniform?
LYNCH: What you had is a person that resisted arrest who was in bad health, challenged a police - and I say you cannot resist arrest because resisting arrest leads to confrontation. Confrontation, unfortunately, leads to tragedy. And that's exactly what happened on that corner that day. We cannot send our police officers out to do the job and then not support them when something doesn't go exactly by script.
SIEGEL: Bill de Blasio is the mayor - the elected mayor of New York City. William Bratton is the police commissioner. Can the city take three more years of this kind of hostility between the cops and the men who've been placed in authority over the cops? Should you sit down with the mayor, perhaps, and cool things down?
LYNCH: We will always sit down, and we'll always have dialogues and discussion because New York City police officers want to effectively do their job, and safely, on the streets. And when he attacks the New York City Police Department, he's attacking his own department and his own policies. If the policy is wrong, then change it. We'll follow our orders and effectively police that policy.
SIEGEL: How far would an apology from the mayor go with you and with your men?
LYNCH: It would go a long way to say we can now start the dialogue on how to correct the problem and do our jobs better, rather constantly putting gasoline on the fire.
SIEGEL: But for having said the mayor has blood on his hands, more or less accusing him of complicity in the deaths of Ramos and Liu, would you be willing to apologize for that?
LYNCH: I will discuss why we feel that way, why our members feel that way and the atmosphere that's created on the street that went unchecked. And when we get there we can have a dialogue. We have to have a dialogue first.
SIEGEL: Patrick Lynch, thank you very much for talking with us.
LYNCH: Thank you, Robert. I appreciate the time.
SIEGEL: That's Patrick Lynch who is president of the New York Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the head of the big police union in New York City.
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One of the first pieces of legislation on the calendar for the new Congress would give a green light to the Keystone XL oil pipeline. It's been held up by court challenges and a regulatory review for more than six years. Backers hope to change that through legislation, but the White House is threatening a veto, as NPR's Scott Horsley reports.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: When we left off last year, the Keystone pipeline was one vote shy of the 60 needed to escape a filibuster. But today the Senate swore in a new Republican majority. And North Dakota Senator John Hoeven, who's sponsoring the pro-Keystone bill, says that 60 vote threshold is no longer a problem.
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SENATOR JOHN HOEVEN: We already have 60 sponsors of the bill. We've got about 63 that have indicated they support it. Obviously, we're continuing to work to get more support for the legislation.
HORSLEY: The new Senate's wasting no time taking up the Keystone measure. Andy Black says that's as it should be. Black runs an association of oil pipeline owners, and he says Keystone's building permit is long overdue.
ANDY BLACK: Just as a majority of the American people have supported the project, now a majority in Congress have supported the project. And I could understand if they think it's beyond time for a decision. So I'm glad that they're taking action.
HORSLEY: Black says for all the political symbolism that's been attached to Keystone over the last half decade, the basic issue is really straightforward. Should the federal government allow a pipeline to cross the U.S. border with Canada?
BLACK: This Canadian crude will go to market somewhere. The question is - is it in the United States? And does it come to us on the best transportation mode?
HORSLEY: The State Department came to much the same conclusion a year ago, issuing an environmental report that said the Canadian tar sands would likely be developed with or without the pipeline. Even Keystone critics, like Greg Dotson of the Center for American Progress, concede oil producers will find a way to get their product to market if the price is high enough.
GREG DOTSON: They will take it by train. They will take it by truck. They will take it by pipeline if they have the capacity.
HORSLEY: But, while the political winds have shifted in Keystone's favor, the economic breeze is blowing the opposite way. When the State Department issued its report last year, oil was trading at nearly $100 a barrel. Today, it's about half that. And with the market awash in cheap oil, it may no longer be worth it for the tar sand's producers to spend the extra money it would take to ship their product by rail or truck. Dotson says that means there's a lot more riding on whether the pipeline gets built.
DOTSON: This pipeline will make or break many tar sands development plays up in Canada.
HORSLEY: And that raises the stakes for President Obama, who's promised to give serious weight to the tar sand's potential carbon pollution in deciding whether the pipeline gets built.
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PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I want to make sure that, if in fact this project goes forward, that it's not adding to the problem of climate change, which I think is very serious and does impose serious costs on the American people.
HORSLEY: Today the White House made clear Obama will veto any congressional effort to short-circuit that review. And despite Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, Keystone backers don't appear to have the votes needed to override a veto. Politically, it's easier for Obama to reject the popular pipeline when gasoline is selling for less than $2.20 a gallon on average. But Senator Hoeven, whose home state is in the midst of a shale oil boom, says today's low prices simply underscore the benefits of promoting North American energy production.
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HOEVEN: Gas prices aren't lower at the pump because OPEC decided to give us a Christmas present or because Russia decided they wanted to help out. We're producing more gas and oil in this country and working with Canada as well.
HORSLEY: Hoeven says if the president makes good on his veto threat, backers may try attaching the Keystone measure to a government spending bill or some other must-pass legislation. And that would raise the stakes still further if the standoff with Obama continues. Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington.
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The premise of "Descent," a new novel by Tim Johnston, is a familiar one. A teenaged girl disappears; her family agonizes over her fate. But reviewer Alan Cheuse says this is much more than your typical thriller.
ALAN CHEUSE, BYLINE: Tim Johnston has written a book that makes "Gone Girl" seems gimmicky. It's a thriller plus. Caitlin is a high school senior from Wisconsin, a track star on vacation with her family when she's abducted by a stranger wearing yellow-tinged sunglasses, a psychopath with philosophical leanings. Her younger brother is also injured in the crime. The entire family suffers terribly as the search for Caitlin ensues, months go by and then a year. After that, it's Caitlin's father who still shadows the waning investigation, even as other things in the world, mainly his agonized son, pull at the coat sleeves of his attention. As Johnston describes it, (reading) in his chest were two hearts, two thudding fists. One heart beat with the memories of his daughter, and the other beat with the sight of his son, each the more furiously in the presence of the other.
The story, in its extension and breadth, has a similar effect on the reader, at least it did on me. The plot moves with steadiness. There's an active chance and then a powerful, unexpected twist. People want to believe in some plan or design, the criminal tells us, when all around them is the evidence that the whole world is nothing but dumb luck. Lucky for us, Tim Johnston is an excellent writer. You want to set this one down so you can take a breath and keep reading all at the same time.
SIEGEL: The book is "Descent" by Tim Johnston. Our reviewer is Alan Cheuse.
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Former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell has been sentenced to two years in prison on federal corruption charges. It's a lot less than the 10 years or more that prosecutors had sought. Still, McDonnell says, he will appeal. NPR's Jennifer Ludden reports.
JENNIFER LUDDEN, BYLINE: The courtroom in Richmond was packed with McDonnell supporters, including other former governors. A string of witnesses pleaded for leniency, saying McDonnell's acceptance of bribes in exchange for promoting a businessman's product was a lapse in judgment. His lawyer read from hundreds of letters attesting to McDonnell's integrity and compassion. McDonnell himself took the stand, saying he has been heartbroken and humbled. Kelly Kramer, a career defense lawyer with Mayor Brown, says all that clearly had an impact.
KELLY KRAMER: Judges always care about what people have to say about a defendant. And I think that the magnitude of the letters here, and how heartfelt many of the letters were, I think it helped to swing this.
STEPHEN FARNSWORTH: The truth is that Bob McDonnell has been a very committed public figure across his career.
LUDDEN: Stephen Farnsworth is a political scientist with the University of Mary Washington. He says the sentence is much in the line with polls showing most Virginians thought McDonnell should serve jail time, but not too much. And Farnsworth says the public drama of the trial, centered on so many sordid details of McDonnell's troubled marriage, has been its own kind of punishment for a man once considered a rising star in the Republican Party.
FARNSWORTH: It's clear that the man's political career has been ruined. His reputation has been ruined. His financial status - as bad as it was before the case started - it's even more precarious now. I think that it - two years in jail is a very powerful message.
LUDDEN: By no means, says Farnsworth, is this short sentence a defeat for the prosecution. He says Virginia's political core was shaken by McDonnell's conviction and the hostility of the jury's decision. The current governor has called for ethics reform and Farnsworth believes politicians across the country will be more wary. After all, the essence of McDonnell's defense was that the sweetheart loans, vacation getaways and luxury gifts he accepted were simply the way things are done - part of the political culture. After his sentencing, the former governor told reporters he has faith in the justice system.
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FORMER GOVERNOR BOB MCDONNELL: But I have a tremendous faith and trust in the providence of the Lord Jesus Christ and his ability to mete out justice and so that is my hope for ultimate vindication.
LUDDEN: In the meantime, though, Bob McDonnell and his lawyer insist they also have faith in his innocence and will appeal his conviction. The judge today ordered McDonnell to report to prison February ninth. He is asking to remain free on bail while his case is appealed. That decision will come later. McDonnell's wife and co-defendant, Maureen, faces her own sentencing hearing later next month. Jennifer Ludden, NPR News.
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An all-Republican Congress is officially in session for the first time since President Obama took office. Both chambers are eager to push an agenda that Obama and congressional Democrats have largely been able to block until now - a symbol of which is the Keystone XL oil pipeline. But today was mainly about ceremony, and joining us from the U.S. Capitol to talk about that are NPR's Ailsa Chang and Juana Summers. Welcome to you both
AILSA CHANG, BYLINE: Thank you.
JUANA SUMMERS, BYLINE: Good afternoon,
BLOCK: And, Ailsa, let's start with you on the Senate side and let's start with Republican Senator Mitch McConnell. It was a big day for him. He achieved something that he has dreamed of for a long time - becoming the majority leader of the U.S. Senate.
CHANG: That's right. This is a man who has never wanted to be president. His wife says so - former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. I bumped into her this afternoon while families were mingling around the hallways, taking pictures, and I asked her why has Senate majority leader always been the be all, end all for McConnell, even after more than three decades in public life? And she said her husband is just a creature of the Senate. And that some people's personalities are just more well-suited to lawmaking than to the executive branch. McConnell's closest friends have said the same thing to me, that he's never been the gregarious, natural campaigner. He is most comfortable as a tactician.
BLOCK: Well, now that he is majority leader, Senator McConnell is going to see to it that a key part of the Republican agenda, the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which we mentioned, passes Congress. And as we've been reporting elsewhere in the program, the partisanship over this issue hasn't gone away. And passing Congress does not mean that that will go any further.
CHANG: That is absolutely correct. Again, the White House just said today that President Obama will veto that bill if it arrives on his desk, so this new Congress starts with a tone of confrontation - surprise, surprise. Even today, during the very first session of the Senate, Democrats immediately objected to the Senate Energy Committee convening tomorrow to hold a hearing on Keystone, even though that won't do anything to slow down a floor vote on the pipeline. McConnell pushed back with these remarks.
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U.S. SENATE MAJORITY LEADER MITCH MCCONNELL: We all know that one of the things the Senate is best at is not doing much. I hope we can work this out so we can get started. Everyone knows the first measure that's going to be up is going to come out of the energy committee.
CHANG: Of course, regardless of when Keystone passes, the bill is going to die on the president's desk. So the question would then be how will Republicans choose to respond?
BLOCK: Juana Summers, let's turn to you on the House side. Today, House Speaker John Boehner held onto his gavel. He has faced rebellion in his ranks over the past two years among his more conservative members of his caucus. But he did cruise to an easy re-election today as speaker of the house. What happened?
SUMMERS: He did, but, of course, that did not happen without a little bit of drama of its own. Twenty-four members of Boehner's own party voted against him, with one member voting present. That was not enough to force the vote to a second ballot, but it's definitely something that stings. This was not an easy vote for Boehner and his aides never really expected that, but for all this talk about a conservative revolt, there was not whole lot of unity. The largest share of defectors - that's 12 lawmakers - voted for Congressman Daniel Webster, of Florida - three voted for Louie Gohmert, congressman of Texas. Ted Yoho, of Florida, and Jim Jordan each received two votes. This is something that actually benefits Boehner. While conservative hardliners in his party might not like him so much or think that he's in their corner, no one running against him was actually a realistic alternative for the overwhelming majority of these Republican lawmakers.
BLOCK: Well, John Boehner will enjoy the largest GOP majority in the House in decades. Does that make his job any easier in this coming Congress than it has been in the past?
SUMMERS: From where I sit, it makes Boehner's job both a little bit easier and a little harder. Simply having more members in the caucus means even more diverse viewpoints and ideas to consider as he and Republicans in the Senate are trying to make good on this promise of making Congress function like a real, well-oiled machine again. House Republicans today look really different than in 2011. That's when Boehner was almost constantly at odds with these 80 rabble-rousing members that made up the freshmen class, many of whom had absolutely no legislative experience. One of the things that does make Boehner's job easier now is he took a role in seeking out new members for a more compromise oriented and tilted more toward the center.
BLOCK: NPR's Juana Summers and NPR's Ailsa Chang on Capitol Hill. Thanks to you both.
SUMMERS: You're welcome.
CHANG: Thank you.
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No one disputes that Andrew Brannan murdered Deputy Sheriff Kyle Dinkheller in 1998. A police dashboard video chronicled the entire scene. But Brennan's lawyers say that the Vietnam War veteran was mentally ill and suffering a flashback from combat when he killed the deputy. They hope that that will be enough to get Brannan's death sentence commuted before next Tuesday, when Brannan is scheduled to die by lethal injection. NPR's Quil Lawrence reports.
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: Deputy Sheriff Kyle Dinkheller was just 22 years old, married with a child and another on the way on January 12, 1998. He pulled over a pickup truck that was going 98 miles per hour down a country road in Georgia. The dashboard camera was rolling.
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KYLE DINKHELLER: How are you doing today?
ANDREW BRANNAN: I'm doing good. How are you doing?
DINKHELLER: Good. Come on back here, and keep your hands out of your pockets.
LAWRENCE: And white-haired man, Andrew Brannan, gets out of the truck. The man goes from calm to erratic. He dances in the street and shouts, here I am; shoot me. Then, Brannan rushes the cop. They scuffle, and Brannan runs back to his truck and gets an assault rifle.
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DINKHELLER: (Yelling) Put the gun down. Put it down now.
LAWRENCE: Deputy Dinkheller shouts repeatedly at Brannan to drop the gun.
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DINKHELLER: (Yelling) Put the gun down.
LAWRENCE: The video keeps running. There's an exchange of gunfire. Dinkheller screams as Brannan shoots him nine times. Brannan was sentenced to death in January, 2000. The sheriff in Laurens County, Georgia now is Bill Harrell. He says the execution next week will finally bring closure for the family and the police department.
BILL HARRELL: Some folks would say he needs to be in prison the rest of his life. Other folks say he needs to lose his life - eye for an eye, like the bible says. But the thing about it - the people in the state of Georgia went though the proper procedures for court, and they deemed that he needed to be put to death. And I feel like that's what needed to go forward.
LAWRENCE: Andrew Brannan pleaded insanity at his trial. He claimed he had been having a flashback to combat, but the jury rejected that. His appeals have failed up to the U.S. Supreme Court. But his new lawyer, Joe Loveland, says that after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there's a different understanding of PTSD and how some people might be damaged by war.
JOE LOVELAND: The video recording speaks volumes for the erratic behavior, the irrational behavior of Andrew at the time. It's there for everyone to see.
LAWRENCE: Loveland is representing Brannan on his final appeal to the Georgia parole board. He says the sentencing jury never heard that, at the time of the murder, Brannan was off his medications for bipolar disorder and PTSD.
LOVELAND: There was a direct connection between his service in Vietnam and the violence that he was exposed to there and the ultimate events that occurred here.
LAWRENCE: Brannan served as an artillery forward observer. He earned a Bronze Star among other medals, and twice had to take charge of the unit because his company commander was lost. His lawyer says Brannan has shown remorse and should have his sentence changed to life in prison.
LOVELAND: The basic question really is, should a 66-year-old Vietnam War veteran with no prior criminal record and who was 100 percent disabled under the DA standards, both with PTSD and bipolar disorder, at the time of the murder of the deputy sheriff - should that person be executed?
LAWRENCE: NPR left messages for members of Deputy Kyle Dinkheller's family. We didn't hear back. But Kirk Dinkheller, the deputy's father, posted on Facebook, nothing will ever bring my son back. But, finally, some justice for the one who took him from his children and his family. Barring action by the parole board, Andrew Brannan will be put to death by lethal injection next Tuesday, 17 years and a day after he killed Kyle Dinkheller. Quil Lawrence, NPR News.
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We are exactly three months away from baseball's opening day. But there is plenty to talk about today for Major League Baseball fans. Four players were elected to the Hall of Fame, including three dominant pitchers. The four voted in are the most for a single year since 1955. NPR's Tom Goldman joins us now to talk about who is going to Cooperstown. And Tom, the winners are...
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: The winners are - well, two pitchers who were considered a lock, Robert. Randy Johnson, the Big Unit, the 6' 10" left-hander, one of the most intimidating pitchers ever - not just his size, but his scary demeanor on the mound - he played from 1988 to 2009, struck out 4,875 career batters. That's second all-time to Nolan Ryan. Pedro Martinez pitched from 1992 to 2009. He had masterful control of course, his 1999 season with the Boston Red Sox considered one of the greatest of all time. John Smoltz, part of the trio of fabulous Atlanta Braves pitchers of the 1990s, he won the 1996 National League Cy Young Award. Halfway through his career, he made the switch from a starting pitcher to a reliever and led the leagues in saves. And then, finally, the fourth, Craig Biggio, second baseman for the Houston Astros - he also played catcher and outfield. Seven-time All-Star, he took more hits by pitches than anyone in modern baseball history.
SIEGEL: A big issue in recent years has been what to do with athletes suspected of taking performance-enhancing drugs. The baseball writers have taken a strong stand against voting in certain players. How did that figure today?
GOLDMAN: They're still doing that. Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, two of the greatest players ever but with those strong links to banned performance-enhancing drugs. Clemens got 37.5 percent of the vote. Bonds got 36.8. Those percentages are slight increases. But the voters are still taking what to many of them believe is a moral stance here. And although you have some who are very outspoken about what they called the hypocrisy of baseball writers determining that this guy doped and this guys didn't - some people say you just don't know who was up to what during that time.
SIEGEL: Here's the painful thing to me. We now say goodbye to Don Mattingly. This was his 15th and final year on the ballot. He was the brightest of bright spots in the darkest of dark ages for the New York Yankees, a wonderful first baseman who had some fabulous years. How did he do in the voting today?
GOLDMAN: Unfortunately, I'm not going to make you feel any better, Robert. Only 9.1 percent of the votes - the writers just didn't believe he had enough. Although, as you say, you know, six-time All-Star, nine Gold Gloves, never played in a World Series. That's rare for a New York Yankees great player.
SIEGEL: Well, if there's a hall of fame for playing through lower back pain, Don Mattingly deserves an alcove to himself in that hall.
GOLDMAN: And you're not alone among Yankee fans, Robert, who today are lamenting the fact that Don...
SIEGEL: Or people with back pain. Thank you, Tom.
GOLDMAN: That's NPR sports correspondent Tom Goldman.
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Some of the world's loveliest cities hug great rivers. Budapest is perched along the banks of the Danube. Cairo without the Nile would be a dustbowl. And the Tigris was the lifeblood of Baghdad for centuries.
It's hard to imagine standing atop a bridge there watching boats gliding through water because war has driven away most of the river's traffic. But NPR's Alice Fordham reports that after a decade of war, the river is slowly coming back to life.
ALICE FORDHAM, BYLINE: It's a cool, sunny, winter day in Baghdad. And on the banks of the river Tigris is moored what I can only describe as a party boat. There's tinsel snaking up the boat rails, festoons of silk flowers and young men with hair in gelled up curly cues dancing while children run around.
ZAINAB LOUAY: Oh, my God. It's so beautiful. (Laughter). It's nice, especially the weather, the air when it touch your cheeks, beautiful.
FORDHAM: Zainab Louay person is an English teacher joining dozens of people paying the equivalent of a few dollars to chug up the river and back. She's with Mohammad Rayan, an engineer. I spy some couple-selfie action.
LOUAY: Yes, sure. We have must take some selfies. We just get married.
FORDHAM: As the party boat thrums along, smaller vessels buzz alongside. They're river taxis on weekdays, but this is the weekend. And some students have crammed in for a joyride. Bassem Ali Shaka has been driving these little boats for 16 years.
BASSEM ALI SHAKA: (Speaking Arabic).
FORDHAM: Now the security is OK, although the police stop him going under the bridges so he can't go far. But there were dangerous times. He remembers a sniper in one of these riverside buildings who killed three passengers in 2006.
The Tigris used to be an artery of Iraq. An old National Geographic has a report on seeing Baghdad for the first time from the deck of a Tigris steamer. Sepia photographs show a waterfront bustling with odd little boat. We read excerpts from that article written some hundred years ago by travelers Frederick and Margaret Simpich.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I was paddled ashore from the steamer in a goofah, a queer craft used here since Jonah's day. A goofah is woven from willows about six feet in diameter. Some say Moses was cut adrift in one of these goofahs.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The kelek is a raft made of inflated goatskins, held together by poles. These keleks come down to Baghdad in hundreds from Mosul bringing wool, pottery, grain and skins.
FORDHAM: With better roads, cars and railways, fewer people paddled their lives down the river. And there aren't keles or goofahs in Baghdad anymore. But the transport ministry plans to bring back river transport as the street traffic's so bad - expand the water taxis and start a boat going all the way from Baghdad to the sea. And there are still oars paddling through the Tigris.
AHMED SITTAR: This is my life, my life, all the time in the river.
FORDHAM: This is the Baghdad rowing club where national athlete Ahmed Sittar comes to row every day. He loves the Tigris.
SITTAR: When I row, I feel romantic.
FORDHAM: He trains hard, competes internationally. But when he gets on the river, he says it makes him dream.
SITTAR: Dream for my life and the future like this, all the time.
FORDHAM: His coach, Hassan Showkat Hassan, says most Iraqis prefer soccer to rowing. But he wishes they would at least come enjoy the river and that more riverside parks and restaurants would open so people could watch the athletes skimming their boats along the Tigris in the golden, afternoon sunlight. Alice Fordham, NPR News.
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You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
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Keeping up with technology can seem to be more trouble than it's worth. Every time you turn around, there's a new platform and a new conversation happening on it. Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest. And among the many things these social media platforms can be used for, arguing is a perennial favorite, whether the topic is sports, TV shows or the day's news. But not every conversation works on every platform. As NPR's Neda Ulaby reports, we're getting more sophisticated about choosing what we say and where we say it.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: If you're going to argue about anything online, there's a strong chance it'll be about culture, feminism or race. Jay Smooth is a media strategist for a social justice group called Race Forward, and he hosts a popular video blog called the "Ill Doctrine," where he talks about issues like the Eric Garner case and police protesting the mayor of New York.
JAY SMOOTH: Wow. So I could've sworn that there was a time when I could make funny videos that had jokes in them.
ULABY: Smooth's also got about 50,000 followers on Twitter and close to 10,000 Facebook followers and friends. They expect him to jump in when something happens, like when the actor Kevin Costner recently said in an interview that the subject of race shuts down conversations. Smooth fired up Twitter like he usually does to talk about it, but things did not go as expected.
SMOOTH: And I felt like in that setting my snarky comments came off as overly petty and didn't really honor the issue the way I wanted to. So I deleted the Twitter and then told everyone to go to my Facebook and we could talk about there.
ULABY: A sensible move, says Guy Kawasaki, who co-wrote a book called "The Art Of Social Media."
GUY KAWASAKI: Twitter is very poorly designed for threading or continuity, right?
ULABY: Meaning it's not effective for ongoing discussions involving lots of different people. Twitter is terse, 140 characters. And its shards of rhetoric work perfectly for spreading jokes, memes and pointed observations. There's room for nuance, says Jay Smooth, but it's a different kind of nuance than Facebook's.
SMOOTH: Facebook for me is more of a place to have a smaller-focused conversation with a core group, and Twitter is a place to add your voice to a much bigger conversation that no one is controlling.
ULABY: But that's not how it works for Saeed Jones. He's an editor for BuzzFeed, the news website dedicated to pumping out everything from serious news to lists of underappreciated Disney characters. Jones tweets to his 18,000 followers mostly about race, sexuality and gender.
SAEED JONES: I'm much less comfortable talking about racism on Facebook.
ULABY: Jones grew up in Texas, he says, and went to college in Kentucky.
JONES: I have a lot of conservative friends, and friends of friends, and people that I knew in other parts of my life that I may not be in touch with now, and I don't really feel like getting in arguments with people. (Laughter).
ULABY: Constantly, Jones says, he sees online conversations he thinks are on the wrong social platforms.
JONES: Oh, my God, all the time. (Laughter). All the time.
ULABY: Just a few days ago in fact, he joked on Twitter he needed to move a conversation to GChat, it was getting just a little too intimate. And over the course of just one day, he says, he and his friends will switch platforms constantly.
JONES: We'll talk a bit on email and then, you know, one of them might send me a direct message on Twitter, and then it's a text message. And all of this is - it's weirdly seamless.
ULABY: Jones says he thinks people feel more pressure today to take on social media identities and be part of these conversations. Those who don't can sometimes feel left out. But Jones, who is also a poet, says it's possible to find pleasure in figuring out the new rules - how we write to each other, how to be ourselves in 140 characters or less.
JONES: I think that's fascinating. I think it's a fascinating opportunity as a writer to kind of think about language in a way that's also in-step with how we live, how we read the news, how we communicate with our friends.
ULABY: And how we shape different stories to different platforms, and how that ends up shaping us.
Neda Ulaby, NPR News.
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An abortion law passed by the Texas legislator is on trial today in a U.S. appeals court. The law requires that the state's abortion clinics have certain hospital-like settings for surgeries, among other restrictions. That part of the law has been on hold for the past year and a half as the factions have fought over it in court. Carrie Feibel of Houston Public Media was in the courtroom in New Orleans today and joins us now. And, Carrie, first tell us more about the law at issue here.
CARRIE FEIBEL, BYLINE: Well, this law passed about a year and a half ago in Texas. And as some may recall, it's the law that Democrat Wendy Davis tried to famously filibuster on the floor of the Texas senate, wearing her pink sneakers. She failed to stop that law. It did go into effect, but part of it was struck down in federal district court. And that brings us to today. The state has appealed. They want this part of the law to go into effect. And basically, it would require clinics that provide abortion to meet the same standards as outpatient surgery centers. Before the law passed, there were over 48 clinics providing abortion in Texas. Now we're down to about 17. Another 10 would have to close if this was upheld. So the overall argument here is that there would be so few clinics in Texas that can meet that standard that women would be denied access, unable to access their right to constitutionally get an abortion.
BLOCK: And that was at the heart of the arguments today in federal appeals court today?
FEIBEL: Yes. So the court heard arguments about the ambulatory surgery centers, what they require. These are outpatient places where you can get knee surgery, injections for back pain - that kind of thing. And there's many standards. They have to have certain hallway widths. They have to have certain equipment for general anesthesia. And abortion providers say, well, most abortions are relatively uncomplicated procedures, they don't even require general anesthesia or an incision, so these are very burdensome and expensive upgrades they would have to make. And that would basically drive a lot of them out of business.
BLOCK: And what was the argument from the state of Texas?
FEIBEL: Well, the state of Texas has always argued that this law is about safety. It's about making abortions safer for women and protecting woman. The Texas solicitor general today said, you know, the state does have an interest in regulating these clinics and if some of them have to close and women have to drive farther to get to the remaining clinics that do comply, well, women have always had to drive to get abortions in Texas - it's a big state, that's just always been part of it.
BLOCK: And, Carrie, what are the implications if these clinics do have to meet the standards in this law?
FEIBEL: Well, the clinics that don't meet the surgery center rules would have to close. And that would be about 10 clinics. And that would mean there wouldn't be any clinic left in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas and no clinic in El Paso and far west Texas. So those women would have to drive hundreds of miles roundtrip to get an abortion in one of the big cities like San Antonio. But the legal question here is that an undue burden for women? The Supreme Court has said states can regulate abortion, but they can't do it so much that there's an undue burden in a woman being able to obtain a legal abortion. But the question is how many miles is an undue burden? And there were women outside the court today from the south Texas region. And they were saying it's not just about driving distance, it's about the time they would need to take off from work. It's about the need to get daycare. It's about the need for some of them, if they don't have legal documents, would they even be about to get past some immigration checkpoints on the highway to San Antonio. So there's lots of considerations that go into unto burden. So if those clinics do have to close, if this part of the law is upheld, those clinics say they would appeal to the Supreme Court for some relief.
BLOCK: Carrie Feibel of Houston Public Media. Carrie, thanks very much.
FEIBEL: Thanks, Melissa.
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There's growing evidence that brain scans can help predict a person's future, or some aspects of it anyway. NPR's Jon Hamilton reports that information from these scans can suggest whether a child will have trouble with math or whether someone with mental illness will respond to a particular treatment.
JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: For years, educators and mental health professionals have relied on old-fashioned tools, like questionnaires, when deciding how to help a struggling patient or student. John Gabrieli, a brain scientist at MIT, says those tools haven't been very effective.
JOHN GABRIELI: Currently, there's so little evidence about which treatment would really work for one individual compared to another, which educational approach would really work for one child compared to another. So we're currently, in many ways, flipping coins and stumbling in the darkness.
HAMILTON: Which is why Gabrieli decided to look at dozens of recent studies that made predictions using functional MRI and other brain scanning technologies. He and his colleagues report in the journal Neuron that the results are encouraging. The studies show that subtle differences in brain structure, activity and connections could predict future behavior. Take people with depression or social anxiety disorder - some respond well to cognitive behavioral therapy while others are better off taking drugs. But doctors often had to find out through trial and error. Gabrieli says studies from the past few years suggest a better strategy is to measure activity in several areas of the brain.
GABRIELI: One study examined brain function prior to patients receiving cognitive behavioral therapy and it predicted much better than clinical measures which patients would benefit the most and which patients would benefit the least.
HAMILTON: Gabrieli says other studies found that brain scans also did a good job predicting which children would go on to have difficulties with reading or math. And still others showed which young people are likely to engage in future binge drinking or drug use. Caryn Lerman, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, has been using the new approach in her research on smoking cessation. She says she and her colleagues used to rely on interviews and questionnaires to predict which patients would actually quit.
CARYN LERMAN: We were interested to see whether incorporating information from brain scans improved our ability to make those predictions.
HAMILTON: And did it?
LERMAN: It did.
HAMILTON: Lerman's team found that measuring activity in an area of the prefrontal cortex helped them predict who would succeed more than 80 percent of the time. She has some ideas about why brain scans work better than questionnaires.
LERMAN: Individuals, even when they're as honest as possible, are often not as good at reporting their thoughts and feelings and the brain data provides a window.
HAMILTON: Lerman says brain scans have the potential to do much more than simply identify who will quit smoking.
LERMAN: The next step is to use this information to develop better treatments to help people succeed.
HAMILTON: Lerman says those treatments could include brain exercises that increase activity in the area associated with successful quitting. John Gabrieli, of MIT, says despite the promising results in all these research studies, predictive brain scans are not ready for widespread use.
GABRIELI: We're not within a year of use of any of these, but we might be within something like five years.
HAMILTON: And when that day comes, he says, it will be important to make sure the scans are used appropriately.
GABRIELI: The better we get at predicting near-term outcomes the more we have to be careful that we communicate that in constructive ways and the more we have to make sure that we don't somehow use it simply to avoid helping people because they're going to have difficulties and only support people who look like they're not going to have difficulties.
HAMILTON: The goal, he says, should be to start helping a child who is likely to struggle with reading or math long before the problem appears. Jon Hamilton, NPR News.
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Smallpox is one of the deadliest diseases known to humans - or was one of the deadliest diseases. It's eradication is among the greatest achievements of modern medicine. That story is told in a new exhibit at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. It starts with English milkmaids and the Eureka moment which led to the first vaccine. NPR Global Health correspondent Jason Beaubien reports.
JASON BEAUBIEN, BYLINE: It's important to remember that smallpox used to be terrifying. As late as the 1960s, it killed millions of people each year. There was no cure. It came with a rash of oozing blisters that scarred many of its victims for life. But when an English country doctor named Edward Jenner found a way to prevent it, he wasn't universally celebrated. A cartoon from 1802 on display at this exhibit lampoons Jenner, suggesting his vaccine will make cows' heads erupt from people's bodies.
Christine Ruggere, the curator of the historical collection at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, says at the turn of the 19th century, diseases were still mysterious. It wasn't clear how they spread. But Dr. Jenner noticed something about smallpox - milkmaids seemed to be immune.
CHRISTINE RUGGERE: In English literature and poetry, very often milkmaids are referred to for their creamy complexion - as pretty as a milkmaid. One of the reasons why they had such nice complexion was they didn't get smallpox.
BEAUBIEN: Jenner guessed that by being exposed to a bovine form of the disease - cowpox - milkmaids were protected from the much more lethal smallpox. So he set out to test his theory.
RUGGERE: Now, his experiments are not ones we do today. He took cowpox, gave it to a small boy. The boy got a good case of cowpox, was healed, then he took smallpox and injected it into the same child.
BEAUBIEN: The 8-year-old never developed smallpox. Jenner had just come up with the world's first vaccine. Still, religious leaders blasted it, saying it violates God's will. In 1966, Dr. D.A. Henderson went to Geneva to head up a campaign by the World Health Organization to eradicate smallpox entirely.
DR. D.A. HENDERSON: At the beginning of the program there were an estimated 10 million cases and two million deaths. The disease was present in some 31 countries at that time.
BEAUBIEN: Smallpox only travels from person to person, so the goal of the eradication campaign was to find cases and then vaccinate in circles around them.
HENDERSON: If you snipped the chain, you stopped the spread.
BEAUBIEN: By the mid-1970s, Ethiopia was one of the last smallpox holdouts. It was also in the midst of a bloody Marxist revolution. Getting around was so difficult that the vaccinators had to use helicopters.
HENDERSON: One was blown up with a hand grenade because the people thought it was the Italians coming back to occupy Ethiopia. Another time, they captured a helicopter and asked for ransom.
BEAUBIEN: Eventually they got their helicopter back, and the last case of smallpox ever recorded was on October 26 of 1977, in neighboring Somalia.
HENDERSON: It's the only disease of man which we have succeeded in eradicating.
BEAUBIEN: Jason Beaubien, NPR News, Baltimore.
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Scientists have discovered a natural compound from bacteria that may prove to be a potent new antibiotic. This news comes at a time when many popular antibiotics are losing their effectiveness as germs develop resistance to them. This natural compound is especially intriguing because it appears that it might not lose its germ-killing potential. NPR's Richard Harris tells us how this discovery came about.
RICHARD HARRIS, BYLINE: Researchers at Northeastern University didn't set out to find antibiotics. Kim Lewis and his colleagues were actually figuring out how to grow bacteria that had never been grown in the lab before.
KIM LEWIS: The majority of bacteria on this planet are uncultured, meaning they do not grow on our Petri dishes. And when I'm talking about the majority, it is 99 percent.
HARRIS: So how do you grow bacteria that don't want to grow in the lab?
LEWIS: We don't grow them in the lab. That's how we do it.
HARRIS: Lewis and his colleagues developed a system that would allow them to explore this biologically-rich but secretive world. Basically, they built a vessel that would hold bacteria-rich soil between two membranes.
LEWIS: And then this contraption, which we call a diffusion chamber, it goes back into the soil from which we took the bacteria.
HARRIS: It turns out, once bacteria started growing and building tiny colonies in the contraption, those colonies could be transferred to the lab. At that point, they'd grow. And Lewis's lab was off to the races. Now, most of our antibiotics are natural products secreted by bacteria and fungi that live in the soil. So Lewis, with a company he co-founded called NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals, started examining the natural compound secreted by his newly-isolated soil bacteria to look for new antibiotics. They've already found more than two dozen. And one of them, which they've named teixobactin, looked like a winner - deadly to several different kinds of disease-causing bacteria but not toxic to mice.
LEWIS: And behaved very nicely. It cured mice of skin and thigh and lung infections.
HARRIS: It cured serious staph infections, strep and tuberculosis. But the best part came when they ran another set of crucial tests.
LEWIS: The most intriguing thing about this compound is the apparent absence of resistance development.
HARRIS: It seems that disease-causing bacteria don't become immune to this antibiotic, and that's because the antibiotic latches onto parts of the bacteria that can't mutate, and mutations are how bacteria typically develop resistance to drugs. So Lewis is tentatively making a bold claim.
LEWIS: This for all practical purposes may be a largely resistance-free compound.
GERRY WRIGHT: That's pretty exciting news, I think, for the field.
HARRIS: Gerry Wright at McMaster University in Canada got a sneak-peek at the study, which is published in the latest issue of "Nature." Antibiotic resistance keeps infectious disease doctors up at night. For instance, there are some strains of tuberculosis that have developed resistance to all known antibiotics. Still, getting from discovery to drug isn't easy. Wright says there are economic and regulatory challenges in bringing a new antibiotic to market, which governments have been working to solve.
WRIGHT: We're moving in the right direction there, and so if we can kick-start the science at the same time then I think we'll have a route towards helping to solve the antibiotics crisis.
HARRIS: Scientists still need to test teixobactin in people, and there's no guarantee it will work as well in humans as it does in mice. But even if this particular product doesn't pan out, Lewis and his colleagues at Northeastern have plenty of other tough-to-grow bacteria that they can now study in the hunt for new antibiotics.
Richard Harris, NPR News.
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Michele Serros gave voice to a generation of young Mexican-Americans through her short stories, poems and her memoir, "How To Be A Chicana Role Model." Serros died of cancer on Sunday at her home in Berkeley, California. She was 48. NPR's Mandalit del Barco has an appreciation.
MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE: Michele Serros was a new kind of Latina writer. She didn't speak Spanish much, listened to Abba, she was a vegan who liked to surf and skateboard. She made wisecracks about breakfast cereal, graffiti taggers and thumping sound systems.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Reading) Why can't I be like those cool girls and like the cars that go boom ba boom.
DEL BARCO: Serros was a college student in 1993 when her first book was published, titled "Chicana Falsa: And Other Stories Of Death, Identity, And Oxnard." It was a collection of wry stories and poems about growing up in an unincorporated, rural, agricultural community, Oxnard, near the California coast. In it, she wrote about protesting in the frozen food aisle of a grocery store and lusting after chicharrones.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Reading) Man, I couldn't get enough of that crackly pork skin. I crammed them in tortillas that were always too small, so I ate them right out of the pot, throwing small, crispy bits into the air, like popcorn, letting them land into my open, anxious mouth.
DEL BARCO: Like others in what came to be known as Generation Mex, Serros and her writing were influenced by both her working-class Mexican-American heritage and Southern California pop-culture.
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MICHELE SERROS: I relished the fact that I was a fourth-generation Californian, but not looking like the stereotypical blond beach girl. I always felt like an outsider.
DEL BARCO: That's Michele Serros on NPR in 2000. She appeared on this network many times over the years. Serros was also a part of the lively spoken word scene in Los Angeles in the 1990s. She often performed as a member of the Chicana poetry collective called Y Que Mas? Screenwriter Evangeline Ordaz was also in the group.
EVANGENLINE ORDAZ: In fact, when we were performing together, like, she always had to go last because none of us wanted to follow her.
DEL BARCO: Ordaz says Serros's writing was different from the militant identity politics of an earlier generation of Chicano poets.
ORDAZ: She still talked about really, you know, important issues in the Latino community, but she did it by telling funny stories.
DEL BARCO: Michele Serros told those stories on stage with 11 other poets on the Lollapalooza tour in 1994.
ORDAZ: It kind of really showed where poetry was at the time that it was, like, OK, alongside rock music. And if anybody could, like, stand up next to a rock star, it was Michele, because she was literally the rockstar of the poetry scene at the time.
DEL BARCO: Playwright and performance artist Luis Alfaro was among those performing with her at Lollapalooza.
LUIS ALFARO: She speaks for a whole generation of Mexican-Americans, you know, who have a very different way of looking at their parents' culture and trying to make sense of all of those crazy rituals that are you.
DEL BARCO: Alfaro donned a poofy dress for one of those rituals, a quinceanera - a sweet 15 party - that Michele Serros threw for the publication of "Chicana Falsa." She also had a more serious side, writing two young adult novels - "Honey Blonde Chica" and a sequel, "Scandalosa!" She said she wanted them to be different from the books she grew up reading.
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SERROS: They followed a similar theme and that's a theme I call, like, the three B's. It was always about barrios, borders or bodegas. And I wanted to present a life that truly goes on that we don't always see in the mainstream media.
DEL BARCO: Michele Serros is also well-known for her guidebook, "How To Be A Chicana Role Model." She wrote it as a tongue-in-cheek chronicle, but for many readers she remains someone to emulate. Mandalit del Barco, NPR News.
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In Las Vegas this week, at the International Consumer Electronics Show, a big surprise - there are smartphones everywhere. Samsung's Galaxy series is on display in a dazzling showroom. Lamborghini, the sports car brand, has a new phone out for just $6,000. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: Tonino Lamborghini (a company not related to the famous car brand) has a new phone out for $6,000.] But high-end phones are not what's driving global sales. And to find out what is, NPR's Aarti Shahani went to a little corner of the massive expo.
AARTI SHAHANI, BYLINE: It took me just a half hour of speed walking to finally get to this place in the Westgate Hotel.
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SHAHANI: It's the Asia wing, and it's got a little smart phone alley with cramped, boxy booths rented out by some of the leading manufacturers that you've never heard of.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: WeiHung Digital Company Limited. WeiHung.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Quality Technology.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: Our company is Shenzhen GBD Electronics LTT Co.
SHAHANI: All these companies are here at the show for the first time. They've been building customer bases in Asia, in Africa and in Europe. And they say now it's time to hit the U.S. market. I go booth-to-booth, asking vendors to show me the very best phones they've got.
GANDOLF GUAN: For example, we have a very special touch panel we call smart awake.
SHAHANI: Gandolf Guan is showing me the smart awake feature on a phone that's about $110. And when it's in sleep mode, you can swipe a letter with your finger to awaken it. Swipe C to get your call pad, E for e-mail.
GUAN: M for music. You can make the definitions by yourself.
SHAHANI: We take pictures with the camera, it's high-resolution 60 megapixels, just like mine only this phone has another feature. Guan pops open the back to show me.
GUAN: Samsung Galaxy has only one SIM card here. But for our phone, you can see from here we have SIM one, SIM two.
SHAHANI: The SIM card is a memory chip used in most of the world. In the Asia wing, I have several conversations like this one. Seller Irene Chen tells me that her $100 phone is not cheap.
IRENE CHEN: No, no. It's very smart. Let me show you.
SHAHANI: Chen launches AnTuTu Benchmark. It's an Android app that diagnoses the phone's specs, its speed, its memory.
CHEN: This is our phone score.
SHAHANI: And its ranking does compare to leading models. Now, many of us, we see the label Made in India, Made in China and we think it must be bad quality. But Chen points out...
CHEN: As you know, almost all the phones are made in China. Like Apple - it's made in China also.
SHAHANI: The vendors at the Asia wing make a good sales pitch. But they've got money at stake. So I wander through the convention in search of experts who don't. And I meet this guy.
GREG HARPER: My name is Greg Harper. I'm president of Harper Vision Associates. And in terms of smartphones, I have 28 active numbers.
SHAHANI: Harper is the kind of rigorous - or obsessive - expert you would want advising you. And he too swears by his Asian phones.
HARPER: The Mi5 is a very, very good phone, and the OnePlus. Those are the two phones I'm using right now.
SHAHANI: His favorites cost $300 to $400 - about half the price of a top-end Apple or Samsung. And he says they're just of good. They run on Android, so you can use all the same Google apps. One company called Xiaomi has risen so fast it's now the third-largest smartphone maker in the world. Harper says we in the U.S. aren't paying for quality, we're paying for brand. I ask him...
Are American consumers dumb when it comes to how we buy smartphones?
HARPER: We're very dumb. We're very, very dumb in how we buy smartphones because we've been caught up in the whole marketing blitz.
SHAHANI: The Asian phone makers here say that back home, they're fighting over pennies. In the U.S., with prices so high, they can grab dollars. Aarti Shahani, NPR News, Las Vegas.
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If you have a smartphone, you might not use a paper calendar anymore or an old tattered address book, and you no longer have to present a paper boarding pass at the airport. Well, a pilot project in Iowa could mean that soon you won't have to carry your plastic driver's license in your wallet anymore either. Iowa Public Radio's Joyce Russell reports.
JOYCE RUSSELL, BYLINE: Iowa Department of Transportation Director Paul Trombino is standing in front of a mockup of a smartphone driver's license at a recent statehouse briefing.
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PAUL TROMBINO: This is a digitally encoded driver's license, which we're expecting to roll out later this year. It's on your cell phone, so you can carry it around with you.
RUSSELL: Trombino demonstrates at first you access an app on the Internet. Next, with a pin number, you fill in the app with information from your physical driver's license. Then your new virtual license downloads into your phone for you to present wherever you need an ID. But some Iowans who might be most affected by the change have their doubts.
SERGEANT SCOTT BRIGHT: From law enforcement perspective I don't see any advantages.
RUSSELL: That's Sergeant Scott Bright with the Iowa State Patrol.
BRIGHT: First thing I thought about is if we're making a traffic stop, is that violator going to be looking for their cellphone so they can get their license out before we stop the car.
RUSSELL: Bright also doubts they could scan the information from a digital license without carrying the cell phone back to the squad car. And that raises obvious privacy concerns. On the plus side, computer security experts say the digital license could be more secure than a plastic license you might lose or leave lying around, but that doesn't mean there's any real need for this yet. Doug Jacobson directs the Information Assurance Center at Iowa State University.
DOUG JACOBSON: My first thought was I wouldn't get one, but not necessarily for security reasons. You know, we've all stood in line at the airport behind the people trying to scan their QR codes to get aboard the airplane and, you know, after about the fifth attempt...
RUSSELL: And Jacobson says it would take some time for most people to consider this a valid ID. So with all the objections what's the point of a digital driver's license? Andrea Henry, at the Iowa DOT, concedes there isn't exactly a clamor yet for this innovation.
ANDREA HENRY: However, we do know that customers are demanding services through their mobile devices more and more. It's really about just keeping up with technology.
RUSSELL: And the technology company developing the app is pushing that concept to other motor vehicle departments around the country. Jenny Openshaw is vice president of MorphoTrust USA. She says customers do want to be able to renew their driver's licenses online and she sees this as the next logical step.
JENNY OPENSHAW: I think that the digital driver's license doesn't so much solve a problem as it fulfills a need and a desire on the part of the American consumer to have everything that is important to us in electronic form and on the mobile device of our choice. People are more likely to leave their wallet at home these days than they are their cellphone.
RUSSELL: Officials predict a rollout of the new smartphone license this year or next. That's after security and privacy concerns are carefully addressed and after DOT employees test it out for customer comfort. For NPR News, I'm Joyce Russell in Des Moines.
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French police are searching for three men who attacked the offices of a French satirical weekly in Paris earlier today. The three masked gunmen shouted Islamist slogans as they killed 12 people, including cartoonists at the paper and also police guarding them. The attack has been condemned by President Obama and other world leaders. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley joins us from Paris. And, Eleanor, take us through today's events.
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: Well, Robert, at about 11:30 a.m. Paris time, three masked gunmen showed up at the offices of this satirical weekly magazine, Charlie Hebdo. They got in. The first thing they did was shoot the policeman that was prominently guarding the building. And they went upstairs to the newsroom. And they had Kalashnikov rifles and they opened fire in the newsroom. And witnesses said that they called out several journalists' names before killing them.
Then they came down into the street where they got into a car. But before they left, they shot a policeman - the second one - at point-blank range. And then when he was down on the sidewalk, came back up to him and shot him again in the head. A witness was filming this from his apartment. And in the video, you can hear the men saying in French, we've avenged the prophet. And then they say, we've killed Charlie Hebdo. And then they drove away.
SIEGEL: What do we know about the hunt for these men?
BEARDSLEY: Well, there is a massive manhunt going on. The assailants apparently drove to the north of Paris and had wreck with a motorist on the way and then left their car and took another car. And from there, there is no trace of them. There is, like I said, a massive manhunt going on. The government has organized a terrorist cell unit that is looking for them. There's a hotline you can call, and the city and the region - the Paris region - are under the top terrorist alert, which means imminent attack, so there's a lot of fear out there. Those guys are still at large.
SIEGEL: Eleanor, I want you to tell us a little about this publication, Charlie Hebdo, which had offended many different groups of peoples before. Why were Muslims so offended by it?
BEARDSLEY: Right, it's a very clever publication, but it's also crude. And I think first, one reason they're offended is because, you know, the Prophet Muhammad is not to be drawn. He's not to be depicted. So Christians may be used to seeing Jesus and Mary drawn, but to see the prophet drawn - so the first trouble they got in was in 2007, they republished some Danish cartoons showing the prophet. And then they did their own depictions of him. There's one cartoon that shows the prophet, he's got his head in his hands. He's going, it's so hard to be loved by so many idiots. But that just really offended Muslims, even, you know, Muslims who were not very practicing. But the fundamentalists just hated this publication.
SIEGEL: There was another in which the prophet has returned, and he's being beheaded by - presumably by somebody from ISIS in the cartoon.
BEARDSLEY: Oh, yeah.
SIEGEL: So what's been the reaction from the French people to this attack today?
BEARDSLEY: You know, there's been these huge vigils around France, and I went to Place de la Republique tonight. And I've been in France 10 years, and I have never been in a crowd that large. And you know the French love to demonstrate. But there is a feeling of togetherness - it's sort of a defiance. Everyone out there was chanting, we are all Charlie. And people were holding up signs and saying, Je suis Charlie, I am Charlie. So there is, like - we will not be muzzled, we will not shut up. We will not have our press, you know, shot down like this. We are a country of liberty and freedom of expression, and you really feel that in people.
SIEGEL: That's NPR's Eleanor Beardsley in Paris. Eleanor, thank you.
BEARDSLEY: Thank you, Robert.
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At the White House today, President Obama condemned what he called the cowardly, evil attacks in Paris. And he pledged U.S. counterterrorism help in pursuing the attackers. As we just heard, the shooters are heard on video as they fled, shouting we have avenged the Prophet Muhammad.
Earlier today, I spoke with Lisa Monaco, the president's chief counterterrorism adviser. And I asked her if the White House is confident that radical Islamists are behind the attack.
LISA MONACO: I think based on what we're seeing right now and the reporting thus far, I think that is a fair assumption, yes.
BLOCK: Are there any indications that the attackers are connected to the Islamic State or to al-Qaida?
MONACO: We don't have any information at this point that's credible in terms of groups or organizations taking credit for this attack. Again, we're going to continue to work this. Our military intelligence, law enforcement communities will work hand in glove with our French partners. The FBI has offered assistance and will provide assistance with overseas and here, and will continue to work with them to identify the perpetrators of this attack and do everything we can to hunt them down and bring them to justice.
BLOCK: We do know that al-Qaida's media operation had threatened Charlie Hebdo, the publication, before in al-Qaida's publication Inspire, even published a wanted poster. There were photos on there that include the editor of Charlie Hebdo, Stephane Charbonnier, who was one of the people who was killed today. Do you find that significant?
MONACO: I do. And what we've seen, obviously, is this magazine has been the target of previous attacks and previous threats. And we also have seen al-Qaida, ISIL and their followers have been extolled, really, and urged on to take up opportunistic attacks like the one we've seen today in Paris. And I'm afraid we're going to see more of this. And we need to prepare to see more of this.
This is the type of attack that can happen anywhere in the world. This is why we are so vigilant at our embassies and our posts and around the world, particularly in high threat areas, and why we work daily with the law enforcement and Homeland Security communities here to maintain vigilance.
BLOCK: Witnesses in Paris described the shooters moving and attacking very methodically today. Does this strike you as a sophisticated assault, something that suggests military training, for example?
MONACO: Well, it's something that we always have to be concerned about. Again, it's very early days in this investigation, but we're very concerned about the prospect of individuals traveling, particularly now increasingly to Iraq and Syria to join up and to gain training and to gain experience and then come back to the west, which is why we have led the international community, including with an unprecedented meeting last fall at the UN Security Council to bring together international partners to do more to combat the threat from foreign fighters.
BLOCK: The number that I've seen, in terms of French citizens who have gone to join jihadist groups in Iraq or Syria or plan to, is in the neighborhood of 1,000. Does that ring true to you?
MONACO: It does. Right now, we estimate upwards of 18,000 individuals who've traveled or attempted to travel to Syria and Iraq to become foreign fighters. That includes over 100 Americans.
BLOCK: Ms. Monaco, the attack in Paris comes pretty soon after the deadly attacks in Canada back in October, the hostage siege last month in Sydney where the gunman hung a jihadist flag. Do you see this, in some ways, part of a pattern?
MONACO: I think that's a fair characterization. Perhaps not a pattern, but an evolution of the terror threat. And again, we don't know the circumstances here with this particular attack, but attacks that are more opportunistic in nature are going to, by definition, be more difficult to identify and stop.
BLOCK: Lisa Monaco is the White House chief counterterrorism adviser. Thank you very much.
MONACO: Thank you.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
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And I'm Melissa Block. There was an unexpected day off today for students in Chicago and scores of other school districts from the Dakotas to Alabama. The reason? Bitterly cold weather. Temperatures failed to get above zero in much of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Northern Iowa and Illinois, and strong winds make it dangerous to be outdoors. From Chicago, NPR's David Schaper reports.
DAVID SCHAPER, BYLINE: A lot of kids in this part of the country look forward to snow days, but very few probably relish this kind of day off, where there's little else to do but try to stay warm inside. Four hundred-thousand Chicago public school students didn't have class today and many more children in the middle of the country stayed home, too. National Weather Service meteorologist Gino Izzi says it's not just because of the frigid temperatures.
GINO IZZI: Probably the bigger part is going to be the strong winds. And a lot of portions of the Midwest are seeing winds gusting 25, 30, 35 miles per hour, which, in many cases, can make the temperature feel from anywhere 20, 30, 35 degrees colder from what the actual air temperature is.
SCHAPER: And as biting as it is in Chicago, it's worse in Minneapolis. But Tom Goeman dressed for it.
TOM GOEMAN: Heavy coat, scarf, mittens, long johns.
SCHAPER: And Goeman says he gets used to it.
GOEMAN: (Laughter). It's what we do in Minnesota. It's cold out here so we just deal with it.
SCHAPER: He'd better, and so should everyone else in the Midwest - bitter cold is expected through the weekend with wind chills remaining below zero, and there's snow on the way.
David Schaper, NPR News, Chicago.
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The euro, already at a nine-year low against the dollar, slipped a bit more today. The drop came after a report that consumer prices actually fell in December from the previous December. Falling energy prices were the biggest factor. But there's no question the European economy remains weak. And that is putting more pressure on the European Central Bank to do something bold to stimulate growth. NPR's Jim Zarroli reports.
JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: The European Central Bank said that consumer prices in the Eurozone fell two-tenths of a percentage point in December, compared to the year before. It was the first time prices had fallen since the depths of the financial crisis in 2009. The report said much of the drop could be attributed to the dramatic worldwide decline in oil and gas prices. Ben May is senior Eurozone economist at Oxford Economics.
BEN MAY: This is all about the fall in the oil price, really. And in that respect, I guess you could argue that this is a positive development.
ZARROLI: May said lower energy prices will give European households more money to spend on other things, so it could help stimulate growth. But even when energy costs were factored out, inflation was still very low, lower than most economists think is healthy. And it once again raises the frightening process of deflation, a broad drop in wages and asset values. That hasn't happened so far, but Gregory Claeys of the research firm Bruegel says Europe is suffering from an ongoing economic stagnation, and the low inflation report is a reflection of that.
GREGORY CLAEYS: I think it's not only in the countries that have been troubled, like, Greece, Spain or Portugal, but it's now a move that you observe in most of the country of the Eurozone, like France, also.
ZARROLI: Claeys says even wealthy countries like Germany and the Netherlands are feeling the pain of the region's slowing economy.
CLAEYS: So this also explains why fundamentally we see this falling inflation, which is now near zero percent.
ZARROLI: Today's report puts new pressure on the European Central Bank to act. The ECB has been deeply concerned about inflation over the years and it's been criticized for imposing strict austerity measures on weak economies, such as Greece. In the process, it's been slow to pursue the kinds of bold measures taken by the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bank of England to stimulate growth. In recent months that's begun to change, and European officials have taken some steps to encourage more bank lending, for instance. But ECB President Mario Draghi hinted last month that the ECB is ready to go further.
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MARIO DRAGHI: It's both time to look at what the effect these measures are having and will have, and also time to be prepared to further action if needed.
ZARROLI: In fact, the ECB will meet on January 22, and there's widespread expectation that it's ready to take up the kinds of large-scale asset purchases pursued by the U.S. Federal Reserve, measures that go by the name quantitative easing.
Again, Ben May.
MAY: If you look at all of the comments from various ECB members over recent weeks, it pretty much guarantees that they'll do something. If they did nothing, that would be a major surprise to markets and have some quite nasty consequences.
ZARROLI: If nothing else, today's report drives home the point that the threat of higher inflation is a distant one. That means European officials have more room to experiment, to look for ways to bring back the kind of growth that has eluded the region for so long.
Jim Zarroli, NPR News.
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Spain's economy is growing again but not fast enough to bring a sky-high employment rate and not fast enough to boost wages either. Spain, like the rest of Europe, has deflation concerns. Lauren Frayer reports from Madrid.
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LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: Holiday music still pipes through downtown Madrid where Luis Fernandez and his, wife Rosana Mateos, take their children on one last lap of a giant nativity scene before it's packed up for the season. Luis' New Year's wish is the same as it has been for the past five years. He's hoping for a better economy.
LUIS FERNANDEZ: It's growing, OK, it is growing. The figures say that, but it is very slow, really slow.
FRAYER: Spain's economy is out of recession with about half a percent growth last quarter. But everything is not back to normal for the Fernandez family. Luis lost his IT job last summer and then luckily got rehired, but with lower pay.
FERNANDEZ: It's more or less 35, 40 percent less than before. They sack you and then contract for less money because you have the need, because you have a family, you have children to look after.
ROSANA MATEOS: (Through interpreter) We didn't do a big Christmas. It was pretty simple, says his wife Rosana.
FRAYER: They're managing to get by on less.
FERNANDEZ: That's because we organize the budget. For instance, we didn't travel during the Christmas holiday.
FRAYER: The Fernandez family is both experiencing and contributing to deflation. With lower wages, they're spending less and that means falling prices across the euro zone. Shops and restaurants are all scrambling to lower their prices and compete. At a nearby coffee shop, manager Irina Vovyzhyna serves up cafe con leche to her regulars.
IRINA VOVYZHYNA: (Speaking Spanish) A cup of coffee here costs about a $1.60, she says. And we haven't lowered that, but we also haven't raised it for six years, she says. Normally, we'd raise the price every year by three cents or so, but we're trying to keep our prices low.
(Speaking Spanish) Irina says it's stressful. Her margins are tighter, competitors are lowering their prices. She's not making profits like before.
FRAYER: Although it's little consolation to Irina or the Fernandez family, deflation is actually making Spain more competitive, exports are up, and the recession is over. But with unemployment here still above 23 percent and wages falling, people are not optimistic about the future. Anti-austerity parties are challenging the status quo and are expected to do well at the polls this year in both Spain and Greece. For NPR News, I'm Lauren Frayer in Madrid.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
French police now say that they've identified the three men who committed mass murder today at a satirical weekly in Paris. This morning, the men, dressed all in black, entered the offices of Charlie Hebdo and shot 10 employees to death - among them, the editor-in-chief and some of France's most famous cartoonists. They also shot two police officers, and the attackers then escaped.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Charlie Hebdo has faced multiple threats from Muslim extremists angry over caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. The weekly newspaper's offices were firebombed in 2011.
Today, French president Francois Hollande said our republic has been attacked. Here he is with translation from the BBC.
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PRESIDENT FRANCOIS HOLLANDE: (Through translator) These men, this woman, died for the idea they had of France, that there is freedom.
BLOCK: President Hollande declared tomorrow a day of national mourning. And this evening, people filled the streets of Paris and other European cities waving signs that read Je suis Charlie - or I am Charlie.
SIEGEL: For the latest on this story from Paris, we've reach reporter Jamey Keaten of the Associated Press. Welcome to the program. And tell us what you've been able to find out about who these three men were.
JAMEY KEATEN: Well, French police officials have told us that two brothers, whose names are Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi - who are men in their early 30s - and a young man named Hamyd Mourad, who's 18 years old, are their leading suspects at the moment.
SIEGEL: And, Cherif Kouachi, I gather, has a history with the police.
KEATEN: Yes. Cherif Kouachi actually was convicted in 2008 of terrorism charges for helping funnel fighters to Iraq's insurgency. And he was sentenced to 18 months in prison.
SIEGEL: Much has been made of what people have seen in the videos, the calm with which these gunmen seemed to go about their business. Suggesting they might have been trained militarily. Do we know if they actually fought in Iraq or Syria?
KEATEN: We're still working to confirm those details, but what we do know is, as you mentioned, in the video that we have seen from the shooting, these black clad shooters, these gunmen, proceeded very methodically in shooting a police - a French policeman. And even at one point, while they clambered back into a black car to get away, one of them appeared to toss what looked like a shoe into the car, very calmly, very coolly. And even some police and intelligences officials here have been noting how coolheaded these attackers appeared to be.
SIEGEL: The police have told you, the AP, who the suspects they're looking for are but they don't have them in custody, do they?
KEATEN: For the moment, they do not, as far as we know. There have been a number of police raids and actions around the Paris area from what I've been told. But for the moment, they have not detained the main suspects.
SIEGEL: Now, among the dead in this assault was the publication's editor-in-chief. We'll hear more about him in a moment. But just briefly, tell us a bit about the others who have been confirmed dead.
KEATEN: Right, so the - just to get a quick background on this newspaper - it's a satirical newspaper that is known for pillorying many different types of political leaders. It has repeatedly tweaked the Prophet Mohammed and Catholic religious leaders and others. And it's known particularly for its cartoons. So two of the cartoonists were shot as well - and killed - as well as the newspaper's editor, who was under police bodyguard because he had come under threats in the past.
SIEGEL: OK. Jamey Keaten, thanks a lot for updating us. That's reporter Jamey Keaten of The Associated Press in Paris, with the news again that the police have identified the three suspects they're looking for for the killings of those at Charlie Abdo.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
The editor of Charlie Hebdo was defiant in the face of long-standing violent threats. Stephane Charbonnier, known as Charb, was among those murdered today. He said in an interview a couple of years ago it may be a little pompous to say so, but I prefer to die standing up than to live on my knees. We're going to talk more about the impact of the satirical weekly now with Francoise Mouly. She's the art editor of the New Yorker. She grew up in France, and, Miss Mouly, it's fair to say you also grew up with Charlie Hebdo.
FRANCOISE MOULY: Yeah, and I grew up thanks to Charlie Hebdo. I feel I also am in enormous debt because it opened my eyes to the adult world. I was a kid in May '68 and walking through the streets of occupied Paris of Le Quartier Latin (ph). It was the publications that was the lifeblood of the demonstrations and our point of gathering together was Hara-Kiri Hebdo and then Charlie Hebdo.
BLOCK: How would you describe the satirical tone of the paper and the mission that it held?
MOULY: Well, it described itself as bete et mechant, so stupid and nasty. And it was trying to be a provocateur in the most healthy sense of the word, meaning not just provocation for provocation's sake, but to challenge the status quo.
BLOCK: It does seem that there is a tradition of satirical publication in France that would be quite alien to us here. That these publications have a following and a significance there that as Americans we may not really understand.
MOULY: Yeah, the British have their own cartoonists that were very important in the culture, less so in America. It obviously goes with publication being available on every newsstand or Wolinski, Cabu, all of those cartoonists were also published in other publications and had quite a large following.
BLOCK: These are two of the artists who were killed today.
MOULY: Yeah, and have been part of the inception of Hara-Kiri and Charlie Hebdo so it's fitting as they were publishing one more cover with Mohammed on it that they were actually at the office.
BLOCK: When you started hearing today about what had happened and this massacre at this publication in Paris, what went through your mind? What were your first thoughts?
MOULY: For me, it hit me on so many different fronts because it's rare that my professional life as the art editor of the New Yorker, somebody who is in touch with cartoonists all the time, and my background as a French kid collapse and certainly collapsing in such a tragic way. It's like everything that I have lived for got maimed and hurt and attacked, but on the other hand, I'm also incredibly proud of them (laughter).
BLOCK: Proud of them.
MOULY: Oh, I'm proud to have known them and proud of cartoonists for showing such courage. I mean, it's not like they didn't know. I mean, they were there. They were at the office and they were publishing irreverent caricatures. They set themselves up as lightning rod for this mindless crime. And I mentioned to my husband, Art Spiegelman, that, you know, this just felt so incomprehensible and he pointed out that, you know, fundamentalist Islamists are also people who kill school children. So I can't quite try to make sense out of it.
BLOCK: Have you been following the reaction in France today? Huge, huge crowds coming out in support, many of them holding up pens in the air saying I am Charlie, we are Charlie.
MOULY: Yeah, I wish I was there sharing that moment with people that can remain silent, but know that we all feel the same. I did it in spirit at least.
BLOCK: Francoise Mouly, thanks very much for talking with us.
MOULY: Thank you.
BLOCK: Francoise Mouly is the art editor of the New Yorker.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The director of the FBI offered new evidence today to explain why the U.S. believes North Korea launched the cyberattack against Sony. James Comey spoke at a conference on cybersecurity in New York. When the FBI first accused North Korea last month, many technology experts were skeptical. NPR's Dina Temple-Reston reports on the FBI's latest effort to prove its case.
DINA TEMPLE-RASTON, BYLINE: The FBI director revealed newly declassified information that explained the link between North Korea and the Guardians of Peace, the group that claimed responsibility for the attack.
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JAMES COMEY: The Guardians of Peace would send emails threatening Sony employees and would post online various statements explaining their work. In nearly every case they used proxy servers to disguise where they were coming from, but several times they got sloppy.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Comey said that the hackers sometimes either forgot to disguise themselves or had a technical problem, so U.S. authorities could see them.
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COMEY: And we could see that IP addresses that were being used to post and to send the emails were coming from IPs that were exclusively used by the North Koreans. It was a mistake by them that we haven't told you about before that was a very clear indication of who was doing this.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Comey said the hackers would disconnect very quickly once they realized their mistake, but they were visible long enough for the U.S. to identify them.
MARK ROGERS: But there's certainly interesting information there that does support the fact that it could have been North Korea.
TEMPLE-RASTON: That's Mark Rogers, the principle security researcher at CloudFlare, an Internet security company.
ROGERS: But the problem is none of it conclusively says that it was North Korea and none if it conclusively rules out any other actors either.
TEMPLE-RASTON: And he says the FBI needs to be even more transparent.
ROGERS: Give us a little bit more to go on because right now it's just raising more questions than it is answering.
TEMPLE-RASTON: The FBI director hinted that there would be more details to come. In particular, details on how the hackers got into the Sony servers in the first place. Rogers said details about that would go a long way toward convincing skeptics like him who was behind this. Dina Temple-Reston, NPR News, New York.
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This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel. The FDA recently recommended lifting the ban on blood donations by gay men. For those gay men who've been celibate for a year and who regard giving blood as a civic act, that's good news. As for me, my blood is still disqualified, which for me is ironic. I lived in London from 1979 until 1983, and one British tradition that impressed me there was the big blood drive that drew upon British wartime memories, as well as British blood vessels. I came home a confirmed blood donor. But in this country, the Red Cross will not take blood from anyone who between 1980 and 1996 spent three months or more in the United Kingdom. It has to do with an outbreak of mad cow disease and its human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which attacks the brain. The Red Cross's reasoning is that I probably consumed beef in Britain so I might have ingested a prion - a deformed protein - that causes the disease.
So here's my question - people who spent three months in Britain between 1980 and 1996 are relatively rare in the U.S., but in Britain, they're all over the place. How do the Brits handle this problem? Joining us from Watford, England is Dr. Lorna Williamson who is medical and research director at NHS Blood and Transplant - that's part of Britain's NHS, the National Health Service. Welcome to the program.
DR. LORNA WILLIAMSON: Thank you.
SIEGEL: Obviously, Britain can't do without blood from all the people who lived in the U.K. when there was contaminated meat in the food supply. So have there been outbreaks of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and has anything been related to a transfusion?
WILLIAMSON: So at the moment there have been 177 confirmed cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. And we believe three clinical cases of those may have arisen due to blood transfusion in the 1990s. So 1999, the U.K. adopted a policy of filtering the white cells out of all blood transfusions because it's been shown that these cells harbor the infectious prions which cause CJD. The problem with prion disease is that they can become apparent many, many years after the person has acquired the infection, so we maintain a state of vigilance. And it's probably too soon to say there wouldn't be any more cases, either through eating beef or indeed through blood transfusion.
SIEGEL: I've read about a study in which the appendixes of otherwise healthy Britons who had had appendectomies, the tissue was studied and the prion was found in 16 out of 32,000 appendixes.
WILLIAMSON: Yes.
SIEGEL: Which would imply that possibly as many as 1 in 2,000 are carriers of this disease, of the possibility of this disease.
WILLIAMSON: Exactly, and that's quite a scary figure. And we don't know how that figure would compare if you tested the individual's blood. But the 1 in 2,000 figure is the assumption that the policymakers on blood safety use in the U.K. in setting policy. So that would therefore explain why everybody is pretty precautionary still about the possible risk of variant CJD.
SIEGEL: Is there some period in which you as a hematologist think you could sound the all-clear, that is, if you haven't seen cases among recipients of transfusions over 25 years or 30 years that perhaps the alarm is over?
WILLIAMSON: Well, that's what everyone hopes. And I think next year when we have the results of the appendix study on these young people born after 1996, we will have a better idea of whether this will be self-limiting. And when more of these people become blood donors and eventually provide the bulk of the blood supply, we can all stop worrying about this awful infection.
SIEGEL: Well, Dr. Williamson, thank you. I'm beginning to get the impression that I will never give blood again in the United States, but so be it - there's enough to go around. And thanks for explaining to us what you do over there in Britain.
WILLIAMSON: You're very welcome. Thank you.
SIEGEL: That's Dr. Lorna Williamson who's medicine and research director at NHS Blood and Transplant, National Health Service Blood and Transplant in Watford, England.
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From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel. We turn now to the fraught relationship between the nation's largest police force, the mayor of New York and the man who's caught in the middle. New York City police Commissioner William Bratton met today with the heads of the city's police unions in an effort to rebuild trust between City Hall and the departments rank-and-file. NPR's Joel Rose has this profile.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: Commissioner William Bratton had harsh words this week for the scores of officers who turned their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio at the funerals for Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos.
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POLICE COMMISSIONER WILLIAM BRATTON: The selfishness of that action. A funeral is not a place for that.
ROSE: But in practically the same breath, Bratton also said this...
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BRATTON: At the same time, I compliment the 20,000-plus who did what you'd expect at a funeral - They stood, saluted and honored their comrades who had passed.
ROSE: It shows the narrow line Bratton is trying to walk - on the one hand, show support for his rank-and-file, and on the other, back a mayor who swept into office on a promise to rein in over-policing of minority communities. Now, on top of all that, Bratton is dealing with a de facto work slowdown - arrests and summonses for minor offenses are down dramatically. Police union leaders deny coordinating it, but they're clearly furious at de Blasio. They say he contributed to an anti-police climate by not cracking down on protests after the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man who died in police custody, a climate the unions think fed into the shooting deaths of officer Ramos and Liu. Now the anger may be extending to Bratton. Edward Mullins is the head of the Sergeants Benevolent Association.
EDWARD MULLINS: Commissioner Bratton had a huge amount of credibility coming into this position, and I think that a lot of it's been tainted at this point. So what everyone's looking at now is that the commissioner is doing the mayor's bidding for him.
ROSE: With his silver hair and thick Boston accent, Bratton looks and sounds like a throwback to another era of policing.
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BRATTON: In my heart, in my soul, I always will be a cop. And I use that term proudly.
ROSE: Bratton spoke at the NYPD graduation ceremony last month and he reflected on his own graduation in 1970.
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BRATTON: One day after my 23rd birthday, with 155 other young men, of 155 of us in a very racially-diverse city, there were only three minority officers.
ROSE: But despite the old-school exterior, Bratton has continued to reinvent himself and his profession. He took over the NYPD for the first time in 1994, when he introduced reforms like CompStat, a system that tracks crime and arrests. And he embraced the theory of broken windows - the idea that police should be tough on small quality-of-life crimes to prevent bigger crimes from happening. Crime in New York City dropped for the first time in decades, and departments across the country adopted his innovations. Then in 2002, Bratton took over the top job at the Los Angeles Police Department, which had a terrible relationship with minority communities.
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CONSTANCE RICE: I introduced myself and I said, welcome, Chief Bratton, my name's Connie Rice, and please don't take this personally, but, I will be filing a lawsuit against you next week.
ROSE: That Constance Rice, a civil rights attorney in Los Angeles, speaking to NPR's Morning Edition last month.
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RICE: And you know what he said to me? Connie, don't sue me. Come inside and help me. I've got to change these cops.
ROSE: She credits Bratton with transforming the LAPD's relationship with communities of color, and she thinks he can do the same in New York. That's clearly what Mayor de Blasio was hoping when he brought Bratton back to New York a year ago. But that change hasn't been happening fast enough for everyone, as protests continue over Eric Garner.
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UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting) Bill Bratton has got to go. Hey, hey. Ho, ho.
ROSE: Monifa Bandele is with Communities United for Police Reform.
MONIFA BANDELE: We really need to see this new Bratton that was touted when he came back from LA.
ROSE: Bandele says the department's emphasis on the broken windows theory leads to too many arrests in minority neighborhoods.
BANDELE: The broken windows piece is just critically important, and we see it as directly connected to what happened to Eric Garner.
ROSE: But Bratton defends broken windows, he says many communities want the police to go after minor offenses. That hasn't been happening much in the past few weeks during the NYPD's apparent work slowdown. But Bratton doesn't sound worried. At a press conference in December, he described the current tension as a change moment, much like when he became a cop in the 1970s.
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BRATTON: We have transformed the NYPD over that 40-year period of time where we have some of the lowest, if not lowest, rates of use of force of any police department in the United States. And I think I can successfully predict that we will come out of this better and stronger as we go forward.
ROSE: If William Bratton is right about that, he may be the one who gets much of the credit.
Joel Rose, NPR News, New York.
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New cars, and plenty of them, are driving off the sales lot - 16.5 million in the last year, in fact. It's the best performance for the U.S. auto industry since 2006.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
President Obama, who famously bailed out Chrysler and General Motors, celebrated the industry's rebound today at a Ford Motor Plant in Wayne, Michigan.
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PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Plants like this one built more than just cars, they built the middle class in this country. And that was worth fighting for.
(APPLAUSE)
BLOCK: The administration sees the resurgent auto industry as part of a broader turnaround for U.S. manufacturing. But as NPR's Scott Horsley reports, the gains aren't necessarily being shared with America's factory workers.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: President Obama's backdrop today was a unionized assembly plant in Michigan; the traditional epicenter of the U.S. auto industry. But you might get a better feel for what's happening in that industry by traveling south to a nonunion parts plant in a place like Selma, Alabama. That's where Latasha Irby works making foam car seats for a Hyundai supplier. After nine years on the job, Irby makes $11.33 an hour.
LATASHA IRBY: You would think that if you're working for an auto manufacturer, you would get more. I mean, we're getting paid like Walmart wages.
HORSLEY: Irby's story is not unusual. While the U.S. auto industry has added hundreds of thousands of jobs since bottoming out during the recession, many of those jobs are in nonunion parts plants where pay and benefits are typically lower. Auto suppliers increasingly rely on temporary firms to staff their factories. As a result, auto workers no longer command the premium pay they once did.
Sarah Leberstein, who wrote about the trend for the National Employment Law Center, sees a similar decline in pay for other factory workers.
SARAH LEBERSTEIN: New manufacturing jobs simply aren't as good as the ones that we've lost in recent years.
HORSLEY: For most of the last decade, factory workers, on average, earned less than other private sector employees. One out of four manufacturing workers now makes less than $12 an hour.
LEBERSTEIN: That's just not a living wage. Workers aren't earning enough to support their families. So this really calls into question whether manufacturing jobs are living up to their promise. States and local governments are throwing a lot of money in tax breaks and subsidies to manufacturers that are promising good jobs, but too often are not delivering.
HORSLEY: The Obama administration has actively promoted manufacturing, setting up several specialized institutes for that purpose. And U.S. factories did add more than 170,000 jobs last year. White House economist Jason Furman still highlights that as though factory jobs paid what they used to.
JASON FURMAN: You have seen over at least the past year, an improvement in the mix. The jobs that are being added a faster pace are in higher-wage sectors like construction and manufacturing.
HORSLEY: To be sure, a strong manufacturing sector has other benefits, including above-average investment in research and development. And as the broader job market improves, wages should start climbing as well. But factory work is no longer the sure-fire gateway to the middle class it once was. That's something for political leaders to think about before donning their hard hats and safety goggles. Scott Horsley, NPR News, the White House.
SIEGEL: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
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Plans to build the nation's first offshore wind farm, Cape Wind, were announced more than a dozen years ago. It was ambitious - 130 wind turbines in the scenic waters off Cape Cod. Well, today it looks like Cape Wind might never be built. Two of its biggest customers have abandoned contracts to buy power from the wind farm. Sean Corcoran, of member station WCAI, eye reports.
SEAN CORCORAN, BYLINE: After 13 years in the making, the battle to install a wind farm the waters off Cape Cod could soon be over, and opponents appear to be on the winning side. Two of the project's biggest customers, NSTAR and National Grid - the utilities poised by nearly 80 percent of Cape Winds expected electricity - announced Tuesday that they're backing out of their purchasing contracts.
AUDRA PARKER: So this is very bad news for Cape Wind.
CORCORAN: That's Audra Parker, the president of a group called the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, which has led the onslaught against Cape Wind, challenging every regulatory and permitting step it took.
PARKER: So with the loss of those contracts it's a huge problem for Cape Wind, but it's very good news for opponents of Cape Wind, as well as rate payers all across Massachusetts who will, you know, avoid paying billions of dollars of unnecessary added costs related to Cape Wind.
CORCORAN: Cape Wind spokesperson Mark Rodgers acknowledges they did not meet a December 31 construction deadline, which prompted the contract terminations, but Rodgers says the delay was unavoidable. He blames the Alliance for stymieing Cape Wind's progress by delaying its construction through regulatory and court battles. And he includes in that blame the Alliance's greatest support, businessman Bill Koch, who'd be able to see the turbines from the windows of his Cape Cod vacation home.
MARK RODGERS: It would be a travesty if delays caused by an interest group funded by one of the Koch brothers could stop a project that would make Massachusetts a leader in offshore wind and create good jobs and help mitigate climate change.
CORCORAN: It's not certain that the Cape Wind project is dead, but even some of its most ardent supporters say they don't know how it could go forward. It doesn't have all its financing in hand to begin construction and now it doesn't even have customers to buy its electricity if it is built. Susan Tierney is a Boston-based energy and environmental consultant who's worked with Cape Wind officials in support of the project. She says it was important for Cape Wind to succeed in order to spur on other offshore projects.
SUSAN TIERNEY: They were looked at by the banks, by other developers in the region, by environmental groups, as being the place where we could start to see some progress. And oh, boy, it's a big disappointment.
CORCORAN: Former Massachusetts energy official Ian Bowles also worked to shepherd the project along through state government, but with the contracts gone, he doesn't see how Cape Wind can recover. In his mind, the issue now is what impact could Cape Wind's demise have on other offshore initiatives?
IAN BOWLES: For the offshore wind industry, which doesn't exist in the United States, it does in Europe, where they've got, you know, a hundred Cape Winds in the U.K. and in other countries. You know, I do think it tends to delay the growth and development of an offshore wind industry, you know, in the United States.
CORCORAN: For its part, Cape Wind isn't rolling over. It says there's a legal argument to be made that its purchasing contract with the utilities are still valid. But for advocates of clean energy and offshore wind, the big question is if Cape Wind couldn't get built after 13 years, if it couldn't find the funding it needs or the customers, will different developers and financiers be willing to take a chance on their own projects? For NPR News, I'm Sean Corcoran on Cape Cod.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Twelve people were killed in Paris today when gunmen stormed the offices of a satirical weekly newspaper. The masked men shouted Islamist slogans as they killed the leading cartoonists at the magazine and the police guarding them. There's now a national manhunt for the perpetrators of the worst terrorist attack in France in decades. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley sends this report.
(SOUNDBITE OF GUNSHOTS)
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: A journalist's cell phone captured the sound of the killing rampage this morning at 11:30 a.m. Paris time. That's when the masked gunmen entered the offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo. They shot a police guard before bursting into an editorial meeting and spraying the room with automatic gunfire.
(SOUNDBITE OF GUNSHOTS)
BEARDSLEY: The men then left the building and wounded a policeman. Then one gunman calmly walked up and shot the officer in the head. The scene was filmed by a witness in a nearby apartment building. The men can be heard shouting, we have avenged the profit. We have killed Charlie Hebdo. Then they got in their car and drove off. French president Francois Hollande soon joined the hundreds of police and paramedics at the scene of the attack.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
PRESIDENT FRANCOIS HOLLANDE: (Through interpreter) Journalists and policemen have been cowardly assassinated by barbarians, said Hollande. France's is in shock today, but we will be united and act with firmness.
BEARDSLEY: The often crude but clever magazine poked fun at all religions. But it was its depiction of the Prophet Muhammad that so angered Muslim fundamentalists. In 2007, Charlie Hebdo received death threats for republishing Danish cartoons of the Prophet. And in 2011, its offices were firebombed after it published more caricatures of Muhammad. Speaking at the time, Charlie Hebdo's editor, Stephane Charbonnier, was defiant.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
STEPHANE CHARBONNIER: (Through interpreter) I could never live in a country where I couldn't laugh at certain subjects because there was a mortal risk or a judicial risk. No, I'd rather die.
BEARDSLEY: Charbonnier was one of those killed today. France has Western Europe's largest Muslim population, and the community's leaders were among the first to condemn today's attack. Dalil Boubakeur is Imam of Paris' largest mosque.
IMAM DALIL BOUBAKEUR: (Through interpreter) These attacks are not only happening in France and in Europe, but in Muslim countries. And we Muslims refuse any association with these terrorists and religious radicals.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHANTING)
BEARDSLEY: Tonight across France, tens and thousands of people gathered in silent vigils. At Paris' Place de la Republique, people held signs that said Je suis Charlie or I am Charlie and chanted we are all Charlie. Thirty-year-old Adrien Brunetti wanted to show his support for the slain cartoonists. He carried pictures of some of their famous cartoons.
ADRIEN BRUNETTI: We are here, like, to just gather, show our deep respect for the work they have done and for being together. And I am part of the ones that fear that they will be like stigmatization of Muslim people in France. And I don't want that to happen so that's why, also, I'm here tonight.
BEARDSLEY: As world leaders express their condemnation of today's attack, the terror alert in the Paris region was raised to its highest level. Police are said to be looking for three French nationals including two brothers in connection with the killings. Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Today in the journal Science, researchers introduced a computer program that can outwit any human on the planet at poker. To help explain how this gambling robot beats the odds, NPR's Geoff Brumfiel goes back to last year's World Series of Poker.
(SOUNDBITE OF 2014 WORLD SERIES OF POKER)
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: And there it is, the pocket nines for Jacobson.
GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: The final was broadcast on ESPN. This particular type of poker is called Texas Hold'em. Don't worry if you don't know the rules, players have cards, they bet, then they show their hands. And one person takes the pot.
(SOUNDBITE OF 2014 WORLD SERIES OF POKER)
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: Martin Jacobson has his breakthrough win. He has climbed the mountain and is poker's 2014 world champion.
BRUMFIEL: Poker isn't just a game of chance. It's a mixture of luck, statistics and psychology. You need to know the odds, know whether your opponent is bluffing. You've got to know when to hold 'em, (singing) know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away. Enough. Michael Bowling is a computer scientist at the University of Alberta in Canada who invented the new program. He's played poker in Vegas once.
MICHAEL BOWLING: I actually did phenomenally well out of pure luck and so I'm just going to never gamble again and be up on Vegas.
BRUMFIEL: Bowling loves thinking about all the strategies for playing poker.
BOWLING: Well, there are 10 to the 14, which is 10 trillion different decision points in the game. And so the actual number of ways of playing is an astronomically large number.
BRUMFIEL: And it turns out, one of these trillions of strategies can beat all the others. It doesn't matter if your opponent is a master bluffer or blundering amateur; a computer with that strategy can eventually win. It took Bowling years to find it. His team had to crunch the strategies with supercomputers. But eventually, they came up with the perfect strategy; well, almost perfect.
BOWLING: It is just a tiny bit off, and that tiny bit is so small that even if you played a lifetime -12 hours a day, 200 hands an hour for 70 years - you still wouldn't be able to tell it apart from actually having played a perfect game.
BRUMFIEL: It does have limitations. It can only play one opponent at a time. And the version of poker it wins at that isn't exactly like what's on TV. But that doesn't matter to Bowling. Remember, he's not a gambler.
He hopes the program he's developed can make computers generally better at making decisions when faced with uncertainty. Still, this left me wondering - are there any games for humans to win? I called Oren Etzioni, the head of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and asked him, maybe Connect Four?
OREN ETZIONI: The computer will never lose in Connect Four.
BRUMFIEL: Checkers.
ETZIONI: The computer will beat you.
BRUMFIEL: Backgammon.
ETZIONI: The computer is playing at the level of the world champion.
BRUMFIEL: Parcheesi?
ETZIONI: I don't know Parcheesi. It sounds kind of cheesy. (Laughter).
BRUMFIEL: I don't think anyone plays Parcheesi anymore. Maybe I can win on that ground.
ETZIONI: Yeah.
BRUMFIEL: Actually, Etzioni says humans still have an edge. Chess computers, poker computers, Parcheesi computers, if they exist, they're all completely different.
ETZIONI: It's not the same program that's doing this. It's very, very different computer software.
BRUMFIEL: A single human brain, on the other hand, can play all those games even if it loses. Geoff Brumfiel, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE GAMBLER")
KENNY ROGERS: (Singing) You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away and know when to run. You never count your money when you're sitting at the table. There'll be time enough for counting...
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
An American icon was born 80 years ago today.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ALL SHOOK UP")
ELVIS PRESLEY: (Singing) Well, bless my soul. What's wrong with me? I'm itching like a man on a fuzzy tree.
BLOCK: We're going to mark the birthday of Elvis Aaron Presley with two of his favorite things, music and food. It's a Found Recipes story about the Elvis Presley milkshake.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
SEAN BROCK: It's peanut butter, banana, some cooked, crispy bacon. And we also used bacon fat and ice cream.
BLOCK: Wait. Did he say bacon and bacon fat? Oh, yes, he did. Sean Brock is the owner of the restaurants Husk and McCrady's in Charleston, South Carolina. A couple of years ago, he told us how he created this milkshake tribute to the King.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ALL SHOOK UP")
PRESLEY: (Singing) My heart beats so it scares me to death.
BROCK: I am a really big Elvis fan. One of his favorite things to eat was a peanut butter and banana sandwich that he would often fry in bacon fat or, like, tons and tons of butter.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MILKCOW BLUES BOOGIE")
PRESLEY: (Singing) Well I woke up this morning, and I looked out the door. I can tell that old milk cow. I can tell...
BROCK: One day - it was right around Elvis's birthday - and I just wanted to do something unique and fun and immediately thought of those flavors.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MILKCOW BLUES BOOGIE")
PRESLEY: (Singing) I ain't had milk and butter since that cow's been gone.
BROCK: So two very ripe bananas, vanilla ice cream, just straight peanut butter, some bacon that has been cooked crispy. And there's also a little bacon fat. You want the bacon fat to be cold and solid. The bourbon is really my touch. A lot of people don't know that Elvis actually didn't drink. It's just something we add in the there for our own personal amusement.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MILKCOW BLUES BOOGIE")
PRESLEY: (Singing) Ah, let's milk it.
(SOUNDBITE OF BLENDER)
BROCK: I don't even want to know what the calorie count is going to be.
(SOUNDBITE OF BLENDER)
BROCK: There you go, the Elvis Presley milkshake. And it has, like, chunks of bacon in it - so good. It's, like, all my favorite things. (Laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LAWDY MISS CLAWD")
PRESLEY: (Singing) Well...
BLOCK: Sean Brock is a chef based in Charleston, South Carolina. Details on how to make his Elvis Presley milkshake are on our Found Recipes page at npr.org.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And lest you think we're not calorie conscious, we calculated, made a rough estimate of the calories in that shake. With the bacon, peanut butter, bourbon, ice cream and bananas, it's just under 2,400.
BLOCK: And worth every one.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DEVIL IN DISGUISE")
PRESLEY: (Singing) You're the devil in disguise. Oh, yes, you are. Devil in disguise...
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Her silk screens were compared to Andy Warhol's. Her banners and posters were featured at civil rights and antiwar rallies of the 1960s and '70s. She made the covers of national magazines. But today, Corita Kent seems to have fallen through the cracks of art history. An exhibition that began at Cleveland's Museum of Contemporary Art and opens later this month at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh aims to change that. David C. Barnett of member station WCPN has more on Kent's colorful pieces and story.
DAVID BARNETT, BYLINE: Ian Berry organized the retrospective of Corita Kent's 30-year career and has a good idea of why her artistic reputation has taken a hit.
IAN BERRY: An artist was from New York. They were a man. They were an epic, abstract painter. She wore a habit. She just didn't look like what the movie version of an artist looked like.
BARNETT: Sister Corita Kent headed the art department at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles. Graphic designer and art historian Lorraine Wild says Sister Corita, as she was known, had already been experimenting with the silk screen printing process when she saw a now legendary 1962 exhibition of Andy Warhol's work.
LORRAINE WILD: What she got from Warhol, clearly, was that there was this powerful imagery that came out of advertising and that if you just looked at it from a slightly different angle, you could read all these other things into it. And it already had a kind of power because the audience was familiar with it.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERIOS COMMERCIAL)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Singing) If you know your oats, you too will go for the power Os, Cheerios.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: One of the Big G cereals from General Mills.
WILD: There's so many advertising slogans she appropriated. General Mills used this slogan, the Big G stands for goodness, because they used a big capital G as their sort of brand image. And she turns that into G, God, goodness, spiritual goodness.
BARNETT: Sister Corita started freely juxtaposing advertising logos with Bible verses, with quotes from Gertrude Stein and E.E. Cummings. Images from a Wonder Bread wrapper turned into a meditation on poverty and hunger. She gives her students an idea of what to look for in a 1967 documentary.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "WE HAVE NO ART")
SISTER CORITA KENT: Now, the phrases that you pick from the magazine will all say something. And you can also find words on soap boxes or sides of cartons if you want.
BARNETT: Sister Corita was also tuned in to the Top 40, says Doris Donnelly, who taught in the religious education department at Immaculate Heart College.
DORIS DONNELLY: You know, this is the early '60s. In general, nuns wouldn't know The Beatles. She knew The Beatles. She understood the lyrics of The Beatles.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THINGS WE SAID TODAY")
THE BEATLES: (Singing) Though we may be blind, love is here to stay, and that's enough.
BARNETT: Sister Corita quoted that song in a 1965 piece called, "Look," which appropriates the local from Look magazine followed by the words, love is here to stay, and that's enough. Her work was partially inspired by the Second Vatican Council. Vatican II, as it was popularly known, led to major reforms in the church ranging from conducting services in English instead of Latin to allowing nuns to wear secular clothes. The nuns at Immaculate Heart quickly embraced those reforms to the displeasure of the local archbishop.
DONNELLY: Cardinal McIntyre. He thought they were going too far too fast.
BARNETT: Doris Donnelly says mounting pressure from the cardinal finally prompted Sister Corita to make a hard choice.
DONNELLY: I was in my office. And one of my colleagues came in. And she said, Corita's leaving. It was a total surprise. And it was a sad day.
BARNETT: Corita Kent left the college and its convent in 1968. But she never left the church. She moved to Boston to continue her artwork. A poster from the following year features news photos from the Vietnam War accompanied by a Walt Whitman poem that includes the line, agonies are one of my changes of garments. Curator Ian Berry says Kent's themes started getting darker for several reasons.
BERRY: Toward the end of her life, she fought cancer three times. And she was struggling with what that was doing. And she was struggling with what was going on in the world. And that comes out in the artwork for sure.
BARNETT: But in 1985, she created a stamp for the U.S. Postal Service based on one of her favorite themes, love. Over 700 million were sold. She succumbed to cancer the following year. Yet, she's had a lasting influence on pop art argues Alexandra Carrera, director of the Corita Art Center in Los Angeles, a repository for Corita Kent's work. Carrera also says Kent's legacy is far different from that of East Coast peers like Andy Warhol.
ALEXANDRA CARRERA: She was directing people. And rather than just standing back and being like, this is what's going wrong, and I'm just showing you guys 'cause I'm so cool I'm not going to be part of it, she was really asking people to engage. And I think that that is a more popular message today than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
BARNETT: Later this month, the public will get a chance to compare the messages of the two artists when the traveling exhibition of Corita Kent's work opens at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. For NPR News, I'm David C. Barnett.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel with some good, old-fashioned morals instilled in us from fables and fairy tales.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #1: Slow and steady wins the race.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #2: What's right for one may be wrong for another.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #3: Treat others the way you'd like to be treated.
SIEGEL: In today's world, TV shows and movies aimed at children often weave lessons into their narratives. NPR's Elizabeth Blair wanted to see whether children actually get these messages.
ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: Let's take one of today's highest-rated TV shows among 2- to 11-year-olds.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "SOFIA THE FIRST")
ARIEL WINTER: (As Sofia) (Singing) Oh, I was a girl in a village doing all right. Then I became a princess overnight. Now I got to...
BLAIR: Disney's "Sofia The First" is about a regular girl from the village who ends up a princess. Rick Porter of Los Angeles likes that his little girl watches the show because it's...
RICK PORTER: about being true to yourself and not letting the trappings of royalty change you.
BLAIR: And what does he think his daughter would say about Sophia?
PORTER: She's a princess. She's happy, and she has a pretty purple dress.
BLAIR: Now of course both opinions are valid, but is Rick Porter's daughter getting the message be true to yourself? Let's ask an academic.
SEETA PAI: The capacity to understand a so-called moral of the story involves several cognitive and logical steps.
BLAIR: Seeta Pai is a researcher with Common Sense Media, which rates and reviews all kinds of children's media. She says to get the moral or lesson of a story, a child needs to first be able to understand what a character's intentions are and then the consequences of those intentions.
PAI: And then they need to be able to make some sort of judgment about that sequence.
BLAIR: But even when they do, says Pai...
PAI: Research among U.S. populations of kids indicates that this ability to articulate a moral theme develops fairly slowly.
BLAIR: Not until about age 9 or 10, says Pai. And by that age, a lot of kids have moved on to other stories. Rick Porter, whose daughter watches "Sofia," is the editor of the ratings website TVByTheNumbers.
PORTER: I was surprised to see this, the number two show among 9- to 14-year-olds is "The Walking Dead."
BLAIR: "The Walking Dead," number two among cable shows for 9- to 14-year-olds, is a gory, post-apocalyptic series about zombies and humans battling each other.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE WALKING DEAD")
ANDREW LINCOLN: (As Rick Grimes) Come on. Come on. Stay close.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: (As Character) Carol.
LINCOLN: (As Rick Grimes) Stay close.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As Zombie) (Growling).
BLAIR: Psychology professor and early childhood researcher Yvette Harris of the Miami University of Ohio says the show might be OK for young adults, but 9 and 10-year-olds are unlikely to understand "The Walking Dead's" underlying message.
YVETTE HARRIS: Violence is sometimes justified. And it's the hero who actually can engage in violent behavior because the justification is this hero is protecting everybody and saving the world.
JACK ZIPES: You cannot predict whether a child will really understand the moral or the message of a particular tale.
BLAIR: Jack Zipes has written several books about fairy tales. He also developed a storytelling program in Minneapolis where kids read and interpret fairy tales like "Little Red Riding Hood." After some discussion, the teacher asks the kids to rewrite the story based on a "what if" question.
ZIPES: For instance, what if Little Red Riding Hood knew karate? Or what if grandma ate the wolf? Or what if the wolf were a vegetarian?
BLAIR: Zipes says the exercise helps children think more critically about the tale. But even then, they might not be able to say what the moral is. But he says, adults aren't always clear about the moral of the story either. A 17th century version of "Little Red Riding Hood, says Zipes, was written as a cautionary tale about rape.
ZIPES: Little girls who invite wolves into their parlors deserve what they get. Now that's a very clear moral (laughter), and it's very sexist obviously.
BLAIR: Today, we might just say it's don't talk to strangers.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MALEFICENT")
UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: Let us tell an old story anew, and we will see how well you know it.
BLAIR: "Maleficent," starring Angelina Jolie, is a retelling of "Sleeping Beauty" from the evil fairy's point of view. It's really Maleficent's back story. Seven-year-old Grace Feldmann of Laurel, Maryland, says it's one of her favorite movies.
GRACE FELDMANN: It has evil, which I like evil. It has nice, which I like nice.
BLAIR: "Maleficent" starts out nice.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MALEFICENT")
ISOBELLE MOLLOY: (As Young Maleficent) It's not right to steal, but we don't kill people for it.
BLAIR: With her majestic wings, she grows up to be the strongest of the fairies. But the human kingdom wants to conquer her enchanted forest kingdom. A soldier brutally cuts off Maleficent's wings, and that's when she turns evil. When he becomes king, she puts a curse on his first born.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MALEFICENT")
ANGELINA JOLIE: (As Maleficent) Before the sun sets on her 16th birthday, she will prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and fall into a sleep-like death.
BLAIR: But in this retelling, Maleficent repents and ultimately awakens the princess from her sleep-like death. She becomes kind again and reunites the two kingdoms. The message, a person can be both hero and villain, is powerful says Yvette Harris.
HARRIS: It reflects the reality of the world. And it also helps children understand the range of emotions and how emotions fit in to helping people walk through the world.
BLAIR: But for 7-year-old Grace Feldmann, that's a lot to take in.
GRACE: She gets angry. She turns back. She gets angry. It's kind of confusing sometimes.
BLAIR: But she still loves the movie. She was Maleficent for Halloween. When kids learn fables and fairytales, they probably won't fully absorb their morals until they become adults; maybe not even then. Elizabeth Blair, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
The small Middle Eastern kingdom of Jordan has long been a loyal ally of the United States. President Obama speaks effusively about his friendship with King Abdullah. He's a key Arab ally in the U.S.-led coalition against the self-styled Islamic State, or ISIS, but Jordan is now focused on the fate of the Jordanian pilot recently captured in Syria. NPR's Alice Fordham spoke with his relatives, whose statements questioning the pilot's mission are ringing through the kingdom.
ALICE FORDHAM, BYLINE: Talk of Moath al-Kasasbeh, the pilot captured by ISIS on Christmas Eve after his plane crashed in Syria, dominates the media in Jordan - a rare Middle Eastern country accustomed to stability and peace.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO BROADCAST)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Moath al-Kasasbeh (Foreign language spoken).
FORDHAM: On the radio, hosts pledge their support. Little is known of the pilot's fate since the extremists tweeted pictures of him, bloody and bewildered, after the crash. The radio hosts wish that he come safely home. That home is here, nestled in hilly, tribal heartland two hours south of the capital, Amman.
SAAFIA AL-KASASBEH: (Foreign language spoken).
FORDHAM: On a bleak, windy day with snow flurrying around the olive trees, the pilot's parents welcome me in the mountain village of Aie. His father, Safi, is a sheikh of the Kasasbeh tribe, a retired education professor. His mother, Saafia, is a retired teacher. Their elegant parlor is stiff and formal, and it's so cold we all keep our coats on as they tell me about their son.
SAAFIA AL-KASASBEH: (Through interpreter) Of course, I'm proud of my son for being a member of the Jordanian Royal Air Force, but I'm very pained about the incident.
FORDHAM: The 26-year-old was married five months ago. A devout Muslim, he made the pilgrimage to Mecca with his parents. News of the downed plane came like a thunderbolt, says his father.
SAFI AL-KASASBEH: (Through interpreter) I was very, very panicked and very, very sad. I was on the verge of a breakdown.
FORDHAM: And not just shocked - angry.
SAFI AL-KASASBEH: (Through interpreter) Yes, I'm proud that my sons are serving in the armed forces in order to defend the homeland, but only to defend the homeland.
FORDHAM: He says there's no way his son should have been bombing Syria in the first place. Jordan has a long-standing relationship with the U.S. and its economy depends on American aid. So, he reckons, that's why Jordan's in the coalition, but he says he hated it from the outset.
SAFI AL-KASASBEH: (Through interpreter) I wasn't OK with it at all and all Jordanians strongly condemn our participation in the coalition.
FORDHAM: A big part of his problem is that the airstrikes are striking Sunni Muslims like them. These people are our sons, our brothers he says.
SAFI AL-KASASBEH: (Through interpreter) Our army is for defending Jordan. It's not supposed to spread throughout the world like American forces.
FORDHAM: Back in the capital, Amman, I meet the pilot's brother Jawad.
J. AL-KASASBEH: (Foreign language spoken).
FORDHAM: He himself was in the Jordanian Air Force and served in the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan where he says he too was confused about why Jordan was battling fellow Muslims. He and the other relatives speak carefully. They know the people holding Moath could be hearing them. They don't even know if he's still alive. But analysts say these doubts coming so publicly from loyalists to the King and the armed forces present a problem for the country's leader as he tries to satisfy internal opinion and his U.S. allies - a problem which will get much bigger if ISIS fulfill their threats to kill the pilot. Alice Fordham, NPR News, Amman.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The police in New York are not working as hard as usual. The number of arrests and tickets have dropped dramatically over the past two weeks in what is seen as a purposeful slowdown by officers who are angry at Mayor de Blasio. The New York Times editorial board has branded it a deplorable gesture on the part of police. But as NPR's Martin Kaste reports, New York is hardly the first city to experience that kind of protest.
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: There are a lot of names for what's going on in New York. Some call it de-policing or a rule-book protest, meaning officers do the bare minimum required. Kristen Ziman has another term.
COMMANDER KRISTEN ZIMAN: Blue flu has been the one that's permeated my career.
KASTE: She's a police commander in Aurora, Illinois. A few years ago, the department there laid off some officers, and the rest of the force came down with a bad case of the blue flu.
ZIMAN: I think that low morale and that anger then really manifested into officers getting in their squad car and feeling that sense of apathy. And so for that reason, production went down.
KASTE: Production, in this case, means the number of traffic stops, which dropped by double digits. These police slowdowns are sometimes caused by contract disputes. Last summer, for instance, police in Memphis called in sick in droves when the city reduced their health benefits. But in the main, depolicing is something that happens on the job. This how retired cop in Seattle, Mike Severance, describes it.
MIKE SEVERANCE: In the simplest terms, officers aren't doing proactive police work. They'll respond to their calls. You know, if something heinous happens on view, I mean, if they observe, you know, an armed robbery in progress, the officer is still going to do what needs to be done. But they're not going out and looking for the bad guys.
KASTE: He says this happens when officers feel stretched too thin or overburdened by paperwork. It also happens when police feel whiplashed by what seems to be contradictory demands. Take the death of Eric Garner in New York last summer. Police say they were told to arrest people just like him for the minor crime of selling loose cigarettes.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
PATRICK LYNCH: We went there because of those complaints. And police headquarters sent us there.
KASTE: That's the head of New York's biggest police union, Patrick Lynch, talking to NPR earlier this week.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
LYNCH: And then what we had is we had someone that's resisted arrest and said I'm not going. So a lot of folks are telling us what we shouldn't do and what we can't do. But no one's telling us what we should do when a police officer is faced with a resisting arrest situation.
KASTE: Merrick Bobb has heard this kind of thing before. He's been advising cities on police reforms since the 1990s. And he remembers seeing slowdowns during the reform process in Los Angeles.
MERRICK BOBB: There was a period of time of getting used to the new rules. And there was a drop off of activity.
KASTE: But he says the situation in New York seems different.
BOBB: When I think you see in New York is an angry, sullen, in-your-face kind of rejection of the mayor and anybody else who sees fit to criticize the police.
KASTE: Bobb says the NYPD may be due for a fundamental reform program; the kind of thing the Justice Department has imposed on other cities. That would not go over well with the unions.
A less confrontational prescription comes from Commander Ziman in Aurora. She says departments should recognize that the events of the last six months have undermined the morale of police around the country.
ZIMAN: The things that they're struggling internal with is that I want to go out there and I want to do my job. But number one, is it safe right now? The second is what if I mess up? What if I do something wrong and here I am basically living into the templates that everyone thinks I am?
KASTE: She says you rebuild morale by appealing to the officers' sense of professionalism. For instance, she ended her department's blue flu partly by giving the cops more choice in their assignments.
But it's not clear that that kind of conciliatory move is possible in New York right now where the weekly arrest stats are being read as an ominous barometer of the patrol cops' mood. Martin Kaste, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
The hunt goes on in France for two men, brothers alleged to have killed 12 people yesterday in a shooting rampage at the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. According to U.S. officials, French authorities believe that the older brother traveled to Yemen in 2011. The French believe he went there for weapons training with al-Qaida.
Ahead, we'll ask how big a threat France faces from extremists.
First, NPR's Eleanor Beardsley begins our coverage with the latest in the investigation.
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: The biggest manhunt in French history is underway. Eighty-eight thousand police and soldiers have been mobilized nationally in the hunt for the men alleged to have carried out yesterday's attack on the offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo. The two main suspects were reported to have been seen twice today at a gas station north of Paris driving their stolen gray car with a dented front fender. They stole food and gasoline before fleeing.
Hours later, the brothers were supposedly seen driving in the countryside north of the capital in the Picardy region. Television footage showed French police SWAT teams in black armored vehicles driving through country roads and villages. Jean Charles Brisard is chairman of the Center for Analysis of Terrorism.
JEAN CHARLES BRISARD: The situation is confused. It's confused by many rumors. The fact is that the entire French police and intelligence services are all today dedicated at finding and neutralizing these two individuals.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FRENCH INTERIOR MINISTER BERNARD CAZENEUVE: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve spoke on television tonight describing what police know about the brothers; 32 and 34-year-old Cherif and Said Kouachi, who were born in Paris and grew up in an orphanage.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CAZENEUVE: (Through interpreter) Cherif Kouachi was involved with a ring of young men in Paris who recruited members to go and fight jihad in Iraq. He's been described by his peers as virulently anti-Semitic.
BEARDSLEY: Cherif Kouachi was arrested for his jihad activities in 2008 and spent 18 months in jail. Dominique Many was Kouachi's lawyer. Speaking on television, Many says back then, Kouachi just seemed like a kid in over his head.
DOMINIQUE MANY: (Through interpreter). He was like a lost child; a docile kid who had been brainwashed by some guru. He seemed more like a victim than a perpetrator. Never would I have imagined seven years later he could've become such a monster.
BEARDSLEY: A French television investigative show featured Kouachi in an episode in 2005 about young French men influenced to go fight jihad. The journalist says Kouachi turned from being a rap fan to a jihadist after meeting an Islamist preacher. In the video Kouachi claims the preacher showed him texts proving it was good to carry out attacks and become a martyr.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW)
BEARDSLEY: As if Wednesday's carnage wasn't enough, they French woke to reports of another shooting today, this time in the south of Paris. A man wearing a bulletproof vest opened fire on police. The shooter escaped. One officer later died. Officials don't think the incident is related to yesterday's violence.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (Speaking French).
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: All day, experts have been debating on television whether the state can track and follow all the possible radicals in the country. Former Prime Minister Francois Fillon asked the question that's on everyone's mind.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FRANCOIS FILLON: (Through interpreter) How can young people who are French, born in a country of human rights, consider their future to be in crime and jihad rather than integration into a democratic society?
BEARDSLEY: To show a united front, President Francois Hollande even invited his nemesis, former President Nicolas Sarkozy to meet with him at the Elysee Palace. Paris is under its highest terror threat level ever. Nearly a thousand gendarmes and soldiers have been brought into the French capital to buttress security. Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
French historian and political scientist Patrick Weil has made a study of immigration and integration of immigrants in his country. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to the program.
PATRICK WEIL: Hello.
SIEGEL: Do you see the Charlie Hebdo murders as evidence of a terrorism problem that involves hundreds, maybe thousands of people in France? Or is it a feature of a Muslim problem that involves millions of people, many immigrants and children of immigrants who are poorly integrated into French society?
WEIL: Well, if it was - if you relate to integration, then it is actually what you say. You have a higher rate of unemployment among immigrants and children of immigrants. So you have millions of people who look for a job. Are they becoming terrorists? Of course not. And there are like all the French citizen and the foreign resident in France in big sorrow in a huge majority.
And so the issue is more hundreds of thousands of people who are using a faith, sometimes they are using faith Islam, to organize what was it yesterday organize execution of journalists who were executed because of the views they were making of freedom of speech, freedom of thought, period freedom of conscience.
SIEGEL: But you're saying that that is quite different from the larger problems facing the French Muslim community and the issues there.
WEIL: Yeah because they are Muslim or immigrants are facing some specific problem in terms of integration. And they, in their majority, they want to face this problem within the law and within the means given. When you face problem in any democracy, like in the United States, you organize claims, and you mobilize, and you go to court, and you complain, or sometimes you do nothing. But you respect the law. And you feel part of the community.
SIEGEL: The leader of the French far right National Front, Marine Le Pen, blamed the killings on what she called radical Islam. Another member of her party blamed it on the number of Muslims in France. Is the National Front likely to be the biggest beneficiary of this attack in terms of French politics?
WEIL: I'm not sure that there will be the main beneficiary because what you can notice since yesterday, all leaders of all parties calling for unity of the country - including the Muslim compatriots, who they say might face in the future an increase of prejudice or Islamophobia when they have to face it.
SIEGEL: That there might be a backlash - you're saying there might be a backlash for this.
WEIL: Yes. So I think there was humility from the President Hollande, from the leader of the opposition, Sarkozy, a warning towards all the citizens - be careful not to associate this horrible act of few people with the whole community.
SIEGEL: Are you at all concerned, though, that in these days, when - well, it's been many years now since communism ceased to be a going concern in Europe certainly. Has radical Islam sort of seized the role of speaking for Europe's down and out and for the people who can't make ends meet and who do feel alienated from society? Is it possibly attractive to far more people than it is now?
WEIL: You might be right. I mean, religion, sometimes radical approach of it, can be a way of compensating the lack of perspective given by secular projects. And that questions, especially, the lack of perspective given by the left - the social democratic tradition in Europe or even in the U.S. I would say is in crisis. And so the possibility of hope is not really there. And if it cannot - if this hope cannot be given by secular perspective, some goes to religious approach of hope.
SIEGEL: Patrick Weil, a professor and senior researcher at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. Thank you very much for talking with us today.
WEIL: Thank you.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
We're learning more about the 12 people killed in yesterday's attack on Charlie Hebdo. Among them, the satirical weekly's 47-year-old editor Stephane Charbonnier - known as Charb - whom the attackers singled out by name. Charb had been under police protection for years because of threats. And his security detail that day, a 49-year-old police sergeant in the protection services division named Franck Brinsolaro, was also killed.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The cartooning staff of Charlie Hebdo suffered huge losses. Among the dead, the prolific 80-year-old artist Georges Wolinksi, a Tunisian-born Jew. He was one of the founders of Charlie Hebdo and was awarded the French Legion of Honor. His daughter posted a photo yesterday showing her father's desk with pen and paper. Papa is gone, she wrote, not Wolinski.
BLOCK: Cartoonist Jean Cabut also died, one week before his 77th birthday. With a mop of dark hair and an impish grin, Cabut was considered, along with Wolinski, the dean and spiritual father of many of today's cartoonists, according to Le Monde.
SIEGEL: Also dead is Bernard Verlhac, who worked under the name Tignous, which means small moth. It was the nickname his grandmother gave him. He was a member of the organization Cartooning for Peace.
BLOCK: And Philippe Honore, 73, the artist who drew the last cartoon tweeted by Charlie Hebdo. The drawing sends best wishes to the leader of the Islamic State, to which al-Baghdadi replies, and especially good health.
SIEGEL: The gunmen also killed Algerian-born Mustapha Ourrad, a self-taught copy editor who moved to Paris at the age of 20 on a ticket his friends bought for him.
And Bernard Maris, an economist and admirer of John Maynard Keynes. Maris wrote critically of consumerism and he ran for the French Parliament in 2002. He wrote for Charlie Hebdo under the pseudonym Oncle Bernard.
BLOCK: Also killed was Michel Renaud, a former journalist who happened to be visiting the Charlie Hebdo offices at the time of the attack.
SIEGEL: Elsa Cayat, the only woman killed in the attack, was a psychoanalyst who wrote the bimonthly column "Le Divan," "The Couch."
Frederic Boisseau had been the building's caretaker for 15 years. A husband and father of two, Boisseau was seated at the reception desk when the attackers entered the building and shot him.
BLOCK: And finally, there was police officer Ahmed Merabet. Merabet was on patrol in the area and was killed in a shoot-out with the attackers as they made their escape. Merabet was Muslim. And on Twitter today, thousands paid tribute to the slain officer by tweeting the words, Je Suis Ahmed - I am Ahmed, echoing the signs seen at Paris vigils and in shop windows reading, I am Charlie - Je Suis Charlie.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Honda has been fined a record $70 million. A National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says Honda failed to report claims of deaths or injuries in its vehicles, as well as some warranty claims. As NPR's Sonari Glinton reports, this comes after a record year of fines and recalls in the auto industry.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: To understand why this news about Honda's important, I've got to do a quick bit of history. Back in the early 2,000s after Ford Motor Company and Firestone tires were embroiled in a roll-over recall, Congress passed a law called the TREAD Act. It requires what's called an Early Warning Reporting. Sean Kane, a safety advocate and researcher explains EWR, Early Warning Reporting.
SEAN KANE: The EWR requires manufacturers to submit death, injury, property damage, warranty and other data to the government on a quarterly basis about vehicle defects, and it's an honor system. And it depends on truthful reporting.
GLINTON: The idea is that by gathering and reporting that info early on, car makers can spot patterns, fix defects and prevent massive recalls. Honda is paying $70 million in fines because it failed to do that for more than 1,700 complaints that its vehicles caused death or injury over the span of 11 years. Now, this all came out late last year during investigations into defective air bags. That made regulators, members of Congress and safety advocates question just how thorough car makers' reporting has been. For Honda's part, the company blamed its underreporting on, quote, "inadvertent data entry or computer programming errors."
Sonari Glinton, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Rarely has a newly sworn Congress faced a lower bar, a softer standard by which to be judged. Can the 114th Congress pass a few bills that get signed into law and that address national problems? Can they do it without taking the country to the brink of government shutdown or default? Well, the partisan divide that impedes legislation and compromise is much remarked upon, and it's also the title of a new book, a collaboration between two former congressmen who analyze how we got to this place and how we might escape it. They are Republican Tom Davis, who represented a district in northern Virginia for 14 years, welcome to the program.
TOM DAVIS: Thank you. Good to be here.
SIEGEL: And Democrat Martin Frost, who served for 26 years representing the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Hi.
MARTIN FROST: Good to be with you.
SIEGEL: Both of you reached leadership positions. You each were a chair of your party's Congressional Campaign Committee. And in your book, "The Partisan Divide: Congress In Crisis," you would agree about many things. You disagree about some others.
Tom Davis, I'd like to start with a point that you make. Tip O'Neill's famous adage, all politics is local. You say, no longer true.
DAVIS: Well, it's not true in national legislative elections. And the biggest change since Tip O'Neill's time - he was right in his time - is the parties today are ideologically sorted.
SIEGEL: So someone of the wrong party who endeavors to bring stuff back to the district and do things for its constituents just may not help?
DAVIS: Doesn't help.
SIEGEL: Martin Frost, do you agree with that?
FROST: I agree with it. When people vote under the current system, they're really voting party. They're not voting individual. And the reason that we were able to get things done, I believe, in Congress in the past was, we had a lot of individuals who understood their districts, understood it was in their interest to compromise with the other side to accomplish something. Now there's no incentive to compromise.
SIEGEL: What you're saying is a corollary to the fact that whereas when we were kids, the parties seemed to make no ideological sense - there seemed to be odd coalitions or groups of people - now, Tom Davis, the parties have a certain consistency to them.
DAVIS: They do. They're actually - look, you have a lot of smart members, but when it comes to their voting patterns, once they get to Congress they stay within their party box because there's punishment if you go outside. And one of the reasons for this is there's so many single-party districts today where the only race that matters is the primary election. The general elections are nothing but a constitutional formality they have to go through.
SIEGEL: One thing you write about in the book a lot is how we got to the point of having so many districts that are a lock for one party or the other. And Martin Frost, I'd like you to first of all describe how I think with the best of intentions the Voting Rights Act came to create a political map that disadvantages Democrats?
FROST: Well, the Voting Rights Act, justifiably, led to the creation of African-American districts in the South where almost none had existed before. What happened was the Republicans - and with using very clever legal and political strategy - what they did was to form coalitions in some cases with black legislators who were upset that Democrats had not previously drawn Democratic Congressional districts. And now the South is almost entirely Republican, except for a relatively small number of African-American districts.
DAVIS: Martin takes the Democratic bend. I mean, do you need a Voting Rights Act for gerrymandering today? You have to ask that 50 years later, where you have black Democrats elected from decidedly white districts. You have whites elected from black districts...
FROST: A few. A few.
DAVIS: ...You have an African-American president. Is this even needed? Because you're still going to find in gerrymandering money to pack Democrats and sometimes that's going to mean you're packing African-Americans.
SIEGEL: How about that question, Martin...
FROST: Robert, if I could - because this is very important. Tom and I have argued that you really need to have bipartisan commissions draw these districts so that neither party has a distinct advantage and let the voters then decide who the best people are.
SIEGEL: What about money? What was the - Tom Davis, what is the current situation in terms of funding? Is it really affecting the way the economy's...
DAVIS: Well, you know, look - of course it does. Money always affects outcomes. I'm not going to argue whether it should or it shouldn't. But it always affects it. And every attempt that Congress has made to curb it, the money always comes its way back in the system. And a lot of unintended consequences occur. Today, interest groups are more powerful than ever. It is a messed-up system by, you know, every measurement that you can think of and the parties have basically been disadvantaged. The money that used to go to the parties, the so-called evil soft money, is now out in the wing. So it's gone from the parties, which were a centering force in American politics for 200 years, to the wings.
SIEGEL: So from what I'm hearing from the two of you - a Democrat and a Republican - if I'm a member of the House, say, it's very likely that number one, I'm more concerned about a primary challenge from within my own party than I am about the opponent from the other party who might run against me. And I might be more concerned about the interest groups that come and spend tremendous amounts of money on House races, what they're going to say about the race than what my own party might say.
DAVIS: Bingo. That is exactly the problem. The money now can come in large chunks from an interest group in a primary whereas the member has to raise it in small increments at a time. And members live in terror of this. And I have literally sat on the House floor where members said, I don't want X group coming after me, I'm going to vote this way.
FROST: And Robert, there is - it's a real interesting part of this. Because not that many members actually lose in primaries, but they all live in the fear of a primary challenge. And I know Republican members from my state of Texas who are very fine people and who would love to compromise, but they are - they live in mortal fear of a far right-winger running against them in the Republican primary. And so they don't move to the center, they stay on the far fringes. And so while they may not be defeated, these groups influence their conduct and make it more difficult for people to compromise.
DAVIS: Well, you've always had that. But the combination of having these single party districts and now with the money being out, with the ideological groups, this has just been combustible. And it makes it very difficult for good people to do good things.
SIEGEL: Well, Tom Davis and Martin Frost, both former members of Congress. Tom Davis, Republican of Virginia and Martin Frost, Democrat from Texas. Thank you very much for talking with us.
DAVIS: Our pleasure.
FROST: Thank you.
SIEGEL: The book that Tom Davis and Martin Frost have written also with the help of journalist Richard Cohen is called "The Partisan Divide: Congress In Crisis."
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The National Football League has released its long-awaited independent report on the league's handling of the Ray Rice case. The former Baltimore Ravens star running back was captured on a video punching and knocking unconscious his then fiancee. The incident consumed the NFL this season and prompted calls for league commissioner Roger Goodell to step down.
NPR's Tom Goldman joins us now to talk about what's in the report, and, Tom, there were two big questions in the investigation conducted by former FBI director Robert Mueller. First, what the NFL knew about the shocking video of Rice punching the woman who's now his wife, and second, how thoroughly did the league investigate the incident? What did the report find?
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: In regard to the first question, Robert, the headline is no evidence either Roger Goodell or anyone at the league saw the video before it was publicly released on September 8 by TMZ. Now, of course, the release prompted the Ravens to cut Rice and the league to increase an initial two-game suspension into an indefinite ban. Goodell and the NFL maintain publicly all along they never saw it before September 8, and Mueller confirms that. The investigation also said there was no evidence an Associated Press report was accurate.
Now, that's a report that said a copy of the video was sent to the league headquarters five months before its public release. And then an unnamed woman at the NFL acknowledged on a voicemail receiving the video. Mueller said he couldn't find evidence that happened either. So this is good news for Roger Goodell and the league. Now, the answer to the second question, how thorough was the league's investigation? Not such good news - Mueller says the NFL's investigation, essentially, was too passive. It deferred too much to law enforcement and, as a result, missed unearthing a lot of evidence, including the controversial video. Mueller also said the Ravens knew about what was on the video as early as February - that's the month Rice assaulted his then fiance, but the team didn't tell the league because the league didn't ask.
SIEGEL: Now, those were the concerns about the league's investigation. There was also concern about whether Mueller's investigation would really be independent. He works for a firm that's had dealings with the National Football League in the past. How thorough is this report?
GOLDMAN: Well, I'll tell you what the report says. It says Roger Goodell and more than 50 NFL employees were interviewed about whether the league got video before September. One-hundred-eighty-eight female employees were interviewed and each one denied making the call confirming the video was received. Millions of documents, emails and texts were analyzed. A digital forensic company searched computers and mobile phones, and there was an anonymous tip line created, and no calls came into that.
SIEGEL: What does the report recommend for the league?
GOLDMAN: Mueller recommends the NFL should discipline players based on the specific nature of the players conduct and not based on what's happening in the player's criminal case. Now, the league has begun to address that in its revised personal conduct policy, which was announced last month. Other recommendations include establishing a specialized investigative team for domestic violence and sexual assault cases, taking steps to assure information sharing between clubs and the league happens at a better rate, and transcribing proceedings when a player and interested parties appear at a disciplinary hearing.
Now, this was key to the Rice case. Goodell met with Rice June 16. Rice always insisted in that meeting he described everything that happened in the elevator. Goodell said it was unclear what happened, and that's why he handed down Rice's initial and widely criticized two-game possession. Had there been a transcript, it would have told the world exactly what happened in that meeting.
SIEGEL: OK, thank you, Tom.
GOLDMAN: You're welcome.
SIEGEL: That's NPR's sports correspondent Tom Goldman talking about today's release of a report on the National Football League by former FBI director Robert Mueller.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
From NPR News this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel. For a moment today, Paris fell silent as people stopped to remember the 12 victims killed yesterday at the offices of the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo. The search for the gunmen who carried out that attack now involves tens of thousands of police and military. In a moment, we'll hear what's known about one of the principal suspects. First, Lauren Frayer describes some of the scenes in the city as Parisians stood in solidarity.
(CATHEDRAL BELLS RINGING)
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: Paris's famed Notre Dame Cathedral. On any other day, it would be a bustling tourist hub. Today, it's a place of mourning, as hundreds of people in black raincoats stand in the rain and listen to these bells ring out across their city with flags at half-staff.
HELENE DUPRAIS: I'm here because I'm angry, and I'm very, very sad.
FRAYER: Helene Duprais (ph) came to the cathedral with a placard reading, Je suis Charlie - I am Charlie. It's in the windows of homes and cafes across this city.
DUPRAIS: I think it's important to be here and to protest and to say with all these people, so we are sad and very angry. It's our country and we want to have the last word.
FRAYER: Police have cordoned-off the Rue Nicolas-Appert, home to the now empty offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine. Barricades are strewn with flowers and candles as locals gather here. One man brought his young son, saying he wants his 7-year-old to understand what's going on here.
FABRICE GARIBIRIEN: He's afraid, but I explained the situation and it's not dangerous for him. (Speaking French).
FRAYER: "I simply told him there are those who use violence," the father, Fabrice Garibirien (ph), explains. "And then there are those who support freedom of expression, which I think is an absolute right." The magazine Charlie Hebdo has said it will publish on schedule next week, with a record 1 million copies to be printed.
(SOUNDBITE OF CROWD)
FRAYER: Dusk has fallen over Paris and for the second night in a row, people are streaming down into Place de la Republique, one of the city's main squares.
Were you just passing by tonight, or did you intentionally come to this gathering?
FREDERIQUE TEBOT: We intentionally came.
FRAYER: Yeah.
TEBOT: Yeah.
FRAYER: And why?
TEBOT: Just to be here, to show that a lot of people in France here think that Charlie's not dead.
FRAYER: Frederique Tebot (ph) knew one of the killed cartoonists.
TEBOT: It's terrible. There's a guy I knew, the guy who was killed, Tignous, I knew him. But the point is that they just killed guys who were going to work and going to express things with pencils.
FRAYER: Lights on the Eiffel Tower went dim tonight in mourning. A huge march of national solidarity is planned for this Sunday.
For NPR News I'm Lauren Frayer in Paris.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Both of the suspects being sought in the manhunt were apparently known to French the French government. According to U.S. officials, 34-year-old Said Kouachi had come to the attention of French authorities as early as 2010. And in 2008, his younger brother, Cherif Kouachi, was convicted of being part of a cell in Paris that recruited jihadists to go fight in Iraq. Cherif Kouachi had been arrested several years earlier as he was about to leave France for Syria. Elaine Sciolino covered that trial for The New York Times. Earlier today, I asked her what details about him emerged at that trial.
ELAINE SCIOLINO: What emerged at the trial, Melissa, is that he wasn't anyone who popped up on the radar screen as someone who was either a strategic thinker or a jihadist planner or particularly versed in the Koran. He was one of the hangers-on, one of the followers, one of the terrorist wannabes.
BLOCK: He was convicted of being part of a network known as the 19th arrondissement cell. Talk a bit about what they were doing, who they were recruiting and what their call to arms was, basically.
SCIOLINO: What was interesting about the cell is it was the first time that French authorities had evidence of a plot to recruit young French men - either Muslims or converts - to Islam to send potential suicide bombers to Iraq. And as a result, it got a lot of attention at the time because it was a wake-up call in France that indeed, even though France had not been part of the American war against Saddam Hussein, that France could also be vulnerable to the events in Iraq.
BLOCK: What did you learn at the trial about Cherif Kouachi's background and what drew him to this cause?
SCIOLINO: I'm going to tell you the truth, Melissa, which is, at that trial he was not one of the stars. He was a minor league player. He and his brother were born in Paris. They were raised in foster homes, but they were well-integrated in French life. As a young person, he was what you would call in France a (speaking French), a little criminal, who even in that trial called himself a delinquent who smoked marijuana, who conducted small robberies. And he talked about how he was radicalized because he saw on television the tortures in prisons like Abu Ghraib and that motivated him to turn to radical Islam.
BLOCK: Cherif Kouachi was given a three-year sentence, was released on time served and then a couple years later, he was arrested again in connection with a foiled plot to spring an Algerian terrorist from prison. Those charges, I gather, were dropped. But does it point to something bigger about his connections in this jihadist world?
SCIOLINO: This is a very complicated plot. In prison he had gotten to know a terrorist named Djamel Beghal who had been convicted for a plot in 2001 before September 11th to attack the American Embassy in Paris. The attack was never carried out, but there was enough evidence against Beghal so that he was convicted. The two of them - Beghal and Kouachi - kept up the relationship and they tried to plot an escape of an even bigger terrorist. But there was not enough evidence to try the case and so Kouachi was a free man.
BLOCK: Based on Kouachi's criminal history, his record, any sense of how closely French authorities would have been keeping tabs on him?
SCIOLINO: That's a question that's only going to be answered in the next days and weeks. It's not known the extent to which French intelligence might have been following him. That said, French intelligence monitors very closely potential suspected radicals and those who might be involved in a terrorist attack. The French monitor mosques, both with human intelligence - that is, they've got people in the mosques who report on any radicalization in sermons, for example. They monitor electronically any would-be terrorists by phone and also by wiretaps. That said, because this guy was such a small-fry, he may have fallen through the cracks.
BLOCK: Elaine Sciolino reports for The New York Times from Paris. Elaine, thanks very much.
SCIOLINO: Thank you.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
A program that grew out of the September 11 attacks became the first bill to pass the new Congress. It cleared the Senate overwhelmingly this afternoon, a day after passing the House. It guarantees insurance payments in the event of a terrorist attack. It actually lapsed at the end of December. Shopping malls, big city high-rises and sports stadium events, like the Super Bowl, all count on this program, but as NPR's Brian Naylor reports, critics call it a form of corporate welfare.
BRIAN NAYLOR, BYLINE: The Terrorism Risk Insurance program, or TRIA, as it's called, was first enacted in the days after the 9/11 attacks when the private market for terrorism insurance collapsed. The program guarantees the federal government and taxpayers will pay insurance companies after a terrorist strike, if the companies' losses exceed $200 billion dollars - Republican Senator Michael Crapo of Idaho.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SENATOR MICHAEL CRAPO: Getting terrorism risk insurance right is important in order to protect taxpayers and limit the economic and physical impact of any future terrorist attack on the United States.
NAYLOR: The measure was approved with bipartisan support. Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York said the program benefits not only insurance companies, but individuals.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SENATOR CHARLES SCHUMER: Not just those who insure buildings and build buildings, but people who work in buildings - office workers, restaurant workers, those who work at shopping centers, sports fans, those who care about having new stadiums, all of these depend on terrorism risk insurance.
NAYLOR: The measure approved by Congress also contains an unrelated provision that changes the Dodd-Frank financial regulations in a way that Democrats say will protect some businesses at the expense of taxpayers. But an amendment sponsored by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to remove that language was defeated. The government has not had to pay out any claims under the TRIA program. But Mark Calabria, of the libertarian Cato Institute, says that doesn't mean insurance companies aren't getting a good deal from taxpayers.
MARK CALABRIA: I certainly think as evident from the tremendous amount of lobbying that's gone on around TRIA is that the industry does believe it is something of value that they're getting from the taxpayer.
NAYLOR: Calabria notes the program was originally intended to be a temporary one and that today's action in the Senate is just the latest extension, putting off a permanent solution. He suggests that insurance companies could approach the problem as they do with natural disasters in states like Florida.
CALABRIA: Florida has set up what's called citizens insurance, which covers homeowners insurance in Florida because, essentially, private insurers aren't allowed to charge and don't want to charge flooding risk, hurricane risk, that is there and Florida's set up something state specific. So for me you could easily set up a state compact of New York, Texas, California, Illinois and you've covered what is going to be 90 percent of the terrorism risk that's out there.
NAYLOR: The measure approved today extends TRIA for another six years. Its passage was hailed by business groups. The Real Estate Roundtable calls it essential public policy that will aid job creation and support economic growth nationwide. Brian Naylor, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Rebekah Gregory-DiMartino got something new yesterday.
REBEKAH GREGORY-DIMARTINO: So I woke up this morning and I thought it was a dream. I had to actually look at it and say oh, my gosh, like, I just got to take that home yesterday.
BLOCK: What she took home is a new leg. DiMartino was gravely injured in the Boston Marathon bombings. She was standing near the finish line with her boyfriend - now husband - and her young son. She had 17 surgeries to try to save her left leg. Then this past November doctors amputated it below the knee. Now she's beginning the new year by learning to walk with her prosthetic.
GREGORY-DIMARTINO: When I put it on it hurt like heck and I know that it's going to be a lot to get used to. It was kind of a big reality moment for me that this is what I'm going to be doing with the rest of my life, but it's also a huge blessing to be able to be at this point and move on.
BLOCK: Just as she looks forward to moving on, Rebekah Gregory-DiMartino faces the start of the trial for the accused bomber, Jahar Tsarnaev. Jury selection began on Monday. We asked her about that today when we reached her at her home outside Houston.
GREGORY-DIMARTINO: This week has been really hard. I have a lot of sadness in my heart right now. I just - my heart goes out to the survivors and the families that have to deal with the loss of their loved ones and it's just - I can't even imagine what people are going through because I know what we go through on a regular basis. And it's just a part of us now. And my prayers and my thoughts are with everybody that's affected, everyone that has to testify, and the people that are sitting on the jury because I can't imagine having to make such a huge decision.
BLOCK: I was struck, Rebekah, by something you wrote on your Facebook page this week. Normalcy, you said, is another piece of us permanently left on Boylston Street.
GREGORY-DIMARTINO: Yes, and that's how I feel. You know, Boylston Street is such a big part of our lives now. And there was so much left there that day. And there's a part of us that's always going to be there. Physically, my bones were laying next to me on the sidewalk, and, emotionally, I left my sense of peace and security. And now the only choice that we have is just to try to make the best of everything and not let us be weak and instead be, you know, the popular phrase Boston strong.
BLOCK: How much do you think you'll be following the trial?
GREGORY-DIMARTINO: I actually have to testify in the trial and originally I wasn't going to follow along at all. But the more I think about it and the more I kind of have reflected, I do want to follow along because I think maybe it will give me another piece of some closure. I don't know how much closure we would ever have from this, but at least I know after this trial is over that it's another point of which everyone can move on.
BLOCK: Now, you were very close to the first bomb that went off near the finish line.
GREGORY-DIMARTINO: I was. Originally, I thought that I was 10 to 15 feet away and I recently found out that I was about three feet away. So it was incredible to think about and, you know, one of the young ladies that unfortunately died that day, I watched her take her last breath. And that's what keeps me up at night and that's where the nightmares come from. And I just - I wonder every day, you know, why I was the one spared and other people had to die and have much more severe injuries than I did because I'm really in the best possible situation. Yes, I lost my leg, but I can move forward from here and technology is so amazing and I just feel like there's so much worse that could happen, and I feel very, very blessed.
BLOCK: Rebekah, the prosecutors asked you if you saw anything before the bombing that day, saw the suspect, saw a backpack, anything like that.
GREGORY-DIMARTINO: I have - did not see anything that day. Up until then I was not very observant of my surroundings. Now, that has changed definitely, but I had my 5-year-old son with me and I was just worried about him getting lost in the crowd. And the craziest part about that experience is when the bombs went off he was sitting on my feet because I had told him, you know, just to sit down and play in the rocks 'cause he had gotten bored watching all the runners pass. And they said that my body acted as a human shield for him and I took everything in the back of the legs so that he could be saved and had he been standing up the way that he was supposed to be he would've died instantly. So anytime that I think about feeling sorry for myself or just thinking about how bad things are I just feel so silly because my son is here and he's fine and he's running around like normal. And I just - I'm so thankful for that.
BLOCK: This is, of course, a capital case. What are your thoughts about the death penalty here?
GREGORY-DIMARTINO: It's hard to really answer where my head is on the death penalty. I believe that people should be held accountable for what they do. And this is just absolutely the most unimaginable thing that you can possibly think of. I mean, I don't know how people have that much hatred and sickness in their hearts to want to hurt people so bad. So I do believe that, you know, justice should be served. But it really doesn't matter what happens at this point because there's nothing that can help what's happened or erase things or make it better because it's never going to be better.
BLOCK: I read this, Rebekah, and tell me if it's true, that you have plans to run not just one marathon, but more than one marathon this year.
GREGORY-DIMARTINO: (Laughter).
BLOCK: With your new leg, including in Boston.
GREGORY-DIMARTINO: Yeah, I'm officially crazy. My friend and trainer he told me - he said now, I'm going to try to get you prepared for Boston, but you're cutting it a little close with the Italy marathon. I'm going to be a keynote speaker for a marathon in Italy in March, and then my biggest goal and what I am going to do is everyone is going to see me running the Boston Marathon. I've never been a runner before. I ran a half marathon a couple of years ago and I wanted to die. Like, it was awful. I hated every minute of it (laughter) but I also didn't train properly for it. And I just didn't understand how people could do this for fun, but it's just something that I have to do. I have to do it for me. I have to show people that this is not going to defeat me. This is going to make me stronger. And I've been given such a platform to help others through their struggles, and I just really want to do my part in changing the world.
BLOCK: Well, Rebekah, all the best to you and thank you so much for talking with us.
GREGORY-DIMARTINO: Thank you. It was a pleasure. Thank you so much.
BLOCK: Rebekah Gregory-DiMartino survived the marathon bombings in Boston and she expects to testify at the trial of Jahar Tsarnaev. She just got her prosthetic leg yesterday and celebrated with a Facebook post written like a birth announcement. She wrote (reading) after what seemed like the most excruciating labor and much anticipation I am pleased to announce the arrival of my new edition at 1:06 p.m. today. Meet Felicia - four pounds, eight ounces, 18 inches long and absolutely beautiful.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Two of the hottest topics in the tech world over the past year have been cybersecurity and personal privacy. And that's been clear at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. When Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Edith Ramirez addressed the conference this week, she called on companies that make Internet connected devices to build in protections for consumers from the outset.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
EDITH RAMIREZ: Companies should conduct privacy or security risk assessment as part of the design process. They should test security measures before products launch. They should use smart defaults, such as requiring consumers to change default passwords in the setup process.
BLOCK: Privacy and security are also focal points on the CES floor for the first time this year. More than 80 vendors are showcasing related products. Lindsey Turrentine, editor-in-chief of CNET.com, has been talking with those vendors. She joins us from the Las Vegas Convention Center. Lindsey, welcome.
LINDSEY TURRENTINE: Thank you.
BLOCK: And you've been checking out the products on the floor since Tuesday. What are some of the things you've seen in what's called the Personal Privacy Marketplace there?
TURRENTINE: Well, we've seen a lot of products that are dealing with payments, especially since Apple Pay came onto the market recently. We've seen some interesting products that make payments easier for people who might not own the newest smartphone. One I saw was called Hypr-3 from a young company that creates a small device that's essentially a little - it's like a key fob. You can stick it to the back of your phone or you can carry it near a phone and it works with your phone to act as a digital wallet. So it securely stores your credit card information. You use your fingerprint to use it to pay anywhere that accepts digital payments.
BLOCK: And the question - if it's part of the Personal Privacy Marketplace, the assumption is that this will be more secure than other ways of payment?
TURRENTINE: Yes, because it uses multiple factors for authentication and that's basically a fancy way of saying that it uses something you are - your fingerprint in this case - something you have, which is the device it's paired with, like your phone, and something you know, which is the password you use to get into your phone. And so it creates a unique identifier for each session when you use it so there's really no single password that gets stored.
BLOCK: Let's listen to a bit of a keynote address that was given by the CEO of Intel, Brian Krzanich. He was trying to demonstrate using facial recognition as part of home security and here's what happened.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
BRIAN KRZANICH: So you can see she walks up, her phone is authenticated. She shows her face, the face is authenticated. The alarm is disabled. And the next step, the door is unlocked. The door is unlocked.
(LAUGHTER)
KRZANICH: The door is unlocked. Oh, there it goes.
(APPLAUSE)
BLOCK: So a few hiccups along the way, but I gather the door did eventually work. Does this point to some hurdles for tech companies like this? Not everything is going to work the way it's supposed and with the question of security, that's a really big deal.
TURRENTINE: It is a really big deal, but I think we are getting a lot closer to using all kinds of information from your body to create a more secure environment. And so what Intel is working on is using its true sense cameras. These are new cameras that Intel is just introducing at CES to, they say, get rid of passwords altogether and use these biometric security points for you to login, so that you can actually use your face - just sitting in front of the camera on your computer or in front of your cellphone - to act as your password.
BLOCK: Lindsey, anything else on the floor there in Las Vegas that's really caught your eye in this field of privacy and security?
TURRENTINE: I think that I am really very bullish on the biometric security. I think that if we can get to a point where we can use our face or fingerprint or our retina - there's a retina scanner here - to login, that creates such a great alternative to remembering 15 different passwords that you, essentially, always forget and then have to create over and over and over again.
BLOCK: I know that feeling.
TURRENTINE: Oh, yes, it can become incredibly irritating.
BLOCK: Lindsey Turrentine, thanks for talking with us.
TURRENTINE: Thank you for having me.
BLOCK: Lindsay Turrentine is editor-in-chief of CNET.com. She joined us from this year's International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
In Haiti, legislators are running out of time to schedule long-overdue elections before most of their terms expire next week and Parliament is dissolved. If no action is taken before Monday, the president will be the only politician left with legal standing and will run the country by decree. That would be a major blow to Haiti's young and struggling democracy. It could also jeopardize reconstruction efforts after the devastating earthquake that hit the country five years ago.
NPR's Carrie Khan reports from Port-au-Prince.
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: For nearly three years, legislative elections have been postponed for one reason or the other. As of midnight Monday, all but 10 senators' terms run out leaving the body six shy I of a legal quorum and politically useless. Haitians thought their leaders had found a compromise to the political standoff last month when the prime minister was forced out. However, yesterday, as reporters tussled for prime spots outside a luxury hotel high in the hills of the capital, President Michel Martelly and legislative leaders huddled inside trying to keep the deal alive. Senate President Simon Desras emerged from the meeting saying talks are ongoing, but he said little about substance.
SENATE PRESIDENT SIMON DESRAS: (Speaking Creole).
KAHN: "We have our agreements and disagreements," was all the moderate Senate leader would say. In recent days, the opposition's demands seem to have grown. In addition to the prime minister's ouster, a group of six hardline senators want the resignation of all members of the board which oversees elections. In Haiti's rough-and-tumble politics, this is par for the course, says Robert Fatton, politics professor at the University of Virginia.
ROBERT FATTON: Politics in Haiti have traditionally been a question of power, period. You know, if you are in power, you want to keep. It if you are out of power, you want to get it.
KAHN: Fatton says power-sharing is not part of the political culture here. He says the opposition has interpreted the president's compromises as weakness. In fact, some opposition parties, and there are many in Haiti, are now demanding the president's resignation. Some protesters in the streets chant the same and have called for three days of demonstrations beginning today. That has left many in the capital worried.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Shouting in Creole).
KAHN: At the crowded downtown market across the street from Haiti's parliament, everything from tight, nylon miniskirts to colorful, knockoff, Converse tennis shoes is for sale. Twenty-six-year-old Jimmy Oldville sells handsome men's dress shirts and color-coordinated ties. He says holiday sales this year were down 50 percent over last year, and he blames it on the political crisis.
JIMMY OLDVILLE: (Through interpreter) It really affect us, all of us. People in the countryside are afraid to come to Port-au-Prince, to come and by.
KAHN: And, he says, we're all afraid the street protests will turn violent come Monday. That's coincidentally the fifth anniversary of the deadly earthquake which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Haitians.
Forty-five-year-old Adeline Pierre sits in her nearby stall where she sells bright yellow, pink and orange girls shorts. She says she's glad the opposition keeps pushing for Martelly's ouster. But she doesn't want to see chaos in the streets.
ADELINE PIERRE: (Through interpreter) I hope they reach to an agreement so we can avoid the worst. So I'm just hoping for the best.
KAHN: Yesterday, the UN special envoy for Haiti and an International Core Group, which includes the U.S., Canada and their European Union, called on all politicians to immediately come up with a compromise and schedule elections. Carrie Kahn, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And here's something that can be tough for both adults and children to absorb. Those who are dedicated baseball fans, what do you do when your favorite team cuts ties with your favorite player?
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Some take it in stride, others take it like 6-year-old Amelia Lyttle from Vancouver. A few weeks ago, Amelia's favorite team, the Toronto Blue Jays, traded her favorite player, infielder Brett Lawrie, to the Oakland A's.
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO, "BRETT LAWRIE FOR JOSH DONALDSON TRADE REACTION")
AMELIA LYTTLE: (Crying) I don't want to cheer for a different team.
ALEX LYTTLE: You don't have to cheer for a different team just 'cause Brett Lawrie went to a different team.
AMELIA: (Crying) But I want to cheer for Brett Lawrie.
BLOCK: As you can hear, Amelia was devastated after her father broke the news.
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO, "BRETT LAWRIE FOR JOSH DONALDSON TRADE REACTION")
AMELIA: (Crying) I'm positive they won't trade him back some day. That guy's going to be too good. They're never going to want to trade him back.
LYTTLE: Well, we'll see. We'll see if we get - maybe we'll get Brett Lawrie back someday.
AMELIA: We won't.
BLOCK: As you may have gathered, Amelia's reaction to the trade was recorded and posted on YouTube by her father.
SIEGEL: And of course, Amelia's sadness went viral. The video has been viewed almost 300,000 times. Brett Lawrie got wind of the video, and he paid a personal visit to Amelia before he left for Oakland.
BLOCK: And the story gets even better for Lawrie's biggest fan. Just after Christmas, a care package arrived from the Oakland A's with A's T-shirts, hats.
SIEGEL: And a note that said, we were so touched to see how much you enjoy watching Brett play, and we promise to take care of him in Oakland.
BLOCK: And that was enough, as her father explained to us today, to make Amelia a lifelong A's fan.
LYTTLE: She was wearing her T-shirt around, wearing her hat around. She gave myself one and my wife one. She says, you know, we can all have one. We can all be Oakland A's fans.
SIEGEL: After the package arrived, her dad Alex tweeted a photo of beaming Amelia with her green and gold A's swag and in the caption, thanks from Amelia #converted.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
In this part of the program we bring you the story of parents who thought their son was lost, and a son who couldn't tell them that he wasn't. It comes to us from NPR's newest program on human behavior. It's called Invisibilia. The show's co-host, Lulu Miller, tells us about a man in a coma whose mind eventually began to function again, but not his body, and because of that, for years the only relationship he could have was with his own thoughts.
LULU MILLER, BYLINE: When Martin Pistorius was a little boy growing up in South Africa, he was mostly thinking about electronics.
JOAN PISTORIUS: He used to insist that we buy him all sorts of electronic equipment.
RODNEY PISTORIUS: Resistors and transistors and you name it.
MILLER: These are his parents - Joan and Rodney Pistorius.
JOAN PISTORIUS: He was always going to be an electric man, as he told me, when he grew up. And then....
MILLER: Martin's life took an unexpected turn.
R. PISTORIUS: He had just turned 12.
MILLER: He came down with a strange illness. The doctors weren't sure what it was, but their best guess...
R. PISTORIUS: Cryptococcal meningitis.
MILLER: No.
R. PISTORIUS: He progressively got worse. probably in the second year of his illness he was sleeping whenever we didn't wake him up. He was permanently lying down in the fetal position.
MILLER: Eventually he lost his ability to move by himself, his ability to make eye contact, and, finally, his ability to speak.
JOAN PISTORIUS: And the last thing he ever said, 'cause he was still in hospital, was when home. And all he wanted to know was when is he coming home? And - sorry...
MILLER: Martin would eventually fail every test for mental awareness the doctors could think of, and Rodney and Joan were told that he was...
R. PISTORIUS: As good as not there. You know, he's a vegetable. He has zero intelligence.
MILLER: They were told to take him home.
R. PISTORIUS: Try and keep him comfortable until he died.
MILLER: But one year passed, and two years passed.
JOAN PISTORIUS: Martin just kept going, just kept going.
MILLER: So Joan and Rodney and their two kids did their best to care for Martin's body.
R. PISTORIUS: I'd get up at 5 o'clock in the morning, get him dressed, load him in the car, take him to the Special Care Center where I'd leave him. Eight hours later, I'd pick him up, bathe him, feed him, put him in bed, set my alarm for two hours so that I'd wake up to turn him so that he didn't get bedsores.
MILLER: That was their lives.
R. PISTORIUS: Load him in the car, drop him off, pick him up.
MILLER: Three years turned to four.
R. PISTORIUS: Bathe him, feed him, put him in bed.
MILLER: Six, seven, eight years.
JOAN PISTORIUS: This was so horrific.
MILLER: Joan remembers vividly looking at Martin in bed and saying...
JOAN POSTORIUS: I hope you die. I know that's a horrible thing to say. I just wanted some sort of relief.
MILLER: It was a thought she never would've shared out loud, but it had been 10 years and she didn't think her son was there to hear it.
MARTIN PISTORIUS: Yes, I was there, not from the very beginning, but about two years into my vegetative state, I began to wake up.
MILLER: This is Martin.
M. PISTORIUS: Yes, using the grid to speak.
MILLER: The grid is just a computer keyboard that allows him to quickly choose words and then have the computer read them out loud.
M. PISTORIUS: Yeah.
MILLER: Though he never regained his speech, he did regain enough body strength to operate a wheelchair by himself. Today, he almost looks like a former athlete. His upper body is really strong, he's got salt and pepper hair, bright blue eyes and a big smile. And Martin thinks he first woke up when he was about 14 or 15 years old, so about two years after he first fell ill.
M. PISTORIUS: I was aware of everything, just like any normal person.
MILLER: But he couldn't move his body.
M. PISTORIUS: Everyone was so used to me not being there that they didn't notice when I began to be present again.
MILLER: Though he could see and understand everything, he couldn't find a way to let anybody know.
M. PISTORIUS: The stark reality hit me that I was going to spend the rest of my life like that - totally alone.
MILLER: He was trapped with only his thoughts for company.
M. PISTORIUS: I would never be rescued.
MILLER: And they weren't particularly nice thoughts.
M. PISTORIUS: No one will ever show me tenderness.
MILLER: He said they battered him, berated him.
M. PISTORIUS: No one will ever love me.
MILLER: And, of course, there was no way to escape.
M. PISTORIUS: You are doomed.
MILLER: Like, take a walk or talk to a friend.
M. PISTORIUS: You will never get out.
MILLER: And so he figured his only option...
M. PISTORIUS: You are powerless.
MILLER: Was to leave his thoughts behind.
M. PISTORIUS: You will be alone forever.
MILLER: Simply let them all just float by.
M. PISTORIUS: Forever, forever.
MILLER: That was his first strategy, disengaging his thoughts, and he said he got really good at it.
M. PISTORIUS: You don't really think about anything. You simply exist.
MILLER: Can you describe what it - that feels like? I wonder, is it peaceful, or...
M. PISTORIUS: No, I wouldn't say it is peaceful. It's a very dark place to find yourself because, in a sense, you are allowing yourself to vanish.
MILLER: Though, occasionally, there were certain things...
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "BARNEY AND FRIENDS)
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As Barney) You can always count of having a fun day when you spend it with the people you love.
MILLER: That elicitated thoughts he could not ignore, like "Barney."
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "BARNEY AND FRIENDS")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As Barney) (Singing) I love you. You love me.
M. PISTORIUS: I cannot even express to you how much I hated "Barney."
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "BARNEY AND FRIENDS")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As Barney) (Singing) We're a happy family.
MILLER: See, since all the world thought that Martin was basically a vegetable, at the special care center where he spent his days he was often left in front of a TV watching "Barney" reruns, hour after hour.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "BARNEY AND FRIENDS")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As Barney) (Singing) I love you.
MILLER: Day after day.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "BARNEY & FRIENDS")
UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN: (Singing) John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt.
MILLER: And one day, he decided he had had enough. He needed to know what time it was because if he could know what time it was, he could know when it would end, but he was rarely seated near a clock, so...
M. PISTORIUS: I would watch how the sun moved across the room or how a shadow moved throughout the day.
MILLER: He begins to match what he sees with little bits of information he's able to collect - what he hears on the television, a nurse mentioning the time. And within a few months he could read the shadows like a clock.
M. PISTORIUS: Yes, I can still tell the time of day by the shadows.
MILLER: It was his first semblance of control. Simply knowing where he was in the day gave him the sense of being able to climb through it.
M. PISTORIUS: Yes.
MILLER: So now when a dark thought came up, instead of letting it just float by he would take it on, try to find some new relationship to it. Like, one time, shortly after having the drool wiped from his chin by a nurse.
M. PISTORIUS: You are pathetic.
MILLER: He happened to notice that a song was playing on the radio - Whitney Houston's "The Greatest Love Of All."
M. PISTORIUS: In the song she says no matter what they take from me...
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GREATEST LOVE OF ALL")
WHITNEY HOUSTON: (Singing) They can't take away my dignity.
MARTIN PISTORIUS: I sat there and thought, you want to bet?
MILLER: (Laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GREATEST LOVE OF ALL")
HOUSTON: (Singing) Because the greatest...
MILLER: The point is eventually Martin found a way to reframe, reinterpret even the ugliest thoughts that haunted him.
JOAN PISTORIUS: I hope you die.
MILLER: He was conscious when his mom told him that.
M. PISTORIUS: The rest of the world felt so far away when she said those words.
MILLER: But he began to wrestle with it. Why would a mother say that?
M. PISTORIUS: As time passed, I gradually learned to understand my mother's desperation. Every time she looked at me, she could see only a cruel parody of the once-healthy child she had loved so much.
MILLER: And over time Martin began reengaging with his thoughts, and slowly, as his mind felt better, something else happened. His body began to get better. Now, why? This is a long story involving inexplicable neurological developments, a painstaking battle to prove his existence.
M. PISTORIUS: Anyway, the short version...
MILLER: (Laughter) OK, wherever you are standing in your life, prepare to be lapped. At age 26, Martin passed a test where he identified different objects by pointing at them with his eyes.
JOAN PISTORIUS: I then gave up my job.
MILLER: Joan then worked with Martin for two years to teach him to operate a computer.
JOAN PISTORIUS: When he gets the tools to communicate he forges ahead.
MILLER: Then he gets a job at a local government office.
M. PISTORIUS: I wanted to prove that I could do more than just speak words via a laptop.
MILLER: Eventually, he scraps that job, goes to college.
JOAN PISTORIUS: In computer science.
MILLER: Starts a web company.
JOAN PISTORIUS: It was absolutely flabbergasting. I couldn't understand it.
MILLER: Wow.
He writes a book.
JOAN PISTORIUS: He's learning to drive. He always wanted to drive.
MILLER: He's learning to drive.
JOAN PISTORIUS: He is.
MILLER: Wow.
JOAN PISTORIUS: Martin achieves everything he wants to do.
MILLER: And Martin thinks it may have been his decision to lean into those dark thoughts that helped him to get the very best thing in his life.
JOANNA PISTORIUS: Oh, he's just saying - he's just typing.
M. PISTORIUS: My wife.
MILLER: This is Martin's wife.
M. PISTORIUS: Joanna.
JOANNA PISTORIUS: (Laughter) When Martin talks about me or types about me, he always starts smiling.
MILLER: Joanna was a friend of Martin's sister. And the first night they met they talked for hours.
M. PISTORIUS: She would speak, and I would type my response.
MILLER: And Joanna said the thing that drew her to Martin was his humor about the human condition, his frankness.
JOANNA PISTORIUS: If I ask him anything, he'll give me an honest answer. There was no pretend. Oh, OK, well, he's in a wheelchair and he doesn't speak, but I love this guy. He's amazing. Then it just so quickly turned into love (laughter).
MILLER: And Martin, at long last, had no trouble expressing what he felt inside.
M. PISTORIUS: My face would hurt from smiling so much.
MILLER: (Laughter).
SIEGEL: Lulu Miller is the co-host of Invisibilia, along with Alix Spiegel. It's our newest program. It explores how invisible things shape our behavior and our lives. The program debuts this weekend on many public radio stations and the podcast is available for download on npr.org and on iTunes. The book Martin Pistorius published was a memoir of what it was like to be invisible for over a decade. It's called "Ghost Boy: My Escape From A Life Locked Inside My Own Body."
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
A top State Department official will tell to Havana later this month for talks on normalizing relations between the U.S. and Cuba. One of the main topics will be migration. Since President Obama's dual-announcement with Cuban President Raul Castro last month, there's been a spike in the number of Cubans leaving the country on rafts and boats. NPR's Greg Allen reports on what the Coast Guard has been seeing in Florida.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: Rear Admiral Jake Korn is commander of the 7th Coast Guard District in Miami. He says in December, 481 Cubans attempted to reach the U.S. on rafts and boats. That's double the amount seen in December of last year.
REAR ADMIRAL JAKE KORN: It's a pretty uptick. And most of that has occurred since the 17, since the president and Raul Castro's announcement.
ALLEN: Korn says the surge in rafters wasn't unexpected. Any time there's a real or perceived shift in policy between the U.S. and Cuba, he says people take to the seas. The latest wave of migrants, Korn says, are attempting the journey in makeshift vessels.
KORN: Literally taped together Styrofoam pieces or pieces of wood. It's essentially flotsam, and there's lots of people in some of these vessels. Sometimes they'll have a makeshift mast and a sail. And we've had some deaths this year, and we know that not all these people make it.
ALLEN: It's just a short trip of just a hundred miles or more but, on a raft, it can take several days or weeks. In Miami, Ramon Saul Sanchez often knows about Cuban rafters before the Coast Guard.
RAMON SAUL SANCHEZ: I get calls 24 hours a day, seven days a week, many times mothers are crying on the phone saying my son, my daughter left Cuba. I don't know how. I don't know when.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW)
(Speaking Spanish)
ALLEN: Sanchez hosts a nightly radio program in Miami and heads an anti-Castro group, the Democracy Movement. He says the sudden upsurge in rafters is because of a rumor that's sweeping Cuba.
SANCHEZ: That on the 15 of January there will be this new change in immigration laws here that will affect the Cuban Adjustment Act. So that deadline has prompted people to leave Cuba in whatever ways they can.
ALLEN: It's a rumor that's unfounded. The Cuban Adjustment Act allows Cubans who arrive here to remain in the U.S. as permanent residents. It's a law that can only be changed by Congress, and no congressional action is imminent. The Coast Guard sent out a release this week stating that fact, hoping to get the message to Cubans that, despite the president's announcement, immigration policies remain unchanged. Even with the upsurge, the Coast Guard intercepts the vast majority of Cuban rafters, over 80 percent, according to Tim Cronin, deputy chief of law enforcement for the Coast Guard in Miami. It's a dangerous journey, with a low chance for success, but one, Cronin says, some Cubans make time and time again.
TIM CRONIN: It's not uncommon for a Coast Guard cutter to embark somebody that they've seen before. And it's not uncommon for the migrants to indicate that this is their fifth or sixth time and they're going to try again.
ALLEN: With talks on normalizing relations set to begin between the U.S. and Cuba, Coast Guard officials say they're on alert for more rumors and anything that could lead to an exodus of rafters from the island. Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
The new movie "A Most Violent Year" is set in New York City in 1981, a chaotic time of spiraling crime. The story involves corruption in the heating oil industry - businessman trying to stay on the straight and narrow, a prosecutor who has that businessman in his sights, oh, and a wife who may hold all the cards.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "A MOST VIOLENT YEAR")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Where are we exposed?
JESSICA CHASTAIN: (As Anna Morales) We follow standard industry practice on every front.
ACTOR: (As character) What does that mean?
CHASTAIN: (As Anna Morales) You know what it means.
ACTOR: (As character) I know.
CHASTAIN: (As Anna Morales) I need to know what they're saying we did.
BLOCK: That's Jessica Chastain as Anna Morales, daughter of a Brooklyn gangster. Upwardly mobile, she keeps the books for her husband's fuel business and a number of secrets. And as Anna pushes her husband to be tougher, Chastain told me, she becomes tougher herself.
CHASTAIN: She breaks free from this mold that she's been living in - the idea of this perfectly coiffed wife. I mean, I - it was really important for me also that she have really long nails - obnoxiously long.
BLOCK: (Laughter) They are an impressive set of nails, we could say.
CHASTAIN: (Laughter) Yes.
BLOCK: Perfect.
CHASTAIN: Not from, like, even just a cosmetic point of view, but I wanted it to be like a predator. And I also wanted her to be a character that you underestimate, but when you underestimate someone that's when you really get hurt.
BLOCK: Let's listen to a scene from the movie where you are confronting the prosecutor who's about to indict your husband for tax evasion and fraud. And you tell him we're not who you think you we are.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "A MOST VIOLENT YEAR")
CHASTAIN: (As Anna Morales) My husband is not my father, not even close. So if I were you I would start treating us with a little more respect or I guarantee he will make it his mission in life to ruin you. This was very disrespectful.
BLOCK: And, Jessica Chastain, that last line - this was very disrespectful - you've just tossed your cigarette butt on the ground and you do this little motion - this little loop-de-loop motion - with your finger with this incredibly long fingernail.
CHASTAIN: I had no idea, but it's funny. As soon as that was released it was in the trailer. I've had people come up to me do that.
BLOCK: That motion.
CHASTAIN: Like, flicking of an imaginary cigarette on the ground, doing a little circle with their finger and saying this was very disrespectful (laughter).
BLOCK: That's become your thing.
CHASTAIN: I guess so. Who knew?
(LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: Have you tried just tossing that into sort of your daily life every once in a while?
CHASTAIN: Oh, no.
(LAUGHTER)
CHASTAIN: No, no, no, but it was fun. I mean, what I loved so much about this scene is that yes, she thinks, and everyone thinks, that she is talking about her husband. She's actually talking about herself.
BLOCK: You know, I'm thinking about this scene and thinking about another scene from your movie "Zero Dark Thirty." You played a CIA agent named Maya who was obsessed with tracking down and hunting down Osama bin Laden. Let's listen to a scene from that movie. This is where you're confronting your boss, the CIA station chief, in Pakistan.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "ZERO DARK THIRTY")
CHASTAIN: (As Maya) Either give me the team I need to follow this lead or that other thing you're going to have on your resume is being the first station chief to be called before a congressional committee for subverting the efforts to capture or kill bin Laden.
BLOCK: Jessica Chastain, as you listen back to that scene, are you seeing threads between these two characters? Both of whom you see, I think, clearly as really powerful, powerful women in very different ways.
CHASTAIN: You know, I don't see threads between the characters so much because Maya in "Zero Dark Thirty," especially in this scene that you just played, she's a woman that, in some aspects, is out of control. Anna's not like that and Anna's much colder. She's more calculating. She's more serpentile (ph) I think, but I wonder if Maya was born earlier (laughter) and it was in 1981 if she would be more contained because there is less freedom for a woman in industry the further back you go.
BLOCK: I'm talking with the actress Jessica Chastain. Let's talk a bit about your background. You grew up in Sacramento and it sounds like your family was not connected to the business in any way, didn't even particularly enjoy going to movies. Do you remember a moment when you thought I know what I want to be when I grow up and it's an actor?
CHASTAIN: (Laughter) It really was such a natural thing that happened. My grandmother took me to a play and then it started and there was a little girl on stage. And as soon as I saw her on stage I thought this is my job.
BLOCK: How old were you?
CHASTAIN: I was probably, like, 7 or 8. I was very young.
BLOCK: And what was the play?
CHASTAIN: (Laughter) It was "Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" (laughter).
BLOCK: And you knew, I mean, were you are dramatic kid? I mean, did you have a flair for performing?
CHASTAIN: You know, I was never - well, yeah, actually, you're right. I was a dramatic kid. I remember I was very young and once I knew what I wanted to do I, like, created a theater company and I would direct and we'd sell lemonade to buy props. I was, like, 10 years old and I had my own theater company, cul-de-sac theater company.
BLOCK: Oh, it had a name.
CHASTAIN: No, it just was in our cul-de-sac.
(LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: I was going to say you could've done better with the name.
(LAUGHTER)
CHASTAIN: So yeah, it became - it was such an outlet for me. And I went to public school and I didn't do well in school. And it wasn't until actually I got into school at Juilliard - it was the first time in my life that I thought, oh, maybe I'm not stupid because I was so inspired and passionate about what I was learning. And it was the first time in my life I had felt that.
BLOCK: Was it a scary thing to be at Juilliard, at such a prestigious and, I'm sure, high-pressure environment there?
CHASTAIN: Yeah. It was very scary for me. I - my grandmother came with me when I moved out to New York. She stayed with me for a week. I was, you know, living in the dorm. The first year I had a lot of anxiety and (laughter) I remember my teachers kept saying I had so much jaw tension. Like, I couldn't even, you know, in taking voice and speech classes I could hardly open my mouth. I was so terrified.
BLOCK: Oh, wow. What did you do about the jaw tension?
CHASTAIN: I went to a doctor and, you know, of course, got a mouth guard at night, so I didn't get rid of all of my teeth. And then every night, usually, I would just get a, like, a hot towel and put it on my face.
BLOCK: And it worked.
CHASTAIN: I think more than anything like that what worked is just getting some confidence. Julliard - when I was there - I don't know if they still have it, but they had a probation and a cut program. And I'm the first person in my family to go to college. My grandmother was helping me financially. It was a really big deal that I was there and the idea that they would've sent me home was incredibly traumatic. But I had to start to feel like, OK, I belong here. It's all right. They're not going to send me away.
BLOCK: It sounds like your grandmother was a really, really key person in your life.
CHASTAIN: Yeah. She's very, very important to me. I've taken her to the Oscars both years and she's really a special lady and has helped me in more ways than I could ever explain.
BLOCK: What's her name?
CHASTAIN: Marilyn.
BLOCK: And she's still with you.
CHASTAIN: Thank God, yeah (laughter). I can't even ever imagine thinking that she wouldn't be, so yeah, she is.
BLOCK: Well, Jessica Chastain, it's been great to talk to. Thanks so much.
CHASTAIN: Thank you. It was a pleasure for me.
BLOCK: Jessica Chastain stars in the new film "A Most Violent Year."
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
If you listen to a lot of country radio as I do, you've probably noticed that a lot of hit songs sound the same - men singing songs about trucks and girls in trucks, girls in tight jeans and trucks on dirt roads. It's known as bro country and it's not just the lyrics that sound the same. Well, if you took a bunch of those songs and smashed them together into one song, it might sound like this.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG MASH-UP)
LUKE BRYAN: (Singing) Cottonwood falling like snow in July. Set of fireflies popping like the Fourth of July, yeah. Breeze blowing in. Your hair blowing round.
BLOCK: You get the idea. These are six hit country songs by six different men mashed into one on ProTools software with some pitch and tempo shifting.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG MASH-UP)
LUKE BRYAN AND FLORIDA GEORGIA LINE: (Singing) Girl, you make my speakers go boom boom. We hanging round, singing out everything on the radio.
BLOCK: Aspiring Nashville songwriter Greg Todd posted his project on YouTube. He says it all started when he was listening to a song called "Close Your Eyes" by the group Paramlee on his car radio.
GREG TODD: The more I listen, the more I kept saying to myself this sounds awfully familiar.
BLOCK: I've heard this somewhere before.
TODD: Yeah, I've heard this somewhere before.
BLOCK: Then it clicked it. It was just like the Blake Shelton hit called "Sure Be Cool If You Did." So Greg Todd mashed the two together into one song.
TODD: I ended up sending it to a few friends. It was really just a fun little goof, actually.
BLOCK: And then it mushroomed.
TODD: And it mushroomed every day from that point forward, it seemed. I got in the car and heard another song and I kept saying, wait, is this the same as the other two? And one by one, I ended up having six songs sitting there in the ProTools session and when I play them all at the same time, it just sounded like one big band playing a very similar song.
BLOCK: And these are songs by some of the biggest names in country music, right - Blake Shelton, Luke Bryan, Florida Georgia Line, also, Cole Swindell, Parmalee and Chase Rice? When you hear songs like this that are so similar on the radio, does it bug you? Is it annoying to you?
TODD: I wouldn't call it annoying. You know, I'm a reasonable person. Each time I hear it, I still have to admit to myself they are catchy.
(SOUNDBITE OF MASH-UP)
FLORIDA GEORGIA LINE, SWINDELL, BRYAN AND PARMALEE: (Singing) This is how we roll. We rolling in, country on up ahead. Tipping it, spilling that homemade wine. You got me high on kisses. You can see forever when me, yeah, you know we rolling high. I got my shades on, top back...
BLOCK: Let's go through some of the similarities that you were playing with in these songs.
TODD: Well, right off the bat, the melodies and music bits I noticed were all strikingly similar. But it was only when I started really listening to the lyrics that I noticed five out of the six - I think six out of the six songs talked about either moonlight or the sun going down or the sunset. All six had to do with picking up a girl who wasn't yet their girlfriend or the love of their life or something like that. It was just more of a summer thing and almost all of them had a girl who was either in the truck or who was going to be in the truck at some point.
BLOCK: They had fallen in according to plan.
TODD: They had fallen in according to plan. So it was a hoot. I'm not going to lie. So that's when I got the idea to say, you know, maybe I can actually fool around with it and, you know, make a new lyric that makes sense.
BLOCK: Well, there is a long tradition of formula songwriting, right? I mean, wasn't it Steve Goodman and John Prine who wrote a song with the same - the classic country song had to have mama, a dead dog, a train. What am I forgetting?
TODD: And your truck is broke down. Yeah. That was the old country. They sing about slightly different things now but same idea.
BLOCK: So for you, Greg, you're an aspiring songwriter in Nashville. Do you figure well, this is selling? It's on the radio all the time. Maybe I just need to write a song about a truck and a girl and a tight pair of blue jeans.
TODD: Well, you know, you try to stay away from that but as a kind of a joke just like everyone else that's been in Nashville, you know, it's not easy getting through the gatekeepers. And I said, you know, I'll take it upon myself to write a seventh song that fits right into this mold. And I said well, I figure at the very least, they can't tell me it doesn't sound like a hit. So that's my new project so we'll see how that goes.
BLOCK: Well, best of luck with that, Greg. Greg Todd also known on YouTube as Sir Mashalot. We were talking about his mashup of six very similar country songs.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DRUNK ON YOU")
BRYAN: (Singing) You're looking so good in what's left of those blue jeans.
BLOCK: And by the way, the mashup song is on our Facebook page, NPR ATC.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG MASH-UP)
PARMALEE AND SWINDELL: (Singing) Coming on strong, I'm going to lay it on your lips, just chilling it.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Andrae Crouch wrote contemporary gospel music that bridged the black and white Christian communities, and beyond. Andrae Crouch's choir backed Madonna's song "Like A Prayer." He arranged and conducted on "The Lion King" soundtrack. Crouch died yesterday in Los Angeles after suffering a heart attack last weekend. He was 72. NPR's Frannie Kelley has an appreciation of the man known as the father of modern gospel.
FRANNIE KELLEY, BYLINE: Andrae Crouch was the son of a preacher man. When he was nine his dad opened a Pentecostal church in a garage in California's San Fernando Valley.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ANDRAE CROUCH: My father needed a piano player in his church. Then he prayed for me one Sunday, and I started playing the piano about three weeks later.
KELLEY: That's Andrae Crouch in a 1980s TV special. By then he'd already played a major role in creating a more contemporary, conservative gospel sound. The demonstrative shouts of the sanctified church were toned down to appeal to the broadest possible audience. Crouch was on "The Jeffersons" and he played Billy Graham crusades, the White House, even the Grand Ole Opry.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TENNESSEE ERNIE FORD: Now, the man I'm about to introduce is a rare talent. He not only sings, but he's a fantastic writer.
KELLEY: That's Tennessee Ernie Ford introducing Crouch at the Opry.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SOON AND VERY SOON")
CROUCH: (Singing) Soon and very soon we are going to see the king.
KELLEY: Songs Crouch wrote in the 1960s are still in use. Brian Courtney Wilson is a gospel singer and the music director of Covenant Glen United Methodist Church in Missouri City, Texas.
BRIAN COURTNEY WILSON: Just this Sunday we're singing "The Blood Will Never Lose Its Power." So I was leaning on him to make sure we had something to sing on Sunday.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE BLOOD WILL NEVER LOSE ITS POWER")
CROUCH: (Singing) Oh, the blood that gives me strength from day to day, it will never lose its power.
WILSON: There's a certain clarity to what he's doing. Like, he's being very clear about the truths he's trying to communicate.
KELLEY: That clarity has at times been dismissed by critics and academics as bland.
ANTHONY HEILBUT: Andrae himself was, I think, by the kindest yardstick, a gentle vocalist, not a housewrecker.
KELLEY: Nevertheless, Anthony Heilbut, who wrote a definitive history of gospel music called "The Gospel Sound," says Crouch knew how to move a congregation.
HEILBUT: His compositions have had extreme importance and are very, very popular and the responses to the songs are very emotional.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THROUGH IT ALL")
CROUCH: (Singing) Through it all, through it all I've learned to trust in Jesus. I've learned to trust in God. Let me tell you that through it all...
HEILBUT: He really was a visionary then in taking the theology combined with these ambitious melodies.
KELLEY: For his part, Andrae Crouch would insist those melodies weren't all his, as he told NPR in 2006.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
CROUCH: I don't think that it will ever drain out of me. I think that as long as I want to do music I think that God will continually pour into me.
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: (Singing) Don't forget his benefit.
KELLEY: And Brian Courtney Wilson says he's seen the music of Andrae Crouch at work.
WILSON: I don't have a degree in gospel music. I don't have a degree in gospel music history. It's just something that I've lived and I've seen impact people's lives.
KELLEY: What Andrae Crouch made retained its potency, even when he grafted it onto pop music. You may have felt it too. That was his choir behind Michael Jackson at the 1988 Grammy Awards. Frannie Kelley, NPR news.
(SOUNDBITE OF MICHAEL JACKSON SONG, "MAN IN THE MIRROR")
UNIDENTIFIED CHOIR: (Singing) I'm starting with the man in the mirror. Oh, yeah. I'm asking him to change his ways and no message could've been any clearer. If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and then make a change. You got to get it right while you got the time...
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
A dramatic day in Paris - two sieges, some hostages freed, but four others killed. It was the culmination of a security crisis that began with the killing of 12 people at the offices of a French satirical newspaper on Wednesday. French President Francois Hollande spoke to the nation after nightfall in Paris, asking citizens to join him in the streets for a solidarity march this Sunday. Here he is as heard on the BBC today through an interpreter.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT FRANCOIS HOLLANDE: (Through interpreter) I call all the French people to stand on Sunday, get together and carry these values of democracy, of freedom, of pluralism. Long live Republic - the Republic - long live France.
SIEGEL: World leaders have also pledged support for France. Many are traveling to Paris to be there for Sunday's march. For the latest details on the attacks that embroiled France today, we go to reporter Lauren Frayer in Paris. And, Lauren, police say the suspects in the Charlie Hebdo killings died in a village northeast of the city. Tell us what happened there.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: That's right, Robert. After two days on the run, these brothers - the Kouachi brothers - stole a car and holed themselves up at a printing office in a small village northeast of Paris. This is near Charles de Gaulle Airport. It's a verdant farming area and that green area was transformed into France's biggest domestic security operation in decades, with hundreds of police, military, helicopters. They were there for about eight hours and after that we heard explosions, gunfire. We saw smoke rising from the building, flashes of light and black clad figures scaling the walls. We know now that those were French security forces and that the two brothers were killed.
SIEGEL: Now, as all this was happening, there was - simultaneously almost - another siege across town. Tell us about that.
FRAYER: Well, a gunman said to be a friend or possible associate of the Kouachi brothers burst into a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris and took hostages. Now, the hostages were believed to be regular shoppers in the market. This was a Jewish market on a Friday afternoon, so before the start of the Jewish Sabbath. It's unclear how many hostages he took. Initially, it was said to be about five people and now we're hearing upwards of perhaps 15 people. French President Francois Hollande has confirmed that four of those hostages died along with the gunman. And the end of that siege was similarly dramatic - explosions, gunfire. SWAT team members then escorted several civilians to safety, including at least one child. We watched live video of all this taking place. One person slung over the shoulder of a riot police officer running out of the building.
SIEGEL: And then the two raids took place at just about the same time. Lauren, you've been in Paris watching all this unfold. How would you describe the mood of the city?
FRAYER: Well, Robert, I think that people are hoping that they can sort of collectively breathe a sigh of relief. This is after three days of terror attacks, hostage takings, evacuations, alerts across the French capital and, finally, people are hoping that this may be over. But as the smoke quite literally clears, I think French citizens will be waking up to a different kind of France with serious new challenges ahead. In the short term, one suspect is still believed to be at large. That's a woman that authorities say is the girlfriend of the gunman who was killed after taking hostages at the kosher supermarket. On Sunday, we have security meetings with world leaders here in Paris and this giant march that's planned. In the long term, there are likely to be serious concerns among French Jews, who were targeted in one of these attacks. Also among advocates of free speech, we saw journalists targeted in Wednesday's shootings, and Muslims fearing any kind of backlash here after all of this.
SIEGEL: Lauren, thanks for your reporting.
FRAYER: You're welcome. Thank you.
SIEGEL: That's NPR's Lauren Frayer in Paris.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And we began our conversation with our Friday political commentators by talking about the implications of those Paris terrorist attacks. Welcome back to E J Dionne of the Washington Post and David Brooks of the New York Times.
E J DIONNE, BYLINE: Good to be with you.
DAVID BROOKS: Good to be with you.
BLOCK: And, David, let's start with your column today. Following on the murderous assault on the satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, you have turned the viral slogan on its head in your headline. I am not Charlie Hebdo. What do you mean?
BROOKS: Yeah. Well, I'm not that kind of journalist, actually. You know, this reminds us what we stand for. But I just started with the simple point that if Charlie Hebdo had been published on any American university campus, it would have been shutdown in about 30 second, that some of the offensive would have been seen as hate speech, they would have been ruled out by certain hate crime codes. In certain campuses, they would have been scandals. A lot of the people who have controversial views are invited off-campus. So I was really inviting us to take a more tolerant look at what we think of as offensive and allow more offensive speech in our midst and not be so quick to be offended. And I think that's one of the lessons that we can draw in this country from what happened over there in Paris.
BLOCK: E J, I think David's pointing to some hypocrisy on this side of the ocean. What about you?
DIONNE: I rarely disagree as much with David as I did today, because I thought to conflate speech codes with the murders of 12 people, and I know he wasn't really engaged in that kind of moral equivalence, but it really invites it. It's one thing to say that you want to respect others. And I have a pretty expansive view of what should be permitted on college campuses. I don't like shutting down speakers. But this is mass murder. As his colleague Ross Douthat said, the presence of the gun fundamentally changes things. And, you know, my colleague Gene Robinson said now the tendency must be to err on the side of defiance. This is just impermissible. And I think free societies just have to rise up against this.
BLOCK: David, I'm not sure you disagree with E J's point there.
BROOKS: No. I debated - could anybody possibly think that I was making an equivalency between speech codes and killing when I was writing the column? I talked with my assistant about that, and we decided nobody could possibly make that connection.
BLOCK: Well, you were wrong.
BROOKS: I was wrong. I was wrong. I think it's patently obvious. But, you know, it's just a question of - we have this - you know, there are new phrases being invented - micro-aggressions - things that are just not tolerated on campuses, speakers that are not asked to speak there, professors who are fired because they teach the Catholic teaching on homosexuality. There are other professors fired because they write tweets that are hostile to the NRA. We've become intolerant of offensive people. And if we're going to say I'm Charlie Hebdo then we should be tolerant of offensive people. We should give them as much legal attitude to speak as they want at the same time as, socially, we give some people more respect than other people.
DIONNE: And I just want to say I think we should debate what happened in Paris, which I think is essentially un-debatable. You cannot shoot people because you don't like what they print or the cartoons you draw. Separate that from an argument that we will continue to have about what should happen on college campuses.
BLOCK: Well, apart from the horror of the attacks themselves and the discussion about free speech and the right to provoke that we've been having, the killings do, once again, highlight deep, global concerns about the radicalization of Muslims in the West. David, do you think we have any new insights from what happened this week?
BROOKS: Well, I think we have insights to come. As I say, it reminds you of what you believe in, that we believe in pluralism, that we believe in democracy. We believe in respect for people of all faiths. We're hostile to anti-Semitism and racism. And, of course, most Muslims believe that. But there is jihadism tin the world and we've been fighting a struggle against jihadism for, you know, a couple of decades now. I think what's curious to see is how it shifts debates. One of those debates will be in France. Will the Le Pen Party become more popular? Will there be more hostility?
BLOCK: The far-right.
BROOKS: The far-right. I don't know the answer to that. Will we have a new debate about the NSA? You know, there's going to be - we're going try to investigate whether this could have been prevented and whether some of the techniques the NSA uses to intercept communications could have been effective in that. We've seen some of the overreach of the NSA. But, now, frankly, we're reminded why the NSA does what it does.
BLOCK: E J, what about that? The possible refocusing on counterterrorism shifting in the debate.
DIONNE: Well, we apparently had some information on these folks already in our files. And I do think that the NSA debate will probably be reopened to some degree and that we will be watching what's happening to the far-right in France. What scares me is that it's much easier to engage in this kind of murder than it is to launch a gigantic terrorist attack. And if we are in for more episodes like this, which, sadly, are much easier to organize, I think that is a very scary thing.
BLOCK: I want to talk with you a bit about the new Congress. Today, the House of Representatives did with the Republican leadership had pledged to do as their first order of business - pass a bill approving construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. The Senate is going to be starting debate next week. The president has said he will veto. David, how do you see this playing out? Where is this headed?
BROOKS: Nowhere. As far as I understand, with oil prices anywhere like they are now, the Keystone Pipeline will not be built. It doesn't matter what Congress votes. The economics just don't favor it. So we're having a vicious debate over a completely symbolic matter. It's not the first time we've been involved in this.
BLOCK: Will not be built - they've sunk billions into this pipeline already. Do you really think that they would say, forget it? We're going to keep it on rail and trail - rail and trains- rail and trucks, sorry.
DIONNE: Some of it does depend on what happens to gas prices. I am struck by the fact that if President Obama vetoes this, as he says he will if it goes through the Senate, he has enough votes in the house to sustain his veto. They cannot override the veto. And, you know, but I think you are seeing a series of fights set up because you not only have the Republicans doing this on an issue which is heavily symbolic, I agree, even though it has some specific connection to global warming, but the Republicans today also unveiled their response to President Obama on immigration, which an immigration advocate, Frank Sherry, called breathtaking, because they not only try to roll back his recent executive actions, they also go after his actions on behalf of dreamers. And I think this is going to be, in the long-run, a terrible mistake for Republicans and I think they're going to lose some of their own people on that, too.
BLOCK: Well, briefly, to end, we saw House Speaker John Boehner easily survive a conservative challenge to his leadership. Will he be facing as unruly a caucus, David, among Republicans as he has before?
BROOKS: No. The unruly brigades are in diminishment. Their morale is down. I'm sort of struck by what will happen in the Senate. We have a record number of people in the Senate who were members of the house - 53 people. And if they take the matters of the house into the Senate, they can create a real holy terror. The second thing we've learned about people in the South is there are 10 members of the Senate who were born in the 1970, which, if you're my age, is kind of horrifying. It's sort of a young group. And so we have a younger group and probably more polarized group. And so the challenge we should look at is Mitch McConnell's challenge running that body.
BLOCK: OK. Thanks to you both. Have a good weekend.
DIONNE: You too.
BROOKS: Thank you.
BLOCK: David Brooks of the New York Times and E J Dionne of the Washington Post and Brookings Institution.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Bostonians like to call their town the hub of the universe. Well, in 2024, they might have to settle for the less lofty title of Olympic host. Last night, in a surprise move, the United States Olympic Committee chose Boston as its bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics. Boston beat out San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington D.C. And joining me from NPR West is historian and expert on all things Olympics, David Wallechinsky. Welcome to the program once again.
DAVID WALLECHINSKY: Thank you very much.
SIEGEL: One city that lost to Boston here, Los Angeles, has hosted the Summer Olympics twice before. Wouldn't LA have been a much safer choice for the USOC? Why Boston?
WALLECHINSKY: I actually think that Los Angeles would have been a safer bet. Remember that fewer than 100 people are going to vote on which city in the world actually hosts the 2024 Olympics. And people in the IOC - the members have warm feelings about Los Angeles because the 1984 Olympics went well and actually saved the Olympic movement by creating a financial model for future games. I'm not really sure why they went with Boston. It has a good time zone. But, from the international perspective, it's somewhat of an unknown. I mean, it has a great sports reputation, but most of that is irrelevant on the international level. If you're from Africa, Asia, even Europe, you're not going to really know about the Patriots or, you know, the Red Sox.
SIEGEL: Even the Red Sox, yes (laughter).
WALLECHINSKY: Yeah, you're not going to know about the Red Sox. But you would know about the Celtics and you would definitely know about the Boston Marathon.
SIEGEL: Now, part of the pitch by Boston was that it could produce the games on the cheap. It's a walkable city, lots of public transportation, lots of sports facilities ready to go in the area. But do we know the history of the cost of hosting an Olympics? Can they really be done on the cheap at all?
WALLECHINSKY: Let me see. In one word - no.
SIEGEL: (Laughter) That's the long answer you're saying?
WALLECHINSKY: Yeah. That's the short and the long answer - is no. And also, whatever they tell you it's going to cost, it's going to cost way more. I'm not saying this specifically about Boston, but the entire history of the Olympics is like that.
SIEGEL: What other cities worldwide would be competing before the International Olympic Committee to get the 2024 summer games?
WALLECHINSKY: We know that Rome will be bidding. We know that a German city, either Berlin or Hamburg, will be bidding, probably Paris. There may be others. But the real heavy entries will be from Germany, Paris and Rome.
SIEGEL: What do you think? Recent bids by New York and by Chicago to host Olympics failed pretty miserably during the IOC's final selection process. How would you rate Boston's chances this time around?
WALLECHINSKY: I would say that Boston has an uphill battle. You have to keep in mind that this is not a public election where there's, you know, TV ads and so forth. You're just appealing to, you know, about 95 or 100 people who are going to vote, and it's their quirks, their interests, where they like to have dinner, where they're going to be feted well. And, you know, Boston is going to have a tough sell, you know, to compare to, say, Paris. I will say that what's interesting about the Boston bid is that the official bids don't have to go in until September, and the vote won't be for another two-and-a half years. So Boston has a great chance to define itself. I know that if I were the Boston organizers, one thing I would definitely be pitching is that the very first Olympic champion of the modern games was from Boston. James Connolly was a student at Harvard. He asked permission to leave school to go to these Olympic Games that he'd read about - 1896. He was refused. He dropped out, paid his own way, thanks to money from an athletic club and a bake sale of his local church, and he was the very first Olympic champion, you know, since, you know, the fourth century. And he won what we would now call the triple jump, and there's actually a statue to him in Boston.
SIEGEL: David Wallechinsky, thanks a lot.
WALLECHINSKY: Thank you.
SIEGEL: That's writer David Wallechinsky, who is president of the International Society of Olympic Historians.
ROBET SIEGEL, HOST:
Former CIA employee Jeffrey Sterling goes to trial next week on charges that he violated his oath and leaked classified information to New York Times reporter James Risen. Up to this point, Sterling's legal plight had been largely overshadowed by Risen's First Amendment arguments. But there's news on that score. It now seems that Risen will not be called to testify as a witness by the prosecution. NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson is here with us in the studio to talk about the case. And first, who is Jeffrey Sterling, and what do prosecutors say he did to broke the law?
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Robert, Jeffrey Sterling is a former CIA worker who once sued the agency for employment discrimination, and prosecutors say he leaked information on an operation targeting Iran's nuclear capabilities and some other classified material to Jim Risen. Risen's a reporter at the Times, and he put some of that material in his book, called "State Of War." That book wound up embarrassing the CIA because it describes some of the operations it undertook as ham-fisted. And now Jeff Sterling faces several charges of unauthorized disclosure of defense information. The law in question here is the 1917 Espionage Act. Sterling could spend dozens and dozens of years, if he's convicted, behind bars.
SIEGEL: This case has been kicking around the courts for years. Why is it taking so long?
JOHNSON: Largely because of the legal fight over a prosecutor's decision to subpoena testimony from Jim Risen, the New York Times reporter. That decision was initially approved by the Justice Department in the Bush years, and then President Obama's administration reapproved it. The fight went all the way up to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which sided with Justice. And the the Supreme Court refused to hear the dispute. That took years. Groups, including Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, have backed Risen all the way.
SIEGEL: They've been saying that he should not be compelled to testify against the source. But now comes today's news. There's word that the prosecutors have decided not to call James Risen.
JOHNSON: Robert, Politico is reporting the Justice Department decided not to force Risen to testify. Earlier this week, in front of the judge but not the jury, they did a test run of his testimony. And it went pretty rocky, Robert. Risen only very reluctantly confirmed basic details about the case, and he said explicitly on the stand he did not want to add to the mosaic prosecutors may be trying to build to convict Jeff Sterling. That said, Robert, Risen still could be called by defense lawyers for Jeff Sterling in the course of the trial.
SIEGEL: There is a wider significance here than just this one case - a question of press freedom and the First Amendment.
JOHNSON: Yeah, the appeals court - the Federal Appeals Court found no reporter's privilege here. And President Obama has pursued more of these criminal leak indictments than any of his predecessors. But the White House says it supports some kind of media shield law to give reporters some protection and their sources. Nothing's got the approval of Congress so far, though, because it's really hard to define in this age of blogging and tweeting who counts as a reporter.
In the meantime, the Justice Department has slightly adjusted its guidelines. It now requires higher levels of approval at DOJ before subpoenaing reporters.
SIEGEL: Is there any chance that there could be a plea deal in this case in the next few days?
JOHNSON: Never say never, but I'm told both sides are light-years apart. The CIA and Justice take information leaks of this kind of status very seriously. And for Jeff Sterling, this has become a referendum on his integrity and a manner of principle. He's preparing to argue someone else - maybe someone on Capitol Hill with access to this information - was actually responsible for the leak.
SIEGEL: Thank you, Carrie.
JOHNSON: You're welcome.
SIEGEL: That's NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
More now on the fast-moving and chaotic day in France. A nationwide manhunt for two brothers suspected of this week's attack on the satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, ended with the death of the two men. A hostage they were holding was freed. A second related incident ended nearly simultaneously. A gunman holding hostages in a kosher supermarket was killed when police stormed the store. Four hostages also died. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley joins us now from Paris. And let's take these two hostage situations one at a time. Eleanor, first, the two gunmen - brothers who were being sought for carrying out that attack on Charlie Hebdo - what led up to their deaths?
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: Well, this morning they tried to steal a car from a woman. They did steal her car and she recognized them. She saw guns in their car and she called the police. So a chase ensued, a shootout, and the two brothers hunkered down in a printing shop and they took a hostage. So it wasn't long before just a huge military police - riot police were surrounding the town. It was completely in lockdown and there was a hostage situation and they were try to establish contact. All of France was watching that unfold on television.At about on 1 p.m., another shootout in the east of Paris and it turns out to be the person who shot a policewoman woman dead yesterday. He took five hostages in a kosher grocery store - a supermarket - in Paris. So simultaneously we're watching on television split screens riot police in rural lanes and urban streets and, you know, locking down the perimeter. People were just in a state of shock. And then the news media was reporting that the situation were linked because the men knew each other from years ago - a jihad ring in Paris where they were sending fighters to Iraq.
BLOCK: And, as we mentioned, both incidents ended with police storming each of these facilities where the brothers and their associate had taken hostages.
BEARDSLEY: Absolutely. And I was out at the Paris Place in the east of Paris in Vincennes and we just - we heard the stun grenades go off - boom, boom. It sounded like bombs and you knew something was happening. And all of a sudden there were ambulances coming out of that blocked-off avenue. And, you know, now I've seen the footage of it. But there were simultaneously raids at the same time. They went in in the little rural village in to the printing shop and the kosher grocery store and it was over in a matter of minutes.
BLOCK: And do we know, Eleanor - the four hostages who were killed in that kosher grocery store - do we know how they died?
BEARDSLEY: I don't know anything about that yet, and there will be a lot of things - answers to questions coming out in the next few days and weeks I imagine, but no news about that yet.
BLOCK: We are learning more, Eleanor, about the background of these men - their connections and their motivations.
BEARDSLEY: Yea, absolutely. We've been hearing about Cherif Kouachi, who was 32 years old, he was the younger brother. He had a criminal record. He served 18 months in jail. He was involved in this jihad ring in the north of Paris in, like, 2005 to eight, and he spent some time in jail. What we didn't know until actually this morning was that the older brother, Said Kouachi, had spent time in Yemen. And that was confirmed by U.S. officials who also confirmed that both men were on a U.S. no-fly list.
BLOCK: And, Eleanor, worth mentioning that there is one suspect still being sought - a woman who was married to or partnered with one of the men killed today.
BEARDSLEY: Absolutely, and apparently she's gotten away. And how you can get out of a situation like that is anybody's guess.
BLOCK: OK - NPR's Eleanor Beardsley in Paris. Eleanor, thanks.
BEARDSLEY: Thank you, Melissa.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Both of the Kouachi brothers had been known to authorities before Wednesday's attack. In 2005, Charif Kouachi had been arrested and served prison time for trying to join extremist fighters in Iraq. He was part of a terrorist cell called the Buttes-Chaumont network, started by a charismatic janitor with ties to North African militants. Jean-Charles Brisard is Paris-based security and terrorism analyst. He spoke to us earlier about that group.
JEAN-CHARLES BRISARD: The Buttes-Chaumont cell in the 19 Square Terrace was a foreign fighters facilitating network designed to recruit and make individuals travel to the conflict zone in Iraq at the time of the first war in Iraq in 2004 and 2005. And the cell members were arrested in 2005.
SIEGEL: Mr. Brisard, the obvious question is - these people were not only known to police, they were known to journalists. They'd been figures pretty well known for going on 10 years. Were they either under adequate surveillance or had they served adequately long sentences for what they'd done? Why were they able to do what they did?
BRISARD: Most of these individuals were condemned and they served a term. So there was nothing, after they were jailed, that we could do against them judicially. Now, after they served their terms, they were put under surveillance. But to put someone under surveillance you need two things. First, you need a good reason, evidence or information leading you to believe that an individual could turn himself radicalized or could become involved in a violent act. It was not the case at the time. And the second thing - you need resources. The problem is to follow one single man on a 24-hour basis, you need 25 agents. Today, we're facing an unprecedented terrorist threat in France, due to the fact that more than 1,200 French citizens have traveled, since 2012, to the Syrian and Iraqi border in the conflict zone.
SIEGEL: Do you think that a great many of the French citizens who have either gone to Iraq or Syria or perhaps, as appears to have been the case here, gone to Yemen to be trained? Do you think that a great many of them are organized into small cells, or are these merely random combinations of acquaintances and people who served in jail together?
BRISARD: You have, really, a combination of both threats. In this particular case in France today, we had people that were already hard-lined, convicted several times already for some of them. And so they were basically the conventional terrorist that we knew in the years between 1980 and 2000. And now we have a new situation with the returnings from the conflict in Syria and Iraq acting more randomly, more in an individual way. We've seen that active, for example, in Australia, in Canada or in the United States. This is a totally different threat.
SIEGEL: Just one other question, Mr. Brisard. How do you understand the appeal of this kind of radical Islam to someone like Charif Kouachi, born in France, raised there and ultimately killed by police for an act of terror? What was the attraction do you think?
BRISARD: We have individuals in France - and this is due to the social and economy crisis - we have individuals in the crisis of identity. Religion is a pretext. It's attractive because it makes you believe that you can become someone, become a fighter, become known, become a hero. This is, unfortunately, something that is becoming attractive to small parts of the population, but still a larger number than what we've ever experienced in the past.
SIEGEL: Jean-Charles Brisard, thank you very much for talking with us today.
BRISARD: Thank you.
SIEGEL: Mr. Brisard is based in Paris where he is a consultant and an expert on terrorism and security.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
As promised, the House today passed legislation to approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline. The Senate is expected to take up the issue in coming weeks. President Obama has threatened a veto. Also today, one of the reasons the president has cited to delay a decision has been resolved for now. That was a legal challenge over the route the pipeline would take through Nebraska. NPR's Jeff Brady begins our coverage.
JEFF BRADY, BYLINE: Keystone XL supporters won before the Nebraska Supreme Court today, but it wasn't a simple victory. The big legal question was over a state law that gave Nebraska's governor power to approve the pipeline route. Opponents argue the law violated Nebraska's Constitution. Four of the justices, a majority, actually sided with pipeline opponents, but they needed just one more for a super-majority to rule the law unconstitutional. So the ruling was a victory for TransCanada, the company that wants to build the pipeline. One of the Nebraska landowners who was party to the suit, Randy Thompson, was clearly frustrated.
RANDY THOMPSON: You know, it's time for the president to put an end to this damn thing.
BRADY: Opponents want President Obama to block the pipeline, which would transport crude from Alberta's tar sands down to the U.S. Gulf Coast. They don't like that producing the oil emits more pollution than traditional drilling and that the route through Nebraska passes over an underground aquifer that farmers rely on for irrigation. Jane Kleeb, with the group Bold Nebraska, says opponents will continue their campaign.
JANE KLEEB: Obviously we have a bloody nose this morning, but we are not down for the count. We will continue to stand up and fight this risky route.
BRADY: That could include protest or even even another legal challenge over the pipeline route. TransCanada says it's prepared for whatever legal or policy battles come next and remains committed to building the pipeline. The company first sought approval for it in 2008. A lot has changed in the oil market since then, and some have questioned whether it's still needed. TransCanada President and CEO Russ Girling says it is. He says not one of the companies with contracts to use the pipeline has said they don't want it any longer.
RUSS GIRLING: To the extent that any of those customers do want to leave their contracts, we have other customers waiting to take over those contracts if they want out.
BRADY: Girling says lower crude prices make the pipeline even more valuable to oil producers in Canada. He says shipping oil by pipeline is cheaper than other alternatives such as trains. Opponents counter that, without a pipeline, the crude becomes unprofitable. They think companies will choose to leave the tar sands crude in the ground instead, an outcome that those opponents would prefer. The State Department put the pipeline review process on hold because of the Nebraska case. Now, spokesperson Jen Psaki says that determination of whether the pipeline is in the national interest can resume, though she wouldn't offer a timeline for when it would be completed.
JEN PSAKI: We certainly understand the interest - I guess I'll put it that way - from both opponents and supporters of the Keystone Pipeline, but we have a responsibility to see the process through. It was written in a certain way, so that's what we're doing at the State Department.
BRADY: If the Keystone XL pipeline does eventually get approved, TransCanada says it will need two summers to finish construction. Jeff Brady, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
I'm joined now by Attorney Brian Jorde. He represents the Nebraska landowners who've been challenging Keystone XL. Mr. Jorde, welcome.
BRIAN JORDE: Thank you. Happy to be here.
BLOCK: And we just heard the Nebraska Supreme Court ruling today described as a victory for TransCanada. You don't see it as a victory for TransCanada. Why not?
JORDE: Well, in fact, it's the worst possible outcome for TransCanada. Three of the four judges that could have decided the case once and for all on the merits chose essentially to put the case on a procedural issue of standing, therefore opening up the door unfortunately for more delays until we can sort out whether or not the governor of Nebraska can actually give eminent domain powers to a foreign company.
BLOCK: At the same time, it sounds like TransCanada is quite pleased by what happened in Nebraska today.
JORDE: Well, TransCanada is and has been focused solely on PR and that's what they've been doing and they're very good at it and they've got plenty of money to throw around. It's their job to spin this in the best light. It's my job to tell our clients what it actually is and move forward without any care for headlines or anyone else's misunderstanding of the facts.
BLOCK: You're saying that you wouldn't consider this a loss in State Supreme Court but then that effect is that the legislative bill that passed in Nebraska approving this route does stand because of what the court did.
JORDE: As of the time of this conversation, yes, because there's not a case challenging it now. So the essence of what happened today is the worst possible perfect storm for TransCanada because had the Supreme Court - all seven - made a ruling whether for or against us, there would've been clarity.
BLOCK: Is part of the problem here that because the exact route of the pipeline is not known, it's going to be hard for you to find plaintiffs who can say, yes, this pipeline will go directly across my land? I do have standing. I am affected.
JORDE: It's actually going to be surprisingly simple now, you know. We filed this case in 2012. But now, TransCanada is getting very close, according to them, threatening eminent domain action and I'm sure we'll start seeing that and obviously, if that occurs, it'll be very clear who's affected directly by this.
BLOCK: Mr. Jorde, this Keystone XL pipeline has been studied for six years now. A lot of polls show that most Americans say Keystone XL should be built. I believe most Nebraskans polled have said that as well. Why shouldn't this pipeline move forward?
JORDE: Well, first of all, our lawsuit isn't about whether or not it should move forward. It's about whether or not a governor unilaterally should give a foreign corporation or be able to give them the power to take land from Nebraskans. We don't believe the governor, a political position, standing alone should have that type of power.That's why we're fighting it. Environmentalists will give you all the data. You can go to the gas station and see it certainly isn't affecting gas prices. The jobs' numbers have been completely overblown. It's not in our nation's interest. It sends a foreign product through a foreign-owned pipeline through tax-free ports for distribution overseas to foreign markets. It's really a farce. The voters are for it because they don't understand it. It's nuance and all they hear is, you know, American job support, American and North American energy independence. Those are all lies. They're all complete lies. And hopefully, part of the work we've done will eliminate that.
BLOCK: Well, when you meet with your clients, what's your message to them?
JORDE: Well, you know, I mean, in some way if they're against this project having clarity, congratulations. You've got potentially another year or two of no clear decision in Nebraska. Nebraska is completely unaffected by anything President Obama does or anything that Congress does because of the state law issue of which they have no control. So regardless of what happens either today or this week or next month, on a federal level, it's completely meaningless in terms of whether or not a route can be valid within the state of Nebraska. So for those hoping for a delay, congratulations. You've just got an invitation for a huge delay.
BLOCK: Brian Jorde is an attorney. He represents Nebraska landowners who've been challenging the Keystone XL pipeline. Mr. Jorde, thank you.
JORDE: Thank you so much.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
This is NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
As we've been reporting all week, William Bratton is a man in the middle of a bitter argument in New York City. On one side, the officers of the New York Police Department, of which he is commissioner. On the other side, the mayor who brought him back to New York City for his second stint as police commissioner there, Mayor Bill de Blasio. We've been hearing a lot about William Bratton here, and now we're going to hear from him. Commissioner, welcome to the program.
COMMISSIONER WILLIAM BRATTON: It's great to be with you. Thank you.
SIEGEL: First question. This week, the head of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, Patrick Lynch, denied that there is a slowdown or rulebook protest by the NYPD. You said Monday you'd look into it. A 90 percent decline in criminal summonses that have been issued. Is there a police protest, a job action, now underway or isn't there?
BRATTON: There is. We've had the opportunity over several days now to take a close look at the numbers and we are quite clearly - or were in a slowdown. It is being corrected. We've been taking management initiatives to identify where it's occurring, when it's occurring. I think the officers themselves have on their own been beginning to return to normal patterns of work. So we're coming out of what was a pretty widespread stoppage of certain types of activity.
SIEGEL: Have you identified or in any way disciplined leaders of that action?
BRATTON: No. The approach we've been taking is been measured and I think that it is beginning to work. I think the union leadership also have been indicating to their members that it is time to get back to more normal patterns of performance.
SIEGEL: But just to be clear, when the head of the PBA said here that the drop-off had to do with the fact that there were no more solo foot patrols or no solo patrol cars because of the murders of officers Ramos and Liu. You're saying that was not the case. There actually was a grassroots slow down.
BRATTON: That would be one factor in terms of the decline of some of the numbers. But it would in no way influence significantly the overall drop-off of activity. We did double up traffic enforcement agents who normally work by themselves so that in and of itself would reduce the number of summonses, parking summonses. But overall, there were just a lot of officers who were not performing to their normal level.
SIEGEL: How soon would you expect to see things back to normal?
BRATTON: We are already starting to see that. I had a meeting with my management leadership team this morning, precinct and district commanders. This has not impacted at all on our crime reduction. So the lack of discretionary activity on the part of officers, particularly for minor types of so-called quality-of-life offenses, or our crime reduction efforts.
SIEGEL: Of course, some critics would say that implies that there's perhaps far too many summonses being written for quality-of-life offenses.
BRATTON: Thank you for raising that. I'm sorry that we're going to be back to broken windows enforcement. We can step away from quality-of-life enforcement for a period of time, but the vast majority of our quality-of-life enforcement is citizens asking us to come to deal with the aggressive beggar, the prostitute, the marijuana smokers in their hallways. So...
SIEGEL: You're obviously unshaken in your confidence in broken windows.
BRATTON: Oh, having been the architect...
SIEGEL: Yeah.
BRATTON: ...Of it in 1994 here and having been the architect of it in Los Angeles in 2002, I think I have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't work. So the advocates that are advocating that it's racist, that it's unfair, I'm sorry. When properly directed and controlled, it is none of those things.
SIEGEL: But Commissioner Bratton, did the death of Eric Garner in Staten Island at police hands over selling loosies - loose cigarettes - did that incident give you any pause about what may have been an overly zealous crackdown on a crime but a petty crime?
BRATTON: I'm sorry that crime when multiplied is a loss of tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars of tax revenue to the state of New York, money that can be used for better schools, better hospitals, better police protection. So we need to move beyond the single act of - the selling of loosies sounds so - why do we even bother? Well, why do we even bother with a prostitute in the corner? Because in the aggregate...
(CROSSTALK)
SIEGEL: It isn't just why don't you bother, many people would understand why you phone in a complaint and why the police bother. The question is how can that reach a point of physically manhandling somebody? I mean, isn't the summons enough in that case?
BRATTON: Look, I'm not going to get into the particulars of that case because I'll ultimately be making a disciplinary case, but life would be so much easier if people didn't resist the police in the first place and there would not be altercations. Life would be so much easier in the first case if people didn't engage in activity that resulted in other citizens calling, complaining about their activity. So in terms of that particular case, I can't speak to it. But on the larger issue, we will continue to go where we're called to go and we will continue to look at the totality of offenses rather than the singular offense.
SIEGEL: As you've acknowledged, African-American men of all classes, all levels of education and income relate a sense of being treated far more suspiciously and far more roughly than they believe white men are treated by police. Can one acknowledge that sentiment and talk about it without angering police to the point of protest?
BRATTON: Actually, by narrowly defining it to police - its a fact of life in American society. It's not just police, it's storeowners. And African-Americans will tell you that, that when they walk into a store...
SIEGEL: But the store owners don't work for me. The store owners aren't paid by the taxpayers. The police are.
BRATTON: No, but we're talking about a much more complex, larger national issue. Don't go blaming the police. I'm sorry, we're not going to be the whipping boy, if you will, for this issue in America.
SIEGEL: Well, Commissioner William Bratton of the New York Police Department, thank you very much for talking with us.
BRATTON: It's always a pleasure to be with you. Thank you.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
When Joe Randazzo heard about Wednesday's attack on the French satirical weekly Charlie Hedbo, it hit close to home. He's the former editor of The Onion. He's been thinking about what it means for his colleagues and the rest of us, and he sent us this commentary.
JOE RANDAZZO: When I was editor there, the only person manning The Onion's front entrance was our petite, tattooed office manager, Jesse. We used to joke that she was the only thing standing between us and some heavily armed radicals, should any ever become enraged by something we put in print. Now, that joke makes me feel sick to my stomach. 12 people were murdered, apparently for doing the very thing The Onion does - satire. I admit it scares me. This is radical ideology taken to an abhorrent new low. An attack, ultimately, on what? An idea?You can't kill an idea by murdering innocent people, though you can nudge it toward suicide. Even in the most repressive medieval kingdoms, the need for a court jester was understood, the one guy allowed to tell the truth through laughter. It is, in many ways, the most powerful form of free speech because it is aimed at those in power or those who spread hate. Satire is the canary in the coal mine, a cultural thermometer. It has to push, push, push the boundaries of society to see how much it's grown. In America, free speech is so important, the men who wrote the Bill of Rights put it first, but they followed it up with our right to bear arms. To me, that's always been a pretty strong message. But in this state of widespread social change, we need to make sure that the ideal of the Second Amendment never, ever trumps the power of the first.Extremists don't speak for Islam any more than the Westborough Baptist Church speaks for Christianity, but the threat to freedom is real, and it comes from within. We cannot, should not police our own thoughts or the thoughts of our fellow citizens. The First Amendment does not just protect our free speech, it protects all expression, including religion. An ideal worth dying for? I think it is. But should we have to pay for it with blood? I pray to God not. And it doesn't matter that I don't quite know how to believe in God, this week I'm praying anywhere.
BLOCK: That's Joe Randazzo. He's an author and comedian and former editor of The Onion. A longer version of this essay first appeared on msnbc.com.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
We try not to bore you with arcane rules from Capitol Hill, but this one could really change the playing field. Congressional budget watchdogs are changing the way they keep score. The new Republican Congress has ordered scorekeepers to consider broader economic effects when measuring the cost of major new tax and spending legislation. We've asked NPR's Scott Horsley to explain this with a little help from the Wayback Machine.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: The new rule seems straightforward enough. Before bean-counters in the Congressional Budget Office put a price tag on a big piece of legislation, they should try to predict how it would affect the overall economy. For example, if cutting taxes leads to faster economic growth, and that growth puts more money in the government's coffers, the forecast should reflect that. Critics complain they've seen this movie before.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF")
BEN STEIN: (As economics teacher) Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? The Laffer curve.
HORSLEY: Movie actor Ben Stein, whose father, by the way, was a White House economist in the Nixon administration, took apart this supply-side logic back in the 1980s.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF")
STEIN: (As economics teacher) This is very controversial. Does anyone know what Vice President George Bush called this in 1980? Voodoo economics.
HORSLEY: Ferris Bueller missed the lesson, but conservatives insist they've learned from it. Scott Hodge of the Tax Foundation concedes the economic benefits of tax cuts may be modest. But, he argues, they're still worth counting.
SCOTT HODGE: Very, very few tax cuts pay for themselves, so to speak. But they do produce enough additional growth to at least lessen the cost of the treasury.
HORSLEY: Hodge says the new Congressional budget yardstick is designed to measure that growth through a process called dynamic scoring.
HODGE: Much like instant replay is really helpful for giving umpires more useful information to make the right call, dynamic scoring is really useful for members of Congress to give them the kind of information so that they can make smarter tax policy.
HORSLEY: But critics complain the new scoring system is more subjective than a simple yardstick and transforms the CBO's forecasters from impartial umpires into something more like the referees in last week's Dallas-Detroit game.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Boy, that was late. Have you ever seen that call picked up that late?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Not at all.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Even a Bears fan has to admit that that was a little suspect.
(APPLAUSE)
HORSLEY: The Obama administration is more than a little suspicious of what the new Republican Congress is trying to do. White House economist Jason Furman says, while there's always a certain amount of guesswork in predicting the cost of legislation, the new scoring system is particularly vulnerable, with little consensus on where the goal lines are or many yards are needed for a first down.
JASON FURMAN: With dynamic scoring, you're opening up the potential for abuse, for arbitrary assumptions and the potential to stack the decks.
HORSLEY: Furman notes when forecasters tried during the Bush administration to predict the economic effects of the president's tax cuts, their forecasts came in all over the map, depending on the assumptions they started with.
FURMAN: And that underscores, number one, that tax cuts aren't some panacea for economic growth, and, number two, that there's a large dose of arbitrariness in any of these estimates.
HORSLEY: Robert Carroll, who worked on tax analysis in the Bush Treasury Department, says CBO forecasters will have to work carefully in using the new yardstick if they want their predictions taken seriously.
ROBERT CARROLL: The devil is in the details. The execution of how it's done does matter quite a lot.
HORSLEY: Or, as Ferris might say, congressional rulemaking moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "FERRIS BUELLER'S DAY OFF")
STEIN: (As economics teacher) Anyone? Anyone?
HORSLEY: Scott Horsley, NPR News, the White House.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
More now on the fast-moving and chaotic day in France. A nationwide manhunt for two brothers suspected of this week's attack on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo ended with the death of the two men. A hostage they were holding was freed. A second related incident ended nearly simultaneously. A gunman holding hostages in a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris was killed when police stormed the store. Four hostages were killed. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports now from Paris.
(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSIONS)
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: France's double hostage-taking drama came to an end with a simultaneous police assault on both the village printing shop, where the Kouachi brothers took a hostage in the morning, and a Paris kosher grocery, where a second gunman had been holding five people since the afternoon.
(SOUNDBITE OF SIREN)
BEARDSLEY: Despite the death of four hostages, there was palpable relief on the streets of Paris at dusk when both the sieges were over. Contan Dupon (ph) lives in the neighborhood near the kosher grocery store, which was locked down by riot police for most of the day.
CONTAN DUPON: I came near the place where it just happened to share my emotions and to make me feel better. And, like, the sentence in French, Je suis Charlie, to show to the world, and - I'm, like, crying. (Laughter). First time in my life, I'm crying in English.
(SOUNDBITE OF UNIDENTIFIED TV SHOW)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: Most of France seemed to be watching the two hostage situations unfold on television. Split screens showed black-clad riot police preparing for assaults in both rural lanes and urban streets. France mobilized an unprecedented 88,000 police and military for the manhunt, which began three days ago when brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi shot 10 journalists and two police officers at the headquarters of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Speaking on national television tonight, President Francois Holland congratulated the nation's police and security forces for neutralizing the terrorists and saving lives. He told the French that remaining united was their best weapon against terrorism.
As the manhunt went on this week, France learned a lot about the Kouachi brothers. Thirty-two-year-old Cherif served 18 months in jail for being involved in a Paris jihadist ring sending fighters to Iraq. U.S. officials reveal that older brother Said had been in Yemen. Both men were on a U.S. no-fly list.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CHERIF KOUACHI: (Foreign language spoken).
BEARDSLEY: This evening after it was all over, a French radio station aired an interview with Cherif Kouachi recorded during the siege that the French police have verified as authentic.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KOUACHI: (Foreign language spoken).
BEARDSLEY: "I was sent by al-Qaida in Yemen," says Kouachi.
It's the first claim of responsibility for the attacks. French media, quoting police sources, say the two hostage situations were linked, that the gunman who seized the kosher grocery store and the Kouachi brothers knew each other and were part of the same jihadist network broken up by police 10 years ago.
(SOUNDBITE OF SIREN)
BEARDSLEY: Earlier today, Nigerian immigrant Ochi Egim (ph) stood by the police blockade near the kosher supermarket as the drama unfolded. Egim says he cannot understand the motivation of the gunmen.
OCHI EGIM: These boys, these terrorists, you know, they were born here; they grew up here; they went to school here. And they don't know what they want. So they don't belong to nowhere, and they're against everybody.
BEARDSLEY: The world has looked on in horror at the events in France this week. On Sunday, world leaders will come to Paris and march with President Hollande to show their solidarity with his country. Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Jury selection is underway this week for the Boston Marathon bombing trial, and no cameras are allowed in the courtroom. As with some of this nation's biggest trials, for a visual account, we'll have to rely on the work of courtroom illustrators. Do you ever wonder who the artists are behind those drawings? Behind every sketch, there's a story. Here's NPR's Daniel Hajek.
DANIEL HAJEK, BYLINE: Pick a high-profile case in Los Angeles that's happened over the past 25 years. Chances are freelance illustrator Mona Shafer-Edwards was there to draw it.
MONA SHAFER-EDWARDS: It goes from celebrity stuff, which is kind of silly and crazy, to some really, really serious and terrible things that happen.
HAJEK: Inside her lively home studio, next to a birdcage and a radio playing classical music, Shafer-Edwards has stacks of folders on a desk overflowing with images of courtroom scenes. These are drawings of former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling. And lining the walls, she's framed her most memorable courtroom scenes.
SHAFER-EDWARDS: So these are the history of 25 years worth of work...
HAJEK: From Arnold Schwarzenegger to Mel Gibson.
SHAFER-EDWARDS: I've done everything from OJ, one and two, Rodney King. I've done Paris Hilton, Rihanna.
HAJEK: And Lindsay Lohan's probation hearing back in 2010.
SHAFER-EDWARDS: Oh, Lindsay Lohan. With the Christian Louboutin shoes.
HAJEK: A French designer - very expensive, known for shoes with bright-red souls.
SHAFER-EDWARDS: Drew her turning around as she was being handcuffed, and I saw the flash of the soul of her shoe, and I knew that would be the sketch of the day. And apparently that sketch went around the universe, so it was everywhere.
HAJEK: Shafer-Edwards uses alcohol-based markers to sketch out courtroom scenes on 9x12 pad of paper - no pencils to outline, no erasers.
SHAFER-EDWARDS: I love the stress. I love the immediacy, the spontaneity. There is a buzz. There is this electricity that goes on.
HAJEK: And as the world watches, Shafer-Edwards delivers stunning scenes from some of the most high-profile cases.
SHAFER-EDWARDS: In one case, there was a defendant who lunged toward the judge, and I was there. And you get those kind of sketches, or an outburst from a family member. Those are the priceless memories of trials.
HAJEK: There's also the more chilling memories, like the time she was drawing James "Whitey" Bulger, the notorious gangster.
SHAFER-EDWARDS: And he looked at me and smiled and wagged his finger at me to say, don't draw me. And he was smiling when he was doing it, so he was warning me. But he was in custody and I was not, so I wasn't afraid. My job is to draw what I see, and that's what I saw, so I drew it.
HAJEK: Those illustrations pick up what she calls the soul of a case - something a camera could never capture.
SHAFER-EDWARDS: We're surrounded by 21st-century technology. And here I come in, and I'm still necessary. I'm still relevant. And every year, I think this is the swansong. This is the end of my career. And then something happens where a judge, in his brilliance or her brilliance, decide that they don't want the camera in there. Or the witnesses don't want to be photographed.
HAJEK: And so Mona Shafer-Edwards reports to the courthouse with pen and paper, the eyes of the court room, ready to sketch the next big case. Daniel Hajek, NPR News.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
In 1991, a World Wildlife Fund investigator named J.A. Mills was undercover in China, looking into treatment of bears.
J.A. MILLS: I mainly pretended that I was a student of traditional Chinese medicine to try to figure out not only what was being traded but why it was being traded.
RATH: Around then, rumors of a tiger farm surfaced, and Mills was sent to investigate. She uncovered China's first tiger farm, complete with a paper ledger filled with orders for tiger bone, used for traditional remedies and luxury wine. Today, there are many more tiger farms in China. J.A. Mills tells the story in her new book "Blood Of The Tiger." She says that while China banned the trade of tiger bone in 1993, today, demand for tiger parts still thrives. And there are 6,000 tigers on farms in the country.
MILLS: The problem with tiger farming is that it stimulates demand for tiger products, which in turn stimulates poaching of wild tigers because tiger products from wild tigers are considered superior, more prestigious and exponentially more valuable. Some people are even buying tiger products as an investment, much as they would, say, rare art or antique jewelry. And if even a tiny fraction of China's 1.4 billion people seek wild tiger products, we could lose the last 3,000 wild tigers before we know it.
RATH: You write in the book - and it sounds confusing on the face of it - that - something that I wasn't aware of - that traditional Chinese medicine - a lot of the authorities have actually kind of sworn off using tiger products, but there's still this trade. What's going on? What's driving it now?
MILLS: This is a very important point. A tiger farm is basically a feed lot for tigers where they're bred like cattle for their parts to make luxury goods such as tiger bone wine and tiger skin rugs. This is about wealth, not health. Traditional Chinese medicine no longer uses or wants to use tiger bone. And polls repeatedly show that most Chinese people don't want tiger products or tiger farming. This is about a handful of investors poised to launch a multibillion-dollar-a-year luxury goods market. This is about products looking for a market rather than a market looking for products.
RATH: I'm trying to understand also how you farm an animal that's not domesticated. How are these tigers kept?
MILLS: Well, that's one of the things that really disturbs people who have seen wild tigers or know wild tigers well. Tigers in the wild are solitary, of course, except when they have - when they're mothers with cubs. These tigers are basically kept in cages. They are speed-bred. Cubs are taken from their mothers almost right after birth so the mothers can breed again. And the males run around in packs. It's something you would never ever see in the wild.
RATH: And of the trade in tiger parts right now, do we have of an idea of how much of that is farmed tigers versus ones that are poached from the wild?
MILLS: No. It's very difficult to get a handle on it. And part of the reason it is so difficult is that China's State Forestry Administration, which is in charge of the farms, is very opaque at what is going on. In fact, there has been a gradual reopening of trade despite the ban. And everyone from the United Nations to World Wildlife Fund to me personally have been trying to figure out, you know, what exactly is going on and what it means. And we just don't know. And without a DNA database, there's just no way we can tell what's from a farm and what's from the wild.
RATH: Your book and your work - it doesn't just cover what's happened with wild tigers. You talk about elephants and rhinos. And I just want to ask you because I have the opportunity here - you've been working on this for decades - do you feel confident that in 100 years, there will be wild tigers and wild elephants?
MILLS: Well, I will say that the same forces are driving the slaughter of elephants for their ivory and rhinos for their horn. It all involves organized criminals supplying investors hoping to profit from extinction. Unfortunately, what's happened in the United Nations in the context of the treaty that governs trade - international trade and endangered species - is that everyone's gone silent. So my main worry is that everyone will remain silent and things will continue as they are unless we address this phenomenon that's stimulating demand, primarily within China. We may lose these animals. And so the only thing we can do is to speak out, and that's why I wrote this book.
RATH: That's author and wildlife investigator J.A. Mills. Her book is called "Blood Of The Tiger," and it's out right now. Thank you so much.
MILLS: Thank you, Arun.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
This month, Oregon started covering the cost of reassignment surgery for transgender people on Medicaid. It also covers things like hormone therapy and puberty suppression. Oregon now joins a handful of other states that have recently taken steps to help people with gender dysphoria. It's a controversial move. But as Kristian Foden-Vencil of Oregon Public Broadcasting reports, people in the transgender community are thrilled.
KRISTIAN FODEN-VENCIL, BYLINE: When Alexis Paige was born 26 years ago, as far as doctors and family were concerned, she was a boy. But by 11, she began to grow breasts and wanted to be a girl, making school very difficult.
ALEXIS PAIGE: It kind of culminated in an instance in which I was actually pressed, like, against a wall by someone who groped my breast to see if they were real and wanted to check if I was actually male or female.
FODEN-VENCIL: By, 16 her hips began to spread. She says she always felt different, as if she wasn't in the right body, and it drove her to attempt suicide by riding a bike into oncoming traffic. After a lifetime of suffering, a doctor prescribed her estrogen last year.
PAIGE: Suddenly, for the first time, I had energy. I wasn't feeling sad all the time. I actually stopped getting sick. I stopped feeling sore. This was who I was supposed to be.
FODEN-VENCIL: At that time, Paige had a job and insurance to cover medical expenses. But then, she lost that job and was terrified she'd have to end the therapy. She says knowing the Oregon health plan now covers her hormones if she becomes unemployed again is invaluable.
PAIGE: I know there will be some people who question that and will question whether that's right or question whether it's wrong. And the thing is - so what? I mean, you don't look at someone with cancer and go, oh, your cancer wasn't caused by a genetic reason. It was environmental, so we're not going to treat you.
FODEN-VENCIL: Oregon joins California, Massachusetts and Vermont as states where Medicaid covers medical treatment for gender dysphoria. Washington D.C. also offers coverage. By looking at medical billing data, Oregon estimates at least 175 people will use the coverage this year. But, there are those who question its validity and expense.
SENATOR JEFF KRUSE: To a large degree, I think the jury is still out on these procedures and whether or not they're legitimate.
FODEN-VENCIL: Republican State Senator Jeff Kruse is on Oregon's Senate Health Care Committee. He says gender reassignment procedures are elective and dubious at best. Oregon's Health Evidence Review Commission decided to look into coverage for gender dysphoria last year. Until then, it had been lumped in with conditions like pedophilia and fetishism. Commission director Dr. Ariel Smits says now people who've been suffering for years are getting medical coverage for a real disorder.
ARIEL SMITS: People with gender dysphoria that did not receive treatment had a much higher rate of hospitalizations or ER visits or doctor's visits for depression and anxiety.
FODEN-VENCIL: They also had a higher rate of suicide attempts. Some studies put it at about 30 percent.
SMITS: But folks, when they received the treatment that they felt was adequate for their gender dysphoria, had a almost normal rate of depression and anxiety compared to the general population.
FODEN-VENCIL: Their suicide rate also dropped. But what about the cost? Smits' best estimate is up to $200,000 for the whole state.
SMITS: There's also a possibility it will be less, or even cost savings, because, hopefully, these folks will no longer go into the ER or be hospitalized because of their severe depression or their suicide attempts.
FODEN-VENCIL: While new coverage begins this month, it may take a while to line up all the necessary services and doctors for the transgender therapies to run smoothly. For NPR News, I'm Kristian Foden-Vencil in Portland.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
This week, tech companies showed off their latest and greatest at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Wearable tech like Google Glass has been the hot trend lately, along with ultra-high definition 4K TVs. But is that actually what any of us want? Alan Murray is the editor of Fortune magazine, and he was at the CES this week. Alan, thanks for being with us.
ALAN MURRAY: Great to be here.
RATH: So Fortune actually did a survey of consumers asking them what they want in terms of electronics. And what did you find?
MURRAY: Well, what we found was the number one thing that consumers want is for their batteries to last longer. So...
RATH: Yeah.
MURRAY: ...You know, I have to tell you, I was struck by that poll result as I was walking around the convention center. You have to realize this is like two-and-a-half million square feet of display space with all these drones flying around and these mammoth curved televisions with 4K ultra-high definition and an awful lot of people running around, trying to find power strips so they could plug in their smart phones that had run out of battery juice.
RATH: They're not asking for Google Glass or other wearables or hoverboards. They just want better batteries.
MURRAY: Very little interest in wearables, very little knowledge, frankly, in 4K television.
RATH: Now, when you say very little demand, how little is that? How many people want Google Glass, for instance?
MURRAY: Single digits...
RATH: Wow.
MURRAY: ...Expressed an intention to buy a smart watch or some sort of wearable connected device in the next year. I think the real challenge for Apple in particular, which is coming out with its smart watch in the next years, can they do what they did with the iPod and the iPad with the smart watch? Can they create the demand by introducing something that sounds so exciting and compelling that you feel like even though you didn't previously want one, now you do? But it better have a good battery in it.
(LAUGHTER)
RATH: So do you think that - you're talking about Apple and the iPod - that old Steve Jobs' famous line that people don't know what they want until you show it to them. Do I really want wearables, and I just don't realize it yet?
MURRAY: It could be. I think that's what we'll find out. But, you know, sometimes these things fail. I mean, a great example a few years back, the big thing at the CES show was 3D television. And everybody thought this is going to be the next big thing. And they were pushing them out like mad at Best Buy and all the consumer electronic shows. And it was big flop. People don't want to sit in their living room and wear silly-looking glasses while they're watching TV.
RATH: And Alan, was there anybody at the CES with a magnificent battery display, showing...
MURRAY: No.
RATH: ...Like, some sexy new batteries?
MURRAY: No. I'm sure somewhere in those two-and-a-half million square feet of product there were people selling battery products. But there was not a lot of talk or buzz about the big battery breakthrough. Everyone knows it has to happen. The last thing people want is to have their smart watch become one more thing that has to be plugged in and charged at night or even during the day. I mean, imagine it's two o'clock in the afternoon and your watch suddenly runs out of power. You know, this is a problem waiting to be solved. And I didn't get any sense in my three days at the Consumer Electronics Show that the solution is about to happen.
RATH: That's Alan Murray. He's the editor of Fortune magazine, and he joined us from New York. Alan, thanks very much.
MURRAY: Great to be with you.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
This is the song that bumped Taylor Swift from the number one spot on the Billboard charts - "Uptown Funk." Bruno Mars provides the lead vocals.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "UPTOWN FUNK")
BRUNO MARS: (Singing) This hit, that ice cold. Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold. This one for them hood girls, them good girls -straight masterpieces. Styling, while in...
RATH: "Uptown Funk" is the first single from a new album by British producer, songwriter and musician Mark Ronson. That album, "Uptown Special," is out Tuesday. It pulses with vintage R&B, funk, hip-hop and pop vibes, a mix Ronson has been known for since his days as a New York club DJ in the '90s. Over the years, he's produced Amy Winehouse, Bruno Mars, Naz, the Black Lips and many others. "Uptown Special" is Mark Ronson's fourth album. He joins me from London. Welcome to the program.
MARK RONSON: Hi.
RATH: So I wanted to start off talking about "Uptown Funk," and not just because it's so popular at the moment. I know that Prince used uptown to refer not to a place, but a kind of idea. I'm wondering what uptown means to you.
RONSON: I guess because I came up DJing in hip-hop clubs in New York, uptown had a very specific meaning that was kind of - it was the Bronx, it was Harlem. And uptown is like the hipster neighborhood, like, kind of coming up in Oakland. Uptown is where Mystikal is from, like, you know, the housing area he was from in New Orleans - uptown, as you know, Prince, Minneapolis. It's kind of just means so many cool things and absolutely nothing at the same time. It makes it kind of like the perfect thing to put into a song title.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "UPTOWN FUNK")
MARS: (Singing) I'm too hot, call the police and the fireman. I'm too hot.
RATH: But why do you think this tune has really hit a chord with people?
RONSON: Maybe there's something about hearing dance music played by live humanoid people that's just something that's been missing a bit in music. There were so many times we thought it was good enough, but one of us is like no, it can be better. And we were pushing it, you know, every riff at the bass, every drum fill. I try not to think about it because it's just, like, great, lucky us, amazing.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "UPTOWN FUNK")
MARS: (Singing) Uptown funk you up, uptown funk you up.
RATH: You write these great songs, and you've worked with and produced amazing singers - you know, Bruno Mars, who we were just speaking about, Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen. On this new album, you also have some great new vocal talent. You took a trip through the American South.
RONSON: Yeah, so we wrote this song called "I Can't Lose."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I CAN'T LOSE")
RONSON: I love all the Chaka Khan records from the late '70s. We were thinking, who around would sing that? And Jeff...
RATH: That's Jeff Bhasker you're talking about.
RONSON: Yes. Jeff Bhasker is an amazing producer. He was just, like man, let's just get in the car and drive through the South, and we'll find singers and, we'll call it Mississippi Mission or Church Idol. I mean, this was like a 3:00 a.m. conversation after a few whiskeys, so it sounded, like, a bit ludicrous. So we got to New Orleans, and we rented a van. And we drove up through the South. And we heard this girl Keyone. And it was - as soon as we heard her sing, it really just felt like wow, that's the voice that we are looking for.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I CAN'T LOSE")
KEYONE STARR: (Singing) When I met you last night, baby, and you let me roll the dice. You said I think you're lucky, lady. I hit those numbers all night. I can't lose. I can't lose when I'm around you.
RATH: You have a song on this album with another performer from the American South, although not as much of a kind of in-church feel. I'm talking about the song with Mystikal, "Feel Right."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FEEL RIGHT")
MYSTIKAL: (Rapping) Come on. Come on. I feel right in this mother. I feel good in this mother. My whole hood in this mother. And we going to ride this mother for you.
RATH: How did you get to work with him?
RONSON: So we got to New Orleans, Jeff and I, and we ran into Trombone Shorty, who I know, this incredible jazz musician. So he knew Mystikal, and he said oh, when you all get to Baton Rouge, you should look up Mystikal. I've just called him up. Bruno happened to be there at that time because we were working on "Uptown Funk." I think I must've left Bruno and Mystikal alone for maybe two hours. And they came back with the first verse and the chorus of that song.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FEEL RIGHT")
MYSTIKAL: (Rapping) Don't believe it 'cause I'm saying it. Believe it 'cause I'm telling you. I'm doing the rapping and bussing. Ronson on the scratching and cuttin'. Come on.
RATH: I'm talking with musician and producer Mark Ronson. His new album "Uptown Special" is out on Tuesday. You know, is it my imagination or are producers coming stars these days? I'm thinking about you, Pharrell, AVICII. And then there are, you know, people making electronic dance music who are stars basically for producing. What do you make of that?
RONSON: I'm not sure what happened - that somewhere along the way I get to make these records with my own name, even though I'm not really a singer. You know, when I first put out my song "Valerie" with Amy Winehouse, it really wasn't a hit at all in this country.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "VALERIE")
AMY WINEHOUSE: (Singing) Valerie...
RONSON: Somebody at the label explained to me listen, no one will ever understand in America the Mark Ronson featuring Amy Winehouse thing. Like, it's just never going to fly. And then I think Calvin Harris and these guys kind of broke down the door, even though they're doing such different music than I'm doing. I think it suddenly became a thing that I guess commercial radio was ready for this thing. And so it's great. I make these records because, like, I have a concept and a bunch of song ideas and things. But I need great vocalists, and I need people to help me carry that vision. I couldn't do it all by myself.
RATH: I want to ask you about another song that features a credit that kind of jumped out at me, that's "Crack In The Pearl." It's a song that has lyrics from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon.
RONSON: Yes. Well, Michael wrote kind of my favorite piece of modern fiction - "Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier and Clay." I found out he was doing a book signing a few years ago, so I showed up. He told me that he had liked a piece of music from my last record, and I was so thrilled. When Jeff and I started working on the record last year, I said what do you think if we write - if I write a letter to Michael Chabon and see if he'd be interested in contributing lyrics to this album because, you know, for some reason, clever lyrics only get to be like the domain of, like, the kind of tortured singer with the acoustic guitar that you picture. Like, why can't we put these stories over the groove?
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CRACK IN THE PEARL")
ANDREW WYATT: (Singing) In the back room of the El Mago casino under a portrait of Doris Day. You and I and a pair of C-notes, soft candy betting hard eight.
RONSON: "Crack In The Pearl" was the first lyrics that he actually just sent us over the Internet. And it completely inspired a melody that I never would've written had I not been reading those lyrics off the page. It's an amazing turn of events that, like - it's just - it's something that you could never plan for. You couldn't even dream about.
RATH: That's Mark Ronson. His new album "Uptown Special" is out on Tuesday. Really nice speaking with you. And man, album is just - it's a blast.
RONSON: Thank you so much.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Now we turn to probably the most exciting moment in the history of the PBS program "Antiques Roadshow." Marsha Bemko is the executive producer.
MARSHA BEMKO: In came a woman with a set of baseball cards. And these aren't just any baseball cards. They are from the year 1871-1872 for the Boston Red Stockings, which are today - by the way - today's Atlanta Braves.
RATH: That woman, who has decided to remain anonymous, says her great-great-grandmother had a boarding house in Boston back then. For a time, that's where players from the Boston Red Stockings stayed. Here were the handwritten letters the team sent her.
BEMKO: And among those eleven team members who signed it were - maybe you've heard of him - Albert Spalding. That's the person who ended up starting Spalding Sporting Goods. And the Wright brothers - not the flying Wright brothers, but George and Harry Wright of sports fame are among the signatures on that letter.
RATH: You can hear the excitement in the voice of Leila Dunbar, "Antiques Roadshow" appraiser.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "ANTIQUES ROADSHOW")
LEILA DUNBAR: To have anything with their signatures on it is phenomenal because again, you're talking about the precursor to the National and American leagues.
RATH: While taping, Bemko says she knew this was a huge find.
BEMKO: To see them all in one group like that, none of the experts associated with "Roadshow" have ever seen them all in one place that way.
RATH: And then the big moment. Here's appraiser Leila Dunbar.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "ANTIQUES ROADSHOW")
DUNBAR: I'm going to value this as an archive - everything here. If you're going to insure it...
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Insurance, OK...
DUNBAR: I would ensure it for at least...
RATH: Get ready.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "ANTIQUES ROADSHOW")
DUNBAR: $1 million.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Are you serious? Oh my. Holy smokes.
RATH: Bemko says this sets a record for a sports appraisal on "Antiques Roadshow."
BEMKO: It is a stunning thing to hear. You never get used to it. And I've been producing this show for a long time. We can go for seasons without seeing a seven-figure value. That stratosphere of value, no matter what category you're in, is so rare.
RATH: Even Leila Dunbar is overwhelmed.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "ANTIQUES ROADSHOW")
DUNBAR: It is the greatest archive I have ever had at the Roadshow.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Really?
BEMKO: She is close to tears and those are not fake tears. She is overwhelmed with emotion. The guest, of course, is very overwhelmed with emotion. She thought those cards were going to be worth five, maybe 10 grand, something like that.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "ANTIQUES ROADSHOW")
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Holy smokes.
RATH: Marsha Bemko says the guest plans to keep the million dollar Boston Red Stockings archive in the family.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
France is still reeling from its deadliest terror attack in decades. Seventeen people were killed this week in shootings and hostage-takings across the Paris area. Three suspects in those attacks have been killed, but police continue to search for a 26-year-old woman they describe as the partner of one of the gunmen. Lauren Frayer is in Paris following developments and joins us now. Lauren, what's the mood like in Paris today?
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: Well, there are more police on the streets. Even regular traffic cops seem to be wearing heavier gear. There are increased patrols on public transport, and city squares across Paris have become impromptu memorials. We're seeing candles laid out, pens and pencils strewn on the ground in memory of those slain Charlie Hebdo cartoonists from that satirical magazine. The now famous slogan, je suis Charlie, is everywhere. I saw it in seven different languages in one shop window. Flags are at half-staff. The city's famed Paris Saint-Germain soccer team wore black armbands and held a moment of silence before today's game. We're also prepping for a big march tomorrow. Hundreds of thousands of people are expected, if not more. This is a solidarity march for the victims of these attacks. Public transport is going to be free all day tomorrow.
RATH: We've been hearing reports about attacks on some mosques in France. Have you seen any of that?
FRAYER: That's right. So not personally, but we are hearing those reports. France has Western Europe's largest Muslim community. It's 10 percent of the population here, so people are bracing for backlash. Today, I went to the Grand Mosque in Paris. There's no additional security there. I was able to walk right in and actually talk to the Grand Mufti.
DALIL BOUBAKEUR: It is a criminal action. They are criminal people. They are barbaric people, very bad for Muslim people and with risks of violence against Islam, against Muslims.
FRAYER: That was the Grand Mufti of the Grand Mosque in Paris, Dalil Boubakeur. I also went to Paris' largest synagogue, which, in contrast, was closed and lined with security barriers. The Jewish community has been on edge here because it was a kosher market targeted yesterday where four hostages were killed. And this is apparently the first time since World War II that Paris' Grand Synagogue was closed for the Jewish Sabbath. The policeman outside told me he's part of a unit of police reinforcements that was brought in from southern France. Others have been brought in from elsewhere as well.
RATH: Lauren, are we learning anything more about the suspects in terms of their ties to terror groups and their training?
FRAYER: Yes. There has been a claim of responsibility. A French television station last night aired tape of a phone call that it says it made to one of the suspects, the younger of the two Kouachi brothers. Those are the brothers who police believe were responsible for the Charlie Hebdo killings. This television station claims to have spoken to the suspect before he died on the telephone. They called the building where they were holed - he and his brother were holed up and spoke with the younger of the brothers. The man told the French reporter that he was prepared to die, that he killed in defense of the prophet and that he was sent by Al-Qaeda in Yemen.
RATH: Lauren Frayer in Paris. Lauren, thank you.
FRAYER: You're welcome.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
As we just heard, one of the suspected gunmen in the Paris attacks this week told French media he had been sent by Al-Qaeda in Yemen. New York Times Middle East correspondent Kareem Fahim just finished a month of reporting in that country. He spoke with us from his home base in Cairo, and I asked him what we know about the goals and influence of Al-Qaeda in Yemen.
KAREEM FAHIM: They are trying to impose Islamic state in Yemen. They advocate militancy, including abroad against targets like the United States. They're looking to purge Yemen of western influences as well. And they ebb and flow in terms of their strength, but we've seen changes recently that suggest that they are, again, growing in strength.
RATH: And can you sketch out the new battle lines? It's not just the Yemeni government fighting Al-Qaeda. There's a third player now.
FAHIM: Yes, that's right. The third player in Yemen now is a group called the Houthis. And the Houthis were a rebel movement based in northern Yemen, and they've expanded their influence in the last few months. They took over the Yemeni capital, Sana'a, in September, and their are advance has provoked a violent reaction from Al-Qaeda and from allies who seem concerned about the advance of the Houthis.
RATH: With three groups all fighting each other in the country and these various changing of alliances you're talking about, is there anywhere in Yemen that is stable?
FAHIM: Well, the fighting is not everywhere in Yemen. The fighting is concentrated in several flashpoints, you know, including places where the United States counterterrorism campaign has been very active, especially the missile strikes by drones in various provinces. But then, in the last couple of months, we've also seen this very worrying trend of extremist attacks on what appear to be civilian targets. In the last few weeks alone, there have been several attacks, including one last week that killed up to 40 people in the capital, Sana'a, outside a police academy.
RATH: The United States supports the Yemeni government, considers it a vital partner in the fight against Al-Qaeda. How does the instability in the country right now complicate both the partnership with the U.S. and the fight against Al-Qaeda?
FAHIM: Well, I think the question is absolutely right. I mean, it has complicated that fight. And it's, I think, also leading to questions about the strategy behind the counterterrorism campaign. At the moment, the United States finds itself supporting a president and a government that is growing weaker and weaker because of the turmoil and instability in the country. And the big question is what happens now? You know, I just returned from a month in Yemen. It feels really quite perilous there.
RATH: Kareem Fahim is a Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, and he's just back from reporting in Yemen. Kareem, thanks very much.
FAHIM: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
The cartoonists at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo have become targets of this week's attack, apparently because of their depictions of the prophet Muhammad. Some Muslims find any depictions of the prophet offensive, let alone the sometimes crude drawings in Charlie Hebdo. But not all Muslims feel that way - far from it. Earlier, I spoke with Reza Aslan, a religious scholar and the author of "No God But God: The Origins, Evolution, And Future Of Islam." Reza, welcome to the show.
REZA ASLAN: Thanks for having me.
RATH: I've seen and heard conflicting things when it comes to Muslim sensibilities about depictions of Muhammad. You know, there's this sense that it's forbidden, but I know that I've seen historical depictions from, like, classical India showing the Prophet. So what are the rules?
ASLAN: Well, there are no Koranic prohibitions against depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. And even among the six or so authorized schools of law, there's all kinds of disagreements about whether you can and how you can show the Prophet Muhammad. It's certainly a cultural taboo, but that taboo arose organically and through a long period of time, which is why, precisely as you say, the history of Islam teems with thousands and thousands of images of the Prophet Muhammad from his childhood, various scenes from his biography, all the way, really, to the end of his life. It's a very common thing that we see throughout Islam's history.
RATH: If there are no fixed rules, can you explain the reaction to the Charlie Hebdo cartoons?
ASLAN: Well, partly it has to do with the fact that these cultural taboos have become fixed in the minds of particularly Sunni Muslims who adhere to a puritanical, ultraorthodox brand of Islam. So, for them, any depiction of the Prophet Muhammad is insulting. But let's be clear. These weren't just depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. They were quite deliberately provocative images of the Prophet Muhammad. They were intended to provoke a kind of response, not a violent response, but a kind of negative response from Muslims in Europe. And in many ways, the editors of Charlie Hebdo would say, quite unapologetically, that the purpose of these images is to act as a kind of test for Europe's Muslims. Can you bear to have the Prophet Muhammad caricaturized in this way? If you can't, then you don't belong here.
RATH: Reza, you and I roughly the same age, and I feel like I've seen a change in sensibilities and sensitivities over our lifetimes. I think back to the Salman Rushdie controversy in the late '80s. I had a Pakistani friend who said to me at the time, you can buy "Dante's Inferno" in Karachi, which has Muhammad in the eighth circle of hell with his entrails hanging, and they banned satanic verses. What's going on?
ASLAN: I think that there is a fundamental source to what has become a kind of virus of radicalism across particularly the Sunni Muslim world. And that source is Saudi Arabia. We have to understand that what we are faced with is a ultraorthodox, puritanical strain of Islam that arose in the 18th century - the end of the 18th century in Saudi Arabia, often referred to as Wahhabism, and which became the official religion of the Saudi state in 1932. Over the last 25, 30 years or so, the Saudi government has spent somewhere along the lines of about $100 billion promoting this kind of puritanical strain of Islam across the world. And this Saudi Wahhabism is unique in that it takes this notion of iconoclastic behavior to its extreme. I mean, one of the first things the Wahhabis did when this movement began is they went around destroying any tomb or any sacred space in Saudi Arabia that was associated with the Prophet or his family. They even tried to destroy the Prophet's tomb itself in Medina. Now, $100 billon buys you a great deal of traction. I mean, at this point, there is really not a Muslim community anywhere in the world that has not been affected by this strain of Saudi puritanism. And it's created an enormous shift among Muslims towards this kind of Arabocentric, ultraorthodox, puritanical strain of Islam.
RATH: Reza Aslan is a scholar of religion. His latest book is "Zealot." It's a biography of Jesus Christ. Reza, thank you very much.
ASLAN: My pleasure.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
We may have mapped the human genome, but what we don't know about our own genetic code could fill libraries. For example, how do you fit a really long strand of DNA into a tiny cell nucleus?
SUHAS RAO: It's kind of equivalent to fitting a thread that's two football fields long into a head of a pin. You can't just randomly stuff it inside the nucleus.
RATH: That's Suhas Rao, a researcher at the Center for Genome Architecture at Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University. He says that DNA is looped and folded in an incredibly complex way and that the way the DNA is folded can determine which genes get turned on. That's why Rao and his colleagues have created a 3D, high-resolution map of those 10,000 tiny loops.
RAO: And these loops are bringing together far away sights along the DNA string and kind of organizing the genome.
RATH: So tell us about the importance of this 3D map that you've created. What sort of things are affected by where these loops fall?
RAO: Sure. So you have thousands of types of cells in your body, and they all have the same exact DNA inside them, but they all accomplish very different functions. And what we found is, actually, when we compared the maps of the 3D genome across different types of cells, we observed the kind of genomic origami. And so just like you can take a sheet of paper, and you can fold it up into a crane or a warrior depending on how - where you make the folds, a cell starts with the same genome. But depending on where these loops form, it can help the cell perform different functions, whether it becomes a lung cell or an immune cell or some other type of cell. So more and more, we're finding that folding drives function.
RATH: And another big discovery is that the protein that connects these loops tells which genes to turn on or off. Can you talk about the implications of that?
RAO: Yeah. So with diseases like, I mean, cancer and many other diseases, a lot of the variance or a lot of the mutations that affect those diseases affect proteins. They lie in regions that code for proteins in genes. But a lot of the variation actually lies in these hidden switches, these regions of the genome that turn genes on and off. But they don't actually code for anything. And so, after the human genome project, we've realized that these hidden switches are really important. But what we've realized is very difficult is connecting these hidden switches to which genes they turn on and off. And we can start to understand how mutations that we know are associated with disease, but we don't know why - we can start to understand, well, what are the pathways that are affected?
RATH: You're revealing some really major, important things that are determined by the shape of DNA. Now that you have this 3D map, are there other big things that we're going to discover about what's encoded in the shape of the DNA as well as the DNA itself?
RAO: I mean, I think we've gotten a much better sense now with these high-resolution 3D maps of the normal shape of the genome is. But in a lot of diseases, it's possible that the 3D structure changes dramatically, and the actual cause of the disease could be because you have a different kind of 3D shape of the genome. And so I think that's an important direction that we're kind of pursuing. Now that we understand how the genome is kind of folded in its normal way, we can start to kind of edit the shape of the genome. So we go beyond the normal genome editing that's happening now where we just edit the sequence, but we actually change the folds.
RATH: Suhas Rao is a researcher at the Center for Genome Architecture at Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University. Fascinating stuff - thanks very much.
RAO: Thank you for having me on.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
On Wednesday, California's culinary scene erupted when a federal judge overturned a ban on foie gras. The delicacy made of goose or duck livers - the standard practice is to fatten them by force feeding - has been banned in the state since 2012 thanks to a state law passed back in 2004. The decision to lift the ban wasn't a judgment about whether the practice is animal cruelty or not. It has to do with state versus federal jurisdiction over food products. After the ban went into effect in 2012, it was challenged by a group of foie gras producers in Canada and New York and a group of three restaurants, including Hot's Kitchen here in Hermosa Beach. Lawyer Michael Tenenbaum represented all three plaintiffs.
MICHAEL TENENBAUM: There are certain culinary hubs around the country. California happens to have a lot of them - LA, San Francisco, Napa. And so this was about 25 percent of the market for my Canadian clients and about 20 to 25 percent of the market for Hudson Valley in New York. So there was a huge economic impact when the ban went into effect. And we're now going to hopefully see the restoration of all this - these sales.
RATH: Sean Chaney is the owner and chef at Hot's Kitchen.
SEAN CHANEY: We had to take about three or four items off the menu. And they were, you know, higher-ticket items. And, you know, you lose those - it didn't drive our business out of business, but it definitely takes a hit at the end of the month. And even one percent to your bottom line is a huge percent. We're on thin margins here, and that makes a big difference.
RATH: So when the news came down on Wednesday, Chaney called supplier and fellow plaintiff, Hudson Valley Foie Gras, to celebrate.
CHANEY: The first things were congratulations. How much do you need me to send you (laughter)? So I've got to call them again to have more sent tomorrow. We could run out tonight. It goes to show that people are asking for it.
RATH: The shipment arrived in time for lunch. So today, there's a special five-item menu, all with foie gras. It's been a very busy day in the kitchen.
UNIDENTIFIED CHEF: So I'm searing this and I'm going to put it in the oven and let it get to the right consistency, temperature and put it together.
RATH: This is the foie burger.
CHANEY: So this is - you're on a brioche bun. The meat we grind in-house with a little brie cheese, huckleberry compote, seared foie gras on top and a little bit of a honey whole-grain mustard.
RATH: That was the most popular choice at lunch earlier, when a big crowd had come to Hot's Kitchen to celebrate the ruling. Protesters from the organization PETA picketed outside. In fact, the moment I arrived at Hot's, Chaney had to excuse himself for a phone call with the FBI. They wanted to suss out the credibility of a death threat he'd received. Chaney said he's not worried. PETA calls foie gras torture in a tin. And here's what Wayne Pacelle, the president and CEO of The Humane Society, has to say.
WAYNE PACELLE: Of all agricultural practices involving the rearing of animals, this is the only one we're aware where animals are intentionally overfed, radically overfed, in order to swell the size of their liver in order to then kill the animal and harvest the liver. We think it's bizarre and it's unhealthy and it's certainly inhumane.
RATH: But what does the typical Californian think? We ask Allie Gard, who was sitting at the bar.
Did you know about the lifting of the foie gras ban?
ALLIE GARD: No, I did not know about it.
TARA REINHARDT: Or even that it was banned.
GARD: No, tell me more.
RATH: I explained the process to Gard and her friend, Tara Reinhardt. They're pretty grossed out.
GARD: Animal cruelty, is that what we're talking about here?
RATH: Having had no opinion a minute ago, Reinhardt has now taken a side.
REINHARDT: I don't want the ban lifted.
RATH: But she's not going to join the protesters.
REINHARDT: A restaurant can serve whatever the hell they want. I'm still going to go to it. It's a free country. You can do what you want. Am I going to eat this specific thing? No.
RATH: On Thursday, the LA Times published an editorial calling for California Attorney General Kamala Harris to repeal the decision. But her office has had no comment on whether that might actually happen.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Cheryl isn't crazy. Or if she is, you're a little crazy, too. She's the main character in Miranda July's new novel "The First Bad Man."
MIRANDA JULY: Right. Yeah, there's a baby she met when she was 6 that she re-meets in other babies throughout her life. She sort of tunes into them and checks whether they're - they are the original baby but in a new form.
RATH: Another incarnation of this baby - Kubelko Bondy.
JULY: Kubelko Bondy, yeah.
RATH: And if we were to list out Cheryl's various delusions, she wouldn't sound like a very relatable character. But one of the amazing things is - well, you're writing in first-person from inside her head. And as you talk us through it, it kind of - they become more reasonable somehow.
JULY: Right. I know. I never felt - or that was the line I was always walking - like, letting myself go totally as far as I wanted to go into her psyche, which sometimes is mine and sometimes is just something I'm making up. And then realizing, well, I can always take it back if it's too much. And there are places that I pulled back. And, you know, shaping her character was definitely one of the more delicate processes of making the book.
RATH: So there are a lot of complications with various characters in this book. And their lives intersect in various ways. It's going to be kind of complicated to talk about it. And I also don't want to reveal spoilers. But I want to talk about some of the big themes that are in this book. One of them is love and its various permutations. I was hoping you could read a part of this for us. This is where Cheryl, who's been through some of these intense experiences in the book, is reflecting on love.
JULY: Okay. (Reading) We had fallen in love. That was still true. But given the right psychological conditions, a person could fall in love with anyone or anything. A wooden desk, always on all fours - always prone, always there for you. What was the lifespan of these improbable loves? An hour? A week? A few months at best. The end was a natural thing like the seasons, like getting older, fruit turning. That was the saddest part. There was no one to blame and no way to reverse it.
RATH: There's this sort of profound moment of, well, just acknowledging the randomness there.
JULY: Right, yeah. And that something real finally did happen, but that, like, real things are completely fleeting. And you don't control them. You don't reverse them.
RATH: In the book, though, even though they might be random, they still have this kind of magical power to transform people - the love and its various permutations.
JULY: Yeah. Without giving too much away, there is an actual real baby that is made in this book. And one of the most interesting discoveries that I made, I mean, as one does when they're writing, like, you don't know everything that's going to happen, was to realize that this book was an origins story, among other things, and that it wasn't one about a baby being made by two people coming together and having sex. It was a baby made by sexual fantasy, by mistakes, by a web created in Cheryl's mind that strung together all these different people who eventually overlapped enough to create a baby.
RATH: Prior to this novel, you know, you've been known for film, performance art - you know, working in other media. Why is this story and novel and not a film?
JULY: Well, I mean, I love a challenge. There's, like, nothing that gets my heart going than the sense that I will fail. And this was kind of one of the last ones left. And just such an obvious one, like, you've written short stories. You've made movies. Can you write a novel? And to be honest, I think this novel right after - actually writing it right after I finished "The Future," my last movie. And it took a little adjusting to get back into, like, this is just a book. Like, it will never be acted out. And I remember having, like, ruminations like could Scarlett Johansson play Clee? Is she too old? And then I'd be, like, no, there will be no Scarlett Johansson, Miranda. There will just be you writing blonde hair, large breasts. Like, you know, that's what you get. And eventually I calmed down and, like, glued myself to my chair.
RATH: Do you think it'll become a film at some point?
JULY: I mean, I loved that idea while I was writing it. And I felt, like, God, this is the most, like, dramatic thing I've ever made. It's like a better movie than my movies are. Although now that it's done, I'm like, oh, it's done. Like, it doesn't need, you know, another step to it.
RATH: Miranda July's new novel is called "The First Bad Man." Miranda July, thank you.
JULY: Thank you for having me.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
You are tuned in to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR West. I'm Arun Rath. Over the last decade-and-a-half, the country quartet Little Big Town has weathered change on nearly every front. They were dropped by one record label and had another collapse underneath them before finally being picked up by a third. They faced death, divorce and children. By years end, the band had made the jump from small theaters to arenas and released a sixth album that landed on several critics' best of 2014 lists. Jewly Hight of member station WPLN has their story.
JEWLY HIGHT, BYLINE: Backstage at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, Little Big Town's Jimi Westbrook remembers how simple things seemed when they debuted on the Grand Ole Opry in 1999 as a baby band.
JIMI WESTBROOK: Our very first public performance was at the Opry, and we only had one guitar at that time. So it was one guitar and four voices.
HIGHT: With the addition of a few backing instruments, the lineup's remained the same ever since.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BONES")
LITTLE BIG TOWN: (Singing) What goes around comes around. Feel it breathing down heavy on you. You made that bed you're laying on. Deeds that you have done, now you can't undo.
HIGHT: Great care was taken in selecting the voices in this outfit. Karen Fairchild and Kimberly Schlapman have been friends since their days in college choir in Alabama. They came to Nashville pursuing separate music careers but surrendered those plans to form a group. Their search for singers led to Westbrook first, then to Philip Sweet, who had to be convinced to back out of a deal of his own, says Schlapman.
KIMBERLY SCHLAPMAN: We sang with these other guys, and it either didn't feel like maybe the personalities would coexist or it didn't feel like the sound was right. But then when we sang with Jimi, instantly, there was not a question, that was right. Then when we went looking for Philip, same thing kind of happened.
HIGHT: The four of them intended to make the most of their harmonies and take turns singing lead. Sweet and Westbrook say they weren't interested in singling out a front man or woman.
PHILIP SWEET: We heard early on by some label people that maybe you all should pick a lead singer. You know, it'd be easier to kind of get your songs heard. And it was more consistent. But I think we never really bought into that idea.
WESTBROOK: I just remember in the beginning thinking it'd be a shame if you didn't hear those three sing.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BRING IT ON HOME")
BIG TOWN: (Singing) When you're long day is over, and you can barely drag your feet. The weight of the world is on your shoulders. I know what you need. Bring it on home to me.
HIGHT: The tension between individual and collective expression used to tug on the quartet a lot more than it does now. A few years ago, they turned down the chance to record a song they loved because Schlapman says they couldn't quite wrap their heads around how to own it as a coed group.
SCHLAPMAN: We literally had those conversations many years ago. We were like we can't do that song because it's too much of a female song or it's too much of a male song. And that's part of our freedom now.
HIGHT: So when songwriter friends pitched them a tangled feminine expression of unrequited love called "Girl Crush" for the new album, they went for it. Not only that - they chose it as their current single.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GIRL CRUSH")
BIG TOWN: (Singing) I want to taste her lips, yeah, 'cause they taste like you. I want to drown myself in a bottle of her perfume. I want her long blonde hair. I want her magic touch. Yeah, 'cause maybe then you'd want me just as much. I've got a girl crush.
HIGHT: Before that came a much sunnier single that fit right in on country radio, an ode to skipping out on work to drink.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DAY DRINKING")
BIG TOWN: (Singing) I don't need a reason or a happy hour. Ain't hanging around for a fireworks show. Get a head start, a little sip of something. Off and running, here we go. One, two, three, here we go. Don't want to wait 'til the sun's sinking. We could be feeling all right. I know you know what I'm thinking. Why don't we do a little day drinking?
HIGHT: Fairchild and Schlapman are self-aware enough to realize that a party tune showcases only one side of what they have to offer.
KAREN FAIRCHILD: We also talk about stuff, like, hey, we just wrote "Day Drinking." Maybe we should say something that means something more. You know? I mean, but we also don't take ourselves too seriously.
SCHLAPMAN: Yeah. We're also complex and serious, too. There's four of us here. We are everything. We are every emotion.
HIGHT: It might seem like a soprano, an alto, a tenor and a bass singer would start to feel stuck in their musical roles the longer they're stuck with each other. But Fairchild thinks she and her Little Big Town band mates have figured out how to use their restlessness as creative fuel.
FAIRCHILD: The greatest thing about being in a band and the strength of having companionship and collaboration is also the thing that makes a band breakup because then you begin to feel confined. Like, who am I as an individual, as a writer, as a performer? Just all those things that I think individually we wrestle with.
HIGHT: Together they've learned they can exploit the host of possibilities that come from each of them wanting to both stand out and blend in. For NPR News, Jewly Hight in Nashville.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THINGS YOU DON'T THINK ABOUT")
BIG TOWN: (Singing) I put my cards on your table, and I treat you like royalty. These are the things that you don't think about when you think about me.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR West. I'm Arun Rath. Right now, professional rock climbers Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgenson are hanging from the side of a 3,000 foot cliff on El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. Caldwell explained their expedition to NPR's Melissa Block last week.
TOMMY CALDWELL: There's hundreds of people that climb El Cap every year. The thing that makes our climb different is that we're just trying to free-climb an extremely difficult part of the wall. And don't get free-climbing confused with free-soloing. We do have ropes with us. We actually fall quite often. But we are climbing the rock face. We're not actually ascending the equipment. It's just a extremely blank, very, very difficult part of El Cap - captured our imagination and seems to be capturing the imagination of the climbing world as well.
RATH: If they make it to the top, it will be the most difficult big climb ever completed. But Caldwell and Jorgenson aren't the first to scale this cliff. A new documentary, "Valley Uprising," reveals the story of the birth of climbing in Yosemite and its rise. I spoke to one of its writers-directors, Nicholas Rosen.
NICHOLAS ROSEN: This valley is only about 300 miles from San Francisco, so at the birth of American rock climbing back in the 1950s, it didn't take much for budding, aspiring climbers to find this place, look at these walls and dream of climbing them. And it was a pretty audacious dream at the time. Most people didn't think it was possible.
RATH: Can you take us back, though, to the beginning of the climbing scene there, you know, who the characters were who were defining what was a new movement in climbing?
ROSEN: You know, this was really not only the birth of climbing but the birth of American counterculture. In fact, a lot of these early climbers were inspired by a book that Jack Kerouac wrote in 1958 called "The Dharma Bums." At the same time, Yosemite National Park is run by the federal government, which - and the National Park Service, which, you know, has the culture of a federal bureaucracy - quite - much more conservative than your average climber type. And so there was kind of a cultural clash that happened between these two groups, even dating back to the 1950s and one that pretty much continues to this day, actually.
RATH: Now, there also - you track in your film how fraction starts to develop within and among the climbers. There's a controversy that emerges about how you climb. And it turns into this weird kind of moral argument. Can you explain that and talk about the kind of rival camps and the people that represented them?
ROSEN: Yeah, Absolutely. In the early days of Yosemite climbing, there were sort of two giants on the landscape - two climbers that were more ambitious than anybody else. And they also happened to be sort of diametrically opposed personalities. On the one side, you had Royal Robbins, who was this very imperious, purist, philosopher king who was also the most respected and talented climber in Yosemite Valley.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "VALLEY UPRISING")
ROYAL ROBBINS: Even to this day, I consider myself a climber first and foremost. Whenever I get on the rock, I feel it's something that makes me whole.
ROSEN: On the other side, you had this guy Warren Harding, who is this hard-drinking, iconoclast, kind of nut case of a man.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "VALLEY UPRISING")
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: You're picturing a hardhat construction worker with a serious drinking problem and a penchant for a lot of women, radical sports cars, a really childish sense of humor.
ROSEN: When he was doing a climb, he would bring up of bottles of wine and food and Thanksgiving turkeys and women and have these crazy parties up there, which to Royal Robbins, who viewed climbing as this spiritual, elevated activity, that was a sacrilege.
RATH: So the climb that's going on right now - and the stories are as dramatic as ever in the sense that, you know, one guy just tearing his hands up. But now they're actually tweeting live and online live as they do it. Where does this climb fit in to all this?
ROSEN: Yeah. Well, what's kind of amazing is that Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgenson are up there as we speak, battling it out on something called the Dawn Wall. And this will be by far the hardest big wall rock climb that's ever been done anywhere in the world. But really, these guys really stand on the shoulders of the pioneers that came before them. So what's pretty amazing is that 25 years ago, one of the big scenes in our film is when Warren Harding, the crazy, drunk construction worker, goes up and climbs this same stretch of rock. But he ends up - it's so difficult at that time. The wall is so sheer and devoid of any features to climb or any cracks to pound your steel wedges into. It takes him a month. It takes him 28 days to get to the top. And he battles through storms. And then the National Park Service comes and tries to rescue him. And he says, screw you guys. I'm not being rescued. And he's all drunk up there, like, telling the National Park Service where to go. And, you know, he eventually reaches the top after this Herculean effort. And there's this corps of press and photographers and cameramen at the top. It's almost, you know, as one observer says, it's like the Beatles landed in the United States for the first time. And there they are. That's 1970. It was the hardest climb that's ever been done anywhere in the world. And here we are 25 years later, and these guys are up there on the same stretch of rock with the same - with the world's media watching once again, climbing it in this very athletic style that's just completely reimagined the sport.
RATH: Nicholas Rosen is the writer and director of "Valley Uprising," a new documentary telling the story of rock climbing. Great speaking with you - really interesting. Thank you.
ROSEN: Thank you, Arun. It's an honor.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR West. I'm Arun Rath. Thirteen years ago today, the first 20 war on terror detainees arrived at the prison at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. President Obama has yet to make good on his campaign promise to close the prison. Congress cut off funds to transfer the detainees to prisons in the U.S. The president has been getting around that by transferring prisoners to other countries, and the pace of those transfers has been increasing. But Carol Rosenberg of The Miami Herald says that transferring detainees who were cleared for release long ago is the easy part. The real concern is the group of prisoners considered too dangerous to release and those on trial in the military commissions. Right now there's no sign they're going anywhere.
CAROL ROSENBERG: That's not going to change in the last two years of this presidency. So if he wants to close it, he either has to make a deal with Congress to lift that embargo on transferring detainees to the States, or he has to decide that he has the authority to defy Congress.
RATH: Now, I saw Senator John McCain last month, actually. He sounded kind of a consolatory note, saying that he would work with the administration, but he still has his long-standing objections about the president not having a good plan.
ROSENBERG: Right. He wants a plan. And I do think that Senator McCain is the wildcard in the situation because he campaigned against Obama saying Guantanamo should close. If he and President Obama can find the formula for transferring them to the United States, then it closes. Otherwise, I don't know how this president makes good on that promise.
RATH: And, Carol, what about the detainees that are being tried by the military commissions? Isn't that going to kind of gum up the plans to close the prison?
ROSENBERG: So they're trial by military commissions, and there is nothing in the law that says those military commissions have to be held in Guantanamo. If they come up with a formula for moving them to the States, that trial could continue. But those trials, particularly the death penalty trials that, you know, there' six men who were disappeared for three and four years into the CIA black sites, they have been charged for more than two years now. And they're not moving very quickly. So again, none of that may have been concluded by the time that this president leaves office.
RATH: Finally, Carol, you mentioned that these were men who were detained in these black sites. And I know that one of the things that been holding the trials up has been the contentious issue of whether or not they can discuss what happened in those black sites. With the release of the Senate committee's report involving interrogation techniques, with that now being on the public record, does that simplify things?
ROSENBERG: It both simplifies it and complicates it. Yes, there are certain things that we in the public now know officially in an unclassified fashion or a declassified fashion. And those things can come into the court. The judges responded to the release of that report by telling the prosecution to go back through more than two years of court records and evaluate anything that was done in secret about whether it now needs to be declassified. But, you know, the defense attorneys say it has just whet their appetite to find out in the most graphic detail what happened to their clients because they argue that they need to know what was done to them when during the years that they were disappeared so that they can challenge evidence brought at trial as potentially the fruit of torture. And if the five men accused of the 9-11 attacks are convicted, the next phase is the penalty phase. And they want, again, the most graphic details to present to that military jury if they're convicted to say the United States no longer has the moral authority to execute them.
RATH: That's Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald. Carol, thank you.
ROSENBERG: Thank you, Arun.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Dexter Filkins of The New Yorker recently went through what we did learn about the CIA's interrogation of one of those defendants - the self proclaimed mastermind of the 9-11 attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Dexter Filkins, welcome to the program.
DEXTER FILKINS: Hi. Thanks very much.
RATH: So Dexter, long before the report, we all knew that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was water boarded, but there's of course been a huge debate about whether or not these techniques got useful intelligence. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed probably had more important information in his head than just about any other captive I could think about. From what you've seen in the report, can you say if the torture got anything useful out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?
FILKINS: It looks like they got some useful information from him. But I think what's interesting about the Senate report, just to backup for second, is it's based on the CIA's internal communications. So it's basically quotations from emails and memos and cables of the CIA talking to itself. And in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, they are talking about the interrogation as it's going on. And you can see what happens. To answer your question, there's a growing realization as the water boarding - 183 water boarding sessions - there's a growing realization that they're not really getting very much. I mean, they finally give up. The CIA is basically concluding that whatever it is that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has that's really valuable, they never got.
RATH: And can you talk about some of the false information that came out of the water torture sessions?
FILKINS: It's pretty clear that, I think by their own admission, that one of the CIA officers misread an intelligence report which I think came from another detainee that had said - and this is in their words, not mine - but it was something like black American Muslims are training in the Al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, and they want to find somebody to help them bomb gas stations in Montana. And he basically said get it out of KSM. Find out who that guy is who they recruited in the United States, and, you know, water board him until he gives us a name. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed basically says, over and over again, I don't what you're talking about. It's pretty clear they water board him so much he finally says, OK, I'll tell you everything. I want to talk. Please stop water boarding me. And then he makes up this story. It appears to be made up. There's no other evidence that it was real. I think the conclusion that the Senate investigators reached was that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, despite all the water boarding and all the torture, didn't provide any information that, say, helped the CIA stop an attack.
RATH: Finally, the actual information that led to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's capture sounds like it almost got lost.
FILKINS: It did almost get lost. They almost never got KSM. The CIA was in touch with - I guess you could call him an agent. They called - they referred to him as Asset X which is, you know, right out of a spy novel. He basically came to them and said, look, I can take you to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And the CIA basically - I think the agent who was cultivating him made a recommendation back to headquarters saying let's put this guy in the payroll. He's great. The answer came back saying no, cut him loose. And they did. They cut him loose. And then I think nine months passed, and finally they found him again. And they almost cut him loose again. And then without any coordination or contact with the CIA, he just goes off and finds Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Pakistan, runs into him, slips off to a bathroom and sends his CIA handler a text message saying I am with KSM. And within hours, the CIA and Pakistani intelligence launched this military operation to grab Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, which they did. So yeah, it's an amazing story. Like, you couldn't make it up. But they almost missed him.
RATH: Dexter Filkins wrote the story "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed And The CIA" for The New Yorker. He joined us from Brooklyn. Dexter Filkins, thanks very much.
FILKINS: Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
In 2012, this program traveled to Oklahoma and Nebraska and talked to folks about the Keystone XL pipeline.
GUY RAZ: Now, to fully understand the impact of Keystone XL, you have to visit the small town of Cushing, Oklahoma, known locally as the pipeline crossroads of the world.
RATH: Longtime listeners to the show will recognize that voice. The man who used to sit in this chair - NPR's Guy Raz.
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PETE SCHWIERING: You're hearing the crude oil flowing through the pipeline.
RAZ: This is the TransCanada Keystone pipeline. It starts in Alberta, Canada. It travels almost 2,000 miles and ends right here in Cushing.
RATH: Then, that part of the Keystone pipeline system had just been finished. And the question everyone was in Cushing was asking was this - will the U.S. government approve a larger version of the pipeline, the Keystone XL? Three years later, that's still the question. President Obama said last week he would veto a congressional bill OKing the pipeline. Meanwhile, the Nebraska Supreme Court opened the way for the pipeline to pass through that state if it's approved.
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RAZ: Do you want to take us in first?
SCHWIERING: Sure.
RATH: So returning to Cushing, Oklahoma.
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SCHWIERING: Careful, there's a little water.
RATH: In 2012, we talked to Pete Schwiering, the chief operating officer for Rose Rock Midstream, an oil storage company in Cushing.
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RAZ: So this is the inside.
SCHWIERING: This is the roof of the tank right here.
RATH: At the time, his company was building new storage tanks to handle all the crude oil already coming to town in the current pipeline.
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SCHWIERING: I've been in this business 42 years, and I've never seen activity out there on the production side like what's happening right now in northern Oklahoma, western Oklahoma.
RAZ: These are good times.
SCHWIERING: Yeah.
RATH: This week we called Pete Schwiering to see what's changed since then. Are times still good?
SCHWIERING: Yes. I mean, we still see a lot of strong production out there. Of course, the decline in prices is going to have an effect, but we really haven't felt the effects of that yet. Our pipelines are still full. And our trucks are full.
RATH: The decline in oil prices is Schwiering's main concern these days. Since we spoke to him, it's been all boom times, even though the XL pipeline hasn't been built.
SCHWIERING: We built a lot of pipelines since we last talked. We got two major lines.
RATH: In the national debate over the XL pipeline, job creation is a frequent argument in favor. But Schwiering's company has been growing even without it.
SCHWIERING: Without looking at the exact numbers, we probably doubled our people.
RATH: But Schwiering is clear. Even if XL wouldn't directly create jobs in Cushing, he still thinks it's important to build the pipeline for one big reason - OPEC.
SCHWIERING: Well, I mean, I don't want to see America become as dependent as we have been at times in our history on OPEC for our crude oil supplies.
RATH: Schwiering thinks all those jobs that have been created could be in danger if oil prices stay low. So just as he was three years ago, he's hoping the XL pipeline will be built. The bill could land on the president's desk by the end of this month.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
From the studios of NPR West in Culver City, California, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Arun Rath. Brace yourselves, it's almost that time.
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RATH: Yeah, smell that - the breeze carrying the faint odor of the 2016 presidential campaign? It's never been pretty, but Dylan Byers of Politico says the proliferation of news sites and the ascendance of click bait has some of the nation's news directors dreading 2016.
DYLAN BYERS: What makes the dread especially heavy this time around are two things. One, I think that the 2012 presidential election was a real slog for a lot of reporters, right? If you're coming out of 2008 when you've got the Obama-Hillary narrative going on - Obama, McCain, Sarah Palin. I mean, that is such an exciting election. And then 2012, I mean, there's so much just about gaffs and about minutiae and about sideshows. And so you're sort of looking ahead to 2016, and you're thinking, oh, God, I hope we don't go through that again. The other thing that's happening is that because of the way that the media works right now - not just 24 hour cable news coverage, but also Twitter and social media and everything like that - the desire to constantly have fresh news is more intense than it ever has been before. And as a result, there's a greater hunger and need for content among journalists. And so anything - like, if it moves, shoot it. Anything that happens, they jump on it. And a lot of times, those are things that are totally irrelevant to voters.
RATH: Well, you're right that the web - and this is something that people have been saying for a while - that the internet is changing political reporting. But more so you're talking about stuff in the last few years, the age of click bait, maybe.
BYERS: Yeah. It's click bait. And it's, you know, if you have more outlets and more either reporters or folks who sort of fashion themselves as reporters, regardless of whether or not the fact they're even leaving their desks or leaving their computers, they're all sort of competing for viewers or readers. And they're competing for clicks. And how do you get those clicks? And what you have to do is you have to take to the sort of boring news of the day, and you have to spike it. You have the hype it up.
RATH: And you write about how we have this phenomenon with all these different sources now of a media feeding-frenzy. And I think the earliest example you cite of that is the infamous Swift Boat ads attacking Senator John Kerry.
BYERS: Right. So here's a group, the Swift Boat Veterans, who come forward, and they have a story. And they're trying to push it and make headline news with it - right? - and make John Kerry look bad. And I spoke to Ron Fournier, now at The National Journal, used to be at the Associated Press. He's at the Associated Press, and he says, look, there's no way we're going to cover this story. It's not a legitimate story. And it's sort of beneath us to give these guys a platform to make this case. Over time, you have blogs and other news outlets who do make it a story. Readers certainly love it. The thing sort of picks up. And then all of a sudden, news organizations like Associated Press are there, and they say, like, there's no way we can't cover this. And that's the way that the sort of feeding-frenzy can move news organizations that would otherwise exercise editorial judgment to maybe abandon that judgment.
RATH: Is this going to bottom out and start coming back up? Or is this just going to get worse and worse and worse?
BYERS: Well, so most of the folks I talked to for this piece were saying, look, it's just going to get worse and worse and worse. But there were some sort of glimmers of hope. I talked to Peter Hamby from CNN, and he said, look, I think more and more news organizations are realizing that the best campaign reporting happens outside of the news cycle. Don't send everyone running after the same story. I don't need to cover the STEM speech. Let me talk to some voters. Let me talk to some key people who are working behind the scenes. Let me get an original story there, even at the expense of missing three days of the news cycle or three days on the campaign trail. And you know what Chuck Todd, the moderator of NBC's "Meet the Press" said is, look, what distinguishes a reputable news brand like NBC News, like The New York Times? And it's editorial judgment. So if we don't exercise that, what do we have? And so yeah, I do think you see some promise there. Not everyone wants to race to the bottom anymore.
RATH: Dylan Byers writes about the media for Politico. Dylan, thank you.
BYERS: You thank you so much.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
In Haiti, political leaders are still trying to hash out an 11th hour agreement before the government will be dissolved tomorrow. The president and the opposition have been at an impasse for nearly three years over the scheduling of elections. And if a compromise isn't reached before midnight tomorrow, then the terms of almost all lawmakers in the country will expire, leaving only the president with any power. Coincidently, tomorrow's political deadline falls on the fifth anniversary of Haiti's devastating earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people and left the country in ruins. From Port-au-Prince, we have NPR's Carrie Kahn online. Carrie, the prospect of an all-powerful president of Haiti is kind of reminiscent of its dictatorial past. That has to weigh heavy on the lawmakers. What are the chances they'll be able to work out something before tomorrow?
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: Well, in Haiti, anything can happen. And it could happen fast - that's if there's the will. There have been protests in the streets for a month leading up to this deadline. Yesterday, there were another violent protest. Tires were burning in the streets. Police reacted with water cannons and with tear gas.
These protesters are asking for the president to resign. You know, he has made a lot of compromises up to this point to try and reach an agreement. But as I've heard from other analysts, the opposition sees him sort of as weak right now. And they see this as the opportunity that they want more, and they're asking for it. They're asking for his resignation.
RATH: And if the terms of the lawmakers expire and the president does rule by decree, what does that mean for Haiti? Is there fear there about what he might do?
KAHN: Well, the president has said publicly that he will - if he does rule by decree and have all these powers, he will only pass laws regarding the long-overdue elections. I spoke with the UN special coordinator here and other international groups. And they've said that they've had assurance from President Martelly that he - that will be his only focus. But democracy is very young in Haiti. And it's also very weak. And the opposition wants to make those sure those checks and balances are there so that the power sharing will take place. But the president - what he will get to do is set up the powerful electoral council. And they can make or break an election. And that's what the opposition is most worried about.
RATH: So tomorrow, again, will be the fifth anniversary of that devastating earthquake. You were there within hours of the quake, and you've been back many times since. Carrie, how much have things improved?
KAHN: Well, clearly things look much better than they did five years ago. And I haven't been here in two years, and they look amazingly different. You see new roads. You see new constructions. There's even major hotel chains and a movie theater's actually going to open soon, which is amazing for Haiti. The World Bank did a study recently and shown that poverty rates have dropped and economic growth is up. It was 4.3 percent in 2013. That's amazing.
But saying all that, you know, there is plenty that has not happened. And there's plenty to worry about in the future. Growth is already projected to start falling for 2014. I think the figures are going to be 3.6 percent and falling each year after that. And that's mostly because the boost in the economy here was from direct foreign aid and charities. And that's not really a sustainable economic model.
The housing deficit here is immense. There are so many people that are still homeless. There are still about 80,000 people that are homeless, living in tents still. You know, before the earthquake, Haiti was in a bad situation. It was the poorest in the hemisphere. After the quake, it's still the poorest. And this political crisis is not helping matters at all. Investor and international confidence is shaken because of it and so are the Haitian people.
RATH: NPR's Carrie Kahn in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Carrie, thanks so much.
KAHN: Thank you very much.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Since the United States accused North Korea of being behind last month's cyber attack on Sony, some Internet security experts suggested the blame may actually lie elsewhere. Among them was Norse Corporation, who are now working with the U.S. government on the Sony investigation. On the Norse website, there's a virtual war room map. You can see multiple attacks launched every second, hitting their targets halfway around the globe. Kurt Stammberger is the senior vice president at Norse. He says Norse uses a global network of eight million sensors disguised to look like attractive targets.
KURT STAMMBERGER: They pretend to be a point-of-sale machine - a credit card swiper, an ATM terminal. They pretend to be a piece of industrial equipment on a plant floor. And based on the intelligence that we get back from this network, we can tell who's attacking what types of devices. And we can also profile the types of actors that are unleashing these attacks.
RATH: The attack on Sony - was that different just in terms of the scale of the attack, or were the attackers using a different approach - a different way in - than these daily attacks that we're talking about?
STAMMBERGER: Well, we really can't comment in any depth about the Sony hack because all of the data that we've generated and the investigations that we've done have been turned over to the FBI. That being said, the attacks that we saw on Sony did not seem to be fundamentally unusual from a mechanical standpoint. They used pieces of malware that had been seen in the wild in the past. They used techniques that are well understood. Some of the interesting things about the Sony attack was how targeted it was. A lot of malware is a little bit like a Roomba. You know, it's a little robot that runs around the carpet and bumps into furniture and then turns right and then bumps into something else and turns left. And when it runs across a piece of dirt, it picks it up. This malware that was deployed against Sony was a lot less like a Roomba and a lot more like a cruise missile. It had credentials, server addresses, digital certificates - all these things that were built into the malware that allowed this malware to target that organization and extract information and be very destructive.
RATH: Kurt, finally, I think I want you to talk me down a bit because looking at that map - all these attacks happening every second of every day - it is scary. Should I feel so frightened?
STAMMBERGER: Frankly, yes.
RATH: Oh no.
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STAMMBERGER: It should disturb you.
RATH: Now, we should say, in fairness, it serves your corporate interest to say it, right?
(LAUGHTER)
STAMMBERGER: Right. Exactly. 2014 was, by far, the worst year ever for cyber attacks. It grew by an amazing amount, both in terms of the dollars lost and the sheer destructiveness of the attacks. This is a war that the hackers are winning right now. So it behooves listeners and everyday citizens to take some basic steps to protect themselves - change their passwords, use different passwords at different sites. Keep basic security software on your machine up to date. Use a firewall. Ask a friend if this all intimidates you, and you're not quite sure how your machine is set up. And ask for help from professionals because this is real. It is growing very quickly. And it is impacting the flow of commerce on the Internet.
RATH: Kurt Stammberger is a senior vice president at the IT security company Norse. Kurt, thanks very much.
STAMMBERGER: Thank you for having us.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR West. I'm Arun Rath. Millions of people took to the streets across France today in a show of unity and defiance after the deadly terror attacks that shook Paris last week. The attack on the offices of a satirical publication and a standoff at a kosher supermarket killed 17 people, including three police officers. Police say Islamic militants were responsible for the carnage. The largest demonstration today came in the French capital. Reporter Lauren Frayer started her day with a vantage point atop the city's most iconic landmark.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: From the top of the Eiffel Tower, Paris sprawls before me. The city's grand avenues are closed to traffic as hundreds of thousands of mourners marched through the city.
MATTHEW CHAIN: Arab, Juif, Catholic - everybody are here, and everybody are solidarity. OK. And it's really great sensation. Everybody, like, together for the same way - the peace way. I think it's beautiful.
FRAYER: Matthew Chain was in the crowd streaming past Paris' Bastille. At the head of the march was French president Francois Hollande, alongside relatives of this week's victims. Many linked arms and walked in silence. They were joined by the prime ministers of Britain Israel, Germany and many others. Thousands of police and military flooded the French capital. Public transport was free all day.
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FRAYER: Claire Mays, an American who's lived in Paris for more than 30 years, says the atmosphere was both solemn and resilient.
CLAIRE MAYS: This was a silent march, but what was wonderful was to hear the waves of (chanting) Charlie (clapping), Charlie (clapping). And it would just travel right up the alley.
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FRAYER: That ubiquitous slogan, Je suis Charlie, on banners and t-shirts, in bar and shop windows. One marcher lugged along a giant eight- foot pencil in tribute to slain Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. The slogan has variations. Jean-Jacque Fourmond wore a badge with some of them.
JEAN-JAQUE FOURMOND: En Francais, Je suis juif, Je suis un policier et Je suis Charlie.
FRAYER: Je suis juif. I am a Jew in solidarity with Jews killed at a kosher supermarket Friday. Je suis un policier, for police officers killed in the terror attacks. Dozens of world leaders flew in to attend crisis talks with Hollande and his interior minister. Among them - U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who told ABC news from Paris that he believes the West is at war with those who pervert Islam.
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ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER: Well, I certainly think that we are at war with those who would commit terrorist attacks and who would corrupt the Islamic faith in the way that they do to try to justify their terrorist actions. So that's who we are at war with.
FRAYER: There are fears of a backlash against Muslims. France has the largest Muslim community in Western Europe - 10 percent of the population here. There have been attacks and vandalism on some mosques across France. Muslim leaders around the world have condemned the Paris siege. For most French people, this is about the country coming together.
FLORIAN CHEVOPPE: There aren't Muslims or Jews. There's just French people.
FRAYER: Marcher Florian Chevoppe says he hopes some good can come out of tragedy.
CHEVOPPE: I think there's been a before and there will be an after. And I think France has changed. I think there's more solidarity. I think people are more proud of being French.
FRAYER: Many say this was the strongest show of unity in France's streets since the end of World War II. Marchers today say they're determined to stay united in the face of attacks that could otherwise divide their country. For NPR News, I'm Lauren Frayer in Paris.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Finally this hour, images of public housing and the people who live there. Public housing is often seen through a negative lens, and two former residents are trying to change that. NPR's Pam Fessler has their story.
PAM FESSLER, BYLINE: Rico Washington relaxes on a bench outside Kimberly Gardens - that's the housing project in Laurel, Maryland, where he grew up. Washington's 38 with long dreadlocks and a neatly trimmed beard. He says when he was young he was embarrassed to live here. He had coworkers drop him off down the street.
RICO WASHINGTON: I would wait until they had gone far down 197, and then I would double back and start walking towards Kimberly Gardens.
FESSLER: Today, he's no longer embarrassed. He knows many hard-working, incredible people live in public housing despite the stereotypes of drugs, crime and despair. Washington says it was the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor that convinced him he had to do something.
WASHINGTON: People just could not believe that this woman was from public housing. I mean, she had had 15 years of experience on the bench. She also had two Ivy League degrees.
FESSLER: So he decided, as a writer now living in New York City, to bring other success stories to light. He teamed up with photographer Shino Yanagawa, who had her own images of public housing when she moved to New York from Japan. At first she was excited when her then-husband said they'd be living in the projects.
SHINO YANAGAWA: I thought it was going to be super-exciting. And I know it sounds crazy, but this is what happens when you grow up in Tokyo and listening to a lot of hip-hop.
FESSLER: She says Western hip-hop music made public housing in America seem very cool. Instead, she found crime, urine in the elevators, hopelessness. But Yanagawa says she also saw something else - families struggling for a decent life and people like her ex-husband who emerged from public housing to become a doctor.
YANAGAWA: So I wanted to give the opportunity to the children in housing projects that you can always choose what you want. You can always choose your path.
WASHINGTON: We can start, I guess, here.
FESSLER: Washington and Yanagawa have now interviewed and photographed dozens of current and former public housing residents about their lives. The result is an exhibit called We The People at the Brooklyn Historical Society. They hope it adds something to the national conversation about stereotypes and race.
WASHINGTON: This is Brian Paupaw.
FESSLER: Washington points to one photo on display of a young man sitting on a couch, laughing with his mother. Paupaw grew up in public housing in Brooklyn but got a scholarship to attend Parsons The New School for Design. Washington says while Paupaw was there, a roommate invited him to go snowboarding.
WASHINGTON: He was like, nah, that's something that white people do, you know. Black people don't snowboard. That's crazy. Why would I want to do that?
FESSLER: But he did go, and it changed his life. Paupaw became a prolific snowboarder and started a non-profit called Hoods To The Woods. It takes teens from the inner city to go snowboarding, rock climbing and hiking.
WASHINGTON: Susie Mushatt Jones.
FESSLER: The next photo shows an elderly woman in a striped housedress and straw hat, staring into the distance.
WASHINGTON: She's a centenarian. We interviewed her at - she was 111.
FESSLER: Washington says Jones, who lived in Brooklyn public housing, worked her entire life as a domestic. But she managed to save up enough to help four nieces go to college, something she was unable to do.
WASHINGTON: This is Dr. Tony Medina.
FESSLER: He's now a poet and professor at Howard University. The stories go on and on, from the little-known to those more recognized, like hip-hop artist Yasiin Bey, formerly known as Mos Def. Washington says if there's a common theme, it's that almost everyone they talked to said that living in public housing actually helped them to succeed. They learned how to do more with less.
EPHRAIM BENTON: My name is Ephraim Benton. I am 36 years old, soon to be 37. And I am from Tompkins projects.
FESSLER: Which is also in Brooklyn. Benton is profiled in the exhibit. As a teen he was involved in gangs and arrested for felony assault. But he got a second chance - an opportunity to attend acting school. He's now a professional actor appearing on TV and in movies. He says coming from the projects was a plus.
BENTON: Seeing so much, you know, heartache and pain and growing up, it helped me connect more with my emotions as far as characters.
FESSLER: He says he can cry at the drop of a hat. Benton doesn't live at Tompkins anymore but returns often. He's set up several programs, like an outdoor movie series, to keep teens here occupied and out of trouble. He also hopes they see from his example that there is a way out.
BENTON: You know, these kids out here, they don't feel like nobody cares about them.
FESSLER: An attitude that Washington and Yanagawa think is exacerbated by stereotypes and make some of them embarrassed to admit where they live. Pam Fessler, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
If your New Year's resolutions to eat better, be healthier and shed a few pounds haven't quite panned out yet, here's a strategy you may not have considered, intermittent fasting. NPR's Allison Aubrey is here to talk about an approach that's gaining a lot of traction among dieters and researchers who are studying the possible benefits beyond just weight loss. And Allison, intermittent fasting gives us a sense of what it is - fasting every now and then?
ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: Right. Well, the idea here is not to starve yourself for days. I like to think of this more as a mini-fast where you go, say, a 14 to 18 hour stretch without eating one or two days a week. The most well-known plan out there is called the 5-2 diet, popularized by a British physician. And this is where you eat normally for five days out of the week and then you pick two days a week when you do a mini-fast. So for example, you have an early dinner around 5 p.m., and you don't eat again until breakfast the next day at 8. That means you've done a 15-hour mini-fast. And the aim is that on these two days, you cut way back on the number of calories that you're eating to just 500 or 600 calories a day.
BLOCK: That's the catch.
AUBREY: That's right. That's the catch.
BLOCK: And Allison, you've been trying this intermittent fasting. You have a lean and hungry look to me. How's it going?
AUBREY: (Laughter). Well, you know, since this has been generating so much interest among scientists over in the U.K. and here, I decided hey, why not? I'll try it - not so much for weight loss but for other possible benefits such as lowering blood sugar and increasing energy and focus. That sounds good, right?
BLOCK: Yeah, sure.
AUBREY: And I have to say, it is challenging. I won't eat anything after 5 o'clock. So that means I'm at home cooking for my children, not eating dinner, and don't eat again until the next morning. So it can be challenging when you get started.
BLOCK: Yeah, 600 calories doesn't give you a lot of flexibility. What are you trying to eat on those days?
AUBREY: Right, well, you know, you can eat what you like. But be realistic. If you're down to 500 calories, these calories have got to hold you. So you're basically eating a lot of lean protein, greens, other non-starchy vegetables. And the important part here is to go that long stretch of at least 15 hours without eating.
BLOCK: Any downsides, Allison, besides crankiness, as I imagine...
(LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: People for whom intermittent fasting is a really bad idea maybe?
AUBREY: So I think that there are any number of people who probably wouldn't want to try it - pregnant women, children. If this is something that you're interested in and you have hesitations, certainly talk to your doctor.
BLOCK: Why do this though, Allison? Why not just reduce intake throughout the week?
AUBREY: Well, you know, this is where the science really gets interesting. Researchers at the University of Manchester in the U.K. tested this diet approach in about a hundred women. Half of the women in the group went on this 5-2 diet. The other half followed a more traditional, low-fat diet where they tried to restrict calories seven days a week. And what the researchers found is that the 5-2 dieters lost more weight. They lost more body fat compared to the women on the traditional low-fat diet. So this was a surprise. And what's more, the women on the 5-2 diet also saw improvements to blood sugar. So the researchers are still trying to untangle why this seems to be the more effective dieting strategy. But one thing I can say from my own experience is that these mini-fasts really seem to cut the appetite - or at least my appetite. One of the first days I tried this, I was really hungry when I was going to sleep. And I literally fell asleep, like, dreaming of a chocolate croissant. I was even planning my trip over to Union Station in the morning to buy my chocolate croissant. But when I woke up, I did not even want it. I think I had oatmeal instead. And I left half of the oatmeal in the bowl uneaten. So scientists say this pattern of eating may help regulate appetite so we don't eat as much.
BLOCK: Well, apart from appetite, Allison, you said you were interested in the effects of fasting on energy and on focus. What's known about how intermittent fasting might affect those?
AUBREY: Sure. Well, one of the scientists that I've been talking to is Mark Mattson at the National Institute on Aging. And he says fasting brings a lot of changes in body and brain chemistry. His studies in animals, mainly mice, find that going without food can change the way the brain gets energy. So he's studying how this affects learning and memory. And he's actually planning a study in people later this year. Researchers are also interested in immunity. It turns out that fasting seems to put a mild stress on the cells in the body. And again, studies in animals suggest that the cells become more resilient and better able to protect against damage and disease. So as Mattson likes to point out, you know, this eating three square meals a day plus a few snacks - as is so typical of modern life - is very abnormal from an evolutionary perspective. Humans have, in fact, fasted intermittently for most of history, and perhaps there's a benefit to this.
BLOCK: NPR food and health correspondent and intermittent faster, Allison Aubrey, thanks so much.
AUBREY: Thanks, Melissa.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Here's a question for you. Do you have enough time to be bored anymore, as in mental downtime? Now, if you have a smart phone, you already know what I'm getting at. Many of us reflexively grab our phones at the first hint of boredom - say, during our commute - like these people we found waiting for Metro trains here in Washington, D.C.
JONATHAN MCBRIDE: You caught me red-handed.
SABRINA JACKSON: Well, I know I stay on my phone all day. I know I would do more things, but I stay on my phone all day, from the time - like, I got off this morning. And I've been on my phone since I got off.
CORNISH: That's Sabrina Jackson of Washington and Jonathan McBride of Lima, Peru. A study done by the research group Flurry found that mobile consumers now spend an average of 2 hours and 57 minutes each day on mobile devices. So are we packing our minds too full? What's lost with all this texting, tweeting, email checking?
Well, our friend Manoush Zomorodi, host of WNYC's podcast New Tech City, is digging into that question. And she joins us to talk about her reporting for a project called "Bored And Brilliant: The Lost Art Of Spacing Out." Hey there, Manoush.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Hi, Audie.
CORNISH: So you call yourself a skeptical technophile, right?
ZOMORODI: (Laughter).Yes.
CORNISH: And, I mean, I have a smart phone. You have a smart phone. And I assume that you're on yours all the time, right?
ZOMORODI: You know, it's gotten so bad that I actually downloaded an app. And it's called Moment. And it can measure not only how much time you spend on your phone, but how many times you check it. And I'm ashamed to say that I am averaging between 50 and a hundred check-ins a day. And, you know, it's not just because...
CORNISH: Whoa. (Laughter).
ZOMORODI: Yeah, it's a lot.
CORNISH: I'd make fun of you, but mine would probably be the same (laughter).
ZOMORODI: Well, yeah, tell me about your relationship with your phone, Audie.
CORNISH: It's a love-hate relationship. I just try not to sleep with it under the pillow at this point.
ZOMORODI: Yeah. So for me, I kind of realized that I have not been bored since I got a smart phone seven years ago. And recently - another admission here - it's gotten particularly bad because I've become one of those people who cannot stop playing a game. And my addiction is a game called TwoDots. If you ride the subway in New York City, everyone is playing it.
CORNISH: Well, the thing is, a lot of times when we're checking our phones - right? - it's time when we would've spaced out anyway, in the elevator, in a checkout line...
ZOMORODI: Yeah.
CORNISH: Are we really losing anything here? I mean, what have you learned about the importance of time to be bored?
ZOMORODI: Well, what I've learned is that our brains are doing some really important work when we think we're doing nothing. So research suggests we get our most original ideas when we stop the constant stimulation and we let ourselves get bored. So one of the researchers I spoke to for the project is a psychologist named Dr. Sandi Mann at the University of Central Lancashire in the U.K. And she actually tested for the connection between boredom and creativity. She did an experiment where she made people do something really boring and then try a creative task. This was a little test she came up with. And the participants came up with their most novel ideas when they did the most boring task of all, which was reading the phone book. And, in fact, she is on a mission to bring back boredom. Here's why.
SANDI MANN: When we're bored we're searching for something to stimulate us, so we might go off in our heads to try and find that stimulation by our minds wandering, daydreaming. You start thinking a little bit beyond the conscious, a little bit into the subconscious, which allows sort of different connections to take place.
CORNISH: So there is value in being bored. But do we really know if the use of smart phones is affecting that?
ZOMORODI: Well, that's the big question, right? In the last decade or so, neuroscientists have - they've really started to understand what they called mind wandering and how it leads to daydreaming, which is actually the brain's default mode. And that phrase - default mode - was first used by Dr. Marcus Raichle in 2001 to describe the brain's resting function. We go to that place naturally. So psychologists and neuroscientists have only just started to study what the consequences could be of disrupting that rest function. One thing they do worry is that smart phones could be keeping us from doing something called autobiographical planning, and that is goal setting.
CORNISH: All right. Well, remember those smart phone users we talked about earlier? We actually put this idea to them about, you know, whether it might be better just to put the thing down. Here's what they said.
JOE MEYIAN: Better to be bored? I don't know if I agree with that. I think it's a combination of both is good. I think some free time is good, but I also think the brain needs to be engaged and active.
ADRIENNE FIELDING: I would agree that boredom is a good thing. I think lack of nothing to do in your hands or in front of you gives your brain some space to think.
CORNISH: Washington, D.C., subway riders using their smart phones on the platform. That was Joe Meyian of Arlington, Virginia, Adrienne Fielding of Silver Spring, Maryland. And Manoush, on New Tech City this week you were challenging people to think about this, to rediscover the lost art of spacing out. How?
ZOMORODI: So, Audie, we've come up with some ways that people can find the right balance for them with their tech usage. First, what we're going to do is get a baseline. We are partnering with that app that I mentioned that's called Moment that measures how many times a day we pick up our phones and how many minutes we use on our phones. We're just seeing where do things stand now and where could some changes take place?
CORNISH: Explain how this is going to work.
ZOMORODI: OK. So "Bored and Brilliant" - it's this one-week challenge. It's going to happen the first week of February. But you can sign up right now, start observing your own phone behavior and get ready to rethink it.
CORNISH: Manoush, thanks so much for talking with us, and I guess we'll see you in a few weeks.
ZOMORODI: I'm looking forward it, Audie.
CORNISH: That's Manoush Zomorodi, host of the podcast New Tech City from our member station WNYC, talking about her show this week. You can find details at the All Tech Considered blog on npr.org. In fact, some of us here at ATC are going to try to cut our own phone usage, and we'll have Manoush back next month to see how it went.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
There have been dozens of bomb threats and vandalism at mosques across France since last week's terrorist attacks by gunmen claiming allegiance to radical Islam. Yet, some of the first people on the scene of the Paris attacks were Muslims. From Paris, Lauren Frayer has this story of heroism by one Muslim and fear among France's Muslim population.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: When Lassana Bathily escaped from a kosher supermarket under siege here Friday, police at first thought he was the assailant. They forced him to the ground and handcuffed him. Bathily is a 24-year-old Muslim immigrant from Mali with the same skin color as the gunman.
LASSANA BATHILY: (Foreign language spoken).
FRAYER: "An hour and a half they kept me cuffed," Bathily told French TV, "until one of my colleagues who wasn't working that day came and told them who I am." Bathily works at the kosher market. He was in a basement storeroom near a walk-in refrigerator when a gunman burst in upstairs.
BATHILY: (Foreign language spoken).
FRAYER: "I opened the door to the fridge and rushed some of the shoppers inside," he said, "then I turned off the light and closed the door behind us. I told them to stay calm and then I went back out. Bathily managed to escape through a delivery shaft. After police finally believed him, he gave them a key to open the store's metal shutters and make their assault. Four Jewish hostages died, but many of those who survived say Bathily helped to save them.
BATHILY: (Foreign language spoken).
FRAYER: "I didn't know or care if they were Jews or Christians or Muslims," he said. "We're all in the same boat." More than 55,000 people have signed an online petition calling on French president Francois Hollande to grant automatic citizenship to Bathily for his heroism. He's being compared to Ahmed Merabet, the Muslim policeman shot dead responding to the Charlie Hebdo attacks.
MALEK MERABET: (Foreign language spoken).
FRAYER: "My brother was a Muslim," said Malek Merabet, the slain policeman's brother. "He was killed by people who pretend to be Muslims." Like the Merabet family, Muslim leaders worldwide have condemned the Paris attacks. I visited the city's Grand Mosque where there was no extra security. I walked right in and met the grand mufti, Dalil Boubakeur.
DALIL BOUBAKEUR: This is a criminal action. They are criminal people and their actions - very bad for Muslim people, with risks of violence against Islam, against Muslims.
FRAYER: Today France's Central Council of Muslims said there have been more than 50 shootings and bomb threats at mosques across the country since last week. Maarten van de Donk works for an E.U.-funded group that helps fight radicalization in the Muslim suburbs of Paris. His group is dealing with a flood of calls from people who suddenly think their Muslim neighbors might be radicals.
MAARTEN VAN DE DONK: That's already happening. But you also see on the social media is that a lot of people are overreacting and people relate what happened in Paris to all Muslims in Europe.
FRAYER: Outside the now-empty Charlie Hebdo offices where Wednesday's massacre took place, Parisians have piled up flowers. Among those lighting a candle was Pierre Hakim, who's half French and half Algerian.
PIERRE HAKIM: My mother is a Christian, my nanny when I was a child was Jewish, and I'm Muslim. That's all we must believe - together.
FRAYER: But he says he's afraid for the future. France for him has always been a country of tolerance, and he says these attacks have shattered that feeling.
For NPR News I'm Lauren Frayer in Paris.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
On this day in 1865, in Savannah, Georgia, leaders of the Union Army met with a group of black ministers. The Civil War was winding down, and the Union wanted the ministers' thoughts on how to help thousands of newly freed slaves. From that meeting came General William Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15. It said, quote, "each family shall have a plot of not more than 40 acres of tillable ground." Reporter Sarah McCammon has the story of the plan better known as 40 acres and a mule.
SARAH MCCAMMON, BYLINE: After he wrapped up his famous march, General Sherman spent a few weeks in Savannah, staying in an ornate, Gothic Revival mansion called the Green-Meldrim House. That's where he and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton held their meeting with local black leaders. The house is now owned by a local church. Susan Arden-Joly is the preservationist.
SUSAN ARDEN-JOLY: Sherman's memoirs say that he took them upstairs to his quarters. So that's where we will go.
MCCAMMON: Walking up the winding staircase, Arden-Joly says the meeting took place in a high-ceilinged room on a corner of the second floor. She reads from Sherman's memoirs, where he quotes minutes from the meeting. He and Secretary Stanton asked the group's leader, Reverend Garrison Frazier, a series of questions.
ARDEN-JOLY: (Reading) Fourth question, state in what manner you would rather live, whether scattered among the whites or in colonies by yourselves. Answer, I would prefer to live by ourselves, for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over.
MCCAMMON: Charles Elmore is an emeritus professor of humanities at Savannah State University. He says Sherman and Stanton listened to Reverend Frazier and the others.
CHARLES ELMORE: The other men chose this eloquent, 67-year-old, imposing black man who was well over six feet tall. And he said, essentially, we want to be free from the domination of white men. We want to be educated, and we want to own land.
MCCAMMON: Four days later, Sherman signed Field Order 15, setting aside 400,000 acres of confiscated Confederate land for freed slaves. Sherman appointed Brigadier General Rufus Saxton to divide up the land, giving each family up to 40 acres. Elmore says it wasn't in the order, but some also received leftover Army mules.
ELMORE: But it became known as 40 acres and a mule.
STAN DEATON: Once the passion of war was over, the idea of that kind of social experiment kind of lost favor with a lot of people very quickly.
MCCAMMON: That's Stan Deaton of the Georgia Historical Society. As he points out, after Lincoln's assassination, President Andrew Johnson reversed Sherman's order, giving the land back to its former Confederate owners.
VAUGHNETTE GOODE-WALKER: Some call it the biggest gotcha in American history.
MCCAMMON: Writer Vaughnette Goode-Walker leads tours focused on Savannah's black history.
GOODE-WALKER: You know, because here, take this land. But we can't give it to you because it really doesn't belong to us. It belongs to the Confederates when they come back home. How confusing is that?
MCCAMMON: That left many African-Americans with few options but becoming sharecroppers, often working for former slave owners. But Charles Elmore says the meeting in Savannah 150 years ago accomplished one important thing.
ELMORE: It set in motion the dialogue between the white power structure and black men in Savannah, Georgia. What do you all want? And they got some of it, however temporary and fleetingly. They got it. That is significant.
MCCAMMON: For NPR News, I'm Sarah McCammon in Savannah, Georgia.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Thousands of people gathered in the eastern German city of Dresden today to demonstrate against what they describe as the Islamization of Western Europe. This was the 12th such protest in Dresden in this many weeks. Organizers ignored calls from politicians to cancel the march to ease tensions after last week's deadly attacks by jihadists in Paris. The organizers say the attacks in France show why they are demanding an end to Muslim immigration to Germany. NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson joins us now from Dresden. And Soraya, you're there watching the protests? Give us a sense of just how big this anti-immigrant demonstration is.
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON, BYLINE: Well, last week's numbers were 18,000, and today's at least that much if not more. We don't have official figures yet, but you have to picture a steady, large stream of protesters walking past for more than a half an hour. Their march or their protest involves walking around Dresden and showing their discontent with the state of Islam in Germany.
BLOCK: Well, Dresden has relatively few immigrants compared with other German cities, so why would this anti-immigrant sentiment be more vocal or more visible there where you are?
NELSON: Well, it's interesting because I spoke with a political scientist out tonight who has been doing a survey of the people coming. He says a lot of these people, they're middle-of-the-road - I mean, people identify the organizers of this movement, called PEGIDA, which is basically Patriots Against Islamization of Europe is sort of what it translates to - he says that these are middle-of-the-road people who are responding to PEGIDA's calls, that these are Germans, these are pensioners, these are people who have fear what's happening with the economy, and that they're projecting their concerns on to immigrants, certainly Muslim immigrants in particular, who they feel are not integrating well into the society here. So they're particularly loud here in Dresden, in the eastern part of Germany, where there are more economic concerns and issues, even though they do have fewer immigrants as you point out.
BLOCK: We should note, Soraya, that the German Chancellor Angela Merkel said today, Islam belongs to Germany. She has said in the past that these anti-immigrant rallies are organized by people who have hatred in their hearts. How do you think popular opinion is lining up on both sides of this issue?
NELSON: Well, certainly her comments today have brought more people out. A number of people I spoke to said that they were here in direct response to that. They were very concerned about those comments. They feel that that is just not true, that Germany is being lost because of Islam. In fact, there was one poster in particular that was interesting of Angela Merkel in a hijab, you know, in a scarf, basically - Islamic scarf. And people here say that the government, and in particular Ms. Merkel, needs to listen to what they're saying, that they are a vocal group. We are the people is what they chant, which sounds unfortunately very much like the sort of thing one heard during the Nazi era.
BLOCK: Does it strike you that that sentiment - the anti-immigrant sentiment and specifically the anti-Islamic sentiment - is being fueled directly by the attacks in Paris?
NELSON: That is also what brought people out tonight. At first there were some comments made about how the press, you know, has the right to be free. But again, that degenerated pretty quickly into calls and chants of the lying press, so it's - there is sort of a mixed feeling. I mean, Paris was being used as an excuse is what the government was saying. And certainly some of what we heard being spoken tonight on the stage or on the podium before they started marching through Dresden reflects that.
BLOCK: Soraya, thanks very much.
NELSON: You're welcome, Melissa.
BLOCK: NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson speaking with us earlier today from the anti-immigration march in Dresden, Germany.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And a final thought on tech now from last week's International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Commentator Judy Carter was there checking out gizmos with human relationships on her mind.
JUDY CARTER, BYLINE: I was supposed to go to the show with my partner, but we had a fight. So I went alone, wondering if gadgets could help us. The first thing I see - a brain-sensing headband.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: But what it does is it senses the electronic signals coming from your brain.
CARTER: Can it sense the brain activity of your husband or your wife?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: No and it doesn't necessarily read your brain. It just reads your brain activity.
CARTER: Oh, well. I moved across the floor.
This is SoulMate Technology?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: Yes.
CARTER: They were just selling chargers for mobile phones.
I thought it was finding your soulmate, like dating, like getting married. No?
There are thousands of gadgets to recharge phones but nothing to recharge relationships. Apparently, the most important relationship you have is with yourself. I don't need anybody as long as I have my own drone.
What does this say?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Taking your selfies to new heights. You throw your Zano up, and you get a photo or a video of you in a location.
CARTER: So you can take selfies of yourself now from the sky?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Yes, pretty much.
CARTER: Probably a little more flattering.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Yeah.
CARTER: The theme of CES - people don't need people, they did gadgets. Well, as I'm leaving, I look up and I see a big sign proclaiming the message of this conference - break free of your attachments. Really? But I need attachments. Coming home, I realized that my partner does something that no gadget does - makes me laugh. But hey, coming in 2016 - the new gadget Laugh At That for all platforms - uh oh. Judy Carter for NPR News.
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This is NPR News.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
The suicide of a young Egyptian activist two months ago set off alarm bells among Cairo's activists. The young woman had fought for democracy only to see four years of protests culminate in yet another military-aligned government that jails dissenters. Activists and mental health professionals are urging others not to follow her example.
NPR's Leila Fadel reports from Cairo.
LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: In mid-November, Zainab El Mahdi, just 23, hanged herself in her home. The young woman's death sent shockwaves through the activist community and people mourned her on social media. They quoted her as saying, there is no justice - we're lying to ourselves just to live.
A musician mourning Mahdi's death put his pain into this haunting melody.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "REQUIEM FOR ZAINAB MAHDI")
AHMAD AMAR: (Playing piano).
L. FADEL: Many activists saw shades of themselves in her struggle. They were jubilant at ousting a dictator in 2011, but now find repression and economic stagnation as bad as any time in their lives, if not worse. Mohamed Kuhsess (ph) was Mahdi's friend and fellow activist.
MOHAMED KUHSESS: (Through interpreter). She found out that instead of democracy taking a step forward, it was going backward.
L. FADEL: Mahdi's path in many ways represented the fear and uncertainty of Egypt's recent years. She was a revolutionary who marched in Tahrir Square in 2011. She was a member of the now banned Muslim Brotherhood, but split with them after the uprising because she didn't think they upheld revolutionary ideals. She campaigned for justice and freedom of expression and she worked to bring attention to the thousands of people who've been jailed in Egypt for voicing dissent. But nothing changed, and at some point she gave up.
Again, Kuhsess.
KUHSESS: (Through interpreter). The dream of the revolution was not achieved and youth are frustrated, and that takes different shapes. Ending your life is one of the hardest, most severe ways to express that frustration.
L. FADEL: Mahdi made her fatal decision in a society where suicide is so taboo that one speaks about it and families hide the cause of death. Other public suicides followed hers. A 48-year-old driver hanged himself from a billboard in Cairo over economic woes and family problems, a relative said. Another man later hanged himself from the side of his apartment building. And those are just the most public examples. More often, Egyptians take their lives in anonymity, in a country where social stigma prevents frank public discussion of mental illness.
Sally Toma is a psychiatrist who treats trauma. She is also an activist.
SALLY TOMA: It's a vicious cycle of trauma, violence, anxiety and depression, you know, and no one is getting help. And some just leave the vicious cycle by suicide. They just exit. That's the idea, it's like pressing an exit button out of this.
L. FADEL: Anecdotally, Toma says suicide appears to be on the rise in Egypt based on her own cases. She's identified at least 10 suicides in the last two months and many other attempts. But the country doesn't even document suicide cases and there is little access to mental health care. It's clear though that Egyptians are suffering as their government lurched from Islamist to now a former Army officer and strongman.
TOMA: They've been promised every day things are going to get better. They're not getting better. We got an Islamist, he didn't make it better. Now we've got a military man and it's not getting better, so there are reasons. Every time they want to hope, you know, hope is taken away.
L. FADEL: Khalil Fadel is a psychiatrist in Cairo and he says the public displays of hopelessness are a cry for help.
K. FADEL: When you are hanged from a billboard, you are telling people that you are screwed up by the society and by the government, and you're fed up. You are telling them by your body, by your hanged body.
L. FADEL: After Zainab El Mahdi's startling death, a prominent activist organization, the April 6 Movement, pleaded with others not to commit suicide. Despite the hopelessness, it said, you must not forget that your life is the most precious.
Leila Fadel, NPR News, Cairo.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
The State Department today confirmed that Cuba has kept its pledge to release 53 political prisoners. That's a move that keeps the U.S. rapprochement with Cuba on track. A top State Department official plans to visit the island next week. The assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere will be the highest ranking U.S. official to visit Cuba in decades. NPR's Michele Kelemen has more on how the relationship is evolving.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: The release of the political prisoners was not a prerequisite for next week's talks in Havana, but it will make things easier for the Obama administration to move ahead with the normalization of relations. The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, says the White House is clear-eyed about this.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SAMANTHA POWER: We know that the release of 53 political prisoners in recent days by the Cuban government - welcome as that step is and heartening as it is for their families - does not resolve the larger human rights problems on the island.
KELEMEN: Speaking in Kentucky at an event hosted by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Power says the Obama administration shares the same goals as Cuba's toughest critics in Congress. The U.S. wants to promote change, but she says the embargo hasn't worked in 50 years, so the U.S. is trying something new. Cuba expert Julia Sweig says it's too early for the critics to make any judgments.
JULIA SWEIG: It would be a huge mistake to say that because the United States begins to allow its citizens to travel and trade there that we can therefore expect democracy, freedom, human rights cocktail to flow on that island the next day. That would be a huge mistake.
KELEMEN: Sweig, author of the book "Cuba: What Everyone Needs To Know," sounds frustrated by Senator Marco Rubio and other pro-embargo lawmakers who don't think the U.S. got enough from Cuba out of this deal.
SWEIG: The policy is no longer about two guys named Castro on the island and it's no longer about five members of Congress in the United States who have Cuban ties.
KELEMEN: Another longtime Cuba-watcher, Tomas Bilbao of the Cuba Study Group, says the increased contacts and more normal ties will help promote change on the island, though slowly.
TOMAS BILBAO: And to the extent that expectations for greater change rise in Cuba, that puts pressure on the Cuban government to deliver. It, I think, empowers Cubans to expect more and demand more. And I think that that's positive for bringing about change inside the island.
KELEMEN: Human rights groups have welcomed the release of 53 political prisoners, but say many of them still face restrictions. Robin Guittard of Amnesty International also says that Cuba needs to get rid of the repressive laws that put dissidents in jail in the first place.
ROBIN GUITTARD: Otherwise, it will be, again, only a smokescreen.
KELEMEN: Guittard says Cuba is only changing it tactics - releasing longtime prisoners of conscience, but increasing the number of short-term arrests that clamp down on free speech. The U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power cites one example - just days after Presidents Obama and Raul Castro announced they would normalize ties, a Cuban artist, Tania Bruguera, called for a rally in a main square in Havana, she says.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
POWER: Tania was picked up before she made it to the Revolution Square. She and around a dozen other activists and journalists were detained on the morning of the event by the Cuban authorities. Dozens of others activists, bloggers and artists were placed under house arrest so they couldn't even reach the square.
KELEMEN: In the last year alone, Power says Cuban authorities carried out nearly 8900 short-term detentions like these to stifle dissent. But she says now the Castro government has to do more to explain itself and not just use the hostile relationship with the U.S. as an alibi. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.
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Tonight, it's Ducks versus Bucks. It's a huge moment for college football - the first national championship game under the new playoff system. The Oregon Ducks are taking on the Ohio State Buckeyes for the title. NPR sports correspondent Tom Goldman is there at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, where the game is being played. Hey there, Tom.
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: Hey, Audie. How are you? Greetings from chilly Arlington, Texas.
CORNISH: Oh, well, stay warm because we're going to talk for a few minutes about these two teams, which I understand are pretty evenly matched. Talk about what we should expect.
GOLDMAN: They are, Audie, that's a really good point. You know, statistically, you can look at it - both teams on average score about 45 points or more a game and give up about 22 points a game, so it looks like it should be a big offensive explosion. But of course, when we always say we know what's going to happen, the opposite happens, so it may be a defensive struggle. But I will get a little footbally on you, Audie, and say that the key to the game - the real key - is going to be the battle of the line of scrimmage between the offensive and defensive lines. Can Ohio State's great defensive line slow Oregon runners Royce Freeman and Thomas Tyner and put pressure on Marcus Mariota, the great Heisman-trophy-winning quarterback for Oregon? And on the Oregon side, can be the defense rattle third string quarterback Cardale Jones into mistakes? And can that line contain running back is Ezekiel Elliott? He's a big bull of a runner. He's shown he can get through the opponent's line and go all the way for touchdowns.
CORNISH: At the same time, Tom, two key players for Oregon have been suspended. I mean, how much could that hurt the Ducks?
GOLDMAN: Yeah, that's right. Wide receiver Darren Carrington and teammate Ayele Forde tested positive for marijuana, so they're out. The past two games for the Ducks, Carrington has been an important player with a lot of receiving yards and several touchdowns. Ayele Forde has been an important special teams player. The Ducks have dealt with missing players all season long because of injuries and they're using the next man up motto with these suspensions. And they're hoping that the next man up for these two guys will help them tonight.
CORNISH: And Tom, as you mentioned, Ohio State missing a key player; specifically, their starting quarterback. Now, I take it their third-string quarterback is now their starter?
GOLDMAN: Yeah, exactly. The last two games Cardale Jones has been fantastic. Interestingly, before the last couple of games, he was best known for a tweet in which he spoke an uncomfortable truth about big-time college sports. He said, essentially, we don't go to school to go to classes. We go to play football. Well, now he is playing football. He's doing it very well. He hasn't looked like a third-stringer so far. It's going to be up to Oregon to see if they can make him look like that.
CORNISH: Tom, you've covered Super Bowls, you've been to a ton of big football games. Is this a success, this first national championship game under the new playoff system?
GOLDMAN: Oh, it's been a rousing success, Audie. And I think, you know, tonight is going to be even bigger. The two New Year's Day semi-final games - Oregon beating Florida State and Ohio State beating Alabama - the ratings were off the charts. The ratings were even greater than the BCS championship game the year before - that was the old college football system - and even bigger than the 2014 March Madness final in college basketball, so this has been a rousing success. The New Year games generated some tremendous excitement that's gone on for the last 10 days and it's going to culminate here in Arlington. And I'm expecting this to be a real exciting atmosphere. It'll be Super Bowl-like, but beyond the Super Bowl because the Super Bowl is very corporate. That element is here, but you're also going to have the passion that you get with college football, so it'll be a thriller.
CORNISH: Tom, thanks so much, and stay warm.
GOLDMAN: Thanks, Audie.
CORNISH: That's NPR sports correspondent Tom Goldman talking about tonight's college football championship between the Ohio State Buckeyes and the Oregon Ducks in Arlington, Texas.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
In New York City today Mayor Bill de Blasio made a pitch for a piece of plastic.
MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO: One piece of plastic, but it's going to open so many doors for our fellow New Yorkers. It's going to make their lives better.
BLOCK: That plastic is a new ID card for New York City residents 14 and older, and they can get it regardless of immigration status. NPR's Hansi Lo Wang reports.
HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE: Mayor Bill de Blasio said renting an apartment, opening a bank account and entering a school building will now be easier for this city's estimated half-million unauthorized immigrants. They're now eligible for city-issued IDs.
DE BLASIO: We don't want any of our fellow New Yorkers to feel like second-class citizens. We don't want them to feel left out.
WANG: And the IDNYC program doesn't leave out New Yorkers who already have ID. Here's how the mayor sweetened the deal.
DE BLASIO: A free one-year membership to 33 cultural institutions. That did get the attention of many New Yorkers.
WANG: Johanna Miller of the New York Civil Liberties Union says getting lots of New Yorkers, not just unauthorized immigrants to sign up, will be key.
JOHANNA MILLER: The success of this program depends almost entirely on having a diverse pool of cardholders. If the card becomes a scarlet letter for undocumented people then it fails.
WANG: Los Angeles is preparing to roll out an ID similar to New York's. They join cities like San Francisco, Oakland, California and New Haven, Connecticut, where only about 10 percent of the city's population has applied since 2007. New York officials hope their program will be more widely adopted and there were already long lines today at the Queens Library's Flushing branch, 75-year-old Ni Shaolong waited to apply.
NI SHAOLONG: (Speaking Mandarin).
WANG: "The ID is definitely a good thing," Ni says in Mandarin. He says he plans to use it to check out books from the public library and visit some of city's museums for free. For Wa Sutardji, an immigrant from Indonesia who makes sushi at a Manhattan restaurant, the new ID will help answer more practical questions.
WA SUTARDJI: Everywhere you go everybody's asking, can I have your ID? Can I have your ID? This thing is good for the people who don't have their ID, you know?
WANG: What may not be good, says Johanna Miller of New York Civil liberties Union, is that privacy protection for cardholders under New York City law is limited.
MILLER: Currently, this law unfortunately would allow law enforcement to seek your information by only showing that it's relevant to an investigation. And that could be an investigation about somebody else.
WANG: Miller says probable cause isn't required for law enforcement or other government agencies to request cardholders' information.
Hansi Lo Wang, NPR News, New York.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Today in Haiti people filled churches and attended memorials for those who died in that country's massive earthquake five years ago. The official death toll according to the Haitian government stands at more than 316,000. More than a million and a half people were left homeless. Billions of dollars in aid has helped Haiti, but recovery has been uneven, at best. Now the country is struggling with a political crisis that's left the nation without a functioning parliament and the president ruling by decree. NPR's Carrie Kahn reports from Port-au-Prince.
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: In the shadow of the ruins of Haiti's main cathedral, hundreds pack a small brick church, raise their hands above their heads, sway back and forth and sing hallelujah.
(SOUNDBITE OF CROWD SINGING)
KAHN: We will never forget, the church sings in unison over and over. Mimot Jean (ph), a street vendor and her two kids head into the church. She says, we won't forget and we will honor those we lost that terrible day.
MIMOT JEAN: (Through interpreter) We don't think we are better than those who died. But those who survived, we are grateful to God, and we thank God for that.
KAHN: Maramuda Estad (ph) says the same. She came to church to remember her cousins, her uncle and countless friends who died in the quake.
MARAMUDA ESTAD: (Through interpreter) January 12, 2010 was very painful. This is one of the most painful days we ever have.
KAHN: Both women took the day off of work. Schools are closed, as are most businesses, and both say they will go straight home. They don't want to be out in the streets too long for fear of protests. Demonstrators clashed with police throughout the weekend, demanding the resignation of President Michel Martelly. Elections have long been postponed due to bickering between the president and opposition parties. As of today, most of the terms of the majority of Haiti's lawmakers expired, leaving Martelly ruling by decree.
(SOUNDBITE OF CROWD YELLING)
KAHN: At Haiti's rebuilt Parliament, the flag blows in the sea breeze at half-staff. Workers were told to report to duty today, but most stood outside arguing politics. Martelly announced he reached a deal with opposition lawmakers to call elections and extend the legislators' terms, but he faces a Catch-22. The parliament has to approve such a deal and it's unclear whether enough still have legal standing today to cast a vote. Opposition Senator Jean Baptiste Bien-Aime says regardless, he won't vote for it.
JEAN BAPTISTE BIEN-AIME: (Foreign language spoken).
KAHN: "I cannot support the corruption of Martelly. He is corrupt. The people want him to go," he says. Earlier in the day, President Martelly and his wife laid white flowers on the mass gravesite memorial where hundreds of thousands of Haitians were buried after the earthquake. Martelly said at this time, Haiti needs peace. The ongoing political turmoil is threatening to derail the recovery effort and undermine investor and donor confidence. Much has improved in Haiti in the past five years. The rubble has been removed. New roads, businesses, hotels and homes have been built. Crime and poverty are down and economic growth is up for four years in a row. But tens of thousands of people are still homeless. Food and gas prices are high. And poverty remains extreme.
Back in front of the shattered cathedral, Maramuda Estad, who sells used shoes on the street, says she is not interested in politics.
ESTAD: (Through interpreter) I haven't paid my rent yet. That's what I care about. And I don't know where I'm going to find the money to do that.
KAHN: Carrie Kahn, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
We're going to talk now about U.S. efforts in Haiti with the State Department's special coordinator for that country, Thomas Adams. He joined us in the studio earlier today. I asked him to describe one thing or person that illustrates the complications of the Haitian recovery.
THOMAS ADAMS: I met a young man who had been a crush victim. After the earthquake, his spine was crushed. He was taken to a U.S. Navy vessel and operated on. And then he was flown down to a rehabilitation center in the South that we support. And I arranged for him to get a scholarship and attend university, and he will graduate this year with a business degree and has a job offer. But when you talk to him and see all of his challenges, Haiti is not the most friendly - handicap friendly - and then you multiply that by all the other people, you realize that Haitians have struggled mightily since the earthquake - and even before that.
CORNISH: You mentioned some of the difficulties with the physical structures, obviously. There has been some development in Haiti, but a good deal of reconstruction is still required. What's some of the visible evidence of these challenges for you as you visit the country?
ADAMS: Sure. I go to Haiti once or twice a month and I've been doing that for the last four plus years. And if you were there right after the earthquake - and we all saw those tremendous pictures on TV - there were 1.5 million people in the tent camps after the earthquake. There are about 75,000 left, and the government estimates they'll all be pretty much settled by the middle of the 2015. The rubble's all gone. The United States paid for about a third of that removal. So you do see - you do see progress in Port-au-Prince. Haiti's still the poorest country in the hemisphere and is likely to remain so for a while. But they've had positive economic growth there. If they can attract foreign direct investment, and they've made a good start on that, Haiti has every chance of becoming a middle-income country, like the Dominican Republic next door, in about 25 years.
CORNISH: Five years on, the U.S. has spent upwards of $3 billion in Haiti, and we're still looking at a capital that doesn't have reliable electricity. We're looking at very high food prices, and still very extreme poverty. I mean, given this outlay of resources by the U.S., should progress have been greater?
ADAMS: Well, we certainly would've preferred for there to be more progress in Haiti than we've seen, and so, I think, would the Haitian people. But you have to realize there are other constraints than Haiti. Haiti has about 55,000 government employees for a population of 10 million. A lot of the delays in reconstruction have been due to weak government capacity, slowness on making decisions, slowness in settling land-tenure disputes, a judiciary system that's very weak. And yes, one of the things we would like to see happen over the next year is a real effort to strengthen governance down there. Donors are ready to support that. We have supported it. But we want to see...
CORNISH: But isn't the...
ADAMS: ...More political will there.
CORNISH: Essentially, isn't the opposition driven by concern about this governance, accusations that this government is corrupt? I mean, it seems like these things are tied. And this is a government that we're - essentially, for the time being - supporting.
ADAMS: Well, the opposition has kind of moved the goalposts on what they say they want over the last year. And I think President Martelly made a number of changes. He effectively embraced every single request they made, except for the one that he remove himself from office. So I think their reasons for not wanting to have elections now may be for other reasons. And the main reason might be they don't want to lose.
CORNISH: Thomas Adams, at the end of the day, when Americans see how much money - how much taxpayer money - went towards trying to rebuild Haiti, what's your response to people who say they don't see very much, and who see real problems with the way the kind of aid system works, right? That it didn't necessarily incentivize a Haiti that is rebuilt for some of its struggling citizens.
ADAMS: Well, I hear a lot of this criticism. And certainly, we have our sins. I think our greatest sin is some of our timelines were overly optimistic. We - for example, our health program, which has had great results, we thought we would spend a $1 billion over five years. It's probably going to be seven years before we can actually expend that money. But generally speaking, I think the American taxpayers should be proud of what's been accomplished down there. We've accomplished quite a bit, and we're going to stick with it.
CORNISH: Thomas Adams, he's the State Department's special coordinator for Haiti. Thank you so much for coming in.
ADAMS: Thank you for having me, Audie.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
The actress Anita Ekberg defined Swedish beauty in the 1950s and '60s. She was blonde and statuesque, with a figure that became the punch line of countless admiring jokes. She capitalized on her sensuality in over 50 movies. Anita Ekberg died yesterday in a small town near Rome after a series of illnesses. She was 83. NPR's Neda Ulaby has this remembrance.
NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: It's one of the most visually intoxicating scenes in movie history. Anita Ekberg, in a black evening gown, her blonde hair gleaming, floats through Rome's narrow, shuttered streets at night, a white kitten perched on her head.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LA DOLCE VITA")
ULABY: She's playing essentially herself - a glittering movie star slacking off with a handsome journalist, Marcello Mastroianni.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LA DOLCE VITA")
ANITA EKBERG: (As Sylvia) My goodness.
ULABY: Before you know it, she's romping in a centuries-old baroque fountain, strapless dress and all.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LA DOLCE VITA")
EKBERG: (As Sylvia) Marcello, come here.
ULABY: Anita Ekberg was already famous in 1959 when "La Dolce Vida" was filmed. The Swedish born beauty queen made her first movie with Abbott and Costello seven years earlier. Producers clamored to work with the starlet Bob Hope called the greatest thing to come from Sweden since the smorgasbord.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BOB HOPE: Anita Ekberg, my favorite actress.
ULABY: By 1956, Ekberg was so famous, an entire Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis comedy was written around trying to meet her. The movie was called, inevitably, "Hollywood Or Bust."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "HOLLYWOOD OR BUST")
JERRY LEWIS: (As Malcolm Smith) I saw her last picture six times.
DEAN MARTIN: (As Steve Wiley) Couldn't be with a body like that.
LEWIS: (As Malcolm Smith) What couldn't be?
MARTIN: (As Steve Wiley) Her last picture.
LEWIS: (As Malcolm Smith) Oh (laughter).
ULABY: But Ekberg tired of the limitations that came with being a sex symbol. By her own account, she so wanted to work with Oscar-winning director Federico Fellini, she tried to get his attention by driving around his film sets in a flashy Mercedes convertible. And as she told Dutch TV in 1992, it worked.
(SOUNDBITE OF DUTCH TV SHOW)
EKBERG: I think maybe he was the best director I've ever worked with.
ULABY: Fellini told Anita Ekberg she would not get a script for "La Dolce Vita." She had to make up her part herself.
(SOUNDBITE OF DUTCH TV SHOW)
EKBERG: He discussed with you what you wanted, and then he wanted your opinion. So he gave what he want wanted and you gave what you wanted.
ULABY: Fellini filmed that famous Trevi Fountain scene over seven or eight nights during a cold Roman winter. People living around the fountain rented out their balconies so fans could watch. Every take ended with roars of applause, small compensation, said Ekbert.
(SOUNDBITE OF DUTCH TV SHOW)
EKBERG: It was freezing.
ULABY: Ekberg appeared in three other Fellini films, but that scene was one of the director's favorites. Later in life, he told an interviewer every time I see her in the Trevi Fountain, I have the sensation of reliving those magic moments. Those sleepless nights surrounded by the meowing of cats and the crowd that gathered from every corner of the city.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LA DOLCE VITA")
EKBERG: (As Sylvia) Oh, I do cry sometimes.
(CAT MEOWING)
ULABY: Neda Ulaby, NPR News.
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The White House did something unusual today. It admitted it made a mistake. President Obama has been widely criticized for not attending the huge anti-terrorism march in Paris yesterday and for not sending the vice president or another senior cabinet official. NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson joins me now to talk about this and more. The White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest got a lot of questions about this today. What'd he say?
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Well, he essentially said the White House agrees that the criticism of the president's decision not to go to the march, not to send Vice President Biden, was fair. And he delivered a rare White House mea culpa.
JOSH EARNEST: We agree that we should've sent someone with a higher profile, in addition to the ambassador to France.
LIASSON: What Josh Earnest wouldn't do is explain why the initial decision was made other than to suggest that security issues were a concern - securing an outdoor event when the American president or even vice president is present can be very disruptive. He also mentioned that there was a very short period of time between when the march was announced and when it happened, just about 36 hours. But presidents do travel on short notice. Earnest couldn't say what the president did instead of going to the march on Sunday or explain the fact that the vice president didn't seem to have any competing schedule or why Attorney General Holder, who was in Paris this weekend for counterterrorism meetings, had to rush home to Washington instead of joining the march.
BLOCK: And we should point out, there were any number of other world leaders who were there - the British prime minister, the German chancellor, the Israeli president, the Palestinian president...
LIASSON: Palestinian leader - yes, 40 world leaders.
BLOCK: Where is the criticism coming from, Mara? And is this different from regular partisan bickering that we hear all the time?
LIASSON: Some of it is coming from the president's Republican opponents, to be sure, and that is to be expected. But there really was a very broad spectrum of criticism. I mean, some former U.S. diplomats called the decision stunning. One of them said it was a poster child for tone-deafness; there's not an excuse in the universe for him not going. And then of course there was the inevitable New York tabloid headline that said, "Sorry Charlie: Obama's Team AWOL At Paris Rally."
BLOCK: Referring to Charlie Hebdo, the target of the attack.
How big a deal is this, do you think, as a political question?
LIASSON: I think as a domestic political matter, it's probably not that big a deal. The White House has said over and over again the U.S. stands with France. The French ambassador came over to the White House today to meet with counterterrorism officials. We are allies with France in the fight against terrorism. Next month the president is going to host world leaders at the White House for a summit meeting on preventing terrorism.
I think the American people are not as consumed with whether the president went to the march, but they do want to know what the U.S. strategy is to keep this kind of attack from happening here. So I think the bigger question is what is the strategy to fight radical Islamic terrorism? Should more troops be sent to the Middle East to fight ISIS? Should the Europeans spend more money and time tracking returning foreign fighters? What's the U.S. doing at home? What's the strategy inside the Muslim community for rooting out violent extremists?
I think those are the in-questions that most Americans outside the kind of, media political elite, where we live, care about.
BLOCK: Well, so the White House today is basically acknowledging they messed up on the symbolism of the moment. The images that will be captured of yesterday's march will not have a prominent American presence there. Is it just symbolism that we're talking about, or is there some bigger issue here?
LIASSON: Well, I think there is a bigger issue. I think the initial decision not to go does illustrate a foreign policy debate that's going on inside both parties. Inside the Democratic Party you've got the Clintonites, kind of the more muscular foreign-policy people, who are indispensablists, think that the U.S. is the indispensable nation, thinks that the U.S. should lead almost everywhere, be out in front of the parade, literally, in this case. And then there's the Obama camp I think where the president often comes down reflexibly, which is not isolationism but it's leading from behind - supporting other countries as they take the lead to solve problems on their own soil. And there's a similar debate going on in the Republican Party, too. So I think the symbolism is important, but there is a bigger backdrop.
BLOCK: OK. NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Mara, thanks.
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On President Obama's third day in office, he issued a sweeping executive order. It banned the use of torture by U.S. officials or at any facilities under American control. The order was a public rejection of the CIA's interrogation methods during the George W. Bush administration, methods spelled out in a recent Senate report. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein led that review. Now she's concerned that President Obama's order banning torture might one day be reversed. NPR's David Welna reports.
DAVID WELNA, BYLINE: Late last month, Senator Feinstein sent President Obama a letter. It listed a number of things Congress and his administration could do which, she wrote, were, quote, "intended to make sure that the United States never again engages in actions that you have acknowledged were torture."
SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN: I think they are recommendations that should be implemented. They're not way out in left field or way out in right field. They're very practical and, I think, necessary.
WELNA: Practical because she would limit interrogations to what's already done by the military - necessary, Feinstein says, because Obama's decree banning torture remains in effect only as long as he's president.
FEINSTEIN: The thing is, the president has an executive order, as you know. But that's not binding on other administrations.
WELNA: Indeed, use of what the CIA calls enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs, and what many others call torture, does not appear to be entirely off the table. CIA Director John Brennan, responding to last month's Senate report, insisted he fully supported the president's ban on the use of EITs. But Brennan suggests that such methods may be called for again.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOHN BRENNAN: We are not contemplating at all getting back into the detention program, using any of those EITs. So I defer to the policymakers in future times when there is going to be the need to be able to ensure that this country stays safe if we face a similar type of crisis.
WELNA: Nine years ago, following revelations that the CIA was sending suspected terrorists to be interrogated at secret facilities abroad, Arizona Republican Senator John McCain pushed a measure through Congress known as the Detainee Treatment Act. It's the law today. It forbids the cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners. And it requires that military interrogators use only techniques permitted by the Army Field Manual. But Feinstein says that measure has loopholes. Her legislation, which she plans to introduce this week, aims to close them. McCain, who was himself tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, says he supports Feinstein.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN: Yeah, I'm with her. I'm with her. I'm with her. I'm with her.
WELNA: But it's not clear how many of McCain's fellow Republicans, who now control Congress, are also with Feinstein. Idaho's Jim Risch is a member of the Intelligence Committee.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SENATOR JIM RISCH: There were laws at the time this was done. There are laws on the books today. And unfortunately, what I find in Washington, D.C. is no matter what happens, people want to pass more laws.
WELNA: Feinstein wants to codify some key measures from President Obama's executive order from six years ago. She proposes limiting U.S. spy agencies, as with the military, to only those interrogation techniques in the Army Field Manual - another idea, prohibit the CIA from holding suspects for long periods of time. Oklahoma Republican Senator Jim Inhofe sees no need for what Feinstein's proposing.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SENATOR JIM INHOFE: I want to get results. I want to get these guys nailed so they're not killing Americans. So if it - I disagree with her.
WELNA: Beyond the uncertain prospects for Feinstein's proposals on Capitol Hill, some activist groups say a larger problem is that CIA interrogators have faced no legal consequences. Katherine Hawkins is a national security fellow at openthegovernment.org.
KATHERINE HAWKINS: No prosecutor will go after the CIA. No Justice Department will do that. No president will prosecute abuses that his predecessor approved. On some level, there's nothing Congress can do about that.
WELNA: Nor is it clear, especially after last week's Paris attacks, that this Congress would do anything, even if it could. David Welna, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
At the U.S. Supreme Court today, the justices wrestled with a question about signs. What should the Constitutional rules be for local governments who want to limit sign clutter on public property? The case pits a small religious group against the suburban town of Gilbert, Arizona. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg has more.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Sign regulation is a thorn in the side of local governments. Too little regulation and they get sued for traffic safety problems, sign clutter and degraded property values. Too much regulation and they get sued for First Amendment violations. So like Goldilocks, they're always trying to get the balance just right. The case before the court today was brought by Pastor Clyde Reed and his Good News Community Church, a tiny congregation of 25 to 30 adults who meet in different rented spaces in suburban Gilbert. The town maintains that the church's signs on public property are temporary, directional signs for events and under the town ordinance are thus limited to six square feet and can be posted just 12 hours before the event. But other signs posted on public property, namely political or ideological signs, can be bigger and stay up far longer. On the steps of the Supreme Court today, Pastor Reed said he found the difference shocking.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CLYDE REED: Our signs inviting people to church are very important yet are treated as second-class speech. We aren't asking for special treatment. We just want our town to stop favoring the speech of others over ours.
TOTENBERG: Pastor Reed's lawyers argue that if local governments are worried about sign clutter, they can limit the number of signs to one per block, for instance, and make it first come, first served. Local and state government officials counter that such a rule would be unrealistic given that there may be 50 or 60 candidates and initiatives in a given election. The town of Gilbert's lawyer, Philip Savrin, says the result would be far less speech.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PHILIP SAVRIN: And that means if you get a sign out there, the next person can't. So it's going to crowd out more people. And it's going to have the effect of whoever gets there first gets to have their sign.
TOTENBERG: Inside the Supreme Court chamber, Pastor Reed's lawyer, David Cortman, told the justices that the town of Gilbert unconstitutionally discriminates against those seeking to put up temporary event signs because it treats these signs differently based on what they say. Chief Justice Roberts - your argument does not turn on the fact that it's a church sign, does it? Your argument would be the same if this is a temporary sign about where the soccer game was going to be. Answered - that's right. Roberts followed up, don't you think that political speech is more valuable than directions to a soccer game? Lawyer Cortman replied that the government should not be able to decide that question. It must treat all signs equally. So, asked Justice Alito, if the state and city allow election-related signs to stay up for five months on public property, would the commercial organizers of a one-time yard sale have the same right? Answer - yes. Justice Kennedy - it seems to me you're forcing us to make a very wooden distinction that could result in a proliferation of signs for birthday parties or every conceivable event. And they would be allowed to stay up for five months because political signs are allowed for that long. While Kennedy and several other conservative justices sounded doubtful about Pastor Reed's equal treatment demand, both conservative and liberal justices sounded doubtful about the way the town of Gilbert has written its regulations. Justice Ginsburg noted that Pastor Reed's sign not only gives directions; it welcomes people to attend. Lawyer Savrin argued that the town's sign regulations are based on function, not content. And here, the function was directional. He noted that it is the state that makes the rules on political signs, and the town just enacts its ordinance to comply with that state law. Justice Scalia - So your defense is the state made me do it? Answer - in part, yes. Justices Ginsburg and Alito pressed Savrin on the town's position about mixed signs. Would a sign that both invites people to attend church services and gives directions still be limited as a 12-hour directional sign? Answer - yes. Justice Alito asked rhetorically, so could you put up a quote-unquote "ideological sign" that says, come to our service on Sunday morning. We can't tell you now where it'll be because the town won't let us? That prompted Justice Breyer to ask, what is this argument about? Are you saying that if they do that, they can't say, three blocks right and three blocks left? Is that what this argument is about? Answer - that's what it comes down to. Well, my goodness, harrumphed Justice Breyer, it does sound as if the town is being a little unreasonable, doesn't it? A decision in the case is expected by summer. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
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President Obama wants the federal government to do more to prevent cyberattacks. And this afternoon, the government itself became a target. Hackers claiming ties to the Islamic State militant group temporarily took over the Twitter feed of U.S. Central Command. They tweeted out threats against U.S. service members, as well as personal information and what appeared to be military maps. As NPR's Scott Horsley reports the Twitter takeover came shortly after the president delivered a speech calling for stronger data protection in schools and stores.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: A Pentagon spokesman downplayed the Twitter attack as more of an annoying prank than a genuine security threat. But it did underscore the president's point about protecting data security in a world where just about everyone is banking, buying and communicating more through digital networks.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: This extraordinary interconnection creates enormous opportunities, but also creates enormous vulnerabilities for us as a nation and for our economy and for individual families.
HORSLEY: Obama outlined a series of proposals designed to safeguard personal data, steps he'll talk about in next week's State of the Union address. One is aimed specifically at the data collected in schools through increasingly popular educational software.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
OBAMA: Michelle and I are like parents everywhere. We want to make sure that our children are being smart and safe online. That's a responsibility of ours as parents, but we need partners.
HORSLEY: Obama wants Congress to pass a law modeled on one in California that prevents software companies from selling students' data or using it to craft targeted ads.
Jim Steyer is with an advocacy group that helped write the California law.
JIM STEYER: The bottom line is data in the classroom and in schools should only be used for educational purposes, not to sell to other people, not to reveal inappropriate data.
HORSLEY: Dozens of software companies have already signed a voluntary pledge not to misuse students' data. But Mark Schneiderman, who's with the Software and Information Industry Association worries a new federal law might be piling on.
MARK SCHNEIDERMAN: We just want to make sure that we're not simply adding additional layers that further complicate the situation.
HORSLEY: Obama's also calling for new laws governing commercial handling of data, after a series of high-profile breaches at retail chains like Target and Home Depot. Nick Ahrens of the Retail Industry Leaders Association says big stores back the president's call to notify their customers of any data breach within 30 days. But, Ahrens says, policymakers have to be careful.
NICK AHRENS: Getting the trust equation right, at the same time making sure that any new laws that are considered really allow that dynamism that we've come to see in our economy to continue.
HORSLEY: President Obama is trying to strike his own balance this week. He'll be talking about both the benefits of faster, cheaper broadband service and the growing need to guard against cyberattacks.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, the White House.
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Greeks head to the polls later this month for an election that could decide the country's future in the Eurozone. Many voters are shunning mainstream politicians, whom they blame for bankrupting Greece, and then subjecting it to years of austerity. But voters are often not excited about the alternatives to the mainstream. Joanna Kakissis has the story from Athens.
JOANNA KAKISSIS, BYLINE: Megakles Rogakos and Antigone Nounou spend many nights after dinner talking about this month's elections. The couple - he's an art historian, and she's a researcher - are on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Rogakos is a conservative, who's always voted for New Democracy, the party of the current Prime Minister, Antonis Samaras. Rogakos is one of those rare Greeks who welcomed the European Union's intervention when Greece went bankrupt and had to ask for billions in bailout loans.
MEGAKLES ROGAKOS: I'm very supportive of foreign voices from Europe advising Greece what to do and how to move on. But it's really the job of the everyday government to implement these advices. And they are doing a terrible job.
KAKISSIS: He says the government was too scared to implement reforms that would have created jobs and lured investors to Greece. It paid lenders only by chopping spending, public salaries, pensions. Now more than a quarter of Greeks have lost their jobs, including Rogakos.
ROGAKOS: Had we been more careful, we would have seen development. We would have seen, you know, light at the end of the tunnel. But things are growing gloomier and gloomier.
KAKISSIS: So now Rogakos has no idea whom to vote for - maybe nobody. There are many Greeks like him. Polls show that at least 15 percent of voters are undecided. Yannis Palaiologos, who's written a book dissecting the Greek crisis, says many voters believe no one can save Greece.
YANNIS PALAIOLOGOS: We have very large numbers of people who don't have access to health care. We have a real social catastrophe on our hands. So there's suddenly a large part of the population that does feel that they have nothing to lose.
KAKISSIS: Nounou, Rogakos' partner, also feels like she has nothing to lose. She says her politics lean to the left, but she doesn't trust Syriza, the leftist party that's leading in polls.
ANTIGONE NOUNOU: I never was convinced by the party rhetoric and the party politics as well.
KAKISSIS: The party has promised to give public sector jobs back to Greeks, even increase salaries. She wouldn't mind that last bit. Her salary as a university researcher has been drastically cut since the crisis. But Greece doesn't have any money, she says. She's fed up with politicians...
NOUNOU: Who don't have the guts, who don't have the courage to actually do what needs to be done, regardless of what the cost is for them personally, as politicians, as professional politicians.
KAKISSIS: She says she will likely decide on the day of the election who to vote for. But like most Greeks, she doesn't believe her vote will make a difference. For NPR News, I'm Joanna Kakissis in Athens.
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Child welfare advocates filed a class action lawsuit this afternoon against the state of South Carolina, saying it has failed to protect thousands of children in its care. The advocates are demanding changes at a state agency that has faced repeated cases of child deaths and mismanagement. NPR's Laura Sullivan reports.
LAURA SULLIVAN, BYLINE: For several years now, South Carolina's Department of Social Services has been criticized for mismanagement and abuse in its foster care homes. The state held hearings and officials promised change. The agency also recently got a new leader, but now the department is facing new criticism, this time from the children. The class action lawsuit was filed in Federal District Court in Charleston and it's based on the complaints of 11 kids in foster care.
Sue Berkowitz is an attorney with South Carolina's Appleseed Legal Justice Center.
SUE BERKOWITZ: The South Carolina Department of Social Services has been neglecting the children that are in its care for decades.
SULLIVAN: Appleseed helped bring the suit, along with children's rights and national nonprofit.
BERKOWITZ: Not only are they not being protected, they're not given an opportunity to recover. And we should be just ashamed as a state.
SULLIVAN: The suit alleges the state has failed to provide therapy, counseling and medical care for the children, even when they appear to have been physically or sexually abused in foster care or group homes. It says the state moves the kids repeatedly from home to home - in some cases 10 or 15 times per child - places an inordinately high number of children in group homes rather than with families, and lacks an adequate number of foster homes or caseworkers.
BERKOWITZ: We know that it's a systemic problem and not just an isolated problem that needs to be fixed.
SULLIVAN: In a statement, South Carolina's Department of Social Services says,
The department and its caseworkers are dedicated to ensuring that foster children get the care that meets their needs.
But Stephanie Trevitz, who's not a party to the suit, says it sums up her experience with the state's social services. Trevitz and her husband Rex took in six foster children. Trevitz is a special education teacher and wanted to take on some of the hardest cases. What she says she wasn't prepared for was being left to fend for herself by the Department of Social Services.
STEPHANIE TREVITZ: It's been easier to bury my mother than it has been to get services through DSS. Everything for these children has been a fight. And I'm connected, I know who to call - or at least I know who to try to call - and I worry about those families or those people who don't have the abilities that I do.
SULLIVAN: She says one of her children came to her having already been placed in 13 homes by the age of 11, in some of which he had been abused.
TREVITZ: That child deserves more than what he has gotten, and he deserves services now.
SULLIVAN: Trevitz and her husband went on to adopt the six children. Child advocates say they hope that by filing suit the state will be forced to change the way it looks after the children in its care. Laura Sullivan, NPR News.
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Pennsylvania's worst performing school district is facing a state takeover. It's also poised to become one of the nation's largest urban school systems, where public education is provided entirely by private charter companies. As Emily Previti reports, it's a drastic response to the dire situation in the city of York.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: Save my school. Save my school.
EMILY PREVITI, BYLINE: High school senior Ashlee DeSantis protested outside nearly every hearing on the state's petition to take over her struggling school district.
ASHLEE DESANTIS: So this is to show anybody that's driving by, the chief recovery officer, anybody in the community, to show them that we actually do care. We care about our school. We love our school. And we love public school. We don't want receivership to happen here.
PREVITI: They might love their school, but its standardized test scores are the worst of all 500 public school districts in Pennsylvania. Eighty-four percent of York students live in impoverished households, and the city's stagnant tax base largely caused the financial problems at the heart of the state's takeover bid.
York school officials are fighting the court decision to approve a state receivership, but if it stands, the state will turn over the school system to Charter Schools USA, a for-profit company with 70 schools in seven states. They are a very few all-charter districts in the U.S., and York would be one of the largest. Rand Quinn is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's graduate school of education. He says controversy in these scenarios is almost unavoidable.
RAND QUINN: We can almost expect contention regardless of what these choices are and how well thought out and deliberate and reasonable they may seem.
PREVITI: York already has a handful of charter schools, and results are mixed. Some of York's existing charter schools post better standardized test scores than the district, but the highest performance comes from a school with students from two suburban districts as well as the city. Another charter with the worst scores later closed. Quinn says that's how it's supposed to work.
QUINN: There's this idea of competition and innovation and choice that's embedded in the logic of this method of reform. The good schools and the good teachers thrive, and the underperforming schools and underperforming teachers are removed from the system.
PREVITI: Charter Schools USA will have to meet performance standards or face losing its charter, but the contract isn't final yet. And incoming Governor Tom Wolf hasn't said what he'll do if it's finalized before his term starts. Wolf opposes privatizing public education, but he doesn't have another plan for York. Wolf has promised school funding formula changes, and they would affect the district, but any impacts would be delayed. Department of Education spokesman Tim Eller says York school officials have moved too slowly for years.
TIM ELLER: The board's continued delay in taking action just further delays the recovery process of taking place and further impacts the students.
PREVITI: But critics say the state is just rushing to bring Charter Schools USA to York before Wolf takes office. For NPR News, I'm Emily Previti.
BLOCK: This story comes from Keystone Crossroads. It's a statewide public media initiative reporting on the challenges facing Pennsylvania cities.
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Some new-and-improved potatoes could show up in grocery stores this year. They promise fewer ugly, black spots when you peel them, and when you fry them, you'll get less of a chemical that may be bad for you. There's just one problem with these potatoes. Some of the biggest potato users won't touch them. They don't even want to talk about them. NPR's Dan Charles explains why.
DAN CHARLES, BYLINE: For 32 years now, David Douches has been involved in a committed but high-maintenance relationship with the potato.
DAVID DOUCHES: I felt that I kind of stepped in to a beautiful plant to work with.
CHARLES: Not just beautiful, also really important. A billion people depend on it for nourishment.
DOUCHES: I feel that when I work on something like this, it could have a large impact.
CHARLES: Douches is a geneticist in charge of potato breeding at Michigan State University. He wants to make the potato just a little bit better. But the potato, unfortunately, resists improvement. I won't go into the detailed genetic reasons for this, just the result. If you have an almost-perfect potato variety, it's really difficult to make it any better using traditional breeding.
And this is why David Douches has brought me here, to his lab, to see an innovation that he thinks is really exciting - some potatoes that are banging around inside an ancient, rotating wooden drum. This is a bruise test. Douches and his academic colleagues are tumbling two different kinds of potatoes to compare them. One variety is Russet Burbank. It's been widely grown for more than a century. The other one is also Russet Burbank but with a small difference. A big potato company in Idaho, the J.R. Simplot Company, added some extra genes to this potato in the laboratory. The new genes are modified versions of some genes that potatoes already have, and those inserted genes have a curious effect. They shut down the original, natural genes. Scientists call it gene silencing. And we are about to see the results. We peel some potatoes that went through the bruising barrel yesterday and lay them out on a table - first, the traditional potatoes.
DOUCHES: So here you can see the bruises forming on the...
CHARLES: That's a bruise there?
DOUCHES: Yeah.
CHARLES: That's another bruise?
DOUCHES: Mhmm. Pretty bad.
CHARLES: The bruises are turning black. If you've peeled potatoes at home, you've probably seen black spots like these. And then we look at the other potato, the one that the Simplot Company modified. There aren't nearly as many as black spots.
DOUCHES: So you can really see a difference.
CHARLES: Oh, yeah.
There's also something you cannot see about these potatoes. If we fry them, the new potatoes won't have nearly as much of a worrisome chemical called acrylamide. When lab rats eat acrylamide, they're more likely to get cancer. Lots of foods have acrylamide - coffee, for instance. But the Food and Drug Administration says it's a good idea to consume less of it. For both of those reasons, less bruising and less acrylamide, Simplot's Vice President for Plant Sciences Haven Baker thinks that consumers should be lining up to buy these new potatoes.
HAVEN BAKER: The number one consumer complaint is black spot bruise. No one that peels potatoes likes to peel it and then you see a black spot. You have to cut it out or, if it's bad enough, throw the potato away. And it's a significant waste issue.
CHARLES: The U.S. Department of Agriculture approved the new potatoes two months ago. They're not on sale yet because the Simplot Company is waiting for a green light from the Food and Drug Administration because all these promised benefits come from genetic modification. These are GMOs. And because of that, the very biggest potato buyers appear to be backing away in fear. Frito-Lay and McDonald's both say they're not planning to use the Simplot potatoes in their products. An executive at another potato chip company told me, we are not planning to use these potatoes in our chips, and I don't even want to be quoted about this because someone might misunderstand me and think that we are using GMOs.
Patty Lovera, the assistant director of Food and Water Watch, an environmental advocacy group, says food companies should react this way.
PATTY LOVERA: When you ask consumers if they're comfortable with this technology, they're not.
CHARLES: There may not be anything wrong with these potatoes, she says, but we don't think the government is regulating biotech crops carefully enough.
LOVERA: You know, I don't have some smoking gun to hand you of, you know, this danger or that danger. But we are not comfortable that the review they've gone through can show us that they're safe.
CHARLES: But Michael Jacobson, who has been a healthy food activist for longer than almost anyone, has a different view.
MICHAEL JACOBSON: It's really strange how GMO has become like a curse word.
CHARLES: Jacobson is executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. For the last 40 years, he's been leading the fight against excess sugar, fat, salt and food additives. But genetic engineering? It's just another technology, he says.
JACOBSON: And if we could have genetically engineered crops and then foods that produce safer products, less expensive products, that's terrific.
CHARLES: The FDA does need to examine these new potatoes, he says. But if they do deliver less cancer risk and less food waste, he hopes people will buy them. Dan Charles, NPR News.
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Commuters, this one is for you. You know that person you see each day on the bus who never looks up, or when your train slows to a crawl each evening and you see the second floor apartment that never seems to have the blinds drawn? Perhaps you've made up stories about the people inside. Who's burned dinner? Why is that person drinking alone? Author Paula Hawkins once wondered the same, and she spun those daydreams into a crime thriller called 'The Girl On The Train." And she joins us now from London to talk more. Paula Hawkins, welcome to the program.
PAULA HAWKINS: Thank you very much.
CORNISH: So how did your commute plant the seed for this book?
HAWKINS: Well, I think it all started when I first moved to London. I grew up in Zimbabwe in Southern Africa and I moved to London when I was 17. And I started commuting and actually to go to college. And I used to really enjoy that part of my journey where the - it was actually a tube train, but it was over ground and it went right past the backs of people's houses and I could actually see right in. And there were these houses with little terraces and they had colored lights strung outside and I was - I sort of used to imagine the lives of the people that lived there as being really bohemian and interesting. And these were the sort of lives that I aspired having.
CORNISH: And the main character in this book - her name is Rachel Watson - and she sort of knows the people in the neighborhood she's daydreaming about, right? Her ex-husband lives on that street and the couple that she idealizes from this passing train are his neighbors.
HAWKINS: Yeah.
CORNISH: Now, when the wife in that couple goes missing, Rachel thinks she needs to get involved. Why?
HAWKINS: Well, Rachel has been watching these people from her train journey. She doesn't actually know the woman who's missing, but she feels like she's made a connection with her. She sees her all the time. And Rachel is also lonely and she's also an outsider. And she also believes that she knows a key piece of information, which she thinks could unlock this whole mystery about the disappearance of this woman.
CORNISH: And she's not just idealized this couple. I mean, she thinks they're the perfect couple.
HAWKINS: Well, she's projecting because she's lonely and unhappy and she's - her marriage has ended recently. But she's also sort of idealizing what she used to have with her husband when she sees them. She looks at them and thinks that's what we're like. We were golden. We were perfect.
CORNISH: Now, this character, Rachel, you mentioned she's divorced. She is an alcoholic and...
HAWKINS: Yes.
CORNISH: Even though she may have been in the neighborhood the night that the victim, Megan Hipwell, goes missing, Rachel has blackouts that make it impossible for her to really recall anything. She's not just an unreliable narrator, right?
HAWKINS: Oh, yeah, she's unreliable not just to other people, but to herself as well because she cannot trust her own memories, and she cannot trust her own behavior. She will do stupid things and not remember it. So yeah, she's on the extreme scale of unreliable.
CORNISH: At the end of the day, this is a mystery Rachel is trying to solve, right, for better or worse.
HAWKINS: Yes.
CORNISH: And in her own way. What makes this genre fun for you? I don't know if you've always been a mystery or a thriller reader.
HAWKINS: Well, I have been on and off. I suppose what introduced me was Agatha Christie's when I was much, much younger. Like a lot of people, I really got into Agatha Christie. But yes, I mean, I love the sort of psychological thriller genre. I love that atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia. People trying to figure out other people, perhaps in unusual circumstances and not really knowing - I find all that Hitchcockian sort of atmosphere really fascinating.
CORNISH: Now, I read this is actually not your first novel, right, that you actually did some writing under a pseudonym.
HAWKINS: I did.
CORNISH: What kind of writing did you do before?
HAWKINS: That was women's fiction, I suppose - chick lit it's sometimes known as, so much more lighthearted, not so much killing.
(LAUGHTER)
CORNISH: You've got a dark streak, my friend.
HAWKINS: Yes, as I was - and I did enjoy writing them, but they kept getting darker and darker. And this really was - once I started writing this book I knew this is what I was supposed to be doing...
CORNISH: Oh, that's great.
HAWKINS: Because it just felt completely right for me. This sounds awful, but I'm not, you know, a joyful, romantic person. Well, I can be, but I've got a proper dark side, and I enjoying indulging it.
CORNISH: So what happened there? It's like, you're writing - I mean, we're jokingly calling it chick lit here, which is very valid, fun genre, but is it just that, like, your protagonists also would have one too many to drink, or would happen upon a murder?
HAWKINS: Some of them did. Actually there were - I did have an alcoholic in one of them, yeah. But I wasn't that interested in the sort of romantic comedy side of things. I wanted to look at darker emotions and darker acts. And, you know, tragedy interests me more than comedy, put it that way.
CORNISH: Well, Paula Hawkins, thank you so much for talking with us.
HAWKINS: Thanks very much.
CORNISH: Paula Hawkins - her new novel is called "The Girl On The Train."
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Catholics in the Kansas City-St. Joseph Diocese are waiting to find out if the Pope is going to remove their bishop. Robert Finn is the only American bishop convicted in state court of shielding a sexually abusive priest. Bishop Finn is also the focus of a rare Vatican investigation. Frank Morris of member station KCUR reports that the debate over the controversial bishop is splitting the diocese.
FRANK MORRIS, BYLINE: A Catholic bishop normally governs pretty much unchecked in his diocese. Only the Pope can dislodge a bishop. And each time Catholics celebrate mass in Kansas City, they pray for Bishop Robert Finn, right after they pray for Pope Francis.
(SOUNDBITE OF MASS)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Our Holy Father Francis, our Bishop Robert.
MORRIS: But some Catholics here, like Deacon David Biersmith, refused to go along. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: The audio of this story incorrectly identifies David Biersmith as a deacon. He is actually a Eucharistic minister.]
DAVID BIERSMITH: When the priest says that, you know, you're supposed to say it with him, I just - I leave that out (laughter). I just don't say it.
MORRIS: Why?
BIERSMITH: Because he's not my bishop as far as I'm concerned.
MORRIS: Much of the discontent has to do with an incident four years ago. A computer technician found hundreds of lewd photos of little girls on a priest's laptop. The priest was Shawn Ratigan, and it wasn't the first sign that he was a pedophile. But Bishop Finn didn't tell authorities. Instead, he sent Ratigan to a therapist, switched his job and asked him to stay away from children. Ratigan didn't. And months later, a diocese official did finally report him. Ratigan was sentenced to 50 years in prison for child pornography and Finn drew two years' probation for shielding him.
JEFF WEIS: So we have a guilty verdict from a judge - yes, he did fail. There had to be more.
MORRIS: Jeff Weis was just a regular parishioner, not an activist. That is, not until this.
WEIS: What I was looking for was what is the church's response to this? What is the bishop's response?
MORRIS: The church set up new protocols for reporting child abuse and hired a former federal prosecutor to investigate the Ratigan mess. But Finn stayed on as bishop. And so Weis launched an online petition asking the Pope to remove him. It's drawn more than 260,000 signatures. Others sent the same message in different ways. And then, last fall, the Vatican dispatched an archbishop here to investigate.
JIM CACCAMO: Out of the blue I got a call, and they were arranging meetings for the archbishop to talk with people about the Bishop Finn issues. Could I come?
MORRIS: That's Jim Caccamo, who had a good vantage point on the issue. He led a board for the diocese set up to advise Bishop Finn on sexual abuse issues. While Caccamo calls Finn a wonderful, holy man, he can't fathom why he failed to report Ratigan to authorities.
CACCAMO: Oh, my gosh. In this environment today, when the church is moving to protect its children, how could that happen?
MORRIS: A lot of people are asking the same question. James Connell, a priest and canon lawyer in Milwaukee, says Finn broke protocols the church set up after the huge sexual abuse crisis in 2002. Even high-ranking church officials have publicly weighed in. Cardinal Sean O'Malley from Boston, a close adviser to Pope Francis, addressed the Finn issue on "60 Minutes."
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "60 MINUTES")
SEAN O'MALLEY: It's a question that the Holy See needs to address urgently.
NORAH O'DONNELL: And there is a recognition?
O'MALLEY: There is a recognition.
O'DONNELL: From Pope Francis?
O'MALLEY: From Pope Francis.
MORRIS: Pope Francis recently demoted Finn's closest ally in Rome, a conservative cardinal named Raymond Burke. But Finn still has plenty of support here in Kansas City.
JOHN PURK: Well, I love Bishop Finn.
MORRIS: John Purk, a recently ordained deacon in the Kansas City-St. Joe Diocese, holds traditional Catholic views of marriage, birth control, abortion and theology - same as Finn. It's a belief system that Purk says reveals the deity of Jesus.
PURK: Now, a lot of people have a problem with that, just like they had a problem with Jesus. And so the problems that Jesus encountered, this bishop encounters.
MORRIS: Purk says Finn faced a real dilemma over Father Ratigan. He says the bishop had conflicting advice and notes that Ratigan tried to kill himself when his lewd photographs came to light.
PURK: I think the bishop did the best that he could have done with the information that he had, having to balance mercy and justice with a man who was suicidal.
MORRIS: American Catholics are looking to see how the Vatican balances the traditional autonomy of bishops with the need to better address the church's ongoing sexual abuse issue and who the Pope wants to lead the diocese in Kansas City. For NPR News, I'm Frank Morris.
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President Obama is talking about cybersecurity - how to ensure our safety when we step into the digital world. One key proposal sounds pretty straightforward. Companies should tell us, in a timely manner, if our data has been hacked. By timely manner the president means 30 days, but some cybersecurity experts say the president's proposals don't address the core issues. NPR's Aarti Shahani reports.
AARTI SHAHANI, BYLINE: If your data is stolen, it would be nice to know.
DAVI OTTENHEIMER: That's correct. You can protect yourself or at least know that you're at risk when you know that you've been breached.
SHAHANI: Davi Ottenheimer, with EMC, has been auditing retail security for decades.
OTTENHEIMER: Otherwise, you might not pay attention at all.
SHAHANI: You can't sign up for credit monitoring. You won't know to read every line of your bank statement, looking for signs of identity theft, if the company that's been attacked doesn't tell you to watch out. The history of cyberattacks is littered with examples of companies that didn't want to fess up - like when Walmart waited until 2009 to admit it was hacked in 2005.
OTTENHEIMER: They need to be told when to notify people about being harmed.
SHAHANI: The U.S. already has a federal rule on health care breaches. Ottenheimer says this 30-day proposal for consumer data gives the company reasonable enough time to investigate. And it helps clean up the messiness created by all those state laws that say different things.
OTTENHEIMER: It's going to have a huge impact because we've been working on the state level so far and every state doesn't have their own interpretation. The Feds may be more reasonable.
SHAHANI: A senior administration official describes the proposal as a major push. And the National Retail Federation is very pleased to have one federal rule to replace the current patchwork. But John Dickson, a security expert with the Denim Group, says retailers may just be breathing a sigh of relief because President Obama isn't demanding much.
JOHN DICKSON: There's nothing magical about the 30-day notification.
SHAHANI: The White House proposal is thin on key details, like - do the 30 days begin when a company suspects it's been hacked or when it confirms the fact? And who exactly has to tell consumers, the brand we know, like Target, or the subcontractor behind the scenes that may have been the weak link in the digital chain? Also, if the data is supersensitive, Dickson says, 30 days may be too long.
DICKSON: Is it just, you know, your name and address? Or is it your name, address and Social Security number?
SHAHANI: Last year the White House announced voluntary standards for companies to follow to protect our data. Dickson says make some of those mandatory, like the idea that companies storing our data should regularly scan their networks for malicious code and get rid of it.
DICKSON: These are kind of things that resilient companies and secure companies do. You regularly scan for vulnerabilities. You regularly try to identify holes before the bad guys do.
SHAHANI: Tom Brandl, with Docusign, offers another idea. Make the big, publicly traded companies sign-off on a cybersecurity audit every year - just like Sarbanes-Oxley requires with financial information. That way the top brass can't just say after a hack, whoops, I didn't know.
TOM RANDL: There's some skin in the game, too, from a CEO perspective and a board level perspective in that there is an explicit expectance and sign-off that yes, I'm responsible for these things as a CEO.
SHAHANI: So far the CEO of Target lost his job over a data breach, but that's rare. Brandl says the White House could up the stakes for corporate governance in our digital times. Aarti Shahani, NPR News, San Francisco.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Last week, the U.S. government gave more than 200,000 Salvadorans living here temporarily the opportunity to stay for at least another year and a half. These immigrants have Temporary Protected Status, or TPS. This is for immigrants who are already living in the U.S. when a natural or humanitarian disaster hits their country. Alexandra Starr reports that in some cases TPS seems to be more permanent than temporary.
ALEXANDRA STARR, BYLINE: Alex Sanchez left El Salvador for the United States in 1999. For the first few years, he didn't have papers. And that made for a difficult life.
ALEX SANCHEZ: (Speaking Spanish).
STARR: "I didn't have a stable job," he says. "Practically speaking, I was dependent on my mother."
But then, in 2001, an earthquake devastated El Salvador, causing more than $2 billion in damage. The U.S. government then granted Salvadorans something called Temporary Protected Status, or TPS. That program is for immigrants like Sanchez who are living in the United States illegally when their home country is overcome by something like a hurricane or a civil war. Over the past 25 years, the U.S. government has placed 19 countries on the TPS list. Once Sanchez got TPS, he took a job as a handyman.
SANCHEZ: (Speaking Spanish).
STARR: "It would have been impossible for me to have a job with my company if I didn't have legal documents," he says. "Thanks to TPS, I was able to find my job and stay in my job."
Sanchez was able to keep his job because El Salvador has not been taken off the TPS list since the 2001 earthquake. Salvadorans actually account for more than half of the nearly 350,000 immigrants with that status.
MARC ROSENBLUM: With countries like El Salvador, where you have, you know, over 200,000 people with TPS and they've had it for, you know, more than a decade, it gets increasingly difficult to imagine ending that designation because it's going to have such a huge impact on such a large number of people.
STARR: That's Marc Rosenblum. He is with the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C. think-tank. TPS has been around since 1990. It was signed into law by then-President George H. W. Bush. Presidents from both parties have granted it through the years. Bosnian and Sudanese immigrants were given TPS during the civil wars in their countries. Last year three African nations contending with the Ebola outbreak were added to the list. Once a country is on the TPS list, the administration reevaluates every 18 months whether it should stay on. As Rosenblum explains, Central American countries in particular have made maintaining TPS a priority.
ROSENBLUM: You know, those countries have actively lobbied to be kept on the list because they benefit very much from having, you know, some of their nationals here and being eligible to work and to send remittances versus being subject to being deported.
STARR: El Salvador and Honduras are also racked by gang violence. That factors into the decision to keep them on the list. The fact that TPS seems semi-permanent for a lot of immigrants frustrates Mark Krikorian. He is director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for a restrictionist immigration policy.
MARK KRIKORIAN: It's a kind of lottery or jackpot for illegal immigrants who just happened to be here when a volcano explodes in their home country.
STARR: Krikorian says he understands there are situations where immigrants can't return, but he thinks TPS needs to be reformed.
KRIKORIAN: It needs to be much more clearly temporary. In other words, there need to be mechanisms to prevent it from turning into a permanent grant of amnesty.
STARR: Of course, TPS isn't the equivalent of an actual green card. To maintain their work authorization, immigrants have to pay $465 every 18 months. Just last week Salvadorans and Syrians were informed their TPS status would be extended. For NPR News, I'm Alexandra Starr in New York.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
This week, the North American International Auto Show kicks off in Detroit. It's like the auto industry's prom, Super Bowl and quinceanera rolled into one. And for Detroit automakers, there's likely no bigger prize than being the number one truck.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
That's because the car companies make most of their profits on pickup trucks. For more than three decades, Ford has been the king of trucks. But there are some new contenders for the throne, as NPR's Sonari Glinton reports from the Detroit Auto Show.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: It's the award season in Hollywood and Detroit. But picture of the year ain't got nothing on who wins at the truck stakes. And the nominees are...
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The Chevrolet Colorado.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The Ford F-150.
(APPLAUSE)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: And the Lincoln MKC.
GLINTON: And the winner is...
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The 2015 North American Truck of the Year is the Ford F-150.
(APPLAUSE)
GLINTON: Awards are nice. But that's not the real prize. You see, the Detroit car companies - General Motors, Ford and Fiat Chrysler - they're essentially truck companies that also sell cars. That wasn't always the case.
AARON BRAGMAN: You started to see that in the '80s and '90s when the big pickups started to become lifestyle vehicles, when they replaced the sports car in terms of the ultimate expression of masculinity.
GLINTON: Aaron Bragman is with cars.com and more importantly for this story, pickuptrucks.com. He says the American car companies turned to pickup trucks in part because they were really good at making them.
BRAGMAN: That's really where the profit centers were. That's where their strengths were. That's where their engineering know-how was. And that's what they focused on.
GLINTON: Even though cars have become more important to each of the Detroit automakers, trucks are a big deal. As central as they are to profits, they pose a problem - fuel economy. Right now, each truck company is taking a gamble so they can meet the government's strict new fuel standards. To talk about those gambles, we're going to head over to each of the Detroit Three.
PETE REYES: We've been the number one selling full-size pickup for 37 years in a row. And we're not going to give that crown up to anybody.
GLINTON: Pete Reyes is the Ford F-150 chief engineer. At Ford, that's a really important job. Morgan Stanley estimates the company gets 90 percent of its profits from its F-series trucks. Ford's gamble is making its truck body out of aluminum.
REYES: You know, if you take weight out of the base rig, it can carry more. And it's more productive. We're thrilled that we're able to make what may appear to be a big bed, but what is, in reality, a very proven plan or a traditional move, now in a high-volume vehicle.
SANDOR PISZAR: Every month is truck month. It's game on.
GLINTON: Next step is GM. Depending on how you count, the company often beats Ford in a given month. Their strategy in the war, open a new front. Back when trucks were getting bigger and more butch, the Detroit car companies abandoned smaller trucks. GM's Sandor Piszar says smaller trucks will help with fuel economy targets and winning new customers.
PISZAR: You know, the introduction of this truck I think shows our serious commitment to the truck space - because you're right. A lot of people have written off this segment - eh, what's the point? But if you dig deeper, the customers are there. They just don't have a product that's satisfying their needs.
GLINTON: Last on the list is Ram from Fiat Chrysler. Ram's big gamble is diesel. Ram's pushing to make diesel available on a wide scale. But Ram's Bob Hegbloom had this bit of wisdom about the upcoming truck war.
BOB HEGBLOOM: We all like to win. We're all very competitive. So to say that we're not all out there battling and want to be the biggest and the best out there - you know, I think anyone would be lying to you.
GLINTON: What they earn and learn from this new breed of truck will go into your next sedan. Winning the truck battle isn't about smack talk. In Detroit, it's the whole Megillah. It's the future. From the Detroit Auto Show, Sonari Glinton, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Today in Paris, after a moment of silence to honor the victims of last week's terrorist attacks, a lone voice in the French Parliament began singing.
(SOUNDBITE OF FRENCH NATIONAL ANTHEM, "LA MARSEILLAISE")
UNIDENTIFIED PARLIAMENTARIANS: (Singing in French).
BLOCK: The other members joined in on a spontaneous, rousing rendition of the national anthem. It was apparently the first time "La Marseillaise" had been sung in the National Assembly since 1918, at the end of the First World War.
(SOUNDBITE OF FRENCH NATIONAL ANTHEM, "LA MARSEILLAISE")
UNIDENTIFIED PARLIAMENTARIANS: (Singing in French).
BLOCK: Authorities in France have new leads in the case, but the deaths of the three main suspects have left many unanswered questions, including whether these men worked alone. NPR's counterterrorism correspondent Dina Temple-Raston joins me now from Paris. And Dina, do authorities there have an idea of how many more people may have been involved in these incidents beyond the three attackers who were killed?
DINA TEMPLE-RASTON, BYLINE: Well, we heard this morning Paris time about a new arrest in Bulgaria that appear to be linked to the attacks. Everyone thought that this might be the evidence of a sleeper cell of some sort, but we've confirmed that this man is a family member related to the shooters. We aren't quite sure what the relationship is, but he was initially held by Bulgarian authorities on charges that he was kidnapping his own son - some sort of custody problem. The French are trying to get him extradited. And it's unclear whether he was involved in these attacks at all. Police announced this morning that they were looking for six more people who they had linked to the attacks. But we understand that these are people they'd like to question, not necessarily arrest.
BLOCK: We also know, Dina, that there was a woman police were seeking - a fourth suspect who apparently traveled from France to Turkey and then on to Syria.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Right. Today there was new evidence. Turkish officials released surveillance video that showed her coming into Turkey at the border. And just to remind you, her name was Hayat Boumedien. And she was living with a gunman who was killed in the kosher market. But now it seems she had already left the country before that attack started. And she crossed the border with another man that they would like to question.
BLOCK: And based on what's known now, Dina, does this add up to being a terrorist cell in France?
TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that others were involved. For example, there was a video of one of the suspects that was uploaded on Twitter and YouTube over the weekend, which suggests that there are more people involved since someone had to upload the video after the suspect died. You know, every day there seems to be a new twist in this case. This morning, for example, police officials revealed that Hayat Boumedien's car, this MINI Cooper, was seen driving in Paris over the past week. Remember, this is the woman they think is in Syria. So police want to question the man they've seen behind the wheel. He may be involved in the attacks, he may not. They don't know.
BLOCK: And, Dina, one of the big questions has been, based on the statements and videos from these attackers, is whether they were acting under the direction of al-Qaida or the Islamic State. Have officials there reached any conclusions about that?
TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, after about a week of looking, they can't find any connection to the Islamic State even though the gunman in the market said he had attacked on behalf of ISIS. They haven't found any indication that al-Qaida somehow directed this attack. They don't think any of the men traveled to Syria. They think only one of the men - one of the brothers thought to be behind the magazine attack - had direct contact with al-Qaida. But they can't find evidence that al-Qaida actually directed or launched this attack. One way to think about this attack is if you think of this on a scale with the Boston Marathon on one end, in which the Tsarnaev brothers apparently acted on their own, and the Underwear Bomber of 2009 on the other, where al-Qaida and Yemen provided the bomb, this is somewhere in between.
BLOCK: OK. NPR counterterrorism correspondent Dina Temple-Raston in Paris. Dina, thanks very much.
TEMPLE-RASTON: You're welcome.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
In the aftermath of the attacks, France is mobilizing ten thousand troops to provide extra security to sensitive sites in the country - train stations, mosques, synagogues. Many are being assigned to protect Jewish schools. Moshe Goldwaser's daughter attends one of those schools now under armed guard, and he joins us now from Paris. And, Mr. Goldwaser, start by telling me what things are like now at your daughter's school.
MOSHE GOLDWASER: Well, there are parts that have not changed, but parts that have changed. There is an increased tension throughout the school. Some parents are very concerned. Some parents just a little concerned. Some parents told their children the whole story, some parents didn't. We chose to tell our daughter everything that did happened as it was happening and she seemed to be handling it extremely well.
CORNISH: How did she respond? What kinds of things did she said to you about it?
GOLDWASER: She asked questions about the bad people. What is happening? Where? I told her. The supermarket that was attacked, we actually frequent it maybe three or four times in the course of a year. So she knew exactly where the place was. We pass by their often. And over the last five days the overall atmosphere around the school, around the streets, it's a little bit reminiscent of after 9/11. People tend to be talking quieter and it's a concern.
CORNISH: Can you tell us more about the reaction from other parents at the school? I don't know how old your daughter is or sort of the age group at the school.
GOLDWASER: She's almost 9.
CORNISH: OK.
GOLDWASER: The reaction from some parents who say, well, the security will last for a short time. Other parents were very complementary to the police and the army. Taking our daughter to school and picking her up from school, we thanked the soldiers. And when I asked my daughter are you worried? Do you have nightmares? She says not at all. I say why? She says I feel secure. I feel that my parents protect me, my teachers protect me and police and the army.
CORNISH: What are your concerns for your child growing up in France after this attack?
GOLDWASER: I was asked this question by a number of people over the last few days. And at one point somebody asked me is this the same thing as Germany in the early '30s? And my answer was over here you have a situation where the French government is actively protecting its citizens - Jewish and non-Jewish. So I'm not as concerned. What I'm concerned about the future of Jews in France is not so much security it is a question of assimilation. That's the way I feel.
CORNISH: But can you talk more about that? You said assimilation. I mean, your child will be growing up in France. Why do you think that would be a concern?
GOLDWASER: Look, my concern is as far our assimilation is - it is that we keep a traditional home - traditional Jewish home. And hopefully I will have from her Jewish grandchildren, etcetera, in a country where the emphasis is on lack of religion. And that's a concern to me.
CORNISH: In the end how are you feeling about the response from fellow citizens, from the government?
GOLDWASER: I'm - overall I am pleasantly surprised at the response from the French government. I'm satisfied as of this day. Let's see how it continues.
CORNISH: Well, Moshe Goldwaser, thank you so much for speaking with us and I wish you safety for your family and for your daughter.
GOLDWASER: Thank you so much.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board are still looking into what caused a Washington, D.C. subway train to fill with smoke yesterday. One person died, and dozens more were sent to hospitals. The NTSB says the incident highlights the need to improve public transit safety in the U.S. And NPR's David Schaper reports that's one of the agency's top 10 priorities for 2015.
DAVID SCHAPER, BYLINE: Witnesses describe a terrifying scene as thick smoke filled a subway tunnel and Metro station Monday afternoon.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PASSENGERS: (Coughing).
SCHAPER: Jonathan Rogers recorded the chaos on his train with his smartphone and told the local Fox television affiliate that he helped lead fellow passengers to safety.
(SOUNDBITE OF NEWS BROADCAST)
JONATHAN ROGERS: Yeah, there was people - a couple women and children - that were panicking all throughout the train. You know, just instructed them to get down low, lower than the smoke. But the train - the whole train - the car was just full of smoke.
SCHAPER: National Transportation Safety Board investigators say there was no fire but an electrical arcing event that created the thick smoke, possibly caused by something coming in contact with the high-voltage third rail. Here's the NTSB's acting chairman, Christopher Hart.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CHRISTOPHER HART: Our investigators completed their on-scene work at L'Enfant Plaza last night and will be documenting further evidence at the rail yard today. While unique, this event underscores the importance of the need to improve mass transit safety as reflected in this year's list.
SCHAPER: The list thing Hart is referring to is the NTSB's annual wish list of safety improvements announced at a previously scheduled news conference today. One of the top priorities is for transit agencies and railroads to implement a system called positive train control, which can override an operator and slow down or stop a train that's going too fast. There's no indication speed was a problem in the Washington Metro incident, but Hart says it has been in other train crashes.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HART: Four people died and scores were injured in the December, 2013 Metro-North derailment in the Bronx. The train entered a 30 mile-an-hour curve going 82 miles an hour. Positive train control would have prevented this derailment.
SCHAPER: Federal law requires railroads and transit agencies to fully implement positive train control by the end of this year. But the railroads are asking Congress for a delay. Also long-delayed are new safety standards for rail tank cars that carry crude oil and other hazardous materials. The NTSB wants those soon and wants the Department of Transportation to quickly phase out older DOT-111s that are prone to rupture. And the NTSB wants more action to stop distracted driving. NTSB member Robert Sumwalt is calling for a ban on the use of all personal electronic devices while driving.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ROBERT SUMWALT: Not just handheld but hands-free as well. We know that there's a cognitive distraction. We want visible enforcement of these laws.
SCHAPER: Other NTSB recommendations include lowering the illegal blood-alcohol level for drunk driving from 0.08 to 0.05 and studying the effects of other drugs on driving, among others. David Schaper NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
If you're wondering what the car of the future will look like, well, Sheryl Connelly is too. In fact she's doing a lot more than wondering. She is Ford Motor Company's manager of global consumer trends and futuring - that's right, futuring. Connelly spoke with me earlier today from the Detroit Auto Show. One of the things she's been thinking about is the sharp decline in the number of 16-year-olds with driver's licenses, and she mentioned some statistics from the Department of Transportation.
SHERYL CONNELLY: They showed a study that in 1978, 50 percent of 16-year-olds had their license, and in 2008 that number was down to 30 percent. So only 3 out of every 10 16-year-old's getting the license does raise an eyebrow or two, and so we have to ask ourselves why. And, fundamentally, you can't deny the economics, so when I was a teenager I got my driver's education through the local high school...
BLOCK: Me too.
CONNELLY: And it was free. But today, you know, if you're a parent, you know, it can cost several hundred dollars, but I - probably the biggest focus is technology. So you, you know, when you think about the millennials, their parents are baby boomers. The traditional baby boomer bought their first car at 16 and saw that getting their driver's license is a rite of passage to becoming an adult. And today I'd argue that the cellphone does that for our kids. And so we have to recognize that for companies, like Ford, to reach that younger consumer it's not going to be about aspiration or status symbol. It's going to be about a lifestyle accessory, a toolbox on wheels that allows them to stay connected to the things that are most important to them.
BLOCK: Doesn't that cut across all the studies, though, that show that distracted driving is a huge problem, and, if anything, car makers should be pressured to provide fewer distractions in the car?
CONNELLY: Sure, I mean, that is an extraordinary challenge today. So Ford's response to that has been to make sure that we build platforms that keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road. We have just bought - announced an app called Life360 that will tell, like, your social circle when you get in the car not to text you. And then when you stop the car and you park and shut it off it'll tell you that you're now ready to receive text messages and to engage. We also have a do not disturb button that basically lets that car become a sanctuary.
BLOCK: As somebody who is paying attention to trends, and thinking about environmental trends in particular, I'd be curious to hear how climate change factors into the work you do and how a company like Ford has to think about cars as a driver of climate change.
CONNELLY: We actually see mobility as a fundamental human right and just putting more and more vehicles on the road may not serve people in the way that we hope. And so we have to think about multi-modes of transportation. We have to think about sharing economy. We are partnered with Zipcar to understand that some people treasure access more than ownership.
BLOCK: What about besides cars putting Ford in a position to be involved with other kinds of transportation - rapid transit, things like that?
CONNELLY: Sure, so we explore all of those things. I mean, Zipcar is one arena that we kind of look at, but there are other sharing experiments that we have going on in different countries around the world. And we recently announced last month 25 experiments on mobility that we're using to try to understand where this is going. Of course, autonomous driving vehicles is something that's top of mind for consumers out there. And the real benefits of autonomous driving vehicles outside of even just distracted driving could mean things like, you know, road fatalities or accidents in general could be mitigated. These vehicles have so many computers and sensors - that innovation feels like it's within reach.
BLOCK: Well, Sheryl Connelly, thanks for talking with us about the future of the car.
CONNELLY: Oh, it's been my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
BLOCK: Sheryl Connelly is the in-house futurist for the Ford Motor Company. She spoke with us from the Detroit Auto Show.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
These five words - I want to be president - are creating seismic waves in Republican circles. Mitt Romney has told donors that he's seriously considering a third run for the White House. And that could set up a real battle with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush in pursuit of the Republican nomination. Patrick O'Connor of The Wall Street Journal broke this story last Friday, and he joins me now. Thanks for coming in.
O'CONNOR: Thanks for having me.
BLOCK: And Mitt Romney brought this all to a real boil when he met with a group of donors on Friday. How specific was he with them about his intentions?
O'CONNOR: He was fairly specific. He got the question specifically whether or not he was going to run for - or he was entertaining another presidential bid, and he said unequivocally, yes, he was. He told them to go reach out to their surrogates and friends and tell everybody that he was considering doing it. And in the days since, he's been making a lot of phone calls to people that had worked on his past campaigns or had given money to his past campaigns. So he's very actively pursuing a presidential campaign, which is not something that we expected even on Thursday afternoon. So this has, I think, thrown a real wrench into the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
BLOCK: Well, it's interesting because it was just about a year ago this time that Mitt Romney said - when asked by the New York Times if he would consider a third presidential run, he said - 11 times in a row - no, no, no. And it went on and on, 11 times. What's changed?
O'CONNOR: I don't know. That's been his talking point for a long time. But he had traveled pretty aggressively for other Republican candidates during the fall in the run-up to the midterm, drew pretty big crowds, raised a fair amount of money. I talked to someone who traveled with him a lot and said that he was getting a lot of the same rush that he got down the home stretch in 2012 when he thought he had a chance to become president. So I think that's a little bit of it. And I think it's also assessing the field. And in talking to Romney allies, they say that the last nominee sees - kind of each candidate has some weaknesses that may make it hard both for them to get the nomination but then in a general election to be able to beat Hillary Clinton.
So to listen to the Romney loyalist, they're kind of pitching this as, well, he's a true patriot and he just thinks that he has the best shot of beating Hillary Clinton in 2016, and that's why he wants to do it. I think in truth this has caught everybody by surprise, and he had not been kind of laying the groundwork for this in the last months. So I don't know what's really changed. But it sounds like it's he's going to dive headlong into this race, so...
BLOCK: I imagine some of the people who would be most surprised by this would be the folks in the camp of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Presumably, Bush and Romney would be vying for the same stripe of the Republican electorate - the establishment stripe, as it were.
O'CONNOR: Yeah. There's a lot of crossover when it comes to donors. There's a lot of crossover when it comes to former staff and outside advisors. And there's a lot of crossover when it comes to the actual voters who would vote for each of these candidate in a Republican primary. So, you know, in a typical Republican nominating contest you kind of have a couple different lanes, and Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney at this point occupy largely the same lane, both for how they would finance the campaign and then eventually how they would get voters to back them for the nomination.
BLOCK: As you talk to Republican donors, what are they telling you? What's the mood out there?
O'CONNOR: I think they feel really conflicted. You know, these are people who in some cases have had decades-long relationships with the Bush family and also were very close with Mitt Romney because they either backed him in 2008 and 2012 or they developed a relationship with him in 2012. And Mitt Romney was criticized for a lot of things during the campaign, but one of the things that he was widely praised for was how they interacted with their donors, which, you know, maybe was a bad thing for how he interacted with voters. But these people feel a very deep allegiance to the former Massachusetts governor, one that I think has a lot of them torn and nervous about what to do. I talked to one guy over the weekend who said, well, I think people are just going to probably write checks to both of them and hope that one flames out. So I think that that sentiment is probably a little more widespread than it would be in a normal contest.
BLOCK: Well, Patrick O'Connor, thanks so much.
O'CONNOR: Thanks for having me.
BLOCK: Patrick O'Connor is political reporter with The Wall Street Journal.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
While we're on the subject of politics, next week is the fifth anniversary of Citizens United. That's a Supreme Court decision that radically altered the campaign finance system and unleashed a flood of new money into political campaigns. For instance, the way perspective GOP candidate Jeb Bush moved to get his share through a new political committee could show the way for other candidates chasing big money donors. NPR's Peter Overby reports.
PETER OVERBY, BYLINE: The Bush organization has created a super PAC, a species of political committee that wasn't possible before Citizens United. It can take contributions of any amount. Confusingly, the Bush organization also set up another PAC at the same time, an old-fashioned PAC operating with contribution limits. And both PACs are called Right to Rise. They have similar logos and the same lawyer. Bush announced one of them - the old-fashioned one - in a smartphone video last week.
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JEB BUSH: Everybody, today we're setting up the Right to Rise PAC, which is a PAC to support candidates that believe in conservative principles to allow all Americans to rise up. If you're interested, go to righttorisepac.org.
OVERBY: OK. But if you're someone who's really interested in Jeb Bush's political future, Right to Rise a super PAC seems the place to go. At Right to Rise super PAC you can give six or seven figure contributions. Bush can even ask you himself, something he couldn't do as a declared candidate. It's a new twist in post-Citizens United politics. The hearts of Citizens United is the notion that super PACS and other outside groups are completely independent of candidates. That's why the money of their big donors wouldn't be corrupting. The law says federal candidates and office holders can't coordinate with them. But until Bush becomes a candidate, he isn't one.
CRAIG ENGLE: So long as you do not take steps to actively and publicly campaign, then a super PAC is permissible.
OVERBY: Campaign-finance lawyer Craig Engle represented John Huntsman in the 2012 Republican contest.
ENGLE: If you have a super PAC and there isn't a candidate, there's no worry of coordination because there aren't two entities that could be coordinating.
OVERBY: The Bush organization didn't respond to requests for comment. There's nothing to stop many other not-yet-candidates from having super PACs too - Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, anyone who isn't an announced candidate or federal office holder.
DANIEL TOKAJI: What Citizens United and related cases from the Roberts court have given us is a system that is pretty close to no-holds-barred.
OVERBY: Daniel Tokaji is a law professor at Moritz College of Law in Ohio, and he's co-author of a book examining the outside spending in politics. He notes that many of the old regulatory standards are still in effect.
TOKAJI: But they're increasingly ineffective at stopping people from spending massive amounts of money to influence campaigns. So we're not quite to a completely deregulated system, but we are pretty darn close to that now.
OVERBY: This year, a well-financed pre-candidacy could be especially important. The 2016 primary season starts later than normal. Tokaji says White House hopefuls might follow Bush's lead.
TOKAJI: You could have what is, in effect, a sort of wealth primary before the primaries and caucuses even begin.
OVERBY: Just another product of campaign finance law after Citizens United. Peter Overby, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And now a return trip to one of the darkest places on earth. It's a story that will leave you seeing stars or at least wanting to. An organization called The International Dark-Sky Association has given gold-tier status to three places - places where the full array of visible sky phenomena can be viewed. One is in Namibia, another in New Zealand. In this story, first heard on Morning Edition, NPR's Ari Shapiro takes us to the only gold-tier site in the Northern Hemisphere. It's in Southwestern Ireland. And he had an enthusiastic guide.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
JULIE ORMONDE: Oh, my God. Oh.
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: You live here and you're still so impressed with this.
ORMONDE: I know. I always am, always.
SHAPIRO: I mean, it's my first time. I'm impressed, but you're here every night.
ORMONDE: No, I always - it never, ever stops. Could you put off that light there? Great.
SHAPIRO: Julie Ormonde talks about the night sky the way a stage mother talks about her child's performance.
ORMONDE: It's just - I just can't stop admiring it. I just love looking at.
SHAPIRO: We're standing in a parking lot in the middle of the Kerry International Dark Sky Reserve. The Kerry Mountains are on one side of us, the Atlantic Ocean on the other. Ormonde moved here from Dublin almost 20 years ago. She was a secretary and mother of four with a passion for astronomy. A few days after she arrived, she sent her son out to get fuel for the fireplace.
ORMONDE: And next fall, he come crashing through the door.
Mom, mom, quick, quick, quick, come out here.
I nearly had a heart attack running out the door, expecting to see a catastrophe somewhere.
SHAPIRO: She followed her son out the door into the pitch black night.
ORMONDE: And he said, mom, mom, look. Look at the stars. And we looked up and it was like this. I have never seen anything like it. It was just a wonderland.
SHAPIRO: Ormonde loves pointing out constellations, but on that night she couldn't find any of them.
ORMONDE: There was simply too many stars.
SHAPIRO: Time passed and she wondered why the community had no astronomy club.
ORMONDE: And like everybody else on the planet you're waiting for somebody else, so then I decided...
SHAPIRO: Oh, I just saw a shooting star.
ORMONDE: You will see them...
SHAPIRO: I'm sorry to interrupt.
ORMONDE: No, you will see them now.
SHAPIRO: Eventually, she started a group, but she still wasn't satisfied. Then she heard about the International Dark-Sky Association in Tuscon, Arizona. John Barentine is a program manager there.
JOHN BARENTINE: It's not just going around and identifying the places that are dark, but rather finding ways to make sure that they stay dark in the future so that generations from now people will still be able to come to these places and have that experience.
SHAPIRO: Back in Kerry, Ireland, Julie Ormonde started a campaign to get formal recognition for this area. She asked local councils to change their outdoor street lighting. She spoke with neighborhood groups about light pollution from homes because unlike other dark sky reserves, which may be in the middle of nowhere, people actually live and work in this area.
ORMONDE: In the core zone, we have a playground. We have a little school. We have a small, little pub, which is a two-story farmhouse with the tiniest little pub downstairs where you can have a pint.
SHAPIRO: And there's a hostel, which gets a regular stream of astronomers and amateur stargazers. Frieda Straub is the manager. She's French and moved here after living in Paris and New York.
FRIEDA STRAUB: People come from all over the world and they don't sleep at night. Seriously, they do not sleep. I mean, they go to their bed at four in the morning and then they get up at five, and it's amazing.
SHAPIRO: It's been one year since the Dark-Sky Association recognized Kerry with gold-tier status. You can tell the community has bought into this program because when you drive through town it's pitch black. All the houses have their lights off. It's easy to assume that these are summer rental homes where people have left for the winter, but locals say no, people are home. They just want to leave the lights off so everyone can see the stars. Ari Shapiro, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Now to your letters. But first, we need to make some things right. Last week, we aired the story about pop art pioneer Sister Corita Kent. We said a recent exhibit of her work started at Cleveland's Museum of Contemporary Art. Well, actually, that museum started at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.
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Also last week, we told you Lamborghini was displaying a $6,000 smartphone at the International Consumer Electronics Show. In fact, it's the son of the carmaker's founder who's selling the phone, and he knows a little about this luxury game and got permission to use his dad's famous logo.
BLOCK: OK, let's open the letter bag, or just our inbox. On Friday, we introduced you to NPR's newest program, Invisibilia, with the story of Martin Pistorius. His mind woke up from a coma, but for many years, his body did not.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
MARTIN PISTORIUS: The stark reality hit me that I was going to spend the rest of my life like that - totally alone.
CORNISH: Several of you praised the piece, and Invisibilia co-host Lulu Miller. Greg Gaia of St. Louis writes, (reading) most of the stories on NPR are excellent, but hers was one of the best I've heard in the 10 years I have been listening. It was riveting, showing us just how much about consciousness remains shrouded in mystery.
BLOCK: And Barry Negrin of New York City sent this. (Reading) I just listened to the first show of Invisibilia, and I was blown away - profound, amazing, inspiring. I could go on, but would not do it justice, brava.
CORNISH: The feedback wasn't all positive though. David Slocum of Berlin, Germany wrote, (reading) at the end of a hugely significant news week, I found myself shaking my head and shaking my head and shaking my head some more as the segment on Martin Pistorius seemed to meander on and on. To be honest, however inspiring his life, such an extended story on the human condition isn't what I was listening for.
BLOCK: And finally, we didn't see this coming, but Matthew Dana of Rochester, New York, says the story of Martin Pistorius made his commute downright dangerous. He writes this. (Reading) By the end of the segment, I was fighting to see the road through tears. Damn't, NPR, are you trying to get me killed?
CORNISH: No, we're not. Sorry, maybe we need an advisory to pull over before listening.
BLOCK: And definitely pull over before you write to us. But do write us. You can do so by visiting npr.org. Click on contact at the bottom of the home page.
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America's police have been experiencing a crisis of public confidence in many places. Now, after six months of protest and controversy, experts are stepping in. The president's Task Force on 21st Century Policing began its work today with a public hearing in Washington. NPR's Martin Kaste reports.
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: Yes, it's a task force. And in Washington, that's often what you call the place where good intentions go to die. But Laurie Robinson has reason to believe this task force will be different.
LAURIE ROBINSON: The president has asked us to come up with concrete proposals on a very short timeline - by March 2.
KASTE: Robinson is a law professor and a former assistant attorney general. Now she's co-chairing President Obama's policing task force.
ROBINSON: He's made it clear that he doesn't want kind of general philosophizing. He wants very pragmatic suggestions.
KASTE: There was some philosophizing at today's meeting, but there were also some concrete ideas. For instance, maybe police departments should use data from body cameras to check for patterns of racial bias in police stops. Or maybe they should punish officers who curse and insult people in the streets. But here's the question. How does a task force implement these ideas given how decentralized policing is in America? It's a problem that Laurie Robinson acknowledged before the meeting started.
ROBINSON: It's a very good question. There are between 17,000 and 18,000 local police departments in this country, and they're locally controlled.
KASTE: She hopes the government can encourage police departments to adopt the recommendations, maybe by tying them to federal grants. And she points to the example of the last time there was a presidential blue ribbon panel on policing - President Johnson's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, which delivered its report back in 1967. It gets respect from people who study the history of police in America, people such as Professor Sam Walker. He says people should remember that the police acted very differently back then.
SAM WALKER: A police officer could shoot to kill any person that officer suspected - suspected -of being a fleeing felon.
KASTE: He says the pressure to reform the police came from many quarters in the '60s, but LBJ's commission helped to focus things.
WALKER: It made a number of specific recommendations, a number of which fell by the wayside. But some others have had very, very clear, very strong impact. And they charted a clear direction for improving the police.
KASTE: For instance, departments started to write clear policies for when cops could pull the trigger. Today, President Obama's task force is more focused on building trust between police and the community. For that to work, the task force can't afford to alienate the police. And so far, the police do seem to be on board. They like the fact that the co-chair is Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey. He is widely considered to be a cop's cop. Eugene O'Donnell is a former New York policeman who now teaches at the John Jay College. He's glad that the task force doesn't include any real radicals, as he puts it.
O'DONNELL: The last thing you need is people who pander. And you will not get that, I don't think, with Chief Ramsey and the other people there. There may be some fights. There may be some internal disagreements, but the last thing you need is for people to tell the public that the police work is something other than what it is.
KASTE: And what policing is, he says, is adversarial. He also sees a cautionary tale in the history of another commission ordered by President Johnson. It was set up to investigate the causes of the 1967 race riots.
O'DONNELL: The Kerner Commission, probably our most famous criminal Justice commission, warned us that we were on the way to something that we're clearly way, way past getting to, where many minorities and indeed many white young kids have no pathway to the middle class at this point.
KASTE: O'Donnell worries that the president's policing task force will allow politicians to ignore the harder problems, the social and economic problems which he thinks contributed to this summer's outburst of anger at the police. Martin Kaste, NPR News.
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Forty-two to 20 - if you're a fan of college football, or even if you're not, you may know that's the score of last night's first ever College Football Playoff National Championship Game. Ohio State beat Oregon. Buckeye fans are glowing, so is ESPN, which saw its highest TV ratings ever. And we could assume the NCAA is patting itself on the back. Its new playoff system seems to have paid off and there are dollar signs everywhere. Now, here to discuss the even bigger business of college football is John Ourand of the Sports Business Journal. And, John, going into this new plan, this creation of the new playoff system, what were some key concerns that people had about whether it could work?
JOHN OURAND: I think the main concern was whether or not people were actually going to show up. You're asking people to go and attend a game on New Year's Day and then turn around about a week later and attend another game in another city to support their team. And I think that they found that people did show up. They had more than 84,000 people in the stadium. The stadium was packed. The city was packed. I think they entered that - the other one was TV ratings and whether or not having a big tournament at the end of the season is going to hurt regular season ratings. And I think what they found is that regular season ratings were up. Ratings for the tournament are huge, but that's still an open question and something that they're going to keep an eye on over the next couple of years.
CORNISH: Is that something that the NCAA experiences with basketball championships?
OURAND: Yeah, everybody points to basketball. Regular season basketball TV ratings aren't particularly high, but they have at the end of it this huge tournament that is insanely popular and people - they want to have a little bit of both in football. They want regular season that's strong and they want a smaller end of season tournament that is, you know, hugely popular.
CORNISH: Now, obviously, there is a lot of hoopla with this because it was the inaugural championship under this system for football, but are we looking at, basically, another Super Bowl? And what does that mean for the college sport?
OURAND: I think they want to set this up as kind of like a Super Bowl week. People started getting in on Saturday, maybe Friday, and spending a couple days in Dallas. It wasn't quite the Super Bowl, though. Super Bowl people get there a full week beforehand. And, really, corporate America comes out in spades and they really blow it out, but there's a very big ceiling of growth there that I think this playoff can experience.
CORNISH: Finally, how does this complicate the argument that these are student athletes who don't deserve to be paid? I mean, with all the revenue floating around, all the cash that's flowing, you know, these guys weren't exactly going to class during this time. What does it mean for that debate?
OURAND: You know, I have a lot of sympathy for that viewpoint, but I don't think that this furthers that debate really at all. For the past decade, there have been corporations and TV networks that are spending billions and billions of dollars on college sports. So the idea that ESPN spending about $7 billion over 12 years for the college football playoffs almost seems quaint when you look at ESPN and CBS paying $7 billion just for the SCC. So I think that this is something that's been happening in college sports for a while, and I just think that this furthers that.
CORNISH: John Ourand is a media reporter with the Sports Business Journal. Thank you so much for talking with us.
OURAND: Thanks for having me.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Tomorrow morning a special edition of the French satirical weekly, Charlie Hebdo, will go on sale in Paris and throughout France. It will be one week since the publication's office was attacked by gunmen claiming to be affiliated with al-Qaeda. Twelve people were killed. Charlie Hebdo's staff said they would not be cowed into silence. From Paris, NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports.
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: In normal times, Charlie Hebdo barely sold 60,000 copies. The magazine was struggling and had appealed to its readers for donations. But these are not normal times. Tomorrow morning, 3 million copies of the magazine will hit the newsstands, and the issue will be translated into several languages, including Arabic. Barely had the bodies been taken away from the scene last Wednesday when the remaining staff of Charlie Hebdo knew they must go on, says Gerard Briard, editor-in-chief.
GERARD BRIARD: (Through interpreter) Of course we have to publish - first of all, because we don't know how to do anything else. But, secondly, it's out of the question that we stop Charlie Hebdo because that would mean they won, and that is impossible.
BEARDSLEY: Despite the threat of further attack, the remaining staff of the magazine continued to work this week, setting up temporary shop at another French newspaper.
Charlie Hebdo has moved from its location that was attacked and is operating in the offices of the newspaper Liberation. Of course, the street is guarded by armed policemen. And, as you can imagine, the entrance is heavily guarded.
Upstairs, Charlie Hebdo's staff huddled in a newsroom with several plainclothes police sitting outside the door. Despite offers of help to get the issue out, the surviving journalists said they wanted to do it on their own. No one has been allowed in to get a glimpse of the upcoming issue. Charlie Hebdo reporter Laurent Leger, who was in the editorial meeting as it came under attack last week, gave a few hints when he came out for a break.
LAURENT LEGER: (Through interpreter) We're going to feature the drawings of those who were killed. We just want to do a regular issue for our regular readers and cover the news, which happens to be us right now. We want to show that Charlie Hebdo is not dead, even if half our newsroom is no longer with us.
BEARDSLEY: French television cameraman Herve Gasparini is trying to get a few sneak shots of the much-anticipated issue. Gasparini grew up in the '70s and '80s, which he calls Charlie Hebdo's heyday. He says his brother was a huge fan, and there was always a copy of the provocative magazine in his house.
HERVE GASPARINI: It was always funny, for sure. And we had a lot of fun with that because half of the family was shocked and the other was laughing at them being shocked.
BEARDSLEY: The gunmen who attacked Charlie Hebdo claimed they were taking revenge for the magazine's depiction of the Muslim prophet, Muhammad. But staff members say the magazine is not Islamophobic and is only fighting to keep religion out of public life. Charlie Hebdo has also been the target of more than a dozen lawsuits by Catholic groups over the years, but now financial help is pouring in. British newspaper The Guardian is giving 100,000 pounds, and Google is reported to be chipping in $300,000. Charlie Hebdo journalist Patrick Pelloux says the world's support is unbelievably uplifting.
PATRICK PELLOUX: (Through interpreter) I am Charlie. For me, that means I love you - a planetary slogan that means I love you and no to terrorism of any kind.
BEARDSLEY: Earlier today, excerpts of the latest issue were leaked to the press. The issue's 16 pages mocked jihadists and pay homage to the victims. On the cover is a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad with a tear running down his cheek, holding a sign that says, je suis Charlie. Above him is a banner that reads, all is forgiven. Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris.
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Nigeria's finance minister is among the world leaders who have tweeted the words je suis Charlie in support of France. What's not in her Twitter feed, though, is a single word about the recent string of attacks in her own country at the hands of the militant group Boko Haram. The country's president, Goodluck Jonathan, has been silent too. Last week, reports emerged of raids on the town of Baga that killed hundreds, possibly up to 2,000 people. The New Yorker's Alexis Okeowo has been trying to get more details about the attacks. She's in Lagos, Nigeria, but says getting information is incredibly difficult.
ALEXIS OKEOWO, BYLINE: The problem right now with ascertaining how many people were killed is because reporters can't get up there. It would be a death wish. And so when attacks happen in these places, news only comes out through survivors, through people who escape and make it to other towns and talk about it. But phone lines are down, for example, in now Baga and other places under Boko Haram control. And so because of that, it's very difficult as a reporter to write about what is going on because you're relying on witness accounts, but you're not able to go there and see and observe what's happening. So we're just relying on what people have seen and cobbling it all together.
CORNISH: And this is not the first time the group has attacked this town. I mean, what's the value of this city as a target?
OKEOWO: Well, in this town there is a multinational military base. And Boko Haram managed to run out the soldiers who were stationed there and now have control of that base. One way that Boko Haram has gotten a lot of its weapons is by raiding Nigerian Air Force and military bases. So this is aligned with what they have done in the past. And, you know, it's a very symbolic measure that they've occupied now another town and are continuing to gain territory.
CORNISH: Nigeria is a very large country - right? - larger than any in Europe, a little more than twice the size of California here in the U.S. How much of it is under control of Boko Haram?
OKEOWO: Right now, we're hearing, on the lowest end, somewhere around 20,000 square miles, which is about the size of Belgium - up to about 20 percent of the country, which is around 70,000. It's a territory that was never really well-governed by the national government anyway, and Boko Haram has taken advantage of that.
CORNISH: We know they've attacked these areas. Are they actually now trying to govern them?
OKEOWO: Well, that's the thing. They're kind of doing a kind of thug governance where, you know, they extort people, they enact a kind of justice system where they punish people with very harsh punishments for violating whatever rules they create. So it's not any kind of real governance, but it's kind of crude control they have over people, forcing them to, you know, abandon whatever normal lives they had and now be under this oppressive new regime.
CORNISH: So it sounds like what you're saying is they're not exactly moving towards creating a state.
OKEOWO: Well, the goal that they had in the beginning when this was a very localized uprising was to create an Islamic state. But now people don't know what they want. Any people who supported Boko Haram in the beginning did so because they thought they were fighting for Allah, and they had a sort of noble, religious mission. But a lot of those people now say, you know, Boko Haram is attacking Muslims. You know, we don't see any kind of religious leanings in what they're doing.
CORNISH: You've written that the relationship between the U.S. and Nigerian government has been comprised in recent months - in what way?
OKEOWO: Well, the problem is that the Nigerian military is corrupt. It's both guilty of human rights abuses against civilians and of also not providing its soldiers with enough equipment to properly fight Boko Haram. And so the U.S. does not feel comfortable giving Nigeria intelligence and more help in this war. And so, as a result, the relationship between the two countries has broken down.
CORNISH: Alexis Okeowo, she's a correspondent for the New Yorker magazine. She spoke to us from Lagos, Nigeria. Thank you so much for talking with us.
OKEOWO: Thanks for having me.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Gore Vidal was known for his historical novels and his social criticism. He was also famous for an acid wit that occasionally ventured into nastiness. He died in 2012. Now his friend of nearly four decades, the writer Michael Mewshaw, has written what he calls a corrective portrait of Vidal. It's called "Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal." And Alan Cheuse has our review.
ALAN CHEUSE, BYLINE: Mewshaw refers to himself in the book as a mid-list kind of guy, meaning not a best-selling writer. But he approached Vidal almost 40 years ago to do the first of what turned out to be a series of interviews for various magazines. And eventually, the young writer and elder literary statesman became friends. The interviews are set in Vidal's Rome apartment, his villa on the Italian coast and his Los Angeles house. They turn into conversations, and conversations turn into declamations on Vidal's part about writing, sex and politics. Sometimes, they turn into relentless lecturing on history and architecture. But the whole time, Mewshaw is trying to debunk the popular notion of Vidal as an icy, mean-spirited, America-hating, narcissistic sexual deviant. Mewshaw tries to present him as a politically engaged, socially responsible man of letters. And what comes across is something in between, a memoir of friendship with a man whose no angel, but not a devil either. Mewshaw develops a picture of his friend as quixotic, a devoted life-mate to his companion Howard Austin, an avuncular if not fatherly figure and often a raging provocateur at dinner parties, banquets and conferences - except when he's not. Mewshaw records a lot of sharp, witty one-liners which, as he reveals, Vidal practiced and polished before he delivered them. And the vast amounts of alcohol the writer imbibed on a daily basis reveal him to be a contradictory character. This book started out as a stitched together bunch of magazine pieces, but it ends up being a study of friendship with a famous man, easy to admire and difficult to love.
BLOCK: That was Alan Cheuse reviewing the book, "Sympathy For The Devil: Four Decades Of Friendship With Gore Vidal," by the author Michael Mewshaw.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
If you've traveled outside the U.S. recently or sent your American-made products abroad, you've probably noticed the dollar is getting stronger. As NPR's John Ydstie reports, the stronger dollar is the sign of a healthier U.S. economy. But it also has the potential to erode growth.
JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: There are a number of factors behind the dollar's rise, says economist Jens Nordvig, a currency expert at Nomura Securities. The main one is the health of the U.S. economy.
JENS NORDVIG: When you compare the U.S. economy to the rest of the world, you really have a situation where there's a pretty dramatic outperformance of U.S. growth relative European growth, Japanese growth or global growth in general.
YDSTIE: But former IMF Chief Economist Simon Johnson emphasizes it is relative. The dollar is being measured against the currencies of other countries.
SIMON JOHNSON: It's a lot, also, about problems elsewhere in the world, including in the euro area and including in Japan, but also in emerging markets.
YDSTIE: Europe and Japan are both struggling to grow at all. The dollar's value has risen about 15 percent relative to their currencies, the euro and the yen, just since the summer. Nordvig says there are a number of channels through which the dollar is pushed up. One is driven by global investors who want to share in the gains the U.S. economy is making.
NORDVIG: That can be foreign companies buying U.S. companies. We call it foreign direct investment. That flow has picked up over the last 12 months.
YDSTIE: Global investors can also decide to buy individual U.S. stocks. But to do both of those things requires them to buy dollars to make those purchases. The greater demand drives up the dollar's value. The dollar's value is also pushed up by the prospect of higher interest rates on U.S. government bonds. Of course, the Federal Reserve has signaled it will begin pushing up rates around the middle of this year. But even now, Nordvig says, the returns on U.S. 10-year bonds are four times that of comparable German bonds.
NORDVIG: And that's obviously something that European investors are looking at and global investors are looking at. And they are making transfers out European investments and into U.S. investments.
YDSTIE: The stronger dollar is good news for U.S. travelers, whose dollars buy more in foreign countries, and it means U.S. consumers can purchase imported products more cheaply, from French wine to South Korean TVs to foreign oil. The stronger dollar puts downward pressure on global oil prices, though it's a minor factor in oil's current fall. But Simon Johnson, who's now a professor at MIT, says the stronger dollar can hurt some Americans.
JOHNSON: If you're exporting from the U.S. manufacturing, for example, and your costs are in dollars, then it's become harder to export - all your products are more expensive in foreign currencies.
DYKE MESSINGER: We're just beginning to see our customers mention it.
YDSTIE: That's Dyke Messinger, whose company manufactures machines that make curbs and gutters. The company, called Power Curbers, is based in Salisbury, North Carolina.
MESSINGER: Our German, European competitors, their prices may be slightly more favorable than it was. It really hadn't been a factor, but now people are going to notice. And so we're having to adjust a little bit.
YDSTIE: For now, Messinger says, the strengthening U.S. market for his product is offsetting any difficulty the stronger dollar is causing in the export market, so the trade-off is worth it. But if the dollar strengthened another 15 percent, Messinger says it could start to bite. Jens Nordvig does not expect that to happen this year, but he does expect the strong growth trend in the U.S. to continue.
NORDVIG: We have some headwinds that the dollar being stronger is going to be negative for some specific companies that export a lot. But I think the positives outweigh the negatives.
YDSTIE: Those positives include an improving jobs market, falling energy prices and more optimistic consumers. John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
And that, on bass, is Christian McBride, the host of a new public radio program called Jazz Night In America.
(SOUNDBITE OF BASS)
CORNISH: McBride is also a Juilliard trained bass player, a composer, a Grammy winner and a frequent collaborator with pretty much all the big names in jazz. We asked Christian McBride to talk with us about some of the things in jazz that he's looking forward to this year. And to start, he recommended a few albums, including a debut called "From The Vine" by the group Fresh Cut Orchestra.
CHRISTIAN MCBRIDE: I really love the way that they work with layers. They - all of their songs build. They stay with that consistent structure of starting off small and then just growing and growing and growing.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CORNISH: And really taking advantage of the horns, as well, by that point when you really get to the bigness of the song.
MCBRIDE: That's right, 'cause then it means something. You know, once it gets to that final layer where the horns come in, you just fold over, like, wow.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CORNISH: I want to talk about another new work coming out. This from a pianist named Aaron Goldberg, who...
AARON GOLDBERG: My man.
CORNISH: You are familiar with him, right? Have you worked with him?
MCBRIDE: Oh, very - I've worked with Aaron on and off for many, many years. He's one of my favorite musicians in the whole world. I can't see him and not shout out Goldberg variations. That's my nickname for him.
CORNISH: Well, here's a song called "Perhaps."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PERHAPS")
MCBRIDE: Well, what do you know - a jazz record that sounds like jazz.
(LAUGHTER)
CORNISH: This is pretty - I guess the phrase these days is straight-ahead jazz.
MCBRIDE: Yeah.
CORNISH: So what do you mean by sounds like jazz (laughter)? And what do you mean by that surprise in your voice?
MCBRIDE: Well, everything is cyclical, and in the jazz world right now it's not too popular to play swing rhythms. But if you're talking about something with a legacy as deep and as vast as jazz, one thing that's always been constant in that tradition is the swing rhythm. Now, you will get a counter argument and say that, well, the other constant is imagination, but I've never thought of swinging and imagination as mutually exclusive. Aaron Goldberg, you're so far behind the times. You need to get a little more modern, son (laughter). No, but I'm saying that jokingly because...
CORNISH: Yeah.
MCBRIDE: I think Aaron is absolutely brilliant. Listen to that. It's so smoking.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PERHAPS")
MCBRIDE: Go ahead, you all. Listen to that.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PERHAPS")
CORNISH: All right, that song was called "Perhaps." It's off the new album from Aaron Goldberg called "The Now." Now, Christian, I know one thing you're excited about this year - actually two things you're excited about this year - two big birthdays in jazz. And I want to start with Herbie Hancock. He turns 75 years old in April. Obviously, one of the great jazz pianists, you know, of our time, but why is his birthday on your to-do list?
MCBRIDE: You know, Herbie Hancock to me is - he's just such a titan. He's got to be the most youthful 75-year-old on the planet, you know, but his playing is still so imaginative and vital and so full of life.
(SOUNDBITE OF HERBIE HANCOCK MUSIC)
CORNISH: Now, an album that you're recommending to us is actually a collection called "Herbie Hancock: The Warner Bros. Years."
MCBRIDE: Yes.
CORNISH: It's from 1969 to 1972, so not a big window of time given the length of his career. What is it about this time in his work that really struck you?
MCBRIDE: When Herbie Hancock left Miles Davis - his quintet - in 1968, he embarked on one of the most creative periods of jazz. Now, music was so experimental, so dense, and it was everything. It was funky, it was swinging, it was avant-garde, it was land, it was water. You know, it was everything, it was addressing the black power movement, it was addressing African heritage, numerology. There was so much happening with that particular band, which now is affectionately known as the Mwadishi band.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MCBRIDE: I have so many bootlegs of this band playing live. And when they would play this song they would play it for, I think, the shortest version I have is 40 minutes.
(LAUGHTER)
MCBRIDE: The song doesn't really have a melody. It's just kind of this groove, this vamp.
(SOUNDBITE OF UNIDENTIFIED SONG)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Roy Haynes.
CORNISH: Now, there is one more big birthday that you want to mark for 2015 - Roy Haynes, obviously, icon to jazz drummers. He turns 90.
(SOUNDBITE OF DRUMS)
MCBRIDE: Well, Roy Haynes has a nickname, and the name is the sound that his drums make, and that is snap crackle.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MCBRIDE: You know, Roy Haynes has such a pop, has such a flare, a shine to his drum sound. You know, we joke sometimes and say his snare drum at times can sound like a pistol. So if you're not really paying attention and Roy whacks that snare drum, you'll be hitting the floor, you know?
(LAUGHTER)
MCBRIDE: And the man personifies the word hip. I mean, he's got that lean, that gangster lean, when he walks, and he wears those big sunglasses and the cowboy hat. I love that man with every inch of my soul.
CORNISH: That sounds like a good-looking 90.
MCBRIDE: Yes. He's definitely a science project, the fact that he is still so spry at age 90 and still sounding great. I played with him just a couple of months ago here in New York City, and he was incredible. I can't believe it.
(SOUNDBITE OF ROY HAYNES SONG)
CORNISH: Well, Christian McBride, thanks so much for giving us a heads-up for 2015.
MCBRIDE: It was my pleasure talking with you.
CORNISH: Christian McBride - he's the host of the new program Jazz Night In America. It's produced by NPR, member station WBGO and Jazz at Lincoln Center.
(SOUNDBITE OF ROY HAYNES SONG)
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
The killings in Paris last week have united most of France in sadness and outrage. But in the majority Muslim and immigrant suburbs of Paris, you'll hear a very different perspective. And many in France worry about what this means for the country's values of secularism and freedom of speech. From Paris, NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports.
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: Many French people were shocked to learn that some school kids refused to join in the minute of national silence observed across the country following the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Newspaper Le Figaro quoted one teacher in a heavily Muslim neighborhood in the eastern city of Strasbourg saying that 80 percent of her students refused to participate.
Students pour out of Pierre de Geyter Middle School in St. Denis, a largely Muslim suburb north of Paris. Iannis Roder has taught history here for the last 15 years. He says the day after the Charlie Hebdo killings, the staff knew they would have problems.
IANNIS RODER: A part of our pupils - a minority - didn't want to do the minute of silence because they thought that Charlie Hebdo didn't have the right to make this caricature.
BEARDSLEY: Roder says the pupils said it was blasphemy. And he had to explain that blasphemy is a religious concept and doesn't exist in French law.
RODER: That was very difficult to explain because their point of view, their lives, are very religious. They are convinced that their religion is above the law of the French Republic.
BEARDSLEY: Roder says nearly all the students thought the killings were wrong, but purely for religious reasons. He says he finds that worrisome. France has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe. Muslim leaders have condemned the attacks, and regular Muslims worry about being stigmatized. Since the killings at Charlie Hebdo and the kosher grocery store, there have been incidents of vandalism at dozens of Muslims sites across the country.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRIME MINISTER MANUEL VALLS: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: Speaking in parliament, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said he would not tolerate Jews living in fear in France or Muslims being ashamed. France is here to welcome both, he said. But many Muslims say there is a double standard. They say anti-Semitism is treated as a crime, while Islamophobia is tolerated.
Not far from the school in St. Denis is a housing project. The soulless, gray apartment buildings have bars on the first-floor windows. Muslim immigrants from North Africa came to live and work in places like this 40 years ago, when the economy was booming. Now the work has dried up, but the next generation is still stuck here. In a corner convenience store, three men in their mid-30s are hanging out. I buy some batteries and ask what they think about the Charlie Hebdo killings.
HAKIM DRIDI: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: "I'm not saying what they did was good," replies Hakim Dridi.
DRIDI: (Through interpreter) But those cartoonists shouldn't have been doing that. They know Muslims are practicing their religion, and they should leave them alone. They provoked it, and they knew it was coming because they had a bodyguard.
BEARDSLEY: The men have been watching a video on a large computer screen behind the counter of the police assault last Friday on the kosher market. They believe it was staged. They say the video proves something else was going on at the supermarket. They also say there's no way one of the Kouachi brothers who attacked Charlie Hebdo would have left his ID in the car.
The conspiracy theories pour out. One of the men says the two attacks were a plot by France, the U.S. and Israel to give Israel more power. They say it's unfair the world's media talks for weeks about Jewish deaths, but says nothing when Muslim children die. Their narrative seems worlds from the Je suis Charlie demonstrations in Paris just a few miles away.
Back at the school, teacher Iannis Roder says he and his colleagues warned there was a problem in Paris suburb schools more than 15 years ago, but nobody listened.
RODER: Today, they open their eyes and say, oh, my God, there are people in France that don't share values of the French Republic. For us, that's not a surprise. We knew that for a long time.
BEARDSLEY: Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Among those hoping for Oscar nominations this week are the producers of the thriller "Gone Girl." The film is based on the best-selling book - a thriller about a wife gone missing. As NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik reports, the film includes a knowing critique of how the media feast on scandal and a fictionalization of a controversial cable news star.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: What happened to the girl who is gone? There's the crux of the film.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "GONE GIRL")
MISSI PYLE: (As Ellen Abbott) On the show today, we have defense attorney Tanner Bolt - patron saint to wife killers everywhere.
FOLKENFLIK: That's the voice of the fictional legal cable news host, Ellen Abbott, who serves as a televised Greek chorus throughout the movie's twists and turns.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "GONE GIRL")
PYLE: (As Ellen Abbott) Tanner, the hallmark of a sociopath is a lack of empathy.
FOLKENFLIK: Abbott seemingly investigates, indicts, tries and convicts people nightly on TV. She's an interviewer who doesn't weigh opposing argument, but combats them. That Ellen Abbott sure sounds a lot like HLN's Nancy Grace. This - from a real life show.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "NANCY GRACE")
NANCY GRACE: No offense to either you or Guster, but you're a defense lawyer. And it's your job, if you choose to take the case, to represent somebody like him. What do you do?
DARRYL COHEN: Nancy, it's not easy. It's an egregious case. We've got...
GRACE: I don't know how you do it. How do you go home at night?
FOLKENFLIK: From the outset, "Gone Girl" director, David Fincher, told his cast that Ellen Abbott would be loosely based on Grace. The actor, Missi Pyle, has played a version of Grace before on the CBS show "The Mentalist." Grace is from Georgia. Pyle's a Texan. And Pyle tells me she knew exactly how she would play the role in "Gone Girl."
PYLE: You know, I tend to think of an exact exaggerated personality - someone who's loud, southern and somebody who's just not really afraid of what anyone thinks.
FOLKENFLIK: Pyle says Fincher insisted the part not be purely a caricature.
PYLE: I think she sees herself as someone who's very pivotal to getting justice done. I just - the word justice is constantly something that she is thinking or saying. And it's just the idea of finding righteousness or the justice for those who can't speak for themselves.
FOLKENFLIK: But, Pyle says, she enjoyed playing up the atmospherics, too.
PYLE: Trish, the costume designer - she was so excited because Nancy - Nancy wears a lot of leather and she wears a lot of loud clothing. So I got to wear all of those, like, leather jackets and, you know, really bold print pants and get the hair really big and a lot of makeup. So it was really fun to do that. And that kind of put me, also, into the character.
FOLKENFLIK: The one person most likely to take issue with that presentation doesn't.
GRACE: I was very flattered most lately that Ben Affleck included me in "Gone Girl." I think my husband and I were the only people laughing at certain junctures of the movie.
FOLKENFLIK: That's Nancy Grace herself. She spoke to me from the set of her HLN show in Atlanta, which she's hosted for nearly a decade.
GRACE: Well, I guess they kind of got the hair right. I imagine the black leather jacket was right. The southern accent was a little over the top, but it was pretty good.
FOLKENFLIK: Grace has cited the murder of her fiance more than three decades ago as the inspiration for her earlier career as a prosecutor. She says "Gone Girl" gets her fierce advocacy on TV be more or less right, too.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "NANCY GRACE")
GRACE: As the defense sits by and as their champagne toast, after that not-guilty verdict.
FOLKENFLIK: This is grace from 2011. A Florida woman, Casey Anthony, had been found not guilty of killing her daughter. Grace made the case a national cause.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "NANCY GRACE")
GRACE: Somewhere out there the devil is dancing tonight.
FOLKENFLIK: Grace tells me the scenario in the movie reminded her of Scott Peterson, a California man later convicted of killing his wife.
GRACE: I commented on and analyzed his behavior while his wife was missing, we all know, now, at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay.
FOLKENFLIK: At times, Grace has faced criticism and even lawsuits arguing she cynically casts aside the presumption of innocence in pursuit of ratings and heat. In 2010, Grace settled a case filed by the estate of a woman who committed suicide shortly after taping an interview for her show. The woman's son was missing and Grace strongly suggested she might be responsible. But Grace says she's driven to provide a voice for victims. And the parody in "Gone Girl"...
GRACE: I laugh - laugh out loud at it. And so does my family and so does my husband. Look, I didn't go into this to win a popularity contest. I do not expect to be crowned Miss congeniality, OK? If that's what I was looking for, I would have gone into a different line of business.
FOLKENFLIK: Even Affleck's character cannot help watching the fictionalized version of grace, as Ellen Abbott takes him down live on primetime TV.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "GONE GIRL")
TYLER PERRY: (As Tanner Bolt) It's the most abnormal situation in the world.
PYLE: (As Ellen Abbott) Excuse me - Tanner - Tanner, are you trying to tell me that this photo is remotely in the realm of acceptable?
BEN AFFLECK: (As Nick Dunne) I'm so sick of being picked apart by women.
FOLKENFLIK: But Ellen Abbott wouldn't be silenced, and nor, it appears, will Nancy Grace. David Folkenflik, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, French authorities today announced the arrests of more than 50 people as part of a crackdown on hate speech - speech that's anti-Semitic or speech defending the attacks. Among those arrested was the popular and controversial French comic Dieudonne. He's been convicted numerous times before for racism and anti-Semitism. We're going to talk about this and more with the French ambassador to the United States, Gerard Araud. Welcome to the program.
GERARD ARAUD: Thank you. Good evening.
BLOCK: And how do you explain to Americans the distinction drawn in France between permissible, if offensive, free speech and speech that is punishable by law?
ARAUD: That's the debate that we have had with our American friends for some time because of your First Amendment. For a long time, for instance, you know, we have a debate on the Internet because you accept on the Internet that you could have hate speech.
BLOCK: Hate speech.
ARAUD: You know - yes, apology of Adolf Hitler and so on - why it's forbidden in France. In France, the speech is free, but if it could lead either to a crime or if it could be seen as libel, which is, of course, under the control of the judge. It's to the judge to decide whether the red lines have been crossed.
BLOCK: What do you think the message should be to France's Muslim population, who have - many of them - been deeply offended by what they've seen in the paper, in Charlie Hebdo, and also have been the target of attacks, reprisal attacks after what happened last week?
ARAUD: You know, France is a country of 65 million inhabitants. There are something between five and six million Muslims and I guess 99.9 percent of the Muslims are peaceful citizens. All the polls are showing their commitment to France. They are French; most of them are born in our country. So the message that we have to send to them is that they are part of the nation. I do think that the main problem is not so much religious. The main problem is a social problem of integration. We have had a high level of unemployment for 10, 20 years. And as usual, you know, that's - the immigrants are the first victims of unemployment, so to have a rate of unemployment of 20 percent and - which means you have a lot of these youths - Muslim youths - who are excluded from the social life. And they fall into petty crimes - you know, drug trafficking or small thieves - they go to prison. And in prison, they are radicalized. They find a sort of raison d'etre, you know, in religion.
BLOCK: I want to ask you about new security measures that the French prime minister presented to parliament yesterday, including anti-radicalization programs, more air travel monitoring, more monitoring of phone calls and Internet communication, things like that. In hindsight, do these all appear to you as measures that should've been in place before. If they had been in place, maybe we wouldn't be having this conversation right now.
ARAUD: Maybe. Obviously, you know, there is somewhere - something went wrong in our monitoring systems. The question is the balancing between the public liberties and the need of the police forces. And it's a very - in a democratic society, it's a very delicate balance that we have to find. This - we had one, and obviously, we have to find a new one.
BLOCK: Does the French government give credence to the claims of responsibility for last week's attacks that we were just hearing about, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula saying we ordered this, we are behind this?
ARAUD: That's one of the questions we have to solve. You know, the French authorities have been expecting for some time a terrorist action. We have 5,000 radical youth. We have 1,200 young people who are in Syria or are coming back from Syria. They are trained; they are radicalized. I say 1,200 means that we have identified 1,200. There are more than that, so we were sooner or later - unfortunately, we were fearing that something would happen. And what happened was, in a sense, maybe worse than what we were expecting because it was done in a very professional way.
BLOCK: Well, let me ask you about that. Given what you just said - we were expecting this - these attackers were men who were well known to French intelligence authorities, Charlie Hebdo, the target, had been targeted before, was under threat. Was this a real failure of intelligence here?
ARAUD: We are conducting an investigation and we will see what went wrong. I think that something went wrong and we have to adjust our work abilities. But, you know, let's say we have 5,000 radicalized youth. We are a democracy, so it means that we can't arrest them for their opinion. But it's impossible to monitor 24-7 5,000 people. It means you need between eight to 10 agents a person. It's impossible.
BLOCK: Except in this case, of course, at least one of the attackers had been convicted of recruiting jihadists, had served time in prison.
ARAUD: Yeah, he served time in prison. But even if you monitor them, it's difficult to know when they become dangerous.
BLOCK: Mr. Ambassador, you were not so long ago France's ambassador to Israel. And the number of Jews emigrating from France to live in Israel doubled last year, many people saying they're leaving France because they don't feel safe, that there's a dangerous and rising climate of anti-Semitism in your country. How troubling is that for you and what do you do about it?
ARAUD: No, it's not troubling. It's devastating - it's devastating. The French prime minister said in parliament yesterday that without the Jews, France wouldn't be France. And would it be a royally major failure of the French Republic if we couldn't protect our compatriots. For some time, we have introduced - in the curriculum of the schools, we have introduced teaching about the Shoah. We are organizing trips to Auschwitz. But obviously, it's not enough.
BLOCK: Mr. Ambassador, thank you for coming in.
ARAUD: Thank you very much.
BLOCK: Gerard Araud is the French ambassador to the United States. And tomorrow on Morning Edition, we'll visit a French district where Jews and Muslims live together.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
One week after the Charlie Hebdo attack in France in which 12 people were killed, al-Qaida's branch in Yemen is claiming responsibility. A statement by the group, also known as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, says the satirical magazine was specifically chosen as a target and the gunmen were, quote, "two heroes of Islam." The group also released a YouTube video asserting the claim. In a moment, we'll hear from the French ambassador to the U.S. But first, some analysis on this claim from Bruce Hoffman. He directs Georgetown's Center for Security Studies. Thank you for joining us.
BRUCE HOFFMAN: You're welcome.
CORNISH: So the State Department now says that the video released by AQAP is authentic. But that - does that necessarily mean that they were fully responsible for the attack? And by that we mean, like, order, plan, finance.
HOFFMAN: I suppose welcome to the new form of terrorism. This may not have had the direct pedigree in that they actually issued specific targeted instructions at a particular time in a particular place, but rather provided the Kouachi brothers with more general instructions. And that is not at all uncommon in al-Qaida operations, even going back a decade and a half ago.
CORNISH: So what are the implications of all this?
HOFFMAN: That's quite significant because when a terrorist group claims credit for an attack, it has a much more salient, now organizational dimension, which suggests something that is not a one-off, but that is part of a wider strategic campaign.
CORNISH: You mentioned Cherif and Said Kouachi and their connection to AQAP. But does that connection necessarily mean that they were led directly by the group?
HOFFMAN: Well, at least in the case of Said Kouachi, it's almost certainly true that he was trained by the group at one point. I mean, it may have been three or four years ago. This conforms, actually, I have to say, to an old pattern of al-Qaida in many respects in that they train individuals, they send them back to their actual homelands or adopted homes, they leave them in place and then they completely devolve authority to them to plan, plot and implement a terrorist attack. And that, to me, seems to be the most plausible explanation for the chain of events that led to the tragedy last week at the Charlie Hebdo offices.
CORNISH: Meanwhile, the gunmen in the attack at the kosher market in Paris that came after the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices, those attacks were claimed to be in the name of ISIS. What do you make of that?
HOFFMAN: First and foremost, it underscores what is probably the biggest rivalry in the globe today, and that's the rivalry between ISIS and al-Qaida for leadership of the jihadi movement. Secondly, I think it shows that for the foot soldiers on the ground, the ideology is the same, which I think is true. There's really not that much difference between ISIS and al-Qaida. It's more the personality differences and rivalries between the leader of ISIS - al-Baghdadi - and Bin Laden's successor, the leader of al-Qaida - al-Zawahiri .
CORNISH: Does this change at all the way we think about how al-Qaida's tactics may be changing?
HOFFMAN: Yes, and I think that's particularly disquieting. At the end of the day, the coin of a realm for a terrorist group is attacking, and success. Otherwise, they generate no favorable propaganda - or at least propaganda they can harness in their favor - they can't attract recruits and they can't get money. So I think AQAP - al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula - was desperate for a successful terrorist operation and therefore, I think, devolved onto a much simpler type of attack that wasn't even a suicide attack, but something involving firearms and something that was relatively easy for people that are disciplined and trained, such as the Kouachi brothers, to pull off.
CORNISH: Given what you've described, what are the options for security? What are the questions here about how to defend against this kind of discrete, lone attack?
HOFFMAN: We're really facing a threat now. And I hate to sort of sound alarmist, but of almost an unprecedented dimension in the sense that in the past we could track individual terrorists. In the past, we could - we were challenged and we could focus on foreign fighters. And I believe that's where much of the emphasis of intelligence and security and law enforcement services throughout Europe - and even in the United States - has been on tracking individuals leaving a country to fight overseas, particularly in Syria or in Iraq, and then the fear of them returning. On top of that now, they have to contend with this very significant homegrown threat of individuals who basically remain in place or have remained in place for some years following a period of training. And for law enforcement, security and intelligence services that have already been strained by the threat of foreign fighters and, let's say, the more professional terrorists This is now an added dimension that they have to pay attention to. And it's something, I think, that has the potential really to strain already constrained or reduced resources, as in recent years, we've seen the War On Terrorism - or at least we had hoped it was winding down.
CORNISH: Bruce Hoffman is director of Georgetown University's Center for Security Studies. His new book out next month is called "Anonymous Soldiers." Bruce Hoffman, thanks so much for speaking with us.
HOFFMAN: You're very welcome.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Amazon has announced that it signed Woody Allen to write and direct his first ever television series. The online retailer made news earlier this week at the Golden Globes when it became the first digital streaming service to win a series award as best TV comedy for its show, "Transparent." Here to talk with us about what all this means for Amazon and the world of television is NPR TV critic Eric Deggans. Eric, welcome back.
ERIC DEGGANS, BYLINE: Hey. How are you doing?
BLOCK: Good. What more can you tell us about Woody Allen's new show?
DEGGANS: Well, not much, as it turns out. We know they're going to be half-hour episodes. There's a sense that it's going to premiere in 2016. But we don't have many other details. There's not a title. Even Woody doens't - says he does not know what the concept is. But it's important to note why they're working with him. He is arguably the greatest living filmmaker who isn't doing TV. We've seen Martin Scorsese do "Boardwalk Empire." We've seen Stephen Soderbergh do "The Knick" for Cinemax. We've seen David Fincher do "House of Cards" for Netflix. And now Woody Allen, who is also considered kind of an old-school filmmaker, is entering into this new, emerging world of original series for streaming television, and that's a very interesting move.
BLOCK: Woody Allen also said in his statement, I have no ideas and I'm not sure where to begin. Do you think you think he's being disingenuous there or do you take him at his word on that?
DEGGANS: He's probably being a little disingenuous. I mean, people who have followed Woody's career know that he kind of plays up the befuddled, you know, nerd kind of image that he's had as a comic sometimes. But he's also a very smart and very talented filmmaker. It would be hard to imagine Amazon spending the kind of money they've got to be spending to get him without having some sense of the story that he's going to tell. But, given his reputation, and his history as a filmmaker, it's hard to imagine that he would agree to a deal if he didn't have some passion for a story that he can't tell in a smaller film but could tell in a larger series.
BLOCK: Woody Allen, of course, is a controversial figure, especially after the allegations by his adopted daughter that he sexually abused her. How much of a risk is this for Amazon?
DEGGANS: It seems like it might be a significant one. Even when the announcement came out there was lots of talk on social media - especially on twitter - people comparing him to Bill Cosby. And we saw Bill Cosby lose a series deal with NBC. We saw Comedy Central decide not to air a comedy special they had taped in his honor. If the backlash - if that that chatter grows against Woody Allen, it's possible Amazon may have to reconsider what they're doing in some way. But right now it seems as if people are reacting differently to Woody Allen, in part because he has directly addressed these allegations - directly denied them. He's written a commentary for the New York Times, for example, where he laid out his case as to why it's an unfair accusation. So the situations are a little different, but I think they will have to do some damage control and the question is, can he do press? Can he talk to people like me about the TV show knowing that we're going to ask about those allegations? All of those are questions that have yet to be answered.
BLOCK: Eric, you've spent the last week or so in Los Angeles at the Television Critics Association Press Tour - critics from all around the country gathering to see what the networks have in store. What's the buzz on Amazon right now?
DEGGANS: Well, it's interesting. Before the Golden Globes win, I think people thought that Amazon didn't quite know how to do original series television. People liked "Transparent." But their previous series didn't get people as excited. They had a show called "Mozart In The Jungle" that they released right before Christmas at a time when they couldn't get a lot of press, when people were focused on Christmas and were not going to pay attention to a new digital streaming series. And we were saying, do they really know how to launch show? Well, now, "Trasparent" has gotten a lot of attention. Now they've announced this deal with Woody Allen. And there's this sense that they are now players in this field in a way that they weren't before. And they might actually be an equal to Netflix or HBO in a way that they weren't before.
BLOCK: OK. NPR's TV critic Eric Deggans. Eric, thanks so much.
DEGGANS: All right. Thanks a lot.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
A case before the U.S. Supreme Court today boiled down to whether a sock can be considered drug paraphernalia. It's a case that tests whether the government can deport legal permanent residents for minor drug crimes. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Each year the government deports 30 to 35,000 non-citizens for drug crimes. The question is what crimes justify deportation, especially for those who, like Moones Mellouli, are legal permanent residents in the U.S.? Mellouli came to the U.S. on a student visa from Tunisia. He graduated with honors, then went on to earn two master's degrees in applied mathematics and economics from the University of Missouri-Columbia. He became a lawful permanent resident, worked as an actuary and taught mathematics at the university.
But in 2010, he was arrested for driving under the influence and having four Adderall pills in his sock. Adderall is a drug prescribed to treat hyperactivity, but it's widely used by students and others to stay awake. Mellouli pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for possession of drug paraphernalia - namely the sock used to contain the four pills. He got a suspended sentence plus a year's probation, and he was subsequently deported. He appealed his deportation all the way to the Supreme Court. Jon Laramore is his lawyer.
JON LARAMORE: This is part of a series of cases in which the Supreme Court has looked at deportations for minor drug convictions, and in each of the cases that's come before this - three of them - the court has ruled against the government.
TOTENBERG: Inside the Supreme Court chamber today it looked very much as though the government's losing streak would continue and Mellouli would get the chance to return to the U.S. The argument focused on the intersection between federal and state law as it applies to deportations. Federal law allows the government to deport a non-citizen convicted in state court for a crime relating to any drug controlled under the federal criminal code. But state laws often make many more drugs illegal, and Kansas law treats any container used to store a drug as drug paraphernalia.
And so when the government's lawyer, Assistant Solicitor General Rachel Kovner, got up to argue today, the justices who asked questions were unabashedly, and without exception, incredulous. Justice Ginsburg - because of the sock the crime justifies deportation. Justice Scalia - do you think a sock is more than tenuously related to these federal drugs? Justice Breyer - if we look back at the charging documents they don't say anything about drugs. Justice Kagan - paraphernalia offenses are generally extremely minor offenses. They're not felonies. They're misdemeanors that prosecutors use when they don't want to charge a more serious offense.
Kovner, the government's lawyer, replied that just because prosecutors let someone plead to a lesser offense doesn't mean that immigration authorities lack the authority to deport that individual when the crime is related to a federally controlled substance.
Chief Justice Roberts - I would have thought the opposite inference. If it's not such a big deal that the state is willing to let him cop a plea to drug paraphernalia, then why should that be the basis for deportation under federal law?
Lawyer Kovner - suppose he'd had cocaine in his sock; under his theory he would not have been deportable for having drug paraphernalia. Justice Kagan - if he'd had cocaine in his sock he would probably be convicted of possession of cocaine. But in this case, observed Kagan - the former dean of the Harvard Law school - he had four pills of Adderall, which if you go to half the colleges in America and just randomly pick somebody, you'd find Adderall. That brought the house down, and probably the government's case too. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Chicago, New York and Hawaii are all lobbying to be the home of a presidential library for Barack Obama. It might seem like the president's hometown would have the edge, but Chicago is scrambling to remain a top contender. More than a thousand people in Chicago showed up at a hearing last night and again today to weigh in on the matter. NPR's Cheryl Corley reports.
CHERYL CORLEY, BYLINE: As hundreds of people packed the lobby of Hyde Park Career Academy, some called this the most well-attended Park District hearing ever.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Please don't push and shove. Everyone will get into this building.
CORLEY: And inside, when Dr. Leon Finney stepped to the podium to announce his support for two University of Chicago bids that would place the Obama library in one of two Southside parks, it was a little like a revival meeting.
LEON FINNEY: It's time to say, yes, Mr. President, we want you to bring it on home. We came to win it. We came to get this library for the city of Chicago.
CORLEY: Here's the rub. The foundation considering all the bids says the city should control the land and not the park district. So the issue is whether the park district should hand over about 20 acres of parkland to the city. After Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel, found out about the foundation's concerns, he said he'd step in to make sure Chicago remains competitive.
MAYOR RAHM EMANUEL: And that this becomes an easy decision for the president to pick his hometown for where his presidential library, in my view, belongs.
CORLEY: But at the Park District hearings, not everyone was on board. Lauren Moltz, the chairman of Friends of the Park, says fine to an Obama Library in Chicago - just not where the University of Chicago proposed it.
LAUREN MOLTZ: These parks were designed by one of the world's most visionary landscape architects. They are neither the city of Chicago's, the Chicago Park District nor the University of Chicago's to carve up and give away.
CORLEY: Although the focus hearings is about placing an Obama library on the city's south side, there's also a bid from the University of Illinois in Chicago. And Chicagoan, Cotta Truss(ph), says that proposal, which would place the library on the city's west side, is still very much in the running.
COTTA TRUSS: This economic boost that this library will bring can be a viable piece of legacy wherever it's located. And it does not have to be regulated to a park or green space.
CORLEY: The president and First Lady are expected to choose a location by the end of March. Cheryl Corley, NPR News, Chicago.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Win a Golden Globe - good. Win an Oscar - better. Win a Razzie - well, you might want to hide that thing. The Golden Raspberry Awards honor those movies and performances that we love to hate. But there's a new category this year that nominees might want to win. The Redeemer Award will recognize someone whose work has made a turnaround and the nominees are...
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Ben Affleck. His low...
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "GIGLI")
BEN AFFLECK: (As Larry Gigli) In every relationship there's a bull and cow.
CORNISH: The 2003 movie "Gigli."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "GIGLI")
AFFLECK: With me and you, I'm the bull. You're the cow. Bull - cow.
CORNISH: Lots of people called bull something else on his acting that you.
BLOCK: But this year Affleck has Oscar buzz for "Gone Girl" and Razzie buzz in the Redeemer category.
CORNISH: His competition - Jennifer Aniston in "Cake," Kristen Stewart for "Camp X-Ray" and Mike Myers.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE LOVE GURU")
MIKE MYERS: (As Guru Pitka, singing) Some people call me the space cowboy.
CORNISH: Myers stank in "The Love Guru," but soared this year directing the documentary "Supermensch."
BLOCK: And then there is Keanu.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING")
KEANU REEVES: (As Don John) If it please you. Yet, Count Claudio may hear, for what I speak of concerns him.
BLOCK: Keanu Reeves has been nominated six times for a Razzie. But he could take it home this year for his acclaimed performance in John Wick.
CORNISH: Affleck, Aniston, Stewart, Myers and Reeves - no shame this time - all nominated for the Golden Raspberry Redeemer Award.
BLOCK: The winner will be announced next month - the night before the Oscars.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
The Obama administration today announced plans to make oil and gas drilling companies clean up natural gas leaks. The current boom in drilling has led to lower oil and gas prices, but these wells sometimes leak methane, the main constituent of natural gas. Methane is also a powerful greenhouse gas that warms the atmosphere. NPR's Christopher Joyce reports on what the government plans to do about that.
CHRISTOPHER JOYCE, BYLINE: Leaks can come from lots of places - the wells themselves or gas compressors or valves that control the flow of gas on the drilling site. How much these leaks add up to is hard to pin down. The government estimates it's about 2 percent of what comes out of the ground. Janet McCabe heads the air pollution office at the Environmental Protection Agency. She said today the new rules will only apply to new drilling activity.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JANET MCCABE: We're going to focus our rulemaking on the emissions sources that make the most sense to address now - new emission sources in areas of this industry where new investment and growth are occurring and where emissions will be increasing as a result.
JOYCE: The EPA's goal is to reduce emissions by 45 percent below what they were in 2012. Conrad Schneider of the environmental group Clean Air Task Force says that's good news. Its EPA's first direct limit on methane for oil and gas operations. But he notes that, for most existing operations, leak-plugging remains voluntary.
CONRAD SCHNEIDER: Failing to immediately regulate the existing oil and gas infrastructure nationwide really misses 90 percent of the problem. So we feel that the administration is proposing to find methane pollution with one hand tied behind its back.
JOYCE: Schneider points out that, across the country, most of the big leaks appear to be coming from a small minority of the drilling operators. And they may or may not be the ones to step up and clean up.
SCHNEIDER: So if the voluntary programs miss these few sites, it'll miss the lion's share of the problem.
JOYCE: Problem? What problem? Says Howard Feldman of the American Petroleum Institute.
HOWARD FELDMAN: Right now, omissions are coming down when production is going up.
JOYCE: By EPA's own estimate, methane emissions from oil and gas operations have dropped about 15 percent since 2005.
FELDMAN: The EPA is talking about putting another layer of regulation on top of that, and we just don't think it's necessary. The progress that we're making will continue without this extra layer of regulation.
JOYCE: Feldman notes that there are regulations already in place for existing natural gas wells that do have the effect of reducing methane leaks. And the Petroleum Institute has a set of good practices it distributes to operators to help them limit leaks.
FELDMAN: The vast majority of operations are actually very clean, and there are, unfortunately, some cases where some equipment, some of the operations, is not as clean right now. But industries incentivized to reduce those emissions because methane is what we sell.
JOYCE: The methane announcement is just that - an announcement. The proposed regulations are due out this summer for public comment. They would take effect in 2016. Christopher Joyce, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
We begin this hour with the fight over funding at the Department of Homeland Security. The House today voted to overturn President Obama's executive actions on immigration. Those provisions were attached to a nearly $40 billion measure to pay for homeland security spending. Coming up, we'll hear from Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, but first NPR's Brian Naylor has more on today's vote in Congress.
BRIAN NAYLOR, BYLINE: House Republicans voted to block the president from acting on immigration while insisting their actions were not about immigration, but rather reeling in a presidential misuse of power. Here's House Speaker John Boehner.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
REPRESENTATIVE JOHN BOEHNER: We do not take this action lightly, but simply, there is no alternative. This is not a dispute between the parties or even between the branches of our government. This executive overreach is an affront to the rule of law and to the Constitution itself.
NAYLOR: All told, House Republicans approved five amendments to the homeland security spending bill. They included blocking the president's 2012 action that protects, from deportation, young people who were brought here illegally by their parents. That amendment went too far for 26 Republicans, some of whom have large Latino constituencies. Those Republicans voted against the amendment, as did every Democrat.
The House also voted to block the president's action of last month, which differs deportation of parents of children who were born in the U.S. or who have green cards. After the vote, the White House reiterated its position that the president would veto the House bill as it's written. In a conference call with reporters, White House Domestic Policy Director Cecilia Munoz said the House's amendments amounted to political theater.
CECILIA MUNOZ: There is long way to go in this process, but, obviously, what the priority of the administration is to fund the department, and there is no reason to tinker with the executive actions at all.
NAYLOR: The bill now goes on to the Senate, where it will need 60 votes to pass, a prospect seen as unlikely. Brian Naylor, NPR News, Washington.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
And joining us to talk more about the effect of the budget fight, and other security issues, is the Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. Welcome to the program.
JEH JOHNSON: Thank you for having me.
CORNISH: Now, this back and forth over the DHS budget could potentially delay funding, but 85 percent of DHS employees are considered essential, right? I mean, they'd come to work anyway, albeit, without pay. Give us an example of how everyday operations might be affected if this funding is not improved in time.
JOHNSON: Well, first of all, a situation where we go into a shut down and we have to only employ those who are considered essential is far from optimal to the American people. We need a clean appropriations bill to pass the Congress to fund the Department of Homeland Security. We're operating now, as we speak, on a continuing resolution. As long as we're on a continuing resolution, which, on its current course, expires February 27.
We're prevented from new spending, new initiatives for homeland security, new initiatives for border security. We cannot fund any of our new grants to state and local law enforcement - new initiatives for aviation security. And we're in a time right now where there are a number of very, very important homeland security initiatives that need to be funded. After the attack in Paris, the attack in Ottawa and Australia and other places, I'm very concerned about making sure that our budget is adequately funded for the protection of the homeland, for the protection of the American people.
CORNISH: And as we, you know, House Speaker John Boehner earlier, he made it very clear that this action by the House is to, essentially, retaliate against the president's executive actions on immigration. I mean, what is your response to Republicans, to citizens, who feel that the president went beyond his executive discretion? They may agree with him on immigration, but not agree with the way he went about it.
JOHNSON: Well, I'll say what the president has said multiple times - that Congress should pass a bill then. If Congress wants to take up the question of immigration reform, we welcome that. But, in the meantime, don't burden the homeland security budget with this political debate. We need an appropriations bill free of this language to protect the homeland and to protect the American public.
CORNISH: You mentioned the imperative for the department, given the terror attacks in Paris. You also mentioned Ottawa, but, you know, one thing about these attacks is that they illustrate how difficult it is to track loan actors.
JOHNSON: Well, as I've said many times now, given how the terrorist threat is evolving where it involves more attacks by so-called lone wolfs, our intelligence community is less able to detect those types of terrorist plots from overseas. And so we need to work more and more with state and local law enforcement because very often, given how the terrorist threat is evolving, it may be that the cop on the beat is the first one to learn about a terrorist attempt.
And so my department in particular spends a lot of time working with state and local law enforcement, training for these types of potential attacks. As long as we're on a CR - a continuing resolution - we cannot fund with new money. And so that's one of the imperatives to passing a full year appropriations bill for my department.
CORNISH: Does the U.S. have a full counter radicalization strategy?
JOHNSON: We have a very active countering violent extremism program across the government and within this department. I personally participate in our - we refer to them as CVE engagements - countering violent extremism. I personally participate in these because I believe that they're important to our homeland security efforts.
CORNISH: Is that meeting with community groups and cultural centers? What does that entail?
JOHNSON: That's exactly what it means. And so I have personally been out to Columbus, Ohio, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, to meet with community organizations, Islamic cultural centers, other community leaders to talk to them about talking to people in the community who might be inclined to turn toward violence and talking to them about countering the narrative of terrorist organizations, such as ISIL. And so we've been very active on that front, and we're actually going to be ramping it up soon.
CORNISH: In the end, are we seeing a moment where counter radicalization is moving up in terms of priorities for U.S. counter terror strategy?
JOHNSON: I would put it this way - given the way the worldwide terrorist threat is evolving, we have to be much more sensitive to the things we should be doing here at home for the homeland. That's including countering violent extremism initiatives. It includes working with state and local law enforcement. When I go on these engagements, there's always the local police commissioner, the sheriff, with me. So there needs to be more collaboration across all of our governments - state, local, federal - and it involves the public, too. It involves community leaders, it involves the public. This has to be a combined partnership at every level of society.
CORNISH: Jeh Johnson - he's the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security. Thank you so much for speaking with us.
JOHNSON: Thank you for having me.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Albuquerque is the latest city to face protests over its police department. Last night, police shot and killed a man who, they say, fled from police and then fired at them. NPR's Kelly McEvers report.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Fire the man, fire the chief, fire the (inaudible).
KELLY MCEVERS, BYLINE: A few dozen activists in Albuquerque went out in the snow today to stand in front of police headquarters and protest last night's shooting. Police say they responded to suspicious criminal activity last night. They say they caught one suspect. The other one ran, then fired at police. Police say they returned fire and killed him. They have not yet released the suspect's name. The two officers involved were put on leave, according to police department policy. Earlier this week, the district attorney in Albuquerque's Bernalillo County brought murder charges against two other officers in the shooting death of a homeless man named James Boyd. Last spring, police said Boyd was illegally camping on the side of a hill. After an hours-long standoff with police, caught on camera by one officer, and later released as this video, Boyd says he's ready to surrender. Police move in.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Get on the ground now.
MCEVERS: Boyd picks up two knives then turns his back then...
(SOUNDBITE OF GUN)
MCEVERS: Boyd is shot three times. He died the next day. Defense attorneys for the two officers charged with murder in this shooting - Dominique Perez and Keith Sandy - say they acted to protect other officers, just as they have been trained. Prosecutor Kari Brandenburg told reporters this week that rather than bringing the case against the two officers to a closed grand jury, as with high-profile cases in Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City, the evidence in this case will be heard in open court proceedings.
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KARI BRANDENBURG: We want to share all of that information with the public. We want them to see it as it's unfolding. I think that that's critical to be transparent and I believe that that will be part of the healing process.
MCEVERS: Under Brandenburg's term as district attorney there have been dozens of officer involved shootings. Those have gone to grand juries. No criminal charges have ever been filed. Civil cases have awarded millions victim's families. A year-and-a-half long investigation by the Justice Department found Albuquerque police use excessive force. Albuquerque has now agreed to a court mandated plan to retrain police and close down units that were involved in violence.
The difference in the James Boyd case, Brandenburg says, it that her office finally had probable cause to bring criminal charges against police - in the form of that video. Legal experts say it's one of the first times police will be charged with murder using evidence from a camera. Police say these videos only present one view of events, but advocates for the camera say police and citizens are on better behavior when they know they're being filmed. Kelly McEvers, NPR News.
BLOCK: Rita Daniels, of member station KUNM, contributed to this report.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
When the French magazine Charlie Hebdo came out today, its first issue since the attack, it appeared to reiterate its provocative traditions. The cover features a cartoon of a long-nosed, bearded man wearing a turban - another depiction of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed. He holds a placard reading Je suis Charlie. And above his head are the words all is forgiven.
Around the world, many are trying to interpret that today. In the Middle East, the new cover was met with condemnation from religious figures and other authorities, but so far in rather measured tones. NPR's Leila Fadel joins us now from Cairo to discuss the reaction, and, Leila, what you hearing so far?
LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: Well, the depiction of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed hasn't been welcomed by any means. But authorities seem intent on tamping down any huge outrage. In Egypt, top religious authorities condemn the publication as provocation, and attempts to show sedition rather than unity. But Al-Azhar, which is the highest institute of Sunni learning in Egypt, called on people to ignore the, quote, "sick renderings rather than to react." Iran's foreign minister called the cover insulting and provocative and said in Geneva today that, quote, "sanctities need to be respected, and unless we learn to respect one another, it will be very difficult in a world of different views and different cultures and civilizations."
Also, Hezbollah in Lebanon said the cartoon insults Muslims and contributes to the support of terrorism. Hamas said America and Israel support the media that published - but, you know, it's important to note that all these countries, institutions and these movements also condemned the attacks on the magazine and the killing of the 12 people.
CORNISH: Has the cartoon been published in local papers?
FADEL: In general, no, it hasn't. We have seen actual attempts to stop the dissemination of the cartoons for so-called public order reasons. In Turkey, one court ordered a ban on websites with the cartoon. And police stopped and then let go of trucks carrying a secular newspaper because they suspected it published the cartoons, which they actually had inside in miniature size inside the newspaper.
In Egypt, the president issued a new decree allowing the prime minister to ban any foreign publications deemed offensive to religion. The law was issued to, quote, "maintain order in the society." These are not free societies. Many people are punished here for saying, blogging, tweeting things that are deemed insulting to faith or leadership, and it's a way for governments to control their populations.
CORNISH: Meanwhile, you're not describing action in the streets, right? I mean, is this very different than past reactions to perceived insults to Islam?
FADEL: Well, yes and no. When a very offensive film was released online in 2012, it prompted really angry protests. But these weren't representative of populations at large. Again, they were smaller, angry protests by a minority. So it's always inconsistent, and there's not always widespread anger in the streets of the Middle East when Western outlets produce depictions of Mohammed, although here it's seen as disrespectful and as insulting. And also, right now, we're in a new political reality in the Middle East, where authoritarian figures have been systematically repressing and jailing Islamists and pretty much all dissenters.
So analysts say it's their opportunity to get the West on board with their repressive tactics. You have Bashar al-Assad saying I told you so from Syria, where tens of thousands of civilians have been killed, and many by his government. So while these leaders aren't really all about free speech, they are worried about consolidating power and are concerned about very real extremism that's growing regionally. Most extremist acts by groups like the so-called Islamic State or al-Qaida are conducted against Muslim populations in mostly Muslim countries.
CORNISH: That's NPR's Leila Fadel in Cairo. Leila, thank you
FADEL: Thank you.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
President Obama visited the city of Cedar Falls, Iowa, this afternoon to tout the benefits of affordable high-speed Internet connections. Cedar Falls is a small city - just 39,000 people - but the president says its speedy Internet traffic puts the city on a par with some of the most connected capitals in the world.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: There's Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris, Cedar Falls.
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: Right?
(APPLAUSE)
OBAMA: That's - that's the company you're keeping.
BLOCK: The president outlined several initiatives designed to help other communities follow Cedar Falls's lead. And that's something he'll talk more about in next week's State of the Union address. NPR's Scott Horsley joins us now to talk about this. And, Scott, the vast majority of Americans already have access to the Internet, right? Why is this an issue for the president?
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Well, Melissa, this is no longer a question of whether you're on or off the information superhighway, but how fast your lane is moving and what kind of toll you have to pay. You're right. Most of us have basic broadband now, even my mom. She's one of 45 million Americans who signed up for broadband since President Obama came into office.
BLOCK: Go mom (laughter).
HORSLEY: But there are still big differences in connection speeds. And even for people who have very fast connections, 3 out of 4 have only one provider to choose from, so there's not very much competition. And, oftentimes, that means the prices are quite high.
BLOCK: And according to the president, what is Cedar Falls, Iowa, doing right?
HORSLEY: Well, Cedar Falls is Iowa's first gigabit city, meaning customers there can get download speeds of up to a gigabit per second. That's nearly a hundred times faster than the national average. And Obama says that's about much more than just faster streaming on Netflix.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
OBAMA: It's about giving the entrepreneur, the small-business person on Main Street, a chance to compete with the folks out in Silicon Valley or across the globe.
HORSLEY: And what's interesting is Cedar Falls built this high-speed network itself through a city-owned utility. Now, Obama sees that kind of public option as one possible remedy for the lack of competition. Of course, the idea of a public option is controversial in this industry, just as it was during the health care debate. Some commercial broadband companies don't want to compete against the government. And in fact, 19 states have laws on the books limiting the ability of local governments to get into the broadband business.
BLOCK: So, given those obstacles, how does President Obama propose getting around them?
HORSLEY: He's asking the FCC to override those state laws using its powers of preemption. Now, Obama can't force the commission to do that. It's an independent agency. But his hand-picked chairman, Tom Wheeler, has suggested he would be in favor of getting rid of state laws that limit broadband competition.
Wheeler is getting some pushback on that, though, from some Republican senators, and some free-market economists have questioned whether high-speed Internet is really something that gives much of a return for taxpayers. Iowa's Republican governor thinks it does, though. Terry Branstad has been pushing a program to connect every acre in his state. So this is another case where President Obama is taking an idea that a Republican governor has promoted, trying to replicate it nationwide and, in some cases, meeting stiff opposition from Republicans here in Washington.
BLOCK: And, again, this is something the president will be taking up in his State of the Union address next week.
HORSLEY: That's right.
BLOCK: NPR's Scott Horsley, thanks so much.
HORSLEY: My pleasure.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
In the first week of this year alone, Apple sold more than half a billion dollars in software - apps, actually through its store. For most folks who own an iPhone, the App Store is the only place to buy software for their device. In other words, Apple has created a monopoly. It takes 30 percent of every dollar spent, and it can do this because Apple locks every iPhone when it sells them. But it's possible to break out of Apple's jail. Steve Henn from NPR's Planet Money team brings us the story of three groups of hackers in a high-stakes race to do just that.
STEVE HENN, BYLINE: Every time Apple comes out with a new phone, hackers around the world go to work. The first one to find a way into the phone can sell that information - that hack - for a lot of money, especially if they can keep the deal secret.
JONATHAN STEWART: I don't want to be known as somebody who talks, but I'm just saying, you know, you came to me and asked if there's a market for this stuff. Absolutely there is.
HENN: This is Jonathan Stewart. Online he goes by the name Johnny Mnemonic. And I went to him because he was part of what became a legendary race to crack the iPhone back in 2013. To hear him tell the story, the actual caper was kind of dull. Johnny was sitting with a friend in an apartment in Redmond, Washington, on his couch pouring through computer code, and he found a bug.
STEWART: Register struck CD3_SoftC *SoftC=Get soft C (ph).
HENN: That bit of code opened a back door into the iPhone. In the past, when Johnny found a bug like this, he'd tell the company about it, help them fix it. But Johnny had gotten frustrated.
STEWART: These are major companies employing the best developers in the world. And for years we got paid zilch - nothing - for finding these vulnerabilities and writing exploits for them. So you know what? It's kind of time to, like, get paid for your work.
HENN: And there is a worldwide market for bugs. Criminals, foreign governments, spies - they're all willing to pay for this stuff. Often, it's legal to sell it, so Johnny was thinking about selling. But there was this other team of hackers doing the same thing, already planning how they could make a fortune from breaking into that same door. The tape I'm about to play is from a phone call made around this time. There are two voices on the tape. One is a hacker. The other is kind of a broker - a guy who puts these deals together.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GEORGE HOTZ: Let's make clear what the contract is.
TY MANICA: You want 350,000.
HENN: The hacker is George Hotz. He goes by geohot, and he's famous in this world. The broker is a guy named Ty Manica, and Ty recorded the call. He had heard about that door Johnny had, and he knew some people who really wanted to hack the iPhone - huge tech companies in China that were gearing up to launch their own app stores. But for these stores to get off the ground, millions of Chinese iPhone users would have to break their phone out of Apple's jail. So here was the plan - take that back door Johnny had, sell it to the Chinese businessmen, cut Johnny out of the deal and split the profit.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MANICA: Listen, bro. It'll be cool. We'll set it up. As a matter of fact, I'll shoot over to China, you shoot over there, let them meet you...
HENN: It's amazing to listen to this tape because it opens this window into the market for hacks. If a hacker finds a flaw, it could be incredibly valuable. But if word gets out, if he talks too much, it could be worth nothing. Someone else could use it. And the end of this whole story illustrates this perfectly because, as Johnny Mnemonic is trying to figure out what to do and these two guys on the phone planning are planning their trip to China, word spreads. And a third team beats everyone to the punch.
DAVID WANG: My name is David Wang. I go by planetbeing on the Internet, and I am a member of the evad3rs.
HENN: The evad3rs - a team of four guys spread across three continents who were offered a million dollars for the same hack, and they delivered.
WANG: You know, I was really shocked. I was flabbergasted.
HENN: It was an incredible, life-changing amount of money. They bragged about it online, and that's when Johnny Mnemonic found out that flaw in the iPhone he'd found was worth a million dollars to someone else.
STEWART: I put it together, and, like, I was just kind of, like - I felt used, you know?
HENN: And that is the thing about markets like this - no rules, no intellectual property protections. Even David Wang and the evad3rs ended up losing out. They got into a disagreement with their Chinese business partner about piracy and never collected a dime. Steve Henn, NPR news.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
With snow on the ground in much of the northern U.S., lots of kids are scouting out the best hills for sledding. But in some Midwestern cities, more and more hills are off-limits. Iowa Public Radio's Lindsey Moon reports that's because of concerns over liability.
EDA: I need pushing.
LINDSEY MOON, BYLINE: It's a cold, blustery day in Dubuque, and giggly 5-year-old Eda McCarthy (ph) is bundled up in pink snow gear at Bunker Hill Golf Course.
JUSTIN MCCARTHY: Are you ready?
EDA: Yeah.
MOON: She says she likes the big, fast hills. Eda and her dad, Justin, don't usually go sledding here. But a new ordinance severely restricting where they can go just went into effect, and this is now one of only two places where sledding is allowed on city property. If you are caught sledding down restricted hills, you could face a steep trespassing fine. Dubuque resident Jason Wemmer (ph) is concerned that some kids won't be able to get to one of those two parks.
JASON WEMMER: I think it's a little ridiculous. Like, there are going to be less fortunate kids whose parents, you know, they got to - they get home from work. That's the last thing they want to do is take their kid to two separate places.
MOON: The city says it doesn't want to be The Grinch of winter fun, but it has a responsibility to protect taxpayers.
KEVIN LYNCH: There's a state law that says that municipalities are not liable for accidents that occur on city property that would come from activities like skateboarding or rollerblading or unicycling or kayaking, things like that. But noticeably absent from that list is sledding.
MOON: That's City Councilman Kevin Lynch who points to large lawsuits that have targeted cities after sledding accidents. Sioux City was involved in a nearly $3 million lawsuit after a man was paralyzed when his sled crashed into a stop sign. In Boone, a young girl slid into a concrete barrier covered with snow and was awarded $12 million. But in states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota, large sledding lawsuits haven't prevailed because immunity laws offer liability protection.
These laws, however, aren't ironclad. In Omaha, for example, city officials thought they had liability protection under state law, but after a 5-year-old girl was paralyzed after sledding into a tree, her lawsuit went all the way to the Nebraska Supreme Court. And the city ended up settling for nearly $3 million. Harvard law professor John Goldberg says it suits like these that are leading some cities, like Dubuque, to consider sledding restrictions or bans even when state laws try to protect them.
JOHN GOLDBERG: All it takes is a couple of high-profile judgments to get people worried, so I think, in this case, it may be not so much a calculation of oh, my God, it's only a matter of time before we get sued and more gee, if we do get sued, which is a low probability event, the stakes might be quite high. We could be talking about millions of dollars in liability. And why take the risk when we don't have to?
MOON: A bill to offer some protection for Iowa cities has failed in the Iowa Legislature for the last two sessions. Dubuque city officials say that if state lawmakers eventually pass that measure, they'll take steps to reverse their ban. Until then, kids like Eda McCarthy...
EDA: Wait until I'm ready.
MOON: Will have to go sledding at one of two parks. For NPR News, I'm Lindsey Moon.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Falling oil prices are leading to a slowdown in drilling in states like North Dakota. And that means workers are rethinking the long commutes they've been making for the once steady, good paying jobs there. That's the story of a man we're about to reconnect with - Rory Richardson is a 36-year-old father whom we profiled a year ago. At the time, he was commuting 550 miles one way from his home in western Montana to the oil fields of Williston, North Dakota.
RORY RICHARDSON: I tried to avoid coming over here best I could, but it's one of the only spots where it's really booming and there is opportunity over here.
BLOCK: Well, a year later the slowdown is one of the reasons Richardson decided the long commute just isn't worth it anymore. NPR's Kirk Siegler sent this update.
KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: Rory Richardson spent this past Christmas at home near Missoula, Montana, with his wife, Jennifer, and 3-year-old, son Colton.
COLTON: Mommy, I want to watch a movie.
SIEGLER: It sure beat last year when Jennifer and Colton were here in this modest living room alone and Rory was out near Williston, North Dakota, working 18-hour days on a rig and sleeping in his freezing cold truck.
R. RICHARDSON: It's really tough to leave a fair paying job, but on the other hand you've got to put your priorities in line, figure out, you know, friends and family kind of come first and...
SIEGLER: Richardson was making about $18 an hour - sometimes a lot more with overtime, way better than anything he could find at the time around here. But he also had to pay his own way to drive or fly back and forth and for temp housing when he was there. After about a year-and-a-half, just five days at home a month, things were taking a toll on his family life.
R. RICHARDSON: Every time when I went to leave the house here Colton, he would start crying, you know, not wanting me to go to work or go to Williston, and it's pretty tough leaving him.
SIEGLER: So when the company Richardson was working for started cutting back his hours around Thanksgiving, he saw it as a good excuse to get out.
R. RICHARDSON: There has been a lot of work over there for people for the past two or three years, which is really good. But I don't know what's going to happen here over the next year.
CHRIS MEHL: There's an awareness among workforce here that if you, in a sense, pick up everything and move there now you could be taking a great risk.
SIEGLER: Chris Mehl is policy director for Headwaters Economics, which studies migration patterns and the economy in the rural West. He's also on the city council in Bozeman, Montana. Now, economists say oil prices have to be at least $80 a barrel for drilling in North Dakota to be profitable. So we should expect things to slow down there, for now anyway.
MEHL: Now what you're seeing is, in a sense, is the breathing out. The Bakken is - because of the price uncertainty of oil you're not seeing nearly as much production there, but also Montana and the Northern Rockies have recovered quite well.
SIEGLER: So commuting those great distances isn't as attractive. In cities like Missoula, where Rory Richardson lives, the unemployment rate is now hovering around 3 percent, and some of that is being fueled by a real estate boom.
R. RICHARDSON: Well, I come back and I'm starting my own construction business.
SIEGLER: That's right. Rory Richardson is applying for a business license right now. In the meantime, he's got steady work doing remodels and building new homes for a friend's company in the nearby Flathead Valley's resort towns.
R. RICHARDSON: It has picked up a little bit, yeah, this past year.
SIEGLER: Going out in his own is going to be a bit of a risk. No guarantee there will be a steady paycheck, but it's better than the commuting, plus his wife, Jennifer, now has some help with little Colton again.
JENNIFER RICHARDSON: Oh, yeah, it's nice. It's really nice. It's a little odd having an extra person around all the time now. I've been by myself for, well, a year-and-a-half.
SIEGLER: Still, Rory Richardson says he wouldn't rule out going back to North Dakota in the future if the job and hours were right and oil prices go back up again. Kirk Siegler, NPR News.
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And today we begin a new round of stories from the NPR Cities Project. It's called "How We Live."
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Develop it into a world-class city.
CATHY BROOKS: Community rising from the ashes.
TONY HSIEH: You had everything you need to live, work, play within walking distance.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Our lawns, our houses, our streets.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: We're more unified as people in these communities.
CORNISH: In the coming weeks, we'll explore how design of buildings - of whole neighborhoods affects and shapes our communities.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Today, we'll hear about the attempt to design a rebound in a derelict downtown. It's in Las Vegas.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MAYOR CAROLYN GOODMAN: If we don't create that bus downtown, we will remain at the status quo. And the status quo, in my opinion, is just not good enough.
BLOCK: In her State of the City Address this month, Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman focused heavily on the need for a downtown revival. And she gave a shout out to a tech billionaire...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GOODMAN: Mastermind Tony Hsieh.
BLOCK: ...For playing a key role in a long list of new openings.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GOODMAN: The bunkhouse alone, Zappos made-to-order pop-up shop at the old Western Hotel.
BLOCK: The CEO of Zappos has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into property and startup businesses over the last three years in downtown Vegas. For Tony Hsieh, this is part revitalization project, part social experiment. He wants to create a lasting, livable community. But his efforts are not without bumps. NPR's Elise Hu takes us around.
ELISE HU, BYLINE: In a lot that used to be a Motel 6, zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh has helped create a park.
HSIEH: Kids are having fun and adults are hanging out with each other. And what you're hearing in the background is live music from local bands.
HU: The park's perimeter is lined with shipping containers in bright shades of orange and blue and yellow. About 40 local restaurants, retail shops and tiny art galleries have opened up inside them. In the middle of the park is the music pavilion and lawn, and a 25-foot tall Swiss Family Robinson-style tree house playground.
HSIEH: Have you gone down the slide yet? You should. It's part of the experience of visiting the Downtown Container Park.
HU: The Container Park is part of a much grander vision called Downtown Project. We've been tracking this since we visited last April. The project's aim? To get more people living and working in this forgotten part of Vegas. Hsieh pledged to pour $350 million from his personal fortune to the area. Downtown Las Vegas is the blighted part of the city where rooms can rent for $29 a night and bottomless drinks are served in plastic footballs. The much better known Las Vegas Strip is miles away.
HSIEH: What you find on the Strip is really geared towards tourists. And what we're focusing on here is geared towards locals and this sense of community.
HU: He says just as culture is to a company, a community is to a city.
HSIEH: So Vegas traditionally isn't really known as a walking town or city. It's a very car-based culture and we wanted to help create a place where you had everything you need to live, work, play within walking distance. And so if you look one block that way, there's actually the world's largest functioning fire hydrant attached to the dog park and doggie day care.
HU: Hsieh's pointing a few blocks down Fremont Street at the dog-dominated small business started by Cathy Brooks.
BROOKS: (Calling to dog) Hey, Moxie.
HU: She moved here after closing her tech consulting practice in San Francisco.
BROOKS: If you had asked me a year and a half ago the top 100 places in this world, on this entire planet, where I might consider relocating my life, Las Vegas would not have even been on the list.
HU: But thanks to an investment from Downtown Project funds dedicated to incubating small businesses, Brooks opened up the Hydrant Club. It's a downtown dog park where dogs stay and play for the day while getting behavioral training, too.
BROOKS: Amidst this community rising from the ashes of downtown Las Vegas was a real need for a place for the dog community to be a community.
HU: The Hydrant Club is one of 60 start-ups and about 800 jobs funded by Hsieh's project. The investments are a mix of tech start-ups, traditional small businesses like restaurants, and education or health initiatives, all part of creating a community at hyper speed. The idea is that when people live, shop and work in the same neighborhood, it fuels chance encounters - collisions, as they call them here - that lead to innovation.
MATT HELLER: It's impressive. There's a lot of change happening, and it happens almost daily.
HU: That's Matt Heller, a downtown Las Vegas dweller I found at one of the new co-working spaces that's popped up downtown. He used to lead brand development at retailer Abercrombie and Fitch but now considers himself part of the downtown community. Three years since Hsieh started spending, Heller wonders what happens beyond this initial cash infusion.
HELLER: There is zero sustainability in downtown Las Vegas - zero. We have to keep it growing every day. So the question is at what cost? And I'm not sure when someone will say, you know what, we can't afford to water this grass anymore. There isn't any income.
HU: Hsieh's company of 1,600 is headquartered here, and there's no sign Zappos is short of income after a $1 billion purchase by Amazon. The Downtown Project started when Hsieh moved Zappos's permanent headquarters to the old downtown City Hall.
UNIDENTIFIED TOUR GUIDE: All right, you guys. So welcome to our customer service department. This is our largest group here at our headquarters.
HU: I took a tour of Zappos, where guides emphasize its focus on customer service. Hsieh actually made his name on creating a company culture where people wanted to work. With Downtown Project, he's doing it at a city-sized scale, trying to create a place that people want to live.
UNIDENTIFIED TOUR GUIDE: Well, we love to eat here so (unintelligible) ice cream.
HU: Hsieh's young staff also needed life outside work and there was nothing around but dilapidated motels. So the man who focused on company culture started thinking about what cities need in order to thrive. But there are questions now about how the vision's being managed. The project laid-off 30 main office staff in the fall. This week the project's chief spokesperson left her job. The company offered no explanation. And unsettling events have further rattled the community. Among them, two entrepreneurs involved with the project died by suicide.
Back at the Container Park with Hsieh, he says he's learning as he goes along.
HSIEH: I come from the tech world where you can kind of go from idea to launch in 24 hours. And so even though I knew obviously the physical world can move slower than the tech world, there are just some things that just take a lot of time and therefore a lot of patience.
HU: Hsieh told NPR this week the project is still on track, but he doesn't claim to have all the answers.
HSIEH: Sometimes there are things that you just might not have ever anticipated, just because I'm not from that world.
HU: The investor in Hsieh is giving this project another two years to break even. His Zappos business is based here, after all. But he says he wants to see a city revitalized for more than just a business reason.
HSIEH: I don't know if it needs to be framed as, oh, you're either in business to maximize profits, or you're this philanthropic, altruistic person. I think there can be an in-between where you try to do well by doing good and it's a win-win-win for everyone.
HU: Is it working so far?
HSIEH: I hope so. (Laughter).
HU: A revitalizing urban core, built on tens of millions of dollars and a lot of hope. In that way, the project is a lot like the restaurants retail inside shipping containers here. Is this temporary? Is it permanent? For now, it's a little bit of both in downtown Vegas.
All right, thanks Tony.
Elise Hu for the NPR Cities Project.
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China's population is expected to peak in about 10 years and then begin to decline. Demographers say it's time to end decades of strict population controls, including the country's one-child policy. The government has started to allow some couples to have two children, but the long-term effects of China's one-child policy are already being felt. NPR's Anthony Kuhn takes us to a part of China where that's the case, an area that pioneered the policy.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN: (Singing in foreign language).
ANTHONY KUHN, BYLINE: Children voices ring out from a music class at an elementary school in Rudong County. It sits on China's east coast just north of where the Yangtze River empties into the East China Sea. The county is known throughout China for its good schools, but school principal Miao Boquan says there aren't many of them left.
MIAO BOQUAN: (Through interpreter) There used to be 14 schools in this township, one in every village. Now we are the only remaining elementary school. All the others have been merged.
KUHN: There are 460 students at Miao's school, about half the number a decade ago. Many of the students' parents have gone to work in the cities. They're not entitled to education or any welfare benefits there, so they leave their children in the countryside in the care of their grandparents. Miao says that this causes developmental problems for some kids.
BOQUAN: (Through translator) The grandparents' love is a doting love. They don't know how to love them. They don't know what to give them or talk to them about.
KUHN: Meanwhile, in a nearby town in Rudong County, senior citizens sit down to dinner at their government-funded retirement home. They're bundled up against the cold, as there's no heat in winter here. Most of them have no income or children to support them. In recent years, this town went from having one such facility having five. Fifty-eight-year-old resident He Jingming has had polio since childhood. He never married. Before retiring he collected scrap for recycling. He says he's grateful to be here.
HE JINGMING: (Speaking foreign language).
KUHN: "We have it easy here," He says, smiling. "We get to eat without having to do any work. The state looks after us and is good to us. Our director here speaks humbly to us and would never curse at us." He glances at the director, Chen Jieru. Chen used to work as the Communist Party secretary of a nearby village. Beginning in the 1960s, Rudong County launched a family planning pilot program, a decade before China's one-child policy began in 1979. Chen remembers that he spent a lot of time implementing the program, which meant being on the lookout for pregnant women.
CHEN JIERU: (Through interpreter) Having a second child wasn't allowed, so we had to work on them and persuade them to have an abortion. At the time, our work as a village cadre revolved around women's big bellies.
KUHN: By one estimate, 15 years from now, 60 percent of Rudong County residents will be 60 years or older. But Chen Youhua, a Nanjing University sociologist, who grew up in Rudong County, says that the family planning policy is not the only reason the county is aging so quickly.
CHEN YOUHUA: (Through interpreter) Another reason is that our young people go elsewhere to seek their education and few of them return. The third is that with improvements in health, people are living longer.
KUHN: In other words, Rudong County's population would shrink anyway without the one-child policy. The policy just speeds it up a bit. Chen Youhua and other experts say that if China is to avoid a national crisis it needs to scrap the one-child policy immediately and get Chinese citizens to make more babies, but China admits this could be difficult.
YOUHUA: (Through interpreter) Only yesterday China was emphasizing the advantages of the one-child policy. To encourage people the next day to have children is a 180-degree reversal.
KUHN: And then he says it could be hard for both officials and ordinary citizens to accept. Anthony Kuhn, NPR News, Beijing.
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In California, the Affordable Care
Act is seen as successful, but it still has a competition problem. Nearly 30,000 people in California have only one insurer to pick from on its exchange. Pauline Bartolone, from Capital Public Radio, traveled to the mountains of Northern California to see what this is like for patients.
PAULINE BARTOLONE, BYLINE: Dennie Wright lives an Indian Valley, a tiny Alpine community at the northern tip of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, close to the Nevada state border.
DENNIE WRIGHT: We're back in the backcountry, you might say, but it is a beautiful place to live and that's why we choose to live here.
BARTOLONE: But it's not a place that insurance companies prefer to do business. In 2014 a major insurer, Blue Shield of California, stopped selling policies to individuals in many parts of Northern California. That left Anthem Blue Cross as the only insurer selling in all of that region on the exchange. Dennie Wright has one of those Anthem Blue Cross plans. He also has piles of medical bills and and insurance paperwork from over the past year. He had several heart related emergencies and was flown across the state border to a Nevada hospital.
D. WRIGHT: One of the things they don't want you to do is to get stressed out, and when you look at a bill like that think it might not be covered, there's nothing much more stressful than that.
BARTOLONE: The problem is Anthem Blue Cross covers emergencies out-of-state, but not routine care. Wright is still going back and forth with the insurer to get his Nevada care fully covered. And he's not sure what, or if, the company will pay if he continues to see the doctors in Nevada who are most convenient for him. Wright says the system makes no sense to him.
D. WRIGHT: I mean, you should have some choices, and especially if you're going to have one that's not going to cover you in the places you choose to go.
BARTOLONE: Thousands of Californians may feel like Dennie Wright. People in zip codes all across Northern California who need financial help to buy coverage are stuck with one insurer in Covered California. The exchange is discussing how to change that, but Executive Director Peter Lee says the insurance market in rural Northern California has been difficult for a long time.
PETER LEE: We aren't the solution to all the problems that have always been there in terms of challenges in rural communities, and that's something we're certainly looking how to improve access and choice and we'll continue doing that.
BARTOLONE: Covered California should help increase the number of insurers, says consumer advocate Anthony Wright from Health Access. He says policymakers should also lean on insurers and providers to participate in that market.
ANTHONY WRIGHT: Some of this is a combination of putting pressure on the insurers and some of this is trying to do work to actually increase the number of providers on the ground in these areas, whether through more training incentives to be in some of these more rural areas.
BARTOLONE: Wright says more insurers in the marketplace make it more likely people can get the care they need.
A. WRIGHT: At one level we're trying to make a functioning market, but it still means that consumers are at the mercy of the market.
BARTOLONE: There are other health insurance options for Dennie Wright, but not through Covered California. Not everybody knows about those options or can afford them. For NPR News, I'm Pauline Bartolone in Sacramento
CORNISH: This story is part of a reporting partnership with NPR, Capital Public Radio and Kaiser Health News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its first estimate of the effectiveness of this year's flu vaccine, and the news isn't good. As NPR's Rob Stein reports, the estimate confirms fears that this year's flu shots aren't working very well.
ROB STEIN, BYLINE: The CDC's been warning for weeks that this year's flu shot was probably going to be pretty lame. And so far that prediction seems to be coming true. Alicia Fry, a CDC epidemiologist, says the vaccine looks like it's only about 23 percent effective.
ALICIA FRY: What this means is that if you were vaccinated your chances of getting a flu illness that required you to go to the doctor was reduced by 23 percent.
STEIN: That's less than half as effective as the flu shot can be. So why is the vaccine turning out to be such a dud? Blame the main strain of flu viruses that are out there this year. It mutated slightly since the vaccine was produced, so the vaccine's not revving up the immune system enough to fight it off very well.
FRY: The viruses that are circulating in the majority of the country have changed genetically enough that we would expect the vaccine not to be as effective.
STEIN: And this comes at a particularly bad time. That strain that mutated is what scientists call an H3N2 virus, and H3N2 flu viruses tend to be nasty, making more people sick, sending more to the hospital and killing more people than other strains, especially kids and older people. So a lot of you might be thinking - why did I bother getting my flu shot? Or if you haven't gotten one yet - I might as well skip it this year. Fry says nope, it's still worth it. That's because the vaccine does protect a least a little against that nasty H3N2 virus and is working pretty well against other less common strains that are out there and could get more common later this year.
FRY: In almost every flu season another flu virus circulates, and we would expect the vaccine to continue to be effective against other viruses other than the H3N2.
STEIN: All this does highlight some big problems with making the flu vaccine. First of all, because the virus changes every year, scientists have to make a new vaccine every year. And scientists have to make an educated guess, months before every flu season begins, which strains of the flu the vaccine should try to protect people against. So William Schaffner, of Vanderbilt University, says researchers are working hard to come up with a better way so the vaccine won't be such a gamble every year.
WILLIAM SCHAFFNER: So the holy grail of influenza vaccine researchers is what's called a universal flu vaccine, one that would protect against all these variant strains, and maybe one that we only would have to get ourselves every five years or maybe only every 10 years. That would be a boon.
STEIN: But that's still years away from becoming a reality. So, in the meantime, the CDC says continue getting your flu shots, and if you do get the flu anyway, go see your doctor right away to see if you can get some antiviral drugs. Rob Stein, NPR News.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
In the United Kingdom, the company British Gas employs 30,000 workers. Five of them could be said to carry a metaphorical torch that has been burning for 200 years. They are the lamplighters, tending to gas lamps that still line the streets in some of London's oldest neighborhoods and parks. NPR's Ari Shapiro joined them on their nightly rounds.
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: I wish I could tell you that these men were dressed in top hats and waistcoats. But as the sun went down around 4 o'clock last night, Iain Bell and Garry Usher arrived wearing regular blue and gray jackets with the British Gas logo. They look like standard, 21st century utility workers.
GARRY USHER: I was originally doing central heating installation for British Gas.
SHAPIRO: About 15 years ago, Garry Usher found out he was being assigned to the lamplighter's crew. He told his boss that's ridiculous. London doesn't use gas lamps anymore.
USHER: I thought he was taking the mickey, actually.
SHAPIRO: You thought he was totally...
USHER: I was...
SHAPIRO: ...Fooling you?
USHER: Yeah, exactly, trying to pawn me off onto another area.
SHAPIRO: But, in fact, London still has about 1,500 gas lamps. The group British Heritage decided to preserve them after almost all the others were replaced by electric lamps. These look almost exactly the same as when they were first installed two centuries ago, just a little taller to accommodate modern traffic. Usher leans a latter up against a lamppost and opens the small glass door at the top of the lamp. Inside, a little ticking clock triggers the flame to go on and off at the right time each night. These clocks must be wound by hand.
USHER: I manually turn it around.
SHAPIRO: The flame jumps up and catches on little silk nets. They're covered with a substance called lime, which produces a bright white light. A couple centuries ago, London's West End theaters realized how useful lime could be to illuminate a stage.
USHER: They used to have a bit of this lime - quicklime - put a flame through it and it showed a really bright light across - on their star - and so the star was the person that was in the limelight. And that's where that comes from.
SHAPIRO: So we are literally standing in the limelight, steps from the river Thames, a stone's throw from Big Ben.
(SOUNDBITE OF BIG BEN)
SHAPIRO: Iain Bell is British Gas' operations manager and a history buff. He describes what this area would've looked like before the lamps arrived.
IAIN BELL: The streets would've been pitch-black. They would've been smoggy. They'd be quite dangerous because the only light the public would have had would have been a candle.
SHAPIRO: If you wanted to walk to the local pub, you could hire a child know as a link boy to light your way with a torch.
BELL: Some of the link boys weren't as nice as you would expect them to be. They actually would mock you, so they would take you down a dark lane and then you'd be set upon and robbed.
SHAPIRO: So when streetlights arrived, everything changed. At first, people were afraid of the lamps - and rightfully so, says Bell. The gas pipes were poorly made from shabby materials.
BELL: We're talking wood. We're talking mud wrapped around it, so there was a lot of leaks. There was a lot of fires. There was a lot of explosions. So that's - the public were terrified.
SHAPIRO: Even today, diggers often come across the remains of old wooden pipes. Today, the gas lamps that are still standing are protected by law. If one is knocked down, it's replaced with an exact replica. They cast a calming, mellow light, maintained by these few remaining lamplighters - literal keepers of the flame. Ari Shapiro, NPR News, London.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "OLD LAMPLIGHTER")
THE BROWNS: (Singing) He made the night a little brighter.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
The stereotype of the lone genius, generally in popular culture and the real world, is expected to be a man. As NPR's Geoff Brumfiel reports, that gender stereotype may have an impact on women in some academic fields.
GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: Sarah-Jane Leslie works at Princeton University as a philosopher.
SARAH-JANE LESLIE: Which is a humanities discipline that has very few women.
BRUMFIEL: She says philosophy is also one of those disciplines where the word genius gets thrown around a lot.
LESLIE: We wondered if there might be a connection between philosophers' disposition to place all this emphasis on the need for brilliance and the discipline's large gender gap.
BRUMFIEL: So she and some colleagues surveyed philosophers and asked them; to be really good at philosophy, do you need natural talent? They asked the same question of scholars in 30 other fields, the result published in the journal Science.
LESLIE: To the extent that a discipline expresses the belief that you have to have a special spark of brilliance to really be successful, we found that those disciplines had larger gender gaps.
BRUMFIEL: There were fewer women in fields where genius was a perceived prerequisite. That rule didn't apply to just the usual genius-y fields like physics and math.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOZART SONG, "EINE KLEINE NACHTMUSIK")
LESLIE: Music composition was definitely towards that end of the spectrum, and correspondingly has very few women in it.
BRUMFIEL: Genius composers like Mozart, genius physicists like Einstein - these icons are male. And Leslie believes that image is keeping women out.
LESLIE: Even though women are just as likely as men to have what it takes.
BRUMFIEL: But not everyone thinks this genius effect is to blame. Lisa Randall is a theoretical physicist at Harvard. She says the problems women face in science are no different than they face in other professions.
LISA RANDALL: I remember a long time ago, there was a cartoon in The New Yorker. A bunch of guys and one women around a desk, and they said this is a very good comment, Miss Tribbs, would one of the guys here like to make it?
BRUMFIEL: She thinks academia has the same problems as, say, business. Men talk over women at meetings. Some women feel marginalized, and eventually, they give up.
RANDALL: Is it really that it's because it's being associated with genius that this is happening, or is it simply that people aren't listening to their ideas?
BRUMFIEL: Hard to say. But in physics, at least, the number of women earning degrees is rising, slowly. Geoff Brumfiel, NPR News.
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Tomorrow in Saudi Arabia we can expect that a 31-year-old blogger will be brought from prison to a public square. There Raif Badawi will be flogged before a throng of spectators - 50 lashes. And that punishment will continue - 50 lashes every week for 20 weeks, plus 10 years in prison. Raif Badawi's crime, according to Saudi authorities - insulting Islam. He published the Saudi Free Liberals blog before he was arrested in 2012. Human rights activist Elham Manea is speaking on behalf of Badawi's family. She told us how witnesses have described last week's flogging in the port city of Jeddah.
ELHAM MANEA: He was brought to a square in front of a mosque. Seems to be thousands of people were gathering around him in a circle. Someone started to whip him. He tried to hold his hand in victory symbol. And then the guard had to put his hand down. He didn't flinch while being lashed and remained proud and defiant.
BLOCK: Well, let's talk about some of what Mr. Badawi has written that got him in such trouble there in Saudi Arabia. What was he writing on his blog?
MANEA: About secularism, about what it means to have a free society, freedom of expression - when you think about it he was just stating what many countries are living. He just wanted that in Saudi Arabia.
BLOCK: When you were in touch with him, before he got arrested back in 2012, did he express fear that he would be imprisoned and ultimately punished for what he had written?
MANEA: He knew this entails risk, but he thought that reform is a necessity, and from that perspective he was sure that there will be a listening ear from the Saudi regime. Unfortunately, they seem to have disappointed him.
BLOCK: Mr. Badawi's wife has said that her husband is not a criminal, but, in her words, a victim of the thought police in Saudi Arabia. Is his case part of a broader crackdown on free speech throughout the kingdom?
MANEA: Yes, and that's very important to mention in this context because Raif's a symbol - is symbol for many thousands of other men and women who are imprisoned for doing nothing but expressing their opinions or demanding reform or demanding women's right. Now, the question is for me is, like, why is the Saudi regime so afraid of fulfilling its obligation under international human rights convention? I mean, Saudi Arabia is a member of Human Rights Council, for God's sake. The least that one expects is that they respect a minimum in terms of freedom of expression.
BLOCK: Saudi Arabia, of course, is a key U.S. ally. The state department has said it's greatly concerned about what it calls this inhumane punishment of Mr. Badawi. Do you and other human rights activists expect a strong international response? What would you be calling on other countries to do?
MANEA: That they continue this pressure and also a consideration of boycotts of some sort, but I don't think that would make any sense given the fact that Saudi Arabia has the upper hand when it comes to economic leverage - I'm talking about oil here. But the discrepancy between continuing a relationship with a kingdom who is violating human rights on a daily basis is becoming unbearable. And I think the United States has a responsibility given the fact that it's always defending human rights on an international level, that it puts pressure on its ally, Saudi Arabia, in order to uphold its own image.
BLOCK: Well, Ms. Manea, thank you very much for talking with us about this case.
MANEA: You're very welcome.
BLOCK: Human rights activist Elham Manea speaking with us from Durham, England. We were talking about the imprisoned Saudi blogger Raif Badawi. He's been sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for insulting Islam. Among his last blog post was this quote from Albert Camus - the only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
We go now to Texas, which gets a new governor next week. Former Attorney General Greg Abbott will replace fellow Republican Rick Perry, the longest-serving governor in Texas state history. Abbott laid out his vision for the state in a recent speech to a conservative think tank. As NPR's Wade Goodwyn reports, of some of Abbott's comments set up a battle between the Republican state government and big cities, which are led by Democrats.
WADE GOODWYN, BYLINE: It was the kind of speech that nearly always passes unnoticed, an oration to a group of public policy wonks full of dogma and legislative strategy. But then soon-to-be Texas governor Greg Abbott began talking about how Texas's cities have passed laws and regulations that were leading to the California-ization of Texas.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
GREG ABBOTT: The truth is Texas is being California-ized with bag bans, fracking bans, tree cutting bans. We're forming a patchwork quilt of bans and rules and regulations that is eroding the Texas model.
GOODWYN: Texas Republicans have long held out California as the model for all that is evil. The Texas model that Abbott refers to is to free businesses from the red tape of environmental and legal obligations and tax burdens. But while Texas's state government is Republican through and through, its cities are most blue - Democratic. And since it's clear the state is not going to regulate businesses or the environment, Texas cities have begun passing their own laws. Abbott says the state legislature needs to put a stop to it.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
ABBOTT: This is a form of collectivism. Some cities claim that the trees on private property belong to the community, large cities that represent about 75 percent of the population in this state.
GOODWYN: Of course, it's not just trees. It's regulations about the oil and gas industry, like the fracking ban inside city limits passed by the small city of Denton. And the new governor doesn't like charging consumers for plastic bags or requiring permits for businesses like junk yards. (SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
ABBOTT: Unchecked overregulation by cities will turn the Texas miracle into the California nightmare faster than you can spell TPPF.
GOODWYN: That's the Texas Public Policy Foundation where Abbott was speaking. Abbott's call to arms is not some idle threat. Most of the legislature is right behind him. And his comments certainly haven't gone unnoticed in the cities. Even the conservative Dallas Morning News took offense in an editorial entitled "Since When Did A Plastic Bag Ordinance Become A Collectivist Plot?"
MAYOR MIKE RAWLINGS: I believe that the city is the ultimate form of democracy.
GOODWYN: Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings does not want to fight new governor and Republican legislature over each and every Dallas law and regulation the state doesn't like. Why not? Because Dallas will lose. It's about power.
RAWLINGS: To the victors go the spoils. This is not about ideology but ultimately about who's in charge and the rules that they want to make.
GOODWYN: So the Democratic Dallas mayor will make an argument that Republicans have themselves been making for decades - local control is the best control.
RAWLINGS: Decentralizing power is a very important decision to make. What Dallas needs to do is different than what Big Spring needs to do.
GOODWYN: The cries that this is the height of Republican hypocrisy have been ringing from the Democratic heavens - oh sure, it's all about local control, until the Democrats are in local control. But Republicans say that's not so. Chuck DeVore is the vice president of policy at the conservative and influential Texas Public Policy Foundation where Greg Abbott was speaking. And DeVore says it's not hypocrisy for the state to intervene if it's in the cause of freedom.
CHUCK DEVORE: Hypocrisy is not present however in the justification. And what we're trying to do here is to secure liberty. And it matters not whether your liberty is eroded by the federal level, the state level or the local level. If it's eroded, it's eroded.
GOODWYN: The start of the 140-day session of the Texas legislature began yesterday. For the state's cities, it's likely to be quite the ride.
Wade Goodwyn, NPR News, Dallas.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Reports from Belgium say two people have died in a police raid on a suspected militant hideout in the east of the country. Belgium's public prosecutor said the casualties occurred while police were checking on people they believed to be about to launch what he called a terror attack in Belgium. Reporter Teri Schultz joins us from Brussels. And Teri, the Belgian federal prosecutor held a press conference about this raid. What did he have to say?
TERI SCHULTZ, BYLINE: The Belgian prosecutor said that not only were these attacks expected to be large-scale, but they were imminent and that's why the search warrants were carried out tonight, 10 of them in fact, carried out across Belgium. As you mentioned, two people died. Those were two of the suspects in the raid. The prosecutor said they opened fire on police as they were trying to carry out a raid and they were shot and killed by police. No police nor civilians were injured. And a third man was taken into custody.
CORNISH: Did they suggest there was any connection between this operation and the events in Paris?
SCHULTZ: The prosecutor is being very tight-lipped at this point about what they believe about these attacks. But he did say that the investigation had been going on for weeks, so certainly not connected to anything that's happened just since Paris. Police have been working on this for some time, and there is no suggestion at this point that they were directly linked to Paris.
CORNISH: Now, I understand the prosecutor mentioned that these people had just returned from Syria. Is that a big concern in Belgium?
SCHULTZ: Yes, he did say that all of the suspects had returned from Syria and it's a huge concern in Belgium. For a fairly small country with a population of just over 11 million, Belgium has the highest number per capita in the West of citizens who've gone to fight in Iraq and Syria. And there's of course, huge concern not just about these kids going - most of them kids - going to fight, but about what happens when they come home. And there's even a large trial going on now with some of these returning foreign fighters who are suspected of coming back radicalized, well-trained and planning to launch attacks on their home country.
CORNISH: Finally, Teri, a notable arrest, that of a suspected arms dealer in Belgium recently - what more can you tell us about that?
SCHULTZ: Yes, Audie, and what's interesting is that this does appear to be connected to the Paris attacks. A man who says he has been in connection with Amedy Coulibaly - the man who took over the supermarket and killed four people there - he says, according to Belgian media, that he had cheated Coulibaly in a car deal and he was worried that Islamist terrorists were going to come after him for that. So this man actually turned himself into police and it will be very interesting to find out what he's able to tell them about his connections with Coulibaly and the two brothers who carried out the Paris attacks.
CORNISH: That's reporter Teri Schultz speaking to us about the latest in Brussels. Teri, thank you.
SCHULTZ: You're welcome, Audie.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
French authorities announced the arrests of more than 50 people yesterday - not for terrorism, but for speech. Among those detained was the controversial French comedian Dieudonne. He's been convicted numerous times before for inciting anti-Semitism. To understand the laws governing free speech in France, I spoke with Aurelien Hamelle, an attorney in Paris. And I asked him what is considered illegal hate speech under French law.
AURELIEN HAMELLE: Well, I guess we could identify three different offenses that could qualify, broadly, as hate speech. One is inducing anyone into violence, hate or discrimination towards a person or a group of persons on account of their origin, race or religion. Then, another offense is actually what we call apologie, meaning defending or justifying certain crimes, certain offenses, among which you will find terrorism, but that's not the only one. And then I would say that another offense falls under the broad category of hate speech, and that is the offense of denying the existence of the Holocaust, which is a specific French offense that a few other countries in Europe actually have.
BLOCK: We've been hearing this week about the comedian - the controversial comedian - Dieudonne, who's gotten in trouble most recently with a Facebook post. And here's what he posted. I feel like Charlie Coulibaly. In other words, he's mixing Charlie, from the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, and Coulibaly, which is the last name of the killer at the kosher grocery store. How did that cross the line and get him detained?
HAMELLE: Well, it seems that the prosecution department that brings cases and prosecutions on account of hate speech has formed an opinion that by putting these two words, I am Charlie Coulibaly, Dieudonne will have condoned or justified what Mr. Coulibaly did - because putting the words together, in a way, means that it brings support to what Mr. Coulibaly may have done - or did, actually.
BLOCK: Has humor been a path toward getting around these limits on free speech before? In other words, if someone can show this was humor - this was a joke - that that could get them in the clear.
HAMELLE: Yes. That's a line of defense that courts do accept. And if they are satisfied that it was humor, then they are likely to enter into an acquittal decision. The reason is actually legally extremely clear when one looks at French decisions. And there's a very consistent and established case law in that respect in France. If no one can take the speech at hand seriously, then it cannot be an offense. And it is only when what is being said or written can be taken seriously that it is likely or it could amount to a hate speech offense.
BLOCK: I gather the satirical weekly that was targeted, Charlie Hebdo, has been at the center of these - of a number of these cases before. Has humor been an avenue for them to mount a defense and to avoid prosecution?
HAMELLE: Well, it has been indeed. There is a very clear decision from 2011, which is a recent one, that actually was dealing with caricatures of the pope and certain articles that were clearly offensive to the Catholic religion. And the court decided that even though these may have been clearly very offensive, these could not be taken seriously. Therefore, Charlie Hebdo evaded conviction.
BLOCK: Well, Mr. Hamelle, thanks very much for talking with us today.
HAMELLE: You're welcome.
BLOCK: Attorney Aurelien Hamelle specializes in cases involving freedom of speech. He's a partner with Allen & Overy in Paris.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Yesterday, al-Qaida's affiliate in Yemen claimed responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo attack. And then last night, the Pentagon announced that five detainees held at the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay are being transferred to other countries. The men who were freed all come from Yemen. Senate Republicans are moving to block any more transfers from Guantanamo. NPR's David Welna reports on how new terrorism attacks are complicating efforts to close the prison.
DAVID WELNA, BYLINE: The five Yemenis being transferred from Guantanamo to Oman in Estonia bring to 33 the number of detainees released over the past year. That's far more than in previous years. All had been cleared for release early in President Obama's administration. Kenneth Roth is the head of Human Rights Watch. He says Obama's clearly trying to fulfill his promise of closing Guantanamo.
KENNETH ROTH: If you compare the population of Guantanamo today with when Obama took office, he's basically cut it in half. He's gone from 241 detainees to 122.
WELNA: Late last month, the president explained on CNN why he's so determined to shut down the prison camp.
(SOUNDBITE OF CNN NEWS BROADCAST)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: It is something that continues to inspire jihadists and extremists around the world, the fact that these folks are being held. It is contrary to our values. And it is wildly expensive. We're spending millions for each individual there.
WELNA: About $3 million a year per prisoner according to the Pentagon. Roth of Human Rights Watch says he thinks cost is a key part of Obama's strategy.
ROTH: I think his plan is to reduce the number sufficiently so that the cost per detainee becomes prohibitive for those who remain, and he's able to overcome some of the congressional resistance to enabling him to transfer the last few detainees.
WELNA: Earlier this week, that congressional resistance was on full display at a news conference at the Capitol. It featured several leading Republican senators on national defense issues, including New Hampshire's Kelly Ayotte.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
SENATOR KELLY AYOTTE: It's one thing to make a campaign promise. But if you look at the security situation that we're facing around the world right now, now is not the time to be emptying Guantanamo with no plan for how and where these individuals are going to go, no assurances of security of those who have been released.
WELNA: Ayotte and her fellow Republicans, including the new chairman of the armed services and intelligence committees, are proposing a two-year moratorium on the transfer of most of the detainees in Guantanamo and barring any transfers to Yemen. South Carolina's Lindsey Graham says the events in Paris show now is not the time to be freeing those held at Guantanamo.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
REPRESENTATIVE LINDSEY GRAHAM: The only reason most of these people have not planned another 9/11 at Guantanamo Bay is because they've been in jail. You let them out of jail, they're going to be on the ground floor planning another 9/11.
WELNA: And Arizona's John McCain, who now leads the Armed Services panel, has done something of an about-face on Guantanamo. The former Vietnam prisoner of war argued for years that Guantanamo was a blight on the U.S. image around the world. He now says many being held there are too dangerous to be released.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN: We're going to continue to release batches of prisoners, according to this administration, with no plan and the extreme likelihood that approximately one out of every three of them will reenter the fight. We owe the men and women who are serving in the military better protection than that.
WELNA: At the White House today, Press Secretary Josh Earnest said only about 6 percent of the detainees released during the Obama administration had returned to the battlefield. Holding prisoners at Guantanamo, he said, only helps jihadists recruit more followers.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOSH EARNEST: This is a very difficult policy problem. And it's only been made more difficult by members of the United States Senate who have thrown up obstacles to the president's effort to try to close the prison.
WELNA: An effort that the White House has vowed will continue. David Welna, NPR News, Washington.
CORNISH: And we'll have more analysis on the global security risk related to Yemen tomorrow morning. That's where Morning Edition's David Greene will talk with an expert who says extremists are taking advantage of that country's lack of security infrastructure.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Spectators cheer as a dream is realized in Yosemite National Park. Crowds below, and climbers Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson atop El Capitan, were finally able to celebrate at sunset yesterday after the duo completed their historic ascent of the sheer vertical Dawn Wall. They were the first ever to free climb the Dawn Wall in one continuous push from the ground up using just their hands and feet, and probably knees and elbows at times, to ascend using ropes only to break their falls. It took 19 days to make it up 3,000 feet. They were living on portaledges suspended from granite face in between efforts and now, it's over. And Kevin Jorgeson and Tommy Caldwell join me now from the base of the El Capitan.
Welcome back to the program guys, and congratulations.
KEVIN JORGESON: Thank you.
TOMMY CALDWELL: Thank you.
BLOCK: And we should mention, Tommy, that you've lost your voice somewhere along the way.
CALDWELL: Yes, completely. Sorry about that.
BLOCK: We're going to try to preserve it as much as we can here. Kevin, why don't you describe the moment when the two of you finally reached the top?
JORGESON: It was a pretty special moment. It was cool because when we pulled over the top, it was still just Tommy and I on the ledge - because there's a bunch of bushes between us and all of our friends and family on top - and all these cheers erupted from the valley floor. And it all kind of set in at once that it was done.
BLOCK: Did I see, Tommy, did I see the two of you sprinting up the last little bit there?
CALDWELL: We did speed it up near the top a little bit, for sure. I think we were just really excited to get to the summit after 19 days on the wall.
BLOCK: Tommy, how does it feel now to be back down on solid ground, after being up on that sheer face for so long?
CALDWELL: The amount of people watching us is a little bit overwhelming, but it's really cool to spread the love of this climb with so many people.
BLOCK: But what about your legs? I mean, how do you get your ground legs back after a climb like this?
CALDWELL: We had to descend like, 3,000 feet of steep slabs to walk down yesterday after not having walked for 19 days. And the soreness is just now starting to set in.
BLOCK: You know, when we talked to you on the program a week ago, Kevin, your hands were really ripped to shreds. What do your hands look like now at the end of this climb?
JORGESON: They still look like they're ripped to shreds.
BLOCK: Yeah?
JORGESON: All the tips have bruises and cuts on them and the backs of my hands have scabs on them, but it'll heal sooner than later I think.
BLOCK: You had, Kevin, some of your hardest time when you were trying to get past one section of the climb - this is pitch 15 - and you kept falling. It took, I think, 11 tries over seven days for you to master that pitch. What was going through your mind at the end of that?
JORGESON: At the end - at the end was pure elation and relief, but over those seven days it was just pure focus and resolve. I knew I was capable, it was just waiting for the right moment for both weather conditions and skin conditions.
BLOCK: You mentioned that, you know, once you had finished this you weren't sure what was going to replace this huge goal that you've had for so long. What do you think is next, Tommy?
CALDWELL: Yeah, I don't know in terms of a big life goal. I'm fully expecting to go through a mid-life crisis...
BLOCK: (Laughter).
CALDWELL: ...But in the meantime, I'm going to keep traveling with my family. I have plane tickets booked to southern Argentina to Patagonia in three weeks. So that's the next trip.
BLOCK: Kevin, what about you?
JORGESON: I have no idea what's next, honestly. I'm going to go in a bouldering trip and I'm going to let my hands heal.
BLOCK: And a shower and a bathroom, probably not a bad thing to have?
JORGESON: A shower was amazing - not going to lie.
BLOCK: (Laughter). Well, Kevin Jorgeson and Tommy Caldwell, congratulations and thanks for talking again to us.
JORGESON: Thanks.
CALDWELL: Thank you so much.
BLOCK: Tommy Caldwell - now battling laryngitis - and his climbing partner, Kevin Jorgeson. They finished the first free ascent of El Capitan's Dawn Wall yesterday afternoon.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
The Oscar nominations were announced this morning.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: For the first time in Academy history, we are announcing all 24 categories. So let's begin.
CORNISH: And the leaders of the pack were mostly as expected. The eight nominees for best picture included four films that have been winning virtually all the critics' prizes - "Birdman," about a washed up superhero trying to make a comeback.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BIRDMAN")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) You're Birdman.
CORNISH: "The Grand Budapest Hotel," which spoofed 1930s melodramas.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL")
RALPH FIENNES: (As M. Gustave) Dear God, what have you done to your fingernails?
TILDA SWINTON: (As Madame D.) I beg your pardon.
FIENNES: (As M. Gustave) This diabolical varnish, the color is completely wrong.
CORNISH: "The Imitation Game," about the man who broke the German Enigma code in World War II.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE IMITATION GAME")
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH: (As Alan Turing) I - I like solving problems, commander.
CORNISH: And "Boyhood," which watches a youngster grow up for 12 years, from age 6 to 18.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BOYHOOD")
ELLAR COLTRANE: (As Mason Evans, Jr.) I remember. I was in third grade, and you were taking me over to Anthony Nadar's house for his birthday.
CORNISH: The rest of that category, though, was less expected. Our critic, Bob Mondello, joins us to talk about it. Welcome back, Bob.
BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: It's good to be here.
CORNISH: Let's start with the big one - right? - best picture. Tell us about the nominees.
MONDELLO: Well, there are the ones you just heard. And the other four are Clint Eastwood's "American Sniper," about the most deadly sharpshooter in American military history. That got six nominations. "Whiplash," about a young drummer, got five. "The Theory Of Everything," about physicist Stephen Hawking, got four. And "Selma," about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Alabama protests, and that one got two nominations, which is a little less than everybody thought. Everybody expected Ava DuVernay to be nominated for best director, for instance, and for David Oyelowo, who plays Martin Luther King, to be nominated for best actor. And neither of those things happened.
CORNISH: You know, this comes a year after "12 Years A Slave" won best picture. People made a very big deal out of that - a black director there. And that movie was nominated for nine Oscars and won three. But people are looking at the nominees this year and saying, hey, I don't see a lot of diversity. What's going on?
MONDELLO: (Laughter). Boy, that's true. Our colleague, Linda Holmes, had a really terrific blog post today about the lack of diversity. She points out that all of the best picture nominees are about men; all but one are about white men, that all the nominated screenwriters are men. All the nominated directors are men. All the nominated actors and actresses are white. If what you're trying to do is get a more diverse group of performers and talent, this is not the way to go about it.
CORNISH: Meanwhile, snubs - everyone always wants to know about the people who didn't get nominated. Who's on that list?
MONDELLO: OK. Well, I mentioned David Oyelowo. Best actor was a really tough category. I - there are five slots. When I made up a list of likely candidates, I came up with 16. So there - a lot of people are going to be left out of that no matter what. Actress was less crowded, but Jennifer Aniston's overmedicated accident victim in "Cake" has to count as a snub. I think everybody thought going in that the - in the animated category, "The Lego Movie" would dominate. It wasn't even nominated. And "Wild" for best pic, which is the Reese Witherspoon picture - you know, it's a - it's a kind of a wonderful movie. It would have diversified that category.
CORNISH: You know, Bob, none of these films could be described as, like, a box office smash.
(LAUGHTER)
MONDELLO: That's understated.
CORNISH: And in the Academy - right? - like, they expanded the best picture nomination process so that you could possibly get in some box office winners and, I assume, eyeballs.
MONDELLO: Yeah, well, it's not going to happen this year. If you total up all of the grosses for all of the best picture nominees this year, you come up to about 200 million, which is roughly what a picture like "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" makes all by itself so that you're talking about very few eyeballs were on those pictures. And the idea here is that you're not going to watch the Oscar telecast unless you have a horse in the race. So what this says, if you've got such low grosses, is that they've got a real problem here. And I think what they're hoping is that the next six weeks up until the show, these movies will be seen by a lot more people. If they aren't - and they only have 38 days to do this - then you're going to have the lowest rated Oscars telecast in the history of the Oscars.
CORNISH: Well, that telecast is on Sunday, February 22. Bob Mondello will be watching, as will I.
MONDELLO: I certainly will.
CORNISH: Bob, thanks so much for coming in.
MONDELLO: It's always a joy.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
We're getting a better idea today of what has made the current Ebola outbreak the worst ever recorded. The World Health Organization has just released a 14-part assessment of the crisis, what went wrong and what needs to happen to finally stop the spread of the virus. NPR global health correspondent Jason Beaubien has been plowing through the report. And, Jason, the WHO has the benefit of hindsight here, right? I mean, what's their assessment of why this Ebola epidemic has been so severe?
JASON BEAUBIEN, BYLINE: Basically what they're describing here is a perfect storm. And they're linking it straight back to deforestation that was happening in that part of Guinea where the first case was originally found. There's some foreign mining companies, some foreign timber companies that have been working there. And the idea is there used to be these barriers between people and the bats, which are believed to be holding the virus. And this deforestation has allowed them to come into contact. The virus then jumps over to people. Once the virus gets a foothold in these countries where you've got some of the poorest countries in the world with some of these very weak health systems, it just really took off. And even though you've got weak health systems in these places, you have these reasonably decent transportation systems with buses and taxis that managed to move the virus. So they're saying that this - all of these conditions sort of contributed to it being the worst - and also just unique burial practices there. They linked back one case they found in Sierra Leone to 365 deaths from a single funeral.
CORNISH: And we should remind people that there have been more than 21,000 cases, right?
BEAUBIEN: That's right.
CORNISH: This outbreak still isn't over. What does the report say, if anything, about the organization's own role - right? - in the inability to contain the epidemic?
BEAUBIEN: It gets into this to some degree. Chapter seven is the key events in the WHO response. And then it goes into the WHO's technical support here. But all of this really casts the WHO as this sort of underfunded organization that's heroically leading the charge against the outbreak. And it is true. The WHO was there. They were on the ground. But the problem is that what they were doing clearly wasn't enough. You know, this is still going on now, as we, you know, just said. And to this day, their mandate is to support the local ministries of health in Liberia and Guinea and Sierra Leone. And so the WHO is viewed by some people in the world as supposedly this agency that's going get in there and deal with any international disease crisis or outbreak. And that's how - but it views itself very differently. It views itself as an agency that's supposed to support and provide technical advice and consultants to local ministries of health. So there's this contradiction there between its mandate and how it views itself and how some other people view it.
CORNISH: So buried further in those later chapters, anything about whether the WHO thinks its role needs to change?
BEAUBIEN: Yes. There's an awareness of this. One section right towards the end looks back to a flu outbreak that happened in 2009. And in a report written in 2010 that was quoted there, it says the world is ill-prepared to respond to a severe influenza pandemic or to any similarly global threatening public health emergency. Well, last year's Ebola outbreak again underscores the world remains ill-prepared to deal with these types of crises. The WHO's board of directors is meeting later this month in Geneva. They're going to look back at the role of the WHO in this outbreak and try to look at, you know, what should be the role of the WHO in the 21st century? Does it have the funding, the tools and, most importantly, the international mandate it needs to take on the next major disease outbreak probably more forcefully?
CORNISH: Jason, thanks so much for explaining it to us.
BEAUBIEN: You're welcome.
CORNISH: That's NPR's Jason Beaubien on a new report from the World Health Organization examining the Ebola crisis.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Hundreds more American soldiers will soon head to Iraq. Their mission? To train that country's army in its fight against the so-called Islamic State. Eventually up to 3,000 American troops could end up operating out of a half-dozen training bases in Iraq. As NPR's Tom Bowman reports, the idea is to have Iraqi forces ready for combat within the next few months.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Nearly every day, U.S.-led airstrikes hammer the so-called Islamic State in Iraq, and usually the same areas north and west of Baghdad. The target list this week included a Islamic State fighting unit, a suspected car bomb, an artillery system. Add that to the list of more than 3,200 targets in both Iraq and Syria since the summer. Military officials tell NPR that ground operations to win back Iraqi territory from the Islamic State will likely begin in the spring. And they say some American soldiers or Marines, now focused solely on training, will be needed close to the front lines. Troops like experienced operators who use radios or laser pointers to call in air strikes.
JIM DUBIK: We're going to have to have at least some form of ground observers that can direct that fire.
BOWMAN: That's retired Lieutenant General Jim Dubik. He oversaw training for the Iraqi Army back in 2007. Dubik says U.S. personnel might work in rear headquarters on planning things like casualty evacuations and some Green Berets might be needed with the lead Iraqi units, advising on tactics and artillery strikes.
DUBIK: We could see some limited Special Operations Forces or other advisers at the rear headquarters and maybe some at the front headquarters. That's going to be a call that will be made later on.
BOWMAN: Later on. Right now, the call is for training. That's what Captain John Kivelin's doing at al-Asad Air Base just west of Baghdad. He watches the front end loaders fill up the massive reinforced sand bags called HESCO barriers to guard against rocket attacks. He spoke with NPR's Alice Fordham about deploying here before.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
CAPTAIN JOHN KIVELIN: Yeah, I've been in Iraq two other times. I was here in 2007, landed on this base. I was stationed down in Hit.
BOWMAN: Hit, a town just southeast of the base that's under control of Islamist fighters. Now Kivelin and several hundred Marines hope to turn all that around.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
KIVELIN: We're out here to train Iraqi soldiers in the Al Anbar province. Right now we're looking for Iraqi solutions to Iraqi problems.
BOWMAN: And Iraq has plenty of problems. The Islamic State has taken over wide swaths of territory. Half the Iraqi Army has disintegrated. General Dubik says when the American military left Iraq in 2011, the entire army fell apart. Seasoned commanders who worked with the Americans were replaced with political supporters or those with the right amount of money.
DUBIK: Corruption became such that unit leadership positions were being bought and sold.
BOWMAN: Another problem, says, Dubik? Then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki micromanaged the military.
DUBIK: He tried to command the forces down to battalion level from the prime minister's office.
BOWMAN: Now the Americans are working with a new prime minister, Haider al-Abadi. Officials say he's focused on rebuilding the military and not micromanaging their operations. But Abadi complained this week that the Americans needed to do more to train Iraq's army. U.S. military officials say there that they're still in the process of selecting additional Marine and Army units for Iraq. Those units would focus on everything from basic marksmanship, to logistics and medical evacuation.
REAR ADMIRAL JOHN KIRBY: It's a mixed bag. Some need more training than others.
BOWMAN: That's a Pentagon spokesman, Rear Admiral John Kirby.
KIRBY: This isn't about rebuilding the Iraqi Army. It's about trying to make more professional, make more capable, make more competent on the battlefield those units that are there and that are in the fight.
BOWMAN: In a matter of months, the U.S. military may be asking the White House to allow some of its troops to take part in that fight.
Tom Bowman, NPR News, Washington.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
We're going to take a closer look now at this campaign, but with an eye towards the Syrian border, where our next guest says that ISIS has been gaining ground. Jennifer Cafarella is a Syria analyst at the Institute for the Study of War.
Welcome to the program.
JENNIFER CAFARELLA: Thank you for having me.
CORNISH: So first describe what's meant by gaining ground here. Are we talking about ISIS taking territory where there are many people? Or is this territory that's not contested or highly populated?
CAFARELLA: What we've seen in recent months is ISIS begin to shift resources into central Syria and into western Syria, taking advantage of small ISIS cells that had existed in the past and really utilizing a corridor of terrain that is unpopulated and relatively sparse in eastern Homs.
CORNISH: So is that moving weapons? Moving people? What does that mean?
CAFARELLA: It includes both moving people and weapons. So we see ISIS convoys emerging in places like the outskirts of Damascus and inside of the Qalamoun corridor on the border with Lebanon. That is an increase from ISIS's past involvement in that area.
CORNISH: So what's the concern here? I mean, you're describing remote areas, not very populated.
CAFARELLA: Well, this isn't the sort of thunder run on Mosul-style ISIS expansion. It is nonetheless an increased ISIS presence in an area that has predominantly been either held by the Assad regime or by rebels. So the expansion of ISIS into this zone greatly complicates the ability of the international coalition to conduct airstrikes against ISIS and to actually deter ISIS momentum and prevent further expansion.
CORNISH: Now, is this all that much of a surprise given that the U.S. has focused primarily on Iraq?
CAFARELLA: No, it is not a surprise given that the current coalition campaign in Syria is predominantly focused on deterring the ISIS momentum in Kobani and rolling that back, as well as disrupting leadership networks and ISIS's ability to extract oil revenue. However, it does highlight the limitations of a strategy limited to disrupting ISIS inside of Syria, which does not actually prevent ISIS from establishing new strongholds and new networks in differing terrain inside of the country.
CORNISH: So the counter-argument that's been made about this is that ISIS also could affect be spreading itself thin, right? By holding so much territory spread over both these countries?
CAFARELLA: That is correct, but I would highlight that expansion into Western Syria does actually complicate the ability to conduct airstrikes against ISIS. Because whereas in eastern Syria, there is relatively few other actors besides ISIS operating in the terrain, in western Syria, the ability to identify where the actual ISIS cells are is immensely difficult.
CORNISH: What are the other factors contributing to the spread of ISIS in Syria, especially when there are competing rebel groups like the al-Nusra front which is al-Qaida connected, a competitor group to ISIS, and also the civil war against the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad?
CAFARELLA: Other factors include the fact that large elements of the Syrian opposition are still looking for allies in the fight against Assad. So that presents an opportunity for ISIS to present itself as an ally in the fight against the regime and in doing so to secure additional pledges of allegiance from disillusioned, and in large ways, disenfranchised rebel groups.
CORNISH: What does this mean in terms of recruits, and what does that mean for calculus of this battle on the ground?
CAFARELLA: One of the ways in which we've seen ISIS expand into Western Syria includes by reaching out to local rebel commanders and encouraging these rebel commanders to defect to the ISIS cause, to allow ISIS to establish its own network inside of Western Syria, and to expand in that way.
CORNISH: And we should note that your group, the Institute for the Study of War, has advocated for more aggressive action by the U.S. generally, right? That's the stance. But the Obama administration has been very clear about not necessarily wanting to get involved in Syria's civil war. Why should that calculus change?
CAFARELLA: The point that I would highlight is that the long term effectiveness of the strategy in Iraq is actually reliant on an effective strategy inside of Syria. And while the Syria environment is incredibly complex, it is actually crucial for the success of the international coalition's effort against ISIS that a credible ground partner for the fight against ISIS emerge inside of Syria. And that requires a heightened level of U.S. engagement and an evaluation of a more holistic strategy inside Syria.
CORNISH: Jennifer Cafarella. She's the Evans Hanson fellow at the Institute for the Study of War.
Thank you so much for speaking with us.
CAFARELLA: Thank you.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
The Obama administration is making good on its promise to ease travel and trade restrictions on Cuba. The Treasury and Commerce Department say new rules go into effect tomorrow. Critics of the administration are questioning the legality of those moves, as NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Silvia Wilhelm has been leading cultural and educational tours to Cuba for nearly two decades and says her job just got a whole lot easier. She's looking forward to spending less time filling out paperwork for the Treasury Department.
SILVIA WILHELM: It took, like, six months to get the license, and then another six months to get it extended. It was totally a bureaucratic nightmare. We don't have to do that anymore.
KELEMEN: But it's not yet open season for tourism, she cautions. Americans hoping to go to Cuba have to fit into one of 12 categories that include family visits, professional research, religious activities and cultural exchanges.
WILHELM: So people can't just go individually if they don't fall under the 12 categories of travel and just go to the beach. That's still not possible.
KELEMEN: Still, she says, the phones at her company, Cuba Puentes, have been ringing off the hook. And Wilhelm is pleased to see that travelers will now be allowed to use U.S. credit and debit cards on the island, and Cuban-Americans, like herself, will be able to send more money back to family in Cuba, up to $2,000 every three months. Travelers will also be able to bring back up to a hundred dollars' worth of Cuban cigars. At the White House, spokesman Josh Earnest says President Obama has gone as far as he could to chip away at a decades-old embargo.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOSH EARNEST: However, there are limits on what the president can change in that relationship using his executive authority. So we certainly would welcome congressional action that would make it possible for people to travel to Cuba solely for the purposes of spending time on the beach in Cuba.
KELEMEN: There are still some staunch supporters of the embargo on Capitol Hill, though. One of them, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, calls the changes announced by the Commerce and Treasury Departments a windfall for the Castro regime. And he's raised questions about the legality of the administration's actions. The president does have a lot of latitude on this issue, according to John Kavulich, senior policy advisor to the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council. He supports the regulatory changes and thinks Obama's critics should take another look.
JOHN KAVULICH: The abilities to provide a much higher level of remittances and allow individuals to carry much more cash to Cuba and allow support for private entrepreneurs and micro businesses and that has the potential to stress the social fabric of Cuba.
KELEMEN: The U.S., he says, will be in a better position to support the development of a Cuban middle-class and promote change on the island, but Kavulich isn't expecting an increase in trade overnight.
KAVULICH: This is a poor country. It has horrible credit. And it has some major challenges. And it's only going to be able to import what it can afford to import.
KELEMEN: And what it can control, he says. So he has his doubts, for instance, that Cuba will allow U.S. investments in the telecommunications sector, as the Obama administration has been suggesting. When it comes to travel, Silvia Wilhelm has other concerns.
WILHELM: Cuba is not ready to greet the - who knows how many - thousands and thousands and thousands of American travelers that may want to go in the next year or so.
KELEMEN: The infrastructure just isn't there, she says. Still, Wilhelm, who was in Cuba a few days ago, says her contacts are excited about the prospect of increased travel, and she's expecting to add more cultural tours this year. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
A frequent challenge for news organizations is how to reach young people. Well, here's one way of doing it. In Senegal, two rappers who go by the names Keyti and Xuman offer a hip-hop version of the week's headlines. They do it in a short show posted on YouTube, and it has a huge following, especially in West Africa, where a majority of the population is under the age of 25. Here are the hosts of that program.
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)
XUMAN GUNAM XUMAN: Bonjour.
Yes, my name is Xuman Gunam Xuman (ph). I'm a rapper, artist, edutainer.
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)
XUMAN: (Rapping in French).
I created a new form of web program called Journal Rappe. We're wrapping the news in French and in Wolof. A lot of youth, they're not reading the news. They're not watching the news, but they listen to rap music. So that's why we call this edutainment. We're educating them, but we entertain them at the same time. Ignorance is your enemy. Most of the people, they think that Ebola is - Africa is Ebola. Most of the people, they think that Africa is misery. Most of the people, they think that Muslim is terrorism. So this is ignorance. Wisdom is a weapon.
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)
KEYTI: OK, yo, hi everybody. This is Keyti from Senegal, co-host of Journal Rappe with Gunman Xuman.
Idea basically was to take back the information. West African youth got get more into what is going on in this part of Africa. That's why I tend to think that we are representing the people. We are representing the youth. It got to be a movement and not only in music, but in journalism - the main audience is in Senegal. This last season we had like 1 million and a hundred thousand clicks.
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)
KEYTI: Mr. Obama, welcome back to Africa. (Rapping in French) We love America.
KEYTI: I discovered rap through Public Enemy and they forged my mentality, my perception of key things, like race, like politics. Back then we had only one regime, which was the socialist regime. There were a lot of problems, political problems. The education system was really, totally down. Rap helped a lot of us channel that anger into lyrics, into music.
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)
KEYTI: Check and see (Rapping in French).
Our relationship with language is really - it's funny. French is the official language. Language is something really important for a community because it defines you. We've forgotten our language, or they made us forget about our language, so we got to restore that pride of using your own language and being proud of using your own language. So that's the job we are also doing with this Journal Rappe. We shouldn't let our languages die.
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)
XUMAN: (Rapping in foreign language).
XUMAN: I'm just me. Once I get into my house I'm not an activist. I'm not a rapper. I'm just a simple dad. When I'm on stage I'm just having fun doing my job. When I'm out and there's something worth fighting, I'm fighting it.
XUMAN: (Rapping in foreign language).
CORNISH: Our story about rapping the news in West Africa comes from independent radio producer Jake Warga.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Caesars is one of the biggest names in the casino business. Today, it placed its largest division, Caesars Entertainment Operating Company, in bankruptcy. The company's perhaps best known for the sprawling Caesars Palace resort at the center of the Las Vegas Strip. But it also operates Bally's in Atlantic City and Harrah's casinos around the country. NPR's Yuki Noguchi reports that the company has been awash in debt ever since the financial crisis in 2008.
YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: The story of Caesars' road to bankruptcy isn't exactly straightforward or simple.
ADAM LEVITIN: Bankruptcies are often messy. But this is - this is an especially messy one.
NOGUCHI: Adam Levitin teaches bankruptcy law at Georgetown University. He says this case pits Caesars' private equity owners against its hedge fund creditors. The company accused its creditors of pushing it toward failure so they could collect on insurance or credit default swap payments.
LEVITIN: The full story is basically a private equity versus hedge fund fight. So that's always going to be a pretty good catfight.
NOGUCHI: The sides are even dueling over where the bankruptcy should proceed. Earlier this week, Caesars' creditors preempted the company by filing an involuntary bankruptcy petition in Delaware. Today, the company filed its own voluntary petition in Chicago.
LEVITIN: Involuntary bankruptcy petitions are pretty rare. And dueling petitions is even rarer.
NOGUCHI: The seeds of this fight go back to just before the financial crisis, when two private equity firms, Apollo Global Management and TPG Capital, borrowed massively to buy the company, saddling it with over $20 billion in debt. Gaming traffic fell off dramatically during the crisis. Atlantic City suffered, and Caesars' bid to get a gaming license in Macau, the world's largest gambling market, didn't pan out. The company has lost money four years in a row. And its debts have ballooned. Through bankruptcy, the company wants to split off its biggest unit, Caesars Entertainment Operating Company, or C.E.O., and divide it into two parts. One would operate the casinos, and the other would separately manage its real estate. David Skeel is a bankruptcy law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He says bankruptcy inevitably creates losers. And in this case, the less senior creditors are clearly dissatisfied with the proposed division of assets and their share of the new ownership.
DAVID SKEEL: What often happens when you do this kind of a division is one of the companies - and it's often the real estate company - ends up with a lot of debt. And the other one ends up with a lot less debt.
NOGUCHI: But the company is defending its proposal. In a video statement today, CEO Gary Loveman characterized the deal as fair and would allow the company to emerge from its heavy burden of debt.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GARY LOVEMAN: The restructuring plan will significantly reduce the amount of money C.E.O. spends every year paying interest on the debt and paying down the debt.
NOGUCHI: In Caesars' hometown of Las Vegas, bankruptcy attorney Jim Shea says the news isn't causing alarm.
JIM SHEA: Out here, we're really not any stranger to having casinos file bankruptcy.
NOGUCHI: Shea is president-elect of the American Bankruptcy Institute. He says in the past, bankrupt casinos operated without disruption.
SHEA: Most customers, I don't even know that they realize that somebody has filed bankruptcy.
NOGUCHI: Caesars says reservations, loyalty programs, business conventions and employee payments will face no interruption. Yuki Noguchi, NPR News, Washington.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
And we have special guests today - Thievery Corporation. They are our house band, which I don't get tired of saying. And they've been playing all the music that you're hearing today on the show. It's been happening live. And I'm joined here by Eric Hilton. He's the co-founder of Thievery Corporation. Eric, thanks so much for doing this.
ERIC HILTON: Oh, it's absolutely our pleasure - sorry.
CORNISH: No, no, you're here with a band, I should say - Thievery Corporation. People may know you as a kind of an electronic duo, but introduce us to your friends.
HILTON: Indeed. On guitar we have Robbie Myers. On bass we have Hash. And we have Jeff Franca on drums.
CORNISH: And this morning, you guys actually sat in on our news meeting, which was pretty fun because now I'm looking at the names of the songs, like "Web Of Deception," and I feel like you've sort of done a little matching to the news. What was that like?
HILTON: Well, we've done a lot of thinking, yeah. We're - I guess we're conspiracy theorists (laughter).
CORNISH: Now, what was it like, I guess, playing - you're not playing to an audience - right? You're kind of playing to - I don't know.
HILTON: We play for ourselves. I mean, we make our music for ourselves, and whatever we enjoy, we hope other people will enjoy. And that's just always the way we've done it.
CORNISH: Now, your most recent album, "Saudade," highlighted Brazilian rhythms, kind of like bossa nova. But you guys are known for really highlighting all kinds of cultures. Can you talk a little bit about some of the influences people hear in your music?
HILTON: Oh, we're influenced by reggae, Indian music, obviously, rock, psychedelic music, hip-hop. It just seemed kind of dull for me and Rob, my partner, to stick to one genre. You know, we are able to do a lot of different types of music, so...
CORNISH: So there's not just like a stray punk album in your past or something that we don't know about?
HILTON: Actually, we both grew up on punk rock, and that's where we came from.
CORNISH: Oh, right, here in Washington, D.C.
HILTON: Yeah, grew up on Dischord Records.
CORNISH: Now, you're actually going to play us out, and the song is called "Shaolin Satellite?"
HILTON: Yeah, that's one of the first songs we ever made. It's a little simple, but it's a classic trip-hop song.
CORNISH: All right. Well, let's hear it. Eric Hilton, co-founder of Thievery Corporation. Thank you. Thanks to the band.
HILTON: Thanks so much.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SHAOLIN SATELLITE")
THIEVERY CORPORATION: (Singing) Get down, everybody. Get down, everybody. Get down, everybody. Get down, everybody. Get down, everybody. One, two, check-a, one, two. One, two, check-a, one, two. One, two, check-a, one, two. One, two, check-a, one, two. One, two, check-a, one, two. One, two, check-a, one, two. One, two, check-a, one, two. One, two, check-a, one, two.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Think of auto shows and concept cars probably come to mind. Remember the cars of the future?
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Cars with sensing probes that follow the road with no help from the driver. Cars without steering wheels. Cars without transmissions.
BLOCK: New technology and new styling - that's what concept cars are all about. And after being virtually absent from auto shows for the last few years, concept cars are back with a vengeance. NPR's Sonari Glinton has this report from the big auto show in Detroit.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: Car executives, techno music and crazy, new concept cars - it must be January in Detroit.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Ladies and gentlemen, introducing the Chevrolet Bolt EV concept.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Its codename is HCD-15, but we call it Hyundai Santa Cruz.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: If you can use innovation to build the ultimate Ford performance vehicle, what would it be? Well, here's an idea.
GLINTON: Ah, Detroit, the birthplace of techno music. Anyway, concept cars tell us much more about the current state of the auto industry than the future. All these cars at the show are pretty normal. Bill Visnic from edmunds.com says it wasn't that long ago that concept cars were just plain wack.
BILL VISNIC: But some of the really wildest of the wild that I remember back then was Chrysler was very big on plastic cars. They were going to make all-plastic cars.
GLINTON: I got just one word for you - plastics. Visnic says car companies can be really insular. They can convince themselves that the future is in, say, plastics. But concept cars allow automakers to do test runs before they sink an average of $1 billion into a new car.
VISNIC: And that way, if it falls flat on its face, you can just sort of open the closet and put it in there and never show it again, and there's really no harm, no foul other than the money that you've spent up to that point to develop it. It's really expensive now to bring a vehicle to production - any kind of vehicle - and then have it fall flat on its face in the market,
GLINTON: Now, car companies have abandoned the really crazy ideas for designs that are much closer to reality. The new concept cars are ones you're more likely to see on the road.
ANGIE NUCCI: So what we're looking at right now, this is Honda's FCV concepts. And it showcases the styling evolution of Honda...
GLINTON: Angie Nucci is with Honda. She says the companies don't just learn about whether consumers will accept the whole car but also about the parts that go into them.
NUCCI: I think for a lot of manufacturers, and for Honda too, it's an exercise in figuring out how is everything going to fit together? And also we can gauge some early consumer reactions to the vehicle.
GLINTON: From Honda now to Buick. I'm standing in front of a Buick concept, the Avenir, that car geeks here are raving about. It's supposed to show the public what direction Buick is going in. It's a long, low car with a swoop back, and it kind of screams luxury.
Michelle Krebs, an analyst with autotrader.com, says there is a dollars and cents reason for the reemergence of these prototypes and passion project.
MICHELLE KREBS: More concept cars and more performance cars and more sexy cars are representative of the booming economy.
GLINTON: Building and moving concept cars from show to show isn't cheap, so when the economy is bad, they're the first thing that gets cut. But Krebs says they can be really vital.
KREBS: There's ego in it. But the other thing it does is it allows people to be creative. They don't have the constraints of a production car. Designers need to be thinking way out there, and some of it's not ever going to see the light of day. But you want to keep creative forces going.
GLINTON: Krebs says as silly as some concept cars are or have been, they help make the cars we actually drive better. From the Detroit auto show, Sonari Glinton, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Julianne Moore has just been nominated for an Oscar, and she already won a Golden Globe award for her betrayal of a woman diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's disease. In the movie "Still Alice," Moore plays Alice Howland, a 50-year-old linguistics professor at Columbia with a razor-sharp intellect.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "STILL ALICE")
JULIANNE MOORE: (As Alice Howland) Today, I'd like to focus on some recent studies from my lab on the acquisition of past tense irregular verb forms.
BLOCK: In this scene, she is giving a lecture.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "STILL ALICE")
MOORE: (As Alice Howland) You may say that this falls into the great academic tradition of knowing more and more about less and less until we know everything about nothing.
(LAUGHTER)
MOORE: (As Alice Howland) But I hope to convince you that by observing these baby steps into the - into - I knew I shouldn't had that champagne.
(LAUGHTER)
MOORE: (As Alice Howland) Into the word-stock of a given language.
BLOCK: Alice laughs it off, but she realizes her memory lapse fits a pattern. She's starting to forget things, loses her way, gets fuzzy. The movie charts her rapid decline with Alzheimer's and her struggle to hold onto her sense of self. I talked with Julianne Moore about this character, a woman in her prime whose career depends on her brain.
MOORE: Yeah, yeah, she's someone who's really - who's always defined herself by her intellect. And now that that's something that she can't depend on, she's finding that she doesn't really know who she is, or she doesn't feel that she knows who she is.
BLOCK: When you were thinking about how to betray the progression of this disease, I understand you talked with women who have been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's.
MOORE: Yeah, I spoke to so many people. I had - I didn't have any familiarity with Alzheimer's. I'm - I think I'm one of the few people who hasn't had a family member affected by it. And I - when I spoke to filmmakers I said that I didn't want to represent anything on screen that I hadn't witnessed myself or had been described to me. So my research process was pretty lengthy. I actually had about four months and the women I spoke to were so incredibly generous with their time and their thoughts and their experiences. And it was a pretty profound experience, actually, talking to them.
BLOCK: Were there specific things they told you, keys to what it's like to have Alzheimer's disease that filtered into your performance in really specific ways?
MOORE: Yeah, so, I mean, so many specific things. Well, I mean, one of the things that I sort of misunderstood about Alzheimer's is that somehow it was - just affected memory, just simple memory. And what I didn't really understand that it's also kind of a neuro spatial disease; that you're going to have a different interpretation of how things are happening to you. One woman I spoke to said she was a high school Spanish teacher and she said she didn't know what was happening to her, but one of her students noticed that she was writing backward on the board - on the blackboard.
Another woman told me that she was making very simple mistakes at work and she couldn't learn a very simple computer program and didn't know what was wrong. So it was interesting to me that for some of these women so many things happened at work. That was where they noticed the deficits first. And then once there had been some kind of ramification in their professional life, they realized that things had been happening in their personal life as well.
BLOCK: Let's listen to another scene from the movie. This is after Alice has lost her teaching job at Columbia. And she goes before an Alzheimer's conference and delivers a speech about her experience with the disease, a long speech. Here's part of it.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "STILL ALICE")
MOORE: (As Alice Howland) Who can take us seriously when we are so far from who we once were? Our strange behavior and fumbled sentences change others' perceptions of us and our perception of ourselves. We become ridiculous, incapable, comic, but this is not who we are. This is our disease.
BLOCK: And, Julianne Moore, why don't you describe what you're doing as you are reading those words?
MOORE: I am - I'm taking a yellow highlighter as I read so I can follow along. So I'll know what I've read and what I have to read. And this is something that we saw in speeches that people give at these Alzheimer's conventions.
BLOCK: You know, I found myself, as I watched this movie and afterward, becoming hyperaware of my own memory and any time that I forgot words...
MOORE: Oh, yeah (laughter).
BLOCK: Or lost my keys or didn't know where my phone was. Is it the same for you?
MOORE: Sure.
BLOCK: I mean, has this sort of changed how you see your own memory?
MOORE: One of the things that I did very early on, actually, I went to Mount Sinai and I met with Dr. Mary Sano, who is one of the leading researchers and clinicians in Alzheimer's disease and spoke to some of her colleagues there. And they said so often people come in and say, you know, I want to be tested. I think I have Alzheimer's and they test them and they'll find that it's normal. They're - people are stressed. They haven't been sleeping enough. They're overworked. But when you take the - I took the cognitive test. The neuropsychiatrist gave me the cognitive tests. And I didn't hear anything and for - a couple weeks later I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to email her again to say thank you, really (laughter) the guise of finding out whether, you know, she'd seen anything. And when she answered me she said I just wanted tell you your results were normal, and I was like, good (laughter).
BLOCK: Yeah, yeah.
MOORE: Yeah.
BLOCK: Did working on this movie and thinking about memory and memory loss, did it make you any more or less afraid about aging?
MOORE: I think that what it does make you think about - as it's not just about aging. It's about mortality - I mean, it's about mortality and aging's about mortality, too. And it's something that, you know, I think in our culture, in lots of cultures, we have this kind of, you know, you are as old as you think you are, forever young, you can do whatever, you know, 50 is the new what, you know, 30. This idea that somehow you're forever young or - and this refusal to look at the, you know, the life - our life cycle.
And the thing that happens to Alice in this movie is that she's kind of in the prime of her life, in a great place in her life, and she's faced with the idea of her own mortality. She does know that it's going to be shorter than her expectation was. Or it just forces her to acknowledge an end, which is very difficult for any of us to do. And I think the interesting thing about looking at the end of your life or knowing it's an end of your life is that you start to value what you have even more. You know, you value the present. I think you're never, never more in love with life than you are in the presence of death or your own mortality. So it kind of makes you think about that, you know? It thinks - you think about how much you love to live, how much you love the people you love. What do you value? Who do you value? What do you want to do? In a sense, it makes everything kind of crisper and sharper and more vital.
BLOCK: Well, Julianne Moore, it's been a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much.
MOORE: It's been so nice to talk to you, Melissa. Thank you for having me.
BLOCK: Julianne Moore stars in the new movie "Still Alice."
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Following last week's terror attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told French Jews Israel is your home. He pledged to help more of them immigrate to Israel. It's something French Jews have been doing since the founding of Israel, and their community in the Jewish state has changed over time. NPR's Emily Harris has this report.
EMILY HARRIS, BYLINE: 28-year-old Samuela Mass left Paris last October. He immigrated to Israel to escape violence.
SAMUELA MASS: For a better life for me and my future family because with the anti-Semitism in Paris, it's progressive and extremely virulent.
HARRIS: Although Israel as a nation features frequent attacks, he says he feels more secure here because he's not part of a minority. But French immigration wasn't always connected with security. When Avi Zana came in the 1970s, nothing was driving him from Paris, something was drawing him to Israel. At that time, he says, most French Jews moved to Israel for ideological reasons.
AVI ZANA: They built their identity in Israel. They learned the language, they decide to be Israeli. That was then the model of absorption to take a Jew from all over the world and to transform it into an Israeli people.
HARRIS: Zana runs an organization to help French immigrants adjust in Israel. But he says as more come, they are staying more French.
ZANA: In the last 15 years, we have some - I will not say ghetto, but I would say neighborhood - of French people who develop and copy a good part of their way from France.
HARRIS: Over almond croissant and pear tart at a Tel Aviv cafe, writer and filmmaker Stephane Belaisch says much of his life still revolves around France.
STEPHANE BALAISCH: I write in France so I need to stay connected. I don't know so many people who totally integrate the Israeli world of business and work with Israelis.
HARRIS: Many French business owners fly back and forth or manage remotely. Many French call centers have sprung up in Israel. Balaisch immigrated 10 years ago, but still calls himself a Frenchman living in Israel.
BALAISCH: I consider myself as a French living in Israel. I think I will never be Israeli. I didn't share the army. I didn't share a lot of things with the Israeli society. And I spend the majority of my life in France. So I have a France culture, and there is nothing I can do about that.
HARRIS: A majority of French Jews - in both France and Israel - have roots in North Africa. Some say that makes Israel's Mediterranean lifestyle familiar. 51-year-old Avraham Azoulay was born in Morocco and moved to Toulouse, France, as a child. He felt his heritage set him apart.
AVRAHAM AZOULAY: (Speaking Hebrew) (Through interpreter). When I came to Toulouse, I felt first and foremost a Jew. But everybody told me you're Moroccan, so I said I'm French. Later, they said you are a Jew. Israel is the only place I can be a Jew and an Israeli. I feel like I arrived at the right place.
HARRIS: Azoulay started a French-language magazine covering Israel, and recently began dabbling in politics. He says there are enough French here now that they can change Israel.
AZOULAY: (Speaking Hebrew) (Through interpreter) If you live here as a Jew, this is your country and you have to be part of it. You have to take action - not like in France when we looked at things from the outside. Here we are inside. We have to be involved.
HARRIS: Azoulay is politically right wing, like most French Israelis now. Some French here say the community could become more liberal if France feels unsafe for a wider variety of Jews. Emily Harris, NPR News, Jerusalem.
(MUSIC)
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And all through the show today we're hearing the band Thievery Corporation. They're playing live from our studios here in Washington, D.C., which is also home to the group. They are riffing on the news for all of our musical breaks today.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
We begin the hour with British Prime Minister David Cameron's warning about seemingly unbreakable codes. Cameron says that by offering customers high-tech encryption technology, companies like Facebook and Google are making it easier for would-be terrorists to avoid detection. As NPR's Scott Horsley reports, that's one of the issues Cameron raised today during a White House meeting with President Obama.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Obama and Cameron wrapped up their meeting with a promise to cooperate on cybersecurity. The agreement includes a friendly competition between MIT computer whizzes in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and their counterparts in Cambridge, England. Cameron is not so friendly when it comes to U.S. technology companies offering encryption that allows users to evade the prying eyes of government. The prime minister argues digital messages should be no different than phone calls that the government can tap with proper legal authority.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRIME MINISTER DAVID CAMERON: We're not asking for back doors. We have - we believe in very clear front doors through legal processes that should help to keep our country safe. And my only argument is that as technology develops, as the world moves on, we should try to avoid the safe havens that could otherwise be created for terrorists to talk to each other.
HORSLEY: The threat of terrorism was a dominant topic for the two leaders, meeting in the shadow of last week's deadly attacks in Paris. Obama says those attacks don't justify the wholesale dismissal of privacy concerns. But he adds he's confident the government can do a better job of balancing privacy and security.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I think the companies want to see that as well. They're patriots. They have families that they want to see protected.
HORSLEY: Obama says the biggest advantage the United States has in preventing Paris-style attacks is not its intelligence or law enforcement agencies, though he says both are very good. Instead, the U.S. benefits from a homegrown Muslim population that feels itself to be American.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
OBAMA: There is, you know, this incredible process of immigration and assimilation that is part of our tradition that is probably our greatest strength. Now, it doesn't mean we aren't subject to the kinds of tragedies that we saw at the Boston Marathon. But that, I think, has been helpful. There are parts of Europe in which that's not the case.
HORSLEY: Obama has long been concerned about Westerners training for terrorist attacks in places like Syria. And he says the continued chaos in that country adds to the problem. But the president rejected the idea that a U.S. invasion of Syria would've made terror attacks less likely.
He and Cameron also discussed efforts to keep economic pressure on Russia in response to its actions in Ukraine and the ongoing nuclear talks with Iran. Some members of Congress want to see tougher U.S. sanctions against Iran, but Obama told Democratic senators at a retreat this week he'll veto any such proposal.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
OBAMA: My main message to Congress at this point is just hold your fire.
HORSLEY: Obama says even the threat of more U.S. sanctions now could jeopardize negotiations and fracture the international coalition that's been assembled against Iran. Cameron agrees; he's been calling U.S. lawmakers and urging them to give diplomacy more time.
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CAMERON: A deal that takes Iran away from a nuclear weapon is better than either Iran having a nuclear weapon or military action to prevent it.
HORSLEY: Obama says if the talks with Iran fail - and he puts the odds around 50-50, there will still be time for more sanctions, as well as other, possibly military, options. Scott Horsley, NPR News, the White House.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
And to talk more about the week in politics, we're joined by E J Dionne of The Washington Post and Brookings Institution. Hey there, E J
E J DIONNE, BYLINE: Good to be with you.
CORNISH: And David Brooks of The New York Times. Hey there, David.
DAVID BROOKS: Hello.
CORNISH: And we begin with one more voice, this one concerned with the issue of security.
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JEH JOHNSON: After the attack in Paris, the attack in Ottawa, in Australia and other places, I'm very concerned about making sure that our budget is adequately funded for the protection of the homeland, for the protection of the American people.
CORNISH: That's Jeh Johnson, Homeland Security secretary, on our show earlier this week. Now, he's been out lobbying, trying to beat back the immigration measures that were tacked on to the latest DHS funding bill. House Republicans passed measures this week as part of their effort to basically prevent the president's executive action on immigration. E J, I'll start with you. This plan, in a way, was patched during the budget fight last year - right? - to try to put these measures onto the DHS spending? Does it seem like a good idea now?
DIONNE: Well, I think this episode is very revealing 'cause it shows the problems that Speaker Boehner could help the Republican Party get into in an effort to escape his own problems. What I mean is he has put together a wildly restrictive measure that not only tries to overturn President Obama's executive action on immigrant families, but he - they also proposed to overturn what he's done for Dreamers - the kids who have gone through school and who are very popular among the American people.
What the House passed almost certainly can't even get by the Republicans in the Senate. Boehner's trying to send a message to his most conservative colleagues that, look, we can do whatever we want. The Senate won't buy it. But they sent a terrible signal to the Latino community, which noticed how really quite radical this proposal turned out to be. I don't think it will go through, but I think it's a problem for Republicans.
CORNISH: David, this - are you seeing it the same way as E J, a kind of indication of strategy? I mean, the Senate picked the Keystone pipeline - right? - as their first issue.
BROOKS: Right, it's a strategy. It's not a particularly good one. It's your first thing out of the box. You're in the majority in both houses. Pick a fight you can win. Whatever you think of the merits - and I think they're right to want to roll back on the executive action of the president, mainly because it was executive action, I think the substance on immigration is completely wrong - but whatever you think of the merits, you're trying to launch a Republican rule in Congress, and they really have no hope. There's no hope of winning. They did this very strong bill. They issued their protests, and it's going to be defeated in the Senate. And by some miracle, if that doesn't happen, the president will obviously veto it. So they're going to have to retreat. And so why do you charge up a hill you're bound to retreat back down? It's like the Fox-ification of the Republicans. They want to make a statement. But instead of actually, you know, doing something, they can pass some legislation.
CORNISH: These are issues, obviously that will play out way well into 2016, right? Everyone has their eye looking forward. And speaking of which, Mitt Romney reportedly considering a third presidential run. He's set to address the RNC, the Republican National Committee, tonight at their winter meeting in San Diego. Plus, people have been talking about Jeb Bush. David, what do you make of these "establishment," quote, unquote, names kind of jumping - getting the jump on things?
BROOKS: I'm pro-establishment, as a rule. But Mitt Romney's the old establishment. You know, I think he's a no-hoper, frankly.
CORNISH: No hope?
BROOKS: No hope - well, I shouldn't say that, little hope.
CORNISH: OK (laughter).
BROOKS: I'm hedging my bets here. But, you know, he is not so much supported among the big Republican donor class, not so much support among the committee people. There's a much stronger field than he faced four years ago. And finally, the candidates who are re-nominated after defeat have passionate defenders, passionate followers - Adlai Stevenson, William Jennings Bryan. If there are those passionate throngs, I missed them. I've been missing them for eight years, so...
CORNISH: E J (laughter).
DIONNE: And I think Mitt Romney is missing - I think one of the most depressing thing for him is you send up a trial balloon of this sort, and all of a sudden all kinds of Republicans, including some you thought might be sympathetic to you, start shooting at it. And you wonder what Romney - Romney's a practical man. You wonder what conclusion he is going to draw from this.
But it tells us something about the nature of the quest for the presidency now. He sent out the signal because Jeb Bush, who had announced earlier that he is pretty certain to run, was starting to pick up a whole lot of his fundraising basement - Romney's fundraising base. Romney couldn't allow that to happen, so he had to put a marker down. Just given the reaction to him among Republicans, I wonder if he's going to proceed much farther.
CORNISH: You know, there's one other thing I want to ask about, and that's the president's State of the Union address that's coming up. I want to say that there's going to be some surprises, but it feels like he's been out on the road telling us everything leading up to this. David, what do you expect to hear? What would you like to hear?
BROOKS: They've destroyed the intense drama of the...
CORNISH: We're waiting with bated breath for this.
BROOKS: No, E J is up nights wondering, what will the cybersecurity reform package look like? So - and so what they decided to do - it's not a moment, it's a movement, I guess, is their language, which is that they're going around the country pre-advancing everything. And so we more or less know what's going to be in it. Some pretty good ideas - I think community colleges for free, some ideas - we'll see nothing too major. But, you know, it's a lot of little things he can do without too much legislation.
CORNISH: E J's facing a Republican-controlled House and Senate. What's the case he needs to make now?
DIONNE: See, I stay up nights only worrying about Obamacare, not cybersecurity. First of all, he is lucky because his popularity has finally bounced up a little bit. He has gone from the low 40s to the higher 40s. And I think there are a lot of reasons for that. Latinos have come back to him because of immigration. People are feeling better about the economy. That's very important because these days, we are so partisan that people don't even watch States of the Union by presidents they oppose. That's not unique to Obama. That started happening with Democrats under President Bush.
I think this little bounce up he's gotten will draw him a bigger audience. And I think he's very conscious that he's not just proposing things that he hopes to pass. He's proposing things as part of a legacy, things Democrats - presumably Hillary Clinton, but other Democrats - can fight for after he's gone. And he's hoping on some of these things - maybe sick leave for parents - might even draw some Republican support. But he's playing a double game. He needs to govern now, but he wants to lay markers for what should happen in the future.
CORNISH: One quick thing, David, Joni Ernst with the reply, the Republican from Iowa.
BROOKS: Yeah, the annual victim. You know...
CORNISH: You know, that is a coveted spot, David Brooks, settle down.
BROOKS: It tends to be a spot that does more damage than good. But, you know, I think she's representing a Republican Party that's slightly more unified than it was two years ago. And so I think her job - nobody has high expectations, but I think the party is actually in reasonably good shape if they could get a strategy.
CORNISH: That's David Brooks of The New York Times and E J Dionne of The Washington Post and Brookings Institution. Thank you both.
DIONNE: Thank you.
BROOKS: Thank you.
CORNISH: And I want to take a moment to acknowledge the lovely music we are hearing. It's Thievery Corporation - yes, our house band - words I never get to say - for a day. Melissa?
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
That's right, Audie. The Thievery crew is going to be playing every musical break in the show live in our studios here, so be sure to keep an ear to how today's stories are inspiring them.
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MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
In Pakistan, one month ago today, the Taliban attacked an army-run school in the city of Peshawar - 150 people were killed, the vast majority of them children.
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BLOCK: Today, Pakistanis remembered the victims with demonstrations and vigils. The school that was attacked reopened earlier this week and NPR's Philip Reeves joins us from the capital Islamabad to talk more. Philip, we were just hearing that sound of a demonstration. Tell us more about how this day was marked in Pakistan.
PHILIP REEVES, BYLINE: Well, there were vigils like that in Islamabad across the country. Talking to people at that particular vigil that you just heard -people were saying they're just fed up after eight years of conflict in which tens of thousands of people have been killed. They feel that it's time to, you know, crush violent Islamist groups once and for all. And there were ceremonies at the school itself where the massacre occurred. So all in all, it was a day of high emotion.
BLOCK: When this attack happened a month ago, Philip, it was assumed that this would be a turning point for Pakistan - that it would fundamentally change the country. Has that turned out to be true?
REEVES: Well, there's no doubt the country was engulfed by a wave of disgust and anger. Some people have for ages been unhappy about the killing of civilians including children by US drones and Pakistan's military offensive in the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan. But the sheer scale of the massacre by the Pakistani Taliban at this army school in Peshawar has led people to set that apart as a crime of, you know, particularly horrific proportions. And I think that's why it's changed the political environment here. And the change is being reflected in a batch of counterterrorism measures passed by the government, which have been in some cases controversial.
BLOCK: What are some of those counterterrorism measures?
REEVES: Well, for the last several years, there's been a moratorium on capital punishment - that's now lifted. At least 18 people have been hanged since the Peshawar attack. The authorities also say they're cracking down on the dissemination of militant ideology. For instance, by confiscating loudspeakers from certain mosques and also printing presses. But the most controversial and important measure is the introduction of military courts to handle terrorism related cases for the next two years.
BLOCK: Controversial - so there has been push back on that question?
REEVES: Yes. I mean, it's been justified by the authorities on the grounds - the judges and prosecutors and witnesses are intimidated and too scared to rule or take part in terrorism related cases. And the courts are anyway dysfunctional and there's a huge backlog and so. Nonetheless, there is a lot of debate about replacing that system with military courts. Pakistanis, you know, are very aware that for the half of this country's history, the nation's been ruled by the military, and after the ousting of the last military ruler - Pervez Musharraf - people began to hope that civilian government was here to stay - imbedding in. But allowing the military to run these courts is fueling concerns that once again, behind the scenes the Army - which has always remained very influential - is stealthily assuming control of key leaders of power.
BLOCK: And Philip, the school where so many died one month ago has been as we said reopened and, I gather, with new layers of security.
REEVES: Security is extremely tight around that school. But also other schools - the government has actually ordered that schools should have eight-foot walls with razor wire on top and security cameras. So the experience for a kid going to school is going to be a very different one from now on.
BLOCK: OK. NPR's Philip Reeves speaking with us from Islamabad, Pakistan. Philip, thank you.
REEVES: You're welcome.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
This week, satellite images of Nigeria show the devastation of a recent siege from the Islamic militants known as Boko Haram. The remote community of Baga was destroyed in an attack which began January 3. Hundreds of people were killed, and some reports actually put that death toll up to 2,000. Baga is a fishing town, but it's also home to a government military base that was focused on shutting down the militant group's smuggling operation. The images were published by Amnesty International, and here to talk more about what can be learned from them is Adotei Akwei - Managing Director of Government Relations for Amnesty. Welcome to the studio.
ADOTEI AKWEI: Thank you.
CORNISH: Help us understand what we're looking at here in these before and after images.
AKWEI: As you said, Baga and Doron Baga are villages right on Lake Chad. They're a community of about 200,000 people. So the images show maybe 10 - 15,000 different structures. And these - difference between the pictures before January 3 and the ones after show roughly 3,000 village structures that have been destroyed. And it kind of underscores how badly damaged both villages were. And the fact that the numbers that we're talking about are clearly higher than what the Nigerian government is releasing, which is saying 150.
CORNISH: So from these satellite images, can you get any better sense of perhaps the death toll?
AKWEI: Unfortunately not, but you can estimate that based on the number of structures that were destroyed and the population density of both Baga and Doron Baga, that it really is several hundred - if not easily over 1,000 close to 2,000. But until we actually get into those - Baga we're not going to be able to verify. But we do believe that it constitutes a war crime or a crime against humanity - given the severity of it.
CORNISH: We mentioned a military base being in the area, but I also understand this is a community that has collaborated with Nigerian security forces. On the civilian level - like a civilian defense group. What can you tell us about these groups?
AKWEI: Well, the CDFs are the response that sort of emerged organically when...
CORNISH: So Civilian Defense Force?
AKWEI: Exactly. And these are home vigilantes - in other words, they provide a kind of protection because the Nigerian military has not been able to keep people safe from the attacks. They are affiliated with the Nigerian forces but not officially. Their methods of prevention are questionable. And in some cases, they've been linked to serious human rights abuses and there's certainly no accountability. But there's no other protection for these villagers.
CORNISH: Is there any indication that this is one of the reasons why Boko Haram targeted this community?
AKWEI: The presence of the military base probably could be a deciding factor in that it was a prize that would have been symbolic in terms of sending a message that, you know, we are Boko Haram and we can take on whatever military force you people put together. And I would say that because a lot of the communication and the video messaging from Boko Haram is very much geared towards perpetuating this myth that they're unstoppable.
CORNISH: Do you feel that they're unstoppable?
AKWEI: No, I believe that the response to date has been unsuccessful for a number of reasons. The first one is that the military's capacity has been basically gutted by corruption and by low morale - and those are things that are chronic to the Nigerian military and need to be addressed. I think that there's also been a dilemma, or a lack of consensus about the strategy - and that may be coming from the civilian side of President Jonathan's administration disagreeing with the military - which is perceived to be more from the north and may not be as supportive of this current president as it should be or needs to be. The bottom line being that the people in the northern part of the country have been vulnerable to these attacks and have paid the price for it.
CORNISH: Adotei Akwei - he's Managing Director of Government Relations for Amnesty International. Thank you so much for coming in to speak with us.
AKWEI: Thank you.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
The Silk Road was an online, anonymous black market for buying and selling illegal drugs. The FBI shut it down in 2013. Now the man accused of running that billion-dollar market is on trial. Proceedings began earlier this week. Wired reporter Andy Greenberg says it's the most significant case of its kind. He was in the Manhattan federal court room all week and joins us now from our bureau in New York. Andy, welcome to the program.
ANDY GREENBERG: Thanks for having me on.
CORNISH: OK, so the question at the heart of this thing is whether Ross Ulbricht is actually the mastermind of Silk Road - right? - whether he was indeed the one operating under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts. Help us understand the case that the prosecution is making here.
GREENBERG: Well, the prosecution says they literally caught Ross Ulbricht red-handed. They swooped in on him in the public library in San Francisco with his fingers on the keyboard as he was logged into the Silk Road on this page called Masterminds. And if that weren't damning enough, they say they also found on that laptop a kind of daily log and journal that detailed years of planning and then administering the creation and management of the Silk Road.
CORNISH: So what are the exact charges?
GREENBERG: There are quite a lot of charges. He's facing conspiracy to traffic narcotics, to launder money, to sell fake IDs, to sell hacking tools - which I think surprised a lot of people who followed the Silk Road.
And then he faces, as well, this so-called kingpin charge, what's technically called a continuing criminal enterprise, and that's something that's usually reserved for Mafia Dons and drug cartel leaders. So the prosecution is framing this as a massive drug conspiracy - not just a kind of backwater website, but a true drug empire.
CORNISH: And after many months, we're finally hearing from the defense - right? Fundamentally, what are they arguing for Ross Ulbricht?
GREENBERG: In their opening argument, the defense surprised everyone, I think, by first admitting that Ross Ulbricht created the Silk Road. But as they framed it, Ulbricht, they said, created the site only as a kind of economic experiment - this anonymous website running on the Tor anonymity network, using the cryptocurrency bitcoins to hide people's identities, essentially allowing people to buy and sell anything just to see what would happen.
But according to the defense, after just a few months, he gave the site up. He found it too stressful. And it was taken over by someone who would become the Dread Pirate Roberts. And then, of course, they have to argue - to make sense of this sort of caught-red-handed situation - that he was lured back in by the real operators of the Silk Road and framed.
CORNISH: So at one point you actually did do an interview with Dread Pirate Roberts, whoever that was. This was before the trial. Obviously, this is an anonymous figure, but what did you learn from him?
GREENBERG: Right. So I interviewed the Dread Pirate Roberts in 2013 over the Silk Road's anonymous messaging system. One of the things that's now become relevant again, I think, is that he told me that he didn't actually create the Silk Road. The Dread Pirate Roberts said that he actually acquired the site; that he paid the site's creator to take it over. And now that does seem to sync up with what the defense in Ross Ulbricht's case is saying - that Ross Ulbricht created the Silk Road but that he wasn't the Dread Pirate Roberts.
CORNISH: You describe this earlier as an economic experiment. And it gets to the heart of why people are paying attention to this case - right? I mean, there seems to be more at stake here than just what happens to this one particular guy.
GREENBERG: Yeah, the Silk Road was more than just a kind of cyber-criminal scheme. There were limitations to what you could sell on the site. The Dread Pirate Roberts had strict rules about only victimless contraband being sold. So, in a sense, this trial will be a test of how much the government can reach into these corners of the Internet where anarchists and libertarians have tried to carve out a kind of regulation free-trade zone.
CORNISH: That's Andy Greenberg of Wired. Andy, thanks so much for talking with us.
GREENBERG: Glad to be here. Thanks.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
The record of the late Joe Paterno has been restored. Paterno once again has more wins than any other college football coach. Today, the NCAA agreed to give back 112 wins to Penn State's football team. The victories had been erased as part of a 2012 agreement with the university following the Jerry Sandusky child sexual abuse scandal. NPR's Jeff Brady has more.
JEFF BRADY, BYLINE: Joe Paterno supporters say the legendary coach was unfairly tarnished by the scandal involving one of his former assistant coaches. Jerry Sandusky was found guilty in 2012 of 45 counts of sexual abuse and is serving up to 60 years in prison. Today, those supporters celebrated as Penn State's Board of Trustees voted on the new agreement.
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UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Aye.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: And Taliaferro.
TALIAFERRO: Aye.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Let the record show that this resolution was approved by unanimous support of the board.
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BRADY: Penn State President Eric Barron says under the new agreement, his university will spend $60 million on child abuse issues.
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ERIC BARRON: This money will be committed within the state of Pennsylvania and at Penn State for the prevention of child sexual abuse, the treatment of victims of child sexual abuse and the study of issues related to child sexual abuse.
BRADY: The new settlement comes just weeks before a trial was to begin over whether the earlier consent decree that stripped Penn State of its wins was legal. Pennsylvania State Senator Jake Corman led that challenge.
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SENATOR JAKE CORMAN: The NCAA has surrendered. The agreement is - that we have reached represents a complete victory of the issue at hand.
BRADY: NCAA board member and University of South Carolina President Harris Pastides said in a statement that while others will focus on the return of the wins, the Association's top priority is making sure young people are protected. Senator Corman says the Penn State community hopes for the same in the wake of Jerry Sandusky's crimes.
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CORMAN: The fact of the matter is, or was, an evil predator operated in our community for years and everyone missed it.
BRADY: Paterno's family members praised today's settlement, but said they will continue to pursue a separate lawsuit challenging the original consent decree. The NCAA says it will defend itself in that case. Jeff Brady, NPR News, Philadelphia.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
An update now on a story we brought you yesterday. The Saudi blogger who was to be publicly flogged again today - 50 lashes - has been given a temporary reprieve. Raif Badawi is serving 10 years in prison for his writings, which Saudi authorities say insult Islam. And he's to receive 1,000 lashes over 20 weeks. Well, today, unexpectedly, Badawi was not flogged. Human rights activist Elham Manea is following the case. And she says today's lashing was apparently postponed for medical reasons.
ELHAM MANEA: Raif Badawi was sent to a medical examination before his flogging session. A doctor examined his back and his body and he insisted that today's session should be postponed in light of his wounds.
BLOCK: And what does that mean - in light of his wounds - what's the implication there, that his wounds haven't healed enough for him to be flogged again?
MANEA: Yes, that basically they have to see if the wounds are in a stage where they could flog him again. And from that perspective, I think it's very clear the brutality of this type of cruel punishment.
BLOCK: Elham Manea says there is another possibility - that international outrage over Raif Badawi's punishment has given Saudi authorities pause.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
The U.S. Supreme Court, after dodging the question of same-sex marriage this fall, has finally entered the fray. Today, the justices agreed to review historic cases from four states, testing whether they have the right to outlaw gay marriage. Put another way - the question is whether the Constitution's guarantee to equal protection of the law protects the rights of same-sex couples to marry.
NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg joins now. Hi there, Nina.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Hi.
CORNISH: Both sides have really been waiting breathlessly for this moment for a while now. What can you tell us about these cases that the court's agreed to hear?
TOTENBERG: Well, the cases are from Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee. The lower courts initially struck down the marriage bans in each of these states, but a panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Cincinnati, reversed those judgments and upheld the bans.
CORNISH: So why did the court decide to hear the question now, though, when it rejected the issue last fall?
TOTENBERG: Well, because last fall there was no conflict among the lower federal courts of appeal. All of them had ruled that bans on same-sex marriage violate the Constitution. And then, when the Sixth Circuit ruled, there became a conflict.
CORNISH: So when will the justices actually hear arguments in the case?
TOTENBERG: In late April. They've ordered 2.5 hours of argument on two questions - first, whether the bans are constitutional, and second, if they are, whether those states must nonetheless recognize same-sex marriages that are legally performed in other states.
CORNISH: So let's step back here, Nina. Remind us what the status quo is and where gay marriage is legal and where it's not.
TOTENBERG: It's legal in 36 states, Audie, and the District of Columbia. And many of those states are the most populous in the country, so that the Williams Institute at UCLA estimates that 70 percent of Americans now live in states where gay marriage is legal.
CORNISH: So the people behind these lawsuits, who are they? What can you tell us?
TOTENBERG: Well, all I can say is that they look like the perfect poster children for gay marriage. The lead plaintiff in Michigan, for instance, is a couple - two women who have adopted three children with disabilities. They're both nurses. They work split, 12-hour shifts to care for their children and also welcome foster children into their home. But because Michigan bans same-sex marriage, the women cannot both be listed as adoptive parents.
In Ohio, the lead plaintiff is widower James Obergefell, whose partner of more than 20 years, John Arthur, was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease. And in the last months of Arthur's life, the couple chartered a medical plane to Maryland, and they got married on the tarmac. But when death came, Ohio refused to recognize the marriage, meaning that Obergefell could not be listed on the death certificate as the surviving spouse. And that's a failure that can have significant legal and financial consequences.
And then another of the Ohio plaintiffs is a same-sex couple who married in New York and lived there. When they adopted a child from Ohio, however, the state would not list both of them on the adoption certificate as parents.
CORNISH: Before we go, when should we actually expect a decision?
TOTENBERG: I think we will have a decision before the end of June, which leaves the justices not a huge window, but they'll make it. They've been thinking about this for a while.
CORNISH: That's NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg on the Supreme Court's decision to rule this term on same-sex marriage. Nina, thank you.
TOTENBERG: Thank you, Audie.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
We're following news of a broad anti-terror crackdown in several European countries today. More than two dozen suspected militants have been arrested in France, Belgium and Germany. These arrests, of course, coming soon after last week's terror attacks in Paris. In Belgium last night, security forces killed two suspects they believed were about to launch a terrorist attack against police. The two men had just returned from Syria.
NPR's Eleanor Beardsley is following developments from Paris. And Eleanor, this does seem to be a broad counterterrorist sweep across Northern Europe.
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: Yes, very broad, Melissa. This morning, in Paris, police arrested 12 people suspected to be accomplices to the three terrorists who killed 17 people here last week. Police haven't been given details, but they say they've rounded up anyone who could've possibly provided logistical support to these men.
In Belgium, authorities have arrested 13 people in that country and two others in France. They say those arrests were to thwart an imminent attack. And some of Belgian media is reporting that that attack was just hours away. These arrests in Belgium were part of an ongoing investigation, and Belgian officials at this point say that they don't look to be related to the Paris attacks. In Germany, a couple-hundred police raided 12 homes and a mosque. They arrested two people on suspicion of recruiting fighters to go to Syria.
BLOCK: Eleanor, there are varying claims of responsibilities, speculation about groups that may have been behind the French attacks. What more are you learning about that and how much credence are those claims given by authorities in France?
BEARDSLEY: Well, the three attackers last week, they claimed al-Qaida in Yemen and the so-called Islamic State. When I spoke with a terrorism expert today - and he said you have to be very careful about saying who ordered these attacks. And this is what Jean-Charles Brisard said to me. He's an expert on Islamic terrorism.
JEAN-CHARLES BRISARD: With France, the attacks on Paris were mainly carried out by a group of friends who knew each other for more than 10 years before the attacks. And I think that was most powerful within that group than any affiliation to any terrorist group.
BEARDSLEY: Now, Melissa, nothing is really clear at this point. Mr. Brisard also told me that we know that one of the Kouachi brothers who attacked Charlie Hebdo, he went to Yemen. But we just found out today that he also travelled to Saudi Arabia in 2008, so nothing is clear right now on who could have sponsored or paid for those attacks.
BLOCK: And, Eleanor, you're there in Paris. Are you seeing visible signs everywhere you go of increased security around the city?
BEARDSLEY: Yes, Melissa, I am. There are soldiers everywhere. You know, things are a lot calmer, but there's still attention. And France has deployed 10,000 soldiers around the country. On my own street, there's a Lubavitch synagogue. It's more like a prayer hall. It doesn't really look like a religious building. But there are two soldiers with automatic weapons out front, and they have been standing there for three days now. It's very jarring to see that on your own street. Jewish schools, mosques, they all have protection now. In Belgium, all the Jewish schools in Brussels and Antwerp have closed out of precaution. People are going about their daily lives, but they're wondering will things ever be really normal again?
BLOCK: OK, NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reporting from Paris. Eleanor, thanks very much.
BEARDSLEY: Thank you, Melissa.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Imagine if every day, every interaction you had ended with a demand for a bribe - postal clerks with your mail, police officers stopping you randomly, a bank clerk who refuses to sign off on your paperwork without a little extra cash. That last one happened to Sarah Chayes when she tried to start up a soap factory in Afghanistan.
SARAH CHAYES: I don't know how the next thing happened, but next thing I know, I'm sitting on top of his desk. And I said fine, I'll just sit here until tomorrow, until whenever you get this done. And of course, he starts scurrying around, and we get our paperwork and it's done.
CORNISH: Chayes, a former reporter for NPR, left journalism to focus on helping the people of Afghanistan. The problem is, as she describes it in her book "Thieves Of State," that even when she tried to hold corrupt officials accountable, she did little to help the regular Afghan citizen.
CHAYES: When I insisted on not playing along, I could usually get an exception because I was a foreign female. I was connected in people's minds with 100,000 thousand troops on the ground in their country, and they didn't quite know what would happen if they got into a conflict with me. And the other thing I think that's really important to understand that again, I didn't experience as a foreigner because people treated me carefully, is the amount of humiliation that accompanies this kind of, quote, "petty corruption." I think that Americans have a tendency to see corruption almost as invisible, but this is extorted. It's money that's extorted from people face-to-face by government officials who are treating them incredibly contemptuously, so there's a psychological dimension to this that I think many Americans neglect.
CORNISH: And it's with almost - you're saying in some cases every interaction, right, at every level that you're dealing with the government. Give us an example that kind of...
CHAYES: Every...
CORNISH: ...Day to day...
CHAYES: So every time you go past a police checkpoint, if you're driving, someone comes out and shakes you down. People have to pay bribes in order to pay their electricity bills. For the privilege of paying your electricity bill, you get shaken down by the clerks in the electricity department. A friend of mine, who was the police chief of Kabul at the time, was blown up in a remote-controlled improvised bomb. A relative of his, who was an American citizen, was also killed. The son of that relative came to Afghanistan and had to pay bribes in order to get his father's death certificate.
CORNISH: So you say this takes a toll, but you also argue that it creates a kind of fertile environment for the growth or entry of religious extremists - in what way?
CHAYES: It infuriates people. So first of all, you get people who are indignant and personally humiliated in a country like Afghanistan and a significant number of them, especially of males, are going to get violent. So if you have a violent movement that's around and looking to recruit people, there's a likelihood that they are going to really find people who have had an interaction like this or - or five of them or 10 of them - that are ready to get some revenge. More deeply, what I discovered in working on this book is that there is historically a really interesting intersection between acute public corruption and, I would say, militant puritanical religion, and that's in Christianity as well as in Islam. You know, go back and read Martin Luther and you'll find that the "95 Theses" are largely taken up with issues of corruption. And I saw in Nigeria, for example, where I looked at northern Muslim areas, I also looked at some of the Pentecostal churches, which, although they're not violent now, have a lot of pretty violent rhetoric. And the connection seems to be that some people argue that the only way you can achieve public integrity is by way of a very strict code of private morality.
CORNISH: You know, whether it's the Nigerian government or the U.S. military in Afghanistan, what you often hear from governments is that, you know, our primary focus right now needs to be on security. The idea of, like, corruption and good governance, we can deal with that when people aren't fearing for their safety. What's wrong with that argument?
CHAYES: I heard it again and again and again as I was trying to make this case with respect to Afghanistan. And my argument, quite simply, is so long people as people are being abused every day by their government, they will be joining the Taliban or joining Boko Haram every day. And so if you ignore those - those factors, what you'll be doing is essentially mowing the grass, but the grass keeps growing. And so in the end, it's a really self-defeating way of ordering priorities. And I'm not trying to say that corruption is the one driver of, you know, revolutions and violent extremism around the world. Of course, it's intersecting with other risk factors and things like that. But I feel as though this linkage between corruption and acute global security crises, people are missing it.
CORNISH: For the U.S., sometimes the contacts that are used in a country are corrupt themselves, right, but they have some strategic importance, say, in fighting terrorism, for example. I mean, we can't necessarily cut ties in these countries. What's a better way to go? What are some solutions, you think, for handling this situation in countries that are corrupt without making the problem worse?
CHAYES: You can interact with someone without doing so in such a way as to raise their stature. You can choose not to funnel significant developmental resources through that individual. There's quite a range; it takes real understanding of who's who, and it takes some deftness to apply. But I would say the very first thing that the United States government needs to do is improve its intelligence and information gathering around this problem. The United States government has a tendency to assume that its counterpart government is functioning as a government. And so what U.S. officials tend to know about are the official functions of different, you know, government officials in a foreign country. U.S. officials have not done a systematic analysis in countries like Uzbekistan or Nigeria or Cameroon or - or Bulgaria of how this government is actually functioning as a very effective criminal organization.
CORNISH: So they have a flow chart that says what everyone should be doing...
CHAYES: Right.
CORNISH: ...But they don't have an accurate picture of what everyone's actually up to.
CHAYES: That's exactly right.
CORNISH: And is the idea that we should be mapping communities in the same way that we map for terrorist organizations?
CHAYES: Absolutely, that's exactly what I have in mind. And then - that then allows those interactions that have to take place at least to be taking place eyes open.
CORNISH: Sarah Chayes, thank you so much for speaking with us.
CHAYES: Audie, what a pleasure.
CORNISH: Sarah Chayes, she's a senior associate in the Democracy and Rule of Law program and the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment. Her new book is called "Thieves Of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security."
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Republicans from the House and Senate just wrapped up a retreat in Pennsylvania. It's the first time in 10 years that they've held their retreats together, a sign of how much party leadership want the groups to collaborate now that the GOP controls both chambers of Congress. But as NPR's Juana Summers reports, the retreat ended without consensus on one big issue.
JUANA SUMMERS, BYLINE: Republicans took a two-day retreat in Hershey, Pennsylvania, a tourist town known as The Sweetest Place on Earth, to find common ground on big issues facing Congress. But one topic, one that Republicans don't agree on, dominated discussion this week. Republicans remain deadlocked over how to confront President Obama on immigration.
Earlier this week, House Republicans passed a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, but attached policy provisions that would rollback Obama's actions on immigration, including last month's move to allow people who are in the country illegally, but have close family who are here legally, to stay. The House bill would also overturn Obama's 2012 program allowing children who were brought by their parents to the U.S. illegally to stay. While the bill did pass the House, some moderate Republicans, like Congressman Jeff Denham of California, said it went too far.
REPRESENTATIVE JEFF DENHAM: I think by adding the deferred action amendment in here it goes back to a situation where you've got kids that came here to no fault of their own that we need to have a full discussion and debate on that now are going to be put at the top of the list for ICE to deport, if this were to become law. I think that that sends the wrong message to the American public on what our overall reform ideas are.
SUMMERS: But others, like Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz, said that Republicans needed to take a strong stand.
REPRESENTATIVE JASON CHAFFETZ: Well, look, we can't always gravitate to the lowest common denominator. I think we've got to do what we believe is right. And I think the president totally overstepped - totally - in his executive amnesty.
SUMMERS: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he'd like to see the Senate pass the House's bill. But the math will make that difficult. Senator John Thune, of South Dakota, put it this way...
SENATOR JOHN THUNE: The magic number in the Senate is 60.
SUMMERS: To get 60 votes in the Senate, this bill would have to get support of some Senate Democrats along with nearly all Republican senators, and that's unlikely to happen. Even if the bill did reach President Obama, he's said he'd veto it. That would put Congress back at the starting line with a tight deadline. Lawmakers only have until February 27 to figure out how to fund the Homeland Security Department. That's when money appropriated under the current spending bill runs out. Juana Summers, NPR News, Hershey, Pennsylvania.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Wired magazine published a classic underdog tale 10 years ago. It was about four Mexican-American kids from a Phoenix high school who entered a prestigious engineering competition and beat the Ivy League. That story has now become a movie starring George Lopez. It's called "Spare Parts." Karen Grigsby Bates from NPR's Code Switch team fills us in.
KAREN GRIGSBY BATES, BYLINE: The four guys who won the competition you just heard about made national news in 2005, so this isn't a spoiler.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SPARE PARTS")
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: It is my honor to announce that first prize in the U.S. Underwater Robotics Championship goes to Carl Hayden Community High School.
(APPLAUSE)
BATES: That really happened, but how did they get there? "Spare Parts" tells the story of four Mexican-American kids - three of them undocumented - who combined their skills in engineering and math to construct a clunky-looking robot out of, yep, spare parts that performed elegantly. Teacher Fredi Cameron, played by George Lopez, has to be persuaded by one of his students to give it a try. He's skeptical.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SPARE PARTS")
GEORGE LOPEZ: (As Fredi Cameron) In order to enter this competition, we would have to build a remotely operated vehicle that swims underwater. I mean, you know this is the desert, right?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Permission to speak freely, sir?
LOPEZ: (As Fredi Cameron) Sure.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) There's an ROV up on Mars. I'm pretty sure it wasn't built up on Mars, sir.
LOPEZ: (As Fredi Cameron) OK.
BATES: And it's not easy or cheap. The kids raised money, but even using spare parts from discarded machinery and inexpensive substitutes, it's not enough.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SPARE PARTS")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) You are still short $134.63.
BATES: So, reluctantly, Dr. Cameron pulls out his checkbook even though he'd told them earlier he couldn't.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SPARE PARTS")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) I thought you couldn't donate.
LOPEZ: (As Fredi Cameron) It's a robotics contest not a fundraising contest. Besides, who's going to know? Oh, hey, and my man ate a couple ice creams on the way in.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character) Can I have an ice cream?
LOPEZ: (As Fredi Cameron) Too late. I already wrote the check.
BATES: They made the robot, named it Stinky after the glue that held his PVC pipes together, and the rest is engineering history. "Spare Part's" studio, Lions Gate, is hoping Hispanic moviegoers will turn out to support this film.
Chiqui Cartagena is vice president of the political and advocacy group at Univision and an expert in the Latino market. For a long time, she says, Hollywood ignored Latino moviegoers.
CHIQUI CARTAGENA: There has been, I would say, a major ah-ha in the last three years, really, we have seen studios starting to pay attention. But, you know, before that, it was not as frequent.
BATES: "Spare Parts" may get an unexpected boost from the news. The new GOP-led Congress reignited the immigration debate when it announced this week it would vote to repeal funding that provides protection for the country's undocumented residents.
At a Washington, D.C., screening hosted by the Center for American Progress, the theater is a mix of policy types, immigration reform advocates and DREAMers - young, undocumented kids very much like the ones in the movie. Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, a staunch DREAMer supporter, says "Spare Parts" shows that immigrants are a necessary part of America's success.
SENATOR DICK DURBIN: The immigrant spirit in America makes us different. That is built into America's DNA. That's why we are the nation we are today.
BATES: Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro's grandparents were Mexican immigrants. He says the movie is good entertainment, yes, but it also illustrates what the country will miss without immigration reform.
REPRESENTATIVE JOAQUIN CASTRO: It really highlights the very incredibly talented young people who are DREAM Act students and have such wonderful talents to lend to our American society but are not given the chance to do that.
BATES: No one knows that better than Oscar Vasquez, one of the four students depicted in the film. He says the movie may help people to understand a contentious political issue through the experience of his robotics team.
OSCAR VASQUEZ: You know, the immigration debate's out there, and I think that really brings it into focus. It's trying to put some faces in that issue.
BATES: Chiqui Cartagena says there are many good stories like this, and she hopes soon there will be more Latino filmmakers who will make these stories visible.
CARTAGENA: We're not there yet, but I have great faith that we will get there.
BATES: And with Hispanic moviegoers continuing to be the dominant demographic for Hollywood to please, that's more of a when than an if. Karen Grigsby Bates, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Packers and Seahawks, Patriots and Colts. It's Championship Sunday this weekend in the NFL. The winners will head to the Super Bowl on February 1. Jane McManus, of ESPN, joins us now for a preview. Hey, Jane.
JANE MCMANUS: Hi, how are you?
BLOCK: Good, and let's start with the first game on Sunday afternoon - the Green Bay Packers going up against last year's Super Bowl champion, the Seattle Seahawks. What does this matchup look like to you?
MCMANUS: Well, I think the first and most important thing to know is that there is a cheese ban in part of Seattle. The Packers, of course, are the cheeseheads, and Bainbridge Island has outlawed cheese in public.
BLOCK: A cheese-free zone, OK.
MCMANUS: Cheese-free zone, exactly, but this could be a very difficult game for the Packers. The Seahawks are great at home. They have the notion of the 12th man there, which means that the crowd is so loud it makes it difficult for opposing teams. And the Seahawks, you know, they are the defending Super Bowl champs and they have a lot of the team intact this year from last year, including Marshawn Lynch - fabulous running back, although a bit temperamental when it comes to talking to the media. And the Seahawks also have a terrific secondary, which means anyone throwing passes is going to have a difficult time.
BLOCK: And another problem - potential problem - for the Green Bay Packers. Their quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, has been dealing with a torn calf muscle - not good for them.
MCMANUS: Yes, and you've seen it affect him in games leading up to this one. He's had a week to rest. That's not very much at this point in the season. And, as you know, any team that has any kind of weakness is going to be picked on by the opposing team.
BLOCK: And the last time these two teams met, we should mention, Seattle crushed Green Bay back in September.
MCMANUS: That's right. I mean, I think all signs point to the Seahawks here, but it should be a great game. Aaron Rodgers is a quarterback that you can never count out. He has just been too good. He's been in postseason play. He's won the Super Bowl with Green Bay, so it could make for a good game, but I think the Seahawks have quite an advantage.
BLOCK: OK, well, let's talk about the other playoff game, now, later on Sunday - the Indianapolis Colts head to Massachusetts to take on the Patriots. And what does this quarterback matchup look like, Jane? We have Andrew Luck of the Colts going up against, of course, Tom Brady of the Patriots.
MCMANUS: Well, I think this is - kind of could be summed up in the empire versus the upstart. You have Bill Belichick and Tom Brady who have been incredibly successful as a pair. They've won three Super Bowls. They've been in two others that they didn't win, since 2002, so they are formidable. Bill Belichick, the coach, has a 20-and-9 playoff record, which is tied for best in the NFL. They have the experience here, and they have really beaten up on the Colts whenever they've had the opportunity. They're 3-and-0 in games against the Colts since Andrew Luck took over as quarterback.
BLOCK: Jane, off the field, the Colts are also dealing with rape charges that were filed this week against their backup linebacker, Josh McNary. How did the team and the NFL handle this?
MCMANUS: Well, this, I think, goes to show the difference in the way that the NFL and teams are handling this since the Ray Rice elevator tape came out in September. And that is that the Colts, once they found out about the rape charges that were pressed against McNary, asked the NFL to put McNary on paid leave, essentially. There is a commissioner's exempt list, which players can go on now if they are charged with a crime. And while that crime is being investigated, or while they wait for trial, they can be put on paid leave. It's something new, but I think the speed with which the Colts did this shows how serious they are about these charges. And it's very different, I think, from the way that the league might've acted a year or two ago. You do have a team that is in the playoffs. I mean, there are very real stakes here, and they made, very quickly, the decision to take him off the roster.
BLOCK: OK, Jane McManus, writer for ESPN. Jane, thanks so much.
MCMANUS: I appreciate it.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
At Duke University today, students gathered on the lawn outside the campus chapel to listen to the Muslim call to prayer, but that prayer did not come from the chapel bell tower. Earlier this week, the university said Muslim students could use the bell tower, but then backtracked after getting threats. Reema Khrais, of member station WUNC, reports.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRAYER)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Singing in foreign language).
REEMA KHRAIS, BYLINE: Hundreds of people stood on Duke University's campus today in the shadow of a 210-foot gothic chapel. That voice is coming from a wireless speaker in front of the chapel. Had things gone differently, the chant would have come from the top of the bell tower, not the bottom. Imam Adeel Zeb is Duke's Muslim chaplain.
IMAM ADEEL ZEB: I would be more happy if it happened the original way. I think many in the Muslim community would be more happy about that. At the same time, from my theological point of view, things happen according to what God wants to happen.
KHRAIS: Duke reversed course yesterday. Initially, the private university said Muslim students could give a three-minute prayer from the chapel bell tower every Friday. But then came the threats, says Duke spokesman Mike Schoenfeld.
MIKE SHOENFELD: They were serious. They were credible, and there's something that is very important for the university to recognize.
KHRAIS: There are more than 700 people on Duke's campus who identify as Muslim. Duke had one of the first university imams in the country. Schoenfeld says this weekly event was supposed to be about unity.
SHOENFELD: Both the number and the tone of the call - just sort of random, over the transom calls that were coming in were pretty loud and pretty nasty.
KHRAIS: One of the loudest was from evangelist Franklin Graham. He's the son of Reverend Billy Graham. Here he is on WSOC TV in Charlotte.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FRANKLIN GRAHAM: We as Christians are being marginalized and Islam, which is not a religion of peace - there's nothing peaceful about Islam at all, just look at the Middle East.
KHRAIS: On Facebook and on TV interviews, Graham urged donors not to support Duke. The university says it didn't bow to that pressure, but some students think otherwise. Back in front of the chapel, hundreds of people stood by the Muslims, including Indhira Udofia. She's a master's student at Duke's Divinity School and a Christian.
INDHIRA UDOFIA: Even if I may not understand the fullness of the Islam faith, it does not mean that I'm not called to be hospitable and be open and welcome those type of experiences here.
KHRAIS: Ahmad Jitaan is a Duke alum and a former president of the Muslim Student Association.
AHMAD JITAAN: I hope that Muslim students on campus are able to stand up for themselves and show that we can be visible on this camp. We can feel safe on this campus, and also to tie that struggle with all the other struggles going on in the United States right now for other marginalized communities.
KHRAIS: On campus, people are worried about Duke's handling of the situation and what it means to religious freedom at universities across the country. For NPR News, I'm Reema Khrais in Durham, North Carolina.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Google announced this week that they're ending individual sales of the much celebrated and maligned Google Glass. But wearable tech is not dead. In fact, there's an amazing new vest that has GPS, can call 911 and talk back like Siri. Only it's not for people. It's for service dogs. It's the brainchild of a group called the FIDO Project, headed up by Dr. Melody Jackson. She's director of the Center for BioInterface Research at Georgia Tech. Jackson and her colleagues want to dramatically expand what service dogs can currently do.
MELODY JACKSON: I have a colleague who is blind and has a guide dog. And he was on the Georgia Tech campus one day when his dog stopped, as they're trained to do if there's something in their path. Well, he knew that there was nothing that should be in their path, so he pulled out his collapsible cane and he felt around to see if there - something was on the sidewalk. He didn't feel anything. And so he said, come on, buddy, let's go. And the dog refused. So he thought, well, maybe he's just being a dog. He gave him a little correction, saying let's go. And the dog said all right, and they both stepped into wet cement. So if the dog could have said we need to go around something that you can't feel with your cane, it could've saved them a very dangerous and certainly inconvenient situation.
RATH: So tell me about the FIDO vest that you've designed. Describe it first.
JACKSON: Well, the FIDO vest - FIDO stands for Facilitating Interactions for Dogs with Occupations - and essentially we're putting technology to wearable clothing for dogs. So we have sensors that dogs can activate with natural dog abilities such as holding in the mouth, biting, tugging or just touching with their nose.
RATH: And you have the vest with you in the studio, right?
JACKSON: Absolutely, I do. And I have a little scenario if you don't mind.
RATH: Please.
JACKSON: Medical alert dogs perform vital functions. For example, an epilepsy alert dog will detect, before the person even knows it, that they're about to have a seizure. And what they're trained to do is to push the person up against a wall so that they don't just fall down, that they might slide down the wall. And then once the person is having the seizure and they might be unconscious, the dog licks their face to arouse them. But what if the dog could activate a tug sensor to dial 911 and summon help that might sound like this...?
COMPUTER-GENERATED SPEECH: Excuse me, my owner needs your attention.
RATH: Well, could you talk about some of the other applications of this because situations like search and rescue - there are dogs at work with the police and the military. I've got to assume there are a lot of other applications beyond the medical service dogs.
JACKSON: Absolutely, and we keep finding more just about on a daily basis. A scenario that happened about three months ago in Georgia - we had a young man, a teenager, that was lost in the North Georgia mountains who was on the autism spectrum. And every time the dogs would find him, he would run away. So what happens with the search and rescue dog typically is they'll find the target. Then they have to re-find their handler, and then they have to re-find the target again. Well, every time the dogs got close, the young man would run away because he was afraid. But what if the dog could stay with the person that they found, activate a sensor on their vest that would geolocate and send a message to the search and rescue handler that says, hey, I found the person, and I'm going to stay with them?
Bomb-sniffing dogs have the ability to tell what explosive they have found, so is it C4, which is relatively stable and not going to explode if you bump it, or is it a very volatile substance such as TATP, which, pretty much, you can breathe on it and it'll explode? The bomb squad probably would like to know that. The dog does know it. And so we're working right now with the Georgia Tech police to implement some systems that will allow the dogs to tell us exactly what explosive they've found.
RATH: Dr. Melody Jackson is the director of the Center for BioInterface Research at Georgia Tech, and she's also the founder of the FIDO project. Dr. Jackson, thank you.
JACKSON: Thank you so much.
RATH: This is NPR News.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Lynda Blackmon Lowery was the youngest person to join Dr. Martin Luther King on the historic march from Selma, Alabama. She tells the story in a new book for young adults, "Turning 15 On The Road To Freedom." When Lynda was growing up, she used to watch a TV show called "Sergeant Preston Of The Yukon."
LYNDA BLACKMON LOWERY: And Sergeant Preston had this dog named King, a German Shepherd, that saved everything and everybody in 20 to 25 minutes on Saturday morning.
RATH: So when Lynda heard her grandmother was going to see King at Tabernacle Baptist Church, Lynda was excited to see the dog.
LOWERY: Needless to say, we were some disappointed children. But when Reverend King started to speak, the whole church got quiet. Reverend King was talking about voting rights and how our parents was going to get the right to vote. But we would have to to do it nonviolently. He had a standing ovation.
RATH: And can you talk about your own involvement with the protests because you were 14 at that time?
LOWERY: Well, I was turning 14 at that time, yes. I like to tell people by the age of 15, I had been jailed nine times. The first time we actually went to jail, I was kind of scared, but we had each other's back. What we were going to do with each other's backs I don't know because those big, you know, policeman had guns and so forth, so - but we were there for each other.
RATH: And you had your own experience with police brutality - Bloody Sunday - that was Sunday March 7, 1965, the first attempted march from Selma to Montgomery. Can you tell us what happened to you on Bloody Sunday?
LOWERY: On Bloody Sunday, I was very near - very near the front. I was, like, in the 19th line from the front. When we got to the crest of the bridge - the top of the bridge - and we saw all these men in blue. That was the Alabama State Troopers. We saw the Sheriff Jim Clark and his deputies, and we saw his posse. They were on horseback. I really wasn't afraid that day, until we got down there all the way to the state troopers, and they said we were an illegal assembly and we had to disperse.
And I heard this pop, pop sound. Later, I found out it was tear gas. And I remember I couldn't breathe, and I was scared. I was on my knees, and somebody grabbed the back of my collar - coat - and started pulling me backwards. And I guess I was resisting because they grabbed the front of my lapel, and I bit the hand that was on the front of the lapel. And I heard that horrible N-word. And I felt him hit me twice. I ended up with seven stitches over my right eye - I still have that scar - and 28 stitches in the back of my head. And I still have a knot in the back of my head from that.
RATH: And then two weeks later, when there is the march that leaves from Selma that does finally make it to the capital, you want to be a part of that because you want to show Governor Wallace what he did to you.
LOWERY: I was 14. I wasn't a threat to anybody. There was really about 3,200 people that left Selma on that march that day. But only 300 were allowed to walk all the way from Selma to Montgomery. And I was among that 300. I was terrified. But I also knew that if I did not embrace this fear or take this the fear and - it would one day own me.
RATH: Lynda, this is a book aimed at young readers, and I'm wondering what the thinking is behind that. What do you want young people to take away from the story?
LOWERY: I would like for young people to know that each day of your life is a journey into history and that you are making that history. And you have the ability to change something each day of your life. Believe it or not, people, it can't happen without you.
RATH: Before I let you go, I've got to ask you if you've seen the new film out - the "Selma" film.
LOWERY: Oh, yes.
RATH: What was it like for you to watch that on the screen?
LOWERY: The Bloody Sunday scene - I could not sit up there and just watch it. I was crying, and I had to get up and walk outside of the theater and could not watch that scene again. Those were very real for me.
RATH: Lynda Blackmon Lowery was the youngest person to take part in the entire march from Selma to Montgomery. Her new book is "Turning 15 On The Road To Freedom: My Story Of The 1965 Selma Voting Rights March." Lynda, you're an inspiration. Thank you so much.
LOWERY: Thank you for having me.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Look over the output of writer, producer, director Michael Mann. You'll find a lot of criminal activity - films like "Heat," "The Insider" and "Public Enemies," TV shows like "Crime Story" and of course, "Miami Vice." With his new movie, "Blackhat," he's taking on cybercrime.
MICHAEL MANN: This is basically a detective story. It's a detective story, but it's happening in the brave new world that we live in.
RATH: Chris Hemsworth with plays Nicholas Hathaway, a brilliant criminal hacker in a maximum-security prison. When a cyberattack triggers a nuclear accident in China, Hathaway gets furloughed so he can help solve the crime.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BLACKHAT")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Is he political?
CHRIS HEMSWORTH: (As Nicholas Hathaway) Terrorist attack, maybe declaration.
VIOLA DAVIS: (As Carol Barrett) The guy we're working will drop the big hammer and not think twice about it.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) He's on the move again.
AS CHARACTER UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: Chicago...
TANG WEI: (As Chen Lien) Now China.
HEMSWORTH: (As Nicholas Hathaway) This is only the beginning.
RATH: Hathaway teams up with a Chinese army officer, played by Asian-American pop star Leehom Wang. There's plenty of space for gun battles and explosions, but the heroes are fighting an invisible villain.
MANN: Hathaway has to find and stop an adversary who resides, for the most part, in a virtual world.
RATH: We have to talk about the weird timing on this because I imagine that by November, you've pretty much wrapped up everything on this film. Then the Sony cyberattack happens. What goes through your mind when you're watching the news about that?
MANN: We started researching this two and a half years ago. And the extent of intrusions and the awareness of vulnerabilities to hacking because of the interconnectedness of absolutely everything - we've been tracking it all along, so this was kind of one in a sequence. And since this is our subject, we were kind of familiar with it. What did hit home was that some of these people are my friends that got attacked, so that became very personal.
RATH: So what was it that initially got you excited about this topic?
MANN: Stuxnet happened, and I was very interested in that because it was more than a hack. It's not kind of impersonal, un-dramatic, just ones and zeros doing things.
RATH: Stuxnet was the worm virus that was sent to attack the Iranian nuclear infrastructure.
MANN: Exactly. And when I read about how the malware was built, it was a scenario but a very dramatic scenario, kind of a multi-act play. You know, who's conceiving this? Who's writing it? What kind of people are they? And then in the private sector, who are black-hat hackers? What is the - what's the high? What's, you know, the elevated experience? And we wanted to do a large-scale kind of crime story, something epic in size, and this was it.
RATH: You know, a lot of Asian-Americans have complained about wanting to have more Asian male leads that...
MANN: Right.
RATH: ...Aren't stereotypes. And the officer - the Chinese officer in this film, played by Leehom Wang, definitely seems to deliver on that. Can you tell us about him? I understand he's a pop star in China?
MANN: Oh, he's not just a pop star in China, he is the biggest pop star in Asia. He's Justin Timberlake of Asia. I had trouble shooting in some locations in Hong Kong because if I'd pan the camera to the right a little bit, there'd be some block-long, two-story-high, you know, billboard of Leehom Wang selling Seiko watches. We'd have 1,500 screaming teenagers at 3 o'clock in the morning waiting to see Leehom Wang. And Chris Hemsworth laughs about it, and told this anecdote - they're basically pushing Chris Hemsworth out of the way to get to Leehom Wang.
RATH: (Laughter).
MANN: He grew up in Rochester, New York, until he was 17. He's tremendously, tremendously bright. I love him. He's just a great guy.
RATH: Looking over your body of work, I mean, going back to "Crime Story" and "Miami Vice," you know, "The Insider," it seems safe to say you have a fascination with illegal activity.
MANN: Yeah, well, I like dramatic conflict. I like things in high relief. I like people who are faced with important questions that - you know, they have to make critical decisions.
RATH: Is there something about that that just opens up human experience for you somehow? What is it about it?
MANN: Well, it's kind of an opportune dramatic structure. Most of us live our lives within the confines of the judicial system we were born into, the political economy we were born into. A criminal, by self-definition, is outside social mores and values, so that puts him into conflict - conflicts that he has a struggle to manage to maintain his existence. And if I can bring an audience into some empathetic relationship where we're invested in them, then we see them in an internalized kind of a way.
RATH: I wanted, finally, to take you very far back because I came across a line in a piece about you, where it said that you, as a young man, you moved to London after discovering Stanley Kubrick, the great director of "2001," "Dr. Strangelove," "A Clockwork Orange," you know, many great, great films. I was just curious about that. What was it about Kubrick that caught your imagination?
MANN: You know, I saw "Dr. Strangelove" in 1963, when I was in Madison, Wisconsin, where I was an undergraduate. And it was a revelation. What struck me is that it was possible to make a film, as a real auteur, for a mass audience.
RATH: For people who haven't seen it, I should say that you are so inspired by a dark, dark, dark comedy about nuclear holocaust.
MANN: Right, it's something that I quite still haven't figured out, which is why that film passed the test of time. I don't know matter how many times I've seen "Strangelove," but it's as fresh and exciting today as it was, you know, in 1963.
RATH: Could you see yourself making something in that vein?
MANN: I...
RATH: What would be the black comedy that Michael Mann would make?
MANN: Oh boy, OK.
(LAUGHTER)
MANN: I don't know. I would really have to - that's a very good question.
RATH: Michael Mann's latest film is "Blackhat." It's out right now. Michael Mann, thanks very much. It was a pleasure speaking with you.
MANN: Pleasure being here.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
After the past four years, it's hard to imagine the words Syria and peace in the same sentence. The United Nations has struggled to establish even temporary truces in the brutal civil war. Now Russia is trying to play peacemaker. The warring parties have been invited to Moscow this month. But NPR's Michele Kelemen reports some opposition groups won't go to a country that has been backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Syrian opposition figures have good reason to be skeptical of the Russian diplomatic moves, says Reza Afshar, a former British diplomat who now advises the Syrian opposition coalition.
REZA AFSHAR: A process that is initiated by the Russians, who are a party to the conflict - they provide weapons and advice to Assad regime, and they have taken an approach of cherry picking who they talk to and who the regime talks to - is obviously a process that is going to be concerning to some people, of course.
KELEMEN: The U.S. is not pressuring the opposition groups it supports to go to Moscow but suggesting that they should think about it so that Russia can't blame the opposition for the diplomatic stalemate. From the U.S. perspective, the opposition has nothing to lose by going, but National Defense University professor Murhaf Jouejati disagrees.
MURHAF JOUEJATI: If there are no guarantees as to the end state, that is a movement towards a transitional government with full executive powers without Assad, then there's really no reason to go. It will only be a repeat of the failed Geneva talks.
KELEMEN: Russia's ambassador to the U.N., Vitaly Churkin, says the meetings set to begin January 26 in Moscow are meant to revive the Geneva peace process which first began in 2012.
VITALY CHURKIN: (Speaking Russian) (Through interpreter) Those who decide not to take part in this event will lose their standing in the entire negotiation process.
KELEMEN: That warning on the floor of the Security Council won't work with the Syrian opposition, says their advisor, Afshar.
AFSHAR: Well, that's typical Russian behavior, which is to try and bully and threaten people. But the reality is the Russians aren't in a position to decide who will take part in future negotiations. And this has been the whole problem with their approach.
KELEMEN: He says the Russian job has always been to deliver the regime to negotiating table. But the Syrian government only wants to talk about fighting terrorism, not discuss a political transition. So international diplomats - even U.N. envoy, Staffan de Mistura - aren't raising expectations about this month's meeting in Moscow.
STAFFAN DE MISTURA: We are hoping, more than expecting, that it will be a success.
KELEMEN: De Mistura describes Syria as the largest humanitarian crisis since the Second World War, and he's been meeting U.S. and Russian officials and many others to find ways to resolve this.
DE MISTURA: They all agree that we need to do something to avoid that the Syrian conflict goes into a back burner and that movement towards some type of political solutions should take place this year.
KELEMEN: That optimism is not shared by Professor Jouejati, who points out that the U.N. envoy has had trouble getting the warring sides to agree to a temporary truce in the city of Aleppo. He says that's because Assad thinks he's winning, and the U.S. plans to train and equip 5,000 moderate rebels a year won't help level the playing field.
JOUEJATI: De Mistura has a lot of energy and a lot of good will, but I think the realities on the ground are quite difficult.
KELEMEN: And there are other complicating factors. The rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic state and the U.S.-led airstrikes against that group, both in Syria and Iraq, now top the U.S. agenda. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
The nation's legal debate over same-sex marriage appears to be headed for a resolution. Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it will hear arguments and cases challenging gay marriage bans in four states - Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee. Same-sex marriage is legal in 36 states and the District of Columbia. The High Court's decision will determine whether same-sex couples have the right to marry all over the country. NPR's Richard Gonzales reports.
RICHARD GONZALES, BYLINE: The justices will consider two basic questions - do same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, and do states with gay marriage bans have to recognize such marriages performed elsewhere? That last question is at the heart of the case brought by three same-sex couples in Tennessee. For example, Thomas Kostura married his husband, Ijpe DeKoe, in New York three years ago, just before DeKoe, an army sergeant, was deployed to Afghanistan. Upon his return, DeKoe was stationed at a military base in Tennessee, a state that does not recognize his marriage. So they filed suit. Kostura says he hopes to have his marriage validated.
THOMAS KOSTURA: That's important, especially for a lot of people growing up - in case they're in households that don't support them - to know that there is a community out there that will support them in who they are and who they love.
GONZALES: Activists on both sides of the argument, for and against same-sex marriage, cheered the news. Opponents of same-sex marriage have been eager for the high court to weigh in. They hope the justices will reverse the domino-like court rulings that have legalized same-sex marriage in states now covering 70 percent of the country. They say lower court rulings have robbed the millions of voters who supported state bans on gay marriage. Jim Campbell, a senior legal counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom.
JIM CAMPBELL: The question before the Supreme Court is are the people free to affirm marriage as a union of the man and a woman, or does the Constitution take the issue of marriage away from the people and require all states to redefine marriage?
GONZALES: For supporters of same-sex marriage, the pending court hearing's a culmination of what they say is a civil rights issue that began when Massachusetts first legalized such marriages in 2003. It's a chance for the court to say that gays and lesbians who want to get married have equal protection, as guaranteed by the 14th amendment. Evan Wolfson is founder and president of Freedom to Marry.
EVAN WOLFSON: We now believe on the strength of having won the freedom to marry in about two-thirds of the country. And now, having public support at about 59 percent or more nationwide, we can confidently say to the court, whatever they can feel, America is ready for the freedom to marry, and it's time for the Supreme Court to bring the country all together on the right side of history.
GONZALES: The Supreme Court will depart from its tradition of holding a one-hour hearing, extending the time allotted to two-and-a-half hours in a session scheduled for April. Its decision is expected by June. Attorney General Eric Holder issued a statement saying the Obama administration will file friend-of-court briefs supporting the right of same-sex couples to wed nationwide. Richard Gonzales, NPR news.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Yesterday, the Justice Department severely limited what's known as civil asset forfeiture. It's a program that essentially allowed police officers to seize the money or property of a suspected criminal. Pull over a drug dealer, grab the piles of cash in the trunk, keep the cash, hurt the drug trade - that was the idea. In practice, the policy was abused, almost as soon as it went into effect more than 30 years ago. Billions of dollars were seized. Back in September, Robert O'Harrow and a team at the Washington Post uncovered tens of thousands of cases like this one.
ROBERT O'HARROW: Mandrel Stuart, who was a barbecue restaurant owner out in Stanton, Virginia - he was driving to buy supplies and equipment. He had a wad of cash - $17,500 in cash. He was pulled over and detained, had all his money taken and then was set free without any charges being filed. In case after case, we found people, often times people of color, who are being stopped by police on the highway, many of them people who live their lives in what's known as cash economy. They don't have bank accounts. They don't have credit cards. A lot of those people had their money just taken, and the onus was on them to then go fight the federal government, which meant hiring a lawyer who might typically have cost more than the money that was seized. Therefore, they were stuck.
RATH: Can you explain why police can seize and keep assets from suspects? And underscoring again, we're talking about suspects, not convicts.
O'HARROW: The law that allows this is called a civil asset forfeiture law, and it enables authorities to take property or cash from somebody under civil law. And in those cases, it's the item - the thing that's charged with some relationship to crime, not the person.
RATH: And because these are civil actions against inanimate objects, you have these bizarre court documents with titles like United States versus a pile of cash, basically, or some stolen goods or things like that.
O'HARROW: It's a strange, upside-down system that subverts our notions of due process. In this case, when the money or cash is taken, it's, in effect, guilty until proven innocent.
RATH: So what was the intent of it? What was it meant to do, and how to get to where it is now?
O'HARROW: It's a legacy of the war on drugs. It allowed federal agencies to partner with the local and state authorities. Locals could make a seizure and then the federals would process it under federal law. And interestingly enough, what came next was September 11, 2001 and the terrible terror attacks. In reaction to that, the Justice Department and the new Department of Homeland Security asked local and state police to be the eyes and ears of security across the land, and it's at that point where you see a new blossoming of civil seizures pushing the dollar value of these seizures to new heights.
RATH: Now, what happened with the Justice Department action on Friday didn't actually put a full stop to this kind of asset seizure.
O'HARROW: It's very important to note, in fact, that civil asset forfeiture is an exceedingly powerful and legitimate tool for law enforcement if used properly with great restraint. So the attorney general boxed out a huge portion of seizures that have shown to be a source of abuse, but he allowed civil seizures in cases where federal authorities are intimately involved. And I think the idea there is that there's clear oversight, and they will have boots on the ground to be able to establish whether a crime has really occurred.
RATH: Robert O'Harrow is an investigative reporter with the Washington Post. Robert, thanks very much.
O'HARROW: Thank you.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Almost as soon as the Oscar nominations were announced this week, many people were pointing out an uncomfortable fact. Every director nominated is a white male. All the nominees for lead and supporting actor are white.
DEBORAH SATHE: This felt like a real shame.
RATH: That's Deborah Sathe, head of talent development and production at the British nonprofit Film London.
SATHE: Dare I say it, I was really gutted for the industry. And I was really gutted personally because I feel there have been some extraordinary films that could have been in there.
RATH: She heads Film London's Microwave project, a program that provides mentorship and training to help filmmakers make their first feature on tiny budgets. Twelve film projects are selected out of more than 100. The goal is to ensure that half of the filmmakers that end up on that long list are racial or ethnic minorities. These teams go through an intensive boot camp to sharpen their skills, and in the end, two films are commissioned.
SATHE: We wanted to have a very aggressive drive to enable our long-lists to reflect the make-up of London. And both in my experience in television and in film, the talent pool often are those who are in the know. And I felt that what we needed to do, in order to broaden Microwave's reach, was to run a targeted recruitment campaign across London. And so we made sure we were talking to all the organizations that had a foothold in communities that sometimes we don't see reflected in the cinema. And we use social media. We used theater outreach groups. And all the sessions that we ran, all the roadshows, all the master classes were full, and it was really, really exciting.
RATH: Last year, a successful film came out of the project. It was called "Lilting."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LILTING")
ANDREW LEUNG: (As Kai) If only she liked you, then it's a lot easier.
CHENG PEI-PEI: (As Junn) (Foreign language spoken).
NAOMI CHRISTIE: (As Vann) He was my only child.
BEN WHISHAW: (As Richard) He was my life.
RATH: Can you tell us about that film?
SATHE: Hong Khaou, who is an extraordinary storyteller, is a London-based filmmaker. It's just been nominated for a British Academy Film Television award as the most outstanding debut, and it has sold across the world. And it is an incredible achievement, considering his budget was under 150,000 pounds.
RATH: Wow, so you've set a goal to get 50 percent filmmakers from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, and you've reached that goal with 12 long-listed films.
SATHE: Yes.
RATH: What're you aiming for beyond that?
SATHE: Sometimes, I think, the greater public think that it is an earnest endeavor, which I don't agree with. I think that we have to look at the changing face of the audience and how we enable and grow a new audience to champion television and film. That doesn't mean to say we ignore the film fan that exists there already, but I think that film fan is able to consume stories from everywhere. And if you look, particularly in London, in our big urban centers, the most quickly growing population is a diverse one.
RATH: So if the push is successful, what would be your measure of success? What would you like to see the Oscar nominees look like in 2025 or 2030?
SATHE: I would love to see them champion extraordinary innovation and bravery and performance, as well as the traditional kind of big hitters. And I feel like, as an industry, in order to survive, we have to innovate. And sometimes that feels terribly scary, but ultimately, it will strengthen our industry in the long run.
RATH: Deborah Sathe runs Film London's Microwave project. Deborah, thanks very much.
SATHE: My pleasure.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
And now to England and the dramatic conclusion of the BDO World Darts Championship on Sunday. Pro dart player Scott Mitchell - his friends and fans call him Scotty Dog - was crowned champion. He's a farmer from the New Forest, about two hours west of London. Scotty Dog's passion for darts blossomed - where else? - at the local pub.
SCOTT MITCHELL: It's a little country pub. It's just, you know, in the middle of nowhere. It was fabulous.
RATH: Twenty-seven years ago, a friend's dart team was short a player. They asked Mitchell to step in.
MITCHELL: They said would you have a throw at the darts? I said, well, yeah, OK, but I'm not very good. So I picked the darts up. And I threw three darts, and they all hit the board in the scoring area. And he said, that's good enough. You're on my team tomorrow night.
RATH: Fast-forward past decades of honing his skills to the present day. Scotty Dog is a contender for the BDO World Darts Championship.
MITCHELL: You go from a little pub that's crammed on a Monday night to play darts and, you know, log fire roaring in the corner, to 1,500 people in an auditorium-type place, onstage with cameras thrust in your face. It was quite nerve-racking being watched by about three-and-a-half million on TV.
RATH: In his world, the championship is a huge deal.
MITCHELL: It's the place in world darts. It's where everybody wants to play, you know, like an American football player wants to play at the Super Bowl.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: Sixteen.
RATH: In Sunday's final, Mitchell went head-to-head against famed three-time world champion, Martin Adams.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR: Now we're into a deciding 13th set.
RATH: Mitchell is just a leg away from the title, and he starts off really well.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR: What a start, what a start - magnificent.
(APPLAUSE)
MITCHELL: You're now thinking the dream could come true.
RATH: But his opponent, Martin Adams, is trailing right behind until...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR: It's bull's-eye for a 121.
RATH: Adams misses the bull's-eye. Scotty Dog moves in. To win, all he needs is just one dart to hit the tiny double ring on the top edge of the target. He's got to be careful.
MITCHELL: Now, you could mess this up. With the nose, you could mess this up. So my first dart I threw off the top of the board to get like a marker, to get a feel of where I had to throw the second dart.
RATH: He then adjusts his aim slightly. He needs just one dart to win.
MITCHELL: So in my head, I'm then just thinking don't mess this up.
RATH: Like slow motion, Mitchell raises his black and pink dart and throws it.
MITCHELL: Soon as it left my hand, I knew it was in. It hadn't even hit the board, and I knew that it was in.
(APPLAUSE)
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR: The 22nd and the 2015 Lakeside World Darts Champion is Scott Mitchell.
UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR: Every dog has his day. And for Scotty Dog Mitchell, that day is today.
MITCHELL: I've watched the Lakeside Darts World Championship since I was a child - a small - 8 or 10 years old - and dreamt of being there to play. And I dreamt that I would win it one day. Just an old farmer's kid - I'm just a big kid from this little tiny village on the edge of the New Forest.
RATH: Scotty Dog Mitchell, 2015 BDO World Darts champion.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
In the border town of Calexico, California, the FBI has launched a federal investigation into the police department. Jill Replogle has been reporting on the investigation for member station KPBS.
JILL REPLOGLE: The new police chief, who started in October, says that when he got there, there was no real police work going on. He says the investigations unit didn't have any investigations going on. He found internal investigations scattered all over the place - a safe, in desk drawers, in somebody's car. He found that the department had used a lot of money from seized assets to buy spy equipment like spy glasses and, you know, lapel cameras, things like that. And then when they're looking through the footage, they find that they're spying on City Council members. They also found that they had bought a bunch of equipment to break into buildings and cars, but they have no search warrants for those searches.
RATH: Now, that new police chief, Michael Bostic, who took over in October after his predecessor was fired - some of the most damning public allegations have actually come from him. Here he is.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MICHAEL BOSTIC: They're recording City Council members, and they're using it for extortion. I can say that. That's just true. That's what they were doing.
RATH: Jill, it was an amazing moment. The police chief actually broke down and cried at one point he was so disturbed by the corruption allegations. And this guy's a 34-year veteran of the LAPD.
REPLOGLE: He says he is extremely embarrassed by the kinds of things that his cops have been up to. And he's gotten complaints from all sectors of society. I should mention that the FBI will only say that it's alleged criminal conduct by officers while on duty, so the FBI has not said exactly what they're looking into. But the chief has been very vocal about things that he's found wrong with the department.
RATH: And for being vocal, he's been sued by the police union, right?
REPLOGLE: He's being sued by the police union for things that he's said in press conferences that they think is slander.
RATH: So what does Bostic say he's going to do to clean up the department?
REPLOGLE: Well, he's already done a lot. There were four cops put on administrative leave. Two have since been fired. He completely replaced the investigations unit. And he says he's really trying to support the good cops, who he thinks have been intimidated in the past into not doing their job. And so he's trying to make sure that they can do their job.
RATH: Jill, you've been in Calexico reporting on this. How do people there view the police department and the investigation that's going on?
REPLOGLE: It's an interesting mix. It's a very small town, and so a lot of people grew up with, you know, some of the cops that are being investigated. And some people grew up with City Council members that have been sort of pushing for the investigation, so it's a very sort of divided opinion on what's going on. And a lot of people just don't believe that there's real serious criminal activity going on. Others say it was high time for a cleanup. They've been bullied by cops. They've had friends who have been bullied or who have had their investigations go nowhere, and they say, you know, it's about time.
RATH: Jill Replogle has been reporting on the FBI investigation of the police department in Calexico, California. Jill, thank you.
REPLOGLE: Thanks for having me.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
For the past year, we've brought you career triumphs big and small. This weekend, our series My Big Break turns 1-year-old. And our own producer, Daniel Hajek, is here to talk about the series. Hi, Danny.
DANIEL HAJEK, BYLINE: Hey, Arun.
RATH: So Danny, over the last year, we've had you regale us with stories about some of the wild characters that you've had the chance to meet. What are some of your favorites?
HAJEK: Well, I interviewed Danny Trejo, the actor in movies like "Machete" and...
RATH: Yeah.
HAJEK: ..."From Dusk Till Dawn," and actually met him at his house. He lives here in Southern California. And we talked for, like, an hour-and-half about his back story. It involves, as he'll tell you, you know, being in every prison in the state of California. So after this long interview, he wants to take me on a tour of his house. And so here's...
RATH: And you don't say no to Danny Trejo.
HAJEK: No, no. You know, he's this character - he's this tough and rugged guy in these movies. And you should know that he's a really big fan of John Wayne. And if you ever go to his house, you'll see these pictures of John Wayne on the wall. And so anyways, we go outside and his dog Cash runs up to him. And this is what he says to his dog.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
DANNY TREJO: Watch this, watch this - Cash, do you like John Wayne? Hey, do you like John Wayne? Tell me if you like John Wayne.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOG BARKING)
TREJO: (Laughter) Come on.
HAJEK: So we end up going into his garage, where he has these classic cars - a lowrider pickup truck, there's a motorcycle and this really awesome polished, black 1976 Cadillac Seville.
TREJO: This was the car that the doctors and the lawyers in the 1960s - they all got it because this was the car that said, you made it. This is mint - absolute mint condition.
HAJEK: And I think it had hydraulics on it, too.
RATH: Nice, he sounds awfully excited.
HAJEK: Yeah.
RATH: You also met with - without question - my favorite of the Golden Girls.
HAJEK: Yeah, Betty White. And I was in her dressing room. And she wasn't there yet, so I was getting my microphone out and my recorder. And then all of a sudden, I hear the sound of these little heels clicking down the hallway. And I look up and there she is, you know, Betty White. And you never really know how these initial interactions are going to go. But she offered me some Twizzlers and a Diet Coke, and she was just so welcoming and really nice, so it was great.
RATH: That's nice. Betty White was just the way you'd want her to be.
HAJEK: Exactly.
RATH: So comedian Ken Jeong was here at NPR West, sharing his big break - going from medical doctor to an actor. And you got a little serenade out of the deal.
HAJEK: Yeah, I found out that back in his high school days, he sang Lionel Richie's "Three Times A Lady" at his talent show. And so I asked him to sing it for me in studio.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
KEN JEONG: Danny, (singing) you're once, twice, three times a lady. And I love you. Danny, you're once...
HAJEK: And it was so hard not to laugh. And you can hear we both just lose it.
RATH: He likes the tremolo there, doesn't he? (Laughter).
HAJEK: He's a good singer.
RATH: So the behind-the-scenes stories with celebrities are great. But I've got a say, my favorites are the ones who are the people who are not the celebrities.
HAJEK: Yeah, I mean, we've talked with a National Geographic explorer, we've talked with an ER doctor, the inventors of the Post-it Note, a fashion designer, a former NBA player, so we even get some listeners who contribute. And it's just a really fun series to work on.
RATH: And we want more of those, so, people, please send us your big breaks. NPR's Daniel Hajek - our very own Daniel Hajek. Thank you, Danny.
RATH: Thanks, Arun.
RATH: So let's get back to our very first My Big Break that we aired last year. Washington Post photographer Bill O'Leary's story begins almost exactly 25 years ago, when Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry was arrested for possession and use of crack cocaine during an FBI sting. O'Leary, at the time, was just an intern at the Washington Post when he heard the breaking news.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
BILL O'LEARY: So a month into this internship, an editor comes running in and says there's a rumor that the mayor has been arrested. For this to be happening was a monstrous local story.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
O'LEARY: It's true - the mayor has been arrested. He's being held at the FBI Buzzard's Point center. And we are going to flood the zone. We're going to have people at every intersection and every corner of the building. And we're going to get the mayor when he comes out of that building. So they dispatch all of the heavy hitters off to their assignments. And there's two or three people left - just me and one of the older photographers who had been going through a divorce and had asked for light duty. So my boss looks at us and he says and you two guys - why don't you go out to his house, just in case we miss him?
It's now close to midnight. It's January. It's very cold and dark and quiet. My colleague takes the front of the house and I take the back. And sure enough, vehicle pulls up - SUV with smoked windows. And the door opens, and four men get out. And damn, there he is, there's Marion Barry. So I raise my camera, but before I can take a picture, this big, beefy FBI agent blocks me, puts his hand on my lens and starts pushing me back. At that moment, I hear a commotion. And at the end of the alley, a competitor - Joe Johns of Channel 4 News - he's arrived at the end of the alley. He's seeing that he's missing it, so he's taken off on foot. And he's yelling at the top of his lungs, Mr. Mayor, you know, what were you doing in that hotel room? Something like that.
Well, this alarms the FBI agent, who stops worrying about me and turns to intercept this new threat. At that instant, I get off this one picture - bam - with a punch flash, direct strobe, hideous in the middle of the night. So I get in the car and I go rushing back, go running into our dark room, close the door and lock it, begin the process. When I finally start to unwheel it from the spool, hold it up to a light box, and there it is. It's clear. It's sharp. It's properly exposed. And it's the mayor. It was our lead picture - an incredible scoop. Everyone wanted it. We got picked up by all the wires, all the magazines. It was - it was magic is the only way to describe it, I think. And that's what happened. That's - that was my big break.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RATH: That's photographer Bill O'Leary, our very first My Big Break segment that aired one year ago.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
For centuries, treaties have defined the relationship between Native American nations and the U.S. They reflect a history of many broken promises. Hansi Lo Wang, of NPR's Code Switch team, reports on a rare exhibit in Washington, D.C., that looks back at this history.
HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE: One of the first treaties between the U.S. and Native American nations was signed in 1794. It's on display now at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian - a movie poster-sized contract stitched together from pieces of parchment.
That's very big.
KEVIN GOVER: Literally, writ large.
WANG: Kevin Gover, a citizen of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, is the museum's director. He points to some notable names on the Treaty of Canandaigua, also known as the Pickering Treaty, between the U.S. and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, or the Six Nations, based in New York. There's the signature of Seneca Chief Cornplanter and President George Washington, who starts the treaty with the greeting.
GOVER: To all, to whom these presents shall come, whereas a treaty of peace and friendship between the United States.
WANG: The treaty secured an ally for the young U.S. government after the Revolutionary War and returned more than a million acres to the Haudenosaunee. Their territory has been cut down over the years, but more than two centuries later, the U.S. has kept one promise.
GOVER: Article 6 says that they will provide goods in the amount of $4,500, which shall be expended yearly forever.
WANG: Every year, those goods from the U.S. government include bolts of cloth to distribute to tribal citizens. Haudenosaunee leaders have said that cloth is more important than money because it's a way to remind the U.S. of the treaty terms, large and small. At least seven other original paper treaties will be featured in the museum exhibit, which will rotate about every six months. For now, the ones not on display are kept at the National Archives, where one almost forgotten treaty is stored underground.
JIM ZEENDER: We're looking at one of the unratified California treaties.
WANG: Well, it's smaller than I expected.
Jim Zeender, of the National Archives, pulls out a treaty from 1852 that will be on display next fall. Its light-blue pages are signed without ratifying seals or ribbons, like 17 other unratified treaties signed by representatives of the U.S. government and Native American nations in California. Suzanne Shown Harjo, of the Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee Indian nations, curated the museum exhibit. She says many American Indians in California suffered without treaty protection.
SUZANNE SHOW HARJO: They were not only scattered from their lands and lots of people murdered during the gold rush, but they were erased from history.
WANG: California lawmakers pressured the U.S. Senate not to approve ratification for the treaties, which promised reservation land to the Native American nations. And there was one reason driving their decision, according to Harjo.
HARJO: Gold - the answer is always gold. And if it's not gold, it's silver. And if it's not silver, it's copper. And if it's not, go right through the metal chart (laughter).
WANG: Harjo says while many treaties resulted in tragedies, she hopes museum visitors will take away the full spin of this diplomatic history.
HARJO: People always think of broken treaties and the bad paper and the bad acts and that is our reality, but it didn't begin there. It began on an honorable footing.
WANG: And anyone who wants a strong footing in American history, Harjo adds, needs to understand the history of these treaties. The exhibit "Nation To Nation" runs at the National Museum of the American Indian until fall of 2018. Hansi Lo Wang, NPR News.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
New York Times columnist Roger Cohen's family history covers a lot of ground - literally. His ancestors lived in Lithuania. Then, starting with his grandparents, the moving began.
ROGER COHEN: My parents were born in South Africa, and they were immigrants in the UK, where I was born. And then when I was an infant, we went back to South Africa for a couple of years and then moved to Britain, where I mainly grew up. So in each of the past four generations, the family has moved - Lithuania, South Africa, London. I'm now an American citizen and consider New York to be home.
RATH: Cohen's new family memoir is called "The Girl From Human Street." The girl in that title is Cohen's mother, a focus for much of the book. She died in 1999, after a long battle with depression.
COHEN: My mother, shortly after we immigrated, immediately after my younger sister's birth, broke down. She had what was then called post-puerperal psychosis, now generally called postpartum depression. And she had insulin shock treatment - a treatment since completely discredited - this is in the late '50s in England - and electroshock treatment. It was only in researching the book that I finally was able to put dates and times on this.
And now I know, for example ,that on August 1, 1958, one day before my third birthday, she had this treatment. But she came back to the family after an intimate absence of a couple of years, and a great effort was put into preserving an appearance of normality. And I didn't - I was not aware - consciously aware - of what had happened to my mother until, in my late teens, she began to become mentally unstable again and was manic-depressive for the rest of her life - first tried to commit suicide when I was 22.
And I suppose a genesis of "The Girl From Human Street," Arun, was - it was a box in the attic. And in it were my mother's suicide notes. And my dad was a doctor. And there was a pretty detailed chronology of what had happened. And there was a family tree that he's obviously made in a moment of desperation with black dots next to every family member who had suffered from manic depression. There were more relatives with black dots than without them. And I began to think about how this family condition had been hidden within my own family. And then there was a wider story of how displacements with each generation and the trauma, if you like, of losing a home, of upheaval, of beginning again.
RATH: Can you talk about growing up in South Africa because you were in kind of an unusual position. You were a - sort of an English-Jewish family in South Africa and in kind of an interesting time.
COHEN: Yeah, well, my parents were South African Jews. They'd come from Lithuania. They grew up there. My dad came to England as a young doctor at the end of World War II and then went back. And he abhorred apartheid. He was actually the dean of the last black house within the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. And then he saw how, as a result of apartheid, black students were no longer able to attend. And that, for him, was the last straw.
I lived there as an infant and then would go back every year. And there was always this faint menace in the horizon. The blacks were going to rise up and sweep away these beautiful homes where I stayed in Johannesburg. And I remember cousins saying to me, enjoy the swimming pool. Next year, they'll be red with blood. And I didn't quite get it. You know, sometimes I would sit on the wrong bench or wander into the wrong place because I was part of South Africa, but I wasn't from there.
And, of course, one of the particularities of apartheid was that blacks were banished, except in the most intimate of settings - the home, the family. And more or less every white family had black staff. And I would wonder why these utensils were set apart, and I would see them going to sleep in these little concrete outhouses with their baleful, single windows. So there was this combination of intimacy, of closeness and of threat, fear, menace, always out there. And it gave me a profound abhorrence of this evil.
You know, I spent a lot of time the Middle East. I don't think Israel practices apartheid. Some people, when it comes to Palestinians - some people use that phrase. But there are echoes. You know, when you're in the West Bank, and you're on the road, and it says only for Jews, only for settlers, only for Israelis and not for Palestinians, those echoes are there. And it's one of the reasons why I'm a Zionist who believes very strongly that Zionism must involve two states for two peoples.
RATH: You and your family had been through various upheavals, various new homes. And you come to America. Now, America is a place, we like to think - where it's easier to assimilate than a lot of other places in the world.
COHEN: It is easy, Arun. That's why love it. That's why I became an American citizen. You can't imagine what a relief it was, as a Jew, to arrive in New York City. And the bright stars, I think I put in the book, of immigration, of moving on, is new opportunity. And its black sun is loss - the loss of a home, the loss of a country, the loss of a community. And for some people, the project of beginning again is overwhelming. It's too much. That was the case for my mother. Even in America, for me, it's hard. But even the most open of European societies has nothing like the openness of the United States, which is a country that is still, in my view, endlessly enriched by immigration.
RATH: Roger Cohen is a columnist for the New York Times. His new memoir is called "The Girl From Human Street." Roger Cohen, real pleasure speaking with you. Thank you.
COHEN: Thank you, Arun.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Meanwhile, in London, some history is actually fading away. Many of the items in the British Library's vast collection of recorded sound are in danger of disappearing. Some just physically won't last much longer. Others are on long-dead formats. Here's one they have saved. It's one of the very few recordings of Florence Nightingale.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE: I hope my voice may perpetuate the great work of my life.
RATH: OK. It's hard to understand but pretty good for 1890. That's taken from an Edison wax cylinder. The British Library is currently asking for donations to help raise the $60 million it'll take to digitally preserve their collection. Will Prentice is one of the people tasked with saving these recordings.
WILL PRENTICE: We only have a finite window of opportunity in which to preserve them. That's actually about 15 years, which seems like a long time, but we have over six million sound recordings in the British Library. We know that to work at our current rate, it'll take us 48 years to digitize everything.
RATH: And there's a ton of what people have called dead media - you know, abandoned formats like, more recently, the eight-track or the laser disk. Can you talk about the range of dead media you're dealing with?
PRENTICE: Yeah, we have over 40 different audio formats alone. So everything from tin foils and wax cylinders in the early days and postwar dictation formats like the Dictabelts and those kinds of strange, obscure things.
RATH: I want to hear an example of the kind of thing that is in the archives. This is the voice of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. This is a recording of him reading "The Charge Of The Light Brigade." It's pretty scratchy, so I'll remind listeners - the beginning of the poem is half a league, half a league, half a league onward. All in the valley of death rode the 600.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ALFRED TENNYSON: Half a league, half a league, half a league onward. All in the valley of death rode the 600.
RATH: Amazing to hear his voice - although honestly, I felt a little bit let down by his reading.
(LAUGHTER)
PRENTICE: Well, it's a fascinating story. Your listeners may know about the Crimean war in the 1850s - the battles of Balaclava and so on, which "The Charge Of The Light Brigade" poem was written about. In about 1890 in London, there was a scandal that the veteran soldiers of that battle had been left destitute and were, in many cases, living homeless on the street. This is before anyone knew of posttraumatic stress disorder, I guess.
A campaign was launched to raise money for these guys. And Colonel Gouraud, who was Edison's ambassador, if you like, in the UK, spotted this is as an opportunity to publicize the phonogram. So what he did was he went to find eminent celebrities of the day who could somehow support this campaign. And he chose Florence Nightingale - the Lady with the Lamp - and he chose Lord Tennyson, who'd written this poem. He visited Tennyson's home on the Isle of Wight, and persuaded him to record this poem.
RATH: There's so much fantastic stuff. We heard Florence Nightingale, Tennyson. You can hear James Joyce reading from Ulysses. But my favorite is actually - this is the great George Bernard Shaw speaking directly to us to make sure we get the speed of the turntable right.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: If what you hear is very disappointing, and you feel, instinctively, that must be a horrid man, you may be quite sure the speed is wrong. Slow it down until you feel that you are listening to an amiable old gentleman of '71 with a rather pleasant Irish voice, saying, that is me.
(LAUGHTER)
PRENTICE: That's lovely.
RATH: Isn't that great? What's it like to discover something like that?
PRENTICE: It can be really exciting. It's very much like pulling up treasure from the ocean bed or something. You can often stick on a disk with nothing written on the label or very little information and digitize it and find that there's something absolutely incredible on the other end of it.
RATH: So what've been your favorites? What would've been your most thrilling moments going through these recordings?
PRENTICE: Well it's - I've been here 15 years, and I've been finding new things at every turn, really. So in the last few weeks alone, I can tell you we've found some plays of Noel Coward. We found a recording of the opening night of one of his plays - Peace in our Time - where he, at the audience's behest, goes up onto stage and gives a little speech to the actors. And that's a lovely little flavor of what a night at the theater was like in London after the Second World War.
RATH: Wow. So let's go out with that Noel Coward recording. But before we do, Will Prentice, audio conversation specialist for the British Library, thanks so much. This was great.
PRENTICE: My pleasure.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
NOEL COWARD: It is a convention of the theater that the author always thanks the cast. But my feelings at the moment about this cast are far from conventional. I would like to say that, in my opinion, that this company have given a performance in the highest tradition of English acting.
(APPLAUSE)
RATH: You can go to our website to sample a few of the other amazing recordings. That's at npr.org.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
We're going to take you now to place where people live, work, play, do everything in one building, all under the same roof. It's not a prison. It's Whittier, Alaska. Over 200 people live in the sleepy town tucked between picturesque mountains on the west side of Prince William Sound. And almost all of them live in a 14-story building that looks like an aging hotel - the Begich Towers. It's actually a former Army barracks - a Cold War relic. Writer Erin Sheehy and photographer Reed Young visited Whittier for the California Sunday Magazine. When they first stepped foot inside Begich Towers, Sheehy says it felt like the halls of her high school.
ERIN SHEEHY: There were bulletin boards along the hallway entrance - its concrete blocks that look like cinderblock, and they were all painted pale yellow.
RATH: The post office is near the entrance. Down the hall, you'll find the police station.
SHEEHY: It did remind me of, you know, my principal's office.
RATH: Whittier is remote. Young says you can get to the town by sea or take a long, one-way, one-lane tunnel through the mountains.
REED YOUNG: So it's still a fairly inaccessible town. Plus, at night, they close the tunnel completely.
RATH: Then there's the weather. The 60-mile-per-hour winter winds are brutal. That's why, in Begich Towers, residents have everything they need, all in one place.
SHEEHY: There's a laundromat, a little market.
YOUNG: And there's a convenience store. There is a health clinic that is not considered a hospital, but they can do some minor things there.
SHEEHY: There's a church in the basement.
RATH: One resident they met, June Miller, owns a bed-and-breakfast on the top two floors.
YOUNG: She prides herself on having the fanciest and prettiest, best interior design condos for rent in the whole town.
RATH: In Young's photo, she's in front of a window with binoculars, staring at the snow-covered mountains.
SHEEHY: She outfitted all of the bed-and-breakfasts with binoculars, which most people in town, particularly on the harbor side of the building, seemed to have binoculars.
YOUNG: A lot of people keep them there to watch whales breaching and mountain goats grazing and things like that. But June always told us that these are basically for finding out if your husband's at the bar. So we love that part.
RATH: Downstairs, at the Kozy Korner grocery store, employee Gary Carr, an older man with big denim overalls and a long, white beard, sits behind a computer. Surrounded by shelves stocked with food, it looks like he's waiting out the zombie apocalypse.
SHEEHY: When we were setting up our portrait, he said, oh, man, maybe I should save my beard. And this guy who was in the store with him was, like, no, man, they want that Alaska swag, you know? They want that real Alaska. So people were very aware of how interesting their town was to outsiders.
RATH: But for those like Erika Thompson, a teacher who lives in Begich Towers - she says life is pretty normal.
ERIKA THOMPSON: For me, it's just home. For the most part, you know everybody. It's a community under one roof. We have everything we need.
RATH: Thompson teaches at the school behind the tower. She's lived there for five years now. She says everyone has a story of how they ended up in Whittier.
THOMPSON: Some people love it because it can be really social. And some people love it because they can be reclusive.
RATH: Young and Sheehy's two-week reporting trip gave them a new perspective on their own hometowns.
YOUNG: The views were just unreal. You have this bay and then these giant mountains. It's hard to imagine that people get to wake up to that every day. It was incredible.
SHEEHY: Coming back to New York, I see the ways that all of us compromise things. And for a lot of people in Whittier, it makes more sense to be there than somewhere down here.
RATH: Writer Erin Sheehy and photographer Reed Young. Their report, "Town Hall," is featured in the California Sunday Magazine. Check out Young's photos at npr.org. This is NPR News.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
You're tuned to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR West. I'm Arun Rath. It's been a year now since we started our series My Big Break, bringing you stories of career-changing moments big and small. The LA-based band Fitz and the Tantrums has been called a genre-smashing group, blending retro soul and R&B with indie pop. In the six years since the band formed, they've had two singles at the top of Billboard's Alternative Songs chart and one that's cracked the Hot 100. Fitz the Tantrums got their start in 2008. Vocalist Noelle Scaggs was invited to sing at a rehearsal organized by the band's founder, Michael "Fitz" Fitzpatrick.
MICHAEL FITZPATRICK: That was the crazy thing - is that this collective of six people had never played together as one unit before. And we played that first song, "Breaking The Chains Of Love."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BREAKING THE CHAINS OF LOVE")
FITZPATRICK: From the first time we played it, it sounded like we had been playing together for years.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BREAKING THE CHAINS OF LOVE")
FITZ AND THE TANTRUMS: (Singing) I said, oh, what a lovely day. Breaking the chains of love. I'm hoping that you won't find a new love.
NOELLE SCAGGS: Our voices worked. You know, it really worked immediately. And I think, after that first song, we kind of looked at each other - all of those nerves all kind of went away.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BREAKING THE CHAINS OF LOVE")
FITZ AND THE TANTRUMS: (Singing) Oh, can't you see, can't you see that you're mine? 'Cause I know that, baby, you're mine.
FITZPATRICK: And that first song and that first rehearsal was so magical that I walked out of the room. I called the Hotel Cafe, which is this famous singer-songwriter place in LA, and came in the room and told everybody, we got a show next week. And everyone's like, um, we don't even have enough songs. And I go, well, we better get cracking. The week after that, we did our first show in front of 50 of our closest friends. And it was crazy. Like, we were such a young band. We had literally done, I think, six or seven shows, and we had actually done a performance on the LA-based KCRW station.
(SOUNDBITE OF KCRW BROADCAST)
UNIDENTIFIED RADIO HOST: Fitz and the Tantrums live on KCRW - great way to wrap up our workweek, you guys are blowing up the spot.
FITZPATRICK: Well, thank you. Thank you.
SCAGGS: Thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED RADIO HOST: Sounds terrific.
FITZPATRICK: And there was this tattoo artist visiting from New York. He heard us on the radio, flipped out, bought our little EP that we had done in my living room, put up by ourselves on the inter-webs, and went back to New York.
(SOUNDBITE OF MAROON 5 SONG, "THIS LOVE")
FITZPATRICK: Adam Levine from Maroon 5 was in New York, and that's his favorite tattoo artist. He goes to visit him for some work to be done on his sleeves, and he walks and the guy says, you got to here this new band, Fitz and the Tantrums. It's blowing my mind. I love it. Check it out. And so Adam proceeds to listen, starts tweeting about our music. We start having a little conversation with him via Twitter.
SCAGGS: Actually, I think I remember the tweeting situation with Adam Levine saying, you know, this band Fitz and the Tantrums is, like, my new thing. And I was, like, is this a drone? (Laughter) I was, like - or no, what do they call it?
FITZPATRICK: A bot. A bot.
SCAGGS: A robot or a bot or something? I was, like, you know, is this his real Twitter account, you know?
FITZPATRICK: And it was actually him.
SCAGGS: It was actually him.
FITZPATRICK: A week later, he was sitting front row at this tiny little club show that we were doing. And a week after that, we got an offer to open up for Maroon 5 on their big East Coast college tour.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE WALKER")
SCAGGS: I think maybe Adam Levine heard that there was something really for thinking about the approach that we were going for.
FITZPATRICK: And that was just this crazy, serendipitous moment - one of many that propelled this band forward. And we kind of have never stopped since then.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE WALKER")
FITZ AND THE TANTRUMS: (Singing) Oh, here we go, feel it in my soul, really need it, need it so good. Got to feel it. Oh, it takes control. Really need it, need it.
FITZPATRICK: All of us have been in many different projects. There was just a different energy that came out of this from the get-go. Like, the universe was aligning. And that said, there was also an incredible amount of back-breaking work. Our success was kind of like success by a thousand paper cuts. You know it was just little by little by little by little.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MORE THAN JUST A DREAM")
FITZ AND THE TANTRUMS: (Singing) More than just a dream.
FITZPATRICK: I still, every show, peak out behind the curtain, and I'm surprised that anyone's there to see us.
SCAGGS: We feel blessed every day that we get to do what we do. That's the break.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MORE THAN JUST A DREAM")
RATH: Noelle Scaggs and Michael Fitzpatrick from the band Fitz and the Tantrums. Their latest album is "More Than Just A Dream." You don't have to be discovered by a tattoo artist to have a big break. Send us your story - mybigbreak@npr.org - or share on Twitter, using the hashtag #NPRbigbreak. And you can see all of the stories from the past year at npr.org/mybigbreak.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR West. I'm Arun Rath. At the University of Virginia, it's a new era for the school's fraternities. After Rolling Stone Magazine reported, then hedged on, a story of a gang-rape at a frat house, UVA administrators announced new rules for parties. From member station WVTF, Sandy Hausman reports.
SANDY HAUSMAN, BYLINE: Fraternities have endured their share of bad press - stories of hazing incidents that ended with injuries or death. And popular media have rarely been kind to the Greek scene. Here's the 1978 hit film "Animal House."
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "ANIMAL HOUSE")
JOHN VERNON: (As Vernon Wormer) One more slip-up, one more mistake, and this fraternity of yours has had it.
HAUSMAN: That, of course, was comedy, but what's been going on at the University of Virginia is serious. Last semester, Rolling Stone Magazine put UVA at the epicenter of national concerns about sexual assault on campus. It offered a graphic description of how a young woman was plied with alcoholic punch and raped by seven men at Phi Kappa Psi. The magazine later admitted discrepancies in its story. And police cleared Phi Psi of wrongdoing. But UVA pressed ahead with reforming fraternity rules.
JALEN ROSS: None of this was ever about one case. It was about every case.
HAUSMAN: Speaking before registration for rush week, student council president Jalen Ross said sexual assault on campus is still a concern.
ROSS: This is a problem everywhere. But it hadn't really gotten, I think, the sort of attention that it deserved as the big part of our communities that it is.
HAUSMAN: So over the winter break, he and other student leaders came up with a series of recommendations for fraternities. The Inter-Fraternity Council, which represents 30 frats and about 1,700 members, argued against banning alcohol at fraternity functions. IFC president Tommy Reid.
TOMMY REID: If it's not a fraternity house, it's going to be in the parking lot behind the Taco Bell. If it's not there, it's going to be in the woods behind first-year dorms. Acceptance and management is a much more practical strategy and a much safer strategy than denial and shooting to eliminate.
HAUSMAN: Instead, fraternities agreed to serve beer in cans or bottles, to have wine poured in plain sight, to require mixed drinks be served by a licensed bartender and to ban trashcan punch - a mix of hard liquor with sweet, fruit-flavored drinks. Fraternity member Jack Carlin approves.
JACK CARLIN: You never know how much you're drinking with something like that. If it doesn't taste like there's alcohol in it, then I do think that's a good move.
HAUSMAN: The Inter-Fraternity Council also promised to have at least three brothers who are sober and lucid at its member parties, placing one at each spot where alcohol is served and another armed with a master key to every room at the stairs leading up to the sleeping areas. The University accepted those suggestions. And in an editorial, the New York Times praised them. But Julian Jackson, who heads the Pan-Hellenic Council, doesn't think they go far enough. His group represents eight small African-American fraternities and sororities who have written to the university's president asking for tough punishments in the event of a sexual assault or a hazing incident.
JULIAN JACKSON: Unfortunately, you have to make an example of somebody. But that's the route that you need to go when you have a history of, you know, fraternities and sororities operating with, really, impunity.
HAUSMAN: Mark Mann, a senior who dropped out of his fraternity before last year's scandal, doubts that houses where drinking has been a problem can effectively police themselves.
MARK MANN: It was very hard for students within the fraternity to actually kind of speak up against a lot of misogyny and a lot of destructive behavior, mostly revolved around drinking.
HAUSMAN: And two fraternities said they would not agree to the new rules since changes were prompted by a story that wasn't true. Faced with the prospect of missing out on rush, they relented. Meanwhile, rush has begun.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Hey guys, I can take whoever's next.
HAUSMAN: And despite the bad press, nearly 1,000 freshmen signed up - about the same number as last year. They'll spend the next two weeks visiting fraternities, deciding whether Greek life is for them and waiting for an invitation to join. For NPR News, I'm Sandy Hausman in Charlottesville, Virginia.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
This past week, over 2,000 mental health workers for the HMO health care giant Kaiser Permanente, here in California, went on strike.
(SOUNDBITE OF STRIKE)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: What's this about?
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: Patient care.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: When do we want it?
UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: Now.
RATH: The strike was organized by the National Union of Healthcare Workers. The union says Kaiser patients have been the victims of, quote, "chronic failure to provide its members with timely, quality mental health care."
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: I'm also talking about a 24-year-old Hispanic male who's had a psychotic break, in college, schizophrenic, and the best that I can say is five to six weeks.
RATH: One-hundred-fifty or so Kaiser employees picketed the Woodland Hills Medical Center in the San Fernando Valley on Thursday. One was Deborah Silverman, a therapist. In her eyes, the biggest problem at Kaiser right now is understaffing. She said there are so many patients waiting to see therapists that Kaiser sends new patients to see her even if she's already overbooked.
DEBORAH SILVERMAN: So I had three days over a two-week period where I had four people that I didn't know. So that's 12 new people and I have to put them someplace. And I didn't have any appointments for at least three weeks. So that's a huge emotional cost to me that I have 12 people that I either have to try to find someone else who has an open slot, which means the person has to switch, or, you know, then people have to wait. And they've come to see you and it makes you feel, you know, it really bumps up against our ethical standards.
RATH: Silverman said switching therapists often makes it difficult to establish a bond and make progress. John Nelson, Kaiser's vice president of government relations, had this to say about the union's allegations.
JOHN NELSON: Kaiser Permanente delivers some of the highest-quality mental health care in California and in the country. That said, we absolutely want to get better, and, really, the only way we can do that is by working together. So we need our therapists and psychologists and others to be working with us and constructively on how to get better and not walking away from patients and being gone for seven days.
RATH: But it's not just the union saying there's a problem at Kaiser. In 2013, the state of California fined Kaiser $4 million, finding that some of these problems - like the long wait times and discouraging people from seeking costly individual therapy - violated federal and state laws about mental health care. April Dembosky, of member station KQED, has been following the story. She says even though Kaiser paid the fine last September, the union is still not happy.
APRIL DEMBOSKY: What the union is pointing out is - they're arguing that Kaiser has simply shifted resources. So that fine was directed mainly at initial visits. So people who called in for the first time saying they wanted to get an appointment, arguing that they had to wait an unreasonably long period of time. And so what the union is saying is, well, now you can call and you'll get that initial appointment in a reasonable period of time, but good luck with a follow-up appointment. They're saying people are still being made to wait two, four, six weeks. Kaiser, again, disagree with this characterization.
RATH: You know, April, it feels like, gosh, you know, for decades we've been having this debate in America about needing to provide more mental health care services to people and people to provide them quickly. How do you see what's happening here with Kaiser fitting into that debate?
DEMBOSKY: Well, it's interesting. I think what might be happening here is a result of some of those former advocacy campaigns that are aimed at reducing stigma around mental health services. So in the past, the fear was that people who had problems weren't coming forward because they didn't want to admit that they had a problem because they were afraid of being judged for having a problem. And so one theory is that some of that work around stigma has really worked, and people are coming forward. And so, in my reporting I'm seeing this come up in several other venues, not just at Kaiser.
The University of California system is undergoing a review of its mental health services right now. They've been finding that students who come in at the beginning of the semester asking for help with some depression and anxiety can't get seen until finals time, you know, when they're at a crisis. So this is something that is impacting not just Kaiser. It's certainly an issue that's coming up in other health care systems. And one other theory is that we're seeing a shortage of mental health professionals, that there aren't enough professionals being graduated from schools, not enough people completing the long licensing process that are needed to meet this demand.
RATH: April Dembosky of KQED, thank you.
DEMBOSKY: Thank you.
RATH: There's no sign that an agreement between Kaiser and the union is imminent, but Kaiser's mental health workers will be back on the job tomorrow.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR West. I'm Arun Rath. There has been some welcome good news in the fight against Ebola. The number of new cases in the worst affected countries has been declining, according to U.N. figures. In Guinea, one of those countries, schools that have been closed since March are set to reopen tomorrow, but there are still pockets of denial and resistance there about the virus. NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton is back from Guinea's capital, Conakry, where she first reported last year. Ofeibea, schools reopening sounds like a good sign. Do people there feel like the tide has turned?
OFEIBEA QUIST-ARCTON: In principle, yes. Schools reopening after more than six months being closed because of Ebola should be a good thing, but, of course, parents are worried because of continuing transmission, although, the number of cases is down. And if their children, for example, show signs of what might be malaria or flu or cholera, they're the same initial symptoms for Ebola. You know, you might have a sore throat, you might have heavy limbs, you might have a headache. So although parents are saying they're happy their kids are going back to school, they're still worried because Ebola is still real here in Guinea.
RATH: We saw Liberia go from chaos to dwindling numbers of Ebola cases. Experts are saying Sierra Leone may be turning a corner. It seems like we're hearing less though about Guinea.
QUIST-ARCTON: And indeed, here in Guinea, there is still resistance and denial as you said, Arun, in your introduction. And the prime minister has said that those who keep Ebola patients hidden at home, or those who try to conduct secret burials - because a dead body is equally toxic as somebody suffering from Ebola - that has to stop. That secret funerals of people who have died of Ebola has to stop. And they're threatening - the government is threatening to prosecute those who continue this.
RATH: So what else does the government need to do now?
QUIST-ARCTON: Well, they have launched a new campaign. In French it's zero Ebola en soixante jours - that is no Ebola cases within 60 days. It's been a year - a long year - of Ebola. And complacency might set in there saying to Guineans no, this is the moment where it's got to go to the community level. The imams, the religious Muslim leaders, church leaders who have got to galvanize you and tell you that Ebola is still here. Until we have zero cases of Ebola we can - we are a threat to ourselves and a threat to our neighboring countries, Syria Leone and Liberia.
RATH: Finally, what changes do you see from the last time you were in Guinea?
QUIST-ARCTON: I'll tell you, surprisingly, we were at this huge launch of this campaign yesterday. There were no buckets around, no buckets with chlorinated water, which I saw everywhere when I was last in Guinea, and people were even shaking hands. And yet, Guineans, Sierra Leoneans, and Liberians have been told not to touch. Instead, they usually salute by knocking elbows or by holding up their arms to their chest to say hello. We saw people shaking hands. I must say that shocked me.
RATH: NPR's Africa correspondent Ofeibea Quist-Arcton on the line from Guinea, Conakry. Thanks so much.
QUIST-ARCTON: Always a pleasure. Thank you.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Now, to Washington. On Tuesday night, President Obama will use the State of the Union address to lay out a series of tax changes, raising taxes on investment income, inherited money and big financial firms. The president will say that would enable Congress to lower some other taxes and pay for other programs as well. Joining us to talk about what to expect is NPR senior editor and correspondent Ron Elving. And, Ron, this is the first State of the Union address since the Republicans took control of the Senate. Is that going to make a big difference in the atmosphere?
RON ELVING: You know, it ought to make some. Those cheering sections that you see on television - Republicans on one side, Democrats on the other - the Republicans are going to have more voices in their chorus. They're going to have nine more senators, more than a dozen additional in the House, but, of course, most of that cheering you hear will probably not be coming from Republicans.
RATH: Well, we've been hearing about some of what the president is going to propose, and, surely, some of that is going to get some pushback.
ELVING: Yeah, it already has. And that's probably very much part of the president's plan. But, to begin, the president is going to talk about how the economy's doing better - 58 straight months of job growth in the private sector, unemployment rate down to just 5.6 percent. But then he's going to talk about how the middle class and, especially, working families are not seeing as much benefit from that improvement as the wealthy are.
RATH: It seems pretty uncontroversial, not much argument about that.
ELVING: Not about the existence of some inequality, but there's lots of argument about the causes and the cures. So the president's going to propose a number of ideas, such as two years of free tuition at community colleges. That alone would cost an estimated $60 billion over 10 years. And then the president's going to propose a big increase in the current tax credit for children of middle-class families - up from a thousand to $3,000 per child. And then there would also be tax breaks for two-income families and for people saving for retirement.
RATH: That sounds like that would be popular, but where does the money come from?
ELVING: Yes, well, there's the rub. The president will propose raising taxes for investment income, capital gains, where the top rate would go from about 24 percent to 28 percent on the very highest incomes. And he'd also go after what we call trust funds, where assets can appreciate tax-free until they're distributed. And, of course, that's been a great benefit for families of means, passing large amounts of money between generations.
RATH: And then there's a fee on the largest investment banks, as well, that's supposed to bring in billions over 10 years.
ELVING: Yes, that's right, continuing the theme. And overall, the president's plan is supposed to be revenue positive for the Treasury.
RATH: But, Ron, how can this president get that plan? You know, things like raising taxes on investments approved by a Republican Congress. Isn't that just dead on arrival?
ELVING: It's surely not going to get passed by this Congress in anything like the form that the president is proposing, but it isn't necessarily dead on arrival as a topic of discussion. The Republicans want to do something for working families, too. They're just going to disagree about what. And this makes the issue of, if you will, income inequality and the distribution of the benefits of the improving economy front and center as the new Congress sits down to business.
RATH: NPR senior editor and correspondent Ron Elving. Ron, thank you.
ELVING: Thank you, Arun.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
It's ALL THINGS CONSIDRED from NPR West. I'm Arun Rath.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Back up.
(SOUNDBITE OF FLASH-BANG GRENADE)
RATH: And that is the bang part of a flash-bang. It's a type of hand grenade used by the police and the military, but instead of shooting out deadly shrapnel, like a standard grenade, most of the flash-bang's explosive energy creates a blinding flash and a deafening boom.
JULIA ANGWIN: They were designed for hostage rescues because the idea is that in hostage rescue you want something that won't harm the hostages but will stun the hostage takers.
RATH: That's Julia Angwin. She's a senior reporter with ProPublica. She investigated the use of flash-bangs by police around the country. Angwin says the police, in some places, use flash-bangs routinely with little training and sometimes with horrifying results.
ANGWIN: What is surprising is that they're being used to serve really low-level search warrants. And when I say really low-level, I mean one instance I found was a grandmother who was selling beer and plates of food from her home without a license in Arkansas, which is a misdemeanor. In the Little Rock police stormed in and threw two flash-bang grenades into her home just to serve her with a search warrant to look for, you know, evidence of illegal activity. And they did confiscate several cases of beer.
RATH: And for a sense of how badly things can go wrong with these explosives, can you describe what happened with that police raid on a family in Georgia last year?
ANGWIN: So last year, a team in Habersham County, which is in northern Georgia, stormed into a house around 5 a.m. looking for what they thought was a meth dealer. And they threw one of these flash-bang grenades and it landed in a portable playpen where a 19-month-old baby was sleeping. It appears to have landed right next to his face. It blew off his nose, it opened up his chest, it tore open his lips and mouth. He' had eight reconstructive surgeries since then. He barely survived this event, and the police didn't find anything. There was no drugs. It was not the place where the suspect was living. And it was just the tragic example of how these are tools that could be used well, but when they're used badly, it can go very terribly wrong.
RATH: And, in that situation, was there any accounting for what happened? Was anybody held responsible?
ANGWIN: The grand jury that looked into that issue declined to indict the officers who threw it. They said that the raid had been sloppy and disorganized, but that it wasn't - it didn't rise to the level of what they considered something that was necessary to indict an officer.
RATH: Do we have a handle on the extent of the problem - how often flash-bangs cause serious injuries?
ANGWIN: Well, I looked hard to find out whether I could really quantify the scope of flash-bang injuries, and I found 50 people who were severely injured or killed in the past since 2000.
RATH: And that includes police officers.
ANGWIN: Yeah, including several police officers who had them explode when they were holding them. So we - I found about 50 - more than 50 people who had been injured, but I am positive that there are many more because many of the police departments that I looked into did not document injuries. There's no national reporting requirement that they report these burns. And, anecdotally, I heard from many officers that it happens all the time.
RATH: So what are the rules when it comes to police using flash-bangs?
ANGWIN: Well, there are no rules, really. Actually, each police officer can - and their department - can make the decision themselves about when to use a flash-bang. Some departments have voluntarily decided to put limits, so the New York Police Department actually doesn't really use them anymore. They put very strict limits on the use of flash-bangs after a woman was killed in a heart attack when they threw a flash-bang into her house about 10 years ago. But other departments that I wrote about, like, for instance, in Georgia and in Little Rock, were throwing them on almost every raid. And it's really up to the discretion of the department and whoever oversees that department, which is, like, the city council or the state officials.
RATH: You talked about the limitations on the number of them in New York City. Is there any move now to limit the use of these devices more broadly? Or are any police departments reevaluating the flash-bang?
ANGWIN: I haven't heard from other police departments about whether they're reevaluating use of flash-bangs. The problem is that with policing it's a very decentralized business. There are 18,000 police and law enforcement agencies in the United States, and there are no national standards for anything that they do, so they all get to make their own decisions on the use of these things.
RATH: Julia Angwin is a senior reporter with ProPublica. Her investigation into flash-bangs was co-published with The Atlantic. Julia, thanks very much.
ANGWIN: Thank you.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
It is a convoluted story, but it's a must-see for ballet lovers - "Swan Lake." One-hundred-twenty years ago this month, the version most often performed today premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia. NPR's Elizabeth Blair wondered why audiences still flock to it.
ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: Yes, there's the music.
(SOUNDBITE OF BALLET, "SWAN LAKE")
BLAIR: Thirty-two ballerinas moving lyrically in unison can be a marvel to watch. And for Vielda Milano and her seven-year-old daughter, Abigail, from New Jersey, the costumes are to die for.
VIELDA MILANO: They looked absolutely stunning.
ABIGAIL: Glittery and pink and silver.
BLAIR: They went to see the legendary Mariinksy ballet perform Swan Lake at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Tickets are expensive - up to $175 a pop. But the one-week run is nearly sold out.
(SOUNDBITE OF BALLET, "SWAN LAKE")
BLAIR: It's been said that dancing the lead in "Swan Lake" is like climbing Everest or playing Hamlet. The principal dances two roles, the black and the white swan. And both birds go through a lot, changing from swan to human, falling in love, getting tricked and jilted, duets, solos and at one point dancing the 32 fouettes, which is literally 32 whip-fast turns.
(SOUNDBITE OF BALLET, "SWAN LAKE")
BLAIR: For dance scholar Lynn Garafola, it's simple. "Swan Lake" has endured because when well executed, it's a gorgeous, dramatic story.
LYNN GARAFOLA: Something that begins at the beginning and ends at the end and goes through so many different states of mind and emotional moments that at the end, I really feel I've had an experience.
BLAIR: That's assuming you've made it to the end of the roughly three-hour performance and not fallen asleep.
MELODY DATZ HANSEN: Everybody that I took to "Swan Lake" who was not a diehard ballet fan already was just bored to tears.
BLAIR: Melody Datz Hansen is a dance critic in Seattle. She is passionate about all kinds of dance. She appreciates "Swan Lake" both as a ballet and a moneymaker for companies, but she says the story about a royal prince deciding which girl swan he loves is outdated and sexist, and that can be a turnoff.
DATZ HANSEN: For many people, ballet and dance performance starts and stops with those traditional performances.
BLAIR: But "Swan Lake" hardly represents all of the exciting things happening in dance, says Datz Hansen. The last time Pacific Northwest Ballet did "Swan Lake," she says even the dancers looked bored.
DATZ HANSEN: There was no spark, and it was just very, very drab.
BLAIR: But it can be just the opposite, she says, when the same dancers do a contemporary piece, like choreographer Justin Peck's "Debonair."
(SOUNDBITE OF BALLET, "DEBONAIR")
DATZ HANSEN: Their faces are more expressive, and their bodies are just shooting energy out of their fingertips. It's amazing.
BLAIR: Now, there are fresh interpretations of "Swan Lake." There's Matthew Bourne's Tony Award-winning almost all-male version...
(SOUNDBITE OF BALLET, "SWAN LAKE")
BLAIR: ...And another gender bending "Swan Lake" with an African twist by Dada Masilo.
(SOUNDBITE OF BALLET, "SWAN LAKE")
BLAIR: But these are the exceptions. Most productions of "Swan Lake" stick to the rules.
MISTY COPELAND: Every spring season we do it, and it's like riding a bike.
BLAIR: Star dancer Misty Copeland's first performance with American Ballet Theatre was "Swan Lake" in the corps de ballet in 2001. Now she's a soloist with the company, dancing the lead.
COPELAND: It's huge.
BLAIR: Copeland is African-American. This spring she will do something that is rare in the mostly white world of professional ballet. She and another African-American, Brooklyn Mack, will dance the leads together for two performances with the Washington Ballet at the Kennedy Center.
COPELAND: To see two black leads is just not something that you see, so it's a big deal I think for the ballet world, and especially for minorities within the ballet world as well.
BLAIR: They'll perform the classic, the pure, the relatively unchanged late 19th century "Swan Lake" choreography. And yet, it feels like a breakthrough. Elizabeth Blair, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
"Selma" is the first major Hollywood production to focus on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The actor who plays the American civil rights leader on screen is British, and we're going to learn more about him right now. His name is David Oyelowo. And NPR's Bilal Qureshi says that's a name you'll be hearing a lot in the future.
BILAL QURESHI, BYLINE: At the recent Palm Springs Film Festival, actor Brad Pitt introduced the winner for Breakthrough Performance with this sing-along pronunciation guide.
(SOUNDBITE OF PALM SPRINGS FILM FESTIVAL)
BRAD PITT: (Singing) Oyel, Oyel, Oyelowo, Oyel-owo.
DAVID OYELOWO: Everything just went out of my head. All I could think is what a surreal moment to the point whereby they then called my name and I almost forgot to go on because I was laughing so hard. But yeah, the best PSA of my career for sure.
QURESHI: In just eight years in Hollywood, the British-Nigerian actor with the unfamiliar name has assembled an impressive portfolio of supporting roles.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LINCOLN")
DANIEL DAY-LEWIS: (As Lincoln) What's your name, soldier?
OYELOWO: I'm Corporal Ira Clark, sir. Here with the Massachusetts Cavalry.
I played a Union soldier in "Lincoln" in 1865. I played an African-American fighter pilot in "Red Tails" in the 1940s. I played a preacher in "The Help" in 1964, and then I played the son of a butler going through the 20th century, being a Freedom Rider, in the sit-ins, a Black Panther and then a senator. And that 150 of what it is to be black as an American in this country really prepared me for playing Dr. King.
QURESHI: That performance in "Selma" has cemented his status as a leading man.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SELMA")
OYELOWO: (As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) Those that have gone before us say no more.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTORS: (As characters) No more.
OYELOWO: (As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) No more.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTORS: (As characters) No more.
OYELOWO: (As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) That means protest. That means march. That means disturb the peace. That means jail. That means risk. And that is hard.
QURESHI: Oyelowo is a classically trained actor. And film critic Tim Cogshell says it shows.
TIM COGSHELL: This is a guy who had to play Henry IV for the role with the Shakespeare Company, and he took a lot of heat for that, you know, the first black actor to play that role. And he did it, and he silenced his detractors by being brilliant.
QURESHI: Roles on British television and in small films followed, but Oyelowo says he always had his eyes on a Hollywood career. So he moved his family to Los Angeles in 2007. And one of the first scripts he read was "Selma."
OYELOWO: This film started for me as a whisper. It started for me on the 24 of July, 2007, God telling me that I'm going to play this role in this film. Now, that may sound odd to people who aren't people of faith or just hearing that cold, but I knew that deeply in my spirit. And that's what kept me going.
QURESHI: The director of "Selma," Ava DuVernay, told NPR's Michele Norris that one of the reasons Oyelowo was the perfect actor for the role was precisely because he wasn't American.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
AVA DUVERNAY: The fact that he's British gave him a better in because he wasn't holding King up on a pedestal. He didn't have - grew up with the iconography of King. You know, in my home, my great-grandmother had a picture of King and Jesus on the wall at equal level, like it's just - there's just King and Jesus. That was it.
QURESHI: David Oyelowo didn't have that weight of history. His parents are Nigerian immigrants to Britain. And at one point the family moved back to Nigeria. Oyelowo says those years in Africa were formative.
OYELOWO: The truth of the matter is what living in the West unfortunately does for you as a black person is it engenders a minority mentality, whereas when I lived in Nigeria, the notion of the color of my skin, the notion of the opportunities afforded me as a result, never occurred to me. And it does affect how you bounce out of bed. It does affect your ambitions. It does affect your outlook on life.
QURESHI: Oyelowo says his role model is another actor, born in the Caribbean, who also became a star here.
OYELOWO: I call it the Sidney Poitier syndrome, in that I think the reason he achieved what he did the way he did at the time he did is because he grew up in a different society where he wasn't a minority. And so therefore, when he came to this country, he just couldn't understand the notion that everything on the plate wasn't his to eat. And he approached his career, he approached his ambitions, he approached his work in that way. And it was so undeniable that you just had to get out of his way. I think if you are brought up in a culture whereby that is not the case, you have a stance of combat. And that invariably means that you are spending more energy trying to bust through than be you.
QURESHI: Critics have raved about David Oyelowo's performance in "Selma," but the film has also been harshly criticized for taking liberties with its portrayal of the relationship between President Lyndon Johnson and King, shown here as confrontational and contentious.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SELMA")
OYELOWO: (As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) We need your involvement here, Mr. President. We deserve your help as citizens of this country, citizens under attack.
TOM WILKINSON: (As President Lyndon Johnson) Now you listen to me. You listen to me. You're an activist. I'm a politician. You got one big issue. I got 101.
QURESHI: I asked David Oyelowo if this portrait of King that will be seen by so many people has a responsibility to history.
OYELOWO: My responsibility was to go and find who that man was spiritually, emotional, intellectually and historically. And I can stand by every choice I personally made. I also can stand by the choices the film made. But at the end of the day, it is an artistic interpretation.
QURESHI: Some believe that artistic interpretation cost the film Oscar nominations. I spoke with David Oyelowo before those nominations were announced last week, but he was quite candid about what he sees as Hollywood's enduring problem with diversity - the fact that films about black life are under a different kind of pressure and scrutiny.
OYELOWO: Everything you do has such an intense gaze upon it because the opportunities are so sparse, so you always feel this need to be all things to all men for their salvation. And what we don't get that you get if you are a white artist, you know, director, producer or even the audience is that, you know, from a white point of view, you have so much context for what it is to be a human being. You have good movies, bad movies, sci-fi, romantic comedies. You have historical dramas. You have silly movies. You have very important films. You have all these different options that mean that you don't have to kind of politicize or think about is this painful for people to watch? Is this edifying for people to - you know, you can just be an artist and put your voice out there.
QURESHI: So one of his next projects will be more personal. It's the story of two Nigerian lovers, crisscrossing from Africa to London and America. It's a big-screen adaptation of the award-winning novel "Americanah" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adich. His co-star is Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong'o. Oyelowo says in light of "Selma's" success, he's happy to finally have the American credentials to get a film like "Americanah" off the ground.
OYELOWO: The fact of the matter is if Lupita Nyong'o didn't exist in terms of her notoriety, her talent and who she is, if I wasn't afforded the opportunity to play Dr. King, that film would not get made if we hadn't been given the opportunities we've been given to give filmmakers, financers, producers, writers the confidence to make the movie. And so that is smack in the middle of what I hope to do going forward.
QURESHI: And since his is a name we'll be hearing more, and probably mispronouncing, I asked him for a final clarification.
OYELOWO: The way to do it is O on both sides of yellow. So it's David Oyelowo.
QURESHI: And from NPR News, I'm Bilal Qureshi.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Jury selection begins tomorrow in the trial of James Holmes, the man accused of killing 12 people in a shooting spree at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. That happened in 2012. One of the reasons it's taken so long to get to court is the defendant's plea - not guilty by reason of insanity. He's undergone two court-ordered psychiatric evaluations. The case pushed the state to revamp its approach to mental health, including an approval of $20 million by state lawmakers. That, in part, has paid for new crisis centers. Grace Hood, of member station KUNC, has more on what's changed.
GRACE HOOD, BYLINE: The structure of a mental health crisis varies dramatically from person to person. For Colorado resident Cindy Binger, everyday life events suddenly weren't computing.
CINDY BINGER: When you go through a crisis, you're confused. You can't distinguish from right from wrong. Your thought patterns are off. They don't gather and complete.
HOOD: More than a decade ago, Binger struggled to make sense of traumatic events that happened in her life. She grappled with deep questions about alcohol abuse and simpler ones about where to get help.
BINGER: For me, it was trying to get people to understand what I was going through - to feel what I was going through. And that was hard.
HOOD: Finding the right resource becomes more difficult if your emergency happens at 9 at night or on a Saturday or if you're a grad student living alone off-campus. That's where Colorado's 13 walk-in crisis centers come into the picture.
LARRY POTTORFF: The first priority is, why are you here and how can we help?
HOOD: Larry Pottorff is executive director of North Range Behavioral Health, one of several agencies partnering with the state to provide new crisis services in the years since the Aurora shooting.
POTTORFF: This is the entryway, and so this will be available to people around the clock.
HOOD: He's standing inside a softly lit waiting room in Greeley, Colorado. The reception desk and waiting chairs - everything here is brand new. A receptionist does not ask someone in crisis to fill out forms. There are no insurance cards exchanged.
POTTORFF: I really think of it as a new way of responding to people in crisis. Historically, that's been done through emergency rooms.
HOOD: The new system includes walk-in centers, a statewide hotline and mobile units that can be dispatched in the event of crisis. All this was set up through legislation sponsored by State Senator Irene Aguilar. She says the Aurora Theatre and Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings highlighted a need.
IRENE AGUILAR: One of the issues that both of these events brought up was that we frequently have people in our community who are struggling with mental health issues and can't get the care that they need.
HOOD: Aguilar says future success depends on creating a continuum of care from crisis response to stabilization to safe return into the community.
AGUILAR: This was not just a let's settle the fire, but let's get rid of whatever else is going on under there so that this doesn't happen again.
HOOD: In a new respite care program, where crisis patients can stay up to 14 days, there's a close hand-off it between walk-in crisis centers and community services.
BINGER: OK, at 2 o'clock this afternoon?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Yeah.
BINGER: OK.
HOOD: Cindy Binger, who struggled with her own crisis a decade ago, reviews doctor appointment times with a client. As a peer specialist in the respite center, she's now offering support.
BINGER: It took me a long, hard process - a journey, I should say - to get where I'm at. And if the respite would've been there for me, it would have made it easier.
HOOD: There's no guarantee that Colorado's new system will entirely prevent the next Aurora theater shooting. Mental health experts simply hope it will narrow cracks in the system, making it harder for the next person in crisis to slip through. For NPR News, I'm Grace Hood in Greeley, Colorado.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Back in 1973, Burton Malkiel published "A Random Walk Down Wall Street." The book was a very readable guide to investing, rooted in the efficient market theory. He'll explain that in a moment. Over the past 42 years, as we have lived through bubbles and crashes, novel investment instruments, scandals and fads, Burton Malkiel has been updating "A Random Walk" and standing by its central message. The investor, who buys and holds a broadly based index fund, who effectively invests in the market as a whole, does better in the long run than all the stock pickers and Wall Street pundits. Well, this year, he's up to the 11th edition of "A Random Walk Down Wall Street," and Burton Malkiel joins us from Princeton, New Jersey, where he is a professor of economics. Welcome to the program.
BURTON MALKIEL: Thank you.
SIEGEL: And first, a brief definition of the efficient market theory.
MALKIEL: Basically, the efficient market theory says that there are a lot of smart people around the world and that if information arises about a particular company or about an economy, that information gets reflected in market prices without delay. So that if, let's say, a drug company has developed a drug that will give that company double the value that it had before the announcement, the price will double right away. It won't double slowly over time. You won't have time to read the news and get in. The market is very efficient at digesting news.
Now, that doesn't mean that market prices are always correct. In fact, they're far from perfect. But the point is it's very efficient at reflecting news, and if they're incorrect no one knows for sure whether they're too high or too low. And therefore, simply buying a portfolio of stocks, given the tableau of market prices that you have at any point in time, is likely to give you a better performance than trying to go and picks stocks and buying one stock and selling another.
SIEGEL: Now, you do acknowledge in the book that George Soros and others looked at the crash of 2008 - the near collapse of the international financial system - and said, so much for efficient markets. Academic models of the economy didn't see disaster coming. This thinking - efficient markets -stands accused of contributing to, if not causing, the financial crisis - to which you say?
MALKIEL: To which I say markets are not always correct. Markets are often wrong. Markets don't anticipate the things that happen. If you look at the whole of active managers, including these very highly paid hedge fund managers, you don't see that they, over the long pull, have outperformed a simple strategy of buying and holding all the stocks in the market.
SIEGEL: One school of thought that has grown up in the years since you first wrote "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" is behavioral economics and behavioral finance. You devote a chapter to it in the book. Should our confidence in the efficiency of the market be tempered by the idea, backed by lots of research and granted a Nobel Prize, that we typically are very irrational in economic behavior?
MALKIEL: We are indeed irrational in many things. And in fact, part of the reason for putting a chapter on behavioral finance in is to protect us from what we have learned about our irrationality. And one of the parts of irrationality that is very clear - the evidence is crystal clear that when we are optimistic, we tend to buy stocks. When we are pessimistic, we tend to sell them. More money went into the stock market at the height of the Internet bubble in early 2000 than ever before, and more money came out of the stock market in the third quarter of 2008, at the height of the crisis, than ever before. So what we learn that we've done is we put the money in at the top. We tend to take it out at the bottom. And what I've always recommended is you just buy that portfolio and you hold it through thick and thin, and that gives you a superior performance to anyone who tries to pick individual stocks and tries to get in and out of the market based on their view whether the market is too high or too low.
SIEGEL: At one point you quote Warren Buffett, the investor, with a wonderful analogy that - he says, if you know that you're going to eat a lot of hamburgers, and you are not a cattleman yourself or in the beef business, you'd like to see the price of beef be low rather than high. So if you're going to buy a lot of stocks, you want to buy when the price is very low rather than when it's very high, but that's exactly the opposite of what people do.
MALKIEL: Exactly. And I think for most people who are saving for retirement, they're going to be investing year after year after year. And so for those people, while everyone prays for higher stock prices, you actually ought to pray for lower stock prices because it's as if the hamburgers you're going to buy next year - do you want them to be more expensive or less expensive? So for people who are accumulating a retirement fund, it's just fine if the market goes up and down. Yes, you'll buy some things at the top, but you'll also then buy stuff at the bottom. The only people who should pray for higher stock prices are people who are in retirement who are liquidating their portfolios. Everybody else should actually be very happy when stock prices go down.
SIEGEL: Burton Malkiel, thank you very much for talking with us today about the latest edition of the book.
MALKIEL: My pleasure. I thank you very much.
SIEGEL: The book is "A Random Walk Down Wall Street." Burton Malkiel is professor of economics at Princeton University.
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Today, designing tech with seniors in mind - simplified tablet computers, phones with big buttons, health monitors. It's a burgeoning marketplace attracting venture capital and startups, as well as established companies. We'll hear about that.
And if you're going to design for elderly people, it may help to be one. So we're about to meet someone like that in Silicon Valley of all places. Barbara Beskind defies the tech industry's reputation for being obsessed with youth. She is 90 and as NPR's Laura Sydell reports, she works for IDEO, a design and innovation consulting firm.
LAURA SYDELL, BYLINE: Designers solve practical problems, and as Barbara Beskind ages, she says being a designer can be very helpful.
BARBARA BESKIND: Everybody who ages is going to be their own problem solver.
SYDELL: Beskind sits on a couch in an open office space at IDEO filled with staff young enough to be her grandchildren. She commutes to the office once a week from a community for older adults where falling is a problem.
BESKIND: And people where I live fall a lot. I started out for a friend of mine - I tried to design airbags of greater sizes that would be activated at a lurch of 15 degrees.
SYDELL: Beskind is stumped on how to find the right power source for her airbags. She says she started designing when she was 8 years old - toys of course.
BESKIND: Well, in the Depression, if you can't buy toys, you make them.
SYDELL: Beskind's first design was for a hobbyhorse.
BESKIND: I was determined I was going to have one, and so I made it with old tires. I learned a lot about gravity because I fell off so many times.
SYDELL: When it was time for college, Beskind told her counselor that she wanted to be an inventor. That required an engineering degree. In those days, women couldn't get into those departments so she studied home economics and later enlisted in the army where she became an occupational therapist. After 44 years, she retired as a major, then went into private practice. From those years, she has six patents on inflatable devices that help children with balance issues.
Beskind tried to retire again. Two years ago, she was watching 60 minutes. She saw David Kelley, the founder of IDEO, talking about how important it was to have a diverse staff on a design team.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "60 MINUTES")
DAVID KELLEY: That's the hard part, is the cultural thing of having a diverse group of people and having them be good at building on each other's ideas.
SYDELL: Beskind says the interview made her think she wanted to work at IDEO.
BESKIND: Oh, that sounds like that's for me. And besides that, I was living in Silicon Valley. What could be better?
SYDELL: Beskind wrote to the firm and she heard back within days. It turns out that in the U.S. over the last couple of years as baby boomers age, interest in designing products for older adults is growing. Gretchen Addi, an Associate Partner at IDEO hired Beskind.
She says when Beskind is in a room young designers do think differently. For example, Addi says IDEO is working with a Japanese company on glasses to replace bifocals. With a simple hand gesture, they will turn from the farsighted prescription to the nearsighted one. Initially, the designers wanted to put small, changeable batteries in it. Beskind pointed out to them that old fingers are not that nimble.
GRETCHEN ADDI: It really caused the design team to reflect on, you know, maybe it's just a USB connection. Are there ways that we can think about this differently?
SYDELL: IDEO employees like Jason Daylor often tell Beskind that her energy is contagious.
JASON DAYLOR: I'm sitting here doing like a not very inspiring task - I'm doing budgets. And like, just listening to you talk and your attitude, I'm like - I got more into it.
SYDELL: Beskind has macular degeneration and only has peripheral vision so she draws her designs with easy-to-see, thick black felt pens. She hands me a design for glasses that would help people like her. One of the features is that they take a photo as people walk up and introduce themselves. The glasses also have a small speaker.
BESKIND: So that the next time as you approach within 10 or 12 feet, something in my ear would say, it's Laura.
SYDELL: Beskind says, as she gets older and faces new problems in the world, she's thankful she's a designer.
BESKIND: It makes aging more tolerable, more enjoyable. Yeah, I mean, I enjoy the age I'm in. I think this is one of the best chapters of my life.
SYDELL: And for the bulging demographic of baby boomers growing old, Beskind has this advice - embrace change and design for it. Laura Sydell, NPR News.
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We begin this hour with new scrutiny of a federal program that is supposed to protect juveniles in the criminal justice system. It's designed to ensure that they're not locked up alongside adult offenders. A senator is leading an investigation into the use of federal grant money for the program. And NPR's Carrie Johnson reports whistleblowers have helped drive this effort.
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Whistleblowers like Jill Semmerling - Semmerling loved her job as a federal agent at the Inspector General Office in the Justice Department. She carried a firearm and a badge to work every day.
JILL SEMMERLING: We were there as a watchdog to ensure that there was no waste, fraud or abuse.
JOHNSON: But when Semmerling started digging into allegations that Wisconsin had been cooking the books to get federal grant money, her own troubles began.
SEMMERLING: It was pretty awful. I had - you know, you didn't know where to turn.
JOHNSON: Here's the issue. A federal law called the Juvenile Justice Delinquency and Prevention Act allocates grant money to states. In return, states are supposed to protect young offenders and make sure they're not housed with adult criminals. But Semmerling had a source who told her Wisconsin had been doing just that - putting kids who were abused in foster care and who ran away in jails next to adult criminals and still collecting federal grant money designed to protect those kids.
SEMMERLING: The whole purpose of the act was to keep juveniles out of adult facilities. And the whole point is that a kid may act out or a kid may do something wrong but I mean you don't ultimately want them to become career criminals.
TOM DEVINE: My name's Tom Devine and I'm the legal director of the Government Accountability Project.
JOHNSON: Devine is also Jill Semmerling's lawyer.
DEVINE: She became a bloodhound trying to find out who was responsible for mixing domestic violence victims with hardened criminals - and to stopping it.
JOHNSON: Semmerling uncovered leads that the practice wasn't isolated to Wisconsin, but her bosses allegedly told her not to go there. Eventually, she says, the Justice Department yanked her from the case altogether.
SEMMERLING: I ended up with an autoimmune disease which I really did not know that I had, but the stress that I endured exacerbated it.
JOHNSON: She ended up taking medical retirement, but Semmerling refused to give up, and she reached out to the federal office that supports whistleblowers again and again. Her lawyer, Tom Devine.
DEVINE: The Office of Special Counsel found a substantial likelihood she was right about all those charges, and they've ordered the attorney general to conduct an independent investigation.
JOHNSON: A Justice Department spokesman says it's committed to ensuring young people are protected from harm inside corrections facilities. Meanwhile, someone else is investigating the issue, too.
SENATOR CHARLES GRASSLEY: I see it this way - oversight, oversight, oversight.
JOHNSON: That's Iowa Republican Senator Charles Grassley, the new chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
GRASSLEY: The fact that the Justice Department is not overseeing how juveniles are treated in those instances and they're still getting the federal dollars - then it's the federal administrators that are at fault. And we obviously want to correct that.
JOHNSON: Grassley has made juvenile justice one of his top priorities this year. He sent a letter to Justice this month demanding information about possible fraud in the grant program not just in Wisconsin, but four other states. And he's introduced a bipartisan bill that would reauthorize the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act. His legislation includes tougher standards to make sure juveniles are not detained with adults behind bars.
For her part, Jill Semmerling says it's a relief someone is finally listening. She says she hopes states and the federal government will become better stewards of taxpayer money and better protectors of vulnerable young people. Carrie Johnson, NPR News, Washington.
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The solar energy business is growing fast. Solar panel prices dropped more than half in the last four years. But government subsidies expire soon, and natural gas prices also keep dropping. Those things make the future of solar a little hazy, but for now, the industry is hiring. NPR's Jeff Brady reports a new survey shows more than 31,000 solar jobs were added last year.
JEFF BRADY, BYLINE: Among those who became a solar industry worker last year is 54-year-old Charlie Wilde of Denver.
CHARLIE WILDE: It's really hard work, especially in the summertime when you're on those hot roofs.
BRADY: Wilde finished a training last spring, got certified and then worked temp jobs as an installer. Now he's starting his own business called Ecology Solar.
WILDE: I'm launching a marketing plan this month, and I'll be targeting people in my neighborhood of Denver, Colorado, and then expand out from there as the business grows.
BRADY: He'll work on his own. But for people like Wilde, with experience, the pay is good. Andrea Luecke heads The Solar Foundation and says installers make about $22 an hour.
ANDREA LUECKE: People in sales positions are making about $40 an hour. So these are good jobs. These are highly desirable jobs and jobs that are helping to positively contribute to the U.S. economy.
BRADY: Luecke says there's work for roofers, electricians and engineers, too. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't track solar industry employment, but the agency cites figures from Luecke's foundation. It released a census of solar industry employment last week.
LUECKE: We have nearly 174,000 solar jobs in the U.S., which is 22 percent more than last year and 86 percent more than when we first started to track jobs in 2010.
BRADY: Luecke says solar makes up less than 1 percent of the energy consumed in the U.S. today. Two-thirds of the country's power still comes from coal and natural gas. Luecke says that leaves plenty of room for growth in coming years. There are a few big issues that could affect the solar industry's future though. Solar companies still rely on a 30 percent federal tax credit to compete with those more-established fossil fuels. That credit is scheduled to end in about two years. Jeff Brady, NPR News.
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About a third of all Chipotle restaurants are not serving pork right now. That's because the restaurant chain suspended one of its major pork suppliers. As NPR's Dan Charles reports, the incident raises questions about whether Chipotle can keep growing and still maintain its current standards.
DAN CHARLES, BYLINE: When Chipotle suspended its pork supplier, the restaurant chain did not say exactly what the problem was, only that the unidentified supplier was violating Chipotle's animal welfare standards. But David Maren says he had a pretty good idea what the violation was. Maren is the founder of Tendergrass Farms near Roanoke, Virginia.
DAVID MAREN: An online, mail-order meat company, specializing, at this point, in organic lard.
CHARLES: Maren sells lard and pork from pigs that are raised Chipotle-style. They get no antibiotics or growth-promoting drugs. They aren't confined inside buildings. In fact, most of them spend their whole life on pasture. And Maren says these days even big pork producers are willing to adopt part of that package. They don't mind so much cutting out the drugs, but there are two technologies that a lot of them cannot imagine giving up - things that Chipotle does not allow.
MAREN: Specifically, the use of farrowing crates and then the use of slatted floors.
CHARLES: Farrowing crates are small pens about 6 feet by 2 feet, where mother pigs are confined for about three weeks when they give birth and nurse their piglets.
MAREN: And the purpose is to protect the baby pigs.
CHARLES: Metal walls keep sows from stepping on the piglets, but it also means the pigs cannot move or turn around. Slatted floors, meanwhile, are a way to raise lots of pigs indoors, out of the weather, and keep them clean. Manure drops down through the slats. Critics say it's inhumane to keep pigs inside on a hard, bare surface.
An industry source has confirmed Maren's suspicions. These two things were the cause of Chipotle's pork problems this past week. The company does not allow farrowing crates or slatted-floor housing, and it discovered that this supplier was using them. But David Maren, who sells organic and pasture-raised pork, is surprisingly conflicted about the situation. Even though we produce pork Chipotle's way, he says, I'm not really sure these rules make sense. Take farrowing crates - people look at them and say that looks inhumane.
MAREN: And certainly it does. But the alternative is - if you put a picture right beside that of a farmer walking out of his alternative, you know, farrowing house with a five-gallon bucket full of dead baby pigs, you have to ask yourself, which is more humane?
CHARLES: Or take that slatted-floor housing. It's true - it's not a natural environment for pigs, but it's efficient. You can handle a lot of pigs. What Chipotle wants takes a lot more work and space.
MAREN: It's all about scalability. You know, they can find maybe - maybe a few hundred farmers who can do that, and I think they have. Can they find a few thousand farmers or tens of thousands to feed America? I think at this point in time that's going to be very challenging.
CHARLES: Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold says people should not jump to that conclusion. This was a one-time problem with a single supplier, he says. In general, Chipotle has not had great difficulty finding suppliers who are willing and able to follow its rules. Arnold would not identify the offending supplier. He says it's possible they did not fully understand what Chipotle wanted.
CHRIS ARNOLD: We believe that these are good people who are trying to do the right thing, and if they can bring the protocols in order with our standards, we'd certainly consider having them back as part of our supply network.
CHARLES: But that won't happen quickly. It would mean building new farrowing pens and new structures to house the pigs. Dan Charles, NPR News.
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The World Health Organization says that in the 21st century your lifestyle is what will most likely kill you. In recent years, two thirds of all deaths worldwide were the result of chronic conditions such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes and respiratory infections. The mortality rate from these diseases was the highest in the developing world. NPR's Jason Beaubien reports that the WHO believes many of these deaths could be prevented.
JASON BEAUBIEN, BYLINE: Around the world lifestyles are changing dramatically, but often in ways that are not healthy. As low-income countries grow, people can afford to eat more foods that are heavy in fats and salt. As jobs shift away from agriculture, people are less active. Economic growth isn't always a plus for your health. Bigger paychecks can lead at times to drinking way too much. Doctor Shanthi Mendis with the World Health Organization in Geneva says the biggest health challenges on the globe right now aren't coming from a virus or parasite. They're coming from noncommunicable diseases.
SHANTHI MENDIS: It's a slow-motion public health disaster seemingly invisible and rapidly gathering speed. And the important thing to remember is it is not killing just a couple of thousands of people. It's killing millions, and it's going to kill millions for decades.
BEAUBIEN: The leading killers are cardiovascular diseases.
MENDIS: And when you say cardiovascular diseases, they are mainly heart attacks and strokes.
BEAUBIEN: She says many of these could be prevented by getting people to change their diet, exercise more and show up for annual physical exams. The WHO is pushing an initiative to try to get countries around the world to focus on reducing these disease rates. The initiative calls on governments to put in place policies to try to cut salt intake, increase physical activity and reduce smoking.
MENDIS: These diseases - they pose a much greater public health problem than any epidemic known to man.
BEAUBIEN: And she says beyond public health, they also trap individuals in poverty and hurt economic growth.
MENDIS: 60 million people are dying in the 40s, 50s, 60s. These people are dying in their productive years.
BEAUBIEN: Mortality rates for heart disease, diabetes, lung cancer and these other diseases are lower in high income countries, which Mendis attributes to those countries starting to address lifestyle diseases decades ago. Jason Beaubien, NPR News.
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If you're still trying to jumpstart your January ambitions for healthier living and eating, you may be wondering about the best strategies to start anew. As always, there's a lot of buzz about detox and elimination diets. And we've asked NPR's food and health correspondent, Allison Aubrey, whether there is any science to support any of these diets, and she joins us now to answer. Hi, how are you?
ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: Hi there, Robert.
SIEGEL: Let's start with detox diets. They seem to be constantly trendy, especially at the beginning of the year. I guess the year 2015 is no different?
AUBREY: That's right. I mean, look at the stack of books here. These are new books sent to us by publishers. We've got "The Detox Diet Cookbook." We've got a book here to reset your health and detox your body. And the idea here is that if we just follow the advice in these books that we'll be able to flush out all of the toxins from our bodies. And it's kind of an appealing concept, right? I like the sound of it - kind of like spring cleaning the body. But when I talk to researchers about what this really means, it turns out that the whole concept that you have to go on some kind of special diet or cleanse to detox the body really has no scientific backing. I spoke to Ranit Mishori. She's a professor of family medicine at Georgetown University. And the way she explains it is that our bodies have an excellent built-in system for getting rid of toxins. I mean, this is the job of our kidneys and livers, to filter and flush out the bad stuff. And these organs are working 24 hours a day.
RANIT MISHORI: The liver has all kinds of different enzymes that break down the chemicals that are considered to be harmful potentially and then it excretes it. And there are no supplements or super foods that can boost the liver and kidneys to do it better than they already do.
SIEGEL: So as we've heard of the self-cleaning oven, we have self-cleaning bodies...
AUBREY: (Laughter) That's right.
SIEGEL: ...And no need for detox or cleansing diets.
AUBREY: That's the kind of the point she's making. In fact, Mishori tells me when her patients ask about these kinds of diets, which they tend to do this time of year, her opinion is, you know, thumbs down. There's just no evidence that they're effective.
SIEGEL: Well, if detox isn't the goal to aim for then, are there any particular foods that people should look to avoid or eliminate from their diets?
AUBREY: Well, you know, there's a whole host of elimination diets. Gluten-free is the one with the most buzz, of course. But unless you have a specific medical problem, there's no magic bullet that's going to suddenly make you healthy. When I asked Mishori what she recommends, these are her top three.
MISHORI: Cutting on sugar is always a good idea. Cutting on processed food is always a good idea. Being better hydrated is always a good idea.
AUBREY: Now, when she talks about sugar here, she's talking about added sugar, of course - not the sugars you find naturally in fruits and vegetables. And what she's saying here is that, you know, you don't have to go on an all-or-nothing diet. Just cut back and be more mindful.
SIEGEL: We hear a lot about avoiding refined sugar. And you've reported here on this program on the studies linking excessive sugar consumption to heart disease, diabetes, even certain cancers. So how much refined sugar is too much sugar?
AUBREY: So - well, the typical American is consuming about 22 teaspoons a day, and that's three times what the American Heart Association recommends.
SIEGEL: Twenty-two teaspoons of sugar per day...
AUBREY: Right.
SIEGEL: ...Is the average intake by Americans?
AUBREY: That's right, I mean, think about that.
SIEGEL: That's just your average guy.
AUBREY: That's right, that's right. And that's a lot when you think about it. Now, most of the time on food labels, sugar's labeled in grams, right? You pick up a yogurt, you see 24 grams of sugar. Now, yogurt's a health food, and who doesn't think that having yogurt for breakfast is a good idea? But at 24 grams of sugar, that right there - if you consider four grams per teaspoon, you're already to 6 teaspoons for the day just with this yogurt. So there's a lot of added sugar in foods - things that we don't even think of as being sugary.
SIEGEL: So this sounds extremely unhealthy actually.
AUBREY: Right. And there was a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association's Internal Medicine that shows why it's not healthy. Researchers did a lot of number crunching and what stood out is that Americans who consumed the most sugar were about twice as likely to die from heart disease compared to people who consumed the least. So bottom line here is that if you want to make one change this year, cutting back on added sugar may be a good one to pick.
SIEGEL: And then you can just call it detoxing - sugar detoxing.
AUBREY: Well, you could if you wanted to, Robert.
SIEGEL: Thank you. It's fascinating and horrifying.
AUBREY: Yes.
SIEGEL: That's NPR's Allison Aubrey.
AUBREY: Thanks very much.
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Iran says an Israeli airstrike in Syria has killed one of its generals. The Lebanese Shiite militia, Hezbollah, also says six of its operatives died. Israel has not commented. NPR's Alice Fordham reports there have been angry responses from both Iran and Hezbollah.
ALICE FORDHAM, BYLINE: Both Hezbollah and Iran are allies of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as he fights for control of a country in the grip of civil war. An Iranian statement says Brigadier General Mohammad Ali Allahdadi from the Revolutionary Guard Corps was on assignment advising Syrian forces when he was killed Sunday. Hezbollah's media announced the death of Jihad Mughniyeh, son of the late strategist Imad Mughniyeh, among six killed.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says a house and two cars were hit in the Quneitra region, less than 10 miles from the Israeli border area. Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif condemned the strike as a terrorist attack.
UNIDENTIFIED MEN: (Chanting in foreign language).
FORDHAM: At Mughniyeh's funeral today, young men chanted religious slogans. Just last week, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned Israel not underestimate its powers in a TV interview. Lebanese analyst Hilal Khashan says this is a blow to them.
HILAL KHASHAN: You know, what happened yesterday was major.
FORDHAM: He says the group is stretched thin in Syria, making it less likely they will strike back. But other analysts think the group will be humiliated if it does not take action. And Hezbollah officials were quoted anonymously in Lebanese media saying they were seeking a calculated response. Alice Fordham, NPR News.
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In February 1957, Martin Luther King made the cover of Time magazine for the first time. King was all of 28, and he'd just become a national figure. It was an admiring article that described his role in the Montgomery, Alabama, Bus Boycott, his bearing, his upbringing, his intellectual influences. One odd note stands out - in the lead, Time wrote that King, the man whose word black leaders sought as they've looked to achieve in reality the desegregation that the Supreme Court had given them in law, was - and this is a quote - "not a judge or a lawyer or a political strategist or a flaming orator." That last one may raise some eyebrows. How well did the mainstream press do in seeing the significance of Martin Luther King Jr.'s leadership? Joining us now is Hank Klibanoff who, with Gene Roberts, wrote the Pulitzer prize-winning book "Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle And The Awakening Of A Nation." Welcome to the program.
HANK KLIBANOFF: Well, thank you very much, Robert.
SIEGEL: Back in the mid-1950s, when King was in Montgomery, did reporters see him as a preeminent figure in the civil rights movement?
KLIBANOFF: They did eventually, but I would say it was slow-going at first. When the bus boycott began in December 1 of 1955, even the Montgomery newspaper did not know who he was. It wasn't until February that he starts to get any national press of significance beyond a few wire stories here and there.
SIEGEL: How would you describe King's relationship or what he wanted from the press that was covering the civil rights struggle?
KLIBANOFF: Well, the press, once they met him and got to know him, was welcomed by him. The reporters could sit in the pews and watch him, and beyond doubt, they were mesmerized by him.
SIEGEL: There's a story you relate about, I guess, to Life magazine photographer who was about to cease being a journalist and intervene at a moment that King disapproved of.
KLIBANOFF: Well, that was in Selma in 1965. And by this time, of course, Dr. King fully understands what it takes to attract the press. And Flip Schulke, shooting for Life magazine, is out on the streets one day, and he sees a sheriff's deputy on a horse with a gun and a billy club attacking some young African-American kid who has no gun, no horse, no club of any sort, no weapon. And Schulke lowers his camera and goes and stops the sheriff's deputy. And Dr. King hears about this. And he and Flip go way back to the early-50s. And he was mad at Flip more than the sheriff's deputy. He says, what are you doing? He says, I've been trying to stop these people for years from beating up our people, and I'm not having much success. What made you think you could do it right then and there? He said, there was one way you might've been able to stop him and that's to keep taking photographs.
SIEGEL: Were there lessons for you about journalism and studying the coverage of "The Race Beat"?
KLIBANOFF: Yes, there were many lessons, certainly in covering the stories of Dr. King. There was a lesson in how he and the press mutually benefited from each other. He understood that coverage of his nonviolent movement up against the violence that he would encounter in the South would get good play. And certainly reporters knew that they were on an enormously story that was capturing the attention of the nation and often provoking it to action.
SIEGEL: That's Hank Klibanoff, co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book "The Race Beat" and professor of journalism at Emory University in Atlanta. Hank, thank you.
KLIBANOFF: Robert, it's always a pleasure.
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In Argentina, a man who accused that country's president of a cover-up has been found dead. Special prosecutor Alberto Nisman accused President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of protecting Iranian suspects in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center. It was the worst terror attack in Argentine history. Nisman was supposed to testify in a congressional hearing there today.
Haley Cohen joins us now from Buenos Aires where she's a correspondent for The Economist. Welcome to the program. And Mr. Nisman's death appeared to be a suicide but the timing raised a lot of suspicion of homicide. And now an autopsy shows that there's no evidence anyone else was involved. What else is known about his death at this point?
HALEY COHEN: So far, all that we know is that Mr. Nisman died because of a gunshot wound to his right temple. The bullet casing of which was found next to his body - it appears to have come from a 20 - a .22 caliber pistol. The investigator has revealed that Nisman had two guns registered to his name but would not say that the gun found next to him was one of them. We also know that when his mother attempted to gain entry to his apartment upon becoming suspicious after he didn't answer texts or her phone calls which was uncharacteristic, she found that the door was locked from the inside. Now, we know also that there's a second entrance through which any third person or intruder could have gained entrance to Nisman's apartment. But that person or intruder would have needed a code to get up in the elevator, and the door did not appear to be forced.
SIEGEL: Haley, take us back to 1994. Help us understand what happened at the Jewish center back then.
COHEN: In 1994, a car laden with explosives was driven into a Jewish center in the center of Buenos Aires killing 85 people - 86 if you count the terrorist - and injuring hundreds more. No one has ever been charged for this crime, and last week, Mr. Nisman had presented a 300-page report in court in which he accused Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and some of her other allies of covering up Iranian involvement in the bombing.
SIEGEL: Now, we should say it was the allegation of a cover-up that was new here. For many years Iran and the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah have been accused by many of having been responsible for this bombing, but no one has ever been tried for the case. Is that right?
COHEN: That's correct.
SIEGEL: How did Mr. Nisman become involved in all this?
COHEN: Mr. Nisman became involved in this case about a decade ago. He was put in charge of heading the investigation. And this is actually not the first time that he's accused a head of state of obstructing justice in some way. In 2009, it was his investigation that led to the indictment of President Carlos Menem who was president at the time of the bombings on charges of obstructing justice and trying to protect one of his contacts, essentially, from further investigation.
SIEGEL: So this was not the first time that he had publicly tangled with a sitting president of Argentina.
COHEN: Exactly. And his death came just hours before he was supposed to present the findings of an investigation that he had undertaken for many years. So for many people, the timing raises questions even if the evidence that investigators have found point to a suicide.
SIEGEL: Haley Cohen of The Economist in Buenos Aires. Thanks.
COHEN: Thank you, Robert.
SIEGEL: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Millions of children in the West African nation of Guinea had been out of school since July. Classes were canceled as Ebola spread. Well, today, they went back. The number of Ebola cases has dropped recently, but some parents are still concerned. In the capital, NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton witnessed one family's return to its early morning school routine.
OFEIBEA QUIST-ARCTON, BYLINE: The Sows - parents and four children, two girls, two boys - are up early. Aissatou Sow heats up breakfast for the household, including her two youngest - Alhassane, who's 11, and 6-year-old Hadja, who stretches out her arms and hands to be rubbed down with chlorinated water against Ebola. Big bro helps little sis zip up her book bag and it's into dad's car.
AISSATOU SOW: All on board. Off to school.
(SOUNDBITE OF CAR ENGINE)
OFEIBEA QUIST-ARCTON, BYLINE: Sounds like the start of an ordinary school day - not so. Ebola has kept the Sow children and millions of others away from their books for months in Guinea. The U.N. says Ebola cases are falling. But launching a Zero Ebola in 60 days campaign over the weekend, the prime minister said denial is still a problem.
EL HADJ MAMADOU ALIOU DIALLO: You welcome here. This school is the school of Mr. Sow. His children, for many years, are here.
QUIST-ARCTON: A warm welcome at a private nursery and primary school in Conakry from co-founder El Hadj Mamadou Aliou Diallo. Children wash their hands with diluted bleach water and have their temperatures taken. All is well, says Diallo.
DIALLO: We are happy, no problem. We are happy, and we do all that is possible to have a very good year. It is our hope.
(SOUNDBITE OF GUINEA'S NATIONAL ANTHEM)
UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN: (Singing in French).
QUIST-ARCTON: Faustin Agbaleti conducts a motley crew. Children sing Guinea's national anthem as Mamadou Bah looks on. He's brought his two boys back to the school but says some parents are jittery. Almost 2,000 people in Guinea have died of Ebola, including children. But Bah says kids must be educated - Ebola or no Ebola.
MAMADOU BAH: (Speaking French).
QUIST-ARCTON: "If I didn't feel at ease," he says, "I wouldn't have brought my kids back."
Rushing off to work, Mariam Oulare has dropped off her five children at different schools. She had a moment of hesitation but is giving this school the benefit of the doubt.
MARIAM OULARE: (Speaking French).
QUIST-ARCTON: "I'm sort of reassured that the precautions are good here," she says, "So I trust them with my children, but you can't help worrying about Ebola." Most of the pupils look happy to be back after months away, though some gave baleful looks as if they'd like to be at home. Eleven-year-old Alhassane Sow tells me it feels good to sit in a classroom again.
ALHASSANE: (Speaking French).
QUIST-ARCTON: Alhassane says, "I'm really happy to be back. I like school very much, and I've come to study." Just like their school moto - work, discipline, success.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Speaking French).
QUIST-ARCTON: Children have returned to class, leaving Guinea's adults to grapple with the Ebola epidemic. Some say the government's plan is overoptimistic - trying to stop the virus in two months - but that the campaign is a first step. Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, NPR News, Conakry.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Greece is six days from electing a new Parliament with the EU-imposed austerity regime for the country at stake. Greece owes Europe about $100 billion, a debt it appears hard-pressed to pay off. And a leftwing party, Syriza, is leading in the polls, promising an end to the unpopular austerity program which was a condition for keeping the country financially afloat. Well, joining us today is former Prime Minister George Papandreou who negotiated that deal with Europe and who just this month formed a new party, The Movement of Democratic Socialists. George Papandreou who grew up in the U.S. and Canada joins us from Athens. Welcome to the program once again.
GEORGE PAPANDREOU: Thank you very much, Robert.
SIEGEL: And we should say according to the polls in Greece, both your old party, the Socialists, and your new party are polling pretty low in single digits. Why at age 62 start all over again with a new party?
PAPANDREOU: Well, even though we've gone through major sacrifices and the country now has a primary surplus - we've cut our deficit - we have major changes in the country to be a viable one. I believe that that was where the real issues were - deep reforms and bringing more transparency a more just tax system, justice system, a whole political reorganization of the political system and fighting waste and graft. These are the issues which I fought for. Just because were talking more about austerity than reform, we lost this dynamic for reform. So I wanted my voice and my movement's voice to be heard. That's where I think the prospect of a viable and prosperous Greece is.
SIEGEL: But are you saying that in terms of fiscal policy, that the European austerity program is now working or has worked and has succeeded?
PAPANDREOU: I think there was one major flaw with the - at least one major flaw with the fiscal policy. An emphasis from the European Union was on austerity rather than on reform. We were able to succeed actually with huge sacrifice by the Greek people. We now have the fastest adjustment amongst OECD countries. We have a primary surplus from a deficit that was 15.6 percent of GDP. So we have made major strides, but we've paid for that because the dynamic of changes which we started in 2009 has slowed down. Vested interests still hold the country back. Actually, that is the reason why we were in dire straits in 2009 and 2010. So I want to get down to the root causes of this crisis rather than looking only in the symptoms. The deficit was a symptom. It wasn't the root cause. And that's why I've decided to build up this movement.
SIEGEL: In 2011, having inherited the Greek economic crisis, you had to resign as prime minister because of your proposal to put the European Union's austerity plan for Greece up for a referendum. The Germans and the other Europeans were furious about that. Do you now regret that idea or in hindsight, does it strike you as having been a wise one?
PAPANDREOU: I think we lost a great opportunity not going through the referendum in Greece. The program would have been owned by the Greek people if they had said yes, and I believe they would have. But in any case, it would have been their decision - the Greek people's decision. I also now am proposing that whatever deal we strike for this last phase, if you like, of this bailout policy or an adjustment policy - the negotiation with the European Union - our European Union partners that we actually say yes, we will make major changes in order to have, from your side, much lessening of the burden of the debt which is very, very heavy on the shoulders of the Greek people and no more austerity, but simply responsible fiscal policy. And we should put that agreement to a referendum now.
SIEGEL: What does an end to the austerity regime realistically mean at this stage in Greece? Does it mean restoring public sector jobs? Does it mean giving raises to people who haven't had raises or restoring pensions? What exactly would happen?
PAPANDREOU: What would happen would be that the surplus we are now accruing would not go into paying back the debt, but would be able to be plowed into the economy by building - let's say the necessary infrastructure to help reorganize our tourist industry, which is of course a thriving industry but can be much more competitive to help the poor in Greece, certainly, because they have major problems. We have a lot of people under the poverty line. I think we need to streamline - further streamline the Greek state, make it a much more efficient, much more accountable, much more transparent and that was what I started.
SIEGEL: Does streamline mean still more cuts to the public sector in terms of jobs?
PAPANDREOU: No it doesn't mean - I don't believe that's where the problem is. I'll give you an example. When we put in electronic prescriptions for medical - in the medical sector, we cut the costs of medicine by 30 percent to the pension system. That's - two years of that was as much as we now get by all the property tax we've put on our citizens. So certain cuts - or not cuts but streamlines and reorganizing, and that's where we'll find the right money to plow into the Greek economy. But we need to have our European friends and partners help us in lightening this burden.
SIEGEL: You mentioned changing the - really reforming Greek politics and the relationship between Greek governance and the economy. You're a former Prime Minister, your father was Prime Minister, your grandfather and namesake was Prime Minister. Can you sympathize with those Greeks who say that if we're going to go for root causes, perhaps we should have an entirely new group of people - an entirely new group of faces and ideas running Greek government?
PAPANDREOU: I'm all for bringing in new people, and I actually brought in new people in my government, too. But don't forget, when you talk about the Papandreou family, we were always fighting for reform, and we paid for it. My grandfather fought for democracy in Greece and went to jail six times in his life and exile. My father fought for democracy and reform in Greece and he was exiled and jailed twice in his life. I fought for reform and I had heavy winds against me, particularly when I decided that I needed to pass the reforms through a referendum. The establishment certainly didn't like what I was trying to do. So we're on the side of fighting for reform and changes in Greece, and I believe that fight, we still need to continue. And we should use this opportunity - this crisis now to fight for these reforms and make sure that in fact, we do establish a functioning democracy.
SIEGEL: Former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou in Athens. Thank you very much for talking with us today.
PAPANDREOU: Thank you very much, Robert.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The marketplace for technology specifically aimed at older people is growing, and Laurie Orlov makes a point of keeping tabs on it. She runs a consulting business called Aging in Place Technology Watch. And Orlov says that by 2020 it will amount to some $20 billion a year. And she joins us now. Welcome to the program.
LAURIE ORLOV: Thanks a lot.
SIEGEL: And first of all, what are you measuring here - twenty billion dollars a year spent on what?
ORLOV: Well, I've divided the market into four categories of technology - communication and engagement technologies, home safety and security technologies, health and wellness, and learning and contribution technologies. And I overlay that with the category of technologies for family and professional caregivers. And when you assemble all of that together, that is how I projected it to be a $20 billion market by 2020.
SIEGEL: But you're talking about higher tech than at-home elevators or motorized wheelchairs or bathtubs that you can sit down in and the like.
ORLOV: Oh, yes. I'm talking about internet-enabled technologies, camera-based technologies, wearables, personal emergency response technologies which have historically included the pendant you wear around your neck - you know, what's euphemistically called I've-fallen-and-I-can't-get-up buttons. But they have become fairly sophisticated in recent years and allowed for quite a bit more functionality than just that.
SIEGEL: You were at the Consumer Electronics Show this month keeping an eye out for technologies for older folks. Newest offerings - what did you see?
ORLOV: Well, I saw some interesting things. I saw yet another tablet for older adults called the grandPad. The grandPad has been intentionally locked down to restrict the number of capabilities it offers to a very limited and secure set.
SIEGEL: You know, I read your description of some of the most interesting technologies you saw at the Consumer Electronics Show, and a couple of them involve robots. How is that?
ORLOV: Well, there are robots emerging in this market space and I think - not yet, but at some point they're going to get to an appropriate consumer price point that we will be able to buy them. One of them is being piloted in hotels to bring - instead of having a person show up at your door with whatever it is you need, this robot shows up. I don't really see why that couldn't also work, for example, in an assisted living or independent living community.
SIEGEL: But do you think it's possible that by the time the youngest of the baby boomers are deep in their 80s that you could have at-home robots to help you age in place?
ORLOV: Oh, I totally think it's possible, and I think they could be voice activated, and I think they could remember our preferences. And so I believe there will be the same level of disruption or disconnection between the boomers who are - you know, become 85 at some point. There will be a disruption in terms of the technology that's introduced and comfort level.
SIEGEL: There's something to look forward to right there.
ORLOV: Oh, there you go. (Laughter).
SIEGEL: That's Laurie Orlov who writes a business consulting blog called Aging in Place Technology Watch. Laura, thank you.
ORLOV: Thank you.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
When the president delivers his State of the Union address tomorrow night, he will stand for the first time before a Congress in which Republicans control both the U.S. House and the Senate. NPR's Don Gonyea says it's a moment that every two-term president since the end of World War II has faced at some point, looking out at a legislative branch newly dominated by the opposition party.
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: The most recent president to see Congress completely taken over by the rival party was George W. Bush. He had described the November midterms that year as a thumping. But in his January 2007 State of the Union, he opened by marking a significant historic milestone.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: And tonight I have the high privilege and distinct honor of my own as the first president to begin the State of the Union message with these words - Madam Speaker.
GONYEA: Madam Speaker is Democrat Nancy Pelosi, the first woman in that post. A note of graciousness and congratulations to the victors are required of any president with the nation tuned in watching and listening. Two years into his presidency, Dwight D. Eisenhower greeted the new speaker Democrat Sam Rayburn.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER: Today is his birthday, and I want to join with the rest of you in felicitating him and wishing him many happy...
GONYEA: But after that, more than three decades passed before another president faced a similar change of congressional control. It was 1987. Ronald Reagan was starting his seventh year in the White House. Right off the top, Reagan congratulated Democratic Speaker Jim Wright. Then he quoted Eisenhower's 1955 State of the Union.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: I cannot find better words than those used by President Eisenhower that evening. He said, we shall have much to do together. I am sure that we will get it done and that we shall do it in harmony and goodwill.
GONYEA: Then there's Bill Clinton's speech just months after the 1994 vote and a Republican sweep that made Newt Gingrich speaker after 40 years of Democratic control in the House. Clinton reminded the GOP that he too had been elected just two years earlier.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON: If we agree on nothing else tonight, we must agree that the American people certainly voted for change in 1992 and in 1994.
(APPLAUSE)
CLINTON: As I look out at you, I know how some of you must have felt in 1992.
(LAUGHTER)
GONYEA: Clinton's grudging tone underscores the awkwardness of the moment for a president, says Kathleen Hall Jamieson at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School.
KATHLEEN HALL JAMIESON: To some extent, this is the official moment of recognition that the country has not approved of the policies of the party that this president is representing. The president's party has been repudiated. The president's rhetoric reflects that.
GONYEA: In that State of the Union, you can feel Clinton pushing back against Republicans who are ready to engage in battle. The two sides did manage to work together and reach deals on some big issues, including balancing the federal budget. But ongoing tension also led to a government shutdown. The roots of all of that are right there in Clinton's '95 State of the Union. Sometimes outside events make presidents vulnerable politically at the time of a State of the Union address. In '07, for example, George W. Bush had lost the House and Senate and the Iraq war was going badly. He'd even lost Republican support.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, on this day, at this hour, it is still within our power to shape the outcome of this battle. Let us find our resolve and turn events toward victory.
GONYEA: In 1995 Bill Clinton was still smarting from the failure of his healthcare overhaul. And in his 1987 speech, Ronald Reagan felt compelled to address the Iran-Contra affair, a complicated deal in which arms went to Iran and cash went to fund Nicaraguan rebels.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
REAGAN: Although we've made much progress, I have one major regret. I took a risk with regard to our action in Iran. It did not work, and for that I assume full responsibility.
GONYEA: That didn't satisfy his critics who noted Reagan's passive language when he said, quote, "mistakes were made." President Obama in tomorrow's speech will tout the successes of his first six years in office while attempting to shape the next two. It's fair to predict he will not do something President Eisenhower did back in 1955. That's when Eisenhower used part of the speech to call for a little something for those seated in the chamber - a pay raise.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
EISENHOWER: I also urge the Congress to approve a long overdue increase in the salaries of members of Congress and of the federal judiciary.
GONYEA: Don't look for Obama to make a similar proposal. Don Gonyea, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The Super Bowl 49 teams are now set. The Seattle Seahawks got there with a stunning comeback win. The New England Patriots will return to the Super Bowl after a blowout that may not have been sufficiently blown up. Joining me now is Jane McManus of ESPN. Welcome back to the program.
JANE MCMANUS: Hi.
SIEGEL: And the Patriots routed the Indianapolis Colts 45 to 7. But after the game, the NFL was investigating what's now being called deflate-gate. Explain that one.
MCMANUS: That's a very clever name to begin with. The footballs that are used in games, they're supposed to be blown up to specific proportions. If those balls are not where they need to be, there can be a $25,000 fine for altering a football. What happens is that the home team blows up the footballs and then puts them in place - puts the game balls in one spot, puts balls used for kicking in another spot - and then, if anything happens to those, that home team is responsible. And that would be the Patriots in this case.
SIEGEL: And what's the source of the allegation that the ball wasn't as inflated as it should've been?
MCMANUS: Well, you know, the NFL has investigating, and they're being pretty cagey about that. There was a report initially out of Indianapolis that said the investigation was getting started. I think we should be finding more about that, and certainly there's going to be a lot of speculation about it in the two weeks leading up to the Super Bowl.
SIEGEL: It involves the Patriots. And you have to explain that when it comes to the Patriots and allegations of not entirely fair play, there's a history here.
MCMANUS: There certainly is. In 2007, the Patriots were accused of taping Jets' signals, signals that the defensive coaches would use on the sideline. And because of that, the NFL investigated and found that the Patriots had done that. And that is something that has definitely tarnished Belichick's legacy, you know, despite now six Super Bowls that he'll be going to with Tom Brady. I think some people in the NFL public look at that team and don't feel like they've done it on the up and up.
SIEGEL: OK. Let's turn to the other game. True confession right now - the game, obviously being over for all intents and purposes with five minutes left in the fourth quarter, I tuned away. So as come from behind wins in NFL playoff games go, this one would be...
MCMANUS: Right up there. Definitely right up there. Given the short amount of time, I mean, some Seattle fans had already left the building and then came back to kind of watch what was happening through the doors, on some of the monitors - the screen monitors. I mean, this was about as big a comeback as you could get. Seattle was really counted out. Russell Wilson on the sideline, after the game, crying with emotion, just overwhelmed by what had happened.
SIEGEL: OK. Two weeks until Super Bowl 49 in Glendale, Arizona. What are some of the storylines that you are following?
MCMANUS: I'm curious to see how Marshawn Lynch responds on Media Day. He is the running back for Seattle. He is notoriously shy. He does not like talking to the press. Last year, during Media Day, when everybody was up on the podiums talking to everybody, he was trying to hide behind one of the curtains in the media area - and just being swarmed. People were definitely interested in talking to him, but he wanted nothing to do with it. Curious to see, given the fact that he's been fined $100,000 for not talking to the media, if that changes this year.
SIEGEL: I'm deeply impressed that you cover a beat where people can be fined $100,000 for not answering your questions.
MCMANUS: (Laughter) Well, you know, it's part of the job. Part of the job is talking to the media. The NFL is a multibillion-dollar industry. And part of that is that their players are accessible. Their players are human, and their players are accountable to the fans and the public. Part of that is being accountable to the media as well.
SIEGEL: Jane McManus covers the NFL for ESPN. Thanks, Jane.
MCMANUS: Thanks for having me.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Here's a lost and found story. What we assume was lost more than a hundred years ago was a rifle. Archaeologist Eva Jensen found it during a survey in Nevada's Great Basin National Park. She was looking for Native American artifacts.
EVA JENSEN: Truthfully that's kind of what I was hoping to see in that rocky outcrop, but I guess I'll take a Winchester rifle.
SIEGEL: It was made in 1882, but who left it there and when remains a mystery. It had been there so long, its black barrel looked like a part of the juniper tree it was leaning against. Jensen says spotting it was a stroke of luck.
JENSEN: It just was the right time, the right light. Sometimes that makes the difference.
SIEGEL: The rifle will spend some time with the curators of the Buffalo Bill Cody Museum in Wyoming so it can be preserved. Afterwards, it will return to the park where it will be on public display through the National Park Service Centennial in 2016.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Schools often use this week to talk about civil rights and the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., but this year in many classrooms that conversation has been happening for months. Discussions about race in America began in the fall after the events in Ferguson, Missouri. Michigan radio's Jennifer Guerra visited a classroom in Lansing and sent us this audio postcard.
PETER MAGINOT: Who can tell me the facts that we know about Mike Brown? Jalin.
JALIN: Mike Brown - he was shot and killed by a white man.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #1: He didn't have any weapons and he was walking down the street.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #2: He was a teenager.
MAGINOT: He was a teenager.
JENNIFER GUERRA, BYLINE: Welcome to Peter Maginot's sixth-grade class at Shabazz Public School Academy, an afro-centric school in Lansing. Maginot, the teacher, is white, but all of his students are black. And they are honestly concerned that what happened to Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner could happen to them.
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #3: They were unarmed, so why would they shoot them? He was unarmed. He wasn't going to do anything, so how was that...
UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT #4: Police feel like their life is in danger when they're dealing with black people.
GUERRA: The students - all no more than 10 or 11 years old - know all about what happened in Ferguson. They talk about it at home with their parents. They talk about it on the playground with their friends. Their teacher, Peter Maginot, thinks it's also important for them to talk about those issues at school with him.
MAGINOT: It's really heavy stuff. And it can be really hopeless at times, but I think it's important that they at least have exposure to them.
GUERRA: And he wants to make sure his students explore all the sides of the story - for example, how the officer who shot Michael Brown says he was under attack. Now, when Maginot started the semester, he wasn't planning to talk about any of this. It was supposed to be a class about leadership. But then Ferguson happened. And a black man from New York died after being placed in a chokehold by a white police officer. So Maginot decided to spend the semester instead talking about those cases specifically, and the treatment of African-Americans more generally.
MAGINOT: We have talked about racial profiling; we've explained it all the way through. But who thinks they have a solution? Randa?
GUERRA: As the students wrestle with that question, there's one young boy at the back of the room wrestling with his own thoughts. 11-year-old Zyon Adams is turned around in his seat facing backwards. He's staring at a bulletin board he and his classmates made. There are photos stapled up on the board - Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown. The letters R.I.P. are written in black marker over each picture.
ZYON ADAMS: It's like messed up because it's just really black people getting killed a lot. And really, you don't usually see a lot of white people in those kind of type of problems.
GUERRA: How does that make you feel as a young black man?
ZYON: Scared and upset because it might happen to me one day - one of the people up on the posters saying RIP with my picture right under it.
GUERRA: It's heavy stuff, what these kids are grappling with. They've got solutions though. They've got sixth-grade solutions. They want to hang up posters, go on field trips to schools with white kids and talk about the issues with them - get their take on what's been happening. For his part, Zyon Adams is thinking more long-term. Before this class he wanted to be a paleontologist. Now he thinks he wants to be a lawyer so he can represent young black men who get in trouble.
ZYON: Because I could help people explain their case, and I tell the truth every time.
GUERRA: So you want to bring some justice?
ZYON: Yep, justice. That'd be nice.
GUERRA: For NPR News, I'm Jennifer Guerra.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
It's Mardi Gras season in New Orleans and over the next few weeks, thousands of visitors will swarm the city's famous French Quarter, drinks in hand. New Orleans's most-visited neighborhood rarely sees the type of violent crime that plagues other parts of the city, but a recent spike in robberies in the French Quarter has residents demanding changes. From member station WWNO, Eve Troeh reports.
EVE TROEH, BYLINE: The French Quarter is unique, a centuries-old neighborhood that's also a major tourist attraction. In less than two square miles it combines hotels, restaurants, street performers and all-night bars with historic homes and tight-knit neighbors. Now some of the Quarter's iconic wrought-iron balconies hold new signs.
BRYAN DRUDE: And we put the sign out there - Caution. Walk in large groups. We love the N.O.P.D. We just need more.
TROEH: Resident Bryan Drude got that sign from neighbors, who printed hundreds of them after a man was stabbed and robbed on their street last month. Drude wants more police on foot to protect tourists and locals.
DRUDE: We want the people that are here now to be safe. We don't want them to get held-up or mugged or stabbed or shot. That's going to do a lot worse publicity to us than them seeing the signs.
TROEH: It's not the only public ploy to gain attention. French Quarter businessman Sidney Torres bought TV ads. His home was robbed last month then this month armed robbers attacked the bar next door to him.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV AD)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Announcing) The French Quarter is under siege by criminals. The problem can be fixed. It is only 6 blocks by 13 blocks. We should hold the administration accountable for the failures of not protecting the French Quarter.
TROEH: After meeting with the mayor and the chief of police, Torres has canceled the ads. The city's run its own sort of campaign with podium speeches to highlight arrests and task forces. Introducing new police recruits, Mayor Mitch Landrieu addressed the French Quarter directly.
MAYOR MITCH LANDRIEU: Recent upticks that have been plaguing the city have made people feel unsafe and has reinforced our need to focus our attention. It's now more important than ever to have the best people, the best training and the best equipment.
TROEH: Years of attrition have dwindled New Orleans's police force. The city has upped its recruitment budget and says applications have risen 300 percent. But it still takes a year to get recruits on the streets. The city's also starting something called NOLA Patrol. The 40 or so uniformed security guards will walk the Quarter and work with officers. Landrieu also wants more state police.
(MUSIC)
TROEH: The current crowd seems mostly undeterred. Atlanta residents Anthony Mullins and Taylor Norman roam Royal Street. Reading the Walk In Large Group signs, Mullins, who works in law enforcement, says he understands people's fears.
ANTHONY MULLINS: I could probably agree with them. I would probably want to see more police too, so, I mean as a tourist looking at it, you know, that's kind of - it is alarming.
TROEH: The couple hadn't heard about the recent crime, but say it won't change their plans. Not so for Barb Kelly. Up in Alberta, Canada she's been following French Quarter crime in the news and on travel websites. She and her husband planned a 10-day trip in March. Now they're not sure.
BARB KELLY: It's a hard decision to make because I really do want to go back and see more of New Orleans. Like, I loved it there. I really did. I thought it was, you know, it was a great experience. We have to sit down and weigh the pros and cons.
TROEH: It's the kind of calculation people who live, work and play in the French Quarter make every day right now - deciding whether to stay for the band's next set, whether to walk a few blocks or take a cab, asking who might walk with them and how much risk is too much.
For NPR News I'm Eve Troeh in New Orleans.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
This coming weekend, one of the most anticipated musicals of the Broadway season will close. "The Last Ship," with songs by Sting, is the second high-profile production to throw in the towel. The other was a revival of "Sideshow." Both musicals lost almost their entire investment. There is, of course, lots of money to be made on Broadway. Last season it brought in $1.3 billion dollars in ticket sales. But as NPR's Jeff Lunden reports, only 1 in 4 Broadway shows turns a profit.
JEFF LUNDEN, BYLINE: Jeremy Gerard of deadline.com has been covering Broadway as an entertainment reporter and theater critic for decades.
JEREMY GERARD: If there's one thing I've learned in 30 odd years of covering this industry, it is this golden rule - you cannot make people see a show that they don't want to see.
LUNDEN: One of the shows they apparently didn't want to see was "Sideshow," an $8 million revival of a cult musical which bombed on Broadway in its original run in 1997.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHO WILL LOVE ME AS I AM?")
ERIN DAVIE: (As Violet Hilton, singing) Like a fish plucked from the ocean tossed into a foreign stream.
LUNDEN: It tells the true story of Daisy and Violet Hilton, conjoined twins who go from a freak show to vaudeville and try unsuccessfully to find love along the way.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHO WILL LOVE ME AS I AM?")
DAVIE: (As Violet Hilton, singing) Who will love me as I am?
LUNDEN: Scott Mallalieu runs greatwhiteway.com, which sells tickets to groups - school groups, church groups. He says even though he loved the show, he couldn't convince his clients to even try it.
SCOTT MALLALIEU: Whether you call them co-joined or Siamese, you get the same reaction out of people immediately, which is, why? And they immediately say, no, I don't want to go see that show.
LUNDEN: The reviews were almost unanimously raves, and producer Darren Bagert says he did everything he could to attract audiences in the show's brief two-month run - a splashy ad campaign, $35 tickets for people under 30. But "Sideshow" rarely brought in the $500,000 a week it cost to run.
DARREN BAGERT: We just did not get enough bodies and butts in seats that translate into word-of-mouth. We never did.
LUNDEN: And word-of-mouth is now even more important than reviews for a Broadway show, admits critic Jeremy Gerard.
GERARD: Unless you come out of the theater saying, I have to tell everybody I know they must see this show, the show is going to die. It doesn't matter what The New York Times says. It doesn't matter what New York magazine says. If they don't come out feeling that, it's not going to work.
LUNDEN: Critics are in a tough spot when it comes to shows that have some good qualities.
GERARD: How do you tell somebody who's going to spend anywhere from $175 to $500 or more per ticket for a show, how do you tell them it's so-so, but you can't miss this performance?
I'm a consumer. I say, what?
LUNDEN: That creates a boom-or-bust environment on Broadway, says producer Darren Bagert.
BAGERT: You're either a monster hit or you close quickly. There's no middle ground.
LUNDEN: So producers try to hedge their bets by bringing in stars for limited runs or doing adaptations of well-known movies. It's all about branding, says Ben Brantley, chief drama critic for The New York Times. And in the case of the $18 million musical, "The Last Ship," the brand was Sting.
BEN BRANTLEY: But people don't clearly care so much about hearing what Sting has written as actually seeing Sting in the flesh.
LUNDEN: Sting was not in the cast of "The Last Ship" when it opened in October. Jeremy Gerard thinks the problem wasn't the score, but the musical story - an allegory about a prodigal son coming home to a depressed English industrial town.
GERARD: The critics said terrific things about the music, but the story was really kind of ponderous and not very believable, and so people had the same problem with that.
LUNDEN: In something of a Hail Mary, the producers actually put Sting in the show in a supporting role, and that gave "The Last Ship" a brief bump in sales.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE LAST SHIP")
STING: (As character, singing) Through the teeth of this tempest, in the mouth of a gale, may the angels protect me if all else should fail and the last ship sails.
LUNDEN: There's another golden rule on Broadway, says Jeremy Gerard - you can't stop people from seeing a show they want to see despite the critics. Ten years ago, "Wicked" opened to almost unanimous pans.
GERARD: We, as critics, missed the boat on that one. The audience didn't care.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "POPULAR")
KRISTIN CHENOWETH: (As Glinda, singing) Popular. You're going to be popular.
LUNDEN: It's been popular on Broadway and around the world ever since. For NPR News, I'm Jeff Lunden in New York.
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The New England Patriots may have been victorious this past Sunday, but there is a cloud over their trouncing of the Indianapolis Colts. The NFL is looking into allegations that the Patriots deflated the football to give themselves an advantage. While we wait for an official verdict, we asked NPR science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel to investigate.
GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: First I found two scientists qualified to impartially analyze deflate-gate, John Eric Goff, a physicist at Lynchburg College in Virginia studies the science of sports. More importantly...
JOHN ERIC GOFF: Not really a fan of either team.
BRUMFIEL: Ainissa Ramirez is author of "Newton's Football," about the science of football.
AINISSA RAMIREZ: I'm secretly a 49ers fan and and the people around me are Giants fans.
BRUMFIEL: So, no conflicts of interest. What do these two researchers think?
RAMIREZ: Deflating the ball does give a team an advantage. The ball is slightly squishier and particularly during that game, which was very rainy, it's hard to hold the ball, it's hard to catch the ball. So by making it a little softer, it's easier to catch the ball. A flat ball means a better grip for quarterbacks and receivers. On the other hand...
GOFF: There is a slight disadvantage. If you reduce the mass of the ball, which happens if you let a little bit of air out, the ball can decelerate a little bit faster when you throw it.
BRUMFIEL: And that means it won't go as far on each throw. On balance, Ramirez and Goff agree, grippiness trumps the weight problem. Still, Goff doubts the ball was deliberately deflated. The referees handle the ball on every play. They'd feel if it was deflated.
GOFF: You just can't imagine a ball being underinflated for a significant portion of the game to make a difference and not be noticed by the referee.
BRUMFIEL: However, Ramirez says tampering has happened before. In the 1990s kickers in the NFL were secretly trying to soften up the ball to make it go further. They came up with all sorts of tricks.
RAMIREZ: Microwave it, hammer it, Gatorade it, dip it in milk, steam bath it, put in the dryer, inflate it, deflate it.
BRUMFIEL: It got so bad the NFL now brings in special kicking balls from the factory before each game. Ramirez says coaches and players want to win and they'll do anything.
RAMIREZ: Any little advantage that you can get - if it's modifying the ball or the temperature of the stadium - all these things play to giving you an opportunity to score. And no one's above it.
BRUMFIEL: NFL Rule 2 Section 1 clearly states balls must be inflated between 12.5 and 13.5 pounds per square inch. The League confirmed to NPR they are investigating the ball pressure at Sunday's game. Geoff Brumfiel, NPR News.
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Asthma affects children regardless of where they live and whether they're rich or poor. But scientists have long thought that living in low-income urban neighborhoods adds a big additional risk. A new study suggests that that's not exactly the case, as NPR's Richard Harris reports.
RICHARD HARRIS, BYLINE: Asthma is an inflammation of the lungs, and it is often triggered by something in the environment. So in the 1960s, scientists started looking for places where asthma was especially bad.
CORINNE KEET: Researchers started noting that people living in inner cities like New York, Chicago and Baltimore had high rates of asthma in general and that they seemed to have very high rates of hospitalizations and emergency room visits.
HARRIS: Dr. Corinne Keet and her colleagues at Johns Hopkins realized that nobody had ever taken a sweeping survey to see if what was true in those cities applied nationwide, so they did a study to check those assumptions. Their findings appear in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
KEET: We found that living in an inner-city area was actually not a big risk factor for having asthma itself.
HARRIS: Absolutely, lots of children in those poor neighborhoods had asthma.
KEET: But we also found that even more children had asthma in some poor suburban and medium-sized towns in other regions of the country. And even other areas, like in the West, living in the inner city didn't seem to be a risk factor at all for having asthma.
HARRIS: When they dived into isolate the actual risks, they found that poverty itself was an overwhelming factor, along with African-American or Puerto Rican heritage. There's apparently a genetic component to asthma, though it's tough to tease out. That may help explain why Hispanics from places other than Puerto Rico generally have lower rates of asthma, regardless of their income levels. Part of what's going on here is that poor people have been moving out of the inner city.
KEET: Where we used to conflate inner city with poverty, now we see even more concentrated poverty in suburban areas and smaller towns.
HARRIS: So this means that the environment right outside your door doesn't matter nearly as much as what life is like in your home. Dr. Rosalind Wright at Mount Sinai in New York says there's plenty of evidence that bad housing with cockroaches and mold can increase the risk for asthma.
ROSALIND WRIGHT: This can also be true in non-urban areas, of course. If you live in lower quality housing, you may have similar types of risk.
HARRIS: Second-hand smoke is also a risk for children, and poor people are more likely to smoke. People in poverty, no matter where they live, also experience day-to-day stress.
WRIGHT: Certainly, people who live with lower income have many more challenges to deal with and psychological stress, and this can affect your immune system.
HARRIS: Scientists really want to track down the root causes of asthma, so it's helpful to replace a fuzzy observation about life in the inner city with more specific factors that can trigger asthma attacks. Wright has been chipping away at this problem for years, but she doesn't think we'll end up zeroing in on a few things that are common in all circumstances.
WRIGHT: The problem is it's not the same environmental factors that might be the most relevant or important if you're talking about the Upper East side of New York City versus East Harlem versus rural Michigan or something like this.
HARRIS: Wright says what's needed now are studies that don't simply survey the landscape but get down to the nitty-gritty so scientists can understand how environmental factors and genes interact to trigger this common and occasionally deadly disease. Richard Harris, NPR News.
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Today, the people of Guinea tried to forget about Ebola for just one day. They focused instead on soccer. That's because Guinea's national squad played Ivory Coast in Africa's premier soccer championship. NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton watched the match with a group of fans.
OFEIBEA QUIST-ARCTON, BYLINE: At a ramshackle Atlantic Ocean view cubbyhole in Guinea's capital, Conakry, a few dozen women and men squeeze into the room, breaking Ebola's cardinal rule about no contact, no touching. The focus was Guinea's opening game against Ivory Coast in the Africa Cup of Nations.
(CHEERING)
QUIST-ARCTON: The tiny room erupted in euphoria as Guinea scored, and Guinea's National Elephants went ahead of Ivory Coast Elephants, as the teams are called.
(CHEERING)
UNIDENTIFIED MEN: (Chanting in foreign language).
QUIST-ARCTON: But you can't quite get away from Ebola in Guinea. Excited fans chanted FC Ebola - i.e. Ebola Football Club, adding Ebola must go.
UNIDENTIFIED MEN: (Chanting in foreign language).
QUIST-ARCTON: And then shock - Ivory Coast scored in the 72nd minute. The Guinean fans looked deflated and the match ended in 1-1 draw.
So, sir, Guinea was ahead.
MOHAMED CONDE: (Foreign language spoken).
QUIST-ARCTON: Mohamed Conde says, "oh, well, we were hoping that Guinea would win, but I'm really proud of my team."
CONDE: (Foreign language spoken).
QUIST-ARCTON: Conde says, "long live Guinea and out with Ebola." Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, NPR News in Conakry.
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Later this evening President Obama will travel one mile down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol to deliver the annual State of the Union address. Much of what he'll say is no secret. It has been heavily promoted on social media, in speeches around the country and in this video from the president himself.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: This State of the Union gives me an opportunity to present to the American people; now that we have fought our way through the crisis, how do we make sure that everybody in this country - how do we make sure that they're sharing in this growing economy?
SIEGEL: And Republicans also are making no secret of what they think. Here's Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SENATOR MITCH MCCONNELL: Looking at the rollout of what he's likely to talk about tonight - speaking of warmed over proposals, it all looks like the same old tax and spend that the president's been advocating for the last six years.
SIEGEL: Well, for more on the policy and the politics of this evening, we're joined by NPR's Mara Liasson. Mara, what does the president hope to accomplish tonight?
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Well, I think more than laying out a series of bills that he expects Congress to pass, he hopes to accomplish a framing of the debate for the next two years and for 2016. He has an opposition Congress now controlled totally by Republicans as opposed to the divided and paralyzed Congress we had before. That means Congress will be passing things - not necessarily his things, but he'll be waiting at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue with a pen to sign or veto them. So they're going to be big fights - big veto fights. There were going to be negotiations, and the president wants to draw the battle lines tonight.
And I think with his tax package in particular, he's signaling it's time to move beyond the debate about the size of government, about the deficit. And he's going to say tonight - as you heard him before in that clip - now that the recession is over, the economy's growing. Let's use the tax code to address a big problem which is that middle-class wages are stagnating. Inequality is growing even when the economy is growing.
SIEGEL: So what are some of the highlights of the initiatives that the president will discuss tonight in his speech?
LIASSON: Well, I think the tax package is the centerpiece. His plan would close loopholes for the wealthy, raise capital gains taxes, expose more inherited wealth to tax. The White House says this would be closing the, quote, "trust fund loophole," putting fees on the biggest banks and then using that money to make two years of community college tuition virtually free, pay for expanded tax credits for working families, for education, for child care and investing in infrastructure.
SIEGEL: And the prospects that he can get any of that passed?
LIASSON: Well, I think overall they're slim to none. But if Republicans see it in their interest, there could be some kind of tax reform that includes something of what's in the president's package. In the past, Republicans like the former House Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp have proposed fees on big banks. Conservatives like Marco Rubio have proposed expanding the earned income tax credit.
I think trade is another issue the president will talk about tonight that might get passed. It has big Republican support. Although on trade, something to listen for is whether the president pushes his own party on that issue since a majority of Democrats are opposed to the president's trade agenda
SIEGEL: Now, we heard Mitch McConnell just a moment ago - a clip of him. But there's always an official GOP response or minority response after the speech - the party that doesn't hold the White House. Tell us about that.
LIASSON: It'll be Joni Ernst, the freshman senator from Iowa. The Republican party has a tradition of putting bright, young stars forward, particularly ones that put a fresh face on the GOP. In this Republican response Ernst is a conservative, but she's also a mom, a veteran, a farmer and she's from the heartland.
SIEGEL: OK. That's NPR's Mara Liasson. Thank you, Mara.
LIASSON: Thank you.
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It's customary during a State of the Union speech to see lawmakers from the president's own party stand and cheer loudly while members of the opposition sit in stony silence. Tonight though, we could see a mirror image of that during one part of the president's speech. When President Obama talks about free trade deals he's trying to strike, he's likely to get a much warmer reception from Republicans than from his fellow Democrats. NPR's Scott Horsley explains.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Both President Obama and Republican Congressional leaders have identified trade negotiations as one of the few areas where they think they can find common ground. The new Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell talked about that after meeting with Obama at the White House last week.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SENATOR MITCH MCCONNELL: We think trade agreements are good for America, create jobs and opportunity for our people.
HORSLEY: McConnell thinks most Republicans are willing to grant the president fast-track authority to finalize two big trade deals, setting the stage for a simple up or down vote in Congress. The administration has been promoting those deals as a way to boost American exports and improve living standards here at home. But in meeting with a group of CEOs last month, Obama acknowledged he's got an uphill job in selling the deals to a skeptical audience, including many of his fellow Democrats who are worried about overseas competition.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We have to be able to talk directly to the public about why trade is good for America, good for American businesses and good for American workers. And we have to dispel some of the myths.
HORSLEY: Obama concedes competition from low-cost trading partners has cost some jobs in the U.S., but he insists efforts to beat back new trade deals are counterproductive. He argues the proposed agreements would require countries like Malaysia and Vietnam to raise that their labor and environmental standards, putting competitors in this country on a stronger footing.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
OBAMA: Part of the argument that I'm making to Democrats is, don't fight the last war.
LORI WALLACH: If the president doesn't want us to fight the last trade debate then he needs to stop sending us the last trade agreement.
HORSLEY: That's Lori Wallach, who monitors trade policy for the nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen. She argues that the president who once campaigned on a platform of changing the North American Free Trade Agreement is now drafting new trade deals with many of the same characteristics.
WALLACH: When he said he was going to renegotiate NAFTA, we didn't expect him to expand on its worst provisions and then extend that to a dozen more countries.
HORSLEY: Obama's trade agenda has put the president at odds with some of the labor and environmental groups that helped elect him, not to mention many of his fellow Democratic politicians. Wisconsin Democrat Mark Pocan says he won't vote to give the president fast-track negotiating authority.
U.S. REPRESENTATIVE MARK POCAN: We have seen the jobs go away, the wages go down. And it is time that the public has a say, which means Congress has to have a say, and fast-track takes away our voice.
HORSLEY: While Congressional Democrats may be the biggest stumbling block, Obama notes, Republicans' traditional faith in free trade agreements has also been shaken by tough economic times. That points to a bigger challenge facing political leaders in both parties as they try to sell their policies to anxious and uncertain middle class.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
OBAMA: We're not going to get trade done, we're not going to get infrastructure done, we're not going to get anything done in this town until we're able to describe to the average American worker how, at some level, this is improving their wages, it's giving them the ability to save for retirement, it's improving their financial security.
HORSLEY: That theme of helping the average American worker will run throughout the president's speech tonight, even if Obama's own party is skeptical of some of his policy prescriptions.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington.
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Now to Yemen, where there has been intense fighting in the capital, Sanaa. Shiite rebels have been clashing with government forces. They reportedly broke into the presidential palace and shelled the president's house. Tonight, a rebel leader gave a televised address saying the assault was intended to force concessions from the president, who is a close U.S. ally. The fighting threatens U.S. efforts to stabilize Yemen and to fight al-Qaida there. Earlier today, we reached reporter Iona Craig in London. She recently returned from four years in Yemen, and she told us about the rebel group called the Houthis.
IONA CRAIG: They were created as a movement in 2004 and since then have been calling for greater autonomy from Saada in the north. And for the last year, really, have been pushing south towards the capital and taking territory until they got to Sanaa, took control of the city in September last year.
CORNISH: And we can make the distinction here that these rebels are not associated with the al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, right?
CRAIG: Oh, no, absolutely not. They're enemies. Actually, what we've seen since the Houthis came in Sanaa in September if then after that they launched a major campaign against al-Qaida in the province of Bayda (ph). And it's also seen a sharp increase in attacks by al-Qaida targeting the Houthis and now trying to push Yemen into a sectarian conflict, which there is really no great history of in Yemen.
CORNISH: What's known about what's happening there right now? We mentioned earlier that the presidential palace is reportedly overrun.
CRAIG: Yes, certainly, and what happened was on Monday this - clashes started in the southeast of the city, which is around the area of the presidential palace. Although, it's important to remember that the president doesn't live there. He's actually living in the president's residence, which is in the west of the city, but there was heavy fighting there for over 10 hours on Monday. I think the situation was certainly very confusing because the Houthis are essentially a plainclothes militia. But since they took control in September of Sanaa, they have started to be integrated into the army.
So you would have had plainclothes militiamen fighting those in military uniform, but some of the military uniforms were also being worn by the Houthis. So it's a very confusing situation when these clashes started, who was loyal to who and even who was fighting who. There was a cease-fire at the end of the day on Monday, but then that fighting started again briefly on Tuesday afternoon. And, certainly, it seems that it centered around the presidential palace again, but there was also reports of clashes near to President Hadi's house, which, as I mentioned, was in the west of the city. Things then settled down again after that, but this is a very fragile situation on the ground at the moment and people are extremely nervous.
CORNISH: What does this mean for the relationship with the U.S. in terms of being able to conduct a campaign against al-Qaida and the al-Qaida threat coming from Yemen?
CRAIG: Well, I think this problem really stems from the issues over the political transition. And the biggest problem is with it, it hasn't really addressed those issues, and so now we have political instability. We have a very weak president. The Houthis are the greatest fighting force and without political security you can't have security around the country to prevent groups like al-Qaida operating. So it impacts the security of the whole country when you don't have political stability.
CORNISH: That's Iona Craig. She's reported from Yemen for the last four years. She spoke with us from London. Thank you so much for speaking with us.
CRAIG: Thanks for having me.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Haiti's President Michel Martelly swore in a new government yesterday amid growing street protests calling for his ouster. President Martelly now rules the Caribbean nation by decree after a U.S.-backed political compromise that was scheduling new parliamentary elections collapsed.
The political crisis is jeopardizing Haiti's fragile recovery from the devastating earthquake that struck five years ago this month. And that's especially evident in Haiti's impoverished rural areas, as NPR's Carrie Kahn reports.
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: Delva Devalas doesn't participate in the near daily antigovernment protests taking place in the streets of the capital. He farms about an acre of land in the parched valley below the denuded rock hills of Gonaive, some 100 miles north of Port-au-Prince. He's more worried about his bean crop that should be ready to harvest next month.
DELVA DEVALAS: (Foreign language spoken).
KAHN: He says the last few weeks have been very windy. Many of his plants' flowers blew away, and he doesn't know how many beans will actually sprout. Farming in Haiti is one of the mainstays of the country's economy, but it's tough business. Most farmers like Devalas work small plots under tough conditions.
DEVALAS: (Foreign language spoken).
KAHN: In the 1980s, Devalas, who is 60 years old, says he could stick anything in the ground and it would grow. But now it just seems like the land is finished.
TIMOTE GEORGES: We do need the government to intervene.
KAHN: Timote Georges helps small farmers in Gonaive. He teaches the benefits of natural fertilization, crop rotation and seed production. His small farmers' lands get support from the U.S.-based outdoor clothing company Timberland, which also plants trees on the rocky deforested hills surrounding Gonaive. Georges says politicians need to come to the countryside and learn more about farmers' reality.
GEORGES: And not staying at the office to talk, but to come with right policies in order to help these people.
KAHN: Haiti's politicians haven't made it out of the capital too much lately. They've been locked in a prolonged political fight that took a new turn last week when the Parliament essentially dissolved. The terms of the majority of legislators expired, leaving President Martelly ruling by decree, a move that has angered the opposition and led to a new round of street protests. Martelly is yet to schedule the long-overdue elections.
The political standoff is threatening to derail many of the gains made during the past five years as Haiti has struggled to recover from the devastating earthquake, says World Bank envoy to the country Mary Barton Dock.
MARY BARTON DOCK: This could all start to go the wrong direction. And if Haiti can get through its elections and get to the other side and keep growing, things could really start to turn around.
KAHN: A study by the World Bank shows that poverty rates in Haiti have declined recently, but a quarter of the population still lives in extreme poverty, earning about a dollar a day. And Barton Dock says rural Haitians are still the poorest of the poor.
Consultant Jean Maurice Buteau wants the government to do more for agriculture. For years he exported mangoes to the U.S., a particularly challenging enterprise given Haiti's poor infrastructure.
JEAN MAURICE BUTEAU: Haiti has more entrepreneurs per kilometer square than you would ever think. We are ready for business. It's just that we need the political situation to calm down so we can make business.
KAHN: Carrie Kahn, NPR News.
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When President Obama gives his State of the Union speech tonight his new approach to Cuba will likely be featured prominently. One of the official White House guests will be a U.S. government contractor who spent five years in a Cuban jail before being released as part of the warming ties. The president is also sending a high-level official to Havana this week for talks on how to revive a relationship that has been frozen in time. NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Just a month after he was released from a Cuban jail, Alan Gross will be sitting near First Lady Michelle Obama, a sign of his support for the administration's new course in Cuba. Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, has invited someone else to remind Obama of the ongoing human rights abuses on the island - the daughter of the Cuban dissident Oswaldo Paya, who died in a suspicious car accident in 2012. Still, Obama can count on cheers from some in the crowd including Senator Dick Durbin.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
SENATOR DICK DURBIN: For over 50 years we have been committed to a policy of exclusion, believing that if we had embargoes and blockades, we could force internal change in Cuba. The policy failed.
KELEMEN: The Illinois Democrat is just back from Cuba where he says he and other U.S. lawmakers met with government officials and with opponents of the regime, including a young engineering student.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
DURBIN: He said to us, what President Obama's announcement has done is pull the blanket off the caged bird in Cuba. Those of us who live in Cuba are still in the cage of Communism, but we can see out now about opportunities and a future.
That, I believe, is part of what the president's new policy is all about.
KELEMEN: The assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere is holding talks in Havana this week to re-establish an embassy. The U.S. wants Cuba to lift the limits on the number of U.S. diplomats in the country and give Cubans access to the mission. These are talks that have to be based on reciprocity says Cynthia Arnson, director of the Latin America program at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
CYNTHIA ARNSON: So far, the United States has gone a long way in relaxing travel and trade regulations that prohibit in the United States from having deeper contact with Cuban citizens. And the real question is what the Cuban government is going to be doing in return.
KELEMEN: Arnson says the U.S. may have trouble, for instance, as it tries to promote broader Internet access on the island. If Cuba sees this as just another way for Washington to encourage regime change, the negotiations won't go well.
ARNSON: If there's an intelligent, low, incremental way of pushing the envelope, I think that that approach has the potential for being more successful over the long term.
KELEMEN: But Arnson doesn't think the Obama administration has quite figured out how to do that.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.
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The government is asking a New Orleans federal judge to impose a stiff financial penalty on oil giant BP for the worst offshore environmental disaster in U.S. history. It's been nearly five years since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded. Eleven workers were killed, and oil spewed into the Gulf of Mexico for nearly three months fouling beaches, wetlands and wildlife from Texas to Florida. BP is back in court today to determine how much it should pay in civil fines for the disaster.
NPR's Debbie Elliott is in New Orleans watching the case and joins us now. And Debbie, the federal government says BP should face the maximum penalty for polluting the Gulf. How much money are we talking about here?
DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: We're talking about lot of money, a fine that would be unprecedented under the Clean Water Act. The federal government today asked for somewhere between 11.7 and 13.7 billion dollars - that's billion with a B. Now, the most BP could be fined under the Clean Water Act is based on how much oil spilled, and that figure is the high-end of that - the 13.7 billion.
Now, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier has already found that BP's gross negligence led to the Deepwater Horizon explosion. BP is appealing that decision from the first phase of this trial. But in the meantime, he's hearing testimony this week and for the next few weeks on what kind of penalty he should assess that would both punish BP and serve as a deterrent to another such disaster as this.
CORNISH: And, as you mentioned, this huge fine - I mean, the biggest fine ever imposed under the Clean Water Act - what justification does the government offer for imposing the toughest penalty possible on BP?
ELLIOTT: Well, the government sort of tipped off different factors. Under the Clean Water Act, the judge can consider eight things - things that include the seriousness of the violation, BP's degree of culpability, the company's history of prior violations and what efforts BP made to mitigate the spell. So during opening arguments today the Justice Department's attorney, Steven O'Rourke, really zeroed in on the sheer size of and the huge impact of this oil spill. He played an interview with BP's CEO, Tony Hayward. You remember him. He was the one who got so much flak for talking about wanting his life back during the crisis. But this little clip that was played in court today - Tony Hayward said it's clear we're dealing with a serious catastrophe - again, the government trying to underscore the serious nature of the oil spill.
O'Rourke showed photographs of oiled birds, thick, dark oil floating in the Gulf and maps that showed the 1,100 miles of shoreline that was oiled over the Gulf States. He talked about how thousands of people are harmed by the spill, the ultimate impact still remains to be told. And he thinks that, you know, the judge should not take into account BP's claim that everything is much better on the Gulf Coast today.
CORNISH: And BP is trying to convince the judge that it doesn't deserve the maximum penalty in part because of how it responded to the spill. What more did the company argue?
ELLIOTT: Basically, BP is saying it did the right thing and it should get credit for that. BP attorney Mike Brock talked about the diligent work by the company to try to control the blown-out well, while at the same time trying to contain the effects of this spill - collecting the oil at sea, skimming it, burning it, dispersing it, trying to keep it from reaching those fragile shorelines and wetlands. He talked about during the peak of the response there were some 44,000 workers in the Gulf. There were 6,300 vessels working all the same time.
He argued that that work significantly changed the outcome of the spill, and he thinks the judge should take into account what he calls the massive amount of money - nearly $34 billion - that BP has already spent to mitigate the environmental and economic harm from the disaster.
CORNISH: Finally, Debbie, falling oil prices - could that play into this?
ELLIOTT: Well, BP is certainly making that argument. They say, you know, that hampers their ability to pay. It means that a lower fine would inflict plenty of punishment in this climate. But lawyers for the government counter that BP has recently told investors that price volatility is something they can handle, so it'll be curious if the judge accepts that. He said, you know, why can't we just structure a payout over several years? And the lawyer said, you know, maybe you could.
CORNISH: That's NPR's Debbie Elliott in New Orleans. Debbie, thank you.
ELLIOTT: Thank you.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
As much as 50,000 gallons of crude oil has spilled into the Yellowstone River in eastern Montana. It was caused by a pipeline rupture near the high plains town of Glendive. The governor has declared a state of emergency in two counties because of the spill. Montana Public Radio's Eric Whitney reports.
ERIC WHITNEY, BYLINE: The company running the operation, Bridger Pipeline, says their 12-inch diameter pipe ruptured at 10 a.m. Saturday. Dena Hoff is a farmer on land adjacent to the pipeline.
DENA HOFF: I'm very upset, and I want to know how they're going to deal with it.
WHITNEY: Dealing with it is proving to be a challenge as much of the river in the area is encased in ice and conditions on the river and nearby can be treacherous this time of year for cleanup crews. Furthermore, it's still unclear where all the oil is. No one expected it to sink to the level where Glendive draws its drinking water - about 14 feet below the river's surface - but Mayor Jerry Jimison says that apparently happened.
MAYOR JERRY JIMISON: Sunday afternoon in the evening we started getting reports from residents that their water smelled funny, so we chose to alert residents not to drink the water until we could resolve the problem.
WHITNEY: Montana and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency testing has detected the cancer-causing chemical benzene in Glendive's tap water. The town's water system serves about 6,000 people. No one knows how long it'll take before the water is safe to drink again. Meanwhile, truckloads of bottled water started arriving in town late Sunday. Montana Governor Steve Bullock toured the oil spill site Monday afternoon. He says cleaning up events like this can take some time.
GOVERNOR STEVE BULLOCK: The long term is containing as much of the oil and making sure that any property owners aren't impacted, and making sure that the pipeline company is held accountable for any damages, including natural resource damages, that might occur.
WHITNEY: The governor says Bridger Pipeline has promised to clean up the spill and pay for it. The company is digging trenches to try to collect the oil and the federal Environmental Protection Agency is on site, trying to intercept oil in the water.
BULLOCK: Unfortunately, this isn't the first rodeo that we've been to.
WHITNEY: Bullock recalls that in 2011 an ExxonMobil pipeline rupture spilled about 63,000 gallons of crude oil into the Yellowstone far upriver near Billings. That spill that happened in July sent oil at least 70 miles downriver. This spill, Governor Bullock says, has brought reports of an oily sheen about 50 miles downriver at the North Dakota border.
A spokesman for Bridger Pipeline has not returned a phone call for this story. Glendive Mayor Jerry Jimison says that so far, he's been impressed with the response he's seen from the pipeline company at local emergency management meetings.
JIMISON: Last night there were about a hundred people in the room and about 75 of those people were contractors that Bridger Pipeline had brought in for various tasks.
WHITNEY: But given the oil spill into the river in 2011, farmer Dena Hoff whose land is next to this pipeline is mad that another one happened. And it makes her nervous to think that a new pipeline, the Keystone XL, could be built nearby.
HOFF: I'm pretty upset about the whole thing. And where the Keystone XL is supposed to cross the river is upstream, which means my irrigation water would be very affected.
WHITNEY: Pipelines cross Montana waterways in about 3,000 places, and the state's governor says he wants to know more about the federal agency that inspects them for safety.
For NPR News, I'm Eric Whitney in Missoula.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
If you have watched any football on television recently then you have watched a lot of instant replay.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Well, take a look at it, turnovers - a big key. Yeah, the knee's down. The left knee is down and then he comes out. That's a great look at it right there.
SIEGEL: Instant replay was invented more than 50 years ago and it forever changed the way we watch sports. The creator of the instant replay was a young CBS Sports producer named Tony Verna. And Mr. Verna died this past Sunday at age 81. He had leukemia. Reporter Anna Clark spoke with Tony Verna in 2013 while she was writing a profile of him, and she joins us now. Welcome to the program.
ANNA CLARK: Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
SIEGEL: And let's go back to the moment of invention - December 1963, the Army-Navy game, big college football rivalry. What does Tony Verna do?
CLARK: He was sneaky (laughter). He had been wanting to try out this new sort of production trick for a while, and he did not want to go through the usual routes for television innovation at the time. He didn't want to, like, file a bunch of memos, have it go through CBS's research and development, you know, department. He just wanted to do it, but to do so was tricky. He had to basically sneak out more than a ton's worth of equipment from New York, truck it down to Marchant Stadium in Philadelphia for the game and broadcast this, you know, much-hyped, emotional, live football game while trying to, at the same time, trying to manipulate the tape to do an instant replay. And what he ended up doing - he didn't manage to get it until the fourth quarter, and he only managed to do it once, but it did change the game.
SIEGEL: Now, there are some great details about that first instant replay in 1963. One is there's no video record of the broadcast - of the telecast - I gather, so we can't actually see it. But the CBS announcer actually had to tell viewers ladies and gentlemen, Army did not score again. It's totally confusing to see something replayed right away.
CLARK: Completely confusing. I mean, if you're watching at home you saw Army quarterback Rollie Stichweh cross over the end zone, score a touchdown. You saw them celebrating and then seconds later you saw him do the exact same thing again. The broadcaster was trying to explain to audiences that it was not a second touchdown, but a lot of them were confused and calling their local CBS stations trying to figure out what was going on. And it got all the more confusing when Army went for a two-point conversion and the quarterback again, for a third time, you know, crossed over.
SIEGEL: There was a wonderful detail that he shared with you, which was that CBS Sports used used videotapes. And so when he was trying to do this earlier in the Army-Navy game he would come up to his spot and instead of seeing the play it would still have "I Love Lucy" on it because that's what they had...
CLARK: (Laughter) That's right.
SIEGEL: That's what they had last recorded on the videotape.
CLARK: He kept trying to zero in, especially on Staubach, who was the star of the game.
SIEGEL: This is Roger Staubach, the Navy quarterback.
CLARK: Exactly, and he couldn't manage to do it because the equipment slipped in and out of recording. And any time you would get a clip it - suddenly Lucille Ball's mug would just sort of pop through it (laughter) or some kind of soap commercial or something like that, and so it wasn't suitable for airing. And that's why - that's part of why he wasn't able to do it until the fourth quarter before he found something that, like, recorded straight through.
SIEGEL: Now, that was the first instance of instant replay, but it was - the phrase instant replay wasn't born yet. That happened a few weeks later, I guess.
CLARK: That's right. It was called immediate video replay at the time. And it wasn't until Tony Verna took this television trick to the the Cotton Bowl, where Navy was playing Texas, that broadcaster Pat Summerall, who was making his television debut at the time, dubbed it instant replay.
SIEGEL: Tony Verna worked for CBS. Did he realize any money for his innovation instant replay?
CLARK: He did not. Although, he fantasized a lot about what he would get out of royalties (laughter) if you could patent a concept like this, but no he didn't. CBS and other networks were using instant replay as much as they possibly could very shortly after its debut, but it did not result in any profits for any particular person.
SIEGEL: Anna Clark, thanks for talking with us.
CLARK: Thank you so much.
SIEGEL: We're talking about the late Tony Verna, a CBS Sports producer, man who brought instant replay to televised football.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The Japanese government is facing a ransom demand of $200 million for the lives of two Japanese men held hostage by the self-described Islamic State. The demand was made in a video posted online in which a hooded fighter gave Japan 72 hours to come up with the money. NPR's Peter Kenyon reports.
PETER KENYON, BYLINE: The video, which is being examined for authenticity, has some echoes of previous ISIS hostage videos. Two Japanese men kneel in orange jumpsuits in front of a black-clad, hooded militant with a British accent, brandishing a knife. He criticizes Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for contributing $200 million in nonmilitary assistance to the anti-ISIS coalition and says Japan now has three days to send the same amount of money to ISIS to spare the lives of its citizens. Although the two hostages share Japanese nationality, their paths to this point were very different. Accounts of 42-year-old Haruna Yukawa's recent past by the Associated Press and the Reuters news agencies paint a picture of devastating family and economic losses back in Japan, leading him to contemplate suicide before reinventing himself as a private security consultant who headed to Syria. 47-year-old Kenji Goto, on the other hand, is a freelance journalist who has worked in a number of conflict zone and whose reports have focused on refugees, children and the impact of war. Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says the dramatic and very public circumstances of this unusually high ransom demand suggest that it's unlikely to be paid.
ANDREW TABLER: I think it makes it much less like. ISIS is drawing a direct correlation between Japan state policy and the safety of its two citizens. In a way, it's putting the government of Japan into a dilemma and trying to exact a public cost.
KENYON: The sheer size of the demand also suggests, to Riad Kawhaji with the Dubai-based Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis, that ISIS, widely considered the best-financed militant force in the region, is having revenue problems thanks to falling oil prices and the aerial onslaught of the anti-ISIS coalition.
RIAD KAWHAJI: Alliance air raids have hurt a lot of their oil refineries and fields. And, therefore, they will be now quite hungry for any funds.
KENYON: The possibility that ISIS is looking for money shouldn't necessarily be interpreted to mean the tide is turning in favor of the coalition, however. Analyst Andrew Taber says, despite the airstrikes, ISIS now controls as much territory in Iraq and Syria as ever, and Washington's decision to stick with an Iraq-first policy in combating ISIS does not bode well for Syria in 2015.
TABLER: Essentially, the corollary to that is let Syria burn because the war there is raging. There's no sign of a victor on one side or the other, only in parts of the country. So Syria is going to be the black hole around which this storm rotates for the coming period. And a lot of dangers can come out of that part of the world.
KENYON: Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Istanbul.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
ISIS isn't just a threat to Iraq and Syria. As the group spread across Iraq last summer and fall, neighboring Saudi Arabia started building a 600 mile fence aimed at keeping militants out. The Saudis are adding chain link razor wire fencing, silent alarms, watchtowers armed with video, along with thermal and night vision surveillance. Gregory Gause is head of the International Affairs Department at Texas A&M University's Bush School of Government and Public Service. I asked him if his high-tech barrier signals Saudi Arabia's fear of an outright invasion by ISIS.
GREGORY GAUSE: I think that that's one of those low probability but very high-impact events that governments tend to do over plan for. I think that the more serious issue for Saudi Arabia and many other states in the Middle East is the affect that ISIS can have within its own domestic populations. I think that there's quite a bit of sympathy in many areas of Saudi public opinion for ISIS' fight against the Assad regime, for their fight against what many people in Saudi Arabia see as an Iranian puppet-regime in Iraq. So there is undoubtedly sympathy for what ISIS is doing.
CORNISH: ISIS is linked to Sunni Muslims in identity. Saudi Arabia has traditionally been home to very conservative Sunni Muslims, and some have talked about private donors in the past funding or supporting the precursor to ISIS. Give us a context for why the Saudi government has been so aggressive about fighting ISIS.
GAUSE: Well, I think that they see ISIS as an analog to al-Qaeda. And the Saudis, in the 1980s, as we did, supported Islamist insurgency in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union and, in the '90s, kind of turned a blind eye to the development of this Salafi jihadist movement. And then that came back to bite them when al-Qaeda conducted a real campaign within Saudi Arabia against the regime. And I think that the leaders of Saudi Arabia see ISIS as possibly doing the same thing. And I think that there's a real recognition at that point in Riyadh that this could have really serious domestic repercussions for the country.
CORNISH: We've talked about this from the perspective of the Saudi government, but, when it comes to Saudi Arabia, what are the goals of ISIS?
GAUSE: Eventually they would like to take over Saudi Arabia, just like al-Qaeda wanted to. The holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the heartland of Arabia is almost irresistible to Salafi jihadists like ISIS. It is their home base. And so I think that there is a sense where ISIS is shooting at Saudi Arabia as an ultimate goal. But this particular attack, I think, was more just a shot across the bow to let the Saudi's know that, you know, you're in our sights.
CORNISH: We've been talking about this border fence, but what other actions is the government taking there in response to the threat that they perceive from ISIS?
GAUSE: At the beginning of 2014, the Saudi's officially put ISIS on their brand-new terrorist list. They criminalized any Saudi joining a foreign jihad. It's explicitly illegal for them to be members of ISIS or even express support for ISIS. So, in that regard, the Saudis defined ISIS as a domestic security threat. And that was, I think, the big escalation. There's also an effort on the part of the religious establishment at the behest of the Saudi government to try to delegitimize ISIS. That, of course, is a harder thing to do because, on the political front, it's easy for the Saudi religious authorities to say these guys are bad because they stand and against our government. But, at the practical level, the way ISIS governs the territory it controls is not all that different from - at least in theory - the way the Saudi religious establishment thinks Islam requires you to govern any territory. They work from the same texts, and although ISIS is much more extreme and much more brutal, there is a similarity in terms of the core texts that both the Saudi religious establishment and that ISIS looks at for guidance about how politics should work in an Islamic State.
CORNISH: Gregory Gause. He's the head of International Affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. Thanks so much for explaining it to us.
GAUSE: It was my pleasure.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
New York is one of only two states that still lock up 16 and 17-year-olds in adult prisons. Governor Andrew Cuomo wants to change that after the release of a critical report. It came from a commission that he appointed to study the issue. North Country Public Radio's Brian Mann has the story.
BRIAN MANN, BYLINE: Right now more than eight hundred 16 and 17-year-olds are being held in adult jails and prisons across New York. Soffiyah Elijah, head of a prison reform group called the Correctional Association, says those young inmates are in danger.
SOFFIYAH ELIJAH: Youth at that age often suffer horribly inside adult facilities. They're far more often than adults to suffer from sexual and physical abuse.
MANN: Studies here in New York and around the country show that young people who serve time in state prisons also face higher risks of suicide compared with teens sent to juvenile facilities. They're also more likely to commit new crimes after release. Elijah co-chaired the state commission that gave its report this week in Albany. She says the vast majority of young people who wind up in adult prisons, 82 percent are black and Hispanic.
ELIJAH: That injustice has a disproportionate impact on communities of color that need to be acknowledge and is an extra reason to get these reforms passed.
MANN: Andrew Cuomo created this commission last year as part of his ongoing effort to shrink New York's prison system, which has included cuts to the number of inmates and the closing of correctional facilities. He says these reforms for younger inmates are long overdue.
GOVERNOR ANDREW CUOMO: Your imagination can paint vivid pictures when you talk about exposing a young person to a state prison. I can tell you the reality is worse. This is one of those issues that has gone on for a long, long time and an issue, frankly, where we have done a lot of damage.
MANN: Under New York law prosecutors now have discretion to try 16 and 17-year-olds as adults or as minors. Cuomo says the age of adult incarceration should be raised to 18. If this plan is implemented, these younger offenders would instead be sent to newly established youth courts or to the state's juvenile facilities by 2017. Commission members also want teenagers who commit non-violent mostly drug-related crimes to have their records sealed if they stay crime-free after release.
Jeremy Creelan co-chaired the commission.
JEREMY CREELAN: Young offenders who stay out of trouble will get a second chance so they can get jobs, enter the Army or college or law school, and New York state will once again be the nation's true leader in juvenile justice.
MANN: The commission included prosecutors, county sheriffs and probation program directors who voted unanimously to support these proposals. But the plan could still face opposition from the Republican-controlled state Senate and from the powerful corrections officer union. Both have resisted Cuomo's push to downsize prisons. If these reforms do pass the legislature, North Carolina will be the only state that still locks up 16 and 17-year-olds in the same prison cells with adult inmates.
For NPR News I'm Brian Mann in upstate New York.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Tens of millions of people will watch President Obama's State of the Union address tonight. It's an enormous audience, but it's far fewer than watch the Super Bowl, and it'll likely be far fewer than watch the State of the Union just a few years ago. So in order to make sure that his message resonates this year, the president has traveled far and wide, literally and virtually.
NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik is with us now from New York City. And, David, usually White Houses hold the message of the speech pretty close to the vest, but this time Mr. Obama has done a great deal foreshadowing.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: He sure has. I mean, before we think about the words of his speech, it's worth thinking about a few numbers. TV audience estimates, if you think back five years ago to 2010, Mr. Obama got 48 million people to watch him on television conventional channels, and that just dropped. Last year, it was just 33 million - a little bit over that. So it's, you know, dropped by about a third in just a few short years. He's gone out in the last 10 days, two weeks, to Tennessee, Iowa and Maryland.
He's been promoting the community college and broadband policy initiatives he's going to likely sketch out in tonight's speech. And he, you know, what does he do? He gets some local coverage. He gets some new settings for where he does it, and he also gets to try to wrest - control the policy discussion ahead of time from the Republicans, who have just taken control of both houses of Congress with pretty sizable margins.
SIEGEL: Of course, watching the speech on TV or, for that matter, listening to it on the radio are not the only ways to follow it. Help us understand how the White House is approaching this differently this year.
FOLKENFLIK: Well, there's this fascinating essay on the digital publisher called Medium by a senior White House advisor, Dan Pfeiffer, and he said that the White House thinks about the audience with four baskets of viewers, right? There are conventional TV people who tune in on TV. There are those who watch with TV plus watching with a second screen that could be a tablet or a PC or smartphone - using other social media outlets or other media to follow in real time. There are folks who are just digital only.
They might stream it, and the White House has been really pumping it whitehouse.gov, where they've got all kinds of supplementary facts and figures and graphics planned to make available to those watching while streaming. And then there are those who aren't watching at all. And the White House wants to create enough snackable, viral, sharable elements that people are going to feel compelled to post on their social media platform accounts. And in that way the White House is thinking not just like a political operation, or not just like a network, but like a sports league, like the NFL. They want people to consume it everywhere.
SIEGEL: And are the Republicans doing their own social media outreach, not to be outdone by the Democrats?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, I'm sure there are. There are a couple that have struck our eye recently. John Boehner's staff sent out a series of gifs - those quick, movable videos - using Taylor Swift eye rolls to mock various proposals by the president. And there's said to be a live online response in Spanish, as well as the conventional one in English, by a Latino Republican lawmaker. Although, there was a mini flap online when it turned out he'd essentially be repeating the English remarks of the new Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa.
SIEGEL: Now, President Obama has more plans for something online after the State of the Union. What's he up to?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, he wants to capture various elements of this increasingly fragmented audience, right? So among the things he's doing will involve conversations with three YouTube stars. One of them's named GloZell Green. She earned online fame for essentially stuffing her mouth with cinnamon and suffering the consequences. They can be pretty sharp. That video alone got 42 million hits. That's more than we expect the president himself to get through the various channels on TV.
It's a little bit - if you think back to Obama's appearance on "Between Two Ferns" with the comedian Zach Galifianakis, who played a snarky and clueless interviewer. The administration claimed it got a Galifianakis bump from younger enrollees to Obamacare. And this is a way in which Obama and the White House is trying not to really go around the MSM but to - the mainstream media that is - but to supplement those audiences. He does a fair number of interviews with news anchors and senior correspondents, but he's seeing the fragmentation of the audiences and reaching out to them in both the language and the conduits they understand. And again it's worth thinking about the White House more as acting like the NFL than POTUS, trying to get different audiences on different layers of platforms all at the same time.
SIEGEL: POTUS - newspeak for President of the United States. That's NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. Thank you, David.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
If you're terribly excited about the State of the Union address, why wait till 9 o'clock Eastern? You can patch together a speech of your own right now.
CHRIS GATES: We have a very fun tool on our website called State of the Union Machine.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
That's Chris Gates. He's president of a group here in Washington, D.C., called the Sunlight Foundation. It advocates for government transparency.
CORNISH: And its State of the Union Machine lets you create a mashup of actual sentences delivered by nine different presidents in their annual messages to Congress.
GATES: You could compare the Georges. You could compare George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush and George Washington. And you could compare Teddy Roosevelt to George Bush or Ronald Reagan.
SIEGEL: And, Audie, we are now ready to try using it.
CORNISH: OK, look out speechwriters.
SIEGEL: (Laughter) We are logged on to sotu.sunlightfoundation.com. And can you see those handy sliders along the left side of the screen?
CORNISH: I do, Robert. I feel like we should make a speech right now. Let's do it.
SIEGEL: This is 50 percent George W. Bush, 50 percent Thomas Jefferson. Here's a transition where Bush speaks of the evil that inspired and rejoiced in 9/11 is still at large. And it transitions to (reading) while the other Barbary States intended as part of the state of our seaports and harbors were made under former authorities from Congress.
It switches right back to dealing with pirates in the Mediterranean in the early 19th century.
CORNISH: (Laughter).
SIEGEL: So (foreign language spoken).
CORNISH: All right, well I made a mix that has 29 percent Reagan and 29 percent Lincoln and 14 percent George Washington and Barack Obama, 29 percent. And, actually, as you scroll up and down the page, it's, like, there are highlights so you can know what speech...
SIEGEL: Yes, yes.
CORNISH: Came from where. So one says, from Lincoln (reading) this shows an average decennial increase of 4 percent, has run faster than the North for its continuance.
And what follows is Ronald Reagan saying (reading) we will call for historic reform for fairness and fellow citizens.
CORNISH: But he didn't say decennial.
CORNISH: (Laughter) He did not - didn't make the cut.
SIEGEL: We've been playing with the State of the Union Machine created by the Sunlight Foundation. You can follow President Obama's speech tonight on many NPR stations and at npr.org and also tomorrow on MORNING EDITION. Tune in for more analysis.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
A new book coming out next week takes its plot straight from the headlines. Writer John Vaillant has penned a fictional story about a very real occurrence - people illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Our reviewer Alan Cheuse says it's an extraordinary feat of literary ventriloquism.
ALAN CHEUSE, BYLINE: Fifteen people are hiding in a water tank truck. They've paid a human smuggler about $2,000 to get them across the border. On the other side they're hoping to find freedom from strangulating poverty, or politics, or both. The truck has a sign painted on it, but agua, the word for water, has been altered. Someone's put a J in front of it and an R at the end, so now it reads, Jaguar. Soon the truck stalls in the desert somewhere in southern Arizona. The smugglers leave, promising they'll come back with a mechanic, but hours go by, then days. Sealed into the truck by the smugglers, the passengers can't get out and a merciless dehydration sets in.
How do we know all this? One of the passengers, a former student named Hector, has picked up the cell phone of his injured companion Caesar. Hector's sending text messages and sound files to a woman, a friend of Caesar's, with an American area code.
Hello, I'm sorry to bother you, but since yesterday we're in this truck with no one coming. We need water and a doctor and a torch for cutting metal.
Once you accept the premise that the cell battery can last for more than a day or so, the story takes off. And before too long, Hector's narrating his own history and that of his family. He goes back to his grandfather in the mountains of Oaxaca, a man who believed in the myth of a totem animal, the Jaguar, who connected the family to nature, past and future. So agua becomes jaguar and the horrors of a single passage over the border blossom into a human history of sorrow and suffering, all of it beginning with the thirst to be free.
CORNISH: The book is "The Jaguar's Children" by John Vaillant. Alan Cheuse is our reviewer.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments today in a case that tests whether states may ban judicial candidates from personally soliciting campaign contributions. For years the high court's conservative majority has been dismantling campaign-finance laws that apply to the legislative and executive branches of government. Today's challenge is the first that takes aim at the judicial branch. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Thirty-nine states elect some or all of their judges and 30 of them bar personal solicitations by judicial candidates in order to preserve judicial impartiality. If the Supreme Court treats those bans the same way it's treated other funding limits, the personal solicitation bans are doomed by a 5-to-4 vote. In those earlier cases, Justice Anthony Kennedy led the charge to abolish funding limits for legislative and executive candidates. But Kennedy has long been a strong advocate of maintaining a judiciary free from outside influences. Kennedy's questions today gave mixed signals about his views on the solicitation ban.
Arguing against Florida's ban, lawyer Andrew Pincus told the justices today that it violates the Constitution's free speech guarantee. He said the ban might be justified for one-on-one, in-person solicitations, but not for mass mailings.
Justice Kennedy - but a ban on face-to-face solicitations has all sorts of gradations. What about a personal, one-on-one letter? How's that different? And then a letter to five people?
Lawyer Pincus replied that the court has in other contexts drawn a line between written and oral communications.
Chief Justice Roberts - well, if we meet somewhere and I hand you a written request for a contribution, is that written or oral?
Justice Ginsburg - suppose the state's view is that we want our judiciary to be above the political fray?
Answer - when a state chooses to elect judges instead of using some appointment mechanism, the same rules apply to the judicial elections as all other elections.
A second problem with the Florida law, said Pincus, is that it allows judges to know who gave contributions to their election committees.
Justice Kennedy - well, how can the judge not know, especially in states with public disclosure? Everyone else reads the list but he doesn't? That seems to me to be unworkable.
All these Kennedy questions clearly suggested the justice believes it's very difficult to draw a more limited line than Florida has drawn. But it remained unclear whether he thinks any line is permissible that would limit judicial candidates. When lawyer Pincus tried to bolster his challenge by noting that Florida's judicial candidates are permitted to send thank you notes to contributors, Justices Sotomayor and Breyer scoffed. A thank you note is a form of politeness, said Breyer, that doesn't put the same pressure on a lawyer to give. In contrast, when a judge asks a lawyer to do something, the answer is almost invariably yes. But a lawyer feels much more free to say no to a campaign manager.
Justice Sotomayor - the proof is in the pudding. In states where judicial candidates can personally solicit contributions, they raise much more money than in other states.
Justice Kennedy was silent for the second half of the argument when the Florida bar's Barry Richard defended the personal solicitation ban. The other conservatives, with the exception of the always silent Justice Thomas, took turns taking whacks at Richard. Chief Justice Roberts pressed him repeatedly, asking what interest is served by the solicitation ban. Richard replied that the state's interest is in protecting the impartiality of the courts and preventing quid pro quo corruption. Justice Breyer pointed to the Magna Carta; justice shall not be sold nor shall it be denied.
That's at least 800 years old, he observed.
Chief Justice Roberts shot back, 800 years ago judges were not elected.
Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
For more than 40 years, the best-selling tabloid newspaper in Britain showed photos of topless women almost every day. The paper is The Sun and this happened on page three. Well, as of this week the women on that page are wearing clothes - not a lot, but, they're not topless. The end of this tabloid era follows years of campaigning by feminist groups which the paper's owner, Rupert Murdoch, had long ignored. Vicki Barker reports from London, starting with an advertisement that exemplified the old version of page three.
(SOUNDBITE OF AD)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Hello boys. Look at your woman. Now back to me. Now back at your woman. Now back to me.
VICKI BARKER, BYLINE: In this 2010 ad marking the 40th anniversary of The Sun's page three feature, a model sways in front of a running shower, her towel almost losing its battle with gravity. Feeding male fantasies on a daily basis was part of the formula that helped Rupert Murdoch turn the failing daily he acquired in 1969 into Britain's biggest selling newspaper. Steve Hewlett is a British media commentator.
STEVE HEWLETT: When this started, it was all about an offer to a key constituency, if you like, the working bloke, to say we'll give you what you want. Don't let the BBC or feminists tell you you can't have it. We're there for you. Well, the world has now moved on.
BARKER: There's been no public announcement from The Sun, but another Murdoch-owned paper, The Times of London, confirms that Friday's topless page three girl - and they're always called girls - would be the last.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "NO MORE PAGE 3")
THE CAMPAIGN CHORUS: (Singing) We'll know freedom once we heal the mind.
BARKER: This is the No More Page 3 Campaign song, played as activists posted a huge collage on YouTube comprising all the images of men and of women from three months of The Sun. The men are all athletes, leaders, almost always shown in motion. The women, even when clothed, are almost all passive and pouting. To the campaigners, page three was just the tip of a cultural iceberg.
Stella Creasy is a British lawmaker.
STELLA CREASY: It wasn't about page three being offensive, but about the impacts on our society of judging men and women by different standards and basically saying that we didn't need boobs with our breakfast tables.
BARKER: This is, however, not the end of page three as a showcase for female flesh. Today's edition shows three bikini-clad soap actresses frolicking on a beach in that slot. Lucy-Anne Holmes helped spearhead the No More Page 3 campaign. She calls today's announcement a start.
LUCY-ANNE HOLMES: I can't stand here and say it's an amazing day for women and female representation in the media when, essentially, all The Sun have done is they've stopped showing nipples, but they're now going to show women in bikinis or underwear, say.
BARKER: Several former page three models have today been mourning the feature's end and defending what they have called their personal decision to display their bodies. Among them, Laura Lacole from Northern Ireland.
LAURA LACOLE: It's a sad day. For me, I feel that this isn't a triumph for feminism. It's a triumph for prudishness. I have made this choice. I want to openly and freely express my sexuality. There's no sort of men forcing me into this.
BARKER: The topless models have only vanished from print editions of The Sun. They can still be viewed in the paper's subscription-only online edition. And several analysts speculate that Rupert Murdoch may yet reintroduce the feature if he loses too many readers to rivals which continue to show nude women. For NPR News, I'm Vicki Barker in London.
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In times of political and financial turmoil, Russians turn to their great writers for solace. One of those writers is Mikhail Bulgakov, who died 75 years ago. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin liked some of Bulgakov's work, but considered most of it too dangerous to publish. NPR's Corey Flintoff visited a museum in Moscow dedicated to the author and he discovered that the work is as subversive as ever.
COREY FLINTOFF, BYLINE: In the early 1920s Mikhail Bulgakov's and his wife lived for several years in a rambling Art Nouveau building in central Moscow. They lived in apartment 50, which the writer eventually turned into a key setting for his magical novel "The Master And Margarita." The satire ridiculed much about Soviet life and it wasn't published until 1967 - 27 years after Bulgakov's death. Since then, it's been reprinted in countless editions and made into plays and movies. One of the most popular is this serialized version made for Russian television in 2005. In the novel, the devil pays a visit to the officially atheist Soviet Union, appearing as a well-dressed, but somehow foreign-looking gentleman, who introduces himself as Woland, professor of black magic. His first encounter is with a pair of writers who don't believe in him and Woland predicts, quite accurately, that one of them is about to lose his head in a freak encounter with a tram car. The elements of the story in Bulgakov's life are presented in a gem of a museum in the same building as the notorious apartment number 50. Our guide is Irina Gorpenko, an authority on Bulgakov and a passionate fan who introduces the characters with theatrical flair.
IRINA GORPENKO: (Speaking Russian).
FLINTOFF: One of Professor Woland's more troublesome sidekicks is a huge black cat called Behemoth. In one famous scene, the cat plays chess with live pieces in what Gorpenko says is a geopolitical game, just like the great powers today in the European Union, America and Russia. The museum has a well-known photograph that shows the writer as a dapper figure with a bow tie, a monocle and an ever-present cigarette. Bulgakov knew about the dangers of dealing with people in power.
Irina Gorpenko quotes a scene in which one character puts it quite succinctly.
GORPENKO: (Speaking Russian).
FLINTOFF: "Who are you," one character asks, "an official person?" "Today, one is an official person and tomorrow, one's not. And it can be the other way around." There seem to be parallels everywhere between Bulgakov's Soviet characters and the functionaries of today's Russia.
EDYTHE HABER: It's very complicated novel and people get what they want out of it. Those people who are very pro-church and so forth pick that out, whereas most readers look at the anti-authoritarianism.
FLINTOFF: That's Edythe Haber, an expert on Bulgakov at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. She says that after all the years of repression, Bulgakov's work is now out in the world and no amount of censorship can ever put it back. On weekends and holidays, people queue in long lines to see Bulgakov's apartment. In the novel, the apartment can expand to infinite size in some other dimension, big enough to hold the devil's ball with all the denizens of hell. On this Sunday though, the denizens are just fellow sightseers, and it's a relief to get back on the stairway with its walls covered in graffiti and hand-drawn pictures of Bulgakov's characters, including many of the famous black cat. Speaking of which, there's a very large, very black cat sitting on the second landing, a cat with unblinking yellow eyes.
(To cat) Oh, excuse me, are you Behemoth?
Under the circumstances, it doesn't seem wise to wait around for an answer. It's much safer to read "The Master And Margarita" at home. Corey Flintoff, NPR News, Moscow.
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A new California law requires condoms to be made available to all state prisoners. That makes California the second state after Vermont to do so even though sex between prisoners is forbidden. But San Francisco has been distributing condoms to inmates in county jails for decades. As George Lavender reports, it's a program state officials might look to as a model.
KATE MONICO KLEIN: They simply turn a knob.
GEORGE LAVENDER, BYLINE: Kate Monico Klein runs the public health department's HIV services for San Francisco County Jails. She stands in front of an inconspicuous metal box mounted on the wall here in the gym of Jail No. 4.
KLEIN: We set it off to the side so that people would have a minor amount of privacy.
LAVENDER: Condom machines like this one are installed in all of San Francisco's male jails, dispensing condoms for free in small cardboard packets.
ROBERT GREVE: I get about 10 of them every time (laughter).
LAVENDER: That's Robert Greve, an inmate who's serving a short sentence in the jail. In and out of prison in several states, this is the first time Greve's been locked up somewhere that provides condoms.
GREVE: Condoms are very good to have around, I think, you know, because it's a life-saving device. A lot of people don't care about their health, I think.
LAVENDER: But even though condoms are available inside the jail, Greve says deputies still enforce rules against inmates having sex.
GREVE: They freak out about it - like, I've seen them catch people in bed together and they're like hey, what are you doing?
RENE ANGEL RAMIREZ: We still have the need of sex. And believe it or not, the straight men, while they're in custody, they do have sexual activity with other males.
LAVENDER: Inmate Rene Angel Ramirez, who is gay and HIV positive, says condoms keep his partners safer and protect him from other diseases like gonorrhea, chlamydia or hepatitis C.
RAMIREZ: It's sad because I heard from other inmates how they have got infected with HIV while incarcerated.
LAVENDER: Back in the 1980s, San Francisco became one of the first places in the country to hand out condoms to inmates in the county jail. But it's still one of only a handful of prison and jails in the country that do so. And often that's down to one simple reason.
ROSS MIRKARIMI: Sex in prison or jails is illegal under the California Penal Code 286(e).
LAVENDER: That's San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi. In fact, in prisons and jails across the U.S., sex between inmates is against the rules, even if it's consensual. In some states, like California, it's actually a crime. Still, Mirkarimi says he supports the condom distribution program if it helps slow the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.
MIRKARIMI: The law is the law. But should this behavior occur - that there is a safer way. We want people to be protected - and we insist on it that they be protected.
LAVENDER: The Centers for Disease Control estimate that 1 in 7 people living with HIV pass through correctional facilities each year. But even with condoms in steady supply, not all deputies are comfortable with condoms being available.
MATTHEW FREEMAN: I could not report to you that there still is buy-in from the uniformed staff.
LAVENDER: San Francisco Chief Deputy Sheriff Matthew Freeman says there are reasons even consensual sex is prohibited in jail.
FREEMAN: We know from our experiences running and managing these county jails that even consensual sexual activity amongst inmates can lead to very real problems.
LAVENDER: Problems like disharmony in the jail, which the sheriff's department says is a potential security risk. In the early days, deputies were also concerned that condoms could be used as weapons or to smuggle drugs. And while Kate Monico Klein of the public health department says that hasn't happened, she says condoms have been put to some more unusual uses.
KLEIN: We found that, among other things, the prisoners take the condoms and they use them as hair ties. They use them as pillows. One of the deputies told me that they blow them up and use them as balloons.
LAVENDER: And although that initially bothered some people...
KLEIN: One of the things we realized is that it is another way of de-stigmatizing HIV.
LAVENDER: California's state prison system has five years to come up with a plan to provide condoms in all of its facilities. For NPR News, I'm George Lavender.
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Genetic engineering is used for everything from crops like corn and cotton to designer drugs, and the technology is getting more sophisticated all the time. Scientists are even changing the language of genes by rewriting the genetic code. Researchers at Harvard and Yale are starting to use these tools to build safety features into designer organisms. Two studies in the journal Nature report a major step forward in that effort, as NPR's Richard Harris reports.
RICHARD HARRIS, BYLINE: First, a two sentence refresher on some basic biology. The enzymes and other proteins in our bodies are all built from building blocks called amino acids. There are usually just 20 amino acids in nature, but George Church at Harvard has created a bacterium that requires an additional amino acid - one made in the lab and not found in nature.
GEORGE CHURCH: So this really makes it a completely new branch of life.
HARRIS: These modified E. coli bacteria essentially speak a different genetic language from all other life on Earth. That means they can't easily swap genes which bacteria often due to pick up or get rid of traits. And it also means that these modified bacteria must be fed this synthetic amino acid.
CHURCH: It will die as soon as you remove that essential nutrient.
HARRIS: It's a radical reengineering of life, but Church says this actually makes these synthetic life forms safer because if they escape into the wild they'll die. And it also makes them less vulnerable to being infected by viruses. Yes, bacteria get infections, too. That's a selling point for the biotech industry which uses bacteria to make things like drugs. Those operations are vulnerable to viral infections.
CHURCH: If you get your factory contaminated, it can be hard to clean out for year.
HARRIS: So Church is hoping that industry will want to start using these highly engineered bacteria not for the safety considerations as much as to help them avoid contamination.
CHURCH: We get two or three things for the price of one.
HARRIS: How do you know it won't mutate and be able to basically shake off these traits that you've added?
CHURCH: Well, we anticipated it would be able to mutate and shake off the traits if we just did one.
HARRIS: With one modified gene, Church found that there's a one-in-a-million chance that the bacteria could once again live in the wild without the synthetic amino acid. But by modifying multiple genes, the odds of that drop sharply.
CHURCH: So the current strains are at least one-in-a-trillion, if not, better than that.
HARRIS: Farren Isaacs who left Church's lab at Harvard to start his own at Yale has kept pace with his former boss. He too has built some safety features into E. coli, and he says it's possible to use this approach for all sorts of other organisms - for example, bacteria that you spray on an oil spill to help clean it up or bacteria that produce probiotics for human consumption.
FARREN ISAACS: This also sets the stage for opening up new types of applications going forward.
HARRIS: It's harder to think about how this technology could be used in agriculture. If you build this into genetically engineered crops, you'd need to feed them the artificial amino acid that they'd require from crop dusters or something like that. And the artificial amino acid would be part of the grain, so you'd need to prove that it's safe to eat. Jennifer Kuzma is codirector of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State.
JENNIFER KUZMA: I think it's commendable that they're starting to design safety into genetically modified organisms, however, I really don't think it's going to affect the public perception that much or the way we have to deal with the uncertainty anyway. You may reduce the chance of spread, but you cannot eliminate it completely.
HARRIS: Science doesn't offer absolutes, but this technology is evolving quickly, and George Church says it's important to engineer in safety features as they go. Richard Harris, NPR News.
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In eastern Peru, wildcat gold miners are seeking their fortune in the headwaters of the Amazon, but in the process they're polluting the river with mercury. And a research paper from scientists at Duke University finds toxic residue from the mines hundreds of miles downstream. NPR's global health correspondent Jason Beaubien reports.
JASON BEAUBIEN, BYLINE: Over the last decade, thousands of people have moved to a remote part of the Amazon jungle in eastern Peru. They're hoping to strike it rich, or at least find work from the gold-mining boom. Unfortunately, the process of extracting tiny specks of gold from the riverbed of the Madre de Dios River involves mercury, and it's poisoning the waterway. Researchers say mercury is showing up downstream at levels that pose a significant public health threat.
BILL PAN: Bill Pan, I'm an assistant professor at the Global Health Institute at Duke, and I've been working in Peru for about 10 years.
BEAUBIEN: Pan started out looking at environmental issues related to the recently completed Interoceanic Highway that links Brazil to the Pacific Ocean. And while doing that, he noticed that wildcat miners were having a huge impact on the region. In addition to infusing cash into this remote part of the jungle, they were cutting down trees and tearing up the river banks. Many of the miners operate on floating makeshift barges in the river. Pan says the barges are about the size of two compact cars strapped together.
PAN: You get these little tiny boats where there are two Hondas hooked together with this enormous tube that someone will dive down into the bottom of the river with a scuba suit or some kind of - connected to some tube so they can breathe underwater, and they're just on the bottom of the river sucking up the dirt.
BEAUBIEN: The miners then use mercury to extract the flecks of gold from the sludge. The mercury binds to the gold and the rest of the sediment is dumped overboard. Some of the mercury, however, clings to the slurry and ends up in the river. The team from Duke found dangerously high mercury levels, not just near the mining operations, but far downstream.
PAN: There's definitely strong correlations between where the mining is occurring and where people are at risk for mercury toxicity. And that risk actually stays elevated, you know, for hundreds of miles.
BEAUBIEN: This current report just looks at the levels of mercury in fish and river sediment. An earlier study in 2013 from the Carnegie Institute looked at the impact on people. It found mercury levels far above what the World Health Organization views as acceptable. Mercury exposure can lead to neurological damage and it's particularly dangerous for pregnant women and young children.
Heileen Hsu-Kim, who worked on the Duke study, says it's clear that mercury levels in fish and people have been going up as mining has expanded.
HEILEEN HSU-KIM: There's been an increase, certainly, in the last 10 years and the increase tracks - it's like, almost one-to-one with the global price of gold. And with that increase in the price of gold, there's been an increase in mining in this area.
BEAUBIEN: The government of Peru has attempted to crack down on illegal miners operating on the Madre de Dios River. The Peruvian navy has even blown up some of the barges. But with gold prices remaining well above a $1,000 an ounce, laborers are flocking to the boats, where they can earn far more than in most other jobs in the area.
Jason Beaubien, NPR News.
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As President Obama was talking last night about further improving the U.S. economy, he nodded to the role the Internet plays in the economic development.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I intend to protect a free and open Internet, extend its reach to every classroom and every community and help folks build the fastest networks.
SIEGEL: Those seem like goals everyone can support, but there's deep disagreement over how to achieve them, and those few words hint at looming clashes between the White House and the big phone and cable companies. Here's NPR's Joel Rose.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: President Obama has picked a couple of fights with the powerful telecom industry lately. Last week, he traveled to Iowa to show his support for municipal broadband.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
OBAMA: Hello, Cedar Falls.
ROSE: Twenty years ago, Cedar Falls, Iowa, decided to build its own high-speed internet network, which is now among the fastest in the country. There are towns that would like to do the same because their other broadband options are too slow or too expensive or simply don't exist. But some cities find themselves blocked by state laws.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
OBAMA: In too many places across America, some big companies are doing everything they can to keep out competitors. Today in 19 states we've got laws on the books that stamp out competition.
ROSE: The president is urging the Federal Communications Commission to preempt state laws that restrict municipal broadband, but not everyone thinks the commission has the legal authority to do that.
BERIN SZOKA: That's a complete legal fantasy.
ROSE: Berin Szoka is president of TechFreedom, a market-oriented think tank in Washington. He says President Obama's speech in Iowa was a missed opportunity to encourage more private investment in broadband networks.
SZOKA: And instead not only did he call for government-run broadband as the first answer, he called for the FCC to do something that is unconstitutional that is going to lose in court.
ROSE: The president's supporters and at least one federal judge would dispute that. What the FCC can or cannot do is a hot topic these days. The fight over municipal broadband is just the beginning. The main event is the battle over open Internet rules. The president is urging the Commission to protect the the principle of net neutrality, the idea that Internet service providers should treat all of the traffic on their pipes equally. He's asking the FCC to do it in the strongest possible way.
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CONGRESSMAN GREG WALDEN: The commission is preparing to invoke net neutrality's nuclear option.
ROSE: Congressman Greg Walden is a Republican from Oregon. He's also the chair of the House subcommittee on communications and technology, which held a hearing today on its own plan to protect the open Internet. Walden and others think it would be a mistake for the FCC to reclassify broadband as a communications service like the federally regulated telephone companies. Michael Powell is a lobbyist for the cable TV industry. He says that kind of heavy-handed approach could lead to less investment.
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MICHAEL POWELL: We want every American to have access to Internet, and we're impatient about that. It's simply common sense to understand, increasing regulatory cost, increasing uncertainty, certainly will slow the magnitude or the pace.
ROSE: Powell says it's Congress, not the FCC, that should write new rules of the road for the Internet. Republicans on the subcommittee offered some. They say their proposal would, among other things, prevent broadband providers from charging Internet companies more for special fast lanes. But Chad Dickerson, the CEO of the online marketplace Etsy, testified that the proposal is full of loopholes.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CHAD DICKERSON: Etsy is a low-margin business. We couldn't afford to pay for priority access to consumers, yet we know that delays of even milliseconds have a direct and long-term impact on revenue.
ROSE: Critics of the draft rules think their real intent is to strip the FCC of its power to regulate broadband providers. Democrat Anna Eshoo of California is the subcommittee's ranking member.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CONGRESSMAN ANNA ESHOO: What is abundantly clear in the majority's proposal is to purposely tie the hands of the FCC by prohibiting them from reclassifying broadband.
ROSE: Reclassification is what the president wants, and it's what the FCC is expected to vote on next month. Joel Rose, NPR News, New York.
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The government wants to make raw chicken meat safer to handle. Right now, about a quarter of the cut-up chicken you buy is contaminated with salmonella bacteria. The U.S. Department of Agriculture proposed some new rules today aimed at cutting that number drastically. NPR's Dan Charles reports.
DAN CHARLES, BYLINE: The USDA already has a legal limit on the percentage of whole chickens that can carry salmonella bacteria. That limit is 7.5 percent, and until about a year ago government officials figured that was enough. But most people buy chicken parts - thighs, breasts and drumsticks - and during an outbreak of salmonella poisoning that was traced to the Foster Farms company in California, the USDA scientists started systematically testing those parts, too. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack says they discovered that those chicken parts were three or four times more likely to test positive for Salmonella than the whole chickens. Ground chicken meat was even worse.
TOM VILSACK: The question was why? What were we missing?
CHARLES: Something may happen during the cutting-up process that spreads the bacteria around or perhaps releases them from pores in the chicken's skin. Whatever the cause, that discovery persuaded the USDA to propose a new set of legal standards covering poultry parts and ground poultry. The limits will cover salmonella and also a less common microbe called campylobacter. If the proposal goes into force, companies will have to cut the amount of salmonella contamination about in half. There will be more testing, too, and some public shaming.
VILSACK: We're going to be posting facility ratings or category ratings online as a way of encouraging folks to try to get to a better place.
CHARLES: The USDA says right now about 60 percent of poultry processing plants are probably violating those proposed limits. But The National Chicken Council, an industry group, says when the limits go into effect, companies will meet them. Michael Doyle, Director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, says companies certainly can do this. He says, look at what Foster Farms did after it was identified as the source of that Salmonella outbreak a year ago.
MICHAEL DOYLE: The company has literally driven that percentage of positive samples down to well below what the USDA's expectations are.
CHARLES: Foster Farms cut the share of chicken parts testing positive for Salmonella from 25 percent, the industry average, to less than 5 percent. Under the USDA's proposal, the legal limit will be 15 percent, a much less ambitious goal. But Doyle says, it's a reasonable start. Dan Charles, NPR News.
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Voters in the nation's capital said yes last fall to legalizing marijuana, but it hasn't happened. That's because Congress doesn't want it to happen. Martin Austermuhle of member station WAMU reports.
MARTIN AUSTERMUHLE, BYLINE: One hundred-fifteen thousand and fifty votes - that's how many District of Columbia residents voted in favor of a marijuana legalization ballot initiative in November, putting 70 percent of the city's voters behind the measure that permits residents to possess up to two ounces of pot and grow their own. But a month later, it took only 219 House votes and 56 Senate votes to throw the initiative's future into doubt and rekindle a long-standing fight between Congress and the city over how much power it has to govern itself.
DAVID GROSSO: I grew up here, so I said, here we go again.
AUSTERMUHLE: That's David Grosso, a member of the D.C. Council, the city's local legislature. He says Congressional meddling, like the move in December to block D.C. from implementing the voter-approved legalization measure is par for the course.
GROSSO: It's been the same thing over and over and over, where Congress thinks that they can meddle in our business and basically use us as a sort of Petri dish where they do things to us that they could never possibly do in their own jurisdiction. They'd be thrown out.
AUSTERMUHLE: Despite having an elected legislature and mayor, D.C. remains a federal city controlled by Capitol Hill. That means that Congress often weighs in on social issues like guns, drugs and abortion. Andy Harris is a Republican Congressman from Maryland's Eastern Shore and has led the effort to stop D.C. from legalizing marijuana. Harris says that he's concerned about the health impacts that legalization could have on children. As to the accusations that he's interfering in local D.C. affairs, he says the Constitution allows him to.
CONGRESSMAN ANDY HARRIS: You know, if somebody wants voting rights, you know, the Constitution is clear. They go to a state - not the federal enclave - and they have voting rights. If they're in the federal enclave then Congress is their local legislature.
AUSTERMUHLE: Maybe, but for Miguel Oyola who lives in suburban Virginia outside D.C., it's unfair that the city's residents can be overruled by Congress, especially a Congress where they have no voting representation.
MIGUEL OYOLA: I think the city has really spoke to what they want. And I think it's just really unfortunate, kind of, the position we're in right now with Congress and, you know, the back-and-forth with the House and the Senate and just really trying to push through what the people of the city have already spoke up on.
AUSTERMUHLE: Grosso is more blunt about it.
GROSSO: Most Republicans want less federal government. They want less intrusion, yet here they are, every single day of the year, thinking about how they can mess with us. They're just purely hypocritical, but that's no surprise.
AUSTERMUHLE: It's no surprise, he says, because it isn't new. In 1998, Republicans stopped the legalization of medical marijuana in D.C. despite it being approved by 69 percent of voters. It took 11 years until the prohibition was lifted and now over 2,000 residents use medical marijuana. D.C. officials are fighting back on marijuana legalization, saying they believe that Congress can't stop the voter-approved measure from taking effect. Adam Eidinger led the campaign for legalization and says that it has generated new energy in the fight for autonomy.
ADAM EIDINGER: I think we have been wounded here, but sometimes it takes, you know, being attacked to get people to respond and do what they should've done all along and stand up for their rights.
AUSTERMUHLE: Harris says that if D.C. moves forward on legalizing the possession of marijuana, House Republicans should consider suing the city. But even with that threat hanging over D.C.'s head, Grosso is still going a step further. This month he introduced a bill in the City Council that would allow retail sales of marijuana in the nation's capital.
For NPR News, I'm Martin Austermuhle in Washington.
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Last night in his state of the union address, President Obama said he still believed in a United America, one that wasn't divided into red and blue camps. But the reaction to his speech from both camps has been anything but united. Democrats were thrilled that the president laid out a middle-class economic agenda, and Republicans dismissed almost every part of it saying the president made no effort to reach out to the new majority in Congress. Just ahead we'll hear from a Republican in Congress, but first, we have NPR's national political correspondent, Mara Liasson. Hey there, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi, Audie.
CORNISH: So people have described this speech as ambitious, even aggressive, especially for someone who just suffered a setback at the polls - right? - with the GOP taking control of Congress.
LIASSON: Well, the president has made a decision. He's decided he's not going to act like someone who just took a thumping, in George W. Bush's words. He actually tried that approach back in 2010 when he lost the House. He acknowledged the rejection. He reached out to Republicans on their own terms, and he spent months and months fruitlessly trying to negotiate a deficit and entitlement deal with the Republican leadership, and it didn't work. Now he's decided he's going to use his last years to layout a populist agenda focused on economic growth that's widely shared and try to frame the debate for the next two years, setting the table for the 2016 elections and not worrying so much about how to satisfy Republicans.
CORNISH: Meanwhile, the president delivered an awful lot of veto threats - right? - for someone who says he still believes in creating better politics. Can he have it both ways?
LIASSON: Well, he thinks so. Better politics means, in his words, debate without demonization. And we now have a different kind of dynamic in Washington. We have a unified Congress, not the paralyzed, divided Congress that we had for the last four years. So you can make the argument that the president is a much more important player now than when everything was bottled up in the Democratic Senate. Now the Republican Congress is going to pass things. They're going to send them to him, and he's going to have to respond. He can sign them. He can veto them. There will be negotiations with Republicans. And he started drawing the battle lines for those big fights last night. Today the Republican Congress returned the favor. The Republican leadership announced that they'd invited Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress without telling the White House first, although House Speaker John Boehner denies that was a poke in the eye to the president.
CORNISH: Now, the president devoted the largest part of his speech to middle class economics. Remind us of the details of the proposals.
LIASSON: Well, he wants to address this big economic problem which is that even when the economy is growing, all the benefits seem to go to the top 1 percent. Middle-class incomes are stagnant. Inequality is growing. So what he's saying is let's invest in infrastructure, make community college virtually free and use the tax code. Raise the capital gains tax, close some loopholes for inherited wealth in order to pay for tax subsidies for middle-class families who are paying for education or child care or retirement. These are all popular proposals. He also wants to expand sick pay, raise the minimum wage and he's daring Republicans to oppose these policies. He said last night if you think you can work full time and support a family on less than 15,000 dollars a year, go try it.
CORNISH: So where does this leave the Republicans?
LIASSON: Well, they're still in charge of the legislative agenda. But what I hear from Republicans are complaints that the Republican leadership has wasted the last two months. They haven't come forward with policies that they can rally around - their own tax plan, their own alternative to Obamacare. And they've let the president hijack their honeymoon. So the ball is in their court. We know they want to stop immigration actions and dismantle Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, but we don't know yet exactly what they want to do.
CORNISH: That's NPR's national political correspondent, Mara Liasson. Mara, thank you.
LIASSON: Thank you.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
We're going to hear from a Republican in Congress now.
Jeff Flake, freshman senator from Arizona, welcome to the program.
SENATOR JEFF FLAKE: Hey, thanks for having me on.
SIEGEL: Mara Liasson just said that while your party controls Congress, other than wanting to pass Keystone, we don't know what Republicans actually want to do as opposed to what they want to undo - Obamacare, non-deportation of the so-called DREAMers, Dodd-Frank, financial breaks. What does the GOP want to do?
FLAKE: Well, there's one thing that the president mentioned that we can work with him on and should - and this will require mostly Republican votes - and that's trade promotion authority. The president is seeking it. My guess is at least 80 percent of the votes needed will come from Republicans. And we're happy to do it.
SIEGEL: This was the rare moment in the speech when Republicans rose to applause and most Democrats remained in their seats.
FLAKE: That's right.
SIEGEL: Last year the National Taxpayers Union, a conservative group, gave you its highest score for reducing or controlling federal spending taxes of debt and regulation. Is there any part of what President Obama calls his middle-class economics that you can imagine voting for that I don't think the NTU would approve of?
FLAKE: I'm not sure. I'm still of the school that a rising tide lifts all boats, and so the president's talk of increasing taxes just didn't sit too well. I think there are areas, certainly loopholes and whatnot, that we can get rid of that are going to change some people's taxes, and some on the high end, some in the middle. But in terms of just raising taxes on one class, I don't think that's going to go anywhere.
SIEGEL: Senator Flake, you're a border state Republican and I know you have a very strong interest in immigration. The starting point for immigration seems to be an approach from Congress that the president will veto, a policy by the president that the Congress would try to defund. Do you foresee in this Congress even the possibility of Republicans and the president somehow meeting halfway on immigration?
FLAKE: I do. As you know, I was involved in the effort. I was a part of the Gang of Eight to put a comprehensive bill together before. It was just never taken up by the House. And you're right. I think the first action will be the House bill to defund the president's action. It will get to the Senate. It will likely not have 60 votes to, you know, pass the first procedural hurdle.
SIEGEL: Would you vote for there, by the way?
FLAKE: Well, I haven't seen all the amendments in the House, but I would vote to consider and to bring it procedurally.
FLAKE: But my response has been - to the president's action on immigration - let's not stick a finger in his eye, let's put legislation on his desk. And in one sense, the president's made it more difficult by moving unilaterally. But in another sense, he's made it easier because he was only supportive of comprehensive reform. Now he's gone piecemeal. And the House and the Senate will likely respond in kind. You're likely to see a border bill and then an interior enforcement bill, then maybe a guest worker bill.
SIEGEL: But when you say you might see that sequence on bills on immigration, aren't we obviously talking about the next president of the United States dealing with the end of that sequence? You wouldn't have time to see if the border bill worked, by Republican standards.
FLAKE: Not necessarily. I mean the border bill, you could tie the metrics to maybe the ultimate granting of citizenship. And that's kind of what we did in the so-called Gang of Eight bill, but that doesn't stop you from moving ahead on some of the other issues - the guest worker plans and a mechanism to deal with those who are here illegally while you're securing the border. So I don't think anybody should believe that you can secure the border unless you address some of the other issues, as well. But I think we're likely to see a sequence of bills that will end up on the president's desk and he'll be in, I think, a difficult position not to sign them.
SIEGEL: This time next year, we in the news business will be covering the Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire primary. It's not a great time for high-profile politicians to endorse big compromises.
FLAKE: No, it's not.
SIEGEL: Is there - well, what's a realistic window for getting some serious legislation done that requires some give? Do we have a year?
FLAKE: Yes, I'd put it at that. And the closer we get to December of this year, the more difficult it's going to be. And it's always tough, particularly for Republicans. I've encouraged Republicans if we can't have a rational approach on immigration to maybe skip Iowa because it's tough to take positions that really puts you at odds with the general electorate. It's tough to get rid of ethanol. Some cities do because primaries start in Iowa. So there are peculiarities to this system that we have that we have to take into account and need to move quickly.
SIEGEL: Senator Flake, thanks for talking with us once again.
FLAKE: Thanks for having me on.
SIEGEL: That's Jeff Flake, Republican senator from Arizona.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
And tomorrow as you start your day with MORNING EDITION and another conservative perspective, Steve Inskeep talks to former presidential speechwriter David Frum.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The ratings agency Standard & Poor's agreed today to pay nearly $80 million to settle charges tied to mortgage-backed securities. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the states of New York and Massachusetts said S&P misled investors. It and other major ratings companies were widely accused of fueling the mortgage mania that led to the 2008 financial crisis. NPR's James Zarroli reports on why this settlement is an important milestone.
JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: Companies like Standard & Poor's are paid by the very companies whose assets they rate - something critics say is a built-in conflict of interest. It means they have a financial incentive to downplay any problems they may find. And that's exactly what the SEC has accused them of doing. SEC enforcement director Andrew Ceresney says the firm loosened the criteria it used to rate certain commercial mortgage-backed securities without telling investors they were doing so.
ANDREW CERESNEY: They lied to investors about the criteria they were using to rate CMBS offerings, and investors were misled. This was egregious behavior with significant consequences.
ZARROLI: The SEC also filed charges against Barbara Duka, an S&P official involved in the ratings. She has denied any wrongdoing. S&P is one of three major ratings companies along with Moody's and Fitch. The rating services came under fire after the 2008 financial crisis accused of contributing to the subprime mortgage bust. And there was widespread talk about the need for reform. But Ceresney noted in a conference call with reporters that the cases unveiled today actually occurred in 2011 and 2012.
CERESNEY: But while the financial crisis may be behind us, these cases are a reminder that race-to-the-bottom behavior - that is loosening the rating standards in pursuit of market share - persists.
ZARROLI: Like numerous other financial firms accused of misconduct, and S&P did not acknowledge any wrongdoing, but it did agree to pay a fine and it promised to stay out of the market for certain mortgage-backed securities for a year. Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance, says that isn't likely to hurt the company's bottom line all that much because companies such as S&P have a lot of different ways of making money.
GUY CECALA: You know, it's sort of like getting a speeding ticket or a drunk driving charge and you say you're not going to drive for six months or whatever else it is. It has some impact, but it's certainly not a huge financial loss for S&P.
ZARROLI: Still, Cecala says, the charges announced today represent a milestone of sorts because it's the first time the federal government has managed to bring an enforcement action against a major ratings company. And he says it's unlikely to be the last. The Justice Department and several states have filed a $5 billion lawsuit against Standard & Poor's, accusing it of downplaying risks in the years leading up to the financial crisis. The company is said to be in talks to settle that suit. Guy Cecala says that's likely to be just the start of the company's legal troubles.
CECALA: This really looks like the tip of the iceberg. It's certainly going to be part and parcel of a larger settlement with S&P, and I think it's going to open the door to go in after the other ratings services.
ZARROLI: Federal officials declined to comment today on any other investigations now taking place. But Ceresney did say, "this is an area in which I imagine there will be future activity." Jim Zarroli, NPR News.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Now - the economics of checking your bag. Most airlines these days charge you to do that. JetBlue, one of the last holdouts, recently caved and it's not hard to see why. The fees bring a billion dollars a year to airlines. It might feel like another annoying charge on top of an already pricey plane ticket, but Planet Money's Stacey Vanek Smith says if you look at it another way, you might actually be getting a deal.
STACEY VANEK SMITH, BYLINE: So, let's just get this out of the way - everybody hates baggage fees. But what you don't realize when you're sitting in the cabin is that there's intense competition for space in the belly of the plane. There are only so many pounds a plane can carry, so your 40-pound bag means the airline can take 40 pounds less in cargo.
What kinds of things are in the cargo space of an airline?
MARISA GARCIA: Practically everything that you can imagine.
SMITH: Marisa Garcia writes about airlines.
GARCIA: Things that are going to end up in our stores - electronics, there are clothes, livestock.
SMITH: Livestock? Like, they ship cows in cargo?
GARCIA: I don't know about cows but I do know that they ship sheep. There's a lot of shipping of sheep between New Zealand and Australia and the continents.
SMITH: That's right - your hair dryer, hiking boots and balled-up sweaters are competing for space with sheep. Or, if your plane is headed to New York City, a whole lot of shellfish.
SANDY INGBER: This is our oyster bar. We have Island Creek, this is from Massachusetts. These are Shigoku from Washington state.
SMITH: Sandy Ingber is the executive chef at the Grand Central Oyster Bar in Manhattan.
INGBER: We're the largest seafood restaurant in New York City. Not the fanciest but definitely the freshest.
SMITH: Every day a thousand oysters fly here from all over the world to be shucked and iced and slurped down with mignonette sauce.
Where's the farthest that you've ever flown an oyster from?
INGBER: Tasmania.
SMITH: No way.
INGBER: Yeah. (Eating an oyster). Amazing.
SMITH: Your suitcase is competing with Ingber's oysters. If you pack too much, his bivalves get bumped.
INGBER: People go first. Freight goes last, even fresh food.
SMITH: Is that like, if people check too many bags then there's not room?
INGBER: Yeah.
SMITH: Ingber pays about a nickel per oyster to put his freight on your flight. On average, it works out to about a dollar a pound for cargo - a dollar a pound for cargo. So take a look at your luggage and do the math. The average checked bag is 35 pounds. Most baggage fees are $25. So if you're just going by cargo prices, most travelers are getting a deal. You could argue that we should be paying more to check our bags.
BILL COY: No, I wouldn't want to.
SMITH: Bill Coy is on his way to Washington, D.C. with a suitcase he has to check.
Do you know how much your bag weighs?
COY: I have no idea. I'm going to guess this one's about 30 pounds.
SMITH: Do you mind if we weigh it?
I brought a scale.
Let's see. There we go. So it's about 38 pounds.
Would Coy pay $38 to check his bag?
COY: You have to change clothes and that sort of thing, you know. If I didn't have to, I wouldn't.
SMITH: Now, there is an argument that Bill Coy did just spend a couple hundred dollars on a plane ticket. Couldn't that make up for the 13 pounds he's not paying for? Our airline expert Marisa Garcia says it's not that simple. Airlines have a very slim profit margin and people, like Bill, sitting in a seat costs a lot of money. They need flight attendants and safety videos and soft drinks.
GARCIA: You sell the ticket. The average profit margin for that ticket is $6.
SMITH: Six dollars. Whereas cargo doesn't demand free pretzels - much higher profit margin.
So why do they carry people at all?
GARCIA: Airlines are meant to carry passengers and they get benefit out of carrying passengers. For one thing, they get to exist.
SMITH: Even with the tiny profit margin, airlines always have the hope that they can get passengers to spend more - more cocktails, more in-flight movies and, when they dream them up, more fees.
Stacey Vanek Smith, NPR News, New York.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Historic talks began in Havana today between Cuban and U.S. diplomats, the highest level American delegation to visit in 35 years. This, of course, follows the thaw in relations announced simultaneously last month by President Obama and President Raul Castro. From the mundane - how to get supplies to U.S. personnel - to the broader question of building ties between longtime foes, these meetings will cover a wide range of issues. NPR's Carrie Kahn joins us from Havana where both sides briefed the media today. So what did they say?
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: We heard officials from both the Cuban and the U.S. side, and they both said words like the talks are constructive, they're respectful, they're going well. There's progress in some areas and there are areas where they agree. But there are also distinct areas where they disagree.
SIEGEL: Now, today's talks are focusing just on migration policy. What are the issues there?
KAHN: That's true. These are just the migration talks, which Cuban and U.S. officials periodically do anyway. So this isn't the hard work right now. They're talking about things where they have cooperation, such as cracking down on document frauds, passports, visas, also, trying to crack down on illegal immigration, mutual search-and-rescues for migrants out in the ocean.
But there are points that Cuba very much objects to in the U.S. policy. And that was kind of interesting, what the Cuban official said to us. Cuba really dislikes what is colloquially known as the wet-foot-dry-foot policy where Cubans that make it on the mainland of the U.S. can stay there. The Cuban official said that they believe this is the major stimulus for illegal immigration into the United States. And they also feel that they had some sort of promise from the U.S. about 20 years ago that that policy would be removed, and the fact that it is still enforced casts a pall on the spirit of the new warming of relations between the two countries, so that was sort of a dagger that I thought was quite surprising from the Cuban official today.
SIEGEL: Now, tomorrow the talks turn to restoring relations. How would you describe the mood going in to those talks?
KAHN: Those are going to be the tough ones, Robert. That's definitely going to be about how to reestablish diplomatic relations between the two countries. From the U.S. side, it's quite interesting. Like you said in your introduction, they just - they were asking for - or want to talk about, you know, how you get supplies to U.S. personnel here, trying to lift the cap on the number of U.S. personnel allowed on the island, lifting travel restrictions for them, things like that, whereas the Cubans - they have much more on the table that they're looking for. Principally, they say, you know, lifting the embargo. And also, one main sticking point for the Cubans is that they're still on the U.S. list of for state-sponsored terrorism. That, to them, is a stumbling block in this new warmer relationship.
Questions were asked about the talks tomorrow and the officials here on both sides said they did not want to preempt any atmosphere going into those talks, so they did not discuss any of the stumbling blocks or how those talks would progress. We'll have to wait until tomorrow to really hear the core issues of reestablishing the diplomatic relations between Cuba and the U.S.
SIEGEL: The U.S. wants to move from an intersection to a full-fledged embassy in Havana. I assume that'll be a subject for talks there?
KAHN: Definitely, that's something that the U.S. really wants. And one thing that they also brought up that they are looking for is that Cuban nationals that come to an embassy in Havana - that they have unrestricted entrance into the new U.S. Embassy and also no harassment by Cuban officials for maintaining contact with U.S. diplomats. So those are some of the things that they're looking for.
SIEGEL: That's NPR's Carrie Kahn in Havana. Carrie, thank you.
KAHN: Thank you very much.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Thousands of protesters marched in the German city of Leipzig this evening in the latest in a series of anti-Islam marches in the country. The protesters object to the growing numbers of Muslim immigrants coming to Germany and what they claim is the Islamization of Europe. Today's protest was much smaller than expected and coincided with the sudden resignation of the man who started the protest movement last year.
NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson joins us now from Leipzig. And Soraya, we'd been told to expect a huge demonstration - maybe 60,000 people - what happened in the end?
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON, BYLINE: Well, I think it was a combination of an incredibly large police presence - we're talking 4,000 officers - many of them from different states or places outside of Leipzig - who were really keeping a tight control over who was coming in and out of the city and moving about in the city - as well as counterdemonstrators. There were 19 groups that applied for permits. I myself saw two within the vicinity of this anti-Islamization or anti-Islam march. And I think that helped keep people away. Certainly, the organizers of the LEGIDA rally - and that stands for Leipzig Against the Islamization of Europe. They were saying that people were actually being kept - that there were thousands more who would've joined in, except they could not get to the march.
CORNISH: And there's been fierce criticism from the government and religious figures, not to mention counterdemonstrations. Did that also have an effect in keeping this demonstration small?
NELSON: Absolutely, and again, I think it caused nervousness on the part of police. They were very, very determined to keep the two sides apart. I could hear what appeared to be stun grenades or concussion bombs, they're called, that were apparently being lobbed in some areas where perhaps there was some encounters. But for the most part, the police were able to keep the two sides apart.
CORNISH: And Soraya, who were the organizers of these rallies, and why did their leader resign today?
NELSON: Well, a lot of them claim to be common folk. The one who resigned - he's the founder of the original group PEGIDA, which is Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of Europe, and he ran his rallies out of Dresden. He resigned because he was seen in some photographs that emerged on social media and also in regular media of him sort of taking on a Hitler pose where he had a bit of a mustache and sort of that stern look that Hitler has. And also, he was making some disparaging remarks about refugees that again appeared on social media.
So under pressure - because, I mean, this is a guy who's been getting up there saying we are not racist we are just looking out for the interests of Germany - we want the people who immigrate here to be integrated. So because of that, he really couldn't stay in charge anymore. And so he did resign tonight.
CORNISH: Soraya, finally, have there been any demands? Do they want to talk with the government?
NELSON: They certainly do want to talk to the government. LEGIDA and PEGIDA both would like to see immigration restricted. They want refugees not to be coming in the large numbers that they are into Germany, and they don't feel their government represents them, and certainly tonight they were calling Chancellor Merkel all kinds of names and demanding that she step down.
CORNISH: That's NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson speaking to us from Leipzig Germany. Thank you so much.
NELSON: You're welcome, Audie.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Name a problem plaguing the Arab world and Yemen is likely to be suffering from it. The country of 24 million on the southern half of the Arabian Peninsula is poor. It's home to the most dangerous offshoot of al-Qaeda that's still in business. During the Arab Spring, protests forced out the pro-Western kleptocratic president, but his successor is so weak that a force of rebels - who unlike al-Qaeda are Shiite Muslims or members of a branch of Shiite Islam - took over the presidential palace this week. Some observers of the chaos in Yemen say U.S. counterterrorism strategy there has at least failed to make things better and perhaps has even made things worse. We're going to talk now with Ibrahim Sharqieh, who's with the Brookings Institution center in Doha, Qatar. Welcome to the program once again.
IBRAHIM SHARQIEH: Thank you for inviting me.
SIEGEL: And first, is it fair to say that U.S. counterterrorism strategy in Yemen has been essentially to kill al-Qaeda terrorists with drones?
SHARQIEH: Well, the U.S. counterterrorism policy has always focused on drones, and that actually contributed to the instability that Yemen has been having for the past years.
SIEGEL: So you're saying it's a policy that has not succeeded?
SHARQIEH: It has not succeeded at all. And on the contrary, it actually contributed to the instability that Yemen has been seeing for the past years because that's not the source of the problems. There are many sources of the problems in Yemen, including first and foremost, poverty and development and corruption.
SIEGEL: Now, take us to the situation in Sana'a - in the capital now - where the rebels called the Houthis who are not Sunni Muslims have taken the presidential palace - there's talk of a COO. How - what would that do to the U.S. presence in Yemen?
SHARQIEH: That definitely has complicated the U.S. activities in Yemen because traditionally, U.S. and the Houthis don't get along. The Houthis are considered proxies of Shia in Yemen - of Iran, I mean, and (unintelligible) perceived to work for an Iranian agenda.
SIEGEL: Is it fair, Ibrahim Sharqieh, to observe that frankly in Yemen there are no good choices - that things are just so bad that there's not much the United States or neighboring Saudi Arabia or the Gulf Cooperation Council could do?
SHARQIEH: Well, I agree actually. Now the situation has become probably the most complex in the past probably 10 - 15 years because there are so many different actors and each group is working for its own agenda. This situation has led to creating so many odd and weird situations where you would find for example, the U.S. and the Houthis are in the same camp fighting al-Qaeda. And that's exactly what happened almost a month ago in the city of Rada' where the Houthis who raised the slogan of death to America were fighting along with the U.S. drones, one from the air and one from the ground. So this has created and led to a complex situation and for the first time, we are seeing signs and signals about a possible civil war especially if the Houthis continue to escalate and alienate the other political parties in Yemen.
SIEGEL: Ibrahim Sharqieh, thank you very much for talking with us today.
SHARQIEH: Thank you, Robert, for inviting me.
SIEGEL: Ibrahim Sharqieh is deputy director of the Brookings Doha Center - that's in Qatar where he always teaches at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Last night President Obama was crowing about the economy.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We've seen the fastest economic growth in over a decade, our deficits cut by two thirds, a stock market that has doubled and health care inflation at its lowest rate in 50 years.
CORNISH: But wait - just the other day, Senate majority leader, Republican Mitch McConnell, suggested that growth didn't come from the Democrats. Here's what he said on the Senate floor.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SENATOR MITCH MCCONNELL: The uptick appears to coincide with the biggest political change of the Obama administration's long tenure in Washington, the expectation of a new Republican Congress.
CORNISH: So who should get credit for a possible economic recovery? We're going to ask Kenneth Rogoff. He's professor of economics at Harvard University and a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. Welcome to the program.
KENNETH ROGOFF: Thank you.
CORNISH: So you just heard those two quotes. Do you hear two parties claiming real credit, or is there some hedging in those boasts?
ROGOFF: Well, they were both there when it happened. I mean I think there's just no debating that this recovery, given the depth of the financial crisis, has really been very solid. Both parties are trying to claim credit for it, but it's certainly true for a long time the Republicans were criticizing President Obama and saying it's not good enough. But if you look at other countries, it really could have been a lot worse.
CORNISH: At this point, what is the consensus among economists about what actually did help the economy recover?
ROGOFF: Ah, consensus among economists - you're asking a tall order. I think there's no doubt that the Federal Reserve did a lot of heavy lifting, although it had to do a lot of experimentation along the way to see what worked. I think that the so-called bank stress test where back in May 2009 they tried to figure out just how bad things were - that also was something that helped tremendously. It sort of put a floor under how bad the panic was. And then the fiscal stimulus started under George Bush - President Obama essentially doubled it when he came in. And I think all of these things contributed. People don't know. There's a lot of debate. Certainly, what the Federal Reserve did, everybody agrees was great.
CORNISH: Talk a little bit more about the Federal Reserve. I mean, do they essentially deserve most of the credit? And they're not exactly controlled by the president, right - by the executive office?
ROGOFF: So what the Federal Reserve did the most was take out the panic. It did things like simply put money into the system so that people knew they'd be able to get their money out. It did things that were just incredibly out-of-the-box, but so too did the government. And the truth of the matter is when you face a crisis like this, you throw the kitchen sink at it. You're never quite sure what worked, but thankfully we didn't have another Great Depression.
CORNISH: You're at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, talking to economists from around the world. What are they saying, I mean especially economists, say, from Europe which isn't recovering in the same way?
ROGOFF: I think actually everyone everywhere in the world is looking at the United States and wondering how it's managed to do so well, wondering how they could do things better. And that may seem very strange being in the United States where we wish it was a lot better, but Europe is in much worse shape in large part because they don't really have a central government over the Eurozone. Imagine if Texas and Massachusetts had to agree on every policy the way, say, Germany and France do.
And even the European Central Bank - that's the equivalent of Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve - they don't really have the same remit that the Federal Reserve does. And so they've been trying to struggle with that. But even you can go to Asia, other places, and everyone admires how the U.S. economy has managed to take this huge punch and manage to come back and now is really something of the envy of the world.
CORNISH: That's Kenneth Rogoff, professor of economics at Harvard University and former chief economist of the IMF. Thank you so much for speaking with us.
ROGOFF: My pleasure.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
One phrase from President Obama's State of the Union speech that quickly became a hashtag was middle-class economics. Here's how he defined it.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Middle class economics means helping working families feel more secure in a world of constant change. It means helping folks afford child care, college, health care, a home, retirement.
CORNISH: The president said that the budget he sends to Congress in two weeks will address the challenges middle-class families face in all of these areas and more. And during his speech the president sketched out his proposals. As NPR's John Ydstie reports, members of the Republican-controlled Congress were unimpressed.
JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: The president wants to provide help for middle-class families in more than a half dozen different ways. One would be providing a new $500 tax credit for families where both spouses are working. Another would be to dramatically expand child care benefits to up to $3,000 a year for each child under five. The president said last night it's time to stop treating child care as a side issue...
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
OBAMA: ...Or as a women's issue, and treat it like the national economic priority that it is for all of us.
YDSTIE: The president also called for legislation from Congress mandating equal pay for women and boosting the minimum wage. He's also pushing a plan to make it easier for workers to save for retirement through their employer. And Obama proposed making two years of community college free. He pointed to Tennessee which has Republican leadership and Chicago with its Democratic mayor as places where it's already happened.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
OBAMA: I want to spread that idea all across so that two years of college becomes as free and universal in America as high school is today.
YDSTIE: To help pay for that, the president would consolidate six current overlapping provisions that provide help to students. Most controversially, he would once again make the proceeds from 529 educational savings accounts taxable. That produced objections from Republicans today including Kansas representative Lynn Jenkins.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CONGRESSMAN LYNN JENKINS: Middle income families that have worked hard and saved to send their children to college should receive our support, not a tax bill to pay for his agenda.
YDSTIE: Republicans also took issue with the president's proposal for paid sick leave. He pointed out that the U.S. is the only advanced country that doesn't mandate paid sick leave, forcing parents to choose between a paycheck and a sick child.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
OBAMA: Send me a bill that gives every worker in America the opportunity to earn seven days of pay, sick leave. It's the right thing to do.
YDSTIE: Alabama Republican Representative Martha Roby said she and her colleagues have a better approach.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CONGRESSMAN MARTHA ROBY: We couldn't agree with you more that we need to be helping working moms and dads. So he has the right goal, he just has the wrong approach. More mandates on the workforce is not the way to go.
YDSTIE: Roby introduced a bill today in the house that would instead allow workers to trade overtime hours worked for sick leave. To pay for his plans, the president proposed raising taxes on well-off individuals and big banks, including raising the taxes on income from investments like capital gains and dividends to 28 percent. House Speaker John Boehner made clear the president's ideas are not welcomed by Republicans.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CONGRESSMAN JOHN BOEHNER: All the president really offered last night was more taxes, more government, more of the same approach that has failed the middle class for decades.
YDSTIE: But Boehner's suggestion for a better approach was also familiar. Replace Obamacare, fix the broken tax code, and balance the federal budget. John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
We're going to hear from a Democrat in Congress now. Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, welcome to the program once again.
CONGRESSMAN CHRIS VAN HOLLEN: Thank you Robert - good to be back.
SIEGEL: We heard from two of your Republican counterparts saying that one - we don't need another mandate for paid sick leave, and two - it's time to cut taxes, not to tax 529 college savings plans. Where's the middle ground between what the president proposed and what they're saying?
VAN HOLLEN: Well, the president made a couple of proposals including these in order to address the very real and chronic problem of middle-class squeeze. The president proposed a number of measures to help folks in the middle class who feel like they're getting squeezed on both ends. The earn paid sick leave is an important part of that. People need to be able to care for a sick loved one without having to forgo income and have to choose between taking care of someone who may be in really bad shape and paying the rent and putting food on the table. And there are a number of states that have moved forward in a way to do that.
With respect to other measures, the thrust of the president's middle-class tax provisions were to provide significant tax relief to working families, especially in the area of child care. And so he was looking for a number of things that would be able to relieve this pressure that folks in the middle are feeling.
SIEGEL: But the core of what the president called middle-class economics - of increasing taxes on the very wealthy in order to provide some relief to middle-income taxpayers - it's understood to be dead on arrival with the Republican majorities in Congress. What's the point of proposals that we know aren't going anywhere in this Congress?
VAN HOLLEN: Well, on the opening day of this Congress I heard speaker Boehner say he wanted to deal with the issue of wage stagnation and middle-class squeeze. That's what the president's proposing. If Speaker Boehner has other ideas, they should put them forward. And the president has said that our current tax code is skewed - stacked in favor of those who make money off of money and against those who make money off of hard work.
SIEGEL: But he's been saying that for the past several years, though. We know that - it would seem extremely unlikely that Republicans would support such a plan.
VAN HOLLEN: Well, I mean the purpose of the state of the union is to lay out your vision of the country and how you're going to move forward. And, you know, Republicans will have to answer by showing where they might be able to agree with the president, and we hope there might be some areas. But if they're going to say they want to address the problem of middle-class squeeze and wage stagnation, they should come forward with their own ideas. It's easy to criticize.
SIEGEL: After hearing President Obama's speech and his arguments for, as he says, middle-class economics, do you think perhaps that in the 2014 election campaign that Democrats distanced themselves too far from the president and that a more vigorous, frankly, more liberal campaign that sounded more like the state of the union last night might have been more successful?
VAN HOLLEN: I do believe that in the last election a number of Democratic candidates decided that they could distance themselves from the president. I believe in those cases it was a mistake. The big debate here is between an economic strategy Republicans have pursued that's based on trickle-down. What the president is saying is that the economy is strongest when more Americans are benefiting from increased economic growth - that you grow from the middle out and the bottom up, and he's putting more meat on that bone. And I'm looking forward to the debate.
SIEGEL: Representative Van Hollen, thanks a lot for talking with us.
VAN HOLLEN: Thank you.
SIEGEL: Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, member of the House of Representatives speaking about last night's state of the union address.
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OK, we're going to try to keep the puns to a minimum, but we couldn't resist this one. The controversy has blown up in the NFL over deflated footballs. Late last night ESPN reported 11 of the 12 footballs available for use by the New England Patriots' offense for last weekend's AFC Championship game were under-inflated, and this could make it easier for the quarterback and receivers to throw and catch, especially in bad weather. It was raining heavily Sunday when the Patriots beat the Indianapolis Colts 45-7 to qualify for the Super Bowl. But what's being called deflate-gate has prompted questions about whether New England cheated. Here are some opinions from Boston.
TONY FIGUREIDO: Sour grapes, that's all it is.
RYAN BURNS: I don't want to believe it, but I mean, they've cheated before so it's definitely possible.
MARK CONOLLY: That, to me, is just ridiculous. I think there's people that are jealous of the Patriots success. People don't want to see you on top too long.
CORNISH: That's Tony Figureido, Ryan Burns and Mark Conolly earlier in Boston today. Joining me now is NPR sports correspondent Tom Goldman.
And Tom, give us the latest news.
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: We are waiting for the NFL to finish its investigation, Audie. No details yet from the League, which leaves more questions than answers, including were the balls purposefully deflated, and if so, by whom? Now, "ProFootball Talk" reports today that the NFL has determined the balls were properly checked by the officials before the game and found to be properly pumped, meaning if something shady happened, it was after that.
CORNISH: Now, sports media and social media are going bonkers with talk about this. What's the big deal?
GOLDMAN: (Laughter). Good question. It does seem a bit extreme, doesn't it, a firestorm over flat footballs? But, this is a big deal to a lot of people who still look to sport as one of the last institutions in our society where you can find virtue and honesty - although so much bad has happened in sport to seriously challenge that ideal. But, you know, you contrast this alleged dishonesty with the raw moment of the other game Sunday, when Seattle staged that miracle comeback prompting quarterback Russell Wilson to cry openly. You know, in the fans' minds that was real. That's why we turn to sports and pay billions to watch it, not to hear stories of deceit.
CORNISH: Now, if a current NFL investigation shows the Patriots did purposely under-inflate the balls, will people be able to say that New England cheated its way into the Super Bowl?
GOLDMAN: I know you may disagree with this, Audie, but no. The Patriots dominated Indianapolis in all facets of the game, as they've done the past few games against the Colts. And a former NFL official was quoted as saying he'd be surprised after the balls were found to be under-inflated at half time if they weren't pumped back up for the second half, like they're supposed to be.
And in that second half, New England quarterback Tom Brady was 12 for 14, passing for 131 yards. He had two touchdown passes and the Patriots outscored Indianapolis 28-0. Those are very good stats with, we assume, properly inflated footballs. But the story certainly doesn't help New England's reputation. Those who hate the Patriots - and there are many - already think the team cheats, after the 2007 spy-gate scandal when the team and head coach Bill Belichick were punished for illegally videotaping an opponent's defensive signals during a game. And if the current investigation shows shenanigans again by the Patriots, that just further taints what has been really the closest thing to a dynasty in the last 10 to 15 years in the NFL.
CORNISH: That's NPR's sports correspondent, Tom Goldman. Tom, thanks so much.
GOLDMAN: You're welcome, Audie.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
The formality and calm of the U.S. Supreme Court was briefly shattered today by shouts of protest and overturned chairs, but the justices soon moved on to announcing opinions as NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Wednesday morning's Supreme Court session had just been gaveled to order when protesters in the back of the chamber began yelling things like, one person one vote. We are the 99 percent. Money is not speech. And, overturn Citizens United.
That's a reference to the court's 2010 decision issued on this day five years ago which struck down limits on corporate and union campaign spending. Soon the spectacle became even more bizarre. It sounded like loud drums as galvanized guards overturned chairs to get to protesters, tackle them and hustle them out of the courtroom. When the commotion subsided, Chief Justice John Roberts looked out over the courtroom with a tiny smile and said, our second order of business - but the protest was not over as more shouters stood only to be hauled out. By then, the Chief Justice was not amused, declaring, we will now continue our tradition of having open court in the Supreme Court building.
In all, eight protesters were arrested and charged. Protests are extremely rare at the high court. The most famous was in 1983 when Hustler publisher Larry Flynt was hauled out as he shouted obscenities. Despite today's tumult, the court quickly returned to business, starting with opinion announcement and a case of great interest to government whistleblowers and airplane passengers.
The facts are these. In July of 2003, the Department of Homeland Security issued a confidential advisory warning of a potential and imminent hijacking on a long-distance flight. Air marshals across the country were called in for a secret briefing. Forty-eight hours later, however, they were informed that assignment to overnight long distant flights was being canceled. Air Marshal Robert MacLean had first thought the cancellation message was a joke or a test of some kind.
ROBERT MACLEAN: Everybody said, this doesn't make any sense. We just had this emergency briefing that we're under attack, yet two days later we get this message saying that all flights that are going to be three and a half hours or longer weren't going to be covered.
TOTENBERG: So he called his supervisor who told him the coverage was canceled because the agency didn't want to pay for hotels, overtime and travel allowances and that there was nothing he could do. MacLean then called the Inspector General's hotline where he says that he was told that this is what agencies do when they're running out of money. Fearing for the public safety, MacLean blew the whistle. He leaked the story to a reporter. Congress went ballistic, and within 24 hours the cost-saving measure was canceled.
MacLean was not named in the story, but three years later the agency discovered his role and MacLean was fired. He challenged his dismissal as illegal retaliation under the Whistleblower Protection Act. But the Merit Systems Protection Board charged with reviewing such appeals ruled against him, citing agency regulations that make it illegal to disclose specific details of aviation security measures.
When the case reached the Supreme Court, the question was whether an agency regulation is the same thing as a law in this context. The answer, said the court today, is no. Writing for the 7-to-2 court majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said the statute relied on to fire MacLean only authorizes dismissals for violations of law and does not contain broader language that commonly punishes violations of any law rule or regulation. MacLean will return to the Merit Systems Protection Board seeking reinstatement and back pay. He needs the job and the money. His firing meant he could not get another law enforcement job, so he now sells solar panels. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Virginia has a rich history, which is a source of great pride. But one thing it does not have is a state song. It used to, but the song was retired in 1997.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CARRY ME BACK TO OLD VIRGINNY")
LOUIS ARMSTRONG: (Singing) Carry me back to old Virginny. There's where the cotton and the corn and taters grow.
SIEGEL: That's "Carry Me Back To Old Virginny" as it was sung by Louis Armstrong. Well, since 1997, the home of Shenandoah and the mother of Presidents has been unable to agree on a new musical anthem. One of the bills before the Virginia legislature this session would finally remedy that situation. The man behind the campaign is Professor James or Bud Robertson and he joins me now from Richmond. Welcome to the program.
JAMES ROBERTSON: Thank you, sir.
SIEGEL: And Virginia had a song for years, as we mentioned. What was the problem with "Carry Me Back To Old Virginny?"
ROBERTSON: It was written by an African American in 1857, but it was written in Negro dialect, which was offensive to many people, understandably.
SIEGEL: It was written in the character of a slave who's yearning for the old days, back working for master.
ROBERTSON: Yes. Yes, indeed. Yes.
SIEGEL: Well, so in 1997 it was declared sonata non grata, I guess would be the Latin.
ROBERTSON: That's appropriate.
SIEGEL: And talk began to turn to the folk anthem "Shenandoah" in 2006.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SHENANDOAH")
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Singing) Oh Shenandoah. I long to see you, await your rolling rivers.
ROBERTSON: "Shenandoah" is one of the most beautiful, beloved melodies we have, and it makes one think instinctively of Virginia. I don't know any other melody that does that.
SIEGEL: Even though there is a line in the lyric that talks about, across the wide Missouri.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SHENANDOAH")
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Singing) Missouri...
SIEGEL: And there's the rather un-anthem-like verse, oh Shenandoah I love your daughter.
ROBERTSON: Yes. When the song was first suggested as a state song, a legislative committee refused it because it referred only to the Missouri. It said nothing about Virginia or its beauty or its past or it future. But the song itself - it was such an appropriate Virginia song that if we could only get up-to-date words for it, it would make an ideal state song.
SIEGEL: And where did you find a lyricist to put new words to the old tune?
ROBERTSON: He's in New York. His name is Mike Greenly. He was born and raised in South Carolina, an honor graduate from Duke. His heart is all Southern. And Mike, I think, did a beautiful job. He gave us the song. I'm not sure we could've afforded him. And it's now in the legislature running through the mill.
SIEGEL: Well, let's take a listen to the product of the lyrics of Mike Greenly and the tune of Shenandoah.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "OUR GREAT VIRGINIA")
UNIDENTIFIED CHORUS: (Singing) I fill with pride at all you give us. Rolling hills, majestic mountains. From the Shenandoah to the Atlantic, rivers wide and far as tall. All in one Virginia.
SIEGEL: What do you feel when you hear the lyrics that have been put to "Shenandoah" here to become "Our Great Virginia?"
ROBERTSON: I cried the first time I heard. But I still think it's just a moving song. I think you have to listen to it, and there's a lot of legislative support for this song, and I hope very fervently that it does become a reality.
SIEGEL: Professor Robertson, thank you very much for talking with us and sharing the song with us.
ROBERTSON: Thank you so much for having me.
SIEGEL: That's James Bud Robertson, professor emeritus of history at Virginia Tech.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The King of Saudi Arabia is dead. Saudi state television reported his death late today. Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud was 90 years old. According to the Saudi government, he'll be succeeded on the throne by Crown Prince Salman. Salman is 79. King Abdullah was a close but sometimes contentious ally of the U.S. And he was seen as a reformer, albeit in slow, conservative Saudi style. A few months ago, he promised women would vote and run in this year's local elections. NPR's Kelly McEvers has this report on King Abdullah's reign.
KELLY MCEVERS, BYLINE: Abdullah was born before Saudi Arabia was even a country. It was the early 1920s, and his father, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, set out to conquer the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. In one famous battle, ibn Saud surrounded the capital of a rival tribe.
ROBERT LACEY: Famously, instead of executing everybody, he invited them to be his guests.
MCEVERS: And married one of them, says Robert Lacey, author of two books on Saudi Arabia. The result of this marriage was Abdullah. Abdullah's father eventually declared the land he'd conquered a kingdom. Yet, it remained of little interest to the West until 1938, when an American company discovered vast reserves of oil. After World War II, oil experts soared and Saudi Arabia boomed. Abdullah's father died in 1953. His dozens of sons vied for power and influence. Abdullah did not stand out from the crowd. Again, Robert Lacey.
LACEY: I can remember when I lived in Saudi Arabia in the late '70s, early '80s. Abdullah was a sort of joke. I mean, he was very butch and powerful-looking with his black beard, but then he'd open his mouth and out would come this stutter.
MCEVERS: Abdullah later got a speech coach. Unlike the so-called playboy princes, he was known for austerity and toughness. Here's Ford Fraker, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during Abdullah's reign.
FORD FRAKER: Well, when he engages, he engages very personally, very directly. And you can feel the power in him. He can be very charismatic to the point where I've been in meetings where he's actually moved people to tears.
MCEVERS: In 1982 Abdullah's brother Fahd became king and Abdullah was named Crown Prince. He already headed the powerful national guard. It was a turbulent time. The holy shrine at Mecca had recently been seized by Islamist fanatics. Iran had undergone an Islamic revolution and Afghanistan would soon rise up against a Soviet invasion. Fahd wanted to keep Saudi Arabia's own restive religious establishment on his side. He spent millions on Islamic universities and put religious leaders in key government jobs.
In 1995, Fahd suffered a debilitating stroke. Abdullah became the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia. Then came the attacks of September 11, 2001. The fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi shook the Saudi leadership and threatened the kingdom's relationship with the U.S. Robert Jordan is another former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia who arrived in the kingdom less than a month after 9/11.
ROBERT JORDAN: And the Saudis, by and large, could not simply believe that 15 of their sons had hijacked these airplanes and done what they had done. They literally were in denial.
MCEVERS: High-ranking members of the royal family told Jordan they believed 9/11 was an Israeli plot. American intelligence officials flew to Saudi Arabia to share forensic evidence. Even then Abdullah viewed the attackers as a handful of deviance rather than a widespread movement. It was only in 2003, after a series of attacks inside Saudi Arabia that killed more than 160 people, that Abdullah changed his mind about the threat posed by al-Qaida. Again, here's Robert Jordan speaking to a Washington think tank.
JORDAN: That was a turning point and after that turning point, we saw tremendous progress in capturing and killing most of the al-Qaida leadership in Saudi Arabia.
MCEVERS: Author Robert Lacey says not only did Abdullah's attitude toward al-Qaida change, but he also began to question how influential the religious establishment had become. After all, many of the terrorists had been educated in Saudi schools and prayed in Saudi mosques.
LACEY: Abdullah's diagnosis of 9/11 was that the religious had got out of hand. And there was a famous episode when in one of the public meetings held to discuss what had gone wrong, a learned sheikh said, well, of course, you know, when it comes to the wali al amr, the powers that govern, we must remember that the religious are part of that as well as the secular government. And he was slapped-down immediately.
MCEVERS: Later, key religious figures were sacked and the religious police were reigned in. Slowly, Abdullah came to be known as a ruler committed to reform.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BARBARA WALTERS: October 14, 2005. I'm Barbara Walters.
MCEVERS: Then in 2005, Abdullah's brother King Fahd died.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
WALTERS: Tonight an exclusive interview with King Abdullah, ruler of Saudi Arabia.
MCEVERS: And Abdullah assumed the throne.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
WALTERS: A flashpoint for Westerners is that Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world in which women are not allowed to drive.
KING ABDULLAH BIN ABDULAZIZ AL-SAUD: (Through interpreter) I believe strongly in the rights of women. I believe the day will come when women drive. The issue will require patience. In time, I believe it will be possible.
MCEVERS: That was 2005, but women still can't drive in Saudi Arabia. It has long been said that under Abdullah, the Saudi rulers wanted reform more than the Saudi people. But dissidents say that's just an excuse for inaction. Under Abdullah, the country did hold its first-ever elections for city councils. Jamal Khashoggi is a Saudi journalist and a longtime editor of a pro-reform newspaper.
JAMAL KHASHOGGI: Maybe not everything he believed in will be materialized. But he put us - or, he put the foundation for reform. At least he succeeded in making officials and the public accept the term reform. It is a beginning.
MCEVERS: The concern now, says Najla Saud al-Faraj, a Saudi woman who studied law during Abdullah's time, is whether that momentum toward reform will continue under the next Saudi king.
NAJLA SAUD AL FARAJ: I am definitely worried. I mean, I'm worried about future generations. What would my kids have? Let's say not being able to go to school, not being able to drive, not being able to have the job of their choice, just because of some gender issues. I mean, that doesn't make any sense.
MCEVERS: Faraj says she enjoyed some freedoms under Abdullah, but she's not sure if they will last.
Kelly McEvers, NPR News.
SIEGEL: The king of Saudi Arabia has died at age 90. According to Saudi state TV, he will be succeeded by Crown Prince Salman.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Today's Found Recipe starts with a panic over baked goods.
JENNIFER STEINHAUER: When Hostess announced that it was filing for Chapter 11, I saw a lot of weeping on the Internet about, how will I ever get a Twinkie again?
CORNISH: And that got Jennifer Steinhauer thinking, would you even want a Twinkie again and why?
STEINHAUER: Well, maybe we all want a Twinkie or have access to a Twinkie because it's not just that you're losing a snack food you may not eat anymore, you're kind of losing your childhood.
CORNISH: Jennifer Steinhauer covers Congress for The New York Times. She's a busy woman. Yet the possibility of a snack food apocalypse sent her to the kitchen for a solution. For a year from scratch, she made Twinkies, Devil Dogs, Mallomars, Fritos - yes, you can do it yourself, homemade junk food. Steinhauer even tackled that little pink treat she had zero respect for - Sno Balls. And that is today's Found Recipe.
STEINHAUER: So you're walking down the grocery aisle and you're walking past your Twinkies, and you're walking past your Ho Hos, and you're walking past your Donettes, and there is the Sno Ball. The Sno Ball is the pastel cousin to everybody else. It's showing off. It's saying, look at me, I'm bizarre, don't you want to take part in this? It's bright pink. It's not anything that you've seen in nature or food. It's kind of a holiday, but it's March and it's still there. You can tell it's going to be cloyingly sweet and you pull back the cellophane and you bite in, and it's a mouthful of coconut, marshmallow, a frosting thing - a sort of overly-sweet cake batter. It's a mouth of sugar and probably an instant sugar high.
For me, the Sno Ball was a bridge too far. And so I thought it through and I thought, OK, how can I make this Sno Ball be something visually that will remind the Sno Ball lover of their favorite treat, but actually make them something that I want to eat and that maybe others who were not fans of Sno Ball would enjoy? So first I started with idea of the shape, the round. What's round? A doughnut hole is round. A doughnut hole is also delicious. Guess what else? You can buy a doughnut hole pan. And then I think about the marshmallow and how I don't like that marshmallow on the outside sticking to me and I don't like the way it feels, you know, all over my face or it's just kind of gross. And I think, let's get the marshmallow - let's pop it inside the doughnut. We're going to get a mouth of marshmallow, but we're not going to get a face of marshmallow. And we're going to do the coconut, like a nice little frosting with it. And we'll roll it in that coconut, but we won't go crazy. And let's not maybe make it bright pink. We can - we can do that, or we don't even have to.
So I had an event at school, there was a school party. And I brought those Sno Balls to school and there was some skepticism including from teachers who said, I don't like coconut. And I have to say, there was something about that texture and the flavor of that doughnut itself kids loved. They were smaller in scale too, than the Sno Ball. I think that's important. It's not an overwhelming, gross-sized treat. It's a little pop, a little fun thing. I think, in a funny way, it's sort of a deconstructed cake pop at this point.
CORNISH: Jennifer Steinhauer. Her snack food recipes are in the cookbook "Treat Yourself." We've posted her revamp of that classic snack cake the Sno Ball on our Found Recipes page at npr.org.
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Ten states already ban abortions after 20 weeks post conception. That's a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade, which grants women the right to the procedure for several weeks after that until the point when a fetus is considered viable. NPR's Jennifer Ludden reports that just 1.5 percent of all abortions take place that late in pregnancy.
JENNIFER LUDDEN, BYLINE: They may be few, but they can be among the most emotionally fraught. Six years ago, Christy Zink and her husband were thrilled to be expecting a second child. All seemed good until her ultrasound at 21 weeks. Her OB-GYN noticed something off, so Zink had an MRI. She was shocked to see the image of her baby's brain.
CHRISTY ZINK: It looked like there were, on one side, almost, like, splotches, like an abstract painting. It did not look like a brain.
LUDDEN: She says half the brain was basically missing. So were key central nerve fibers. Doctors said the baby would probably have near constant seizures and might have to live in a hospital.
ZINK: We did not feel like we wanted to bring a baby into the world whose life was going to be about pain and surgery and being hooked up to machines.
LUDDEN: Zink and her husband had little trouble getting an abortion where they live in Washington, D.C., but she would not be allowed one in most of the 10 states that now ban the procedure at 20 weeks post conception. Why 20 weeks?
MARJORIE DANNENFELSER: This is a point where the humanity of the unborn child is very, very clear.
LUDDEN: Marjorie Dannenfelser heads the Susan B. Anthony List, which seeks to ultimately end all abortion. She says there's good reason polls show majority support for these bans.
DANNENFELSER: Brothers and sisters of a baby that's 20 weeks look at the sonogram. They see the child moving around. Mothers read WebMD and it says you should be singing to your baby at this point, that she can hear melodies, she can feel rhythms.
LUDDEN: And she says the fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks. The legislation is called the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, but most research disputes that, finding neural connections are not yet developed.
VICKI SAPORTA: So this whole bill is based on faulty science.
LUDDEN: Vicki Saporta of the National Abortion Federation says it's really about politics.
SAPORTA: They are introducing bans in the states as early as six weeks. They're introducing them at 12 weeks. And they would like us to believe that a 20-week ban is therefore then reasonable. It is not.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DEENA: Hi, thanks for calling the NAF hotline. This is Deena (ph). How can I help you today?
LUDDEN: The Federation gets 5,000 calls a week to its abortion hotline. Saporta says they hear from many women with no money for the procedure, so they put it off, which makes it even more expensive. Others don't realize they're pregnant until late, or are afraid to tell anyone. Dr. Warren Hern runs the Boulder Abortion Clinic in Colorado.
WARREN HERN: One of the patients that I saw recently had been raped continuously by her half-brother, and who was many months pregnant when her mother discovered that she was pregnant, and they were all quite terrified.
LUDDEN: The girl was 13. Only Arkansas's ban allows someone in her situation to get an abortion after 20 weeks. The nine other states have no exception at all for rape. Hern says other women seeking later abortions struggle with substance abuse or mental illness or simply decide they are unfit to be a parent.
HERN: She's not prepared for that economically or educationally. She's been abandoned by her partner or she has no support from her parents, and she doesn't have the means to raise a child.
DANNENFELSER: Well, the vulnerable population that must be considered is the vulnerable child waiting to be born as well.
LUDDEN: Ban supporter Marjorie Dannenfelser says a woman's rights should not trump those of a fetus just to make her life easier.
DANNENFELSER: This debate revolves around a group of children who have nothing wrong with them, but the circumstances in their life beyond the womb are very difficult for the mother.
LUDDEN: Activists are pushing for 20-week abortion bans in at least three more states this year. A House panel in South Carolina approved one unanimously today. Jennifer Ludden, NPR News, Washington.
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All right, if you're not driving, take a look at your hands. It's probably not something you think about a lot, but they're pretty amazing. Our short fingers and relatively long thumbs can grip things with precision. And this ability is far beyond that of our closest living relatives. The great apes, chimpanzees for example, would find it really hard to hold a pencil like we can. NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports that our unique way of handling objects may actually be older than scientists used to think.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: You, me and everyone you know is an official member of the species Homo sapiens. And the earliest ancestor in our group is a species called Homo habilis, which means handy man. Matthew Skinner is a paleoanthropologist at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom. He says this species has hand bones sort of like ours, and it's long been thought to be the first maker of stone tools.
MATTHEW SKINNER: Stone tool use - and tool use generally - is something that's really been used to differentiate the genus Homo and our group Homo from what came beforehand.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: What came before was an even earlier ancestor, called Australopithecus africanus. Skinner and his colleagues wanted to see how it might have used its hands. The researchers knew that bone responds to the forces and stresses put on it. So they used a powerful scanning technique to peer inside some of these ancient hand bones. They saw something surprising, a distinctive structure that seems to be created by forcefully opposing your thumb with your fingers. Skinner says chimpanzees don't have it. But it is found in stone tool users.
SKINNER: It's clear evidence that these australopiths were using their hands and using grips that are very consistent with what modern humans did and what our recent relatives, like Neanderthals, did.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Now, the first stone tools date back to around 2.5 million years ago. The bones in this study go back a half-a-million years before that. Brian Richmond is a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He says there have been other hints that human ancestors were using stone tools much earlier. One group recently found animal bones from 3.5 million years ago that seemed to have telltale cut marks.
BRIAN RICHMOND: But that's been controversial. Not everyone has accepted that.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: He says this new study is really cool, but it's still not proof that this ancestor used stone tools.
RICHMOND: What it is - it's direct evidence of handling objects in a fairly humanlike way.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: What objects they were handling and why is the big mystery. Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
There's a new documentary film that does a better job than I've seen anywhere else explaining what life has been like for Russians over the past few decades and how that experience has culminated in the leadership of Vladimir Putin. The movie is about hockey, which at times is about politics and not just for Russians. In 1980, when the U.S. hockey team upset the Soviet Union in the Winter Olympics - the game they called the miracle on ice here - President Jimmy Carter called coach Herb Brooks to congratulate him.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JIMMY CARTER: Tell the whole team that we're extremely proud of them. They've come through like true champions.
HERB BROOKS: It was a great win, you know, for everybody and I think it just proves that our way of life is the proper way to continue on.
SIEGEL: The other way of life, the one that produced the best Soviet hockey players, arguably the best players in the world, only went on for another decade or so. And Gabe Polsky's documentary film "Red Army" is about those great players who played for the Red Army team, especially one of them. Gabe Polsky, welcome to the program.
GABE POLSKY: Thanks for having me, Robert.
SIEGEL: And first, how good was the Red Army team?
POLSKY: Oh, they were incredible. They basically, for almost two decades, were almost unbeatable. They were dominating.
SIEGEL: And they had a style that was just different from the way the North American teams played hockey.
POLSKY: They originated from Anatoli Tarasov, who was the godfather of Soviet hockey, who was a philosopher. He took a very creative approach to the game and studied chess and ballet and applied these principles to hockey. And he really made it a very fun, creative, artistic game to watch with a lot of puck possession and weaving and just beautiful playmaking.
SIEGEL: So, like Sputnik or the Bolshoi ballet, Soviet hockey is one of the things that people took pride in even if the society it was part of was otherwise dysfunctional.
POLSKY: You know, it was created by Joseph Stalin in the '40s, who, at that time, wanted the Soviet Union to be number one in sports in the world. And he wanted that to be because, one, it creates a sense of national pride and, you know, when the team's doing well people unified inside the Soviet Union. And it also makes other countries, you know, think what are they doing there in the Soviet Union? It must be a more superior culture in certain ways. And it was a propaganda tool for the Soviet Union to show how dominant and superior their society was.
SIEGEL: The story of your film is mostly about Viacheslav - or, for short, Slava - Fetisov. Describe Slava Fetisov as a hockey player and as a person.
POLSKY: Well, as a hockey player, he is a defenseman. And he was captain of the Soviet national team for many years and was considered one of the greatest defenseman ever to play the game. And he's one of the most decorated athletes in Soviet history. As a person, he's a lot the same way he is on the ice. He's always keeping you on your toes. He's unpredictable. He's a little bit aggressive, but he's an intelligent guy, and that's how he was on the ice.
SIEGEL: Russia, the Soviet Union, entered the age of Gorbachev and the opening to the West - really, the end of the Cold War. And Fetisov and other Russians had shown that they could outplay National Hockey League teams. So the question was could they come and play in the U.S. or Canada? Describe what happened.
POLSKY: During the Perestroika times in the late '80s, the government could no longer afford to fund the sports programs in the Soviet Union. So they started to think about allowing some of the older Soviet players to go and play in the West. And they would sell them to NHL clubs for a lot of money and then basically take all that money for the government. So the players would make, let's say, a thousand dollars a month and then the rest of that money would go to the government. And some of the players were sort of so eager to get out of there that they would take that deal. But Fetisov held out and didn't want to be treated like a slave and basically work and be sold like a slave to the U.S. and then give all his money back to the Soviet government.
SIEGEL: Yeah. There's an amazing moment that he recounts in the film. He's playing for Red Army's - he's actually an officer in the army. And the ministry of defense calls him in, in uniform, to face the minister of defense of the Soviet Union, Dmitry Yazov, arguably the second most powerful guy in the Soviet Union of the day. And Fetisov feels that Yazov has double-crossed him by not letting him go play in the U.S. Here's Fetisov in your movie describing that scene.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "RED ARMY")
VIACHESLAV FETISOV: I said, Mr. Minister, if you not do what you promised, you're not the minister, you're not the officer. Release me from the army. Thank you very much. Turn and go. He would scream and yell and [bleep]. You try to play for our enemies. You know what I can do with you. I exile you to Siberia. You never get out. But then I will turn back. I left. You know what? In 10 days, they give me passport and I was free of the army. First multiple working entrance visa to United States.
SIEGEL: First multiple-entry work visa to the United States. He stared down the ministry of defense of the Soviet Union - my gosh.
POLSKY: He'd said he really knew that there was no other way than to do it the way that he did it. Otherwise, it was over, and who knows what would have happened to him?
SIEGEL: The rest of the story is Slava Fetisov does come to play in the National Hockey League. Like other Russians, at first he's kind of disappointing. They're all brought together, a bunch of them, by the Detroit Red Wings and in 1997 they win the Stanley Cup. Fetisov, I suppose at that point, could've decided to just remain an American - stay here, stay in Detroit.
POLSKY: Yeah, yeah. I mean, he was, at that point, making quite a bit of money and, you know, lived the American dream, won two Stanley Cups and he was actually coaching. He coached for New Jersey and won a Stanley Cup as assistant coach with them. And, you know, his life could've been great and fruitful, but he got a call from Vladimir Putin. And Putin asked him to be the minister of sport in Russia. And I assume that it was a difficult decision, but I think when you have a guy like Vladimir Putin asking you to do that, it's difficult to say no to, first of all.
Second of all, I think that Fetisov - he's probably one of the most famous people in Russia. And with that comes a lot of responsibility. You know, Russia was a country that needed heroes. You know, I think they suffered from a lack of people that young people look up to. And, you know, it was a country - it still is - that was rebuilding itself from the collapse of the Soviet Union and still trying to find itself. And I think Fetisov felt a sense of responsibility for his country and his people and he considered Russia his home. And I think he wants to help make the country as good as it can be.
SIEGEL: It seems that as minister of sport for Putin, part of what Fetisov is doing is trying to connect things that Russians took pride in in the past. And bring them back into the modern Russia and, at the same time, bring Russia some sense of order out of the chaos that he found when he came back from his playing days.
POLSKY: Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, the story basically brings to life the difficulties that Russia has had after the collapse of the Soviet Union and finding its place in the world and being prideful and finding its national identity and regaining the prestige that it had during the Soviet years.
SIEGEL: Well, Gabe Polsky, thank you very much for talking with us about your documentary "Red Army."
POLSKY: Thanks a lot, Robert.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
France is intensifying its efforts to fight Islamic radicalization in the nation's prisons. It's an enormous problem. One of the brothers who attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris went from small-time criminal to violent jihadi after spending 20 months in the French prison system, and one of his suspected accomplices converted to Islam while he was behind bars. In the second of her series on radicalization in France, NPR's Dina Temple-Raston went to Paris to find out why violent extremism is rampant in French prisons.
DINA TEMPLE-RASTON, BYLINE: At a bar in the 19th arrondissement last week, everyone was gathered around a flat screen television to get the latest news about the terror attacks. It was midday and the bar was filled with men in polo shirts and coveralls, transfixed by what they were watching. I was there to see Laila Fathi, a Muslim activist who lives in the 19th, to talk about the radicalization of Muslims in prison.
LAILA FATHI: The U.S. problem that you have with high rates of Afro-Americans and Hispanic populating the prison seems to be like, now we have this high rate of Muslims living in the prison.
TEMPLE-RASTON: And the problems are similar?
FATHI: Yeah.
TEMPLE-RASTON: The numbers tell part of the story. More than half the people behind bars in France are Muslim - more than half. The question of radicalization in French prisons has become so central because two of the men behind the terrorist attacks in Paris appear to have turned to violent jihad while incarcerated. Cherif Kouachi, one of the two brothers who attacked the magazine offices and Amedy Coulibaly, the man suspected of shooting a policewoman and four hostages in a kosher supermarket, not only met in prison but officials confirm they were radicalized by an imam there. Several years ago inmates managed to smuggle an amateur video out of that prison to show just how bad it was.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken).
TEMPLE-RASTON: In this clip, an inmate is showing how to build illegal cook stoves in the cells. The stove is made of cardboard and coke cans and cooking oil. The video cuts to showers green with mildew and cells so small, a man can extend his arms and touch both walls.
FRANCESCO RAGAZZI: Prisons are a place in which radicalization happens for the very simple reasons that you have people in a confined space who have nothing else to do than to talk to one another.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Francesco Ragazzi is a professor at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and a researcher at Sciences Po in Paris. He says besides boredom there's also fear - fear of prison gangs.
RAGAZZI: People who initially might not be part of violent networks or networks related to jihad end up caught in these kinds of networks. There are quite simple gang logics that we find in many other types of settings in prisons in the U.S. or in Europe.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Radical Islamists can provide protection and help prisoners cope with incarceration by helping them either convert to Islam or rediscover their Muslim faith. Myriam Benraad is a researcher at Sciences Po in Paris and she says for new inmates who are frightened by the violence behind bars, Muslim prisoners can be role models.
MYRIAM BENRAAD: To the ones who find themselves in a state of crisis, they quickly appear as models of wisdom and so they very easily draw to them the others.
TEMPLE-RASTON: They do that by engaging young men primed to radicalized, people like Kouachi and Coulibaly, who toyed with radical Islam but who were more talkers than doers.
JEAN-LOUIS BRUGUIERE: I was very concerned about the situation in prison.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere sent Cherif Kouachi to prison in 2005. And he says that a high-profile terrorist indoctrinated Kouachi and others there.
BRUGUIERE: Yes, you know, the problems - we tried to separate them. When I was a chief, I ordered that separation, but it's not possible anymore.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Not possible because the prisons are overcrowded and inmates find ways to communicate illegally. One of the proposals now under consideration by the French government is to create a separate facility for Islamists who are trying to radicalize others.
Laila Fathi, at the bar back in the 19th arrondissement, not far from where the Kouachi brothers grew up, says rampant radicalization in prisons shouldn't surprise anyone.
FATHI: The prisoners are a very vulnerable population. How can we avoid that more Kouachi brothers would come out of the prison now?
TEMPLE-RASTON: Avoiding more extremists coming out of prisons is exactly what France is trying to figure out. Dina Temple-Raston, NPR News.
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Wearable video cameras are becoming standard issue here for American police. The cameras promise a technological answer to complaints about racial bias and excessive force. But, in fact, the benefits of body cameras are not well-established yet, and the police departments that rushed to buy them are now dealing with some unintended consequences. NPR's Martin Kaste reports.
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: The people who like body cameras often point to a study done in Rialto, California back in 2012. Researchers found that cops who wore cameras used force less often. Incidents dropped more than 50 percent. Sounds like that settles it, right?
ALEX SUTHERLAND: The Rialto study is one study. And it could be a fluke.
KASTE: That's one of the researchers who ran the study, Alex Sutherland of the University of Cambridge. He says Rialto was not a definitive answer on the effectiveness of cameras.
SUTHERLAND: It's a small department. The police chief was kind of involved in implementations. So, you know, if those things aren't present, then maybe these things - it wouldn't be as effective. But we just simply don't know that at the moment.
KASTE: Among the unanswered questions - did the cameras make the difference, or was it the cops' verbal warnings about being recorded? How important was the camera's novelty? After all, this was three years ago. Does the effect fade as people get used to the cameras? Sutherland says we can't say anything definitive until more studies are done in more places.
SUTHERLAND: If public money is being spent on this technology, the onus is certainly to make sure that it's being evaluated as it's being rolled out, rather than deciding that it works and then that's that.
KASTE: And it's not just money that's at stake. The cameras may have other kinds of costs. They may affect police morale and recruitment. Eugene O'Donnell is a former cop who now teaches at the John Jay College in New York. He says he would never encourage a young person to take a job in a police department that requires cameras.
EUGENE O'DONNELL: Because the whole atmosphere there tells you right at the outset that if there's a bad ending, you're going to be called a murderer. You're going to get death threats in your home. Who's going to do the job?
KASTE: This argument doesn't make any sense to the people who want to see more cameras. They say cops who behave correctly have nothing to fear from the video. But cops say it's more complicated. In private and on their anonymous blogs, they talk about how civilians see these videos differently than they do. For instance, take that now infamous video of a state trooper shooting a man at a gas station in South Carolina last fall, a man who was just reaching for his ID. A civilian sees a completely unprovoked shooting. But when a cop watches that video, he sees it a little differently.
ADAM PLANTINGA: I felt my stomach tense up because I've seen that. And this has nothing to do with whether the incident was justified or not. But I've seen that kind of quick movement before when people have emerged with a weapon.
KASTE: Adam Plantinga is a police sergeant in San Francisco. He's also an author, and he writes about the way police see the world and what they're watching for in suspects.
PLANTINGA: Sometimes, it's - they may wipe their hands on their pants. They may lower their head so to - lower their jaw to protect their neckline. It's sort of unconscious human behavior that means that there could be violence at any time.
KASTE: To be clear, Sergeant Plantinga supports the use of body cameras. But he hopes that people will keep in mind that video alone isn't always the whole story. And, finally, there's this. This is the body camera recording of the final moments of a rookie officer named Tyler Stewart in Flagstaff, Arizona.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TYLER STEWART: How are you doing?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Good.
STEWART: Can we talk outside?
KASTE: This is late last month. He was out on a domestic dispute call. And when the boyfriend came out to talk, he had a gun hidden in his pocket.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
STEWART: Do you mind if I just pat down your pockets real quick? You don't have anything in here?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: No, no.
STEWART: OK, nothing in here?
KASTE: Moments later, the man kills Stewart, then himself. Local media requested the video under the state public records law. The police complied last week with version of the video that stops short at the moment the gun appears. Police Chief Kevin Treadway says they drew the line there on the advice of the lawyers, but he'd rather not have had to release the video at all.
KEVIN TREADWAY: I guess if you're asking me the question, you know, the public right - does the public right to know in this particular case outweigh the pretty significant trauma that showing this on the nightly news has for the members of the family? You know, I have to say no.
KASTE: Flagstaff tried to do things right with body cameras. It followed expert recommendations and laid out a clear policy in advance on how the video should be stored and who'd get to see it - but this? This they weren't expecting.
TREADWAY: Even the model policies that we looked at didn't foresee this, you know, very specific kind of incident occurring.
KASTE: It's believed to be the first time a police body camera has captured the death of its wearer. Unfortunately, as the technology spreads, it won't be the last, giving police something else to think about as they're told to put the cameras on. Martin Kaste, NPR News.
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Four of the 17 people killed in the Paris attacks were Jews, murdered by a radical Islamist because they were Jews. That and other recent attacks has led to talk of a resurgence of anti-Semitism in France. But French Jews and Muslims have lived in peace for most of the last 50 years.
NPR's Eleanor Beardsley has been talking to Jews in Paris, who say their perception of widespread anti-Semitism is wrong.
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: Voices fill a synagogue with song during an aliyah service last summer in Paris. Making aliyah, or returning home to Israel, is usually a cause for celebration. But recently fear has pushed many Jews to leave France, a record 7,000 last year, and that was before the Paris attacks.
Hi, Jean Marc.
JEAN MARC ILLOUZ: Hi, how are you?
BEARDSLEY: Jean Marc Illouz, a former senior correspondent for French television who's also Jewish, says he's been spending time refuting what he calls ridiculous comments on the Internet about anti-Semitism in France. He says Americans always seem to think it's a resurgence of Nazism.
ILLOUZ: You see, people are thinking about anti-Semitism in terms of World War II and coming from the French. It has nothing to do with the French. It has nothing to do with the French, it has nothing to do with the mainstream Muslim French thinking. It has to do with imported terrorism.
BEARDSLEY: Illouz believes today's anti-Semitism stems from radical Islam brought to France by imams and jihadists espousing a hard-line wahhabi doctrine from places like Saudi Arabia. He says the vast majority of French Muslims want to be integrated with French society, and many are. But, he says, the radicals' message is corrupting a small, angry minority.
ILLOUZ: You have a number of poor, young people that have a problem much bigger than money. It's a problem of identity because they're neither Algerian nor do they feel that they are full-fledged Frenchmen. So in that gap, the jihadis found the way to put their lever.
BEARDSLEY: Illouz, whose family comes from Algeria, says Jewish families like his lived there peacefully with Muslims for centuries. His family came to France in the late 1950s among the nearly 1 million Europeans who fled the violence of the Algerian War of Independence. Today, these Sephardic Jews from Algeria and other North African countries make up 70 percent of the Jewish population in France.
American Rabbi Tom Cohen has been in France nearly 25 years. His synagogue helps to bridge what he calls the cultural gap between French and American Jews who are 95 percent Ashkenazi, meaning their origins are in eastern Europe. Today there are soldiers guarding Cohen's synagogue 24/7. They even sleep there. He says his congregation feels confident the French government wants to protect them. After the Paris attacks, Prime Minister Manuel Valls beseeched French Jews not to leave, saying France would not be France without them. Cohen agrees.
TOM COHEN: There is some inherent anti-Semitism that's been in France just like in the United States. And there are inherent philo-Semites - people who love Jews. This is, after all, the first country that enfranchised Jews with citizenship.
BEARDSLEY: That was in 1791 during the French Revolution. Cohen says since then there has been good and bad, but Jews have always been part of the fabric of French society. He says today's threat is something completely different.
COHEN: We're dealing with a part of the Muslim community - and it's a small percentage - who have been radicalized and are - and this is the new anti-Semitism that has infested some of the Muslim world, unfortunately.
BEARDSLEY: Back at his apartment, Jean Marc Illouz plays a video of his son's recent bar mitzvah on his cell phone.
ILLOUZ: I do not see why a few people with an important ideology inside of France, inside of Islam, would push us out. I think this is ridiculous.
BEARDSLEY: Illouz says he understands why some Jews may be feeling anxious, but he sees no reason to leave France. Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris.
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The recession hobbled the U.S. economy and crushed a lot of businesses. Some also did really well during that time, like dollar stores. Shoppers flocked to them. As the economy has improved, one chain, Family Dollar, hasn't kept pace with its competitors. Today, shareholders voted to sell to a rival, as Ben Bradford of member station WFAE reports.
BEN BRADFORD, BYLINE: For those who haven't been to one of Family Dollar's 8,000 U.S. stores, they sell paper towels, sodas, children's clothes, but these things don't actually cost a dollar. Inside a store in Charlotte, shelves have a range of prices.
There are car fresheners that are $2.65, dog treats for $4 and...
(SOUNDBITE OF TOY TRUCK)
BRADFORD: That's a plastic toy monster truck - $10.
Outside in the parking lot, Michelle Williams has just finished her shopping and she clutches a small bag.
MICHELLE WILLIAMS: Well, I just bought some chips, a soda and some jelly beans (laughter).
BRADFORD: And some jelly beans. All right.
This, Williams says, is where she does most of her shopping for everything.
WILLIAMS: Especially when you're limited on money and can't get the stuff that you need out of grocery stores. The same thing in the grocery store is in here, but cheaper.
BRADFORD: But today, Williams is one of the few customers here. And that's been one of the problems, says retail consultant Howard Davidowitz. Since the recession, profits have risen, but not very fast.
HOWARD DAVIDOWITZ: At the end of the day, Family Dollar fell on their face 'cause they didn't execute correctly. And they allowed their competitors to beat their brains in. They've been closing stores like crazy in a segment where everybody is opening stores. What does that tell you?
BRADFORD: It told the company's two other big competitors it was a good time to buy. In July, executives worked out an $8.5 billion deal with Dollar Tree, a smaller rival. The biggest discount store, Dollar General, quickly made an even higher offer - $9 billion cash, including a half-billion dollar deposit.
GARY BURGESS: Why didn't we take it?
BRADFORD: Gary Burgess owns 200 shares with his wife and came to the vote in Charlotte. He wasn't happy.
BURGESS: If it didn't go through, we walk away with half a billion dollars. To me that's a hell of a good deal.
BRADFORD: Family Dollar executives agreed. CEO Howard Levine admits it was better on paper, but executives wanted the lower bid and shareholders approved it today. Board member and former North Carolina Commerce Secretary Sharon Decker says the smaller bid is the right one.
SHARON DECKER: Both deals were very good offers and what we wanted was certainty. Communities depend on these stores, so bringing certainty to that was very, very important. So that was a big part of this decision.
BRADFORD: Mergers between such large companies require approval from the Federal Trade Commission. Had Family Dollar chosen the higher bid from Dollar General, the FTC said it would want to close 4,000 stores to prevent a monopoly in some markets. The accepted deal is different. All of Dollar Tree's items are a buck or less, so not as much conflict. Only about 300 stores are expected to close, and Family Dollar's headquarters will remain in the Charlotte area.
Dollar Tree also promised to keep the CEO of Family Dollar, Howard Levine. His dad, Leon, founded the company in 1959. It's a prominent name in Charlotte - Levine Center for the Arts, Levine Museum of the New South. And under the terms of the merger, the name Family Dollar will stick around, too. For NPR News, I'm Ben Bradford in Charlotte.
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We begin this hour in Washington, where mayors and police chiefs from all over the country met today to talk about rebuilding trust with minority communities. The conversation came as a Justice Department investigation of a white police officer in the shooting death of a black man in Ferguson, Missouri winds down. Law enforcement sources say no charges are expected against the officer who shot 18-year-old Michael Brown. With us to talk about the issues is NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson.
And Carrie, what are you hearing about why federal prosecutors are moving to end the investigation of Darren Wilson?
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: The FBI and federal prosecutors and civil rights investigators have been reviewing hundreds of witness statements and physical evidence from that scene in Ferguson. But they've said all along, Audie, there's a very high bar. In order to bring criminal civil rights charges, they would need to prove that that officer, Darren Wilson, knowingly used excessive force when he shot unarmed black man Michael Brown last summer. And prosecutors just apparently cannot meet that bar, law enforcement sources are telling me. They're wrapping up the investigation now. Eventually they're going to release a written report to explain to the public the decision, the rationale behind their findings. And this report is not imminent, despite some news reports overnight otherwise. Authorities tell me though, there is a part of this investigation that's very much ongoing. That relates to possible discriminatory policing practices within the Ferguson police force. They've been looking at traffic stop data, hiring, training and other things with an eye toward eventually getting a court-enforceable agreement to change how Ferguson cops operate.
CORNISH: Meanwhile, Attorney General Eric Holder has called for more data on police-involved shootings nationwide. Is that a recognition that there's not enough public information about how often this happens?
JOHNSON: For sure. One of the things to come out of this Ferguson tragedy is that reporting about police shootings is voluntary now, and many police agencies just don't bother to do it. The ones that do sometimes use a different counting method, funny math, so the numbers are all over the place. And the attorney general, Eric Holder, says we need Congress to weigh in and require state and local police to do some kind of consistent form of reporting whenever police-involved shootings occur, but it's not that simple, Audie. He also wants something else. He also wants better data on how many times police are targets of violence by civilians. He says that's an important part of the conversation we shouldn't miss. And in part, there's been a lot of controversy from police forces all over the country about how Holder and President Obama have responded to Ferguson. So this may be a step in that direction.
CORNISH: So many of these issues revolve around local governments and local law enforcement. What are mayors saying about this?
JOHNSON: There was a big conference in Washington today of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. They were talking about community policing. And I spoke with a co-chair of a commission there. Her name is Karen Freeman-Wilson. She's the mayor of Gary, Indiana. She told me mayors are used to responding, turning up at the scenes of crimes and fires. And mayors need to use those skills when it comes to community policing, too. She says that this problem and the solution to it involves not just police and mayors, but also business leaders in a community and clergy, and people who go door-to-door knowing the citizens, block-to-block. She says the only way to ease some of this mistrust of law enforcement is to communicate and make sure investigations of police are independent and transparent.
CORNISH: That's NPR's justice correspondent, Carrie Johnson. Carrie, thank you.
JOHNSON: You're welcome.
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Israel's prime minister has accepted an invitation to address Congress about Iran. Benjamin Netanyahu was invited by House Speaker John Boehner in what the White House calls a breach of protocol. Reaction to that from Israel coming up, first, NPR's Michele Kelemen reports that Netanyahu will be here just as the U.S. and its negotiating partners try to meet their latest deadline in talks with Iran.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: When Boehner invited Netanyahu, the message was clear. Many U.S. lawmakers are dubious of the Obama administration's negotiations with Iran and want to turn up the heat on Iran in these final months of talks. But Nancy Pelosi, leader of the House Democrats, doesn't think this is such a good idea.
HOUSE MINORITY LEADER NANCY PELOSI: If that's the purpose of Prime Minister Netanyahu's visit two weeks before his own election, right in the midst of our negotiations, I just don't think it's appropriate and helpful.
KELEMEN: The White House says President Obama won't meet Netanyahu because the trip is so close to Israel's March 17 elections. The administration is also trying to head-off Congressional action on Iran that Obama argues could undermine diplomacy. The foreign ministers of France, Germany and the U.K. are joining in that effort, writing an op-ed that urges Congress not introduce what they called new hurdles. One of the co-authors was the EU's foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, who was in Washington this week.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
FEDERICA MOGHERINI: I would invite everybody to give these negotiations, this diplomatic channel, a chance, especially when it comes to the end of the negotiations.
KELEMEN: She spoke Wednesday alongside Secretary of State John Kerry, who said even an Israeli intelligence official is raising questions about Congressional moves.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY: This person was asked directly by a Congressional delegation that visited there over the weekend what the effect of sanctions would be, and this person answered that would be like throwing a grenade in the process.
KELEMEN: The Israeli Intelligence Agency, according to local reports, say those comments were misinterpreted and not meant as a sign that Israel opposes new sanctions that would take effect if talks failed. Negotiators have missed two deadlines already and are trying to reach the outline of an agreement by March. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker, says he thinks the U.S. and its partners have been drifting closer to Iran's position.
(SOUNDBITE OF HEARING)
SENATOR BOB CORKER: Having Congress as a backstop, someone that you do in fact not only have to consult with but you have to seek their approval, would be somewhat of an anchor to keep us from continuing to move towards their position.
KELEMEN: He chaired a testy hearing on the issue this week, complaining that the Obama administration is trying to cut Congress out of a crucial foreign policy debate.
(SOUNDBITE OF HEARING)
CORKER: Just to stiff-arm, say no, we really don't want you to play a role, we want you just to trust us, is totally unacceptable from my standpoint.
KELEMEN: Corker says Congress should at least be able to vote on any deal that comes out of the negotiations, but the Obama administration argues there won't be any formal treaty in need of an up or down vote. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
So the Israeli prime minister will come to Washington to address Congress at Congress's invitation. The White House wasn't involved. It'll be just two weeks before the next Israeli election. We wondered how this invitation is playing over there in Israel. We've called upon Michael Oren, who until about a year ago was Israel's ambassador to Washington. He is now in Israel running for a seat in parliament, not on Benjamin Netanyahu's party's list. Michael Oren, welcome back to the program.
MICHAEL OREN: Always good to be with you, Robert. Thank you.
SIEGEL: An invitation to the Israeli prime minister to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress not involving the White House whatever. Is that standard operating procedure? Or does it break precedent?
OREN: It is, to the best of my knowledge, a groundbreaker, Robert. During the prime minister's previous speech to a joint meeting of Congress - this was in May of 2011 - the invitation indeed came from Speaker Boehner. But the White House was kept apprised of the entire process and approved of it.
SIEGEL: Is it a breach of protocol?
OREN: I think it's probably just more of a breach of practice rather than protocol. The Congress I think has the right to invite any foreign dignitary and/or leader. But it was certainly a sort of conventional practice to keep the White House informed. I think it's a matter, at the end of the day, of courtesy between allies.
SIEGEL: The National Security Council at the White House issued a statement saying as a matter of long-standing practice and principle, we do not see heads of state or candidates in close proximity to their elections, so as to avoid the appearance of influencing a democratic election in a foreign country. Would a speech to Congress by Benjamin Netanyahu have the appearance of influencing the election over there?
OREN: Well, certainly there's a very intense electoral cycle going on, as you mentioned before. I'm involved in that. I think that that statement was issued as a way of the White House saying that it would not receive the prime minister because that would be seen as intervening or interceding in an internal Israeli electoral process.
SIEGEL: Well, but is - does that mean that the U.S. Congress is, in fact, giving the appearance of intervening in a foreign election, the Israeli election?
OREN: Well, I don't know if the Congress is acting out of that intent. I think the issue is of Iran and the possibility of increased sanctions on Iran. And this is probably related more to an internal American political process, as the issue of the president's handling of foreign affairs becomes more prominent as we approach 2016.
SIEGEL: But say the leader of the party that you're now aligned with, Mr. Kahlon, will not be seen in news footage addressing the American people and the American Congress. Isaac Herzog, the head of the so-called Zionist Camp group won't be seen that way. Is it - whatever else its virtues may be in terms of advancing Israeli policy on Iran - is it a great campaign trip to come before the U.S. Congress?
OREN: I'm sure it will not hurt the prime minister's chances. Put it that way. However, if a prime minister of Israel from any party is invited by the Congress to address a joint meeting of Congress, then he or she would be hard-pressed not to accept that invitation.
SIEGEL: Should we see what's happened here as a measure of how frosty or bad relations are between Bibi Netanyahu and Barack Obama?
OREN: Well, certainly this would not suggest that the relationship has been warming up. And, in fact, there is a very serious divide, a fundamental divide, on the Iranian issue. President Obama has said that he believes that Iran is a rational regime. It is not North Korea. Prime Minister Netanyahu has said again and again this is a medieval, irrational regime and that it is worse than 50 North Koreas. I don't think you can get more fundamental than that.
SIEGEL: Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the United States, now a candidate for parliament over there in Israel. Thank you very much for talking with us.
OREN: Thank you, Robert, have a good day. Bye.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
The Doomsday Clock is not an alarm clock, but it is meant to be alarming.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
It's more of a metaphor than an actual clock. The Doomsday Clock was created by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist's Science and Security Board decades ago. It's a warning about the dangers facing humanity.
CORNISH: And the board announced today that they've moved the clock forward by two minutes. It's now three minutes to midnight. And the reasons why we're closer to doom?
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KENNETTE BENEDICT: Today, unchecked climate change and a nuclear arms race resulting from modernization of huge arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity.
SIEGEL: That's Kennette Benedict of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. This figurative countdown was last reset three years ago. The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947, and it's been adjusted just 18 times.
CORNISH: The nearest it ever was to midnight was in January 1953, a few months after the first test of the hydrogen bomb.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
A dead investigator, a disgruntled spy, a humble locksmith, an embattled president and, of course, a connection to the Middle East. Sounds like the plot of a new thriller, but it's actually a real-life murder mystery that is gripping Argentina. Today, Argentina's president said she believed a prosecutor investigating the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center there was murdered. NPR South America correspondent Lourdes Garcia-Navarro reports on the latest in the mysterious death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, BYLINE: Since Alberto Nisman's death on Sunday, the government and investigators had maintained that the evidence pointed to suicide. The prosecutor was discovered in what they claimed was his locked apartment with a gunshot to the head and a pistol with one bullet casing next to him, but the timing was highly suspicious.
Nisman, who had been investigating the bombing for many years, was about to present evidence in a closed-door session of Congress. He said it would show that Argentina's sitting president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, had been obstructing the investigation into the attack on the Jewish community center in which 84 people were killed and hundreds injured. Nisman maintained that Iran and its proxy, the Shiite Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, were behind the attack. He said that he had proof that showed that the government was trying to cement a deal for Iranian oil and sought to bury evidence implicating Iran.
On Tuesday, the results of an autopsy revealed that Nisman had no gunpowder residue on his hands. Investigators said that was not uncommon because of the small caliber of the gun, but it further called into question the suicide theory. Adding to the deepening mystery, the locksmith, who was called in to open the door to Nisman's apartment after police and his family tried unsuccessfully to reach him on the day of his death, claimed that the backdoor entrance to the apartment was open.
UNIDENTIFIED LOCKSMITH: (Foreign language spoken).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: He was swarmed by reporters after giving his testimony to police and has become an unlikely celebrity in the case. Lastly, investigators have also found a third access to the home, where a recent footprint and fingerprint were discovered. People have been accusing the president and her government of being involved.
On Twitter, CFKAsesina, which stands for Cristina Fernandez Kirchner Killer, started trending. In the latest twist today, President Fernandez released her own bombshell. She took to social media to say that she now also did not believe Nisman had committed suicide. She wrote, quote, "they used him while he was alive and then they needed him dead." She did not explain who she meant by they, but her chief of staff alleged yesterday that Nisman had been fed erroneous information implicating the government by a disgruntled former spy in an attempt to discredit the president.
Meanwhile, the evidence that Nisman was going to present has been made public. The transcript of phone taps shows a history of secret negotiations between Iran and Argentina's government over a grain for oil deal. Argentina's government says Nisman's allegations were feeble and unfounded. As for the original bombing case that took place over to twenty years ago, it remains unresolved. Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News.
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Google is already king of search engines. Now it's nudging its way into the wireless industry. According to several reports, Google is poised to enter into deals with Sprint and T-Mobile - two smaller carriers - to sell wireless service. News of Google's move first broke in the tech outlet The Information. NPR's Aarti Shahani has been in touch with Google and she joins us now. And Aarti, Google isn't providing any details, of course, but it's not denying this plan, right? They could become something called a mobile virtual network operator.
AARTI SHAHANI, BYLINE: Yeah, exactly. Google doesn't own its own spectrum and it didn't have to pay all those big infrastructure costs to lay down wires and build that stuff. But they can rent it in wholesale quantities from the companies that did. So Google would want to do that because more people on the Internet doing more on the Internet is always good for Google. And it could target Google customers like the subgroup of people who stream YouTube videos hardcore and generate some nice mobile ad revenue for the company. Now, T-Mobile and Sprint would be into that because they're not maxed out on their capacity. They've got network space that they're not using because they don't have the customers, so maybe Google gives them a fixed price - less than they would've made on their own - but at least they don't have to pay to get the customers. So in the short term, it could be a really good deal for them.
CORNISH: What about the medium or long-term? I mean, aren't T-Mobile and Sprint basically opening the door to a major competitor, right, someone who could come in and take over?
SHAHANI: Right, like Google the giant, right? Well, these companies are the third and fourth biggest providers and they're trailing behind the top two, OK, and that's key here. T-Mobile has had a for-sale sign on it years now and they wouldn't mind being bought out. And Sprint isn't quite in the same place, but analysts say they could be. So Google comes in through this very measured and manageable arrangement, test the waters - you know, is it worth building a new business here, dealing with customers, etcetera, etcetera. And if Google likes the feel of it, they can dive deeper and use that ton of cash they've already got to buy a carrier that's been struggling.
CORNISH: Is this bad news for number one and number two carriers, right, Verizon and AT&T?
SHAHANI: I mean, it very well could be, right? When you think about Google in the landline context - in land connections, Google built fiber in some places. And that became their toehold into the business and a way to drop the costs and offer higher speeds. And other Internet service providers are having to follow suit. And so this move right now that Google is making is clearly, in part, going to have an impact on Verizon and AT&T to feel more pressure on when they're already feeling a lot of pressure.
CORNISH: What might this mean for customers?
SHAHANI: You know, we don't know how far this is going to go, right? But in theory, this is going to change the wireless business as we know it. Right now, you sign up for a data plan and pay for the data, and it's in the interest of the carriers to keep the cost of that data up because that's the resource that they're selling. Google makes money from ad revenue. And on smartphones, short YouTube videos are the thing that people stream, so Google wants to get us streaming more. The company could subsidize the cost and recoup with mobile ad money. So it could be that what we really end up paying for is the advertising clicks - or revenue generated that way - and less on our monthly bill for data.
CORNISH: So what if they don't go that far?
SHAHANI: Well, if they don't go that far, this becomes, in the end, either, you know, a blip on the map of the gazillion things that Google tries to do and then decides not to do, or it could be something that pushes the current carrier market to compete more with each other or think of price plans that are better for us as consumers.
CORNISH: That's NPR's Aarti Shahani. She joined us from San Francisco. Thanks so much.
SHAHANI: Thank you.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
House Republicans made an abrupt switch today on an anti-abortion bill. A vote had been scheduled on a measure that would ban most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Instead lawmakers went for a bill that bars federal funding for abortions, something that is actually already part of current law. The more innocuous vote happened as anti-abortion demonstrators marched just blocks away. Ahead, more on 20-week bans in states and how often abortions happen passed that point. First, though, NPR congressional reporter Juana Summers joins us from the capital. Juana, what caused the breakdown over this bill?
JUANA SUMMERS, BYLINE: The breakdown really happened when a number of Republican women within the conference, as well as some moderate Republicans, were unhappy with one part of this measure that would allow for abortions in the case of rape, but only if the victim had reported the incident to police. Lawmakers argued that that exemption and that language could potentially put unfair pressure on victims or survivors of rape. And, still, others said that Republicans should not be getting into that kind of a social issue.
Congressman Trent Franks of Arizona, who sponsored this bill, told me today that the bill is not dead. And he's received assurances from House leadership that it will later come to the floor after some of that language has been tweaked. But there are, of course, also some politics here. This vote is, as you noted, scheduled to coincide with today's March For Life. And that put thousands of anti-abortion demonstrators very close here at the Capitol.
Leaders had pushed back on postponing the bill because of that, but there's also an optical concern that it'd be a little awkward to have a vote on anti-abortion legislation on the House floor that had vocal opposition from some GOP women, and that's especially as the party's looking towards 2016 and trying to broaden its appeal to both women and younger voters.
SIEGEL: Well, let's stick with the politics here. What does this tell us about the House of Representatives?
SUMMERS: What this tells us is the 2014 election gave the House a historically large Republican majority. And if you look closely at that majority it includes more moderate Republicans from swing districts. And they're more likely to buck their party's leadership on issues like this one as well as what we saw a few weeks ago with the spending bill that would've rolled back President Obama's changes to immigration. Worth noting - in recent history, a similar version of this bill easily passed the Republican-controlled House in 2013. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had said he'd bring this bill up for the vote, despite the fact that the White House has said it would veto it.
SIEGEL: So how are our Democrats in Congress responding to all this?
SUMMERS: Women's rights groups and Democrats had denounced the 20-week abortion bill that Republicans had hoped to pass as dangerous and unconstitutional. On the floor of the House earlier today, New York Democrat Louise Slaughter ridiculed Republicans' apparent inability to pass this bill, but she said House Republicans have passed no shortage of bills that look a whole lot like it.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
REPRESENTATIVE LOUISE SLAUGHTER: Can't pass that one. Just take the next one. Their insistence on attacking women's health seemingly knows no bounds.
SIEGEL: So what about the bill that was passed today? The Congress has been banning federal money for abortions for decades. What's any different here?
SUMMERS: That's exactly right, and this bill would just make that permanent. And Republican supporters of this bill tell me that it also tightens restrictions to make sure that abortions are not funded under the Affordable Care Act.
SIEGEL: OK, that's NPR's Juana Summers at the Capitol. Thanks.
SUMMERS: Thank you.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Yemen's government has collapsed. The country's president and his cabinet resigned today. President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi had been a staunch supporter of the U.S. counterterror efforts against al-Qaida's affiliate in Yemen. That group has targeted the U.S. and recently claimed credit for the terrorist attack against the magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Now, as NPR's Tom Bowman reports, the U.S. is trying to understand how the political turmoil in Yemen will affect the counterterrorism fight.
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: The best way to describe Yemen at this moment is chaos and confusion. Rebel fighters from the Houthi movement had been fighting the government for months and yesterday they seized the presidential palace. The Houthis are Shiite Muslims in a majority Sunni country. They're allied with Iran and sharply critical of the U.S. counterterror efforts in their country. And the current Yemeni government, they complain, is corrupt and failed to provide basic services. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters that U.S. diplomats in Yemen were scrambling to get a handle on events, but she said there's no doubt about the U.S. interest in Yemen.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JEN PSAKI: I will say that our top priority in Yemen remains the counterterrorism effort, where we've been targeting al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula for a number of years. That's ongoing.
BOWMAN: Ongoing because al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, also known as AQAP, is a particularly lethal offshoot of the terrorist group. One member of the group is an expert bomb maker. In recent years, AQAP has tried to place bombs on American bound airliners, including one over Detroit in 2009. To go after the group, the U.S. has relied on drone attacks for the last several years - about two dozen each year. The U.S. has also sent special operations forces to train the Yemeni military and has even flown Yemeni troops on operations to attack AQAP strongholds. That all led President Obama to make this statement last fall.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us while supporting partners on the front lines is one that we have successfully pursued in Yemen and Somalia for years.
BOWMAN: Was it a success when he was talking about it back in September?
BARBARA BODINE: No. We have been using the wrong tools by and large.
BOWMAN: Barbara Bodine served as ambassador to Yemen for four years starting in 1997. She says the U.S. can't just drop bombs. It must help the Yemeni people with their grievances, including a lack of jobs and education, which have spurred unrest.
BODINE: If you don't get at the economic drivers and you just go after the extremists' symptoms, you're never going to get ahead of the game.
BOWMAN: Bodine doubts the counterterror campaign has been successful against AQAP. U.S. counterterror experts disagree. They say many of the group's mid-level operatives have been killed in the military operations backed by the U.S. There is one point everyone agrees on. The Houthi rebels have been fighting against AQAP, and it's important to reach out to them even though their slogan is death to America, death to Israel. Again, Barbara Bodine.
BODINE: I think this is absolutely a group that we need to have connections with, work with, find the political leadership and see what we can do.
BOWMAN: In the meantime, officials tell NPR that both a drone campaign and the military training efforts have been put on hold until it's clear whether they have a government to work with in Yemen. Tom Bowman, NPR News, Washington.
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Fighting between the Ukrainian army and Russian-backed separatists has spiked again in the eastern city of Donetsk. Pro-Russian rebel fighters have seized control of the main terminal of the city's airport. And both sides are blaming each other for shelling a trolley bus that killed at least eight civilians in downtown Donetsk this morning. More than 4,800 people have been killed since the outbreak of fighting between Russian-backed separatists and the Ukrainian Army last spring. Another 1.2 million Ukrainians have been displaced. Joining us from Kiev, Ukraine, is journalist David Stern. He works for the BBC as their Kiev correspondent. Welcome to the program.
DAVID STERN: Hello.
CORNISH: Now, the airport was already badly damaged, right, from months of fighting. What's the symbolic value of an attack on it?
STERN: Well, the airport has been the center of a bitter struggle for months now. So the emotion and the symbolism comes from the time and blood that's been invested in it. The Ukrainian forces have held it pretty much since the end of May. But now it's fallen. And it probably will cause a reaction in the country because it was seen to be very much sort of the Ukrainian Stalingrad. They are holding out against all odds.
CORNISH: So is this idea of the cease-fire basically alive in name only?
STERN: Yes, and that's basically been the situation since the beginning of the cease-fire. It never really took hold. I'd say it was more of a de-escalation. Now it's reaching the levels that we saw over the summer. And there's a fear that it's going to become even worse and possibly even spread.
CORNISH: Can you give us some context in terms of how much of Ukraine is now controlled by pro-Russian rebels?
STERN: Well, it's not that significant in terms of land, I guess you could say. The two regions are Lugansk and Donetsk, and they're very significant for the economy. They're the center - if not the center, one of the main areas for heavy industry - so their loss - besides the human cost - has caused the country greatly in terms of lost revenues.
CORNISH: When fighting first broke out last spring, the Ukrainian army was totally unprepared, very much in disarray. What's the state of the army now?
STERN: Well, much better. They've done a remarkable job of creating one in a matter of months. But it's a formidable enemy. If it's the separatists - the separatists have - are very well equipped with the latest in heavy weaponry. There are all indications that there are at least some Russian troops among them, whether they're on their leave or they've been sent over the border, as Western officials say. So they are not quite up to speed to be able to take on this power. But they are holding their own.
CORNISH: Finally, what has been heard from Russian President Vladimir Putin? Obviously, Russia has been under sanctions because of its involvement in Ukraine. I don't know if there's any more speculation on what his long-term goal might be there.
STERN: Well, that's the $64,000 question. Ultimately, all of this hinges on what Russia wants and what its ultimate goal is. A great deal of your analysis depends on what one views as what the purpose of this whole thing is. If it's just to stir up trouble in Ukraine, maybe there could be some sort of compromise reached. If it's ultimately to destroy the Ukrainian state, that's another thing. If it's to project Russian power further abroad, then that's another thing, so we don't really know. The one thing that you can say is that it really looks as if this war is going to go on for quite some time.
CORNISH: Journalist David Stern, working with the BBC. He spoke to us from Kiev, Ukraine. Thank you so much for speaking with us.
STERN: Thank you.
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President Obama is wrapping up a multi-day multimedia blitz following his State of the Union address. The president just returned from a trip to two red states, where he went to sell his proposals. NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith was there. And she's back as well to talk us through the strategy. Hey there, Tam.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: Hey.
CORNISH: And I know you're in the parking lot of Andrews Air Force Base, right?
KEITH: (Laughter). That's correct - couldn't make it back to the studio in time. So I'm in the car.
CORNISH: Well, you're a trooper. You were traveling with the president today in Lawrence, Kansas. What was he doing there?
KEITH: Well, he was officially at the University of Kansas to give a speech about the policies that he pushed for in his State of the Union. In particular, he was talking about making quality affordable child care more readily available. But KU has this powerhouse basketball team many people have heard of, the Jayhawks. And the president is a basketball fan. So he also met with the team and coach Bill Self before his speech. But, as you mentioned, this was part of a trip where president Obama made a point of visiting very red states. Yesterday, it was Idaho. And then today, it was Kansas. And the idea was that by his mere presence, he was making a point that America is not as politically divided as the Washington narrative will have you believe. But as the president pointed out in his remarks in Lawrence, Kansas, that area is something of a blue island in a sea of red.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Coach Self won 10 straight. I lost two straight here.
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: But that's OK.
(CHEERING)
OBAMA: I - listen, I love you. And I might have won sections of Lawrence.
(APPLAUSE)
OBAMA: That's possible.
CORNISH: Big applause there, Tamara. Is that for the coach or for the president?
KEITH: (Laughter). Well, I mean, certainly among this 7,000 people in the sports complex, it was for the president. But you have to say that that was a self-selecting supportive bunch of people in a notably liberal town, at least by Kansas standards. And the response in Boise was also similarly supportive. I mean, you have to imagine, here are these Democrats who live in these very red areas, who probably feel pretty lonely. And president Obama shows up in their state and gives them some attention. And, you know, as this motorcade went through both Boise and through Lawrence, the streets were lined with people taking pictures. There were relatively few protesters. And the other thing, in terms of strategy for the White House, is that they go to these states when they wouldn't normally get a lot of media coverage. And by being there, they get more media coverage.
CORNISH: Now, more on this strategy here. The president was interviewed this afternoon at the White House by three YouTube creators. Here he is with entrepreneur and YouTube star Hank Green.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HANK GREEN: President Obama.
OBAMA: Thank you so much for having me.
GREEN: Thanks a lot for doing this.
OBAMA: It's cool.
GREEN: I don't really feel like I'm having you. This is your house.
OBAMA: You know, well, it's the people's house. This is - I'm actually leasing. And my lease runs out in two years.
CORNISH: Tamara, help us understand this. Why is the president sitting down for interviews with YouTube personalities?
KEITH: Well, and although that didn't sound particularly serious, Hank Green did go on to ask some relatively serious questions. But this is just another attempt by the White House to expand its reach. According to Nielsen, the State of the Union address aired live on 12 television networks. And it was seen by 31.7 million people. That may sound like a lot of people, but that is one of the least viewed State of the Unions since Nielsen started tracking it. You know, media consumption is very segmented now. People maybe streamed it, maybe not. Maybe they saw some infographics from the White House in their Twitter feeds. But this is the White House saying, you know, we want you to hear what we have to say, And we're going to go wherever you are, including talking to these YouTube celebrities.
CORNISH: That's NPR's White House correspondent, Tamara Keith. Tam, thanks so much.
KEITH: You're welcome.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
For all of you central bank junkies who were missing quantitative easing, it's back - with a European twist this time. Threatened by deflation and recession, the European Central Bank finally launched a massive bond buying stimulus program today. It's much like the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing, which ended in October. NPR's John Ydstie has details on the trillion euro program.
JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: The European version of quantitative easing involved bond purchases by the 19 central banks from the eurozone countries. Mario Draghi, head of the European Central Bank, which will manage the new program, outlined it this morning.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MARIO DRAGHI: The combined monthly purchases of public and private sector securities will amount to 60 billion euros.
YDSTIE: That's the monthly figure for the program, which will run through September 2016. During that time, the Europeans will pump more than 1.1 trillion euros, about $1.3 trillion, into their financial system, says Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at IHS global.
NARIMAN BEHRAVESH: The goal here is obviously to kick start growth in the eurozone and to reduce the risk of broad-based deflation.
YDSTIE: Deflation means falling prices. And it's as threatening to economic growth as rapid inflation, says Jacob Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He says deflation causes consumers to hold off purchases waiting for prices to decline more.
JACOB KIRKEGAARD: Then consumption falls, and growth falls. And the economic activity basically falls.
YDSTIE: Deflation has afflicted Japan's economy for much of the past two decades. The euro area experienced a bit of deflation in December. And that helped spur the ECB to act. Nariman Behravesh says just the anticipation of quantitative easing in Europe has triggered a fall in the value of the euro that will help fight deflation.
BEHRAVESH: A weaker currency is inflationary because it means the price of imported goods goes up. The imported goods are more expensive. And so that adds to inflationary pressures.
YDSTIE: Another aim of quantitative easing is to boost growth. When central banks by bonds, they create money, channeling it into the financial system. That lowers interest rates, stimulating borrowing, and thereby encouraging growth. The problems, says Jacob Kirkegaard, is that interest rates are already very low in Germany, and even in former crisis countries like Spain and Italy, and may not go down much more.
KIRKEGAARD: There probably isn't going to be much oomph, if you like, or much - much gasoline in that channel.
YDSTIE: Today, Mario Draghi made clear that defeating deflation is the main goal of Europe's quantitative easing. Kirkegaard says he's hoping that the program will change long-term inflation expectations in the euro area.
KIRKEGAARD: Basically, what markets and businesses and consumers think inflation will be in Europe in, say, five years or ten years, will stop falling.
YDSTIE: And begin rising. That should begin to spur investment in consumption and ultimately repair the economy. Both Kirkegaard and Behravesh think the ECB's quantitative easing will be a net positive for the U.S. and global economies. Though, it will dampen demand for U.S. exports in Europe. Investors seem to agree, as global stock markets moved up sharply today. John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Deflate-gate got interesting today. The head coach of the New England Patriots, Bill Belichick, said he was shocked to hear reports that footballs may have been illegally deflated in last Sunday's AFC Championship Game. The Patriots beat the Indianapolis Colts 45-7 in that game and advanced to the Super Bowl. Belichick spoke at a news conference today. New England quarterback Tom Brady talked to the media, as well. Meanwhile, the NFL is not talking, and joining me with the latest is NPR sports correspondent Tom Goldman.
Tom, Bill Belichick met with reporters today for about 10 minutes. I believe it may have been the most we've ever heard him say, so what did he say?
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: (Laughter). A lot. And it was striking for that reason, Robert. As you point out, you know, most were expecting Belichick to clam-up like he does, defer everything to the League, only talk about the upcoming Super Bowl. But in fact, he went on and on, about an eight-minute statement in which he talked in detail about what he didn't know. He said he had no explanation for the reports that say 11 of the 12 footballs New England prepared for the Indianapolis game for underinflated. Here he is.
(SOUNDBITE OF NEWS CONFERENCE)
BILL BELICHICK: To tell you that my entire coaching career I have never talked to any player, staff member, about football air pressure. To me, the footballs are approved by the League and game officials pre-game and we play with what's out there. And that's the only way that I have ever thought about that.
SIEGEL: OK, that's Patriots coach Bill Belichick. We also heard from Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, the man who presumably would benefit directly from an underinflated football because it's easier to grip and throw. What did Tom Brady say today?
GOLDMAN: He had no statement, just questions and answers - and a lot of questions. Brady said he did not alter the balls in any way. He said he picks the balls he wants to use pre-game and then really doesn't think anything more about them, including whether they are underinflated or overinflated. He said he didn't notice any difference in the balls Sunday from the first half to the second. Reportedly, the underinflated balls were discovered at halftime and then swapped out for properly inflated balls in the second half. And Brady was asked point-blank if he cheated. And here's what he said.
(SOUNDBITE OF NEWS CONFERENCE)
TOM BRADY: I don't believe so. I mean, I feel like I've always played within the rules. I would never do anything to break the rules. And I believe in fair play and I respect the League and you know, everything that they're doing to try to create a very competitive playing field for all of the NFL teams.
GOLDMAN: Robert, interestingly, some former players said after Brady's comments that they didn't believe him. They thought he was dismissing the whole situation too easily and that he should know the difference in the feel of an overinflated and underinflated ball. So the principal Patriots have spoken. They know nothing. Now we have to wait and see what the NFL finds out in its investigation.
SIEGEL: And we should note, in the second half with the properly inflated balls, he threw it pretty well.
GOLDMAN: 12 for 14 for 131 yards and two touchdowns. That's pretty good.
SIEGEL: OK. So we've heard from the Patriots. Anything from the Indianapolis Colts?
GOLDMAN: We have gotten some comments. My favorite tweet, Robert, was from Indianapolis tight end Dwayne Allen who said - Not a story. They could have played with soap for balls and beat us. Simply the better team.
Now, of course despite what Allen says, it is a story, certainly for sports reporters and for many fans who are having a great time debating this, filling the downtime before the Super Bowl on February 1. On the fringe of the debate some in fact are saying the Patriots should be disqualified from the Super Bowl and responding to that suggestion, Indie punter Pat McAfee tweeted this - If New England was to be disqualified, we'd be their replacements, right? I should probably lay off these strawberry margaritas.
We'll let that be the last word.
SIEGEL: (Laughter). OK. Thanks, Tom. That's NPR sports correspondent Tom Goldman.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Writer Ben Yagoda has set out to explain a shift in American popular culture. It happened in the early 1950s. Before then, songwriters like Irving Berlin, the Gershwin brothers and Jerome Kern wrote popular songs that achieved a notable artistry both in lyrics and music. That body of work, at least the best of it, came to be known as the American Songbook.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DANCING IN THE DARK")
FRANK SINATRA: (Singing) Dancing in the dark till the tune ends. We're dancing in the dark and it soon ends. We're waltzing in the wonder of why we're here.
SIEGEL: Frank Sinatra, singing a great 1931 song by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz. By the early 1950s, the popular hit song had evolved or, Ben Yagoda might say, devolved into a work of less artistic ambition. Novelty and simplicity ruled, and it sold.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "(HOW MUCH IS) THAT DOGGIE IN THE WINDOW?")
PATTI PAGE: (Singing) How much is that doggie in the window, the one with the waggly tail?
SIEGEL: That's Patti Page, who also made a huge hit out of "Tennessee Waltz." What happened? That's a question that Ben Yagoda addresses in his new book, "The B-Side." Welcome to the program.
BEN YAGODA: Thank you so much, Robert.
SIEGEL: In the way you tell it, the kind of song that gifted songwriters might write or try to write wasn't what the big record companies wanted in the early '50s. Why?
YAGODA: There was a change in popular taste. The soldiers who had come back from World War II didn't seem to be as interested in the more complex, challenging kind of popular song, the more jazz-based song. And sentimental ballads and, yes, novelty numbers, suddenly was much more appealing.
SIEGEL: You cite an interview that Patti Page, the singer, gave to Metronome in 1948 when she said you've got to please the people who get up at 8 o'clock in the morning, which, I guess, at the time, seemed a measure of getting up early. What you're describing, in part, is the separation of jazz music from popular music in America.
YAGODA: Absolutely. And for that period - the Great American Songbook period - there was this amazing unity of great jazz, popular song writing. The songwriters - Berlin, Porter, Gershwin - understood jazz, and the great improvisers and jazz musicians - Lester Young, Benny Carter and so forth - understood those songs and did great improvisations with them. That broke down after the war.
SIEGEL: There's someone whom you write about a great deal in the book who was the most important decision-maker at Columbia Records - about what songs would be made into records - his name was Mitch Miller. And 10 years later, he was known by everyone in America because he had a TV show with a male chorus called "Sing Along With Mitch."
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "SING ALONG WITH MITCH")
MITCH MILLER: Please, don't just sit there. Come on and sing.
CHORUS: (Singing) Five foot two, eyes of blue. But, oh, what those five foot could do.
YAGODA: Well, Mitch Miller, I mean, I guess if you're under 50, it means nothing. If you're between 50 and 60 or 65 or so, it's this smiling figure with a goatee, leading sing-alongs on television. But if you've studied or are aware of music history, his importance was far more than that. He was, simply put, the most powerful man in American popular music throughout the 1950s.
SIEGEL: There's a great scene that you describe of how the songwriters would line up outside of Mitch Miller's office, I guess, at Columbia Records. And they would - they would have their audience for the moment to try to pitch a song to him.
YAGODA: Every Tuesday, he would have open doors. And the song pluggers and the - sometimes the composers themselves would line up and he had great ears. He would say no, no, no, yes, yes, yes. No, there's already been a novelty number about, you know, cattle so we can't do that this week. And he had his finger on the ear of American listeners, for good or ill, in that period.
SIEGEL: Something interesting about Mitch Miller - I don't think that his face ever appeared on television in my household without my father remarking, you know, he is a great classical oboist.
YAGODA: (Laughter) Well, true enough. And that's something even fewer people know.
SIEGEL: (Laughter) Well, what can you say? He seemed to prefer the cheap, overdubbed novelty tune of childish song to something more sophisticated.
YAGODA: Well, you know, yes and no. You know, people like Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett have subsequently cast him as the villain of the piece, in much the same terms that you've just used. And I think it's definitely true that he did not see popular music as an art form, but a commercial entity. I think, to him, classical music was the only kind of artistic music. But, that said, he really invented the modern role of record producer. Tony Bennett - all Tony Bennett's hits of the '50s and "Come On-a My House" by a Rosemary Clooney.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "COME ON-A MY HOUSE")
ROSEMARY CLOONEY: (Singing) Come on-a my house, my house. I'm going to give you candy. Come on-a my house, to my house. I'm going to give you apple, plum and apricot too.
YAGODA: He produced, in every sense of the word, with sound effects and overdubbing and, really, in its production, if not the music, quite sophisticated effects.
(SOUNDBITE OF ROSEMARY CLOONEY SONG, "COME ON-A MY HOUSE")
SIEGEL: The subtitle of your book, "The B-Side," is the death of Tin Pan Alley, which is what they called the whole essential songwriting factory system of New York, and the rebirth of the Great American Song. Talk about rebirth a bit. Yes, the popular song is in decline by the early '50s, but it's hardly the end of story.
YAGODA: Not at all. And, in fact, in my view, there is two rebirths of the Great American Song. One is in that period of the mid-to-late '50s and into the early '60s. Of course, 1955 was kind of Ground Zero of rock 'n roll. So Elvis came - "Rock Around The Clock," followed by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, et cetera, et cetera. And all of a sudden that attracted the great amount of attention, especially of younger listeners. But in the sort of shadow of that, this notion of the Great American Songbook emerged. Frank Sinatra, Mabel Mercer, Tony Bennett, Mel Torme, great interpreters started really concentrating on that earlier work of the sort of 1925 to 1945 period. And that continues to this day.
The other rebirth is before The Beatles. That early '60s period turns out, in my view, and in many people's view, to be a sort of Ground Zero for another kind of great song. So you have Brian Wilson in California writing "Caroline No," Willie Nelson in Nashville with "Crazy," all those great writers in Detroit. And these songs were not so much jazz-based as the earlier ones were. They came out of R&B, folk and country, but they were - have turned out to be just as memorable and just as long-standing.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CRAZY")
WILLIE NELSON: (Singing) I'm crazy - crazy for feeling so lonely.
SIEGEL: Ben Yagoda, thanks for talking with us.
YAGODA: Thank you so much.
SIEGEL: Ben Yagoda's book is called "The B-Side: The Death Of Tin Pan Alley And The Rebirth Of The Great American Song."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CRAZY")
NELSON: (Singing) Crazy for feeling so blue. I knew that you'd love me as long as you wanted. And, then, someday, you'd leave me for somebody new.
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"American Sniper," starring Bradley Cooper, is a surprise box office hit. The movie is based on the life of Chris Kyle, the Navy SEAL who was killed in Texas in 2013 by a former Marine who suffered from PTSD. The movie has become a lightning rod. Some critics say it glorifies war. Others say it does not accurately portray the real Chris Kyle. Still others say the movie, and the reactions to it, reveal the deep divide between civilians and the military, as NPR's Elizabeth Blair reports.
ELIZABETH BLAIR, BYLINE: The vitriol has been ugly. The story is complicated and subjective. But when it comes to war, the most credible sources are often people who've experienced it firsthand.
JACOB SCHICK: Jacob Schick, third-generation Marine, retired.
BLAIR: Jacob Schick is a warrior relations specialist with the Brain Performance Institute in Dallas, Texas. He has a small part in the movie as one of the wounded veterans Chris Kyle mentors. Schick was injured while serving in Iraq in 2004.
SCHICK: I was in the lead vehicle. And the vehicle hit a triple-stacked tank mine that was pressure plate ignited. And it blew right underneath me and then blew me through the top of the Humvee. Their guesstimation was 30 feet, and stuck the landing with my head.
BLAIR: Schick lost part of his hand, part of his arm and part of his leg. But he says the most debilitating injuries were post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury.
SCHICK: Physical pain lets you know you're alive. Mental pain will test your will to stay that way.
BLAIR: And that is one reason Schick believes the movie "American Sniper" is important.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "AMERICAN SNIPER")
BLAIR: Jacob Schick says it shows the effect of combat on one individual who lived through it - in this case, Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle. Kyle did four tours in Iraq, fighting in some of the war's bloodiest battles. In this clip from the movie, Kyle's marriage suffers. His wife is played by Sienna Miller.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "AMERICAN SNIPER")
SIENNA MILLER: (As Taya Kyle) Your family is here. Your children have no father.
BRADLEY COOPER: (As Chris Kyle) Well, I have to serve my country.
MILLER: That is such [bleep] [bleep].
COOPER: (As Chris Kyle) Let's not.
MILLER: (As Taya Kyle) You don't know when to quit.
SCHICK: People need to understand that when we come home it's not all rainbows, roses and lollipops when we take off the uniform. It's quite the opposite. We struggle to fit back into society because we are mechaniced to do what we were trained to do. And we don't get trained on the way out on how to be a civilian.
BLAIR: In his memoir, Chris Kyle wrote about his experiences in Iraq with direct, unvarnished language. The book was a bestseller. It was also condemned by critics for its callous tone. He calls Iraqis savages and says he loved killing bad guys in order to protect Marines.
NICHOLAS SCHMIDLE: Chris Kyle's story's an uneasy story.
BLAIR: Nicholas Schmidle, a staff writer for the New Yorker, wrote an extensive article about Chris Kyle in 2013. He says Kyle wasn't the only soldier to be crass when talking about the enemy.
SCHMIDLE: He did dehumanize the enemy. That is something, however, that is part of training. That's part of preparing young men and women to go to war.
BLAIR: Another reason for the backlash against "American Sniper" is the fantastical stories Chris Kyle told after he left the Navy. He claimed he killed two men who tried to carjack him in Texas. He said he went to New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina and shot people from the roof of the Superdome. On the "Opie and Anthony Show," he said when Jesse Ventura made disparaging remarks about soldiers at a bar, he punched him.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "OPIE AND ANTHONY")
JIM NORTON: Wait, when you hit him, did he hit you back? Or...
CHRIS KYLE: No, he went down.
NORTON: Oh...
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Like out? Like, was he - like...
KYLE: I don't think he was out. It definitely took him off balance. He went down...
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: But the ref wasn't looking.
BLAIR: It never happened. Jesse Ventura won a defamation suit against Chris Kyle. The other stories have also never been proven. Actor and producer Bradley Cooper has said that "American Sniper" is a character study. But there's no mention of this part of Kyle's character in the movie. That's a problem for Alyssa Rosenberg, a cultural columnist for The Washington Post. She says omitting Chris Kyle's fabrications, as well as his bragging about things like bar fights, makes the movie incomplete.
ALYSSA ROSENBERG: By sort of stripping away a lot of the details of Chris Kyle's views, he becomes less the man he was and less the man he was trained to be and less the man that the American government and populous asked him to be. And so the movie isn't really willing to make the case for Chris Kyle as he was.
BLAIR: People still have strong, unresolved feelings about the Iraq War, says Alex Horton, an Army veteran and foreign affairs writer who fought there. He thinks the reactions ignited by "American Sniper" prove it.
ALEX HORTON: This shows that we're still not ready to have an adult, clear-eyed conversation about the Iraq War. You know, the wounds are still fresh. It's still heavily politicized.
BLAIR: And, says Horton, few Americans have personal experience with the Iraq War. Elizabeth Blair, NPR News.
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Researchers may have found a new risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. The culprit? Leaky blood vessels in the brain. NPR's Jon Hamilton reports that the finding could eventually help doctors predict and prevent Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia.
JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: Blood vessels in the brain include a special protective layer called the blood-brain barrier. It keeps the bacteria and toxins that circulate in blood from leaking into the brain. A few years ago, some researchers noticed that this barrier is damaged in people who die of Alzheimer's. Berislav Zlokovic is at the University of Southern California.
BERISLAV ZLOKOVIC: We're looking at brains from autopsies, and it becomes quite apparent that there is breakdown of the blood-brain barrier.
HAMILTON: But wasn't clear whether the breakdown was happening before Alzheimer's appeared or after. In other words, was it a potential cause or just byproduct of the disease? To find out, Zlokovic used a special type of MRI to study the brains of more than 60 people. These included both healthy individuals and people with mild cognitive impairment, which can be an early sign of Alzheimer's. Zlokovic says he paid special attention to the hippocampus, one of the first brain areas affected by Alzheimer's.
ZLOKOVIC: There is an increase in the blood-brain barrier breakdown by about 40 to 50 percent in the hippocampus, the brain region that is involved with memory and learning.
HAMILTON: Blood vessels are much leakier in people with cognitive problems. And Zlokovic believes that is exposing their brains to toxic substances.
ZLOKOVIC: Leading to loss of brain cells eventually or loss of connections between different brain cells.
HAMILTON: The hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease. The finding could help explain why people with atherosclerosis and other problems with their blood vessels are more likely to develop Alzheimer's. Rod Corriveau is a program director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, which helped fund the research.
ROD CORRIVEAU: There's every reason to think a lot of Alzheimer's disease does involve vascular damage.
HAMILTON: Corriveau says the study also adds to the evidence that amyloid plaques and tangles known as tau aren't the only factors that can lead to problems with memory and thinking. He says there are probably several paths.
CORRIVEAU: One of them could be through amyloid. One of them could be through tau. One of them could be through vascular contributions. And in fact, what is more likely is that they are interactions between these and other factors to create dementia, including Alzheimer's disease.
HAMILTON: Corriveau says changes in the blood-brain barrier happen long before mental problems appear so it may be possible to use those changes as markers to predict who will go on to develop Alzheimer's disease. And Corriveau says the disease might be delayed or prevented by drugs that make blood vessels less leaky.
CORRIVEAU: This study gives patients and families hope for the future, hope that detecting leaky blood vessels early will provide the opportunity to stop dementia before it starts.
HAMILTON: The new research appears in the journal Neuron. Jon Hamilton, NPR News.
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In Akron, Ohio, today's the deadline to apply to join the police force. The city has worked especially hard to attract African-American applicants this year. The task is considered crucial, and even more difficult in the wake of recent high-profile police shootings in Cleveland and in Ferguson, Missouri. M.L. Schultze, of member station KSU, reports on Akron's recruitment drive.
(SOUNDBITE OF AKRON POLICE RECRUITMENT VIDEO)
M.L. SCHULTZE, BYLINE: Two years ago, the Akron police recruiting video began with pulsing music and an image of police in helmets and camouflage - assault rifles ready. This year, the most prominent video demonstrates how to prepare for the physical test to be hired. It features a woman. The change goes beyond video. The recruiting team from this mid-sized Ohio city is more diverse in just about every way - younger, more women, more African-Americans.
CAROL HILL: We're trying to have the department mirror the community that we work in.
SCHULTZE: Carol Hill is the daughter of a Cleveland cop. She has 19 years on the Akron force. Before that, she was a social worker - good training, she says.
HILL: We're out there in the community trying to help people, help resolve problems. Maybe we can refer a family somewhere, somebody might need some food or they might need clothes for their kids.
SCHULTZE: Hill and the five other recruiters have been to Pittsburgh and Detroit, to military bases, Cleveland's Latino centers, Akron's inner-city churches and the mall to chat up prospects.
TREVA MATHEWS: Yeah, you guys both fill out the application.
SCHULTZE: Treva Mathews is 24, African-American, and though she has only 14 months on the force, supremely confident, even in what she acknowledges is a climate of suspicion among parts of the African-American and policing communities. When she's at the recruiting table, more black men and women stop to talk.
MATHEWS: I give other black female and black males, I guess, an outlook on saying hey, I can do it, too, if somebody's already there.
SCHULTZE: Take Florika Sheeler. She's 21, the minimum age to apply. She's in college and an Akron resident, both worth extra points on the civil service test.
FLORIKA SHEELER: I like the field. I can help keep Akron safe for the most part. I have a little girl. I want her to be in a safe city.
SCHULTZE: The national debate over police tactics has had its impact here. After all, Cleveland, where police are under investigation for shooting a 12-year-old boy to death, is just 30 miles north. Michelle Blakely found out how much of an impact from her 4-year-old's day care teacher. She'd asked the children what police officers do.
MICHELLE BLAKELY: These are like 4 - 3 or 4-year-olds. And then, like, a lot of the responses that they had of - it was tied to blood, it was tied to killing people.
SCHULTZE: Michelle and her husband explained to their daughter that's not the norm. But she says the misperception is keeping some good people from signing up.
Donald Clayton is the lone African-American in a class of about 20 training to become police officers. His stepfather is retiring from the Akron force, and Clayton hopes to be one of his successors.
DONALD CLAYTON: You hear talk amongst the African-American community about oh, this, that and the other as far as law enforcement. Well, lead by example. You know, if you feel that change needs to come, step up and do it, you know?
SCHULTZE: Akron's police department is 80 percent white. Its overall population is more than 30 percent black. Willie Derricott runs the Legends barbershop on Akron's west side. His customers include cops, and he wouldn't discourage anyone from signing up. Still, he says tensions between white police and black communities elsewhere were bound to resonate here.
WILLIE DERRICOTT: How could it not? We're all mindful of the police. And if you've had a run-in with the police, 9 times out of 10, it's not going to be very good.
SCHULTZE: Increasing the odds of a good experience for both police and the public is one goal in recruiting the class of 2015 for the Akron Police Department. For NPR News, I'm M.L. Schultze.
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SkyMall, the glossy in-flight catalog you can't miss or resist, has filed for bankruptcy. The company cites in-flight Wi-Fi and intense online shopping competition for falling sales.
NPR's Elise Hu looks back.
ELISE HU, BYLINE: If no one buys SkyMall when it goes up for auction, we have to be prepared for a world without the tray table nap pillow or those giant yard yetis, as James Bingham remembers.
JAMES BINGHAM: You always dreamed, like, someday maybe you'd make it big enough to be able to afford those.
HU: Anne Lewis of Pierre, South Dakota recalls SkyMall as a link to home.
ANNE LEWIS: In the early '90s, we lived overseas. And my mother bought us a huge AM/FM shortwave radio from SkyMall so we could listen to Voice of America.
HU: Matthew Bagot of Baton Rouge says it's a link to his mom.
MATTHEW BAGOT: Every flight she took, every business trip she took, she'd bring back a copy for me. And I could always expect that when I got home.
HU: Danielle St. Louis of Madison, Wisconsin uses SkyMall like so many of the rest of us.
DANIELLE ST. LOUIS: It's kind of, like, the thing I look forward to when I get on the plane - is I'm going to get to sort of faux shop through SkyMall.
HU: And Ehren Werner of Santa Rosa reads it to the end.
EHREN WERNER: The very last page of the SkyMall I picked up had a personal submarine/watercraft called the Sea Breacher for the low, low price of only $85,000.
HU: Maybe that's why its parent company is filing for bankruptcy - too few submarine sales. Elise Hu, NPR News.
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The number of Americans buying cars and trucks approached a record high last year. It's one more sign of how much the economy is improving. But there's a big potential downside that's evoking comparisons to the subprime mortgage broom. Dealers are extending loans to a growing number of people with weak credit, and more of them are having trouble making payments. NPR's Jim Zarroli reports.
JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: When Chris Westervelt moved from Texas to Alaska to take a job, he decided to trade in his Mazda for a car that could handle snow and ice.
CHRIS WESTERVELT: I started looking at vehicles that had four-wheel-drive capabilities, and I ended up settling on a Jeep Wrangler.
ZARROLI: He went to a dealer who let him test drive a car.
WESTERVELT: He said, go ahead and take the Jeep home, you know, come back sometime tomorrow and, you know, we'll get everything settled. So after driving around a little bit and coming back, the store manager actually got a little aggressive with me. He's like, you've already put 200 miles on my Jeep. What am I going to do? I can't resell this.
ZARROLI: He agreed to buy a car, but when he tried to negotiate the loan, he discovered that, thanks in part to a billing dispute with his cell phone company years before, his credit score was low.
WESTERVELT: They just said that based on whatever merits that they judge on that I did not meet their requirements.
ZARROLI: Westervelt was offered a loan with an interest rate of 18 percent, which he was able to bring down a bit after his mother cosigned a loan. The monthly payment was half again as much as he'd hoped to spend. Economist Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics says more people like Westervelt are taking out auto loans.
MARK ZANDI: We're seeing a lot more lending and a lot more lending to people with lower credit scores, so-called subprime auto lending.
ZARROLI: Zandi says the auto boom is one reason the economy is doing better. But it's come at a cost. The number of subprime borrowers missing payments is at its highest level since 2008. Chris Kukla of the Center for Responsible Lending says the increase in auto lending has clear echoes of the subprime mortgage boom of the mid-2000s. It's driven by investors seeking higher returns.
CHRIS KUKLA: Americans are borrowing more to buy a car, and so in order to make it, quote-unquote, "affordable," they have to stretch out those loan terms.
ZARROLI: Auto financing industry officials say comparisons to the mortgage market are misguided. Jack Tracey of the National Automotive Finance agency says the subprime boom was fueled by the erroneous assumption among investors that housing prices would always rise. He says no one thinks that about autos which depreciate quickly.
JACK TRACEY: That's just not been the case with the auto financing market. Securitizations have performed through bad times and now in the good times. There's no reasonable expectation that this industry would blow up.
ZARROLI: Tracey says the rise in subprime auto lending is an outgrowth of the fact that more people are returning to the workforce.
TRACEY: The ability to provide auto financing, be it prime or nonprime, is very important for our economy and for the health of our citizens in keeping people employed and money coming in. Not everybody can get on a bus and go to a job. Most people in the country need to have transportation.
ZARROLI: Economist Mark Zandi doesn't dispute that. And he says people shouldn't exaggerate what's happening. For one thing, the auto industry is a lot smaller than the mortgage market.
ZANDI: I wouldn't send off red flares at this point, but I think we should be shining a very bright light on practices in the industry just to make sure that things are being done properly so that this does not become a problem in the future.
ZARROLI: Zandi says that as subprime auto lending rises, it's important to remember one lesson from the housing bust - regulators need lots of information about what's happening in the markets, and they need to monitor it closely before troubles get out of hand. Jim Zarroli, NPR News.
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More than a month has passed since the Pakistani Taliban stormed into a school and killed 150 people, most of them children. The school, in the city of Peshawar, is run by the Pakistani army. Many of the dead are the sons of soldiers. NPR's Philip Reeves went to the school to meet the teachers and to see how they're rebuilding after such a devastating event.
PHILIP REEVES, BYLINE: Pause for a moment and imagine what it would be like if this happened at your school - 132 students, mostly teenage boys and a dozen teachers, are wiped out in a single attack. How do you even start to heal a community that's been through this?
SAMINA IRSHAD: We are now more loving, showing more love to the students.
REEVES: Samina Irshad is head of the middle school.
IRSHAD: Even those who used to, you know, make us angry in the past, we just go and hug them and love them and just say thank God we're OK.
REEVES: When you first walk into the Army Public School in Peshawar, it seems strangely normal. Right now, classes are over for the day. Boys in green blazers and gray pants mill around chatting. Then you notice the detail - the fresh concrete where the perimeter walls have been made much higher, the new razor wire coiled on top of those walls, the soldiers with machine guns guarding them. And hanging from those same walls, banners, bearing the words I shall rise and I shall shine.
IRSHAD: This is the principal's office. This was not like this. It was a very beautifully decorated office previously.
REEVES: The school principal was killed in the attack. Her office has been rebuilt. It was wrecked by the Taliban suicide bombers, says Samina Irshad.
IRSHAD: And two of them, they blasted their jackets here in this room.
REEVES: When that happened, two women teachers were hiding just a few feet away in the washroom. The teachers survived, but haven't yet felt well enough to return to school. Getting back to work amid so much pain and trauma hasn't been easy for anyone.
IRSHAD: On the very first day, when I saw all my children in the bad state, for a moment there was a thought - I thought maybe I should quit. But then afterwards, I thought I'm the person who has to rebuild. I'm the one who has to encourage the teachers, the students, the parents to come and - come to the school again.
REEVES: Samina Irshad said that meant keeping her own emotions in check.
IRSHAD: There were people who had been crying all the time, but I didn't cry afterwards. I used to cry at my home, but never here - just to encourage the parents and the students and the teachers to come again.
REEVES: When the Taliban stormed in, Samina ran from classroom to classroom telling kids to stay inside and lie on the floor. She recalls that at one point, children suddenly came flooding in from another part of the school.
IRSHAD: They were badly injured. Most of them, they were bleeding, and we pushed them and we just told them to go into different rooms.
REEVES: Samina spent two hours holed up with the injured kids. She says they showed remarkable courage.
IRSHAD: They were not screaming at all, they were not screaming. And they were just lying on the floor with, you know, all the blood around them. The others who were not injured, they just gave their mufflers and their handkerchiefs to us, and we just tied them on their wounds.
REEVES: Ayesha Shoaib teaches English at this school. She says her family's now urging her to quit her job.
AYESHA SHOAIB: But I just told them that death can be possible everywhere. You can't protect me at home also. And I want to serve over here because it's my moral responsibility. And also, these students need us.
REEVES: Ayesha is in charge of an eighth-grade class. Fourteen students in that class were killed. It's now important, she says, to let students talk about what happened and the death of their friends.
SHOAIB: These fellows are missing so they want to discuss about those boys - their fellows. Each and every day they just, like, repeat the same sentences again and again. Unconsciously they are they are doing these things.
REEVES: Ayesha says the school held an activities day recently when the boys were encouraged to express their feelings through writing and art. That helped, she says. Ayesha has noticed her students are behaving a little differently these days, some get a bit aggressive, some are quiet. They're all jumpy.
SHOAIB: When sudden noise come and sudden voice - a loud voice, so they're just distracted, and they asked that what happened, what happened ma'am, what happened? And even they just go to windows and just want to find out what happened outside.
REEVES: The school says counselors are on hand to help parents, staff and the 800 or so surviving students. There are trauma specialists from the Pakistani military. As studies resume, most kids are turning up for class again. Today's attendance is 88 percent. Ayesha Shoaib says there's a certain defiance about the children.
SHOAIB: Our students are more motivated. They wanted to show the world that we are better than before.
REEVES: Yet, no one here doubts the road to recovery will be difficult.
SHOAIB: It will take years. It will take years. Not less than that.
REEVES: Don't be fooled by appearances, says middle school head Samina Irshad. From the outside, we may look as if we're on the mend, she say, but healing the wounds within will take a very long time. Philip Reeves, NPR News.
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Tomorrow is the first big, multicandidate event of the 2016 presidential campaign season. And no surprise, it's taking place in Iowa; the home of the first big contest of the race. The Iowa caucuses are scheduled to take place in just over one year from now. This weekend's event is hosted by Republican Congressman Steve King of Iowa; a man who's sometimes blunt manner raises eyebrows and sometimes sharp rebukes, sometimes even from his own party.
Joining us now from a preview is NPR national political correspondent Don Gonyea. And, Don, I understand Anderson we've got close to 10 possible or would-be GOP candidates in a sold-out auditorium. Does this mean a campaign is, like, basically underway in Iowa?
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: I think we can say it begins now. Candidates have been coming here for the past year or more, but one at a time. But here we'll have a stage full of them, and the packed house indicates that at least some Iowans are ready for this thing to get underway.
CORNISH: Tell us more about the man who has organized the event - Iowa Congressman Steve King. I mean, what's his agenda? What does he hope to accomplish?
GONYEA: Steve King is a guy who was often at odds with party leadership. He voted against keeping John Boehner as speaker, but he really wants to be a power broker in this coming year's - the 2016 presidential contest. His big issue is immigration. On that issue, he is a hardliner. He wants that issue to be part of the dialogue and debate over the course of the next year.
His language on immigration, though, is what really attracts so much attention. He is very blunt. Let me give you an example. Prior to the State of the Union address this week, it was announced that one of the so-called dreamers - you know, young people brought into this country illegally as children by their parents - that one of them would be seated with the first lady.
King tweeted out from his official Twitter account - Obama perverts prosecutorial discretion by inviting a deportable to sit in a place of honor. That's just one of many examples. But he insists he's winning on the immigration issue. He wants it to be part of the agenda.
CORNISH: So given what you've described, which of the potential candidates or hopefuls will actually be in Des Moines?
GONYEA: The most serious contenders we can list Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Texas Governor Rick Perry, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, there's former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee who'll be here. Also on the lineup, Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, former Senator Rick Santorum, who actually won the 2012 Iowa Republican caucuses. And then you've got others hoping maybe for some attention - Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon, Donald Trump always looking for attention and Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO. They're all here.
CORNISH: Don, that's a long list, but aren't some pretty notable names missing? I mean, are they actually avoiding Congressman King?
GONYEA: Yeah, that's where it gets interesting. Nobody says they're avoiding King. But listen, there are people in the party who warned that a candidate who hopes to actually win the presidency should be careful about currying King's favor. So who won't be here? Jeb Bush won't be here, Mitt Romney, Senator Rand Paul. He actually cited a prior commitment. And Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal won't be here, but he says he's got a big prayer day being held in Baton Rouge that he has to attend. So it's also a busy weekend generally. The Koch brothers are having a private, closed-to-the-media event out in California so some people are going there. Some people are doing both.
CORNISH: And separately, we hear that Florida Senator Marco Rubio may actually officially jump into the race. What's going on there?
GONYEA: Yeah, he's not in yet, but he's huddling in Florida with a sizable group of advisers, including people who would raise the money for a run. It appears to be a step toward making a formal announcement that he's in. And we also hear that Mitt Romney is holding a similar meeting in Boston today.
CORNISH: That's NPR's national political correspondent Don Gonyea. Don, thanks so much.
GONYEA: My pleasure.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
In the span of 24 hours, two U.S. partners in counterterrorism experienced dramatic shifts in leadership. One was, at least, expected, the other, a surprise. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who was 90 years old, died after an illness. And, in Yemen, the president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, announced his resignation.
NPR's Tamara Keith reports from the White House on what this means for the president and U.S. counterterrorism efforts.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: The short answer is no one knows, really. For now, the situation in Saudi Arabia appears much more straightforward. Steve Seche is a former U.S. diplomat.
STEVE SECHE: The Saudis and King Abdullah himself, before he passed away, had established a very clear succession pattern.
KEITH: Former Crown Prince - now King - Salman has ascended to the throne. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest says President Obama hopes to talk to him soon.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY JOSH EARNEST: The president certainly hopes and we expect that the strong relationship that exists between the United States and Saudi Arabia will endure under the leadership of the new King.
KEITH: The situation just to the south of Saudi Arabia, in Yemen, is significantly more uncertain. Yemen has been a U.S. ally in its fight against AQAP - al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, which is based in Yemen.
JOHN ALTERMAN: It was a government that was trying to help us.
KEITH: That's John Alterman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
ALTERMAN: And it's not just counterterrorism in terms of drone strikes. It's about information. It's about passing knowledge about what's going on with who.
KEITH: But the man the U.S. had a solid relationship with, President Hadi, has resigned under increasingly impossible pressure from Houthi militiamen. The Parliament in Yemen has scheduled an emergency meeting to decide whether to let him step down. But if the Houthi do take over the government, Alterman says this could be a real problem for U.S. counterterrorism efforts.
ALTERMAN: It's hard to imagine they're not going to ask for a large change if not a complete halt to those actions.
KEITH: Steve Seche, the career diplomat, was U.S. ambassador to Yemen for three years. He says the Houthi's motto is roughly translated - God is great. Death to America. Death to Israel.
SECHE: Well, it certainly is that, and certainly is a little bit off-putting.
KEITH: Seshe says it isn't clear if President Hadi really will follow through and step down. It's also not clear whether the militiamen who've put him in in this position really want to run the government.
SECHE: Frankly that's not a job of a lot of people would put on their list of things they want to do in life.
KEITH: So, for now, Josh Earnest says the U.S. government still has an ally in Yemen.
EARNEST: I can tell you that some of our counterterrorism partnership efforts continue in Yemen, that there are national security relationships that continue to exist and continue to be useful in protecting the United States. But, you know, we obviously are concerned about the situation in Yemen, about the political instability.
KEITH: And you can add Yemen to a long list that includes Syria, Iraq and Libya, among others, as concerns for President Obama. Tamara Keith, NPR News, the White House.
CORNISH: And one additional note on the topic of Yemen. Today defense secretary Chuck Hagel made his first comments since Yemen's president offered his resignation. Hagel spoke with NPR's Morning Edition host, Steve Inskeep. And Steve asked if, from the Pentagon's point of view, the U.S. still has a partner in Yemen.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE CHUCK HAGEL: We still want to participate and cooperate and partner with the Yemeni government.
STEVE INSKEEP, BYLINE: Is there still someone to cooperate with? Who's answering the phones?
HAGEL: Well, that's my point. This just happened. Phones are being answered at ministries. Because the president leaves and senior members of his cabinet leave, does not mean that all the institutions shut down. They don't and they are not.
CORNISH: Defense secretary Chuck Hagel made those comments in an exit interview as he prepares to leave the Pentagon. And you can hear more this coming Monday on Morning Edition.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Politics now. This week around 30 million Americans watched President Obama's State of the Union address. That's the lowest TV audience in many years, but it still beats the seventh game of the World Series. And for our Friday commentators, E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post and the Brookings Institution and David Brooks of The New York Times. It is still must-see TV and we're glad to see you guys here.
DAVID BROOKS, BYLINE: Good to be with you.
E.J. DIONNE, BYLINE: Glad to be here.
SIEGEL: Tuesday's State of the Union came with this confident and upbeat statement at where the country stands.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: America, for all that we have endured, for all the grit and hard work required to come back, for all the tasks that lie ahead, know this - the shadow of crisis has passed and the state of the union is strong.
SIEGEL: But as for more of what the president calls middle-class economics, Republicans, like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, sounded unimpressed.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SENATOR MITCHMCCONNELL: Much of what he did tonight, you know - new taxes, new spending - is sort of the same old thing that we've heard over the last six years.
SIEGEL: So David, if Tuesday night sounded the keynote for the year to come and more, how melodious or discordant can we expect the next year to be?
BROOKS: Both. You can have two melodies that are discordant, and that's about what we're going to have. You know, I think what struck me about the speech, looking back, is we had this big problem dropped on our lap - basically wage stagnation, widening inequality. And I think it took the parties a long time to figure what to do about it. And for a long time, the Democrats, all they had was raising the minimum wage, which was not a solution commensurate with the size of the problem. But slowly, Democratic intellectuals have come up with a set of policies and you can call it middle-class economics, or others are calling it inclusive capitalism, but an agenda has come into being. And Republicans also have an agenda. And so I think the debate was not about legislation, this speech was about setting up the argument we're about to have on how to solve this big problem. And it's basically the Democrats are more on the demand side - let's give middle-class people some money so they can spend it and get the economy going. Republicans are a little more on the supply side - let's create the conditions for innovation. And so that's the debate. So I thought it was a great speech, actually, and an exciting prospect.
SIEGEL: E.J.?
DIONNE: I feel much the same way. I just had a small point. I think actually Democrats are talking about supply side in a completely different way, which is they are focusing on workers and how you can prepare workers to help the economy grow. I think one of the things that was clear is the president has decided to deal with the Republican Party. He has not the Republican Party he wished he had. He knew that Mitch McConnell was going to say what Mitch McConnell said no matter what he put in his speech. And so what he's doing is laying out a very bold agenda, which is actually easier to lay out, I think, with the Democrats not controlling the Senate because you look back to the old days, an awful lot of moderate Democrats would've said, oh, gee whiz, do we really want increase capital gains taxes? I think he could be bolder, and he was. And it was a very concrete agenda - the community college proposal, stronger child care and sick leave laws, middle-class tax cuts paid for by a tax increase on the rich. I think it really lays down a marker that the Republicans are going to have to respond to. They're talking a lot about wage stagnation. They've got to put up something now.
SIEGEL: Since this was a kind of curtain opener for 2016 - if the curtain wasn't already wide open - we heard lots about the Republicans, where there's no shortage of old faces and new faces. On the Democratic side, all the discussion seems to be is, is Hillary Clinton going to be a stronger candidate this time than she was the last time she ran? Not much talk about Vice President Joe Biden, David. Does he have a role, a future in the Democratic Party?
BROOKS: Well, there's not much to talk about Joe Biden for those who are not talking to Joe Biden. He's talking about himself. (Laughter). I think that his view is that he's very proud of what he calls the Obama-Biden record. And he believes that if nobody is representing that record and running as a continuation of that record, then he's going to run. And he's eager to do so. And so, you know, I think there's a good possibility that he'll throw his hat in the ring. I tend to think...
SIEGEL: If the State of the Union is actually to the left of Hillary Clinton, perhaps, Joe Biden might see himself as the...
BROOKS: I think it's a - the real question - the party's moved to the left. There's the think tank called the Center for American Progress, used to be on the sort of leftward edge of the party. Now it's right in the middle of the party. And Hillary Clinton is going to move that way. Whether she can do so successfully is the question. And if she can't, then there's going to be so much running room for a lot of other people.
DIONNE: You know, everybody forgets that Bill Clinton could do a pretty good populist speech back in the day, too. In fact, one of the Clinton genius was he could be a new Democrat and a populist at the same time. So I think Hillary can do that. In terms of Joe Biden - of course he's still ambitious to be president. Mo Udall, the great, funny Democratic figure back from the '70s once said the only cure for the bug of wanting to be president is embalming fluid.
SIEGEL: (Laughter).
DIONNE: So I think it shouldn't surprise us that both he and Mitt Romney want to run again. And as David said, he does see himself as running - if he did run - on the legacy of the Obama administration, which is looking a lot better today than it might have a couple of years ago. I still think Hillary Clinton is the overwhelming favorite. And by the way, there was a poll this week that showed her way ahead of any of the Republicans, including Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney.
SIEGEL: One other item that we reported on here yesterday. The Congress has invited Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to speak for the third time to a joint meeting of the two chambers. He will come to Washington a couple of weeks before he's up for election - or his party is, in the elections there. He will not meet with the president, with whom he differs sharply on Iran policy. What's going on, David?
BROOKS: Polarization is extended to foreign affairs. And you know, I guess I don't blame Boehner for inviting him. I'd certainly blame Bibi for accepting. It's just stupid. It's not good for two countries - it's bad for them to be feuding in public. It's really bad when you do it on the soil of one of the two countries.
SIEGEL: I mean, the impression is that he's coming here to speak past the president to the American people.
BROOKS: Right, on the subject of the Iranian negotiations. And his position, by the way, is totally legitimate. I'm not sure I agree or not, but it's just not diplomatic. And diplomats should be diplomatic.
DIONNE: I thought it was really astonishing. I mean, he's not here just to speak past the president. Bibi's coming to speak against the president's policy. There's no easy analogy because Israel has a particular place in the hearts of a lot of Americans, but I was thinking gosh, if the Democrats had invited Jacques Chirac to address Congress about the Iraq war - in other words, this is somebody who opposes President Obama's policy. I don't think there's any precedent for this. The White House is clearly furious. I suspect there are a lot of Republicans who care about foreign policy who are quietly unhappy about it, too. It's a very in-your-face move. And you wonder, will it help or hurt Netanyahu in the Israeli elections?
BROOKS: You know, I'm not sure this is the first time politics maybe in this way has been introduced. You know, Nancy Pelosi went to Syria against the Bush administration wishes. David Cameron a week or so ago was calling senators to lobby on the Obama side of the Iranian negotiations.
DIONNE: But speaking to the Congress of the United States in the same place the president spoke from is still pretty strong.
BROOKS: Yeah, but Bibi's a better speaker, so.
(LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: Well, thanks guys. In this week, when inflation and deflation actually became literal terms, thanks to the New England Patriots.
DIONNE: I'm a Patriots apologist, watch it.
BROOKS: Cheaters, cheaters, cheaters.
SIEGEL: We didn't get a chance to talk about that. David Brooks and E.J. Dionne, thanks again.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
The Sundance Film Festival opened in the mountains of Utah last night. It's the annual Mecca of independent and documentary films founded by actor Robert Redford. With Hollywood studios fixated on blockbuster franchises, smaller stories, like the ones that break out of Sundance, are increasingly shifting to TV screens and streaming services. To hear how that shift is changing Sundance and what movies we can actually look forward to in 2015, we're joined now by Steve Zeitchik of the LA Times. Hey there, Steve.
STEVE ZEITCHIK: Hey, Audie. How are you?
CORNISH: Good. Let's start with this year's program. What are the most high-profile premieres at Sundance this year?
ZEITCHIK: Well, a lot of interesting titles as ever. And of course, everybody looking for the next "Boyhood" and "Whiplash," the two movies that really broke out of last year's festival. One film that's very high on a lot of people's radars, mine included, a film called "End Of The Tour," which is an adaptation with Jason Segel as David Foster Wallace, focusing on the late iconic author's period after he published "Infinite Jest." A lot of controversy around this film because the Wallace estate has basically disavowed it, as has his editor. That film is premiering tonight here in Sundance, so going to be a lot of interest on that. Other movies premiering - James Franco has two big movies. One called "True Story," another called "I Am Michael" with Zachary Quinto, which is a film about a gay activist who renounces his homosexuality and becomes a pastor. So a lot of movies; you never know what's really going to break out until we get further in. But certainly, with last year's track record, some of these movies have raised some hopes pretty high.
CORNISH: We're hearing a lot about the new players at Sundance this year - Amazon and Netflix, right, streaming services. What does that mean for independent film?
ZEITCHIK: It's been very interesting to see how that's evolved over the last couple years. And Amazon and Netflix now each saying they're going to make films as well in addition to making TV, so they've even further complicated the model. But all those executives are here, a lot of TV executives are here. And a lot of filmmakers are kind of thinking now in a two-pronged direction, as they are in the world at large. But certainly, here thinking about how do we, you know, make content that's both, perhaps, eligible for the big screen but can also be kind of formatted out in an episodic way?
One project that's particularly caught my attention, Audie, in that regard is something called "Animals," which is produced by Mark and Jay Duplass, who are behind the HBO show "Togetherness" that's on now and have long been Sundance favorites. They've got a project called "Animals" that is essentially a fully-formed TV show they've produced with two young creators, 10 episodes all in the can - very unusual for TV. Usually networks and studios get involved in those.
They've made them on their own, independent-style, Sundance-style, bringing it here to the festival, hoping to sell it in what I think is a first of a 10-episode TV series trying to get distribution the way a lot of indie films come into this festival and try to get distribution. So the model really is changing. And I think filmmakers are really starting to focus on that.
CORNISH: So how is Sundance as a festival adjusting to this? I mean, it's always prided itself on being a launching pad for films, right, on the big screen. That was the whole point, to give these indie filmmakers a shot.
ZEITCHIK: Absolutely, and I think that's been one of the big questions they've faced. And they'd be the first to tell you they're not quite sure how to deal with it. I think giving platforms to things like "Animals," which again, you know, the program directors - I talked to them a couple days ago. They said we have no idea if this is going to work. But we have to get on board with this because this is where creativity is headed.
You know, we've seen Cary Fukunaga, who, as many people now know, the creator of the HBO hit "True Detective," but actually came out of Sundance and was an indie director of some note. He was just here at the festival talking about the same issue. I think everybody's kind of grappling with it at a festival that's called a film festival, but is very much about TV as well.
CORNISH: And then I feel like this is a question people ask every year. But given what you've described, I feel like I should ask it now about whether Sundance is still necessary. You know, does an executive have to fly all the way to Utah to see a movie he might be able to get a link to online?
ZEITCHIK: You know, it's a very good question. And it's one in the media we deal with as well because a lot of times we say hey, there's a lot of movies for us to see, can you send us a link? And some of the more accommodating producers oblige. All that said, I do think it is relevant. I think there's a serendipity factor when you gather a lot of people in a room - creative people, business people - deals happen at late-night parties, before a screening, ideas germinate. These things are all very relevant. I don't think for all the ways technology has made these areas more efficient, I don't think we're going to see it going away anytime soon.
CORNISH: That's Steve Zeitchik of the LA Times. Thank you so much for talking with us.
ZEITCHIK: Thank you, Audie.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
One thread of the investigation into the Paris terrorist attacks has led to Spain. The gunman who murdered four people in a kosher supermarket is believed to have traveled to Madrid just before the attacks. Police are trying to figure out where he stayed and who he met, but, as Lauren Frayer reports, news of his presence there has upset many Muslims in the Spanish capital.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: This is Madrid's biggest mosque - a sprawling, white, marble complex built by Saudi Arabia and nicknamed for the M30 highway over which its minaret towers.
UNIDENTIFIED IMAM: (Reciting surah in foreign language).
FRAYER: Inside, an Imam recites a peaceful surah from the Quran. But people here are shaken. One of the Paris gunmen, Amedy Coulibaly, visited Madrid in the days before his attack. Muslims here worry he may have prayed alongside them.
SAMI ELMUSHTAWI: (Speaking Spanish).
FRAYER: "I don't like to think a violent person could have been in our mosque," says its director, Sami Elmushtawi. "But, at the same time, our doors are open to all. I won't add security. I don't want people to panic," he says. Coulibaly is believed to have spent New Year's in Madrid with his partner before she flew to Turkey and he drove home to Paris, where he killed four shoppers at a kosher supermarket January 9 and then died in a police raid. Spanish police are trying to figure out where Coulibaly stayed in Madrid. They can't find any hotel reservation and whether he had any local help.
JUAN FERRARO: He was here and he might have some friends. But, you know, we are 40 - almost 47 million Spanish people. It's very difficult.
FRAYER: Human rights lawyer, Juan Ferraro, was also visiting the mosque. In tense times, he acts as an informal liaison between the Muslim community and law enforcement.
FERRARO: If they gather in the cafeteria of some mosque, that's normal because what the terrorists want is to gather in places where there's no control.
FRAYER: Fifteen people were arrested last June for allegedly using this mosque's cafeteria as a recruiting hub for ISIS, to which Coulibaly had pledged allegiance. None of the worshipers I met said they knew anything about the cafeteria plot or of Coulibaly's movements in Madrid. But some, like Rodrigo Rodriguez, a Spanish convert to Islam, certainly have opinions about him.
RODRIGO RODRIGUEZ: What I think is that that guy - he hasn't even read the Quran. I think that guy - he doesn't even make his daily five prayers. I think that guy is an ignorant. He's a murderer, and people shouldn't give a damn about if he' a Muslim or whatever. He's just a madman with a gun.
FRAYER: Muslims are angry that, after the cafeteria arrests, Coulibaly's Madrid sojourn might cast further suspicion on them. Mosques across Spain were vandalized in the days after the Paris siege. Meanwhile, amid arrests of suspected militants across Europe, police say a suspect who escaped capture in Belgium, an 18-year-old Dutch Muslim, may have also fled to Spain.
This country's al-Qaida cells are thought to have been dismantled 10 years ago, after the Madrid train bombings that killed nearly 200 people. But people who study radicalization in Spain say sleeper cells may be reactivating and may provide a possible haven for militants. For NPR News, I'm Lauren Frayer in Madrid.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
All across Europe, there's new attention to homegrown terrorism. Thousands of Europeans have traveled to Syria to fight. The concern is that when they return, they aren't back to resume their lives, but, instead, are dispatched by al-Qaida or the so-called Islamic State to attack the West.
NPR's Dina Temple-Raston traveled to Paris to report on this phenomenon. And today, she looks at how serious the threat really is and what counterterrorism officials can do about it.
DINA TEMPLE-RASTON, BYLINE: I went to the Marais in Paris on a rainy day last week to meet Samia Hathroubi.
Are you Samia?
SAMIA HATHROUBI: Yeah, I am.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Hi. Did you get to buy things during the sales? This is good.
The Marais is the oldest Jewish neighborhood in Paris, and Samia Hathroubi took me there while it was still guarded by heavily-armed police. This was just days after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo magazine and a kosher market.
HATHROUBI: We are, right now, in Rue de Rosiers in the beginning of the street.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Samia Hathroubi is a Muslim human rights advocate with the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding. And we walked down a street that looked like Greenwich Village in New York - artisan shops, bookstores, small cafes.
HATHROUBI: But you have also the place where the terrorist attack happened, here in Rue de Rosier, which is a very famous...
TEMPLE-RASTON: That was in 1982 at a Jewish restaurant right here. Six people were killed by machine-gun fire and grenades. Two dozen others were wounded. The Abu Nidal organization was thought to be behind it.
HATHROUBI: Khaled Kelkal. He was the terrorist who made this terrorist attack. He was a French-Algerian.
TEMPLE-RASTON: France has experienced the prospect of homegrown terrorists for decades, but today's version is different. It's global, but reaches into the neighborhoods of Paris. Hathroubi used to teach in those neighborhoods, the sort where the brothers behind this month's Paris terrorist attacks grew up. She said she saw students radicalize before her eyes.
HATHROUBI: Haram and Halal. This is you know, what is forbidden and what is not forbidden. This is the way people and some of the young people are looking at Islam today.
TEMPLE-RASTON: They couldn't speak Arabic or even read the Quran, but they dropped out of school, deleted there Facebook pages and embraced a strict and radical form of Islam. These are the kind of people, she worries, who are going to fight in Syria and Iraq. And they're the kind of people ordinary Parisians worry are living among them.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LAURENT BONELLI: (Speaking French).
TEMPLE-RASTON: Days after the attacks, the basement auditorium in the Maison des Associations in Paris is packed. Organizers unfold more chairs. People are standing along the wall. They've all come to hear Laurent Bonelli, a professor at Paris 10-Nanterre University, talk about terrorism.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BONELLI: (Speaking French).
TEMPLE-RASTON: "If you look at what's happened recently in Paris," Bonelli says, "you have to look at the history of these men." In the audience, some are taking notes. For most of the people in the room, the main concern is a simple one - how much of a threat were radical jihadists in their midst?
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BONELLI: (Speaking French).
TEMPLE-RASTON: "The vast majority of those people," Bonelli says, "won't do anything and aren't a threat." "The problem," he says, "is trying to determine which among them might be a threat." Bonelli spoke and took questions from the audience for more than two hours.
(APPLAUSE)
TEMPLE-RASTON: France estimates that between 800 and 1,000 French men and women have traveled to Syria and Iraq in the past three years. Francesco Ragazzi is a professor at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and a researcher at Science Po in Paris. And he says trying to figure out who might decide to attack is almost impossible. Just traveling to Syria and Iraq doesn't mean you're necessarily a threat. Just think back to the '90s in Bosnia.
FRANCESCO RAGAZZI: Muslims went to fight and support the Bosnian Army, and sometimes they were enrolled with mujahedin-type groups. They came back. They didn't necessarily want to plant bombs in Europe, and they were not considered the security threats that people going to Syria are now considered as a security threat.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Of course, this is a different time, a time when al-Qaida and the Islamic State are household names. The brothers behind the attacks were already on watch lists, both in the U.S. and France.
RAGAZZI: So, in terms of finding out who, if you want the dangerous people, are, we don't really seem to have a problem.
TEMPLE-RASTON: So they can identify who went to Syria and came back. The challenge is figuring out which ones might make the next step and attack. Dina Temple-Raston, NPR News. POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: Our interview subject incorrectly says that Khaled Kelkal was the terrorist responsible for a 1982 attack on a Jewish restaurant in Paris. In fact, police linked that attack to the Abu Nidal Organization. Khaled Kelkal was affiliated with a French-Algerian terrorist group known as the GIA. The GIA claimed responsibility for a series of bombings in France in the summer and fall of 1995. Police said that Kelkal's fingerprints were found on an unexploded bomb and he was killed when they tried to arrest him in Lyon that same year.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
American and Cuban diplomats say they'll keep meeting after their historic talks this week in Havana. But they say it's going to be a long process before they open embassies and exchange ambassadors. The head of the U.S. delegation today said the two sides still have fundamental differences, but there are no preconditions to restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba. NPR's Carrie Kahn is in Havana and joins us now. And Carrie, this was the highest level U.S. delegation to visit Cuba in 35 years. What was the news out of the talks?
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: I think the headline is, is that they met and that both sides were very cordial, said everything was respectful and that there was progress made. I think the other headline is that not much changed. Both sides voiced long-held complaints and grudges, and a lot of that was discussed, but that they're still meeting and they're still willing to meet.
SIEGEL: What are the stumbling blocks in these talks?
KAHN: Well, these are things that we've heard all along. From the Cuban side, the long U.S. embargo, economic embargo against Cuba, they want that lifted. A lot of times they talked about Cuba being listed on the U.S. State Department's list of state-sponsored terrorism. They said that is an incredible stumbling block for them, for full diplomatic relations to be restored. And they said that that designation is precluding them from finding a U.S. bank that will do their financial transactions for their intersection in Washington, so it's a great hindrance for them. They brought that up a lot. But they both say that they'll keep talking and that soon - although they won't give an exact timeline - there will be embassies in each other's countries and they'll exchange ambassadors.
SIEGEL: And what was said in these talks about human rights, or do we know?
KAHN: Well, the head of the U.S. delegation was asked that today at a briefing. She would not give any specifics regarding it. But she did say it is a central concern of the United States in dealing with Cuba. They are pushing for an improved human rights record and freedom of expression on the island. Curiously, the head of the Cuban delegation also said that human rights came up, and Cuba expressed its concern about the human rights situation in the U.S. and offered its assistance in that realm. But neither side wanted to get into too much nor did we hear any specifics.
SIEGEL: OK. Thank you, Carrie.
KAHN: You're welcome.
SIEGEL: That NPR's Carrie Kahn in Havana, in Cuba.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
We all know that costs for surgery vary, but a study released this week documents differences that are stunning. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association and BHI, the Blue Health Intelligence, looked into the cost of knee and hip replacement surgery around the country. And they found that an operation that will cost, on average, $60,000 in New York City, costs about $16,000 in Montgomery, Alabama, and there are many different prices in between. They also found that within the same city, there are big disparities. In fact, in more than a dozen cities, the price range for one of these operations is over $17,000 - just the range. Maureen Sullivan of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association joins us from Chicago. Welcome to the program.
MAUREEN SULLIVAN: Thank you, Robert.
SIEGEL: And, first, are people who pay, say, an average of $41,000 for a new knee in San Diego getting a better knee than people who pay, on average, $19,000 in Fresno?
SULLIVAN: You know, that's the first question we looked at - is, is there a relationship between the cost of the procedure and the quality? And there is not a relationship. We have high-quality episodes of care for knee and hip that are low-cost and that there are high-cost.
SIEGEL: And, as for variances within the same market, I gather Boston tops the list. What's the range there for these operations?
SULLIVAN: Yes, for hip procedures in the greater Boston market, its 313 percent. And there, the lowest is about almost 18,000, and the highest closer to 74,000.
SIEGEL: I mentioned the biggest disparity between New York City and Montgomery, Alabama for both knee and hip replacements. It's roughly $60,000 in New York, $16,000 in Montgomery. How much of that $60,000 might be paid out-of-pocket by somebody insured by Blue Cross Blue Shield?
SULLIVAN: It could vary based on the coinsurance and benefit levels, but you could be looking at $6,000, $12,000 depending on how much coinsurance you had on it. And I think a lot of individuals, as they're looking at a procedure, take a look at - what does is it mean for my benefits? And where do I need to go in terms of having the coverage? But, as cost-sharing increases for individuals, we're committed to giving the information so that they can make those decisions on their budget as well.
SIEGEL: What do you say to the observation that the system we have, where the actual price of a procedure depends on who your insurer is and what kind of a plan you have with your insurer, and it's very difficult to get to an absolute price for the system, that that is what permits there to be such variance in the prices? Because it isn't like a shopping mall where you can see - here's what that coat costs here. Here's what that coat costs on the other side of the mall.
SULLIVAN: Well, Robert, that's exactly why, you know, you see the report in front of you. We think, as we increase transparency, we now have the tools to do that, where an individual can then be able to integrate that with the information that they have on their benefits that they can make more informed decisions.
SIEGEL: Is the message here - if you're having a new knee, shop around? There are lots of knees to be had in different places.
SULLIVAN: Yes. I mean, look at the tools that are available. Right now, there are tools that we offer at the local Blue Cross Blue Shield plans. You can actually find out - what does this cost? And what does is it mean for my budget? And you can look at it at different hospitals. And that kind of information helps you become, as an individual, more in control of the decision. And you have more information.
SIEGEL: Well, Maureen Sullivan, thanks a lot for talking with us today.
SULLIVAN: Thank you, Robert.
SIEGEL: Maureen Sullivan is chief strategy officer for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. She was talking about a study of variance in prices for hip and knee replacements that the Association did together with BHI - Blue Health Intelligence.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
From NPR News this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And I'm Robert Siegel. The Saudi king who just died and the king who succeeds him are both sons of the founder of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz, who was born sometime around 1880. Abdul Aziz had 22 wives and 45 sons. And since his death in 1953, all of the country's kings have been his sons. Upon assuming the throne today, Salman named as his crown prince his half-brother Muqrin, who is 69 years old, another so-called second-generation prince. And perhaps just as interesting is Salman's choice of a deputy crown prince, 55-year-old Mohammed bin Nayef, who is a grandson of the founder, one of the so-called third-generation princes. Mind you, it could be another 20 years before that generation takes the throne. But we're going to ask Middle East specialist Joseph Braude about that prospect. Now, he's an adviser to the Dubai-based Al-Mesbar Center for Research and Studies.
Welcome to the program.
JOSEPH BRAUDE: Thank you.
SIEGEL: Tell us about Mohammed bin Nayef, this 55-year-old deputy crown prince who would represent the first of his generation to ascend to the throne.
BRAUDE: Well, he's the son of the late interior minister and the present serving interior minister. He took the responsibility for interior and has introduced formidable expertise in the field of counterterrorism and also new approaches to the rehabilitation of jihadis. He has started something called the Mohammed bin Nayef Center for Counseling and Advice which creates a kind of a carrot and stick. So on the one hand, he's cracking down hard on jihadists. But on the other hand, he's giving them an opportunity through largess and marrying them off and retraining them to re-enter society as peaceful working men. It's also significant that Mohammed bin Nayef has no sons, he has only daughters. And in the cultural context of Saudi Arabia, that means he enjoys more trust to be less self-interested because he isn't trying to groom a son to be king. And that's part of why Mohammed bin Nayef, not a son of the former king or the present one, enjoys the support of the sons of the late King Abdullah.
SIEGEL: Do you have any sense of whether the Saudi people feel the same degree of allegiance to the younger princes, and the same tolerance of non-representative government for that matter, when the younger princes begin to take charge as they do to the sons of Abdul Aziz?
BRAUDE: In terms of popularity, I'd say again, Mohammed bin Nayef enjoys much of it. But more broadly, Robert, I think that for Saudi watchers in the West, the new generation of royals also coincides with a new and different Saudi Arabia, a monarchy less absolute for which the traditional Kremlinology-style focus on court intrigue is no longer enough to explain the future because pressures on the leadership are being brought to bear by ever more complex social forces in the country that do themselves influence top-level decisions more than in the past, and regardless of who emerges at the helm.
SIEGEL: Joseph Braude, thank you very much for talking with us about it.
BRAUDE: Thank you, Robert, my pleasure.
SIEGEL: Middle East specialist Joseph Braude spoke to us from Berkeley, California.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
The International Criminal Court in The Hague was founded 13 years ago to prosecute those who commit war crimes, especially the crime of abducting and conscripting children as soldiers. But for the first time in that court's history, a man is going on trial who was once a victim of that same crime. NPR's Gregory Warner reports on the complicated case of Dominic Ongwen.
GREGORY WARNER, BYLINE: There's an account by his younger sister that describes him as a shy boy, eager to please. He used to make crafts and sell them to pay his own school fees. But not much is known about this period in the life of Dominic Ongwen, before he was abducted at age 10 by the Lord's Resistance Army. That's when his new life began deep in the Ugandan forest under the psychopathic rebel leader Joseph Kony. Any child who was caught trying to escape the forest would likely have been beaten to death by the other children, Ongwen no exception.
LEDIO CAKAJ: He would've certainly been involved in the beating, if not death, of others, particularly younger children.
WARNER: Ledio Cakaj has been studying the LRA for close to a decade. He's interviewed dozens of former child soldiers about their experience. Kony, he says, was a cult leader claiming spiritual powers, and violence was the currency of survival.
CAKAJ: And the ability to not only inflict but also withstand violence.
WARNER: Ongwen grew up in the image of his oppressors. As a teenager he allegedly became a fearless leader of raiding parties abducting more children and subjecting them to initiations as cruel as his own. Joseph Kony promoted him higher than anyone abducted into the ranks. Paul Ronan runs a think tank called Resolve that studies the LRA.
PAUL RONAN: Kony was able to hold him up as a shining example of what you could achieve if you stayed in the LRA and followed his orders.
WARNER: But in the end it was this favored status and the widely circulated legend of his notorious rise that earned Dominic Ongwen an indictment in 2005 by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The court had been created to prosecute those who abduct children as fighters, but only a handful of top LRA commanders besides Joseph Kony himself were indicted. Ongwen was the only one on that short list who'd been a child soldier himself.
CAKAJ: This is the point that many people in northern Uganda bring up, which is to say the Ugandan government failed in protecting our kids, including Ongwen.
WARNER: Who were then instructed in the doctrine of the LRA.
CAKAJ: And then he had to either follow those rules and survive or, frankly, die. So to a certain extent we're holding him responsible for being alive, particularly if you understand the story of people who are not here anymore because they either refused or were unable to perform the same way Ongwen did.
WARNER: The details of these tough choices will almost certainly be part of Ongwen's defense when his trial begins later this year. Thirty-five year-old Ongwen was turned over to U.S. custody this month. Conflicting reports say he either surrendered or was captured by another rebel group. But whatever his fate in court in The Hague, what's interesting is how different that fate is from his former LRA comrades who fall under a Ugandan amnesty law. Amnesty means that no matter how many murders or mutilations those other rebels committed, they can walk out of the forest back to civilization and not do a single day in jail. The aim of that blanket amnesty is to lure lesser fighters out of the forest and in part, it's worked. According to Ugandan reports, Kony's force has dwindled to a few hundred fighters. But because of the ICC indictment, Ongwen doesn't qualify for amnesty. This is the voice of Dominic Ongwen heard for the first time in a radio address he recorded in a hotel in U.S. custody. In it he appeals to his former comrades to abandon Kony and accept the amnesty they qualify for.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO ADDRESS)
DOMINIC ONGWEN: (Foreign language spoken).
RONAN: Just one line from the radio message that he recorded. He says, "all of you out in the bush, you won't believe the bed that I'm sleeping in now," which is just a testament that one of the things that he thinks might help people decide to defect is that, hey, you get to sleep in a bed.
WARNER: No wonder. It was likely Ongwen's first mattress in 25 years. Gregory Warner, NPR News, Nairobi.
(MUSIC)
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Greek life is back at the University of Virginia after a discredited article in Rolling Stone magazine on campus rape shut down the social scene for weeks. But the University extracted a few concessions before allowing fraternities to strike up the party. Beers must be served in cans and sober monitors must be designated to supervise parties. Fraternities bear the brunt of the regulations because, for decades, sorority houses at UVA and across the country have prohibited alcohol.
Now, with the national debate continuing over the dangers of alcohol and campus sexual assault, some women say campus life might be safer if women had more control and could serve alcohol in their own sorority houses.
Here to talk more is Nicolette Gendron, a senior at UVA and member of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority there. She joins us from UVA. Welcome to the program.
NICOLETTE GENDRON: Thanks for having me.
CORNISH: So, Nicolette, you actually make this argument in the C-Ville Weekly, which is a weekly newspaper nearby - this is off-campus - about sororities being allowed to have their own alcohol at their own parties. And what are the reasons why you're arguing for this?
GENDRON: I found that - that this argument became really important with everything that happened with Hannah Graham this past fall.
CORNISH: And this is the young women who disappeared after being out at a party.
GENDRON: Yes. In talking with the editorial team at C-Ville Weekly, we realized that a lot of the issues is that - the anonymous nature of fraternity parties and how it was hard to track her trajectory that night. We then thought of - what's the counterargument? What if sororities could have parties where they had their own alcohol and, basically, existed just as fraternity parties do?
The conclusion we came to when I interviewed a bunch of sorority women and men was that it would be safer in the sense that women would have control over who's coming into their homes. They would be more cognizant of, you know, who is coming through the door at all hours where, at fraternity parties, there tends to be a bit of a lax attitude later in the night. And, also, a sense of control over how much alcohol is being served and if there needs to be no more serving of alcohol. And just, in general, being on their own turf instead of going to someone else's home all the time.
CORNISH: It sounds like you're saying that, essentially, you guys just want a little more control. I mean, does it feel like it's just totally in the hands of the young men?
GENDRON: I think so. And I think I'm not alone in this perspective, especially when I interviewed a bunch of, like, my fellow sorority women. It is male-dominated. I mean, we're - we're going to homes that are fraternity houses that are all men, that are lived in by all men. The parties that are run and put on and bartended and the doors are controlled by men. So it would just be nice to even the playing field and have, you know, it be a female-dominated environment where men show up and have to follow our rules.
CORNISH: Here's the thing. There are a lot of parents listening who are saying the solution to the problem of binge drinking or concerns about campus assault aren't going to be fixed by having more alcohol, right, available at the drop of a hat. I mean, help us understand why that makes sense.
GENDRON: Well, in college in general and at a place like UVA, there's going to be drinking no matter what. There's going to be drinking in first-year dorms. There's going to be drinking at frat parties, at bars. I think that Greek life in general at UVA doesn't promote moderation in drinking, and it's kind of inevitable. It's always going to be a factor. But where the drinking is happening and making sure, like, the environment is safe, I think that's a completely different story.
CORNISH: Well, Nicolette Gendron, thank you so much for speaking with us.
GENDRON: Thank you so much for having me.
CORNISH: Nicolette Gendron. She's a senior at UVA and member of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR West. I'm Arun Rath. Mike Huckabee served as governor of Arkansas and made a run for the presidency in 2008. He went on to host his own show on the Fox News Channel. He left that show this month, as he considers making another run for the White House. In the meantime, Huckabee has a new book. It's called "God, Guns, Grits, And Gravy." I spoke with the former governor, Huckabee, Friday, and he explained the title.
MIKE HUCKABEE: I think some people hear the title, "God, Guns, Grits, And Gravy," and think that it is a recipe book of Southern cuisine, but that's really not the goal. It is to - maybe in a rather, I hope, entertaining and sometimes fun way to read - really belies a serious message. And that message is that there is a cultural disconnect between the bubbles of New York, Washington and Hollywood, versus the flyover country, or the land of God, guns, grits and gravy.
RATH: Well, explain that cultural contrast. Tell us about these two Americas - the Bubba-ville and bubble-ville.
HUCKABEE: Well, I think that the disconnect in the culture is sometimes more a part of the polarization than even Democrats and Republicans. In the three bubbles of influence, New York, Washington and Hollywood, most of the cultural template of America is established, whether it's in fashion or finance or politics or government or music, entertainment, television, movies. A lot of people who live in the flyover land will sometimes say, my gosh, that's very different than the general prevailing attitude of the land of God, guns, grits and gravy.
So this book tries to explain - here's who we are. It says to the people out there in flyover country - you're not alone. There are a lot of you. And you may not think there are a lot of you 'cause everything you see on TV and in the movies is more connected to the bubbles, but I've made the distinction between bubble-ville and those three major influence areas, and, what I call, Bubba-ville.
RATH: I have to say, Governor, having - I've lived in New York and Los Angeles and in Washington, D.C., and the way you describe it, it just feels a little bit absolute - the distinction, you know? I can tell you that you can get biscuits and gravy in all three places and some good fried catfish, too.
(LAUGHTER)
HUCKABEE: I mean, I've found a few places up in Harlem where I can get a bowl of grits and maybe some decent barbecue, but I'm talking about the general prevailing culture that exists. And - I'll give an example. Often times, even my own Fox News staff that I would work with every week - good people - many of the people on my show's staff, anyway, were conservative, but many of them were not. But if the issue of guns came up, it was almost universal, like, you really own a firearm? Why? Most of them had never owned a gun, never picked up one, never shot one, had no idea what they would ever do if they ever did have one, and that's just very different from the way I grew up where I had my first BB gun at age 5 and a pellet gun at age 7 and .22 rifle at age 9. But I grew up, also, never imagining that I would point it at someone and murder anybody over it.
RATH: Well, with guns, let's stipulate that there's a genuine cultural divide on that. But on some of the other issues in the book, say, you talk about the crassness of the culture that comes out of these bubbles. There's been a little bit of a dustup over what you've said about Beyonce. People were offended.
HUCKABEE: A little bit?
(LAUGHTER)
RATH: Yeah, well, people were pretty offended, governor, that you said that her husband - that Jay-Z was basically pimping his wife.
HUCKABEE: Well, if people would read that whole chapter, what they would find is that it's half a page out of 272, and it's an illustrative moment of the bigger picture of the chapter that's entitled "The Culture Of Crude." I'll be honest with you. I never thought that that particular reference was going to create any controversy. And I do believe that a lot of people were reacting not to what I said in its full context, they were reacting to what the headlines said, that where the reports on it and the blogs about it, which have been numerous, to say the least.
RATH: Well, some of the reaction, though, don't you think that - I mean, it's still - I have read the whole chapter, and my take on it was that maybe it's just a thing about where people come from. It's not that values are different, but maybe, it's just we come from different cultures.
HUCKABEE: Which is precisely the point of the book - there's different cultures. I mean, that's - you've, in essence, just validated the very point I made.
RATH: But there's a value judgment there, though.
HUCKABEE: Well, no, it's not a value judgment that one is right, the other is wrong. But what is completely, maybe, normal and not the least bit distressing to people in the cultural bubbles of New York, D.C. and in Hollywood - and I'm not just talking about a language - but what's normal in Washington, for example, in the way government works, is appalling to those who live out here and have to pay for this nonsense.
RATH: Do you have any concern that, you know, the book spends a lot of time talking about these things that divide us, this cultural divide. Do you worry - I mean, I know you're somebody that - you would probably say that you like to bring people together to talk about the things that we share in common.
HUCKABEE: Well, first of all, you can't be together unless you know what it is that separates you. And one of the realities of life is if two people sit down at the table and they're not honest about what's different, they'll never be able to come to what's common.
RATH: That's Mike Huckabee. His new book is "God, Guns, Grits, And Gravy." Governor Huckabee, thanks very much. We really appreciate you taking the time with us.
HUCKABEE: Well, I enjoyed the visit. Thank you, Arun.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Arun Rath. Today we hear from a man who's chronicling his own experience with Alzheimer's disease. Greg O'Brien is a writer and journalist.
O'BRIEN: You ask me the question of who I am, there are days when I'm not quite sure. But in reality, my name is Greg O'Brien. I'm 64 years old. I've been married 34 years. We have three beautiful children. At age 59, I was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. The disease stole my maternal grandfather, my mother, and now it's coming for me.
I was diagnosed in 2009. It was scary. I remember sitting in my neurologist's office. He had all the tests results and the clinical tests that I failed and all that. And he's sitting next to my wife. And he said that you have Alzheimer's. The doctor looked at me, and he said, are you getting this? You have a battle on your hands. I'm talking to you - excuse me, this is hard to talk about -as if you're terminal.
Now I have a strong faith, and I know I'm going to a better place, but I started thinking of my wife and kids. And I could feel water running down the side of my face, and they were my tears. How do you tell your kids that you got Alzheimer's? It sucks. I had planned this family meeting so all the kids were home, and we were going to go out to dinner. I'm in the bathroom, you know, I felt a little bit like Luca Brasi in "The Godfather" practicing my speech, you know, on the day of your daughter's wedding. And so I could hear, Daddy, where are you? So I came out and, you know, went over the fact that their great-grandfather, my grandfather had died of Alzheimer's and my mother, which they knew, and now it's come for me. And they were stunned. They didn't quite know what to say. And Conor kind of cut through it, and he says, so, Dad, you're losing your mind. And everyone laughed, and I laughed. And I said, you know what? That's enough talk for today. Let's go to dinner. And that's what we did. And we started talking about the Boston Red Sox and the patriots and the Celtics. And I felt more comfortable in that.
So about a week later, we had a family outing in Coronado Island. And I had just basically assigned my son to be my guardian should something happen to Mary Catherine, and made him power of attorney. So I said we need to talk about this, and he didn't want to. He wanted nothing to do with the discussion. So I said, OK, I'll be right back. And I went inside, and I got 80 pages of medical notes that talked about my diagnosis. And I said, Brendan, you need to read it. I don't want to read it, he said. So I started reading it. And he started yelling and screaming. I don't know what words I can use here. He started saying bull [bleep], bull [bleep], bull [bleep]. And then he said, expletive, bull [bleep]. And I said, Brendan, you need to get this. He grabbed my medical records, tore them up and threw them off the balcony. And then turned to me and said, Dad, it's bull [bleep] 'cause I know it's true. Excuse me. He put his head in my chest. Here's this guy now in his late 20s, and he cried like a little boy.
It's difficult doing interviews like this. It's like getting up for a big sporting event. You know, I say my mind is like my prized iPhone - still a very sophisticated device, but one with a short-term battery, one that breaks down easily, pocket dials and gets lost. So in writing and in doing an interview like this, it beats the crap out of me. But I'm feeling and doing it. I'm beating the crap out of Alzheimer's. And there is a stereotype that Alzheimer's is just the end stage when, you know, you're in a nursing home, and you're getting ready to die. And the point is no, that's not true. There are millions more out there suffering through the stages of early onset Alzheimer's who are afraid to seek help; they're afraid to talk to people. And if I can help give them that voice so maybe things get a little better for them, then that's good.
RATH: Greg O'Brien is a writer on Cape Cod. His memoir is "On Pluto: Inside The Mind of A Alzheimer's." We'll be following Greg as he chronicles his experience with the disease. Next week, he tells us about how his life changed since his diagnosis five years ago.
O'BRIEN: More and more, I don't recognize people. And now people understand that, and God bless them, they come up and they introduce themselves to me. These are people I've known since childhood.
RATH: That's next week. And you can read more about Greg O'Brien at our website, npr.org.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
For children with autism, loud noises, bright lights and crowded spaces can be painful. Many parents with autistic children avoid these situations entirely, which often means missing fun outings. Some museums are starting to recognize this problem and tone down the sights and sounds. The Pacific Science Center is one of them. From member station KPLU in Seattle, Jennifer Wing has more.
JENNIFER WING, BYLINE: Saturday at the Pacific Science Center - life-size robotic dinosaurs roar, a giant video monitor shows a person sneezing as a spray of mist shoots down from the ceiling. Nearby, naked mole rats scurry blindly through a maze of tunnels. Outside, it's all mud and rain, which means this place is packed with adults trying to keep up with curious children. This is exactly the situation Mike Hiner tries to avoid with his 20-year-old son Steven, who's autistic.
MIKE HINER: We've got the library, you know, we have our usual routines that we do so it's really nice coming here for a change. The butterfly exhibit kind of freaked them out, but that's all right. We had fun. (Laughter).
WING: Steven Hiner is one of the many children and young adults in the northwest who have some form of autism spectrum disorder or ASD. In the Seattle school district, 10 percent of the special education population has ASD. And in nearby Bellevue, that figure is 17 percent. With a sideways grin, Steven shoots out a firm hand.
STEVEN HINER: Hello, my name is Steven. What's your name?
WING: My name's Jennifer. Nice to meet you.
S. HINER: Like it.
WING: The Hiners are here before the official hours. This is the one Saturday each month when the Science Center opens up early for people with autism spectrum disorders. For two hours, the lights are dimmed, the loud noises are toned down and there's room to move around because it's less crowded. Mike Hiner wouldn't have come here with his son during regular hours.
M. HINER: Well, we're going to spend money to go see something. And then you get there, and you have to leave. And it's sometimes difficult. So this is really nice.
WING: The requisite quiet and calm can be limiting and lead to feeling a little isolated. The Pacific Science Center's Renee Gervais says the whole point of opening up early on these Saturdays is to offer more access.
RENEE GERVAIS: What we want is to be able to provide our programming, provide these experiences for children who may love them, who may be able to kind of run with them and become very inspired through that interaction.
WING: Other museums and organizations across the country have similar programs from the Smithsonian in D.C. to the Dallas Museum of Art. Even NASCAR holds events where autistic children go to the track to watch a live race from a quiet room.
Inside the butterfly house, the place Steven Hiner didn't really like, unpredictable electric blue and yellow flying insects land on tropical flowers for a quick snack. Eight-year-old Desmond Tsai takes it all in. Jeffrey Eckenroade, a docent, introduces Desmond to the heavy scent of gardenias and Jasmine.
JEFFREY ECKENROADE: Yeah. Take a smell. What does that flower smell like?
DESMOND TSAI: Honey.
ECKENROADE: Yeah. Right.
DESMOND: Honey like a honey-made toast.
ECKENROADE: (Laughter) Right.
WING: Desmond's father Gordon Tsai says his son would never open up to a volunteer like this if it were loud and crowded.
GORDON TSAI: Clearly, you can tell he's interested, and he has a lot of questions. And it's just an opportunity for him to ask them. Normally, he wouldn't even try to. But now, he's totally engaging with them, which is a side we'd rarely see.
WING: The two hours go by fast, and 20-year-old Steven Hiner has had a great time. His sister Elizabeth helps him recap the highlights.
S. HINER: It's just a...
EELIZABETH HINER: Do you like it?
S. HINER: Like it.
E. HINER: The dinosaurs.
S. HINER: There are dinosaurs and there are puzzles. They're good.
WING: And with that, Steven hops on to his sister for a piggyback ride to go check out the planetarium. For NPR News, I'm Jennifer Wing in Seattle.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR West. I'm Arun Rath. "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central has a new senior international correspondent. South African comedian Trevor Noah joined Jon Stewart earlier this week and started by reminding the audience that it's not just Europe that has to worry about terrorism.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE DAILY SHOW")
TREVOR NOAH: Like sometimes, it just feels like Africa's the vaguest of Islamic terror. What happens in Africa, stays in Africa.
(LAUGHTER)
JON STEWART: That was a tremendous accent. (Laughter).
RATH: Trevor Noah, welcome to the program.
NOAH: Thank you very much for having me, Arun.
RATH: So congratulations on "The Daily Show." We saw your second appearance on Thursday night. That's a big deal.
NOAH: Yeah, it really is. I think it's all sinking in, but I'm enjoying every moment.
RATH: Let's go back to your first performance. This was in December. It started off kind of risky with a joke that, at first, seemed kind of lame.
NOAH: (Laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE DAILY SHOW")
NOAH: Yeah, I just flew in and, boy, are my arms tired.
(LAUGHTER)
STEWART: OK. All right there. Oldie, but a goodie. Very nice.
(LAUGHTER)
NOAH: No, no, no, seriously. I've been holding my arms like this since I got here.
(LAUGHTER)
NOAH: I never thought I'd be more afraid of police in America than in South Africa.
RATH: You're, at that point, holding your arms up like you're surrendering to the police.
NOAH: Yes. Yes. I guess that was the fun of the joke. I could see the disappointment on the people's faces when they thought that was genuinely the line that I was opening with, which was part of the fun.
RATH: And going on to talk about, you know, your friends who are afraid of the Ebola risks and coming to America.
NOAH: Yes. Yes. You know, people were looking to countries like South Africa saying, oh, you're an Ebola threat when flying into America, whereas, America had more Ebola cases than we had 'cause we had none.
RATH: It's also kind of a risky way to start off there by - you're taking some jabs at your new audience, at their country.
NOAH: Yeah. Well, what I've always said about comedy is I think if you do it in the right way, you can say anything to anybody because they know where you're coming from. I guess they know it's not malicious or there's no mal intent.
RATH: So on your appearances in "The Daily Show" so far, you fall into a shtick with Jon where it's sort of like he's kind of playing the straight guy, like he's the dumb American, and you're kind of having fun at his expense. Do you think you'll keep going with that or is that going to change up as you go along?
NOAH: I think we'll change it up depending on the story. That's the fun thing. But I think right now, it helps with certain stories because Jon has to ask the questions that maybe people are afraid themselves to ask. If he's willing to take that stance, then you open yourself up to an audience where nobody's going to go, I'm afraid to say I don't know what Davos is, I'm afraid to say I don't know who the Boko Haram are. I don't - you get what I'm saying. So I guess Jon has been kind enough to offer himself up sacrificially.
RATH: (Laughter). And you've talked about a lot of heavy stuff on "The Daily Show" so far - the Charlie Hebdo attacks, racial profiling and poverty. And in your standup, you're known for tackling topics like AIDS. I'm guessing, though, there are some sillier, lighter topics you'd like to take on.
NOAH: Oh, definitely, all the time. I always say, people always remember those things, which I guess is a good thing. But I have the silliest jokes you will ever hear. (Laughter).
(SOUNDBITE OF STAND-UP COMEDY SHOW)
NOAH: I enjoy your traffic lights, just standing there watching people obey them.
(LAUGHTER)
NOAH: I've never seen anything like it in my life 'cause, I mean, we do have traffic lights in Africa, but we don't use them the same way. It's almost like we saw them here and just brought them over just to fit in, you know.
(LAUGHTER)
NOAH: People were just like, what are these? These are the brand-new traffic lights. What are they for? Ah, just adds atmosphere to the intersection.
(LAUGHTER)
RATH: For people who don't know about your background, your stand up and your work before "The Daily Show," one of the things that you usually share is that you were born a crime.
NOAH: Yes.
RATH: Explain that to people.
NOAH: Well, I was born in South Africa during apartheid - a system of laws that made it illegal for people to mix in South Africa. And this was obviously awkward because I grew up in a mixed family. My mother is a black woman, South African Xhosa woman - and that's one of the clicks. That's not your mic malfunctioning. And my father's Swiss from Switzerland. So I grew up in a world where my existence in itself was a crime. And luckily, the country changed by the time I was 10 years old so I did not have to, I think, suffer through as much as my parents did.
RATH: Leading us out of "The Daily Show" because that's obviously a friendly audience, in terms of doing standup, who 's the tougher audience - Americans or South Africans?
NOAH: That's interesting. That's interesting. I would venture - I would say Americans may be tougher only because they've seen so much standup comedy. That's really what it is. People, they almost know what to expect, and there's a - you have to work harder to give them something different and something new. Whereas in South Africa, because the comedy scene is so new, because we've only had comedy, you know, since the really - since democracy started in 1994, so you're looking at a young comedy scene.
But at the same time, I feel like South Africans are less PC. We're a fresher nation. We laugh at more. We haven't gotten to the point where we're afraid to offend everyone so we say nothing. And that's a really interesting thing for me in America is - where it's interesting to see how afraid people are or how much censorship people put on themselves.
RATH: There's this notion that a lot of people have that great comedy or a lot of great comedy has its roots in great pain or in struggle. It may be hard for you to do this as a thought experiment, but do you think you would've been a comedian had you not grown up in South Africa?
NOAH: I genuinely don't know that. I think I may have become a comedian. I think because I still got it from my family. My mother is extremely funny. My grandfather was the funniest in the family. So it was something I feel that's been in the family on my mother's side for a while. My father's Swiss so humor doesn't play too well on his side. Everything is matter-of-fact and there's chocolate involved.
(LAUGHTER)
NOAH: But when it comes to my mother's side of the family, that was really the one currency we had was laughter. And that's really what it is. It's just, you know, your laughter takes you through everything.
RATH: South African comedian Trevor Noah is a new senior international correspondent on "The Daily Show." Thanks so much. It was great speaking with you.
NOAH: Thank you very much, Arun. Thank you very much for having me.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR West. I'm Arun Rath. The United States work force has more women than ever, more people of color than ever, more gay and transgender employees than ever. So more than ever, researchers are examining diversity and bias in the workplace.
Michelle Duguid is a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She decided to test the validity of a common belief - that requiring the use of politically correct language in the workplace also stifles creativity. It makes sense intuitively.
MICHELLE DUGUID: People should be able to freely think, throw any crazy ideas, and any constraint would actually dampen creativity.
RATH: But Duguid and her co-authors set up an experiment to see if that notion held up to scientific scrutiny. So they sat down students in groups of three to brainstorm ideas on how to use a vacant space on campus. Some of the groups were all men, some all women, others mixed. Control groups got to start right away with the brainstorming, but the test groups were primed with this script.
DUGUID: We're interested in gathering examples from college undergraduates of political correct behavior on campus. As a group, please list examples of political correctness that you have either heard of or directly experienced on this campus. And they did that for 10 minutes.
RATH: In the same-sex trios, the old notion held true. Groups of three men or three women who were instructed to think about political correctness were less creative than the control group. But in the mixed-gender groups that got the PC drill, creativity went up.
DUGUID: They generated more ideas, and those ideas were more novel. Whether it was two men and one woman or two women and one man, the results were consistent.
RATH: Here's how Duguid interprets those results.
DUGUID: Men are uncertain about, you know, what may be seen maybe as sexist or inappropriate. And women, they're uncertain about, you know, can I speak up because will my ideas be valued. But in both cases, by reducing this uncertainty, people were much more open - both men and women - to share more ideas and more novel ideas; ideas that were kind of out-of-the-box that would be associated with uncertainty.
RATH: Duguid and her colleagues started another experiment, one that looked at stereotypes. They tested whether educating people about stereotypes would in turn reduce stereotyping.
DUGUID: But we found that by telling, publicizing that everyone stereotypes - we'd say the vast majority of people stereotype in our study - that it actually creates a norm for stereotyping. People feel more comfortable expressing stereotypes or acting in ways that would be seen as inappropriate because it has set up this norm where everyone does it, so I might not be punished or isn't that bad.
RATH: Duguid and her co-author tinkered with their message. Rather than telling the group that everyone was guilty of stereotyping, they simply told them this.
DUGUID: The vast majority of people put effort into not stereotyping.
RATH: Here's what they found.
DUGUID: And by telling them the vast majority of people put effort into not stereotyping, actually had great effects, and it was the same as telling them that few people stereotyped. So that actually reduced stereotyping, and it was better - significantly better than telling them nothing at all.
RATH: For Michelle Duguid, the good news from her study is this.
DUGUID: I think most people want to be unbiased. And there are ways that we can try to make that happen.
RATH: Professor Michelle Duguid of Washington University.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR West. I'm Arun Rath.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CONGRESSMAN STEVE KING: Do you believe that the next president of the United States is going to be speaking from this stage to you, today?
RATH: Ready or not, the 2016 presidential race is underway. That was the voice of Iowa congressman, Steve King, speaking to a big crowd in downtown Des Moines, today, for what is the first big multi-candidate public event of the campaign season. Iowa, of course, will hold its first-in-the-nation caucuses just over one year from now. So when King, a conservative from the northwest corner of the state, invited would-be White House hopefuls to attend a daylong event in Des Moines, nine of them showed up. If it's Iowa and politics, there's a decent chance you'll find NPR correspondent, Don Gonyea, there. Don, greetings.
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: Hi there.
RATH: So it's still January of 2015. Given that, who's found their way to Iowa?
GONYEA: Here you go - Chris Christie, Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Ted Cruz, Scott Walker, some less well-known folks like retired neurosurgeon, Ben Carson. The business executive, Carly Fiorina, is here, former ambassador, John Bolton. Sarah Palin is here. So, too, is - are you ready - Donald Trump. Of course, there are lots of names missing - Romney, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio and a handful of other potentials.
RATH: And I've got to put in a plug because former governor, Mike Huckabee, is going to be on the show later on this hour. Let me ask you, though. Does the crowd seem - are they fired-up and ready for this?
GONYEA: They seem very ready. You know, you go around the country and people are so glad the election's over, and they're sick of it. But these are activists who've showed up here - more than 1,000 of them at this beautiful old theater downtown. They like the role they play. They like that the caucuses kick everything off, and yes, they're ready.
RATH: So in this so crowd of potential candidates, are there any early standouts?
GONYEA: I think when the stories are written about this event - and even in the early days - I think you're going to hear a lot about Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker. Now, people know of him and his battles with unions in Wisconsin, something that goes over very big in a conservative room like this here. And they know that he's a conservative who's been elected in a state that's gone blue in presidential elections for many, many cycles now, but people don't really know him. They don't really know what he's like.
And he prowled the stage, today, in his shirt sleeves, and, you know, he talked about those battles with unions. And then, he went into this riff on the economy that kind of gets to his frugality. He talked about how when he first got married 23 years ago, he made a big mistake. He paid full price for a gift from Kohl's - that Wisconsin-based department store. He paid full price at Kohl's for a gift for his wife, and she let him have it. He said he got in trouble for it, so he said he learned. Now, listen to this riff from Walker.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
GOVERNOR SCOTT WALKER: So now, If I'm going to go pick up a new shirt, I go to that rack that says it was $29.99, and I say it's marked down to $19.99. And then because I'm well-trained, I get that insert out from the Sunday newspaper. And I take it up to the clerk with my Kohl's credit card, and I get another 10 percent or 15 percent off. And then, I watch that mailer 'cause man, Tonette shops there a lot, so I know I'm going to get another 10 percent or 15 percent off. And if I'm really lucky, I get that flyer with 30 percent off, right, right?
GONYEA: And that story goes on for about another minute or so, but here's the deal. He turns it into a pitch on the economy, on saving money, on cutting taxes, on doing what it takes. It also appeals to, you know, women in the crowd, and it gives him kind of real, kind of working-class, regular-guy cred. So that story played really well as part of a speech that was well-received.
RATH: (Laughter) NPR's Don Gonyea at the Freedom Summit in Des Moines, Iowa. Don, thank you.
GONYEA: It's my pleasure.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Meanwhile in Cuba, historic talks took place this week as American and Cuban diplomats sat face-to-face in Havana. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson is now the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Cuba in nearly 40 years. But yesterday, just one day after Jacobson talked with Cuban government officials about restoring diplomatic relations, she met with a group of Cuban dissidents. NPR's Carrie Kahn says, that meeting caused some controversy. We reached Carrie in Havana.
CARRIE KAHN, BYLINE: As right on cue, as always, the Cuban officials are very unhappy when U.S. officials come here and meet with dissidents. And that's exactly what happened. Jacobson's Cuban counterpart gave an interview last night, where she said that this is just a violation of a national sovereignty. And what happens when U.S. officials do that, is that they meet with a small group of Cubans that are not representative of the opinions of the larger population. And this is a violation of national sovereignty. They hate when U.S. officials do it, and right on cue, they said that again.
RATH: And what did Jacobson talk about with the dissidents yesterday? And did they have a message for her?
KAHN: The interesting thing about the dissident groups here in Cuba is that there's a lot of different views. Some are very much in favor of the U.S. opening diplomatic relations with Cuba, and some are not. And so she actually met with some dissidents that were in favor of U.S. policy. And those that were not in favor of U.S. policy boycotted the meetings and then later in the day, held their own press conference where they expressed their views, which we have heard for a long time. They just feel that there should not be any engagement with the Castro regime. But that is what the U.S. officials say is not working and that they want to change after 50 years of this policy.
RATH: Carrie, you've been out talking with people around Havana. What kind of things are you hearing about reestablishing diplomatic ties?
KAHN: I'd say overwhelmingly, the expectations are incredibly high. You hear people saying that they are so excited that they will be able to go to the U.S. They'll be able to go visit relatives that they haven't seen for years, decades. You hear them saying that now they'll even have more buses on the street of Havana. It's just - the expectations are very high, and they're going to be difficult to meet because the process is going to be incredibly slow. That's what we heard from both U.S. and Cuban officials - that, you know, just setting up embassies and exchanging ambassadors is probably the easy part. The hard part is repairing an acrimonious 50-year relationship. That's going to take a long time and a lot more work and a lot more meetings.
RATH: NPR's Carrie Kahn. Carrie, thank you.
KAHN: Thank you very much.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Nearly 80 people in the United States are now confirmed to have measles, most of them with confirmed links to the outbreak that started at Disneyland and Disney's California Adventure Park. The California Department of Public Health was able to find vaccination records for some of the infected. They found that at least 28 had not received the measles vaccine.
Last April, we examined the state of the anti-vaccination movement, and turned to science writer, Seth Mnookin, who wrote a book about the vaccine-autism controversy. We called him again this week and started by playing back part of a conversation we had with him last year. In it, he told about an epidemiologist who would track where the anti-vaccine trend tends to cluster.
SETH MNOOKIN: And he said, sure, we just take out a map and put a pushpin everywhere there's a Whole Foods and draw a circle around that area. He was speaking slightly in jest, but what he was referring to is the fact that you do see a number of well-educated, politically liberal people who self-identify as being environmentally conscious.
RATH: So right now, we have an outbreak in Orange County, California, with cases in places like the Bay Area, Oregon, Washington State.
MNOOKIN: Yeah, those are actually exactly the types of communities that the epidemiologist I was talking to in that instance was referring to. These are all communities that have higher-than-average income, higher-than-average education levels. Their communities, for - unfortunately, where the idea that by not vaccinating your son - how doing something for your children has taken hold. And I think now, we're seeing some of the really, really scary effects of that.
RATH: So this is kind of what you were expecting, but is there anything that you've learned from this current outbreak in California?
MNOOKIN: I guess one heartening thing is that over the past couple of years, the vast majority of parents who do support vaccination and who do want their children and the people around them to be protected have realized that they really need to stand up and make their voices heard. For a long time, this was an issue where you would have really, really vocal anti-vaccine advocates, and then, the people who sort of supported the status quo didn't feel as compelled to make their voices heard.
But now we have a situation where, you know, you have hundreds of thousands of people potentially at risk. You have an enormous burden on the public health system. And you have whole populations of people - infants, anyone who's immunosuppressed, the elderly - who are not only vulnerable to measles infections, but if they do get infected, are likely to fare far worse than just having a trip to the hospital.
RATH: So with a number of cases growing to over 70 this week, how worried should we be?
MNOOKIN: Well, the thing about measles is it's the most infectious microbe known to humankind. If I was infected and I walked into a room and then left, you could get infected if you came into that room, even two hours later. It has a 90 percent transmission rate. So if you have measles and you're around 10 people who don't have measles but are vulnerable, nine of them will get infected. It's just incredible, incredible numbers.
And that's one of the reasons why public health officials get so anxious about measles and scramble so much to contain outbreaks. What we're seeing, now, in how these cases have multiplied over the past days and weeks. I think we're still, thankfully, not in a worst-case scenario, which is you get an infection in a community where you have a really, really high number of unvaccinated children, and all of a sudden, you know, from one day to the next, you go from 70 cases to 100 cases.
RATH: That's Seth Mnookin. His most recent book is called "The Panic Virus." Seth, thanks very much.
MNOOKIN: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Two fighters who used to perform for World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE, are suing the company, alleging that it ignored signs of brain damage. NPR's Jasmine Garsd has more.
JASMINE GARSD, BYLINE: The lawsuit was filed by Vito "Big Vito" Lograsso and Evan Singleton, who wrestled as Adam Mercer. It alleges that they both suffered serious neurological damage, with symptoms like memory loss and convulsions, as a result of fighting. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy is a progressive, degenerative disease of the brain, associated with repeated concussions. It's been known for years to affect boxers, and more recently, NFL players. It's linked to depression, impulse control problems and dementia.
CHRIS NOWINSKI: When done properly, nobody should ever get hurt, and no one should ever be hit in the head.
GARSD: That's former WWE wrestler, Chris Nowinski. In 2007, he founded the Sports Legacy Institute, a nonprofit that focuses on CTE. Nowinski offers an example of how wrestling has evolved. It's the chair shot - you know, the one where one fighter hits the other with a chair.
NOWINSKI: Twenty or 30 years ago, everybody put their hand up on a chair shot, and it would never hit you in the head.
GARSD: But then, he says, a rival wrestling company took it further.
NOWINSKI: And they actually let themselves get hit in the head.
GARSD: Nowinski says, these days, both wrestlers and companies understand the dangers of concussions. Charles LaDuca, the lawyer representing Lograsso and Mercer, say that's not true.
CHARLES LADUCA: WWE deliberately creates and heightens the violence of these matches in order to heat up the audiences and increase the profit.
GARSD: He claims the WWE discouraged his clients from seeking medical help when they get injured, making the damage worse.
JERRY MCDEVITT: You could put what those lawyers know about wrestling in a thimble and it would not overflow.
GARSD: Jerry McDevitt is WWE's legal counsel. He says Adam Mercer actually received ample medical attention, and that chair move isn't just dangerous, it's banned. And he says WWE is...
MCDEVITT: Way ahead of the curve on concussions, and have been for years.
GARSD: The suit is seeking monetary damage and medical monitoring. Jasmine Garsd, NPR News, Washington.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
A new book by Ravi Howard is called "Driving The King." It's a fictionalized account of the adventures of Nat King Cole and his bodyguard driver, a guy named Nat Weary, a guy who's plucked from Jim Crow Alabama into glitzy Los Angeles in the 1950s. How Ravi Howard got that idea, well, that story goes back a long way, back before his first novel, before he won an Emmy for his work on "Inside The NFL," before grad school, before college, way back when he was just a 10-year-old kid. Here's Ravi himself to tell the story.
RAVI HOWARD: I was growing up in Montgomery. And like most kids there, I had heard the stories of the Montgomery bus boycott and Martin Luther King Jr. And that history was just always present. I was also made familiar with the story of Nat Cole almost by accident on a black history month tour that I took around the city when I was about 10 years old.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "L.O.V.E.")
NAT KING COLE: (Singing) L is for the way you look at me.
HOWARD: I can remember it just being kind of a cold, rainy February Saturday. I remember going and almost thinking, well, I'm familiar with all of the things that I'm going to see because I live here. But I do remember kind of pulling up to this house on St. John's Street, kind of white clapboard house, clapboard siding with green shutters and being told, well, this is the house where Nat King Cole was born. This is the house where he grew up. And it was in an area that I would, you know, pass going to the barbershop or walk by going to the park. So I had all this personal connection to this neighborhood where he kind of grew up. So I kind of started to think about, well, where did I come from? What was going on in Montgomery? And all of those little stories that I'd heard growing up, those little experiences I wanted to build into my life as a writer.
When I was a student at Howard, I was studying journalism, researching, trying to find stories. Eventually, though, I went to graduate school and started writing creatively. So those, you know, aspects of writing - be it the research or just imagining - kind of came together. You know, those were the tools I applied to those things that I'd heard growing up. After college, I worked for a travel magazine for a while. I was doing freelance work for a while just trying to get myself - I guess work up the courage to go into fiction. But NFL Films was something that I started to do immediately after graduate school.
I worked at NFL Films for four years. And what I really loved about that experience was we were telling stories that many networks were telling. Anyone had access to the facts of who won or what the box score might've been for a particular game. So it became important to then say, well, how are we going to stylistically tell this in a way that's going to be compelling? Those four years after graduate school were really kind of transformative because I was writing fiction at night, and I was doing sports work during the day. So I think I saw how versatile I think I had to be as a writer.
Things kind of started to take off with the fiction, and so we ended up moving to Alabama, which is where my first book took place. The first book, "Like Trees Walking," was based on the true story of a lynching of a young man named Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama. My extended family is from Mobile. So that was also a story that I grew up hearing because it happened in 1981. And so when I became a writer, I just kept kind of going back to what that history was; not just the facts of it, but how people might have felt within that moment.
After, you know, completing that and feeling good about the process, I started to mime my childhood a little bit more to see what stories kind of resonated or kind of came back to the surface that I really wanted to live in for a little while longer to tell the story. And I think maybe I was prompted to think about the Nat Cole story more because the block that he lived on is no longer there. It was demolished when the college was expanding. And a group of people got together and helped to get his house saved or preserved. And it has been moved a couple of blocks away. And it kind of made the news again. So I'm looking at pictures of this house that I remember from this tour. It's on a different block. It's facing a different direction. And I had a professor in college who said, when you move an old house or an old building, you are creating a fiction.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE NAT KING COLE SHOW")
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Ladies and gentlemen, "The Nat King Cole Show."
HOWARD: There's just so much on Nat Cole - books, documentaries, so much music. So I kind of had this idea. I had this voice. I had this visual of him from his television show, but I kind of needed these spaces; spaces outside of the airway, television airwaves, spaces outside of the radio, outside of records. It was really grounding for me to take someone with such a big national and international following and kind of boil his story down initially to this one space where he lived. And I needed a starting point. I had a lot of ideas or bullet points or historical moments, but I needed to kind of have a starting point visually for the storytelling process. And that house kind of became it for me.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "UNFORGETTABLE")
COLE: (Singing) Unforgettable. That's what you are.
RATH: Ravi Howard's novel is called "Driving The King." It's out now.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "UNFORGETTABLE")
COLE: (Singing) Unforgettable.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
You're tuned to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR West. I'm Arun Rath. Going to a doll show is not really my idea of a good time. So I was shocked to find myself having a blast at a doll exhibit that's going on right now at the William Grant Still Art Center in the West Adams neighborhood in Los Angeles.
KEISA DAVIS: This is Nina Simone. This is Gil Scott-Heron.
RATH: This is the Black Doll Show. Curator Keisa Davis is showing me around.
DAVIS: We can start off with her.
RATH: So this looks like a conventional superhero suspended from the ceiling. She's got a cape. She's flying.
DAVIS: She's flying. This is Alice Coltrane. Her name is Harp. Her music...
RATH: She played the harp - Alice Coltrane.
DAVIS: Yeah, exactly, because she has a cape and because her arms are able to suspend, we thought it would be great to have her suspending from the ceiling. I love her up there.
RATH: The exhibit features dolls submitted by artists and collectors from around the country. And this year's theme is jazz superheroes and features more than 75 pieces.
DAVIS: Oh, and in here, we have a literal portrayal of music giants. They don't have capes or adornments or anything. But again, the idea's to use their talents as superhero powers. We have Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Holiday, Lena Horne and then Cab Calloway conducting.
RATH: Oh, there he is (laughter).
DAVIS: Yeah.
RATH: The exhibit was founded in the 1980s by the late Cecil Fergerson, who was the first black curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He was inspired a classic psychology experiment - the Doll Test. During the 1940s, two psychologists, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, set out to measure the effects of segregation on children, using black and white dolls. They found that white and black kids both preferred white dolls and tended to assign positive qualities to the white dolls and negative ones to the black dolls.
AMI MOTEVALLI: It wasn't just about education or formal education but about the education that we receive from our environment on a day-to-day basis.
RATH: That's Ami Motevalli, the director of the art center. The Doll Test was cited by the Supreme Court in its landmark Brown vs. the Board of Education decision that ended legal segregation in public schools. But a court decision can't alter popular culture or change how kids feel about themselves. So in the 1980s, curator Cecil Fergerson started the Black Doll Show.
MOTEVALLI: He curated this exhibition with a call out to artists asking artists to make dolls. And so every single doll was actually a handmade doll because Cecil's idea was that so long ago, people had to actually fabricate their own dolls. They had to make things out of whatever they had so that their children can have something that they can kind of use to comfort themselves or play with or identify with.
RATH: The Black Doll Show is now in its 34th year. Past themes have included dolls in space and dolls of color from around the world. For this year's theme of jazz superheroes, Keisa Davis tapped into a pre-existing world of black superheroes courtesy of Marvel Comics.
(SOUNDBITE OF BLACK PANTHER MUSIC VIDEO)
UNIDENTIFIED VOICE ACTOR: The Black Panther is ready for you.
DAVIS: In my vision, we're working with a cohort of jazz superheroes who use their music to transcend injustice happening in Wakanda.
RATH: Wakanda is a fictional African nation, home of the superhero Black Panther, one of the traditional superheroes on display here.
DAVIS: So this is Black Panther's action figure, and this is Storm's action figure.
RATH: The show also includes comics and action figures donated by local collectors. Keisa Davis has brought Wakanda to West Adams and got artists from all over the country to create new inhabitants.
DAVIS: When are you going to have an opportunity to walk into a world where you have characters and superheroes that are of color and that little kids are going to be able to resonate with and feel empowered about? So that's the whole point, too. You're not going to find this at Target (laughter), you know?
RATH: You know, thinking about my own kids, I imagine that one point of frustration might be there are probably a lot of people that want to take these home with them.
DAVIS: Yeah. I mean, that happens a lot. Bur from our experiences, it's more so the adults that want to touch and take. They're not as bad as the adults.
RATH: And there's a chance for those who do want to touch and take to make their own dolls.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOLL-MAKING CLASS)
TERESA TOLLIVER: OK, watch everybody. Can I get everybody's attention for a second?
RATH: Artist and doll-maker Teresa Tolliver leads doll-making workshops. Here she is guiding children and adults, as they piece together dolls with recycled bottles, fabric, popsicle sticks and hot glue. They're making three different types of dolls.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOLL-MAKING CLASS)
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: I want to do the mermaid.
TOLLIVER: I know you do.
RATH: Most of the children want to make a mermaid doll.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOLL-MAKING CLASS)
DESTINY HILL: Now I'm making a skirt for her.
RATH: Destiny Hill is at the class with her grandmother. It's her first time at the center. She's making the mermaid doll and, like everyone else, she has a unique design.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOLL-MAKING CLASS)
HILL: I'm probably going to put on blue hair.
TOLLIVER: Isn't that wonderful? That's what I like. You see the smile on her face? That's what I like.
RATH: For curator Keisa Davis, this kind of engagement shows what locally based arts programs can do.
DAVIS: One of the girls who came to the opening - she was wearing a cape at the opening the entire night. And then the next day the mom contacted me and let me know that she was so inspired that she was, like, making dolls, drawing dolls and giving all the girls African names as superheroes. So that was really touching. And that's one of those kind of, like, you know, moments where you're, like, OK, this works.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
It had all the makings of a beautiful post-war love story. A man living thousands of miles from his native land places a personal ad for a pen pal back home. A pretty girl starts writing back. Through their letters, they fall in love. He proposes, and she moves to be with him. They have three beautiful children and a charming home in Canada. Then she finds out he's a part of a Serbian terrorist organization preparing to bomb targets across the continent. What would you do?
NINA BUNJEVAC: She only knew that she had to run away and save the lives of her children.
RATH: This is the story of Nina Bunjevac's parents, laid out in a haunting new graphic memoir called "Fatherland." Her mother, under the guise of visiting family back in Yugoslavia, was able to leave with Nina and her older sister. Nina was 1-year-old. Her father, Peter Bunjevac, was killed just two years later.
BUNJEVAC: My opinion of my father up to 16, 18, 20 years of age was he was a nationalist, and he blew up, and what he did was always kind of shrouded in secrecy and everything. But once I started discovering more and more, I started - which would be probably '99, when I realized that his ideology was exactly responsible for the dissolution of the country that I had lived in. And that brought a shock to me. I was very resentful for a long time. Working through the book and doing the research, I realized that there is more to it. And I think there's more understanding about who he was and less judging.
RATH: Yet the first thing that we know about your father, reading this book, is the aspect of violence. He dies an explosion, apparently working on a bomb for an attack.
BUNJEVAC: Yeah.
RATH: But you learn more about the roots of his violence, more about - a bit more of a sympathetic view of him.
BUNJEVAC: Well, yeah. I look at his childhood. He was born in a Serbian village in Croatia in '36. So by the time that he was 5, the war had started. And Croatia was a fascist country at the time. The Serbs were also deported to the Jasenovac concentration camp. My father's father was killed in Jasenovac in 1945. He loses his mother shortly after the war. But even before that, his father was very violent. And his mother lived under so much stress that, I think, that she basically died very young from witnessing the war and the aggression in the family.
So I think that my father was also exposed - being exposed to the same. I don't think that he really had much of a choice. After the war, he was behaving oddly. He began to torture animals. His grandparents sent him to military school because that was the only way they thought they could deal with that kind of behavior. These days, we know about PTSD. We know about childhood traumas, like, that, you know, he probably, in this day and age - he would have received years of therapy. But no, I think I understand where he comes from. I do not agree of his actions. I do not agree with his ideology. But I do understand.
RATH: I want to talk about your artistic technique. A lot of people have mentioned how striking it is. It's kind of, like, a crosshatch style of pen drawing that looks sort of like engravings. It has a strange effect that you would expect something like that - that looks like engravings - to kind of drain emotion out.
BUNJEVAC: Yeah.
RATH: But you're portraying these gut-wrenching, emotional moments. And they really communicate that.
BUNJEVAC: Well, I always believed that overly sentimental pieces have, like, this kind of aura of cheapness, you know? I always try to stay very objective.
RATH: You reproduce some old family snapshots. And I was wondering what that was like for you artistically - to do that reproduction by your own hand, if you learned things from these images you didn't know about before.
BUNJEVAC: Oh, it was really interesting doing reproductions of these photographs because in order to do so, I had to scan them and then zoom in. And it was - it really - it resembled detective work because I would discover things. For example, my grandmother - my father's mother - who was basically abused by her husband physically - when I scanned this picture of her and her younger sister, Mara, I noticed that the photograph of my grandmother, where her face was, was very light - kind of, like, very overexposed look. You couldn't really see it. And then I zoomed in. And thanks to Photoshop, I was able to bring out the tones and realized that she had a black eye that the photographer tried to hide.
It was things like that. It was - that was very interesting. That was detective work. But then scanning in pictures from my early childhood was very difficult. And drawing that - looking at facial expressions - my mom not smiling, my sister kind of having the forced smile, you know, smile for daddy for the photograph. And me, who has a face that can't hide emotion, as I say in the book. And in every photograph, I look really angry or sad. So, you know, that was probably the best part - was using the photographs because I really think it makes the whole story a little bit more real and brings it home.
RATH: The sense of exile has defined both of your parents' lives in different ways - your father and your mother. Has that sense of exile - how has that affected your own life?
BUNJEVAC: I live in permanent exile (laughter). My life's been marked by moving, shifting the continents, going from one country to the next. The only time I feel comfortable is when I'm around other cartoonists and artists and activists from former Yugoslav republics. I think there's something that binds us together. And that's lost country, lost childhood memories, the country that doesn't exist anymore and the crazy ideologies that, you know, took it apart.
RATH: Nina Bunjevac is the author and illustrator of the new graphic memoir "Fatherland." The book is out now. Nina, thanks so much.
BUNJEVAC: Thank you so much for having me, Arun.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Think about how difficult it can be to organize an evening out with friends. You're busy. They're busy - conflicting schedules, babysitters. Well, consider the seven solo artists who sometimes get together as the band Doomtree.
DESSA: Making a Doomtree record is like planning a wedding for seven people because you do send out a lot of, like, save the dates, don't forget - RSVP to make this record.
RATH: Clearly, it was worth the effort.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BEASTFACE")
DOOMTREE: (Singing) And I know where to go when I'm lost, where to cope, when I need a little hideout. But nothing new under the sun, so head up and get up and get on the run. So you the boogey man, huh? Yeah right. Where you at? I ain't scared. Bend prism in the dark, dilated, working with the moonlight. I can see who's hunting. Wherever I go, there I am, eyes wide open, not for nothing. Sucka headspin unitl it nod off, hyperventilated, mind eradicated. Boy, I'm lucky I made it. Little homie, be a boy.
RATH: Doomtree started putting Minneapolis on the hip-hop map 15 years ago. I spoke with two of the seven - Dessa and P.O.S. Their new album comes out on Tuesday. It's called "All Hands." And to make it, they say they had to get off the grid.
DESSA: We ended up sequestering ourselves in a series of cabins just to make sure that we weren't distracted by the city or by, like, ringing phones. So we did our best to get ourselves out of cell phone reception.
P.O.S.: A cabin that Dessa found on Twitter that didn't have finished walls and let all the bugs in. But...
DESSA: OK. In my defense, the crew was, like, hey, we need a cabin. And I found a cabin for free.
P.O.S.: No, no, no. You killed it. I was very happy with that cabin.
RATH: No, see, when I picture a cabin, I just - I go right to horror movies, you know, like "The Evil Dead" or something like that. What are the - describe the cabin that you guys were working in?
DESSA: Your imagination is too accurate, unfortunately, for the cabin that I found on Twitter. But it was really sweet. We were short cabin. And I tweeted, hey, anybody willing to let, like, seven rapping strangers stay in your cabin? And somebody on Twitter said, sure.
RATH: And you have a song on here called "Cabin Killer."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CABIN KILLER")
DOOMTREE: (Singing) But it keeps genes hardy, so feed a fever, the winter we starve. Keep razoring the cheek, robin in the ribcage, braided in the street, hair down in the crib stay. Easy on the beat. Mouths get easier to feed. Meter's running, every minute got to matter. Move. I got a minimum to meet.
DESSA: This one was, like, a formative track on the record for me because I remember hearing the beat and saying, you know what? I don't really hear myself on this one. And then I heard the way that Mike...
RATH: That's Mike Mictlan?
DESSA: Mike Mictlan, yeah, rapped on that. And then a little dam broke inside my chest of, like, inspiration or competition or something. And I really wanted to, like, you know, claim my 16 bars on the track. And there's not any, like, one-upsmanship, but there's very much a drive to show and prove and come out as hard as all the other member of the crew are.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CABIN KILLER")
DOOMTREE: Beamer and the Sim simma. The Vimmy, the semi, Petty bounty, any penny or any fedi. Homie, is you relevant? Let me get a piece. I'm going to tell it, develop it, sell it to the beast. Rolling in the breadbox, mayo spilling on the ceiling, bailing one eight seven.
P.O.S.: He's made me want to rap like him since I met him in 10th grade.
DESSA: Yeah. I think the secret weapon of Doomtree is feeling like maybe you're not good enough every time.
P.O.S.: I think him and Sims kind of came with it on this record as far as, like, we are professional rap pattern destroyers. Deal with it, kind of.
RATH: I'm speaking with Dessa and P.O.S. from Doomtree. Their new album is called "All Hands." A lot of hip-hop scenes make a big deal about, you know, their pedigree - where they come from. There's the Atlanta scene, Miami scene, Brooklyn, South Central. Do you care about sounding like Minnesota?
P.O.S.: I don't know if it's a matter of caring about sounding like Minnesota. We do. We do, I think, just happen to sound like Minnesota - Minneapolis. Whether it's the, like, atmosphere-inspired underground vibe or it's, you know, Prince or The Time, like, we've been soaking in it - and Dillinger Four and Husker Du and all of these bands, you know. I mean, I only listen to music from here - for a couple solid years of, you know, being a punk rocker, being like a hip-hoper, just being really proud of my city and knowing that I could get any style I was looking for around here. I think just being around such good, quality musicians for so long - it just, whether you're trying to sound like a scene or not, you just end up sounding like where you're fom, you know?
RATH: The song "Gray Duck" gets at that little bit, doesn't it?
P.O.S.: It does. I don't think people outside of here know even what that is.
DESSA: The childhood chase game that's called duck-duck-goose everywhere else in the country is called duck-duck-gray duck in Minnesota. And that's what it's actually called. So get with the program. So yeah, so we definitely - you're right. We titled that song as a tipped hat, like, to exactly where we come from. And everybody from Minnesota immediately knows - actually, no they don't because some of us don't even know that it's called something else elsewhere.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GRAY DUCK")
DOOMTREE: (Singing) Closed the circuit skull full of white light, mouthful of ash. Sparks the pavement, dragging the chain, anchor's off, man, lost it again. Steady on, got to push through the rain. Weather in the veins, came for this, train for this. Made for this, pray they miss, duck. Duck, gray duck, gets up and running. Rest fall back like a bridge in London. Brand new brakes - I never touch them.
RATH: There aren't tons of hip-hop collectives. And I think, like, you know, a lot of bands break up because of egos. And hip-hop is something you think where there's a lot of big egos. Why is it you guys are able to make it work, where you just kind of drive each other harder instead of, you know, just getting into one-upsmanship?
P.O.S.: I don't know. I think that a lot of the first years of this crew - they were a lot rockier than I feel like they are now. And I think that kind of wanting to do it so bad and getting through some really tough times kind of made it easier to stick it out for, you know, such a long time that we've been at it.
RATH: You guys have been together since high school, right? Doing this since high school?
P.O.S.: Well, a lot of us have been friends since high school.
DESSA: And I think there's also sort of, like - there was a double-edged sword to the slow rate of commercial success, you know? I think if we'd gotten big and made a lot of money when we were 23 - I don't know if we would've been able to stay together. We were able to, like, acclimate to every step along the way. And when I joined the crew, you know, Stef said to me - I think what he said to everybody - which was this thing is friendship first. And it's music second. And it's money third. And I remember telling that to, like, my dad and him being, like, you know, have fun - good summer or whatever. That does not the foundation of a sustainable LLC sound like. But it worked.
RATH: That is P.O.S. and Dessa from the band Doomtree. Their new album is called "All Hands." You can hear few tracks on our website, nprmusic.org. Fantastic album and real pleasure speaking with both of you. Thank you.
P.O.S.: Thank you. This was really cool.
DESSA: Thanks, Arun.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Now for the latest installment of our series, My Big Break, about career triumphs big and small. This story comes to us from a listener - Tom Toro in Kansas City. He's a cartoonist at the New Yorker. It's a career he kind of stumbled upon. He actually went to film school at NYU. That's when he realized he was in the wrong field. At the time, Toro had no idea what he was going to do.
TOM TORO: Up to my neck in debt, directionless, feeling lost in a huge city, and I went into a pretty dark depression. I ended up dropping out of film school. I floundered around for a little while. And I finally just had to come back home.
I had sort of been a golden child. I was valedictorian of my high school class. I went to Yale. I got into NYU right out of undergrad. And all the sudden, I'm back at home. I don't think my parents really understood what I was doing there. And I almost didn't understand myself. So that first period of being at home was just kind of long, quiet dinners, sitting around the dinner table, trying to make conversation. I went to this used book sale, and in a cardboard box, there was a stack of old magazines. For some reason, I was drawn toward them. And I started rifling through them. And they were just a bunch of old New Yorkers. And, you know, there they were - these cartoons, in among the articles. I don't know. Something just clicked. And I just - I started drawing again.
Here's the thing about breaking into the New Yorker. No one tells you how to do it. So I just sent them to the New Yorker by post. I would walk from my parents' house down to the post office and mail off these packets of cartoons that I was sketching together every week. You know, I kept getting those form rejections back. It's, like, two of the most elegantly phrased sentences. The New Yorker found the way to, like, most courteously and most briefly reject people. It's just beautiful. You feel, like, so honored to receive it. And yet it's a brush-off. It's so well done. But I just had a stack of those.
And finally, I decided, after about a year-and-a-half, I'm just going to go and meet the guy - the editor, Bob Mankoff - and sit across from him and show him my stuff and see what he has to say. And, you know, I went in. He looked at my stuff. You know, I was just, you know, nervously sitting there, waiting for him to say something. And I remember he just - he looked up and he said, you know, I don't see any joy in these. These aren't ready yet. And you're, like, OK, there's - I see the standard here. I know that I have to live up to this, you know. And so I went back home. And I just threw everything that I had done previously out the door, sat down with a blank sheet of paper and just tried to draw from the heart.
It was a perfectly ordinary day. I was just back in the backyard, and I wandered back into my mom's office - went in there, logged in. And there, sitting at the top of my inbox, was the email from Bob's assistant. It said cartoon sold.
So that was my big break. January 20, 2010 - cartoon sold (laughter). It was the 610th cartoon that I sent in to them. Two cowboys sitting at the bar - in the background, you see the saloon doors. Over the top of the saloon doors, there's the face of a third cowboy. But below the saloon doors, it's just blank. And one of the cowboys at the bar is pointing back over, and he says, that there is one bowlegged cowboy. It's funnier if you see it. You have to go see it. You have to look it up. I'm just very appreciative. I feel very lucky. And I'll be forever grateful for that.
RATH: Cartoonist Tom Toro - he's the featured artist for the cartoon caption contest in the New Yorker this weekend. Submissions are due today. You don't have to sketch 610 cartoons to have a big break. Do what Tom did. Send us an email with your story - mybigbreak@npr.org. This is NPR News.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR West. I'm Arun Rath. President Barack Obama arrived in India today for a three-day visit that aims to reinvigorate the U.S.-India relationship. The new government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to advance India's stature in the world, and evolving stronger ties with the U.S. appears to be part of that strategy. NPR's Julie McCarthy joins us from New Delhi. Julie, what did the two men accomplish today?
JULIE MCCARTHY: Well, apart from the pomp and circumstances that attended President Obama's second visit, there was substance. The president and Prime Minister Modi both stressed the importance of cooperating on climate change, Arun. You know, the Himalayas are melting and India stands to be very hard hit by this. And Obama's also very keen to deliver a global agreement in Paris later this year. But for India that's a tall order. It's the world's third-largest carbon polluter after China and the U.S. and its industrial development is just getting underway. So the big question here is whether India can find an alternative model for growth that is less toxic. It plans to increase its solar capacity by a huge amount, but the most talked about breakthrough was a nuclear deal between the two sides that would clear the way for American companies to come into India and build nuclear plants - a carbon-free form of energy. Now, reducing carbon emissions, as you know, is a delicate diplomatic tightrope for states. And it could only be helped here by two leaders who seem to have a real rapport.
RATH: And take us through the day. It sounds like the two men are developing a bit of a bromance.
MCCARTHY: (Laughter) Indeed. The most telling moment, I think, was when they were alone, actually. It was a walkabout through the grounds of Hyderabad House, which is a manicured government building. It's beautiful and it seemed to set the tone. It was very cordial. It was very informal. The two sat alone in this setting and drank tea, and Modi poured, by the way. He was very animated, laughing, the president was smiling. And Mr. Obama seemed to appreciate this relaxed approach to work and he was ready to take the tradition home with him. Here's what he had to say afterwards.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Prime Minister Modi, thank you for hosting me, including our chai pe charcha.
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: We need more of those in the White House.
MCCARTHY: Chai pe charcha is basically the talk over tea. It's Modi's specialty, right? And so is this orchestrated PR behind the tea ceremony, which was viewed by millions of people on TV who have a pretty big curiosity about these two, who are, in some ways, you know, the odd couple - the Indian religious nationalist and the American constitutional scholar and Nobel Prize winner.
RATH: Julie, this president has got a lot on his plate. Do we have a sense of why he is putting so much stock into India making this second trip?
MCCARTHY: That's right. You know, you can only conclude that he sees the opportunity to re-energize relations with a country that is hugely strategic in a volatile part of the world. India is also interested in taking its place on the global stage. And they have a leader in Modi who is determined to expand India's influence, and Obama seems to be all for it. India's got a $2 trillion economy and it's positioned to overtake China's growth, according to the IMF, next year. So the U.S. and President Obama see problems, certainly, but see great potential here.
RATH: NPR's Julie McCarthy in New Delhi. Julie, thank you.
MCCARTHY: Thank you.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
The war in eastern Ukraine seems to have restarted. Russian-backed militias have launched an offensive on several fronts. NATO says that Russian troops are now openly taking part in the assault, providing heavy weapons and advanced technology to the militias. President Obama says the U.S. is considering all options short of military action, and the European Union has called a meeting of its foreign ministers. We've been speaking with NPR's Corey Flintoff in Kyiv. I asked him about the situation on the ground in eastern Ukraine.
COREY FLINTOFF: Well, Arun, the separatist leader in Donetsk - Alexander Zakharchenko is his name - said on Friday that he won't be seeking any more cease-fires. He said the militias would go on the offensive and that seems to be exactly what's happening. Yesterday, the militias fired several volleys of rockets into Mariupol. That's a port city in southeastern Ukraine. They killed at least 30 people, wounded dozens more, and that attack was widely denounced. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe - the OSCE - called it an indiscriminate attack on civilians, reckless and disgraceful. But the militias have kept up their attack on the city's defenses. They're also attacking a rail hub in Luhansk province, and they're still pushing at Ukrainian positions that are close to the main city of Donetsk.
RATH: Corey, we're hearing that Russian troops are taking a much more open part in this fighting, despite the repeated denials from President Putin. Is their firm evidence now that these are really Russian troops?
FLINTOFF: Well, President Putin denied that Russian troops were in Crimea last spring, but once his troops had seized the Peninsula, he admitted, in effect, that he had been lying. NATO says it's been monitoring these columns of vehicles with heavy weapons that have been flowing in from Russia. They even measure the heat signatures of these vehicles, and they say it's clear that it's a buildup of Russian troops and weapons inside Ukraine. There's also been a lot of video shot by reporters and civilians, including, for instance, one that appears to show troops with Russian Marine insignia fighting at the Donetsk airport. I've seen other photos that show tanks and rocket launchers that are of a newer type that only the Russian military uses. President Obama referred just today to what he said was, and I'm quoting, "Russian equipment, Russian financing, Russian training and Russian troops" who are backing up these separatists.
RATH: And President Obama also said that Washington is considering all options short of military action to isolate Russia. But will anything short of military action stop this offensive?
FLINTOFF: Well, Vladimir Putin seems to have considered the possible consequences, including increased sanctions and greater isolation, and apparently decided that he doesn't care. Last week, several Russian officials mentioned what they considered to be the most severe financial sanction of all. And that would be cutting Russia off from the SWIFT banking system. It would make it really difficult for Russia to transfer money internationally. One official said it would be a sign that the Cold War was officially underway. So it shows that the Russians have been thinking about this, but it hasn't deterred them. Many analysts think this offensive is a drive to get as much strategic territory under the separatist control as possible before turning this region into a frozen conflict. You know, that would give Russia a lot of leverage over the Ukrainian government, and nothing short of war would dislodge them.
RATH: NPR's Corey Flintoff in Kyiv. Corey, thank you.
FLINTOFF: Thank you, Arun.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has been roundly criticized for the striking lack of diversity in this year's Oscar nominees. So it may not be much of a surprise that the roughly 6,000 members of the Academy aren't that diverse themselves.
DARNELL HUNT: Roughly 90-something percent white, 70-something percent male, average age about 62.
RATH: That's Darnell Hunt. He's the director of the Ralph Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, and he oversees UCLA's Hollywood diversity report. To become a member of the Academy, you can't just apply. First, you must be sponsored by two current members. Hunt says that's a real impediment to change.
HUNT: I mean, you have a system that has built into it the likelihood that you're going to reproduce a membership that's not very diverse. So unless something changes in that process, we're talking decades and decades before we're going to see anything that looks like America.
RATH: The president of the Academy is Cheryl Boone Isaacs. She is African-American, and she's spoken out on the need for Hollywood to diversify. What is she actually doing about it?
HUNT: Well, my understanding is when Cheryl Boone Isaacs took over a year-and-a-half or so ago, there was a push. The problem is they kind of inherited a huge ocean liner that's in the middle of the ocean that's hard to turn around. I mean, you know, you're going to have to make some major changes in the way things operate to see any, you know, sea change. And that's what we need is a sea change because these numbers are completely out of whack with where we are in America. So I don't know if she's in the position to do that unilaterally. I know that there's the intention to make some changes and I think there's been, like, a 1 percent increase in minority members or something like that. Well, you know, that's - you know, at that rate it's going to take us some time before we get to anything that looks anything like America.
RATH: So what is going to trigger that sea change? What is going to finally force the Academy to change?
HUNT: Well, that's a great question. You know, I'd like to think that the industry itself may change a little sooner because the bottom line is pretty clear. I mean, diversity sells. I mean, our reports show that movies that roughly reflect the diversity of American society, in terms of race and ethnicity, on average do the best at the box office. We saw the same thing in television. So I think people in the industry who are supporting our report, who are reading our report, are beginning to realize that, look, we have to do business a little bit differently. We need to kind of open up opportunity for writers, producers, directors, people behind the scenes who actually make creative decisions - not just actors in front of the camera. Although, that's important, too. They realize they're going to have to do that if they're going to remain competitive.
RATH: Why does it matter that the Academy is so white? Why should we care?
HUNT: One of the problems with having an Academy that doesn't reflect America - and we've written about this in our reports - is that because it sets the standards for what constitutes quality, it essentially anoints the top directors, the top talent - those who everyone in the industry is clamoring to sign - the agents, the agencies who package a lot of deals. And to the extent that people of color and women are left out of that discussion. They aren't deemed quite ready for prime time. They probably aren't given the same opportunities. Or as we found in some of the hacked - some of the emails, they aren't paid the same amount for their labor. So there's this standard that's set essentially by white males, who are older, that tends to lead to a definition of all other work as not being of the same caliber. And that's very destructive, I think, for an industry that's trying to keep up with and give America what it really wants.
RATH: Darnell Hunt is the director of the Ralph Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA. Dr. Hunt, thanks very much.
HUNT: Thank you.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
From the NPR studios in Culver City, California, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Arun Rath. President Obama's State of the Union address this week was lousy with the V word.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I will veto it - taking away their health insurance, unraveling the new rules on Wall Street, a nuclear-armed Iran, new sanctions. I will veto any new sanctions bill. It will have earned my veto.
RATH: But with Republicans now firmly in control of both houses of Congress, what are their chances of overriding some of those vetoes? Fawn Johnson is a correspondent with the National Journal. Fawn, welcome.
FAWN JOHNSON: Happy to be here.
RATH: So let's look at whether Congress could possibly override a presidential veto. Both houses would need two-thirds majorities.
JOHNSON: Correct.
RATH: That means the House would require 290 votes to override if they voted in unison.
JOHNSON: Yes.
RATH: Two-hundred-forty-six Republicans would need to be joined by 44 Democrats. And in the Senate, the math is 54 Republicans would need 13 Democrats, or Independents, to get to the 67 they would require, which...
JOHNSON: That's correct.
RATH: Seems like a tall order, but...
JOHNSON: It is a tall order. It's actually - it doesn't happen very often and I went back and I did a little bit of research. The president has vetoed a total of two bills in his tenure and both of those vetoes were sustained, and they did not have the two-thirds majority to override it. President Bush, as it were, actually had three bills that his veto was overridden by the Congress. It does not happen very often, but it does happen. And there are some areas of disagreement with some Democrats that they have with the president where you could see people toying with that idea in next couple of years.
RATH: So what would be the one that you think has the biggest chance of being overridden?
JOHNSON: People are looking very closely at legislation that would place additional sanctions on Iran if the current nuclear disarmament talks fail. Those are - there's a deadline for some disarmament that needs to be in place by the summer. And the president has already said that should the Congress pass an Iran sanctions bill he would veto it. But there are enough Democrats in the Senate, particularly, that it's possible to get to the 67. If you do the math, the way you look at it is that there are 12 Democrats in the Senate who have supported Iran sanctions in the past. So that gets you to one short of the 67 you would need to override a veto. But the problem is, of course, that some of those Democrats are not inclined to buck the president at this particular point. And there've been some who have said that they plan to see what the president has to say, see what the State Department has to say, about how the talks are going before they make a decision on what to do on an Iran sanctions bill.
RATH: And in terms of one party having to attract another to override a presidential veto, what kind of deals get made? Is there horse trading that happens to...
JOHNSON: Yeah.
RATH: To get people to come over to the other side?
JOHNSON: The place that I paid attention to this was many years ago in the Bush administration when President Bush had repeatedly vetoed children's health care legislation. And the battle for overriding that veto was actually taking place in the House. The Senate already had their 67 votes, but the House was not there. And I spent many nights outside of these meetings inside the Capitol watching these rank-and-file Republicans, some of us who - we didn't even know who they were - coming into these meetings as they were listening to them try and convince those Republicans that they should vote to override the legislation. It was never eventually successful, but it was particularly interesting to watch and also to see who became important because it wasn't your traditional leaders in the party. These were people who, you know, essentially went about their business. Some of them were relatively new to Congress, others had just been kind of sitting in the back bench for a long time.
RATH: Fawn Johnson is a correspondent with the National Journal. Fawn, thanks very much.
JOHNSON: You're welcome.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick held a surprise press conference yesterday, not to talk about next week's Super Bowl, but about, well, you know, deflated footballs.
(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)
BILL BELICHICK: As far as I know and everything that I can do, we did everything as right as we could do it.
RATH: In case you've been living under a rock, 11 out of the 12 balls used by the Patriots in their AFC championship win last week were allegedly underinflated by about 2 pounds per square inch. We wanted to know just how much that changes how the football feels. And we sent our producer Tom Dreisbach to find out.
TOM DREISBACH, BYLINE: First, let me introduce you to my expert witnesses.
DEVIN BULLOCK: How are you doing? I'm Devin Bullock. I play receiver for Occidental College.
DREISBACH: Number seven - five touchdowns last season.
BRYAN SCOTT: My name is Bryan Scott. I play quarterback for Occidental College.
DREISBACH: He's number 18 - threw 17 touchdowns last season. Occidental is a Division 3, NCAA football team. And I met Devin and Bryan at their home field to do a completely unscientific experiment. I brought a pump, a pressure gauge and an official-size NFL football. First, we just set a baseline. I pumped the ball to the regulation pressure between 12.5 and 13.5 pounds per square inch. And to me that felt very pumped up, but to the players...
Feels normal.
SCOTT: Yeah. It feel - I mean, it feels like a game ball that we would use.
BULLOCK: It feels regular.
DREISBACH: Just be sure, they threw the ball around a couple times.
SCOTT: Ready, set.
DREISBACH: No real surprises there. Now to the real test.
Let's try deflating it.
The Patriots footballs were allegedly inflated to about 10.5 pounds per square inch.
BULLOCK: And now you're good.
DREISBACH: The gauge reads 10.5.
So first, just your initial thoughts. How does it feel?
SCOTT: It feels a lot easier to grip for sure, probably easier to throw it farther. What do you think, Dev?
BULLOCK: I guess as a receiver I don't notice that much, but when you do, like, kind of press on it pretty hard, you can feel it go in a little more.
DREISBACH: Do you think you could eyeball a difference?
SCOTT: No. Definitely not.
DREISBACH: Then Bryan and Devin take the ball out for a test drive.
SCOTT: Red 19, red 19, ready, set, hut.
DREISBACH: They complete a couple passes about 25 yards out then try mixing it up.
SCOTT: We've been doing two-handed catches, so we're - I'm going to have Devin do a fade route right now and he's going to try and catch it one-handed. Red 13, red 13, ready, set, hut.
DREISBACH: The ball goes up. Number seven, Devin Bullock, reaches out with his left hand and completion.
SCOTT: Yeah, first try he caught it one-handed, so (laughter).
DREISBACH: Hear, let me just ask you, how does it feel different when you're catching?
BULLOCK: It wasn't that much of a difference, I would say, but when it gets into your hands, I felt like it was easier to just, like, kind of corral it, grab it.
DREISBACH: Over all, their verdict - sure, under-inflating the ball helps a little. If we had been in rainy New England instead of sunny LA, deflating might even give a real advantage. But Devin Bullock says it probably didn't make a big difference when the Patriots stomped the Colts last week.
BULLOCK: Maybe we'd have something to talk about if they only won by a field goal. It was just kind of the game was 45 to seven, so it was, like - it definitely wasn't the only reason the Patriots won.
DREISBACH: In other words, two PSI does not equal 38 points. That does it for my quick experiment. Meanwhile, the NFL's investigation is ongoing. Tom Dreisbach, NPR News.
SCOTT: Red 25, red 25, ready, set, hut.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR West. I'm Arun Rath. Miami is being swallowed by the Atlantic Ocean. It's a slow-motion disaster. It's also a business opportunity. Laura Parker writes about how South Florida is planning for sea level rise in the latest issue of National Geographic.
LAURA PARKER: If you look out 50 years, Miami can expect a hotter climate, rainier periods with more severe storms, possibly more hurricanes and sea level rise - anywhere from two feet up to six-and-a-half feet by the turn of the century.
RATH: Now, in spite of the expectations of more severe storms and rising seas, there are businesspeople in Florida who are, in a way, capitalizing on the expectations of more flooding. Can you talk about the businessman that you talked to? His name was Frank Behrens.
PARKER: He's an interesting case. He represents a Dutch firm called Dutch Docklands. And they are trying to get the necessary permits to construct what is known as a floating village on a lake north of Miami Beach. Dutch Docklands wants to place 12 individual, private islands on the lake, which they say will be hurricane-proof. They will be tethered to the bottom of the lake. They are advertising this as being a sort of a climate change-proof venture.
RATH: What about the political side of things? Florida Governor Rick Scott famously said, I'm not a scientist. He's avoided the issue of climate change, for the most part. But there are some local Miami-Dade County politicians who are making plans based on rising sea levels. Can you talk about that?
PARKER: When I went to Miami to do the reporting on this story, I encountered the full gamut of thought on this from a fellow I met wearing rubber boots during the October King Tide with water up halfway up his calf who told us that there is no sea level rise occurring and this is not right, all the way to scientists who are suggesting that part of the planning process should include plans to decommission infrastructure of the region and not leave remnants of the city behind and things that could be pollutants behind for the folks who come after us. Those are the two extremes. And everything else runs in between that.
RATH: There is, you know, this disconnect - this kind of paradox, I guess - that runs in various ways throughout your piece - that, you know, there's this crisis. And there's an opportunity in the crisis as well. There's this optimism and this building boom, but at the same time, fears about property insurance rates that could cause the housing market to collapse. How is the government approaching that problem?
PARKER: Let me give you one example from the head of a sea level rise task force. The chairman of this, Harvey Ruvin - he's been in Florida and Miami and politics for a very long time. And he brought in Swiss Re, the global reinsurance - a couple of executives to sort of spell things out. Basically, the message was that you guys need to make a plan. Mr. Ruvin says, you know, they needed to hear this message - these members of this group and various other officials. And they've started on a plan. And so they're proceeding with it. But that's - insurance is a critical component of these discussions.
RATH: You can read Laura Parker's article on rising seas in South Florida in the February issue of National Geographic. Laura, thanks very much.
PARKER: Thanks for having me.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Last month was big, big for fans of musical comedy. First, "Peter Pan Live" played to more than 9 million TV viewers, and Stephen Sondheim's "Into The Woods" was seen by 9 million movie goers is in just its first week. That's a lot of musical comedy fans, more than what Broadway plays to in an entire year. So why is our critic Bob Mondello, a big fan of musical comedy, grumbling instead of smiling?
BOB MONDELLO, BYLINE: Can we agree that "Peter Pan Live" was a waste of time? There's already a better one with Mary Martin.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SPECIAL, "PETER PAN LIVE")
MARY MARTIN: (Singing) I've got a crow.
MONDELLO: Same with "Sound Of Music" and Julie Andrews, no good reason to do them again less well. But Stephen Sondheim hitting it big? That's different and the combination of both happening at the same time makes me want a mashup. For years, people have been saying Sondheim shows are too tricky to be turned into films, too sophisticated for a mass audience. Well, we've now established that that's not sure. His blood-soaked musical "Sweeney Todd" made a fortune at movie theaters and "Into The Woods" has more than matched "Sweeney" in its first few weeks. So here's my mashup - a live TV musical that's not just a sing-along retread. Instead, how about a less familiar but far more rewarding show, so star-studded and ratings guaranteed, that it would do fresh updated justice to what many consider Stephen Sondheim's greatest musical ever, "Follies." Indulge me for a moment while I play "Fantasy Follies."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FANTASY FOLLIES")
MONDELLO: 1971's "Follies" was about a reunion of ancient chorus girls, who in their youths had appeared together in a Zeigfeld Follies-style show on Broadway. Audiences came to see a cast filled with big stars from previous decades - Yvonne de Carlo, Alexis Smith - and were more than a little surprised at what Sondheim had them doing up there on stage, singing songs like "Losing My Mind" about a past they remembered not with fondness, but with regret for the roads they didn't take.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOSING MY MIND")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: (Singing) I want you so. It's like I'm losing my mind.
MONDELLO: Also singing with bites and bile about the roads they did take in songs like "Could I Leave You?"
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "COULD I LEAVE YOU?"
JULIE ANDREWS: (Singing) Putting thoughts of you aside in the South of France. Would I think of suicide? Darling, shall we dance?
MONDELLO: It was sensational, gorgeous and it'd make a sensationally gorgeous vehicle today for a dream team that no producer could ever gather for a long run on Broadway, but that would be possible for one night on TV. Imagine bringing together all the folks who were huge in movie musicals a few decades ago.
(APPLAUSE)
MONDELLO: Stars who could really do justice to "Follies'" big anthem, "I'm Still Here," a declaration that aging stars of whatever era almost can't help making.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SHIRLEY MACLAINE: I'm still here, in D flat.
MONDELLO: This is "Sweet Charity's" Shirley MacLaine, back before she arrived at "Downton Abbey."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'M STILL HERE")
MACLAINE: (Singing) Good times and fun times I've seen them all and, my dear, I'm still here.
MONDELLO: Same song angrier by "The Good Wife's" Christine Baranski.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOLLIE'S SONG, "I'M STILL HERE")
CHRISTINE BARANSKI: (Singing) But not me.
MONDELLO: In a brighter mood, "Singin' In The Rain's" Debbie Reynolds.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOLLIE'S SONG, "I'M STILL HERE")
MONDELLO: A sultrier take, "Goldfinger's" Shirley Bassey.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'M STILL HERE")
SHIRLEY BASSEY: (Singing) Seen all my dreams disappear and I'm here.
MONDELLO: And of course it wouldn't be a reunion without Babs.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'M STILL HERE")
BARBARA STREISAND: (Singing) I've heard them say songwriting, acting, producing - what makes her think that she can? Oh, baby, it's songwriting, acting, producing - what? - does she think she's a man?
MONDELLO: In my head, I see all of them dancing with their younger selves in the big mirror dance in "Follies" but bigger than on stay because on TV you could do it Busby Berkeley style.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONDELLO: Dozens of young chorus girls paired with the likes of Ann-Margret and Chita Rivera from "Bye Bye Birdie," Bette Midler, Diahann Carroll, Diana Ross, Doris Day. For the song "I'm Just A Broadway Baby," you could trot out Carol Channing. I mean, it's just one night on TV. For a lot of the supporting players, it'd be just one number. Now, I hear you asking why? Why the fuss about Sondheim? Well, because he's a genius - the Shakespeare of composer-lyricists. Anyone who can toss off a computer interior rhyme like - we have so much in common, it's a phenomenon - deserves to be celebrated more widely. And why bring back these theoretically past-their-sell-date stars? Well, for one thing, when I first mentioned the idea around the office our interns had never heard of them, and that's a shame, no? Blank stares for Shirley MacLaine, Ann-Margret, Shirley Bassey. They knew vaguely who Streisand was, but Debbie Reynolds? Nothing. Even after I said "Singin' In The Rain." I'm not criticizing. This is exactly the reaction I had in my 20s to the big star of the original "Follies," Alexis Smith. I had no idea who she was. Went to see her purely out of curiosity, and I'm glad I did. So, there's a reason, unlike the logic of redoing "Sound Of Music" or "Peter Pan." And it's not like the show isn't pop. It's amazing how many big stars have incorporated "Follies" songs into their nightclub acts, from which I've been pulling these clips. Liza Minnelli, for instance, doing a ghastly disco version of "Losing My Mind."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOSING MY MIND")
LIZA MINNELLI: (Singing) The sun comes up. I think about you. The coffee cup. I think about you. I want you so it's like I'm losing my mind.
MONDELLO: Even "Rocky Horror's" Tim Curry has done that song. Oh, you could update the TV "Follies" for an age of gay marriage.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LOSING MY MIND")
TIM CURRY: (Singing) I want you so, oh, it's like I'm losing my mind.
MONDELLO: And for other parts, in my head I see Nathan Lane and Morgan Freeman - don't tell me he can't sing, remember "The Electric Company?" And as a furious alienated wife, how about Glenn Close or better yet casting against type, Julie Andrews?
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "COULD I LEAVE YOU?")
ANDREWS: Could I leave you? No. The point is could you leave me? Well, I guess you could leave me the house, leave me the flat, leave me the Braques and Chagalls and all that.
MONDELLO: As you may be gathering from the lyrics, "Follies" is not a happy show. But, you know, neither is "Les Mis" or "Rent" or, for that matter, "Sweeney Todd." And with even half this kind of star power, audiences would stick with it to the deliciously bitter end, seriously. Although I'm just playing "Fantasy Follies" here, this idea is not pie in the sky. TV musicals don't have to be chirpy, kid-oriented, lowest-common denominator shows. And if anyone in the world knows that, It's Craig Zadan, the guy who produced the live "Sound Of Music" and "Peter Pan." He's no stranger to Sondheim. He literally wrote the book on him, back when "Follies" was still brand new. It was called "Sondheim And Company" And he's worked with a lot of these stars in the years since. He could do this. He could bring back...
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MONDELLO: At which point, like a lot of other people, I'd be losing my mind.
(APPLAUSE)
MONDELLO: I'm Bob Mondello.
BLOCK: And you can catch more of those performances on our website, npr.org.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
A couple of years ago in England, a baby-faced singer sat down with his guitar on an inflatable red sofa to make a rough video.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
GEORGE EZRA: Hi I'm George Barnett. I'm here in Clifton with the Bristol Couch, and I'm going to do a song called "Angry Hill."
BLOCK: George Barnett was 18 years old, and this song would change his life.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
EZRA: (Singing) All the angels take him away. Lay six feet 'neath clay, and it grows.
BLOCK: In quick order George Barnett was snapped up by a manager. He landed a big recording contract with Columbia Records. Now at age 21 he has a debut album that vaulted to number one in England, and he goes by a different name, George Ezra.
EZRA: So my name is George Ezra Barnett, and there comes a point when you realize a name with a Z in it is just that bit cooler.
BLOCK: George Ezra has a voice that can float high and delicate, or it can do this.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DID YOU HEAR THE RAIN?")
EZRA: (Singing) Woah. Why do you treat me so?
BLOCK: Before he made this record, George Ezra took a train trip around Europe for inspiration. He went by himself, eavesdropping on conversations, taking notes to find starting points for songs, and he told me his first hit single takes its title from a city he never made it to, Budapest.
EZRA: Before I took this trip, I wrote down the cities that I'd like to visit, and Budapest was one of these cities. And I got to Malmo in Sweden, and these girls had agreed to put me up in their place, and it was the Eurovision song contest final in Malmo. Of course, we went to watch it, and I ended up getting a bit drunk. And I missed my train the next day. So I never made it to Budapest, and then when I got home I think that was the first time I tried to tackle writing a love song of sorts, and I had the idea, OK, you know, you can list everything that you've got and suggest giving it up for somebody. And then I thought, well, I think it would be funnier or sweeter if I list beautiful things that I don't have.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BUDAPEST")
EZRA: (Singing) My house in Budapest, my hidden treasure chest, golden grand piano, my beautiful castillo - you.
EZRA: By beautiful castillo, which is Spanish for castle - yeah, my acres of a land.
BLOCK: You have none of those things?
EZRA: Oh, I don't have any of those things. No.
BLOCK: But you'd be willing to give them up for love?
EZRA: Of course, yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BUDAPEST")
EZRA: (Singing) But for you, you, I'd leave it all. All for you, you, I'd leave it all.
BLOCK: You know, I always love watching musicians listen to their own songs. And you were quite engrossed in what you were hearing just now, George.
EZRA: (Laughter) Oh, I still love it, you know? Like it's still - the whole - well what I have to remind myself is you're doing this and being a touring musician. You're away from home and away from family and loved ones a lot. So if you don't love it, then there's no point in doing. And I do. I love it. And I remember, you know, the whole writing process, the recording process are some of the best memories I think I'll have. So I do - it reminds me of good things.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BUDAPEST")
EZRA: (Singing) Give me one good reason why I should never make a change. Baby if you hold me, then all of this will go away.
BLOCK: I'm talking with George Ezra. His new album - his debut album is titled "Wanted On Voyage." Talk a bit about the title, George.
EZRA: So wanted-on-voyage has always been something I've been aware of because it's on Paddington Bear's suitcase. So Paddington Bear is this character I'm sure you're aware.
BLOCK: Yes - yeah.
EZRA: So when I was a kid, my mom used to dress me up as him if it was cold out. I'd have a blue duffel coat and I'd have my wellies on and whatever. And I grew up watching him. This sounds really bizarre.
BLOCK: (Laughter) Yeah.
EZRA: Anyways, so I was always aware of wanted-on-voyage. And then I learned that wanted-on-voyage people used to write on their hand luggage equivalent when traveling by boat because if you're taking a long boat journey, anything that goes in the cargo, you're not going to see for the two weeks you're on the boat or whatever. So wanted-on-voyage was the sticker that meant this - you know, I want this on my person.
BLOCK: Right. I need this.
EZRA: Yeah. So I liked the idea of people listening to a record that I wrote while I traveled while they traveled and wanting it on their journey. I liked that idea.
BLOCK: I have to ask you about the video for your song, "Listen To The Man," which is hilarious.
EZRA: (Laughter) Yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LISTEN TO THE MAN")
EZRA: (Singing) I feel your head resting heavy on your single bed. I want to hear all about it. Get it all off your chest.
BLOCK: And we should explain it. You're sitting on a park bench with none other than the great actor...
EZRA: Sir Ian McKellen.
BLOCK: ...Sir Ian McKellen.
EZRA: Yeah.
BLOCK: And he hijacks your song.
EZRA: He does. Very well.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC VIDEO, "LISTEN TO THE MAN")
EZRA: Wait. Wait, wait, wait. Hold up. Ian.
IAN MCKELLEN: Yes?
EZRA: What's going on?
MCKELLEN: McKellen.
EZRA: I'm trying to shoot a video for my song.
MCKELLEN: Well, I'm just trying to sing the song. It's such a fantastic song.
EZRA: Thank you very much.
BLOCK: At some point in the video, he's handed a drink out of a coconut.
(LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: He's got every - he's getting all the attention.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC VIDEO, "LISTEN TO THE MAN")
EZRA: There was someone bringing you a gong, he was taking it off. You got a drink. I don't even get that.
MCKELLEN: Oh, well, I'm sorry. But I'm just so excited to be here, you know?
BLOCK: And he's not entirely sure who you are.
EZRA: No.
BLOCK: He has a pretty good sense, but he's a bit confused.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC VIDEO, "LISTEN TO THE MAN")
MCKELLEN: You know, Jeff - George, I love all your music from Bucharest onwards.
EZRA: Budapest.
MCKELLEN: Budapest, yeah.
EZRA: So what happens with videos is one thing I'm aware of that I'm not very good at - creating a music video. So with this song all I said was, I don't want to be singing the song. You know, that was all I knew.
BLOCK: That was it?
EZRA: And now this guy Rob Brandon, who is awesome...
BLOCK: He's the director.
EZRA: Yeah, of the video - so I got a call from Rob, and he said, George, how would you feel about having Sir Ian McKellen in your music video? And I said, well, Rob, that would be lovely, but you need to see if Sir Ian McKellen wants to be in my music video. And he went, no, no. I've already asked him. He wants to do it. So, I mean, that's crazy, isn't it? To get there, and you're kind of pinching yourself all the way up until you get there. Oh, no, it really is him.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "LISTEN TO THE MAN")
EZRA: (Singing) Won't you listen to the man that's loving you?
BLOCK: When you think about where you are now and at age 21 think about longevity in the music world, where does that take you? What - how far down the road can you see?
EZRA: I always say if this is the only album I ever get to release, so be it. I've had the best time, and I'll continue writing and creating. If people get to hear it, then that's amazing. I don't want people to think that I don't love this. I do. But I just - you know, I think also that things move so quickly now as well. I think that's the same with audiences in music. I think there's a - before they know it, they're being pitched the next act that they should be getting into, and it's a lot more accessible now. So I mean, if I can be sat here when I'm 60 and talking about my 15th - 20th record, happy days. I'd love that. But, you know, we'll see.
BLOCK: George Ezra, thanks so much for coming in. It's been fun having you here.
EZRA: No, thank you for having me.
BLOCK: And you've brought in one of your guitars.
EZRA: Yeah, yeah.
BLOCK: It's a 1959 Gretsch.
EZRA: Yes.
BLOCK: And would you take us out with a song?
EZRA: Yeah, I'm going to play a song of mine called "Blame It On Me."
BLOCK: Terrific.
EZRA: Thank you for having me.
(Singing) The garden was blessed by the gods of me and you. We headed westward to find ourselves some truth. What you waiting for? What you waiting for?
BLOCK: You can hear the full live version of this song at npr.org. George Ezra's album is titled "Wanted On Voyage."
EZRA: (Singing) When I dance alone and the suns bleeding down, blame it on me.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
The Pentagon plans to send hundreds of military personnel overseas to train moderate Syrian rebel fighters. The effort is meant to help these fighters take on the self-styled Islamic State or ISIS. But moderate commanders say their men took up arms against the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, and it'll be hard to explain why they're now expected to fight ISIS instead. NPR's Alice Fordham reports.
ALICE FORDHAM, BYLINE: It's been a long time coming. That's what Syria's rebels say about the announcement the U.S. and its allies will train and equip around 5,000 moderates. Troops are heading to Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia for the training.
ZAKKARIA ABBOUD: (Speaking foreign language).
FORDHAM: This is Zakkaria Abboud, law student turned commander in the southern city of Daraa. In the four long years since the uprising began, he says he's lost 200 family members and friends. His face is scarred from combat.
ABBOUD: (Speaking foreign language).
FORDHAM: "We're a moderate military," he says, "we've become America's trusted friends and we deserve help."
I met several rebel commanders and activists in the city of Amman in neighboring Jordan. They're from the Southern Front alliance that controls much of the south of Syria, and they show me how they're trying to win America's trust.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
FORDHAM: Col. Baqqour al-Salim defected from Assad's army and is now a commander north of Damascus.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
FORDHAM: A brisk, older man, he shows me a professional-looking video the Southern Front made showing dozens of commanders individually committing themselves to human rights, moderation and rule of law.
BAQQOUR AL-SALIM: (Speaking foreign language).
FORDHAM: "The intended audience is the international community," says Salim. He wants the world to see that if they train and equip his men they're helping moderate revolutionaries, not the jihadists which grew up as the rebellion splintered.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
FORDHAM: And these commanders carefully video themselves using the missiles they're given by the group they call the Friends of Syria, which includes the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. They're proving the missiles are not falling into the hands of extremists. That's one of the big fears of U.S. officials, that these rebels are too weak and disorganized to even hang onto their weapons or have an impact in battle, particularly in the north. Some have joined with extremists or they've lost key ground. They change leaders and squabble. These commanders say they have received some covert training, though the Pentagon won't confirm that, and they hope they'll be high on the list for the new plan to train and arm fighters on a larger scale, but there's still hurdles.
AL-SALIM: (Speaking foreign language).
FORDHAM: The colonel says most of the men in his area are simple religious people. They took up arms against an enemy, Assad, and it's hard for them to understand why they're now getting help from a coalition whose goal is to fight ISIS, rather than Assad.
AL-SALIM: (Speaking foreign language).
FORDHAM: The colonel adds there isn't a big ISIS presence in his area, but the group sends preachers to talk to people. So when he tells his men they have to fight ISIS, they respond that they do not fight fellow Muslims.
BASHAR AL-ZAABI: (Speaking foreign language).
FORDHAM: Probably will be the most influential commander in the Southern Front is Bashar al-Zaabi, a onetime travel agent.
ZAABI: (Speaking foreign language).
FORDHAM: In his meetings with Americans, he says he explains that stopping terrorism requires stopping terrorism at the source. He says Assad allowed ISIS to grow by releasing extremists from prisons and not conducting military operations against the group.
ZAABI: (Speaking foreign language).
FORDHAM: Like the others, he wishes the coalition would try to defeat Assad and ISIS. The U.S. says it's seeking to pressure Assad to step down.
ZAABI: (Speaking foreign language).
FORDHAM: But, Zaabi says, "if Assad doesn't fall, a whole brutalized generation will grow up to be extremists." Alice Fordham, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
President Obama will ask Congress to grant wilderness status to more than 12 million acres of the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. The president announced his plan in a YouTube video yesterday, describing the area as a pristine habitat with abundant wildlife.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: But it's very fragile, and that's why I'm very proud that my Department of Interior has put forward a comprehensive plan to make sure that we're protecting the refuge and that we're designating new areas including coastal plains for preservation.
BLOCK: The president's action could put billions of barrels of oil out of reach of energy companies. As NPR's John Ydstie reports, industry representatives are criticizing the decision, but they also say Obama's request will have little immediate effect.
JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: President Obama's request for wilderness status reverses as a recommendation by the Reagan administration back in 1987 to allow drilling in a small area of the ANWR. In the intervening quarter of a century, Democrats and Republicans have continuously sparred over the issue, and no drilling has taken place. Erik Milito of the American Petroleum Institute, which represents industry's views, says despite the glut of oil on the market today because of the U.S. shale boom, the country will eventually need the oil from ANWR.
ERIK MILITO: If you look at Department of Energy forecasts, we're going to need oil and natural gas to fuel this economy for decades to come. So we've got to plan well ahead so we have the ability to fuel this economy for future generations.
YDSTIE: Milito points to a U.S. Geological Survey estimate that projects ANWR contains between five and 16 billion barrels of oil. He says industry would likely find even more once it begins drilling.
Fadel Ghiet, a managing director and oil expert at Oppenheimer and Company, says he believes the president's decision does not change the outlook for developing the ANWR reserves significantly.
FADEL GHIET: It will make life more difficult for the industry. It will put another hurdle, but technology will always bring the hurdle down.
YDSTIE: And Ghiet says the shale revolution reduces the urgency of tapping the ANWR oil.
GHIET: There is really no need to take a chance on ANWR since ANWR is still a very sensitive area.
YDSTIE: Ghiet says the shale oil glut gives the industry 5 to 10 years to develop the technology it needs to convince the public that it can drill safely in such an environmentally sensitive place. It's virtually certain the new Republican-controlled Congress will reject the president's recommendation, but Obama's request does effectively block drilling for the next two years, and he could veto a Congressional bill to allow it. But if Republicans keep control of the Congress and the country elects a Republican president, Obama's effort to protect ANWR from drilling could be swept aside. John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The search for jurors in the trial of accused Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is taking longer than expected. Defense attorneys say it's nearly impossible to find unbiased jurors around Boston, and they are asking yet again for the judge to move the trial somewhere else. NPR's Tovia Smith reports.
TOVIA SMITH, BYLINE: From the beginning, defense attorneys have argued the entire jury pool has been poisoned by what they call a narrative of guilt from a, quote, "tidal wave of media."
(SOUNDBITE OF VARIOUS NEWS BROADCASTS)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Even in jail, the government says, make no mistake, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is dangerous.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: ...That he knew how to build a bomb and would be happy to die a martyr.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wrote why they targeted innocent people at the finish line.
SMITH: Now Tsarnaev's lawyers say widespread bias is proven by jurors' own comments on a court questionnaire. One, for example, wrote (reading) we all know he's guilty, so quit wasting everybody's time and string him up.
Another put down, (reading) they should have already killed him.
Defense attorneys said that 68 percent of the nearly 1,400 summoned have already decided Tsarnaev is guilty, and about as many say they have a personal connection to the case.
DAVID HOOSE: I don't think it's a close call. If this case doesn't get moved, what one would get moved?
SMITH: Defense attorney David Hoose, who's handled other death penalty cases, says this one has an exceptionally broad impact.
HOOSE: Virtually everyone is going to be no more than two degrees of separation from someone who was at the scene.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: (Unintelligible). What was that?
SMITH: Personal connections to the blast run the gamut from those who were there to those with friends or family who were victims medics or police involved in the violent shootout or dramatic capture of Tsarnaev.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #4: We have a person in the boat - a live party - live party in the boat confirmed.
SMITH: It's unclear where the judge will draw the line. One juror wrote her personal connection was, quote, "being a 29-year-old female, just like one of the victims." Equally challenging is who should be disqualified for opposing the death penalty. By law, jurors have to be open to it, and many can be easily ruled in or out. But what to do, for example, with the woman who told the judge she's categorically opposed to capital punishment, but when pressed, eventually conceded she might be for it maybe if her own child were the victim.
HOOSE: There are shades of gray. And, I mean, this does get confusing and muddy. Some jurors do go back and forth.
SMITH: While defense attorneys have unsuccessfully argued before that it would be impossible to find impartial jurors here, former federal judge Nancy Gertner says citing the opinions of actual jurors now bolsters their case.
NANCY GERTNER: This is now basically arguing that those predictions are borne out. I mean, it's essentially saying, see - we were right.
SMITH: The judge has insisted impartial jurors can be found here, but he's also left the door open to reconsidering. Gertner says there is good reason to doubt whether jurors can really set aside a personal connection to the bombing, even when they say they can.
GERTNER: The notion that you can take a bad fact - a prejudicial fact and then easily compartmentalize it so it doesn't bleed into the rest of your view of the case - that is extraordinarily difficult -extraordinarily difficult.
SMITH: If Tsarnaev is ultimately convicted, jury selection is likely to be grounds for appeal. When you screen out all jurors who oppose the death penalty and all those with pre-existing opinions on guilt or with personal connections, defense attorneys say those few who survive the winnowing will not be representative of the community as the Constitution requires. Tovia Smith, NPR News, Boston.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
In India today, a big parade complete with camels, dancers, military marching band and an American president. Barack Obama was the guest of honor at India's annual Republic Day Parade, an event marking the anniversary of the country's constitution. The president's participation also marks a new chapter in U.S.-Indian relations, as NPR's Scott Horsley reports from India.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: The Republic Day parade in New Delhi, India, is as colorful and as varied as the country celebrates. The procession begins with a show of military muscle - Sikh soldiers in saffron turbans marching alongside tanks and bristling rocket launchers. Eventually, though, the camel-mounted military bands give way to an assortment of floats from Indian states and government ministries. There's a mechanized lion from the Department of Industrial Policy and even a float honoring the annual cardamom crop.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMEN: (Singing in foreign language).
HORSLEY: President Obama took all this in from a closely guarded reviewing stand. He's the first American leader invited to attend this celebration, and that's seen as a signal of India's newfound willingness to cooperate with the United States. Obama says the U.S. and India should be natural partners. But thanks to leftover distrust from the Cold War era and bureaucratic inertia, the relationship is too often been defined by its untapped potential. Obama told a group of business leaders this afternoon he hopes to change that with the help of India's energetic new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Let's make it possible for a young woman in a rural village to start a business with a partner in America that will change both their lives.
HORSLEY: One of the business leaders who met with Obama this afternoon was Daniel Roderick, the CEO of Westinghouse. His company is eager to build a nuclear power plant in India, but that project and others have been held up by concerns over liability and the tracking of nuclear material. The White House and the Modi government say they've reached a breakthrough to address those concerns. U.S. companies want more detail before they proceed with nuclear projects in India. But U.S. Ambassador Rich Verma says the two countries' governments are satisfied.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
RICHARD VERMA: Which we think now opens the door for U.S. and other companies to come forward and actually help India towards developing nuclear power and support its kind of non-carbon-based energy, which is so desperately needed.
HORSLEY: India is already the world's third-biggest carbon polluter after China and the U.S., and the problem could get worse as Modi's government works to extend electricity to hundreds of millions of Indians who don't now have it. With an international climate summit in Paris later this year, the world will be watching to see how far India is willing to go to cut greenhouse gases. White House climate guru John Podesta says Modi is anxious to bring more clean energy sources into the mix.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOHN PODESTA: The prime mister recognized that that there's no sustainable development path if we don't deal with climate change.
HORSLEY: The U.S. and India have also agreed to a 10-year extension of their military relationship and to jointly develop some new military technology. Much of the hardware on display in today's parade was made by the Russians. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes says by removing some long-standing stumbling blocks, Obama and Modi have cleared a path for a stronger partnership in the future.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BEN RHODES: They were taught about the Asia-Pacific region strategically. They were talking about how to reach a global climate accord in Paris. By making the progress we've made here, I think we've opened up the door to do a lot more with India in the years to come.
HORSLEY: Obama is the first U.S. president to make two trips to India. He's already talking about the progress he hopes to see on his third visit. Scott Horsley, NPR News, New Delhi.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
So strengthened ties between the U.S. and India are celebrated in India, but in neighboring Pakistan, a frosty reaction to President Obama's visit. Relations between India and Pakistan have long been hostile. And they are especially troubled right now.
We're joined by NPR's Philip Reeves, who is in the capital, Islamabad. And, Philip, first, what are Pakistanis saying about President Obama's visit to India?
PHILIP REEVES, BYLINE: Well, there's an acute bout of anxious navel-gazing going on here. And the general feeling can be summed up in one word - peak. Pakistanis are peeved that President Obama's been to India twice but hasn't made an official visit here. The bear hug, which you might have seen on TV between the president and India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has gone down pretty badly here. Modi isn't well liked, generally seen as a Hindu arch nationalist. And as you say, relations between India and Pakistan are in pretty poor shape right now, not least because of Kashmir, the dispute at the heart of their decades-long conflict.
BLOCK: So overall, peevishness in Pakistan, but anything official? Any official reaction coming from the Pakistani government?
REEVES: Not so far in words, but certainly in deeds. It's no coincidence that Pakistan's army chief General Raheel Sharif's next door in China on an official visit. The military here plays a key role, by the way, in foreign policy. And today, the army's media people are highlighting, you know, this China trip. They circulated a tweet quoting a top Chinese official describing Pakistan as an irreplaceable, all-weather friend. That wording plays into the belief that the U.S. is a fair-weather friend.
BLOCK: A lot to interpret from one tweet.
REEVES: Yes, indeed, but that's what people do here. It's a national sport almost, gazing at the language of diplomacy and trying to figure out whether you've gained or lost in that.
BLOCK: Well, Philip, we heard Scott Horsley mention just now that President Obama and Prime Minister Modi have reached a breakthrough agreement on nuclear power. How in particular was that received?
REEVES: No one's really surprised. It's been years in the making. But Pakistan doesn't like anything that adds to India's ability to acquire nuclear technology, whether it's from, you know, the U.S. or anywhere else. Its nuclear arms race with India has been going on for years, and it has been very costly. They're also very well aware that the U.S. would never offer them a deal like this for fear of the wrong stuff landing in the wrong hands.
But I think there's another more basic sentiment in play here. This deal helps India generate more energy, and that kind of hurts here in Pakistan. The country's struggling to keep the lights on. There's just been a huge, pretty much nationwide electricity black out, and there are power outages everywhere, every day.
BLOCK: Well, Philip, overall, when you think about the U.S. relationship with Pakistan and especially issues such as creating stability in Afghanistan, how much of a setback might this visit to India be or is it not so much?
REEVES: Well, the U.S.'s relationship with Pakistan's always been a roller coaster. It hit a very low point in 2011 with the discovery of Osama bin Laden in a garrison city here and the U.S. operation that killed bin Laden. Recently, it's been on an upward trajectory. The mood, music around Secretary of State Kerry's recent visit was positive. And the U.S. is happy. Pakistan has been, for some months now, involved in a big military offensive against the Taliban in the tribal belt. America's been calling for that for a long while, and it's happened. The massacre of all those schoolchildren - 130 schoolkids in an army school in Peshawar - helped draw the two sides closer in the, you know, war on Islamist militancy. I think if history is any guide, this relationship will carry on being a roller coaster, and there'll be more bumps in the road.
BLOCK: OK, NPR's Philip Reeves in Islamabad. Philip, thanks so much.
REEVES: You're welcome.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
In most situations, 745,000 miles would be considered a great distance. That's how far you travel if you went to the moon and back and then one more time to the moon. But when an asteroid the size of two football stadiums comes within 745,000 miles of the Earth, it is ready for its close-up. And an asteroid called 2004 BL86 is visible in the night sky this evening all across the country. And this is of special interest to Paul Chodas, manager of the Near-Earth Object Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Welcome to the program
PAUL CHODAS: Thank you.
SIEGEL: You're studying near-Earth objects. Is this asteroid really unusually near the Earth?
CHODAS: It certainly is. And not only that, it's on our list of potentially hazardous asteroids. It's those asteroids that can come really close to the Earth. Although, three lunar distances is about as close as this one can come.
SIEGEL: Just 745,000 miles?
CHODAS: Yeah, astronomically speaking, that's just a skip and a jump.
SIEGEL: So it poses no danger to us, the fact that it's this close?
CHODAS: No, not at all. We've been tracking this for 11 years now, and we know that it can't come closer than that anytime soon. But it's worth keeping an eye on, because over the millennia, it may eventually be able to migrate into an orbit that could intersect the Earth's orbit.
SIEGEL: Your sense of long-term is different from most of us in terms of when we think of long-term.
CHODAS: Yes.
SIEGEL: What can you learn and what can other scientists learn about this asteroid from its close pass? Well, we get a chance to see an asteroid really up close and personal here. Large telescopes will be taking a close look at it to get its spectrum, to find out about its composition - and especially radar. We'll get a great view of this asteroid, and we get an idea of its shape, its size, how quickly it's rotating. We get an idea of whether or not it has a moon. We get an idea of what its surface is like, whether it has boulders on its surface. So we're learning a lot about asteroids, and we're learning a lot about how they form. And that tells us, really, how the whole solar system formed.
SIEGEL: Now, who will be able to see the asteroid this evening? What kind of equipment do you need?
CHODAS: You need a really good pair of binoculars or a small telescope. This thing is bright for an asteroid, but it's still a challenging object. You will also need a good star chart because the asteroid is moving, so from minute to minute, it will in a different place. And, by the way, this evening is the best time to see it, when it's brightest. Tomorrow evening it will have faded considerably.
SIEGEL: And are you thinking about the possibility of an asteroid like this one or even larger actually someday posing a threat to the Earth? And if so, do we know what we would do to deflect it?
CHODAS: Well, certainly that's part of the reason that we're hearing so much more about asteroids these days. NASA has funded surveys that are searching for asteroids that could pose a hazard of collision with the Earth. If one should be on a collision course with the Earth, we would like to find it early, that is to say years and years ahead of time - much like this one, you know, a decade ahead of time. And if we did find it that early, we could do something about it. We could launch a spacecraft, for example, to collide with the asteroid and just change its trajectory enough that it would miss the Earth years later.
SIEGEL: Would that have saved the dinosaurs if we had been able to deflect that asteroid?
CHODAS: Yes, the dinosaurs didn't have a space program, and they could not deflect that asteroid coming in. They didn't even know about it. But, yes, if we had enough time - that was a large asteroid that - on the order of six miles across, so it was quite a bit larger than this one that caused global devastation back 65 million years ago.
SIEGEL: Well, Paul Chodas, thanks a lot for talking with us.
CHODAS: Thank you.
SIEGEL: Paul Chodas is manager of the Near-Earth Object Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And today in All Tech Considered, the cutting edge of storytelling. At the Sundance film Festival this year, there's a section called New Frontier. It's devoted to virtual reality - experiences that make you feel like you're suddenly transported to another place. NPR's Mandalit del Barco is in Park City, Utah, checking things out.
MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE: Creators at Sundance's New Frontier showcase are demonstrating what they call immersive experiences. They put on virtual reality goggles and headphones and it's like you're physically in a movie. You can run through a leafy forest. You can walk through epic natural environments or escape giant attacking Japanese monsters.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIRTUAL REALITY GAME)
DEL BARCO: One of the most popular projects at New Frontier is called Birdly, a flight simulator for the 21st century. You get to be a bird. I try it out, stretching face down on what's sort of like a horizontal massage chair. My hands are strapped into paddles to flap my wings, rising and diving, soaring through the sky like a hawk.
Woah. So I'm flying over downtown San Francisco right now. You can see all the buildings. There's a bird flying right next to me, oh, my God.
A fan blows the wind into my face and hair and through the goggles I'm in the sky.
This is kind of scary. Birdly is headed up by Max Rheiner at the Zurich University of the Arts.
MAX RHEINER: Flying is of course one of the oldest dreams of the humans, so we try to incorporate this kind of feeling and experience of flying simulator like you do when you're dreaming.
DEL BARCO: Other installations are more like nightmares. One computer-generated project by former journalist Nonny De La Pena puts you on the streets of Syria as it gets bombed. Another project by performance artist Oscar Raby places you in front of a scene his father witnessed in 1973 during the regime of Augusto Pinochet, a mass execution of 15 prisoners.
OSCAR RABY: This is Santa Lucia Hill. Right on this spot. My father was an Army officer in part of the military dictatorship in Chile.
At my father was an Army officer. When I was 16 years old he told me the story of that day.
DEL BARCO: Raby says in this piece he hopes to reflect on and even revise history. Last summer his father tried it out.
RABY: When he finished he took the mask off, he looked at me very seriously and told me you changed it and then he hugged me, and I realize that he meant that I changed the memory of that day. I gave him another version of the same day.
DEL BARCO: Shari Frilot is a senior programmer for Sundance. She curated the New Frontier program and says this intersection of real life and virtual reality is meant to spark conversations.
SHARI FRILOT: To let v.r. break through our tribal lizard brains (laughter) and tap into something that is really vulnerable. So when we take those goggles off, you know, we're in an elevated state of consciousness, you know. I don't know how else to say it, and then we can offer that to one another.
DEL BARCO: Most of these projects are still in the developmental stage, though at least one will be for sale this spring. That is a virtual reality game based on the Iranian revolution of 1979.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIRTUAL REALITY GAME)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (As character) We can for change on this brutal and illegal regime.
DEL BARCO: This game is a creation of Navid Khonsari. He worked on big video games like "Grand Theft Auto" and "L.A. Noir," so he as a strong sense of how to create cityscapes. In this game, you're placed in the midst of street protests and you go through a tough interrogation. Khonsari says he wanted to create empathy for the people who live through this.
NAVID KHONSARI: I really believe if you can spend time in another person shoes you have a greater understanding for their experiences and that's certainly part of our goal here.
DEL BARCO: But the true test of these virtual reality projects will be whether people will actually want to pay money to experience any of this. Mandalit del Barco, NPR News at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
We're going to hear now about "Project Syria," one of the virtual reality experiences that Mandalit just mentioned. The director calls it immersive journalism. The experience takes the audience to the city of Aleppo, albeit a computer-generated Aleppo, and recreates a mortar attack.
(SOUNDBITE OF "PROJECT SYRIA")
SIEGEL: Nonny de la Pena is the director of "Project Syria." Welcome to the program.
NONNY DE LA PENA: Thank so much for hosting me.
SIEGEL: And you have to describe this. If I were in Sundance - seeing what you've done here - I'd put on a pair of goggles with earphones and I just - I'd be in a room walking around where I could experience this scene from Aleppo?
DE LA PENA: That's correct. And when you're walking around the street it's actually changing the imagery one-for-one to match wherever you look, bend, kneel, jump. So that's why it so accurately conveys the sensation of being present on scene.
SIEGEL: The sensation is powerful. The simple question - is it journalism? Is walking and experiencing computer-generated images the same thing as seeing a documentary film you might have made or read an article you might have written for Newsweek?
DE LA PENA: I would certainly argue that, you know, ultimately text is just lines on a page, right? And that to say that a computer-generated imagery isn't going to have some accuracy to it, you know, I think it's disingenuous. So despite the fact that it's computer-generated - and I can tell you that the 3D modeling is getting better much more quickly and that the capturing of scenes is going to get much more photo-real, and it's really up to us journalists to understand what are the best practices for these new spatial narratives?
SIEGEL: So you're saying that if I'm experiencing - if I'm seeing even computer-generated images of people, if they get more realistic and they're closer to the actual image of those people, you're saying that at some point its not different from actually seeing a film taken of them as they were, what they were doing at that moment.
DE LA PENA: You know, I would say that we know that each platform has a different - conveys a different feeling. Newspapers differ from radio, radios differ from television. This is just a brand new platform, and the experience is going to offer different affordances. This is going to have different things that perhaps might not be considered as acceptable by today's standards, but later on we'll understand that there's a real value to telling stories in this way.
SIEGEL: Yeah. Applying today's standards, we would say that the degree of manipulation of the image for photography would be out of bounds. We wouldn't accept that as news photography.
DE LA PENA: That might be the case, but I think that the overall sense of the re-creation would be acceptable certainly in documentary film. And with that background that I have I applied the same sort of techniques that I would when I was trying to re-create a scene that perhaps was not captured on camera, and I think that there's a lot of best practices that documentarians use to make sure that something's accurate and I try to bring those to bear in the virtual environment.
SIEGEL: If one person sees it at one time - are we talking about in effect a museum exhibition as the medium of showing this or could you ever imagine reaching a mass audience this way?
DE LA PENA: Quite easily. There are certain stories that will lend themselves to immersive journalism to be done on a mobile phone within a 48 hours - or certainly within a news cycle. I always cite the Trayvon Martin case as an example. The condo was a cookie-cutter building. It's a dark rainy night. You can't see very well what's going on. George Zimmerman's SUV, I can buy it on one of the modeling sites, exact replica for 130 bucks. We could've had that story up and onto people's mobile phones with mobile viewers, like Google Cardboard, within 48 hours at the most. So yes, I think that it's going to no doubt affect the way that we get our news in the future.
SIEGEL: Nonny de la Pena, director of "Project Syria." Thank you very much.
DE LA PENA: I really appreciate you spending the time with me today.
SIEGEL: Nonny de la Pena spoke to us from the Sundance Festival in Park City, Utah.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
For nearly six months, the U.S. has carried out air strikes in Iraq and Syria against the self-proclaimed Islamic State. But Congress has yet to authorize that air war. Last week in his State of the Union address, President Obama urged lawmakers to act. But Republicans say its the president to should make the first move. NPR's David Welna reports.
DAVID WELNA, BYLINE: President Obama told Congress the time has come for a new authorization for the use of military force, also known as an AUMF.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And tonight I call on this Congress to show the world that we are united in this mission by passing a resolution to authorize the use of force against ISIL. We need (applause) that authority.
(APPLAUSE)
WELNA: How badly he wants it, says Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who served in the George W. Bush administration, may be quite another matter.
JACK GOLDSMITH: Historically, presidents who have wanted to get an AUMF have actually sent a draft to Congress and fought for it, and this president keeps saying he wants one, but he hasn't done anything to follow through.
WELNA: Obama has been relying on two AUMFs assigned by George W. Bush for fighting the 9/11 perpetrators and invading Iraq. White House press secretary Josh Earnest continues to insist the president has all the authority he needs for fighting the Islamic State. The reason Obama wants a new AUMF, says Earnest, is to show that Democrats and Republicans are united behind a strategy, and he wants members of both parties to help craft a war resolution. Like most GOP lawmakers, New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte is not interested.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SEANTOR KELLY AYOTTE: For the Congress to propose what authority we should give the president doesn't seem logical. For the president as the commander-in-chief to say this is why I need this authority and this is what I plan to do with it. That seems to be the proper steps in the process here for foreign policy.
WELNA: And House Speaker John Boehner, when asked about the president's request for a new AUMF, left it up to Obama.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CONGRESSMAN JOHN BOEHNER: I would expect the president's going to send an authorization to the Congress. I expect that we will have hearings on that and that we will in fact have a debate and a vote on it at timing yet to be determined.
WELNA: For California House Democrat Adam Schiff, such GOP deference to the president looks highly suspicious.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CONGRESSMAN ADAM SCHIFF: It's extraordinarily ironic that this House leadership, which considers the president to be an imperial president to his usurping so much authority from the Congress, is so ready to give the president carte blanche when it comes to making war.
WELNA: The disagreement over who should go first reflects a deeper divide over just what should be in a new war resolution. One issue is who should be targeted. Virginia Democratic Senator Tim Kaine says it should not be Syria's President, Bashar al-Assad.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SENATOR TIM KAINE: We ought to have an ISIS-specific authorization and we ought to have an Assad strategy that's separate.
WELNA: John McCain, the Republican who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, disagrees.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN: For it to be ISIS-only is of course ludicrous.
WELNA: There's also disagreement over the role the U.S. troops should play. Chris Murphy is a Democratic senator from Connecticut.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SENATOR CHRIS MURPHY: Many of us, myself included, believe that we should learn from the Iraq war and put a prohibition on ground troops. We don't need to send our soldiers to fight this fight on the ground. Republicans seem to want to give the president the ability to fight another land war, ground war in Syria and Iraq.
WELNA: They do, says South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, because the effort against the Islamic State won't succeed without U.S. ground forces.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: Get over the fact that you can do this without an American ground component. It doesn't have to be 100,000.
WELNA: That may be a moot point for now. Republicans sense little urgency for a new war resolution. Bob Corker is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations panel.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SENATOR BOB CORKER: It's urgent when you know what it is they want and when they're able to explain a plausible way forward, which they've been unable to do at this point. So when they're able to do that we're ready to act.
WELNA: And when that happens, Congress may belatedly start debating a war no one seems eager to own. David Welna, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Over the past few years, the Swedish city of Malmo has earned a reputation for anti-Semitism. Members of Malmo's small Jewish population say that walking in some of the city's Muslim neighborhoods wearing a skull cap, a kepah, is to risk verbal abuse and possibly worse. Well, that risk has now been documented by Swedish television journalist Petter Ljunggren. Ljunggren wore a cap and also a Jewish star pendant in Malmo while secretly filming. One scene captures him fleeing a group of increasingly agitated young men as eggs are thrown at him from nearby windows. Later, a young man from that neighborhood describes how on that night, he'd gotten a text telling him to egg the Jews.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MISSION: INVESTIGATE")
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: (Speaking Swedish).
SIEGEL: Well, Petter Ljunggren joins us from Stockholm. Welcome to the program.
PETTER LJUNGGREN: Thank you.
SIEGEL: And describe what it was like to walk, for you, disguised as an observant Jew through those streets of Malmo.
LJUNGGREN: I think it can best be described as a permanent tension. We met mixed reactions really, which is important to point out. We had very many meetings with friendly Middle Eastern persons as well, some very warm meetings. But there was a number of occasions with hostility. And those occasions, they made the whole experience being very tensed, and, you know, you are on your guard all the time. It was very good for me to experience that because I realize how some Jews in Malmo feel every day.
SIEGEL: Now, this is not the old problem of anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi skinheads. This is anti-Israel sentiment that is turned into outright anti-Semitism. Do I have that right? And how common would you say that is?
LJUNGGREN: It's - you are right. And it's common enough to be a big problem. It's not all Muslims or all Middle Eastern men in Malmo - not at all. But there are so many that it's a problem. And it's not only on an individual basis either. There are groups. And it's an acceptance of anti-Semitism. It's an acceptance of hatred of Jews in some environments. And that's a big problem.
SIEGEL: This report of yours was on the program "Mission: Investigate" a few nights ago. How would you describe the reaction in Sweden to your film?
LJUNGGREN: Oh, the reactions were overwhelming really. I didn't realize that I would get so many reactions. It was not only in the papers and in the media but also debates, you know, in the social medias - a lot of comments. And you could see it's a very sensitive subject. And it's a subject engaging people. And I must tell you a wonderful reactions. The representatives of the Muslim population in Malmo actually went to the rabbi, who is harassed. They went to him with flowers and a letter where it said, Malmo wouldn't be whole without you. So, I mean, that's a very positive reaction of course to my documentary
SIEGEL: Well, Petter Ljunggren, thank you very much for talking with us about your film.
LJUNGGREN: Thank you.
SIEGEL: Petter Ljunggren is a reporter at "Mission: Investigate," a program on Swedish television. Later this week, he'll air a documentary on anti-Muslim sentiment in Sweden.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
It is Tuesday in Australia, which means it's time for the quarterfinals at the Australian Open. And Australians' hopes are pinned on a fiery 19-year-old who's electrified the men's competition, but whose foul mouth has also gotten him into some trouble. Joining me from Melbourne to talk about that and more is ESPN contributor Kamakshi Tandon. Welcome to the program.
KAMAKSHI TANDON: Thank you for having me.
BLOCK: And let's start by talking about this young Australian player, Nick Kyrgios, known for his explosive play as well as his temper. He has been fined at the Open for swearing and throwing his racket. Talk about how he has been received by Australian fans there.
TANDON: Yes, I think the young Australians in general really took the Australian Open by storm this first week, especially Kyrgios, who probably has the biggest personality and the biggest game of them all. He's come through couple of five-setters, has a really big serve and big groundstrokes. And I think, you know, Australians are really captivated by both his personality and the way that he plays. As you mentioned, he has had a few displays of temper. You know, Australians really do like their athletes to be very sportsmanlike, so that's created a little bit of controversy and talk. Some people like him. They see him as a modern personality. And some people feel that perhaps he needs to tone it down, and, you know, he's sort of cocky rather than confident. But I think all of that just has helped him just really capture the country's attention, and everyone is just waiting for his match against Andy Murray later today, on Tuesday.
BLOCK: There was a big upset on the men's side early on when the number two seed, Roger Federer, was ousted in the third round. Who is looking especially strong now on the men's side?
TANDON: Djokovic seems like he's playing the best tennis. He is a four-time champion, and I think he's going to be the one to beat in the second week.
BLOCK: Let's move over and talk about the women's side. Both of the Williams sisters, Serena and Venus, have made it to the quarterfinals, could end up potentially facing each other in the semis.
TANDON: Yes, it's been a real resurgence from Venus, and I think that's really been one of the stories of the tournament so far. You know, Serena has more or less expected to get to this point. But for Venus, at 34, to be coming back and playing really good tennis again is a pretty exciting development.
BLOCK: And what about the 19-year-old American Madison Keys? Tell us about her.
TANDON: Yes, it's been a real breakthrough tournament for her. And it's something I think people have been waiting for because there's been a lot of talk about her talent. She's got a big game. She serves very well. And I think with coaching of Lindsay Davenport, who was of course a former number one, she's really found the confidence in how to use her game. And it's going to be a very interesting match between her and Venus, sort of a battle of the generations in American women's tennis. >>BLOCK: Kamakshi, there has also been some controversy about something that's become known as Twirlgate. This is when a male interviewer asked a couple of the players to twirl - to do a little twirl for the cameras on court.
TANDON: Yes, during an on-court interview - there's a young Canadian player, Eugenie Bouchard - the interviewer just referred to her outfit and said, can you give us a twirl? Which she did. Serena did say that she was also asked about what she was wearing in her interview, and she actually gave a twirl as well. And that caused quite a bit of controversy and reaction from people who were watching. You know, a lot of people saying it was sexist. Bouchard herself has said she doesn't really mind, but generally there has been the sense that that was an inappropriate question. I think what it shows more than anything else is that the Australian Open does tend to push the envelope a little bit in its on-court interviews. It tries to really play up the players' personalities. And this is just one example of how things can get a little bit awkward.
BLOCK: Yeah, and have the women players responded?
TANDON: I think generally the sense from them is that they don't want to get involved in the sexism controversy, but generally they wouldn't like to get to questions like that.
BLOCK: Yeah, maybe just focus on the tennis. How about that?
TANDON: Exactly. I mean, it's a tennis tournament. It's not a talk show.
BLOCK: Well, Kamakshi Tandon of ESPN, thanks so much for talking with us.
TANDON: Thanks very much.
BLOCK: Kamakshi Tandon is in Melbourne covering the Australian Open.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Dan Mangan's music has evolved over the last decade. The 31-year-old singer-songwriter's first album offered quiet folk songs in the style of Nick Drake. His last album, the acclaimed "Oh Fortune," leaned heavily toward rock. And Mangan's new album, "Club Meds," is a turn towards the experimental. Reviewer Tom Moon says it's wildly ambitious and thoroughly engrossing.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "OFFRED")
TOM MOON, BYLINE: Dan Mangan doesn't read music. He's from indie rock - considers himself a word guy. A few years ago when he needed a band, he reached out to musicians from Vancouver's jazz scene. Together they've developed an unusual, sometimes dizzying sound.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "OFFRED")
DAN MANGAN + BLACKSMITH: (Singing) I give in. I do not have the fight. They changed my purpose, especially everything.
MOON: Mangan credits the players, known collectively as Blacksmith, with changing his approach to songwriting. He once crammed every space with words and images. Now he opens things up with expansive instrumental passages. These deepen the already shadowy moods.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "OFFRED")
MOON: Mangan draws inspiration from Peter Gabriel and other progressive rockers, as well as novelists like Margaret Atwood and Milan Kundera. And like a novelist, he obsessively writes and rewrites.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "KITSCH")
DAN MANGAN + BLACKSMITH: (Singing) Boys in the trenches. Call it old fashioned, call it nostalgia.
MOON: He says it took a solid year of editing to get some of these lyrics into finished form. By contrast, the instrumental reveries came together quickly. Often they grew out of open-ended experimentation, or jamming.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "A DOLL'S HOUSE/PAVLOVIA")
MOON: Dan Mangan admits he used to suffer from singer-songwriter disease - the belief that everything important in a song directly relates to the words. Inside the riveting and sometimes chaotic collaborations of his new album "Club Meds," it sounds like he's found a cure.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "VESSEL")
SIEGEL: The latest from Dan Mangan + Blacksmith is called "Club Meds." Our reviewer is Tom Moon.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "VESSEL")
DAN MANGAN + BLACKSMITH: (Singing) I'm a vessel in the valley. I'm in the middle of the season.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
A massive blizzard is hitting the Northeast with as much as three feet of snow expected in some areas, along with hurricane force winds. Four states are imposing travel bans tonight. Meanwhile, airlines have canceled or delayed thousands of flights. NPR's Hansi Lo Wang reports now on how the region is preparing.
HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE: The message is clear from governors along the Northeast.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GOVERNOR CHARLIE BAKER: I can't stress this part enough - please stay off the roads.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GOVERNOR CHRIS CHRISTIE: You should stay home if you can. You should only go out in the case of an absolute emergency or necessity.
WANG: That was Governors Charlie Baker of Massachusetts and Chris Christie of New Jersey. Their counterpart in New York, Andrew Cuomo, explained why this snowstorm may not be your average blizzard.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GOVERNOR ANDREW CUOMO: The blizzard brings with it very high winds, gusts up to 55 miles per hour. And that's what makes the situation dangerous and difficult. It's the snow combined with the wind.
WANG: In fact, hurricane-force winds are expected along parts of the eastern shoreline with some predicted to go as high as 75 miles per hour. Blizzard conditions also threaten the shoreline with coastal flooding as high as four feet, with the worst expected in Massachusetts. Officials warn that conditions may ramp up quickly overnight with total snow accumulations expected to reach between two to three feet.
Thousands of snow plows and salt trucks have been at the ready in cities like Boston and New York, where sanitation workers are gearing up to clean up about 6,000 miles of city streets. In Manhattan's East Village neighborhood, Mercedes Santana did her part this morning outside her office building.
MERCEDES SANTANA: Well, I'm actually putting a little bit of salt down.
WANG: Santana said she's prepared, but not too concerned.
SANTANA: You know, we've been disappointed before when we've heard that there were going to be blizzards and major snowstorms, so just out here doing the normal maintenance and preventive measures to avoid any accidents.
WANG: There was a more anxious tone among commuters at the New York's Grand Central Terminal, where some showed up early to take trains out of the city after cutting short their workdays.
DAN SCHAKED: I'm definitely worried that it's going to be a lot of snow, and I won't be able to get home.
WANG: Dan Schaked, an attorney from Scarsdale, New York, decided to make his 30-minute commute home before noon.
SCHAKED: It's starting to pile up out there, and travel's going to be difficult. Getting off the train, getting home from the train's going to be difficult. So I want to avoid the risk and get home early.
WANG: Once Jasmine Bryant of Poughkeepsie, New York, arrives home, she says she's already prepared to weather the storm.
JASMINE BRYANT: I have food, I have shelter, so I'm good.
WANG: The storm is also grounding businesspeople and tourists who are stuck and likely won't be able to fly home tomorrow or the day after from some of the region's airports. Gina Flores of Pittsburg, California, says her airline asked her to rebook a later flight out of New York for her and her family. Flores says she's worried.
GINA FLORES: They sent me, like, a little alert letting me know that I should change my flight just in case and to keep on the lookout that it might not be good enough - might have to do it on Friday instead.
WANG: Friday, wow...
FLORES: Yeah, my boss is going to kill me (laughter) so...
WANG: Flores says there is one bright side to staying longer in New York for her young son and daughter.
FLORES: We used to live here a long time ago, so they get to see where mommy and daddy met, so it's very exciting.
WANG: Exciting and cold. Hansi Lo Wang, NPR News, New York.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
The new prime minister of Greece, Alexis Tsipras, was sworn in today, promising an end to his country's humiliation and suffering. His leftist Syriza party is the first anti-austerity party to take power in Europe. The new prime minister is young and has no government experience. But after five years of economic pain, Greeks have pinned their hopes for the future on him. Joanna Kakissis reports from Athens.
JOANNA KAKISSIS, BYLINE: The Greek economic depression turned Ilias Tsikos into a fan of the new prime minister. Today, Tsikos, a 42-year-old father of two, ekes out a living selling loukoumadhes, fritters of fried dough, out of a mobile cart. He used to work in construction, but that job disappeared when the Greek economy collapsed.
ILIAS TSIKOS: (Speaking Greek).
KAKISSIS: "Things cannot get any worse," Tsikos says, "and every other politician has screwed things up, so why not take a chance on this guy?"
Alexis Tsipras is different from other politicians in Greece. He's only 40 years old, the youngest prime minister since 1865. He's been with his high school sweetheart for more than two decades, and they have two children, but the couple has never married. Instead of the wealthy suburbs, the family lived in a working-class neighborhood. Tsipras has even been seen taking out the trash.
Mathaios Tsimitakis, a journalist who knew Tsipras in high school, says Greeks like that he's a political outsider.
MATHAIOS TSIMITAKIS: Alexis is not coming from a political family. You know, he didn't inherit a position in politics. And Alexis is - at this point, he seems to be one of the very few politicians in Greece to be in connection to society.
KAKISSIS: A communist in his youth, Tsipras took over the leadership of Syriza in 2008. The party picked up support as Greeks grew more and more frustrated with the country's political establishment. With a record unemployment and rising poverty, Greeks are fed up with austerity and the politicians who can offer nothing else. At his victory rally Sunday night, Tsipras got the loudest cheers when he talked about the message of his campaign.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)
PRIME MINISTER ALEXIS TSIPRAS: (Through interpreter) This victory undisputedly cancels any agreements of austerity, of catastrophe. The Greek people have given their verdict.
KAKISSIS: Today, with hundreds of cameras clicking away, Tsipras was sworn in as prime minister. As usual, he didn't wear a tie. He refused a religious ceremony, the first prime minister to do that.
Veatriki Archmandriti, a public transportation worker, says she expects Tsipras will fight any more austerity plans cooked up in the back rooms of Brussels and Berlin.
VEATRIKI ARCHMANDRITI: (Through interpreter) Of course now those leaders have to talk to him. He's the prime minister, and he represents not only a change for Greece, he's the face of change in all of Europe. And he has forced Europe to see that austerity can't go on.
KAKISSIS: European leaders say Greece cannot walk away from the terms of its bailout. The country could face bankruptcy. Tsipras says he's open to talking to anyone, but he won't budge on his promises to the Greek people. For NPR News, I'm Joanna Kakissis in Athens.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
What effect might the Greek election and the new anti-austerity government have on the rest of Europe? Can Athens, under Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, succeed in negotiating a rescheduling of its debt? And if it does, could that encourage other debt-burdened countries in the eurozone to follow suit? Well, we're going to hear now from Jacob Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. Hi, welcome to the program.
JACOB KIRKEGAARD: My pleasure.
SIEGEL: First, the argument for a renegotiation of the Greek debt is roughly this - the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, the European Commission, so-called Troika, bailed out Greece in 2010 with conditions so harsh that they turned a recession into a depression and made repayment even more unlikely. Any sign that European lenders are reconsidering that austerity program?
KIRKEGAARD: I think at the current moment the answer is no. But at the same time, I think the reality is that everyone in Europe, they understand that the Greek debt, as it is currently structured, is unsustainable. So it's not really a question of whether or not Greece is going to see another debt restructuring. I think everyone agrees that it will. The disputes are about the process that leads to this debt restructure. It's essentially the chronology of it, where the Troika and the Eurogroup and the European Commission and the ECB are saying, look, we can discuss this but only after you, Greece, has completed the structural economic reform program, or essentially the Troika program, first. So you do your homework first, and then we negotiate.
SIEGEL: Let's say the new Greek government actually manages to win some forbearance - a good deal for them. Would that be an encouragement to Italy, Spain, Portugal, whoever to say, you know, these left-wing parties, this may be the way to go?
KIRKEGAARD: I strongly doubt that. Because remember that the only reason that such a good deal could be negotiated is that Greece has gone through a great depression. And I don't think that any other country in the euro area would want to go through a debt restructuring of privately held debt, like the Greece had in 2011, 2012, because the repercussions of that were very severe indeed.
SIEGEL: Under this agreement, Greece, in addition to cutting lots of public employees and other public expenditures, was supposed to crack down on corruption and on tax evasion. Is there any sign that someone's gone after Greek oligarchs to pay some taxes?
KIRKEGAARD: I think there's some signs, but I think it's also fair to say that Greek tax collection as it is currently structured is not viable, which is one of the reasons why the euro area is saying that, look, why should we give you debt relief when you are still not a viable country in fiscal terms?
SIEGEL: When you're saying it's not viable you mean they're just not collecting the taxes they're supposed to collect?
KIRKEGAARD: Yeah, they're not collecting the taxes, and it's also the sort of burden-sharing of this. And this is where I think, you know, Alex Tsipras and Syriza has a good argument - that there's no doubt that there are sectors of the Greek economy that has been largely shielded from this.
SIEGEL: When the Greek bailout was agreed a few years ago, it was said that Greece and all of its 11 million people were kind of an outlier. Its policies had been truly irresponsible, and its leaders had cooked the books. But Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland were more consequential economies. They were also in trouble. And there was a mixing of the signals that would be sent to Greece and the signals sent to those countries. Today what's the context for Greece's dilemma? Are those countries out of the woods or are they still in the same trouble they were in in 2010?
KIRKEGAARD: No, I think the situation today is dramatically different. The risk of financial contagion from, you know, Greece is in trouble, that leads to troubles in Portugal, Ireland, elsewhere, we're simply not seeing that. And this is partly in response to the better performance reform-wise of these other countries, but also as part of the changes that have been made to the euro area.
SIEGEL: But say in Spain, where there's still a very high unemployment rate, one can look at the past few years and say they're in a completely different situation from the Greeks?
KIRKEGAARD: In terms of the unemployment rate, the answer is no. But certainly in terms of the level of debt is still significantly much lower than in Greece. And then the broader prospects of is it an economy that can grow? I think the answer to that question is yes for Spain. It is a country that has enacted a number of important structural reforms to labor markets, pension systems. So it's a country with a better future.
SIEGEL: To keep your guard thank you very much for talking with us.
KIRKEGAARD: My pleasure.
SIEGEL: Jacob Kirkegaard is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Traffic is a fact of modern life. Cars, plus more cars, plus trucks and there you are creeping along wondering why you're not going any faster, but of course you're thankful that you're tuned to your local NPR station. But even the most captive of you might have missed this story in the first time around. It's about ants and why crowded roads don't slow ants down. As part of his project Joe's Big Idea, NPR science correspondent Joe Palca has this ant traffic report.
JOE PALCA, BYLINE: Good morning, everyone. Looks like another no-hassle day on the ant highways. Traffic is moving smoothly on Jungle Route 17 near the split. Ants are traveling at speed coming in on 95 through the savanna, heavy volume but no slowdowns on Parkside Drive near the picnic basket.
Now, you may have noticed something a little surprising about this traffic report - no traffic jams. Physicist Apoorva Nagar at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology says it turns out, for the most part, ants don't have traffic jams. Nagar wanted to know why that was and whether human traffic engineers could learn a thing or two from ants about how to avoid jams. I reached Nagar via Skype in his office in Kerala, India. He says there are basically three reasons ants don't jam up when running together in a single direction. Number one, ants don't have egos. They don't show off by zooming past slowpokes.
APOORVA NAGAR: They do not want to overtake each other.
PALCA: No aggressive drivers on an ant highway.
NAGAR: The second thing is that they do not mind a few accidents or collisions.
PALCA: So unless there's a serious pileup, they just keep going. And the third reason?
NAGAR: Ants seem to get more disciplined as the density increases.
PALCA: More discipline means no rubbernecking or distracted driving. Nagar felt this kind of behavior could be explained by something called the Langevin equation, an equation physicists use when describing the movement of liquids or how individual atoms behave in a lattice. I wasn't entirely familiar with the Langevin equation, so I turned to Thomas Donnelly, a physics professor at Harvey Mudd College.
THOMAS DONNELLY: This is basically a reworking of Newton's famous F=MA equation.
PALCA: Oh, yes, of course. Force equals mass times acceleration.
DONNELLY: So it's all Newton, but they're using a sort of special description of the forces, which includes a random component.
PALCA: OK, I think that's as far as I'm going to go in explaining that. But the bottom line is when Nagar made a mathematical model of the ants' traffic patterns using the Langevin equation and compared what his model predicted with what experiments with ants running in a line showed...
NAGAR: And they sort of seemed to fit very well with the experiment.
PALCA: So he wrote up his results, and they will appear in the journal Physical Review E. Nagar is not sure how relevant his model will be for human traffic engineers. After all, he agrees allowing cars to bump into each other at 60 miles an hour may be a nonstarter. Although greater discipline and less ego should help keep traffic flowing smoothly.
There's one other tiny problem. Nagar is a physicist, not an ant man. I've talked with ant researchers who say when the volume of ants is high enough, ants do jam up. But I suppose you could solve that problem by building more ant highways. Joe Palca, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Tonight, the president of Argentina went on TV and announced plans to dissolve the country's domestic intelligence agency. It's the latest twist in a drama that has involved allegations of government corruption and the mysterious death of a prosecutor. NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro joins me now from Buenos Aires. And tell us more, Lourdes, about what Argentina's president had to say.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, BYLINE: Yeah. President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner addressed the nation. She said basically that she was dissolving the domestic spying agency. I'm looking at the news programs now, and the tagline is, a slap to the spies. As you can imagine, this is a pretty huge move. Essentially, she says the existing spy agency which employs some 2,000 people - it will be dissolved and a new federal agency will take its place. President Kirchner last week on social media blamed what she said was the murder of that prosecutor you mentioned on disgruntled spies whom she had fired.
Just to refresh your memory a little bit, Alberto Nisman, the prosecutor, was found just over a week ago in his apartment with a bullet to the head and a gun next to him. He was the lead investigator trying to uncover who was behind the worst terrorist attack in Argentina's history. That was in 1994 when 85 people were killed at a Jewish community center. It's been 20 years since that attack happened, and no one has been charged.
Nisman claimed Iran and it's agents, the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah were behind it, and he was just about to submit a report to Congress in which he claimed President Kirchner was trying to cover up Iran's complicity. Then he was discovered dead. So there's been a lot of speculation here.
BLOCK: And I gather that the president also named a suspect tonight - someone she says was involved in the prosecutor's death.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yes, she did. She took to national television and said that the man who had last seen the dead prosecutor, Alberto Nisman, alive and had given him the gun was linked to a large media organization that is a foe of the Kirchners. And he was Nisman's coworker, a computer expert. And this is the second person she has suggested was linked to Nisman's death and, may I say, with absolutely no proof. This is all being judged in the court of public opinion, it seems, and not in the court of law.
BLOCK: There is also an active investigation underway into the prosecutor - Alberto Nisman's death. So far, it has not been ruled a homicide, right?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: They haven't ruled it a homicide. The investigation is still ongoing, and it could be ruled a suicide. But no one really believes that. You have to remember this is an election year. The stakes are very high. And for her part, President Kirchner tonight defended herself at length saying Nisman's complaint against her was absolute nonsense. She does not want to have the suspicion put on her that she had anything to do with Nisman's death.
BLOCK: This is such a tangled story, and I imagine there where you are, in Buenos Aires, this has just galvanized the public's attention.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I cannot tell you how absolutely riveted the Argentine people are by this drama. Everywhere you go, everyone speak to has an opinion on Nisman's death. Just where this started - this was Argentina's worst terror attack. It happened 20 years ago and the investigation has gone nowhere. No one has been convicted, but everyone has been implicated. I've been told here that Iran was behind it, the CIA might've been behind it, Syria might've been behind it, the Argentine government did it and so on.
And you have to understand that in the absence of real proof - again, no one has been proven to have been behind this bombing 20 years ago - people form their own opinions. People feel that the institutions here cannot be trusted, and Nisman's death is one more tragic chapter in this saga.
BLOCK: OK, NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro reporting from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Lourdes, thanks very much.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You're welcome.
BLOCK: And again, the news - that the president of Argentina has announced plans to dissolve her country's domestic intelligence agency.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
When writer Marie Mutsuki Mockett's father died unexpectedly several years ago, she became unmoored, lost in deep depression and grief. Her father was American, her mother is Japanese, and it was in Japan's rituals of mourning that Mockett found solace. Her mother's family owns and runs a temple just 25 miles from the Fukushima nuclear power plant which melted down after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Mockett begged her cousin - the temple's priest - to leave. He refused. He told her his community needed him.
MARIE MUTSUKI MOCKETT: To care for the souls of the ancestors so that the living who are left behind feel at ease that the souls of their beloved departed family members are being tended to every day.
BLOCK: It's at her family's temple that Marie Mutsuki Mockett begins her journey through grief, a journey that takes her into the radiation zone, into the homes of tsunami survivors, into Zen temples where she spends hours in meditation. She writes about those experiences in her new book, "Where The Dead Pause And The Japanese Say Goodbye."
MOCKETT: Of course grief is special and private and everyone's grief is unique, and the person that we have lost is unique. But there are all of these wonderful traditions which take individual pain like that and cast it against the backdrop of human suffering, just in general. So for example, I write about something about something called Toro nagashi, which is lantern floating, where during Obon - which is this period in August when the spirits of the ancestors come home - one can go to any number of locations, purchase a paper lantern and write down the names of the people who you have lost, then go to either a river - or in my case, it was the ocean - and put the lantern in the water just as the sun is setting. So when you put your lantern out, you know, it's still sort of light. And then very quickly, it becomes dark. And then very quickly you're aware of the fact that there are hundreds of lanterns on the water and that hundreds of people are mourning their loved ones, you know, and that your loss is one of many, many losses. When I was really intensely depressed and disoriented, I would sit there and think, I just want this pain to shrink, I want it to get smaller. And what I learned was it wasn't really possible for me to miss my father less, but, kind of the world, the backdrop against which I missed him could be larger, which had the effect of making that pain feel less. And the only way to do that was to sort of open my heart up more and have more compassion for other people who had suffered similar losses.
BLOCK: By the end of your book, Marie, you have come to an otherworldly landscape in Japan, it's called Mount Doom. And why don't you describe what it looks like and what Mount Doom is, what it represents?
MOCKETT: Mount Doom is considered one of Japan's most sacred places and it's in the very, very far north of Japan and it is an extinguished volcano. You're met with a really, really strong smell of sulfur, but it kind of signals that you're in another world. You know, you're smelling the inside of the earth. And there are these little pools of bubbling sulfuric hot water that come up in these strange rock formations. There aren't a lot of birds flying around. There's very little vegetation. So it's a very desolate, barren, dead landscape, but it's also eerily beautiful. And there's a river, Sanzu-no-Kawa, which runs from the lake down the mountain and out into the ocean, and this is considered sort of like the River Styx. And there are many stories about the souls of the dead seen walking along this river as they come to the top of Mount Doom and then pause - hence the title of my book "When The Dead Pause" - before they slip into the underworld. And so Mount Doom has become this place of pilgrimage where people who are mourning if they needed desperately to just go to that final spot where they could perhaps catch the person who they miss who has died and say goodbye one more time.
BLOCK: There's something that you learn when you go to Mount Doom from the head priest that there who talks to you, and talks to you about you as a Westerner and how your need to know why things happen may not be really working, may not really help you.
MOCKETT: He was an extraordinary character, sort of severe and serious, who told me with great pride that his nickname when he had been in the monastery for 20 years was Darth Vader.
BLOCK: (Laughter).
MOCKETT: I mean, and what do you do if someone tells you that their nickname is Darth Vader? That's what he said his name was.
BLOCK: You listen.
MOCKETT: And - yes, I did, very intently. And I told him about my meditation training and I told him how irritated I was to have to sit there for three hours, how irritated I was because I had thought that if I wanted to understand anything about Buddhism and what Buddhism had to offer, I thought I was supposed to read sutras and texts and, you know, think, like what I did in college. And he said, oh, you Westerners. He said, you always want to know why you have to do something before you do it. And he said, in Japan we make you do something, and then you learn why afterward. He said, but sometimes you just need to do something and learn the lesson later - which is perhaps a healthier way to live because, of course you can't always know why you're doing what you're doing. Sometimes you simply have to go through an experience.
BLOCK: When the priest told you that about that sort of having to shake off this need to know why, did it change how you were grieving for your father?
MOCKETT: I think so. I think, you know, the Japanese believe that we are connected to our ancestors. And I heard a lot of, oh, your father knows this, your father knows that, your father is watching. And I used to dream about my father constantly and it was always the same dream. He would always come to see me in my childhood room and I would have to tell him that he was dead. And he would look very disappointed and sorry that he had died and then he would go away. And in my kind of Western psychoanalytic mind, I thought, oh, I'm processing the fact that he's dead and that my brain can't accept that he's gone, and that's what I'm doing.
Now I have these dreams about him and he will occasionally show up, and it's always with some sort of very specific and important message. I had a really powerful one last summer where he showed up and he said, you need to be living your life a little bit differently than you are, this is not the way I want you to live your life. And I'm open to this idea that, you know, in however we can explain this, whether it's just a facet of my mind and he's, you know, I'm projecting this onto him when I sleep, that he is still present in a significant way. And if I pay attention to that, the things that I miss about him - his guidance and his wisdom - that's still in me. And that is something that the Japanese believe. And I guess I found a way to believe that and integrate that in a way that works for me, that makes any sense.
BLOCK: Yeah, it does.
MOCKETT: I don't - I'm not one of these people who can believe in a spirit plane or believes that I can actually conjure his spirit or anything truly - truly metaphysical. Metaphorically, I can accept. And that is something I definitely learned from Japan and feel comfortable with.
BLOCK: Marie Mutsuki Mockett. Her book is "Where The Dead Pause And The Japanese Say Goodbye." Thanks very much.
MOCKETT: Thank you so much.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Now a football story of a different kind. This one begins in River Rouge, Mich., on a cold Friday night in November.
COREY PARKER: All we have is us. All we have is us.
SIEGEL: Under the lights, the Panthers of River Rouge High are about to play for the district championship.
PARKER: Fight for each other. Love each other. Let's go get it, Rouge.
SIEGEL: Leading them on their way is Coach Corey Parker. For our series 50 Great Teachers, Dustin Dwyer of Michigan Radio has this profile of a man who teaches football and a whole lot more.
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Panthers stadium for tonight's district final game.
DUSTIN DWYER, BYLINE: It is two minutes and 40 seconds until kickoff. The players of River Rouge High School are going out on the field. The visitors' side of the stand is packed and the River Rouge side is pretty empty.
The River Rouge Panthers kick off to start the championship game. The first quarter is a struggle.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.
DWYER: On offense, there's a string of dropped passes. On defense, Coach Parkers pulls out a senior defensive player, Miles Campbell, to talk gap assignments.
PARKER: Lower your body. They're running right inside of you.
DWYER: As they talk, the players from Ida march in for the game's first touchdown.
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: Touchdown for the Streaks.
DWYER: On the sideline, the Panthers look disorganized, hurt and angry. Coaches, too.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: You know, all right? OK, Ray Ray, you got Pip.
DWYER: River Rouge is a tough place to grow up. Blocked in on one side by an oil refinery, on the other side are a steel plant and a power plant. The neighborhoods are marked by broken homes, poverty and violence.
PARKER: Go ahead, stretch together, DBs. We got time.
DWYER: A week before the district championship game, I followed the team for a Thursday practice. Coach Parker is a young guy, still as fit as many of his teenage players. He grew up on the east side of Detroit in a neighborhood much like this. Football's what got him out, first to a private high school and then to Eastern Michigan University. He started coaching here in 2009. Immediately, he put a new focus on academics.
PARKER: When I got here, you had so many guys that made a decision to be the thug, the gangbanger. And those were the best athletes in the building. And they always played and started here. I said I'm going to change all of that.
DWYER: Now the goal isn't just to win, but to get players like Miles Campbell to college.
So is Coach Parker talking to you about college?
MILES CAMPBELL: Yes, every day, all day. That's his first focus.
DWYER: Coach Parker gives up practice time to have study hall. He makes decisions on who starts Friday night based on GPA. And last year, Parker says 9 out of 14 graduating seniors earned football scholarships to go to college. In the school where less than two-thirds of young men graduate on time, the football team's GPA this fall was just shy of 3.0.
CAMPBELL: Coach Parker got a lot of ambition and he just want to help kids and just help all these boys become men 'cause there's a lot of them, if it weren't for football they wouldn't have nothing.
ANGELO WHITTIS: When I was younger, I used to play football to take my anger out. Like, it was a pain reliever, you know?
DWYER: This is Angelo Whittis, one of Corey Parker's former players. His story tells you a lot about what kids on this team might be going through and about how far Coach Parker is willing to go to see them succeed. Whittis tells me he never knew his father. His mother was in and out of prison. By high school, he was basically homeless, sleeping on friends' couches, sleeping in cars. But at school, he always kept a smile on his face.
WHITTIS: I never wanted to let nobody know that I was depressed or what I was going through at home. So I would be depressed for days.
PARKER: And that's when he attempted to commit suicide.
DWYER: Parker got updates on Whittis from his wife, who was in medical school at the time at a nearby hospital. Whittis survived. He got help, but two months later Parker got another call, and this time Whittis had been arrested for stealing a bike so he could go get money for food. That's when Parker says he and his wife had a conversation.
PARKER: And I said, well, what do you want to do? And she said, Corey, we have to do something.
DWYER: So the Parkers took Angelo Whittis in. They adopted him.
WHITTIS: I got my first bed I ever slept in my whole life. You know, got clothes. So, I mean, once they started doing all of this I'm thinking to myself I can't just up and leave, you know, the family really cares about me.
DWYER: Whittis graduated high school. Now he's in college. The man he used to call coach, he now calls dad.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: Hey, we a family right now. We ain't no team. We a family right now.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #4: Bang on three, bang on three - one, two, three, bang.
DWYER: The halftime clock runs down in the district championship game with the River Rouge Panthers down by two. Their opponents across the field, from Ida, Mich., look more organized, more focused, but the Panthers are used to being underdogs.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #5: Let's go defense. Let's go.
DWYER: On the first drive of the second half, the River Rouge defense makes a stop. From then on, everything goes the Panthers's way.
PARKER: That's my boys, yeah.
DWYER: Final score - Ida 14, River Rouge, 42.
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: Thank you all for coming out. We'd like Ida for being here.
DWYER: There's one thing that I - I think of you often when I hear people say this - that football's just a game.
PARKER: (Laughter) Oh, no way. No way. Football around here is a tool. If you've never had it - if no man has ever told you that they love you, it's a good strong backbone to let you know you are good enough. You are strong enough. You are smart enough to do anything you want in this world. That's what football is.
DWYER: Corey Parker's version of football - it's not the same one that'll be broadcast around the world this weekend. It's not the version advertisers fight over each other to support, but it's the version that perhaps most has the potential to change lives, to change communities. It's the version that got a kid like him - a kid from a rough neighborhood on the east side of Detroit - through college. And it's the version he'll use to do the same for his players. For NPR News I'm Dustin Dwyer in Grand Rapids, Mich.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Today, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, is also the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the most notorious of Nazi death camps, Auschwitz. Over a million people were murdered there, the vast majority of them Jews. Jack Mandelbaum's mother and brother died in the camp, but he was sent to a forced labor camp. The Polish-born Holocaust survivor recently traveled to Berlin to help open an exhibit about the children of Auschwitz. He spoke with NPR's Soraya Sardhaddi Nelson.
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON, BYLINE: Jack Mandelbaum thrives on being an optimist.
JACK MANDELBAUM: I'm a person of action. Anger doesn't get you any place. Hate doesn't get you any place.
NELSON: The outlook is one he developed as a teenager surrounded by horror and despair. The nightmare began when he was 13 and living in the Polish port city of Gdynia. It was August 1939 in and the Nazis were about to invade Poland so his father sent the family to live with relatives in the countryside. He ended up in a concentration camp and Mandelbaum never saw him again. Then before dawn on a morning three years later, the SS came for what was left of Mandelbaum's family.
MANDELBAUM: There was a lot of shooting and crying, and people didn't know what was happening because they had to rush out. Many people were even in their bed clothes. And we were lined up in the market square and then we were marched to a local brewery and as we came, there was an SS officer that was separating people to the left and to the right.
NELSON: Mandelbaum says he clung to his mother and brother as the guards herded them to the left, but the SS officer learned that he had worked as an electrician's helper.
MANDELBAUM: He grabbed me and pushed me to the other side.
NELSON: Mandelbaum spent the next three years at seven concentration camps. As for his family...
MANDELBAUM: The people who went to the left were sent to Auschwitz to be gassed. I never saw them again.
NELSON: He was first taken to Gross-Rosen, a concentration camp where prisoners worked in a granite quarry. Food was scarce and their daily meal amounted to a single piece of bread and what Mandelbaum calls a grass-like soup. He remembers emaciated prisoners stuffing paper into their mouths to fatten up their cheeks so they wouldn't be removed for extermination. But Mandelbaum refused to give up hope. He says he poured what little energy he had into work, hoping he'd be released.
MANDELBAUM: We had a good life before the war. My dream was to go back to this life, to be reunited with my family, and that sustained me.
NELSON: So did not knowing that the Nazis planned to slaughter all Jews, which he didn't learn about until after liberation.
MANDELBAUM: I was so weak at that time, I was down to about 80 pounds.
NELSON: Mandelbaum was 17 when the Holocaust ended. The following year he emigrated to the United States and settled in Kansas City where he married, had four children and became a successful importer. It was nearly two decades before he began speaking publicly about the Holocaust, a decision he says he reached after talking to a neighbor.
MANDELBAUM: He asked me what kind of sports did I play in the concentration camp, so all of a sudden it just opened everything up, how little people knew what was going on. And this is when I started to speak in different venues about my experiences.
NELSON: A desire to share his story also brought him to Berlin last week. Mandelbaum says it's sad to see anti-Semitism on the rise here and elsewhere in Europe.
MANDELBAUM: You know, when we were in the camps, we would always ask how can the world stand by and let this happen? So it's a matter of being vigilant in order to enlighten people how dangerous is if you become a bystander.
NELSON: Soraya Sardhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Berlin.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Leaders of Argentina's Jewish community turned their Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony into a protest. It was aimed at President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. There's outrage in the country after the mysterious death last week of a prosecutor who was looking into the unsolved bombing of a Jewish community center in 1994. NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro reports from Buenos Aires.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, BYLINE: Normally, today's Holocaust remembrance ceremony would've been held at the Foreign Ministry, but a large part of the Jewish community decided to boycott that event and hold their own, on the site of the deadly bombing 20 years ago. Speakers, including the treasurer of the Delegation of Argentine Israeli Associations, Mario Comisarenco, wanted to make clear why.
MARIO COMISARENCO: (Foreign language spoken).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: "In honor of the victims, we will not sit at the table with people who do not tell the truth," he said, "and do not impart justice." "We have also come here," he said, "to honor Alberto Nisman, a prosecutor who became a victim," he said. That attack happened in 1994. A bomb leveled the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association or, AMIA as it's known here, killing 85 people and wounding hundreds. Alberto Nisman was the lead prosecutor on the case. He had accused Iran of masterminding what happened. Nisman died last week in murky circumstances just before he was going to present evidence which he said would implicate President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of a cover-up intent in absolving Iran of responsibility. For the Jewish community, it is only the latest twist in what Argentines agree is a terrible saga and a national shame that began with the AMIA bombing.
ANITA WEINSTEIN: Those first moments were really terrible, of course. I think that I couldn't say a word because I saw the destroyed building at my feet. That was the worst moment.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Anita Weinstein was at AMIA the day of the attack. She only narrowly escaped losing her life because she had left her office momentarily to another part of the building. Her parents Holocaust survivors and she says she will never forget what her mother told her after the attack happened.
WEINSTEIN: She said, I would never have thought that a daughter of mine would be a survivor of an attack against Jews. She thought that humanity had learned something.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: In the following years, the investigation was marred by incompetence and obstruction of justice. In fact, the only people to have been charged in the case were those who were supposed to be investigating it.
PABLO GITTER: (Foreign language spoken).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: "What happened after that was everyone was driven apart," Pablo Gitter says. He belongs to one of the four groups which now represent the families of the AMIA bombing. They all have different ideas about who was behind the bombing and what should be done now. Many say the bombing was the work of Iran and Hezbollah, as Nisman was investigating. Others like Pablo Gitter say Carlos Menem - president at the time - and accomplices were behind it. There's also little consensus on what should be done moving forward.
GITTER: (Foreign language spoken).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: "We will never know the truth if this remains in the hands of judges and prosecutors," he says. "We are guaranteed another 20 years of impunity going forward." Gitter says he wants to see an independent truth commission established. Others contend that won't work and those culpable need to be pursued through the Argentine justice system. Romina Manguel is an investigative journalist who has been following the AMIA case since the attack happened. She says in many ways those who still fight for a resolution to the bombing are broken people.
ROMINA MANGUEL: (Foreign language spoken).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: "They were left alone in their battle for justice," she says. "In the last 20 years many have died of pain, of despair. The years went by and AMIA didn't matter to anybody," she says. Now with the death of Alberto Nisman, the case has been resurrected and it's at the heart of a national scandal. Still, Anita Weinstein says she isn't sure they'll ever find out what really happened that day in 1994.
WEINSTEIN: I hope so. I don't believe so.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News, Buenos Aires.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Southern California gets most of its water from four aqueducts that flow from the north. All of them cross the San Andreas Fault. That means millions of people are just one major earthquake away from losing access to water for a year or more. From member station KPCC, Sanden Totten reports.
SANDEN TOTTEN, BYLINE: All right, so I'm walking up a hill right now in Lake Hughes, Calif. near the Los Angeles Aqueduct. And somewhere beneath me there's the San Andreas Fault, a fault that when it moves next could move up to 20 feet, effectively cutting this aqueduct in two. That is trouble.
CRAIG DAVIS: It's a really concerning issue for the city of Los Angeles.
TOTTEN: That's Craig Davis. He's an engineer with the LA Department of Water and Power, which oversees the LA Aqueduct. Research shows that a magnitude 7.8 quake on the San Andreas could sever this and every other local aqueduct at once, cutting off more than 70 percent of the water sustaining Southern California.
DAVIS: Which is, depending on what counties you look at, is somewhere in the order of 18 to 22 million people. That's a very large number.
TOTTEN: Studies show it would take a year or more to rebuild the waterways. During that time the state's economy would lose roughly $53 billion. That's bad news for Southern California companies like Disney, Mattel and DirecTV. But here's the rub - there's no way to bring water from the north without crossing this fault, so engineers like Craig Davis are looking for other solutions.
DAVIS: So I'm holding a short piece of a high-density polyethylene pipe.
TOTTEN: Davis says the LA Aqueduct crosses the San Andreas Fault in a large underground tunnel that'll shift and crumble in a big quake. But this pipe could survive.
DAVIS: You can almost collapse this pipe in its entirety and still get water through this. And there are some examples of ductile pipes in similar types of fault rupture events in Turkey that actually did this.
TOTTEN: LA Water and Power wants to place this pipe in the existing tunnel to keep some water flowing after a major quake. It's similar to what the San Francisco Bay Area did after its 1989 earthquake. Abby Figueroa with the utility district there says engineers placed a reinforced pipe on sliding cradles inside a tunnel.
ABBY FIGUEROA: We made it so that the pipeline could shift with the movement of the earth, and that way it would minimize any damage.
TOTTEN: That project was paid for by a surcharge added to local water bills. Los Angeles is still looking for a way to pay for its $10 million plan, but shoring up tunnels is only part of the answer.
OK, so tell me about this water in my hands right now.
GORDON JOHNSON: This is water from Northern California. It comes from the Sierras and it is very pure water.
TOTTEN: That's Gordon Johnson with Southern California's Metropolitan Water District. We're in a boat on the Diamond Valley Lake reservoir, about two hours south of Los Angeles. The Water District also oversees one of the region's four aqueducts. If it's destroyed, this man-made lake will come in handy.
JOHNSON: This is Southern California's largest surface water reservoir. This reservoir is intended to supply about six months' worth of water supply.
TOTTEN: The Water District also wants to stockpile construction supplies so crews can quickly build a new waterway after a disaster. But Craig Davis with LA Water and Power says it's not easy getting these big projects off the ground.
DAVIS: But because we are effectively sitting on a time bomb, we need to keep that in mind and get this done as soon as possible.
TOTTEN: Davis just hopes it won't take a major quake for officials to find the money and the motivation to get things done. For NPR News I'm Sanden Totten in Los Angeles.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
New York City and Philadelphia dodged the worst of it, but the nor'easter did wallop parts of New England, and that's where we begin this hour. NPR's Tovia Smith is in Boston and says parts of Massachusetts as well as Connecticut are battling floods power outages and several feet of snow and it keeps coming.
TOVIA SMITH, BYLINE: After all the hype of an historic storm, Massachusetts ended up with all that and then some. Blizzard conditions continued in the eastern part of the state today. As the storm spun overhead, it kept spilling several inches an hour.
CORY DUNLOP: The length of it is that - you know, 10 hours to 40. It takes a beating on you.
SMITH: Cory Dunlop started plowing in Swampscott, north of Boston, just after midnight and was at it all day. Lenny DeMauro would have kept at it, but his plow got stuck.
LENNY DEMAURO: Yeah, I'm going to - they've got to send a bigger truck and hook a chain to me and pull me out of here.
SMITH: Before it's done, snow in parts of central and eastern Massachusetts will hit 25 to 30 inches. Meantime, wicked winds as high as 78 miles per hour in some places have left drifts of up to six feet according to Governor Charlie Baker.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GOVERNOR CHARLIE BAKER: This is clearly a very big story. And there are areas around eastern Mass. at this point that you would probably describe as being in a whiteout-type condition.
SMITH: Tens of thousands in southeastern Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island lost power. The whole island of Nantucket went dark before a generator brought light and heat back to some. Officials say permanent repairs could take days. Meantime, in areas south of Boston, power was purposely cut to prevent fires during flooding which was severe in some areas. Several homes have been damaged and condemned, and extensive beach erosion along the Cape Cod shoreline is being reported. Eastern Connecticut was hit with record-breaking snowfall, some places heading for 30 inches. Mystic resident Jim Short was not optimistic as he tried to clear the two feet or so from his driveway.
JIM SHORT: This is a pretty bad one, and there's a lot of wind with this, too, which makes this such a depressing operation 'cause you just know by tomorrow it's all going to be back and you're going to do it over again.
SMITH: New Hampshire and Maine were also hit hard. Maine's governor said no town would be spared. But New York and New Jersey mostly escaped the brunt of the one, most parts getting something closer to a dusting than the dump that was predicted. New Yorkers were already dubbing it the snore-easter and grousing about the travel ban imposed yesterday.
DAVID MCMILLIAN: I thought how I'm going to get work because they done shut the city down.
SMITH: Bronx resident David McMillian managed to get to his construction job shortly after subway service resumed midmorning. He's among those wondering if officials may be airing a little too much on the side of caution by ordering such broad travel bans and closures.
MCMILLIAN: Now that they know they can do it, they just shut it down. And I'm not sure if it's on a whim, but a lot of people lose work, a day's pay, and they have bills to pay. There's a lot of poor people that live in New York City. So maybe they should've did a little more homework or something before they decided to shut it down.
SMITH: Meteorologists say the storm just went further east than expected. A National Weather Service forecaster in New Jersey actually tweeted out an apology. But as New York, New Jersey and Connecticut lifted their travel bans, officials defended the precautions they took.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MAYOR BILL DE BLASIO: You can't be a Monday morning quarterback on something like the weather.
SMITH: New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio called the restrictions a no-brainer.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DE BLASIO: Bottom line is we got lucky, but we had to take precautions to keep people safe.
SMITH: The sentiment was echoed by Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy. Instead of the hundreds of car accidents you'd expect in a major storm, he said, there were about 15 by midday in his state. One storm fatality reported so far was not from the roads. A 17-year-old boy who was snow tubing crashed into a light pole. Tovia Smith, NPR News, Boston.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
The number of confirmed cases of measles in this country has risen to 88 - most of them in California. The outbreak has been traced to exposure at Disneyland in Orange County, which has the greatest number of measles cases - 23. Dr. Eric Handler is the public health officer for Orange County.
ERIC HANDLER: I can tell you that we have six children that were confirmed measles, five of which were unimmunized. And the majority of the adults, which were 17, don't have immunization records or do not recall.
BLOCK: Why don't you describe for us just how easily measles is spread and the health risks that it can pose for people who do get it?
HANDLER: Certainly. It's spread through the air. If just somebody sneezes, for example, or coughs, and so it becomes droplets that people are exposed to. And individuals are infectious four days before they come down with symptoms, which are fever, cough, runny nose and red eyes. And it's highly contagious, and if you're in a room where somebody does have the disease and you're not protected, there's a 90 percent chance that you're going to come down with that disease.
BLOCK: Ninety percent.
HANDLER: Yes. And this disease has complications. Approximately 30 percent of people will develop either pneumonia or encephalitis or an ear infection. In addition, if you're 5 years of age or younger, there's a 30 percent chance that you're going to be hospitalized.
BLOCK: I was looking at a letter that you sent to parents in Orange County, Dr. Handler, saying that their children may be prevented from going to school or day care if they're not vaccinated and there's a measles case in that school. Have you had to do that? Have you had to order kids out of school?
HANDLER: Well, first of all, let me explain that the beginning of the school year a couple years ago, we sent out a letter through the schools to parents saying that if there is an event just like this and you do not have evidence of being protected, you will be excluded from school for 21 days. So this year, again, on January 14 I sent a letter to the Huntington Beach High School parents, where we had a case, and said that if you do not have evidence of being protected, that your child will be excluded from the high school. And approximately 24 students have been excluded.
BLOCK: You know, it's interesting to think that measles had been eradicated in this country. There would be, I would think, a generation of young doctors who haven't seen measles before, don't know what to look for, might not be trained, really, in the disease. What do you do about that?
HANDLER: You're right. The younger physicians have not seen measles. So we have multiple educational campaigns going on to say, look, we know you haven't seen these cases and here are the things that you need to be aware of in case somebody comes into your office or calls you. I trained at LA County USC almost 30 years ago and it was pretty prevalent to see measles cases. This is not the case now.
BLOCK: It must be strange for you to see those cases coming back after all that time.
HANDLER: It's disheartening to say the least. Interestingly, in Orange County last year we had an outbreak where we had 22 cases of measles. And now we're seeing another outbreak occurring now.
BLOCK: Well, Dr. Handler, thanks so much for talking with us today.
HANDLER: It's my pleasure. Thank you very much.
BLOCK: That's Dr. Eric Handler. He's the public health officer for Orange County, Calif. He spoke with us from Santa Ana.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
A British court is breathing new life into the case of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy turned outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin. Litvinenko was poisoned with radioactive Polonium 210 in a London hotel on November 1, 2006. He died in the intensive ward of a London hospital 22 days later, and he blamed Putin for his death. Joining us now is Alan Cowell of The New York Times, who is covering the inquiry. He also wrote a book about the life and death of Alexander Litvinenko called "The Terminal Spy." Welcome to the program.
ALAN COWELL: Thank you.
SIEGEL: Well, what have you learned from the inquiry into the death of Litvinenko so far?
COWELL: Well, compared to what we knew before and what was reported at the time, there's a clear assertion by counsel for the inquiry that there were two attempts on Mr. Litvinenko's life - 1 two weeks before the other. One was possibly something like a trial run, which he didn't ingest a lot of polonium, and the second one when he clearly ingested a dose that made his death absolutely inevitable.
SIEGEL: And why is the British government opening an inquiry into this case now as opposed to when it happened in 2006?
COWELL: Well, there's been a lot of reluctance on the part of the British government over the years to allow any kind of close scrutiny of what happened because there is so much involvement behind the scenes by intelligence agencies. And for a long time, of course, there was a feeling, as there was with President Obama, that it was possible to make a kind of reset with President Putin and there was a desire in the British government, led by David Cameron, not to rock the boat. And indeed the present inquiry in the High Court is the result of a compromise because there will be a public inquiry most of the time. But a lot of sensitive testimony will be heard in secret. And even the judges' final summing up later this year will not refer directly to matters that the British government say are matters of national security.
SIEGEL: Is part of Britain's sensitivity about all this that Alexander Litvinenko, having been a Russian spy, was, I gather, working for British intelligence also before he died?
COWELL: Well, before he died he was working for the British intelligence. That's what his widow's lawyer says. The focus of what he investigated was the link between the Kremlin and various organized crime groups. And that is where people are beginning to see some kind of smoking gun, that he turned against the KGB in his success at the FSB. He was a blow whistleblower before he fled from Russia in 2000. And from self-exile he was a vitriolic critic of Mr. Putin. He did not hesitate to accuse his former employer, the FSB, of corruption and malfeasance.
SIEGEL: You've been working on the Litvinenko story for a long time. I mean, what are the biggest or most interesting questions that you would hope to hear answered by this inquiry?
COWELL: I think if there is anything that comes anywhere near conclusive evidence of how the polonium itself got from the very controlled world of the Russian nuclear industry and into a teapot in London, that would answer a lot of the questions about who was responsible for it and who ordered it.
SIEGEL: Alen Cowell, thank you very much for talking with us.
COWELL: Thank you, Robert.
SIEGEL: That's Alan Cowell of The New York Times talking to us from London, where he's following the inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko back in 2006. Mr. Cowell is also the author of a book about the case called "The Terminal Spy."
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
We're going to hear now about how a single town in Syria has become a symbol of the war against the so-called Islamic State. Kobani sits along the border between Syria and Turkey. And this week, Kurdish fighters retook most of the town from the Islamic State. The Kurds were supported by hundreds of U.S. and coalition airstrikes. NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman has been following the story and joins us now. And Tom, what more do we know about how these Kurdish retook Kobani?
TOM BOWMAN, BYLINE: Well, Robert, three things came together. You mentioned hundreds of airstrikes. Eighty percent of all U.S. and allied airstrikes in Syria took place right around this area of Kobani. And to make this work, though, you need a ground force. There were no U.S. troops, of course, on the ground there, so they had to rely on the Kurdish forces. And finally, they were helped by the fact that Turkey allowed a supply line across its border to support these Kurdish fighters. And U.S. Central command confirms what the Kurdish fighters are saying - that about 90 percent of the town is in control of the Kurdish fighters. The rest is still being contested.
SIEGEL: And what's the significance of Kobani? Does its recapture represent an important setback for ISIS?
BOWMAN: Well, it's not really that important. It's really just kind of a dusty crossroads town, but capturing it would have given ISIS even more of the northern border area in Syria and Iraq. Kobani was really more of a symbol. First you had international news media on the Turkish border, and it was the only safe place you could see the fight against ISIS. So that tended to elevate the importance of the town. Some call it the CNN effect - you have pictures. And then the question becomes, hey, why can't the U.S. do more to help these poor people in Kobani? But there was also symbolism for ISIS, too. They wanted to show that they were still on the offensive. They continued to have momentum.
SIEGEL: Well, is that momentum now stopped?
BOWMAN: Well, U.S. officials are being cautious. They're not claiming that this is a significant turning point against ISIS. In fact, the Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby said today, no one is spiking the football, even around Kobani.
SIEGEL: Although there have been reports today that the fight around Kobani may have killed around a thousand fighters for the Islamic State. That sounds like a lot of people have died there.
BOWMAN: Well, it does sound like a lot. But remember, the estimates are anywhere from 15,000 to 30,000 ISIS fighters in Syria and Iraq, which is of course a big range and gives you a sense of the uncertainty of this fight and this enemy as well.
SIEGEL: So what's next in the fight against the Islamic State?
BOWMAN: Well, we're told airstrikes will continue around Kobani and in Syria, but the Obama administration has long said that the main focus is Iraq. And that's a particular challenge because the Islamic State controls a lot of territory to the north and west of Baghdad - areas that were, of course, helped by the U.S. forces particularly in the Anbar province west of Baghdad. The problem here is you have an Iraqi army that's widely seen as not very competent. So hundreds of U.S. trainers have been sent to help. Hundreds more will go.
You also have a serious political problem in Iraq. ISIS is finding support among the minority Sunni tribes in Iraq. They, of course, were treated poorly by the previous Iraqi government. And there's still a lot of distrust among Sunnis. The U.S. is trying to act as a go-between, and you need these Sunni tribes as allies. So if there's a turning point in all of this, the place to watch isn't Kobani. It's Mosul. That Iraq's second-largest city.
SIEGEL: But just back to Kobani for a second. Hundreds of airstrikes against a rather small place. Do we know if the targets are vehicles, buildings, places where a few fighters are gathered? What are they - do we know...
BOWMAN: It's all of that.
SIEGEL: All of that.
BOWMAN: And they had plenty of targets, and a lot of it was fighters - was small groups of fighters, vehicles and so forth - hundreds of airstrikes for a small town.
SIEGEL: That's NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman. Thanks a lot, Tom.
BOWMAN: You're welcome, Robert.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
We're going to hear now about a picturesque Swedish island in the Baltic Sea - Gotland. For military experts, Gotland is an essential strategic spot. NPR's Ari Shapiro explains this island is at the center of a complex web of alliances in Europe.
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: When I was in Sweden I didn't go looking for a story about Gotland. But the place just kept coming up in interview after interview.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: An island called Gotland.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Gotland is an extremely important position.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Sweden is including Gotland, there is no doubt.
SHAPIRO: Northern Europe is a complicated chess board and Gotland is a crucial square. Just to the east of this island are the Baltic states - Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. These former Soviet Republics are afraid that Russia might try to swallow them up again, just like it did with Crimea in Ukraine. In September President Obama traveled to Estonia and said, we've got your back.
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PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: So if in such a moment you ever ask again who will come to help, you'll know the answer - the NATO alliance, including the Armed Forces of the United States of America right here, present now.
SHAPIRO: See, the United States and the Baltics are NATO members. That military alliance says an attack on one member is an attack on all. But Sweden is not part of NATO, which means the island of Gotland isn't either. And whoever controls Gotland has the Baltics in their crosshairs. Keir Giles is a military expert at the Chatham House think tank in London.
KEIR GILES: The island of Gotland is a prime target and has been effectively demilitarized by Sweden over the last decade.
SHAPIRO: Sweden's military is a tiny fraction of its former size. Karlis Neretnieks watched it shrink over his decades-long career in the Swedish military.
KARLIS NERETNIEKS: If the Russians just hypothetically borrow that island...
SHAPIRO: (Laughter). Borrowed without asking.
NERETNIEKS: ...Yes, borrow without asking, then they would dominate the Baltic Sea to such an extent that NATO would have very great difficulties supporting the Baltic states.
SHAPIRO: I asked Sweden's state secretary for the Ministry of Defense whether the Swedish military could keep Russia from grabbing Gotland. Jan Solesund told me...
JAN SOLESUND: Sweden could not prevent that in the long run. I wouldn't think so, to be honest.
SHAPIRO: And if Russia takes Gotland then the U.S. cannot keep its promise to defend the Baltics. Stefan Ring is with the Swedish General Defense Organization, a think tank.
STEFAN RING: Europe is in terrible need for assistance from the United States. We don't have resources enough in Europe to handle a severe situation.
SHAPIRO: Of course, this scenario is hypothetical. But consider - Russian military jets flying in stealth have come within 100 yards of crashing into a Scandinavian passenger plane. Foreign submarines have been spotted in the waters off Stockholm. And in northern Europe, the complex web of military alliances means a local conflict can easily become a regional one and potentially, a global one. Ari Shapiro, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
The political network led by billionaires Charles and David Koch plans to spend nearly $900 million on the 2016 elections. NPR's Peter Overby reports that's roughly as much as the Republican Party's three national committees spent in the last presidential election cycle four years ago.
PETER OVERBY, BYLINE: In modern politics, $889 million is more than just a ton of money. Here's Sheila Krumholz, director of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks politicians and donors.
SHEILA KRUMHOLZ: It is staggering. To put it in perspective, the Koch brothers and their network will spend double what they spent in 2012.
OVERBY: And not just staggering, but also mostly secret. Unlike the political parties, which have to disclose their donors, the Koch network consists almost entirely of groups that don't register under the campaign finance laws and so don't publicly identify their donors. Again, Sheila Krumholz.
KRUMHOLZ: So much of their funding and operations are conducted in secret that we really don't know who else is behind this.
OVERBY: The Koch organization unveiled the $889 million budget to several hundred donors at a private conference in Palm Springs, Calif., which concluded Monday. Donors were asked to pledge. A participant told NPR people realized it's an ambitious number. The conference featured newly-elected Republican senators who won with help from the Koch network. The participant, who asked to remain anonymous, said those success stories helped spur donors' enthusiasm. Darrell West is a political scientist and author of "Billionaires," a book about wealthy donors in politics.
DARRELL WEST: Essentially we've created a new party. It's the party of conservative, rich activists.
OVERBY: He said the Republican and Democratic Parties have big donor bases. But here...
WEST: You're talking about an incredibly tiny slice of Americans.
OVERBY: The donors in Palm Springs also got to see three likely GOP presidential candidates in a debate. The moderator, Jonathan Karl of ABC News, asked them about the influence of wealthy donors. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul said the real political corruption involves government contracts.
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SENATOR RAND PAUL: I haven't met one person since I've been here or as I travel around the country who's coming up saying, oh, I want a contract. They're saying they want to be left alone.
OVERBY: And Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said the real corruption was about special access, which wasn't happening with these donors.
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SENATOR MARCO RUBIO: I don't know a single person in this room who's ever been to my office - and I haven't seen everybody here today - but a single one that's ever been to my office asking from government any special access.
OVERBY: But it was Texas Senator Ted Cruz who gave a full-throated endorsement of his hosts.
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SENATOR TED CRUZ: Let me be very clear - I admire Charles and David Koch. They are businessmen who've created hundreds of thousands of jobs.
(APPLAUSE)
OVERBY: As the applause faded, he continued.
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CRUZ: And they have stood up for free market principles and endured vilification with equanimity and grace.
OVERBY: No word yet on whether the donors were dazzled, but the Koch network is showing interest in jumping into the presidential primary fight - something it's never done before. Peter Overby, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken to moonlighting as a radio host. He hosts his own show once a month. And for his latest episode he had a special guest - President Obama. The two leaders recorded the show Sunday during Obama's visit to India. And as NPR's Julie McCarthy reports, the broadcast aired across the nation today, and millions tuned in.
JULIE MCCARTHY, BYLINE: Modi set the ground rules. The questions would come from the heart, he said. That way we'll get new energy, said the Indian leader, an inveterate tweeter who had solicited questions from the public on his account. This installment of Mann Ki Baat, or Voice From The Heart, did have a homespun feel and gave two leaders a chance to talk more personally about themselves and their improbable rise. Modi, a tea seller - Obama, the son of a single mother. Modi said some people wondered what the president's name meant.
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PRIME MINISTER NARENDRA MODI: (Foreign language spoken).
MCCARTHY: In Swahili it means one who is blessed, Modi explained. He went on. "The ancient African idea of Ubuntu," he said, "alludes to the oneness in humanity." The same ancient tradition, he said, that has guided India since Vedic times. "This unites us," he declared. Modi is relatively new to this radio business, as all the papers rustling near the president's microphone suggested. The president opened with a traditional Indian greeting.
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PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Namaste. Thank you, Prime Minister Modi.
MCCARTHY: Obama was relaxed, or jetlagged, and distinctly different in tone from this morning when he pointedly took India to task over religious intolerance. The president said he has made common cause with Modi to uplift the poor and empower women. He invoked Gandhi to describe how he viewed his job.
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OBAMA: And that is we should endeavor to see God through service of humanity because God is in everyone.
MCCARTHY: One questioner asked the president, would he go shopping for his daughters? Answer - yes, but a staffer would do the footwork. Modi spoke of Obama's affection for his daughters an inspiration for India's families who put a premium on sons. Modi waxed nostalgic about an old snapshot of him that has surfaced since he became prime minister, picturing him as a young man standing before the White House gate on a visit to the U.S.
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MODI: (Foreign language spoken).
MCCARTHY: "Of course," Modi said, "I never thought that I would have the opportunity of actually going into the White House," which he did last year. Another questioner asked did you both imagine you would reach the positions you have reached today? President Obama said just as Modi had, he too once stood outside the White House gate. He talked of both of them - two men from humble backgrounds ending up leading their countries and the importance of educating everyone.
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OBAMA: Because you never know who might be the next prime minister of India or who might be the next president of the United States. They might not always look the part right off the bat and they might just surprise you if you give them a chance.
MCCARTHY: Modi said he did not focus on being somebody, but doing something. The president concurred.
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OBAMA: If you're helping somebody else, the satisfaction that you can get from that, I think, exceeds anything else that you can do, and that's usually what makes me inspired to do more.
MCCARTHY: And who inspired Modi, the prime minister who is early to rise? Benjamin Franklin, of course. Julie McCarthy, NPR News, New Delhi.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
President Obama's high-profile visit to India has highlighted an absence. While First Lady Michelle Obama attended formal events and a banquet, the wife of Prime Minister Modi did not. In fact, Jashodaben Modi has never been seen by her husband's side. Her very existence was only acknowledged by the prime minister last year. The Washington Post's Annie Gowen has been writing about this and she joins us from New Delhi. Welcome to the program.
ANNIE GOWEN: Thank you for having me.
BLOCK: And, Annie, this was a teenage, arranged marriage. How did this secret first come to light?
GOWEN: Reporters and journalists in India have been writing about the fact that Modi may have a wife for the past several years. But it was only confirmed by him last year when he was filing his formal application to become a candidate for Parliament. The Indian Supreme Court had ruled that all of the spaces on the application had to be filled in. One of them was - are you married? Do you have a wife? And so he was essentially forced to admit the fact that yes, he did have this wife, who he married more than 40 years ago.
BLOCK: Yeah, so she was 17, he was 18 when they were married. How long were they actually together?
GOWEN: It's not clear and the principals aren't really talking. But, essentially, what Modi's biographers say is that both of them were from this lower caste that called Ghanchi. And in the traditions of that cast, that social community, there was a three-step process. The children would have been promised to each other when they were 13. And then there was more of a formal ritual ceremony when they were 17 and 18, and then they would've cohabitated. In this case, they did not cohabitate.
BLOCK: And, Annie, according to your story, very soon after their marriage, Modi went off to the Himalayas to contemplate a religious life. Then he became involved in a Hindu nationalist group, which, apparently, frowned upon the marriage, and then made his political ascent. He never moved to divorce his wife or annul the marriage, right?
GOWEN: Yeah, that's the big question - that's a big lingering question - is why have they not divorced? And really the only two people that can answer that are Jashodaben herself and the prime minister.
BLOCK: You actually interviewed Jashodaben Modi by phone. What did she tell you? What'd you learn about her?
GOWEN: Well, she is a very unassuming woman. She's 64, which is the same age as the prime minister. She lives a very, very quiet life in his home state of Gujarat. And she lives with her brother sort of scraping by on a pension salary from her career as a public school teacher.
BLOCK: She did, though, as you report, file an official request last year asking about her safety, asking also about benefits. What does she want?
GOWEN: Well, so after Narendra Modi became prime minister in May of 2014, she was given a security detail as befits, you know, the wife of the prime minister. She had asked for some information about why this security detail was assigned to her and what were they to do? And she said she was actually scared of them. So it's been a difficult experience having these men trail her all the time. She takes, a lot, a rickshaw, or a bus, and they're following her in an air-conditioned car. And it turns out that when she visits friends and family then the friends and family feel compelled to cook for these guards, so it's been quite a difficult experience for her adjusting to having this security detail.
BLOCK: You know, you had me, Annie Gowen, from the first line of your story, which is this - she's waiting for him as she has been all her life. Did you get the sense that she wants to be acknowledged as the prime mister's wife, as the first lady of India?
GOWEN: She's said many times, and said again to me, that if he called her she would come to Delhi, and I think she would like to see him. And she keeps a picture of him in her prayer book. And she's still waiting for him to call her.
BLOCK: Do you think she realistically expects that to happen?
GOWEN: I think she still has hope because we spoke to her brother as well and he was saying that she gets depressed sometimes because she's still waiting and hoping that he'll call all these long year.
BLOCK: Annie Gowen, thanks so much.
GOWEN: Thank you for having me.
BLOCK: Annie Gowen with the Washington Post in New Delhi. We were talking about the wife of Prime Minister Narendra Modi from an arranged, teenage marriage.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
The Obama administration unveiled a draft plan today that would allow oil companies to drill off parts of the Atlantic Coast - more specifically, from Virginia all the way down to Georgia. NPR's Jeff Brady reports the plan is likely to ignite a long political battle.
JEFF BRADY, BYLINE: There are strong feelings about offshore drilling, especially in places where it's been banned.
AMY BAXTER: Actually I do not like it.
BRADY: In the North Carolina coastal city of Wilmington, stay-at-home mom Amy Baxter says she's worried about environmental effects.
BAXTER: I just think the chance for accidents and spills, the wildlife - it's just - needs to be researched a lot more than just allowing it in a couple of years.
BRADY: The administration is writing a five-year plan that begins in 2017. It determines where offshore drilling will be allowed.
BERNIE MARKEY: Yeah, it doesn't bother me.
BRADY: Carpenter Bernie Markey took a break from cutting planks of wood in downtown Wilmington to say he's not worried about offshore drilling.
MARKEY: I don't think the government's in control of the environment. I think God is.
BRADY: Markey says he hopes more offshore drilling will keep oil prices low. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell says the goal now is to take a balanced approach to exploit valuable oil off the nation's shores and protect the environment. Speaking on the Diane Rehm Show, she said that's why some areas off Alaska's northern coast will be off-limits.
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SALLY JEWELL: There are areas up there and elsewhere in the country that we believe are too special to develop.
BRADY: President Obama signed an order that bars drilling in nearly 10 million acres off Alaska's shores because those areas are environmentally sensitive and important to Alaska natives. But Jewell said there's nothing in this proposed plan that prevents oil giant Shell from drilling in the area.
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JEWELL: There is ongoing support in our draft proposed plan for exploration in both the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.
BRADY: The plan got mixed reviews from environmental groups and the oil industry.
ERIK MILITO: We were hoping that they would include the eastern Gulf of Mexico.
BRADY: Erik Milito with the American Petroleum Institute says oil companies also want permission to drill closer to Florida.
MILITO: It is close to existing infrastructure, and we understand and know at this point that the Gulf of Mexico still holds a lot of oil and gas resources that could benefit the U.S. economy and create a lot of jobs.
BRADY: But that area remains off-limits for this planning period. What's included in today's draft is important because it lays out the boundaries for what the Interior Department will consider for future drilling. From this point, areas can only be removed. None can be added. Jackie Savits with the environmental group Oceana is focused on two areas specifically.
JACKIE SAVITS: Our job now is really to try to get the Atlantic and the Arctic removed from the plan before it gets finalized.
BRADY: You can be sure Savits and others will remind policymakers of the massive 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The industry says it learned lessons from that accident and is much safer now. As public hearings over this draft plan begin, that safety record will come under more scrutiny. Jeff Brady, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The price of oil has ranged from an all-time high above $147 a barrel in 2008 to just over $45 earlier this month. That goes for oil that is cheap to drill for and oil that's expensive to drill for. Obviously when the price of oil goes down, profit margins go down a lot more for expensive oil than for cheap oil. And at some very low market price, very expensive oil could be priced out of the market. So which oil is expensive and which is cheap? Well, joining us to talk about that is Amy Myers Jaffe of the University of California Davis Graduate School of Management where she does research in energy and sustainability. Welcome to the program.
AMY MYERS JAFFE: Thank you for having me.
SIEGEL: Saudi Arabia has pursued the policy of high production which has helped drive down prices. Is Saudi oil the cheapest oil, and do we know how cheap it is?
JAFFE: Well, Saudi Arabia has among the cheapest oil. I think, perhaps, in some parts of Iraq it could be even cheaper. But the Saudis - not only do they have oil that's very inexpensive to produce, they also have a lot of it - you know, 50 to 100 years worth of reserves. And they have to take a long view on making sure that there continues to be demand for their oil. And that is, I think, part of what this price war is about.
SIEGEL: But at $45 a barrel, the Saudis are still making a lot of money on every barrel of oil.
JAFFE: There is no question at $45 a barrel, and even at $30 a barrel. The Saudis are making a lot of money on every barrel they produce.
SIEGEL: And you said that Iraq may have oil in some places that's just as cheap.
JAFFE: So in Iraq, again, there are places where their reserves are so large and their cost to develop them are so low - you know, under $5 a barrel. But even though, Iraq is suffering now because they have a tremendous amount of financial pressure and budgetary pressure with mouths to feed, so to speak, and a war. But the bottom line is the level of profit for every barrel of oil that gets produced in Saudi Arabia or Iraq is a much higher margin than the measure of profit that goes for, say, oil produced out of the oil sands in Canada or in the Russian arctic.
SIEGEL: Well, we've just heard a story about drilling in the arctic up in Alaska or drilling offshore in the Atlantic. Would those places and the methods used there produce petroleum at very high cost or low cost?
JAFFE: Well, if you're talking about offshore Alaska, projects developed in the Arctic have turned out to have - much more expensive than people had imagined. And so it's risky business today.
if it is billed is very very expensive to extract. Is that way up there in the charts?
SIEGEL: And offshore in the Atlantic?
JAFFE: The deciding factor of how profitable that's going to be is how large are the reserves. If it turns out that the reserves are small - even though maybe the initial cost for exploration might be competitive to some other places in the world, unless they find big fields, the amount of money I had to spend to get, you know, one barrel of oil could still wind up being fairly high.
SIEGEL: Now, it's sometimes said that oil extracted from the tar sands in Canada - the oil that would presumably flow south through the Keystone XL pipeline once it's - if it is built - is very, very expensive to extract. Is that way up there in the charts?
JAFFE: There's no question that Canadian oil sands is on the expensive end of what it costs to produce oil. It's partly because you're talking about a complicated mining process. You know, on a scale of one to 10, it might not be 10 because maybe 10 is oil that's in a very extreme location like in the North Arctic, but it's certainly an eight or a nine on the scale of one to 10 of what is the most difficult, expensive oil to produce in the world.
SIEGEL: Amy Myers Jaffe of the University of California Davis School of Management. Thanks for talking with us.
JAFFE: Thank you very much for having me.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
A massive nor'easter winter storm is still hammering Massachusettes and other parts of New England. Heavy snow and high winds are creating blizzard conditions, making travel difficult and dangerous. The blizzard ended up mostly skirting New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and didn't bring nearly as much snow and wind as expected there. Still, airlines canceled hundreds of flights to those areas ahead of time. As NPR's David Schaper reports, that's forced thousands of travelers to become their own travel agents.
DAVID SCHAPER, BYLINE: Robert Carlson is sitting in a chair near the ticketing counter at Chicago's O'Hare airport, writing out notes for an important business meeting by hand.
ROBERT CARLSON: This is my presentation written on foolscap paper with a pencil. (Laughter).
SCHAPER: The 68-year-old businessman from England is using pencil and paper because he doesn't have the chip he needs yet for his mobile phone to work here, and he's not on Wi-Fi. Carlson is supposed to be giving that presentation in Albany, and he planned to fly there via New York City yesterday, but his flight from London to New York was canceled.
CARLSON: I got switched to O'Hare. I stayed at a hotel last night, and now I'm trying to get to Albany again. Two flights have been canceled already.
SCHAPER: Carlson's last chance is a fight to Albany tonight. He's one of tens of thousands of people left to improvise because airlines preemptively canceled thousands of flights into and out of New York, Newark, Philadelphia, Boston and other northeastern cities. Oksana Schnayder was in Miami on business Monday when she found out her flight home to New York was canceled.
OKSANA SCHNAYDER: We tried to reschedule. As soon as we reschedule, our flight right away get canceled one after another.
SCHAPER: After staying an extra night in Miami, Schnayder was able to get a flight to Reagan airport in Washington, D.C. From there...
SCHNAYDER: We taking the car - we're renting the car, and we're going to drive up there.
SCHAPER: Driving instead of flying isn't the only option with so many flights canceled. James Williams from Long Island was in New Orleans over the weekend to run a half marathon. His flight home to New York was canceled so he, too, rebooked through Washington, D.C., but that flight was rescheduled for tomorrow.
JAMES WILLIAMS: Instead we were able to catch Amtrak today at noon, so we'll be home 24 hours earlier, so it's worthwhile.
SCHAPER: Most travelers do understand why an act of nature such as a snowstorm can lead airlines to cancel flights. And some say they're glad the airlines take action far ahead of time rather than at the last minute when they're already at the airport. But some wonder if the airlines, in their effort to be proactive, are maybe too quick to pull the trigger on cancellations.
JOE SCHWIETERMAN: I've been pretty critical of this because we're seeing a real paradox.
SCHAPER: Joe Schwieterman is an airline industry expert and transportation professor at Chicago's DePaul University.
SCHWIETERMAN: We're getting better at predicting the weather. We're getting better at dealing with weather, yet we're canceling more flights when the weather gets bad. And I think it's the incentives the airlines have that are trumping, maybe, safety concerns.
SCHAPER: One incentive - just a few flight delays at one airport can have a ripple effect through an airline's entire system. Mass cancellations have a ripple effect, too, says Schwieterman, but it keeps pilots, flight crews and planes in place for when the bad weather passes. That way the airline can catch up again much more quickly. David Schaper, NPR News, Chicago.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Before President Obama left India today, he gave a speech aimed at the country's young people. He stressed the importance of religious freedom, democracy and women's rights. On his way home, the president stopped off in Saudi Arabia, which is not exactly known for those things. NPR's Scott Horsley reports that Obama was there to pay respects to the royal family after the death Friday of King Abdullah.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: The Saudi stop was a late addition to the president's schedule. He was originally supposed to spend this afternoon sightseeing at India's Taj Mahal. Instead, Obama detoured to Riyadh, where he took the lead of a large and bipartisan U.S. delegation, showing its respect for the late Saudi King.
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HORSLEY: The president and Mrs. Obama stepped off Air Force One into blazing sunshine, crossing quickly to a covered pavilion where they shook hands with the Saudi delegation. Secretary of State John Kerry is also here along with secretaries from both Bush administrations, and Republican Senator John McCain. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes says the Saudis hosted a dinner for their American guests. Obama then met with Abdullah's successor and half-brother, King Solomon.
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BEN RHODES: Principally, this is to mark this transition in leadership and to pay respects to the family and to the people of Saudi Arabia. But they'll touch on some of the leading issues where we cooperate very closely with Saudi Arabia.
HORSLEY: Those issues include the battle against militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The Saudi Air Force has been flying missions there alongside the U.S. The leaders also plan to discuss the volatile situation in neighboring Yemen. The Yemen-based terrorist group al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, has claimed responsibility for the attacks in Paris earlier this month. Rhodes says the U.S. efforts to fight that group will continue despite the forced resignation of the pro-American Yemeni president.
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RHODES: We've made clear that we'll take direct action inside of Yemen against AQAP targets. That's something we've done in the past. I'd anticipate us doing that in the future.
HORSLEY: In this challenging atmosphere, made more so by the sharp drop in oil prices, the new Saudi King has promised continuity. The late King Abdullah, who effectively ruled his country for the last 20 years, took some baby steps in the direction of improving women's rights. But the White House acknowledged this Persian Gulf ally still has a long way to go. Women's rights was a key theme for the president in India today as he spoke to an audience of young people.
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PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: If nations really want to succeed in today's global economy, they can't simply ignore the talents of half their people.
HORSLEY: Obama says while neither India nor the United States has a perfect track record of treating all its people fairly, both countries have advanced by opening more doors to those of different backgrounds and different faiths.
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OBAMA: Across our two great countries we have Hindus and Muslims, Christians and Sikhs and Jews and Buddhists and Jains and so many faiths. And we remember the wisdom of Gandhiji, who said for me the different religions are beautiful flowers from the same garden where they are branches of the same majestic tree.
(APPLAUSE)
HORSLEY: Rhodes was asked if Obama would push that same message of religious pluralism in Saudi Arabia, where the Royal family owes its power to its longtime alliance with the strict Wahhabi sect of Islam. The White House adviser replied long-term stability in Saudi Arabia will depend on reform. But he quickly added places don't change overnight. Scott Horsley, NPR News, Riyadh.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
We heard Scott say that under the late Saudi King Abdullah there were baby steps taken toward improving women's rights. Saudi women are still not allowed to drive or even travel without permission from a man. But one of the steps forward came in the form of a scholarship program that allows women to study outside the country. That's how Rajaa Al Sanea attended graduate school in Chicago. She's 33 now, a dentist and a writer. We reached her in Riyadh.
RAJAA AL SANEA: I don't think that I had a very high chance of studying abroad before the introduction of King Abdullah scholarship program, which was introduced in 2005. I have an older sister who struggled much more than me to get her education abroad. The majority of us, we're only allowed to work as either teachers or doctors back in the '90s or the '80s or even in the early 2000s, but nowadays we see women working in courts. We see them working as engineers. We see them working in the media. Those are fields that have not been allowed for women back in the days.
BLOCK: At the same time, Dr. Al Sanea, I mean, we know that, as we've mentioned, women do not have the right to drive. When you leave the house, you, a medical doctor - a dentist - do you have to have permission of a man to do that?
AL SANEA: Yes. Unfortunately, I need to have a male driver, but the thing that people don't know about Saudi Arabia is that people of Saudi are really conservative. Some of us are liberal, but I would say that the majority, according to polls, are opposing women driving. And I'm not saying that those are just men. There are a lot of women who are opposing driving. The Saudi government introduced women education back in the days when people were against it. They did the same thing with TV, satellite. People were always against it for the first few years and I don't think that driving will be any different. I think that it will happen sooner or later and we're hoping that it would happen sooner rather than later. But I believe that it will not be something welcomed by everyone in the society.
BLOCK: Does that trouble you that you have to have a man driving you?
AL SANEA: Of course it does. I mean, I've studied in the states for four years and I've been driving myself for those four years. But I understand how people are very sensitive to matters related to women. When you have a discussion with someone's living in a village outside the big cities in Saudi Arabia, not everyone really supports women's rights. So we need to work on that before we implement any decisions that will create a drastic change in the society.
BLOCK: Would you expect to see any further progress on women's rights now under the new king - King Salman.
AL SANEA: It's a tough call to say. I mean, only time will tell, but I'm fairly optimistic because the ground that King Abdullah has set for women's rights cannot be taken down. So we're only going to be building further on top of that.
BLOCK: I wonder how concerned you are about a backlash from conservative Muslims from powerful clerics in the kingdom.
AL SANEA: In Saudi, we have to differentiate between the government and the Muslim clerics. The government is quite liberal and we see that with the royal family, with their daughters, with the way they drive outside Saudi Arabia. They're quite advanced when it comes to their rights, and I believe that the religious clerics represent the conservative Saudis in the streets. There's always a battle between trying to reach compensation between those two. Some of us are always unpleased when things are too conservative or too liberal, but the majority kind of work around the results of those two different ideologies. At the end, we always feel that the government is the one that wins and whenever the thing is useful for the Saudi society, just like women's education, it always wins at the end.
BLOCK: Dr. Al Sanea, thank you very much for talking with us today.
AL SANEA: Thank you.
BLOCK: That's Dr. Rajaa Al Sanea, a Saudi writer best known for her novel "Girls Of Riyadh." She's also a dentist and we reached her in Riyadh.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
A stay at a Super 8 outside Washington, D.C., will run you about 60 bucks a night. Around Phoenix right now, it could be 10 times that - that is if there were any rooms left. The Super Bowl is Sunday, and people are already arriving and plunking down cash. Thirty million dollars in public and private funds were spent to host the game, and the region is hoping for a huge return. That includes Super 8, as Curt Nickisch of member station WBUR reports.
CURT NICKISCH, BYLINE: With 100,000 football fans on their way, nearly every Phoenix hotel is sold out. The no-frills Super 8 motel five blocks east of downtown is getting in on the profits and on the fanfare, too.
WALT SHEM: We need to get fruit. We need to get Cool Whip. We need to pick up the helium.
NICKISCH: Manager Walt Shem (ph) sold his last economy room for nearly $500 per night.
SHEM: People are going to drop a lot of money. We don't want them to feel that they're blowing their money and we're ripping them off.
NICKISCH: Shem doesn't have the same budget as the big, fancy hotels downtown, but he's doing his best to add some frills - pennants in the reception area, catered burritos instead of continental breakfast and balloons in team colors for each guest. Receptionist Carla Garrett (ph) says employees feel like they're part of the big event.
CARLA GARRETT: Just the interaction with all the people and feeling all the excitement, being right in the middle of it - I love that.
NICKISCH: With the guest list split evenly between Boston and Seattle fans, the motel will play it neutral. It's raising a big white balloon over the property this weekend with a flag of Super Bowl XLIX. For NPR News, I'm Curt Nickisch in Phoenix.
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Nobody does a fake like China. In 2011, a phony Apple store popped up in the country's southwest. It looked so authentic even some of the employees thought it was real. This year, three farmers in central China set up a fake local government, and now comes word of a fake bank in the eastern city of Nanjing, that scammed unsuspecting depositors out of $33 million. NPR's Frank Langfitt reports from Shanghai.
FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: The bank seemed real. There were security guards, computers and LED screens that displayed real-time interest in foreign exchange rates. Oliver Rui, who teaches finance at China Europe International Business School in Shanghai, says depositors were easily fooled.
OLIVER RUI: People are not well-educated on financial services. People think as long as there is an office, looks like it's a bank and they will provide the bank service.
LANGFITT: Depositors were attracted by higher interest rates than the notoriously low ones in China's state-run banks. A man named Shan told China National Radio he deposited the equivalent of almost $1 million and the bank immediately paid him a whopping $54,000 in advance interest. But when Shan returned later for his money, he couldn't get it back. All told, 200 depositors were duped.
RUI: They want to earn high interest, but they don't understand the high interest usually comes with high risk.
LANGFITT: Are you surprised by this case in Nanjing?
RUI: A little bit surprised, because the fake bank has operated for more than a year.
LANGFITT: He says the fake bank wasn't a pyramid scheme, but invested in real estate projects that went sour as China's market dropped. The fake bank's managers are now in police custody. As to why fakery is so rife in China, Rui - like many - blames the Communist Party, which demolished traditional Chinese values.
RUI: People are lacking of the religions, the faith. They don't have basic moral standards.
LANGFITT: Without that, fakery will continue. And, Rui says, China won't be able to earn the international respect it craves. Frank Langfitt, NPR News, Shanghai.
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Some childhood mysteries, we try to hold onto with all our might, but others, well, offered a peak behind the curtain, we snatch it. Case in point - last year the South Dakota Historical Society published the annotated autobiography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the "Little House" books. Her memoir, titled "Pioneer Girl," sold like hot johnny cakes fried up in bacon drippings. The initial print run of 15,000 was snapped up in just a few weeks. Last week, another 15,000 copies were sent to hungry readers, and now the Historical Society is waiting on a third run of 45,000 copies. Nancy Koupal joins me now. She's director of the South Dakota Historical Society Press. Welcome to the program.
NANCY KOUPAL: Thank you.
BLOCK: What do you think accounts for the demand? You underestimated the demand that was out there.
KOUPAL: Yes, we did. Everybody who has ever read a "Little House" book really has been fascinated by Laura Ingalls Wilder and her life, and this book offers an opportunity to get behind the scenes and see what that life was really like.
BLOCK: Well, let's talk about that a bit because the "Little House" series was the fictionalized version of Laura Ingalls Wilder's life. This memoir is the real deal, and I gather there's some key differences that emerge very quickly. One, that life - her real life was surrounded by a lot more violence - drinking, domestic abuse. These things were around her.
KOUPAL: Yes, and most of that sort of thing that occurs in her autobiography actually happened in one-year timeframe. And that was the year that the family was in Iowa, and that year is not a part of her fiction at all.
BLOCK: What are some examples? What do we learn in the memoir about what happened in that year in Iowa?
KOUPAL: Well, we find out that Laura was in a compromised position with a young man. She was caring for his wife, and the young man was drunk and came into her bedroom, and she challenged him and he left. So it was, I suppose you would say, a near miss.
There was a story of a drunk who took a huge slug of whiskey and then lighted a cigar and managed to light his lungs on fire - some tragic episodes. I think that time in Iowa was a time when the family was at a very low ebb financially, and it just was not a happy time. They didn't have a home of their own for the most part, they were living above stores, and it just was not a good time in their lives.
BLOCK: You know, I'm really hoping, Nancy, that the scene where Laura and Mary inflate the pig bladder and toss it as a ball - I'm really hoping that happened in real life. Is that in the memoir?
KOUPAL: You know, I don't recall that it is. I don't believe it is. Sorry to burst your pig bladder.
(LAUGHTER)
KOUPAL: No, I don't think that's there. But I'm sure it's a detail that Laura would have remembered and may have filled in on the path to fiction.
BLOCK: Well, you now have - what? - 45,000 more copies of the memoir on the way. Do you figure that's enough to fill the demand? I mean, especially now - we've given you a big, national platform here. (Laughter) Probably a lot of Laura Ingalls Wilder fans are listening right now.
KOUPAL: Exactly. It is enough to fill the current demand and some left over, so that's all I can say because every time we guess we - the number just gets bigger for us. It's been pretty exciting.
BLOCK: Well, Nancy Koupal, thanks so much for talking with us.
KOUPAL: Thank you, Melissa.
BLOCK: Nancy Koupal is director of the South Dakota Historical Society Press, publisher of the Laura Ingalls Wilder annotated autobiography, "Pioneer Girl."
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Dengue fever is something we tend to associate with faraway places, but it's on the rise in the U.S. -southern Florida in particular. Mosquitoes transmit the debilitating disease.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
One solution is to fight the carriers with other mosquitoes - ones that are genetically modified. And right now, the Food and Drug Administration is deciding whether to approve trials in the Florida Keys of those GMO mosquitoes.
BLOCK: In other countries, these trials have reduced the population of mosquitoes that carry dengue by 90 percent. But in the Keys, as NPR's Greg Allen reports, residents are wary.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: There are few places in the country where mosquito control is as critical as the Florida Keys. The Keys are in the southernmost county of the continental U.S. Mosquitoes are a year-round public health problem, and controlling them is a top priority.
MICHAEL DOYLE: This is our hangar and we've got four helicopters in here and two airplanes.
ALLEN: Michael Doyle oversees the Mosquito Control District in the Keys. He's worried about one species in particular - Aedes aegypti. In one of the district's labs, a biologist brings in a wire cage containing Aedes aegypti mosquitoes she's been studying. Doyle puts his hand next to the cage, not touching it. The mosquitoes immediately respond.
They do like people, don't they?
DOYLE: They love people, so if you put your hand up to the screen - I'm not going to touch them because these are wild types so they could be carrying something - but you put your hand up and they'll fly over and land on the screen to try to bite you through the screen.
ALLEN: These are the mosquitoes that carry dengue fever and chikungunya, another tropical disease that swept through the Caribbean and is now showing up in Florida. After years of spraying, Aedes aegypti mosquitoes have developed a resistance in the Keys to most chemical pesticides. Now the Mosquito Control District wants to become the first in the U.S. to try something new - genetically modified mosquitoes. They were developed more than a decade ago by a British company, Oxitec. Trials already conducted in Malaysia, Brazil and the Cayman Islands show releasing bioengineered male mosquitoes can reduce the Aedes aegypti population by 90 percent. Derric Nimmo is overseeing plans to conduct the trials in the Keys. He says only male Aedes aegypti are released.
DERRIC NIMMO: That male when we release it - it mates with the females in the wild and passes on that gene to all the offspring. The female goes off and lays her eggs, the eggs hatch, but then they die before reaching adults.
ALLEN: For the past five years, officials in the Keys have been working with Oxitec to get FDA approval for trials here. The district says surveys it's commissioned of area residents show 60 percent are OK with the trials and 10 to 20 percent opposed. In public meetings though, opposition to the bioengineered mosquitoes has been strong and nearly unanimous. Some residents, like Deb Curley of Cudjoe Key, questioned whether dengue is enough of a problem in the Keys to warrant the trials.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DEB CURLEY: An investigational trial here - I mean, why here? I mean, I know you're trying to answer that, but it makes no sense to me. We don't want to be guinea pigs.
ALLEN: In 2009 and 2010, Key West was hit with an outbreak of dengue fever - the first in 75 years. There haven't been any cases since, but Doyle compares it to a smoldering fire.
DOYLE: We've had 2.5 to 3 million people that visit the Keys every year. We're very popular. And so the likelihood of it arriving any time is good.
ALLEN: Other residents say they're concerned about how a bioengineered mosquito may affect them and the environment. Here's Key West resident Patty Crimmins.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PATTY CRIMMINS: We're not particularly thrilled with genetically modified anything.
ALLEN: Derric Nimmo of Oxitec says since Aedes aegypti aren't a native species, removing them would actually be an environmental plus. And, he says, the bioengineered mosquitoes don't live long after they're released.
NIMMO: The insects that we release are designed to just pass on that gene and then the offspring will die. And we've shown that after trials where we start releasing it doesn't last very long in the environment so we've got a very self-limiting, safe, species-specific technology.
ALLEN: The FDA is now considering whether to approve trials of the bioengineered mosquitoes. In the Keys, mosquito control officials say they hope to get approval and begin releasing them this spring. Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.
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And, in case you forgot to mark it on your calendar, today is National Kazoo Day. Anybody can play the kazoo - practically no skill required. But only two places in the U.S. make them. The metal ones are made in northern New York State, and the plastic ones hail from Beaufort, SC, where Karen Michel got a tour of the factory.
KAREN MICHEL, BYLINE: Stephen Murray, president and CEO of Kazoobie Kazoos, used to play trumpet.
STEPHEN MURRAY: Here you go, I'll do a little "Smoke On The Water," so (playing kazoo).
MICHEL: Murray worked in theater. Now he looks like an elementary school teacher, ready to share his knowledge of the kazoo's broad influence in popular music.
MURRAY: There are a lot of rock greats that have used kazoo. Pink Floyd used kazoo. Jimi Hendrix used a kazoo. If you're familiar with his song, "Crosstown Traffic," if you listen closely, you'll hear a kazoo.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CROSSTOWN TRAFFIC")
MURRAY: He actually used - what we we've been told is that he used the wax paper and cone, which a lot of folks have used that as a kazoo before. In new music, Carolina Chocolate Drops use our kazoos. The band Weezer has used kazoos.
MICHEL: Murray keeps one of the custom-made Weezer kazoos on a shelf near his desk. It's green, embossed in white with the words Weezer "Hash Pipe." Kazoobie makes a lot of different kazoos and attachments.
MURRAY: We have and attachment. We call it the wazoo because it's the excessively loud kazoo. It's a horn. If you think of a - like, a kind of a gramophone horn on steroids that you pop right in the top of your kazoo. So it fits in the tower right over the resonator, and it amplifies the sound of the kazoo, so (playing kazoo).
MICHEL: Murray started working at Kazoobie Kazoos 15 years ago without realizing that some people actually need instruction on how to play the instrument.
MURRAY: You have to talk. You have to make a noise - you have to hum (playing kazoo). Most folks want to blow into the kazoo and we actually put instructions in all of our orders because we would have folks call and say, I just got my kazoos and they don't work. I'm blowing as hard as I can. You have to hum, don't blow. When we give lessons, we tell people to say the word who into the big end. So you say (playing kazoo). Like that.
MICHEL: There are actual instruction booklets and CDs and DVDs for sale in the gift shop, alongside kazoos, of course, and T-shirts proclaiming the wearer a kazoo hero. Just past the shop, in an alcove, there's the Kazoo Museum, where vitrines display some of the earliest kazoos manufactured in GA in the mid-1800s, back when they were called down-south submarines. Kazoos likely originated in Africa, made from cow horns and spider egg membranes. None of those are in the museum, but there is sheet music, including Jesse Fuller's "San Francisco Bay Blues."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SAN FRANCISCO BAY BLUES")
MICHEL: Duck through a doorway, under a banner proclaiming, build it and they will hum, there's Kazoobie's small factory.
MURRAY: We sort everything by color. We keep - we keep somewhere around a quarter-million kazoos in stock at all times. We probably have the largest concentration of kazoos anywhere on the planet at any given time.
MICHEL: It's a labor-intensive process.
MURRAY: You've got three pieces to our basic kazoo - the body of the kazoo, the resonator, which is the little desk that goes on top, and then the cap. So the first stop is the capping station. And all of our kazoos are assembled by hand. Cappers can do anywhere from 500 to 900 kazoos an hour.
MICHEL: At the end of the factory tour, you can assemble your own kazoo. And, somehow, people have found out about the place. Three generations of the Schultz family are here, and grandmother Dorothy knows a thing or two about the instrument.
DOROTHY SCHULTZ: I was with an entertainment group out of Beaverdam, WI, and we did songs with a tambourines, kazoos and anything that made noise.
MICHEL: Unfortunately, the group broke up, so there's a vacuum to be filled. All you have to do is put your lips together and hum. For NPR News, I'm Karen Michel.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
A tough border security bill introduced in Congress has produced a fierce backlash among business leaders and politicians in south Texas. They worry the bill's warlike border security measures send the wrong message to their valuable trading partners to the south. As NPR's John Burnett reports, the strong reaction represents a growing rift between Washington and the Rio Grande Valley.
JOHN BURNETT, BYLINE: If it passes, the Secure Our Border First Act of 2015 would effectively put the Department of Homeland Security on a wartime footing in regard to the southern border, deploy more spy blimps, drones and ground sensors, build more fences, roads, boat ramps and forward operating bases, call in more National Guard, borrow air assets from the Department of Defense, divert military equipment headed home from Afghanistan. And if the Homeland Security secretary can't stop illegal crossers in five years, he cannot fly on government aircraft or get a raise. When Keith Patridge heard about it, he blanched. Once again, Washington doesn't get the border.
KEITH PATRIDGE: And what they're proposing with more walls and more military equipment is not what we would prefer to see.
BURNETT: As president of the McAllen Economic Development Corporation, Patridge already has to convince prospective employers that South Texas is not a warzone. Former Governor Rick Perry's deployment of Guard troops, helicopters and gunboats to the Rio Grande on top of continuing news reports of drug trafficking and illegal immigration - all that has led to a national panic about the borderlands. Again, Keith Patridge.
PATRIDGE: We deal with it every day. When people call, they say - they maybe have an interest in locating here - they'll say, is it safe for us to come to McAllen? Well, that's absolutely ridiculous. You know, every day there are over 800,000 people that get up in the morning, go to work, come home at night, have dinner, go to a ballgame, and nothing happens.
BURNETT: Keith Patridge says FBI statistics consistently show that Texas border cities have among the lowest crime rates in the country. The bill's author is Texas Congressman Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. He formerly led a joint antiterrorism task force in the state, and he remains focused on what he believes is the southwest border's vulnerability to terrorists. He has been a leading critic of the Department of Homeland Security's border control under President Obama. McCaul spoke to Fox News.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOX NEWS BROADCAST)
CONGRESSMAN MICHAEL MCCAUL: We're going to take the discretion away from the Department, and we're going to mandate how they get this thing done through the deployment of assets from Afghanistan and other places to the southwest border.
BURNETT: One of the recommendations in the 72-page bill would be to increase barrier fencing in high-traffic areas along the border. The border wall, as it's called by locals, is already controversial in communities on both sides of the divide. Filemon Vela represents a portion of the Rio Grande Valley in Congress. He's also the ranking Democrat on the House Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security.
CONGRESSMAN FILEMON VELA: Mexico is one of our largest trading partners. It is the largest trading partners with the state of Texas. It doesn't make any sense to me that we would ever have built a fence on the U.S.-Mexico border given the relationship that we have with that country.
BURNETT: Passage of the divisive new border security bill is uncertain. The House GOP leadership sidelined earlier this week after some conservative members worried the bill would somehow lead to comprehensive immigration reform. Even though the legislation has been postponed, South Texans insist their voices be heard when Congress prescribes what should be done on the southern border. John Burnett, NPR News, Austin.
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Now, the contango - we're going to add this word to our vocabulary with the help of NPR's Jackie Northam. Surprisingly, this term is related to why gas prices are so low right now.
JACKIE NORTHAM, BYLINE: There's a term for it when the price of oil is dropping because of oversupply but it's almost guaranteed to go back up in the future. Brenda Shaffer, an energy specialist at Georgetown University says this dynamic in commodities is something called a contango.
BRENDA SHAFFER: (Laughter) It almost sounds like a - you know, like a sort of a great oil dance or something.
NORTHAM: Shaffer says contango means the future's price of a commodity such as crude oil is higher than the current price. Shaffer says that sort of price gap is sparking the interest of oil speculators.
SHAFFER: Some people out there think that oil is going to get more expensive so it's worthwhile now to buy oil, lock it in and, you know, have those supplies - have them stored and have them available to sell a few months down the line if you actually believe the price is going to go up.
NORTHAM: Shaffer says the last time this happened was in 2009 after the price of crude oil plummeted to about $35 a barrel. At least 70 million barrels were stored on tankers until the price went up. Crude oil is now selling for less than $50 a barrel, but it's likely to go up again. In the meantime, international traders are storing all that oil they're buying on tankers, anchoring them and waiting it out. Basil Karatzas, a ship broker and adviser, says the tanker market is very active right now.
BASIL KARATZAS: Especially takers for crude oil and particularly for very large crude oil carriers - the supertankers for transporting 2 million barrels of oil each time.
NORTHAM: Karatzas says it costs about $15 million a year to store the crude oil on one oil tanker. Only a few international traders have the heft to buy and sit on this much oil - companies such as Vitol and Trafigura. Karatzas says he's inundated with calls from investors who want to take advantage of the contango and buy and store oil. Karatzas says it's not so easy to do.
KARATZAS: You have to have a special license. You have to be a registered trader with oil producers like Saudi Arabia. If you are just a financial institution, you cannot just show up at Saudi Arabia and tell them I want to buy a million barrels of oil because I want to speculate. They will not sell it to you.
NORTHAM: Ken Medlock, senior director of the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University, says oil companies and countries are also taking advantage of the soft market. U.S. companies store in huge tanks onshore. Medlock says oil producers such as Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer, are also looking further afield.
KEN MEDLOCK: Of course the Saudi's have been very active themselves in developing storage capabilities. You know, there was an announcement a few months back of an expansion in storage capability in Asia, so they've been sort of playing into this as well.
NORTHAM: Medlock says the risk for traders is that the price could keep dropping.
MEDLOCK: Then the oil you're holding on to that you've been hoping to sell forward - if you haven't fully contracted that up, you're going to sell at a loss.
NORTHAM: Medlock says trading in international oil is not for the fainthearted. But if the market works in their favor, the payoff for storing up millions of barrels of oil is huge. Jackie Northam, NPR News, Washington.
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We're going to hear about a pilot program that's allowing kids who are hospitalized to become inventors. You may have heard about maker spaces, locations where people gather to network and work on projects together. Artists, computer hackers - all sorts of do-it-yourselfers meet up to create things. At Vanderbilt University's Children's Hospital in Nashville, the maker space comes in the form of a large metal cart. Youth Radio producer Noah Nelson followed the cart alongside one 17-year-old patient.
NOAH NELSON, BYLINE: Emily Neblett has cystic fibrosis, so she spends a lot of time in the hospital.
EMILY NEBLETT: There's not really much to see from around the hospital from the room. It's just sick kids and nurses and doctors.
NELSON: Hospital stays can be isolating for kids, and keeping up with schoolwork can get tricky. That's where Gokul Krishnan comes in. He's a PhD student at Vanderbilt University's Peabody College of Education, and he has created a mobile maker space.
GOKUL KRISHNAN: Many patients who have chronic illnesses are not allowed to leave their room due to safety reasons and cross-contamination issues. And that's why we bring the mobile maker space into the patient's room.
NELSON: The space is a metal cart filled with the equipment and materials you would need for small-scale engineering projects.
NEBLETT: On the cart I am looking at flashing lights and colorful drawers full of circuits, wires, Play-Doh and a huge white 3-D printer.
NELSON: At first she wasn't into it, but then Emily realized there was one thing she really wanted.
NEBLETT: I decided to make the doorbell just because my nurses or anybody that would come in the room would never knock. So I put a sign on my door that said ring my doorbell.
NELSON: But to get that bell, she had to build it and maybe accidentally learn a little about math and engineering along the way.
KRISHNAN: So what's this? This is the...
NEBLETT: It's the button.
KRISHNAN: Button - and what comes next?
NELSON: The point of the maker space isn't just to give kids with long hospital stays something cool to do. It's a pilot program designed by Krishnan to solve the problem of teaching those all-important science and math skills to kids inside hospitals. The project started when Krishnan met Brandon Bradley in September of 2013. This is Brandon who is in the hospital getting treatment for acute myeloid leukemia.
BRANDON BRADLEY: I was planning on for my senior year just taking my math and reading classes and filling the rest of the slots up with engineering classes. I asked my homebound teacher if she knew anybody, and she said that she might know some people. And a couple of weeks later, Gokul walked in.
KRISHNAN: He was the first person I actually interacted with as a volunteer.
NELSON: Brandon made a nurse nightlight.
BRADLEY: It would just light up the toilet and trash area so if the nurses came in at night and they opened up the door and flipped the lights on, it wouldn't wake up the child that was asleep.
NELSON: Krishnan credits Brandon as a cofounder of the project which started a serious trial this winter at the Nashville hospital. One cart has become two, and premed students are now being trained to expand the project further.
NEBLETT: I think that the cart is an amazing thing. It made my hospital stay the best hospital stay I've ever had.
NELSON: Krishnan's pilot program creates a new role for patients. Now they can be inventors and part of a global maker movement. For NPR News, I'm Noah Nelson.
SIEGEL: That story was produced by Youth Radio.
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The U.S. lost one of its greatest scientists yesterday - Charles Townes was a physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his part in the invention of the laser. As he told NPR in 2005, the idea came to him while he was sitting on a park bench.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
CHARLES TOWNES: Suddenly, I had the idea - well, that was a revelation - it's a little bit like Moses wondering about how to help his people and so on. And then in front of a burning bush one time, he suddenly said this is what ought to be done.
BLOCK: NPR's Geoff Brumfiel has more now on a man whose ideas changed the world.
GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: Charles Townes was born in 1915 in Greenville, South Carolina. He finished college at age 19, but often his smarts weren't the first thing that people noticed.
ELSA GARMIRE: He was a southern gentleman. He was just a very nice person.
BRUMFIEL: Elsa Garmire is a physicist at Dartmouth who studied under Townes when he was teaching at MIT in the 1960s.
GARMIRE: At the same time, he was very dedicated and single-minded in what he did.
BRUMFIEL: It was that single-mindedness that led Townes to come up with the idea for a laser - a device that sends out a bright beam of carefully synchronized light particles. Townes wanted lasers as a tool to help him with his research on molecules. But the research wing of AT&T, known as Bell Labs, was also interested in his idea for a different reason.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: Light could provide a communications highway of staggering capacity - a potential capacity of more than a million telephone conversations or a thousand television channels.
BRUMFIEL: Today, the Internet uses lasers to send information. Forget a thousand TV channels - we've got YouTube thanks to the laser. Townes shared the Nobel Prize in 1964 for his discovery, and shortly after that, he got out of lasers.
GARMIRE: He said well, lots of people were working on it, and he wanted to go where he thought he could make major contributions.
BRUMFIEL: He became an astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley. That's about the time Reinhard Genzel met him. Genzel heads the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.
REINHARD GENZEL: He was just such a wonderful person, always optimistic and always curious.
BRUMFIEL: Townes and Genzel studied stars and galaxies for years. In 1985, they discovered the black hole that lives at the center of our Milky Way. Through all these scientific adventures, Townes maintained a deep faith in the existence of God.
GENZEL: While this may sound like sort of a contradiction, he really was one of these rare people who could be a deeply thinking research scientist and yet at the same time be a deeply devout Christian.
BRUMFIEL: Actually, Townes didn't see science and religion as contradictory at all, as he told NPR back in 2005.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
TOWNES: Consider what religion is. Religion is an attempt to understand the purpose and meaning of our universe. What is science? It's an attempt to understand how our universe works. Well, if there's a purpose and meaning, that must have something to do with how it works. So those two must be related.
BRUMFIEL: Charles Townes was 99. Geoff Brumfiel, NPR News.
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When you think of the federal government and computers, your mind may go straight to the botched rollout of healthcare.gov. But the government is upping its game and changing the way it develops and designs software systems. There's a new chief technology officer hired from Google, and new agencies have been launched aimed at bringing a more Silicon Valley-ish approach to government IT. NPR's Brian Naylor reports on one of those agencies. It's called 18F.
BRIAN NAYLOR, BYLINE: 18F is actually part of the GSA, the General Services Administration, and is at GSA headquarters located at - wait for it - 18th and F streets in Washington. It's an open space, with nary a government-issued cubicle in sight.
GREG GODBOUT: It's our attempt to make an office look a little bit like a coffeehouse, I guess, (laughter) would describe it.
NAYLOR: Greg Godbout shows me around. He's 18F's executive director and co-founder.
GODBOUT: We've got couches, tables. I work at a table, not a desk. We do have desks - just some people prefer it, particularly the designers for the larger graphics. We have an open space, glass, lots of visibility to the outside world.
NAYLOR: No ping-pong table, though.
GODBOUT: No, not yet. Actually, we - I think the government won't permit provide that for us.
NAYLOR: Not to worry, 18F's software designers are pooling their resources for a foosball table. Most of Godbout's team of 100 works here on what they call a production floor. Others are scattered at sites, including in San Francisco, Seattle and Denver. The idea, Godbout says, is to bring to the government some of the digital magic that we use every day to chat with friends and shop and share photos.
GODBOUT: So essentially, the way you would book a vacation in your own life and the easiness of research and doing that should be the way you would interact with your government, right?
NAYLOR: 18F is working with a number of different federal departments. One of the biggest projects it's taken on is redesigning the website for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. That's the agency that processes applications from people hoping to become citizens and those covered under the president's executive actions who hope to obtain work permits.
GODBOUT: I like to think of it as it's the online Statue of Liberty, right? At some point in our nation's history, we were romantic enough to have this Statue of Liberty - this idea of, you know, how do we present ourselves to people coming to America? Well, our digital process should be that beautiful, too.
NAYLOR: As part of another project for the Federal Election Commission, Lindsay Young is designing an online interface that will make it easier for citizens to track how much money political candidates raise and spend.
LINDSAY YOUNG: I really do believe in the mission. And I think it's about empowering other people, so it's making sure that the people that use this website are getting what they need out of it.
NAYLOR: And that's one of the biggest challenges Godbout and his team face - changing the mindset among federal bureaucrats about software. 18F is focused on user-centered design as opposed to stakeholder-centered design, meaning software design for what the agency thinks it needs rather than the person using it.
GODBOUT: User-centered design work versus stakeholder- centered design is really very revolutionary inside the federal government, and it causes a lot of pain as we insist that people work this way.
NAYLOR: It's clearly an uphill battle. Surf government websites, and you'll find few that seem designed to provide users easy access to anything useful. 18F and U.S. Digital Services, the White House agency that's coordinating government-wide efforts to modernize its IT systems, are planning to hire some 200 programmers in hopes of changing that. Brian Naylor, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The deadline passed today for when the self-proclaimed Islamic State or ISIS said it would kill two hostages, a Jordanian pilot who was flying bombing runs against ISIS and a Japanese journalist. And now the Jordanian government says it will consider handing over a notorious prisoner in a trade - a woman named Sajida al-Rishawi. ISIS says that if it doesn't receive that woman it will kill the hostages, and if it does, it would release the Japanese prisoner.
NPR's Alice Fordham joins us now. And Alice, what's happened today?
ALICE FORDHAM, BYLINE: Well, first, Jordan released a carefully worded statement. It didn't mention the Japanese hostage, but it did say Jordan would release Sajida Rishawi in exchange for the pilot Moaz al Kasesbeh, who crashed over Syria about a month ago. Now that is raising ISIS a bit on what they offered in their audio recording yesterday which, as you say, is just that they wouldn't kill Kasesbeh if Rishawi were released. We've spoken to several people in Jordan including the family of the pilot, and it's clear the situation there is very tense as everyone waits to see what happens next. This - you know, this has really been a big issue there.
SIEGEL: Well, why has ISIS asked for a prisoner held in Jordan in exchange for a Japanese hostage?
FORDHAM: Right, it's confusing. Analysts think that the answer lies in looking at what ISIS wants. Really, there's not much Japan can do for them. They were never very likely to get this $200 million they initially demanded in exchange for two Japanese hostages. It seems they have already executed one, and perhaps they rethought their priorities and decided to leverage the remaining Japanese hostage to get a more achievable goal in a place much closer to home, Jordan.
SIEGEL: And what do they hope to actually gain closer to home?
FORDHAM: Well, Jordan is important because it's one of the few Arab countries that participate in the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS. It has borders with Iraq and with Syria where ISIS hold territory. And people think that for ISIS, having Jordan hand over a high-profile prisoner would show that a coalition member has been forced to do a deal with them, and it would have the secondary purpose of showing ISIS's support base that they don't forget their fighters even years later.
SIEGEL: Now, tell us about the prisoner who's being talked about here - the woman named Sajida al-Rishawi.
FORDHAM: Right. So Iraqi sources say that she's Iraqi. She's from Anbar province. She was arrested after attempting to be part of a series of suicide bombings in hotels in the Jordanian capital Amman in 2005 which killed dozens and dozens of people and left a deep mark on what's usually a pretty calm country. Of course, ISIS wasn't around then, but she was linked to their precursor, the regional Al-Qaida affiliate. She was convicted and sentenced to death, although there has been a long appeals process.
SIEGEL: Well, put us in the mind of Jordanian officials. We hear what's in it for ISIS. What's in it for them?
FORDHAM: Jordanian officials, I think, are in a very difficult position. They really took a risk in a way when they joined the coalition. Very few Arab countries did so, as I say, and it was somewhat controversial among the population. They are suspicious of the motives of the coalition in the region. They see this as not their war, not their problem. And so in order to keep the Jordanian population to some degree on side, they have to get this pilot back. If they don't, then it will be politically very difficult for them to stay in the coalition in terms of domestic politics. But because of regional dynamics - because of their relationship particularly with the United States and with Saudi Arabia, both of which are big patrons of Jordan which is a very poor country, they are under a lot of pressure to stay in the coalition.
SIEGEL: That's NPR's Alice Fordham. Alice, thank you.
FORDHAM: Thanks for having me.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Jordan's willingness to negotiate with the Islamic State represents a sharp about-face for the kingdom. And joining us from the Jordanian capital, Amman, is Rula Al Hroob. She's a member of the Jordanian Parliament - we've spoken with her before about this. Ms. Al Hroob, is this a risky move for the Jordanian government - to talk about negotiating with ISIS or ISIL?
RULA AL HROOB: Well, there has been great dispute among Jordanians since yesterday after the statement issued by ISIS demanding for releasing Sajida al-Rishawi. As for the family of the pilot, they are demanding the government to do whatever is possible to be done, including releasing Sajida or any other terrorists that are being convicted in Jordan. So yesterday, we had some big tribal movement coming from Karak to Amman demanding the king, the regime, the government to release Sajida in exchange for the pilot's life.
SIEGEL: What about the families of the 60 people who died at the hands of Sajida? Are they speaking out against the trade?
AL HROOB: It is a big problem, but Sajida did not kill. She was about to blow herself, but she didn't do that. This belt she had did not work, which means that her hands are not blooded.
SIEGEL: But one could say that's not for lack of trying. Her husband's belt, I believe, did detonate in the same attack.
AL HROOB: Exactly. She had been a part of a big plot against Jordan and against Jordanian security, yet bringing Moaz back safe and sound is a big priority among Jordanians, regardless of their opinion of Sajida and their opinion of what's going on and this war against ISIS. Everybody in Jordan demands getting Moaz al-Kasasbeh back alive.
SIEGEL: Considering that fact, airstrikes carry with them the risk that a plane might go down and that a pilot might be lost or taken captive. Can Jordan credibly remain a part of the coalition staging airstrikes against ISIS if indeed the prospect of losing a pilot is going to be a crisis?
AL HROOB: It's not the matter of the Jordanian government. It's the matter of Jordanian people. We have the Jordanians not really supporting this war against ISIS. Most of them believe that this is not a war for several reasons - some of them for religious reasons, others for political reasons and the rest of them just say that we have nothing to do with this war; they have not threatened our borders, and why should we take our soldiers to be dead or to be captured in this war? So we don't have support in the street for this war in the first place, and there haven't been any kind of prearrangements to convince the people of Jordan that this war is a necessity for Jordanians and it's a national security war.
SIEGEL: You've said that the Jordanian government has not yet been able to convince the people that this war is inevitable - or I assume you mean as well that it's necessary for Jordan. Do you think the kingdom has a chance of doing that? Can the government actually convince a significant number of Jordanians that it's important to take part in the coalition attacks against ISIS and even risk the loss of pilots, or is this argument already lost?
AL HROOB: Unfortunately, this is too late to be done. This should have been done before taking the decision of going into this war. Right now we have a person whose life is on stake, and all Jordanians feel that this is their own. And this has been turning into a factor of decivilizing the kingdom.
SIEGEL: Rula Al Hroob, thank you very much for talking with us once again.
AL HROOB: Thank you.
SIEGEL: Rula Al Hroob is a member of the Jordanian Parliament. She spoke to us from the capital, Amman.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Half of the men who die every day in the U.S. are veterans. That's according to the Department of Veterans Affairs, and it's not as shocking as it sounds. Millions of Americans who served in World War II and in Korea are now in their 80s and 90s. Vietnam veterans are now reaching their 70s. As a result the VA is spending a lot more on what's called end-of-life care. As NPR's Quil Lawrence reports, the treatment can be different for those who've seen war.
JOSEPH O'NEIL: My name is Thomas Joseph O'Neil. I was in the U.S. Army in Vietnam '66 to '67.
QUIL LAWRENCE, BYLINE: O'Neil used to think about Vietnam constantly. He spent a year near the Mekong Delta at a time when that war was killing more Americans in a year than the total casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
O'NEIL: The only good thing was the night time because you knew another day was gone and you was closer to coming home. To be honest with you, I was a scared. I was very scared the whole year. And I don't think Iâm the only one. I mean, maybe I'll admit it and other guys wonât.
LAWRENCE: When he came home, he didn't talk to anyone about the war. O'Neil says he nearly drank himself into the grave. In 2011, he finally came to the VA to treat the PTSD he'd been enduring for 40 years. Last year, he learned he has terminal cancer. O'Neil says the staff at the VA in Queens, New York, have been helping him deal with the pain and be at peace.
O'NEIL: I think they call it end-of-life care. But whatever it is, I mean, it's unbelievable. They treat you like gold - like, you know, really, if you're going to be sick, this is the place to be.
ALICE BEAL: Our goal is - in hospice is to make life as good as it can be for as long as it can be.
LAWRENCE: Doctor Alice Beal is director of VA palliative care for most of New York City. That usually means focusing on relieving pain for the last weeks or month of life. She says it can be different for vets.
BEAL: If a veteran's been in combat, a veteran's likely to have killed. And I think no matter what your culture is, when you meet your maker - even if it's been to save your buddy, to save your life, to save your country - it's just a burden that the rest of us haven't even thought of.
LAWRENCE: If you've had blood on your hands, it comes up. People who have PTSD may have not had it unmasked their whole life. But as they're dying, all of a suddenly they get flashbacks.
LAWRENCE: The ward is a contradiction. It's brightly decorated. At the entrance, there's a fish tank and an electric fireplace. But there's usually a room just vacated with an American flag draped on the bed and a lantern on the nightstand honoring a veteran who passed on.
BEAL: There were two deaths over the weekend. And it's a real toss-up between respect and release. Around here, we tend to be full of life, but you don't want to be too joyful in the presence of a family who is grieving.
LAWRENCE: If a vet doesn't have family coming, someone from the staff will spend their final hours bedside. No veteran dies alone. Tom O'Neil, the Vietnam vet, is 68 is old - no kids. He says he doesn't want to be a burden on his family. He'd rather stay here.
O'NEIL: Once in a while I get scared - like when I have a breathing attack. You know, I'm used to being a halfway strong guy, and now I feel like I'm depending on others to help me out. Like, you know, like the nurses get mad because I try to do it myself, and they say don't do that. Don't do that. Like, you know, I guess it's ingrained in me - like, you know?
LAWRENCE: O'Neil doesn't like crowded places which he blames on PTSD. Other than the doctors and nurses, he doesn't see many people. He even asked if he could get his meals in his room. It's a corner room with lots of light. That's where he's going to spend the rest of his time.
O'NEIL: I don't think it'll be too long anyway. I never really asked to be honest with you how long. I don't think that - no offense to the doctors, but I don't think the doctors really know. So whenever the good Lord wants me - I hope he does anyway - like I came to terms with this. I'm not happy with the diagnosis, but I came to terms with it.
LAWRENCE: Quil Lawrence, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
A delay in products showing up on store shelves can be tracked back to a slowdown in shipping and a major labor dispute on the West Coast. Dock workers in shipping company have been at odds over a new contract for nearly eight months now. Well, today, there are signs a deal may be close. NPR's Kirk Siegler reports.
KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: Dock workers with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union have been working without a contract since July. At first, one of the big sticking points was over healthcare and other benefits. More recently, it's been over maintenance contracts for the trucks and trailers that haul the containers off the ships.
The Pacific Maritime Association blamed the union for deliberately slowing down operations at ports, especially in the northwest. And last month, amid fears of a broader strike that would cripple goods movement across the U.S., the Obama administration dispatched federal mediators to help move things along.
WADE GATES: We still have a number of issues to discuss. We are making slow progress.
SIEGLER: That's Wade Gates, spokesman for the Maritime Association. Thereâs widespread speculation that a deal could come as soon as this weekend. And a lot is hanging in the balance. Take the largest port complex in the U.S. here in Los Angeles in Long Beach.
There are 19 large container ships just anchored, idling off shore right now, waiting for free space. Usually you'd see one or two. Over the holiday season, retailers blamed congestion at these ports for late deliveries. And right now, it's farmers who are most anxious. Grain producers along the northern plains and California's walnut growers - theyâre worried about exports sitting on the docks and rotting. Again, Wade Gates.
GATES: Some of the union actions took a difficult situation and made it even worse.
SIEGLER: A spokesman for the longshoremen declined to do an interview on tape. But the union points to a host of other factors that are contributing to the broader congestion crisis at west coast ports. They say shipping lines are bringing in more and more cargo on bigger and bigger vessels. Theyâre making logistical decisions that are slowing things down. Industry analysts say there's plenty of blame to go around. And port operators are in the middle of it.
JOCK O'CONNELL: I think from the perspective of the port - the authorities - the supply chain has been stressed to the point of its nearly breaking.
SIEGLER: Jock O'Connell is an international trade expert at Beacon Economics. A deal or no labor deal coming, he says there's still going to be a congestion crisis and companies should expect to lose business in the months ahead.
O'CONNELL: No one should be under the illusion that settlement of the labor contract dispute will result in efficiently running ports. The ports have been suffering from congested conditions for the better part of the last 12 months.
SIEGLER: But O'Connell says there is reason to breathe a little more easily today. It appears for now that a strike or lockout is less and less likely. And everyone agrees that a full-blown shut down at west coast ports would have much bigger impacts on the national economy. Kirk Siegler, NPR News, Culver City, California.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
In a crowded hearing room in Washington today, Loretta Lynch faced hours of questioning in her bid to become attorney general. If confirmed, she would be the first African-American woman to serve in that post.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LORETTA LYNCH: I believe in the promise of America because I have lived the promise of America.
BLOCK: Senators questioned Lynch on her views about immigration, the death penalty and the controversial attorney general she would replace, Eric Holder. NPR justice correspondent Carrie Johnson has been watching the hearing. And Carrie, how's it been going so far for Loretta Lynch in this hearing before the Judiciary Committee?
CARRIE JOHNSON, BYLINE: Melissa, I've covered three of these hearings for three different attorney general nominees, and by far, this is the easiest one. It's been pretty smooth sailing here. A few examples of that - for instance, Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat and a supporter of Lynch, joked that she's having a harder time being a New York Knicks basketball fan this season than fielding questions from Republicans in the hearing room today. And Congressman Charles Grassley - Senator who runs this Judiciary Committee at one point asked the nominee how things were going. Al Franken, another Senator, a Democrat, asked, how was her lunch?
BLOCK: Well, there must have been tougher questions, I would think, on some of the issues that we mentioned - national security, immigration policy. How has Loretta Lynch been responding to those sorts of questions?
JOHNSON: So far immigration has been the big sticking point here today. The nominee, Loretta Lynch, says she supports in general the legal reasoning for the president's action to grant temporary reprieve from deportation for about 4 million people last year. She had a bit of a stumble on whether undocumented people have a right to work here in the U.S., but she's tried to clear that up with help from Democratic supporters in the Senate.
BLOCK: And on national security - what about there?
JOHNSON: She made clear that terrorists can and will be tried in American courts. She got some questions from Republicans on the desire to bring in two men from Yemen to be tried in Brooklyn, which happened in the last several days. She also said that government surveillance programs, such as the ones leaked by Edward Snowden, are legal and effective, but she's open to some tweaks. And finally, Melissa, she said waterboarding is torture and it's illegal. That has tripped up other nominees in the past, but she seemed to have handled it fairly easily today.
BLOCK: And I gather, Carrie, that a number of Republicans on the committee seem to have more of a beef with President Obama and his current attorney general, Eric Holder.
JOHNSON: Yeah, no further than listening to Senator John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, in this exchange. Let's take a listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SENATOR JOHN CORNYN: Let me just stipulate - you're not Eric Holder, are you?
LYNCH: No, I'm not, sir.
(LAUGHTER)
CORNYN: So no one's suggesting that you are. But of course, Attorney General Holder's record is heavy on our minds now.
JOHNSON: Attorney General Eric Holder - his close relationship with President Obama has been on the table for the entire hearing. But at least three Republican senators seem likely to vote for her in the committee, which would move her nomination to the floor. Melissa, it's still going to take weeks. Republicans are in no rush here, although there's a conundrum from them, which means the longer they wait, the longer Eric Holder, their nemesis, sticks around running the Justice Department.
BLOCK: And Carrie, how long do these hearings last?
JOHNSON: Today focused on the nominee, Loretta Lynch. Tomorrow, Melissa, a slate of witnesses proposed by Republicans and Democrats will speak, including some long-time critics of the Justice Department and Eric Holder on immigration, the fast-and-furious gun trafficking scandal involving the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms earlier in this president's term and a few other hot-button issues.
BLOCK: OK. Carrie Johnson, thanks so much.
JOHNSON: You're welcome.
BLOCK: That's NPR's justice correspondent Carrie Johnson. We were talking about the first day of confirmation hearings for Loretta Lynch. She is the president's nominee to succeed Eric Holder as attorney general.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The paper industry has been shrinking, and it turns out, so has your toilet paper, at least when it comes to its surface area. That's right. The individual sheets, or squares, of your toilet paper roll have been getting smaller. In fact, some of them aren't even square anymore. You aren't just imagining things. Here to explain why this is happening is Steven Chercover. He's a research analyst who covers the paper and forest industries. Welcome to the program.
STEVEN CHERCOVER: Thank you.
SIEGEL: We recently read about this trend in the Washington Post. What are the numbers actually? How much have toilet paper rolls shrunk?
CHERCOVER: Well, I think according to the Washington Post it was in the mid-20 percent range - at least, each square is down by that percentage.
SIEGEL: Each square used to be - or the standard was four and a half inches by four and a half inches, they report. And now the roll has narrowed to just four inches.
CHERCOVER: That's correct. I've noticed that. I live in a house full of females, and I'm always astonished at how quickly the toilet paper goes away.
SIEGEL: Why? Why is the - I mean, I guess you get to sell less paper for the same price, but why now? Why would toilet paper rolls change size?
CHERCOVER: Oh, I think it's precisely profit margins. I think it's really a stealth price increase. They don't change the price, but they give you less product. And I've also noticed that a standard roll is much smaller than it used to be, so now they're selling double rolls. So without being scientific, I think a double roll is pretty well equivalent to what a standard roll was perhaps a decade ago.
SIEGEL: Now, The Post entertains the theory that this is related to declines in sales for paper napkins and paper towels and that the industry is hard-pressed to make it up. Do you see declines in sales for those products?
CHERCOVER: You know, it's in environments like shopping centers and office buildings where you're seeing hand dryers, towel dispensers or just having to ask for multiple napkins in fast food restaurants. They tend not to be just providing you with napkins a volonte like they used to.
SIEGEL: In addition to the rolls of toilet paper getting narrower, I gather there's some indication that perhaps the cardboard tube in the middle has gotten bigger.
CHERCOVER: Well, that would be another way to fool the consumer.
SIEGEL: Get less paper, more cardboard at the center.
CHERCOVER: Yeah, more air in the void of the tube. Now is the upside of all of this that the country is actually conserving more with paper and using blow dryers more and being more efficient?
CHERCOVER: I doubt it. I think you're just changing the rolls on your toilet paper dispenser more frequently.
SIEGEL: And buying a new roll more frequently.
CHERCOVER: I mean, the trends would suggest that we're not using less tissue paper. They've been adding capacity, and the operating rates are pretty good. So consumption is going up basically in line with population.
SIEGEL: And is there actually an industry standard that cuts across brands - that is that when one company went to four and a half inches by four inches to the sheet as opposed to four and a half by four and a half, that everyone effectively did that?
CHERCOVER: I'm not aware of an industry standard, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone decided to market themselves and differentiate their product by going back to the old school four and a half by four and a half square.
SIEGEL: You think that could sell toilet paper these days possibly.
CHERCOVER: It would be another way to say that it's new and improved.
SIEGEL: Or old and improved.
CHERCOVER: Well, I think a lot of us pine for the good old days.
SIEGEL: Well, Steven Chercover, thank you very much for talking with us about it.
CHERCOVER: It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Robert.
SIEGEL: Mr. Chercover, talking about shrinking toilet paper roll, is a research analyst who watches the paper and forest industries.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
There's mounting concern over fighting in two of the world's hotspots. EU foreign ministers will meet tomorrow to discuss possible new sanctions against Russia, which they blame for a surge in violence in Ukraine. We'll have more on that in a moment.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
But first, renewed fighting between Israel and Hezbollah - two Israeli soldiers were killed today when their convoy was attacked by Hezbollah on the frontier with Lebanon. Israel answered with artillery and airstrikes. A Spanish UN peacekeeper assignd to southern Lebanon died in the crossfire.
SIEGEL: The convoy attack came 10 days after an airstrike in Syria, widely attributed to Israel, that killed six Hezbollah fighters and an Iranian general. NPR's Emily Harris reports from Jerusalem.
EMILY HARRIS, BYLINE: When Israeli Lior Shelef heard the first explosion Wednesday morning, he rushed outside to see what he could see.
LIOR SHELEF: Huge dark smoke, which we obviously understood had something to do with vehicles.
HARRIS: Shelef lives within sight of Lebanon.
SHELEF: A few minutes later, we already started to hear the Israeli artillery responding and the whole shenanigan of almost a war.
HARRIS: He's lived through past Israeli wars with Lebanon and Hezbollah and more recently increased exchanges of fire after almost a decade of calm in the area. Reserve Israeli major and analyst Sarit Zehari says Israel and Hezbollah are redrawing their lines in the sand.
SARIT ZEHARI: Hezbollah red lines, I guess, is trying to stop Israel from doing anything against it. Israelâs red line is not going back to action-reaction, action-reaction again and again. We want silence.
HARRIS: Despite Hezbollah suggesting today's attack was retaliation for the apparent Israeli strike that killed Hezbollah fighters in Syria last week, Zehari thinks neither side wants escalation. Still, Israel's president cut short a U.S. visit to hurry home, and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu says those responsible will pay, quote, âthe full price.â He mentioned Iran, the Lebanese government and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad by name. Emily Harris, NPR News, Jerusalem.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And we go now to eastern Ukraine as the war there flares up again. European Union foreign ministers plan to meet in Brussels tomorrow to consider drastic new sanctions against Russia. Both the EU and the United States say Russian troops and weapons are directly involved in the recent offensive by separatists fighting Ukrainian troops. The violence is the latest chapter in a war that has wracked the region since last April. As NPR's Corey Flintoff discovered in Donetsk today, the continuing conflict in eastern Ukraine is grinding down civilians and soldiers alike.
COREY FLINTOFF, BYLINE: There are a lot fewer people in Donetsk today than there were during my last visit in November. But I did find Nadezhda Stolyarenko - her apartment was wrecked by shelling, and she's been taking shelter in the basement of her building, shaken by almost constant sounds of artillery.
NADEZHDA STOLYARENKO: (Through interpreter) We (unintelligible) months already live in a basement. We're very frightened and scared because of that. And just a few people left, and we're all here, and we're scared.
FLINTOFF: Stolyarenko is a small, dark-haired woman, living with her sister, Galina. They say they sent their children away to safety, but they stay here because Nadezhda still has work in the office of a local mine.
They don't have running water or heat, she says. The space where they sleep is about 50 degrees Fahrenheit. We want peace, she says, nothing bad to anyone, just peace. After she left, I walked into the snowy courtyard trying to come up with a way to describe what was going on. In the meantime, the separatist offensive is continuing almost methodically. There is intermittent shellfire throughout the day. The separatist leaders say that they've advanced beyond the airport and that they're now fighting for some suburbs and small cities on the other side of the airport...
(SOUNDBITE OF SHELLFIRE)
FLINTOFF: ...Where the Ukrainians have their positions. That gunshot was my cue to hit the ground. I looked back to see that my two companions were on the ground already surrounded by about 10 local militiamen with Kalashnikovs. They swarmed around us demanding to know who we were and what we were doing.
(CROSSTALK)
FLINTOFF: We produce passports and passes from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: You are from national radio, yes?
FLINTOFF: Yes, right, National Public Radio.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: What is your name?
FLINTOFF: My name's Corey Flintoff.
They quickly let us go and told us to get out of the area. It was a measure of how jumpy people are in this area, both civilians and military. They told us that a local resident had called them after spotting us in the courtyard. And ominously, they said that they had recently caught two Ukrainian saboteurs in the neighborhood. Corey Flintoff, NPR News, Donetsk.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The two head coaches in this Sunday's Super Bowl couldn't seem more different. The Seattle Seahawks Pete Carroll is engaging, has seemingly boundless enthusiasm and is upbeat even after loss. The New England Patriots Bill Belichick is secretive, reserved and seems like you'd rather have an appendectomy than talk to reporters. But the coaches are actually more alike than you might think. Joining us from Boston is Bob Ryan former longtime sports columnist for the Boston Globe. Welcome to the program.
BOB RYAN: Thank you, Robert.
SIEGEL: You've, of course, dealt with Bill Belichick for more than 15 years in New England. But what some people might not know is that before Belichick, Pete Carroll was the Patriots' coach. Describe that time.
RYAN: Pete Carroll was hired by Bob Kraft as the anti-Bill Parcells in the sense of being a very engaging fellow, as you have suggested - buoyant would perhaps be the proper word. I can recall a conversation that I had with Bob Kraft circa 1997 in which he said how excited he was that this coach, he said, will schmooze. The last one wouldn't, and Pete Carroll is a schmoozer. He's a people guy. He is a camp counselor kind of personality, and he now fits in between two very different personalities - Bill Parcells and, of course, Bill Belichick.
SIEGEL: After Carroll was fired, Belichick took over. He was thought to be a failure after an unsuccessful stint as coach of the Cleveland Browns. I assume that nobody foresaw the historic, nearly 15-year run, the Patriots were about to take at that point.
RYAN: When Bill Belichick was hired, I think I can safely speak for the majority of the Boston media, that we thought perhaps Bob Kraft was losing it, that he didn't know what he was doing, because Belichick's reputation had preceded him as this dour, non-people person - this technocrat of football who had proven in Cleveland conclusively that he did not know how to deal with whole human beings.
SIEGEL: And the irony here is that while Kraft has hired Pete Carroll to be the anti-Parcells - the anti-Bill Parcells who had been the coach of my beloved New York football Giants - Belichick was in fact his defensive coach. He was a protege of Parcells.
RYAN: He very much was. He was hired at a rather young age to be the defensive coordinator. And it's interesting to note Bill Parcells didn't announce to the world that he had given the powers of the defensive coordinator job to Belichick because he wanted to protect Belichick from the media and the fans because he didn't think he could present himself in public at all. That's how protective he was of Belichick based on Belichick's rather peculiar personality.
SIEGEL: Isn't Belichick Wesleyan educated? Wouldn't you think that he's - he could could answer a question?
RYAN: Not only is he Wesleyan educated - and he is - there's obviously a great complexity to the man. I mean, he's Wesleyan educated, an economics major. But he's also the son of Steve Belichick. Steve Belichick was a 33-year assistant at the Naval Academy. He chose to stay there in order to maintain a stable family life. But Steve Belichick ran camps and got acquainted with many of the powerbrokers in the NFL. And Bill Parcells used to have Steve Belichick come not only to training camp, but to the games to stand on the sidelines while everyone got to know about the little prodigy Billy Belichick, the son who was taken into the film room at age 10, 11, 12 and learned how to break down football films. And Parcells kept track of him and eventually hired him.
SIEGEL: Both these coaches had big second chances, as you've described. Belichick, after washing out in Cleveland, then gets the head-coaching job in New England. Carroll, after the Patriots, went back to become a college coach.
RYAN: Where we all thought he belonged. His ra-ra-sis-bum-bah (ph) approach didn't appear to work in New England as the team regressed in each of the three seasons he was there - and the reason being too nice a guy, too peppy a personality, not something cut out for the pros.
So he goes back to college at Southern California - a sleeping giant situation. Where others had failed to rekindle the great glory days of John McKay, he did. He harnessed this machinery and turned them into multiple national champions. The general personality worked in the college, and no one thought it would work in the pros. And it was great skepticism when Seattle hired him. But he was determined to prove to the world that he could do it, and he indeed has done that.
SIEGEL: Obviously, the big story, as we approach the Super Bowl, has been all about as I like to think of it the deflationary-inflationary cycle of the football. Belichick has a history of getting caught, but Pete Carroll also has a history. University of Southern California had to vacate a national title and the Heisman Trophy for violations of NCAA rules when he was the coach. So both of these guys have played it pretty close to the line.
RYAN: When Pete was at SC, it was a rogue program, as it turns out. People were getting, as the NCAA liked to say, quite a few, quote- unquote, "extra benefits of various sorts." And as I say, he never faced the music. In fact, he got out of town before anything happened. They have welcomed him back as a prodigal this year, you know, inducting him into the hall of fame. So all was forgiven Pete, and it's all ended up very fine. But no question, he was able to rationalize, as so many of them do, his decisions, his behavior. And now it's all total ancient history for him. It's all about the now. It's all about his ongoing success with the Seattle Seahawks.
SIEGEL: Bob Ryan, thanks for talking with us.
RYAN: You're entirely welcome.
SIEGEL: Bob Ryan, former sports columnist for the Boston Globe.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
It was a day of historical reckoning in Rock Hill, S.C. A judge threw out the convictions of several civil rights pioneers who were jailed 54 years ago for a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter. NPR's Debbie Elliott reports.
DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: It was standing-room only in the Rock Hill Courtroom where surviving members of the so-called Friendship Nine came before the bar of justice again, more than a half-century since they sat down at the all-white lunch counter at McCrory's Five and Dime Drugstore. One by one, the defendants stood as their old convictions were read into the record.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Docket number 412, prisoner Willie Edward McCleod. Offense - trespassing. Disposition - guilty, $100 or 30 days sent to the chain gang.
ELLIOTT: The young men from Friendship College, led by an activist from the Congress of Racial Equality, refused to pay their trespassing fines, the first to test a jail-no-bail strategy in the fight against Jim Crow. One of the Friendship Nine's original defense attorneys is retired Justice Ernest Finney, who later became the first African-American chief justice in South Carolina since Reconstruction. He represented them again today.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ERNEST FINNEY: Today I am honored and proud to move this honorable court to vacate the convictions of my clients.
ELLIOTT: On behalf of the state, York County solicitor Kevin Brackett agreed to the motion.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KEVIN BRACKETT: There is only one reason these men were arrested. There's only one reason that they were charged and convicted for trespassing, and that is because they were black.
ELLIOTT: Brackett said it's time for the state to say it's sorry for how the men were treated.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BRACKETT: So allow me to take this opportunity to extend to each of you my heartfelt apologies for what happened to you in 1961.
(APPLAUSE)
BRACKETT: It was wrong.
ELLIOTT: Judge John Hayes was presiding.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JOHN HAYES: We cannot rewrite history, but we can right history.
ELLIOTT: Hayes' uncle was the judge who sentenced the Friendship Nine 54 years ago.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HAYES: Now is a time to recognize that justice is not temporal, but it is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The defendant's convictions for trespassing in January of 1961 are vacated, null, void and set aside.
ELLIOTT: Seeing the judge sign the order was emotional for members of the Friendship Nine. Clarence Graham says they never expected such notoriety.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CLARENCE GRAHAM: In 1961, we would go downtown - it wasn't for any glory. We were not looking for any hero worship. We were simply tired of the status quo, tired of being treated like second-class citizens, tired of being spat on, kicked, called the N-word, drinking out of colored water fountains. We got tired of that.
ELLIOTT: But as the first group of protesters to quit enriching the coffers of a segregationist government by paying fines, their decision to face jail time inspired other civil rights activists across the South. Charles Jones was a student in Atlanta at the time.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CHARLES JONES: Having read about these young men - being so inspired, that we said we got to go there, we got to join them.
ELLIOTT: He and other activists came to Rock Hill and ended up in jail with the Friendship Nine.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JONES: But we were singing that's the sound of the men working on the chain gang.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: What were you singing? Do you remember?
JONES: (Singing) That's the sound of the men working on the chain - uh - gang.
ELLIOTT: Their convictions were cleared along with the Friendship Nine's, but the court records from 54 years ago will not be expunged. Clarence Graham says there's a lesson from Rock Hill today.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GRAHAM: Fifty-four years later, we're proving you can be successful with nonviolence - nonviolence. Even though we were treated unjustly, still, nonviolence prevailed, and to the day that's our message to young people.
ELLIOTT: Debbie Elliott, NPR News, Rock Hill, South Carolina.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The story goes something like this - Russians in the U.S. masquerading as ordinary citizens, leading ordinary lives - turn out to be KGB agents. No, we're not talking about recent events in New York where authorities have arrested an alleged Russian spy working as a banker. We're talking about the FX television show "The Americans."
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE AMERICANS")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: The counterintelligence we're up against is the most sophisticated enemy in the world. Super-secret spies living next door. They look like us, they speak better English than we do.
NOAH EMMERICH: (As Stan Beeman) How are you doing? Stan Beeman.
MATTHEW RHYS: (As Philip Jennings) My wife, Elizabeth, Paige, Henry. What do you do, Stan?
EMMERICH: (As Stan Beeman) I'm an FBI agent.
RHYS: (As Philip Jennings) I have to make sure I don't do any spying around here.
SIEGEL: The third season of "The Americans" premieres tonight. Joseph Weisberg is the creator behind the scenes and former CIA officer himself. Joe Weisberg, welcome to the program.
JOE WEISBERG: Thank you, Robert.
SIEGEL: The recent arrests - life imitating art imitating life?
WEISBERG: We've made a lot of jokes around here recently about whether or not our marketing department was behind all of this.
SIEGEL: Well, you know, when you began doing this - and the story is set in the 1980s, so you're doing a period piece - but actually as things proceed, it's more and more timely every year it seems.
WEISBERG: Yeah, it was interesting. When we started out, one of the real goals of the show was to say look at the enemy and think about whether or not there's any reason to be so hostile towards people. At the time, things were really quite peaceful in our relationship with Russia. So it seemed like a good time to be able to re-examine how we thought about them. And almost as soon as the show went on the air, things started getting more and more hostile in our relations with Russia. And now they seem to be almost at an all-time low since the advent of the Cold War.
SIEGEL: It's that marketing department of yours again doing a fabulous job, obviously.
WEISBERG: (Laughter) Right.
SIEGEL: Your own history as a spook - you were interested, I gather, in Russian history. That's what led you to it?
WEISBERG: Yeah, when I was in college, I took a great course on the history of the international communist movement. And I pretty quickly turned into a cold warrior and decided I should play my part in trying to bring down the Soviet Union. I don't think I accomplished much, but I did spend a few years in the CIA and learned a lot about espionage.
SIEGEL: One of the themes of the program - and I guess it's a theme you experienced - deception - deception in everyday life, deception over serious espionage matters, deception over everyday life matters.
WEISBERG: Yeah, you know, when I was at the CIA, I became really quite a liar. I had to lie all the time. I had to lie about everything I was doing. And I went in. And at first I thought that'd be very emotionally difficult for me. And it took about two weeks. After that, I just became adept at it. It never bothered me again. I just - I just found - it became almost second nature right away. And then after I left the CIA, I had to re-examine all that and think about how did that happen? How did that become so easy for me to do? And I got very interested in the whole question of lying and what it's like and what it means to a person and what it does to a person.
SIEGEL: Now, the plot of "The Americans" was inspired by the arrests of several Russians who had been living as Americans covertly in the United States for several years. I guess the arrests were back in 2010. The one major difference - I mean, I imagine those people experienced many of the issues of lying and deception that your Americans experienced - but my impression was that those Russians did remarkably little, actually. It didn't seem as though they accomplished very much. Your spies are amazingly productive.
WEISBERG: Our spies are very busy - not only busier than the actual illegals that were arrested in 2010, but our spies are probably busier than any spies in the actual history of espionage. Fictional spies have to stay very, very busy in order to keep people entertained.
SIEGEL: So season three - were still in the 1980s here, yes?
WEISBERG: Right.
SIEGEL: At some point, if the show is too successful, you know, you're going to bump up against the collapse of the Soviet Union.
WEISBERG: Well, the big hallmarks that are coming up that we think about are 1985. Gorbachev is going to come in, and he's going to start Glasnost and Perestroika. And what are Phil and Elizabeth going to make of that? And then, of course, the wall is going to come down. That's going to be the big one - and then the end of the Soviet Union. But the show would have to last a very long time to get to those later points.
SIEGEL: Well, here's hoping. And thanks for talking with us about season three.
WEISBERG: Thank you, Robert.
SIEGEL: That's Joe Weisberg, creator of the TV show "The Americans," which begins its third season tonight on FX.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
We called up Edward Gerson today. We read about him in the Wall Street Journal. He writes a column.
EDWARD GERSON: And it's widely received very favorably.
BLOCK: Mr. Gerson writes for his college alumni magazine.
GERSON: Dartmouth College graduate of 1935.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
We'll do the math for you - that makes Mr. Gerson 100. And it means the material that Gerson has to work with is increasingly limited. There aren't many members of the class of '35 left.
GERSON: There are only three alive.
SIEGEL: So for each issue, he makes sure to write about his two surviving classmates - Irv Sager and Ed Reich, or Eddy.
GERSON: Before I write a column every month, I have a talk with them to see how they're doing and what I can write my column. Eddy Reich - I've known Eddy since 1923. We went to camp together. We went to college together. So we always have something in common there. Irv Sager for years romanced my first cousin, but she just up and died on him.
BLOCK: The hard facts of life mean that Mr. Gerson's class notes also have room for him to get some things off his chest.
GERSON: I think this country is in terrible shape. And it can't be just glossed over. When my kids went to college, I paid for them. Now we charge it to the future generations
BLOCK: So we asked does he worry about Dartmouth limiting his column as he pushes the boundaries?
GERSON: No, I'm a fixture. They can't fire me.
SIEGEL: Before his 100th birthday last year, Edward Gerson got married, and he wrote in an end-of-year issue of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine you are hearing from the luckiest person on earth. I'm able to live to be 100 years old, and I'm still living a life that just gets better and better.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
We've been exploring urban design as part of the NPR Cities Project.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Becoming a world-class city.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: More unified community.
LUCY KERMAN: Engaging the neighborhood that much more deeply.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #2: If other cities can do it we can do it.
BLOCK: Many cities look to universities to spark new neighborhood life, and expanding schools spurs the economy around campus; developers want in, real estate prices go up. That's starting to happen around Drexel University in Philadelphia. It's taking place in a predominately black community, one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. And Drexel is trying to counteract that real estate pressure with a hands-on approach to redevelopment. Hansi Lo Wang of NPR's Code Switch team takes us there.
ROSE SAMUEL-EVANS: Ladies and gentlemen, good evening.
HANSI LO WANG, BYLINE: Dinner is served in the West Philadelphia neighborhood of Mantua.
SAMUEL-EVANS: You look like you're ready to have a great Dornsife neighborhood partnership meal. Am I right about it?
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: Yeah.
WANG: Rose Samuel-Evans warms up the crowd for a free community dinner hosted by Drexel University. She works in this orange-brick schoolhouse that's part of Drexel's Dornsife Center for Neighborhood Partnerships. Just a couple years ago, this building was boarded up.
KERMAN: This building was actually full of cats...
WANG: Stray cats.
KERMAN: Stray cats, and it smelled like it.
WANG: Lucy Kerman oversees the Dornsife Center as a vice provost at Drexel. The center opened its three buildings last summer north of campus. Stepping outside on a rainy day, Kerman says they're designed to serve not just faculty and students, but mainly local residents.
KERMAN: Developers were saying, boy, we could put a lot of student housing on the block. What's intentional is to look at this as a resource for the community and to say no, that's not what's going to happen.
WANG: There is a computer lab and rooms for career building workshops and legal clinics, many staffed by Drexel students. Kerman says these resources are in high demand in Mantua, where more than half of people live below the poverty line. Walking around, i'ts easy to see the signs.
KERMAN: The sidewalk is totally broken up here.
WANG: Lucy Kerman shows me some of the blocks around the Dornsife Center. Old tires, potato chip bags and strips of yellow caution tape fill many empty lots here.
KERMAN: Oh, another vacant lot even worse than the other one. You can see the remains of the house over there.
WANG: It all makes the Dornsife Center's main building - a freshly painted white mansion - stick out like a lily in a barren field. The center also serves as a kind of olive branch from Drexel to Mantua. More students are moving here as the school scrambles to build more housing on campus. Kerman says it's in Drexel's interest for Mantua to thrive, and the center is trying to solve some of its problems.
KERMAN: Can we protect longtime homeowners who are in trouble from losing their homes? Can we deal with rising real estate taxes? That's harder. It's a tough situation, and it's one that we're very, very aware of.
ANDREW JENKINS: My name is Reverend Dr. Andrew Jenkins. I lived in this house since 1969.
WANG: Residents like Reverend Andrew Jenkins are also aware of Mantua's tough situation. Jenkins is a board member of the Mantua Civic Association. He lives a few doors down from the Dornsife Center in a three-story townhouse that stands as a reminder of better times. This was once a stable working-class community that over decades, white flight and the loss of manufacturing jobs turned into a neighborhood of poverty by the 1960s. Just as Jenkins shows me the gazebos and rosebushes in his backyard, we're interrupted by the sounds of Mantua's future - drilling and hammering from a nearby construction site.
How do you feel about that, to have new neighbors?
JENKINS: Oh, I'd rather see buildings going up than an empty lot.
WANG: Private developers are transforming these empty lots into new apartments that some longtime renters feel certain they won't be able to afford. Jenkins says he's worried that eventually homeowners like him will be pushed out.
JENKINS: Once all the land is obtained, naturally, developers are going to approach the people who have aged and offer them something they can't refuse.
WANG: It's a kind of change West Philadelphia has seen before around another school - the University of Pennsylvania. That's where Drexel's current president, and Lucy Kerman, also helped to lead neighborhood development efforts that some derisively called Penntrification. Kerman says they've learned how universities can unintentionally displace longtime resident.
KERMAN: What we didn't know as well at Penn, I think, was that we needed to be proactive in engaging the neighborhood that much more deeply.
WANG: Let's head back to where that engagement between Drexel University and Mantua is most direct, back inside the Dornsife Center.
TAMICKA STEPHENS: Hi, everybody. Did you bring your appetite?
WANG: Volunteer Tamicka Stephens greets neighbors at the center's free community dinner. She's a single mother of two and says Drexel's presence is helping her children envision a better future.
STEPHENS: It lets my children see college is not just somewhere else. College can be here, so I hope it's something that they'll be like, oh, I want to go to college 'cause I want it to be like this.
WANG: But the benefits of redevelopment come at a high cost.
STEPHENS: The landlord just kept saying the rent is going up, the rent is going up, the rent is going up, and when it went up it was way too much.
WANG: So much that Stephens had to move last summer from her Mantua apartment into a shelter less than four blocks from the Dornsife Center. She's now living in an apartment three miles away. Can longtime residents stay if the neighborhood improves? That's a question Drexel officials say they know is on the minds of many people in Mantua, a question that will determine the future of this Philadelphia neighborhood.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #3: Can I have a plate for my child, too, or do we have to share?
WANG: At Drexel University's Dornsife Center in Philadelphia, Hansi Lo Wang for the NPR Cities Project.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
The newest inductees into the Pro Football Hall of Fame will be picked on Saturday. This comes as the Hall itself is planning a radical transformation over the next four years. It's going from a museum to a vast complex of hotels, conference centers and corporate training facilities, what backers envision as the Disney of pro football. From Canton, Ohio, M.L. Schultze, of member station WKSU, reports on perhaps the most unusual part of that project - an assisted living center for aging Hall of Fame football players.
M.L. SCHULTZE, BYLINE: When David Baker talks about the Pro Football Hall of Fame, you can almost imagine the pounding music of NFL films under his voice.
DAVID BAKER: To honor the heroes of the game, to preserve its history, to promote its values.
SCHULTZE: But Baker, who took over as president of the Hall a year ago, also sees a museum - like many sports museums - with stagnating attendance. And he sees the answer through a developers eye.
BAKER: You know, when a developer comes in and looks at a piece of property, he tries to find what's that diamond in the middle? You know, that diamond's already here in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The question is, how can we complement it?
SCHULTZE: Baker thinks the how is an eventual $1.3 billion plan that would include an assisted living center he calls Legends' Landing. It's part business, part nostalgia and part a sense of responsibility to ballplayers whose bodies, and possibly brains, have been bruised by the game.
BAKER: Can you imagine anything that would be better to help you come alive than say, hey, I love football, I love the game - this is where I want to spend the rest of my time.
SCHULTZE: Baker is sure that there's a demand for a place like this. There's already a parallel - The Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, Calif. And there are more than 160 living Hall of Fame football players. Ed Rosenberg is a social gerontologist who has studied athletes in transition. He says the Hall of Fame concept makes sense and could specialize in treating dementia, which ballplayers suffer disproportionately, but he says there's more.
ED ROSENBERG: The people that they're interacting with would understand what they've been through. They would understand what the players' careers meant to them. They'd have a type of identification that people who haven't been involved with professional football couldn't have.
SCHULTZE: Stephany Coakley is a sports psychology consultant who helps football players adapt to life after the pros. She notes that the time between the end of even a star player's career and when they're ready for assisted living is a long one. And she's not sure what's being proposed is developmentally appropriate.
STEPHANY COAKLEY: I think that there are things that you can continue to do and grow and learn and develop as you get older without stepping back to your glory days.
SCHULTZE: Still she thinks there will be a market for the project.
DAVE ROBINSON: They tried to play a passive (ph) game and the other team got aggressive and they just beat them. That's what happened. And they lost it.
SCHULTZE: Hall of Famer Dave Robinson squeezes into a narrow bench at the Diamond Grill - a 1950s-era steakhouse in Akron, Ohio - and debates what could have gotten his beloved Packers into Sunday's Super Bowl. Robinson played for Green Bay in the '60s and early '70s. He's also among the thousands of players who have sued the NFL over pensions and injury compensation. He forgets appointments a lot, but none of that has a place when he talks about his love of the game. And he says the Hall of Fame raises that to a higher level.
ROBINSON: Hall of Famers have a bond, and to be with a bunch of Hall of Famers, it's almost like a dream come true.
SCHULTZE: Tom Mack is a Hall of Fame guard who played for the Rams. He says the project's success will rest largely with the answer to one big question.
TOM MACK: Are there things to do and are there people to interact with and interface with?
SCHULTZE: The Hall's president and cheerleader, David Baker, is convinced his Legends' Landing will have plenty of both, in a unique blend that honors the past and embraces the future. For NPR News, I'm M.L. Schultze in Canton, Ohio.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
What if you could drink the elixir of life, sip from a magical spring that would make you live forever? Would you do it? That's the question at the heart of a celebrated book for young readers that's marking its fortieth anniversary this year, "Tuck Everlasting." In the book, 10-year-old Winnie Foster has stumbled upon the secret spring and the family that's been given eternal life, the Tucks. The father, Angus Tuck, takes Winnie out in a rowboat to explain how unnatural it is to live forever, how the great wheel of life has to turn.
NATALIE BABBITT: (Reading) All at once, Winnie's mind was drowned with understanding of what he was saying. For she, yes, even she, would go out of the world willy-nilly someday, just go out, like the flame of a candle. And no use protesting, it was a certainty.
BLOCK: This is the author, Natalie Babbitt, now 82 years old, reading from "Tuck Everlasting."
BABBITT: (Reading) She would try very hard not to think of it, but sometimes, as now, it would be forced upon her. She raged against it, helpless and insulted, and blurted at last, I don't want to die.
No, said Tuck calmly, not now. Your time is not now. But dying's part of the wheel, right there next to being born. You can't pick out the pieces you like and leave the rest. Being part of the whole thing, that's the blessing. But it's passing us by, us Tucks. Living's heavy work, but off to one side the way we are, it's useless, too. It don't make sense. If I knowed how to climb back on the wheel, I'd do it in a minute. You can't have living without dying. So you can't call it living, what we got. We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road.
BLOCK: What's it like for you to read those words now, 40-some years after you wrote them?
BABBITT: I like these. I like this chapter and I think it was really hard to write. Except in a way it wasn't because this was the whole - this is what the book is about.
BLOCK: When you think back to the origins of this book and what inspired you in the first place, what was it? What got you thinking about the great wheel of life and writing a kids' book that involves death?
BABBITT: Well, it's not entirely a kids' book. But it came into my mind - I have three children and my youngest is my daughter. One day she had trouble sleeping, woke up crying from a nap. And we looked into it together, as well as you can with a 4-year-old, and she was very scared with the idea of dying. And it seemed to me that that was the kind of thing you could be scared of for the rest of your life, and so I wanted to make sure that she would understand what it was more. And it seemed to me that I could write a story about how it's something that everybody has to do and it's not a bad thing.
BLOCK: You know, I was looking, reading a letter that you wrote to your editor back in 1974. So soon before the book was published, you were working through some changes to "Tuck Everlasting" and you wrote this (reading), I have removed some of the heavier material.
Do you remember wrestling with, sort of, what the age that you were aiming for, what people might be able to take in?
BABBITT: No. I don't think I've ever done that. If I took something out, it wasn't because I thought the kids were not going understand it. It was just probably something that made the whole thing a little more laden with sorrows and stuff.
BLOCK: Didn't want to make it too ponderous for them?
BABBITT: No. Because it isn't. I mean, that's like not telling them that there's such a thing as death, but we know that early on, early on. Your favorite dog or cat is run over in the street, your grandmother - I mean, it's around us all the time and why adults think they have to hide all of that stuff, I think, are quite wrong.
BLOCK: Do you remember thinking at all when you finished writing "Tuck Everlasting" that it would still be popular, I mean, 40 years now and so many kids still read this book. I mean, would you have had a sense back then that this one had real legs?
BABBITT: No. I never thought about that at all and didn't expect it. And I give the credit for that to the teachers because they liked it, and the kids that read it, some of them thought it was too slow in the beginning.
BLOCK: You heard that from kids?
BABBITT: Yup. I got a wonderful letter from a couple of boys in Boston who thought I should add stuff in the beginning (laughter) so it wouldn't be so boring.
BLOCK: They had some ideas, yeah?
BABBITT: Yeah, they had some ideas. They wanted me to put motorcycle racing in the story (laughter).
BLOCK: Well, that would've speeded things up, I suppose.
BABBITT: Yeah, it would. Never been on a motorcycle, I should try that.
BLOCK: Well, Natalie Babbitt, thank you so much for talking with us and congratulations on the fortieth anniversary of "Tuck Everlasting."
BABBITT: (Laughter). Thank you very, very much. It's been a great pleasure.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Vital neighborhoods need anchors - places like a community center, a restaurant or a store. Here's an example - a place that's been in some music videos - in this City Life Snapshot.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Hey, how're you doing, ma'am?
PATRICK MORRISON: My name is Patrick Morrison. I'm from Atlanta, Ga., and I work at Walters Clothing. It's a mom-and-pop store - opened in 1952.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Walt's Clothing - yeah, just a moment.
MORRISON: Walt's is like, one of the pillars of the community. It's a landmark in Atlanta. So anybody that's from here knows Walters. So it started as a clothing store at first, but it evolved into shoes, and shoes is pretty much our biggest business now.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: Are you a size nine?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #4: You going to try them on?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: These are a size nine right here.
MORRISON: Imagine going into a room full of tennis shoes. All the walls are filled with tennis shoes. If you're an older guy looking for that tennis shoe back in 1980, we probably still have it. So if you're a guy now who's looking for the new KD's and LeBron's, we're going to have that, too.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #5: All right, you want to get these?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #6: Can I try them on real quick?
MORRISON: I think a lot of these artists that came up in the city used to shop here when they was coming up, like Outkast, Rick Ross, all those guys shopped here when they were young. So you know, they kind of still just come back here, even Ludacris.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WELCOME TO ATLANTA")
JERMAINE DUPRI FEAT. LUDACRIS: (Singing) Welcome to Atlanta, where the players play and we ride on dem thangs like, every day.
MORRISON: We just do a lot of music and we have a lot of athletes because we carry shoes up to size 18.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #7: How're you all doing today? Can we help you?
MORRISON: People come to certain places. It's just the way that it is. It's why you think people go eat Varsity hamburgers. It's not great food, but it's always people there. You just can't explain it.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WELCOME TO ATLANTA")
JERMAINE DUPRI FEAT. LUDACRIS: (Singing) Welcome to Atlanta, where the players play and we ride on dem thangs like, every day. Big beats, hit streets, see gangsters roamin' and the parties don't stop till 8 in the mornin'.
SIEGEL: Patrick Morrison at Walters in downtown Atlanta. Thanks to Susanna Capelouto and Eboni Lemon for that City Life Snapshot. They're part of the New Voices initiative from the Association of Independents in Radio.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
NBC's "Parenthood," one of broadcast TV's last family dramas, airs its final episode tonight after six seasons. NPR's TV critic Eric Deggans says "Parenthood" gets the finale it deserves, mining laughter and tears from the small moments that bind a big, noisy family.
ERIC DEGGANS, BYLINE: It happens at least once every episode, a scene in "Parenthood" comes along that's carefully crafted to make you cry. Like this moment, when devoted parents Adam and Kristina Braverman - played by Peter Krause and Monica Potter - try to console their autistic son Max after a school camping trip goes bad. Max is played by Max Burkholder.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "PARENTHOOD")
MAX BURKHOLDER: (As Max Braverman) Why do all the other kids hate me?
MONICA POTTER: (As Kristina Braverman) They don't hate you. I promise.
BURKHOLDER: (As Max Braverman) Trevor peed in my canteen.
PETER KRAUSE: (As Adam Braverman) I'm going to kill him.
BURKHOLDER: (As Max Braverman) Asperger's is supposed to make me smart, but if I'm smart then why - why don't I get why they're laughing at me?
JASON KATIMS: I remember when I was deciding whether to include this story about autism...
DEGGANS: That's Jason Katims, the executive producer of "Parenthood."
KATIMS: ...I thought, well, is this going to be something that people are going to see and be like, well this has nothing do with me, you know, and just - I think the opposite happened, first of all. I think like, that was the story that in the beginning of the show really grabbed people.
DEGGANS: Katims, who also created TV adaptations of the films "Friday Night Lights" and "About A Boy" has a child with Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism. He says using storylines crafted from his own family's experience helped distinguish NBC's "Parenthood" from the 1989 film it's based on and also helps amp up the emotion.
KATIMS: It leans into the idea that you might not be autistic or have a child with autism or know somebody like that, but everybody's got something. And it's about the curveballs that are sort of thrown at you in life.
DEGGANS: Like the movie, NBC's "Parenthood" centers on an extended family called the Bravermans, featuring an older couple, their four adult children and their families. It's one of the last broadcast dramas where the plot centers solely on the family. Other shows, like CBS's "Blue Bloods" mix family drama with cops and crime stories. Fox's "Empire" mixes family drama with music. The curveballs they've overcome on "Parenthood" include Kristina Braverman's breast cancer, which led to a fight when her husband Adam brought a wig to cover her hair loss.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "PARENTHOOD")
POTTER: (As Kristina Braverman) Obviously you want to cover me up, so this is more for you than it is for me.
KRAUSE: (As Adam Braverman) Honey, that's not what this is.
POTTER: (As Kristina Braverman) Actually, it is.
KRAUSE: (As Adam Braverman) I think you look beautiful. I thought this was something that you wanted.
POTTER: (As Kristina Braverman) Please admit to me that you hate that I look sick. A portacath's in my chest, I have bruises all over my body and scars, my head is bald.
KRAUSE: (As Adam Braverman) I know you do. You're beautiful to me.
POTTER: (As Kristina Braverman) OK, stop it.
KRAUSE: (As Adam Braverman) Hey...
POTTER: (As Kristina Braverman) Stop it. Just take it back.
KRAUSE: (As Adam Braverman) ...Honey, I'm not the enemy here OK? I got this for you.
POTTER: (As Kristina Braverman) You got it for me, or for you?
DEGGANS: Monica Potter, who earned a Golden Globe nomination playing Kristina, said programs exploring the bittersweet moments in families have a long tradition in TV.
POTTER: I sort of relate to the shows of yesteryear - "Eight Is Enough" and "Family" and "The Waltons." We don't have that so much anymore.
DEGGANS: But "Parenthood" has struggled in the ratings every year, prompting NBC to cancel the show after a shortened run this season. NBC entertainment chair Bob Greenblatt gave a simple explanation to reporters at a recent press conference.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
BOB GREENBLATT: If it's something that is just slice of life, or - you know, it's just hard to get attention from people who have a million choices.
DEGGANS: Executive producer Jason Katims said he often wrote the end of previous "Parenthood" season so they could wrap up the series if NBC decided to cancel it without warning.
KATIMS: We came very close to the show ending last year without us knowing it was going to be the end. So the great thing about this season is we knew that it was going to be the final season. We were able to sort of drive toward an ending and give the audience a great ending for the show.
DEGGANS: "Parenthood's" ending has centered on the fate of patriarch Zeek Braverman, played by Craig T. Nelson, who's struggled with heart problems. Potter won't dish on his fate, but she says a definitive ending isn't really "Parenthood's" style.
POTTER: If you really think about it, we just sort of caught up with them as they were living life and we went on this journey with them. And at the very end, you know, they're going to continue on.
DEGGANS: It's not quite "The Sopranos" cut-to-black conclusion, but something close. It's also a fitting end for parenthood, a show which always insisted great families will endure and the small moments between family members can provide the grandest drama around.
I'm Eric Deggans.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FOREVER YOUNG")
BOB DYLAN: (Singing) May God bless and keep you always. May your wishes all come true. May you always do for others and let others do for you. May you build a ladder to the stars...
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This month we've been hearing about strategies to jump-start our health, and you only have to walk into a grocery store to see there's an explosion of interest in juice - fresh, refrigerated concoctions of fruits and vegetables. NPR's food and health correspondent Allison Aubrey joins us here in the studio to talk about some of the health claims.
And Allison, you have come armed with bottles of bright orange, green and red juices of all sorts.
ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: That's right. I've got this bright green juice here, which according to the label, packs three and three-quarters servings of fruit. Here's another one, a cold-pressed vegetable juice. It's made with beets, spinach, lime, parsley, ginger. So, a real cornucopia here. And the idea is hey, you can just drink up all the fruits and vegetables that you might not be eating.
BLOCK: Right, so if you don't want to chomp your way through a kale salad, you can open a bottle, drink it down.
AUBREY: That's right. And, in fact when I picked this one up this morning, I was thinking hey, this bottle of green juice, this would be the equivalent of drinking my salad. But when I look at the label here, there is no kale, there is no vegetable at all. What it actually is, is a lot of fruit and that means it's got about 60 grams of sugar, which is a lot. And almost no fiber. So, you know, this is a downside. We know that fiber helps to fill us up and is important in other ways. And we know that just drinking your calories doesn't give you the same feeling of fullness.
BLOCK: You could though, find a bottle that is actually vegetable juice, right? Would that be better?
AUBREY: That's right. There's one here. This is vegetable juice. It's certainly lower in calories. But again, it's all juice and no fiber. So, a bit of a downside.
BLOCK: Well, Allison why don't you truth-squad the claims from juice makers who say that your body will get more nutrients from the juice than if you eat the whole fruit or vegetable.
AUBREY: Well, it's really not clear. There just hasn't been a lot of research. Now, one way to think about it is that if you're drinking juice, you might be consuming a higher volume of fruits and vegetables. It's concentrated. This bottle here has almost four servings. So, you're getting more nutrients that way. And there is some evidence that when you drink juice, the nutrients from the fruit or the vegetable are more available to your body. That's because the pulp and the membranes are broken down in the juicing process. But it turns out that a lot depends on how the juice is made. For example, a study published in the Journal of Food Science found that when you put a grapefruit in a blender and pulverize all the edible parts of the fruit, you end up with a lot more of the beneficial phytonutrients in your drink compared to if you just squeeze the juice out of a juicer.
BLOCK: So in the end, Allison, where does this leave us - to juice, or not to juice?
AUBREY: Well, I think part of the question is can you afford these things? I paid $4 for this bottle here. I will point out that I also have a bag of produce. It was $4, too. This is an expensive habit. You know, at a time when most Americans only eat one fruit and one vegetable a day, juicing can be a quick and convenient way to get your fruits and vegetables, but it's also expensive.
BLOCK: OK. NPR's Allison Aubrey.
Allison, thanks.
AUBREY: Thanks, Melissa.
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The FBI says that last year about 20 Americans were detained trying to travel to Syria to fight for the so-called Islamic State. According to law enforcement, ISIS and other terrorist organizations are getting increasingly adept at using social media to recruit from abroad. NPR's Laura Sydell reports that social media companies like Facebook and Twitter are drawing criticism for not doing enough to stop this.
LAURA SYDELL, BYLINE: No one seemed more surprised to learn that 19-year-old Mohammed Hamzah Khan and his two younger siblings planned to join ISIS in Syria than their mother. The three siblings were caught by the FBI at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago as they were about to leave the country. Mohammed Khan has been charged with providing material support to a terrorist organization. Zarine Khan stood outside the courthouse, her head covered in Muslim modesty just after her son pled not guilty.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ZARINE KHAN: We condemn the brainwashing and recruiting of children through the use of social media and the Internet, and we have a message for ISIS, Mr. Baghdadi and his fellow social media recruiters - leave our children alone.
SYDELL: Only a few details of how social media was used to recruit the Khan children have been made public. But Kahn's lawyers say that Twitter and a messaging service called Kik were crucial. Clinton Watts, a former FBI special agent who focused on terrorism, is now a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who follows online recruiting.
CLINTON WATTS: We go to Twitter...
SYDELL: Watts shows me how easy it is to tap into the world of online terrorist propaganda.
WATTS: When al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula put out their video message taking claim for the Hebdo attack, it quickly had its own hashtag.
SYDELL: Watts and I put the hashtag into Twitter.
WATTS: If you pan down on that account, it's interesting because you'll see there's video, there's Storify, there's like, every social media platform that's out there. They use - all the platforms are linked to it from there.
SYDELL: That hashtag takes me down a rabbit hole of propaganda from al-Qaida and ISIS.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Foreign language spoken).
SYDELL: This is al-Qaida taking credit for the recent attack in Paris, a leader simply giving a speech. But Watts says many of the recent ISIS messages are slickly produced to attract the young.
WATTS: They actually showed young men who joined the fight, young foreign fighters, in Iraq conducting military operations, conducting violence, showing these guys as heroes. And that really resonated with the target audience.
SYDELL: The videos even use music to dramatize violent acts in the real world. J.M. Berger, a researcher at the Brookings Institution who's working on a book about ISIS, says if someone feels sympathy towards ISIS it's fairly easy to follow a like-minded Twitter account.
J.M. BERGER: You find somebody you're interested in, you start following them. You might interact with them. And then if the person is serious about joining the Islamic State or joining another group, they'll take it through a more private forum.
SYDELL: The forum used by Khan and his siblings appears to have been Kik, a social media app that allows private conversations.
BERGER: A lot of times, English-speaking jihadis on Twitter and on Facebook and other platforms will list their Kik address right in their profile to, you know, really to encourage people to approach them in a more private way.
SYDELL: Berger says the jihadis also use WhatsApp, a similar service that's owned by Facebook. One thing all of these social media platforms have in common is that they would not comment on the record about the issue.
BERGER: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are all trying to address this problem to some degree, but none of them stepped up to volunteer to do it. They all responded to outside pressures, whether it was negative news coverage or Congressional hearings or stern letters from people in government.
SYDELL: All of these companies could choose to ban pro-ISIS and al-Qaida propaganda because the First Amendment does not apply to privately-owned websites like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. They do have terms of service. All of them ban violent threats. But for the most part, these companies rely on other users to report violations, and former FBI agent Watts says it isn't really in the DNA of these companies to take down content unless they're forced to.
WATTS: Doing takedowns or removing content goes very much against what they want their platform to do, which is to bring on as much content and discussion as possible. Because the more content that's there, the more discussion that's there, the more revenue they can generate for their business.
SYDELL: Although, Watts and Berger agree that taking down all the terrorist content might not actually be the best thing to do.
BERGER: There are ways that you can extract information from these networks that go beyond traditional investigative techniques that you would've had to rely on back in the days when all this stuff happened in physical spaces.
SYDELL: Berger thinks it's possible to keep up content that's useful to law enforcement without making it easy for alienated and vulnerable youth to find it. However, he thinks tech companies will need to be more active than they are now to strike the right balance. Laura Sydell, NPR News.
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This winter an Arctic institution is celebrating its 25th anniversary. The original Icehotel sits 120 miles above the Arctic Circle in far North Sweden. Other hotels made of ice have popped up around the world, but the first one offers something else. As NPR's Ari Shapiro found out, it's also an art exhibition that changes every year.
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: The temperature outside is 22 degrees below zero - that's minus 30 Celsius. Whatever you call it, it's way beyond freezing. And Jens Thoms Ivarsson stands over a block of ice with a razor-sharp chisel. He's turning a bare room into an ornate Spanish mosque made entirely of ice.
And some of it is crystal clear, some of it looks like snow, some of it is textured like a rough stone. Are those all artistic techniques that you've learned of how to work with ice?
JENS THOMS IVARSSON: Yeah, yeah. So I used to work with stone and wood and concrete. I always like to bring out the qualities that's in the material. For this - I mean, here it's just water.
SHAPIRO: Ivarsson is a sculptor, and for the last two years he's been design director at the Icehotel. This 55-room lodge is built from scratch every fall, entirely from the frozen Torne River. Every spring, it melts back into the water it came from. Ivarsson says, as an artist, that impermanence frees him from the pressure of carving something out of marble or granite that seems permanent.
IVARSSON: So when I work with the ice and snow, it's very liberating 'cause I know already when I start, you know, on the drawing board, that this will disappear.
SHAPIRO: Every year, more than a hundred artists from around the world compete to design rooms here - 15 are chosen. The Icehotel then flies them to Kiruna, Sweden.
IVARSSON: And a lot of those have never, ever worked with snow and ice before, and that's what we want. For us that's important.
SHAPIRO: He says everyone has seen swans and eagles before. He wants artists to find something new in the ice. There are rooms that look like forests or cathedrals. One room has typeface set into the wall, another is pure angles, telescoping and spiraling inwards. Each room has a bed in the center, covered in reindeer hides, because people actually sleep here. Tour guide Paola Lappalinen says the building provides a level of insulation - she's talking Celsius.
PAOLA LAPPALINEN: Even though the temperature outside at the moment is about minus 30, inside the hotel rooms it's never colder than minus five or minus seven.
SHAPIRO: It's so warm.
LAPPALINEN: That's really warm. Even sometimes when we go in the morning and wake people up in the hotel rooms, they say that it was too hot to sleep there.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter) I don't believe that.
There is a warm room where people leave their luggage and electronics. The front desk hands out snow suits, balaclavas, boots and sleeping bags heavy enough for the Arctic. But the minute you step outdoors, the inside of your nose begins to tingle with frost. Your eyelashes become thick and heavy with white ice crystals. Many hotel guests duck into the ice bar to drink Swedish vodka out of glasses made of ice.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SHAPIRO: Gary Armstrong is here with his wife and adult daughter.
GARY ARMSTRONG: I was just saying how crazy it is with English always complaining about the weather and then we come here in January. You know, five degrees under for us is a nightmare and we come to 30 degrees under. I mean, it's bizarre really.
SHAPIRO: OK, so why did you do that?
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Laughter) We have no idea.
(LAUGHTER)
SHAPIRO: People come because it's like experiencing a fantasy world, borrowed from the river, which will return to the river again in the spring. Ari Shapiro, NPR News.
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This conversation about the sound of public radio caught our attention.
CHENJERAI KUMANYIKA: What do you hear, the voices of those journalists, what do you hear?
A.D. CARSON: I hear middle-aged white dudes who sound like they just drank some really warm coffee.
BLOCK: That's A.D. Carson talking with his friend Chenjerai Kumanyika. Kumanyika loves public radio, Carson, not so much.
CARSON: Like, it sounds like the whole joint is recorded in the back of Barnes & Noble.
BLOCK: That exchange was part of an essay Kumanyika posted this month on the public radio website Transom. It was called "Vocal Color In Public Radio." We invited him to share his thoughts and tell us about his experience last summer at a Transom workshop when he got a turn at the microphone.
KUMANYIKA: My piece was about a fisherman who manages the Tuna Club of Avalon, but while editing my script aloud, I realized I was also imagining another voice - one that sounded more white - saying my piece. Without being directly told, people like me learn that our way of speaking isn't professional, and you start to imitate the standard or even hide the distinctive features of your own voice. This is one of the reasons that some of my black and brown friends refuse to listen to some of my favorite radio shows, despite my most passionate efforts. This really affected me as I was producing my Transom piece. And sometimes I speak in a voice I'm using right now, but as a hip-hop artist, I use a very different voice. Checkout this verse I wrote right after I found out that no one would be indicted for Eric Garner's death.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KUMANYIKA: (Rapping) I can't breathe; hear my brother dying, every day another name, another mother crying, oh, Lord.
So the question is how can I bring that kind of voice into my efforts as a radio producer, right? Now compare that to how I sounded on my first piece for the Transom workshop.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KUMANYIKA: For John, losing a fish is no small thing because John is a fisherman with a capital F.
Fisherman with a capital F - what does that even mean? So what bothers me most is the way I'm inhabiting my own personality. My voice sounds too high and all around the corners of my slang are squared off. It's like I don't even recognize myself. It's like, who am I? So just as an experiment, I rerecorded part of that piece to see how a relaxed, sort of less code-switched style of narration might sound.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KUMANYIKA: See, what you might not understand is that for John, losing a fish is no small thing. John is a real fisherman. I mean, this guy's caught hundreds of fish in his lifetime.
I'm not sure how much more effective it is, but I feel better listening to it. My voice is calmer, but hopefully not boring. Overall it's like - I feel more centered. I sound more like myself rather than myself pretending to be a public radio host. Of course, it's not just about what potential journalists face. It's also about the audience and the mission of public radio. Different hosts with different voices tell different kinds of stories, and vocal styles communicate important dimensions of human experience. What are we missing out on by not hearing the full range of those voices?
Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. My wife and I spent some time in Ferguson, Mo., in August and November of 2014. I was standing on the block where Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown and I asked one young man why he thought there had been such an uprising in Ferguson. He reminded me that Michael Brown's body had laid in the street for four-and-a-half hours before being picked up. Of course, I had heard this before in the news, but this young brother made me feel it. No one was there to translate. Instead, he carefully told the story his own way. I felt the weight of Michael Brown's body and the weight of so many other young lives in this young man's voice. So what do we do? We really have to think about who is the public in public media. The demographics of race and ethnicity are changing in the United States. The sound of public media must reflect that diversity, so get on it. It's time to make moves.
BLOCK: That's Chenjerai Kumanyika. He's an assistant professor in Clemson University's Communication Studies Department. And we want to hear what you think about this, so we started a conversation on Twitter. You can join in by using and following the hashtag #PubRadiovoice.
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The U.S. poultry business is growing. And with that growth, there's growing demand for immigrant labor. NPR's Jim Zarroli recently visited a poultry operation in the South, and he found executives there are looking for broader congressional action on immigration beyond President Obama's executive action, which doesn't help them much.
JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: At Fieldale Farms in Gainesville, Ga., workers cut up chicken breasts and then feed the parts into machines. The pieces get marinated and breaded and eventually sold to restaurants.
JOHN WRIGHT: We don't waste any of it. It's all used in some shape, form or fashion. This is actually cut in filets and nuggets.
ZARROLI: John Wright is the company's vice president of operations. Work here can be physically demanding, and not a lot of people want to do it, even though the average wage here is $16 an hour plus benefits. President Tom Hensley says Fieldale Farms hires just about anyone who can pass a drug test.
TOM HENSLEY: We hire a hundred people a week because we have a hundred people who quit every week out of 5,000 employees. We're constantly short.
ZARROLI: And the shortage has gotten worse. For a long time, a large majority of the workforce at Fieldale Farms came from Latin America - mostly Mexico. Hensley always checked their documents, though he concedes some of those might have been forged. Whatever their status, he says the Latinos he hired were good employees.
HENSLEY: They were outstanding. If you asked for overtime, everyone raised their hand. They couldn't wait to come to work because they appreciated having a job.
ZARROLI: Today only about a third of the workers here are from Latin America. In 2011, the state of Georgia passed one of the strictest anti-illegal immigration bills in the country. Before that, the county became part of a federal program that designated local police to help find undocumented workers. Arturo Corso, a local activist and lawyer, says Latino residents were stopped for minor offenses, and those who didn't have the right papers risked being taken to jail and deported.
ARTURO CORSO: You had immigration agents partnering up with deputies at these roadblocks. Even if they stopped a taxi, they would ask the people riding in the backseat of the taxi to - you know, show me your Social Security card.
ZARROLI: The program was modified in recent years so the risk of deportation has dropped significantly, but Hall County retains a bad reputation among Latino immigrants, even legal ones. Corso takes me to meet Maria who didn't want her last name used. She came to Georgia years ago from Mexico without papers. She has legal status today and owns a store, but she says she wouldn't advise other immigrants to come here.
MARIA: No.
UNIDENTIFIED INTERPRETER: Why not?
MARIA: (Through interpreter) Because if they come here and they don't have papers, they're running a huge risk.
ZARROLI: No one in county government wanted to talk about the climate for immigrants. Republican Congressman Doug Collins grew up in Gainesville. Collins says local and state laws have probably discouraged some immigrants from coming to Georgia. He concedes it's a problem for employers.
CONGRESSMAN DOUG COLLINS: We do need a short-term guest worker program where they come, they do the job and then they're able to go back home so that there is sufficient employees for these kind of work that right now they're struggling to find - at the same time still encouraging Americans to take those jobs as well.
ZARROLI: But he says such a program needs to be part of a comprehensive immigration bill that also secures the borders, and in the current political climate, that's hard to achieve. Meanwhile, companies such as Fieldale Farms struggle to find workers. Tom Hensley says that as Latino immigrants have left, he has to hire more native-born Americans who tend to be older.
HENSLEY: So we've had to hire middle-aged Americans who have not been used to working in an industrial facility, and they have difficulty keeping up with the machine. So it's not the same labor force that we had 10 years ago.
ZARROLI: As for President Obama's executive order, Hensley sees it as a kind of Band-Aid solution. Is allows a lot of undocumented workers to remain in the country, but it could easily be reversed by the next president. Plants like Fieldale Farms need a steady supply of workers, but without congressional action, finding them is likely to remain difficult. Jim Zarroli, NPR News.
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A deadline has passed today and still no word on the fate of two hostages held by the group that calls itself the Islamic State. The group has indicated that it would spare the life of a Jordanian pilot if Jordan released a woman in its custody. At the same time, another country, Japan, is trying to determine how this negotiation will affect the life of one of its citizens. At the center of all this is that women being held by Jordan. Her name is Sajida al-Rishawi, and NPR's Dina Temple-Raston reports that she has close ties with the founding members of the so-called Islamic State.
DINA TEMPLE-RASTON, BYLINE: Sajida al-Rishawi is best known for taking a belt loaded with explosives and ball bearings into a luxury hotel in the capital of Jordan.
BRUCE HOFFMAN: She was part of a husband and wife suicide bombing team.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Bruce Hoffman is a terrorism expert at Georgetown University.
HOFFMAN: Together with a third man, in November 2005, attacked three Western hotels in Amman, Jordan.
TEMPLE-RASTON: But when al-Rishawi pulled the cord to detonate her suicide belt, it malfunctioned. She ran from the hotel with the crowds that fled the attack and was arrested in Jordan a short time later. She's been in prison ever since. The so-called Islamic State demanded her release because she has long-standing ties to the group. The group that ordered those hotel bombings was al-Qaida in Iraq, and a top lieutenant there was none other than Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of today's ISIS. So in a way, this woman is a natural candidate for a high-level prisoner swap. Again, Georgetown's Hoffman.
HOFFMAN: I'm not surprised that they're demanding it, and I'm not surprised either that the Jordanians are willing to trade her.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Not surprised because pilots are elite members of the Jordanian military. And Jordan has swapped terrorists for hostages before. Last year, Jordan returned a Libyan terrorist in exchange for the Jordanian ambassador to Libya, who had been taken captive.
HOFFMAN: For the Jordanians, I think getting back this Jordanian pilot has become very important to them.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Prisoner exchanges are not uncommon. Amos Guiora served in the Israeli Defense Forces, and as part of his responsibilities, he helped broker lots of prisoner exchanges. Guiora is also a law professor at the University of Utah, and he said the Israeli government feels a moral and legal obligation to do whatever it takes to get its soldiers back because they were drafted.
AMOS GUIORA: If the state drafts the soldier then the state is obligated to do everything it can to return the soldier - the kidnapped soldier.
TEMPLE-RASTON: That's why, he says, you've seen prisoner exchange after prisoner exchange. The most controversial was the release of more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners in exchange for just one Israeli.
GUIORA: The argument is always going to be made that there's the possibility that if you release a thousand prisoners that you're going to do nothing more than lead or directly contribute to future acts terrorism in the context of recidivism.
TEMPLE-RASTON: That's the risk with ISIS if it gets Sajida al-Rishawi back. For Guiora, the risk is outweighed by a state's obligations to its soldiers, and that applies, he says, in Israel, but also to the situation in Jordan. Dina Temple-Raston, NPR News.
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Every three months, the special inspector general offers an independent view on the war in Afghanistan. The IG, John Sopko, has issued reports on how well and sometimes how badly American tax dollars are being spent to shore up the government in Kabul. Well, today, the latest report is out, but it was missing the usual details on funding for the Afghan military and police. That's because the top American general in Afghanistan has decided those details must now be kept secret. NPR's David Welna reports.
DAVID WELNA, BYLINE: In his report released today, Inspector General Sopko says most of the data on Afghanistan's security forces, spending levels, troop strength and readiness equipment is now classified, a development he called unprecedented. A spokesman for General John Campbell who ordered the classification wrote NPR today justifying the secrecy, saying that data could, quote, "jeopardize the operational security of our Afghan partners to include unnecessarily highlighting possible vulnerabilities in capability gaps."
SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN: We need to have a lot more of that made public.
WELNA: That's John McCain, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
MCCAIN: These are taxpayers' dollars. Now, there may be some sensitive information, and I'll be glad to listen to that, but a blanket censorship is not acceptable.
WELNA: And Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat who serves on McCain's committee, today called the classification of the Afghan spending data incomprehensible.
SENATOR RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: I'm going to push for greater disclosure because it's a duty on the part of the Pentagon in spending taxpayer money, particularly on training where there seems to be little if any justification for keeping secret how taxpayer money is used.
WELNA: And there's a good reason for keeping that information public, says Senate's number two Democrat, Dick Durbin.
SENATOR DICK DURBIN: We've learned some better lessons in places like Iraq where massive amounts of money were being spent on training, and as soon as the United States left the scene, it fell apart.
WELNA: Congressional insiders say the armed services committee could order that the classified information in the inspector general's report be made public. The order to keep the spending data secret coincided with the formal end of U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan at the end of last year. But close to 10,000 U.S. troops remain there to train Afghan forces, and billions of dollars have been budgeted for that effort - just how much remains unclear since that information is now secret. David Welna, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block. The recent measles outbreak centered in California is of particular concern to Carl Krawitt. His six-year-old son Rhett has been fighting leukemia. He finished chemotherapy a year ago and is now in remission. And Rhett can't be vaccinated until his immunity builds up. That's why Carl Krawitt is asking again that his son's school in Marin County bar children who haven't been vaccinated because of their parents' personal beliefs.
CARL KRAWITT: We've made that - asked for two years. I mean before Rhett even started kindergarten, we've been having this same request.
BLOCK: The school district says it's monitoring the situation, but hasn't made any further moves. Almost 7 percent of kids in Marin County aren't vaccinated. I asked Mr. Krawitt whether he's heard people say he's overreacting since there have been no confirmed cases of measles in Marin County.
KRAWITT: I think if you ask that question to the parents of the students whose communities do have a measles outbreak, you might have that same response - oh, it's an overreaction. I know what it's like to have a very sick child. I really feel for the parents that now have a child with measles or people with babies that have measles. And I'm saying why wait for it to happen before we take action? And I understand the position of the school district and the public health officers, and I hope somebody will champion this and have the courage to do more.
BLOCK: Mr. Krawitt, do you have friends who don't vaccinate their kids by choice?
KRAWITT: I don't know. I do know that I have friends that do vaccinate their children because they have been extremely supportive. I do know that there - that I have friends of friends that don't vaccinate their children because I've had, you know, really engaged conversations and debates with some of my friends about why it's so important for me and my family and especially my son. Having said that, we have friends that have their children in private schools. Some of these schools have non-immunization rates as high as 20 - 30 - 40 percent.
BLOCK: Wow.
KRAWITT: So I don't know whether or not their children are immunized. I don't know whether they will still be my friends, but, you know, I respect people as my friends. And I hope that we can have more conversations like this to educate people on why this is so important for the health and safety of our children. Somebody made a comment to me yesterday. They are not allowed to bring their dog to a dog park if the dog is not immunized.
BLOCK: I'm curious if you've had any conversations about this - about measles in particular - with Rhett. He is only six years old, but does he know about this?
KRAWITT: Rhett does know that he is at risk of illnesses, and Rhett will make the statement, I know that if I don't get shots I could get sick. And he knows what it's like to get sick and be out of school for weeks and months at a time and have to wear a mask in public because his immune system is so, so low. I would hate for my son to go through that again, but more important I would hate for somebody else's child to have to go through what we went through.
BLOCK: Well, Mr. Krawitt, thank you so much for talking with us, and we wish you all the best for Rhett's recovery. Thanks.
KRAWITT: Thank you for inviting me.
BLOCK: Carl Krawitt is asking his son's elementary school in Marin County, Calif., to bar children who haven't been vaccinated because of personal belief exemptions. Seven percent of students at the school have that exemption.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Several members of Congress recently back from Cuba are taking steps to further ease a decades-old embargo on the communist island. But even as they announced new legislation to open up travel for Americans, Cuba's president is talking tough. Raul Castro says he wants the U.S. to give up the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and to end the embargo. NPR's Michele Kelemen has more.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: President Obama has done what he could to ease travel restrictions on Americans who want to go to Cuba. Now Senator Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona, is trying to get rid of the travel ban altogether.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SENATOR JEFF FLAKE: Some will say that we ought to receive something in exchange for this - that if we're giving up something, then we ought to get some concession from the Cuban government. We all need to remember that this is a sanction or a prohibition on Americans, not Cubans.
KELEMEN: And that's why Flake thinks this attempt to lift the travel ban will work.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
FLAKE: This is something that we think will move ahead. We have four Republicans, four Democrats as original cosponsors. We expect to add more in the coming days - many more on both sides.
KELEMEN: But while he and his cosponsors try to increase contacts with the communist island, the country's president sounded like he was upping the ante. Raul Castro says the U.S. and Cuba have just started a long process toward more normal ties.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT RAUL CASTRO: (Speaking Spanish).
KELEMEN: "But this will not be possible," Castro says, "while the blockade still exists and while they don't give back," in Castro's words, "the territory illegally occupied by the Guantanamo Naval Base." On Capitol Hill, Senator John McCain of Arizona rejects those demands.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN: We just saw the true nature of the Castros - want reparations, want Guantanamo back. This is the true nature of the Castro brothers. It will not change until they have an opportunity to meet Karl Marx.
KELEMEN: McCain, who calls the Castros hard-core communists, says he can't imagine giving back Guantanamo. Tomas Bilbao of the Cuba Study Group, which advocates for closer ties, doesn't think Castro was trying to make the Guantanamo issue a prerequisite for reestablishing diplomatic ties. And Bilbao says no one should have been surprised by the tone of Castro's remarks since he made them at a regional summit.
TOMAS BILBAO: Where some of his partners such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador or others who are ideological adversaries of the United States - so perhaps a little bit more concerned about Cuba's normalization with the United States.
KELEMEN: Guantanamo has long been a source of tension, Bilbao says. Cuba never cashes the annual rent checks, nor does it recognize a lease dating back to 1903, decades before the Cuban revolution.
BILBAO: Just like the embargo, it's been another talking point - another excuse for the Cuban government to point to to help point out the United States as an aggressor - as an imperialist power.
KELEMEN: Bilbao says he's read persuasive arguments for the U.S. to give up the base as well as some to maintain it. But he believes that's a long-term discussion for U.S. policymakers. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki echoed that, saying the focus now is on restoring diplomatic ties.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JEN PSAKI: That would be things like opening up embassies in our respective countries so that we may work toward the long-standing list of issues that have festered over the last half-century and are more about normalization.
KELEMEN: And the White House says Guantanamo hasn't been part of the discussion so far. Spokesperson Josh Earnest adds that while President Obama wants to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, he has no plans to give up the naval base. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
As we just heard from Michele, the U.S. lease of Guantanamo dates back to the start of the last century, 1903. The agreement came after the U.S. saw the value in the Bay's protective waters during the Spanish-American war. For more on the history of Guantanamo Bay, we turn to Vanderbilt University history professor Paul Kramer. He's written about the history of the base for The New Yorker. Welcome to the program.
PAUL KRAMER: Thanks for having me.
BLOCK: And let's talk first about those treaties after the Spanish-American war that gave the U.S. control of the land and water around Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. What were the terms of those treaties?
KRAMER: So, U.S. forces were occupying Cuba, and as one of the conditions for the removal of those forces, American policymakers interested in securing a strategic base said to the Cuban government that as it passed its constitution, its delegates were going to have to accept what was called the Platt amendment - the Platt amendment said that the United States reserved the right to unilaterally intervene in Cuban affairs whenever it was necessary and that the U.S. would reserve the right to buy or lease naval bases in Cuba. And so for Cubans, this is seen as a real affront and a violation of their dignity and their sovereignty, and there was a great deal of opposition. But eventually it is incorporated as a condition for the withdrawal of U.S. forces.
BLOCK: So that was muscled through, basically.
KRAMER: Yeah. You can think of it as a kind of gunboat tendency in which the U.S. is negotiating what is technically a rental agreement but under very coercive conditions.
BLOCK: Now as you wrote in your piece in the New Yorker, the Guantanamo base was used by the U.S. early in the 20th century for the occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, was very busy in World War II, but when did it turn to being a detention center? When did that come about?
KRAMER: The base began to be used as a detention center specifically in response to a set of refugee crises in the Caribbean in the early and mid-1990s. Tens of thousands of Haitians fled in the wake of a coup that overthrew the Aristide government. There was a scramble for a space that will both prevent Haitians from landing on U.S. soil, but also looking for a space that the U.S. controls. And the answer is Guantanamo where makeshift encampments are set up - basically prisons where refugees are going to be basically housed while awaiting asylum processing. And this becomes the first precedent that's set for the use of Guantanamo as a kind of jurisdictional no man's land.
BLOCK: When you look at the relationship between the Cubans who live right around Guantanamo Bay and the U.S. presence there over the years, what has that relationship been?
KRAMER: Early in the 20th century there was this dense interaction between the base and the community in all senses - that the surrounding towns of the places where American sailors will go to party when they're able to go off on what was called liberty. It's also a consumer base when you have sailors who come into town. There are also a lot of workers that work on the base, and that really changes with the fracture of relationships between the U.S. and Cuba after 1959.
By the late 20th century and early 21st century, Guantanamo has really become a kind of artificial island within an island. The U.S. fortifies the base. Workers on the base would no longer be drawn from the local Cuban population, but would be shipped in from Jamaica or even as far as the Philippines. So there's really a deliberate attempt to create a very fortified, isolated space in eastern Cuba that will be entirely under U.S. control in every sense.
BLOCK: Professor Kramer, thanks so much for talking with us.
KRAMER: Thank you.
BLOCK: That's Paul Kramer. He's a history professor at Vanderbilt University.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The U.S. dollar is stronger than it's been in a decade. Other major currencies like the euro and the yen have been falling. These currency fluctuations don't just affect travelers and multinational corporations. They also impact who gets hired and where and even the interiors of the cars we drive, as NPR's Sonari Glinton reports.
SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: When you hear in the news that the dollar is up and the yen is down, it's kind of hard to know what that means, and I'm an economics reporter. A strong dollar means in a very basic way imports are cheaper, and our exports are more expensive, partially because it's hard to see the immediate effects. That's because executives try very hard to hide them from us.
CARLOS GHOSN: Yeah, I'm Carlos Ghosn, chairman and chief executive officer of Nissan Motors.
GLINTON: Ghosn knows a bunch about international currency policy. He's a French citizen born in Brazil but of Lebanese ancestry, and he runs Nissan and Renault.
GHOSN: We have been dealing with the volatility of currencies, particularly the yen - yen to the dollar, yen to the euro, yen to the rial, yen to the rupee - for a very long time.
GLINTON: What Nissan and other carmakers have done to combat that is called localization.
GHOSN: Because we pushed a lot of production in the United States, in China, in Russia, in Brazil in order to import less cars from Japan.
GLINTON: And long-term, that's a policy most automakers are following. Build cars as close to where you sell them as possible, and that protects the companies from big changes in exchange rates, but that's a long-term strategy. It takes years and billions of dollars to build plants. In the short term, it's all about cutting corners.
JOHN KRAFCIK: I'm John Krafcik, the president of TrueCar, and we're sitting now in what I would call a mid-premium Japanese luxury car.
GLINTON: Krafcik spent more than a decade at Hyundai, and before that he was at Ford. He points out how we can see the fluctuation in currencies on the inside of a car.
KRAFCIK: You can tell if times are good for an automaker with a couple of different clues. And one of them is - and I love this - the number of visible stitches you see.
GLINTON: So if you see a lot of stitching, times are good and the currency is going in favor of the carmaker.
KRAFCIK: And the contrary - during times when automakers are for whatever reason trying to reduce the cost of a car, that is one way and one of the first places that automakers go.
GLINTON: Because when a company's home currency is strong, the little extras are more expensive, and when it's weak, they can shove a lot of frills in for those overseas buyers. But they don't just stop at stitching
KRAFCIK: This sound that we hear...
(CAR DOOR CLOSING)
KRAFCIK: ...Is an engineered sound. There is probably within this door three to four dollars of materials that are strictly there to develop a perfect door closing sound.
GLINTON: So when your currency is not going your way, Krafcik says, executives try very hard to cut cost in ways you can't see or hear.
KRAFCIK: There would be discussions like this one with lots of little yellow Post-it notes - right? - saying, OK, here we can save 12 cents if we remove this pad print. We could go from a spray-painted glove box part to a molded in plastic black glove box part, and that would save $1.52.
GLINTON: Now, all those costs add up little by little, and carmakers have learned that the U.S. consumer is unwilling to tolerate a Camry or an Accord being $25,000 this month and $35,000 the next. So currency policy affects you. Even if you don't immediately feel it in your checkbook, you might notice it in the lining of your glove box. Sonari Glinton, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
This week, Mormon leaders made a rare joint appearance before reporters at church headquarters in Salt Lake City. Church leaders said they will support anti-discrimination legislation for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender persons. But they also asked for respect for religious beliefs, including some exemptions for members of the church who believe that homosexuality is a sin. The announcement has been met with both cheers and some skepticism.
Elder Dallin Oaks is a member of the church's Quorum of Twelve Apostles - one of the Mormon leaders who spoke at this week's press event. He's also a former president of Brigham Young University and a former justice of the Utah Supreme Court. And he joins us from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, despite a bad cold and we appreciate that, Elder Oaks. Welcome to the program.
DALLIN OAKS: Good to be with you. I'm sorry I'm not in better voice.
SIEGEL: Well, now, just to be clear, the church has not changed its position on same-sex marriage or gay relationships, has it? It's still opposed.
OAKS: No change in that, no change in our doctrine.
SIEGEL: This would then be more of a change in tone.
OAKS: It is a change in tone, but it's also an appeal to both sides of a very divisive debate. That they speak to one another with respect and avoid public intimidations and boycotts and some of the tactics that have been used so far.
SIEGEL: The church was very much identified with the campaign in California for the proposition that would ban same-sex marriage. Should we infer from the statements made this week that now we're talking about a very different approach to the entire issue?
OAKS: I don't think it's a different approach. We were really the victims of intimidation and retaliation and boycotts in California. Many of them lost jobs or publicly intimidated and boycotted against the businesses, and we're pleading that that not be repeated.
SIEGEL: Well, let me ask you about a specific example of the kind of exemption for faith that the church would support. Could a Mormon doctor who might do artificial insemination for one couple not do it for a lesbian couple because of his or her personal conscious?
OAKS: If you're asking me about whether he would be free to do that and remain a good member of the church, yes. But I think you're asking about whether laws should give him the right to do that.
SIEGEL: Or would you exceed to and approve of such a law if that was a provision of it?
OAKS: We don't predict what position we would take in legislation, so I can't answer a question like that. I think that ought to be looked at in the context of the overall circumstance. That's what we hope lawmakers will do. We have nothing but feelings of love and compassion for LGBT persons. Where the issue arises for us is when they do something that we consider to be contrary to the laws of God. So it's a behavioral issue, not a status issue.
SIEGEL: Well, I can hear a gay or lesbian listener saying right now, well, that's - it's a catch 22. Yes, it's the behavior that's being objected to, but if we could get married then we would have relations within marriage, but they're against our getting married.
OAKS: Yes, but objection to marriage other than for a man and a woman is - that runs contrary to the plan that God has established for raising his children. And helping them get on toward their eternal destiny.
SIEGEL: Well, Elder Oaks, thank you very much for struggling with laryngitis to answer our questions today about The Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints and issues facing gays and lesbians.
OAKS: It's a delight to be with you, thank you.
SIEGEL: Elder Dallin Oaks is a member of the Mormon church's Quorum of Twelve Apostles and also a former president of Brigham Young University.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Our Planet Money team is exploring the world of short selling. Shorting a stock is the opposite of buying a stock. Instead of profiting when the company does well, you make money if the stock price drops. On Morning Edition today, our Planet Money team shorted the entire stock market just for fun to see what it was like. And now they bring us a story from long ago of the very first person to short a stock. It doesn't go well for the guy. David Kestenbaum reports.
DAVID KESTENBAUM, BYLINE: The first person to short a stock was apparently a man named Isaac Le Maire. He lived almost 400 years ago in the Netherlands. I can't read 17th century Dutch, so I got some help.
LUDWIJK PETRAM: My name is Ludwijk Petram. I'm an economist and historian from the Netherlands.
KESTENBAUM: The historical record is thin, but Ludwijk says Isaac Le Maire seems to have been a guy who when he did something, he did it big. For instance, he had 22 children.
PETRAM: Which is, well, quite something special. He obviously was very wealthy. I mean, if he can support 22 children, you have to have a lot of money.
KESTENBAUM: So that's the man. Now for the stock, the company he would eventually short. Turns out there weren't a lot of choices.
PETRAM: At the beginning of the 17th century, there was only one stock. It was the first stock, you know, so it's obvious that there was only one.
KESTENBAUM: That's right. The first short was on the very first stock. The Dutch East India Company - think big wooden boats, big sails, very dangerous trips across rough seas.
PETRAM: Many ships didn't return.
KESTENBAUM: And what were they risking their lives for, to bring back?
PETRAM: Spices - pepper, also nutmeg, mace.
KESTENBAUM: Isaac Le Maire started out on the inside. He was one of the directors of the Dutch East India Company, but there was some dispute over money that got ugly. The details are unclear, but the upshot was that Le Maire was cast out of the company and banned from the spice trade. Le Maire apparently wanted revenge. He hatched a plan to take down the Dutch East India Company. And even better, make money at the same time by placing a bet that the stock price would drop. The bet itself - the short - was fairly easy to do. Back in those days, you could bet that, say, the price of grain would drop. Le Maire did the same with shares of the Dutch East India Company - bet they would drop in value. Of course, there was no stock market back then. Financial transactions happened on this bridge in town. Apparently, trading was very physical. To negotiate a price one guy would put his hands out, palms up, shout out an offer, someone else would shout a counteroffer and slap his hands.
PETRAM: So there was this hand slapping, you know, so people shouting prices and another man coming in between and shouting another price. And this just went on until they got to an agreement.
KESTENBAUM: So it's like an elaborate game of patty-cake.
PETRAM: That's it.
KESTENBAUM: Then, as today, shorting was perfectly legal. Economists says it's even a healthy thing to have in a market, but what Le Maire did next would be considered unethical today, and it was 400 years ago. He lied. Le Maire started spreading rumors, things that would drive the stock price down
PETRAM: He said things like, oh, we heard a ship sunk somewhere off the coast of Cape Good Hope or something, or we heard that there's a ship with a load of pepper, but there's some leakage in the ship, you know, so the pepper is a really bad quality. Stories like that.
KESTENBAUM: Today, the company would tweet no, no, that's not true. Back then, financial information moved more slowly.
How long would it take if you wanted to fact check one of those rumors?
PETRAM: If we had sent a ship to East Asia, that would take you eight months and then eight months back, so that's 16 months in total.
KESTENBAUM: (Laughter) After the rumors, the stock price began to drop, so the Dutch East India Company did what a company today might do - it launched a counterattack. It called for a ban on short selling; saying short selling was hurting society's most vulnerable.
PETRAM: And their reasoning is that there was a large number of widows and orphans who had invested all their money in the Dutch East India Company.
KESTENBAUM: Was that true?
PETRAM: Well, there was (laughter) there were maybe - maybe a few widows and orphans.
KESTENBAUM: The Dutch government did issue a partial ban on short selling. And Isaac Le Maire was barred from accessing any of his shares. His plan to short the company was a failure. According to one historian, Le Maire and his henchmen - he had some partners in this scheme - lost what today would be 10 or $20 million. Le Maire left Amsterdam, basically went into exile. He died in a small village by the water. The writing on his tombstone kind of sums it all up.
PETRAM: Here lie (foreign language spoken).
KESTENBAUM: Translation - here lies Isaac Le Maire, a merchant for more than 30 years, blessed by the Lord, he gained a lot of money and lost it all, except for his honor.
PETRAM: (Foreign language spoken) The sad thing, of course, is that he was probably the only one who was convinced that he actually kept his honor because all other people, well, found him a disrespectful man.
KESTENBAUM: Quite a thing to put on your tombstone.
PETRAM: It certainly is.
KESTENBAUM: Isaac Le Maire's short would have eventually paid off. The Dutch East India Company did die, but only after a really, really long time - 200 years later. Timing is everything. David Kestenbaum, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Today in Argentina, Alberto Nisman was buried. He'd been investigating the country's worst terror attack, a bombing at a Jewish community center that remains unsolved 20 years later, and he accused Argentina's president of a cover-up. He was found dead earlier this month with a bullet to the head. The way Argentines view Nisman's murky death could greatly affect the country's politics. NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro was at the funeral in Buenos Aires.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, BYLINE: Flanked by policemen on motorbikes, the car carrying prosecutor Alberto Nisman's body is now driving into the Israelite Cemetery of Buenos Aires in front of me, where he will be laid to rest in a private ceremony for family and friends. But Nisman's death has caused a very public political crisis in Argentina.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Chanting in foreign language).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Protesters chanted for justice as the procession went by. Opposition lawmaker Patricia Bullrich was in attendance.
PATRICIA BULLRICH: (Foreign language spoken).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: "This is a sad day, a day when all Argentines have to reflect because what has happened is very serious and very grave," she said. "There are many questions surrounding Nisman's death - was it murder? If so, who did it and why?" Unfortunately right now in Argentina, depending on your political viewpoint the answers you come up with are very different, says Martin Bohmer, a professor of law in Buenos Aires.
MARTIN BOHMER: We Argentines are in a very difficult moment that the Nisman case shows, which is, nobody actually believes anything.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Argentina is politically polarized. There's been 12 years of the leftist Kirchners in office. Nestor came to power in 2003 and he was succeeded by his wife Cristina Fernandez, the sitting president who's in her second term. Elections for a new leader take place in October. By law, President Kirchner cannot run again.
BOHMER: Everybody wants to take advantage of this moment, that's the point. Everybody's using this death as a political pawn, you know?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: The government says forces allied to the opposition killed Nisman. The opposition says it was the government, who either don't have control of their own intelligence services, or worse, did the deed themselves.
JORGE CASTRO: (Foreign language spoken).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: "What the polls show," says Jorge Castro, a political analyst, "is that up until now, the two sides - Kirchnerism on the one side and the opposition on the other - are heavily consolidated. The Kirchner block has somewhere between 33 to 37 percent of the vote." He says, "for the leftists to win outright, they will need votes from groups outside their power base in the lower classes. That means courting the middle class. Those are the ones," says Castro, "who are more engaged with the Nisman saga." In August, primaries will choose who are the main presidential contenders for each party. The governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Daniel Scioli, seems to the one whom Cristina Kirchner wants to succeed her.
CASTRO: (Foreign language spoken).
GARCIA-NAVARRO: "So during this crisis, Scioli is adopting a non-confrontational attitude, non-polarizing," says Castro, "so he can distance himself from the position of Cristina Kirchner." Nisman's death plays into the wider context of that coming power grab. The president wants to ensure her political legacy. The opposition wants to change the direction of the country, shift away from the alliance with countries like Venezuela, and get Argentina back in the good graces of the international markets. Martin Bohmer says the tragedy of Argentina's current political climate is that whatever becomes of the investigation into Nisman's death, people have already made up their minds here.
BOHMER: The drama is not that we don't know, it's that we'll never know. Because even if we knew, people wouldn't trust it.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News, Buenos Aires.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Something special is happening in Atlanta basketball. The Hawks are having a phenomenal season. This comes after years of lackluster local support and a preseason PR nightmare. Michell Eloy of member station WABE explains.
MICHELL ELOY, BYLINE: Flashback to right before the season started - the Hawks were in crisis mode. Majority owner Bruce Levenson was out after he wrote an e-mail saying black fans were scaring away white fans. And then general manager Danny Ferry took a leave of absence after racist remarks he made during a scouting call. But last night, none of that seemed to matter.
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: Do you believe?
ELOY: Fans went wild when the hometown team took the court against the Brooklyn Nets. The Hawks have won 17 games in a row and have the most wins in the NBA this year. That success has captured the attention of the city's historically flighty fans. The game against the Nets was sold out and so are Friday and Saturday's games. Last year the team only had four sellouts, but this season, it's at 11 and counting. Hawks CEO Steve Koonin says many of these people are new fans, and that's a challenge.
STEVE KOONIN: We have to turn this into something that becomes part of people's life and lifestyle and that it's not a bandwagon win streak. And those things - those are what keep me up at night.
ELOY: To do that, Koonin is trying to take Levenson's words about black fans scaring away white fans and show that it's not true.
KOONIN: Look at the audience, and it's not 50-year-old guys. It's young, it's female, it's male, it's Hispanic, it's Latina, it's African-American, it's Asian. And it's a great melting pot of young people.
ELOY: Koonin says back in the 1980s when the team was doing well, Hawks games weren't just about the game. It was a social event. To re-create that atmosphere, the Hawks dropped ticket prices at the start of the season to $15 for some seats. The team also hired a chief diversity officer to help rebuild from the preseason fallout. Koonin brought in Disney Enterprises to train everyone from the hotdog stand attendants to executives on hospitality. And fans have noticed. Maggie Tyler says she's never seen the basketball arena so packed.
MAGGIE TYLER: Now it's like people will claw your eyes out if you're in their seat.
ELOY: But she's concerned that the excitement and enthusiasm are more about the team's success, and she wonders if that will translate to long-term support.
TYLER: I mean, we'd like to think that that's the case, but, you know, we'll just have to see. It's only like halfway through the season.
ELOY: Another question is what happens to the team? The Atlanta Hawks are for sale. But right now, fans don't seem to care too much about that. They just want to keep winning. For NPR News, I'm Michell Eloy in Atlanta.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Dying can of course be an uncomfortable topic - suicide, depression, these things don't necessarily say fun night at the theater, especially when there's the awkwardness of audience participation thrown in. But Jeff Lunden was pleasantly surprised when he went to a show off-Broadway called, "Every Brilliant Thing" And he's not alone in that opinion.
JEFF LUNDEN, BYLINE: Ben Brantley would not have seen "Every Brilliant Thing" if he didn't have to.
BEN BRANTLEY: Normally, I loathe that kind of thing.
LUNDEN: Brantley is chief drama critic for The New York Times.
BRANTLEY: But I've never seen a production of that nature that makes you feel so comfortable from the very beginning. It walks such a fine line between overly sentimental and overly bleak, but I think it gets the balance just right.
LUNDEN: Part of what makes that balance work is stand-up comic Jonny Donahoe.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
JONNY DONAHOE: Hello, welcome to the show. This is for you.
LUNDEN: He spends 20 minutes before each performance walking through the audience handing out small slips of paper and chatting.
DONAHOE: Now, when I read out these numbers in this order 992, 993, 994, 995 - can you just read out what it says to me?
LUNDEN: Those slips of paper are the brilliant, life-affirming things his character thinks of to help cheer up his suicidal mother. As Donahoe walks around and talks to people, he says he also gets a sense of who might be willing to be brought on stage and who might not.
DONAHOE: That whole first 20 minutes when I talk to the audience before the show starts, that's the casting process. And hopefully I'll sort of create a little relationship with you and there are people who feel very uncomfortable doing it - and I can see that and that's absolutely fine - there's no obligation for them to do anything they don't want to do. They're some people who are incredibly keen - too keen and I've got to avoid them as well (laughter).
LUNDEN: And then, the show begins. Within 10 seconds, the audience is a part of it.
(SOUNDBITE OF PLAY, "EVERY BRILLIANT THING")
DONAHOE: The list began after her first attempt. The list of everything that was brilliant about the world. Everything that was worth living for. Number one...
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: Ice cream.
DONAHOE: Number two?
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Water lights.
DONAHOE: Water fights.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Water fights.
DONAHOE: What is a water light?
(LAUGHTER)
LUNDEN: "Every Brilliant Thing" began as a short story by Duncan Macmillan who adapted it with director George Perrin along with Donahoe. Macmillan says they tried various approaches with the material but decided upon a setting where the audience faces each other and has to participate.
DUNCAN MACMILLAN: It felt like when suicidal, depression or suicide was appearing in theater or in film or in TV, it was oversimplified, it was glamorized to some extent, it was fetishized or it was stigmatized. There didn't seem to be any voices sort of talking about the complex realities of it.
LUNDEN: Still, Jonny Donahoe says he tries to bring a light touch.
DONAHOE: I think that's just the best way you can deal with it not just in a show but as a human being. I mean, you are going to - whoever you are - at some point, experience mental health issues, whether that is because you suffer from them yourself or your partner does or your parents. But it's too common for it to pass you by.
(SOUNDBITE OF PLAY, "EVERY BRILLIANT THING")
DONAHOE: If you live a long life and you get to the end of it without ever once feeling crushingly depressed, then you probably haven't been paying attention.
(LAUGHTER)
LUNDEN: Donahoe doesn't just get audience members to read slips of paper during the hour-long show. He finds people to play a veterinarian, a school counselor, his father and his romantic partner, Sam.
(SOUNDBITE OF PLAY, "EVERY BRILLIANT THING")
DONAHOE: I kept on going and I turn around and there she was on one knee.
(LAUGHTER)
DONAHOE: She held out both her hands and I took them and she said to me...
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Will you marry me?
DONAHOE: And I said yes, let's kiss later.
(LAUGHTER)
LUNDEN: Playwright Duncan Macmillan says it's a very inclusive process.
MACMILLAN: Jonny says he always just tries to cast the most lovable person in the room as Sam and sometimes he feels like the person he meets in the first 20 minutes who's the most lovable is a woman and sometimes it's a man. And we got very excited by that. And we got excited by having mixed-race relationships and different age gaps and all sorts of things.
LUNDEN: On a recent Friday evening, Sam was played by Brittany Burke, a college freshman.
BRITTANY BURKE: I loved it, it was incredible. It made me think more than anything I've seen in a long time. And I really appreciated that.
LUNDEN: And Keith Darcy, who lectures about business ethics, found himself toasting the couple as the groom's father.
(SOUNDBITE OF PLAY, "EVERY BRILLIANT THING")
DONAHOE: Say what's in your heart, Dad.
(LAUGHTER)
KEITH DARCY: These two kids have had an incredible relationship.
LUNDEN: After the show, Darcy told me his own mother committed suicide.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
DARCY: While I could feel the humor of it, I could also feel the pain of it. And I was deeply touched by it.
LUNDEN: And that's what makes the play so powerful says New York Times critic Ben Brantley.
BRANTLEY: I was incredibly moved. And it was a little embarrassing - that was the only way in which I felt uncomfortable - and the house lights never go down. So of course you're totally exposed to everyone else in the audience, and there I am trying to keep a poker face and I have tears running down my face, but I'm not ashamed of them (laughter).
LUNDEN: I cried, too. For NPR News, I'm Jeff Lunden in New York.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
This week, we've been following the story of the mysterious death of a prosecutor in Argentina and the huge controversy it's caused there. Alberto Nisman was investigating the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center that killed 85 people. He had linked that crime to Iran. But last week, he was found in his apartment with a bullet to the head. He had accused Argentina's president and others in her government of taking part in a cover-up. Well, now one of the central figures of the story, the foreign minister of Argentina, has spoken exclusively to NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro by telephone and she joins us now. Lourdes, tell us about Foreign Minister Hector Timerman and why he's important in this case.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, BYLINE: Yeah, Hector Timerman is the foreign minister, as you mentioned. He's also a prominent member of the Argentine Jewish community here, as was Nisman. Nisman named him in particular of carrying out a parallel secret diplomacy with Iran that was intent on shielding Iran from accusations that it was behind the 1994 bombing that was the worst terror attack in Argentine history. In particular, he said Timerman was trying to get five Interpol Red Notices canceled for five Iranian suspects in the case that Argentina wanted to interview. This is what he said.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
HECTOR TIMERMAN: I never ever in my life asked Interpol to do that.
SIEGEL: But why did he say Nisman said he was doing that and how does he respond?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah, Nisman's accusation was that this was all a plot to get oil from Iran in exchange for wheat, that Argentina was going to sort of soft-pedal the Iran issue to get that deal done. This is a nation with a lot of energy problems, so that was the motive said Nisman. Timerman just denied that flatly. He said Iranian oil is too heavy for Argentina to process, so there's no motive for what Nisman alleged.
TIMERMAN: Argentina cannot use Iranian oil because it is a very heavy oil and we cannot process such a heavy oil.
SIEGEL: So he's saying that oil from Iran is too heavy to be used by Argentina. If indeed they weren't talking about oil, how does Timerman explain his talks with Iran? What were they talking about, according to him?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah, he said he was trying to get access to the Iranian suspects. That his sole purpose in those negotiations, he says, was trying to get the two sides to talk. He says Iran doesn't allow extradition of its citizens, and Argentina does not allow trial in absentia. So this, he contends, was the only way to move forward in the case - to allow a judge, an Argentinian judge, to travel to Iran and interview those suspects. That, he says, was his sole purpose.
SIEGEL: And who does the Argentine foreign minister think was responsible for the bombing?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah, let's remind everyone here - this is a bombing that 21 years later has still not been resolved. I asked him exactly that question, and he said he trusted Mr. Nisman's initial investigation that pointed to Iran, but he said this has to be judged in a court of law.
TIMERMAN: I cannot say that the Iranians are really guilty. I have to wait until the judge determines who is behind the attack.
SIEGEL: He's saying he cannot say the Iranians are guilty, he has to wait to see what a judge says. Do I have that right?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah, that's exactly right. He did say that he did feel there was an Argentinian or local connection to the bombing in 1994 that had not really been investigated and that he felt should be.
SIEGEL: Now, the president of Argentina, de Kirchner, has come out and said that Nisman was murdered possibly by Argentine intelligence agents. What does Timerman, the foreign minister, say about Nisman's death?
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Well, of course this is the central issue. He did not want to speculate, but he said he felt Nisman's death was being used to discredit the government. He accused the media group Clarin, which is an old foe of the Kirchner government, of adding to that. He also spoke at length about his own history of being persecuted under the dictatorship of the history of his family as defenders of human rights. His father was dissident journalist Jacobo Timerman. And so he said he would never obstruct a human rights investigation like the AMIA bombing because of his own personal history, and he left it at that.
SIEGEL: That's NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro in Buenos Aires. Lourdes, thank you.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You're welcome.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
Even though it was billed as bipartisan, Republicans did not welcome President Obama's recent proposal to make tuition free at community colleges. It's widely expected it won't go anywhere in the GOP-controlled Congress, but it made us wonder what students at community colleges think about the plan. Youth Radio reporter Tylyn Hardamon went to his own campus to find out.
TYLYN HARDAMON, BYLINE: It's the first day of classes for this semester at Berkeley City College in Berkeley, Calif. There are hundreds of students rushing to class, printing out their schedules and standing in line at the financial aid office. That's where I ran to Dominique Bell and Tyfanni Edwards, both 19.
DOMINIQUE BELL: We're standing in the financial aid line to see what's going on with our financial aid.
TYFANNI EDWARDS: Yeah, you know, just trying to see what's going on with that because I haven't got it yet.
HARDAMON: We've actually known each other for a long time, which made it kind of awkward interviewing them. We all went to high school just a few blocks away and now we all go to this community college for the same reason - it's cheap. I figured Dominique would be a shoo-in to support free tuition, but for her, it wasn't so simple.
BELL: Can I ask a question? So, is it like, you're not going to need financial aid, too? Or - because that's kind of free, financial aid, right?
HARDAMON: I get why she's confused. Community college students are more likely than students at four-year schools to qualify for federal financial aid in the form of need-based Pell grants. So for Dominique and her friend Tyfanni and for me, too, our tuition is already free. But it's not actually enough, says Dominique.
BELL: Are they going to pay for textbooks? Are they going to pay, like, other things, like, you have to have other things other than just tuition paid for. It's not only about tuition.
HARDAMON: Money was so tight in my house that one time my mom had to choose between buying me a textbook, or paying the phone bill. Community college students tend to be lower-income and more financially independent than kids at four-year schools. To help pay for rent, food and transportation, students like me have jobs, jobs that prevent the majority of us from going to school full-time. Which means it'll take us longer to graduate.
KIM KYLLAND: I always had to work full-time and support myself that way. So it made it really hard to take, you know, a full 12 units or something and do well in the classes.
HARDAMON: Kim Kylland is 28 and she's been going to community colleges off and on for the last 10 years.
KYLLAND: I live in an apartment with my husband. We have rent, we have a car payment, we have a phone bill like anybody else, you know - tons of bills.
HARDAMON: If the president's plan paid for tuition, low-income students could use their Pell grants to cover living expenses, says Thomas Bailey. He's the director of the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. But beyond the free tuition idea, Professor Bailey wants more discussion about how to make community colleges better for students.
THOMAS BAILEY: I think it's clear that the proposal will get more students in the front door, but it's not clear that it will get students to the finish line.
HARDAMON: Bailey wants community colleges to simplify pathways to a degree and make credits more transferable to four-year schools. He says both would help improve completion rates. According to the Department of Education, only about a third of students at community colleges complete their degrees, and fewer than 12 percent go on to get their bachelor's. Free tuition or not, those numbers worry students like me. For NPR News I'm Tylyn Hardamon.
BLOCK: That story was produced by Youth Radio.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Now a story about a mother and daughter bound through impersonation. Comedian Maria Bamford imitates her mother for laughs on stage. And that got NPR's Alix Spiegel wondering about how that might've affected their relationship. Alix is co-host of NPR's new show about human behavior. It's called Invisibilia. And this week's episode is all about the idea of entanglement, the ways in which we are all invisibly connected.
ALIX SPIEGEL, BYLINE: In her professional life, Maria Bamford often plays her mom.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MARIA BAMFORD: My mom - I'll tell you a little about myself. My mom told me before I went to my first girl-boy party in the eighth grade, she said, OK, remember what we talked about - gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes, one, two. Watch the cold sores. Date rape is a lot more common than people think. You look so gorgeous. Oh, Jenny's mom's here to pick you up. Well, have a good time.
(LAUGHTER)
SPIEGEL: Bits like this are standard in Bamford's act. Sometimes, the version of her mom that she plays is just funny because the mom can be so charmingly upbeat about the horrors of the world that it's hilarious. But sometimes the imitation feel like they're about elements in their relationship that have a darker side, like in this YouTube bit she did.
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)
MARIA BAMFORD: So sweetie are you taking a shower? Can I just get in their real quick and just show you something? Oh, I didn't know you were naked. Oh, sweetie, listen, if you want to get breast implants, we will support you - not financially, but emotionally.
SPIEGEL: So what happens when you mess in a very public way with an entanglement that's pretty complicated already - the emotional entanglement between mother and daughter - how does that affect things?
Will you tell me what you had for breakfast?
MARILYN BAMFORD: Oh, I had oatmeal.
MARIA BAMFORD: I had Bran Buds.
MARILYN BAMFORD: Greek yogurt.
MARIA BAMFORD: Rice milk.
SPIEGEL: On two different days, in two different states, with the blessing of both, we spoke to Maria and her mom, whose name is Marilyn Bamford, about this. We started with Maria, who said her mom imitations were some of the very first comedy bits she ever did and that, in the beginning, she did them to get a kind of distance or control over her relationship with her mother.
MARIA BAMFORD: For me, it was a time in life of, like, detaching from my family or detaching from, you know, what I think they want me to be. Like, my mom, I remember she did - or what I heard her say - of course, she may have a different feeling of what she said at the time, but she said if you don't wear makeup...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MARIA BAMFORD: ...Honey, when you don't wear makeup, you look mentally ill. So now, when I go home, I'm certain to wear thick, green eye shadow and a line of lipstick around my lips. Baby look pretty now, mommy?
(LAUGHTER)
MARILYN BAMFORD: Oh, it feels like she's got me down perfectly in terms of voice, cadence, vocabulary. You know, she's...
SPIEGEL: And what about the things that you say? I mean...
MARILYN BAMFORD: Well, quite a bit of that is not exactly what I say. The one I think about was the one where she has me saying when you don't wear lipstick, you look mentally ill.
SPIEGEL: Yeah.
MARILYN BAMFORD: And she and I have gone back and forth about that because I - I know I didn't say it that way. I said you look depressed. I mean, that's my memory of it. On the other hand, she remembers what she remembers.
SPIEGEL: But, still, Marilyn doesn't seem disturbed at all by her daughter's impression of her, even by the things that she feels are misrepresentations of what she said or how she is. She sees the impression as helpful.
MARILYN BAMFORD: And so when I say something like, oh, I don't think I said that, and then we have a discussion about it, it is helpful in the end. But I know there are probably some times where I have chosen not to say anything about it because I'm not sure I want to discuss it or have the energy to discuss it.
MARIA BAMFORD: You know, I think the real reason you're down is because you're 36, and you look 36. And that's hard.
SPIEGEL: Do you learn anything about yourself from watching her imitation of you?
MARILYN BAMFORD: Oh, yes (laughter). I kind of remind myself of my mother. My mother was a believer that you put your lipstick on and you powdered your nose. And I think I see that there in myself and I say, oh, no (laughter). I don't want to be that way. But what can you do?
SPIEGEL: And speaking of inevitable gravity of being your mother, though Maria Bamford started her imitation to detach from her mom, it ended up having the reverse effect. It brought her closer.
MARIA BAMFORD: Like, it cheers me up to think about what she would say about things. Like, I like the idea that she has a certain point of view on life and things are certain or - or if I - if she's not around, I can make her be around. In terms of, like, I would like to be more like her as I get older. Like, I'm hoping that my impersonation just bleeds into - I'm her (laughter).
SPIEGEL: Are you really hoping that?
MARIA BAMFORD: Yeah. You know, I could just be the full-on Marilyn Bamford because she's a very likable person, you know? She's always bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. It's like, oh, honey, we're going - we're in Turkey and I wanted to call you because the hotel next door is on fire and your father is Vining it. We are going to have dinner tonight in the town square and everybody's out...
SPIEGEL: And Marilyn Bamford, in her own way, has experienced an unanticipated benefit from her daughter's impressions of her.
MARILYN BAMFORD: I think that many women my age who are, you know, catching up with 70, you know, feel kind of invisible. So therefore, when you have your daughter doing these really wonderful and gifted impressions of you, it makes you kind of immortal in some way. And that's kind of a lovely thing to happen at this age.
SPIEGEL: Maria had actually never heard this. And when we told her she made three noises.
MARIA BAMFORD: (Making noises) That's really - well, yeah, because my mom is such a delight.
SPIEGEL: Three noises that kind of sum up the entire messy relationship between children and their well-meaning parents. You, the child, feel deep affection and gratitude.
MARIA BAMFORD: (Making noise).
SPIEGEL: But, then, sometimes something mixes in - frustration, maybe.
MARIA BAMFORD: (Making noise).
SPIEGEL: At the imposition of those first emotions. Because to love your parents and to feel frustrated by the complexity and obligation of those relationships, are two realities that are forever entangled.
MARIA BAMFORD: (Making a noise).
SIEGEL: Alix Spiegel is co-host of NPR's new program, Invisibilia. You can hear the program on many public radio stations this weekend, and the podcast is available for download on npr.org and on itunes.com/npr.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
It's a good time to be making trendy hamburgers. Shake Shack is a burger chain out of New York. Fifteen years ago, it was a single hot dog cart. Well, today it became a publicly traded company, and investors gobbled up its IPO. Shares started at $21 and closed at $45. NPR's Yuki Noguchi reports on what's behind the appetite for Shake Shack.
YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE: Aaron Allen, a consultant, says a revolution is taking place in the restaurant business. People want their food fast, but they don't want fast food. They want to see their made-to-order food put together right in front of them.
AARON ALLEN: If you take Red Lobster and Olive Garden, TGI Fridays, IHOP, Applebee's, Chili's - add them all together and their valuation is less than just Chipotle.
NOGUCHI: Allen says Shake Shack hopes to be the Chipotle of burgers. But there's already a lot of competition from chains such as Five Guys, In-N-Out and Habit Burger. But he says the so-called fast-casual movement has been very profitable and is expected to more than triple its sales within the next decade.
ALLEN: This sector is actually cannibalizing parts of the industry.
NOGUCHI: It's certainly taking a bite out of McDonald's, which, this week, announced its CEO would step down amid global sales problems. Allen says fast-casual has a leg up on traditional fast food. The assembly-line format requires both less space and fewer employees, a restaurants main expenses. And, he says, Shake Shack, Chipotle and others focus on fewer menu items with better, healthier ingredients. McDonald's, he says, cannot recast itself to fit the current trend.
ALLEN: Part of the reason that there hasn't been more innovation there is because the supply chain is built around heavily processed, frozen food product. And so, to change the product offering, you'd have to reengineer everything from the supply chain to the kitchen layouts to the training systems and more.
NOGUCHI: It's three o'clock, which is pretty late for lunch, but every single table here at Shake Shack in downtown D.C. is taken. The menu is fairly limited - five basic options for burgers, four for hot dogs and seven flavors of shakes. Shake Shack customer, Jason Cheever, is the restaurant industry's prize consumer. He dines out 8 to 10 times a week, often at salad and Mediterranean chains.
JASON CHEEVER: More healthy fast-casual, not necessarily fast food. I have a Sweetgreen right next to my house, I go there. I'll go to Roti, like, faster food places that, like, have quality ingredients.
NOGUCHI: Cheever, who is 29, says most of his peers feel the same way.
CHEEVER: They will rather pay a few dollars more to go somewhere that has better food and is healthier for you and they know that the people that are making it are preparing it in a sanitary environment.
NOGUCHI: Public investors will pressure Shake Shack to grow quickly from its current base of 63 stores, says Dean Small. Small is president and CEO of Synergy Restaurant Consultants.
DEAN SMALL: Growing strategically, finding the right locations, the right sites, will be one of the biggest challenges.
NOGUCHI: Especially with so many other restaurants with similar models nipping at their heels. Yuki Noguchi, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The number of measles cases linked to a recent outbreak at Disneyland has now risen to at least 98. Even so, measles remains extremely rare in the United States. As NPR's Jason Beaubien reports, that's not the case in many other parts of the world.
JASON BEAUBIEN, BYLINE: Measles is a major public health problem across the developing world. The number of cases globally isn't as high as say, HIV or malaria, but in poor countries with less than ideal health care systems, measles is a killer. Last year of the roughly 250,000 cases around the world, half of them died. Measles causes an intense fever, coughing, watery eyes and a signature, full-body rash. It can also cause brain damage and permanent hearing loss. And once the virus starts spreading among kids who haven't been immunized, it's very difficult to stop.
STEVE COCHI: The measles virus is probably the most contagious infectious disease known to mankind.
BEAUBIEN: Steve Cochi is with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Global Immunization Division. His team tracks flare-ups of measles around the world. Currently one of the biggest is in the Philippines, which generated almost 60,000 cases last year. Cochi says measles started spreading widely there after the country was battered by Typhoon Haiyan late in 2013.
COCHI: That virus incidentally from the Philippines has spread all over the world to the Middle East, to other parts of Asia, to the United States and to Europe.
BEAUBIEN: The CDC is still investigating the Disneyland outbreak and has not yet declared its exact source. From earlier U.S. cases however, Cochi says, surprisingly the source is usually not a foreign visitor.
COCHI: It's really traveling Americans who are unvaccinated then return to the United States with the measles virus that are causing most of the measles in the U.S., currently.
BEAUBIEN: There's a couple of issues here. First, travelers can be infected with measles and contagious before they feel sick. Second, there's measles just about everywhere in the world. Besides, the Philippines, China, Brazil, Ethiopia and Vietnam all had significant outbreaks last year. Even the European Union recorded several thousand cases. Part of the reason measles drives public health officials crazy is that it's a people problem. Humans are its only hosts. As long as the virus can find new, unvaccinated populations, it can reproduce, survive and spread some more.
COCHI: So if one can achieve high immunity throughout the world against measles, one can wipe out the disease.
BEAUBIEN: One of the groups working to achieve that high immunity around the globe is the International Medical Corps. Paul Robinson with the group says, actually, immunizing a child against measles is easy and cheap. Their biggest challenge is reaching children in post-disaster and war-torn countries, but Robinson believes it's very important that they do.
PAUL ROBINSON: The children under 5 are very vulnerable to measles. And it takes just a few days to get them to be vaccinated, but it also takes a very short time for the virus to kill them.
BEAUBIEN: Prior to the widespread use of measles vaccine in the 1980s, there were more than four million cases of the disease around the globe every year. That number has been cut significantly to roughly a quarter-of-a-million cases a year. But measles is still out there, and as Cochi at the CDC points out, the virus is just a plane ride away from the United States. Jason Beaubien, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
It may only be January 2015, but the field of Republican presidential candidates is already taking shape. Today, Mitt Romney, the party's nominee in 2012, says he's out. NPR's Tamara Keith tells us why and who's helped by it.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: After three weeks of floating trial balloons, giving a few speeches and talking with potential donors and staff, Mitt Romney's flirtation with 2016 presidential bid ended before it ever really began.
(SOUNDBITE OF CONFERENCE CALL)
MITT ROMNEY: Good morning, everybody, this is Mitt.
KEITH: It was a conference call with supporters heard round the political world and even broadcast live on CNN.
(SOUNDBITE OF CONFERENCE CALL)
ROMNEY: After putting considerable thought into making another run for president, I have decided it's best to give other leaders in the party the opportunity to become our next nominee.
KEITH: In recent polls, Romney led a huge field of potential candidates, but that may have been more a result of name recognition and nostalgia than political excitement. Romney said, on the call, he was convinced he could win the nomination again and, this time, the presidency, but that it would be better for the party and the nation for him to step aside.
(SOUNDBITE OF CONFERENCE CALL)
ROMNEY: I believe that one of our next generation of Republican leaders, one who may not be as well-known as I am today, one who has not yet taken a message across the country, one who's just getting started, may well emerge as being better able to defeat the Democrat nominee.
KEITH: Many interpreted this as a dig against Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and brother of George W. Bush, who is quickly cementing himself as the choice of establishment Republicans. Jeb Bush issued a statement on Facebook describing Romney as a patriot and saying he hopes Romney continues serving the nation and the Republican Party. Doug Gross, who served as Romney's Iowa chairman in 2008, says it was clear to him that Romney's time had passed.
DOUG GROSS: It was very obvious on the ground. I mean, people that had been with him previously, while they wanted to listen to his arguments, were puzzled as to why he would be interested in doing it again. They just really - they were looking for someone else at this point.
KEITH: Gross says Romney no doubt saw that the energy wasn't there anymore as he talked to donors and others.
GROSS: If it isn't you can see it by their eyes, if there's the flash of enthusiasm and intensity isn't there and it wasn't there this time,
KEITH: Romney's exit is good news for Bush, says Gross. The people he knows in Iowa who were Romney backers have Bush at the top of their list of candidates to look at closely. Peter Brown is assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.
PETER BROWN: Presidential primary politics is the ultimate zero sum game. Every winner has a loser and vice versa. The winner today clearly is Jeb Bush.
KEITH: That's because Bush and Romney would both be going for the same sort of donors, advisers and even voters. Brown says another possible candidate - New Jersey Governor Chris Christie - is in that same moderate conservative lane.
BROWN: The fact that Romney has gotten out and Bush is in the process of locking up a lot of people forces Mr. Christie to make a decision perhaps earlier than he wants.
KEITH: And even with Romney out, the list of GOP candidates remains quite long. Let's just go with last names for the sake of time and in no particular order - Rubio, Paul, Cruz, Christie, Walker, Perry, Bush, Santorum, Huckabee, Carson, Jindal and maybe even Palin and Trump. Tamara Keith, NPR News, the White House.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
That's quite a lineup. Well, a third Mitt Romney White House run is not to be. Let's bring in our Friday political commentators E J Dionne, of the Washington Post and Brookings Institution, and David Brooks, of The New York Times. Welcome back.
E J DIONNE, BYLINE: Good to be here.
DAVID BROOKS, BYLINE: Good to be with you.
BLOCK: You know, I heard Mitt Romney list a lot of reasons today why he should run for president, right? He's convinced he could win, he has financial support, ahead in the polls, he said he has the best chance of beating the Democratic nominee. I didn't hear him give a clear articulation of why he's not running. David, is it a fire in the belly problem?
BROOKS: I don't think so. It's a fire in his followers' bellies. There are probably millions of heirs, heiresses across the country who are rising to support him, but not too many other people. You know, people think he had a chance. He had a chance and he ran a campaign that was mediocre and OK, but not so good. And now there are just a thousand candidates, as we just heard. There are more candidates than there are Republicans.
BLOCK: (Laughter).
BROOKS: And so the people are sort of intrigued and excited. And as you watch this race unfold you see different candidates getting their moments already. Scott Walker had a great week. He gave a talk to a group of conservatives, and Scott Walker, who is thought of mid-Western bland, gave a fiery talk that fired people up. And so people are sort of excited by the prospect of a bunch of quality candidates and not excited by Mitt Romney.
BLOCK: And, E J, we heard Mitt Romney say in Tamara's piece just now that he hopes and expects the Republican nominee will come from the next generation of Republican leaders, somebody just getting started as he put it. Sure sounds like a jab at Jeb Bush as we just heard. Do you see this, though, as the pollster said, a clear victory for Jeb Bush, that he's the winner in this decision?
DIONNE: Well, I think that two people may win - one is Jeb Bush on the grounds that, as Tamara said, most of the money people who were going - might go to Romney are going to Jeb Bush and some of the supporters. But I also think it's good for Scott Walker because Romney was probably going to run to Jeb Bush's right. All the indications were if he did run and I think some of that support goes for Walker. You know, Romney made a lot of money as an investor because he was a realist who looked at the data. And I respect him for looking at the data and saying this wasn't going to work. I don't want to say that nothing became him like the leaving of the political fray. But I think it is an impressive decision when you really, really believe, as you pointed out, that you ought to be president that you can walk away like this.
BLOCK: This week we did learn the eye-popping amount that the Koch brothers - the conservative billionaires - plan to spend on the 2016 campaign along with their network - nearly $900 million; more than double what they spent in 2012. And most of those donors will be secret. E J, $900 million puts the Koch brothers pretty much on financial par with the two major political parties. Where does this lead?
DIONNE: Well, I think we ought to start having formal sponsorship of political parties, like we have of stadiums. So it could be the Charles and David Koch Republican Party on the ballot. I mean, this is really quite astonishing. We really are back to the gilded age of Mark Hanna and William McKinley, except Hanna and McKinley were more progressive than the Koch brothers. And it really is very disturbing that two people with a lot of money can have this much influence, potentially, on the political process. They've already had quite a bit and we'll see how it works.
BLOCK: David, disturbing to you.
BROOKS: In different ways. You know, it's a huge waste of money. These guys are so stupid in how they spend their money. They spent hundreds of millions dollars 4 years ago and almost every single candidate lost. And that's just 'cause you can't buy votes in national elections. There's just too much money floating around. And so we're going to have a bunch - two guys from the energy business transferring a lot of money to a lot of people who own TV stations and it will have no effect on the - almost no effect on the electoral outcome. It will, however, completely distort the Republican field as Republican candidates cozy up to them and try to adopt worn, uncompromising stances. And just the final point to be made is that we need to have stronger political parties, and it's sort of dumb campaign finance rules that weaken the parties and strengthen the Kochs.
DIONNE: Oh well, you can't let that stand. It's Citizens United and tearing down the campaign finance rules that's opening this up. I agree with your point about distorting the Republican Party, but the Kochs clearly made a decision - it didn't work because we didn't spend enough money, so we're going to spend more. I wish they'd just gone to a nice round trillion and then...
BROOKS: It's sort of offensive, I mean, to me because you can spend whatever they're going to spend - 900 million - on actual helping human beings.
DIONNE: Well, that I agree with.
BROOKS: But the evidence that they're not going to do anything to swing the electorate toward the Republicans is massive. Political scientists have studied up the - whatever you can study up.
(LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: Nicely put, David Brooks.
BROOKS: (Laughter). I almost got myself into something bad there. And the evidence is, if you cut campaign spending, one study showed, by half, you would affect the vote total by less than half a percentage point. Money does not lead to actual votes.
BLOCK: Let's look ahead to next week and see what metaphor David can come up with for this one.
(LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: President Obama will deliver his budget proposal on Monday. He wants to burst through the mandated spending caps that were put in place by the sequester four years ago. He wants to spend $74 billion above that cap. Also proposing new tax hikes on banks and capital gains. David, the Republican National Committee calls this a lurch to the left. What's the message that you see in the president's budget?
BROOKS: It is a lurch to the left from the sort of budget deals we were having in the last few years, where they're trying to reduce the deficit. That's sort of blown out the window and now there's just a lot of increased spending. The part of it that's good is getting rid of the sequester. And this is going to be a hot-button issue. But domestic discretionary spending, which is all that stuff that's spent on education and welfare payments and things like that, that is at historic lows. And I don't care if you're a Democrat or Republican, that probably has to tick up a little. And you get some good (unintelligible) family leave policies. There are some good policies for the middle-class tucked in there, as well as some defense spending increases to balance it out. So that part, I think, of the Obama budget, is quite a good part.
BLOCK: E J?
DIONNE: If you think $74 billion in, what, a $16 trillion economy is a big lurch to the left, you lack imagination. And half of that is for defense. I think it's absolutely right to kill the sequester. The sequester was a dumb way to do budgeting. It was a deal made that wasn't supposed to pass. It was supposed to be such a bad idea that Congress would never do it.
BLOCK: And lo and behold...
DIONNE: ...Lo and behold, it came to pass. The politics are interesting. Republicans are kind of split three ways. A lot of defense hawks really hate the sequester because of what it's doing to the military budget. The Libertarians like Rand Paul love the sequester because they cut both sides. Some Republicans are going to try to say, let's cut domestic spending more to spend it on the military. And that's not going to fly because we've cut domestic spending outside of the retirement program so much. So I think Obama is going to get his wish somehow. It'll be a messy process. It'll be a messy process to get there.
BLOCK: And I wouldn't be fair if I didn't let E= J. get in one brief word about the Super Bowl before we say goodbye.
DIONNE: I just am very excited for the New England Patriots.
BLOCK: Shocked - we're shocked to hear that, E J.
DIONNE: I notice that the news is shifting. This is not, as a friend of my son said, you know, cheat-gate or whatever - inflate-gate - this is hate-gate. And people just can't stand the New England Patriots because they keep winning and I hope they show them again.
BLOCK: (Laughter). David?
BROOKS: Super Bowls are good when there's a good, industrial city against some chichi city. But we've got two chichi cities - we've got Seattle and Boston.
DIONNE: New England is not chichi. I come from an industrial city in New England.
(LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: We're going to leave it there. David Brooks of The New York Times, E J Dionne of The Washington Post, thank so much.
DIONNE: Thank you.
BROOKS: Thank you.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
All week, people have been talking about a guy who doesn't like talking. Playing in the NFL means speaking to the media. It's in the contract. Seattle Seahawks running back, Marshawn Lynch, was fined $50,000 this season for violating the league's media policy - same thing last season. In the lead up to the Super Bowl, he has stiff-armed thousands of media members in Phoenix. And as NPR's Tom Goldman reports, that's only getting him more attention.
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: Who says Marshawn Lynch won't talk to the press?
What's it like to be at the Super Bowl?
JAZZ PURWAL: You know what? - it's to be blessed. And it's an awesome feeling to be a part of everything that's going on. It's great.
GOLDMAN: OK, so the guy wearing a number 24 Marshawn Lynch jersey actually was 33-year-old Jazz Purwal from Vancouver, BC. You know, you get what you can get. And for the credentialed media in Phoenix, that's meant close-to-nothing from the real Lynch. What started as humorous theater on Tuesday's media day - I'm here so I don't get fined, 29 times - ended yesterday, the last formal day of interviews, with an uncomfortable stare down.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MARSHAWN LYNCH: I'm not about to say nothing. So now, for this next three minutes, I'll just be looking at y'all the way that y'all are looking at me. Thank you.
GOLDMAN: But, then again, Lynch did talk during the week and was as funny as his Seattle teammates insisted he was. In a mock interview for Skittles candy...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LYNCH: Do I earn wish the field were twice as long so I could get a (laughter) 200 yard rushing touchdown? Not at all.
GOLDMAN: In an ad with sportscaster Kenny Mayne for car insurance...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LYNCH: If you switch to Progressive, good things will happen.
KENNY MAYNE: I've never heard you talk that much, Marshawn. It's weirding me out.
LYNCH: I'm all about that flow, boss.
GOLDMAN: So he's all about the money, said Lynch's critics - and there were many this week, including former Patriots' defensive back, Rodney Harrison. He spoke on "The Dan Patrick Show."
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE DAN PATRICK SHOW")
RODNEY HARRISON: Let me just say this coming from an African-American man - for years, black people didn't have a voice in this world. And you finally have an opportunity to have a voice and to talk, and you make a mockery out of it like it's a joke. And I don't agree with it.
GOLDMAN: Current players, however, the guys getting ready to play Sunday, largely supported Lynch. Although most, including New England defensive back, Kyle Arrington, understand their unique place in the working world, constantly getting asked about what they do.
KYLE ARRINGTON: People can't get enough of, you know, sports, you know? It's a - I won't say drives our country - but, I mean, something a lot of people can rally behind.
GOLDMAN: In an espn.com article this week, writer Jeffri Chadiha laid out possible reasons why Lynch wouldn't talk. Chadiha wrote Lynch was 11 when his dad abandoned the family, leaving Lynch, quote, "more guarded and suspicious of people's intentions." The article was part of the ironic backlash to Marshawn Lynch's silence. We've learned more about him than we ever knew - his tough upbringing in Oakland, his charity work in his hometown and his dedication to teammates and Seattle fans, who give that love right back. Again, here's Jazz Purwal.
PURWAL: I don't see him letting anyone down. His job is to get rushing yards, score touchdowns, and he does that.
GOLDMAN: The NFL says his job entails more. Will this week's collision of star athlete and sports media lead to change from the requirement that players make themselves available, to a requirement that they actually speak to reporters? I asked that question in an e-mail to a league spokesman. Fittingly, he didn't answer. Tom Goldman, NPR News, Phoenix.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
First, the good news - Siegfried Meinstein is not dead.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And the 94-year-old Ohio man likes it that way. The bad news is that the Internal Revenue Service thinks otherwise. Meinstein spoke with ABC 6 in Columbus, Ohio and he explained he realized something was wrong when his tax return was rejected last year.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SIEGFRIED MEINSTEIN: Because I was supposed to be dead.
SIEGEL: Because he was supposed to be dead. Siegfried Meinstein's son, Ron, told us how all this came to light.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
RON MEINSTEIN: Well, Dad tried to file electronically last year and it was immediately kicked out because it said that Social Security had him listed as being deceased.
BLOCK: So officially, Siegfried Meinstein is dead, deceased, no more, with the angels. We called the Social Security Administration and William B.J. Jarrett emailed this statement. And Robert, why don't you read it for us?
SIEGEL: OK, it says (reading) while I cannot discuss individual cases due to the Privacy Act, I can tell you this is an Internal Revenue Service - IRS issue. Please contact the IRS to determine how they will resolve it.
BLOCK: Oh, we did, and an IRS spokesperson hinted we might check with, you guessed it, the Social Security people.
SIEGEL: What's more confusing to the Meinstein family is that even though the IRS won't permit Siegfried Meinstein to file a tax return because he's listed as deceased, the same IRS has some good news.
MEINSTEIN: I got a letter here that says that we have a credit of $14,000, but they can't find our tax returns.
BLOCK: Can't find them because Siegfried Meinstein hasn't been able to file them. So the Meinsteins aren't going to let this rest.
SIEGEL: And of course mistakes happen. We learned that a neighbor at Mr. Meinstein's assisted living facility also had this problem - took about a year to straighten out. So if you're listening, anyone at the Social Security Administration or the IRS - Siegfried Meinstein is alive.
MEINSTEIN: Living here in the United States for 80 years and, you know, nothing like this has ever happened to me.
SIEGEL: The office of Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown said that the senator is going to try to intervene on Mr. Meinstein's behalf and to try to end this plight of the living-dead.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
The war in Eastern Ukraine raged on today, taking a toll on fighters and civilians alike. The Russian-backed separatists are pounding government-held towns in and around Donetsk and civilians are trying to escape. The separatists have been pressing their own offensive for nearly two weeks now, gaining ground against Ukrainian government troops. NPR's Corey Flintoff met some of the refugees today.
COREY FLINTOFF, BYLINE: It might be hard to relate to this story, although you've probably heard many like it - displaced families, crying mothers, people who've lost everything. But the places these people are escaping are very far away and they have strange names like Adievka and Debaltseve. What if they had names like Grand Forks and Valley City? Then you could imagine yourself living on the northern Great Plains, and you'd know how cold it gets with the snowy fields and the dirty slush on the roads. The hardest thing to imagine would be your country in the middle of a seemingly endless war, with your town under constant bombardment.
LUDMILLA: (Through interpreter) It's like the end of the world. Shells flying from all sides, the hospital raked, houses burning and nobody puts them out. We were moving out under the shelling. It was very scary and there are still people in there.
FLINTOFF: That's Ludmilla. Like most people here, she's too afraid of reprisals to give her full name. We found her on a dirty, rickety bus packed with weary people who'd just escaped from Debaltseve. In normal times, the people on the bus would probably look pretty ordinary if you saw them in Valley City, only now they look like the refugees in photos from the Second World War - gray, dirty and worn down from days of hiding in cellars - no heat, no electricity, no toilets, while the shells crashed overhead. Aleksander Chelobitchenko is the Ukrainian military coordinator who organized the evacuation.
ALEKSANDER CHELOBITCHENKO: (Foreign language spoken).
FLINTOFF: He says, "it would've been impossible if a local company hadn't loaned some buses and drivers who were willing to risk their lives." Like this man, who gave his name only as Yuri.
YURI: (Through interpreter) They shelled us but I didn't think about it. I just had to load the people onto the bus. A shell hit nearby, there was shooting, and we just helped the people to get in.
FLINTOFF: The buses brought the people here, to the town of Svyatogorsk. They'll be housed in the cabins of a vacant summer resort for the time being. Tatyana Polyanskaya didn't go inside right away. We found her on the icy road outside the dining hall, pointing out the stars to her grandson in his stroller. She says they arrived here yesterday from Adievka, a town near Donetsk that's been under fire for months.
TATYANA POLYANSKAYA: (Through interpreter) Now I'm just rejoicing in this life. When we came out, we all just sat in silence because the bus was being shelled. We were so afraid and we thought we would die there. But when we got far enough away, we all relaxed - no more horrible noises. They were killing civilians, you understand? Just killing.
FLINTOFF: The truly awful thing about this story is that it's not news. It's happening all the time in places that aren't all that much different from Grand Forks and Valley City, except that they're very far away and they have strange names, like Adievka and Debaltseve. Corey Flintoff, NPR News, Svyatogorsk, Ukraine.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Edgars Rinkevics is the foreign minister of Latvia. His country now holds the rotating presidency of the European Union.
Minister Rinkevics, thank you very much for joining us today.
EDGARS RINKEVICS: My pleasure.
SIEGEL: You recently met with the Russians and you talked about Ukraine. In hindsight, given what's happened over the past month - meetings with the Russians and then a defensive in Eastern Ukraine - were the Russians misleading you earlier this month, as to their intentions?
RINKEVICS: No. I didn't have a sense that there is going to be kind of rapid progress. At the same time, I believe that my visit was needed for two reasons. First of all, we must talk. And definitely I had to raise also some security issues. In the Baltic Sea region we had Russian planes flying with switched-off transponders, endangering (unintelligible). So while there is a crisis, diplomacy needs to be applied and we have to have political dialogue.
SIEGEL: At this moment, do you see the pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine trying to connect territory they control in the east of the Crimean Peninsula? Is that what you understand to be happening on the ground in Ukraine?
RINKEVICS: That is one of the scenarios I wouldn't rule out because what we saw last Saturday, the leader of the separatists announcing that he's going to attack Mariupol and then also to take the city, and after a couple of hours, he actually denounced his own words. That scenario, I think, still is a very realistic one. At the same time, in that case of course it means that the fighting in Ukraine will increase, and our situation will get to the level which I will define as all-out war.
SIEGEL: Yes. As Latvian foreign minister, have you heard any assurance from the Russians that, however much they may back pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine, have they assured you in any way that there's absolutely no question of similar policies in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, which are NATO members?
RINKEVICS: Well, we talked with my Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, about the meaning of a so-called Russian world. That's the new concept that everyone who speaks Russian or is Russian or likes Russian culture...
SIEGEL: They're part of a Russian world.
RINKEVICS: ...Could be protected if terrorists trouble.
SIEGEL: That would include about a quarter of your population.
RINKEVICS: I think that would include also some population here in the United States, as well.
SIEGEL: Do you think Brooklyn is endangered by that statement?
RINKEVICS: Well, I think that everyone should take this a little bit ironically, but also a little bit seriously. But I've got the assurance that, Foreign Minister Lavrov speaking, Russian world is meant to be only the kind of language and cultural space. And I would say that yes, we are concerned about this concept and we are concerned that if we are not able currently to stop the advance in Ukraine, there can a worse appetite, not necessarily towards Baltic states, NATO members, but towards other countries of Eastern partnership - Moldova, Kazakhstan. And the rhetoric that we are hearing from Moscow are of course very, very alarming.
SIEGEL: Are you absolutely confident that if Russia took actions in Latvia comparable to what they're doing in Ukraine, that NATO would come to the defense of Latvia's government?
RINKEVICS: We are confident that our NATO allies understand the situation and that NATO would come to the defense of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland or any other country under the threat. If that doesn't happen, I think that everyone at NATO and every member state do understand that this time, NATO is simply dead.
SIEGEL: Mr. Rinkevics, thank you very much for talking with us today.
RINKEVICS: Thank you.
SIEGEL: Edgars Rinkevics is foreign minister of Latvia. Latvia holds the presidency of the European Union right now.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
A lot of lousy ideas have been spouted by people sitting at a bar. But we're going to hear now about a great one, an idea generated by a guy hunched over his drink at a bar in Germany in 1929, an idea that ended up revolutionizing medicine. It's a story that gives the title to a new book by evolutionary biologist Rob Dunn. It's called "The Man Who Touched His Own Heart." That man was a young German Doctor named Werner Forssmann, just 25 years old, who came up with this crazy idea. And at that bar, he started boasting about it.
ROB DUNN: And the idea was that maybe it would be possible to send a catheter up a vein or, later, an artery, into the heart in order to see the heart in living patients. And he thought, if you could get a catheter into the heart, then you could take an x-ray and you could see where the catheter was and perhaps detect some of the problems.
BLOCK: This was revolutionary, right? Nobody had done this before.
DUNN: Oh, no. I mean, nobody had seen - the idea that you would see a living heart in a patient without cutting them open was totally revolutionary. And before this idea, Forssmann had spent all of his time with cadavers in the basement of his hospital. He was the low man on the totem pole in the hospital, and so he had to through the cadavers trying to figure out what had happened. And he saw in the hearts all of these problems that he thought, maybe, someday somebody could fix if you could see them in the living patients, but nobody could. And so here he is at the bar thinking that, if his new technique is right, he could revolutionize medicine for the future of humanity. And then, like all great ideas, his idea has to be confronted with reality. And the reality is he goes back to the hospital the next day and he tells his boss, look, I'm going to send a catheter into the vein of one of the patients to see if can get it into their heart and then take an x-ray of it. Is that OK? And his boss says of course it's not OK. And then Forssmann says, well, I tell you what, I'll do it on myself. And his boss says no, no. You know, I know your mother and she wouldn't like that. And so he goes home sulking. And then he decides that he's going to do it anyway.
BLOCK: And this is what's so remarkable about this story because, as you describe it in your book, Dr. Forssmann enlists a nurse to help him, right? He tells her he's going to perform the procedure on her and she agrees, but it's all a ruse. He does this procedure, this catheterization, on himself.
DUNN: He does. And he enlists her, realistically, because he needs her to help him because he's so low on the totem pole that he doesn't even have access to the cabinets with catheters in them. And so there's this amazing moment where she thinks that, you know, this procedure is going to happen on her.
BLOCK: She's strapped to a table, right?
DUNN: Yeah. And so she's ready, and she's going to do this for science. And then all the sudden, she looks over and he's sneaking the catheter into his own arm and she screams to stop him and he won't stop. And he pushes it and he flinches because it hurts. It's actually a urinary catheter, so it's huge. And then there's this incredible realization. It's sort of a twofold realization - maybe he's done it, you know, he's made it all the way to his heart. And the other realization is that they've chosen a room in which they can't take a photograph of the x-ray.
BLOCK: You mean there was no x-ray machine in the room where he was doing this procedure?
DUNN: No. I mean, he just - he just made a terrible choice in which room he chose. And so now they've got to walk out of this hospital room with this little catheter bobbing in his heart, down two flights of stairs, and the nurse is helping to drag everything along. And, finally, they get to the room where they can take a picture and one of Forssmann's colleagues is there and is so mad and frustrated with what he views as Forssmann's madness, that he actually tries to physically rip the catheter out. And Forssmann pushes him out of the way - and how aggressive this all is varies in the telling - and they take the picture. And when they do, they can see that it's almost all the way into the heart. And so he pushes it a little bit further and they take the picture again. And there its, and he's done it. And so it's just this amazing moment in the history of medicine that he's done what nobody thought was possible. And at that moment he feels heroic.
BLOCK: Was it recognized right away that this was a huge moment for medicine, the birth of a whole new field of medicine - of cardiology?
DUNN: No. In fact, Forssmann couldn't, you know, get a surgery job like he hoped for. As time passed, he became ever more marginal. And so whatever heroism he had hoped for began to slip away.
BLOCK: Yeah. Well, the years go by. He - Dr. Forssmann serves for the Germans as a medic in World War II. And the story you tell about what happens - it's 26 years after he performs this procedure - catheterizes his own heart. You describe him sitting in a pub and getting a phone call. Its 1956.
DUNN: Yeah. And, amazingly, he gets a phone call in the bar, and it's from its wife. And he says that someone's called the house and it seemed important. Forssmann brushes it off and he goes back to drinking. Later that night, he gets home and there's another call and it has a foreign accent, and he brushes that one off, too. And then he goes into work the next day, and it's only at work that he realizes what these calls have been about, that he's been awarded the Nobel Prize. He thought he was lost, that everyone had forgotten him. He really didn't understand at this point that his technique, even though he'd not been allowed to do more with it, had been used in the U.S. and other scientists - other doctors had gone on to develop new technologies in the basis of this original technique. And so it had expanded dramatically. And so he was sharing the Nobel Prize with other people he didn't really even know of. And he was beyond himself.
BLOCK: You know, it's striking. In reading about Werner Forssmann and a number of the other doctors, surgeons whom you profile in this book, that a lot of them are marginal figures. They're sort of on the fringes of medicine, right? They're outsiders. And I wonder if that freed them up to be risk takers, to make these advances that we're talking about.
DUNN: I think that's, for sure, true. I mean, my first thought is to think of Daniel Hale Williams, an African-American doctor in Chicago, working in the 1890s, who performed really the first surgery on a heart. And he did it in part because he was working in a hospital with few resources where he had just developed the ability to do really hard and impossible things. And so the fact that he was a little bit marginal made - allowed him to do what others couldn't. And I think that story occurs again and again. And I think that the tendency and the story of surgery and the story of science and the story of a heart, in particular, you know, is for a lot of energy and money to be dedicated straight ahead, you know, at what the next most obvious thing. But I think these big discoveries often come from the folks who are working off to the side.
BLOCK: I wonder, in the course of writing this book, if you became much more mindful of your own heart, your pulse and the coursing of blood through your veins.
DUNN: Yeah. I think it's impossible not to write about the heart and study it and become conscious every day of what it's doing. I mean, you can put your fingers up to your carotid artery and feel that pulse. And, you know, you're going to get, in a lifetime, 2.5 billion of those beats if you're lucky. And so to feel them ticking away, I think I'm very conscious of that and to know how elaborate each one of those beats is and yet how much we take them for granted. I'm very aware of that.
BLOCK: Will, Rob Dunn, thanks so much for talking with us.
DUNN: Oh, thanks so much, Melissa. It's really been a pleasure.
BLOCK: Rob Dunn is the author of the book "The Man Who Touched His Own Heart: True Tales Of Science, Surgery And Mystery."
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And now, Michigan's governor, Republican Governor Rick Snyder, who's urging voters in his state to approve something that we don't typically associate with the GOP. He's asking them to approve a tax increase to pay for crumbling infrastructure. And he's not alone - several of the country's 31 Republican governors, faced with dire fiscal realities, are advocating some form of tax increase.
Governor Snyder, welcome to the program.
GOVERNOR RICK SNYDER: It's great to be with you, Robert. This is an important topic.
SIEGEL: You know, in Washington a tax increase is regarded by a lot of Republicans as a form of human rights abuse. What's different in Lansing?
SNYDER: Well, we start with common sense. This shouldn't be about partisan politics, this is about what's doing best for the citizens. And in Michigan in particular, we had been under-investing for a number of years to the point where literally you mention the word crumbling infrastructure - we have cases where, for our bridges we're putting plywood up underneath a number of bridges to keep crumbling concrete from falling on vehicles. We have major potholes in the springtime in particular that create, you know, hazardous driving conditions for people. So this is an important investment that needs to be made and should've been made some time ago.
SIEGEL: But you're putting the question to Michigan voters in a kind of referendum on increases of the sales and gas taxes. Why not just do it in the legislature and approve it, if it's necessary?
SNYDER: Good question. Actually, the legislature was very supportive of this process. What we determined the best way to do it was to increase our general sales tax in the state from six to seven percent. And that's a constitutional change. To show you the legislative support behind it though is to put it on the ballot. It actually required a two-thirds vote of both the House and Senate in Michigan and it shows there was strong bipartisan support to get this done.
SIEGEL: Sales and gas taxes are notoriously regressive taxes. That is, rich and poor people drive and they also buy necessities. Why not ask people with higher incomes and more property to pitch in more and pay more?
SNYDER: We actually exclude a number of items from our retail sales tax. Food, for example, is a major exclusion, which helps address that. But also part of this package is we're bringing tax relief onto lower and middle-income people. For example, we're looking to raise approximately $1.2 billion or more for our roads. We're talking $200 million of tax relief to specifically address the question you talked about. And you mentioned other taxes, for example, the income tax in Michigan by constitution is proportional. So it can't be a graduated system.
SIEGEL: It's a flat rate income tax?
SNYDER: It's a flat rate, at 4.25 percent.
SIEGEL: To the extent that you're campaigning for the referendum to succeed - and I gather it'll come up right, as you've described it, during pothole season when people will be made physically aware in their cars of the infrastructure problem in Michigan?
SNYDER: It will. Actually, it's going to be on the May ballot, which is at the later part of pothole season, which because of the freeze-thaw cycle in Michigan that you tend to see it and get people's attention. We had far too many Michiganders, if you ask them, that had a blown tire, bent rim, other road damage. So when you go out and talk to our citizens, no one likes our roads. And again, that's a major public safety issue. If you blow a tire, that's a scary experience, both for you and other vehicles on the road.
SIEGEL: Even so, as logical as all of this is, for you as a Republican governor, is it a little hard personally to find yourself campaigning for a tax increase even if it needs a referendum to be approved?
SNYDER: No. Again, this is the way government should work. We should be above politics. We shouldn't dwell on what party someone's from. We want to do the right answer and serve our citizens. It's about efficient, effective and accountable government. So it's important to give people good service at a great value, and that's what we've been doing in Michigan very consistently for several years. This is another step in that path.
SIEGEL: You sound like such a wild-eyed pragmatist here, an extreme moderate about this. Has the GOP gone too far on a limb taking pledges never to raise taxes in any way?
SNYDER: Well, again, I wouldn't put it in the party context. I think there's always a challenge. That's one thing I don't believe in - signing, you know, the pledges, the no tax kind of pledge because you have to be thoughtful and pragmatic and do what's best for the people.
SIEGEL: Well, Governor Snyder, thanks for talking with us about Michigan and taxes today.
SNYDER: It was great to be with you. Have a great day.
SIEGEL: That's Rick Snyder, who is the governor of Michigan, speaking to us from the state capital, in Lansing.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Dengue Fever is a band from Los Angeles. It composes in the style of '60s and '70s Cambodian surf rock. If that sounds like a gimmick, it's not. The band has been going strong for over 13 years, touring the world and winning fans from Peter Gabriel to Metallica's Kirk Hammett. Reviewer Banning Eyre says the band's latest album, "The Deepest Lake," breathes new life into Dengue Fever's unique formula.
BANNING EYRE, BYLINE: These days, it's once again fashionable to dub music psychedelic. Anything with ambient guitars, retro keyboard sounds and groovy beats seems to qualify. Dengue Fever has all of that, but also something else, something better - this entrancing voice.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TOKAY")
CHHOM NIMOL: (Singing in Khmer).
EYRE: That's Chhom Nimol, a star vocalist back home in Cambodia. She moved to LA in 2001 and within months was approached by musician brothers Zack and Ethan Holtzman. These guys were avid collectors of Southeast Asian pop music and were looking for a singer to perform the music with them. Dengue Fever started out playing Cambodian covers, but now they easily compose in the style, adding original flourishes from rap to punk.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ROM SAY SAK")
NIMOL: (Singing) (Singing in Khmer) Let down your hair and soak it all up. (Singing in Khmer). Tip back your head and finish the cup.
EYRE: A few songs on the album, "The Deepest Lake," incorporate English. But whatever the language, the lyrics are vivid and mysterious.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TAXI DANCER")
EYRE: This song, "Taxi Dancer," is about Phnom Penh club where men pay to dance with girls.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TAXI DANCER")
NIMOL: (Singing in Khmer).
EYRE: "Song after song," sings Nimol in her native Khmer, "he dances on my heart. Play the part, I'm just a taxi dancer."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TAXI DANCER")
NIMOL: (Singing in Khmer).
EYRE: Dengue Fever's trenchant grooves and textures really draw you in. With minor keys and ominous aesthetics, they create an irresistible world in which Nimol's liquid voice rains. At the same time, the band can pull out the stops with glorious surf rock bravado.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STILL WATERS RUN DEEP")
NIMOL: (Singing in Khmer).
EYRE: Dengue Fever deserve credit for sticking with an offbeat idea and making it work for over a decade. More than just good fun, this music has power.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STILL WATERS RUNS DEEP")
NIMOL: (Singing in Khmer).
EYRE: This frenetic number is somewhat ironically called "Still Waters Run Deep." On "The Deepest Lake," so does Dengue Fever.
SIEGEL: Banning Eyre is senior editor at afropop.org. Dengue Fever's new album, "The Deepest Lake," is out this week.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
The founder of Death Row Records has been charged with murder. Suge Knight was arrested after a fatal hit-and-run car accident yesterday. NPR's Mandalit del Barco has more on the former hip-hop mogul whose life has paralleled some of the gangster rap he's produced.
MANDALIT DEL BARCO, BYLINE: Suge Knight is, himself, straight out of Compton. He was born there 49 years ago. And yesterday, it was in Compton that the LA County Sheriff's Department says he ran over two men with his truck. They say it was after an argument on the set of the upcoming moving, "Straight Out Of Compton." Knight's attorney told the LA Times he'd been running for his life after a group of people attacked and threatened to kill him, even dragging him outside of his vehicle.
(SOUNDBITE OF SNOOP DOGGY DOGG SONG, "MURDER WAS THE CASE")
DEL BARCO: Knight was an architect of West Coast ganger rap in the 1990s, and his career has included a series of arrests, prison terms and legal problems.
DAN CHARNESS: Suge Knight was known to partners as tenacious and smart. And to people who weren't on his side, he was imposing, frightening, bully.
DEL BARCO: Dan Charness is the author of "The Big Payback: The History Of The Business Of Hip-Hop." He describes how the 300 lb-plus former football player and bodyguard muscled his way into becoming a force in the music industry in the 1990s, first by signing a lucrative rapper known as Vanilla Ice and then partnering with Andre Young, known as Dr. Dre, arguably the best hip-hop producer at the time. Their company, Death Row Records, produced such artists as Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "GIN AND JUICE")
UNIDENTIFIED SINGER #1: (Singing) Rolling down the street, smoking (bleep), sipping on gin and juice.
SNOOP DOGGY DOGG: (Singing) Laid back.
UNIDENTIFIED SINGER #2: (Singing) With my mind on my money and my money on my mind.
DEL BARCO: Charness says there are many stories about Knight, some of which may not be true, but added to his mythology, such as holding rapper Eazy E at gunpoint. On stage at The Source Awards, Knight taunt Sean Puffy Combs, igniting the East Coast-West Coast hip-hop feuds in the 1990s. Casualties of this included rappers Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur, who was gunned down in Suge Knight's car.
CHARNESS: I place most of the blame of that silly and ultimately deadly conflict - I lay that at Suge's feet.
DEL BARCO: Last year, Knight was shot six times during an MTV Music Videos Award pre-party. He's been in and out of prison since the 1990s. As for this latest incident, Charness says...
CHARNESS: It didn't surprise me. I mean, you know, karma.
DEL BARCO: Suge Knight is being held on $2 million in bail for murder. Mandalit del Barco, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
This Sunday's Super Bowl could well become the most-watched broadcast in the history of television. And to try to make that happen, NBC has scheduled a day filled with elements that it hopes appeals to viewers who are not die-hard sports fans. There's a special focus on women. NPR TV critic, Eric Deggans, joins us now to talk about that. Hey, Eric.
ERIC DEGGANS, BYLINE: Hi.
BLOCK: And currently, the most watched TV broadcast ever is last year's Super Bowl - according to Nielsen, more than 112 million people tuned in last year. So targeting women is among the things that NBC is trying to do to beat that record?
DEGGANS: Well, you look at the numbers and you see last year, that 46 percent of the Super Bowl audience was female. And keep in mind, Melissa, that for the regular-season that number was just 35 percent. So that suggests that the Super Bowl draws a good number of female viewers who don't watch regular-season football. Now, there's a poll out from the National Retail Federation that predicts 181 million Americans will watch Sunday's game and...
BLOCK: What?
DEGGANS: ...That's - yeah, that sounds too high.
BLOCK: OK wait, that would be like a 60 percent increase over last year - that's crazy, right?
DEGGANS: Exactly. I mean, viewership hasn't jumped by that much in the last five Super Bowls. But their poll also said that less than half of their respondents thought the game was the most important part of the broadcast day. So that tells you that there are a lot of people coming to watch the Super Bowl who don't necessarily care that much about sports. And the only way NBC can beat the numbers that FOX saw last year when they broadcast the Super Bowl is to appeal to an even bigger slice of that casual sports-viewing audience.
BLOCK: OK, so that brings us to the non-sports entertainment part of the Super Bowl - we know of course the halftime show this year - it's Katy Perry who's going to be performing at halftime. Apparently, reportedly with a special guest Missy Elliott. The national anthem will be sung by Idina Menzel - otherwise known as Adele Dazeem of "Frozen" fame. What other plans does NBC have to reach beyond the typical die-hard sports fan?
DEGGANS: I think she's known as that only by John Travolta.
(LAUGHTER)
DEGGANS: The biggest sign we've seen is who they've picked to host a pregame tailgate party - figure skaters Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski. Now, they first popped as a quirky pair of analysts in NBC's Winter Olympics coverage from Sochi last year. NBC's press release say they'll interview celebrities and quote, "Provide their own Super Bowl observations." So it's kind of hard to imagine what they'll add to the game coverage, but they provided pretty amusing fashion commentary for the Oscars and they're likely popular with folks who might not be die-hard sports fans. NBC also has country music star, Carrie Underwood, singing the opening theme, re-doing a version of the "Sunday Night Football" theme for the Super Bowl. And former ESPN anchor, Josh Elliott, will interview Katy Perry, highlighting how prominently women are featured in the show this year.
BLOCK: And Eric, that's an interesting point because the NFL of course has gotten so much criticism this season for how it handled domestic violence cases with its players and there've been a lot of concerns that all these scandals will alienate female viewers - female fans.
DEGGANS: Well, the ratings I've seen from Nielsen show that that hasn't really happened yet. The number of female viewers for the 2014 season is only down about 20,000 viewers from the year before. The NFL has been courting female fans for a while, and we've seen indications that advertisers for instance are getting pressured to abandon this frat boy style of ads that we've seen in years past and offer more sophisticated stuff.
BLOCK: You think so? Well, I'll believe that when I see it, Eric. I don't know, but we'll be watching.
DEGGANS: Yeah, certainly we'll see.
BLOCK: OK, Eric Deggans, NPR's TV critic. Thanks so much.
DEGGANS: Thanks for having me.
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
And, as if Sunday didn't have enough drama, we are now on a baby watch.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
That's right. Seattle's star cornerback Richard Sherman's girlfriend is very pregnant. In fact, she's due with their first child, a son, next week.
SIEGEL: And since this is Super Bowl week, when no story is too small or too personal for the media to weigh in on, talking heads across the country want to know, what if the baby comes early? Should Sherman miss the Super Bowl for the birth of his son?
BLOCK: Sherman told the press yesterday that he's focused on the game and the baby isn't expected to arrive on Sunday. But, if he does...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
RICHARD SHERMAN: Obviously that would change some things. But I think he's going to be a disciplined young man and stay in there until after the game. He's going to do his father his first favor and stay in there for another week or two.
SIEGEL: Sherman's coach, Pete Carroll, says whatever the couple decides is fine with him.
PETE CARROLL: You know, if he's faced with that decision, we'll support him. And we'll see how that goes. You know, we'll wish him luck and can't wait to see little Petey.
(LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: And, by the way, that person we hear laughing there - that's New England Patriots coach and noted sourpuss, Bill Belichick, laughing in public in front of other people. Super Bowl week has officially gotten weird.
SIEGEL: And if it's all too weird for you and you will too out of the tailgate party, the Katy Perry halftime show, Richard Sherman's baby and the game, not to worry. First thing Monday, on MORNING EDITION, NPR's Tom Goldman will have our Super Bowl recap. Be sure to start the new week with your public radio station, and have a good weekend.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Earlier this month, Congressman Andre Carson, a Democrat from Indiana's 7th district, became the first Muslim representative to serve on the House intelligence committee. Conservative pundits have raised quite a few concerns about Carson since came to Capitol Hill seven years ago. NPR's Jasmine Garsd has this profile.
JASMINE GARSD, BYLINE: Congressman Andre Carson believes in the law. But as a young black man, he didn't always have faith in the system.
ANDRE CARSON: I can remember being a teenager, being stopped every weekend, being harassed walking to the grocery store for no reason. Me and my friends - stop. Get on the car.
GARSD: This was the early '90s, around the same time as the Rodney King riots.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CAN'T TRUSS IT")
GARSD: There was a similar distrust of the police in the rundown area of Indianapolis where he grew up. Carson remembers the music that expressed so much anger.
CARSON: During that time, Public Enemy was popular. NWA - you had all these different groups who were highlighting police brutality. And I shared their sentiment at the time, even though I had seen a few good police officers.
GARSD: Carson, who was raised a Baptist, says the Muslim groups in his community caught his attention.
CARSON: These groups were bold in terms of wanting to take back their communities. And it was that sense of righteous indignation that really had an impact on me.
GARSD: Politics wasn't new for Carson. His grandmother, who raised him, was U.S. Congresswoman Julia Carson.
MATTHEW TULLY: People loved her or hated her. There was really no middle ground.
GARSD: That's Matthew Tully, a reporter with the Indianapolis Star. He says Julia Carson was known for two things.
TULLY: I mean, she played hardball politics. But also - just a very outspoken, liberal politician at a time where that was, you know, still pretty rare.
GARSD: Andre Carson says he didn't want to go into politics. Instead, he became a policeman and then went into counterterrorism at the Indiana Department of Homeland Security. In 2007, when his grandmother passed away, he was elected to fill her seat. He became the second Muslim to serve in Congress. Since coming to Washington in 2008, Carson has repeatedly won reelection. Yet early on in his political career, he sparked controversy with some of his comments.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SEAN HANNITY: Democratic Congressman Andre Carson is coming under heavy fire for a speech that he delivered.
GARSD: Fox News host Sean Hannity is referring to this speech Carson gave to the Islamic Circle of North America in 2012.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CARSON: America will never tap into educational innovation and ingenuity without looking at the model that we have in our madrasas, in our schools, where innovation is encouraged, where the foundation is the Quran.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
HANNITY: This is very simple for me. I mean, you don't believe in his backtracking. He was very clear that ingenuity we have in our madrasa and where the foundation is the Quran. He wasn't talking about all faiths there. He was talking about madrasas. Aren't madrasas where the radicalism is taught?
GARSD: Carson says the attacks were not justified.
CARSON: There are huge successes that are happening in our schools. We have a country where a significant population of our kids are graduating in our schools who are functionally illiterate. My wife's a school principal. And so I was simply saying be proud of the innovations that are taking place.
GARSD: Several conservative pundits were in uproar when Carson, a Muslim, was appointed to the intelligence committee. Carson says he believes only an approach that includes the Muslim community can combat terrorism.
CARSON: We can't win the war against terrorism without getting help from Muslims. Congress should reflect the diversity of our nation, and our committee should reflect that same diversity, particularly the intelligence committee.
GARSD: Congressman Carson believes the us-versus-them approach isn't working. And he feels as a member of the intelligence committee, he's in a position to help shape the conversation. Jasmine Garsd, NPR News, Washington.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Last winter, a poet arrived at the end of the earth. Her mission - to somehow capture life in Antarctica. Now Jynne Dilling Martin has published a collection of poems inspired by her experience. It's called "We Mammals In Hospitable Times." Jynne, welcome.
JYNNE DILLING MARTIN: Thank you so much, Arun. I'm so pleased to be here.
RATH: So first we have to talk about how these poems - or where these poems came into being. Can you explain how you ended up in Antarctica?
MARTIN: Absolutely. I was fortunate enough to be given a grant by the National Science Foundation to spend last winter - or their summer, actually - down there shadowing various scientists in their work and studying what they did, getting to spend the days with them. And out of that emerged many of the poems that are in this new collection.
RATH: And this is the place called McMurdo Station in the Antarctic.
MARTIN: Exactly. Those who have seen Werner Herzog's documentary will be very familiar with what it's like down there at the station. It's the main American base in the Antarctic.
RATH: And you were able while you were down there - you were on, you know, Instagram and blogging and writing dispatches with a great deal of enthusiasm.
MARTIN: Yes, I think one of the funniest things about Antarctica is you, you know, go to the bathroom in a bucket. You're heating frozen meals over a tiny little Coleman camp stove in a - in an igloo or in a small tent. But there is Wi-Fi all over the continent.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: It's really because a lot of the science happening down there requires regular transmission of its data and details back to the States. In fact, a lot of the Weather Service apparently gets their data from Antarctica. So there is in fact Wi-Fi, even though there's almost no other imaginable creature comfort.
RATH: Some of the poems in this collection are inspired by specific people you met down there. I'd like if you could read from a poem called "What Breaks First."
MARTIN: Sure.
RATH: And let me precede this by saying that this was a poem inspired by a submarine pilot?
MARTIN: Yes. Yeah, he drove submarines for the U.S. Navy for many years. (Reading) What breaks first? As the iceberg shears off the submarine periscope, the noise is less groan, more wild animal shriek. Trust me, said the captain, piloting toward gunfire to see what the Russians are up to these days. The sea ice resembles a cracked white lung steadily swelling then sinking as high tide fades away. Already birds and barnacles and butterflies are shifting their habitats pole-ward. The eelgrass and jellyfish will be fine, but the basements of coastal cities will begin to flood an inch at a time.
RATH: In something that comes across very much in the poems is there's a lot of reflection on time. Not only are you in a place where things literally move glacially, but you were there when the sun never went down.
MARTIN: Yeah. I so appreciate your noticing that. And it was something I didn't expect going to Antarctica. I expected the vastness of space and of landscape and how enormous - and in fact it's even more enormous than you can possibly fathom or can ever be captured in a photo or video. I did not expect how up close I would be with the enormity of time.
But being where scientists are pulling 800,000-year-old ice up out of a glacier and you can chip it off and drink it in your whiskey, where there's fossils from 300 million years ago when Antarctica was still in the northern hemisphere and there were forests and jungles. Or there's a place where the neutrinos traveling from 10 million light years away, from other galaxies, are falling into this ice cube trap they created, and exploding in blue light. And to be up close, and see and taste and touch, like, vast ancient history or faraway places was to be confronted with a sense of time that I have never felt or had that kind of scale. It was so humbling.
RATH: And on a personal level, right, I guess even more like a, you know, biological level of your body rhythms, your circadian rhythms, how - did that kind of mess with you, your perception of time?
MARTIN: Yeah, the 24 hours of sunlight is, I think, actually just as upsetting in a different way than 24 hours of darkness. It's sort of that feeling that you sometimes have if you're really nervous or drunk too much coffee, and you're both exhausted, yet unable to sort of shut down.
RATH: You've written these poems about a place that most people will never have the opportunity to visit. What is a thing about Antarctica that you most want people to take away?
MARTIN: I think what Antarctica gave me is also what poetry gives me, and it's space and time not to be so busy, anxious, solipsistic, self-consumed, that we don't see how tiny and infinitesimal our own life is, and yet how tied it is to everything that came before, everything that will come and everything that's around us.
RATH: Jynne Dilling Martin's collection of poems about Antarctica is "We Mammals In Hospitable Times." Jynne, thanks very much. This was a pleasure.
MARTIN: Thank you so much, Arun.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
A new independent film called "Supremacy" opened on Friday. It's a thriller based on the true story of a white supremacist who, just after he'd been paroled, kills a black police officer and then holds a black family hostage. "Supremacy's" director, Deon Taylor, has a back story of his own that's perfect for Hollywood. NPR's Priska Neely reports on how he got his shot.
PRISKA NEELY, BYLINE: Deon Taylor never thought he'd be making movies. But he's always loved to watch them.
DEON TAYLOR: I was always the guy in high school that could recite all the movies, right? So "Predator" - CIA got you pushing too many pencils. You know, I'm that dude who knew all the lines, right?
NEELY: The movie-loving high school kid was also a star basketball player.
TAYLOR: Ever since I can remember I've just been in love with the game.
NEELY: He grew up in Indiana, where basketball is big. When he was 17, he moved to Sacramento and played for his high school team. He realized he was good and the game could open doors.
TAYLOR: If it was not for basketball, I would not be sitting here right now because, you know, I come from a family - we did not have money for me to go to college. That was not in the cards for me.
NEELY: His skills on the court earned him a full ride to San Diego State University, a Division 1 school. After college, he went to Germany to play professionally. But there he did more than just play basketball.
TAYLOR: That is where I actually picked up a pen and wrote my first screenplay.
NEELY: That may sound like a strange twist, but here's what happened - Deon Taylor, a really tall black guy, says he became a bit of a hobbit in Germany. He didn't speak the language. He didn't have much of a social life. So he asked friends back home to send him movies.
TAYLOR: I remember, like, waiting for the following week to get like a box of like 25 movies. And I would just sit there after basketball practice and just watch movies.
NEELY: He'd burn through them fast, then go deeper and start watching the DVD extras for movies like "Star Wars."
(SOUNDBITE OF STAR WARS DVD EXTRAS)
GEORGE LUCAS: Every single movie begins with an idea - one that's turned into a screenplay.
NEELY: And Oliver Stone's "Platoon."
(SOUNDBITE OF PLATOON DVD EXTRAS)
OLIVER STONE: It was absolutely, totally, guerrilla filmmaking - so, you know, knock this shot off over here, run over here, do this, you know.
TAYLOR: And I became more intrigued with how they made them than the movie.
NEELY: These DVD extras served as master classes in filmmaking. They became Deon Taylor's film school.
TAYLOR: I remember like a month or two into the process - me, what I like to call transitioning into a filmmaker. (Laughter) I remember calling my best friend. I was like man, I think I'm going to make a movie. It was complete silent on the other end of the phone and then just followed by laughter. (Laughter).
NEELY: But he did it. After playing overseas for four years, he quit pro ball and moved back to California.
TAYLOR: I found myself two years later - no film school, no writing school, no nothing - standing on the set saying action in front of 90 people with a big old camera and actors.
NEELY: He's directed a few comedy and horror movies, working his charm to raise the funds. These were low-budget pictures, mostly TV movies or projects that went straight to DVD. But his latest film "Supremacy" is bigger. It got a distributor and opened Friday in theaters and on iTunes. Danny Glover stars in the film. He plays a man who must protect his family as they're held hostage by a white supremacist.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SUPREMACY")
DANNY GLOVER: (As Mr. Walker) He's just scared, that's all.
JOE ANDERSON: (As Garrett Tully) He's trying to make me kill someone?
GLOVER: (As Mr. Walker) No, no, no, we'll do what you say. There's a baby and a little boy in here.
NEELY: Roxanne Avent produced the film. She's known Taylor for more than 20 years. At the film's premiere last week, she thought back to when he first told her he wanted to start making movies.
ROXANNE AVENT: I thought he was crazy. I was like you're going to do what? OK. Well, I mean, but he's always been, like - everything he said he's going to do, he goes and does.
NEELY: From his cast to his coach, everyone mentioned his determination. Eric Adams wrote the screenplay for "Supremacy." He says that determination is what makes Taylor a good director, and he sees parallels to basketball.
ERIC ADAMS: He has unbelievable energy, and you see that every single day on set. He's in a way a larger-than-life figure, really rallying the troops around him, very inspiring as a director. And I think on the basketball court it's probably the same thing.
NEELY: At a time when low-budget means digital, this movie was shot on 35-mm film. One of the biggest casting directors in Hollywood recruited the actors - all this even though the budget was low, just over a million dollars. I asked Deon Taylor just how he got all these people to sign on.
TAYLOR: I think because I was able to A - have a really cool script, but then B - I like to think I'm kind of sexy in a room. I'm passionate. I mean, I think passion wins everything.
NEELY: Taylor's in the middle of editing his next project - a comedy with Mike Epps and Mike Tyson called "Meet The Blacks." And this from a man who majored in biology, played professional basketball and learned the craft from being a fan.
TAYLOR: Film school for me was actually going onset and learning how to make a movie. I've learned how to do my craft better by constantly picking up the cameras. So little things like picking up the camera with my daughter, that's my film school.
NEELY: That hands-on approach to learning is the same method used by great directors like Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino.
TAYLOR: It's like a basketball fan. When I play basketball - even now - I'm watching them like oh my God, like what is that move he just did? Oh, I've got to get that. You know what a mean? Film is the same exact way. You're always kind of, like, learning. I'm in school today.
NEELY: Deon Taylor still plays basketball whenever he can and even had a spot on an NBA celebrity team. Of course, one of his dreams is to make a film about the game that shaped the course of his life. Priska Neeley, NPR News.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Thanks again for listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR West. I'm Arun Rath.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "APPALACHIAN SPRING")
RATH: And that is the music of Aaron Copland, performed by the Aurora Orchestra. It's a new recording that's caught the ear of our guest, NPR classical music producer and co-host of the blog, Deceptive Cadence, Tom Huizenga. Tom, welcome.
TOM HUIZENGA, BYLINE: Hey, Arun, nice to be here.
RATH: So you brought a stack of albums with you today. Tell us about this one. It sounds like "Appalachian Spring."
HUIZENGA: Yep, it certainly is. It's the actual - the slimmed-down 13-instrument version played by an adventuresome group I don't think too many folks over here have heard of. It's the London-based Aurora Orchestra and the album is called "Road Trip," something of a little musical travelogue of America with music by old masters like Aaron Copland and Charles Ives and some new ones like John Adams.
RATH: Leave it to the British to show us our own roads. But there's an unexpected name on here I noticed, Paul Simon.
HUIZENGA: That's right. Sprinkled throughout the album are a few songs, both traditional and popular, and really lovely arrangements by the young American composer Nico Muhly, including a version of Paul Simon's "Hearts And Bones."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HEARTS AND BONES")
SAM AMIDON: (Singing) Take two bodies, twirl them into one. Their hearts and their bones, oh, they won't come undone. Hearts and bones.
HUIZENGA: This, Arun, I think is indicative of what a number of very young, resourceful chamber orchestras are doing these days. They're kind of erasing those traditional lines between classical and pop music. I'm thinking of groups like A Far Cry from Boston or The Knights who hail from Brooklyn. They play Stravinsky and Sufjan Stevens. So the Aurora Orchestra here - some fun, smart programming.
RATH: Vocals there from Sam Amidon on Paul Simon's "Hearts And Bones." Tom, what else have you got in there in your stack?
HUIZENGA: All right. I'm going to throw you a curveball here and see if you recognize this.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BRANDENBURG CONCERTO #3")
RATH: Definitely Bach. Clearly Bach. But I don't think I've heard that on a keyboard.
HUIZENGA: Ding, ding. You're right. It's the final allegro from Bach's "Brandenburg Concerto #3." That's, of course, usually an orchestral piece but, here it's arranged for piano four hands and played by the piano duo Anderson and Roe.
RATH: That's the thing about Bach, you know? He never wears out. It's so resilient and stands up to all these different arrangements.
HUIZENGA: Yeah, totally sturdy, sturdy music. And there a lot of tasty arrangements here on this all-Bach album by Greg Anderson and Elizabeth Joy Roe. They met as freshmen at Juilliard in the year 2000 and hooked up as a piano duo. So let's move onto another track. I picked this one out especially for you, Arun, because I know that you are as passionate about Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" as I am.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ST. MATTHEW PASSION")
RATH: That's an aria from the "St. Matthew Passion" that's sung in the voice of Peter.
HUIZENGA: "Erbarme Dich" - have mercy from Bach's "St. Matthew Passion."
RATH: He's just denied Jesus for, you know, the three times. He's asking for mercy for good reason.
HUIZENGA: And it's really - it's a haunting and it's and especially moving point in the whole passion drama.
RATH: What's wild about it - hearing it on a piano instead of hearing it sung, it sounds like it's from the wrong period. It almost sounds like it's Bach being a romantic in the 19th century.
HUIZENGA: That's true. And it kind of reminds you of those old Leopold Stokowski recordings - his own, really, super-upholstered arrangements of Bach pieces for, you know, a hundred-player symphony orchestras. But, like you mentioned before, I think the music of Bach is so sturdy that it can withstand almost any arrangement. Remember "Bach On Wood," the Bach on marimba record? I mean, it even withstood that.
RATH: (Laughter) I'm speaking with Tom Huizinga. He's a classical music producer at NPR sharing some interesting new albums that have crossed his desk. Tom, what's next?
HUIZENGA: OK. How about the birth of a brand-new opera star?
RATH: Any time. That sounds great.
(SOUNDBITE OF OPERA, "LA TRAVIATA")
SONYA YONCHEVA: (Singing in foreign language).
RATH: Nice.
HUIZENGA: That's a Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva singing from Verdi's "La Traviata," a role that she made a very big splash in at the Met in New York just a couple weeks ago.
RATH: A big splash? It's got be hard to make a big splash in such a well-performed piece. What happened?
HUIZENGA: Well, she's - Yoncheva is not exactly on many people's radar yet, except for opera geeks, of course. And the role of Violeta in "Traviata" is really, like, three roles wrapped into one, terrifically difficult dramatically and vocally. And she reportedly nailed it. She was so good that the audience interrupted one of her scenes with applause and that's something that hardly ever happens in the opera house. And one critic said that in all of the "Traviatas" he's seen, only two women have made his list of dream-Violetas, and Yoncheva now makes the third.
Her new record is called "Paris, Mon Amor." And instead of just French opera hits, it's mainly off the beaten path French repertoire, like this rarely-heard work by Andre Messager called "Madame Chrysantheme." That's the name of the opera. It's set in Nagasaki. And let's hear a little I excerpt now where she sings about the cicadas, which you can actually hear murmuring throughout the orchestra.
(SOUNDBITE OF OPERA, "MADAM CHRYSANTHEME")
YONCHEVA: (Singing in foreign language).
RATH: That is the voice of a new opera sensation, Sonya Yoncheva.
HUIZENGA: And to show you just how high her star is beginning to rise, Sonya Yoncheva will be opening the Met next season in Verdi's "Otello," so that's pretty good.
RATH: Wow, she'll be Desdemona?
HUIZENGA: That's right, yeah.
RATH: Wow, going to be - that's a challenge. Tom, we have time for one more.
HUIZENGA: OK, Arun, hold onto your hat, seriously. Here's music by the young composer Andrew Norman, just in his mid-30s.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PLAY")
RATH: I like that. That is interesting. It sounds like, well, it sounds like a few different composers I can think of all playing at the same time.
HUIZENGA: I know. That's just the few opening seconds of this new piece that he has called "Play." I'm glad you like it, too. I think it's one of the most exciting orchestral pieces I've heard in a while. It's witty, it's playful, surprisingly transparent, aside from the gazillion little things going on all at once. It's got to be just painful and thrilling at the same time to perform it.
RATH: Well, it kind of sounds like they're having fun there and it sounds like - it sounds like pretty much every instrument is being deployed and probably some things that aren't even instruments.
HUIZENGA: I should mention though, Arun, that it's not all this loud and intense. There are stretches of near silence and there are places where Andrew Norman builds crescendos. He said that he composed it backwards and so the first of the three movements in this 45 minute work is actually the climax so, hence, we get all the clanging and banging there at the start. He said it's also a very visual piece, with instructions for the players to kind of suddenly freeze mid-bow stroke just to be kind of switched on again by some flick of a tympani stroke or something.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PLAY")
RATH: That's music from a piece called "Play" by Andrew Norman, just one of the new recordings our classical music producer Tom Huizenga has been listening to. Tom, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks for all the music.
HUIZENGA: Hey, thanks. It's my pleasure, Arun.
RATH: You can read Tom's work on the blog, Deceptive Cadence, and you can hear more of Tom's picks at our website nprmusic.org.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Last week, we heard from Greg O'Brien. At the age of 59, he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
GREG O'BRIEN: There is a stereotype that Alzheimer's is just the end stage when, you know, you're in a nursing home and you're getting ready to die. And the point is no, that's not true.
RATH: Today, Greg takes us into his everyday life, five years after his diagnosis. In 2009, Greg was a working journalist. He owned a home on Cape Cod where he had raised three children. Now, a lot has changed. Here's Greg.
O'BRIEN: What Alzheimer's is in layman's terms, it's like a plug in a loose socket. And think of yourself, wherever you are in the country, and you're sitting down and you want to read a good book, and you're in a nice sofa chair next to a lamp at night. And the lamp starts to blink. And you push the plug in and it blinks again. You push the plug in, and you're getting a little annoyed. Well, pretty soon you can't put the plug back in again because it's so loose it won't stay there, and the lights go out forever. And that's what Alzheimer's is.
The doctors told me that I needed to turn everything that I had over to my wife. I'm not allowed to own anything anymore. That was a difficult thing for me because our house on Cape Cod, which, you know, I had built, was exactly the kind of home that I wanted to live in and raise my children in, and now I felt that I was a renter.
And that was a beginning of the stripping away of my identity. And now I forgot the rest of your question. Could you repeat it? And this is going to happen on this a little bit. But, you know, I had a good answer and I just can't remember it.
I don't have a self-identity. I have to find it. I'm an old-school guy. And I think of a file cabinet and think of the who, where, what, when, why and how of your life arranged in files in this file cabinet. And then at night, someone comes in and they take all the files out and they throw them all over the floor. And then you wake up in the morning and say oh my God, I have to put these files back before I realize my identity. And that's before I go to the bathroom. And, you know, right now I have to label toothpaste, because I'll grab for soap or lotion and brush my teeth. And I also - I label mouthwash because there was a time when I grabbed the rubbing alcohol - knowing, looking at it - it said rubbing alcohol, Greg. But I said no, and I took a swig. And let me tell you, rubbing alcohol doesn't have a thin, minty taste.
Sixty percent now of my short-term memory can be gone in 30 seconds. More and more, I don't recognize people. And now people understand that. And God bless them, they come up and they introduce themselves to me. These are people I've known since childhood.
Right now, you know, in addition to my short-term memory loss, there are times when, you know, I've hurled a phone across the room, a perfect strike to the sink because in the moment I didn't know how to dial. And I'll smash my lawnmower against an oak tree in the backyard in summer time because I don't remember how it works. I cry privately. It's an emotional thing, the tears of a little boy, because I fear I'm alone, nobody cares and the innings are starting to fade. You know, a fish rots from the head down.
You want an honest answer? What am I looking forward to most now? Making sure that my wife and kids are taken care of and going home to heaven. I've got to tell you, this fight - I don't know how much longer - excuse me - I don't how much longer I can do it. I mean, you've got - you've got the Alzheimer's thing that the progression goes, and then you've got the toll that it takes on you. I don't know how long I can keep this fight up. It's 24-7. It sucks. And there are days when I just want to go home.
RATH: Greg O'Brien is a writer on Cape Cod. His memoir is "On Pluto: Inside The Mind Of Alzheimer's." Greg is still fighting the disease every day and he'll be sharing his experience with us as he does. You can read more about him and hear previous installments in this series at our website npr.org.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
More than a decade ago on these airwaves, NPR's Ari Shapiro attempted to eat one of the most pungent foods in the world - a fermented Swedish herring called surstromming. It did not go well.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: Oh, God.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: (Laughter) It's coming out. Oh, no.
SHAPIRO: I couldn't do it.
RATH: Ari decided it was time to face his fears and give surstromming one last shot.
SHAPIRO: The first thing I had to remember was I am not alone. Other brave souls have tried to eat surstromming and failed.
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #1: I don't know if - I might throw up.
SHAPIRO: When Matthew Barzun was U.S. ambassador to Sweden a few years ago, he fed this fermented fish to his children and posted a video on YouTube. How's that for cultural diplomacy?
(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #2: I shouldn't try it ever, ever again.
SHAPIRO: I knew that if I hoped to do any better, I would need professional help.
MALIN SODERSTROM: We love surstromming, and if you'd like to try, we'd be happy to...
SHAPIRO: Absolutely.
SODERSTROM: ...Help you.
SHAPIRO: Malin Soderstrom is a renowned chef and cookbook author in Stockholm. Her waterfront restaurant Hjerta is closed for the winter, but she has opened her doors on this night just so we can try the pungent delicacy.
SODERSTROM: So I took down three different kinds of cans.
SHAPIRO: One can has her face on the side. It's called Malin's Mix, a mix of surstromming filets and whole fish with roe.
SODERSTROM: I think it's so fun because lots of the Swedish chefs, they do make their own wine, they have their own beer, they have their own pots and pans and so on. But I thought I'd go for something very extra. I'd go for my own surstromming.
SHAPIRO: The cans bulge under the pressure of the fermented herring inside. And when she opens it - an aggressive smell jumps out of the can with a hiss. It's like Roquefort cheese, vinegar and seafood all in one. Soderstrom explains that my mistake when I tried this a decade ago was sticking a fork in the can and biting into a fish like it was sashimi. That is not how surstromming should be eaten. She suggests chopping it up as an open-faced sandwich on crunchy flatbread with butter, sliced potatoes, chopped red onions.
SODERSTROM: You can use like sour cream, dill, and also some chopped chives could be nice to have.
SHAPIRO: The surstromming becomes a funky, salty baseline of flavor, layered with tastes that are creamy, crunchy, sharp and herbal - oh, and there is one more must-have accompaniment.
The beer is a very important part. Do you want to...
SODERSTROM: Yeah.
SHAPIRO: Herring has been a key part of Swedish culture for centuries. Long ago, Swedish workers were even paid in herring. And fermented surstromming allowed people to preserve their catch long after the fishing season was over. Finally, our sandwiches are assembled and it's time to eat.
How do Swedes say bon appetit?
SODERSTROM: (Speaking Swedish).
SHAPIRO: I ate the whole thing and then I had another. When we were finished, Malin Soderstrom even gave me a can of surstromming to take home with me. It sits unopened on my counter, bulging. Ari Shapiro, NPR News.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
Some gains this week in the war against the self-declared Islamic state, or ISIS. The Syrian-Kurdish town of Kobani, long fought over, was finally cleared of militants. And the Iraqi army said they had pushed ISIS out of the eastern province of Diyala, but there's still a lot of fighting. From Baghdad, NPR's Alice Fordham joins us. Alice, what's happened in the last couple of days?
ALICE FORDHAM, BYLINE: We have seen a spasm of violence, actually in several places in Iraq, but notably around the oil-rich city of Kirkuk in the North. Yesterday, ISIS staged an attack on it from three sides. And we've seen a lot of violence south of the city, but Kirkuk itself has until recently been relatively calm. But yesterday there was a big battle. A senior commander was killed.
Today, there are reports that the man who replaced him was also killed by a sniper. There were 10 American airstrikes there yesterday, which hit many ISIS vehicles and prepared car bombs, but ISIS still briefly held a small oil field before being pushed out. And dozens of the Iraqi-Kurdish forces, the Peshmerga, were killed.
RATH: So what does this tell us about the state of the war against ISIS?
FORDHAM: I think it gives us a bit of pause and maybe a bit of perspective. There was an announcement from the Pentagon this morning saying that an ISIS member described as a chemical weapons expert was killed, with the spokesman adding that people now realize that ISIS aren't ten feet tall, that the coalition is making progress.
However, we are now more than seven months into this military campaign. It's true that ISIS haven't taken any more major cities, but they still hold a lot of territory and, crucially, they make bold, aggressive moves like these ones. And sometimes the optimism is proven to have slightly shaky grounds. You know, Iraqi officials, as you said, announced the liberation of the province of Diyala this week, but that was followed by a suicide bombing that killed several people there.
And I think it's also worth noting that a lot of the fighting that was done there was by Shiite militias that support the government but now stand accused of alleged unlawful killings of Sunni civilians. So we're still seeing a lot of brutal often sectarian-tinged fighting here on the ground.
RATH: What about Syria? Are there gains being made against ISIS there?
FORDHAM: The town of Kobani there had become, you know, so emblematic of the fight against ISIS that the celebrations there this week were, I think, powerful to lots of people. But just this evening, we have received word that a video has been released - it's not yet verified - apparently showing the beheading of a Japanese hostage who we believed was being held in Syria. A journalist, Kenji Goto - there had been a hostage negotiation situation with him, which Japanese officials said had been deadlocked. And it now seems that, subject to verification, he may, in fact, have been killed. They're holding a second hostage, a Jordanian. It's a tense time for the governments of both of those countries.
RATH: That's NPR's Alice Fordham in Baghdad. Alice, thanks very much.
FORDHAM: Thank you for having me.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
It can be hard to take a drive these days without getting your image captured. You're probably well aware of speed cameras, traffic cameras, cameras at toll booths. But you might not be aware of the network of license plate readers run by the Drug Enforcement Administration or the massive database of car tracking information they keep. The DEA hasn't provided a ton of detail on the program since it began in 2008. But this week, the ACLU obtained documents that reveal new details about the program. Devlin Barrett covered the story for the Wall Street Journal, where the headline read U.S. spies on millions of drivers.
DEVLIN BARRETT: The DEA is building a national network of license plate scanners. And they're putting them on major highways, and they're scanning the plates. And, in some cases, they're also taking images of the people in the car. Those aren't super high-quality images for the most part, but they can, for example, in many instances, tell, you know, whether a man or woman was driving, what they were wearing and whether they had any passengers in the car.
RATH: Do we know where exactly the readers are?
BARRETT: We know where some of them are. We've long known that there are a lot of readers on the Southwest border. And that's sort of the public face of this program. But they have expanded to states like Florida and Georgia and Nevada. None of those are border states, obviously. And they've also expanded to New Jersey. We know there are readers on the New Jersey Turnpike. And so you're seeing this, you know, general growth of their data collection network.
RATH: Now, before we knew about this, we knew the government and even some companies are tracking license plates in different places around the country. What's newer or different about this program?
BARRETT: We knew these license plate readers are pretty ubiquitous both in local, federal and state law enforcement. What we didn't know was that they were building a national database to track movements of cars throughout the United States. The other piece of this that's interesting is that, in the internal documents that we reviewed, there are repeated references to the primary goal of this program being asset forfeiture.
Now, that's interesting because asset forfeiture is an increasingly controversial law enforcement practice where sometimes they end up taking property, oftentimes money, sometimes vehicles, from people who haven't been charged or convicted of any crime.
RATH: Now, it would seem that we would want the DEA to try to trace drug trafficking. You know, beyond the asset forfeiture, why are the ACLU and others bothered by this program?
BARRETT: Well, I think the civil liberties concerns are a few. One is that this is a database, a national database, that lots of different law enforcement agencies can search. So basically any local and state police agency can search this database if they join - essentially join the network and become a member. And there's not a good understanding of what the limitations are and what the rules are for not just whether or not the DEA is careful about privacy, but whether any of those other agencies that search the system are also careful about privacy. The other big issue that comes into play is what other uses does - are made with that data?
RATH: And do we know how well the DEA has done with this program as intended, either with seizing assets or drug deals intercepted or arrests? Anything like that?
BARRETT: They say it's a very successful program on a number of levels. One, that they make major drug seizures based on the license plates that it finds. Two, that they have connected it to the Amber Alert network, which searches for missing kids. And some of the internal documents reference helping solve murder cases in which they can find not just the victim's vehicle, but the victim in their vehicle at a specific time which, provided in some cases, is a key piece of evidence in solving a murder.
RATH: Devlin, what else don't we know about the extent or pervasiveness of this program?
BARRETT: Well, we don't know a lot about the - for lack of a better word - the rules of the road. We don't know what internal checks there are to make sure this isn't misused, abused or just not run well. And so far the Justice Department won't really spell out what the limits of what they're using it for.
RATH: That's Devlin Barrett. He's a reporter with the Wall Street Journal. Devlin, thanks very much.
BARRETT: Thank you, Arun.
ARUN RATH, HOST:
If you plan to watch the Super Bowl tomorrow - and I mean the football, not just the commercials - chances are your eyes will lock on to a few players. Obviously, the quarterbacks - Tom Brady of the Patriots and the Seahawk's Russell Wilson will get a lot of attention, especially that Russell Wilson. He's so dreamy. But less glamorous players who are less photogenic often have a huge impact on the game. Tomorrow, one of them could decide a championship. From Phoenix, NPR's Tom Goldman reports.
TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: You'd think New England center Bryan Stork - a 6'4, 310 pound mountain of a man - would want to come out of the shadows, tell the world his job. Squatting in front of the quarterback is a lot more fascinating and significant than it looks, you'd think.
BRYAN STORK: I'm snapping the ball.
GOLDMAN: You're doing more than that, though, aren't you?
STORK: I'm snapping the ball and blocking.
GOLDMAN: Bryan Stork seemed a little cranky that morning. Maybe it was his knee injury that could keep him out of tomorrow's game. Whatever the reason, I knew he knows an NFL center is a critical part of the offense, calling out signals to make sure his fellow offensive linemen are working as one, scanning the defense before the snap as if he's using "Terminator" vision. Listen to Seattle center Max Unger.
MAX UNGER: Yeah, you know, you come up, see what the front is - under, over - you know, where - am I covered, uncovered. And then check the linebackers out and then see where the safeties are. You know, if it's too high, you know, what are the two slots doing? If it's a 3 by 1, where's the safety, you know, middle of the field, close, stuff like that. And then just kind of make your calls.
GOLDMAN: Sure sounds involved, doesn't it? Indeed, if Unger gets that stuff wrong, it could mean Seattle running back Marshawn Lynch doesn't pick up key yardage. If he gets it right, it could mean quarterback Russell Wilson throws the winning touchdown pass. The center position, while in the shadows, at least doesn't elicit many giggles.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE CHARLIE BROWN AND SNOOPY SHOW")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: (As Lucy) Come on, Charlie Brown. I'll hold the ball and you kick it.
GOLDMAN: I won't stoop so low as to say Ryan Allen is the Lucy of the New England Patriots. I mean, he never pulls the ball away from Stephen Gostkowski, best place kicker in the NFL. What he does do in a little over a second is receive the ball from the long snapper and place it - he hopes - in the perfect position.
RYAN ALLEN: You kind of got to just be an athlete and react a little bit. The less you think, the better you're going to do and the smoother you're going to do it.
GOLDMAN: The thinking happens in countless hours of practice - catching the ball from eight yards away, spinning it so the laces are away from the kicker all in one motion. These three amigos - long snapper, holder and kicker are mostly separated from the violent, adrenaline-fueled mayhem of football by the precision of their task. And Allen says they embrace it.
ALLEN: We take that persona of being kind of the shadow-dwellers or the science nerds or - because we are. Our positions are a lot different than everybody else's on the team. We have to be very poised. It's got to be very technical.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MARV ALBERT: Ball is placed down and the kick from 53 yards out is good.
GOLDMAN: Including this one against Buffalo. Gostkowski was good a league-leading 35 times during the regular season, meaning Ryan Allen was good, too, although he says making Gostkowski comfortable is more important than recognition. Besides, Allen gets to soak up some limelight come game day. As the Patriots' punter, he has the ability to make big plays - or big mistakes - on his own. Tomorrow's Super Bowl is expected to be a tight contest with two evenly-matched teams. Little things might make the difference - a block, a ball placed just so - and the shadow-dwellers are ready. Tom Goldman, NPR News, Phoenix.